I TA'd for an Intro to Java course. (Say what you will about Java being a crummy language to start with, or early classes being slow--our second-year-plus classes were brutal.) For a fair chunk of the first quarter, programs were basically identical...but after the point when we WANTED you to write identical, correct code, cheating sticks out like a sore thumb.
I don't know the details of our cheating detection program, but it operated partway into the compilation step so it sees through superficial changes. Change a comment? Wouldn't matter, it wouldn't notice. Change your variable names? Same thing. Declare your variables in a different order? Yeah, it'll spot that too. You have to actually start changing the program flow--in significant ways, no less!--before it stops tripping on your program. And even then, it'll often flag similar programs as "hey, a human should check these out".
Cheating happens a lot more than you'd think in CS classes. And in my department, at least...I know that we sent every last one of them to the Dean.
I don't think I've seen so many floating ads in a theoretically-legitimate site before. When I opened it, it grayed out the window and popped up trying to get me to fill out something...scrolling around, the mouse runs into these little green underlined words that pops up an ad thing you have to click to close...and after about twenty seconds, another floating window scrolled down the screen and parked in the middle.
That's a little too much cruft for me. They can keep their content, I don't want it.
The water they're testing is, by federal limits, not drinkable. That said, the water they're testing is not drinking water. If this stuff was getting anywhere that humans were going to drink it, that would be a very serious problem...but they're saying that doesn't seem likely.
So no, they're not ignoring the limits. They should act quickly, yes, but still.
Only time my computer's ever crashed since I installed XP was when my secondary drive suffered a head crash. I'm sure someone will tell me that Linux could have kept running, because hey, it wasn't even the root drive. But I can't say I really care.
Probably more people than you'd think. It serves my professional and hobby needs extremely well, personally. I wasn't a big fan before the 2008 version, but I'm quite happy now.
Devil's advocate: What's the labor involved in tracking down P2P users? They use some pretty sophisticated tech to catch people these days--someone had to pay to develop it--and they hire agencies for the specific purpose of tracking violators and even poisoning torrents in some cases. The cost of enforcement is pretty high, so actual damages might have to include those.
I didn't see anything about regret. All I saw was "Yeah, they have a legal or financial need to protect their brand, so they had to take us down". Why would you even think that their statement was coerced? Sure, they were forced to take it down to avoid big lawsuits, but that's not what you said. You said "Forcing them to put out a "mea culpa" statement like this (no doubt with hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of lawsuits promised if they did not) is absolutely disgusting." Again, what exactly makes you think it's coerced?
Ah, every time something like this comes up I keep hoping that we've found some auditory buffer that both memories and the ear feed into, in a format that would be easy to parse. I think we're seeing the first glimmers of doing that with the visual cortex? I'm not sure how similar 'remembered' music is to 'entirely imagined out of thin air on the spot' music, but I imagine that either way, it would be a great boon for composers...probably do for them what the Internet did for journalists. Whether that's good or bad for the art as a whole remains to be seen!
All I've ever wanted from brain-interface computing is the ability to 'think' music into some format where I can play it back again. Are we getting close to that yet?
The last one sounded like some guy successfully set off a charge that was barely large enough to set his pants on fire, then some guy jumped him afterwards. How, exactly, is that foiled?
Thank god you actually bothered to look at the article before posting. Slashdot needs more people like you, it really does. Why are you only modded +3?
According to an update in the Boing Boing article, Watts got out of the car to ask what was happening -- presumably because his car and/or person was being searched. When the officers refused to answer and told him to get back in the car, he asked the question again. At which point he was attacked, his property was seized, and he was asked to waive his Miranda rights.
Er, I understand that some cops can be kind of dicks--more than kind of, sometimes--but when a cop tells you to get back in your car, you DO IT. If you get pulled over for speeding or a broken tail light and you get out of your car, the cop is probably going to draw his gun, and I have zero qualms with that.
