But then - it may be even better if the security checks appears to be regular done by uniformed personnel and then random by plain clothed personnel.
This is only the case if you are laying a trap instead of trying to protect assets. The theory behind your statement is that the enemy will be emboldened to attack through false knowledge and then you will catch them in the act. In an airport situation, this obviously exposes civilians to a great deal of danger, so it would not apply there. In a police sting operation or an FBI terrorist cell investigation it would much more likely apply.
This is incorrect. There are a finite number of viable attack vectors, thus there need only be a finite number of places to check. The enemy KNOWS there are only a finite number of viable attack vectors - for instance, it is NOT viable to attack directly through the side of a building if you are using non-mechanized personnel, the perimeter is not reasonably accessible to ground troops and the walls are made of thick concrete.
Once you and the enemy have identified the viable attack vectors, the question then becomes - for the enemy - to determine when those vectors will be the most weakly defended. The randomization ensures that the enemy cannot know beyond a certain percentage when a particular vector will be weak. On a regular schedule the enemy knows the defense of any particular vector with much greater - possibly perfect - certainty.
You are expecting the company to do more than it is contractually obligated to do. And expecting that is disingenuous (or perhaps deluded) on your part. If you expected them to support you, then the GPL should also state that the software must be released with support for users of Linux comparable to that of other systems for which the device was primarily indented. Or something to that effect. You can't just write a contract and then later claim that there were additional 'moral' clauses in it to which the recipient must now adhere.
You got exactly what you should have from the GPL - the company has to release modifications. If you expected more, you should have stated as much.
Be careful how you read this. THis specifically states that yes, all these things are the supreme law of the land, by which it is meant that the laws codified therein supercede any State or other laws, and Judges in each State are bound by the supreme laws before those of their respective States. This does not suggest specifically that Treaties are superior or equivalent to the Constitution, or that Laws made by Congress are equal in weight to the Constitution itself. To determine that requires reading Supreme Court decisions.
Wait a second, you are complaining because you had a power failure and it's the software's fault? Get a UPS man. The fact that you merely had some data corruption should be considered a blessing considering what faulty power can do to your hardware.
I'm sorry, why can't we expect them to actually do what they claim to do? They aren't rating the game - they are rating the PR package created by the game company, a package specifically designed to garner a particular rating. Would it be equally credible if Consumer Reports never used and tested the products they rated nor examined actual quality statistics from the field, and instead just went over the MTBF and features lists the manufacturers provided?
The trouble is people who go into politics necessarily want power. Repealing laws doesn't give them power, it generally removes it. I much prefer the idea of some limit on the total number of laws, to keep us focused on the really important stuff. But someone would have to decide that limit, and they'd probably change it then. *sigh*
Just to pick up on your comment about people not caring and adding some anecdotal evidence...
We had some friends over last night, I'd call them pertty normal, average consumers. They didn't even know what HD DVD or Blu Ray was. They knew they were like DVD and had movies on them, but they thought they were played on normal DVD drives.
We on Slashdot live in a rarefied world of high tech knowledge. Most people don't and I suspect my friends are not the only people who don't know much, if anything, about this format war. These companies have thus far done a very poor job of explaning what they are producing and why to the average consumer.
Actually, the Kessel Run is through hyperspace. One might imagine that different hyperspace engines would convert the actual distance into relatively smaller transit distances depending on their capability. Therefore, the Millennium Falcon, being a particularly 'fast' ship, had a hyperdrive that made the Kessel Run particularly short (i.e. it took a shorter path through hyperspace than other ships.) If you can assume that all ships travel through hyperspace at the same rate of speed in that dimension, then Han's statement makes sense.
Whether you believe the writers thought this when they wrote it is another issue altogether.
Clearly in a completely unregulated system even the situation you are suggesting would not last forever. Eventually the people who innovate would go out of business, and those who don't would have no one left to copy. This would lead to one of two situations: 1) All products become crap because no one is willing to invest to develop better stuff or 2) someone would convince a government to protect their investments because it is demonstrably in the public interest to do so.
You don't get points for guessing which situation would come about, because it already has. And please don't invoke any of the utopian social systems (pure socialism, pure capitalism, etc.) as justification for your argument, because they are impossible to achieve by virtue of their assumptions about human nature.
