You just described *half* the FPS genres out there... Seriously.
There were two different FPS genres establised in the early 90s
The first type (and first 3D FPS game) started with a game called Ultima Underworld, and was an open-goal type of FPS where you could do many things and interact with many people. You could achieve your goals by helping people, or perhaps if you were more ruthless, killing them (although the latter often had consequences).
The second was called Wolfenstein 3D. It's the more common type of FPS. Just run around blowing things up. That's the plot... And make your way through a level.
Still, it's gone of from there - Both types of game type exist within the whole of the FPS type of gameset.
Games such as Dark Messiah and Deus Ex ( and sequels ) is a help-people type of game (if you want to) while games like Doom, Quake etc, are a If-it-moves-kill-it-if-it-doesn't-kill-it-anyway sort of FPS.
The same themes exist in many other games. The extent varies and they often get a bit of each mixed in (eg, System shoch is the latter with a little bit of the first)
Try some of the "Single-player" focus FPS games.... They can often be played mostly non-violently - eg, stealth, skill, persausion.
Of course, if you want violence banned from the game entirely, there's always "My Little Ponies" but as an adult, part of the enjoyment of a game is making decisions and seeing the outcome. Sometimes you choose the stick, sometimes the carrot, but at the end of the day, it's your choice on how you want to play.
Given it stands for "Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code" I'd say just about any language or variation of it that meets this requirement and uses a similar syntax structure could be called BASIC.
I guess basic is basic unless it's on a machine you're familiar with... I find Freebasic ( www.freebasic.net ) useful, probably because I came from the same era and did all my programming back then too, although I used a Spectrum and I'd never want to have to use that sort of keyboard again.
Freebasic is a fairly recent compiler that makes pretty neat code and has all the common C calls available to it too as well as being able to process native Qbasic programs (if you migrated from the C64 type basic to the PC later) without many of the limitations and nearly complete compatability.
It also allows cross-scripting between Mac, PC and Linux with the same program which I find useful too.
www.freebasic.net
GrpA.
ps. Basic may not be dead, but you still get funny looks when people see you programming in it. I think some consider it even more ancient and antiquated than cobol (which it's not).
Because $1 per Gb is a lot less than it costs in Australia, which depending on the plan/carrier, still charges up to $10,000 per additional Gb...
Shaping/Policing is just a way of making people upgrade their accounts without the original infraction costing them the earth. It's a lot fairer, but it still leaves you unable to do a lot with your connection one it cuts in.
Actually, in the long run, just about all content will be accessible by net, but some will require serious bandwidth. Having caps works with the net as it is today, but it stifles innovation because it also limits what is commercially viable on the Internet and people adjust their usage to meet costs and available bandwidth levels and the carriers find it helps manage their bandwidth requirements, so they stop adding new capacity and find other ways to make their existing infrastructure go further.
Youtube? Myspace? Never would have happened in Australia. We're still working on models that were in place when modems were the dominant technology.
And a typical cap is around 5gb over here - Far less than the 250 Gb mentioned... Not enough to watch online movies even casually. 20Gb is considered a "Big" plan over here and pretty much no one can afford 250Gb for non professional (commercial) use.
Because the caps are so small, there is no business driver to keep upgrading infrastructure...
It's the same old story that we've seen forever. If a resource is essentially free and limitless, you can only make it commercially viable by restricting it's supply by some means. Music, Water, Electricity, Freedom, you name it. The less it's available, the more it costs you. Information is no different.
The reason they don't create new dams or build new ecologically friendly power stations isn't because they can't - it's because it's more commercially viable to retain limited availability of these resources.
GrpA
p.s. Most ISPs in Australia that "Shape" don't actually Shape - they Police - ie, drop packets that exceed the burst rate of the connection. That causes a much lower throughput than shaping does.
No, the technologies are not all developed in the US, and many of the technologies affected have legitimate civilian uses and markets.
A lot of technology, eg, 3rd Generation Night Vision, is also created outside of the US and some countries even have Second Generation technology that now far exceeds the specifications of any US gen2 equipment and matches or exceeds much of the 3rd generation technology as well, especially in urban conditions. ( ALL Hypergen and Autogated Hypergen Night vision technology is now made outside of the US for example, even though a lot is exported from those countries back to the US for both military and civilian use. ).
And ITAR restrictions do nothing to slow the exports of military equipment to places like IRAN and IRAQ who can get all the tech they need from places like Russia, but it makes it damn hard to get some legitimate technologies like decent night vision devices in Australia, and what does come over here is incredibly expensive.
Sure you can get a license to export, but it's made so complex, difficult and inconvenient, with such huge penalties for making innocent mistakes, that almost no US companies will risk it. Look at ITT - they made a genuine mistake and the US government fined them millions of dollars!!! Most US companies just won't take the risk anymore, while companies in the rest of the world are safe to export all they want.
ITAR may have it's heart in the right area, but it's a pity it's brains aren't there also.
What you say is essentially correct, I'm just pointing out that this has always happened, regardless of the transition to digital.
