Tringo's business model in SecondLife is that you buy a copy of the object and run it as a franchise, paying $60 upfront and some percentage of your rake from the machine. As an operator, you only make money by convincing people to play. The only way to convince them to pay for marginal playing opportunities is to give them a reward, i.e. money. And that implies gambling. Second Life is not a good environment for creating games which are actually fun -- if you wanted primarily fun games you'd be in WoW or Puzzle Pirates (whose puzzle games absolutely smoke the poor Tetris clones that infest Second Life).
Now, if I were really out to make a buck, I'd come up with some form of multi-level marketing for an object in SecondLife. Take anything with intrinsic value -- say, a hat. Now let anyone who has that hat spawn a new copy of the hat for less money than it takes to buy a hat from you (picking numbers out of thin air, $5 for a hat original and $3 for a hat copy). Then you essentially deputize folks to sell your hat to fashion-conscious folks AND folks desperate to make a virtual buck by hawking hats (LOOK! You only have to sell 3 hats to make your investment back!). Now, taking the idea one step farther, instead of actually selling the hat you should sell the *script* that makes the hat into a money machine. "Hiya, Mr. Content creator. Have I got a business proposition for you -- you take that new school girl uniform* and use my Money Machine script on it, and it will virally populate itself around the world. The script only costs $100 and $.50 a copy. You could make hundreds of dollars!"
* Yeah, somebody sells them. *shudder* There's two "killer apps" in Second Life, and one of them is not gambling.
You could spam the entire Chicago phone book with "Dear Valued LaSalle Bank Customer: This is an automated message which is urgent. We have discovered suspicious activity on your credit card. As you may know, identity theft has been increasing recently, and our computers have flagged a transaction on your account as possibly fradulent. We are calling you to verify whether the transaction to Ernie's House of Delectable Delights for $234.40 on 6/1 was authorized. If we do not receive communication from you in 24 hours, we will process the transaction. If this transaction was authorized, no further action on your part is required. If it was not authorized, please call our customer service line at 312-HAH-SCAM and have your credit card details ready for identity verification." Then just have "operators standing by".
I hate challenge/response systems with a burning passion. Every time I get a C/R email it might as well have Subject: My Time Is More Valuable Than Your Time. I would be pretty incensed if businesses I had to call implemented this -- its bad enough that I have to deal with menu heck to get to an actual human being if I dial the generic tech support line, but if I'm dialing Mr. I Have Your Business Card then I had darn well better get him or his voice mail as soon as the phone picks up. If the matter weren't urgent enough so that I wouldn't mind going to a website and waiting for a reply I would have sent a bloody email.
And C/R capchas will be circumvented the exact same way its circumvented for email and registrations -- if it takes 5 seconds to get through the capcha then your callcenter in China (hidden behind 45 proxies to appear that it originates in your compromised American box) can send 1200 spams per operator per hour. That costs, lets see, about a quarter for a thousand spams.
No, the majority of calls will be originating, from the point of view of your computer, from compromised American boxes. See, for example, the recent case where someone ran up $1 million of charges on some businesses VoIP account by reselling the service. Granted, these compromised boxes will be taking dictation from servers in China which are pointed to by proxies in Russia which were purchased from the Mafia by a marketer in Miami... but your computer will only see "Betsy Sue, 555-555-5555, Anytown, USA, Line 1".
They're easy to remember and extremely difficult to brute force. Just tell your users "Write a snippet of something which is meaningful to you". We can all type at 30+ words a minute so entering a 30 character password in natural English (perhaps without spaces) goes supringly fast. For example, supposing I liked classical literature, I could use socaesarmaythenlesthemayprevent (this is part of Brutus' soliliquy in Act 2 Scene 1 of Julius Caesar, which I had to memorize way back in high school). If you want to be reaaaaally anal you can obfuscate it a bit (l33tify, what have you). There is no convinient dictionary of "meaningful phrases in English" out there, although I suppose it would be somewhat less than secure if someone were able to find out you were, e.g., a Star Trek fan. And they're guaranteed to be easy to remember -- humans are a lot better remembering natural language they have an emotional connection to than remembering arbitrary alphanumeric strings.