So instead we should subsidize the indie artists? Or are you suggesting that by charging an equal amount for lesser known artists, people are more likely to take a chance on them?
The big wigs of the music industry are always going to 'play it safe' - that's just a fact of business. But an indie artist can come along and get good exposure through this system because their songs cost little. The consumer might be willing to take a risk on some "unproven" but cheap songs. If they are good, word spreads and more people download it, and hopefully the artist sees the additional revenue from the price increases. As the price goes up, eventually the "big wigs" take note and consider putting more dough into the artist. Remember, even the big pop artists don't account for all of the music out there. The industry has to spread its money around somewhat because tastes change constantly. Of course once they get popular, they won't be indie any more and will be accused of 'selling out,' eventually becoming the very artists you now revile for their success.
On the flip side, small artists who only appeal to a small group will never be rich. But neither should they. Just because you can sing and some people aren't driven away by your banshee-like wail does not mean you deserve to make a career in music. To do that you have to consistently put out something people are willing to pay for, and the fact that right now the musical tastes of the majority (however they are derived) don't align with yours is quite irrelevant to that process.
Yes, but they don't have the guns, so you actually have a chance of getting your claim filled if it was in your contract. With fully socialized medicine, you will get whatever payment the government deems is appropriate for your situation. This is fine so long as it fits your needs. If it doesn't? Tough titties...
It's actually largely human nature, though being behind the corporate veil brings out the darker side of people often times. I know too many individuals who would (and do) shirk their obligations more often than my insurance company does.
By that logic, no insurers would ever pay out. Thus, they would eventually have no customers so they would go out of business.
This is not so for all insurers, your logic is therefore flawed.
By the way, read your insurance contract. It is enforceable just like any other contract. You can usually tell the bad companies from the good by how often they get sued by their own clients. But remember, lots of humans want a free lunch too so they will sue their insurance company even when they have no real legal basis for doing so. I's not just insurance companies who, in your words, make it a giant scam.
You are right. Much better that we are dependent on the government for these services. Then the people with the guns are also in charge of our health, so if we have a problem with it, our only option is to suck it up.
Why do people who think corporations are the problem always assume government is the solution? Have we learned nothing over the past 5000 years of civilization?
There are several other possibilities. We could find ETIs by:
Observing their effects on the galaxy
Observing their communications
Observing them directly
For observing their effects on the galaxy, perhaps the ETIs make changes which are too small to detect on the scales we can currently resolve. Or maybe they don't need to make such changes to advance their society.
For observing their communications, perhaps their communications are too weak to reach us above the background noise, or they used broadcast communications only briefly in such power (and the time to detect those is past), and now use methods which are much less detectable (think quantum communications.)
For observing them directly, perhaps they are just too far away, or they don't travel beyond their own (possibly terraformed) starsystems.
Perhaps that the period of time in which we had to detect them was small because they made it to some singularity and no longer concern themselves with the same things we do. Maybe they have a massive machine mind now, and everyone 'lives' in that, working on more important problems. Maybe they don't need to consume vast quantites of resources now and so their effects can no longer be observed, and the limited window in which to observe them has passed.
And there are undoubtedly a lot of socio-political factors which we would have to consider - colonization of space is expensive, xenophobia, planet doesn't have the resources to support colonization. Perhaps terraforming as we have imagined it is largely impractical or maybe even impossible (at least for some species) and therefore they are stuck within a single solar system on life support. Maybe they don't have the will to do generation ships, or their biology is unsuited to the trip.
I can thing of TONS of reasons why we have not yet observed ETIs, even if the Universe is swarming with them. I'd very much like to believe we'll meet some someday, but I certainly don't see it happening in my lifetime, and I could easily see humans transcending into some form where such things are no longer of interest to them.
Actually, having played most of those games, I even wonder why WoW did so well (I played it up to 50 when 50 was all the further you could go. Or was it 60, been a while.) The only thing I can think of is that they made it easy to solo, at least with some characters. In Everquest, you are pretty much locked out of solo from level 25 on. The other thing is the ability to fight other players, though it turns out this is pointless since you really can't gain or lose anything important.
