. If they don't earn enough then they should go and demand more from their employer.
A tip is not a tip if it's mandatory. A tip is used to reward exceptional service. Simply serving food or mechanically pouring a beer or cup of coffee is not exceptional service.
In theory, I agree. I don't feel inclined to tip for average service. However, the reality of being a waiter/waitress in the US is that they tax them as if they received 8% tippage on all their sales. I know, it's insane. The good news is, if other people are tipping 15%, and you top 0%, it comes close to balancing out.;) Still, I tend to give at least some tip for decent service.
You're right, though... I wish I'd not been conditioned by our crazy American tipping ways.:)
If you knew that you would die (unless you got a certain medical procedure), but that the procedure that could save your life was not covered by your insurance, and to pay out of pocket would be so expensive as to bankrupt your family, what would you do? I don't think it would be ethical to destroy my family's future in such a case. I've read of several families (which sadly I can't reference for you) whose medical bills were sufficient to bankrupt them.
When people are unable to get necessary medical coverage without bankrupting themselves, I see that as a failure of our nation's health care system.
My "we're fucked"-o-meter has been pretty much pegged since I read Little Brother. Unfortunately, I'm pessimistic enough that I don't see how Freenet could work. Perhaps it's more ignorance than pessimism, but I am just insufficiently confident in the capabilities of something like ParanoidLinux to actually protect me from an oppressive government.
A repressive government (if/when we have one that merits Paranoid computing) would be enough in-bed with the media that I don't think Paranoid traffic would be sufficiently hidden. Surely, a system that allows/forces/entices providers like AT&T to enact mass-surveillance on all traffic would have the computing power to detect such abnormal traffic. And, if they didn't, it sure seems like it'd be made a priority, most likely with the argument that "Terrorists are going to be using this, so we must find this Paranoid traffic!". If a government becomes oppressive enough to be an enemy of its populace, they will control the means of bit-transfer, and will have monitoring infrastructure in place to detect aberrant traffic... which means my recourse will be to buy more tin-foil, and stop using the internet.
I say that mostly in jest. Mostly. I'm genuinely scared.
Why not make a "secure" mosaic filter that does one or more of the following:
- Randomizes the pixel data before applying the mosaic (Keeping the original colors so the mosaic looks natural.)
- Applies noise to the area before applying the mosaic (Could use intensity noise rather than hue to retain the color scheme that is being obfuscated.)
Better yet, replace the text with the blurred values of "lorem ipsum...", or some other random text. That way, it still will have the white/black balance of text-that's-been-obscured, but will be unintelligible.
Like others, I don't understand why simply white/grey/blacking out a block of text on an image is something people are averse to doing.
You're correct that it's not really a "paradox". Rather, the general public (and lawmakers) hear "99.99%" and think that is GOOD, whereas for the purpose of arresting people as terrorists, it's nowhere NEAR accurate enough. For something with only a 99%, or even 98%, accuracy rate, the proportion of false positives to true positives is so far out of whack as to be unusable. Significantly less than 0.01% of our population are terrorists, so the.01% of the population which are innocent-but-marked-guilty outnumbers the truly guilty by a margin which is still intolerably wide.
Of course, how tolerable is a matter of political principles. Some people would rather "break a few eggs" and punish innocent people by mistake, in order to ensure that the bad guys don't go unpunished. I, and many of our nation's founders, believed that it was better to let guilty people go unpunished than to unjustly punish innocent people -- especially when the innocents that would be punished so greatly outnumber the Bad Guys.
I realize this is likely starting to sound old, but Cory Doctorow's Little Brother should be required reading for people doing something like this. His writings about the "Paradox of the False Positive" are enumerated there, but also in other sources:
Statisticians speak of something called the Paradox of the False Positive. Here's how that works: imagine that you've got a disease that strikes one in a million people, and a test for the disease that's 99% accurate. You administer the test to a million people, and it will be positive for around 10,000 of them because for every hundred people, it will be wrong once (that's what 99% accurate means). Yet, statistically, we know that there's only one infected person in the entire sample. That means that your "99% accurate" test is wrong 9,999 times out of 10,000!
