According to the article it's because they made subtle variations to the pieces, including changing the tempo by less than 1% (so they wouldn't sync up), changing the balance (so the center was different), and changing the equalizer (so it sounded like a different piano).
These are people playing the same music, there are only so many things you can do to detect fakes, and I also doubt that anyone was looking for them before now. It'd be like detecting a brightness, contrast, color adjusted, and cropped version of a photo from thousands of photos against the same scene when you had no expectation that there even was a dupe.
What I did do in the past is things like read a book, or get a pass to go to the art studios, or get a pass to go to the TV studio, or get a pass to go to the IT rooms, and in some way better myself. There's other things than the Internet, and I think you can be productive even without access to MySpace.
Sorry, I meant to discuss high school / junior high students, not college kids. In college, you should get the freedom to make mistakes with how you use your time, including spending all of it gaming or surfing MySpace. This is the time of life where people are established to learn personal responsibility.
My guess is that the filters they have in place at college are meant to conserve bandwidth. Right after I started university, they established dorm room connectivity, and brought a whopping (for the time) three T1's in. The first year it was awesome. The second year, it was usable. The third year students were turning to dialup because it was substantially faster.
I don't think it's within a university's capacity to really bring in enough bandwidth to satisfy total student desire for it. No matter how much bandwidth you give them, they'll use it up and want more. I think it's reasonable for schools to limit usage in order to keep the network as a whole usable. Some schools do this by giving each student a bandwidth allowance. Some schools do this by restricting certain high-bandwidth non-educational activities. Maybe your school's system isn't perfect, but I doubt they seriously think they'll get their jollies by keeping you from gaming. Most schools are all about freedoms, and unless your school is different, they probably had a significant discussion on alternatives to blocking before they implemented it.
You're supposing that the things that these schools are trying to block access to are not learning.
I trust the school to make this decision more than I trust the kids. At work, if a site is blocked by our proxy which is legitimate, we can request that it be unblocked, and typically this is done within the same day, often within an hour of the request (unless its borderline, then it is escalated). I'm presuming that if a student contacted the administration with a compelling reason to unblock a site, that it would be (certainly if this is not the case, it should be), but I still trust the school to consistently make better decisions on this front.
I wouldn't do it for two reasons. First, if the school moderately has their act together, they'll be watching their outbound traffic, see a big spike to the proxy site, and you'll end up on the block list inside of a week anyway (which might be less time than it takes you to get everything set up).
Second, I believe that when school kids are on school property using school equipment, the school should get to decide what they're allowed to do. My employer sure has this right, and it's also certainly a firing offense for me to bypass it. I salute schools that don't let kids play on the Internet when they're at school and should instead be learning. Sorry, school time is time that students should be using for, I dunno, learning. MySpace and MSN don't qualify, if this is really what they're looking to get to. So I wouldn't do it on principle (though of course realizing the kids will probably manage to find it somewhere else anyway).
Many people complain about schools, but things which I see as reasonable attempts to keep the kids on target are hollared at as censorship or some other poorly-fitting term which is basically the equivalent of saying, "We think kids should be allowed to do whatever they want, but we also think you should make them learn material they don't want to at the same time."
I don't think he was talking about bleeding edge graphics, but rather about the GAME engine. Quest system, stats system, combat mechanics, spell/resist mechanics, talent specializations, interface customization system, etc. The flexibility of their GAME engine means they can easily create compelling content.
Visually what has been compelling to me about WoW was not the special effects, but rather the artistry. They have beautiful, vibrant, imaginative, and colorful landscapes, buildings, characters, monsters, and spells. These things are not very well aided by the graphic engine (which generally keeps it to the basics), but are amazing nonetheless. As a result, the hardware needed to play it is less than other games which are less visually interesting, where they get hung up on bump maps and dynamic shadows, and other things which are nice only in a peripheral way, and don't really contribute that much to the enjoyability of the game itself. Kinda like a typical focused-primarily-on-cgi movie, which is beautiful but boring.
That's funny, I connected my DVI cable to my HD TV, and it worked fine. Then I tried again with a VGA ("analog" in the new speak) cable, and it too worked fine. My receiver even has a VGA cable so it can switch with everything else.
I opt instead to run my games at my native resolution of 2650x1600 (connected to a PC). Kinda kicks HDTV's butt as far as gaming goes.