In fairness, I stole this tip from a Slashdot discussion about a year back sparked by advice from Microsoft, and have been using rediculously long passphrases since for all my "if that breaks, I'm "#$"#"#$%ed" logins (I still go with crazy insecure for trivial things like my slashdot login). I've got about 12 of them at the moment and have no problems with remembering them and changing with the security policy, whereas beforehand I had a discrete post-it.
Most AI problems are not a matter of "well, if we just had bigger/more efficient iron this would be easy". For example, I don't care whether you have a beowulf cluster of Crays, you still aren't going to be able to run magic against a corpus of English words and be able to search by concepts. You need to be able to actually implement the magic -- thats the whole trick in AI. In fact, the cynical might say that AI is a field composed of all the problems for which the solution is still magic -- every time we find a problem class which is actually algorithmically solvable (or close enough) it tends to drop out of "AI" (see: credit card fraud checking algorithms, "Search isn't AI, its just PageRank!", simulated annealing and similar techniques in some problem spaces, etc etc).
Anyhow, you give me the magic for, e.g, parsing natural language and I guarantee you that even if you take a 20% performance hit for running the magic in Java instead of assembly it won't matter as I can always buy more iron and if your magic actually does what you say it does I'll have money to spare.
Back in a shopping cart should always be a contextual "cancel" -- if you're on the page asking for final authorization, its the same as "no". If you're on the page showing you the items you have ordered, its the same as "go back to shopping". Forward should always be the same as hitting the submit button -- forward on the "whats your address" form should process the form if it is sufficiently filled in or throw an error if it isn't. Forward on final authorization should get you "Thank you for this order!". For a CMS application the metaphors are different but the functionality should be pretty similar -- back when reviewing a draft causes the draft to be edited but not published, forward causes it to proceed to the next stage of the workflow.
... is *not a war use*. Its an environment improving use which happens to have some security implications, mostly for terrorism. It incidentally helps out developing countries more than it does the US, since we see have a strong national defense, no ongoing wars with nation-states, and a fairly good defense against terrorists, and developing nations are frequently 0 for 3.
"One cent coin" on the other hand is not ambiguous because England does not have the cent as a unit of currency. I'd also point out that it is not obvious to all readers that just because you call a one pence coin a penny that a one cent coin is also called a penny. A one yen coin isn't called a penny, a ten pence coin isn't called a dime, etc etc.
He's almost certainly talking about retaliatory feedback. In every eBay transaction, the buyer and seller have a chance to leave 80 characters of feedback and one of three ratings: positive, negative, or neutral. Sounds like a great system, but there's some social problems with it. First, anything other than positive is a black mark. Second, the 80 characters of hopefully useful commentary (Positive: Item arrived after some initial confusion and was in acceptable confusion) are generally replaced with total pap (Positive: A++++ BEST SELLER EVER). This is largely because of retaliatory feedback: you're completely at the mercy of the other party in the transaction if you post your feedback first, so you make it excessively positive to encourage them to leave you a positive (rather than dropping a black mark and ruining your reputation -- I know I personally wouldn't even consider going into a deal with someone who had "only" 97% positives because that means a whole 3% of his customer base was so incensed they were willing to get black marks against their own records to mention it).
Now, parent, hate to break it to you but the economics of eBay do not suggest its likely you'll ever get that feedback removed. They make their money off of a quarter here and a dollar there multiplied by a couple hundred million transactions. Human attention to individual transactions or users does not scale, so they'll ignore most cases of abuse.
In the past two years, I've bought WoW and approximately 10 other videogames. 2 of those games do not compete with WoW (DS titles which I play when travelling). The other eight are gathering dust. In the two years immediately prior to WoW, I probably bought or was bought ~25 games, and finished them all. Even at $15 a month WoW is probably saving me money because it sucks up 99.5% of the time I care to spend playing games.
He's not going to go through fourty-five pages of Google results to find the juicy stuff. Just make a habit of commenting on a lot of non-controversial stuff ("While Zonk says video game X is the best thing since sliced bread, I would have to recommend "peanut butter" for that title"). I'm sure in 10 years of Internet use I've probably said 15 things which, seen in isolation, would torpedo my chances at Hypothetical Prospective Employer X. But you can't Google them by "things that would make me not hire Patio11 *I'm feeling lucky*". Yet, anyhow.
