Fine, so they're being naughty and pretending they're someone else. They're still not "entering your property", are they? If someone who is committing mail fraud with incorrect return addresses keeps sending you mail, it's irritating. It is most definitely not fucking trespass, and an ass full of buckshot is a criminally disproportionate response. You could shoot the mailman, you could go to the originator's house and shoot them, but clearly both are entirely inappropriate when the law has sufficient measures to prevent and counteract such problems.
I'm not objecting to the fact that this irritant is illegal and should be punished. My issue is with the unbelievably inflammatory and ignorant statement made by the court regarding email and trespass. It certainly is not the same thing and, unlike trespass, there is no implicit threat to your safety - or, let's face it, to property. It's just damned annoying.
Even with the sternest of signs, you can't stop a determined trespasser except by force, and I can see why you might want a shotgun as a deterrent. You invite and encourage mail and email, open forms of communication, and there is no way they can harm you (not talking about virii, trojans etc - whole other ballgame). Such a huge fucking difference!
a form of trespass, little different than intruding on their land or making unwanted use of their private property.
Look, I'm all for spammers getting ass-raped by rhinos or whatever, but to suggest that emailing someone is equivalent to trespass??!? Just how out-of-touch and confused does the state have to get with technology before they're sat down in an electric chair in front of a monitor, with a sticky on its side saying "Learn"?
This is a totally spurious comparison. Firstly it is the confluence of internet/SM protocols, not the spammer, that puts the email on your server - although in the vast majority of these cases, you can believe that the recipient doesn't own the server at all. In those cases, the analogy would be more like "little different than sending them lots of junkmail which, when they feel like it, they can go down to the local post office to collect and bin".
For those who do own their mail servers - corporations, freelancers or other particularly tooled-up individuals - it's like dumping a shit-load of mail on their doorstep - again, through the postal service, which is an impartial, autonomous service that we deeply value!!
This spam is in no way infringing the rights or security of its recipients. It is a minor inconvenience, as is any form of junk mail, and when requested to desist it is illegal, just as is unsolicited junkmail when you so request (at least, in the UK). As such, yes, it should be punished. Is it entirely necessary, however, to confuse and inflame the issue with such shitty, uninformed, unqualified comparisons? And this from a court? Shit, they're supposed to be more responsible with language than anyone else in the country - what the hell does this guy think he's doing??
In my defence, I didn't include the botched translation into feet in the original submission. After all, I'm from the UK - it would be yards or Olympic swimming pools.
When research is done into data security, it usually concludes that, yes, it is possible to obtain sensitive information from a company regarding its customers (duh).
However, the important thing to find out is whether or not this can be acheived without significant risk of discovery to the enquirer. This is a tough question for a commissioned third party to answer, as they have carte blanche. I dunno about the US but, in the UK, the answer is usually: no.
Anyone who works with sensitive or private data (especially when it relates to children or vulnerable adults) has it so heavily drummed into them that security is crucial, that it has become part of the culture (which, of course, is the point).
Obviously there are breaches and slips, and people are not always challenged when they should be. However, these occurrences are infrequent, irregular and - most importantly - unpredictable. You couldn't approach a company/authority/whatever with a cunning ploy to discover data that worked last time and be sure of not getting caught out this time. It's not worth the risk, and employees are getting more savvy every day.
The absolute worst kinds of data integrity slip-up are from fucking sloppy work by people using info systems. I worked in HR for a while, and ended up maintaining the personnel data system (for about 7,500 peeps - and it was a shit piece of software). I discovered that one or two staff members were using the software incorrectly and, frankly, in a totally incompetent fashion, because they couldn't be bothered to use the proper routines. I wish I could've made that impossible, but it wasn't my software.
They had replaced the addresses of several employees with the addresses of several job applicants who happened to have the same name, because it hadn't crossed their minds that the personnel tables accessed by the applicant-processing module and the contracted-employees module might be the same. The result? I got a phone call from an irate HR manager asking why they had been returned a contract with payroll info, tax stuff etc from someone who had never worked for us with a note saying "not known at this address". Of course, the girl responsible tried to blame it on me, and got heavily bollocked shortly afterwards for being a dense fuckwit.