I'm in need of game-playing partner, myself. Where can I buy this "wife"?
I found mine at this new chain of stores called "College." They have them on display all over the place, but unfortunately they haven't quite gotten compatibility issues straightened out, so you may have to window shop for a while, and test drive a few.
Interestingly, I'd looked at the very same model (same serial number too if you can believe that) that I ultimately ended up with back in high school; I guess she or I got a software upgrade since then since our systems were more compatible this time around.
How about the endless mac disk loop, where two different programs wanted two different disks at the same time. No matter which one you put in the machine immediately ejected it and asked for the other. The only solution I knew at the time was a hard reboot. As I recall, the mac I had didn't have a reset button, so it was down to toggling power.
It's my understanding that this solution would only work for now. The HDCP-Required flag (which tells devices to downsample if the HDCP chain is broken) is not set on any video sources as of yet. They will start setting it in a few more years when setting it won't destroy their market penetration. At that time, many people will start seeing new games and new movies in a downsampled resolution, but correcting it then will be a matter of completing the HDCP chain (probably by plugging a HDMI cable directly from the source to the destination). At this point people will already be invested in their hardware, and it will be less expensive to accommodate the restrictions than it is to switch to a system without restrictions.
Your analogies are incomplete. Let me fix them for you:
Why patch the roof on your garage when the whole thing leaks?
Why buy a new shoe when your shirt will be out of fashion in a few years?
I could go on. The thing is that if you proposed something that eliminated all spam for 5 years, and in 5 years, you do the same thing again and eliminate all spam for the next 5 years, then I'd be behind it. Except what is being proposed will block some spam today and no spam in 5 years. However it'll complicate the infrastructure as mail admins won't want their outbound messages being delayed, nor will they want their mail system cluttered up with all these delayed mails so will configure their mail servers to automatically delivery to the 2nd priority MX record on the first attempt for any server that rejects mail off the first.
The solution being proposed isn't a fix, its a kludge that fails to address the complete problem and does so as a one-time temporary (your other analogies are periodic maintenance that completely address the problem but need readdressing periodically, which I don't disagree with), while introducing complexity that will outlive the usefulness of the original kludge. Any "solution" that proposes deviations from the SMTP RFC, such as this one, cannot be given serious consideration for this reason.
Same here, unless this becomes widely popular few spammers will adopt it. Thus there's a chance for this to work (hopefully, unlike doubleverify this is not patented)
This is probably why the reason the submitter of the form posted this:
YASIGFINFE (Yet Another Spam Idea Good For Individuals, Not For Everyone)
This is actually an extension to the checkbox for failing to account for the external arms race. The arms race idea (which is really anyone who relies on non-standard behavior of spammers) will only work on a small scale and as soon as it becomes widespread it will be defeated. Eventually the payload to these zombie spam bots will include a fully functional rfc-compliant mail server ala sendmail. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if there are some spam bots out tehre that *have* a copy of sendmail or exim or other free public mail server software running on them.
In the end an arms race in the spam war is only a temporary workaround, and not a solution. Workarounds don't merit much attention.
Actually, as long as it is correctly filled in, I find that form consistently insightful.
The reason is that a lot of people preach some new approach to fighting spam, and in reality there are a finite set of reasons which defeat every single one of these ideas to date. When someone comes up with an approach that passes this form, then we'll have something to talk about. If it can't pass this form, then further discussion isn't really merited since it's not even novel enough to get past the standard set of objections that have so far been raised against and successfully predicted the downfall of every failed anti-spam solution to date.
Ideas that can't pass the form are not worth more effort to respond to than putting an X at the appropriate spots on the form.
EQ tried this briefly on their test server maybe 5 years ago. On the character selection screen you were given a "Monster" option. It didn't work, and they took the option off there.
It's got several problems. None of them are insurmountable, but I would be surprised if any game company could successfully overcome all of them without several significant attempts.
1) Players will not fill the role they were designed for. Or more accurately they will deliberately choose to disengage from their intended role since that's tedious. You'll end up with all the monsters from a given level grouping up together for a single assault, or camping and taking pot shots. In EQ they had monsters from the level 10 area wander down to the level 1 area and grief the level 1's until someone bigger came along and wiped them out (only to start the cycle again 10 minutes later). You can design a game which prevents the monster from straying too far from their intended purpose, but then how fun is that?