Ignoring the distasteful nature of the question for the minute, supposed "robot" were a synonym for "slave". Would you trust even very intelligent humans to be able to follow the three laws as written even if they actually desired to do so? They require nearly omniscient comprehension of the effects of ones actions -- how can you know that you have to refuse to drive to the mall and pick up three cans of tomato sauce because if you don't you'll be in a car wreck with a little old lady and break rule 1?
Rather than venerating pie-in-the-sky sci-fi I'd rather see robots made safer in the same way as normal machines. Add obvious kill switches to anything that is physically capable of causing damage to a human. Put sensors around any intake, just like you would put in an industrial-strength shredder -- you don't have to determine whether its tie or finger or kitty cat thats in your intake, if you're not sure its paper stop shredding. Treat robots, like other machines, as requiring safety within the context of their environment -- which means telling your factory workers "No servicing a robot while its still moving, and we mean it, you'll end up dead", putting up safety fences, and using some form of tethering on anything capable of autonomous movement.
I once knew a very talented engineer (also my supervisor) who was consistently less supported by management than his coworker Bob (not his real name). Bob was also a very talented engineer, and Bob had essentially infinite budget any time he snapped his fingers. Do you know why? Because Bob understood the rules of the game and played it like a master. Bob was aggressive about keeping his appointment book in order, was never late to a meeting, and actually bothered keeping a Rolodex with contacts inside and outside the organization. When Bob was at the meeting, rather than pretending it was a waste of his time he listened, discussed, argued, and lost the argument sometimes. Bob was as comfortable in Powerpoint as he was in his C compiler -- probably better, actually. When they'd explain project proposals my supervisor would talk about Zipf distributions, locality of reference, and cache misses and Bob would talk about "maximizing search outcomes".
When Bob got his project greenlighted when my supervisor did not, because Bob was capable of making a business case for it at a meeting chaired by the guy he'd been grooming for months, was that B.S? Seems to me like thats "creative use of resources". You can either continue to laugh ruefully at the world and scorn "small talk" and "politics" and "useless meetings and reports and that bureacratic "#$"%" or you can be like Bob.
I barely got it in six minutes. I quickly eliminated by visual inspection the possibility of any matches among singles and duos of groundhogs. That saves you 9 of 36 tiles. For the remaining 27, I encoded them based on the groundhogs head orientation top to bottom -- S for center, L for left, R for right, and Z for sleeping. This was the hardest part of the puzzle because I was copying from my computer screen -- if I had a printout it would have been much easier. Then, I circled all the strings that started with Z. Thats, if I'm reading this right, seven. I checked which of the seven circled strings matched (two pairs), and then whether their tiles actually matched. One was a perfect fit (A1-D4). I then crossed out those seven tiles. Now I'm down to 20 live tiles on the map. I circled all the ones starting with S. That turned out to be a rather lot of them, so I looked at the uncircled ones and quickly eliminated the possibility of there being any matches there. Returning to the circled tiles, I focused just on the ones starting with SZ and divided them into buckets. SZZ had only one entry each so I crossed it out. SZS had two entries but they didn't match so I crossed them out. SZR and SZL both had two matching entries which, on referencing the graph, were true matches. Yay, done in the nick of time.
... because downloading a song costs about six cents. They're essentially an overseas pirate which through the magic of the Internet happens to be available to customers in the US. You could also order an entire season of,say, 24 on Ebay for $20 and think "Wow, I'm getting a good deal" until you found out that your supplier in Hong Kong wasn't on the up and up. (When I was young and stupid I got burned on two pirated games from eBay -- never using them for anything IP-related again).
So after my a blast of nostalgia I just decided to Google for a local seller of Tang (got to be SOMEONE still with a stock, right?) Apparently Kraft sells hundreds of millions of dollars of it every year, 90% of it outside the US (concentrated in Latin America and Asia). I feel so much less alone now.
