Bet $1Billion you will get an F, then don't show up for the exam.
Gee, I wonder what they've set the odds on someone betting they'd get an F and then going and getting an F.
If it were me I'd make it 1:1.
On second thought... if you really thought this was clever I'll set the payout odds at 1:10. (That's right 1:10 not 10:1 -- so if you are dumb enough to place that bet I'll keep 90% of your cash if you win, and all of it if you manage to lose.)
This is a slick trick to get the taxpayers to provide the extra security and snooping for them.
They are trying to nab fly-by-night (literally) vendors of unauthorized / counterfeit goods.
These people don't have business address, name tags, and take cash. They are clearly in the wrong here. Shouldn't there be some sort of appropriate method of suing them for the trademarks violated, and the counterfeit goods they are hawking?
I understand John/Jane Doe cases where it is clear a crime has been committed, but to file a lawsuit before the supposed crime can even be committed let alone proven to have occurred seems to go well beyond the intent of any law and should not be permitted.
That was my initial take on it too. However: a) the lawsuit is just a practical method of getting their ducks in a row so that they can have police support in getting the names of the people who are doing this, because they have no other way.
b) no crime has been committed. this is a civil suit. the police don't generally get involved in civil suits without a court order. yet the police seem to be required because the trademark holders have no legal method of extracting the identity of the counterfeiters.
Planning to commit a felony is against the law in itself, so those sorts of situations are already covered, as long as it can be proved that the plans were actually in place.
Trademark infringement is not a felonly. "Planning to infringe trademark" isn't either.
So all that said, there seems to be a loophole that the infringers were abusing. We're not committing a crime so the police won't get involved. And we can't be sued because they don't know who we are. HaHa!
My sympathies lie with the rights holder here. And pre-suing them so that they can get police support identifying them seems a bit twisted but in all honesty... a fairly reasonable approach to the problem.
The only other alternative I can think of is that they hire a private investigator to tail these people to identify them, eat the cost, and then sue for damages including the cost of the PI. I actually prefer this alternative... but PI's quasi-law-enforcement status also give me the creeps. Twisted either way.
What if they show up *every night at midnight* and commit acts that resulted in damages to you? You call the police they eventually arrive. You could try and sue them but you don't know who they are and they vanish into the woodwork.
So you know they are coming (remember that they ALWAYS come), you file this suit which is essentially a funky way of asking the police to be there ahead of time, so that they can actually get their names etc, so that you can actually successfully sue them for the damages they cause you by violating your trademarks with their bootleg counterfeit goods...
Quite bluntly, they should be able to ask for police support to snag fly-by-night counterfeiters. Maybe the mechanism shouldn't be "pre-suing them" but do we have a better mechanism?
1) Net neutrality extends further than your ISP. You only have "control" over who provides you the last leg. 2) Control in #1 is quoted, because you may only have one viable option. Lucky if you have two. Very lucky if you have more than 2. 3) Most smaller DSL providers, fixed wireless, etc are backended onto one of the few major telcos. They are often at the mercy of these back end providers, and in turn the end user has no control either.
Regulatory oversight is needed when an industry is a monopoly or oligopoly (few participants, high barriers to entry, etc). Telecom is such an industry. The FCC may not be perfect, but it is necessary.
They already have far more insight into how the troops operate than we do. They actually are on the receiving end of those operations. We need this insight more than they do.
I agree. Its the best alternative if you need total security. Boot off a live CD from a diskless machine. (or at least set the hard drives as read-only).
But its a hassle to boot off a live CD.
My VM method realizes nearly all of the benefits of a live CD with a lot more convenience, since you can run it in antoher window along with everything else you are doing. Its more than secure enough for my purposes (keeps the kids from stumbling into it, and acts as a firewall for malware coming through the browser).
Don't the changes still get written to disk though?
Its more or less a like a snapshot, and all 'new' disk writes are written to a separate file to be optionally merged back into the disk image. If you decide to discard them, then the file just gets deleted. I suppose some sort of disk forensics done on the freed space before its overwritten might be able to recover something.
It depends what you are looking for. When I want private / secure browsing, I just don't want any traces of it in my main browser, I don't want my kids to stumble over it, and I don't want any malware to get through. So a linux VM is covers all my needs.
I like a VM, because I can continue doing everything else I was doing, alongside without having to worry about it.
I'm not downloading stuff that I'm overly worried about concealing all traces of my browsing from some sort of competent law enforcement forensics.
If I -were- doing that, then yeah, I'd take things to another level. I'd probably go with a diskless station booting from a LiveCD or something, with an encrypted usb drive to save anything I wanted to keep.
The ram disk option seems like a better route since you're ensured that those contents are truly gone once they're deleted or the machine looses power. In today's world it's trivial to put an extra 1GB or so towards a ram disk, and most people could web browse from that just fine.
