Actually, thanks to the fact that the game could be bought in stores we had it.
I purchased Elite in a computer store in the US. It was available.
Fair enough, I stand corrected. (i presume you're talking about 1984, when the original came out, and not e.g. the PC version from '91...)
Elite was a fun game from a piracy pov; iirc, there were several easter egg ASCII strings in the decrypted binary, e.g. "Does your mother know you're doing this?" and "You are in a maze of twisty little Acronsfot adventures, all alike" (a reference to text adventures by Acornsoft; actually this might have been in another game by the Cambridge crew)
i also have to randomly mention exile here for no particular reason, other than it was the best 8-bit game ever
Conked out as in stopped working? Yikes! Our machines will print the black square, call an error and then continue to work fine unless you do another 5 attempts at the EXACT same document...
Yeah, cos a user would NEVER do that.
honestly, you're wise not to say which company you work for. it's really disappointing to hear that printer manufacturers cripple their products in this way.
there are surely legitimate artistic and/or administrative uses that would be blocked by the kinds of safeguard you're describing.
In the entire time I've worked for this company, we've never once had to do a micro dot check for the police/government/whatever - I'd know because there's only about 3 or 4 of us in the company that have the knowhow to do it and they all work in my department. (no, the govt doesn't know how to do it themselves
presumably if EFF can work it out then so can NSA.
and even if they did, they'd still need to ask us where that serial number is now
"They" can still match up the digital signatures of different documents and get a lot of information that way.
Just as (for example) other forensic evidence, like fingerprints or DNA samples, can tag a suspect at multiple places/times even if you don't (yet) know who that suspect is.
They feel videogames are too expensive and resent the long wait for many games released in the US or in Asia before the UK.
Guess not much has changed since I used to pirate 8-bit BBC micro games in the 80's with my friends from high school. Of course, as soon as we published a game ourselves, our attitudes changed;-)
I guess that absence of homegrown coders is one thing that might be different nowadays -- even kids who were just a few years younger than me were used to computer games being studio affairs; the closest they'd get to writing a game would be designing a level on Doom.
Another thing that may have changed is the thrill of breaking copy protection. That was a big deal for us back then -- we'd compete to crack the encryption on the latest games... then take off the copy protection, put our own logos on, and put the encryption back in place so that lesser pirates couldn't steal our glory, heheh..... I never saw any of the really nasty "black ice" that was rumoured to exist (e.g. antipiracy code that'd deliberately wreck your drive by moving the disk head beyond its physical limit)... I heard Infocom games had a lot of this.
Back then we didn't have to resent the kids in US or Asia, cos no-one except Europeans knew what a BBC was.... in fact, looking back, US kids didn't even have Elite, so we were the privileged ones:)
Check out some of his presentations of open croquet before you say that (see e.g. here). He is bringing the kind of OpenGL graphics that gamers have got used to into the mainstream GUI. It is among the most innovative and forward-looking interface development I've seen. Do we really think we'll be dragging windows around a 2D desktop in 30 years time?
I wonder what will happen to Open Croquet and
TeaTime
without his leadership. It does seem as if Croquet has gained quite a bit of open-source momentum by this stage, and is the current best contender for bringing the world of Snow Crash to our desktop.
I just hope development on Croquet doesn't stall now, otherwise us cyberspace-lusting techno-hopefuls will just have to wait for the inevitable (but still hopefully far-off) day where you can open Word documents and Excel spreadsheets from inside World of Warcraft.
People do refer to farmers in a derogatory way, and a lot of time, they refer to them as Chinese Gold Farmers....
It's simply a numbers game... Don't mistake laziness for racism.
sorry but that is racism dude... firstly, Bayes rule sez that P(B|A) is not necessarily equal to P(A|B)... so "many farming shops are Chinese" does not imply that "many Chinese are farmers". But if the only time you ever refer to Chinese ppl is in the context of "Chinese gold farmers", then you're guilty of stereotyping, plain and simple; just as if you talked frequently about "black crack dealers" or "Jewish bankers" or "Arab terrorists" "feminist lesbians" and tried to justify this by saying hey, y'know, a lot of lesbians are feminists...
If you passively participate in racism because you're too "lazy" to object to it, that doesn't let you off the hook. In fact I can't think of any excuse that's less convincing than laziness.... and as for this:
The worst thing you can really do about racism is overreact to it.
...have to fundamentally disagree with you there sport.... and I think MLK, Malcolm X and the like would probably concur....
...or running fantasy simulations, or getting ritually excited about Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind Of Science".
When the bots actually start empirically collecting data (instead of playing games), yea, truly then will they have surpassed their creators in technological sophistication.
