This seriously makes me want a PS3. Are there any other actually good creative games for the system? I don't care about your normal mainstream-crap like Guitar Hero or FPS'es. Anyone have any other suggestions to push me over the edge to drop the money for a PS3?
Tell me - might you like Guitar Hero or an FPS if they weren't mainstream?
It's not really a killer app if it's not an exclusive. You can play an FPS or Guitar Hero on any platform, so they're not really high on the "reasons to buy a PS3" list, especially if you already have a competing current-gen console.
Don't get me wrong; I enjoy Guitar Hero at least as much as the next guy, but those games are ported to a total of 4 consoles, two of which I already own.
I don't do anything illegal and I'm honest with friends and family. One might say, "What happens when you do?" to which I will reply, "Then I guess I'm going to jail like I should."
You are making the assumption that nothing will happen in the future to make currently acceptable, moral, lawful behavior illegal.
If the law changes in such a way as to be tyrannical and you have allowed no possibility for revolt without getting caught you have sealed your fate long before the tyranny came to pass.
Some might argue that this has already happened, and that the level of tyranny continues to grow.
For example, what many of us call "fair use", others call "copyright infringement".
And if you've ever traveled the darker corners of the internet, it's pretty easy to encounter illegal imagery without warning, or even intent. Hell, anywhere users are allowed to post links, an FBI raid may be just one click away.
Have you ever tried marijuana? Have you ever possessed sex toys, or engaged in sodomy in certain states -- even in the privacy of your own home, with your spouse? Ever drive over the speed limit? Forget to use your turn signal? Ever jaywalk?
I can't even say with confidence that I know a single person who's never broken the law.
And let's not even get into what happens to the falsely accused. Hell, armed with only your home address, someone totally unknown to you can trigger a raid of your home
Morally innocent people end up on the wrong end of the law all the time. Never assume the system only punishes those who actually deserve it.
I really don't understand all this crap from US posters about how you should drive at the speed limit, or even faster(!).
The common wisdom over here is that differences in speed are more dangerous than speed itself. So if most of us are doing the limit, and you're tooling along at 30 below, you're the biggest hazard on the road.
You can actually be ticketed for driving too slow in the US.
That's just how we do it here. Why? I'd guess it's related to our commuter culture. It's not that unusual for people to drive 20-50 miles every day, with a total commute time of 30 - 120 minutes. Our road infrastructure, and our driving style are based on that sort of frequent, long distance driving. Driving probably plays a different role in your country, and as such, has different rules.
Driving style is very much a cultural thing. Every major metropolitan area has its own, really. And you have to adapt to them as you encounter them. When you're in San Francisco, drive like a Californian. When you're in Patna, India, drive like you're in India. You have to play by the same rules everyone else on the road plays by. Attempting to apply one region's rules to another region is foolish, and dangerous.
But on the other hand, does it really ruin the game if someone magically goes from 1 to 70 in two weeks without working for it?
I certainly hope not, because if it does, Blizzard's own "Recruit a friend" program is really going to ruin your day. Participants get triple XP (up to level 60). My wife and I started new characters and have made it up to 52nd in under an hour per level. As an additional benefit, for every two levels the recruit gains, they're able to grant the recruiter a free level (as long as the target character is lower level than the granter, and under level 60) -- so my wife has granted 26 free levels to my alts.
The problem is 'policing' the content introduced to the system. In an open ended world like this it'd be trivial for someone to upload some malicious code. There'd have to be some sort of submission system where all code is reviewed before it's introduced to the system, but even that wouldn't be fool proof and it'd probably be pretty expensive.
That aside, the possibilities would be endless.
That'd never scale. Imagine if there was a similar requirement on publishing HTML to the web. Instead, everyone's welcome to publish whatever the hell they want from wherever they please, and we view it using an application that's supposed to serve as something of a sandbox, which we call the browser.
That's ultimately what you want: a sandbox for running untrusted code. Not unlike the java applet sandbox.
Electric Communities, (later communities.com; no relation to the current owners of communities.com) tried to tackle this idea in the mid/late nineties -- a metaverse where anyone can host their own world -- and came up with the E programming language.