Terrorism is a lot less common than one in a million and automated "tests" for terrorism data-mined conclusions drawn from transactions, Oyster cards, bank transfers, travel schedules, etc are a lot less accurate than 99%. That means practically every person who is branded a terrorist by our data-mining efforts is innocent.
(emphasis mine)
And, as others have pointed out, this system is likely to have a false positive rate higher than 1%.
I don't know what these companies are going to do to keep spammers from running email bot networks.
If e-mail messages were required to be digitally signed, that would introduce a large enough processing penalty that bulk e-mailing might (would?) be prohibitive unless one had a sufficiently large pool of computing power.
Of course... I'm not sure how much load that would place on mail SERVERS... damn. I suspect Google has the power to verify that kind of thing pretty easily though.;)
Seconded. I enjoyed it a lot. I did NOT like the scavenger hunt for more version points (experience), but... meh. Still good. Reading snippets of e-mail which gave backstory was neat. I especially liked that they seemed to get the "feel" of it right. Sure, computers don't work that way, but for someone willing to suspend disbelief, it was pretty damned marvelous.
The first time through, I tried to use the guns and stuff a lot early on. I learned that the disc really DOES reward skill, and once I got the improvements for it, I basically didn't even bother to use the other weapons (except on the levels where forced to). Fun game, over all, even if I sucked at light cycles. The immersion was top-notch, especially in the mid-game.
you can keep the whole old FS and bring over conf files and binaries as you discover you need them, and even `chroot' into it if you like
Having done this when I upgraded my aging Gentoo box (which I never managedto get configged sensibly) to Ubuntu, I will ALWAYS try to do it in the future. Being able to mount my old drive and copy over things like Apache configurations (or at least read them so that I could see what I wanted to keep vs what I wanted to change) was exceedingly nice.
Re:Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
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· Score: 1
1) Make a text layer in GIMP. Write your text, arrange it how you like. 2) Make a layer under it in which you put your speech bubble.
The need for vector graphics, esp for a one-off thing where you're making "This is the doodad -->" labels, is overrated.
Imagine your bank deciding that it wanted to loan your money away to thousands of people who had no ability to pay it back. Imagine that, when they discovered this was happening, the government decided to increase the national debt from 9950 billion to 10650 billion dollars (a ~7% increase), where the effects will be felt by you, your children, and your grandchildren. Imagine your family tree being screwed by uncle sam for the rest of your life.
Now, to be fair, this is only my opinion, as gathered from the few sources I've read online about what the costs would be. Many economists (notably of the austrian school, like Ron Paul, which was linked yesterday on Slashdot) feel the bailout is a Bad Idea, and that it's better to let the market stabilize and start recovery sooner. I've not yet read a convincing explanation on why it's a GOOD thing for the banks to be bailed out for failed lending practices (esp since most of us small fish are already insured by FDIC/NCUA) -- if anyone HAS a good link to a counterpoint, I'd love to find it as a reply to this... as it'll make my researching it easier.;)
If rules are art, could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?
While most role playing game books include some non-rule filler, the bulk of such books ARE a collection of rules. How your character advances, abilities/actions you can take, combat resolution, loot. D&D, in particular, is notable for this. While there is a default world, the idea is that someone else (the DM) creates their own world in which to apply the rules. While the default D&D world is certainly a creation, the rules themselves are as well. They shape the way you think about the game world.
Now, more recently game rules tend to be more of an engineering affair, I imagine -- beta testers, etc. But, when you look at some of the very earliest D&D resources (e.g., the little pamphlets that made up 1.0 and such -- not that I was old enough to have them, but I saw them at an old DM's house;)), they're basically nothing but a list of monsters, rules for conflict resolution, and tables of results/loot/etc.
I think one could consider the creation of that ruleset art, in some degree.
It sounds a lot like the.mod files that people would compose (e.g., in Impulse Tracker and so forth). It'd be interesting if Guitar Hero inadvertantly brought that creative culture more towards the public limelight. (Not saying it's a good thing -- I'm not part of the scene, so can't really speak for it -- but they cetainly seem like a creative bunch.)
