However were he possessed of even the slightest hint of ethics he would have quit on the spot
Even the slimiest of scumbags deserve their fair day in court with legal representation. There is no such thing as fairness for some. It's unethical to deny them that, so it must be ethical for everyone competent to defend them properly. Otherwise, we have ethics for some, and that doesn't work out very well either.
Is in unethical to do something that is ethically justifiable in itself if it also benefits you?
That being said, when all the evidence is put on the table, most accused of being slimy scumbags are shown to be just that. And they should be treated fairly for that, meaning harshly.
I also remember forum bans and account bans for as little as distasteful fanfic about someone's game. But it wasn't in the game, and it wasn't even on the game's forums. Just, you know, if you dare post something we dislike about our games, we'll kick you out.
That deserves all the public outcry it gets.
But remember that it isn't illegal: you're allowed free speech, but that doesn't give you the automatic right to speak on their private "land".
Their practices do mean that their product-and-service offering is a shitty one that you shouldn't buy, and people deserve to be informed of this poor treatment of customers.
While scrabble is fun game, I'll chime in with a few recommendations:
Nexuiz, a free (as in beer-talk) first-person shooter with neat graphics [if your card can carry it], awesome weapons (some sci-fi'ish) and an online noob server where even I don't get my ass kicked within two seconds;)
Battle for Wesnoth, a turn-based strategy game in a fantasy setting, with a story revolving around the ironfisted queen, princes and princesses and gandalfian mages (aren't they all?). Simple rules with complex strategies arising from them. Your units have names and level up in per-type advancement trees as you progress during the campaign.
Or Tremulous, an Aliens vs. Marines team FPS where you level up as you evolve or buy equipment and can build gun/slime turrets around your base (intelligent design of your perimeter is required:p).
You won't ever be kicked out of those, and they all have better graphics and sound than scrabble:) If you're an ass, the individual server might kick you off, and if you're a complete ass they might do so the next few times again.
Or play some of the great single-player console games [zelda, mario, gh3 for the wii]. You don't have the code, so you can't fix it, but no one can ban you.
I've patched Wesnoth such that a horizontal scroll wheel lets you move around the map more intuitively, and Nexuiz to include a simple handicap mode. Software freedom for the win:)
Is fixing the proprietary games necessary? Yep!
In zelda, the implicit state machine can reach several states from where you can't reach the endgame. When Eldin bridge becomes uncrossable, you are north of it, you have entered the region from the south, and you must reach the north exit. If you save and reload, you will respawn where you entered, unable to reach the north side.
When you find the big cannon, you do something to it and then a guy enters. If you save and reload before doing it, the guy is there when you load, and then you can't do what you need to do due to his presence.
Guitar Hero definitely needs a Jukebox mode, where you can listen to the songs being performed with the guitar part but without playing. You can enable performance mode and no-fail to get all instruments except your part, but that's not good enough. The menu structure is too deep and narrow. The menu items should be selectable by one-or-two fret combinations (i.e. "click") rather than "down-down-down-green". The "are you sure" popups should be killed.
Mario needs better auto-camera, and the freedom to look around in more than half-spaces. I'd like to read the controls code to find out how they really work. Reverse engineering the mapping from [facing, velocity, camera and joystick vectors] to [facing, velocity and camera vectors] is not trivial enough.
But they're still great games despite the flaws I can't fix:)
[noticed how the wii firmware update fixes saved games in deadlocked positions in zelda? Me neither...]
Calling that "universal" makes it to my ears sound like every only emergencies are "real" health care issues.
Last doctor's visit I remember, I had worms throwing a party up my ass. Doctor's visitation, prescription of a drug, the part of the drug I had to pay, all cost about the same as a movie ticket. My visits to the hospital, all covered by taxes. It's free. Free, free, free. Free!
That is universal healthcare. Sure, we get our asses taxed somewhat heavily; the only people to foot the bill are ourselves. But here's the thing: we're living the good life anyways.
Come live in Denmark for a while. If you get one of the good jobs, you might be slightly less rich than if you're in the USA. But you can sleep soundly at night, knowing that if you get sick or fired, abject poverty is not impending in 3-2-1-go.
