There is an economic motivation to botting that there is not to data destruction, and widespread distribution of your virus requires making it non-destructive and, preferably, transparent to the user. Then you can sell your 100 million bots for a million dollars. Nobody ever made a red cent off of destructive viruses. It doesn't follow that people are writing viruses now to create a demand for their products. For one, exposure would be all but inevitable (one disgruntled employee in an industry where 20% is a nice, low churn) and would destroy the company, and where all the competitors have an active incentive to trace the virus back to your door and are experts who made the tools to do so.
Crazy Perl hackers. Who needs dollar signs -- what we need here is LaTex!
If Sy(WoW) > Sy(x) (S = sales, y = country, for every x in the set of MMORPGs other than WoW), then for every x in that set Sigma(Sy(WoW) over all the y's) > Sigma (Sy(x) over all the y's).
CS102: Proving WoW is the Best Game Ever*
* #include : Proves the lemma which gets you from "sells most" to "best". Mostly by brainwashing you with the prospect of large amounts of cash money if you master the concepts presented in class. Hey, it worked for Blizzard:)
Second Life already has plenty of people losing their virtual shirts... as well as virtual shorts, and virtual underwear. I almost signed up to play it until a quick browse around showed that its difficult to make a profit on anything other than real estate or various forms of sex. One web site listing auctions for the game had two people competing to sell the most "fully functional" Japanese schoolgirl avatar... *shudder*
If the website goes under, and you sue them, and you win, then you're just another unsecured creditor for the bankrupcy court to say "Sorry, bub, better luck next time" to:)
WoW contains some of the best information logging capabilities of any game ever client-side due to its extensible, user-programmable AI -- you can't get a nerf past the community because someone will say "Hey, did anyone else notice that Hunters suffered a 15% damage per second drop with this equipment option and talent mix?" and have hard numbers and likely a video to prove it (this example actually happened). Also, transparency to players is a major design goal -- no one wants to hear, several weeks after dropping their virtual life savings, that the 5% edge that made Arcanite Reaver the It weapon for Arms specced warriors is now -2% compared to another weapon which will take you another 80 play hours to farm for... and when you get that, you find the legion of early adopters has already caused the numbers to change again, bwahahaha.
Hand-nerfs are painful but they're the least sucky of all alternatives.
What he said. You're familiar with the term "entrapment", right? You can't be prosecuted for behavior the government solicits from you -- thats why they walk on eggshells in drug/prostitution cases.
Whats the advantage to a laptop for study? Are you intending them to use it in class? Because mobility is the only reason you'd ever recommend a laptop to anyone. It doesn't work very well with the current curriculum in most schools, requires expensive teacher retraining, exacerbates the "ADD" problem (teachers will complain kids spend more time off-task, and they'll be right as far as that goes, for much the same reason as graphing calculators cause it), and would go unused in most classes. Computers are spectacularly poor devices for learning how to factor polynomials on, and OS drill software wouldn't change that one lick. They'll take notes for history, granted, but so will a 35 cent paper/pencil combo. They get in the way of language classes except when you're using them as a video/tape player (which is much better suited to a dedicated language lab, or for that matter a portable CD player, than a laptop).
My mother and favorite aunt are both teachers, I was a teacher before I was an engineer, and I have unending respect for the majority of the profession... but the level of technological expertise approaches zero. Forget firefox, the "power user" at my Aunt's school uses IE and laughs at the people stuck with AOL's browswer or a six year old Netscape-for-macs client. These are the folks who need to be on the ball if Bobby's Electronic Notebook eats his test fourty-five minutes into the period... do you see that happening?
>>Infantry is supposed to be invisible. That's why they put all that fancy makeup on their faces - so they blend in. If they radiate a lot in the EM spectrum, someone is going to detect it and drop a few white phosphorus artillery rounds on them.>>
I'm just nitpicking, because its clear you "get it" from the later comments on urban operations, but infantry doesn't have to be invisible anymore. In fact, its probably better to maximize their visibility a lot of the time, given that a) no one we're likely to be fighting has access to real-time on-target artillery, b) if they did, we'd blow the stuffing out of it and c) our main threats are comparitively small explosive devices, small arms fire, and friendly fire in urban actions. Given the profile of the missions dismounted infantry is generally engaged in at the moment (excepting special ops), I don't mind letting The Bad Guys know we're coming if it helps keep The Good Guys and The Not-Quite-Bad-Or-Good-but-At-Least-Not-Shooting-At -Us-So-We'll-Take-What-We-Can-Get Guys safe.
Alright, I'll bite. What is the earthly connection between those three things? You're ticked off about the present state of politics but good news everyone there is a.01% increase in porn availability? From the same people who are ticking you off on the DCMA front, no less? And, in the final irony, will certainly lock their porn up tighter than anybody imprisoned under the Patriot Act (which is no one, incidentally)?
