When I was training to become an EMT, we had a whole unit on terrorism. As emergency personnel, we of course are front-line in an attack, but also, we tend to get access to people's homes and such. Since we're not police, we tend to get welcomed inside even if somebody's building bombs or running a meth lab. We're trained on what to look for, and so on.
Anyway, long story short, the terrorism expert asks us that hypothetically, if we had $500 and a desire to cause as much damage and chaos as possible, with no regard for our own lives, how much damage we could cause. He gave us only a minute or so to think about it, and if you yourself think about it now, the damage would be significant. Then he says that terrorists are much, much more motivated, better funded, and spend all of their time, day and night, figuring out how to kill us.
It's a scary prospect, but the moral of the story is that any security measures can be beaten, no matter how extreme. As far as I'm concerned, hijacking is now impossible. That happened as soon as we locked and reinforced the doors, things any forward-thinking airline should have done before 9/11. Blowing up a plane seems unlikely as well, but not for the reasons of TSA's latest measures. Think about the times terrorists have tried, since 9/11. What happened? Security failed to recognize a threat, so the other passengers subdued the terrorist and prevented the bomb from going off.
What was the government's response to this? Increase security for last-week's threat, rather than attempt to figure out what might be the next threat. No real praise for the alert general public, just lots of fear-inducing "the government needs to do more!" calls from the media and government leaders.
What I learned as an EMT is that government is not the answer, an alert public is. Like the smoking SUV in Times Square, a street vendor stopped a terrorist attack. Passengers on airplanes have stopped terrorist attacks several times. Government should worry more about identifying these people before they get to the US, and uncovering plots among those terrorists already here.
Two things are absolutely critical for the government and general public to realize. One, that terrorist attacks will occasionally happen, and no amount of security will protect us from a sufficiently determined murderer. Anyone who promises no more attacks can happen is flat-out lying. Two, the best defense from terrorism is in rapid reactions from whoever happens to be there when an attack gets underway, either to stop it, or contain the level of mayhem.
Hopefully people out there, and not just those who read slashdot, come to accept the above two facts, and government changes to reflect that.
As somebody who wears a lot of masks, I defend my internet from my RL and my RL from my internet as best I can. Heck, I try to keep my various internets from each other and my various RLs from each other too. Divisions are important for sanity, to be sure, George was right.
Hehe. From the very beginning, I used Facebook only for stalking my friends. I have only the barest minimum of contact information on my profile, and nothing else. And the people I don't want to share my barest minimum of contact information with? I don't friend them, whee!
I for one, love any new features that let me stalk people easier. People who are concerned about this sort of thing lost all their privacy years ago anyway, because they're dumb.
Yeah, that was the first thing I thought of, when he started talking about who he is and how he's got movies or whatever coming out.
The second thing I thought of is that it looked cold. Everyone was dressed in bulky winter clothes. Then I thought about how when the wind is blowing, I will shield my ear exactly the same way as the lady, and sometimes I mutter to myself about how cold it is during a particularly cold gust. I imagine old ladies are more likely to do both of those things. In fact, I've seen it numerous times.
There was no device in the hand, and her ankles looked fine.
Clever viral marketing gimmick though, but if his movies are as disorganized as his introduction, they're probably not very good.
Thing is, 30 missions straight of Terran-only is going to mean a lot of filler, a really slow progression in tech trees, and probably a fair bit of boredom doing the same things with the same units over and over. I'd gladly take three different races at 10 missions apiece, without any silly RPG stuff between-missions, and a stable multiplayer platform Blizzard can spend time balancing.
The "equal number of missions" thing will probably just mean lots and lots of filler, or a far slower progression in terms of techs/units involved.
Starcraft 2 also has a lot of RPG elements that RTS players don't care about or want. The reason Blizzard gives for splitting the game into three parts essentially boils down to the extra time involved to create the "content" that makes you do between-mission "quests" instead of a nice straight-forward mission briefing so you can get to the game you want to play.
Multiplayer, despite allowing you to play all three races, is not going to be the same between the three releases. Essentially, if you want to play multiplayer, you'll still have to wait until the third game comes out before Blizzard stops tinkering with new units, etc., and the game becomes stable enough for the final balance tweaks that will make Starcraft 2 so good in multiplayer.
