Finally, I'll be able to stop playing WoW! It's so addictive now, but I'm sure Activision will somehow find a way to fuck it up so that it won't be fun, and I'll finally be able to quit.
911 isn't the only reason. My cellphone doesn't get good reception from the back of my house (no one's does), but that's where I spend most of my time. So if I want to talk to someone for an extended period while I'm in front of my computer, I have to be in the back of my house... where cell reception is bad. Hence, landline.
Also, landline cordless phone batteries last a hell of a lot longer than a cellphone battery does, so I just put on my cordless landline headset and talk for hours. (Without using up any minutes or draining my relatively short-lived cellphone battery.)
Actually, a large part of the reduction in violence is probably due to the Mahdi Army's decision to suspend operations for six months; and that decision wasn't due to the presence of the surge.
In other words, just because the surge started and subsequently there was a reduction in violence, doesn't mean it was because of the surge. (It doesn't mean it WASN'T, of course, but as we all know, correlation does not imply causation.)
If you can't say it with written words, it wasn't worth saying.
Look, don't take this the wrong way, but are you retarded? You really think this, this, and this would have been better expressed in words? I realize you're specifically criticizing audio and video, not photographs, but come on: You're saying that all media except the written word is useless.
Seriously, +5 insightful? Who modded you up, Jack Thompson?
Considering that Han doesn't shoot Greedo until Greedo intimates that he's about to shoot Han, even in the original version, it can easily be construed that Han was getting his blaster out in case he couldn't talk himself out of getting shot. Han has his blaster out early enough that he could have shot Greedo several seconds before he did. But he doesn't, until Greedo actually tells Han he's going to kill him. So even in the original version, Han isn't being a cold-blooded bastard; he's acting in pretty clear self-defense.
Imagine that if instead of Greedo saying "That's the idea. I've been looking forward to this for a long time," he'd said something like, "Jabba doesn't want to lose a good pilot, Han. Maybe you can work something out," it would have been very unlikely that Han would have shot him at that point. But no; Greedo says he's going to kill him, and Han does what any rational person would do: takes advantage of Greedo's stupidity and kills him first.
Were I ever to find myself in the same situation, I'm not going to take the slightest risk that I can talk down someone who's just announced he's going to kill me. And I'm a bleeding heart liberal who hates guns; but if someone is threatening me with imminent death, I will happily kill them first (given the opportunity).
Now, when Lucas redid the original trilogy, he took away that first defining moment in Han's character, that cold-blooded, unflinching murder that showed us just how much of heartless, self-driven piece of scum he was.
I have to disagree with your assertion that this scene originally showed that Han was a "heartless, self-driven piece of scum." Han shooting Greedo was pure self-defense (granted, self-defense with panache). Greedo HAD A GUN POINTED AT HIM and WAS ABOUT TO SHOOT HIM. But Greedo was overconfident and stupid, and Han took advantage of that to save his own life.
Greedo shooting first was cinematic stupidity of the highest order, but it didn't really change the story or characterization. It merely meant that Han waited a second longer before firing, not because he wanted to avoid having to shoot Greedo due to some kind of internal moral conflict.
'Oh we're just two kind of grad students hanging out and having a beer and having a grand old time,' not you know, 'We are 16,000 people working on undermining your privacy.'"
Undermining my privacy? The only information Google is able to get abut me is what I do online -- and not much of that. I wipe cookies once in a while, and that's the only reliable way they have to track me on other sites. Take off the tinfoil hat, Nielsen.
Of course, to throw them off the scent, I randomly view Oprah's website, NASCAR videos, and horse porn once in a while.
Mostly what I object to is our two-party system. If any party besides the Democratic or Republican Parties ever became relevant to U.S. politics on a large scale, they'd inevitably end up just as bad as those two parties are now. Oh, it'd take a while, but it'd still happen.
As long as our electoral system works the way it does now, all political parties in the U.S. will either be massively corrupt or totally irrelevant.
...because the length of the day isn't constant? Earth's rotation is constantly slowing due to a number of forces (mostly tidal action), and over time drift happens if we don't add leap seconds. It's the same general principle as having a leap day every four years -- if we didn't, then eventually our calendar would drift so that the coldest, darkest part of the year in the northern hemisphere would happen in June.
