Took me longer to find a pencil than to crack the damn code. Now on to much more interesting things, like watching my three year old arrange the perfect train crash under a footstool.
That's good. Had you actually been procreating during that time period, we might have more people running around thinking that shining a light off your nuts had some long term effect on your reproductive system.
Unfortunately, this isn't true. I believe it should be - but the police have entire agencies dedicated to tracking down drug users and distributors, breaking into their homes and siezing them and their supplies. Worse still, because it's illegal if you happen to have pot smoke in your house and actually NEED the police, like because someone's threatening you or stealing from you or there's a medical emergency - you're screwed. Neighbor's house on fire? Better not call the fire department, or you'll have to explain why your stoned. The benefit is those partaking could still participate in society instead of having to try and hide under a rock.
We're long past due for decriminalization, in fact I'm rather surprised it didn't come about in the 60s. At least for anything you can grow in the ground. There's no excuse in a free society for drug companies to be able to run ads on television for drugs that are far more capable of harm and inebriation than pot, and yet have police barging into peoples private lives to protect society from marijuana. Jailing people for growing plants is a crime against nature, and it's downright scary that we put up with it.
Depends where you shop. I bought a laptop once at best buy, the doorman actually verified down to the model number.
Is checking your shopping bag such an invasion of privacy? Maybe. But their alternative to protect themselves more "legally" would be more cameras and stricter rules on the kinds of containers/bags you could enter the store with. Personally if all they search is the shopping bag, I don't care. If they were to start demanding to go through any other bags, I'd demand a police officer and some kind of witness testifying against me. Otherwise - walk. Let the guy "stop" you, because the second he physically touches you forms grounds for an assault charge.
I don't think it's a big deal, but anytime we get to watch the big dogs of DRM trip over their own tail, I say it's a good submission. Good for a laugh, anyways.
This begs the question though, are there any valid CD key pairs that share the first 19 characters? If so, using the method above, are they eventually doomed to trigger some lockout from using the same key in multiplayer from multiple locations?
I'm not sure whether the Dutch also charged the kids with assault, but I think the focus of the story, which has appeared in a couple other places on the net, is repeatedly that the judge made a point to allow the prosecution to push a theft charge for the virtual goods. I too am perplexed however that the bigger focus is on stealing the pixels and not beating the kid up and threatening him with a lethal weapon. But I guess it's the former that is newsworthy because it's setting a precident - there's nothing new about a judge claiming assault and battery is illegal.
Keep in mind, there is still a huge difference between playing a game poorly and getting scammed/duped, vs someone using physical, out of game intervention to steal your virtual property. The former can be entirely within the ruleset of the game, such as in EVE, the latter would lead to clearly dangerous implications if considered legal. I really don't think this will skip to players being prosecuted for playing like a jerk, as long as it stays in game.
I'm no expert on landing large buildings from extraterrestrial orbit, but it would be my recommendation that modules be no bigger than a small apartment building, and I think it's feasible to put wheels on the bottom of that such that it could self correct after a landing. Realistically with any kind of colony to be built from space drops - you'd want to have a pretty wide designated landing area, potentially surrounded by vehicles that could link to the modules and help guide them to their intended destination. More realistically, thinking way back to the design philosophy of Outpost, you'd construct the majority of your colony underground using a mix of supplied materials and suitable building material from the planet itself. This offers you better protection from weather, allows you to naturally shorten the distance between vital parts of the colony by utilizing 3 dimensions, and solves the resource issue of moving everything you need between planets.
On the downside, a Marsquake could really screw you.
When a politician claims they don't know, don't recall or don't remember a particular event that inconveniently disagrees with the self portrait they're trying to paint, they should get one of these cameras to help them remember.
On my iGoogle, I have only 3 sections. I have my gmail, my slashdot, and my google finance. I don't need tabs. In addition, I find myself needing extra clicks when I open a browser to google, if I was on one of the aforementioned google apps - the stupid thing lands inside the most recently used app now instead of on my homepage. And sure, it's only one extra click, and it's a free browser, but knowing some developer 1. Wasted time to program this, while 2. Not spending a few minutes to leave me the option of hanging with the old system, kinda pisses me off.
If I still played WOW I'd be highly supportive of both of these notions. I think the raiding party should definately have to approve someone spectating them. They should also ensure that there is no performance hit to the raiders being spectated - or top guilds are going to have a pretty firm NO as they attempt to learn a new encounter with 100 drooling wannabes leaning on their precious latency.