Also, for any one issue you pick out [such as health care], you can say that most people can reasonably well inform themselves and make good decisions, and those who can't can just pick the default option pointed out by government. I'm not sure I agree totally, but let's take that claim at face value.
If you do that for every issue where your economic freedom is important, you have days with 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, and 8 hours of making informed decisions.
I'd rather have someone make reasonable decisions for me if they work in practice, let me get on with living a happy life (more time for Guitar Hero), and for a large number of my compatriots are better than what they would have made on their own. Provided of course that the decision is made with input of the people such that we can vote scumbags out if they ever get in.
A really interesting game, where you get to fight for your side no matter what it is, and get to win the election not by having the better message but by rigging the game is this:
You have a 2d grid of squares; for each square, you have a population count and a distribution between blue, red and white. You have to form n connected components (n is given, typically 4), with roughly equal population counts, such that:
- in level 1, true - in level 2, your guy wins (you pick either red or blue at the outset) - in level 3, the red and blue have enough votes to shut everybody else out - in level 4, you have 65% blacks in one area - in level 5, you learn how it all can be fixed.
For one, you could only use them to communicate with 30 other hosts.
Thank you, I'm here all week. Try the v6;)
See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1.txt; destaddr is five bits; 00000 is unused [says Peter Salus, I didn't read the whole rfc and I don't remember this bit].
And as a more modern example, Guitar Hero is just as shallow when you think about it: hit the subset of buttons indicated by the dots when the dots cross the time line up to a certain tolerance. That's all the conceptual "moving parts" in the game; the rest is presentation.
And shallow with good presentation is good; it's a damn fun game, and it's the first game where I've ever replayed a level I've already completed perfectly just for that level's background music:)
Whole disk encryption is excellent for security, but it will bog you down in disk access times.
Really? For each sequential read, I'd think that you'd have a delay as the first block is decrypted, then everything is following sequentially with no extra delay and a constant amount of CPU usage.
Most desk-/laptop are vastly overpowered for the common applications (slashtube, textproc and media). In the few cases where maximum performance is needed (e.g. games), you typically move all data into memory, then do compute-heavy stuff with _very_ little I/O, then write back what you need to. If the I/O and computation are disjoint, there's no slowdown, only a delay.
losing 30% of your throughput for reading data is a lot!
How do you conclude that this loss happened? Nit: I wrote, not read.
The disk has one maximum write speed (n MB/s). The cpu has a maximum write speed (m MB/s) in terms of how much encryption it can do.
If m is greater than n, you lose 0% I/O speed, at the cost of computational resources. What the impact of that loss of CPU speed means depends very much on the application.
If the computation doesn't do any I/O while it's happening, you lose 0% of your computational resources at the cost of a some I/O delay [if you read+decrypt all data before starting the computation].
If the CPU is spent at a big server in the middle that distributes work units and needs the CPU for exactly nothing else, and can keep up with the clients, it's a 0% real-world loss of throughput.
[some of these models are bogus]
If you start interleaving I/O and computation, things get a lot more hairy. And my scenario is probably not very representative. That's why I suggested that the questioner did an experiment of their own: then they'd know that in their particular application, the impact is going to be within some parameters they do know.
And for academic purposes: so the CPU and disk have upper throughput bounds of n and m MB/s. What I probably should have done is encrypt some zeroes and store them in/dev/null to measure the CPU alone. Then, on the unencrypted boot-strapping partition, do a big write to measure unencrypted write performance. Then do both, and compare all the numbers.
Maybe you should generate a gig of random numbers instead?
It would either take time to run the PRNG, or time to wait for the true RNG. That has huge potential to produce results that will mislead the unwary interpreter.
I'm glad to see that we were proven correct, and now they're going back to the paper/electronic system.
I'm glad they're going to do what the evidence suggests is the best thing, and I don't care about the party I would've voted for [!citizen] being wrong.