Well... yes. It's a software product made within the past 20 years.;) This is like betting that there will be cheerleaders at a football game, or that there will be drunk drivers on New Year's day. It's not necessarily GOOD that it ships with bugs, but it isnt' surprising. I seem to recall Morrowind and Oblivion having their fair share of bugs early on (as did some of the prior Fallout games, even). I'm not worried: if there are bugs, they will be patched.
Since you're already at +5, I can reply to you rather than upmod you.;) Thanks for the write-up! I've been wanting to set up an IMAP capable mail server for a while, and always had troubles. Hopefully things will go more smoothly this time.:)
Really? I realize this is not exactly fine legal advice, but I had thought that things like violations of your right to privacy (or search) COULD be used as evidence if not gathered by the police. If I break into someone's house, and find their collection of child porn, cocaine, or dead bodies, or treasonous communications, I'd be highly surprised if such findings were unusable as evidence -- or as a means to get an official warrant.
I'd be very surprised if people were unable to get a warrant or subpoena for what's in her Yahoo mailbox. I doubt anyone WILL, which is sad, but I'd be surprised if the legal support for it didn't exist.
who the hell listens to internet radio for 8 hours every single day in a month?If you're considering listening while at the office, that's not bandwidth you should be concerned about so that's gone.
YOU may not care, but the people paying for uploading those bits to you (the net radio providers) certainly care if you're consuming bits that much.
...as soon as you claim that the AI is brilliant any single example of the AI not working flawlessly has people uploading videos to youtube showing that the AI is completely garbage because of this one time it got stuck on that shark outside the hut or something.
The solution, then, is to ensure that AI can jump, right?:)
I view all "funny" articles as modded -2. The net effect is, when I filter at +3, I see the "good" ones, and when I filter at +4 and above I see only posts that are not modded funny.
Sometimes I wish I had an "exclude funny mods" option when filtering a particular thread, since the post count is few enough that I want to read from a lower mod level... but generally when they're that few, I don't mind scrolling past some funny ones.
Google's should get into the business of... [x] Operating Systems [ ] Video Games [x] Election machines [ ] Hybrid Vehicles [ ] Hookers [ ] Blackjack
Google's savvy is such that I expect they could make (or implement) and (more importantly) lobby for election machines that don't suck. It'd be better than the muppets at Premier Election Solutions (Diebold).
Google's OS would be interesting... not sure I want it, but they think about computing in a Different Way (due to scale) than many of us do, and that could be good for OS innovations.
Re:Are Quests in MMOGs doable?
on
Quests
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· Score: 1
I contend that MMOs wont get to this level of questing again until we go back to unique items. Eg the holy grail gaining a faction special privileges like +2 to all skills and only one can be in a realm/server at a time. Then the players can quest over it and battle and gain things that way
I'd like to contrast this with my experiences recently, playing Oblivion. I've restarted the game, and this time added a few mods that did things like add an archery shop and such. I've noticed that I have a really hard time telling the difference between an iron sword, a steel one, and a silver one -- and I can't really tell much difference in most of the bows (except the hard-hitting one I bought, which is almost certainly exploit-level in terms of single-shot damage, but has a very slow reload time).
The result of this, and of having early-on bought some "Very Good in slot" gear (++Marksman skill;)) for my character from the same archery shop, is that I no longer care as much about gear. I carry a magic sword for dealing with ghosts, and silver arrows for similar use, but in general I find myself using the steel sword I have -- because I like its looks better than the silver one.
Normally (and I still struggle with this mentality), I'd hoard gear as I found it, always skirting the encumbrance limit -- with the mindset that "I might not see anything this good for a while". Screw that. I rather like being able to say, "I'm saving up for those nice boots, but in the meantime these leather ones are Just Fine" -- and continue on just questing away. The enemies seem to be dropping WORSE gear than I have (well, now some have some silver), but at some point I'll encounter any non-magical weaopon. Now, I pretty much just pick up weapons if I know I can sell it when I get back to town.