The latter, it turns out, is not remotely "junk", but contains important regulatory sequences which control gene activation/deactivation and the physical structure of the chromosomes.
actually, known regulatory sequences comprise only a small fraction of the junk....
a much bigger fraction is mobile DNA of various kinds (transposons, satellites, etc.) which may (or may not) be evolutionarily important.....
some more may be unannotated genes, e.g. small ORFs or noncoding RNAs... basically the content of intergenic DNA is still an open question...
For the most part these patents only exist to create some sort of nuclear stalemate - where your competitors are too afraid to sue you since it's certain that they violate some of your patents.
You're joking, right? Surely you aren't really that naive....
Amazon is doing anything but collecting a portfolio of defensive patents...they are actively stockpiling offensive weapons to use against any competitor, anywhere, for any reason they like.
That may be the case, but the parent post was right that this is common practise.
This is exactly how patents are used e.g. by big pharmaceutical companies, who stockpile patents on various processes as a sort of Mutual Assured Destruction policy against each other.
I personally agree with you that MAD is nuts, and counter to the public interest. I also hate patents on "streaming media", etc. However, Amazon's behaviour shouldn't be seen out of context. The point is that many other technology companies are doing this too, and perhaps (as the FSF has decided) a more accurate barometer of their intentions is the way in which they use these patents.
(FSF, at least, seems to think the Barnes and Noble lawsuit ended without too much collateral damage; see link in article summary.)
Towards the government I feel no scruples and would dodge paying the broadband tax if I could. Yet I would give my life for the Internet readily enough, if I thought it necessary. No one is patriotic about taxes.
Friend of mine manages a cluster that models the worlds oceans. One thing they forgot about when planning it was the cooling needs. That added a nice chunk to the budget.
I used to work at the Sanger Institute (before they were quite so big). One year after the main building was occupied, there was a fire in the main server room, filling the informatics corridor with black smoke. It turned out to have been started by a fan that had been left on all year...
There's the cost, but also there's a limit to the length you can make with existing methods, especially if you need a semi-decent yield.
hmmmm, IANASB (i am not a synthetic biologist) but shouldn't you just be able to synthesize a bunch of fragments and then stitch them together somehow..... a bit of sloppiness at the stitching-points would be OK if you were e.g. in yeast, 'cos you could put those points inside introns.....
there must be some way to assemble a bunch of DNA fragments! e.g. by giving them uniquely complementary flanking sequences, then using an integrase or transposase or, uhm, something like that?
I agree that genes should be left for geneticists, but when your compiler, debugger, and emmulator/simulator check for bad or even icky results, it might actually be fun to toy with genes, in an neat visual way.
WIMP!
All this white-bread-spoiled-brat pseudogeekery about compilers and error-checking is sooooo depressing. The true computer pioneers didn't wait for visual IDEs, they hammered out machine code with their bare fists!!!
Don't wait for the technology to mature (jeez!) Get Out There and START HACKING!
Currently, it's easy to 1) amplify large chunks of DNA verbatim and 2) change individual nucleotides. What is difficult is making large blocks of novel or heavily modified sequence, as it's expensive or impossible to synthesize them from nucleotides. Codon Devices seems to have a way to generate large chunks of customized sequence.
This is certainly on its way, whether from Codon Devices or elsewhere. See e.g.
this paper by George Church et al on using microfluidics for DNA synthesis.
BTW, it's not currently impossible to synthesize DNA, just obscenely expensive at
$1.45 per nucleotide.
We certainly don't call any of our clients 'The Meat', or 'Pork Chop #1'. That's just tabloid nonsense. And while we're skewering misconceptions, the job isn't as glamorous as you might think. Although I go to club and restaurant openings, film premières, first nights, fashion shows and stay in first-class hotels all around the world, I'm not there to enjoy myself. I'm there to prevent any live cells from my clients' bodies falling into the hands of meatleggers.
Hate to say it, but this sounds like a pipedream. They want to 'take the proteins and tweak them' an dthen have a computer program spit out the DNA required to make that protein.
Well whoop-de-do. I'd like to make a computer that can generate wormholes. Doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Synthetic biology's been around for a while (see also e.g. Adam Arkin). This is just Drew's startup getting column inches in Forbes, and then getting eagerly lapped up by Zonk, as far as I can see.