You kid, but the stock market is actually worse than gambling. At least when you gamble you know what your odds are.
I always get a kick out of the slots that advertise their payout rate. "98.7% payout! Loosest slots in town!".
Really? The sign clearly states you'll get less money out than you put in, and people find that encouraging?
In regard to your point, at least with the stock market, you can make rational, informed decisions. For example, you can choose not to invest in companies that are heavily invested in junk mortgages.
AT&T: Has a bussiness model based on overselling their bandwidth, and hoping that customers don't actually use it. Cisco: Wants to sell filtering hardware. NBC Universal, Viacom and the Songwriters Guild of America: Trying to save a business model that simply cannot survive in the age of digital distribution.
Microsoft...
Someone's gonna have to help me with that one. What's their role in this? Is it a continuation of their battle on software piracy?
If anything, piracy of *other people's* IP drives sales of Windows.
I really think you might have a hard time finding a "kid oriented" email account, at least that you wont have to monitor as well. I don't know the age of your children, but keep in mind that COPPA regulations don't allow people under 13 to do a lot of things online.
COPPA doesn't restrict what kids can do online. It restricts what information you're allowed to collect from kids online.
As a result, many sites choose to simply not allow kids under 13 to register, so they don't have to risk running afoul of COPPA by requesting information they're not legally allowed to collect.
Obviously, there's one key difference: in CSRF, the malicious activity is POSTed from a remote page. In a "clickjacking" attack, the malicious activity is POSTed actually using your own page (embedded in a remote page).
Other than that, it's largely the same basic idea -- you trick someone into submitting an action to a remote site using their pre-existing credentials.
The question is, is it possible to employ any well known CSRF prevention techniques to "clickjacking"?
I'm totally behind taking these applications out of the default install. (Windows Mail? What's that?) But why take them off the DVD entirely? If you're like millions of Americans, and still on dial up, downloading windows movie maker isn't an option.
That's why your average Linux distro ships with damn near every package you could ever want on the DVD, and installs only a few of them. If you want the extra crap, it's right there, ready to go.
I've you've got free apps, and space on the DVD, throw 'em on! Just don't make them install by default.
Apparently the people paying the bills don't agree. Getting slashdot to talk about Jerry Seinfeld isn't worth hundreds of thousands of dollars after all. Who knew?
If the ad itself is being talked about, then it has been successful on some level.
While there is some truth to that, I'm not sure exactly how successful you can judge an ad to be simply because it gets talked about
Amen. It could have been a 30 second clip of a gold fish swimming around a fish tank, and it'd still get talked about here.
This is a tech site. We talk about things big tech companies do, successful or unsuccessful. If the goal of this ad was to generate chatter on slashdot, they overspent, massively.
We're not the target demographic for these ads. Getting us talking is not the goal.
Ah, yes. But if you were actually a member of his target audience (dirt poor people in countries like Haiti making $2-$4 per day) then you couldn't afford that fancy $3000 turbine in your wildest dreams
I'm sure that the plant that powers my home cost millions of dollars to build; I could never afford that either. Thankfully, I share that cost with thousands of other people.
Don't get me wrong -- I wouldn't for a moment suggest that providing electricity to a small Haitian village is as simple as dropping a $3000 generator off on someone's doorstep -- but to discount the possibility entirely because a single family can't afford one is a bit silly.
There are obvious infrastructure challenges, of course. For one, if these people only need 1 watt each, or less, is transmission and billing even practical in that circumstance? It's one thing when you need to provide hundreds of watts to each house in a neighborhood -- then the cost of maintaining the line to your house is a much smaller piece of the equation. And of course, copper theft is inevitable, thanks to the desperate nature of life in the third world (hell, it's a big enough problem here in the first world these days).
What I'm getting at, and TFA fails to address, is this: what are the *real* problems when it comes to bringing electricity to the third world? Is price per watt important? Is it practical to share larger devices? If not, why not? Is it transmission costs? Infrastructure maintenance? Can anything be done to address those?
Assuming price per watt is in fact a priority, then the GP is right on the money. Why should 600 Haitians spend $5 each, for a total of $3000 and 24 watts of capacity, when they can pool together and have 10 to 50 times more generation capacity for the same price?