The net effect of this is, I'm actually enjoying the game.:D Sure, I'm still too much of a pack rat. (That'll change once I get someplace I can permanently Stash Stuff.) However, the ubiquity of good equipment (and the fact that the "next tier" seems to be stuff that I'll have to enchant myself) means that I can quest to my hearts' content.:)
Hard-to-get unique items make questing less fun: they're all steps in the goal of Getting That New Shield. When your gear is clsoe enough TO the quest rewards as to not really matter, then you can do quests for the fun of DOING them. (experience the lore, etc.)
It would only work on something like PBS, where they don't have to worry about advertising.... though, they do still get sponsorships, so that might still apply.
Slashdot Mirror
In theory, I agree. I don't feel inclined to tip for average service. However, the reality of being a waiter/waitress in the US is that they tax them as if they received 8% tippage on all their sales. I know, it's insane. The good news is, if other people are tipping 15%, and you top 0%, it comes close to balancing out. ;) Still, I tend to give at least some tip for decent service.
You're right, though ... I wish I'd not been conditioned by our crazy American tipping ways. :)
If you knew that you would die (unless you got a certain medical procedure), but that the procedure that could save your life was not covered by your insurance, and to pay out of pocket would be so expensive as to bankrupt your family, what would you do? I don't think it would be ethical to destroy my family's future in such a case. I've read of several families (which sadly I can't reference for you) whose medical bills were sufficient to bankrupt them.
When people are unable to get necessary medical coverage without bankrupting themselves, I see that as a failure of our nation's health care system.
My "we're fucked"-o-meter has been pretty much pegged since I read Little Brother. Unfortunately, I'm pessimistic enough that I don't see how Freenet could work. Perhaps it's more ignorance than pessimism, but I am just insufficiently confident in the capabilities of something like ParanoidLinux to actually protect me from an oppressive government.
A repressive government (if/when we have one that merits Paranoid computing) would be enough in-bed with the media that I don't think Paranoid traffic would be sufficiently hidden. Surely, a system that allows/forces/entices providers like AT&T to enact mass-surveillance on all traffic would have the computing power to detect such abnormal traffic. And, if they didn't, it sure seems like it'd be made a priority, most likely with the argument that "Terrorists are going to be using this, so we must find this Paranoid traffic!". If a government becomes oppressive enough to be an enemy of its populace, they will control the means of bit-transfer, and will have monitoring infrastructure in place to detect aberrant traffic... which means my recourse will be to buy more tin-foil, and stop using the internet.
I say that mostly in jest. Mostly. I'm genuinely scared.
Better yet, replace the text with the blurred values of "lorem ipsum ...", or some other random text. That way, it still will have the white/black balance of text-that's-been-obscured, but will be unintelligible.
Like others, I don't understand why simply white/grey/blacking out a block of text on an image is something people are averse to doing.
You're correct that it's not really a "paradox". Rather, the general public (and lawmakers) hear "99.99%" and think that is GOOD, whereas for the purpose of arresting people as terrorists, it's nowhere NEAR accurate enough. For something with only a 99%, or even 98%, accuracy rate, the proportion of false positives to true positives is so far out of whack as to be unusable. Significantly less than 0.01% of our population are terrorists, so the .01% of the population which are innocent-but-marked-guilty outnumbers the truly guilty by a margin which is still intolerably wide.
Of course, how tolerable is a matter of political principles. Some people would rather "break a few eggs" and punish innocent people by mistake, in order to ensure that the bad guys don't go unpunished. I, and many of our nation's founders, believed that it was better to let guilty people go unpunished than to unjustly punish innocent people -- especially when the innocents that would be punished so greatly outnumber the Bad Guys.
I realize this is likely starting to sound old, but Cory Doctorow's Little Brother should be required reading for people doing something like this. His writings about the "Paradox of the False Positive" are enumerated there, but also in other sources:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/20/rare.events
(emphasis mine)
And, as others have pointed out, this system is likely to have a false positive rate higher than 1%.