As for corpse runs - I think they are to an extent addressing this issue with checkpoints. Hopefully these will come with more graveyards too. If you ever played MMORPG tycoon - having plenty of graveyards made it a lot easier for your gamer sims to get back into the action and having fun - why this simple concept doesn't dawn on the folks making a billion a year on MMO subscriptions is beyond me.
Actually, that's the beauty of it. You're absolutely right - a computer that's too smart for its own good would parse that question and make many of the determinations you did - eventually maybe using statistics to foster a guess as to how many of Ann's friends Tom knows but does not befriend based on the five they do share.
Joe Six Pack will get it right about as often as I can get those visual captchas - about a 50-50 shot. Failure is annoying, but unless you put a really short lockout on the question he can just try again.
Ah, the trick question captcha. It feels chillingly Orwellian.
I think that depends on how you prioritize things. I'd vote either republican or democrat based on a single campaign promise with a plan that would bring 3rd parties into the debates and political process. Since that's obviously not happening, I'm voting independent based on principle - I'm pretty sure any of the third parties would immediately make an effort to secure the rights of 3rd parties to participate in elections. It barely matters who as the voted on person won't actualy win, but its a score against the process in my opinion.
This suddenly feels very relevant to the earlier discussions on Turing Tests. What we need is a computer that can accurately determine whether it is communicating with another computer or a human. That's what a captcha attempts to do - by using visual recognition as a function that a computer cannot replicate. Problem is - a computer CAN perform visual recognition, with increasing accuracy. And while 15% may not win any prizes, it's plenty to perform brute force attacks.
I don't know - maybe a traditional Turing test isn't good enough. Considering that any question that we deem is the silver bullet question - once it's been answered in a way that we're satisfied determines its a human response what's to stop you from programming it into a computer? If you blacklist that answer from being acceptable on further renditions of the question, the human you just passed a minute ago would fail if he retakes the test, unless the previous test somehow significantly alters him.
I concur - I can't see where a reasonable person, especially one knowing what they are judging for, would be convinced these are the reactions of a real person. I tested Elbot and, yes you go in with the preconceived notion that it's a computer generated response, but nonetheless the judges go in with the same suspicions and gear their questions to rout out the robots all the same. It's dodgy answers would have raised my suspicions the first time, and convinced me by the third.
You want to make a really convincing human? Let it make mistakes. Let its grammar slip in minor ways, throw a typo on 1/100 words. "To err is human", and all that.
I guess all that news about "format wars" between HD-DVD and Blue Ray was just some techy stuff nerds talked about that doesn't really matter.
I look at it as going green - I'm reducing my environmental footprint by not encouraging authors to make and sell plastic. It's also a shot at DRM and the organizations that back, and conveniently profit off it.
Piling on, I ran into a similar issue when I recently purchased warhammer. In what I can only guess was an effort to reduce the risk of their in box "cd-key" being cracked, which is used to create an account, the account creation page included an 8 character captcha. It took me 4 tries to establish the account.
Speaking of other types of games (FPS and chess come to mind) - maybe Blizzard could have considered a different possibility, create a new server that explicitly allows botting. In fact, it could even be a sort of competition - try to design the most successful bot. Once bots that could reach level 70 are achieved, perhaps designers could look for ways to make them work together more effectively, even going so far as to work in the finer mechanics of tanking, positioning, aggro, proactive and reactive healing, and effective use of crowd control. Possibly even learning to effectively pvp against other bots, or players. A whole new e-sport appealing to those very same that argue that WOW is too simple minded - to play WOW at a macro level instead of a micro level.
Blizzard wins, because they get money from all the bot's accounts. Curious minded programmers win, because they get the opportunity to explore a new world of AI. And folks that think botting is ok, can be free to play on a server where botting is encouraged. Meanwhile folks that are against botting, should hopefully encounter less of it since most that would use one would rather play on a bottable server.
Or... Blizzard could go the Vivendi route, and successfully sue Glider for more revenue than they ever took in. Yea. Makes sense to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Took me longer to find a pencil than to crack the damn code. Now on to much more interesting things, like watching my three year old arrange the perfect train crash under a footstool.
That's good. Had you actually been procreating during that time period, we might have more people running around thinking that shining a light off your nuts had some long term effect on your reproductive system.
