> When you purchase a hard copy ( disc ) of a brand new game, it is likely already useless as the game developers seem to be incapable of launching and shipping a game that actually works right out of the box. ( It's called incompetence )
This may be your perception, but it isn't reality for most games. And very very few single player games.
Pretend you either buy a brand new Nintendo Switch, or you find one from launch in a warehouse. Then you grab any Switch game, plug it into that thing, and turn it on- no Internet though, just that.
On the older Switch, it will say it needs a firmware update. Which it will come packaged with, and which it will install if prompted. This will be a very fast installation. On the newer Switch, it probably won't even need that. Then the game will work as launched, which is to say, it will work fine.
Now if, instead, this game has online multiplayer, and you hook it to the net, then you'll need to update it before it can go online.
I used the Switch as an example because pretty much everything works just fine on that console. But in *most* cases, this is also true of Xbone and PS4 as well.
Microsoft continues to lead the pack in terms of ludicrous names.
First we had the Xbox, which made sense. Then we had the Xbox 360, which didn't make much sense. People called it "the 360", so being proper villains, they decided to come up with a name that would make people call their new system "the one", like complete with religious overtones, because that's a good use for whatever part of our meat computers experience religion and awe, some disposable plastic box.
To accomplish this, they named it the Xbox One, which no one calls it, because there's already an Xbox 1, it's the thing that came before the Xbox 360. It gets labelled "one" in retrospect because that is how numbers work.
So it's the Xbone. Microsoft fought this because they thought it was some slur, but really, it's just what it's called.
So then we ended up with the Xbonex and the Xbones.
And now this one- the "Xbox One S All Digital", which is now the XBONE S.A.D.
Yep. There's also one more fun point, and that's the "DRM issue"- it definitely inconveniences the innocent, but, very importantly, it doesn't really stop the guilty. Habitual drunk drivers (especially those who have never been caught) will simply find ways around this device. Sure, it'll add another crime to their list if they ever do get caught drinking and driving, but it will still happen.
At the end of the day, though, I do think you'll see something like this at some point. In a rational society, you'd have some way to weigh the costs and benefits of a law like this- does the small amount of suppression on drunk drivers outweigh the small-by-percent-but-actually-large-because-most-drivers-are-sober inconvenience and cost on sober drivers? In a principled society, you'd have an answer based on whether your principle was "freedom" or something else like "loyalty to state".
But in our society, it will simply be pushed by people who stand to make a buck by installing these everywhere. Think about it, if it *just saves one child*, etc. etc. etc.
There's laws against absolutely everything. I'm sure you committed violation of the law today, and likely a crime this month. You know what else is illegal? Speeding. Enforcement is tough, however- with basically everyone speeding at least once a day, the laws and penalties are written very harshly on the assumptions that (1) a cop won't waste his time with someone who is not a risk very often and (2) most speeders escape penalties the vast majority of the time, so when they DO get caught, there needs to be a substantial penalty.
There may one day be sharp speed limiters on all cars that force the cars to obey the speed limit, as referenced on GPS, maps, something. In such a case, you can expect speed limits to go up to represent actually safe speeds. There may also, much more profitably, be a mandate for all cars to simply alert the driver and the police whenever a speed limit is broken, resulting in a ticket arriving in the mail in a few days. In that world, you could expect the speed limits to stay the same (or even be lowered), but you'd expect the fines to go down for most types of speeding- it would then be driven by how much money the local law enforcement is hoping to collect.
So while you may be able to drive today legally as some type of wrongthinker- today, as yesterday, that's Nazis, but NOW also conspiracy theorists and, increasingly, people who speak in favor of just regular nationalism, as the net of thought-crime grows- you wouldn't expect that tomorrow. You may not get it via a law against it, you may get it via some shenanigans like: 1- $THAT_GUY believes $WRONG_THING 2- You, $COMPANY, are offering him a service that allows him to validate that he's not drunk (the same service you offer to literally everyone else for existing) 3- By offering him this service, you are supporting $WRONG_THING 4- Now the company cuts off the service, and the car won't validate and can't drive.