Look, there's an entire Wikipedia article about it. I can't explain it any better than that article (or, no doubt, thousands of other articles out there on the web). If you want to go on imagining that leap seconds are some kind of massive conspiracy, be my guest.
and all that is left is the question of whether or not we need to expend the effort to adjust our clocks every time they are just one second off from some fully imaginary standard.
You make it sound like every Joe Public needs to pay attention to leap seconds and adjust his clock when they happen, which is not the case. The leap second adjustments, as I understand it, are made to the "root" clocks, the atomic clocks that are in various government and scientific facilities. Banks, utilities, and other critical infrastructure sync their clocks to the root clocks, but this happens automatically via NTP or whatever the hell they do. End-users like us either set our clocks manually when they seem like they're off by a lot, which happens irrespective of leap seconds. My wristwatch gains about a second a day, and that's just because the quartz crystal inside it only approximates correct time.
This "imaginary standard" is what allows us to have things like GPS, modern electrical grids, and (for what it's worth) space travel. Just because you don't care doesn't mean it's not important or doesn't affect you.
Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control.
So, we should strive to do only the bare minimum necessary for survival? No thanks. The fundamental problem with Bob Black's whole point of view is that he assumes that nothing has any value beyond providing basic survival needs. I actually tried reading through that article a couple of years ago and I couldn't even finish it, his logic is so bad.
I'm still sitting out both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD until this whole imbroglio is over. And even then, it'll be a good long while before I get any next-gen DVD player; my family buys no more than a few DVDs a year as it is.
How about this as a compromise: We'll only mine/develop/harvest/rape the side of the moon that faces AWAY from Earth. That way he doesn't have to see it change from Earth. And since Luna has no atmosphere (and not enough gravity to ever hold one), there's no worry about pollution smogging up the near side, or (in general) effects generated on the far side from propagating to the near side.
Just kidding! I don't have any problem with developing the moon; this guy's wrong. Not that being careful custodians of our environment is a bad thing, but his "logic" is illogical.
I like the fact that two different people managed to assume that because I corrected someone's misunderstanding of keyspace vs. security, that therefore I must approve of the picture-password idea. I don't.:)
Adding two alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, for 62 characters) would increase the keyspace by a lot (a factor of 3,844, to be precise), but it doesn't increase overall security by that much except against brute force attackers. It certainly doesn't make it a thousand times harder to shoulder-surf, or keylog, or social engineer, or...
It does seem, though, that killing the golden goose through greed is a defining characteristic of all corporations in this age of slash and burn profitism.
I hate to break it to you, but short-sightedness is basically the defining characteristic of all of human history.
I mostly agree, although from an economic standpoint, if you think of the game as a service, and look at the cost per time spent, it's really no different than going to a movie or sporting event or reading a book or even watching TV (assuming you consider the cost of watching commercials that much of a cost...).
Say a $50 game, 20 hours of gameplay. That's $2.50 an hour. 2-hour movie, $10? That's $5 an hour! Twice as expensive! Granted, it's a different environment (huge screen, big sound, etc.) but still. $8 paperback that takes 20 hours to read? Man, that's a value: 40 cents an hour. $100 concert tickets for a 2-hour show: $50 an hour. Yeesh. But the experience is worth it for most people... just not that often.
World of Warcraft: $60 plus $15 a month. If you only play 5 hours a week, then your (amortized) cost over the first month (assuming 4.3 weeks/month = 21.5 hours/month) is $75 / 21.5 = $3.48 an hour. After the second month, it's $90 for 43 hours, or $2.09 an hour. The cost asymptotically approaches about 70 cents an hour if you keep playing.
Now, I totally agree that if you buy a physical item, your use of that item should be unfettered (assuming it doesn't require any additional resources; if I buy WoW, well, it requires Blizzard to keep running those servers, so the additional cost is understandable). But when you buy a standalone game that doesn't require the Internet or any further assistance or resources from (e.g.) Valve in order to use, then yeah, you should definitely just own it and be able to use it and play it forever. Valve retains copyrights and trademarks and such, obviously, but beyond that, you bought it, you own it.
From their point of view, there's piracy issues, but you know what? Too bad. You sold me the game, I'm going to play it, if you don't like it, then fuck off.
There's no way they can do ten million tests per second if it takes anywhere close to that long.
If it takes a hundredth of a second on general-purpose computer X (100/sec), then custom hardware Y designed to run the algorithm in hardware will take maybe a microsecond to execute the algorithm (1,000,000/sec). And custom hardware Y is a chip that you can put 16 copies of on a single logic board, so you can actually do 16 million executions per second per board. (Or, as in the article, you buy bulk GPUs that are already very fast at the kind of logic needed.)