2) Monster balance and player balance are very different things. Monsters are buffed in certain ways to make up for their lack of real AI. These same buffs are unbalanced when those abilities can be used intelligently. These different levels of buffing will make it challenging to make player controlled monsters balanced for all players. Also as a monster your intended role ultimately is to be defeated by the player. Why do you want to go into a situation you know is likely to defeat you as your primary purpose?
3) What do you do as a monster until the player arrives? Maybe you're switching around a lot between monsters so you are always near the player, but what if the player skips you (or you don't find the player)?
4) Especially in games that are approached as single player games, you really need to have a nice challenge gradient. It needs to be doable and the player needs to succeed more than they fail, but not have success be overly easy. Otherwise the player will get bored or frustrated.
5) If you successfully overcome all of these obstacles, how are you really any different from any other pvp game that has classes? Zomg my rogue can take out a priest before they even knew what hit them, or my hunter can two-shot a mage. What is the real distinction here other than one player vs many (and how do you make the many aspect interesting enough that it's not just a standard pve game all around, and how do you keep it from being so interesting that noone wants to be the single player?)
The only thing that's different about this from MMO PVP is that one side is the good guy (maybe) and the other side is evil (maybe).
Google for Flex Examples. Flex and ActionScript 3 aren't quite synonymous as the grandparent suggested. Flex is explicitly designed around creating desktop style applications which are portable to be usable from the web, CD or download, and which run on every major platform including Linux. They create a very positive user experience and are especially good for data mining applications, daily dashboards, and other reporting features.
That's what we're saying, and going one step further in suggesting where they can go to get an answer to that question. Once burned twice shy. Further, we're not "being a dick;" we don't actually owe a candidate anything. This statement is not made with the malice that you seemed to pick up in it, it's made with a sense of, "Here is the best advice we're able to give you." Which is to say we can't answer your question, here is someone who can get as close as possible.
Maybe you're better equipped to come up with a polite, generic, and legally safe response than our legal team, but my job depends on following the advice from our legal team, so no offense, but I'll follow their advice.
Reading over it again, I honestly can't see how you think that it's impolite at all. Maybe if you imagine us pointing and laughing while we say it. But we don't. Unless the candidate has been dishonest with us (which has also happened, actually way more than I would have expected), we wish them no malice and genuinely wish that there was more that we could do to help them find a position which matches.
One time we had a candidate that looked good on paper, but when we brought him in to meet with the team, it was oil and water. Very badly. This guy was absolutely the wrong personality for the rest of the team even though he brought the technical goods.
He emailed us and asked why he hadn't gotten the position. We made the mistake of politely explaining what our issues with him were. He used that explanation to kick off some sort of lawsuit against our company.
I actually have no idea how it ultimately turned out. HR told us never to do that again, legal took charge of the matters with every expectation to fight this tooth and nail (especially to avoid a precedent against our company). I presume it's either still outstanding, he lost, or he gave up, because I think I would have heard if it had gone against us.
If someone asks us how they did in an interview now (and we're not planning on offering them a job), it's, "Well, we have a lot of candidates to examine, we'll contact you if we're interested in a second interview or need more information. If you have questions about your performance in the interview, we suggest you contact a career counselor who is better equipped and has the appropriate training to answer questions like that."
And just like free speech grants these guys the right to make the game, free speech grants the festival organizers the right to reject the game from their festival. They're not saying the game can't be made, they're just saying that the find the subject matter so distasteful that they're not willing to support it (or at least of the financial supporters of the festival as to pressure the festival organizers in this way), even in such an open festival as this one.
Everyone has a line where they find something so distasteful that they won't endorse it even far enough to let someone else show it at an event sponsored by the former. A lot of art is exploring exactly where this line exists, and pushing it when it's discovered. If it was snuff films of people raping, torturing, and killing children (even if it was special effects but especially if not), I doubt many people would have much objection to the rejection of it. Of course this game is nowhere near that drastic, that example is merely used to demonstrate that such a line exists.
It turns out that the creators of this game managed to find a spot just on the far side of the line such that enough supporters of the festival were outraged to get it banned, but not so far as to make that the overwhelming majority opinion. I'd say that these guys probably accomplished exactly what they were after, at least in the sense of line probing (which is not to say that this was their only motivation, though I strongly suspect it's at least their primary one).