This is already happening today with things like paypal, visa, and mastercard, and it's already spread well beyond actually racist circles (no one really complained when those guys got thrown out from civil life), and is being used against progressively more and more people. There's absolutely no reason to assume it won't continue to grow, because the groups organized to fight for civil liberties are instead cheering this kind of shit on because of the left/right divide.
Google forced everyone into Google+ one day. As such, I'm glad it's being reverted.
It has the extra-good side effect of creating an event we can point to (yet another one) in showing why Google shouldn't be given all that much trust- either during its birth, or during its execution.
I'm sad for the people who used it, of course- a competitor to facebook would have been nice, and some people just enjoyed the fact that it was a social network that did what they wanted.
Yea for a game that has several simulationist pieces and tries to put you in a virtual wild west, I don't exactly know what is expected. You can make a straight full action fps with a cowboy skin, or some kind of vaguely interactive movie with a western plot, but for an open world game, why all the complaints?
Games had a variety of ways to ensure that the average quarter didn't stretch too far. Sure, Pacman can be played for hours (until you die or the game locks up) on a single quarter, but no one knew how back then- it took years to figure out the patterns, and to this day only a few people can execute them flawlessly. For the most part, the monetization was aggressive and subtle. Heck, by the 90s, that 3D Gauntlet game would start buffing enemies and eventually squeeze you out, and they added these patches in waves, each willingly installed by operators to keep good players paying something.
By contrast, when an arcade game hit your home console, this stuff was mostly taken out, as it was only ever added to fit the actual sales model of the game. And when a home system WAS made available as an arcade- such as the Playchoice 10- the quarters directly paid for time.
I'd say that games have ALWAYS been created around their sales systems, that this has ALWAYS determined how the game is designed, developed, and implemented, and that even the progressive difficulty you find pleasing in old school games was created by the desire to get you to put more quarters in the game, by honest implementation at first, and by harsher tricks as you went on.
Notice how the implication in these things is that these companies must *police truth*. This is a book store that has made itself a huge force in the bookselling market- so much so that it moved on to pretty much any other physical object you may wish to buy.
And now it is being called on to ascertain that certain political movements are banned? I'm sure they'll start with the wrong ones, but you'd be a fool to think they'll end there too.
This is the most politically charged nonsense statistic I have heard in years.
Dude, ANY return just means you fucked up your withholding. Assuming you get paid like a salary, your return is just the government giving you back your own money that you overpaid. One year I owed 4000, the next I got back about 200. What changed? I had screwed up my settings in a web app that controlled the amount payed per check, and fixed it the next year.
If someone looks at lower taxes, goes through miles of data, and comes up with "8% lower refund" as the one bad thing they can say (with the implication that taxes have gone up, when they have gone down)....
The way the article is written, it sounds like Chrome itself will be responsible for interpreting these keys, which sounds like the correct way to do it. Hopefully we can avoid Chrome sending information about your physical keyboard somewhere remote, which could be used for browser fingerprinting, etc.
It has stuff like "make the web cheap to use and ubiquitous" and then it has stuff about what content should be on the web. Well, I already know what kind of content these guys don't want on the web- anything that is unprofitable to them, anything that they politically disagree with. It's just a bunch of censorship dressed up like it's there to protect you.
Because Moore's law is more about transistor density. It's an easy nit to pick.
It's still a big deal that we aren't getting any easy gains on single core speed, or, factoring in all their new fancy branch predictions, single thread performance. But newer CPUs are fitting more cores in, newer GPUs are wildly more effective (at a fundamentally parallel task). These are the arguments for Moore's law actually being still online.
Anyone who was around for the late 90s or before knows that computers simply aren't doing what they did before- completely obliterating previous generations of computing. A machine from 2008 can run most current games, and those it can't inherit their restrictions artificially (a motherboard that won't take a new enough GPU, for instance). It can certainly run the latest version of pretty much any OS, and many productivity programs. If you do that comparison from 1999 to 1989, it's a joke- a Pentium III at nearly a gigahertz compared to a 486 at like 50 or 66 megahertz. Look back again at 1979, and you are comparing to an 8086 or something.