It makes perfect sense. They're going to *have* to do a beta test for the Mac at some point, as they are going to release the final game on that platform. My guess is, Mac system profiles on people's battle.net accounts actually make for greater odds in getting in, as there will be less of them. It'll just take longer to get in if you're so lucky.
It's more the disconnect between the title and the first sentence. Rendezvous with the sun implies they shot a rocket directly at it, not putting something in orbit of the Earth.
There's also the issue of federal laws being passed with sunset clauses, only to have states pass an identical version at the state law without a sunset clause.
I have to admit, sunset clauses on all laws does have a certain appeal to it. Laws passed for political reasons of a given era more than an actual need for legislation would be eventually taken off the books. That's a good thing, in my mind. On the other hand, there's probably more laws in place that we'd like to keep indefinitely than you'd expect, and Congress would spend all of their time maintaining those existing laws and never accomplish anything new we want passed. It does have a limiting effect on government, but that's both a good and bad thing at times. A good compromise, I think, would be forcing congress to spend a decent part of their time on repealing old laws we don't need anymore, simplifying old laws, etc. That's not really going to happen though.
Heck, give me a service that's better than Time Warner Cable, and I'll pretty much pay any price they want. Right now I'm waiting for the local phone company to finally go under so Verizon FiOS can come in. I'll get their top-tier service just on principle.
Your information, it would seem, is quite a bit out of date.
The CIA is no longer allowed to operate within the borders of the United States, so I think you'd have a hard time making an argument against them for MKULTRA. MKULTRA was decades ago, I doubt many people who were involved with it are still on the payroll.
As for killing foreign enemies of the nation, that doesn't sound so bad to me, although there are laws in place to prevent them from conducting assassinations against world leaders.
Basically, you need to stop reading spy novels written 50 years ago.
You really can't compare MMORPG drama with social tools like having a buddy list in an RTS matchmaking system. There's no persistent gear in Starcraft II. There's going to be battle.net clans, but there already are battle.net clans. The new tools will help those clans keep in touch with each other better, that's really it. As for the achievements, they amount to "this guy finished the campaign" or "this guy reached rank 10 on the multiplayer ladders", neither of which will really matter beyond what will already be readily apparent.
Probably nothing will prevent somebody from doing that, other than edit protections built into the maps themselves. Such things tend to get hacked, though. The real thing will be simply folks making a very similar map for free. My guess is, the folks trying to actually charge for maps will be laughed/scorned so much that nobody really bothers, though maybe we'll get some commercial-grade full campaign mods that cost a bit of money (and actually be worth it).
The more interesting story in my mind is the fact they've got an investor conference call today, the SC2 beta forums got created (and then quickly made private) on battle.net on Monday, and rumors are going around about the beta coming out on Friday, at least since last week sometime. This battle.net preview thing is really just more evidence that they're getting close to beta, since basically the game was delayed until 2010 due to battle.net taking too long.
Yeah, I don't think we really have to worry about Blizzard taking their servers down any time soon. They sell their new games based on the fact that Battle.net is so good and reliable for more than a decade now.
My hope is that people resist the urge to get greedy, and the only maps that end up being pay-to-play are the truly commercial-grade level of mods for the game, like completely new campaigns with new art, new units, etc.
My expectation is any stand-alone maps that cost money will simply be copied, with or without enough changes to justify a legal defense, and made available for free, undercutting the entire paid DLC model on Battle.net.
Really the point is, Verizon has a crap ton of lawyers, a crap ton of money, a crap ton of political influence, and can no doubt squash any DDOS attacks against them like an elephant stepping on a mosquito. I don't think they'll be terribly worried about what 4chan can do to them. I'm guessing the people who work for a *phone* company know how to keep their personal phone numbers private too. But hey, if people want to stand outside their headquarters in the middle of a winter with signs screaming about censorship, that's their right.
I never attribute to malice what I can attribute to laziness. All the more reason to allow those who are feeling particularly not lazy to come along and do the code QA that the original coder (likely an untrained scientist with no CS background) didn't know how to do or didn't want to because there were more pressing concerns like getting a new grant.
As for a central repository, why not make it government, if we're talking about government-funded research? Something like a Library of Congress for scientific OSS.
Hopefully your experiences will cause you to use OSS to begin with instead of using proprietary code in the future. It may be a pain now, and I hope you keep at it. In the long run, it'll be worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was training to become an EMT, we had a whole unit on terrorism. As emergency personnel, we of course are front-line in an attack, but also, we tend to get access to people's homes and such. Since we're not police, we tend to get welcomed inside even if somebody's building bombs or running a meth lab. We're trained on what to look for, and so on.