Yes, the Adblock Plus extension to Firefox does the job nicely, and for a lot more companies than just doubleclick. You'll want to change your hosts file back since it'll become redundant, and it's better than having a cluttered up core system file.
Motorized weights to compensate for the wobble should work out well. Think about the little weights they put on car tires to balance them. It would be the same thing but they'd be mobile and a computer would control their placement.
The space station is not large enough to create artificial gravity via centripital force without requiring such a high spin rate that occupants would get dizzy. Also the only axis that makes sense for rotation with the ISS is length wise, and that means that if you stood perpendicular to the axis (which is necessary), your head would be experiencing upward gravity, and your feet would be experiencing downward gravity, while your middle was 0G.
Short answer: because it wasn't designed for this =)
The costs to banks for online and automated services are development costs (large one-time cost plus moderate maintenance), hardware costs (large one-time cost plus minor maintenance), and sys admin costs (large maintenance cost). The break even point for banks is probably several years in the future if everything works perfectly.
Except that everything does not work perfectly, customers make mistakes so they call the bank's phone support. It takes substantially longer to track down such problems than it would have taken if a teller had done it (right) in the first place. Because the customer is embarrassed they may lie about what happened, increasing the investigative time even further.
Further, the bank is now adopting additional liability in the form of substantially easier fraud against their customers' accounts. So the bank will spend more money trying to educate customers on how to avoid social engineering attacks, and the bank will accept the liability when customers' accounts actually are compromised (which is a given). FDIC insurance doesn't cover fraud.
All in all I'm guessing that these features do actually cost the bank more in the long run.
Couldn't you account for the melting in the design of your colony? Design it to float? Maybe even design it to have large braces which extend through the molten area surrounding it and into the solid ice beyond for stability. If there were no currents in the molten water around your colony, this could even act as its own form of insulation. Put a cover over it to keep any interference from the atmosphere, and even add heat pump over your lake to help maintain it at the right temperature (reclaiming excess heat from the lake).
That's kinda what I was thinking. Put in meters every X interval which talk to the next meter down the line (run a small communications wire right inside the conduit, maybe construct conduits that have these built in). If the gas depletion between them changes substantially over a short interval, or if communication is lost with the next valve down the line, have it shut off automatically and notify the central authority (or the CA notices when one of the lines stops taking gas). The valves would default off if power was lost.
With a simple tolerance configuration option, you can even allow for certain clients which periodically consume tremendous amounts of fuel and at other times consume none (some factories such as concrete factories or places with incinerators will do a heavy burn once in a while and be relatively idle otherwise). Or you could include their endpoint in the communications chain.
No matter what disaster befalls this system (natural or otherwise), it should mitigate the ongoing damage.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the article it's because they made subtle variations to the pieces, including changing the tempo by less than 1% (so they wouldn't sync up), changing the balance (so the center was different), and changing the equalizer (so it sounded like a different piano).
These are people playing the same music, there are only so many things you can do to detect fakes, and I also doubt that anyone was looking for them before now. It'd be like detecting a brightness, contrast, color adjusted, and cropped version of a photo from thousands of photos against the same scene when you had no expectation that there even was a dupe.
What I did do in the past is things like read a book, or get a pass to go to the art studios, or get a pass to go to the TV studio, or get a pass to go to the IT rooms, and in some way better myself. There's other things than the Internet, and I think you can be productive even without access to MySpace.
Sorry, I meant to discuss high school / junior high students, not college kids. In college, you should get the freedom to make mistakes with how you use your time, including spending all of it gaming or surfing MySpace. This is the time of life where people are established to learn personal responsibility.
My guess is that the filters they have in place at college are meant to conserve bandwidth. Right after I started university, they established dorm room connectivity, and brought a whopping (for the time) three T1's in. The first year it was awesome. The second year, it was usable. The third year students were turning to dialup because it was substantially faster.
I don't think it's within a university's capacity to really bring in enough bandwidth to satisfy total student desire for it. No matter how much bandwidth you give them, they'll use it up and want more. I think it's reasonable for schools to limit usage in order to keep the network as a whole usable. Some schools do this by giving each student a bandwidth allowance. Some schools do this by restricting certain high-bandwidth non-educational activities. Maybe your school's system isn't perfect, but I doubt they seriously think they'll get their jollies by keeping you from gaming. Most schools are all about freedoms, and unless your school is different, they probably had a significant discussion on alternatives to blocking before they implemented it.