How many pages of Leonardo DaVinci were used over the centuries to start fires or even wipe asses? How many inventions, concepts and ideas were lost forever? How many musical pieces were lost to antiquity simply because they weren't as popular during the era and slowly became removed from history, piece by piece?
What knowledge became undiscovered when the library of Alexandria was lost?
Losses of information are perpetually occuring. Digital stuff is less likely to be lost because it's so easy to copy, so anything needed for long periods tends to be perpetuated by infinite copying.
Archives are nice (Thankyou Wayback Machine) when you want to find something now lost, but I don't think blaming media is the cause.
Think, as you've put it, that it's gone because someone decided to get rid of it... Did they make the right choice? Maybe not, but it was theirs to make.
I think a bigger issue is DRM... I went to watch some old movie clips I had on an archive the other day while browsing it... They all failed - I didn't have the correct codecs. So I tried to download/find them. Nope. They were gone.
So the clip, which I wanted to view was lost... All I have to know what it was is "funnyvideoclip.avi"
But they were only of value to me so what's the big deal?
Maybe if it was my wedding video, I'd be more annoyed, but then, how many wedding videos, pictures, photo's and even paintings have been lost throughout history?
Just because the loss affected me, it doesn't mean there's a dark age. I'm saying knowledge is always being lost, due to obscurity, damage, natural disasters, political viewpoints and many other factors.
So let's say we lose all copies of programs for the Commodore 64... Is it a dark age? Or is the knowledge we've kept of the machine quite sufficient for contemporary times.
If anything, I think even more retention is made of digital material than non-digital... Just try finding a service manual for a 40 year old obscure car. Not very likely, but if there is a copy anywhere, I'd almost put money on it being digital !
Actually, I don't think garbage is the problem. I don't think there is a problem as it's being presented to us. Lots of printed media is destroyed also. Just the other day I found pieces of a five hundred page story I wrote a long time ago, then lost the disk. I'm not going to type it in again, so I just discarded it. It's not the first time in history and won't be the last. Very little of what is written is ever published. Most of it is discarded by our relatives after we die.
I think the real issue is that some people feel a need to collect everything that's ever created, like digital horders. If a tax return is old enough to be on floppy, then you don't need it anymore and any critical information from it probably exists somewhere else.
Content with real value self-perpetuates and remains and while some value is lost through attrition, such as websites going down, the consequences are often miniscule in comparison to the concept of archiving everything permanently.
Maybe we do lose those digital pictures on the floppy (and the box of floppies it was stored in) but if it was critical, we'd do something about it. We might print it out, but we lose albums too. They get wet, mouldy and burned, and we lose those memories too.
Too often it's not that important to us to keep until we want it later and can't find it.
Like most things horded, the value lies in keeping good care of what is most important to us, and often we find that what we want to keep is just a reflection of what matters the most.
To quote an interesting book entry I once read: Perspective. Use it or lose it.
I've also had similar requests in the past, and in both cases I did the work. I considered the request, decided they were ethical (even if somewhat unusual) and so did it. That's something you're going to have to figure out for yourself - whether you're going to do it or not.
I've been on the other side of the fence also...
If you're relying on data for commercial use, putting yourself in a position where you need that data is a risky thing...
I had a scraper once come after me. I caught them - as the previous poster pointed out, it's easy... I didn't block them. I captured and redirected their requests so I could control what they got and, well, sent them some information that made them look really, really stupid. They were angry, but there wasn't much they could do.
They were just enthusiasts - they had no business risk in their application suddenly failing.
Let your boss know the risk he is facing and then ask him if he really wants to risk being caught and shut down unexpectedly, or worse, finding someone has poisened his data.
Or forget *nix and just stay with windows, or maybe even Vista... The P1510 might be 3 years old, but it's hardly underpowered...
The 1.2 Pentium M isn't a P3 at 1.2Ghz.. Its the equivalent of a p4 at 1.8 Ghz...
I've played Tron 2.0 at 1280x1024 quite smoothly on it, so don't let the fact it doesn't support new shader models hide the fact it has some seriously beefed up graphics with the 915 GMS chipset fall to the side either. Pretty good for what was around 3 years ago in any laptop and more than most compact models still can do.
It's not a Quad core, or even a duo, but it's hardly underpowered even by today's standards.
Try comparing it to other recent palmtop models... It pretty much leaves them for dead, even as a 3 year veteran...
Just get some more memory and quit whining. Its cheap enough, even if proprietary.
Anyway, that's what I'm sending you this response from, from a train, on mobile internet... on a P1510...
After a few years of relative peace in the galaxies, Darth Arts will turn to the dark side and fsck up everyone's game to make it more "appealing" to new players....
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to keep watching reruns of Episode 1....
For a start, the person who asks me to do the work is already taking the problem seriously and usually knows exactly what they want.
eg, "This laptop user claims fusion. Please confirm/reject this claim and provide forensic evidence supporting it" along with a laptop for analysis, that doesn't work, and the company's definition of "Fusion".
or even the more open, "Here's a copy of the packet dumps during the hacking incident. Please work out what this person did to compromise the website" which I did more recently.