Well, given that the "scientifically" motivated protesters are dropping trou and the religiously motivated sane people are cluck-clucking, I guess its no pants for you then, right?
Property rights are, fundamentally, the right to exclude. If you own something, you can exclude others from its use, if you can exclude others from something's use you own it. Laws which control the right to copy or transmit information, which is a prerequisite for using it, do indeed confer ownership over the information under any rational interpretation of "ownership" which is not a quasi-spiritual "Information must be free!" hacker aesthetic.
"Its just a game, sad people would kill over this" -- Look, its grand larceny, a stupid thing to kill over but it happens every bloody day. Somebody jacked a friend to the tune of what would be in the US $40,000. The friend killed him in a fit of rage. If it were even physically possible to remove $40,000 from someone in the US (short of, say, divorce), people would get killed over that, too. Heck, sneakers and drug deals end up in violence all the time at far smaller absolute dollar amounts than $900...
The RIAA isn't primarily in the business of selling music -- they sell identity. Spears, Eminem, whatever, its just a celebrity who plays a roll that people can latch onto a little at a time for something they can't get out of their own life. Do you know a big megapopstar who isn't flawlessly beautiful and plastered on every magazine and TV show when not making music? Do you know a single one who has a song which is more iconic than their persona? Nope. "Hear it like Beethoven himself was playing it!" isn't even on their radar screen.
If you're in Japan, you don't need a remote control for you cellphone because its already a portable television. I didn't bother buying that feature for myself because it drains batteries and I don't really watch that much TV, but the handset that had it (in addition to video calls, something I don't think is catching on anytime soon) cost a whopping... fifty bucks.
Well, look at the mathematics. The Japanese population is aging rapidly, their birth rate is plummeting, and by 2050 there are going to be, what, two people of working age for every retiree. You can't afford to devote 50% of your work force to home helping. Wouldn't you rather most of these folks be given the independence to live at home with a bit of a robo-boost rather than be housed in a labor-conserving institutional setting which resembles nothing so much as a factory farm minus the chickenwire?
Signed, The Guy Who Writes Their Vision Algorithms
P.S. Solution #2 is, of course, immigration. Thats a bit of a political hot potato over here, but its getting less so as people see the handwriting on the wall -- ten years ago no way in heck they would have let a foreigner into this job.
P.P.S. Solution #3, raising the birthrate, is another hot potato. I'll spare you the obvious joke. Anyhow, the government is working on it, including some places which are actually paying people to have kids.
Great idea... instead of using one lossy compression, use two! Maybe the errors introduced from the intermediate text to the final text will cancel out the errors introduced when making the intermediary text!
Hey, we only have two miles (nautical and otherwise), and since I grew up in the most landlocked part of the country I totally disclaim responsibility for the nautical one -- take it up with the Brits, they must have thought it a great way to get more uses of the letter "u", which they seem to have an unhealthy fascination with.
On the other hand, they could go "Hah hah, we got them to trade their entire methane supply for a few kilotons of crystallized carbon and that useless metal Element 79. Morons. Quick, lets go back to the homework and get another batch so we can barter for their amusingly rustic art, like Master of Orion 3 and Gigli."
Its hard to "farm" money in Second Life because there are no Walking Bags of Advancement wandering around to club over the head and take their stuff. You get money the same way you do in real life -- convincing other people to give it to you. In practice, the big ticket items are selling real-estate (which is a limited commodity in the system which gets dribbed in at a predictable rate), casinos, and selling customizations for avatars (clothes, accessories with no effects that a WoW player would recognized, etc). Now, you could certainly farm it if you had a software development house willing to work for nothing and develop scripts for accessories, as the game will let you program a dragon whelp to burp fire and use as a pet *if you can program and render it*, but unless they come up with a value-added proposition the game-world won't suddenly throw money at them.
I didn't program for Second Life because the return for IP in the game is tiiiiiiiiny compared to the amount of time you have to spend creating it, at least for scripts. You're better off tutoring CS101 students for $10+ an hour.
Second Life doesn't have a tiny market though -- there is about $1000 spent per account per year (ponder that for a second and extrapolate how ginormous it would be if Blizzard had the same level of commitment from 5% of its players).
True, but its sort of a cop-out. Galactic Civilizations manages a MUCH better AI than CivIII by the conceptually simple, programatically difficult solution of multi-threading the AI code, which means that when you take five minutes and hit end the AI already knows what he's going to do on his turn. In Civ, the AI only starts thinking when the end button is pressed, and because its a real-time application and the user won't tolerate a 5 minute thinking period between turns, so instead it tries to cram all the calculations in to 5-15 seconds, which means you really have to skimp on your algorithms (like, for example, cruddy pathfinding so you can't efficiently use rail networks despite the fact that that should be a 100% solvable problem).