I wouldn't do it for two reasons. First, if the school moderately has their act together, they'll be watching their outbound traffic, see a big spike to the proxy site, and you'll end up on the block list inside of a week anyway (which might be less time than it takes you to get everything set up).
Second, I believe that when school kids are on school property using school equipment, the school should get to decide what they're allowed to do. My employer sure has this right, and it's also certainly a firing offense for me to bypass it. I salute schools that don't let kids play on the Internet when they're at school and should instead be learning. Sorry, school time is time that students should be using for, I dunno, learning. MySpace and MSN don't qualify, if this is really what they're looking to get to. So I wouldn't do it on principle (though of course realizing the kids will probably manage to find it somewhere else anyway).
Many people complain about schools, but things which I see as reasonable attempts to keep the kids on target are hollared at as censorship or some other poorly-fitting term which is basically the equivalent of saying, "We think kids should be allowed to do whatever they want, but we also think you should make them learn material they don't want to at the same time."
I don't think he was talking about bleeding edge graphics, but rather about the GAME engine. Quest system, stats system, combat mechanics, spell/resist mechanics, talent specializations, interface customization system, etc. The flexibility of their GAME engine means they can easily create compelling content.
Visually what has been compelling to me about WoW was not the special effects, but rather the artistry. They have beautiful, vibrant, imaginative, and colorful landscapes, buildings, characters, monsters, and spells. These things are not very well aided by the graphic engine (which generally keeps it to the basics), but are amazing nonetheless. As a result, the hardware needed to play it is less than other games which are less visually interesting, where they get hung up on bump maps and dynamic shadows, and other things which are nice only in a peripheral way, and don't really contribute that much to the enjoyability of the game itself. Kinda like a typical focused-primarily-on-cgi movie, which is beautiful but boring.
That's funny, I connected my DVI cable to my HD TV, and it worked fine. Then I tried again with a VGA ("analog" in the new speak) cable, and it too worked fine. My receiver even has a VGA cable so it can switch with everything else.
I opt instead to run my games at my native resolution of 2650x1600 (connected to a PC). Kinda kicks HDTV's butt as far as gaming goes.
Interestingly, I'd looked at the very same model (same serial number too if you can believe that) that I ultimately ended up with back in high school; I guess she or I got a software upgrade since then since our systems were more compatible this time around.
How about the endless mac disk loop, where two different programs wanted two different disks at the same time. No matter which one you put in the machine immediately ejected it and asked for the other. The only solution I knew at the time was a hard reboot. As I recall, the mac I had didn't have a reset button, so it was down to toggling power.
It's my understanding that this solution would only work for now. The HDCP-Required flag (which tells devices to downsample if the HDCP chain is broken) is not set on any video sources as of yet. They will start setting it in a few more years when setting it won't destroy their market penetration. At that time, many people will start seeing new games and new movies in a downsampled resolution, but correcting it then will be a matter of completing the HDCP chain (probably by plugging a HDMI cable directly from the source to the destination). At this point people will already be invested in their hardware, and it will be less expensive to accommodate the restrictions than it is to switch to a system without restrictions.
Your analogies are incomplete. Let me fix them for you:
Why patch the roof on your garage when the whole thing leaks?
Why buy a new shoe when your shirt will be out of fashion in a few years?
I could go on. The thing is that if you proposed something that eliminated all spam for 5 years, and in 5 years, you do the same thing again and eliminate all spam for the next 5 years, then I'd be behind it. Except what is being proposed will block some spam today and no spam in 5 years. However it'll complicate the infrastructure as mail admins won't want their outbound messages being delayed, nor will they want their mail system cluttered up with all these delayed mails so will configure their mail servers to automatically delivery to the 2nd priority MX record on the first attempt for any server that rejects mail off the first.
The solution being proposed isn't a fix, its a kludge that fails to address the complete problem and does so as a one-time temporary (your other analogies are periodic maintenance that completely address the problem but need readdressing periodically, which I don't disagree with), while introducing complexity that will outlive the usefulness of the original kludge. Any "solution" that proposes deviations from the SMTP RFC, such as this one, cannot be given serious consideration for this reason.
This is probably why the reason the submitter of the form posted this:
This is actually an extension to the checkbox for failing to account for the external arms race. The arms race idea (which is really anyone who relies on non-standard behavior of spammers) will only work on a small scale and as soon as it becomes widespread it will be defeated. Eventually the payload to these zombie spam bots will include a fully functional rfc-compliant mail server ala sendmail. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if there are some spam bots out tehre that *have* a copy of sendmail or exim or other free public mail server software running on them.