That stuff is easy - just follow the dotted line. It's just engineering.
It's not the same as working with people and the obstacles they raise in front of you...
And the "One" person per state doesn't need to do the forensic analysis themselves. There are plenty of contracted experts who can do that far more effectively. They just need to know when it's called for and make sure it's been done correctly in a way that can be used to prosecute someone.
Something with basic I/O sampling so you can read all those old Audio Cassettes... Amstrad, C64, Sinclair, MSX, Oric, Ti99-4A, JR-100, Vic-20, BBC etc.
I sometimes wonder what I would make of the old things I used to write and do on those old systems...
Yes, I have dealt with federal matters, and it's amazing how the same issues that affect whether or not police will take on your complaint occur at all levels.
I did speak to the federal authorities. I did track down the people whose task it was, and I found out what they needed.
It's a bit like chinese whispers. "I can't do anything if XXXX doesn't do their job." They will tell me that, but they won't tell XXXX directly. (XXXX Being a person, agency, official, whatever). I became the "connection" between them, relaying commitments.
So I did the rounds, learned what they required (specific only to my case) and got them all to agree to what was basically an open-ended commitment. THe problem is that they couldn't discuss anything with me - since they all recognized I had no authority and privacy laws got in the way, but wouldn't start bothering their counterparts to request help, because they couldn't tell their counterparts what was going - they didn't know how to.
However, I could get them to commit to speak to XXXX, if XXXX was prepared to help, so I called *all* the XXXXs and explained the situation, and sent the details through to all of them. The XXXX's were Federal Police, State Police and Telecommunications Regulations Enforcement authorities.
Once I had them all committed, I simply became the "co-ordination" point for the exercise. I learned everyone else's role and broke the task down and sent the appropriate information to each person that was relevant to their job.
The result? As soon as they realised I had handed them a case ready to close, with all the contacts agreeing to their role, they moved immediately. The whole thing took about an hour.
In that case, I had made a slight error with regards to the law that was broken, and they called me back to let me know they couldn't actually prosecute and were helpful enough to provide additional information I needed to know to close that loophole with the way my network was set up ( Guest access can be a real issue - if you let people in, proving tresspass is impossible ).
They also provided a committment to back me up in the future if it ever happened again.
True to their word, they did the next time and I caught the guy. He was prosecuted successfully, although the next time, it was local, so I didn't need to coordinate as many people.
So please, consider my point. You need to co-ordinate *everyone* and make sure they know you have a reasonable chance of prosecution and that you've lined up your ducks, or they won't get involved.
It's no different for a cop doing that job. They need to get everyone involved too. Basically they still have to go through the same process.
Most people will do their job and help you if you remove all the obstacles first. In a perfect world, they would move their own obstacles as well, but hey, if it's your problem and affects you, it's up to you to decide how committed you are to solving it.
You're thinking of the events that were detailed in "The Hacker Crackdown" aren't you?...
I'm not saying your wrong, but please re-read my post. I'm saying that a lot of the time, the police are expected to do this because it's their job, except they don't know where to start, which leads to the situation that they can't actually be certain it *is* their job. So they don't do anything.
It doesn't matter if it crosses state or even federal or international lines...
Only committing crimes in another state from your home state is an old trick to avoid the attention of law enforcement. It only works for a while - the police know how to deal with this.
Imagine this. Someone in your state is breaking the law. You report the details to your local police. They arrest them.
Now consider - Someone in another state is breaking the law. You report the details to *their* local police. They arrest them.
See the difference? You can achieve that without being a police officer - but it does knowing who to contact and what to tell them. Giving them an IP address isn't enough. What they are looking for in *evidence* of a crime they can understand. Send them details of which crime is being broken, so they don't have to work it out themselves, and they know it's something they are responsible for.
Speak to their ISP in advance, explain the situation, get the ISPs contact person and let him know his local police will be in contact to collect the evidence. Most ISPs will co-operate that far - to wait for a request from the local police for information.
Learn about evidence collection. Learn what police need to do their job.
That makes all the difference in the world.
And it is the local police's job to do this. Are you some multibillion dollar exec? No, well how can you seriously expect the secret service to do this for you? Seriously?
Do you think I go and call ASIO (I'm in Australia) or ASIS everytime I find graffiti on my car?
Finding my computer's been hacked is no different. Just because they employ people in secret intelligence organisations who understand the situation doesn't make it their problem... You're a small victim, that's what the local police are there for.
I share the feeling, but I'm sick and tired of receiving all the attempts to socially engineer their way into my bank account or similar, or get me to click on some malware, and no matter how obvious these things are, sooner or later they work ( How often have you clicked on "yes" instead of "no" just to make the stupid window go away, or had a poppup pop up just under where you're about to click?)
They don't need an internetpol - they just need the police.
The problem is that the police don't like dealing with it. It's too hard to understand and they don't get paid enough and they have to deal with stupid paperwork anyway because some kid got caught painting logos on someone's wall, and now some idiot computer user is calling saying "My bank account is being hacked, help me" and the poor cop can't even cope with getting his own email to work, let alone working out how to reverse engineer some genius hacker's work to help some lady who talks like she's on crack and doesn't know why her bank account is empty... And it's the fifth time this morning...