Can I archive rented or borrowed DVDs? No. The ReQuest server has a built-in physical verification system that will ask for physical DVDs at random times to verify ownership.
What the fuck? I understand trying to cover your asses and all, but who in their right mind would produce such a crippled piece of hardware? And who would buy it?
The majority of these companies income is now made on small percentage point fluctuations brokered very fast.
This practice has failed catastrophically in the past, and been likened to "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller". The problem is twofold. First, to make any money at this, you have to throw a lot of money behind it. A 0.1% gain over an extremely short period of time is only worthwhile if it's an 0.1% gain on millions, or billions of dollars. The problem is, sometimes something unexpected happens (the asian economy has a crisis, sub-prime lending collapses, you get a bad tip that United is going belly up), and instead of the 0.1% gain, you end up with a big loss.
So, yes, I understand that the idea of a "free money machine" is very appealing, but people are ignoring the risk. That needs to stop. It's a risk to the stability of the economy.
PC gaming is already in a fragile state. There is much competition from the Console market. Cheaper hardware, less compatibility problems, more stability and no DRM (at least until they go all download based)
On the contrary. DRM is precisely the reason the Nintendo Wii homebrew community has taken so long to get a halfway decent homebrew platform working. The xbox 360 has similar DRM. You can't just whip up some code, burn it to a DVD, and stick it in your Xbox or Wii; both systems will only execute signed code.
And, as you've already hinted, downloaded games are DRMed as well.
Console DRM is present. It's just transparent and non-invasive. This is largely because they can control it at the hardware level. However, there is no hardware DRM on PCs, nor should their be.
We only expect our consoles to run games designed for them, vetted by the manufacturer (nintendo, microsoft). However, we expect PCs to be able to run any code from anyone. As long as you can run any code from anywhere, for DRM to even have a *chance* of locking potential pirates out, it must be *very* invasive, and *very* restrictive. As each generation of PC DRM schemes is defeated, the next becomes more aggressive, with more draconian restrictions. And even then, it's never enough -- nor will it ever be. Pure-software DRM can never work. And the sort of hardware-based DRM present in consoles would render PCs useless.
So, that's pretty much why console DRM gets no attention, while PC DRM is a terrible annoyance.
It's easy to forget how bad search really was before Google.
Oh, I don't ever think I'll forget, thanks to a single, defining moment. It was the mid ninties, I was about 13, and I needed a picture of a door for homework. I searched "door picture" on altavista. There were one or two terrible, low res pictures of doors in the results. The rest were porn.
I, too, was throughly unimpressed by the ad, but there is one thing they didn't do: Play Apple's mud slinging game.
I enjoy the "I'm a mac" ads -- they're just about the only commercials I'll intentionally watch -- but they're pretty aggressive. They blatantly, and actively attempt to belittle their competition. The latest two show "PC" resting on his laurels, and trying to deceive people into purchasing him -- both suggesting that "PC" doesn't have his users' best interests at heart.
This commercial doesn't do that at all. Some have speculated that was the goal: making it clear that they feel that they don't have to insult their competition. Whether they're just trying to win points for being the nice guy, or they're trying to suggest that they don't have to stoop to Apple's level because they're just that superior, I don't know.
"I'm relly sick of the level of discrimination that goes on here."
This level of reverence for the moderation system never ceases to amaze me. Hell, I myself can have a sour day if I'm given a thrashing on a post. This person doesn't even seem to be a regular user and they are already upset.
A very peculiar amount of power, these mod points are. Enough for someone to call a negative moderation discrimination!
I actually enjoyed that email, 'cause I can understand where the kid was coming from. Until you've got positive karma, you might as well be posting directly to/dev/null most of the time. I posted for months before I got a karma bonus, and then, all the sudden, I'm getting posts modded up on a regular basis.