In the end an arms race in the spam war is only a temporary workaround, and not a solution. Workarounds don't merit much attention.
Actually, as long as it is correctly filled in, I find that form consistently insightful.
The reason is that a lot of people preach some new approach to fighting spam, and in reality there are a finite set of reasons which defeat every single one of these ideas to date. When someone comes up with an approach that passes this form, then we'll have something to talk about. If it can't pass this form, then further discussion isn't really merited since it's not even novel enough to get past the standard set of objections that have so far been raised against and successfully predicted the downfall of every failed anti-spam solution to date.
Ideas that can't pass the form are not worth more effort to respond to than putting an X at the appropriate spots on the form.
EQ tried this briefly on their test server maybe 5 years ago. On the character selection screen you were given a "Monster" option. It didn't work, and they took the option off there.
It's got several problems. None of them are insurmountable, but I would be surprised if any game company could successfully overcome all of them without several significant attempts.
1) Players will not fill the role they were designed for. Or more accurately they will deliberately choose to disengage from their intended role since that's tedious. You'll end up with all the monsters from a given level grouping up together for a single assault, or camping and taking pot shots. In EQ they had monsters from the level 10 area wander down to the level 1 area and grief the level 1's until someone bigger came along and wiped them out (only to start the cycle again 10 minutes later). You can design a game which prevents the monster from straying too far from their intended purpose, but then how fun is that?
2) Monster balance and player balance are very different things. Monsters are buffed in certain ways to make up for their lack of real AI. These same buffs are unbalanced when those abilities can be used intelligently. These different levels of buffing will make it challenging to make player controlled monsters balanced for all players. Also as a monster your intended role ultimately is to be defeated by the player. Why do you want to go into a situation you know is likely to defeat you as your primary purpose?
3) What do you do as a monster until the player arrives? Maybe you're switching around a lot between monsters so you are always near the player, but what if the player skips you (or you don't find the player)?
4) Especially in games that are approached as single player games, you really need to have a nice challenge gradient. It needs to be doable and the player needs to succeed more than they fail, but not have success be overly easy. Otherwise the player will get bored or frustrated.
5) If you successfully overcome all of these obstacles, how are you really any different from any other pvp game that has classes? Zomg my rogue can take out a priest before they even knew what hit them, or my hunter can two-shot a mage. What is the real distinction here other than one player vs many (and how do you make the many aspect interesting enough that it's not just a standard pve game all around, and how do you keep it from being so interesting that noone wants to be the single player?)
The only thing that's different about this from MMO PVP is that one side is the good guy (maybe) and the other side is evil (maybe).
Google for Flex Examples. Flex and ActionScript 3 aren't quite synonymous as the grandparent suggested. Flex is explicitly designed around creating desktop style applications which are portable to be usable from the web, CD or download, and which run on every major platform including Linux. They create a very positive user experience and are especially good for data mining applications, daily dashboards, and other reporting features.
Flex is up to version 2, but here are some 1.5 sample apps.
The answer:
mysqli prepared statements.
That's what we're saying, and going one step further in suggesting where they can go to get an answer to that question. Once burned twice shy. Further, we're not "being a dick;" we don't actually owe a candidate anything. This statement is not made with the malice that you seemed to pick up in it, it's made with a sense of, "Here is the best advice we're able to give you." Which is to say we can't answer your question, here is someone who can get as close as possible.
Maybe you're better equipped to come up with a polite, generic, and legally safe response than our legal team, but my job depends on following the advice from our legal team, so no offense, but I'll follow their advice.
Reading over it again, I honestly can't see how you think that it's impolite at all. Maybe if you imagine us pointing and laughing while we say it. But we don't. Unless the candidate has been dishonest with us (which has also happened, actually way more than I would have expected), we wish them no malice and genuinely wish that there was more that we could do to help them find a position which matches.
One time we had a candidate that looked good on paper, but when we brought him in to meet with the team, it was oil and water. Very badly. This guy was absolutely the wrong personality for the rest of the team even though he brought the technical goods.
He emailed us and asked why he hadn't gotten the position. We made the mistake of politely explaining what our issues with him were. He used that explanation to kick off some sort of lawsuit against our company.