So to fix it, the police department need to get serious about computer crime and just simply establish a department that can deal with it... And keep them separate to fix the issue, and not be a part of the group that deals with local computer crime, etc.
Just one person per state who understands technology at a basic level (eg, like most people who read this forum) is enough.
And then this one person can spend some time networking with cops from around the world (heck, send them to some junket in a hotel once a year so they can meet all the others... Maybe blackhat or something) and then knows how to apply the laws correctly and how to go after these people...
And THEN the problem starts to get fixed.
Ranting aside, I know how the situation works. I've been on the prosecuting end of several cases, in which I did the legwork. I tracked down the evidence, and prepared a one-page brief for the police involved, including details on the exact crime committed, the evidence, who has the evidence and the phone numner to call to get it.
If you give the police a target they can understand, they usually are more than willing to take the case on.
When I last did that, they even sent a raiding party and siezed the guy, his computer and everything else within hours of my sending the details. They had a written confession out of him within two hours!
Most people who are still feeling the umbrage of having been owned don't understand this and it's not suprising the police don't want to help, especially when they don't know where to start.
My experience is that the existing laws are usually sufficient. It's the will and knowledge to implement them that are lacking.
I'd still question the stability. It depends on the location of the CoP, which can vary depending on the situation the vehicle finds itself in.
Front-wheel trikes are succeptible to issues when braking (CoP moves forward) and turning (CoP moves to the side) at the same time.
Under those circumstances, which are reasonably likely to occur, I agree with you on the configuration.
However, under other circumstances involving stability and under high yaw (eg, braking causes the car to spin, etc, and with less traction on one rear tire than two) I'd still be fearful that the car would flip rather than slide - all that really needs to happen, IMO, is for the back-end to spin around to the front under braking.
Plus you also have the issues related to contact surface area of the rear tire.
I guess I'm talking about the kinds of positions you might find yourself in, that you learn to deal with in an advanced driving course, but whenever you go for three wheels, the first compromise is stability.
The car does look nice though... Like a composite body aircraft cockpit -:)
I hear that the first beta testers are annoyed that to bootstrap the suit, they have to stand in a spread-eagle configuration and yell out "Power Extreme!"
It does much the same, but leaves the face alone and photoshops it onto an image taken from a fashion magazine.
It's still recognizable as the same person, but they look a lot better.
This technique is so powerful, that if you choose the right magazine (eg, Playboy, Hustler etc) that the test subjects don't even notice if you cut the original face out badly.
Three out of Four test subjects said "What Face" when asked about this irregularity and two left the test early with the new pictures, no doubt impressed by the quality of my algorythm.
I can't understand the appear of iXXXX's either. Locked proprietary technology with limited scope for a geek to truly enjoy.
What I've noticed though is that the people who buy them don't seem to care...
Sure they'll die, but I doubt they'll die just because there's something better on the market.
And as for open alternatives? I've had a Symbian phone for years. Lots of free apps and developer tools, built in GPS and great touch screen, been around for years... That didn't stop the iPhone coming out either.
People have been trying to stop cheats for years. It's damn annoying on a MP game when you keep getting headshot through a mountain, by a pistol every few minutes.
And those cheats aren't even inspired by money - just their own motivation to be assholes.
So put real money into it and watch what happens... The cheating will go hightech no matter what they do.
Think "Dogfight" in William Gibson's "Burning Chrome" Anthology.
Someone will always find a way to cheat, and who want to put up cash to let the h4x0r2 screw up your game and take it?
Actually, depending on just how badly designed the system is (think primary-school-level understanding of technology that most managers have) it could be plausible... Especially without any details on how the system works.
Static (when it doesn't destroy an input by shorting out the diode protection network on it) causes a signal to be received.
If you designed a basic enough cartridge (eg, 1 button on each input, with the cartridge just registering "Button Presses") then yes, I can actually imagine that causing false votes registered.
And I can also imagine vote machines using this type of technology as non-tech savvy people design this equipment and I've seen designs as stupid as this in money changing machines...
And it didn't take the kids at arcades long to figure out rub your feet on the carpet, get free coins.
If they can make this mistake on a machine giving out their own money, then beleive me, it's not that much of a stretch of imagination to beleive they would do something equally stupid in the design of a voting machine.
Slashdot Mirror
You just described *half* the FPS genres out there... Seriously.
There were two different FPS genres establised in the early 90s
The first type (and first 3D FPS game) started with a game called Ultima Underworld, and was an open-goal type of FPS where you could do many things and interact with many people. You could achieve your goals by helping people, or perhaps if you were more ruthless, killing them (although the latter often had consequences).
The second was called Wolfenstein 3D. It's the more common type of FPS. Just run around blowing things up. That's the plot... And make your way through a level.
Still, it's gone of from there - Both types of game type exist within the whole of the FPS type of gameset.