I'm concerned about a ramdisk because I don't know enough about them. Can they have portions swapped as part of your operating systems normal memory management? If they can, then there is a possibility of information leaking onto your hard drive in the same way there is with deleted changes from a VM snapshot.
I'm also concerned because simply copying everything to a ram disk and running it from there means I have to know more about the application than I necessarily do. For example, Firefox saves stuff into my user profile... simply copying the profile and the executable to a ram disk isn't going to change this behaviour, I need to make sure it knows to read and save things to the ram disk profile. And I need to be sure that there is nowhere else that it saves information to that I didn't redirect.
There is also the issue for 'leakage' if an external program is launch. (Say I click on a Word document link...) and a browser on a ram disk provides no security vs a malware infection.
A VM gaurds against a lot of this leakage, and the only real risk, is, as you pointed out, that you should run a secure erase on the free space when your done.
If complete security is your goal (vs my personal lesser goal) than the diskless liveCD option would be the way to go. No matter what happens, when it shuts down there are no traces, because there is no disk to leave them on.
When I want to browse in high security / high privacy I use a virtual machine and delete all changes when shutting it down. (ie so the vm is in precisely the same state it was in when i turned it on.) This also gives me some reasonably good protection from viruses/malware/ and other crud, since unless it manages to break out of the VM, it goes away when I shut the VM down.
Pretty much every network textbook in existence uses the analogy of "pipes" when describing latency and bandwidth. "Tubes" and "pipes" are essentially the same thing, so if Stevens was wrong, then so are all the major network experts who write the textbooks. And "clogged tubes" is a pretty good analogy for congestion along a route.
Right. If this is how an average pay person, even a senator views the internet its not the end of the world.
Part of his comments included this sentence: "I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday." refering to an email message. Its ok for *MY* grand father to say he received an "internet", or to have a view of the internet strictly in terms of tubes.
However, its not really forgivable that the man responsible for authoring legislation like the "Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006" to not be clear on the difference between an email and the internet to have such a lay understanding of the subject.
It sounds like CCP are building quite a good simulation, regardless of whether or not it makes for a good game.
Sure its a "great" simulation. Like most of real life though, its a not especially fun.
I wonder if they will find the right conditions to cause player-run high-sec areas to develop that mirror modern life, or the class of "sporting" games that you describe inside of them.
Doubt it. Players who want that are better served playing a different game where other players want that.
Who cares? If you fight an equal enemy and come out victorious 4 times out of 5 you're playing one heck of a game. Which for those of us who are in the mercenary business means contracts, reputation and more money.
That's only "profitable" if you are extremely bad at math, or your group is deliberately flying cheap cruddy disposable ships... Zerging FTW! Yawn. Been there done that.
The weak tend to have very little of value worth stealing and destroying. The game rewards preying on the stupid, the ignorant and the undefended.
The stupid, ignorant, and undefended ARE the weak. How hard do you plan to argue that you agree with me here?
Not necessarily. Some of my most memorable fights were in heavily outnumbered situations, either because I simply *couldn't* disengage or because I decided to take the bait and spring the trap. And yes, fighting 3 battleships in your single one is *fun*.
Exactly. Those are indeed the most memorable and the most fun memories I have in EVE too. Its poor game design that the most memorable and fun moments are the ones you really can't afford to deliberately get into very often, and you spend hours upon hours doing essentially nothing waiting for those moments.
Sorry, but clearly EVE isn't for you. As per my post above, you're a victim...by choice
Are you reading what I wrote? I was very successful at EVE. Get it through your skull that I was anything but the "victim". I was good at EVE, I was successful at EVE, and I *still* think it was mostly a lousy boring game.
If EVE players are so risk averse how come I keep hearing FC's and fleet members saying the equivalent of 'screw the odds, let's go get ourselves blown up'.
One of
a) Because the value of their currently equipped ship is a fraction of the players total worth. b) Becuase they don't feel they will really lose that day. c) Because they are so tired of the endless tedium that even losing an expensive/valuable ship beats sitting around on their collective thumbs any longer.
And if you don't like it, go play with your Barbie dolls on that Teletubbie themed game WoW where...
Seriously. You can take your arrogance and stuff it. I -just- came off a round of Travian, having belonged to, and then later leading an alliance for the last several months until the round ended. *My alliance won*.
If this game were EVE... Imagine logging in one day, and finding all your ships destroyed. All your ISK gone. No insurance. No clones. No implants. Nothing. You may as well have created a brand new account, except that new players have more than you. You can be ZEROED without even being online. No safe zones, no space stations you can't be touched in, no high-security space.
Trying to play the 'carebear' card on me is just laughable.
Relatively speaking, EVE is the barbie-doll & teletubby filled carebear-land.