Ach, that Norfolk/Norwich thing has always been a blind spot for me; sorry. However, the rest was a blockquote from the site - I saw the maps too, which made me skeptical of the claims, but honestly I just remember reading about this when I saw the/. article and thinking "What the hell? How is this impressive?". It's hardly news when incremental progressions of that magnitude have been going on for the last couple of years all over the developed world. I just wanted to put it in perspective.
a 4km radius from County Hall, as well as key sites to the east and west of the city: Broadland Business Park , University of East Anglia , Norwich Science Park and Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital. In addition 28 hotspots in South Norfolk will be enabled shortly.
That's pretty decent coverage for a back-water city in UK farmer country, and it's free. Kind of throws some context into this article, I reckon.
viewpoint, game timing, actions, setting and the constant mixing of all of them
Or indeed complexity, storyline, atmoshphere etc... all of which apply to, let's be honest, any creative medium, to some degree or other. Okay, maybe static media like photography, sculpture etc are not so time-driven, but all of these things merely describe the different aspects of the way we use creative media to describe the world - whether the real world or an imagined one.
Film, books, music, computer games, theatre - all of these are composed of elements such as those described above, and as such we use those characteristics to create genres.
But that's the key point - it is we who create the genres, not the games (films, books) themselves! Genres are tools, like language, like stereotyping, and these tools allow us to make broad-brush assumptions about other individual items based on how they are described to us using that language. If we create the "action" genre, we as a culture have a vague, general notion about what that means and can use the term to impress the same notion on someone to whom we're trying to describe the item. This is "Lingual Studies 101".
Such abstract notions as "genre" are useful in general discussion, but serve only to obfuscate when discussing the item, genre or medium in depth. Neither the language nor the medium are set in stone, and any attempt to do so with either usually renders it useless in no time.
As a useful analogy, take the example of a colour-perception study performed some years ago on a remote ethnic group. A very rich range of hues was presented to each subject and they were asked to name the colour. Turquoises and teals, for example, caused some to say blue, others green and so on, but the proportion who opted for one or the other was fairly uniform.
One cultural group seemed to have difficulty with Orange though - anything but the yellowest of oranges, they called Red, and Orange to them meant something that was almost Yellow, with a small hint of Red. Research into their heredity was conducted, and it turned out they were physiologically indistinct from the other groups - it was only their understanding of the words that differed, which was a cultural trait.
The article poster's attempt to "do a better job" of categorizing games, assuming that such a thing could be treated as an exact science, betrays a lack of understanding of the function and nature of language and, indeed, of gaming as a creative medium. It's a little disappointing that this article even made it past the editors.
Okay, I think they suck mightily and are unlikely to make any significant headway in the near future, but...
If hardware developers want to get people using specialist expansion cards like this AI cockup, PhysX or whatever, there are only two ways I can see to make them marketable:
Make cards which perform in parallel for online multiplayers (MMOGs or more conventional ones), as suggested by another poster. If you can design the cards so that they benefit all players, but benefit the owner of the cards more, you have something that will gain a foothold in market perception and thus become attractive. Not sure how this would work - maybe a combined AI/PPU that improves the AI for all players, but improves the physics for the card's owner. I dunno, it's a tricky one to sell.
Make cards which do provide some significant improvement to performance for the owner (without chewing up bus bandwidth) and stick them in the box with a couple of new genre-busting games (admittedly difficult to predict) at cost price. If people really want the game, I reckon they'll pay another £20 if they're guaranteed a performance-improving card to boot. It may be a slight loss-leader for the hardware manufacturer but, once the hardware is out there in numbers, game developers have significant reason to include support in future titles. Then you can start putting out higher-spec cards at retail price for those who need that performance edge, and hey-presto: you've created a burgeoning hardware market.
I appreciate that such cards, provided they have any market foothold, could potentially have significant impact if they're well-designed. What Aegis did, though, was underestimate the savvy of the average performance gamer. Most such consumers are tech-savvy to some degree, and are usually conscious of the relative benefits of various hardware upgrades as compared to the investment required. Aegis were arrogant and assumed we'd believe the hype, ignoring the fact that reviews, information and communities were going to be out there, and were going to be defamatory.
Aegis' marketing (and cards, of course) sucked ass, and if anyone wants to follow their ideas, they'd better learn from their mistakes.
All that being said, I'm strongly in favour of dropping the whole notion and going with multi-threaded games development to match our ever-cheaper multi-core CPUs. All I'm saying is, if these AI guys want to succeed, they're going to have to be really fucking canny and stop treating the games market like a pool of irresponsible cash. Not many of us live in the basements of our parents' mansions...