Anyway, long story short, the terrorism expert asks us that hypothetically, if we had $500 and a desire to cause as much damage and chaos as possible, with no regard for our own lives, how much damage we could cause. He gave us only a minute or so to think about it, and if you yourself think about it now, the damage would be significant. Then he says that terrorists are much, much more motivated, better funded, and spend all of their time, day and night, figuring out how to kill us.
It's a scary prospect, but the moral of the story is that any security measures can be beaten, no matter how extreme. As far as I'm concerned, hijacking is now impossible. That happened as soon as we locked and reinforced the doors, things any forward-thinking airline should have done before 9/11. Blowing up a plane seems unlikely as well, but not for the reasons of TSA's latest measures. Think about the times terrorists have tried, since 9/11. What happened? Security failed to recognize a threat, so the other passengers subdued the terrorist and prevented the bomb from going off.
What was the government's response to this? Increase security for last-week's threat, rather than attempt to figure out what might be the next threat. No real praise for the alert general public, just lots of fear-inducing "the government needs to do more!" calls from the media and government leaders.
What I learned as an EMT is that government is not the answer, an alert public is. Like the smoking SUV in Times Square, a street vendor stopped a terrorist attack. Passengers on airplanes have stopped terrorist attacks several times. Government should worry more about identifying these people before they get to the US, and uncovering plots among those terrorists already here.
Two things are absolutely critical for the government and general public to realize. One, that terrorist attacks will occasionally happen, and no amount of security will protect us from a sufficiently determined murderer. Anyone who promises no more attacks can happen is flat-out lying. Two, the best defense from terrorism is in rapid reactions from whoever happens to be there when an attack gets underway, either to stop it, or contain the level of mayhem.
Hopefully people out there, and not just those who read slashdot, come to accept the above two facts, and government changes to reflect that.
As somebody who wears a lot of masks, I defend my internet from my RL and my RL from my internet as best I can. Heck, I try to keep my various internets from each other and my various RLs from each other too. Divisions are important for sanity, to be sure, George was right.
Hehe. From the very beginning, I used Facebook only for stalking my friends. I have only the barest minimum of contact information on my profile, and nothing else. And the people I don't want to share my barest minimum of contact information with? I don't friend them, whee!
I for one, love any new features that let me stalk people easier. People who are concerned about this sort of thing lost all their privacy years ago anyway, because they're dumb.
Yeah, that was the first thing I thought of, when he started talking about who he is and how he's got movies or whatever coming out.
The second thing I thought of is that it looked cold. Everyone was dressed in bulky winter clothes. Then I thought about how when the wind is blowing, I will shield my ear exactly the same way as the lady, and sometimes I mutter to myself about how cold it is during a particularly cold gust. I imagine old ladies are more likely to do both of those things. In fact, I've seen it numerous times.
There was no device in the hand, and her ankles looked fine.
Clever viral marketing gimmick though, but if his movies are as disorganized as his introduction, they're probably not very good.
Thing is, 30 missions straight of Terran-only is going to mean a lot of filler, a really slow progression in tech trees, and probably a fair bit of boredom doing the same things with the same units over and over. I'd gladly take three different races at 10 missions apiece, without any silly RPG stuff between-missions, and a stable multiplayer platform Blizzard can spend time balancing.
A few of other points to back you up here...
The "equal number of missions" thing will probably just mean lots and lots of filler, or a far slower progression in terms of techs/units involved.
Starcraft 2 also has a lot of RPG elements that RTS players don't care about or want. The reason Blizzard gives for splitting the game into three parts essentially boils down to the extra time involved to create the "content" that makes you do between-mission "quests" instead of a nice straight-forward mission briefing so you can get to the game you want to play.
Multiplayer, despite allowing you to play all three races, is not going to be the same between the three releases. Essentially, if you want to play multiplayer, you'll still have to wait until the third game comes out before Blizzard stops tinkering with new units, etc., and the game becomes stable enough for the final balance tweaks that will make Starcraft 2 so good in multiplayer.
It makes perfect sense. They're going to *have* to do a beta test for the Mac at some point, as they are going to release the final game on that platform. My guess is, Mac system profiles on people's battle.net accounts actually make for greater odds in getting in, as there will be less of them. It'll just take longer to get in if you're so lucky.
