...who make a justification to violate the rules(and ruining the game). It happens about every time goldfarming comes up.
This is the developed world, and it has no obligation to assist developing nations in any way. That includes those who aid and abet them. It also includes those who wish to obstruct the US/(pre-expansion)EU, within and without.
> Game creators work so hard to stop these guys... Maybe they should realize their content sucks if people are willing to pay to skip it.
You sir, just summed up the root cause of RMT in one sentence.
Unfortunately, solving the "how to keep people engaged for hundreds of hours without grinding" problem seems insurmountable with the current crop of game designers.
No silly, grinding is part of the plan. Look at how pasty, spotty and overweight a Wow player is after a few months grinding. His lifeforce has been sapped. Now lifeforce is conserved globally so that means someone else has gained it. Look at photos with Blizzard executives if you can find them. They look 20-30 years younger than their chronological age.
It's like The Picture of Dorian Grey. The only reason Blizzard charges is to increase the degradation of the players, the real money they make comes from rich people buying lifeforce from them.
So they're criticized by Noam Chomsky, and cheered by Biill O'Reilly, and this is supposed to be a good thing?
I dunno. Bill O Reilly and Noam Chomsky are both either karma whores or completely fucking mad, so I prefer to judge things on my own rather than listening to either of them.
No, with solar collectors it is better to use a beam like microwaves.
Then you can 'accidentally miss' when it passes over any inconvenient countries.
Maybe even put it under AI control... the possibilities are endless!
I wonder if you could generate sound waves by aiming an orbital microwave beam at a suitable target and modulating the beam with audio. Then a booming voice from nowhere could threaten evil doers anywhere on the planet with annhilation before you zapped them.
Sort of like God in the Old Testament or the Quran.
There's these things called the basic laws of physics which make this idea a dead end.
Magnetic fields go between two poles and not much further afield. That makes the far field go down as the cube of the distance. Basically insurmountable gotcha.
You'd be better off turning the 60W into photons with a laserdiode and converting them back at the other end with a yet to be invented high efficiency converter.
And what voltage do you recommend for your single power socket? 12V? 6V? 5V? 3.3V? maybe 1.5 or 0.8V? Perhaps just a simple 24 and let everybody downconvert?
Most mfrs want to minimize the need for conversion in their devices. This would get you from AC to DC, but would not quite buy you a universal solution.
The charger and the device would negotiate by sending packets of XML over a datastream modulated onto the pins. Once negotiation had succeeded the power would be turned on.
Companies like Apple that wanted to only charge from Apple branded Universal Low Voltage DC adapters would use public key cryptographic signatures in the charger and devices to enforce that. This would enforce higher user satisfaction levels.
Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.
Trust us, as soon as we have a Mac version ready, it will be up and available on our site.
Christ, they can't even do the standard browser ID string parsing ans see I'm running Linux? Fscking idiots.
You have been trolled by Microsoft. You have lost. Have a nice day.
A 10x improvement would make cracking 40bit 'consumer-grade' (such as GSM and DECT) crypto trivial on the latest processors. The most likely application is to give governments easy access to snoop 'private' phone and data conversations.
Governments either tap unencrypted GSM conversations at the basestation or have custom hardware to break 40 bit encryption. Or both probably.
Plugin incompatibility, unsupported flash, java shennanigans, the 32/64 bit crapfest, have fun trying to get a java vpn client working... Under ubuntu with AMD64 you need to run a 32 bit version of the firefox2 browser and java 5 to get the most popular java based vpn client on the planet to work.
Flash is simply BROKEN. I'm not blaming firefox for this one. The easiest workaround is to run firefox.exe from wine.
What's wrong with running the 32 bit version of Firefox on a 64 bit OS?
So how did Iran - apparently a country containing only religious nutbags, comic book villains, and the lost apprentices of the former Iraqi Intelligence Ministry, according to the news - manage to successfully launch rocket capable of carrying a satellite while Space-X os 0-for-3?
Maybe we should be a little concerned...
It wasn't succesful, and they bought the bits from North Korea, who bought them from Russia, who mostly copied them from the Germans.
Or as someone here put it http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=653229&cid=24697441 The Safir rocket is an adaptation of their Shahab-3 missile. This is a medium range ballistic missile and one of several they claimed to have test-launched en masse last month, giving Stephen Colbert an easy 10 minutes of fill material after it was found out the photos of the launch were doctored. It seems their Shahab inventory, at least flight-ready Shahab's, is not as large as they want outsiders to believe.
The Shahab itself is based on the North Korean Nodong missile, which in turn was developed from second-hand Scud missiles acquired from Egypt. Going back even further, the Scud originated in the 50's in the Soviet Union as a scaled down, improved version of the German V-2. Whew! Talk about a long lineage.
When I was in Germany one of the German engineers said that rogue states like North Korea, Iraq and Iran have managed to achieve less in missile technology in 60 years than the Germans achieved in a year or so at the end of World War II.
The problem is that North Korea sells its missiles quite widely. In fact it essentially licenses their manufacture - the Shahab 3 is essentially a North Korean design the Iranians manufacture themselves in a North Korean provided factory. So if North Korea manages to get the Taepodong 2A missile to work and does the same thing, Iran, Syria and Pakistan could basically buy themselves an ICBM factory. They have the money, and North Korea has the technology and no concerns about proliferation.
This is essentially the reason for missile defense - it's inevitable that these states will get ICBMs and it is thus helpful to have some way to shoot them down. Rogue state weapons R&D is glacially slow but at some point they will make it out of the 1940s into the 1950s.
If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place, just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At the other extreme, if a significant number of people convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr's death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place. Especially if they also believe that that other universe is a paradisical escape from the tribulations of the real world. Top it off with sincerely believed, if ludicrous and degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any wonder that naive and frustrated young men are clamouring to be selected for suicide missions?
That is not to say Slashdot doesn't post good stories. I read them - as do you. The world has changed since these beautiful early days you speak of though. You don't have to be a professional to find a good story. You don't even have to be a writer. Slashdot has evolved with the times, in some ways for the good, and in some ways for the bad. It is now a commercial entity though, so stories that bring people are always good, no matter how bad you think they are.
Plus, many editors seem to have been infected by the Howard Beale attitude of the blogosphere, and feel compelled to add their own ill-informed little rants.
I hope one of them kills himself live on slashdot. The page views will and ad revenue will be massive.
2. After Musharraf and the Pakistan military co-operated with the US to crack down on Islamic extremism, there is a virtual civil war going on in Pakistan. On one side is the corrupt military that controls most of the country by force. Scarily, those are the 'good' guys. The other side are the religous mullahs. They aren't the moderate muslim leaders we have over here. They are pro-bin laden jihadists who we really wouldn't like to see in control of the nuclear weapons that AQ Khan built for Pakistan. The Best part is they control the region the Taliban and Al-Qaeda retreated so completely the military is scared to go there and it would be suicide for the police to enter it.
Frankly, that all scares the willies out of me.
but ignore the real world, lets worry about the Bush Dynasty and it's heinous attempts at holding a free election in Iraq.
What's depressing about this that people are crowing on the internet about how Musharraf is going, even though all that really means is that the jihadists will have more power.
One of my favorite Mac placements has always been in the Russian action/horror movie Night Watch, where the iMacs all had carefully placed yellow post-it notes covering the telltale "Apple" logo on the back of the monitor
If you want product placement in a Russian movie, make sure you pay the bills before filming starts. To do otherwise is like asking for credit at a Russian bar.
Yup, they're now in bed with a very dodgy outfit that get their intelligence from a company who've been widely discredited across the EU. But not the UK yet.
Sending out thousands of "pay us or go to court" fishing mails, suing people and crowing about a 16K judgment made in absentia (that's right, she'd moved and the judgement was a default - ie not worth the paper it's written on as a precedent and open to a range of appeal options).
yay atari!
The new Atari still has the enemies list of the old Atari and to be fair to them a lot of the people they are suing into bankruptcy for legally dubious reasons knew people that owned Commodore machines in the 80's.
Slashdot Mirror
...who make a justification to violate the rules(and ruining the game). It happens about every time goldfarming comes up.
This is the developed world, and it has no obligation to assist developing nations in any way. That includes those who aid and abet them. It also includes those who wish to obstruct the US/(pre-expansion)EU, within and without.
Note those econmists have Epic Mounts.
> Game creators work so hard to stop these guys... Maybe they should realize their content sucks if people are willing to pay to skip it.
You sir, just summed up the root cause of RMT in one sentence.
Unfortunately, solving the "how to keep people engaged for hundreds of hours without grinding" problem seems insurmountable with the current crop of game designers.
No silly, grinding is part of the plan. Look at how pasty, spotty and overweight a Wow player is after a few months grinding. His lifeforce has been sapped. Now lifeforce is conserved globally so that means someone else has gained it. Look at photos with Blizzard executives if you can find them. They look 20-30 years younger than their chronological age.
It's like The Picture of Dorian Grey. The only reason Blizzard charges is to increase the degradation of the players, the real money they make comes from rich people buying lifeforce from them.
So they're criticized by Noam Chomsky, and cheered by Biill O'Reilly, and this is supposed to be a good thing?
I dunno. Bill O Reilly and Noam Chomsky are both either karma whores or completely fucking mad, so I prefer to judge things on my own rather than listening to either of them.
Or was that a whooshing sound I heard?
Umm, yeah. I thought the bit about enforcing user satisfaction levels would make it obvious. Or, hell, the mention of XML.
No, with solar collectors it is better to use a beam like microwaves.
Then you can 'accidentally miss' when it passes over any inconvenient countries.
Maybe even put it under AI control... the possibilities are endless!
I wonder if you could generate sound waves by aiming an orbital microwave beam at a suitable target and modulating the beam with audio. Then a booming voice from nowhere could threaten evil doers anywhere on the planet with annhilation before you zapped them.
Sort of like God in the Old Testament or the Quran.
There's these things called the basic laws of physics which make this idea a dead end.
Magnetic fields go between two poles and not much further afield. That makes the far field go down as the cube of the distance. Basically insurmountable gotcha.
You'd be better off turning the 60W into photons with a laserdiode and converting them back at the other end with a yet to be invented high efficiency converter.
Oh yeah, and not looking into the beam.
And what voltage do you recommend for your single power socket? 12V? 6V? 5V? 3.3V? maybe 1.5 or 0.8V? Perhaps just a simple 24 and let everybody downconvert?
Most mfrs want to minimize the need for conversion in their devices. This would get you from AC to DC, but would not quite buy you a universal solution.
The charger and the device would negotiate by sending packets of XML over a datastream modulated onto the pins. Once negotiation had succeeded the power would be turned on.
Companies like Apple that wanted to only charge from Apple branded Universal Low Voltage DC adapters would use public key cryptographic signatures in the charger and devices to enforce that. This would enforce higher user satisfaction levels.
Is not this something Nikola Tesla had done a century ago. But people were afraid just like they were afraid of camera's and tore his lab down.
You'd think that would be warning to people. Smart arsery leads to angry mobs with torches and pitchforks coming for you. But no.
Christ, they can't even do the standard browser ID string parsing ans see I'm running Linux? Fscking idiots.
You have been trolled by Microsoft. You have lost. Have a nice day.
A 10x improvement would make cracking 40bit 'consumer-grade' (such as GSM and DECT) crypto trivial on the latest processors. The most likely application is to give governments easy access to snoop 'private' phone and data conversations.
Governments either tap unencrypted GSM conversations at the basestation or have custom hardware to break 40 bit encryption. Or both probably.
Yeah but Flash would work. The GP was using Win32 Firefox in wine, which is even worse for library usage.
Firewire 800 is how old, and is how fast? About 6.25 Gbps?
If only they named Firewire standards in a way that let users tell how fast it was just from the name.
Plugin incompatibility, unsupported flash, java shennanigans, the 32/64 bit crapfest, have fun trying to get a java vpn client working... Under ubuntu with AMD64 you need to run a 32 bit version of the firefox2 browser and java 5 to get the most popular java based vpn client on the planet to work.
Flash is simply BROKEN. I'm not blaming firefox for this one. The easiest workaround is to run firefox.exe from wine.
What's wrong with running the 32 bit version of Firefox on a 64 bit OS?
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/07/my-browser-needs-16-exabytes.html
So how did Iran - apparently a country containing only religious nutbags, comic book villains, and the lost apprentices of the former Iraqi Intelligence Ministry, according to the news - manage to successfully launch rocket capable of carrying a satellite while Space-X os 0-for-3?
Maybe we should be a little concerned...
It wasn't succesful, and they bought the bits from North Korea, who bought them from Russia, who mostly copied them from the Germans.
Or as someone here put it
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=653229&cid=24697441
The Safir rocket is an adaptation of their Shahab-3 missile. This is a medium range ballistic missile and one of several they claimed to have test-launched en masse last month, giving Stephen Colbert an easy 10 minutes of fill material after it was found out the photos of the launch were doctored. It seems their Shahab inventory, at least flight-ready Shahab's, is not as large as they want outsiders to believe.
The Shahab itself is based on the North Korean Nodong missile, which in turn was developed from second-hand Scud missiles acquired from Egypt. Going back even further, the Scud originated in the 50's in the Soviet Union as a scaled down, improved version of the German V-2. Whew! Talk about a long lineage.
When I was in Germany one of the German engineers said that rogue states like North Korea, Iraq and Iran have managed to achieve less in missile technology in 60 years than the Germans achieved in a year or so at the end of World War II.
The problem is that North Korea sells its missiles quite widely. In fact it essentially licenses their manufacture - the Shahab 3 is essentially a North Korean design the Iranians manufacture themselves in a North Korean provided factory. So if North Korea manages to get the Taepodong 2A missile to work and does the same thing, Iran, Syria and Pakistan could basically buy themselves an ICBM factory. They have the money, and North Korea has the technology and no concerns about proliferation.
This is essentially the reason for missile defense - it's inevitable that these states will get ICBMs and it is thus helpful to have some way to shoot them down. Rogue state weapons R&D is glacially slow but at some point they will make it out of the 1940s into the 1950s.
Dawkins said the same thing after 9/11
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/15/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety1
If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place, just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At the other extreme, if a significant number of people convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr's death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place. Especially if they also believe that that other universe is a paradisical escape from the tribulations of the real world. Top it off with sincerely believed, if ludicrous and degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any wonder that naive and frustrated young men are clamouring to be selected for suicide missions?
I was talking to my Dad about foie gras and he said that the liver of one of our very fat relatives "would probably be good to eat".
Q. How does Slashdot earn money?
Advertising.
Q. How does advertising make money?
A. People.
Q. How do we get people?
A. Discussion.
Q. What makes discussion?
A. Conflict. Arguements.
That is not to say Slashdot doesn't post good stories. I read them - as do you. The world has changed since these beautiful early days you speak of though. You don't have to be a professional to find a good story. You don't even have to be a writer. Slashdot has evolved with the times, in some ways for the good, and in some ways for the bad. It is now a commercial entity though, so stories that bring people are always good, no matter how bad you think they are.
I agree with this comment 100%.
Plus, many editors seem to have been infected by the Howard Beale attitude of the blogosphere, and feel compelled to add their own ill-informed little rants.
I hope one of them kills himself live on slashdot. The page views will and ad revenue will be massive.
That has almost happened
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/6476207.stm
These guys were actually bugged discussing and eventually dismissing the possibility that MI5 was bugging them.
I was being sarcastic.
2. After Musharraf and the Pakistan military co-operated with the US to crack down on Islamic extremism, there is a virtual civil war going on in Pakistan. On one side is the corrupt military that controls most of the country by force. Scarily, those are the 'good' guys. The other side are the religous mullahs. They aren't the moderate muslim leaders we have over here. They are pro-bin laden jihadists who we really wouldn't like to see in control of the nuclear weapons that AQ Khan built for Pakistan. The Best part is they control the region the Taliban and Al-Qaeda retreated so completely the military is scared to go there and it would be suicide for the police to enter it.
Frankly, that all scares the willies out of me.
but ignore the real world, lets worry about the Bush Dynasty and it's heinous attempts at holding a free election in Iraq.
What's depressing about this that people are crowing on the internet about how Musharraf is going, even though all that really means is that the jihadists will have more power.
One of my favorite Mac placements has always been in the Russian action/horror movie Night Watch, where the iMacs all had carefully placed yellow post-it notes covering the telltale "Apple" logo on the back of the monitor
If you want product placement in a Russian movie, make sure you pay the bills before filming starts. To do otherwise is like asking for credit at a Russian bar.
Yeah, I bet Wil spent a lot of time on the 'net after filming, him being so popular there and all.
Leonardo Dicaprio is making a movie about the history of atari...
Is he going to play Landon Dyer?
http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987
Yup, they're now in bed with a very dodgy outfit that get their intelligence from a company who've been widely discredited across the EU. But not the UK yet.
Sending out thousands of "pay us or go to court" fishing mails, suing people and crowing about a 16K judgment made in absentia (that's right, she'd moved and the judgement was a default - ie not worth the paper it's written on as a precedent and open to a range of appeal options).
yay atari!
The new Atari still has the enemies list of the old Atari and to be fair to them a lot of the people they are suing into bankruptcy for legally dubious reasons knew people that owned Commodore machines in the 80's.
Yeah, payback's a bitch, ain't it?