I've seen dosnets on IRIX, Linux, SCO Unix/Openserver, and Solaris. Windows users are not the only ones running infections. Ooh yeah, the guys hitting unix are usually far more skilled than those using cookie cutter exploits to mass-infect windows machines, meaning that though they don't hit harder, they may hit smarter.
go on then trelanexiph u cheeky little chappie, tell us about one of these linux dosnets you've seen.... how did you learn of it? exactly
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, thanks to the fact that the game could be bought in stores we had it. I purchased Elite in a computer store in the US. It was available.
Fair enough, I stand corrected. (i presume you're talking about 1984, when the original came out, and not e.g. the PC version from '91...)
Elite was a fun game from a piracy pov; iirc, there were several easter egg ASCII strings in the decrypted binary, e.g. "Does your mother know you're doing this?" and "You are in a maze of twisty little Acronsfot adventures, all alike" (a reference to text adventures by Acornsoft; actually this might have been in another game by the Cambridge crew)
i also have to randomly mention exile here for no particular reason, other than it was the best 8-bit game ever
Conked out as in stopped working? Yikes! Our machines will print the black square, call an error and then continue to work fine unless you do another 5 attempts at the EXACT same document...
Yeah, cos a user would NEVER do that.
honestly, you're wise not to say which company you work for. it's really disappointing to hear that printer manufacturers cripple their products in this way. there are surely legitimate artistic and/or administrative uses that would be blocked by the kinds of safeguard you're describing.
In the entire time I've worked for this company, we've never once had to do a micro dot check for the police/government/whatever - I'd know because there's only about 3 or 4 of us in the company that have the knowhow to do it and they all work in my department. (no, the govt doesn't know how to do it themselves
presumably if EFF can work it out then so can NSA.
and even if they did, they'd still need to ask us where that serial number is now
"They" can still match up the digital signatures of different documents and get a lot of information that way. Just as (for example) other forensic evidence, like fingerprints or DNA samples, can tag a suspect at multiple places/times even if you don't (yet) know who that suspect is.
Guess not much has changed since I used to pirate 8-bit BBC micro games in the 80's with my friends from high school. Of course, as soon as we published a game ourselves, our attitudes changed ;-)
I guess that absence of homegrown coders is one thing that might be different nowadays -- even kids who were just a few years younger than me were used to computer games being studio affairs; the closest they'd get to writing a game would be designing a level on Doom.
Another thing that may have changed is the thrill of breaking copy protection. That was a big deal for us back then -- we'd compete to crack the encryption on the latest games... then take off the copy protection, put our own logos on, and put the encryption back in place so that lesser pirates couldn't steal our glory, heheh..... I never saw any of the really nasty "black ice" that was rumoured to exist (e.g. antipiracy code that'd deliberately wreck your drive by moving the disk head beyond its physical limit)... I heard Infocom games had a lot of this.
Back then we didn't have to resent the kids in US or Asia, cos no-one except Europeans knew what a BBC was.... in fact, looking back, US kids didn't even have Elite, so we were the privileged ones :)
Babel -- is it PC-only? where can i download it from... can't see a link on that page
Try walking away from the door and exploring the city. Also try opening the door, pressing the plate, etc.
all solo-player though (so possibly off-topic)
Check out some of his presentations of open croquet before you say that (see e.g. here). He is bringing the kind of OpenGL graphics that gamers have got used to into the mainstream GUI. It is among the most innovative and forward-looking interface development I've seen. Do we really think we'll be dragging windows around a 2D desktop in 30 years time?
I just hope development on Croquet doesn't stall now, otherwise us cyberspace-lusting techno-hopefuls will just have to wait for the inevitable (but still hopefully far-off) day where you can open Word documents and Excel spreadsheets from inside World of Warcraft.
People do refer to farmers in a derogatory way, and a lot of time, they refer to them as Chinese Gold Farmers.... It's simply a numbers game... Don't mistake laziness for racism.
sorry but that is racism dude... firstly, Bayes rule sez that P(B|A) is not necessarily equal to P(A|B)... so "many farming shops are Chinese" does not imply that "many Chinese are farmers". But if the only time you ever refer to Chinese ppl is in the context of "Chinese gold farmers", then you're guilty of stereotyping, plain and simple; just as if you talked frequently about "black crack dealers" or "Jewish bankers" or "Arab terrorists" "feminist lesbians" and tried to justify this by saying hey, y'know, a lot of lesbians are feminists...
If you passively participate in racism because you're too "lazy" to object to it, that doesn't let you off the hook. In fact I can't think of any excuse that's less convincing than laziness.... and as for this:
The worst thing you can really do about racism is overreact to it.
When the bots actually start empirically collecting data (instead of playing games), yea, truly then will they have surpassed their creators in technological sophistication.
Say hi to Michele Clamp and James Cuff from me.... used to work with them at the Sanger Center...