Honestly, I don't see what the attraction is any more. ProgressQuest accomplishes just as much without the annoyance of actually grinding.
Massive breadth? If by that you mean the sheer volume of games, you are right. If you mean the large number of games with different gameplay experiences... not so much. Playing Everquest, WoW, Lord of the Rings Online, Dark Ages of Camelot and Final Fantasy offers virtually no differentiation in substance. This really does seem like a last ditch effort by Sony to retain players.
Really, I think it is as much an indictment of the state of fantasy MMOs today as on SoE itself. I suspect this exact game would be received just as well in most of the other MMOs and would have the same effect, dragging people away from grinding. Actually, it gives people PvP effectively, which at the very least is a positive change to most of these systems.
Shyness can be overcome. Just practice being a bit more outgoing - you don't have to volunteer to get up and sing kareoke every time a song comes on, but you'd be suprised how well people generally react to being spoken to. And the more you do it, the easier it becomes. I used to be terrified of speaking up in all but the closest of company, mostly because I wasn't sure if I was going to make a fool of myself saying something stupid. Guess what? Lots of people say a lot of stupid things, and you probably observe it every day. They get on just fine. So will you, and probably with less apparent idiocy:)
Once girls know you can speak, the rest will come in time. Confidence (but not overconfidence) is a huge attractor.:)
While many of your assertions are true, such as sex being disgusting if you think about it (which is why sex is something 'done' not 'thought',) various moral dilemmas and difficulties understanding the benefits of such relationships, I think it is important as an intelligent person to understand that these interactions are essential human interactions. To ignore them is to ignore a very real part of your own humanity and will place you in an inferior position with respect to the rest of the world when you do have to deal with people. It's like walking through life being deaf or blind. Except in this case you can choose not to be deaf or blind.
To pur some of your fears in perspective, I bet you would have NO qualms whatsoever about tackling a very difficult engineering problem. Such a problem likely scares the crap out of your average person, whether for fear of failure, or an unwillingess to expose themselves as having too little knowledge to tackle it. What if you took the same drive and intelligence and applied it to the problem of understanding and interacting with your fellow humans? After all, if the low-brows can manage to deal with the moral dilemmas, safety issues and all the other "complex" interactions, surely somewhat with your enhanced grey-matter can as well...
Oh, and those social skills... they are skills, and like all skills must be practiced. Get out and practice them. Your reward will be a richer, fuller life.
I don't disagree that retro styling can be very beautiful, done properly. But is it at all clear that the styling of the DeLorean would hold up well when compared to its theoretical modern contemporaries, such as the restyled Chevys, Fords and Dodges which by all acounts have VASTLY superior numbers of fans? Marketing the car based on people who liked the movie liking it enough to want to buy it again seems like a poor business decision. It's not even remotely like marketing retro-styled cars based on 60s and 70s designs. Remember, those cars were relatively much more popular among consumers than the DeLorean was in its day.
It just doesn't make business sense no matter how you or I, with our rose-colored 3D movie glasses, might wish it to be. That said, if the idea is to bring it back as a niche item sold to a few people for a relatively high cost, then yes, I could see it happening. But cheap, fast and good styling all together will not come from this project.
Well, then what is the discussion about? A old car coming back as a kit? This isn't even remotely news. There are hundreds of kit cars out there, many more compelling than the DeLorean (I even own one.) If this is just a niche automobile, the 'modern automobile consumer' also won't buy them, because while they like the IDEA of such vehicles, the implementation of those vehicles usually leaves them wanting.
Sometimes the old is best left in its original form, so the rose-colored glasses don't have to be shattered by modern reality.
Indeed, what the hell? Now you have to have another tool and another source file for what is essentially declaring a dictionary in C++, which should be in any good developer's library? Yeesh.
If you don't like the nasty nested ifs, make the keys in your dictionary the command line options and the values delegates, then just loop through your list of options passed on the command-line, invoking the delegate as appropriate. Eliminates the if, there are no switch statements either, and each of your command line arguments is now handled by a function dedicated to it, bringing all of the benefits of compartmentalizing your code rather than stringing it out in a huge processing function.
Slashdot Mirror
But then - it may be even better if the security checks appears to be regular done by uniformed personnel and then random by plain clothed personnel.