If the algorithm takes a hundredth of a second even on special-purpose hardware, then it would take several minutes to execute on a general-purpose machine, which would make it useless in practice. Also keep in mind that any algorithm which took 100ms on (say) a modern 2 GHz CPU to execute, would likely be cryptographically very weak, relying on many loops; there'd almost certainly be a shortcut version of the algorithm that could be executed in a fraction of the time, even on a regular CPU.
(Also keep in mind that hardware keeps getting faster, so even if it takes 100ms today, it'll take half that in a year.)
Checking a password should be slow. Brutally slow. I mean, quite literally, that just checking to see if the user's password hashes correctly should take at least a hundredth of a second. You're not going to have a hundred users logging in per second on a single computer anyway, our modern database-driven sites couldn't handle the load of displaying the login pages, so why are we making our password schemes so flimsy?
You're missing the point. This is for when the attacker has acquired your password hash file and can be running the recovery on their own machines.
The more there is of something the less any individual item is worth.
Incorrect in the general case. If there were only one fax machine in existence, it would be completely worthless (except perhaps as a curio). With ten fax machines, great, you can communicate with nine other people; still not very useful. But when there's a million of them...
This is known as the network effect, where the more there are of something, the more valuable each one becomes.
Obviously there are plenty of things for which more = less individual value (Picasso paintings, for example), but it is not true of everything.
I see comments like this all the time, and really don't understand them.
The grandparent's paucity of information notwithstanding (see my other reply for details), what you really don't understand is the Law of Large Numbers.:)
Assuming he's talking about out-of-the-box drive failure (like, within a week of installation), then think about this: Imagine there's a 1 in 100 chance of such failure per drive. Imagine that the average person buys a new drive only every two years, for ten years. That's five drives. At 0.01 chance of failure, there's a 95% (0.99 ^ 5) chance that the average person, after ten years, will have had no out-of-the-box failures. Pretty good.
However, there's a 0.96% chance that someone will have exactly one failure. That's 1 in 104 people who will have one drive failure during that ten years. And there's a 0.0097% chance (1 in 10,306) that someone will have exactly two drive failures. And there's a 0.000098% chance (1 in 1,020,304) that someone will have exactly 3 drive failures (a 60% "failure rate").
Well, now imagine that ten million people have followed this pattern. That means you've got about 10 people who've had a 60% failure rate.
Well, one of them decided to post on Slashdot about how unreliable hard drives are.:) But just as his experience is not anything like indicative of the average, neither is your experience of buying a drive every six months and having only one failure in ten years. What I don't understand is how people can think that because something hasn't happened to them, it can't happen at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, I'll be able to stop playing WoW! It's so addictive now, but I'm sure Activision will somehow find a way to fuck it up so that it won't be fun, and I'll finally be able to quit.
Thanks, Activision! (Thactivision.)
911 isn't the only reason. My cellphone doesn't get good reception from the back of my house (no one's does), but that's where I spend most of my time. So if I want to talk to someone for an extended period while I'm in front of my computer, I have to be in the back of my house... where cell reception is bad. Hence, landline.
Also, landline cordless phone batteries last a hell of a lot longer than a cellphone battery does, so I just put on my cordless landline headset and talk for hours. (Without using up any minutes or draining my relatively short-lived cellphone battery.)
Actually, a large part of the reduction in violence is probably due to the Mahdi Army's decision to suspend operations for six months; and that decision wasn't due to the presence of the surge.
In other words, just because the surge started and subsequently there was a reduction in violence, doesn't mean it was because of the surge. (It doesn't mean it WASN'T, of course, but as we all know, correlation does not imply causation.)
Look, don't take this the wrong way, but are you retarded? You really think this, this, and this would have been better expressed in words? I realize you're specifically criticizing audio and video, not photographs, but come on: You're saying that all media except the written word is useless.
Seriously, +5 insightful? Who modded you up, Jack Thompson?
Considering that Han doesn't shoot Greedo until Greedo intimates that he's about to shoot Han, even in the original version, it can easily be construed that Han was getting his blaster out in case he couldn't talk himself out of getting shot. Han has his blaster out early enough that he could have shot Greedo several seconds before he did. But he doesn't, until Greedo actually tells Han he's going to kill him. So even in the original version, Han isn't being a cold-blooded bastard; he's acting in pretty clear self-defense.
