Now I'm not saying incompetence isn't plausible, or even likely. But I also wonder if this wouldn't be somewhat intentional on the part of a few people as a political maneuver, whether via who the contracts went too, artificial delays, etc etc, in order to make the project become politically embarrassing. Sabotaging a co-workers project is not unheard of in the corporate world to get ahead or inhibit their credibility, so why would the government be any different...
"The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry," Mr. Bloomberg said during a press conference in Midtown. "But we live in a complex world where you're going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change. Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms. What we cant do is let the protection get in the way of us enjoying our freedoms. You still want to let people practice their religion, no matter what that religion is. And I think one of the great dangers here is going and categorizing anybody from one religion as a terrorist. That's not true... That would let the terrorists win. That's what they want us to do."
Emphasis mine. That quote states that our interpretation will change to PROTECT our freedoms against the fear-mongering people trying to increase security at the cost of it. I'm all for lambasting people for taking away one of the few documents that got this country on the right track, but at least pick quotes that backup the statement you're trying to make...
Actually, if you were a user of the sites, you'd notice there is strong evidence that points to a coordinated DDOS. The spurts of traffic aren't continuous, and they "break" at suspicious timings. For example, at the bottom of the curves, the sites work fine, most of the market/chart sites get their feeds, etc. It's only during the drops/raises start, when it would be fortuitous for people to put in trades, and then freak out when they can't, that the connection issues occur.
I'm not entirely ruling out it being sheer volume of people, but if it was it wouldn't "Come and go" as drastically as it's doing. We're talking sites entirely unusable one minute, and suddenly perfectly fine the next, then unusable 30 min later.
So please, explain to us how a third party's online wallet service is now a fundamental flaw in bitcoin itself? They made a server that did data management for the user, and thought they had security in place such that their data was unacessible without the proper password. They then were proven wrong. So now they need a new method of storing it (architecture) that is secure.
For the obligatory car analogy, this is like you saying a certain car brand sucks at security because an aftermarket mechanic installs hidden compartments in it, and then the compartment gets broken into because it has a shitty lock. Now the mechanic is out of the compartment installing business until he finds a better lock to put in.
Do employees have to trek across campus to get the vending machine they like that stocks their particular favored model of headset, mouse or keyboard?(Model M preferably) Do they sometime get stuck requiring quickly looking around to make sure no one is looking then banging the machine a few times?
IANAEE, but we don't have perfect electromagnetic shielding yet, and more and more of our warefare is relying on technology. Is it not unreasonable to assume that the countermeasures for remote drones would be just blasting as my em radiation into the spectrum as possible to jam their control signals, or short them outright with a focused EMP if they had autonomous capabilities?
Especially since the blast radius of an EMP weapon doesn't have to be particualrly large to be effective and travels through air quite well.
I mean maybe it's just me, but why is it ok for one entity to object multiple times to the same case and have it count as a a widespread rejection just because they've created several shell companies to espouse their ideas? i mean how many times have we seen "numerous" organizations write into a court case only to later find out they're all being paid by a single entity with a vested interest?
Legal Reform Idea: Any objection to a case must be done by individual companies, not group membership, and must declare conflict of interest
Shouldn't it read: "Games Workshop commits perjury filing false DMCA take down request."?
perjury is lying under oath.
No, this is just good old fashioned douchebaggery, masquerading under the guise of IP protection.
Actually, DMCA notices are sent under penalty of perjury. So in effect, they ARE under oath. Whoever marked the above as informative needs to read the laws they cower from.
A patent troll is one who files or buys overly broad patents, expressly for the purpose of not pursuing active development or marketing of their patents. A patent troll's business plan is to wait for a company to make big on something that might infringe, or buy portfolios that might be infringed on, and keep them in obscurity, till such time they can be used to sue(read: extort) a company such that proper legal defense is purposefully less than the cost to comply with their licensing agreements.
In short, a patent troll would prefer you not learn about their patent till it's too late, while a proper patent holder wants you to know of their patent so that you will license it from them for your technology.