... in the one field that using space makes sense in: launching satellites. What private industry is not doing is throwing billions down the money hole to examine, e.g., the effect of weightlessness on spiders. Thats because private industry doesn't get new billions every year even if it had a string of failures and no successes for the last N years.
It's nice to have a more functional space program again, isn't it?
I never noticed it wasn't active. I could probably think of a government program that is less relevant to my life than the Shuttle program but it would take me a while. Wake me when manned spaceflight accomplishes *anything* that can't be done better and cheaper either with robots or just on the ground (Tang is a wonderful drink*, but there's no reason to blast someone out of the atmosphere to drink it).
* Yes, I was probably the only person in the entire world who actually had a taste for Tang.
The judge was sort of miffed. The issue that was decided is "Where do we have a deposition?" This is something that people who were not petulant two-year olds could agree to in a matter of seconds ("Your place or mine?"). What makes it *particularly* a waste of the judge's time is that the two firms are located in the same office building, four floors from each other. So the judge said essentially "Heck if I care, flip a bloody coin and stop wasting my time", except with rather more tact.
Like I said: I live in Japan. We're the earthquake capital of the world, and yet somehow we manage to have buildings stay standing. Many of them also contain computers or millions of dollars of capital, strange as this may be. I trust that the folks living in Iowa and Detroit have figured out some combination of construction techniques, building codes, and insurance schemes which enables their cities to be something other than windswept wastelands. I mean, how long has the auto industry put billion-dollar factories in Detroit? And how many times have you seen GM say "Aww shootskie, we forgot about the ice storms and now three production lines are buried under 400 tons of collapsed roof and snow?"
In the finest of Slashdot traditions I'm speaking from barely informed ignorance here:
It seems to me you can control your costs by buying existing space, like a mothballed factory, in an economically depressed area. Like, say, anywhere in the rust belt. You've got a bit of flexibility in siting as long as you can get Internet pipes, and you don't necessarily *have* to set up in an area known for a workforce with a high degree of tech skill (and absurd prevailing wages along with almost certainly having higher cost of everything because its metropolitan).
Our technology incubator in Japan is in a park with a few major data centers and is located 40 miles from the middle of nowhere. The US analog would be siting the datacenter in a cornfield in central Illinois. We have (comparitively) cheap power rates, a cost of living (and prevailing salaries) a fraction of that in Nagoya, and the rent (heavily subsidized by local government, which may not be an option for folks discussed in these articles) is a song.
Slashdot Mirror
... what does a krona taste like?
Now, if I were really out to make a buck, I'd come up with some form of multi-level marketing for an object in SecondLife. Take anything with intrinsic value -- say, a hat. Now let anyone who has that hat spawn a new copy of the hat for less money than it takes to buy a hat from you (picking numbers out of thin air, $5 for a hat original and $3 for a hat copy). Then you essentially deputize folks to sell your hat to fashion-conscious folks AND folks desperate to make a virtual buck by hawking hats (LOOK! You only have to sell 3 hats to make your investment back!). Now, taking the idea one step farther, instead of actually selling the hat you should sell the *script* that makes the hat into a money machine. "Hiya, Mr. Content creator. Have I got a business proposition for you -- you take that new school girl uniform* and use my Money Machine script on it, and it will virally populate itself around the world. The script only costs $100 and $.50 a copy. You could make hundreds of dollars!"
* Yeah, somebody sells them. *shudder* There's two "killer apps" in Second Life, and one of them is not gambling.
You could spam the entire Chicago phone book with "Dear Valued LaSalle Bank Customer: This is an automated message which is urgent. We have discovered suspicious activity on your credit card. As you may know, identity theft has been increasing recently, and our computers have flagged a transaction on your account as possibly fradulent. We are calling you to verify whether the transaction to Ernie's House of Delectable Delights for $234.40 on 6/1 was authorized. If we do not receive communication from you in 24 hours, we will process the transaction. If this transaction was authorized, no further action on your part is required. If it was not authorized, please call our customer service line at 312-HAH-SCAM and have your credit card details ready for identity verification." Then just have "operators standing by".