This is only the case if you are laying a trap instead of trying to protect assets. The theory behind your statement is that the enemy will be emboldened to attack through false knowledge and then you will catch them in the act. In an airport situation, this obviously exposes civilians to a great deal of danger, so it would not apply there. In a police sting operation or an FBI terrorist cell investigation it would much more likely apply.
This is incorrect. There are a finite number of viable attack vectors, thus there need only be a finite number of places to check. The enemy KNOWS there are only a finite number of viable attack vectors - for instance, it is NOT viable to attack directly through the side of a building if you are using non-mechanized personnel, the perimeter is not reasonably accessible to ground troops and the walls are made of thick concrete.
Once you and the enemy have identified the viable attack vectors, the question then becomes - for the enemy - to determine when those vectors will be the most weakly defended. The randomization ensures that the enemy cannot know beyond a certain percentage when a particular vector will be weak. On a regular schedule the enemy knows the defense of any particular vector with much greater - possibly perfect - certainty.
You are expecting the company to do more than it is contractually obligated to do. And expecting that is disingenuous (or perhaps deluded) on your part. If you expected them to support you, then the GPL should also state that the software must be released with support for users of Linux comparable to that of other systems for which the device was primarily indented. Or something to that effect. You can't just write a contract and then later claim that there were additional 'moral' clauses in it to which the recipient must now adhere.
You got exactly what you should have from the GPL - the company has to release modifications. If you expected more, you should have stated as much.
Be careful how you read this. THis specifically states that yes, all these things are the supreme law of the land, by which it is meant that the laws codified therein supercede any State or other laws, and Judges in each State are bound by the supreme laws before those of their respective States. This does not suggest specifically that Treaties are superior or equivalent to the Constitution, or that Laws made by Congress are equal in weight to the Constitution itself. To determine that requires reading Supreme Court decisions.
I assure you the Chinese government doesn't suddenly have less authority because Google has fiber in the Pacific.
Wait a second, you are complaining because you had a power failure and it's the software's fault? Get a UPS man. The fact that you merely had some data corruption should be considered a blessing considering what faulty power can do to your hardware.
Yeesh.
I'm sorry, why can't we expect them to actually do what they claim to do? They aren't rating the game - they are rating the PR package created by the game company, a package specifically designed to garner a particular rating. Would it be equally credible if Consumer Reports never used and tested the products they rated nor examined actual quality statistics from the field, and instead just went over the MTBF and features lists the manufacturers provided?
It's BS and we all know it.
The trouble is people who go into politics necessarily want power. Repealing laws doesn't give them power, it generally removes it. I much prefer the idea of some limit on the total number of laws, to keep us focused on the really important stuff. But someone would have to decide that limit, and they'd probably change it then. *sigh*
Just to pick up on your comment about people not caring and adding some anecdotal evidence... We had some friends over last night, I'd call them pertty normal, average consumers. They didn't even know what HD DVD or Blu Ray was. They knew they were like DVD and had movies on them, but they thought they were played on normal DVD drives. We on Slashdot live in a rarefied world of high tech knowledge. Most people don't and I suspect my friends are not the only people who don't know much, if anything, about this format war. These companies have thus far done a very poor job of explaning what they are producing and why to the average consumer.
Actually, the Kessel Run is through hyperspace. One might imagine that different hyperspace engines would convert the actual distance into relatively smaller transit distances depending on their capability. Therefore, the Millennium Falcon, being a particularly 'fast' ship, had a hyperdrive that made the Kessel Run particularly short (i.e. it took a shorter path through hyperspace than other ships.) If you can assume that all ships travel through hyperspace at the same rate of speed in that dimension, then Han's statement makes sense.
Whether you believe the writers thought this when they wrote it is another issue altogether.
Such a short term view...
Clearly in a completely unregulated system even the situation you are suggesting would not last forever. Eventually the people who innovate would go out of business, and those who don't would have no one left to copy. This would lead to one of two situations: 1) All products become crap because no one is willing to invest to develop better stuff or 2) someone would convince a government to protect their investments because it is demonstrably in the public interest to do so.
