I had a similar experience -- I played an MMO 20+ hours a week for years.
Then I moved out of my parent's house, got a full time job, and got married. I rarely game even 5 hours a week these days.
But for every one of us, there's a 13 year old who just got his first copy of WoW. One generation ages out, another begins. Something will replace WoW one of these days. You and I won't play it, but millions of kids will.
Note that the blacklist by dowkd may be incomplete; it is only intended as a quick check.
With a statement as vague as that, there could be several orders of magnitude more potential keys.
260,000 would be bad though. At one test per second, that's just over 3 days. Of course, if you blacklist hosts after a certain number of failed authorization attempts, you can greatly increase the difficulty of exhausting the keyspace for a potential cracker.
The iPod only has DRM on it because Apple new they would get sued to fuck if they didn't, or if they went around allowing direct circumvention. By allowing copying to audio cd they avoid this via the fair use claim.
Please cite at least 1 example of a company being sued for creating a device that allows people to play MP3s. You might want to let Justin Frankel know that he should have been "sued to fuck" (whatever that meansd) for creating winamp instead of chilling in his multi-million dollar home studio.
You'll have to forgive the GP, he's gotten his arguments mixed up, or something.
Apple DRMs iTunes because their contracts with the labels require it. Few of the major labels were open to selling their music digitally without DRM when iTunes launched 5 years ago. The labels only recently started coming around -- DRM free media became available on iTunes just a little over a year ago; Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store opened a little over 6 months ago.
Now that iTunes has proven itself, and the concept of commercially successful digital distribution, by becoming the nation's #1 music retailer, they've got some negotiating power. That wasn't the case in 2003.
I have values that stay with me, even in my work as a programmer. There are lots of things I won't do money. There are other programmers who will -- writing malware, sending spam by the gigabyte, typosquatting... People make millions of dollars doing those things. The pursuit of profit does not justify the lack of values.
Similarly, Metallica, a band that once encouraged the sharing of their music turned on their fans, calling them criminals for sharing their music. They abandoned their values for profit. Fuck 'em.
It's not new and it's tiring to see all these people that think it is.
Are you suffering from frequent fatigue? You may be a victim of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Have you tried new Sleepitrol? Sleepitrol: from the makers of Spleenhance. 4 out of 9 doctors agree, it probably won't kill you!
"I wonder if any large MMO company will ever be brave enough to calmly address an issue rather than wielding the ban-hammer."
I doubt it. But this is not without a good reason.
Many, many MMORPG players are 13 year old kids. Immature kids. These people are not adults. They do not behave like adults. If the company "calmly addresses the issues", then they'll be flooded by complainers, cheaters and opportunists within no time.
I've been involved in MMORPG for several years. The immaturity in MMORPG communities in general is just sad. There doesn't seem to be any good way to handle issues other than ruling with iron fist.
Turbine, the developers of Asheron's Call (released around the same time as Everquest) publicly stated that their policy on exploiting was, "If we leave it in the game, it's our fault". If a bug caused enough trouble, they'd fix it ASAP. On a few rare occasions, they'd just roll the database back to a little before a game-breaking exploit was discovered (usually a day or less).
There was eventually a dupe bug discovered; exploiting it required crashing a small portion of the game world (called a "land block" -- the world was made up of thousands of these), which directly inconvenienced all other players in the area. They ended up amending the previous policy to something like: "If we leave it in the game, it's our fault. But if you do something that directly and immediately affects other players, you're gone".
They also allowed third party tools. As a result, AC had a vibrant 3rd party add-on community that still persists to some extent now, the better part of a decade later. Users were able to share client enhancements that made the game much more playable; many were later incorporated into the game. Several of the top 3rd party developers were hired by turbine.
I've always deeply respected Turbine for that, and I think they really understand how to embrace their community, rather than treat their users as an enemy to be battled with. Much like people frown on the RIAA for suing their customers, I've always disapproved of Blizzard for banning their customers tens of thousands at a time for taking advantage of flaws that Blizzard themselves are responsible for introducing.
Of course, while Turbine may have won a lot of respect from developers and players, they didn't really find massive commercial success. But then again, what's the point of running an MMO? Commercial success, or community building? Probably some of both.
You can get hosting for 6 euro/month. Basically what they are saying is: we are between the 6 euro/month line and 0 euro/month.
The resources google's providing here cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month. The CPU limits on the cheap hosting plans you refer to give out after a few tens of thousands of pageviews.