In the general case, the reason we can't make "sufficiently simple and vetted that we can be reasonably sure that ill conditioned inputs can't escape the sandbox" is because no one is willing to take the hit in functionality.
As other comments have pointed out, the correct version of this is OpenVPN. But that doesn't allow all the (presumably configuration-related) things that these guys wanted, so they distributed a binary instead that can take commands remotely. Fundamentally, what they want to do could be done safely, but no matter how you slice it, doing that correctly is going to cost them something. They might have to open source something, or pay auditors, or spend a lot of extra time on something.
Another more obvious example is HTTP. People did come up with extensions to this, that exist within the idea of simple and well behaved descriptions, but eventually there was the desire to download and run a program in a web browser, which we see implemented over and over again (with javascript the current winner). There's way too much interest in something that solves a general case and is very powerful, and sure enough, we see vulnerability after vulnerability.
> Is that not the same as saying poverty should be maintained in order to create profitability?
Of course not
If you have two workers, one in poverty and one not in poverty, and both will work equally well, you'll be equally likely to choose either. Apply this policy, and you are now being paid by the government to avoid hiring the one in poverty, as they now cost you more for the same labor. It's a barricade to the poor.
In my example, they end up hiring the less-poor person while playing the same salary. The more-poor person now comes at a higher price tag, and has *yet another* economic barrier placed in his path, this time by the government. Even if the poorer person is willing to work just as hard, he costs more through no fault of his own, and is even more likely to be unable to find work.
I don't find your rebuttal convincing. Capitalism insists that people play by the same rules- and when they don't, there's meaningful outcry about it, usually not resulting in getting disappeared to the gulag. Capitalism also doesn't run out of other people's money- quite the opposite in fact, as it has a sterling record of creating value like nothing else. The only meaningful critiques of capitalism start by pointing to those who have been left behind by the system, by bad luck, bad genes, or just simply bad economic fitness, and saying, "uh, hey, so those guys- they seem pretty fucked, eh?".
Its historic track record is stellar compared to all the alternatives. It also gets hit by survivor bias pretty badly- the capitalist society has the visible poor, the socialist society has the invisible unmarked graves. One of these can be discovered by a socialist reporter, the other can be covered up by the socialist historian.
> And in the end, that's all that matters, isn't it?
Power and money are somewhat translatable to the other, but ultimately power is power.
My core problem with this Sanders bill is that it makes it unprofitable to hire poor people. Ex: Single woman is willing to work for X. Unwed mother is willing to work for X, and makes up the difference with WIC. Right now, you hire who you think is best. With this bill in place, you are heavily motivated to pick the first woman, because she costs you X, and the second woman costs X+W, where W is the cost of the WIC. The more children, the more the company pays. The poorer the person, the more the company pays. It strongly disadvantages poor people when they go to compete economically.
Correct. For "cyborg" to be applied, you have to either regain abilities or gain new ones via integration with something external. If you have some tail that is reading tiny muscle movements or even nerves, that would count. Some kind of bone conduction thing might work. Even something that pricked your skin slightly in the presence of magnetic fields is arguably counting, because it lets you "feel" magnetism (some people did this via implanting small magnets in their fingers).
Having a mark in your right hand that allows you to purchase goods arguably lines up with elements of a famous book, but it isn't one about cyborgs. Either way, being tagged like chattel isn't futurism, it's submission.
> I'd be careful parsing those alerts. Just sayin'.
What harm could a memcpy do? We'll just read the length from this here 64 bit signed integer that the remote packet conveniently had as the third field. No problems at all.
> In China, there is only one party, so it encompasses every possible ideology. Some members are hardcore Marxists, others are free market libertarians, along with everything in between
So the selling point is that a libertarian has to join the communist party? Super duper...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yea, this is great.
I'm absolutely pumped to play F-Zero with this mod. Good grief that Mute City is so pretty! This stuff looks like a lost generation of games now.
> When you purchase a hard copy ( disc ) of a brand new game, it is likely already useless as the game developers seem to be incapable of launching and shipping a game that actually works right out of the box. ( It's called incompetence )
This may be your perception, but it isn't reality for most games. And very very few single player games.