Relevant xkcd But seriously, how many times have you seen minimum (ok, can see a point here) or maximum (WTF) limits on a password length? Or requirements of what it can or cannot contain.
Is there any reasonable excuse for why a password must not contain certain characters, besides breaking poorly made scripts? I mean password security 101 says they'll hash it anyway, so why should it matter?
whoops, the above is me, just to put my reputation a bit on the line so it's not thinking the above anon is a paid shill.
Dragon's Tale, an mmo/casino hybrid, has already been doing this for two years. As does seals with clubs(an eu betting site, sealswithclubs.eu). If you're looking for hold'em style poker, Seals is awesome.
However Dragon's tales(http://www.dragons.tl/) is a bit unique in that it has a LOT of different styles of games. There's the standard "luck" based games, some slot machine style, some complex paytables with various interesting things. Coconut trees are roulette style red/black odds. But they also have quite a few games of skill, which means there are behaviors you can learn about the game to improve your odds, and price adjusts to reflect the average level of play. So if you're good and careful with betting, making money there on a regular basis is possible. I'll also point out they have a rakeback policy that goes up as you play, which they also use to encourage older players to teach younger ones (in the form of the house giving a small part of its share to mentors).
All in all, bitcoin has proven itself to be quite versatile for online gambling. And at $14USD per btc, you can't really say bitcoin is a failed experiment.:P Stop on by dragons or seals if you doubt and i'll show you around. Both have free options (seals does hourly free tournaments, and dragon's offers free seed money through various activities)
I can shed some insight here. Minecraft and The Sims are not "hard" in the sense that you will fail a lot. Merely that they are hard meaning you start the game with very little understanding in how it works, and then have to master those systems to do what you want. As you are placing blocks, you have to deal with resource management, your own life, etc. A game does not have to be hard to be challenging. Nor does being hard make a game challenging.
My favorite example from recent games is one called Demon Souls. Many people say it is hard, and challenging, yet It has one aspect that I love because it perfectly demonstrates the difference between the two, because it is a perfect example of something that is hard, but not a challenge. It has what used called an arcade coin-trick. A piece of gameplay put in purely to eat your quarters and lengthen time playing, without adding an equivalent value of fun or different playstyle.
The challenging part of the game is learning each individual enemy, how they fight, how you can react, etc. You develop actual skills as the game goes on and your proficiency goes up. The coin trick is the death and respawn limit. While you can argue it adds a sense of urgency and being careful to the game, one could have done this without such a harsh penalty (loss of all exp, plus time wasted attempting to regain it only to fail at the end). This is an example of a piece of a game that is hard, but not challenging. It is hard because it punishes failure, without adding much extra fun.
So with this in mind, you can see why minecraft and the sims can be considered challenging in that they engage the mind and thought, without being hard.
I'll bite the bullet and burn some karma for this one. No, that wasn't what he meant, thanks for the ad hominem.
What he meant is that when a woman applies for, then gets a job, where almost her sole purpose is to be a sexual object and to dress sexually, in an effort to promote her body in some vague conjunction with a product, then she deserves to be treated as a sexual object.
In the same way someone who applies for, then gets a job, where her sole purpose is to defend the law, should be treated as an officer of the law. Likewise a woman who applies for, then gets a job, where her sole purpose is "dispensing the word of god" in a safe and conservative setting, should be treated as a nun.
You pretend you can't curse when you're around nuns, you end everything with a sir around a cop, and you make comments about a woman or mans body when their jobs are only 1 piece of clothing away from being a stripper.
I'm sorry, the minute you voluntarily take a job that exploits your sexuality, you lose your right to complain when people treat you as a worker in that job. There is a line between "legitimate harassment" (i hate that that is even a valid phrase), and "illegal harassment", but lets not go pretending they're saints who deserve to never hear a foul word out of anyone mouths.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but I think YOU need to read up on contract law a bit. The contract of sale is what is complete when you pay for a product, however any additional contracts, such as EULA, TOS, etc ( which is what the parent poster was talking about) are extraneous to that. In addition, they cannot just put a note saying "you agree to the contract by buying this", because that violates the contract law requirement of meeting of the minds.