And those cheap hosting plans don't provide any sort of scaling. If you want to scale, you have to move to their dedicated servers, which cost just as much as everyone elses. Want to scale past a single dedicated server? You're on your own. They'll sell 'em to you, but load ballancing, database sharding... that's all on you.
This offer is unique. There is no comparable platform on the market.
That'd be a great pne, if 3D MMOs hadn't been invented the better part of a decade earlier. Which were themselves simply descendants of MUDs, which are decades old.
Blizzard really didn't "create a new type" of anything. It's just EQ++, with art and lore stolen from Blizzard's existing Warcraft games. They built on existing work, and an existing industry.
The real question is how they managed to be so damn successful with such a derivative product.
Honestly, the 11 points in this article are probably bullshit. It really all comes down to this: They combined a pre-existing successful, addictive game genre (MMOs) with a pre-existing, world-class brand (Warcraft), and they did an acceptable job of software development/maintenance -- unlike, say, SOE, who had a succesful brand (Starwars), but ended up with a mediocre product (SWG) (What's the point of starwars game without spaceflight and jedi powers?)
a computer can be considered intelligent if it can create an artificial world capable of fooling a person into believing it is the real thing.
If the only aspect of the simulation you consider is "graphics", then I'm pretty sure just about anything capable of video playback qualifies as "intelligent" by this definition.
If the requirement is that the interaction with other "humans" in the simulation be realistic, then you've got two components: simulation of human behavior/interaction/conversation, and graphics. And graphics is comparatively trivial, so really, you can ignore that part of the formula.
What are you left with? A regular old Turing test.
Additionally, reality is really, really high res. And let's not forget that the relationship between required processing power and resolution/poly count is non-linear. So even while graphics are the easy part of this over-hyped "Turing test IN 3D!!11"... 3D truly indistinguishable from reality is still a long way off.
You'll know when it comes. Pixar's films will stop looking like cartoons.
Actually, no. The rotation of the earth would cause the ribbon to wrap around the earth in an easterly direction
If what you propose were true, a pin balanced on its end would always fall over to the east as well, as would a perfectly symmetrical tree, or a falling skyscraper.
They don't, because all these things, a space elevator included, travel through space at the same speed as the earth's rotation. Why would it suddenly, magically lose that momentum, were it severed from its counterweight?
Oh yea it is easy type about:config (like that is a common way to change preferences in application of the 21 centory) Then hunt down for some feature name that is probable more reference to a Varable Name and less of what it actually does and then figure out what the value should be... A piece of Cake, I have no Idea why people say Open Source Software is hard to use.
That's quite a bit easier and safer than what you have to do to get that level of control over IE. Want to control the number of simultaneous TCP connections firefox makes to a server? Open up about:config. Want to do the same in IE? You'll have to fire up the windows registry editor.
About:config contains hundreds of settings. 99% of firefox users don't need to alter any of them. Adding a full UI for all of them would only serve to confuse and intimidate most users.
Artists are getting fricking screwed all the time; why do they even have a union?
The RIAA and its members would steamroll 99% of artists into taking *less* than the 10% royalties they're getting now, if they were unionless. If anything, musicians need a stronger union.
I'd hate to be a small time, MTV2 band without a union to back me up against a major label.
We already have the technology to halve the power usage of street lights. It's called an off switch.
Even if that were feasible (who'd want to walk around in any major city center after sundown with no street lights?), more efficient bulb technology is still desirable. If you can save 50% by using more efficient bulbs, and 50% by running the bulbs half as long, you're now only using 1/4 the juice you were previously.
I have a NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, Wii, Genesis, 32x, Sega CD, Dreamcast, and GBA all working. i can play the same games on them now I could play in the past. With Windows, games that ran on Windows 98 no longer run.
You have to keep *nine* separate hardware platforms around to play your console games, and you're suggesting that's an *advantage* over having a single PC? That PC can run emulators that will play ROMs from many, if not all of the 9 platforms you have; and if you want to get older PC games working, give DOSBox a shot. It ran XCom TFTD and Crusader: No Remorse just fine on my windows XP box.
Sure, backwards compatibility on the windows platform is less than perfect, but at least it's correctable with software. Good luck sticking an NES cart in your Wii, or playing a PS1 game on your late model PS3. Hell, there were a bunch of PS1 games that wouldn't even smoothly on PS2s.
I always wanted a martial arts game where you would wear gloves and boots and fight a computer guy. it wouldn't be the same as sparring with a real opponent...