You have a problem with what the cops are doing, you deal with it later. You don't deal with it while they're searching your car, by getting OUT of your car. They search because they think something's up, and you really, really don't want to support that idea. They're in charge...and they're just thinking about going home to their families at the end of the day. Some guy starts acting belligerent, not following directions, putting himself in a potentially threatening posture, and yeah, at one end of the bell curve, you're going to get overreacting cops. But I figure it's at least half your fault if you're doing that stuff.
Really, what did he even think he was going to accomplish? Was he going to say "Hey, guys, please don't open my trunk"? If the cops decide they want to search your car, they ARE GOING TO search your car. And honestly, at a border crossing, I don't mind.
So he got chucked in a cell. Sorry, guy. Somewhere along the chain of communication, someone said "He was acting all belligerent at the border crossing and trying to stop us from searching his car", and someone else said "Ugh, I don't know what else to do with him right now, chuck him in a cell until my superior can handle him". Outliers happen. Yeah, please continue to post stories when this stuff happens--but right now it doesn't happen enough to scare me. Right now it just seems like a very reasonable tail end of the bell curve. I don't see malice, I just see people who weren't at their best...and guy who decides to raise a fuss and get out of his car is one of those people.
It seems pretty obvious to me. They have a suspect in a totally unrelated case who they are pretty sure visited Indymedia on that day...say, they have a laptop that they took around that time, but they need a little more evidence to prove that the IP actually showed up in the logs, or to prove some login information.
So somehow, maybe misguidedly, they think that getting those logs will help them prove some other criminal case. Maybe a kiddie porn investigation, maybe a murder where the guy logged on from his victim's house. In any case, the Indymedia system isn't really involved--except that some guy of interest touched the site, and they need to convince a jury or a jury of that to establish some other fact.
As an indie developer, I have to say I'm at least a little concerned. I think it's wonderful for games to be accessible, but the stuff I'm putting out are small genre titles targeted for a small audience, and my budget is nonexistent. I'm worried that someone could go through my catalog of games and force me to change all of them, swamping me with work, for only a few more sales.
It's easy to say that only small changes are needed, but what if I've lost the source code but I'm still selling the game? Should the law require me to stop selling it, just because I can't change it for a small part of my audience? Again, it's easy to say that this should only affect big publishers like Sony, but the law is never that specific.
Let's ask Wikipedia's article on "Accessory (legal term)":
"To be convicted of an accessory charge, the accused must generally be proved to have had actual knowledge that a crime was going to be, or had been, committed. Furthermore, there must be proof that the accessory knew that his or her action, or inaction, was helping the criminals commit the crime, or evade detection, or escape. A person who unknowingly houses a person who has just committed a crime, for instance, may not be charged with an accessory offense because they did not have knowledge of the crime."
I'm very sure you'd also get tagged with something nasty if you didn't stop a kid from drowning when you were the only person around. Any action, or inaction, that results in a death is really very harshly penalized! Although, knowing about something simple like high-value white-collar crime and refusing to report it is also a criminal act. Maybe it's all felonies? IANAL by a long shot.
Now, if you have reason to believe that reporting it, or not selling the bullets or whatever, would lead to your own personal harm...well, I'm sure you'll get to explain that to the judge.
"To ensure that we're being absolutely crystal clear, this article isn't focused on the discussion concerning the differences between the pure RPG leveling system versus "player skill-based" games. That's a completely different conversation altogether, and - unfortunately - some of our paneled public and developers thought that was where the discussion was leading, and thus some answers from particular teams won't be printable...at least in this article."
It's a horrible point, and we don't want to deal with the consequences if he decides to interpret law based on his point, but that doesn't mean it isn't *TRUE*. Remember that. The internet is killing newspapers, and it wouldn't be killing them as fast if draconian laws were keeping Fark and Slashdot from existing.
I want a simulation program where I can move around rocks and pools and have a water hose. Used to do this all the time in the backyard as a kid, it would be nice to do it without getting wet or wasting water. Wonder how long until this is realtime?