I'm also glad that voting that includes paper was shown to work best. That means the temptation to switch to e-voting is smaller, which is good because e-voting is not transparent to the common citizen. Had e-voting demonstrated to work best [in terms of functional characteristics], that problem would still be there, and would still be important.
I'm not so glad that a party was proven correct, in the way you describe it. It seems very clear that - Both parties made up their mind based on ideology or personal values rather than evidence. - The party in power implemented a policy, still not based on any evidence. - That policy turned out to be pot. That evidence was used to inform policy.
I'd love to see cities built by civil engineers who learn from many iterations of trial and error. Apparently it's a fine way to build democracies and economies.
For crying out loud, they could have tested e-voting machines in a small county, hand-counted the paper trails and kept the machine output only for the purpose of the study, and let people who were uncomfortable with the machine hand in only a paper ballot. That study took me the whole of 28 seconds to design. Was it not run? Was the result disregarded?
Explain to me, very slowly and carefully please, why there are still people not out on the street renewing the tree of liberty with their own blood and that of dictators?
At the very least someone is guilty of high treason.
Slashdot Mirror
However were he possessed of even the slightest hint of ethics he would have quit on the spot
Even the slimiest of scumbags deserve their fair day in court with legal representation. There is no such thing as fairness for some. It's unethical to deny them that, so it must be ethical for everyone competent to defend them properly. Otherwise, we have ethics for some, and that doesn't work out very well either.
Is in unethical to do something that is ethically justifiable in itself if it also benefits you?
That being said, when all the evidence is put on the table, most accused of being slimy scumbags are shown to be just that. And they should be treated fairly for that, meaning harshly.
If you start putting your truck through the tubes ...
FTFY, happy to help.
Or right click the username field and select "Log in with BugMeNot", thanks to the firefox extension.
(waddayakno, it uses the username "public")
Sheep aren't even considered citizens.
Try telling that to an Aussie ;)
I also remember forum bans and account bans for as little as distasteful fanfic about someone's game. But it wasn't in the game, and it wasn't even on the game's forums. Just, you know, if you dare post something we dislike about our games, we'll kick you out.
That deserves all the public outcry it gets.
But remember that it isn't illegal: you're allowed free speech, but that doesn't give you the automatic right to speak on their private "land".
Their practices do mean that their product-and-service offering is a shitty one that you shouldn't buy, and people deserve to be informed of this poor treatment of customers.
Vote with your Lincolns, not your lawsuits.
As long as we don't have to follow rule 34! http://xkcd.com/305/
Time to switch to online Scrabble or something.
While scrabble is fun game, I'll chime in with a few recommendations:
Nexuiz, a free (as in beer-talk) first-person shooter with neat graphics [if your card can carry it], awesome weapons (some sci-fi'ish) and an online noob server where even I don't get my ass kicked within two seconds ;)
Battle for Wesnoth, a turn-based strategy game in a fantasy setting, with a story revolving around the ironfisted queen, princes and princesses and gandalfian mages (aren't they all?). Simple rules with complex strategies arising from them. Your units have names and level up in per-type advancement trees as you progress during the campaign.
Or Tremulous, an Aliens vs. Marines team FPS where you level up as you evolve or buy equipment and can build gun/slime turrets around your base (intelligent design of your perimeter is required :p).
You won't ever be kicked out of those, and they all have better graphics and sound than scrabble :) If you're an ass, the individual server might kick you off, and if you're a complete ass they might do so the next few times again.
Or play some of the great single-player console games [zelda, mario, gh3 for the wii]. You don't have the code, so you can't fix it, but no one can ban you.
I've patched Wesnoth such that a horizontal scroll wheel lets you move around the map more intuitively, and Nexuiz to include a simple handicap mode. Software freedom for the win :)
Is fixing the proprietary games necessary? Yep!
In zelda, the implicit state machine can reach several states from where you can't reach the endgame. When Eldin bridge becomes uncrossable, you are north of it, you have entered the region from the south, and you must reach the north exit. If you save and reload, you will respawn where you entered, unable to reach the north side.