It's more the disconnect between the title and the first sentence. Rendezvous with the sun implies they shot a rocket directly at it, not putting something in orbit of the Earth.
There's also the issue of federal laws being passed with sunset clauses, only to have states pass an identical version at the state law without a sunset clause.
I have to admit, sunset clauses on all laws does have a certain appeal to it. Laws passed for political reasons of a given era more than an actual need for legislation would be eventually taken off the books. That's a good thing, in my mind. On the other hand, there's probably more laws in place that we'd like to keep indefinitely than you'd expect, and Congress would spend all of their time maintaining those existing laws and never accomplish anything new we want passed. It does have a limiting effect on government, but that's both a good and bad thing at times. A good compromise, I think, would be forcing congress to spend a decent part of their time on repealing old laws we don't need anymore, simplifying old laws, etc. That's not really going to happen though.
Realistically stuff with no relation to the internet has been put under the YRO category many times before.
Heck, give me a service that's better than Time Warner Cable, and I'll pretty much pay any price they want. Right now I'm waiting for the local phone company to finally go under so Verizon FiOS can come in. I'll get their top-tier service just on principle.
Your information, it would seem, is quite a bit out of date.
The CIA is no longer allowed to operate within the borders of the United States, so I think you'd have a hard time making an argument against them for MKULTRA. MKULTRA was decades ago, I doubt many people who were involved with it are still on the payroll.
As for killing foreign enemies of the nation, that doesn't sound so bad to me, although there are laws in place to prevent them from conducting assassinations against world leaders.
Basically, you need to stop reading spy novels written 50 years ago.
Actually, the best way to fight piracy is to make a product pirates aren't interested in.
You really can't compare MMORPG drama with social tools like having a buddy list in an RTS matchmaking system. There's no persistent gear in Starcraft II. There's going to be battle.net clans, but there already are battle.net clans. The new tools will help those clans keep in touch with each other better, that's really it. As for the achievements, they amount to "this guy finished the campaign" or "this guy reached rank 10 on the multiplayer ladders", neither of which will really matter beyond what will already be readily apparent.
Probably nothing will prevent somebody from doing that, other than edit protections built into the maps themselves. Such things tend to get hacked, though. The real thing will be simply folks making a very similar map for free. My guess is, the folks trying to actually charge for maps will be laughed/scorned so much that nobody really bothers, though maybe we'll get some commercial-grade full campaign mods that cost a bit of money (and actually be worth it).
The more interesting story in my mind is the fact they've got an investor conference call today, the SC2 beta forums got created (and then quickly made private) on battle.net on Monday, and rumors are going around about the beta coming out on Friday, at least since last week sometime. This battle.net preview thing is really just more evidence that they're getting close to beta, since basically the game was delayed until 2010 due to battle.net taking too long.
Believe it or not, but there are trains here.
Yeah, I don't think we really have to worry about Blizzard taking their servers down any time soon. They sell their new games based on the fact that Battle.net is so good and reliable for more than a decade now.
My hope is that people resist the urge to get greedy, and the only maps that end up being pay-to-play are the truly commercial-grade level of mods for the game, like completely new campaigns with new art, new units, etc.
My expectation is any stand-alone maps that cost money will simply be copied, with or without enough changes to justify a legal defense, and made available for free, undercutting the entire paid DLC model on Battle.net.
That's.... not a boycott though.
Really the point is, Verizon has a crap ton of lawyers, a crap ton of money, a crap ton of political influence, and can no doubt squash any DDOS attacks against them like an elephant stepping on a mosquito. I don't think they'll be terribly worried about what 4chan can do to them. I'm guessing the people who work for a *phone* company know how to keep their personal phone numbers private too. But hey, if people want to stand outside their headquarters in the middle of a winter with signs screaming about censorship, that's their right.
I never attribute to malice what I can attribute to laziness. All the more reason to allow those who are feeling particularly not lazy to come along and do the code QA that the original coder (likely an untrained scientist with no CS background) didn't know how to do or didn't want to because there were more pressing concerns like getting a new grant.
As for a central repository, why not make it government, if we're talking about government-funded research? Something like a Library of Congress for scientific OSS.
Hopefully your experiences will cause you to use OSS to begin with instead of using proprietary code in the future. It may be a pain now, and I hope you keep at it. In the long run, it'll be worth it.