Can't remember where I read it (prolly/.), but there was an article that gave a very convincing argument to the effect that changing your password every month is totally without benefit. It's a common-rule-of-thumb kind of practice that has been handed down from admin to admin for years, probaby from early Unix days, and doesn't have any useful purpose anymore.
Incremental-number passwords are an inevitable side-effect of this sort of policy and, even where password policy is more carefully implemented, the fact that average-joe users have to change it monthly anyway is a chore that WILL lead to short-cuts and, ultimately, weak passwords (or rather, associative passwords that are easy to infer after a little observation).
Try just having a very strict policy on passwords, and scrapping the regular-change part of it. People can be imaginative and obscure once, but ask them to do it regularly and they get sloppy.
Last time I checked (ie last week, building my new silent rig), the 7600GT was just about the most powerful proven graphics card that was available with a fanless heatsink - very important when you're after a silent rig, especially considering Apple's "Cinema" selling point.
Okay, within the last week I have built a rig consisting of a Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4GHz), 2G RAM, 7600GT w/ 256M GDDR3, big shiny widescreen monitor yada yada...
It may not be interesting to you, but to me it was like realizing Steve Jobs has been staring over my shoulder for the last week.
On a side not, what's with the 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo chip? The E6600 stock speed is 2.4, and the next one down is 2.1something. Where's that figure coming from? Or are they using lower-spec CPUs and overclocking them all? They are exceptionally stable for Intel, after all.
Anyone else notice (or care) that the USPTO seems to have spelled Address as "Adress". Spelling-nazis are ten-a-penny, so you would expect the USPTO, of all organisations, to have one or two in their ranks!
Also, Haskell is not a programming language - it's a mystical land where institutionalised C programmers go when they've led bad lives, to be fed on by the younger, better adapted functional-programming maths students...
Also, I have to question any study that deigns to correlate interest in "local affairs" against anything when the statistical population is entirely from PITTSBURG!
Okay, so I may be showing my ignorance here, but the programming system based on LabVIEW is like a dream! I clearly remember playing a game on my trusty Amiga 500 (with added RAM, of course) in which you had to build bots that battled in an arena with AI bots. You could give them various hardware and do bits of research, of course, but the really interesting part of the game was programming the bots, as they had to be autonomous.
They used a very similar type of system to this lego kit - dragging and dropping functional tasks onto a grid (move, sense, turn, fire etc), adjusting the variables of the function and building up a sort of flow-chart of action/reaction. Then you'd stick them in the arena and see how they fared...
At the time, I remember thinking: why can't someone build a real robot kit with this kind of control mechanism? This NXT interface is quite a lot more sophisticated than the game I played, but it's such an ingenious way of controlling a simple robot - and I feel absolutely certain that it's the perfect way to introduce kids to the high-level concepts of programming and robotics without their having to slog through years of groundwork first.
If I could think of any decent use for this kit in my life, I would buy one instantly. As it is, I'm seriously considering getting one anyway, just to revel in the powerful simplicity of such a wonderful idea.
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I'm not objecting to the fact that this irritant is illegal and should be punished. My issue is with the unbelievably inflammatory and ignorant statement made by the court regarding email and trespass. It certainly is not the same thing and, unlike trespass, there is no implicit threat to your safety - or, let's face it, to property. It's just damned annoying.
Even with the sternest of signs, you can't stop a determined trespasser except by force, and I can see why you might want a shotgun as a deterrent. You invite and encourage mail and email, open forms of communication, and there is no way they can harm you (not talking about virii, trojans etc - whole other ballgame). Such a huge fucking difference!
This is a totally spurious comparison. Firstly it is the confluence of internet/SM protocols, not the spammer, that puts the email on your server - although in the vast majority of these cases, you can believe that the recipient doesn't own the server at all. In those cases, the analogy would be more like "little different than sending them lots of junkmail which, when they feel like it, they can go down to the local post office to collect and bin".
For those who do own their mail servers - corporations, freelancers or other particularly tooled-up individuals - it's like dumping a shit-load of mail on their doorstep - again, through the postal service, which is an impartial, autonomous service that we deeply value!!