Imagine that if instead of Greedo saying "That's the idea. I've been looking forward to this for a long time," he'd said something like, "Jabba doesn't want to lose a good pilot, Han. Maybe you can work something out," it would have been very unlikely that Han would have shot him at that point. But no; Greedo says he's going to kill him, and Han does what any rational person would do: takes advantage of Greedo's stupidity and kills him first.
Were I ever to find myself in the same situation, I'm not going to take the slightest risk that I can talk down someone who's just announced he's going to kill me. And I'm a bleeding heart liberal who hates guns; but if someone is threatening me with imminent death, I will happily kill them first (given the opportunity).
I have to disagree with your assertion that this scene originally showed that Han was a "heartless, self-driven piece of scum." Han shooting Greedo was pure self-defense (granted, self-defense with panache). Greedo HAD A GUN POINTED AT HIM and WAS ABOUT TO SHOOT HIM. But Greedo was overconfident and stupid, and Han took advantage of that to save his own life.
Greedo shooting first was cinematic stupidity of the highest order, but it didn't really change the story or characterization. It merely meant that Han waited a second longer before firing, not because he wanted to avoid having to shoot Greedo due to some kind of internal moral conflict.
FlashBlock FTW :)
(And I clear out Flash cookies, too)
Undermining my privacy? The only information Google is able to get abut me is what I do online -- and not much of that. I wipe cookies once in a while, and that's the only reliable way they have to track me on other sites. Take off the tinfoil hat, Nielsen.
Of course, to throw them off the scent, I randomly view Oprah's website, NASCAR videos, and horse porn once in a while.
That is a triumph! I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
Mostly what I object to is our two-party system. If any party besides the Democratic or Republican Parties ever became relevant to U.S. politics on a large scale, they'd inevitably end up just as bad as those two parties are now. Oh, it'd take a while, but it'd still happen.
As long as our electoral system works the way it does now, all political parties in the U.S. will either be massively corrupt or totally irrelevant.
As a U.S. citizen, I'd be happy with more than zero credible parties.
...because the length of the day isn't constant? Earth's rotation is constantly slowing due to a number of forces (mostly tidal action), and over time drift happens if we don't add leap seconds. It's the same general principle as having a leap day every four years -- if we didn't, then eventually our calendar would drift so that the coldest, darkest part of the year in the northern hemisphere would happen in June.
Look, there's an entire Wikipedia article about it. I can't explain it any better than that article (or, no doubt, thousands of other articles out there on the web). If you want to go on imagining that leap seconds are some kind of massive conspiracy, be my guest.
You make it sound like every Joe Public needs to pay attention to leap seconds and adjust his clock when they happen, which is not the case. The leap second adjustments, as I understand it, are made to the "root" clocks, the atomic clocks that are in various government and scientific facilities. Banks, utilities, and other critical infrastructure sync their clocks to the root clocks, but this happens automatically via NTP or whatever the hell they do. End-users like us either set our clocks manually when they seem like they're off by a lot, which happens irrespective of leap seconds. My wristwatch gains about a second a day, and that's just because the quartz crystal inside it only approximates correct time.
This "imaginary standard" is what allows us to have things like GPS, modern electrical grids, and (for what it's worth) space travel. Just because you don't care doesn't mean it's not important or doesn't affect you.
So, we should strive to do only the bare minimum necessary for survival? No thanks. The fundamental problem with Bob Black's whole point of view is that he assumes that nothing has any value beyond providing basic survival needs. I actually tried reading through that article a couple of years ago and I couldn't even finish it, his logic is so bad.
I'm still sitting out both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD until this whole imbroglio is over. And even then, it'll be a good long while before I get any next-gen DVD player; my family buys no more than a few DVDs a year as it is.
How about this as a compromise: We'll only mine/develop/harvest/rape the side of the moon that faces AWAY from Earth. That way he doesn't have to see it change from Earth. And since Luna has no atmosphere (and not enough gravity to ever hold one), there's no worry about pollution smogging up the near side, or (in general) effects generated on the far side from propagating to the near side.
Just kidding! I don't have any problem with developing the moon; this guy's wrong. Not that being careful custodians of our environment is a bad thing, but his "logic" is illogical.