My kids, of course, won't get to play with it. They need to play in the REAL backyard.
I was really pissed when Bitpass went down. Sure, I only ended up using it for a few webcomics passes, but it sure was worth it, and I wish I'd had more to spend it on. I like the system. I like being able to buy things for a quarter. I don't think that this is going to unleash a horrible torrent of games that need micropayments, IE "Want an extra life? That'll be five cents". However I sure wouldn't mind returning to the old shareware model where the next three episodes of Wolfenstein or whatever costs a small amount.
As long as my micropayments go toward something semi-permanent (more levels) instead of something transient (an extra life), I'm totally cool with it--and I'm also cool with other people liking the transient stuff. There's not enough ways to pay small amounts of money for things that are worth small amounts of money, so this sounds good to me. I'll always have my choice to play games that just don't use that feature anyway.
...Of course, I don't even HAVE an iPhone, but I like this on principle...
I once had a Linux workstation that I thought was safely behind a proxy, where nothing could get to it, so I never bothered with much in the way of security. Turns out my network was configured wrong, and it was wide open...sure enough, got totally owned. God forbid I did any banking from that machine! Of course, this was about a decade ago, so I'm sure it's easier to keep updated now...but still.
I know that retail stores often have contracts with towing agencies that give the latter pretty broad control. It's possible that they might also have similar contracts with ATM companies.
Heck, I'd consider it likely that towing agencies and ATM companies both have provisions in their contracts saying that they can require the retail store to ban someone if they bother the contractors' employees.
I thought that was -gizzardo, and wasn't that SC2K? A better solution anyway was to make a city in SC1, 'debug mycity.cty' 'E D24 7F FF' 'W' 'Q', then import it into SC2K.
Every geek kid growing up in DOS knew how to give way too much money in SimCity using Debug.
First time I ever pulled a 'cheat' off a network, either. I think I got that from Prodigy, though it might have been a real BBS.
Yeah, I'd personally be very happy if Windows reserved 0.1% of its CPU specifically for a sleek and fast task manager that could pop up instantly, always ran, and always worked.
Slashdot Mirror
I TA'd for an Intro to Java course. (Say what you will about Java being a crummy language to start with, or early classes being slow--our second-year-plus classes were brutal.) For a fair chunk of the first quarter, programs were basically identical...but after the point when we WANTED you to write identical, correct code, cheating sticks out like a sore thumb. I don't know the details of our cheating detection program, but it operated partway into the compilation step so it sees through superficial changes. Change a comment? Wouldn't matter, it wouldn't notice. Change your variable names? Same thing. Declare your variables in a different order? Yeah, it'll spot that too. You have to actually start changing the program flow--in significant ways, no less!--before it stops tripping on your program. And even then, it'll often flag similar programs as "hey, a human should check these out". Cheating happens a lot more than you'd think in CS classes. And in my department, at least...I know that we sent every last one of them to the Dean.
I don't think I've seen so many floating ads in a theoretically-legitimate site before. When I opened it, it grayed out the window and popped up trying to get me to fill out something...scrolling around, the mouse runs into these little green underlined words that pops up an ad thing you have to click to close...and after about twenty seconds, another floating window scrolled down the screen and parked in the middle.
That's a little too much cruft for me. They can keep their content, I don't want it.
The water they're testing is, by federal limits, not drinkable. That said, the water they're testing is not drinking water. If this stuff was getting anywhere that humans were going to drink it, that would be a very serious problem...but they're saying that doesn't seem likely. So no, they're not ignoring the limits. They should act quickly, yes, but still.
Only time my computer's ever crashed since I installed XP was when my secondary drive suffered a head crash. I'm sure someone will tell me that Linux could have kept running, because hey, it wasn't even the root drive. But I can't say I really care.
Probably more people than you'd think. It serves my professional and hobby needs extremely well, personally. I wasn't a big fan before the 2008 version, but I'm quite happy now.