Basically, if you buy a product, and then open it to find an EULA saying they get your firstborn, you can mail their legal department with an counter-proposed contract, and if they in turn reject that, they are liable for your full cost of obtaining their product originally. Either that, or you can use it and declare their EULA void and hope that it holds up in court (which has stricken down many shrinkwrap licenses in the past).
In terms of asking for metal instead of plastic - My car. I outright refuse to drive fiberglass POS when i have any such option. I much prefer having steel parts, steel body, steel frame protecting me and keeping everything running than the plastic replacement pos that wear out and can't drive worth a crap. That being said, yes i rarely get to buy anything after 1998, why do you ask?:P
Also on the list - My keyboard has a metal core and actual springs, I love my model M.
I like the idea, however your problem is you will always come across trolls on the internet, or people who just like screwing up systems. I would say this percentage on facebook is quite sizable, so i would propose these alterations(to be taken individually or all together or mix/match):
Assign a trustability value to each juror, that is hidden and modified in one of two ways(or both):
Have a pool of pre-existing cases(I'm sure facebook has tons of examples stored in their history banks). In this situation facebook knows what the outcome should be according to their standards. Have any prospective juror have a mix of "real" cases and these pre-existing cases mixed together for a trial period, say that first 20 cases they review have an unknown mix. This way they can't guess which ones are appropriate or not.
Use their verdicts on these existing cases to assign a juror a "reliability" factor on their verdicts on the non-example cases in their batch. That way jurors who don't quite get the rules, or are causing problems, are easily weeded out and their vote counts less in the total verdict weight on their real cases.
Alternatively: Trustability starts at 50%, so new jurors get half votes. whenever a juror disagrees with the majority opinion by the polar opposite choice, lower their trustability rating. Likewise when they are in the majority and it is not a middleground, increase their trustability.
Both of these improvements will lower the odds of troll or mob mentality, even if the control a decent size of the juror pool because their individual votes will be worth less, while being invisible enough to the end-user that they won't be able to tell they aren't being effective.
Why are we having exams that require a calculator? I did all of calculus and most of linear so far(sufficiently complex equations were done to allow for matlab use, but the test stuff could be done without), and even statistics(yay longhand division!) without one just fine, and most problems can easily be done without them if the proper setup numbers are used.
Also, they are NOT crippled enough. Even when i was in middle school there were program packs to download your textbook onto your ti-83 (I had a ti-80 and i could still type the formulas by hand) so they are still too advanced to not cheat with. And don't tell me you can just wipe the memory, any sufficiently smart cheater would have a ti with a different spare battery. You can find easy DIY's for those online nowadays easy.
Allow a calculator with a 10 key, if they need to graph something, then they should be able to figure it out enough by hand and not need a calculator.
All testing with a graphing calculator does is let more students pass because they don't need to learn, they just need to throw thier notes on the calculator memory. (Yes you'd have references in real life, but the point of most math tests is it's so basic you shouldn't NEED references, it should be the core material you know by heart)
then the cold vacuum of space would keep things cool
Correct me if i'm wrong but I thought space, while being cold, was relatively shitty at cooling things, since the only way to transfer heat in the relative absence of atoms was radiation which is very slow?
I mean surely i'm not the only engineer who's joked that all they really need to do is catapult and parachute to get over the border, with no need for a parachute if they're launching hard projectiles. I mean the range on old catapults and trebuchets was quite well, and could be scaled as a simple matter of physics.
So I suppose next we might find a tunnel that is one mile down and 40 miles under the border to breach the "castle walls" of the united states?
Slashdot Mirror
Now I'm not saying incompetence isn't plausible, or even likely. But I also wonder if this wouldn't be somewhat intentional on the part of a few people as a political maneuver, whether via who the contracts went too, artificial delays, etc etc, in order to make the project become politically embarrassing. Sabotaging a co-workers project is not unheard of in the corporate world to get ahead or inhibit their credibility, so why would the government be any different...