When you find the big cannon, you do something to it and then a guy enters. If you save and reload before doing it, the guy is there when you load, and then you can't do what you need to do due to his presence.
Guitar Hero definitely needs a Jukebox mode, where you can listen to the songs being performed with the guitar part but without playing. You can enable performance mode and no-fail to get all instruments except your part, but that's not good enough. The menu structure is too deep and narrow. The menu items should be selectable by one-or-two fret combinations (i.e. "click") rather than "down-down-down-green". The "are you sure" popups should be killed.
Mario needs better auto-camera, and the freedom to look around in more than half-spaces. I'd like to read the controls code to find out how they really work. Reverse engineering the mapping from [facing, velocity, camera and joystick vectors] to [facing, velocity and camera vectors] is not trivial enough.
But they're still great games despite the flaws I can't fix :)
[noticed how the wii firmware update fixes saved games in deadlocked positions in zelda? Me neither...]
Mod me OT now ;)
And that's before they get out of bed in the morning!
That's dumb on their part--it's great fun fucking minors around the clock, outside bed, and especially outdoors. I should know ;)
(gf at the time, all above board)
My town, and most others in California, has a curfew for minors, 10:00pm.
Let me say that in another way: citizens of the USA are being denied their constitutional right and their human right to peacefully assemble.
Send out letters, receive money. Such a deal. Par for the course for for spammers
Interesting similarity, wouldn't you say?
The base package is 1Mbit/512K. Not bad if you live on a farm in Iowa if you ask me.
Bad if you ask anyone living somewhere in Sweden, say Götebarrrrr or Karrrrrlskrona... ;)
UPS already has Dibs on "Brown"
They can expect a lawsuit from south african spaceman dude any day now..
Walk into any Emergency Room lobby
Calling that "universal" makes it to my ears sound like every only emergencies are "real" health care issues.
Last doctor's visit I remember, I had worms throwing a party up my ass. Doctor's visitation, prescription of a drug, the part of the drug I had to pay, all cost about the same as a movie ticket. My visits to the hospital, all covered by taxes. It's free. Free, free, free. Free!
That is universal healthcare. Sure, we get our asses taxed somewhat heavily; the only people to foot the bill are ourselves. But here's the thing: we're living the good life anyways.
Come live in Denmark for a while. If you get one of the good jobs, you might be slightly less rich than if you're in the USA. But you can sleep soundly at night, knowing that if you get sick or fired, abject poverty is not impending in 3-2-1-go.
Also, for any one issue you pick out [such as health care], you can say that most people can reasonably well inform themselves and make good decisions, and those who can't can just pick the default option pointed out by government. I'm not sure I agree totally, but let's take that claim at face value.
If you do that for every issue where your economic freedom is important, you have days with 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, and 8 hours of making informed decisions.
I'd rather have someone make reasonable decisions for me if they work in practice, let me get on with living a happy life (more time for Guitar Hero), and for a large number of my compatriots are better than what they would have made on their own. Provided of course that the decision is made with input of the people such that we can vote scumbags out if they ever get in.
A really interesting game, where you get to fight for your side no matter what it is, and get to win the election not by having the better message but by rigging the game is this:
http://www.redistrictinggame.com/
You have a 2d grid of squares; for each square, you have a population count and a distribution between blue, red and white. You have to form n connected components (n is given, typically 4), with roughly equal population counts, such that:
- in level 1, true
- in level 2, your guy wins (you pick either red or blue at the outset)
- in level 3, the red and blue have enough votes to shut everybody else out
- in level 4, you have 65% blacks in one area
- in level 5, you learn how it all can be fixed.
Think of it as a "Help America Vote For Me Act" :)
Why are Federal taxpayers forced to pay [...]
You cite a non-US media source to back up your claim...
but there's nothing that says a Zelda can't have a good story either (and some do).
They all do! For one,
SPOILER WARNING
In Twilight Princess, Ganondorf kidnaps princess Zelda.
SPOILER OVER
See?
what's so wrong with wanting original IP's?
For one, you could only use them to communicate with 30 other hosts.