I've heard a lot of people who say what we really need is something like:
Make a test network, put a file worth of fictional critical data on it. Give out one hint on the Internet about how to find it and tell people its no holds barred. First to disclose the data to an email address you set up gets $100,000, no questions asked.
The problems with this approach are a) you're not really sure you're going to get any useful information ("Well, we got rooted, really fast. So that was interesting, and now we're out $100k. Uh, thats about all I've got to report, boss."), it costs a lot more money than a consultant and you're sure the consultant will at least produce 100 pages to justify his existence, and importantly it doesn't tell you anything about real life. Not that the consultant necessarily does, of course, but you can't make a crackable fascimile of any real life system which you're worried about cracking because there is no simulation which has the right bugs, exploits, and social engineering approaches except the real thing and you can't possibly let people try to break the real thing. I mean, sure, you could make a I-can't-believe-its-not-a-nuclear-power-plant simulation on a Linux box and put it on the Internet, but does its software have the buffer overrun in the log analyzer the real plant does? Is the Linux box guarded by one guy at night who goes off at 12:30 to have a drink at the local bar and thinks no one knows? Is the world's resident expert on your Linux box now a consultant who mouths off about its security features to his clients without even stopping to consider whether they're more interested in the box than the project they're theoretically paying him for? These are the kind of threats you'd "realistically" see against a critical institution -- inside jobs, social engineering, stupid software bugs, the works -- and they're all but impossible to test for in a "realistic" manner.
Slashdot Mirror
And it only costs $7000 a kilogram to bring that glass payload back down to earth! Sweet! Micro-gravity coke bottles for everyone!
There is an economic motivation to botting that there is not to data destruction, and widespread distribution of your virus requires making it non-destructive and, preferably, transparent to the user. Then you can sell your 100 million bots for a million dollars. Nobody ever made a red cent off of destructive viruses. It doesn't follow that people are writing viruses now to create a demand for their products. For one, exposure would be all but inevitable (one disgruntled employee in an industry where 20% is a nice, low churn) and would destroy the company, and where all the competitors have an active incentive to trace the virus back to your door and are experts who made the tools to do so.
Crazy Perl hackers. Who needs dollar signs -- what we need here is LaTex! If Sy(WoW) > Sy(x) (S = sales, y = country, for every x in the set of MMORPGs other than WoW), then for every x in that set Sigma(Sy(WoW) over all the y's) > Sigma (Sy(x) over all the y's). CS102: Proving WoW is the Best Game Ever* * #include : Proves the lemma which gets you from "sells most" to "best". Mostly by brainwashing you with the prospect of large amounts of cash money if you master the concepts presented in class. Hey, it worked for Blizzard :)
Second Life already has plenty of people losing their virtual shirts... as well as virtual shorts, and virtual underwear. I almost signed up to play it until a quick browse around showed that its difficult to make a profit on anything other than real estate or various forms of sex. One web site listing auctions for the game had two people competing to sell the most "fully functional" Japanese schoolgirl avatar... *shudder*
Some sort of new browser extension for viewing web pages from the comfort of your seat in first class? Seriously, I never heard of nor saw the show.
If the website goes under, and you sue them, and you win, then you're just another unsecured creditor for the bankrupcy court to say "Sorry, bub, better luck next time" to :)
Hand-nerfs are painful but they're the least sucky of all alternatives.
What he said. You're familiar with the term "entrapment", right? You can't be prosecuted for behavior the government solicits from you -- thats why they walk on eggshells in drug/prostitution cases.
My mother and favorite aunt are both teachers, I was a teacher before I was an engineer, and I have unending respect for the majority of the profession... but the level of technological expertise approaches zero. Forget firefox, the "power user" at my Aunt's school uses IE and laughs at the people stuck with AOL's browswer or a six year old Netscape-for-macs client. These are the folks who need to be on the ball if Bobby's Electronic Notebook eats his test fourty-five minutes into the period... do you see that happening?
>>Infantry is supposed to be invisible. That's why they put all that fancy makeup on their faces - so they blend in. If they radiate a lot in the EM spectrum, someone is going to detect it and drop a few white phosphorus artillery rounds on them.>> I'm just nitpicking, because its clear you "get it" from the later comments on urban operations, but infantry doesn't have to be invisible anymore. In fact, its probably better to maximize their visibility a lot of the time, given that a) no one we're likely to be fighting has access to real-time on-target artillery, b) if they did, we'd blow the stuffing out of it and c) our main threats are comparitively small explosive devices, small arms fire, and friendly fire in urban actions. Given the profile of the missions dismounted infantry is generally engaged in at the moment (excepting special ops), I don't mind letting The Bad Guys know we're coming if it helps keep The Good Guys and The Not-Quite-Bad-Or-Good-but-At-Least-Not-Shooting-At -Us-So-We'll-Take-What-We-Can-Get Guys safe.