If e-mail messages were required to be digitally signed, that would introduce a large enough processing penalty that bulk e-mailing might (would?) be prohibitive unless one had a sufficiently large pool of computing power.
Of course ... I'm not sure how much load that would place on mail SERVERS... damn. I suspect Google has the power to verify that kind of thing pretty easily though. ;)
Seconded. I enjoyed it a lot. I did NOT like the scavenger hunt for more version points (experience), but ... meh. Still good. Reading snippets of e-mail which gave backstory was neat. I especially liked that they seemed to get the "feel" of it right. Sure, computers don't work that way, but for someone willing to suspend disbelief, it was pretty damned marvelous.
The first time through, I tried to use the guns and stuff a lot early on. I learned that the disc really DOES reward skill, and once I got the improvements for it, I basically didn't even bother to use the other weapons (except on the levels where forced to). Fun game, over all, even if I sucked at light cycles. The immersion was top-notch, especially in the mid-game.
Having done this when I upgraded my aging Gentoo box (which I never managedto get configged sensibly) to Ubuntu, I will ALWAYS try to do it in the future. Being able to mount my old drive and copy over things like Apache configurations (or at least read them so that I could see what I wanted to keep vs what I wanted to change) was exceedingly nice.
1) Make a text layer in GIMP. Write your text, arrange it how you like.
2) Make a layer under it in which you put your speech bubble.
The need for vector graphics, esp for a one-off thing where you're making "This is the doodad -->" labels, is overrated.
Imagine your bank deciding that it wanted to loan your money away to thousands of people who had no ability to pay it back.
Imagine that, when they discovered this was happening, the government decided to increase the national debt from 9950 billion to 10650 billion dollars (a ~7% increase), where the effects will be felt by you, your children, and your grandchildren.
Imagine your family tree being screwed by uncle sam for the rest of your life.
Now, to be fair, this is only my opinion, as gathered from the few sources I've read online about what the costs would be. Many economists (notably of the austrian school, like Ron Paul, which was linked yesterday on Slashdot) feel the bailout is a Bad Idea, and that it's better to let the market stabilize and start recovery sooner. I've not yet read a convincing explanation on why it's a GOOD thing for the banks to be bailed out for failed lending practices (esp since most of us small fish are already insured by FDIC/NCUA) -- if anyone HAS a good link to a counterpoint, I'd love to find it as a reply to this ... as it'll make my researching it easier. ;)
While most role playing game books include some non-rule filler, the bulk of such books ARE a collection of rules. How your character advances, abilities/actions you can take, combat resolution, loot. D&D, in particular, is notable for this. While there is a default world, the idea is that someone else (the DM) creates their own world in which to apply the rules. While the default D&D world is certainly a creation, the rules themselves are as well. They shape the way you think about the game world.
Now, more recently game rules tend to be more of an engineering affair, I imagine -- beta testers, etc. But, when you look at some of the very earliest D&D resources (e.g., the little pamphlets that made up 1.0 and such -- not that I was old enough to have them, but I saw them at an old DM's house ;)), they're basically nothing but a list of monsters, rules for conflict resolution, and tables of results/loot/etc.
I think one could consider the creation of that ruleset art, in some degree.
It sounds a lot like the .mod files that people would compose (e.g., in Impulse Tracker and so forth). It'd be interesting if Guitar Hero inadvertantly brought that creative culture more towards the public limelight. (Not saying it's a good thing -- I'm not part of the scene, so can't really speak for it -- but they cetainly seem like a creative bunch.)
I regret that I have no more mod points. :-(
I'll bet the game ships with bugs.
Well ... yes. It's a software product made within the past 20 years. ;) This is like betting that there will be cheerleaders at a football game, or that there will be drunk drivers on New Year's day. It's not necessarily GOOD that it ships with bugs, but it isnt' surprising. I seem to recall Morrowind and Oblivion having their fair share of bugs early on (as did some of the prior Fallout games, even). I'm not worried: if there are bugs, they will be patched.