Unfortunately, this isn't true. I believe it should be - but the police have entire agencies dedicated to tracking down drug users and distributors, breaking into their homes and siezing them and their supplies. Worse still, because it's illegal if you happen to have pot smoke in your house and actually NEED the police, like because someone's threatening you or stealing from you or there's a medical emergency - you're screwed. Neighbor's house on fire? Better not call the fire department, or you'll have to explain why your stoned. The benefit is those partaking could still participate in society instead of having to try and hide under a rock.
We're long past due for decriminalization, in fact I'm rather surprised it didn't come about in the 60s. At least for anything you can grow in the ground. There's no excuse in a free society for drug companies to be able to run ads on television for drugs that are far more capable of harm and inebriation than pot, and yet have police barging into peoples private lives to protect society from marijuana. Jailing people for growing plants is a crime against nature, and it's downright scary that we put up with it.
"Fox covers it truthfully".
You had me going until this one.
Depends where you shop. I bought a laptop once at best buy, the doorman actually verified down to the model number.
Is checking your shopping bag such an invasion of privacy? Maybe. But their alternative to protect themselves more "legally" would be more cameras and stricter rules on the kinds of containers/bags you could enter the store with. Personally if all they search is the shopping bag, I don't care. If they were to start demanding to go through any other bags, I'd demand a police officer and some kind of witness testifying against me. Otherwise - walk. Let the guy "stop" you, because the second he physically touches you forms grounds for an assault charge.
Parent doesn't look like a troll to me...
I don't think it's a big deal, but anytime we get to watch the big dogs of DRM trip over their own tail, I say it's a good submission. Good for a laugh, anyways.
This begs the question though, are there any valid CD key pairs that share the first 19 characters? If so, using the method above, are they eventually doomed to trigger some lockout from using the same key in multiplayer from multiple locations?
"Oh candy, no - I don't own a tangerine. And probably never ate - if this is how they bake their cookies."
I'm not entirely sure what's going on, but I feel better, as if suddenly lobotimized.
It's not a biblical event if you use a man-made amplifier.
I bought this chess board one time...
Actually in theory the game was free, but I had to buy the hardware.
So the motion sensor control is still whacked, but now at least I can bask in the warm fuzzy feeling of DRM creeping over nintendo hardware.
Oh wait, no - I don't own a wii. And probably never will - if this is how they respect their customers.
I'm not sure whether the Dutch also charged the kids with assault, but I think the focus of the story, which has appeared in a couple other places on the net, is repeatedly that the judge made a point to allow the prosecution to push a theft charge for the virtual goods. I too am perplexed however that the bigger focus is on stealing the pixels and not beating the kid up and threatening him with a lethal weapon. But I guess it's the former that is newsworthy because it's setting a precident - there's nothing new about a judge claiming assault and battery is illegal.
Keep in mind, there is still a huge difference between playing a game poorly and getting scammed/duped, vs someone using physical, out of game intervention to steal your virtual property. The former can be entirely within the ruleset of the game, such as in EVE, the latter would lead to clearly dangerous implications if considered legal. I really don't think this will skip to players being prosecuted for playing like a jerk, as long as it stays in game.
I'm no expert on landing large buildings from extraterrestrial orbit, but it would be my recommendation that modules be no bigger than a small apartment building, and I think it's feasible to put wheels on the bottom of that such that it could self correct after a landing. Realistically with any kind of colony to be built from space drops - you'd want to have a pretty wide designated landing area, potentially surrounded by vehicles that could link to the modules and help guide them to their intended destination. More realistically, thinking way back to the design philosophy of Outpost, you'd construct the majority of your colony underground using a mix of supplied materials and suitable building material from the planet itself. This offers you better protection from weather, allows you to naturally shorten the distance between vital parts of the colony by utilizing 3 dimensions, and solves the resource issue of moving everything you need between planets.
On the downside, a Marsquake could really screw you.
When a politician claims they don't know, don't recall or don't remember a particular event that inconveniently disagrees with the self portrait they're trying to paint, they should get one of these cameras to help them remember.
It all depends how you use the page.
On my iGoogle, I have only 3 sections. I have my gmail, my slashdot, and my google finance. I don't need tabs. In addition, I find myself needing extra clicks when I open a browser to google, if I was on one of the aforementioned google apps - the stupid thing lands inside the most recently used app now instead of on my homepage. And sure, it's only one extra click, and it's a free browser, but knowing some developer 1. Wasted time to program this, while 2. Not spending a few minutes to leave me the option of hanging with the old system, kinda pisses me off.