Pretend you either buy a brand new Nintendo Switch, or you find one from launch in a warehouse. Then you grab any Switch game, plug it into that thing, and turn it on- no Internet though, just that.
On the older Switch, it will say it needs a firmware update. Which it will come packaged with, and which it will install if prompted. This will be a very fast installation. On the newer Switch, it probably won't even need that. Then the game will work as launched, which is to say, it will work fine.
Now if, instead, this game has online multiplayer, and you hook it to the net, then you'll need to update it before it can go online.
I used the Switch as an example because pretty much everything works just fine on that console. But in *most* cases, this is also true of Xbone and PS4 as well.
Microsoft continues to lead the pack in terms of ludicrous names.
First we had the Xbox, which made sense. Then we had the Xbox 360, which didn't make much sense. People called it "the 360", so being proper villains, they decided to come up with a name that would make people call their new system "the one", like complete with religious overtones, because that's a good use for whatever part of our meat computers experience religion and awe, some disposable plastic box.
To accomplish this, they named it the Xbox One, which no one calls it, because there's already an Xbox 1, it's the thing that came before the Xbox 360. It gets labelled "one" in retrospect because that is how numbers work.
So it's the Xbone. Microsoft fought this because they thought it was some slur, but really, it's just what it's called.
So then we ended up with the Xbonex and the Xbones.
And now this one- the "Xbox One S All Digital", which is now the XBONE S.A.D.
> yet another point of failure to the car
Yep. There's also one more fun point, and that's the "DRM issue"- it definitely inconveniences the innocent, but, very importantly, it doesn't really stop the guilty. Habitual drunk drivers (especially those who have never been caught) will simply find ways around this device. Sure, it'll add another crime to their list if they ever do get caught drinking and driving, but it will still happen.
At the end of the day, though, I do think you'll see something like this at some point. In a rational society, you'd have some way to weigh the costs and benefits of a law like this- does the small amount of suppression on drunk drivers outweigh the small-by-percent-but-actually-large-because-most-drivers-are-sober inconvenience and cost on sober drivers? In a principled society, you'd have an answer based on whether your principle was "freedom" or something else like "loyalty to state".
But in our society, it will simply be pushed by people who stand to make a buck by installing these everywhere. Think about it, if it *just saves one child*, etc. etc. etc.
> How so? There are laws against drunk driving.
There's laws against absolutely everything. I'm sure you committed violation of the law today, and likely a crime this month. You know what else is illegal? Speeding. Enforcement is tough, however- with basically everyone speeding at least once a day, the laws and penalties are written very harshly on the assumptions that (1) a cop won't waste his time with someone who is not a risk very often and (2) most speeders escape penalties the vast majority of the time, so when they DO get caught, there needs to be a substantial penalty.
There may one day be sharp speed limiters on all cars that force the cars to obey the speed limit, as referenced on GPS, maps, something. In such a case, you can expect speed limits to go up to represent actually safe speeds. There may also, much more profitably, be a mandate for all cars to simply alert the driver and the police whenever a speed limit is broken, resulting in a ticket arriving in the mail in a few days. In that world, you could expect the speed limits to stay the same (or even be lowered), but you'd expect the fines to go down for most types of speeding- it would then be driven by how much money the local law enforcement is hoping to collect.
So while you may be able to drive today legally as some type of wrongthinker- today, as yesterday, that's Nazis, but NOW also conspiracy theorists and, increasingly, people who speak in favor of just regular nationalism, as the net of thought-crime grows- you wouldn't expect that tomorrow. You may not get it via a law against it, you may get it via some shenanigans like:
1- $THAT_GUY believes $WRONG_THING
2- You, $COMPANY, are offering him a service that allows him to validate that he's not drunk (the same service you offer to literally everyone else for existing)
3- By offering him this service, you are supporting $WRONG_THING
4- Now the company cuts off the service, and the car won't validate and can't drive.
This is already happening today with things like paypal, visa, and mastercard, and it's already spread well beyond actually racist circles (no one really complained when those guys got thrown out from civil life), and is being used against progressively more and more people. There's absolutely no reason to assume it won't continue to grow, because the groups organized to fight for civil liberties are instead cheering this kind of shit on because of the left/right divide.