I didn't find it quite as frustrating as this kid did, but that email really shows how I'm sure thousands of "outsiders" feel about slashdot. Slashdot's tendency to weed out all but the most dedicated keeps the signal-to-noise ratio extremely high, but it probably drives away many, many potential posters.
here is a reason I don't swear often. It's not so I can be 'clean' and 'pure'... it's so that when I do swear, people know I'm not fucking around. Seriously, if you're dropping f-bombs left and right then where do you go when you're genuinely upset? I prefer to not raise my voice so those words are reserved for extreme moments. I feel bad for the people who incorporate them into everyday life... how loud do you think an injured rapper would have to raise their voice before people gave them medical attention?
Seriously? You can't tell the difference between someone saying "Fucking thing sucks! We'll do it live!", and "HOLY FUCK THERE'S A HOLE IN MY ABDOMEN AND MY FUCKING SPLEEN IS ABOUT TO FALL OUT!"?
I seriously doubt that rappers really have trouble getting medical attention whenever they need it. Really, how do you imagine that scene working out in your world? "Oh, I'm sorry Mr. DMX. When you said 'Bitch, I got shot in the knee - I need a fucking ambulance', I thought you were just experimenting with some new lyrics"?
The scammer instructs you to return the excess ($1650) via western union
You deposit the check, wire $1650, and ship your item
The check bounces (there are even cases in which the check can appear to clear, and then bounce later, especially for international checks). The western union tranfer, however, is unreversable.
Slashdot Mirror
If this was really a risk, shouldn't we be seeing wireless-device-based terrorist attacks?
I mean, if a wireless mouse can bring down a plane, they're probably more of a risk than bottled water, right?
It's not really a killer app if it's not an exclusive. You can play an FPS or Guitar Hero on any platform, so they're not really high on the "reasons to buy a PS3" list, especially if you already have a competing current-gen console.
Don't get me wrong; I enjoy Guitar Hero at least as much as the next guy, but those games are ported to a total of 4 consoles, two of which I already own.
Some might argue that this has already happened, and that the level of tyranny continues to grow.
For example, what many of us call "fair use", others call "copyright infringement".
And if you've ever traveled the darker corners of the internet, it's pretty easy to encounter illegal imagery without warning, or even intent. Hell, anywhere users are allowed to post links, an FBI raid may be just one click away.
Have you ever tried marijuana? Have you ever possessed sex toys, or engaged in sodomy in certain states -- even in the privacy of your own home, with your spouse? Ever drive over the speed limit? Forget to use your turn signal? Ever jaywalk?
I can't even say with confidence that I know a single person who's never broken the law.
And let's not even get into what happens to the falsely accused. Hell, armed with only your home address, someone totally unknown to you can trigger a raid of your home
Morally innocent people end up on the wrong end of the law all the time. Never assume the system only punishes those who actually deserve it.
The common wisdom over here is that differences in speed are more dangerous than speed itself. So if most of us are doing the limit, and you're tooling along at 30 below, you're the biggest hazard on the road.
You can actually be ticketed for driving too slow in the US.
That's just how we do it here. Why? I'd guess it's related to our commuter culture. It's not that unusual for people to drive 20-50 miles every day, with a total commute time of 30 - 120 minutes. Our road infrastructure, and our driving style are based on that sort of frequent, long distance driving. Driving probably plays a different role in your country, and as such, has different rules.
Driving style is very much a cultural thing. Every major metropolitan area has its own, really. And you have to adapt to them as you encounter them. When you're in San Francisco, drive like a Californian. When you're in Patna, India, drive like you're in India. You have to play by the same rules everyone else on the road plays by. Attempting to apply one region's rules to another region is foolish, and dangerous.
That'd be a spectacular waste of electricity, seeing as the drive would be spinning all the time, but almost never actually used.
I certainly hope not, because if it does, Blizzard's own "Recruit a friend" program is really going to ruin your day. Participants get triple XP (up to level 60). My wife and I started new characters and have made it up to 52nd in under an hour per level. As an additional benefit, for every two levels the recruit gains, they're able to grant the recruiter a free level (as long as the target character is lower level than the granter, and under level 60) -- so my wife has granted 26 free levels to my alts.
That'd never scale. Imagine if there was a similar requirement on publishing HTML to the web. Instead, everyone's welcome to publish whatever the hell they want from wherever they please, and we view it using an application that's supposed to serve as something of a sandbox, which we call the browser.