If I still played WOW I'd be highly supportive of both of these notions. I think the raiding party should definately have to approve someone spectating them. They should also ensure that there is no performance hit to the raiders being spectated - or top guilds are going to have a pretty firm NO as they attempt to learn a new encounter with 100 drooling wannabes leaning on their precious latency.
As for corpse runs - I think they are to an extent addressing this issue with checkpoints. Hopefully these will come with more graveyards too. If you ever played MMORPG tycoon - having plenty of graveyards made it a lot easier for your gamer sims to get back into the action and having fun - why this simple concept doesn't dawn on the folks making a billion a year on MMO subscriptions is beyond me.
Actually, that's the beauty of it. You're absolutely right - a computer that's too smart for its own good would parse that question and make many of the determinations you did - eventually maybe using statistics to foster a guess as to how many of Ann's friends Tom knows but does not befriend based on the five they do share.
Joe Six Pack will get it right about as often as I can get those visual captchas - about a 50-50 shot. Failure is annoying, but unless you put a really short lockout on the question he can just try again.
Ah, the trick question captcha. It feels chillingly Orwellian.
I think that depends on how you prioritize things. I'd vote either republican or democrat based on a single campaign promise with a plan that would bring 3rd parties into the debates and political process. Since that's obviously not happening, I'm voting independent based on principle - I'm pretty sure any of the third parties would immediately make an effort to secure the rights of 3rd parties to participate in elections. It barely matters who as the voted on person won't actualy win, but its a score against the process in my opinion.
This suddenly feels very relevant to the earlier discussions on Turing Tests. What we need is a computer that can accurately determine whether it is communicating with another computer or a human. That's what a captcha attempts to do - by using visual recognition as a function that a computer cannot replicate. Problem is - a computer CAN perform visual recognition, with increasing accuracy. And while 15% may not win any prizes, it's plenty to perform brute force attacks.
I don't know - maybe a traditional Turing test isn't good enough. Considering that any question that we deem is the silver bullet question - once it's been answered in a way that we're satisfied determines its a human response what's to stop you from programming it into a computer? If you blacklist that answer from being acceptable on further renditions of the question, the human you just passed a minute ago would fail if he retakes the test, unless the previous test somehow significantly alters him.
I concur - I can't see where a reasonable person, especially one knowing what they are judging for, would be convinced these are the reactions of a real person. I tested Elbot and, yes you go in with the preconceived notion that it's a computer generated response, but nonetheless the judges go in with the same suspicions and gear their questions to rout out the robots all the same. It's dodgy answers would have raised my suspicions the first time, and convinced me by the third.
You want to make a really convincing human? Let it make mistakes. Let its grammar slip in minor ways, throw a typo on 1/100 words. "To err is human", and all that.
I guess all that news about "format wars" between HD-DVD and Blue Ray was just some techy stuff nerds talked about that doesn't really matter.
I look at it as going green - I'm reducing my environmental footprint by not encouraging authors to make and sell plastic. It's also a shot at DRM and the organizations that back, and conveniently profit off it.
Piling on, I ran into a similar issue when I recently purchased warhammer. In what I can only guess was an effort to reduce the risk of their in box "cd-key" being cracked, which is used to create an account, the account creation page included an 8 character captcha. It took me 4 tries to establish the account.
Speaking of other types of games (FPS and chess come to mind) - maybe Blizzard could have considered a different possibility, create a new server that explicitly allows botting. In fact, it could even be a sort of competition - try to design the most successful bot. Once bots that could reach level 70 are achieved, perhaps designers could look for ways to make them work together more effectively, even going so far as to work in the finer mechanics of tanking, positioning, aggro, proactive and reactive healing, and effective use of crowd control. Possibly even learning to effectively pvp against other bots, or players. A whole new e-sport appealing to those very same that argue that WOW is too simple minded - to play WOW at a macro level instead of a micro level.
Blizzard wins, because they get money from all the bot's accounts. Curious minded programmers win, because they get the opportunity to explore a new world of AI. And folks that think botting is ok, can be free to play on a server where botting is encouraged. Meanwhile folks that are against botting, should hopefully encounter less of it since most that would use one would rather play on a bottable server.
Or... Blizzard could go the Vivendi route, and successfully sue Glider for more revenue than they ever took in. Yea. Makes sense to me.
Well, I'm already a gamer.
And this morning, I'm feeling kinda elderly. What the heck, sign me up!
Or, will it run on linux, AND run linux?
Kinda like how in a few fantasy games they poke fun at themselves by having the characters play video games.
I thought it said online gambling platform.