The russians did it, to bad most research along this vein cannot be pursued due to ethics boards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=739DPi7dAOM
You do realize the difference between low frequency and high frequency RFID right?
Allow me to answer in Haiku:
What you found yells loud,
while this new device can hear,
barely a whisper
Did you even read the quote you posted?
Emphasis mine. That quote states that our interpretation will change to PROTECT our freedoms against the fear-mongering people trying to increase security at the cost of it. I'm all for lambasting people for taking away one of the few documents that got this country on the right track, but at least pick quotes that backup the statement you're trying to make...
Actually, if you were a user of the sites, you'd notice there is strong evidence that points to a coordinated DDOS. The spurts of traffic aren't continuous, and they "break" at suspicious timings. For example, at the bottom of the curves, the sites work fine, most of the market/chart sites get their feeds, etc. It's only during the drops/raises start, when it would be fortuitous for people to put in trades, and then freak out when they can't, that the connection issues occur.
I'm not entirely ruling out it being sheer volume of people, but if it was it wouldn't "Come and go" as drastically as it's doing. We're talking sites entirely unusable one minute, and suddenly perfectly fine the next, then unusable 30 min later.
Relevant xkcd to rant below: http://xkcd.com/932/
So please, explain to us how a third party's online wallet service is now a fundamental flaw in bitcoin itself? They made a server that did data management for the user, and thought they had security in place such that their data was unacessible without the proper password. They then were proven wrong. So now they need a new method of storing it (architecture) that is secure.
For the obligatory car analogy, this is like you saying a certain car brand sucks at security because an aftermarket mechanic installs hidden compartments in it, and then the compartment gets broken into because it has a shitty lock. Now the mechanic is out of the compartment installing business until he finds a better lock to put in.
Do employees have to trek across campus to get the vending machine they like that stocks their particular favored model of headset, mouse or keyboard?(Model M preferably)
Do they sometime get stuck requiring quickly looking around to make sure no one is looking then banging the machine a few times?
Inquiring minds want to know!
IANAEE, but we don't have perfect electromagnetic shielding yet, and more and more of our warefare is relying on technology. Is it not unreasonable to assume that the countermeasures for remote drones would be just blasting as my em radiation into the spectrum as possible to jam their control signals, or short them outright with a focused EMP if they had autonomous capabilities?
Especially since the blast radius of an EMP weapon doesn't have to be particualrly large to be effective and travels through air quite well.
You mean just the BSA?
I mean maybe it's just me, but why is it ok for one entity to object multiple times to the same case and have it count as a a widespread rejection just because they've created several shell companies to espouse their ideas? i mean how many times have we seen "numerous" organizations write into a court case only to later find out they're all being paid by a single entity with a vested interest?
Legal Reform Idea: Any objection to a case must be done by individual companies, not group membership, and must declare conflict of interest
Shouldn't it read: "Games Workshop commits perjury filing false DMCA take down request."?
perjury is lying under oath.
No, this is just good old fashioned douchebaggery, masquerading under the guise of IP protection.
Actually, DMCA notices are sent under penalty of perjury. So in effect, they ARE under oath. Whoever marked the above as informative needs to read the laws they cower from.
A patent troll is one who files or buys overly broad patents, expressly for the purpose of not pursuing active development or marketing of their patents. A patent troll's business plan is to wait for a company to make big on something that might infringe, or buy portfolios that might be infringed on, and keep them in obscurity, till such time they can be used to sue(read: extort) a company such that proper legal defense is purposefully less than the cost to comply with their licensing agreements.
In short, a patent troll would prefer you not learn about their patent till it's too late, while a proper patent holder wants you to know of their patent so that you will license it from them for your technology.
Relevant xkcd
But seriously, how many times have you seen minimum (ok, can see a point here) or maximum (WTF) limits on a password length? Or requirements of what it can or cannot contain.
Is there any reasonable excuse for why a password must not contain certain characters, besides breaking poorly made scripts? I mean password security 101 says they'll hash it anyway, so why should it matter?
whoops, the above is me, just to put my reputation a bit on the line so it's not thinking the above anon is a paid shill.