That's ultimately what you want: a sandbox for running untrusted code. Not unlike the java applet sandbox.
Electric Communities, (later communities.com; no relation to the current owners of communities.com) tried to tackle this idea in the mid/late nineties -- a metaverse where anyone can host their own world -- and came up with the E programming language.
I always get a kick out of the slots that advertise their payout rate. "98.7% payout! Loosest slots in town!".
Really? The sign clearly states you'll get less money out than you put in, and people find that encouraging?
In regard to your point, at least with the stock market, you can make rational, informed decisions. For example, you can choose not to invest in companies that are heavily invested in junk mortgages.
AT&T: Has a bussiness model based on overselling their bandwidth, and hoping that customers don't actually use it.
Cisco: Wants to sell filtering hardware.
NBC Universal, Viacom and the Songwriters Guild of America: Trying to save a business model that simply cannot survive in the age of digital distribution.
Microsoft...
Someone's gonna have to help me with that one. What's their role in this? Is it a continuation of their battle on software piracy?
If anything, piracy of *other people's* IP drives sales of Windows.
Can you provide details/sources? I've never heard of this, but it certainly sounds interesting.
COPPA doesn't restrict what kids can do online. It restricts what information you're allowed to collect from kids online.
As a result, many sites choose to simply not allow kids under 13 to register, so they don't have to risk running afoul of COPPA by requesting information they're not legally allowed to collect.
Obviously, there's one key difference: in CSRF, the malicious activity is POSTed from a remote page. In a "clickjacking" attack, the malicious activity is POSTed actually using your own page (embedded in a remote page).
Other than that, it's largely the same basic idea -- you trick someone into submitting an action to a remote site using their pre-existing credentials.
The question is, is it possible to employ any well known CSRF prevention techniques to "clickjacking"?
I'm totally behind taking these applications out of the default install. (Windows Mail? What's that?) But why take them off the DVD entirely? If you're like millions of Americans, and still on dial up, downloading windows movie maker isn't an option.
That's why your average Linux distro ships with damn near every package you could ever want on the DVD, and installs only a few of them. If you want the extra crap, it's right there, ready to go.
I've you've got free apps, and space on the DVD, throw 'em on! Just don't make them install by default.
Oh, duh. THAT's why we've been storing IPs in four, 9-bit signed ints!
Guess that settles it. The defenders of these ads kept claiming "If the ad itself is being talked about, then it has been successful". (and apparently a few moderators agreed)
Apparently the people paying the bills don't agree. Getting slashdot to talk about Jerry Seinfeld isn't worth hundreds of thousands of dollars after all. Who knew?
Amen. It could have been a 30 second clip of a gold fish swimming around a fish tank, and it'd still get talked about here.
This is a tech site. We talk about things big tech companies do, successful or unsuccessful. If the goal of this ad was to generate chatter on slashdot, they overspent, massively.
We're not the target demographic for these ads. Getting us talking is not the goal.
I'm sure that the plant that powers my home cost millions of dollars to build; I could never afford that either. Thankfully, I share that cost with thousands of other people.
Don't get me wrong -- I wouldn't for a moment suggest that providing electricity to a small Haitian village is as simple as dropping a $3000 generator off on someone's doorstep -- but to discount the possibility entirely because a single family can't afford one is a bit silly.
There are obvious infrastructure challenges, of course. For one, if these people only need 1 watt each, or less, is transmission and billing even practical in that circumstance? It's one thing when you need to provide hundreds of watts to each house in a neighborhood -- then the cost of maintaining the line to your house is a much smaller piece of the equation. And of course, copper theft is inevitable, thanks to the desperate nature of life in the third world (hell, it's a big enough problem here in the first world these days).
What I'm getting at, and TFA fails to address, is this: what are the *real* problems when it comes to bringing electricity to the third world? Is price per watt important? Is it practical to share larger devices? If not, why not? Is it transmission costs? Infrastructure maintenance? Can anything be done to address those?
Assuming price per watt is in fact a priority, then the GP is right on the money. Why should 600 Haitians spend $5 each, for a total of $3000 and 24 watts of capacity, when they can pool together and have 10 to 50 times more generation capacity for the same price?