Since you're already at +5, I can reply to you rather than upmod you. ;) Thanks for the write-up! I've been wanting to set up an IMAP capable mail server for a while, and always had troubles. Hopefully things will go more smoothly this time. :)
Really? I realize this is not exactly fine legal advice, but I had thought that things like violations of your right to privacy (or search) COULD be used as evidence if not gathered by the police. If I break into someone's house, and find their collection of child porn, cocaine, or dead bodies, or treasonous communications, I'd be highly surprised if such findings were unusable as evidence -- or as a means to get an official warrant.
I'd be very surprised if people were unable to get a warrant or subpoena for what's in her Yahoo mailbox. I doubt anyone WILL, which is sad, but I'd be surprised if the legal support for it didn't exist.
YOU may not care, but the people paying for uploading those bits to you (the net radio providers) certainly care if you're consuming bits that much.
The solution, then, is to ensure that AI can jump, right? :)
I view all "funny" articles as modded -2. The net effect is, when I filter at +3, I see the "good" ones, and when I filter at +4 and above I see only posts that are not modded funny.
Sometimes I wish I had an "exclude funny mods" option when filtering a particular thread, since the post count is few enough that I want to read from a lower mod level... but generally when they're that few, I don't mind scrolling past some funny ones.
Google's should get into the business of ...
[x] Operating Systems
[ ] Video Games
[x] Election machines
[ ] Hybrid Vehicles
[ ] Hookers
[ ] Blackjack
Google's savvy is such that I expect they could make (or implement) and (more importantly) lobby for election machines that don't suck. It'd be better than the muppets at Premier Election Solutions (Diebold).
Google's OS would be interesting... not sure I want it, but they think about computing in a Different Way (due to scale) than many of us do, and that could be good for OS innovations.
I contend that MMOs wont get to this level of questing again until we go back to unique items. Eg the holy grail gaining a faction special privileges like +2 to all skills and only one can be in a realm/server at a time. Then the players can quest over it and battle and gain things that way
I'd like to contrast this with my experiences recently, playing Oblivion. I've restarted the game, and this time added a few mods that did things like add an archery shop and such. I've noticed that I have a really hard time telling the difference between an iron sword, a steel one, and a silver one -- and I can't really tell much difference in most of the bows (except the hard-hitting one I bought, which is almost certainly exploit-level in terms of single-shot damage, but has a very slow reload time).
The result of this, and of having early-on bought some "Very Good in slot" gear (++Marksman skill ;)) for my character from the same archery shop, is that I no longer care as much about gear. I carry a magic sword for dealing with ghosts, and silver arrows for similar use, but in general I find myself using the steel sword I have -- because I like its looks better than the silver one.
Normally (and I still struggle with this mentality), I'd hoard gear as I found it, always skirting the encumbrance limit -- with the mindset that "I might not see anything this good for a while". Screw that. I rather like being able to say, "I'm saving up for those nice boots, but in the meantime these leather ones are Just Fine" -- and continue on just questing away. The enemies seem to be dropping WORSE gear than I have (well, now some have some silver), but at some point I'll encounter any non-magical weaopon. Now, I pretty much just pick up weapons if I know I can sell it when I get back to town.
The net effect of this is, I'm actually enjoying the game. :D Sure, I'm still too much of a pack rat. (That'll change once I get someplace I can permanently Stash Stuff.) However, the ubiquity of good equipment (and the fact that the "next tier" seems to be stuff that I'll have to enchant myself) means that I can quest to my hearts' content. :)
Hard-to-get unique items make questing less fun: they're all steps in the goal of Getting That New Shield. When your gear is clsoe enough TO the quest rewards as to not really matter, then you can do quests for the fun of DOING them. (experience the lore, etc.)
It would only work on something like PBS, where they don't have to worry about advertising.... though, they do still get sponsorships, so that might still apply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMO
Google and Wikipedia can answer many questions more efficiently than a fellow human, as the question has already been answered before. :)
If clever wordplay and haiku-smithing are your thing, you might really get a kick out of Kingdom of Loathing.