This spam is in no way infringing the rights or security of its recipients. It is a minor inconvenience, as is any form of junk mail, and when requested to desist it is illegal, just as is unsolicited junkmail when you so request (at least, in the UK). As such, yes, it should be punished. Is it entirely necessary, however, to confuse and inflame the issue with such shitty, uninformed, unqualified comparisons? And this from a court? Shit, they're supposed to be more responsible with language than anyone else in the country - what the hell does this guy think he's doing??
NASA are presently in conference with the fuel-cell's supplier, Dell.
For great justice.
Like this...?
What... Vista?
Yes, but it'll take seven and a half million years.
In my defence, I didn't include the botched translation into feet in the original submission. After all, I'm from the UK - it would be yards or Olympic swimming pools.
However, the important thing to find out is whether or not this can be acheived without significant risk of discovery to the enquirer. This is a tough question for a commissioned third party to answer, as they have carte blanche. I dunno about the US but, in the UK, the answer is usually: no.
Anyone who works with sensitive or private data (especially when it relates to children or vulnerable adults) has it so heavily drummed into them that security is crucial, that it has become part of the culture (which, of course, is the point).
Obviously there are breaches and slips, and people are not always challenged when they should be. However, these occurrences are infrequent, irregular and - most importantly - unpredictable. You couldn't approach a company/authority/whatever with a cunning ploy to discover data that worked last time and be sure of not getting caught out this time. It's not worth the risk, and employees are getting more savvy every day.
The absolute worst kinds of data integrity slip-up are from fucking sloppy work by people using info systems. I worked in HR for a while, and ended up maintaining the personnel data system (for about 7,500 peeps - and it was a shit piece of software). I discovered that one or two staff members were using the software incorrectly and, frankly, in a totally incompetent fashion, because they couldn't be bothered to use the proper routines. I wish I could've made that impossible, but it wasn't my software.
They had replaced the addresses of several employees with the addresses of several job applicants who happened to have the same name, because it hadn't crossed their minds that the personnel tables accessed by the applicant-processing module and the contracted-employees module might be the same. The result? I got a phone call from an irate HR manager asking why they had been returned a contract with payroll info, tax stuff etc from someone who had never worked for us with a note saying "not known at this address". Of course, the girl responsible tried to blame it on me, and got heavily bollocked shortly afterwards for being a dense fuckwit.
Glad I'm not working there anymore.
Ach, that Norfolk/Norwich thing has always been a blind spot for me; sorry. However, the rest was a blockquote from the site - I saw the maps too, which made me skeptical of the claims, but honestly I just remember reading about this when I saw the /. article and thinking "What the hell? How is this impressive?". It's hardly news when incremental progressions of that magnitude have been going on for the last couple of years all over the developed world. I just wanted to put it in perspective.
Or indeed complexity, storyline, atmoshphere etc... all of which apply to, let's be honest, any creative medium, to some degree or other. Okay, maybe static media like photography, sculpture etc are not so time-driven, but all of these things merely describe the different aspects of the way we use creative media to describe the world - whether the real world or an imagined one.
Film, books, music, computer games, theatre - all of these are composed of elements such as those described above, and as such we use those characteristics to create genres.
But that's the key point - it is we who create the genres, not the games (films, books) themselves! Genres are tools, like language, like stereotyping, and these tools allow us to make broad-brush assumptions about other individual items based on how they are described to us using that language. If we create the "action" genre, we as a culture have a vague, general notion about what that means and can use the term to impress the same notion on someone to whom we're trying to describe the item. This is "Lingual Studies 101".
Such abstract notions as "genre" are useful in general discussion, but serve only to obfuscate when discussing the item, genre or medium in depth. Neither the language nor the medium are set in stone, and any attempt to do so with either usually renders it useless in no time.
As a useful analogy, take the example of a colour-perception study performed some years ago on a remote ethnic group. A very rich range of hues was presented to each subject and they were asked to name the colour. Turquoises and teals, for example, caused some to say blue, others green and so on, but the proportion who opted for one or the other was fairly uniform.
One cultural group seemed to have difficulty with Orange though - anything but the yellowest of oranges, they called Red, and Orange to them meant something that was almost Yellow, with a small hint of Red. Research into their heredity was conducted, and it turned out they were physiologically indistinct from the other groups - it was only their understanding of the words that differed, which was a cultural trait.
The article poster's attempt to "do a better job" of categorizing games, assuming that such a thing could be treated as an exact science, betrays a lack of understanding of the function and nature of language and, indeed, of gaming as a creative medium. It's a little disappointing that this article even made it past the editors.