Games such as Dark Messiah and Deus Ex ( and sequels ) is a help-people type of game (if you want to) while games like Doom, Quake etc, are a If-it-moves-kill-it-if-it-doesn't-kill-it-anyway sort of FPS.
The same themes exist in many other games. The extent varies and they often get a bit of each mixed in (eg, System shoch is the latter with a little bit of the first)
Try some of the "Single-player" focus FPS games.... They can often be played mostly non-violently - eg, stealth, skill, persausion.
Of course, if you want violence banned from the game entirely, there's always "My Little Ponies" but as an adult, part of the enjoyment of a game is making decisions and seeing the outcome. Sometimes you choose the stick, sometimes the carrot, but at the end of the day, it's your choice on how you want to play.
GrpA.
Given it stands for "Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code" I'd say just about any language or variation of it that meets this requirement and uses a similar syntax structure could be called BASIC.
GrpA
I guess basic is basic unless it's on a machine you're familiar with... I find Freebasic ( www.freebasic.net ) useful, probably because I came from the same era and did all my programming back then too, although I used a Spectrum and I'd never want to have to use that sort of keyboard again.
Freebasic is a fairly recent compiler that makes pretty neat code and has all the common C calls available to it too as well as being able to process native Qbasic programs (if you migrated from the C64 type basic to the PC later) without many of the limitations and nearly complete compatability.
It also allows cross-scripting between Mac, PC and Linux with the same program which I find useful too.
www.freebasic.net
GrpA.
ps. Basic may not be dead, but you still get funny looks when people see you programming in it. I think some consider it even more ancient and antiquated than cobol (which it's not).
That's correct, although it's written as 1c per Kilobyte in the contract.
People would freak out if they saw "0.5 Gb Included, $10,000 per Gb" in the contract, so it's written as "500Mb included, 1c per kb thereafter"
Yes, there are actually plans like that in Australia...
GrpA
Why not shape?
Because $1 per Gb is a lot less than it costs in Australia, which depending on the plan/carrier, still charges up to $10,000 per additional Gb...
Shaping/Policing is just a way of making people upgrade their accounts without the original infraction costing them the earth. It's a lot fairer, but it still leaves you unable to do a lot with your connection one it cuts in.
Actually, in the long run, just about all content will be accessible by net, but some will require serious bandwidth. Having caps works with the net as it is today, but it stifles innovation because it also limits what is commercially viable on the Internet and people adjust their usage to meet costs and available bandwidth levels and the carriers find it helps manage their bandwidth requirements, so they stop adding new capacity and find other ways to make their existing infrastructure go further.
Youtube? Myspace? Never would have happened in Australia. We're still working on models that were in place when modems were the dominant technology.
And a typical cap is around 5gb over here - Far less than the 250 Gb mentioned... Not enough to watch online movies even casually. 20Gb is considered a "Big" plan over here and pretty much no one can afford 250Gb for non professional (commercial) use.
Because the caps are so small, there is no business driver to keep upgrading infrastructure...
It's the same old story that we've seen forever. If a resource is essentially free and limitless, you can only make it commercially viable by restricting it's supply by some means. Music, Water, Electricity, Freedom, you name it. The less it's available, the more it costs you. Information is no different.
The reason they don't create new dams or build new ecologically friendly power stations isn't because they can't - it's because it's more commercially viable to retain limited availability of these resources.
GrpA
p.s. Most ISPs in Australia that "Shape" don't actually Shape - they Police - ie, drop packets that exceed the burst rate of the connection. That causes a much lower throughput than shaping does.
No, the technologies are not all developed in the US, and many of the technologies affected have legitimate civilian uses and markets.
A lot of technology, eg, 3rd Generation Night Vision, is also created outside of the US and some countries even have Second Generation technology that now far exceeds the specifications of any US gen2 equipment and matches or exceeds much of the 3rd generation technology as well, especially in urban conditions. ( ALL Hypergen and Autogated Hypergen Night vision technology is now made outside of the US for example, even though a lot is exported from those countries back to the US for both military and civilian use. ).
And ITAR restrictions do nothing to slow the exports of military equipment to places like IRAN and IRAQ who can get all the tech they need from places like Russia, but it makes it damn hard to get some legitimate technologies like decent night vision devices in Australia, and what does come over here is incredibly expensive.
Sure you can get a license to export, but it's made so complex, difficult and inconvenient, with such huge penalties for making innocent mistakes, that almost no US companies will risk it. Look at ITT - they made a genuine mistake and the US government fined them millions of dollars!!! Most US companies just won't take the risk anymore, while companies in the rest of the world are safe to export all they want.
ITAR may have it's heart in the right area, but it's a pity it's brains aren't there also.
GrpA.
What you say is essentially correct, I'm just pointing out that this has always happened, regardless of the transition to digital.
How many pages of Leonardo DaVinci were used over the centuries to start fires or even wipe asses? How many inventions, concepts and ideas were lost forever? How many musical pieces were lost to antiquity simply because they weren't as popular during the era and slowly became removed from history, piece by piece?