A fact that half the posts in every thread relating to the game would point out.
At least, if guitar hero threads are any indication.
gives off as much light as a streetlight while using less power.
Great, people lighting their properties with more bright lights is just what we need
I missed the part of TFA that said these bulbs were going to be available at prices low enough for home use.
What makes you think these aren't just going to be used to... replace streetlights? Halving the power usage of streetlights nationwide would reduce atmospheric pollution measurably. If the choice is between light pollution and atmospheric polution......light pollution is the more desirable of the two.
Cookie highjacking is not a concern with prefetching. Making your request URLs that have nasty side effects (like making a purchase, forwarding malicious code to your friends, or downloading illegal files) is.
If you have one click purchasing turned on, and you can construct a "buy now" link, HTTPS won't save you. A simple would cause firefox to request that URL (and cause you to send me $50).
However, hopefully amazon's oneclick: 1) Uses POST only. GET, per RFC, is supposed to be a "safe method" -- no side effects allowed. And making a purchase is a huge side-effect. 2) Requires a one time, unique key for all transactions to prevent XSRF attacks.
If the camera's integrated into the set top box, that means the box has to be pointed at the viewers (not, say, rotated 45 degrees), and not in, say, the drawer of your entertainment center. Even then, a little duct tape in the right spot, and you've got an obscured camera.
There's really not much possibility of this being used without the consumer's knowledge.
A recent staple of science fiction is the story of people optioning their body parts for money while they're still living
Meanwhile, in the real world, there are dozens, if not hundreds of university "Willed Body" programs to which you can commit your cadaver. However, their FAQs mention that it is illegal for them to pay you for your donation.
Slashdot Mirror
They're going to own 100% of the "people with disposable income who're interested in FPGA hacking" market.
I had a similar experience -- I played an MMO 20+ hours a week for years.
Then I moved out of my parent's house, got a full time job, and got married. I rarely game even 5 hours a week these days.
But for every one of us, there's a 13 year old who just got his first copy of WoW. One generation ages out, another begins. Something will replace WoW one of these days. You and I won't play it, but millions of kids will.
260,000 would be bad though. At one test per second, that's just over 3 days. Of course, if you blacklist hosts after a certain number of failed authorization attempts, you can greatly increase the difficulty of exhausting the keyspace for a potential cracker.
Apple DRMs iTunes because their contracts with the labels require it. Few of the major labels were open to selling their music digitally without DRM when iTunes launched 5 years ago. The labels only recently started coming around -- DRM free media became available on iTunes just a little over a year ago; Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store opened a little over 6 months ago.
Now that iTunes has proven itself, and the concept of commercially successful digital distribution, by becoming the nation's #1 music retailer, they've got some negotiating power. That wasn't the case in 2003.
I have values that stay with me, even in my work as a programmer. There are lots of things I won't do money. There are other programmers who will -- writing malware, sending spam by the gigabyte, typosquatting... People make millions of dollars doing those things. The pursuit of profit does not justify the lack of values.
Similarly, Metallica, a band that once encouraged the sharing of their music turned on their fans, calling them criminals for sharing their music. They abandoned their values for profit. Fuck 'em.
There was eventually a dupe bug discovered; exploiting it required crashing a small portion of the game world (called a "land block" -- the world was made up of thousands of these), which directly inconvenienced all other players in the area. They ended up amending the previous policy to something like: "If we leave it in the game, it's our fault. But if you do something that directly and immediately affects other players, you're gone".
They also allowed third party tools. As a result, AC had a vibrant 3rd party add-on community that still persists to some extent now, the better part of a decade later. Users were able to share client enhancements that made the game much more playable; many were later incorporated into the game. Several of the top 3rd party developers were hired by turbine.
I've always deeply respected Turbine for that, and I think they really understand how to embrace their community, rather than treat their users as an enemy to be battled with. Much like people frown on the RIAA for suing their customers, I've always disapproved of Blizzard for banning their customers tens of thousands at a time for taking advantage of flaws that Blizzard themselves are responsible for introducing.
Of course, while Turbine may have won a lot of respect from developers and players, they didn't really find massive commercial success. But then again, what's the point of running an MMO? Commercial success, or community building? Probably some of both.
I also have to wonder if damaged/defective cellphones may generate noise on unpredictable frequencies.
And those cheap hosting plans don't provide any sort of scaling. If you want to scale, you have to move to their dedicated servers, which cost just as much as everyone elses. Want to scale past a single dedicated server? You're on your own. They'll sell 'em to you, but load ballancing, database sharding... that's all on you.