Google forced everyone into Google+ one day. As such, I'm glad it's being reverted.
It has the extra-good side effect of creating an event we can point to (yet another one) in showing why Google shouldn't be given all that much trust- either during its birth, or during its execution.
I'm sad for the people who used it, of course- a competitor to facebook would have been nice, and some people just enjoyed the fact that it was a social network that did what they wanted.
Yea for a game that has several simulationist pieces and tries to put you in a virtual wild west, I don't exactly know what is expected. You can make a straight full action fps with a cowboy skin, or some kind of vaguely interactive movie with a western plot, but for an open world game, why all the complaints?
"Once the quarters dropped the game was a game"
Games had a variety of ways to ensure that the average quarter didn't stretch too far. Sure, Pacman can be played for hours (until you die or the game locks up) on a single quarter, but no one knew how back then- it took years to figure out the patterns, and to this day only a few people can execute them flawlessly. For the most part, the monetization was aggressive and subtle. Heck, by the 90s, that 3D Gauntlet game would start buffing enemies and eventually squeeze you out, and they added these patches in waves, each willingly installed by operators to keep good players paying something.
By contrast, when an arcade game hit your home console, this stuff was mostly taken out, as it was only ever added to fit the actual sales model of the game. And when a home system WAS made available as an arcade- such as the Playchoice 10- the quarters directly paid for time.
I'd say that games have ALWAYS been created around their sales systems, that this has ALWAYS determined how the game is designed, developed, and implemented, and that even the progressive difficulty you find pleasing in old school games was created by the desire to get you to put more quarters in the game, by honest implementation at first, and by harsher tricks as you went on.
Notice how the implication in these things is that these companies must *police truth*. This is a book store that has made itself a huge force in the bookselling market- so much so that it moved on to pretty much any other physical object you may wish to buy.
And now it is being called on to ascertain that certain political movements are banned? I'm sure they'll start with the wrong ones, but you'd be a fool to think they'll end there too.
> The average return has dropped 8% this year
This is the most politically charged nonsense statistic I have heard in years.
Dude, ANY return just means you fucked up your withholding. Assuming you get paid like a salary, your return is just the government giving you back your own money that you overpaid. One year I owed 4000, the next I got back about 200. What changed? I had screwed up my settings in a web app that controlled the amount payed per check, and fixed it the next year.
If someone looks at lower taxes, goes through miles of data, and comes up with "8% lower refund" as the one bad thing they can say (with the implication that taxes have gone up, when they have gone down)....
Come on lol
The way the article is written, it sounds like Chrome itself will be responsible for interpreting these keys, which sounds like the correct way to do it.
Hopefully we can avoid Chrome sending information about your physical keyboard somewhere remote, which could be used for browser fingerprinting, etc.
Maybe we can get through Christmas without some online game going down because something they did offended a 4chan anon.
Maybe?
It has stuff like "make the web cheap to use and ubiquitous" and then it has stuff about what content should be on the web. Well, I already know what kind of content these guys don't want on the web- anything that is unprofitable to them, anything that they politically disagree with. It's just a bunch of censorship dressed up like it's there to protect you.
Because Moore's law is more about transistor density. It's an easy nit to pick.
It's still a big deal that we aren't getting any easy gains on single core speed, or, factoring in all their new fancy branch predictions, single thread performance. But newer CPUs are fitting more cores in, newer GPUs are wildly more effective (at a fundamentally parallel task). These are the arguments for Moore's law actually being still online.
Anyone who was around for the late 90s or before knows that computers simply aren't doing what they did before- completely obliterating previous generations of computing. A machine from 2008 can run most current games, and those it can't inherit their restrictions artificially (a motherboard that won't take a new enough GPU, for instance). It can certainly run the latest version of pretty much any OS, and many productivity programs. If you do that comparison from 1999 to 1989, it's a joke- a Pentium III at nearly a gigahertz compared to a 486 at like 50 or 66 megahertz. Look back again at 1979, and you are comparing to an 8086 or something.