Dragon's Tale, an mmo/casino hybrid, has already been doing this for two years. As does seals with clubs(an eu betting site, sealswithclubs.eu).
If you're looking for hold'em style poker, Seals is awesome.
However Dragon's tales(http://www.dragons.tl/) is a bit unique in that it has a LOT of different styles of games. There's the standard "luck" based games, some slot machine style, some complex paytables with various interesting things. Coconut trees are roulette style red/black odds. But they also have quite a few games of skill, which means there are behaviors you can learn about the game to improve your odds, and price adjusts to reflect the average level of play. So if you're good and careful with betting, making money there on a regular basis is possible. I'll also point out they have a rakeback policy that goes up as you play, which they also use to encourage older players to teach younger ones (in the form of the house giving a small part of its share to mentors).
All in all, bitcoin has proven itself to be quite versatile for online gambling. And at $14USD per btc, you can't really say bitcoin is a failed experiment. :P Stop on by dragons or seals if you doubt and i'll show you around. Both have free options (seals does hourly free tournaments, and dragon's offers free seed money through various activities)
I can shed some insight here.
Minecraft and The Sims are not "hard" in the sense that you will fail a lot.
Merely that they are hard meaning you start the game with very little understanding in how it works, and then have to master those systems to do what you want.
As you are placing blocks, you have to deal with resource management, your own life, etc.
A game does not have to be hard to be challenging. Nor does being hard make a game challenging.
My favorite example from recent games is one called Demon Souls. Many people say it is hard, and challenging, yet It has one aspect that I love because it perfectly demonstrates the difference between the two, because it is a perfect example of something that is hard, but not a challenge.
It has what used called an arcade coin-trick. A piece of gameplay put in purely to eat your quarters and lengthen time playing, without adding an equivalent value of fun or different playstyle.
The challenging part of the game is learning each individual enemy, how they fight, how you can react, etc. You develop actual skills as the game goes on and your proficiency goes up.
The coin trick is the death and respawn limit. While you can argue it adds a sense of urgency and being careful to the game, one could have done this without such a harsh penalty (loss of all exp, plus time wasted attempting to regain it only to fail at the end). This is an example of a piece of a game that is hard, but not challenging. It is hard because it punishes failure, without adding much extra fun.
So with this in mind, you can see why minecraft and the sims can be considered challenging in that they engage the mind and thought, without being hard.
First, the rights granted to the users of bittorrent explicitly forbids using it for law enforcement purposes
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you believe the whole "Cops have to say if they're cops if you ask" line too....
I'll bite the bullet and burn some karma for this one.
No, that wasn't what he meant, thanks for the ad hominem.
What he meant is that when a woman applies for, then gets a job, where almost her sole purpose is to be a sexual object and to dress sexually, in an effort to promote her body in some vague conjunction with a product, then she deserves to be treated as a sexual object.
In the same way someone who applies for, then gets a job, where her sole purpose is to defend the law, should be treated as an officer of the law.
Likewise a woman who applies for, then gets a job, where her sole purpose is "dispensing the word of god" in a safe and conservative setting, should be treated as a nun.
You pretend you can't curse when you're around nuns, you end everything with a sir around a cop, and you make comments about a woman or mans body when their jobs are only 1 piece of clothing away from being a stripper.
I'm sorry, the minute you voluntarily take a job that exploits your sexuality, you lose your right to complain when people treat you as a worker in that job. There is a line between "legitimate harassment" (i hate that that is even a valid phrase), and "illegal harassment", but lets not go pretending they're saints who deserve to never hear a foul word out of anyone mouths.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but I think YOU need to read up on contract law a bit.
The contract of sale is what is complete when you pay for a product, however any additional contracts, such as EULA, TOS, etc ( which is what the parent poster was talking about) are extraneous to that. In addition, they cannot just put a note saying "you agree to the contract by buying this", because that violates the contract law requirement of meeting of the minds.