Thank you, I'm here all week. Try the v6 ;)
See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1.txt; destaddr is five bits; 00000 is unused [says Peter Salus, I didn't read the whole rfc and I don't remember this bit].
Or, to illustrate it with videogames;
And as a more modern example, Guitar Hero is just as shallow when you think about it: hit the subset of buttons indicated by the dots when the dots cross the time line up to a certain tolerance. That's all the conceptual "moving parts" in the game; the rest is presentation.
And shallow with good presentation is good; it's a damn fun game, and it's the first game where I've ever replayed a level I've already completed perfectly just for that level's background music :)
Whole disk encryption is excellent for security, but it will bog you down in disk access times.
Really? For each sequential read, I'd think that you'd have a delay as the first block is decrypted, then everything is following sequentially with no extra delay and a constant amount of CPU usage.
Most desk-/laptop are vastly overpowered for the common applications (slashtube, textproc and media). In the few cases where maximum performance is needed (e.g. games), you typically move all data into memory, then do compute-heavy stuff with _very_ little I/O, then write back what you need to. If the I/O and computation are disjoint, there's no slowdown, only a delay.
+5 I Wish I Had That Idea ;)
I'm optimistic, slightly cautiously.
He also said protect. I don't think he was talking about radiation suits ;)
losing 30% of your throughput for reading data is a lot!
How do you conclude that this loss happened? Nit: I wrote, not read.
The disk has one maximum write speed (n MB/s). The cpu has a maximum write speed (m MB/s) in terms of how much encryption it can do.
If m is greater than n, you lose 0% I/O speed, at the cost of computational resources. What the impact of that loss of CPU speed means depends very much on the application.
If the computation doesn't do any I/O while it's happening, you lose 0% of your computational resources at the cost of a some I/O delay [if you read+decrypt all data before starting the computation].
If the CPU is spent at a big server in the middle that distributes work units and needs the CPU for exactly nothing else, and can keep up with the clients, it's a 0% real-world loss of throughput.
[some of these models are bogus]
If you start interleaving I/O and computation, things get a lot more hairy. And my scenario is probably not very representative. That's why I suggested that the questioner did an experiment of their own: then they'd know that in their particular application, the impact is going to be within some parameters they do know.
And for academic purposes: so the CPU and disk have upper throughput bounds of n and m MB/s. What I probably should have done is encrypt some zeroes and store them in /dev/null to measure the CPU alone. Then, on the unencrypted boot-strapping partition, do a big write to measure unencrypted write performance. Then do both, and compare all the numbers.
Maybe you should generate a gig of random numbers instead?
It would either take time to run the PRNG, or time to wait for the true RNG. That has huge potential to produce results that will mislead the unwary interpreter.
I'm glad to see that we were proven correct, and now they're going back to the paper/electronic system.
I'm glad they're going to do what the evidence suggests is the best thing, and I don't care about the party I would've voted for [!citizen] being wrong.
I'm also glad that voting that includes paper was shown to work best. That means the temptation to switch to e-voting is smaller, which is good because e-voting is not transparent to the common citizen. Had e-voting demonstrated to work best [in terms of functional characteristics], that problem would still be there, and would still be important.
I'm not so glad that a party was proven correct, in the way you describe it. It seems very clear that
- Both parties made up their mind based on ideology or personal values rather than evidence.
- The party in power implemented a policy, still not based on any evidence.
- That policy turned out to be pot. That evidence was used to inform policy.
I'd love to see cities built by civil engineers who learn from many iterations of trial and error. Apparently it's a fine way to build democracies and economies.
For crying out loud, they could have tested e-voting machines in a small county, hand-counted the paper trails and kept the machine output only for the purpose of the study, and let people who were uncomfortable with the machine hand in only a paper ballot. That study took me the whole of 28 seconds to design. Was it not run? Was the result disregarded?
What the hell is going on in this world?
I'm speechless.
lets go of a deep sigh
Explain to me, very slowly and carefully please, why there are still people not out on the street renewing the tree of liberty with their own blood and that of dictators?
At the very least someone is guilty of high treason.
Right? Right?