What knowledge became undiscovered when the library of Alexandria was lost?
Losses of information are perpetually occuring. Digital stuff is less likely to be lost because it's so easy to copy, so anything needed for long periods tends to be perpetuated by infinite copying.
Archives are nice (Thankyou Wayback Machine) when you want to find something now lost, but I don't think blaming media is the cause.
Think, as you've put it, that it's gone because someone decided to get rid of it... Did they make the right choice? Maybe not, but it was theirs to make.
I think a bigger issue is DRM... I went to watch some old movie clips I had on an archive the other day while browsing it... They all failed - I didn't have the correct codecs. So I tried to download/find them. Nope. They were gone.
So the clip, which I wanted to view was lost... All I have to know what it was is "funnyvideoclip.avi"
But they were only of value to me so what's the big deal?
Maybe if it was my wedding video, I'd be more annoyed, but then, how many wedding videos, pictures, photo's and even paintings have been lost throughout history?
Just because the loss affected me, it doesn't mean there's a dark age. I'm saying knowledge is always being lost, due to obscurity, damage, natural disasters, political viewpoints and many other factors.
So let's say we lose all copies of programs for the Commodore 64... Is it a dark age? Or is the knowledge we've kept of the machine quite sufficient for contemporary times.
If anything, I think even more retention is made of digital material than non-digital... Just try finding a service manual for a 40 year old obscure car. Not very likely, but if there is a copy anywhere, I'd almost put money on it being digital !
GrpA.
Actually, I don't think garbage is the problem. I don't think there is a problem as it's being presented to us. Lots of printed media is destroyed also. Just the other day I found pieces of a five hundred page story I wrote a long time ago, then lost the disk. I'm not going to type it in again, so I just discarded it. It's not the first time in history and won't be the last. Very little of what is written is ever published. Most of it is discarded by our relatives after we die.
I think the real issue is that some people feel a need to collect everything that's ever created, like digital horders. If a tax return is old enough to be on floppy, then you don't need it anymore and any critical information from it probably exists somewhere else.
Content with real value self-perpetuates and remains and while some value is lost through attrition, such as websites going down, the consequences are often miniscule in comparison to the concept of archiving everything permanently.
Maybe we do lose those digital pictures on the floppy (and the box of floppies it was stored in) but if it was critical, we'd do something about it. We might print it out, but we lose albums too. They get wet, mouldy and burned, and we lose those memories too.
Too often it's not that important to us to keep until we want it later and can't find it.
Like most things horded, the value lies in keeping good care of what is most important to us, and often we find that what we want to keep is just a reflection of what matters the most.
To quote an interesting book entry I once read: Perspective. Use it or lose it.
That goes for hording digital stuff too.
GrpA.
I've also had similar requests in the past, and in both cases I did the work. I considered the request, decided they were ethical (even if somewhat unusual) and so did it. That's something you're going to have to figure out for yourself - whether you're going to do it or not.
I've been on the other side of the fence also...
If you're relying on data for commercial use, putting yourself in a position where you need that data is a risky thing...
I had a scraper once come after me. I caught them - as the previous poster pointed out, it's easy... I didn't block them. I captured and redirected their requests so I could control what they got and, well, sent them some information that made them look really, really stupid. They were angry, but there wasn't much they could do.
They were just enthusiasts - they had no business risk in their application suddenly failing.
Let your boss know the risk he is facing and then ask him if he really wants to risk being caught and shut down unexpectedly, or worse, finding someone has poisened his data.
It's just not good for business.
GrpA
Or forget *nix and just stay with windows, or maybe even Vista... The P1510 might be 3 years old, but it's hardly underpowered...
The 1.2 Pentium M isn't a P3 at 1.2Ghz.. Its the equivalent of a p4 at 1.8 Ghz...
I've played Tron 2.0 at 1280x1024 quite smoothly on it, so don't let the fact it doesn't support new shader models hide the fact it has some seriously beefed up graphics with the 915 GMS chipset fall to the side either. Pretty good for what was around 3 years ago in any laptop and more than most compact models still can do.
It's not a Quad core, or even a duo, but it's hardly underpowered even by today's standards.
Try comparing it to other recent palmtop models... It pretty much leaves them for dead, even as a 3 year veteran...
Just get some more memory and quit whining. Its cheap enough, even if proprietary.
Anyway, that's what I'm sending you this response from, from a train, on mobile internet... on a P1510...
GrpA
After a few years of relative peace in the galaxies, Darth Arts will turn to the dark side and fsck up everyone's game to make it more "appealing" to new players....
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to keep watching reruns of Episode 1....
GrpA
Yes, but that's a completely different process.
For a start, the person who asks me to do the work is already taking the problem seriously and usually knows exactly what they want.
eg, "This laptop user claims fusion. Please confirm/reject this claim and provide forensic evidence supporting it" along with a laptop for analysis, that doesn't work, and the company's definition of "Fusion".
or even the more open, "Here's a copy of the packet dumps during the hacking incident. Please work out what this person did to compromise the website" which I did more recently.
That stuff is easy - just follow the dotted line. It's just engineering.