And C/R capchas will be circumvented the exact same way its circumvented for email and registrations -- if it takes 5 seconds to get through the capcha then your callcenter in China (hidden behind 45 proxies to appear that it originates in your compromised American box) can send 1200 spams per operator per hour. That costs, lets see, about a quarter for a thousand spams.
No, the majority of calls will be originating, from the point of view of your computer, from compromised American boxes. See, for example, the recent case where someone ran up $1 million of charges on some businesses VoIP account by reselling the service. Granted, these compromised boxes will be taking dictation from servers in China which are pointed to by proxies in Russia which were purchased from the Mafia by a marketer in Miami... but your computer will only see "Betsy Sue, 555-555-5555, Anytown, USA, Line 1".
They're easy to remember and extremely difficult to brute force. Just tell your users "Write a snippet of something which is meaningful to you". We can all type at 30+ words a minute so entering a 30 character password in natural English (perhaps without spaces) goes supringly fast. For example, supposing I liked classical literature, I could use socaesarmaythenlesthemayprevent (this is part of Brutus' soliliquy in Act 2 Scene 1 of Julius Caesar, which I had to memorize way back in high school). If you want to be reaaaaally anal you can obfuscate it a bit (l33tify, what have you). There is no convinient dictionary of "meaningful phrases in English" out there, although I suppose it would be somewhat less than secure if someone were able to find out you were, e.g., a Star Trek fan. And they're guaranteed to be easy to remember -- humans are a lot better remembering natural language they have an emotional connection to than remembering arbitrary alphanumeric strings. In fairness, I stole this tip from a Slashdot discussion about a year back sparked by advice from Microsoft, and have been using rediculously long passphrases since for all my "if that breaks, I'm "#$"#"#$%ed" logins (I still go with crazy insecure for trivial things like my slashdot login). I've got about 12 of them at the moment and have no problems with remembering them and changing with the security policy, whereas beforehand I had a discrete post-it.
Anyhow, you give me the magic for, e.g, parsing natural language and I guarantee you that even if you take a 20% performance hit for running the magic in Java instead of assembly it won't matter as I can always buy more iron and if your magic actually does what you say it does I'll have money to spare.
Back in a shopping cart should always be a contextual "cancel" -- if you're on the page asking for final authorization, its the same as "no". If you're on the page showing you the items you have ordered, its the same as "go back to shopping". Forward should always be the same as hitting the submit button -- forward on the "whats your address" form should process the form if it is sufficiently filled in or throw an error if it isn't. Forward on final authorization should get you "Thank you for this order!". For a CMS application the metaphors are different but the functionality should be pretty similar -- back when reviewing a draft causes the draft to be edited but not published, forward causes it to proceed to the next stage of the workflow.
Sorry, couldn't resist. The page is slashdotted before any comments.
... is *not a war use*. Its an environment improving use which happens to have some security implications, mostly for terrorism. It incidentally helps out developing countries more than it does the US, since we see have a strong national defense, no ongoing wars with nation-states, and a fairly good defense against terrorists, and developing nations are frequently 0 for 3.
"One cent coin" on the other hand is not ambiguous because England does not have the cent as a unit of currency. I'd also point out that it is not obvious to all readers that just because you call a one pence coin a penny that a one cent coin is also called a penny. A one yen coin isn't called a penny, a ten pence coin isn't called a dime, etc etc.
Now, parent, hate to break it to you but the economics of eBay do not suggest its likely you'll ever get that feedback removed. They make their money off of a quarter here and a dollar there multiplied by a couple hundred million transactions. Human attention to individual transactions or users does not scale, so they'll ignore most cases of abuse.
In the past two years, I've bought WoW and approximately 10 other videogames. 2 of those games do not compete with WoW (DS titles which I play when travelling). The other eight are gathering dust. In the two years immediately prior to WoW, I probably bought or was bought ~25 games, and finished them all. Even at $15 a month WoW is probably saving me money because it sucks up 99.5% of the time I care to spend playing games.