Alright, I'll bite. What is the earthly connection between those three things? You're ticked off about the present state of politics but good news everyone there is a .01% increase in porn availability? From the same people who are ticking you off on the DCMA front, no less? And, in the final irony, will certainly lock their porn up tighter than anybody imprisoned under the Patriot Act (which is no one, incidentally)?
Well, given that the "scientifically" motivated protesters are dropping trou and the religiously motivated sane people are cluck-clucking, I guess its no pants for you then, right?
Property rights are, fundamentally, the right to exclude. If you own something, you can exclude others from its use, if you can exclude others from something's use you own it. Laws which control the right to copy or transmit information, which is a prerequisite for using it, do indeed confer ownership over the information under any rational interpretation of "ownership" which is not a quasi-spiritual "Information must be free!" hacker aesthetic.
"Its just a game, sad people would kill over this" -- Look, its grand larceny, a stupid thing to kill over but it happens every bloody day. Somebody jacked a friend to the tune of what would be in the US $40,000. The friend killed him in a fit of rage. If it were even physically possible to remove $40,000 from someone in the US (short of, say, divorce), people would get killed over that, too. Heck, sneakers and drug deals end up in violence all the time at far smaller absolute dollar amounts than $900...
No, in the Chinese version Americans farm the gold and then sell it to the Chinese players.
The RIAA isn't primarily in the business of selling music -- they sell identity. Spears, Eminem, whatever, its just a celebrity who plays a roll that people can latch onto a little at a time for something they can't get out of their own life. Do you know a big megapopstar who isn't flawlessly beautiful and plastered on every magazine and TV show when not making music? Do you know a single one who has a song which is more iconic than their persona? Nope. "Hear it like Beethoven himself was playing it!" isn't even on their radar screen.
If you're in Japan, you don't need a remote control for you cellphone because its already a portable television. I didn't bother buying that feature for myself because it drains batteries and I don't really watch that much TV, but the handset that had it (in addition to video calls, something I don't think is catching on anytime soon) cost a whopping... fifty bucks.
Signed, The Guy Who Writes Their Vision Algorithms
P.S. Solution #2 is, of course, immigration. Thats a bit of a political hot potato over here, but its getting less so as people see the handwriting on the wall -- ten years ago no way in heck they would have let a foreigner into this job.
P.P.S. Solution #3, raising the birthrate, is another hot potato. I'll spare you the obvious joke. Anyhow, the government is working on it, including some places which are actually paying people to have kids.
Great idea... instead of using one lossy compression, use two! Maybe the errors introduced from the intermediate text to the final text will cancel out the errors introduced when making the intermediary text!
Hey, we only have two miles (nautical and otherwise), and since I grew up in the most landlocked part of the country I totally disclaim responsibility for the nautical one -- take it up with the Brits, they must have thought it a great way to get more uses of the letter "u", which they seem to have an unhealthy fascination with.
Nah, thats too harsh. After all, if you worked for EA a chance at $7.29 an hour would be an EXCELLENT reason to jump ship.
On the other hand, they could go "Hah hah, we got them to trade their entire methane supply for a few kilotons of crystallized carbon and that useless metal Element 79. Morons. Quick, lets go back to the homework and get another batch so we can barter for their amusingly rustic art, like Master of Orion 3 and Gigli."
I didn't program for Second Life because the return for IP in the game is tiiiiiiiiny compared to the amount of time you have to spend creating it, at least for scripts. You're better off tutoring CS101 students for $10+ an hour.
Second Life doesn't have a tiny market though -- there is about $1000 spent per account per year (ponder that for a second and extrapolate how ginormous it would be if Blizzard had the same level of commitment from 5% of its players).
True, but its sort of a cop-out. Galactic Civilizations manages a MUCH better AI than CivIII by the conceptually simple, programatically difficult solution of multi-threading the AI code, which means that when you take five minutes and hit end the AI already knows what he's going to do on his turn. In Civ, the AI only starts thinking when the end button is pressed, and because its a real-time application and the user won't tolerate a 5 minute thinking period between turns, so instead it tries to cram all the calculations in to 5-15 seconds, which means you really have to skimp on your algorithms (like, for example, cruddy pathfinding so you can't efficiently use rail networks despite the fact that that should be a 100% solvable problem).