It's not the same as working with people and the obstacles they raise in front of you...
And the "One" person per state doesn't need to do the forensic analysis themselves. There are plenty of contracted experts who can do that far more effectively. They just need to know when it's called for and make sure it's been done correctly in a way that can be used to prosecute someone.
GrpA
Something with basic I/O sampling so you can read all those old Audio Cassettes... Amstrad, C64, Sinclair, MSX, Oric, Ti99-4A, JR-100, Vic-20, BBC etc.
I sometimes wonder what I would make of the old things I used to write and do on those old systems...
GrpA
Yes, I have dealt with federal matters, and it's amazing how the same issues that affect whether or not police will take on your complaint occur at all levels.
I did speak to the federal authorities. I did track down the people whose task it was, and I found out what they needed.
It's a bit like chinese whispers. "I can't do anything if XXXX doesn't do their job." They will tell me that, but they won't tell XXXX directly. (XXXX Being a person, agency, official, whatever). I became the "connection" between them, relaying commitments.
So I did the rounds, learned what they required (specific only to my case) and got them all to agree to what was basically an open-ended commitment. THe problem is that they couldn't discuss anything with me - since they all recognized I had no authority and privacy laws got in the way, but wouldn't start bothering their counterparts to request help, because they couldn't tell their counterparts what was going - they didn't know how to.
However, I could get them to commit to speak to XXXX, if XXXX was prepared to help, so I called *all* the XXXXs and explained the situation, and sent the details through to all of them. The XXXX's were Federal Police, State Police and Telecommunications Regulations Enforcement authorities.
Once I had them all committed, I simply became the "co-ordination" point for the exercise. I learned everyone else's role and broke the task down and sent the appropriate information to each person that was relevant to their job.
The result? As soon as they realised I had handed them a case ready to close, with all the contacts agreeing to their role, they moved immediately. The whole thing took about an hour.
In that case, I had made a slight error with regards to the law that was broken, and they called me back to let me know they couldn't actually prosecute and were helpful enough to provide additional information I needed to know to close that loophole with the way my network was set up ( Guest access can be a real issue - if you let people in, proving tresspass is impossible ).
They also provided a committment to back me up in the future if it ever happened again.
True to their word, they did the next time and I caught the guy. He was prosecuted successfully, although the next time, it was local, so I didn't need to coordinate as many people.
So please, consider my point. You need to co-ordinate *everyone* and make sure they know you have a reasonable chance of prosecution and that you've lined up your ducks, or they won't get involved.
It's no different for a cop doing that job. They need to get everyone involved too. Basically they still have to go through the same process.
Most people will do their job and help you if you remove all the obstacles first. In a perfect world, they would move their own obstacles as well, but hey, if it's your problem and affects you, it's up to you to decide how committed you are to solving it.
GrpA
You're thinking of the events that were detailed in "The Hacker Crackdown" aren't you?...
I'm not saying your wrong, but please re-read my post. I'm saying that a lot of the time, the police are expected to do this because it's their job, except they don't know where to start, which leads to the situation that they can't actually be certain it *is* their job. So they don't do anything.
It doesn't matter if it crosses state or even federal or international lines...
Only committing crimes in another state from your home state is an old trick to avoid the attention of law enforcement. It only works for a while - the police know how to deal with this.
Imagine this. Someone in your state is breaking the law. You report the details to your local police. They arrest them.
Now consider - Someone in another state is breaking the law. You report the details to *their* local police. They arrest them.
See the difference? You can achieve that without being a police officer - but it does knowing who to contact and what to tell them. Giving them an IP address isn't enough. What they are looking for in *evidence* of a crime they can understand. Send them details of which crime is being broken, so they don't have to work it out themselves, and they know it's something they are responsible for.
Speak to their ISP in advance, explain the situation, get the ISPs contact person and let him know his local police will be in contact to collect the evidence. Most ISPs will co-operate that far - to wait for a request from the local police for information.
Learn about evidence collection. Learn what police need to do their job.
That makes all the difference in the world.
And it is the local police's job to do this. Are you some multibillion dollar exec? No, well how can you seriously expect the secret service to do this for you? Seriously?
Do you think I go and call ASIO (I'm in Australia) or ASIS everytime I find graffiti on my car?
Finding my computer's been hacked is no different. Just because they employ people in secret intelligence organisations who understand the situation doesn't make it their problem... You're a small victim, that's what the local police are there for.
GrpA
I share the feeling, but I'm sick and tired of receiving all the attempts to socially engineer their way into my bank account or similar, or get me to click on some malware, and no matter how obvious these things are, sooner or later they work ( How often have you clicked on "yes" instead of "no" just to make the stupid window go away, or had a poppup pop up just under where you're about to click?)
They don't need an internetpol - they just need the police.
The problem is that the police don't like dealing with it. It's too hard to understand and they don't get paid enough and they have to deal with stupid paperwork anyway because some kid got caught painting logos on someone's wall, and now some idiot computer user is calling saying "My bank account is being hacked, help me" and the poor cop can't even cope with getting his own email to work, let alone working out how to reverse engineer some genius hacker's work to help some lady who talks like she's on crack and doesn't know why her bank account is empty... And it's the fifth time this morning...