If hardware developers want to get people using specialist expansion cards like this AI cockup, PhysX or whatever, there are only two ways I can see to make them marketable:
- Make cards which perform in parallel for online multiplayers (MMOGs or more conventional ones), as suggested by another poster. If you can design the cards so that they benefit all players, but benefit the owner of the cards more, you have something that will gain a foothold in market perception and thus become attractive. Not sure how this would work - maybe a combined AI/PPU that improves the AI for all players, but improves the physics for the card's owner. I dunno, it's a tricky one to sell.
- Make cards which do provide some significant improvement to performance for the owner (without chewing up bus bandwidth) and stick them in the box with a couple of new genre-busting games (admittedly difficult to predict) at cost price. If people really want the game, I reckon they'll pay another £20 if they're guaranteed a performance-improving card to boot. It may be a slight loss-leader for the hardware manufacturer but, once the hardware is out there in numbers, game developers have significant reason to include support in future titles. Then you can start putting out higher-spec cards at retail price for those who need that performance edge, and hey-presto: you've created a burgeoning hardware market.
I appreciate that such cards, provided they have any market foothold, could potentially have significant impact if they're well-designed. What Aegis did, though, was underestimate the savvy of the average performance gamer. Most such consumers are tech-savvy to some degree, and are usually conscious of the relative benefits of various hardware upgrades as compared to the investment required. Aegis were arrogant and assumed we'd believe the hype, ignoring the fact that reviews, information and communities were going to be out there, and were going to be defamatory.Aegis' marketing (and cards, of course) sucked ass, and if anyone wants to follow their ideas, they'd better learn from their mistakes.
All that being said, I'm strongly in favour of dropping the whole notion and going with multi-threaded games development to match our ever-cheaper multi-core CPUs. All I'm saying is, if these AI guys want to succeed, they're going to have to be really fucking canny and stop treating the games market like a pool of irresponsible cash. Not many of us live in the basements of our parents' mansions...
Incremental-number passwords are an inevitable side-effect of this sort of policy and, even where password policy is more carefully implemented, the fact that average-joe users have to change it monthly anyway is a chore that WILL lead to short-cuts and, ultimately, weak passwords (or rather, associative passwords that are easy to infer after a little observation).
Try just having a very strict policy on passwords, and scrapping the regular-change part of it. People can be imaginative and obscure once, but ask them to do it regularly and they get sloppy.
Last time I checked (ie last week, building my new silent rig), the 7600GT was just about the most powerful proven graphics card that was available with a fanless heatsink - very important when you're after a silent rig, especially considering Apple's "Cinema" selling point.
It may not be interesting to you, but to me it was like realizing Steve Jobs has been staring over my shoulder for the last week.
On a side not, what's with the 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo chip? The E6600 stock speed is 2.4, and the next one down is 2.1something. Where's that figure coming from? Or are they using lower-spec CPUs and overclocking them all? They are exceptionally stable for Intel, after all.
But then I thought, well... I dunno... somehow, everything is.
Kudos for the Grim Fandango quote - I can never find a really good opportunity to use it, and I work for Local Government...
Anyone else notice (or care) that the USPTO seems to have spelled Address as "Adress". Spelling-nazis are ten-a-penny, so you would expect the USPTO, of all organisations, to have one or two in their ranks!
*duck*
Also, Haskell is not a programming language - it's a mystical land where institutionalised C programmers go when they've led bad lives, to be fed on by the younger, better adapted functional-programming maths students...
(j/k - I'm from the UK)
For reference, he was talking about this article.
They used a very similar type of system to this lego kit - dragging and dropping functional tasks onto a grid (move, sense, turn, fire etc), adjusting the variables of the function and building up a sort of flow-chart of action/reaction. Then you'd stick them in the arena and see how they fared...
At the time, I remember thinking: why can't someone build a real robot kit with this kind of control mechanism? This NXT interface is quite a lot more sophisticated than the game I played, but it's such an ingenious way of controlling a simple robot - and I feel absolutely certain that it's the perfect way to introduce kids to the high-level concepts of programming and robotics without their having to slog through years of groundwork first.
If I could think of any decent use for this kit in my life, I would buy one instantly. As it is, I'm seriously considering getting one anyway, just to revel in the powerful simplicity of such a wonderful idea.