In the general case, the reason we can't make "sufficiently simple and vetted that we can be reasonably sure that ill conditioned inputs can't escape the sandbox" is because no one is willing to take the hit in functionality.
As other comments have pointed out, the correct version of this is OpenVPN. But that doesn't allow all the (presumably configuration-related) things that these guys wanted, so they distributed a binary instead that can take commands remotely. Fundamentally, what they want to do could be done safely, but no matter how you slice it, doing that correctly is going to cost them something. They might have to open source something, or pay auditors, or spend a lot of extra time on something.
Another more obvious example is HTTP. People did come up with extensions to this, that exist within the idea of simple and well behaved descriptions, but eventually there was the desire to download and run a program in a web browser, which we see implemented over and over again (with javascript the current winner). There's way too much interest in something that solves a general case and is very powerful, and sure enough, we see vulnerability after vulnerability.
It honestly feels like a "last mile" problem.
> Is that not the same as saying poverty should be maintained in order to create profitability?
Of course not
If you have two workers, one in poverty and one not in poverty, and both will work equally well, you'll be equally likely to choose either. Apply this policy, and you are now being paid by the government to avoid hiring the one in poverty, as they now cost you more for the same labor. It's a barricade to the poor.
In my example, they end up hiring the less-poor person while playing the same salary. The more-poor person now comes at a higher price tag, and has *yet another* economic barrier placed in his path, this time by the government. Even if the poorer person is willing to work just as hard, he costs more through no fault of his own, and is even more likely to be unable to find work.
I don't find your rebuttal convincing. Capitalism insists that people play by the same rules- and when they don't, there's meaningful outcry about it, usually not resulting in getting disappeared to the gulag. Capitalism also doesn't run out of other people's money- quite the opposite in fact, as it has a sterling record of creating value like nothing else. The only meaningful critiques of capitalism start by pointing to those who have been left behind by the system, by bad luck, bad genes, or just simply bad economic fitness, and saying, "uh, hey, so those guys- they seem pretty fucked, eh?".
Its historic track record is stellar compared to all the alternatives. It also gets hit by survivor bias pretty badly- the capitalist society has the visible poor, the socialist society has the invisible unmarked graves. One of these can be discovered by a socialist reporter, the other can be covered up by the socialist historian.
> And in the end, that's all that matters, isn't it?
Power and money are somewhat translatable to the other, but ultimately power is power.
My core problem with this Sanders bill is that it makes it unprofitable to hire poor people.
Ex: Single woman is willing to work for X. Unwed mother is willing to work for X, and makes up the difference with WIC. Right now, you hire who you think is best. With this bill in place, you are heavily motivated to pick the first woman, because she costs you X, and the second woman costs X+W, where W is the cost of the WIC. The more children, the more the company pays. The poorer the person, the more the company pays. It strongly disadvantages poor people when they go to compete economically.
Anonymous sources said that there's a basis that can't be disclosed or discussed or refuted. Sounds legit.
> They are just chipped like cats and dogs.
Correct. For "cyborg" to be applied, you have to either regain abilities or gain new ones via integration with something external. If you have some tail that is reading tiny muscle movements or even nerves, that would count. Some kind of bone conduction thing might work. Even something that pricked your skin slightly in the presence of magnetic fields is arguably counting, because it lets you "feel" magnetism (some people did this via implanting small magnets in their fingers).
Having a mark in your right hand that allows you to purchase goods arguably lines up with elements of a famous book, but it isn't one about cyborgs. Either way, being tagged like chattel isn't futurism, it's submission.
> Dude get real, they'd have to make written language illegal.
Shh, don't give them ideas!
> I'd be careful parsing those alerts. Just sayin'.
What harm could a memcpy do? We'll just read the length from this here 64 bit signed integer that the remote packet conveniently had as the third field. No problems at all.
Given that they are trying to override the behavior of operating systems on phones, it's a good bet this is actually on their list.
> In China, there is only one party, so it encompasses every possible ideology. Some members are hardcore Marxists, others are free market libertarians, along with everything in between
So the selling point is that a libertarian has to join the communist party? Super duper...