So to fix it, the police department need to get serious about computer crime and just simply establish a department that can deal with it... And keep them separate to fix the issue, and not be a part of the group that deals with local computer crime, etc.
Just one person per state who understands technology at a basic level (eg, like most people who read this forum) is enough.
And then this one person can spend some time networking with cops from around the world (heck, send them to some junket in a hotel once a year so they can meet all the others... Maybe blackhat or something) and then knows how to apply the laws correctly and how to go after these people...
And THEN the problem starts to get fixed.
Ranting aside, I know how the situation works. I've been on the prosecuting end of several cases, in which I did the legwork. I tracked down the evidence, and prepared a one-page brief for the police involved, including details on the exact crime committed, the evidence, who has the evidence and the phone numner to call to get it.
If you give the police a target they can understand, they usually are more than willing to take the case on.
When I last did that, they even sent a raiding party and siezed the guy, his computer and everything else within hours of my sending the details. They had a written confession out of him within two hours!
Most people who are still feeling the umbrage of having been owned don't understand this and it's not suprising the police don't want to help, especially when they don't know where to start.
My experience is that the existing laws are usually sufficient. It's the will and knowledge to implement them that are lacking.
GrpA
I'd still question the stability. It depends on the location of the CoP, which can vary depending on the situation the vehicle finds itself in.
Front-wheel trikes are succeptible to issues when braking (CoP moves forward) and turning (CoP moves to the side) at the same time.
Under those circumstances, which are reasonably likely to occur, I agree with you on the configuration.
However, under other circumstances involving stability and under high yaw (eg, braking causes the car to spin, etc, and with less traction on one rear tire than two) I'd still be fearful that the car would flip rather than slide - all that really needs to happen, IMO, is for the back-end to spin around to the front under braking.
Plus you also have the issues related to contact surface area of the rear tire.
I guess I'm talking about the kinds of positions you might find yourself in, that you learn to deal with in an advanced driving course, but whenever you go for three wheels, the first compromise is stability.
The car does look nice though... Like a composite body aircraft cockpit - :)
GrpA
300mpg is impressive, but they stopped selling trike's for a reason ( and they now sell quad's in their place ).
That trend with electric vehicles actually worries me, and I can't help but wonder at the safety implications.
Is it really so difficult to keep the drag co-efficient down without losing the extra wheel?
GrpA
Dead Space I can handle.
GrpA
And Instant Messengers... And the web-based Email clients... And encrypted mail... And..
Hang on, they'll need to take record the ENTIRE Internet!
Seems to me now's a good time to buy shares in Seagate and Western Digital.
GrpA.
I hear that the first beta testers are annoyed that to bootstrap the suit, they have to stand in a spread-eagle configuration and yell out "Power Extreme!"
GrpA
It does much the same, but leaves the face alone and photoshops it onto an image taken from a fashion magazine.
It's still recognizable as the same person, but they look a lot better.
This technique is so powerful, that if you choose the right magazine (eg, Playboy, Hustler etc) that the test subjects don't even notice if you cut the original face out badly.
Three out of Four test subjects said "What Face" when asked about this irregularity and two left the test early with the new pictures, no doubt impressed by the quality of my algorythm.
GrpA
I can't understand the appear of iXXXX's either. Locked proprietary technology with limited scope for a geek to truly enjoy.
What I've noticed though is that the people who buy them don't seem to care...
Sure they'll die, but I doubt they'll die just because there's something better on the market.
And as for open alternatives? I've had a Symbian phone for years. Lots of free apps and developer tools, built in GPS and great touch screen, been around for years... That didn't stop the iPhone coming out either.
GrpA
People have been trying to stop cheats for years. It's damn annoying on a MP game when you keep getting headshot through a mountain, by a pistol every few minutes.
And those cheats aren't even inspired by money - just their own motivation to be assholes.
So put real money into it and watch what happens... The cheating will go hightech no matter what they do.
Think "Dogfight" in William Gibson's "Burning Chrome" Anthology.
Someone will always find a way to cheat, and who want to put up cash to let the h4x0r2 screw up your game and take it?
GrpA.
Actually, depending on just how badly designed the system is (think primary-school-level understanding of technology that most managers have) it could be plausible... Especially without any details on how the system works.
Static (when it doesn't destroy an input by shorting out the diode protection network on it) causes a signal to be received.
If you designed a basic enough cartridge (eg, 1 button on each input, with the cartridge just registering "Button Presses") then yes, I can actually imagine that causing false votes registered.
And I can also imagine vote machines using this type of technology as non-tech savvy people design this equipment and I've seen designs as stupid as this in money changing machines...
And it didn't take the kids at arcades long to figure out rub your feet on the carpet, get free coins.
If they can make this mistake on a machine giving out their own money, then beleive me, it's not that much of a stretch of imagination to beleive they would do something equally stupid in the design of a voting machine.
GrpA