I like the fact that two different people managed to assume that because I corrected someone's misunderstanding of keyspace vs. security, that therefore I must approve of the picture-password idea. I don't. :)
Adding two alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, for 62 characters) would increase the keyspace by a lot (a factor of 3,844, to be precise), but it doesn't increase overall security by that much except against brute force attackers. It certainly doesn't make it a thousand times harder to shoulder-surf, or keylog, or social engineer, or...
I hate to break it to you, but short-sightedness is basically the defining characteristic of all of human history.
I mostly agree, although from an economic standpoint, if you think of the game as a service, and look at the cost per time spent, it's really no different than going to a movie or sporting event or reading a book or even watching TV (assuming you consider the cost of watching commercials that much of a cost...).
Say a $50 game, 20 hours of gameplay. That's $2.50 an hour. 2-hour movie, $10? That's $5 an hour! Twice as expensive! Granted, it's a different environment (huge screen, big sound, etc.) but still. $8 paperback that takes 20 hours to read? Man, that's a value: 40 cents an hour. $100 concert tickets for a 2-hour show: $50 an hour. Yeesh. But the experience is worth it for most people... just not that often.
World of Warcraft: $60 plus $15 a month. If you only play 5 hours a week, then your (amortized) cost over the first month (assuming 4.3 weeks/month = 21.5 hours/month) is $75 / 21.5 = $3.48 an hour. After the second month, it's $90 for 43 hours, or $2.09 an hour. The cost asymptotically approaches about 70 cents an hour if you keep playing.
Now, I totally agree that if you buy a physical item, your use of that item should be unfettered (assuming it doesn't require any additional resources; if I buy WoW, well, it requires Blizzard to keep running those servers, so the additional cost is understandable). But when you buy a standalone game that doesn't require the Internet or any further assistance or resources from (e.g.) Valve in order to use, then yeah, you should definitely just own it and be able to use it and play it forever. Valve retains copyrights and trademarks and such, obviously, but beyond that, you bought it, you own it.
From their point of view, there's piracy issues, but you know what? Too bad. You sold me the game, I'm going to play it, if you don't like it, then fuck off.
If it takes a hundredth of a second on general-purpose computer X (100/sec), then custom hardware Y designed to run the algorithm in hardware will take maybe a microsecond to execute the algorithm (1,000,000/sec). And custom hardware Y is a chip that you can put 16 copies of on a single logic board, so you can actually do 16 million executions per second per board. (Or, as in the article, you buy bulk GPUs that are already very fast at the kind of logic needed.)
If the algorithm takes a hundredth of a second even on special-purpose hardware, then it would take several minutes to execute on a general-purpose machine, which would make it useless in practice. Also keep in mind that any algorithm which took 100ms on (say) a modern 2 GHz CPU to execute, would likely be cryptographically very weak, relying on many loops; there'd almost certainly be a shortcut version of the algorithm that could be executed in a fraction of the time, even on a regular CPU.
(Also keep in mind that hardware keeps getting faster, so even if it takes 100ms today, it'll take half that in a year.)
You're missing the point. This is for when the attacker has acquired your password hash file and can be running the recovery on their own machines.
Incorrect in the general case. If there were only one fax machine in existence, it would be completely worthless (except perhaps as a curio). With ten fax machines, great, you can communicate with nine other people; still not very useful. But when there's a million of them...
This is known as the network effect, where the more there are of something, the more valuable each one becomes.
Obviously there are plenty of things for which more = less individual value (Picasso paintings, for example), but it is not true of everything.
Ah, I see what you did there. So that's how you find new games!
The grandparent's paucity of information notwithstanding (see my other reply for details), what you really don't understand is the Law of Large Numbers.
Assuming he's talking about out-of-the-box drive failure (like, within a week of installation), then think about this: Imagine there's a 1 in 100 chance of such failure per drive. Imagine that the average person buys a new drive only every two years, for ten years. That's five drives. At 0.01 chance of failure, there's a 95% (0.99 ^ 5) chance that the average person, after ten years, will have had no out-of-the-box failures. Pretty good.
However, there's a 0.96% chance that someone will have exactly one failure. That's 1 in 104 people who will have one drive failure during that ten years. And there's a 0.0097% chance (1 in 10,306) that someone will have exactly two drive failures. And there's a 0.000098% chance (1 in 1,020,304) that someone will have exactly 3 drive failures (a 60% "failure rate").
Well, now imagine that ten million people have followed this pattern. That means you've got about 10 people who've had a 60% failure rate.
Well, one of them decided to post on Slashdot about how unreliable hard drives are.