Devil's advocate: What's the labor involved in tracking down P2P users? They use some pretty sophisticated tech to catch people these days--someone had to pay to develop it--and they hire agencies for the specific purpose of tracking violators and even poisoning torrents in some cases. The cost of enforcement is pretty high, so actual damages might have to include those.
I didn't see anything about regret. All I saw was "Yeah, they have a legal or financial need to protect their brand, so they had to take us down". Why would you even think that their statement was coerced? Sure, they were forced to take it down to avoid big lawsuits, but that's not what you said. You said "Forcing them to put out a "mea culpa" statement like this (no doubt with hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of lawsuits promised if they did not) is absolutely disgusting." Again, what exactly makes you think it's coerced?
Proof, please. Imagining the worst possible motives and threats when you don't know what really went on is absolutely disgusting.
Ah, every time something like this comes up I keep hoping that we've found some auditory buffer that both memories and the ear feed into, in a format that would be easy to parse. I think we're seeing the first glimmers of doing that with the visual cortex? I'm not sure how similar 'remembered' music is to 'entirely imagined out of thin air on the spot' music, but I imagine that either way, it would be a great boon for composers...probably do for them what the Internet did for journalists. Whether that's good or bad for the art as a whole remains to be seen!
All I've ever wanted from brain-interface computing is the ability to 'think' music into some format where I can play it back again. Are we getting close to that yet?
The last one sounded like some guy successfully set off a charge that was barely large enough to set his pants on fire, then some guy jumped him afterwards. How, exactly, is that foiled?
Thank god you actually bothered to look at the article before posting. Slashdot needs more people like you, it really does. Why are you only modded +3?
Er, I understand that some cops can be kind of dicks--more than kind of, sometimes--but when a cop tells you to get back in your car, you DO IT. If you get pulled over for speeding or a broken tail light and you get out of your car, the cop is probably going to draw his gun, and I have zero qualms with that.
You have a problem with what the cops are doing, you deal with it later. You don't deal with it while they're searching your car, by getting OUT of your car. They search because they think something's up, and you really, really don't want to support that idea. They're in charge...and they're just thinking about going home to their families at the end of the day. Some guy starts acting belligerent, not following directions, putting himself in a potentially threatening posture, and yeah, at one end of the bell curve, you're going to get overreacting cops. But I figure it's at least half your fault if you're doing that stuff.
Really, what did he even think he was going to accomplish? Was he going to say "Hey, guys, please don't open my trunk"? If the cops decide they want to search your car, they ARE GOING TO search your car. And honestly, at a border crossing, I don't mind.
So he got chucked in a cell. Sorry, guy. Somewhere along the chain of communication, someone said "He was acting all belligerent at the border crossing and trying to stop us from searching his car", and someone else said "Ugh, I don't know what else to do with him right now, chuck him in a cell until my superior can handle him". Outliers happen. Yeah, please continue to post stories when this stuff happens--but right now it doesn't happen enough to scare me. Right now it just seems like a very reasonable tail end of the bell curve. I don't see malice, I just see people who weren't at their best...and guy who decides to raise a fuss and get out of his car is one of those people.
It seems pretty obvious to me. They have a suspect in a totally unrelated case who they are pretty sure visited Indymedia on that day...say, they have a laptop that they took around that time, but they need a little more evidence to prove that the IP actually showed up in the logs, or to prove some login information.
So somehow, maybe misguidedly, they think that getting those logs will help them prove some other criminal case. Maybe a kiddie porn investigation, maybe a murder where the guy logged on from his victim's house. In any case, the Indymedia system isn't really involved--except that some guy of interest touched the site, and they need to convince a jury or a jury of that to establish some other fact.
As an indie developer, I have to say I'm at least a little concerned. I think it's wonderful for games to be accessible, but the stuff I'm putting out are small genre titles targeted for a small audience, and my budget is nonexistent. I'm worried that someone could go through my catalog of games and force me to change all of them, swamping me with work, for only a few more sales.