You don't get points for guessing which situation would come about, because it already has. And please don't invoke any of the utopian social systems (pure socialism, pure capitalism, etc.) as justification for your argument, because they are impossible to achieve by virtue of their assumptions about human nature.
So instead we should subsidize the indie artists? Or are you suggesting that by charging an equal amount for lesser known artists, people are more likely to take a chance on them?
The big wigs of the music industry are always going to 'play it safe' - that's just a fact of business. But an indie artist can come along and get good exposure through this system because their songs cost little. The consumer might be willing to take a risk on some "unproven" but cheap songs. If they are good, word spreads and more people download it, and hopefully the artist sees the additional revenue from the price increases. As the price goes up, eventually the "big wigs" take note and consider putting more dough into the artist. Remember, even the big pop artists don't account for all of the music out there. The industry has to spread its money around somewhat because tastes change constantly. Of course once they get popular, they won't be indie any more and will be accused of 'selling out,' eventually becoming the very artists you now revile for their success.
On the flip side, small artists who only appeal to a small group will never be rich. But neither should they. Just because you can sing and some people aren't driven away by your banshee-like wail does not mean you deserve to make a career in music. To do that you have to consistently put out something people are willing to pay for, and the fact that right now the musical tastes of the majority (however they are derived) don't align with yours is quite irrelevant to that process.
Yes, but they don't have the guns, so you actually have a chance of getting your claim filled if it was in your contract. With fully socialized medicine, you will get whatever payment the government deems is appropriate for your situation. This is fine so long as it fits your needs. If it doesn't? Tough titties...
It's actually largely human nature, though being behind the corporate veil brings out the darker side of people often times. I know too many individuals who would (and do) shirk their obligations more often than my insurance company does.
By that logic, no insurers would ever pay out. Thus, they would eventually have no customers so they would go out of business.
This is not so for all insurers, your logic is therefore flawed.
By the way, read your insurance contract. It is enforceable just like any other contract. You can usually tell the bad companies from the good by how often they get sued by their own clients. But remember, lots of humans want a free lunch too so they will sue their insurance company even when they have no real legal basis for doing so. I's not just insurance companies who, in your words, make it a giant scam.
You are right. Much better that we are dependent on the government for these services. Then the people with the guns are also in charge of our health, so if we have a problem with it, our only option is to suck it up.
Why do people who think corporations are the problem always assume government is the solution? Have we learned nothing over the past 5000 years of civilization?
There are several other possibilities. We could find ETIs by:
For observing their effects on the galaxy, perhaps the ETIs make changes which are too small to detect on the scales we can currently resolve. Or maybe they don't need to make such changes to advance their society.
For observing their communications, perhaps their communications are too weak to reach us above the background noise, or they used broadcast communications only briefly in such power (and the time to detect those is past), and now use methods which are much less detectable (think quantum communications.)
For observing them directly, perhaps they are just too far away, or they don't travel beyond their own (possibly terraformed) starsystems.
Perhaps that the period of time in which we had to detect them was small because they made it to some singularity and no longer concern themselves with the same things we do. Maybe they have a massive machine mind now, and everyone 'lives' in that, working on more important problems. Maybe they don't need to consume vast quantites of resources now and so their effects can no longer be observed, and the limited window in which to observe them has passed.
And there are undoubtedly a lot of socio-political factors which we would have to consider - colonization of space is expensive, xenophobia, planet doesn't have the resources to support colonization. Perhaps terraforming as we have imagined it is largely impractical or maybe even impossible (at least for some species) and therefore they are stuck within a single solar system on life support. Maybe they don't have the will to do generation ships, or their biology is unsuited to the trip.
I can thing of TONS of reasons why we have not yet observed ETIs, even if the Universe is swarming with them. I'd very much like to believe we'll meet some someday, but I certainly don't see it happening in my lifetime, and I could easily see humans transcending into some form where such things are no longer of interest to them.
Actually, having played most of those games, I even wonder why WoW did so well (I played it up to 50 when 50 was all the further you could go. Or was it 60, been a while.) The only thing I can think of is that they made it easy to solo, at least with some characters. In Everquest, you are pretty much locked out of solo from level 25 on. The other thing is the ability to fight other players, though it turns out this is pointless since you really can't gain or lose anything important.