Basically, if you buy a product, and then open it to find an EULA saying they get your firstborn, you can mail their legal department with an counter-proposed contract, and if they in turn reject that, they are liable for your full cost of obtaining their product originally. Either that, or you can use it and declare their EULA void and hope that it holds up in court (which has stricken down many shrinkwrap licenses in the past).
That will a fetch handle of rum or a 1.5 liter of vodka.
Most people will happily surrender tons of personal, and incriminating, information about themselves when offered or plied with aforementioned liquid.
So it's same old same old, just now with no hangover!
My kingdom for some mod points for this man. Thanks for the historic anecdote. I love tales from the old uni comps like this.
Anything worth being impressed by is also worth being afraid of.
So we should be afraid of the Eiffel tower? Ooo, how about the statues of Moai?
In terms of asking for metal instead of plastic - My car. I outright refuse to drive fiberglass POS when i have any such option. I much prefer having steel parts, steel body, steel frame protecting me and keeping everything running than the plastic replacement pos that wear out and can't drive worth a crap. :P
That being said, yes i rarely get to buy anything after 1998, why do you ask?
Also on the list - My keyboard has a metal core and actual springs, I love my model M.
I like the idea, however your problem is you will always come across trolls on the internet, or people who just like screwing up systems. I would say this percentage on facebook is quite sizable, so i would propose these alterations(to be taken individually or all together or mix/match):
Assign a trustability value to each juror, that is hidden and modified in one of two ways(or both):
Have a pool of pre-existing cases(I'm sure facebook has tons of examples stored in their history banks).
In this situation facebook knows what the outcome should be according to their standards.
Have any prospective juror have a mix of "real" cases and these pre-existing cases mixed together for a trial period, say that first 20 cases they review have an unknown mix. This way they can't guess which ones are appropriate or not.
Use their verdicts on these existing cases to assign a juror a "reliability" factor on their verdicts on the non-example cases in their batch.
That way jurors who don't quite get the rules, or are causing problems, are easily weeded out and their vote counts less in the total verdict weight on their real cases.
Alternatively:
Trustability starts at 50%, so new jurors get half votes.
whenever a juror disagrees with the majority opinion by the polar opposite choice, lower their trustability rating.
Likewise when they are in the majority and it is not a middleground, increase their trustability.
Both of these improvements will lower the odds of troll or mob mentality, even if the control a decent size of the juror pool because their individual votes will be worth less, while being invisible enough to the end-user that they won't be able to tell they aren't being effective.
Why are we having exams that require a calculator?
I did all of calculus and most of linear so far(sufficiently complex equations were done to allow for matlab use, but the test stuff could be done without), and even statistics(yay longhand division!) without one just fine, and most problems can easily be done without them if the proper setup numbers are used.
Also, they are NOT crippled enough. Even when i was in middle school there were program packs to download your textbook onto your ti-83 (I had a ti-80 and i could still type the formulas by hand) so they are still too advanced to not cheat with. And don't tell me you can just wipe the memory, any sufficiently smart cheater would have a ti with a different spare battery. You can find easy DIY's for those online nowadays easy.
Allow a calculator with a 10 key, if they need to graph something, then they should be able to figure it out enough by hand and not need a calculator.
All testing with a graphing calculator does is let more students pass because they don't need to learn, they just need to throw thier notes on the calculator memory. (Yes you'd have references in real life, but the point of most math tests is it's so basic you shouldn't NEED references, it should be the core material you know by heart)
then the cold vacuum of space would keep things cool
Correct me if i'm wrong but I thought space, while being cold, was relatively shitty at cooling things, since the only way to transfer heat in the relative absence of atoms was radiation which is very slow?
I mean surely i'm not the only engineer who's joked that all they really need to do is catapult and parachute to get over the border, with no need for a parachute if they're launching hard projectiles. I mean the range on old catapults and trebuchets was quite well, and could be scaled as a simple matter of physics.
So I suppose next we might find a tunnel that is one mile down and 40 miles under the border to breach the "castle walls" of the united states?