I actually have no idea how it ultimately turned out. HR told us never to do that again, legal took charge of the matters with every expectation to fight this tooth and nail (especially to avoid a precedent against our company). I presume it's either still outstanding, he lost, or he gave up, because I think I would have heard if it had gone against us.
If someone asks us how they did in an interview now (and we're not planning on offering them a job), it's, "Well, we have a lot of candidates to examine, we'll contact you if we're interested in a second interview or need more information. If you have questions about your performance in the interview, we suggest you contact a career counselor who is better equipped and has the appropriate training to answer questions like that."
And just like free speech grants these guys the right to make the game, free speech grants the festival organizers the right to reject the game from their festival. They're not saying the game can't be made, they're just saying that the find the subject matter so distasteful that they're not willing to support it (or at least of the financial supporters of the festival as to pressure the festival organizers in this way), even in such an open festival as this one.
Everyone has a line where they find something so distasteful that they won't endorse it even far enough to let someone else show it at an event sponsored by the former. A lot of art is exploring exactly where this line exists, and pushing it when it's discovered. If it was snuff films of people raping, torturing, and killing children (even if it was special effects but especially if not), I doubt many people would have much objection to the rejection of it. Of course this game is nowhere near that drastic, that example is merely used to demonstrate that such a line exists.
It turns out that the creators of this game managed to find a spot just on the far side of the line such that enough supporters of the festival were outraged to get it banned, but not so far as to make that the overwhelming majority opinion. I'd say that these guys probably accomplished exactly what they were after, at least in the sense of line probing (which is not to say that this was their only motivation, though I strongly suspect it's at least their primary one).
Yes, the Adblock Plus extension to Firefox does the job nicely, and for a lot more companies than just doubleclick. You'll want to change your hosts file back since it'll become redundant, and it's better than having a cluttered up core system file.
Motorized weights to compensate for the wobble should work out well. Think about the little weights they put on car tires to balance them. It would be the same thing but they'd be mobile and a computer would control their placement.
The space station is not large enough to create artificial gravity via centripital force without requiring such a high spin rate that occupants would get dizzy. Also the only axis that makes sense for rotation with the ISS is length wise, and that means that if you stood perpendicular to the axis (which is necessary), your head would be experiencing upward gravity, and your feet would be experiencing downward gravity, while your middle was 0G.
Short answer: because it wasn't designed for this =)
The costs to banks for online and automated services are development costs (large one-time cost plus moderate maintenance), hardware costs (large one-time cost plus minor maintenance), and sys admin costs (large maintenance cost). The break even point for banks is probably several years in the future if everything works perfectly.
Except that everything does not work perfectly, customers make mistakes so they call the bank's phone support. It takes substantially longer to track down such problems than it would have taken if a teller had done it (right) in the first place. Because the customer is embarrassed they may lie about what happened, increasing the investigative time even further.
Further, the bank is now adopting additional liability in the form of substantially easier fraud against their customers' accounts. So the bank will spend more money trying to educate customers on how to avoid social engineering attacks, and the bank will accept the liability when customers' accounts actually are compromised (which is a given). FDIC insurance doesn't cover fraud.
All in all I'm guessing that these features do actually cost the bank more in the long run.
Couldn't you account for the melting in the design of your colony? Design it to float? Maybe even design it to have large braces which extend through the molten area surrounding it and into the solid ice beyond for stability. If there were no currents in the molten water around your colony, this could even act as its own form of insulation. Put a cover over it to keep any interference from the atmosphere, and even add heat pump over your lake to help maintain it at the right temperature (reclaiming excess heat from the lake).
That's kinda what I was thinking. Put in meters every X interval which talk to the next meter down the line (run a small communications wire right inside the conduit, maybe construct conduits that have these built in). If the gas depletion between them changes substantially over a short interval, or if communication is lost with the next valve down the line, have it shut off automatically and notify the central authority (or the CA notices when one of the lines stops taking gas). The valves would default off if power was lost.
With a simple tolerance configuration option, you can even allow for certain clients which periodically consume tremendous amounts of fuel and at other times consume none (some factories such as concrete factories or places with incinerators will do a heavy burn once in a while and be relatively idle otherwise). Or you could include their endpoint in the communications chain.
No matter what disaster befalls this system (natural or otherwise), it should mitigate the ongoing damage.