What the fuck? I understand trying to cover your asses and all, but who in their right mind would produce such a crippled piece of hardware? And who would buy it?
This practice has failed catastrophically in the past, and been likened to "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller". The problem is twofold. First, to make any money at this, you have to throw a lot of money behind it. A 0.1% gain over an extremely short period of time is only worthwhile if it's an 0.1% gain on millions, or billions of dollars. The problem is, sometimes something unexpected happens (the asian economy has a crisis, sub-prime lending collapses, you get a bad tip that United is going belly up), and instead of the 0.1% gain, you end up with a big loss.
So, yes, I understand that the idea of a "free money machine" is very appealing, but people are ignoring the risk. That needs to stop. It's a risk to the stability of the economy.
Microsoft *has* replaced the windows kernel.
You don't seriously think Vista's running on anything remotely similar to Windows 95's kernel, do you?
On the contrary. DRM is precisely the reason the Nintendo Wii homebrew community has taken so long to get a halfway decent homebrew platform working. The xbox 360 has similar DRM. You can't just whip up some code, burn it to a DVD, and stick it in your Xbox or Wii; both systems will only execute signed code.
And, as you've already hinted, downloaded games are DRMed as well.
Console DRM is present. It's just transparent and non-invasive. This is largely because they can control it at the hardware level. However, there is no hardware DRM on PCs, nor should their be.
We only expect our consoles to run games designed for them, vetted by the manufacturer (nintendo, microsoft). However, we expect PCs to be able to run any code from anyone. As long as you can run any code from anywhere, for DRM to even have a *chance* of locking potential pirates out, it must be *very* invasive, and *very* restrictive. As each generation of PC DRM schemes is defeated, the next becomes more aggressive, with more draconian restrictions. And even then, it's never enough -- nor will it ever be. Pure-software DRM can never work. And the sort of hardware-based DRM present in consoles would render PCs useless.
So, that's pretty much why console DRM gets no attention, while PC DRM is a terrible annoyance.
Oh, I don't ever think I'll forget, thanks to a single, defining moment. It was the mid ninties, I was about 13, and I needed a picture of a door for homework. I searched "door picture" on altavista. There were one or two terrible, low res pictures of doors in the results. The rest were porn.
I, too, was throughly unimpressed by the ad, but there is one thing they didn't do: Play Apple's mud slinging game.
I enjoy the "I'm a mac" ads -- they're just about the only commercials I'll intentionally watch -- but they're pretty aggressive. They blatantly, and actively attempt to belittle their competition. The latest two show "PC" resting on his laurels, and trying to deceive people into purchasing him -- both suggesting that "PC" doesn't have his users' best interests at heart.
This commercial doesn't do that at all. Some have speculated that was the goal: making it clear that they feel that they don't have to insult their competition. Whether they're just trying to win points for being the nice guy, or they're trying to suggest that they don't have to stoop to Apple's level because they're just that superior, I don't know.
I actually enjoyed that email, 'cause I can understand where the kid was coming from. Until you've got positive karma, you might as well be posting directly to /dev/null most of the time. I posted for months before I got a karma bonus, and then, all the sudden, I'm getting posts modded up on a regular basis.
I didn't find it quite as frustrating as this kid did, but that email really shows how I'm sure thousands of "outsiders" feel about slashdot. Slashdot's tendency to weed out all but the most dedicated keeps the signal-to-noise ratio extremely high, but it probably drives away many, many potential posters.
Seriously? You can't tell the difference between someone saying "Fucking thing sucks! We'll do it live!", and "HOLY FUCK THERE'S A HOLE IN MY ABDOMEN AND MY FUCKING SPLEEN IS ABOUT TO FALL OUT!"?
I seriously doubt that rappers really have trouble getting medical attention whenever they need it. Really, how do you imagine that scene working out in your world? "Oh, I'm sorry Mr. DMX. When you said 'Bitch, I got shot in the knee - I need a fucking ambulance', I thought you were just experimenting with some new lyrics"?
http://baheyeldin.com/technology/technology-in-society/craigslist-scam-cheque-and-western-union-for-more-than-amount.html
Basically, the scam works like this: