There are two ways to run these robots, either by remote control or automatically. If you run them by remote, then all the enemy has to do is to hack your control signal and control your robot themselves. If the DRM/anti-DRM skirmishes have taught us anything it's that all signals can be hacked if there's enough will on the part of the hacker. If they run the robots automatically, then they're asking for an even bigger disaster, since robots today have enough trouble telling a soccer ball apart from a field. There's basically no way they'd be able to distinguish a friend from a foe. Even if you made your uniforms easily recognizable, the enemy could just start wearing those uniforms too and walk on by. So, if you then give up and put the robot into "shoot anything that moves" mode, you've basically reinvented the landmine, only now it's standing up in the middle of the field where anyone can see it with binoculars, and easily call for an artillery hit before they walk through the area.
Doctors basically don't type anything. They dictate things and have transcriptions type things up for them. Meanwhile, if the testing is done by a "central testing company" then you have the exact same problem that you complained about in the first post-- you don't know who has your records!! Even if the company is based in America, that doesn't mean anything, since America has about as many crooks as any other country. More than its share, in fact.
The point is, in this case, the system worked, and the crooks were caught. In fact, it probably would have been harder to catch the crooks if they were in America, since it wouldn't have been flagged by the bank as a strange charge. Any time you're dealing with people you don't know, you have to have trust that they're not psychopaths who want to hurt you for no reason. Every time you buy a burger at McDonalds, you're trusting that the cashier won't just spaz out and run off with your $4.57. Every time you walk down the street, you're trusting that the person on the other side of the sidewalk isn't a serial killer with a gun just waiting to mow you down. We trust people we don't know, literally with our lives, everyday. In most cases that trust is warranted. In the occasional cases where the trust is betrayed, there should be a system in place to rectify those breaches of trust. And in this case, there was such a system, and it worked. You can complain about outsourcing all you want, but this case shows that while there is some danger of identity theft from outsourced firms, the threat isn't really so bad, since the criminals draw a bright line to themselves by virtue of their location.
Yeah, good call. I'd much rather have a secretary who goes to the same church as my family typing up the results of an STD test report than some woman in India.
I know you think that sounds clever, but it hurts my head just to think of how wrong that is. Or do you think you can create the perfect SPAM by "reversing the function" of your mail program's Bayesian filter? The mathematical definition of a function is that it gives one particular response to a particular input, not the other way around. You can't just feed in the output ("A+ essay") and try to get the input ("In this paper, I will attempt to prove..."). Functions don't work like that.
i>I mean, shit--it took me DAYS to write my first couple of C programs in CS 101. Does that mean that the professor is shorting my education if he takes 10 seconds to grade it?
No, but I do think the compiler is shorting me, when it decides not to accept my syntax in just a few seconds. Come on compiler, I worked on this program for hours!! At least, pretend to compile before giving up!
Writing a law review article about Wikipedia qualifies under my statement that "About the only reason to cite Wikipedia is because they have a particularly interesting way to say something." Legally, the interesting thing is that they're publishing it with a particular GNU license, not the factual content of a particular article. My point is that the factual content of the article shouldn't be worth citing, since it should all either be common knowledge or itself cited within the Wikipedia article on the topic at hand.
Of course, as I think of it more, it might be worth citing Wikipedia if you were writing a research paper about Slashdot culture, since they do have a lot of information about various trolls and running jokes that pop up here...
A) Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. If you're out of high school, you never need to cite an encyclopedia, because everything in it qualifies as common knowledge. About the only reason to cite Wikipedia is because they have a particularly interesting way to say something.
B) Wikipedia keeps revert logs, meaning that you can cite a particular version of a page. For example, here's what "Mr. Spock" looked like in October of 2002: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mr._Spoc k&oldid=332169
Compare that to Mr. Spock from March: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mr._Spoc k&oldid=11993073
C) As another user pointed out, you should always put the date of access in your internet citations.
Ah yes, because whether computer based proofs is a good thing or not is a right v. left issue. Good call! I was almost afraid to think for myself for a second there, but now that I understand that only right-wing people trust the Economist, I can spout a party line much more efficiently.
For crying fuck's sake man, I consider myself left of center, but it's this kind of "us versus them" mentality that makes me sick of the whole political system. You know, not every issue can be decided by checking party affiliation! Sometimes you have to puzzle it out yourself. If that's too much for me to ask, you can have your Michael Moores and Rush Limbaughs to yourself and count me the hell out!
There is a simple formula for calculating pi, and a number of equivalent formulas that are less simple but easier to calculate. As to the "real world" use of these formulas: a) space is curved 2) nothing is smaller than a planc space iii) it's hard to be sure that you're actually arranging things circularly, without a reference. So, no, no one checks pi against reality, since we've long since surpassed the level where it has bearing on physical engineering. We do have mathematical proofs though, that make it clear that in a Euclidean geometry, our way of calculating pi is good.
(For the record, the easy but inefficient formula is 4 * {1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11...}.)
Man, I was just about to release my new version of tail written in.NET with drag and drop support, 3D graphics acceleration, drop shadows, and a wicked transparent ripple effect, but after that crack, maybe I'll just keep it to myself instead. All I'm saying is, you haven't seen the end of a file until you've seen it using a high power severside web processing app with XML-SOAP support and client side XAML graphics.
My bad yo. But it has been a year since I read it. I did read the NYTimes article today (before the slashdot write up, actually). But they can't even write the word nigger anyway, so their version of the title didn't stick in my brain.
I read "Kneel Nigger," back when Slashdot covered it last year. I thought it was OK, but not very well written. I like the theory of New Gaming Journalism, but I think its writers need to spend a little more time polishing their craft before its ready for prime time.
Gaming is definitely different from other medias. Its not like a book or a movie that remains the same for everyone. It's more like architecture, where everyone is interacting with the same structure, but in different ways and at their own pace.
It would be nice if there were more to gaming journalism than the old: Graphics X/10 Story Y/10 Gaming Z/10 Overall ([X+Y+Z]/3)/10. That style is definitely limited in what it can relate.
Still, a first person narrative is also limited in how much it can relate. Or do you wish all the stories about the death of the pope read, "I looked down at my computer screen. 'The pope is dead.' I thought back to all the other times I had reported about the pope over the years, but I knew today would be different. Today, I would be reporting his death.":p
I think the real need is for gaming journalists to find a way to do more than just tell us about the story and the graphics. What we most want to know about is how the game plays, and play is a much more complex thing to describe than just the story and graphics. Lots of luck to anyone who wants to try.
Then dynamically compress that into a zip to save space, then convert the zip file's binary to XML to get more extensible goodness out of it. Hopefully, these steps oughta slow Windows 64 down by a good 75%.
So, what you're saying is, it could work, if Sony releases an entirely new system of hardware? So, people payed $250 for the value pack version of the PSP why exactly?
As he said,/. strips the # signs from urls. Hence the need to obfuscate. In fact, this is the first time I've ever seen a non-shock site purpose for tinyurl.com. I'm pretty sure it's going to be the last time too.
We live in an age of social anomie. It's no wonder that people will do whatever is necessary to gain some recognition from the world. With shared values and public authority crumbling, people are increasingly isolated from those around them. Where once everyone in the village had a shared set of priorities, based on their shared social status, today, we are too fragmented to be able to really connect to people-- even people close to us.
There is a positive side to all this though. Though we're all so isolated from our immediate neighbors, technology allows us to form virtual communities with those who have common interests. Look at open source software or Wikipedia-- most contributors are drawn in at first by the product, but eventually become members of a community. Firefox is a fine browser, but without colorful personalities behind it like Blake and Hyatt, it would never have taken off so quickly. People identify with the leaders, feel like they have a common bond, and interact that way. Even really small and silly niches, like Mac product rumors, can spawn a community.
You have to be aware of some of this yourself though. Why post on slashdot at all, if not for the vague feeling that you're connecting with other human beings? We all long for connections, and being denied by our physical community, build virtual ones instead.
Hillary has her causation exactly backwards. Games like GTA don't cause people to want to see murder and mayhem; people wanting to see murder and mayhem causes games like GTA to be popular. These games exist because there's a demand to see them, not the other way around. The other day, Gladiator was on TV, and made me think about how we all say the Romans were cruel, because they made people fight to the death in the Colosseum for their amusement. Nowadays, of course, just watch people who are pretending to fight to the death in the Colosseum for our amusement. It all works out to the same thing-- people want to see violence because it's exciting, and they'll seek it out where they can find it. We should just be glad that in our modern world it's no longer necessary to actually kill people to satisfy the crowd's natural lust for blood.
So, do violent video games cause violence? There's no need to commission fancy studies, just look at the real world statistics: violent video games have only been around since the 90's. Crime has been on a steady decline since the 90's. Crime was much higher in the 80's.
You can batch convert files to MP3 in iTunes. Just temporarily change your preferences to import into MP3 instead of ACC, then highlight the files you want converted and go to the advanced menu. There should be an option there to convert your files. Just whip up some 32 mb playlists, put them on the PSP, then erase the mp3 from your computer, and you should be good to go.
I own Polarium. It's ok, not great. I did all the puzzles, but then I was left with just the challenge mode, and I'm not very good at that. It's race against the clock, which ends up being more of a race against your inaccuracy with a stylus. Oh well.
I'm living in Japan though, and I think someone, somewhere in Nintendo HQ decided this is the month to alleviate the no games problem (at least domestically). You mentioned Meteos, which shipped to raves, but there's also a couple short but good games that just came out, like Yoshi's Touch and Go and Pac-Pix. If you want a Bejeweled clone, Zookeeper's been out for a while.
Touch Kirby's Magic Wand just dropped and based on reviews, it's the first original, full length game for the DS. The concept sounds pretty solid-- tap Kirby to make him charge, draw rainbow tracks to direct him on the screen, tap enemies to stun them before you kill them. It's definitely in my mental shopping cart.
Coming soon is Electroplankton, a crazy art-music project which I absolutely must buy based on the Game Developers' Conference demo, and Nintendogs, a DS tamagotchi with which to keep one's girlfriend or niece busy.
With software for the DS finally in stores or there soon, my problem has become which ones to get and when. My current plan is to get Pac-pix tomorrow then Electroplankton when it comes out, then Kirby, then possibly Yoshi. Who knows, I may even try Nintendogs after that.
It may sound strange for me to start with Pac-pix, but I've already enjoyed doing the demos in store and something about it really appeals to me. Yoshi got good reviews, but I wonder if it isn't just too short for me. Pac-pix should be short enough for me to beat it but long enough to be interesting, making it a good reintroduction to a system I largely put down after beating Mario 64 twice.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two ways to run these robots, either by remote control or automatically. If you run them by remote, then all the enemy has to do is to hack your control signal and control your robot themselves. If the DRM/anti-DRM skirmishes have taught us anything it's that all signals can be hacked if there's enough will on the part of the hacker. If they run the robots automatically, then they're asking for an even bigger disaster, since robots today have enough trouble telling a soccer ball apart from a field. There's basically no way they'd be able to distinguish a friend from a foe. Even if you made your uniforms easily recognizable, the enemy could just start wearing those uniforms too and walk on by. So, if you then give up and put the robot into "shoot anything that moves" mode, you've basically reinvented the landmine, only now it's standing up in the middle of the field where anyone can see it with binoculars, and easily call for an artillery hit before they walk through the area.
Dumb idea.
Doctors basically don't type anything. They dictate things and have transcriptions type things up for them. Meanwhile, if the testing is done by a "central testing company" then you have the exact same problem that you complained about in the first post-- you don't know who has your records!! Even if the company is based in America, that doesn't mean anything, since America has about as many crooks as any other country. More than its share, in fact.
The point is, in this case, the system worked, and the crooks were caught. In fact, it probably would have been harder to catch the crooks if they were in America, since it wouldn't have been flagged by the bank as a strange charge. Any time you're dealing with people you don't know, you have to have trust that they're not psychopaths who want to hurt you for no reason. Every time you buy a burger at McDonalds, you're trusting that the cashier won't just spaz out and run off with your $4.57. Every time you walk down the street, you're trusting that the person on the other side of the sidewalk isn't a serial killer with a gun just waiting to mow you down. We trust people we don't know, literally with our lives, everyday. In most cases that trust is warranted. In the occasional cases where the trust is betrayed, there should be a system in place to rectify those breaches of trust. And in this case, there was such a system, and it worked. You can complain about outsourcing all you want, but this case shows that while there is some danger of identity theft from outsourced firms, the threat isn't really so bad, since the criminals draw a bright line to themselves by virtue of their location.
Yeah, good call. I'd much rather have a secretary who goes to the same church as my family typing up the results of an STD test report than some woman in India.
Parent got the link to Citibank wrong! Here is the correct link:
http://www.citibank.com/
(Just kidding. Don't click that link. It's a joke.)
"Reversing the function?"
I know you think that sounds clever, but it hurts my head just to think of how wrong that is. Or do you think you can create the perfect SPAM by "reversing the function" of your mail program's Bayesian filter? The mathematical definition of a function is that it gives one particular response to a particular input, not the other way around. You can't just feed in the output ("A+ essay") and try to get the input ("In this paper, I will attempt to prove..."). Functions don't work like that.
No, but I do think the compiler is shorting me, when it decides not to accept my syntax in just a few seconds. Come on compiler, I worked on this program for hours!! At least, pretend to compile before giving up!
Writing a law review article about Wikipedia qualifies under my statement that "About the only reason to cite Wikipedia is because they have a particularly interesting way to say something." Legally, the interesting thing is that they're publishing it with a particular GNU license, not the factual content of a particular article. My point is that the factual content of the article shouldn't be worth citing, since it should all either be common knowledge or itself cited within the Wikipedia article on the topic at hand.
Of course, as I think of it more, it might be worth citing Wikipedia if you were writing a research paper about Slashdot culture, since they do have a lot of information about various trolls and running jokes that pop up here...
A) Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. If you're out of high school, you never need to cite an encyclopedia, because everything in it qualifies as common knowledge. About the only reason to cite Wikipedia is because they have a particularly interesting way to say something.
c k&oldid=332169
c k&oldid=11993073
B) Wikipedia keeps revert logs, meaning that you can cite a particular version of a page. For example, here's what "Mr. Spock" looked like in October of 2002: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mr._Spo
Compare that to Mr. Spock from March: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mr._Spo
C) As another user pointed out, you should always put the date of access in your internet citations.
Ah yes, because whether computer based proofs is a good thing or not is a right v. left issue. Good call! I was almost afraid to think for myself for a second there, but now that I understand that only right-wing people trust the Economist, I can spout a party line much more efficiently.
For crying fuck's sake man, I consider myself left of center, but it's this kind of "us versus them" mentality that makes me sick of the whole political system. You know, not every issue can be decided by checking party affiliation! Sometimes you have to puzzle it out yourself. If that's too much for me to ask, you can have your Michael Moores and Rush Limbaughs to yourself and count me the hell out!
Wouldn't that be a mix of OS 10.4 Tiger and OS 10.? Lion?
In any case, gimme some of your tots!
There is a simple formula for calculating pi, and a number of equivalent formulas that are less simple but easier to calculate. As to the "real world" use of these formulas: a) space is curved 2) nothing is smaller than a planc space iii) it's hard to be sure that you're actually arranging things circularly, without a reference. So, no, no one checks pi against reality, since we've long since surpassed the level where it has bearing on physical engineering. We do have mathematical proofs though, that make it clear that in a Euclidean geometry, our way of calculating pi is good.
...}.)
(For the record, the easy but inefficient formula is 4 * {1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 - 1/11
Man, I was just about to release my new version of tail written in .NET with drag and drop support, 3D graphics acceleration, drop shadows, and a wicked transparent ripple effect, but after that crack, maybe I'll just keep it to myself instead. All I'm saying is, you haven't seen the end of a file until you've seen it using a high power severside web processing app with XML-SOAP support and client side XAML graphics.
My bad yo. But it has been a year since I read it. I did read the NYTimes article today (before the slashdot write up, actually). But they can't even write the word nigger anyway, so their version of the title didn't stick in my brain.
I read "Kneel Nigger," back when Slashdot covered it last year. I thought it was OK, but not very well written. I like the theory of New Gaming Journalism, but I think its writers need to spend a little more time polishing their craft before its ready for prime time.
:p
Gaming is definitely different from other medias. Its not like a book or a movie that remains the same for everyone. It's more like architecture, where everyone is interacting with the same structure, but in different ways and at their own pace.
It would be nice if there were more to gaming journalism than the old: Graphics X/10 Story Y/10 Gaming Z/10 Overall ([X+Y+Z]/3)/10. That style is definitely limited in what it can relate.
Still, a first person narrative is also limited in how much it can relate. Or do you wish all the stories about the death of the pope read, "I looked down at my computer screen. 'The pope is dead.' I thought back to all the other times I had reported about the pope over the years, but I knew today would be different. Today, I would be reporting his death."
I think the real need is for gaming journalists to find a way to do more than just tell us about the story and the graphics. What we most want to know about is how the game plays, and play is a much more complex thing to describe than just the story and graphics. Lots of luck to anyone who wants to try.
I think the future on this front lies in XML. All MS has to do is make a simple DTD for binary:
/> />
<key value='data'>
<bit value='1'
</key>
<key value='data'>
<bit value='0'
</key>
Then dynamically compress that into a zip to save space, then convert the zip file's binary to XML to get more extensible goodness out of it. Hopefully, these steps oughta slow Windows 64 down by a good 75%.
So, what you're saying is, it could work, if Sony releases an entirely new system of hardware? So, people payed $250 for the value pack version of the PSP why exactly?
I beat the internet.
The last guy was hard.
Why respond to a comment without reading it?
/. strips the # signs from urls. Hence the need to obfuscate. In fact, this is the first time I've ever seen a non-shock site purpose for tinyurl.com. I'm pretty sure it's going to be the last time too.
As he said,
I didn't mean for it to seem like a cheap shot. I'm pretty big into Apple rumors; that's why I brought it up.
We live in an age of social anomie. It's no wonder that people will do whatever is necessary to gain some recognition from the world. With shared values and public authority crumbling, people are increasingly isolated from those around them. Where once everyone in the village had a shared set of priorities, based on their shared social status, today, we are too fragmented to be able to really connect to people-- even people close to us.
There is a positive side to all this though. Though we're all so isolated from our immediate neighbors, technology allows us to form virtual communities with those who have common interests. Look at open source software or Wikipedia-- most contributors are drawn in at first by the product, but eventually become members of a community. Firefox is a fine browser, but without colorful personalities behind it like Blake and Hyatt, it would never have taken off so quickly. People identify with the leaders, feel like they have a common bond, and interact that way. Even really small and silly niches, like Mac product rumors, can spawn a community.
You have to be aware of some of this yourself though. Why post on slashdot at all, if not for the vague feeling that you're connecting with other human beings? We all long for connections, and being denied by our physical community, build virtual ones instead.
It's as simple as that.
Hillary has her causation exactly backwards. Games like GTA don't cause people to want to see murder and mayhem; people wanting to see murder and mayhem causes games like GTA to be popular. These games exist because there's a demand to see them, not the other way around. The other day, Gladiator was on TV, and made me think about how we all say the Romans were cruel, because they made people fight to the death in the Colosseum for their amusement. Nowadays, of course, just watch people who are pretending to fight to the death in the Colosseum for our amusement. It all works out to the same thing-- people want to see violence because it's exciting, and they'll seek it out where they can find it. We should just be glad that in our modern world it's no longer necessary to actually kill people to satisfy the crowd's natural lust for blood.
So, do violent video games cause violence? There's no need to commission fancy studies, just look at the real world statistics: violent video games have only been around since the 90's. Crime has been on a steady decline since the 90's. Crime was much higher in the 80's.
Should we blame Pac-man?
No, because Safari doesn't let webpages open AppleScripts, it just lets AppleScripts open webpages. Duh.
You can batch convert files to MP3 in iTunes. Just temporarily change your preferences to import into MP3 instead of ACC, then highlight the files you want converted and go to the advanced menu. There should be an option there to convert your files. Just whip up some 32 mb playlists, put them on the PSP, then erase the mp3 from your computer, and you should be good to go.
I own Polarium. It's ok, not great. I did all the puzzles, but then I was left with just the challenge mode, and I'm not very good at that. It's race against the clock, which ends up being more of a race against your inaccuracy with a stylus. Oh well.
I'm living in Japan though, and I think someone, somewhere in Nintendo HQ decided this is the month to alleviate the no games problem (at least domestically). You mentioned Meteos, which shipped to raves, but there's also a couple short but good games that just came out, like Yoshi's Touch and Go and Pac-Pix. If you want a Bejeweled clone, Zookeeper's been out for a while.
Touch Kirby's Magic Wand just dropped and based on reviews, it's the first original, full length game for the DS. The concept sounds pretty solid-- tap Kirby to make him charge, draw rainbow tracks to direct him on the screen, tap enemies to stun them before you kill them. It's definitely in my mental shopping cart.
Coming soon is Electroplankton, a crazy art-music project which I absolutely must buy based on the Game Developers' Conference demo, and Nintendogs, a DS tamagotchi with which to keep one's girlfriend or niece busy.
With software for the DS finally in stores or there soon, my problem has become which ones to get and when. My current plan is to get Pac-pix tomorrow then Electroplankton when it comes out, then Kirby, then possibly Yoshi. Who knows, I may even try Nintendogs after that.
It may sound strange for me to start with Pac-pix, but I've already enjoyed doing the demos in store and something about it really appeals to me. Yoshi got good reviews, but I wonder if it isn't just too short for me. Pac-pix should be short enough for me to beat it but long enough to be interesting, making it a good reintroduction to a system I largely put down after beating Mario 64 twice.
What will Windows 2015 look like?
(Wait for it...)
Mac OS 2010, duh!