This offer is unique. There is no comparable platform on the market.
Blizzard really didn't "create a new type" of anything. It's just EQ++, with art and lore stolen from Blizzard's existing Warcraft games. They built on existing work, and an existing industry.
The real question is how they managed to be so damn successful with such a derivative product.
Honestly, the 11 points in this article are probably bullshit. It really all comes down to this: They combined a pre-existing successful, addictive game genre (MMOs) with a pre-existing, world-class brand (Warcraft), and they did an acceptable job of software development/maintenance -- unlike, say, SOE, who had a succesful brand (Starwars), but ended up with a mediocre product (SWG) (What's the point of starwars game without spaceflight and jedi powers?)
If the requirement is that the interaction with other "humans" in the simulation be realistic, then you've got two components: simulation of human behavior/interaction/conversation, and graphics. And graphics is comparatively trivial, so really, you can ignore that part of the formula.
What are you left with? A regular old Turing test.
Additionally, reality is really, really high res. And let's not forget that the relationship between required processing power and resolution/poly count is non-linear. So even while graphics are the easy part of this over-hyped "Turing test IN 3D!!11"... 3D truly indistinguishable from reality is still a long way off.
You'll know when it comes. Pixar's films will stop looking like cartoons.
They don't, because all these things, a space elevator included, travel through space at the same speed as the earth's rotation. Why would it suddenly, magically lose that momentum, were it severed from its counterweight?
About:config contains hundreds of settings. 99% of firefox users don't need to alter any of them. Adding a full UI for all of them would only serve to confuse and intimidate most users.
I'd hate to be a small time, MTV2 band without a union to back me up against a major label.
Sure, backwards compatibility on the windows platform is less than perfect, but at least it's correctable with software. Good luck sticking an NES cart in your Wii, or playing a PS1 game on your late model PS3. Hell, there were a bunch of PS1 games that wouldn't even smoothly on PS2s.
At least, if guitar hero threads are any indication.
What makes you think these aren't just going to be used to... replace streetlights? Halving the power usage of streetlights nationwide would reduce atmospheric pollution measurably. If the choice is between light pollution and atmospheric polution...
Problem solved.
Cookie highjacking is not a concern with prefetching. Making your request URLs that have nasty side effects (like making a purchase, forwarding malicious code to your friends, or downloading illegal files) is.
If you have one click purchasing turned on, and you can construct a "buy now" link, HTTPS won't save you. A simple would cause firefox to request that URL (and cause you to send me $50).
However, hopefully amazon's oneclick:
1) Uses POST only. GET, per RFC, is supposed to be a "safe method" -- no side effects allowed. And making a purchase is a huge side-effect.
2) Requires a one time, unique key for all transactions to prevent XSRF attacks.
It's worth noting that firefox only prefetches or urls. It does *not* prefetch anchor tags (), ever. It would be possible for a malicious user to embed a , but hopefully it'd be pretty easy to demonstrate in court that you never clicked a link at all. Note, this sort of prefetching is on by *default* in firefox.
...So yeah, you could actually construct a page, right now, that would silently cause default firefox installations to prefetch illegal images. But it'd be a really contrived attack, easily distinguishable from actual browsing.
However, the FasterFox extension *does* prefetch anchor tags. *All* anchor tags. I discovered this yesterday when someone visited a single page on a site I maintain yesterday. The guy viewed one page; FasterFox triggered an additional 40 requests which were never viewed. FasterFox sucks.
In all cases, however, an additional header is sent, identifying your request as a prefetch. Also, only HTML is prefetched. Images are not.
Of course, it's possible to embed images inline in firefox, using <img src="data:image/gif;base64,[Some base64 crap here]">...
Well, actually, conceivably, you could disguise illegal browsing as prefetching, in some circumstances.
If the camera's integrated into the set top box, that means the box has to be pointed at the viewers (not, say, rotated 45 degrees), and not in, say, the drawer of your entertainment center. Even then, a little duct tape in the right spot, and you've got an obscured camera.
There's really not much possibility of this being used without the consumer's knowledge.
http://anatomy.ucsf.edu/WBP/index.html#10.html
http://www.hsc.unt.edu/departments/pathology_anatomy/willedbody/faq.htm#q4
http://www8.utsouthwestern.edu/utsw/cda/dept128871/files/128973.html#4
Interestingly, 2 of the above 3 specifically cite *state* law. Are there any states where some version of the law isn't on the books?