Honestly, I don't see what the attraction is any more. ProgressQuest accomplishes just as much without the annoyance of actually grinding.
Massive breadth? If by that you mean the sheer volume of games, you are right. If you mean the large number of games with different gameplay experiences... not so much. Playing Everquest, WoW, Lord of the Rings Online, Dark Ages of Camelot and Final Fantasy offers virtually no differentiation in substance. This really does seem like a last ditch effort by Sony to retain players.
Really, I think it is as much an indictment of the state of fantasy MMOs today as on SoE itself. I suspect this exact game would be received just as well in most of the other MMOs and would have the same effect, dragging people away from grinding. Actually, it gives people PvP effectively, which at the very least is a positive change to most of these systems.
Shyness can be overcome. Just practice being a bit more outgoing - you don't have to volunteer to get up and sing kareoke every time a song comes on, but you'd be suprised how well people generally react to being spoken to. And the more you do it, the easier it becomes. I used to be terrified of speaking up in all but the closest of company, mostly because I wasn't sure if I was going to make a fool of myself saying something stupid. Guess what? Lots of people say a lot of stupid things, and you probably observe it every day. They get on just fine. So will you, and probably with less apparent idiocy :)
:)
Once girls know you can speak, the rest will come in time. Confidence (but not overconfidence) is a huge attractor.
While many of your assertions are true, such as sex being disgusting if you think about it (which is why sex is something 'done' not 'thought',) various moral dilemmas and difficulties understanding the benefits of such relationships, I think it is important as an intelligent person to understand that these interactions are essential human interactions. To ignore them is to ignore a very real part of your own humanity and will place you in an inferior position with respect to the rest of the world when you do have to deal with people. It's like walking through life being deaf or blind. Except in this case you can choose not to be deaf or blind.
To pur some of your fears in perspective, I bet you would have NO qualms whatsoever about tackling a very difficult engineering problem. Such a problem likely scares the crap out of your average person, whether for fear of failure, or an unwillingess to expose themselves as having too little knowledge to tackle it. What if you took the same drive and intelligence and applied it to the problem of understanding and interacting with your fellow humans? After all, if the low-brows can manage to deal with the moral dilemmas, safety issues and all the other "complex" interactions, surely somewhat with your enhanced grey-matter can as well...
Oh, and those social skills... they are skills, and like all skills must be practiced. Get out and practice them. Your reward will be a richer, fuller life.
In a society ruled by fear (as ours now is), this comes as no suprise at all.
I don't disagree that retro styling can be very beautiful, done properly. But is it at all clear that the styling of the DeLorean would hold up well when compared to its theoretical modern contemporaries, such as the restyled Chevys, Fords and Dodges which by all acounts have VASTLY superior numbers of fans? Marketing the car based on people who liked the movie liking it enough to want to buy it again seems like a poor business decision. It's not even remotely like marketing retro-styled cars based on 60s and 70s designs. Remember, those cars were relatively much more popular among consumers than the DeLorean was in its day.
It just doesn't make business sense no matter how you or I, with our rose-colored 3D movie glasses, might wish it to be. That said, if the idea is to bring it back as a niche item sold to a few people for a relatively high cost, then yes, I could see it happening. But cheap, fast and good styling all together will not come from this project.
Well, then what is the discussion about? A old car coming back as a kit? This isn't even remotely news. There are hundreds of kit cars out there, many more compelling than the DeLorean (I even own one.) If this is just a niche automobile, the 'modern automobile consumer' also won't buy them, because while they like the IDEA of such vehicles, the implementation of those vehicles usually leaves them wanting. Sometimes the old is best left in its original form, so the rose-colored glasses don't have to be shattered by modern reality.
Indeed, what the hell? Now you have to have another tool and another source file for what is essentially declaring a dictionary in C++, which should be in any good developer's library? Yeesh.
If you don't like the nasty nested ifs, make the keys in your dictionary the command line options and the values delegates, then just loop through your list of options passed on the command-line, invoking the delegate as appropriate. Eliminates the if, there are no switch statements either, and each of your command line arguments is now handled by a function dedicated to it, bringing all of the benefits of compartmentalizing your code rather than stringing it out in a huge processing function.