It's easy to say that only small changes are needed, but what if I've lost the source code but I'm still selling the game? Should the law require me to stop selling it, just because I can't change it for a small part of my audience? Again, it's easy to say that this should only affect big publishers like Sony, but the law is never that specific.
Let's ask Wikipedia's article on "Accessory (legal term)": "To be convicted of an accessory charge, the accused must generally be proved to have had actual knowledge that a crime was going to be, or had been, committed. Furthermore, there must be proof that the accessory knew that his or her action, or inaction, was helping the criminals commit the crime, or evade detection, or escape. A person who unknowingly houses a person who has just committed a crime, for instance, may not be charged with an accessory offense because they did not have knowledge of the crime." I'm very sure you'd also get tagged with something nasty if you didn't stop a kid from drowning when you were the only person around. Any action, or inaction, that results in a death is really very harshly penalized! Although, knowing about something simple like high-value white-collar crime and refusing to report it is also a criminal act. Maybe it's all felonies? IANAL by a long shot. Now, if you have reason to believe that reporting it, or not selling the bullets or whatever, would lead to your own personal harm...well, I'm sure you'll get to explain that to the judge.
From the article itself:
"To ensure that we're being absolutely crystal clear, this article isn't focused on the discussion concerning the differences between the pure RPG leveling system versus "player skill-based" games. That's a completely different conversation altogether, and - unfortunately - some of our paneled public and developers thought that was where the discussion was leading, and thus some answers from particular teams won't be printable...at least in this article."
It's a horrible point, and we don't want to deal with the consequences if he decides to interpret law based on his point, but that doesn't mean it isn't *TRUE*. Remember that. The internet is killing newspapers, and it wouldn't be killing them as fast if draconian laws were keeping Fark and Slashdot from existing.
I want a simulation program where I can move around rocks and pools and have a water hose. Used to do this all the time in the backyard as a kid, it would be nice to do it without getting wet or wasting water. Wonder how long until this is realtime? My kids, of course, won't get to play with it. They need to play in the REAL backyard.
I was really pissed when Bitpass went down. Sure, I only ended up using it for a few webcomics passes, but it sure was worth it, and I wish I'd had more to spend it on. I like the system. I like being able to buy things for a quarter. I don't think that this is going to unleash a horrible torrent of games that need micropayments, IE "Want an extra life? That'll be five cents". However I sure wouldn't mind returning to the old shareware model where the next three episodes of Wolfenstein or whatever costs a small amount.
...Of course, I don't even HAVE an iPhone, but I like this on principle...
As long as my micropayments go toward something semi-permanent (more levels) instead of something transient (an extra life), I'm totally cool with it--and I'm also cool with other people liking the transient stuff. There's not enough ways to pay small amounts of money for things that are worth small amounts of money, so this sounds good to me. I'll always have my choice to play games that just don't use that feature anyway.
I once had a Linux workstation that I thought was safely behind a proxy, where nothing could get to it, so I never bothered with much in the way of security. Turns out my network was configured wrong, and it was wide open...sure enough, got totally owned. God forbid I did any banking from that machine! Of course, this was about a decade ago, so I'm sure it's easier to keep updated now...but still.
I know that retail stores often have contracts with towing agencies that give the latter pretty broad control. It's possible that they might also have similar contracts with ATM companies. Heck, I'd consider it likely that towing agencies and ATM companies both have provisions in their contracts saying that they can require the retail store to ban someone if they bother the contractors' employees.
I thought that was -gizzardo, and wasn't that SC2K? A better solution anyway was to make a city in SC1, 'debug mycity.cty' 'E D24 7F FF' 'W' 'Q', then import it into SC2K.
Every geek kid growing up in DOS knew how to give way too much money in SimCity using Debug. First time I ever pulled a 'cheat' off a network, either. I think I got that from Prodigy, though it might have been a real BBS.
Yeah, I'd personally be very happy if Windows reserved 0.1% of its CPU specifically for a sleek and fast task manager that could pop up instantly, always ran, and always worked.