He's not going to go through fourty-five pages of Google results to find the juicy stuff. Just make a habit of commenting on a lot of non-controversial stuff ("While Zonk says video game X is the best thing since sliced bread, I would have to recommend "peanut butter" for that title"). I'm sure in 10 years of Internet use I've probably said 15 things which, seen in isolation, would torpedo my chances at Hypothetical Prospective Employer X. But you can't Google them by "things that would make me not hire Patio11 *I'm feeling lucky*". Yet, anyhow.
Rather than venerating pie-in-the-sky sci-fi I'd rather see robots made safer in the same way as normal machines. Add obvious kill switches to anything that is physically capable of causing damage to a human. Put sensors around any intake, just like you would put in an industrial-strength shredder -- you don't have to determine whether its tie or finger or kitty cat thats in your intake, if you're not sure its paper stop shredding. Treat robots, like other machines, as requiring safety within the context of their environment -- which means telling your factory workers "No servicing a robot while its still moving, and we mean it, you'll end up dead", putting up safety fences, and using some form of tethering on anything capable of autonomous movement.
When Bob got his project greenlighted when my supervisor did not, because Bob was capable of making a business case for it at a meeting chaired by the guy he'd been grooming for months, was that B.S? Seems to me like thats "creative use of resources". You can either continue to laugh ruefully at the world and scorn "small talk" and "politics" and "useless meetings and reports and that bureacratic "#$"%" or you can be like Bob.
In comparison, I rather like your method better.
... because downloading a song costs about six cents. They're essentially an overseas pirate which through the magic of the Internet happens to be available to customers in the US. You could also order an entire season of,say, 24 on Ebay for $20 and think "Wow, I'm getting a good deal" until you found out that your supplier in Hong Kong wasn't on the up and up. (When I was young and stupid I got burned on two pirated games from eBay -- never using them for anything IP-related again).
So after my a blast of nostalgia I just decided to Google for a local seller of Tang (got to be SOMEONE still with a stock, right?) Apparently Kraft sells hundreds of millions of dollars of it every year, 90% of it outside the US (concentrated in Latin America and Asia). I feel so much less alone now.
... in the one field that using space makes sense in: launching satellites. What private industry is not doing is throwing billions down the money hole to examine, e.g., the effect of weightlessness on spiders. Thats because private industry doesn't get new billions every year even if it had a string of failures and no successes for the last N years.
I never noticed it wasn't active. I could probably think of a government program that is less relevant to my life than the Shuttle program but it would take me a while. Wake me when manned spaceflight accomplishes *anything* that can't be done better and cheaper either with robots or just on the ground (Tang is a wonderful drink*, but there's no reason to blast someone out of the atmosphere to drink it).
* Yes, I was probably the only person in the entire world who actually had a taste for Tang.
... if you ever tried to get socially engineered by a little old granny with a p4c3m4k3r it will kill her! Oh, wait, thats not a bonus.
This information comes from www.overlawyered.com.
Like I said: I live in Japan. We're the earthquake capital of the world, and yet somehow we manage to have buildings stay standing. Many of them also contain computers or millions of dollars of capital, strange as this may be. I trust that the folks living in Iowa and Detroit have figured out some combination of construction techniques, building codes, and insurance schemes which enables their cities to be something other than windswept wastelands. I mean, how long has the auto industry put billion-dollar factories in Detroit? And how many times have you seen GM say "Aww shootskie, we forgot about the ice storms and now three production lines are buried under 400 tons of collapsed roof and snow?"
In the finest of Slashdot traditions I'm speaking from barely informed ignorance here:
It seems to me you can control your costs by buying existing space, like a mothballed factory, in an economically depressed area. Like, say, anywhere in the rust belt. You've got a bit of flexibility in siting as long as you can get Internet pipes, and you don't necessarily *have* to set up in an area known for a workforce with a high degree of tech skill (and absurd prevailing wages along with almost certainly having higher cost of everything because its metropolitan).
Our technology incubator in Japan is in a park with a few major data centers and is located 40 miles from the middle of nowhere. The US analog would be siting the datacenter in a cornfield in central Illinois. We have (comparitively) cheap power rates, a cost of living (and prevailing salaries) a fraction of that in Nagoya, and the rent (heavily subsidized by local government, which may not be an option for folks discussed in these articles) is a song.