Check out his site
cool - where are you based? I am in Berkeley and am flying out to the ENCODE meeting next week...
The latter, it turns out, is not remotely "junk", but contains important regulatory sequences which control gene activation/deactivation and the physical structure of the chromosomes.
actually, known regulatory sequences comprise only a small fraction of the junk....
a much bigger fraction is mobile DNA of various kinds (transposons, satellites, etc.) which may (or may not) be evolutionarily important.....
some more may be unannotated genes, e.g. small ORFs or noncoding RNAs... basically the content of intergenic DNA is still an open question...
For the most part these patents only exist to create some sort of nuclear stalemate - where your competitors are too afraid to sue you since it's certain that they violate some of your patents.
You're joking, right? Surely you aren't really that naive.... Amazon is doing anything but collecting a portfolio of defensive patents...they are actively stockpiling offensive weapons to use against any competitor, anywhere, for any reason they like.
That may be the case, but the parent post was right that this is common practise. This is exactly how patents are used e.g. by big pharmaceutical companies, who stockpile patents on various processes as a sort of Mutual Assured Destruction policy against each other.
I personally agree with you that MAD is nuts, and counter to the public interest. I also hate patents on "streaming media", etc. However, Amazon's behaviour shouldn't be seen out of context. The point is that many other technology companies are doing this too, and perhaps (as the FSF has decided) a more accurate barometer of their intentions is the way in which they use these patents.
(FSF, at least, seems to think the Barnes and Noble lawsuit ended without too much collateral damage; see link in article summary.)
--George Orwell's Wartime Diary, 1940
It's on the same site. Surely it's a no-brainer that this is all fiction.
Friend of mine manages a cluster that models the worlds oceans. One thing they forgot about when planning it was the cooling needs. That added a nice chunk to the budget.
I used to work at the Sanger Institute (before they were quite so big). One year after the main building was occupied, there was a fire in the main server room, filling the informatics corridor with black smoke. It turned out to have been started by a fan that had been left on all year...
There's the cost, but also there's a limit to the length you can make with existing methods, especially if you need a semi-decent yield.
hmmmm, IANASB (i am not a synthetic biologist) but shouldn't you just be able to synthesize a bunch of fragments and then stitch them together somehow..... a bit of sloppiness at the stitching-points would be OK if you were e.g. in yeast, 'cos you could put those points inside introns.....
there must be some way to assemble a bunch of DNA fragments! e.g. by giving them uniquely complementary flanking sequences, then using an integrase or transposase or, uhm, something like that?
I agree that genes should be left for geneticists, but when your compiler, debugger, and emmulator/simulator check for bad or even icky results, it might actually be fun to toy with genes, in an neat visual way.
WIMP!
All this white-bread-spoiled-brat pseudogeekery about compilers and error-checking is sooooo depressing. The true computer pioneers didn't wait for visual IDEs, they hammered out machine code with their bare fists!!!
Don't wait for the technology to mature (jeez!) Get Out There and START HACKING!
Currently, it's easy to 1) amplify large chunks of DNA verbatim and 2) change individual nucleotides. What is difficult is making large blocks of novel or heavily modified sequence, as it's expensive or impossible to synthesize them from nucleotides. Codon Devices seems to have a way to generate large chunks of customized sequence.
This is certainly on its way, whether from Codon Devices or elsewhere. See e.g. this paper by George Church et al on using microfluidics for DNA synthesis.
BTW, it's not currently impossible to synthesize DNA, just obscenely expensive at $1.45 per nucleotide.
We certainly don't call any of our clients 'The Meat', or 'Pork Chop #1'. That's just tabloid nonsense. And while we're skewering misconceptions, the job isn't as glamorous as you might think. Although I go to club and restaurant openings, film premières, first nights, fashion shows and stay in first-class hotels all around the world, I'm not there to enjoy myself. I'm there to prevent any live cells from my clients' bodies falling into the hands of meatleggers.
Hate to say it, but this sounds like a pipedream. They want to 'take the proteins and tweak them' an dthen have a computer program spit out the DNA required to make that protein.
Well whoop-de-do. I'd like to make a computer that can generate wormholes. Doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Can't promise much in the way of wormholes, but Homme Hellinga and David Baker's groups already make software for protein design.
Synthetic biology's been around for a while (see also e.g. Adam Arkin). This is just Drew's startup getting column inches in Forbes, and then getting eagerly lapped up by Zonk, as far as I can see.
go on then trelanexiph u cheeky little chappie, tell us about one of these linux dosnets you've seen.... how did you learn of it? exactly