Not that I'm saying travian is the game to mimic. (Its a browser game so the graphics aren't exactly notable.) And its got a raft of serious flaws of its own. But one thing I did like was the structure of it being played in year long rounds... you can get eliminated and restart fresh on another server or the next round and try again with a clean slate. And I liked their being an endgame. Its not an endless pointless treadmill.
Obviously you haven't played much.
LMAO. Sure buddy.
But the point is that in Eve, you typically don't know if you're going into a fair or unfair fight and who's actually going to have the advantage when all is said and done. You don't know if on the other side of the next gate there's a fleet ten times your size that's covered the area in warp bubbles.
Any significant sized fleet running around with their best ships is scouting heavily, checking neighboring systems, the other sides of jump points, and monitoring the chatter. If you are in a significant fleet and you get 'surprised' by a fleet 10x the size, your probably doing something wrong.
The UI is anything but terrible in my opinion.
The fact that you can't see what's wrong with it is just sad. Its clumsy to a fault. I freely admit I don't play it NOW, but for the years I did play it they never addressed any of its glaring short-comings. Perhaps its gotten better. I don't really care enough to find out.
The only spreadsheet-like reading I ever do is the market, and that's simply as efficiently laid out as I can imagine it.
I can imagine several improvements.
Lousy font. Lousy choice of colors for actually reading. Lousy filter/sort controls. You need to dump to excel to get anything remotely interesting done without going blind, especially for working with data from multiple systems. And I'm not paying a monthly fee to watch travelling animations, docking animations, and play with excel... with the occasional short one-sided battle thrown in.
"So you're saying that retreating when you're outmatched, and doing everything you can to make sure you win a conflict before you commit to it, are only "intelligent" in the context of a game that you claim is broken?"
When I want to win a war, I'll take that to heart. When I play a game, I'd like to have a sporting chance, and for my opponents to likewise have a sporting chance. Most games go out of their way to match players of similar skill levels, or at least provide incentives to players to engage other players in what would be an actual challenge.
Out of curiosity, how would you rate this guy?
Who knows. Do you think he'd go to chess tournaments, poison the referees, assassinate his opponents, hack the match-maker to pit himself against retarded children, and then run and hide in a bush when a Kasparov his assassins missed shows up?
Its a perfectly valid strategy in war, its a lousy format for a chess tournament that wouldn't be much fun for the majority of the participants.;)
Except that in this case, the tax breaks are pretty much all to get the oil companies to do things that aren't profitable to them.
Don't forget that the tax breaks ~make~ those things profitable. Otherwise the companies still wouldn't do them. And often 'profitable' is a relative term. Many of these things that tax breaks incent actually ARE profitable... they just aren't profitable enough, or as profitable as doing something else.
Bottom line, the breaks enable the oil companies to profit more than they'd profit without them. They wouldn't follow the carrot if it was less profitable to ignore it and just do there own thing.
At best, it allows the oil industry to involve itself in areas it wouldn't otherwise be involved in and do the things that the government wants them to do.
But that what all tax breaks claim to be. Including the tax rebate on hybrids. I'm not sure you are making an argument.
Indeed. Any time the government doesn't heavily tax something, it amounts to a subsidy.
Indeed. When the government taxes companies producing something markedly less than it taxes companies producing other competing things BECAUSE they are producing that something, that creates a set of market distortions towards producing that something in PRECISELY the same way and to precisely the same degree as a subsidy.
The only difference is in one's mind; the market can't tell them apart.
That tax rebate basically means that the rest of us are paying for part of your car.
Government also directly subsidizes oil and gas consumption through preferential treatment in tax codes, tax credits to oil companies, tax deductions on their revenue. So, if we're going to piss and moan about where that $1500 rebate came from for the hybrid, I guess we should delve into the billions of goverment subsidies on the oil and gas industry too.
After all, "If a technology is truly worth owning then it should stand alone without any government programs that hide the true costs."
Its rather ridiculous to say something like that, don't you think? Given the incredible level of subsidies america's gasoline powered car culture rests on?
We like a challenge. When I take my favorite ship into combat there's a substantial risk of losing it. Higher risks make the rewards of victory that much sweeter.
Yawn. If you really thought there was a 'substantial risk of losing it' you wouldn't take it out, unless you already had a backup that was nearly as good, if not better, or enough isks lying around that you could afford to lose it.
Higher risks make the rewards of victory that much sweeter.
Indeed. I'm no stranger to risk, I've played EVE, I played Diablo2 online "Hardcore" (permadeath) with level 85+ characters in Hell (and not just safe hillz runs) and I lost them time and again, along with piles of difficult/impossible to replace sets, uniques, and rares.
I played Everquest on Rallos Zek - with open PVP and the ability to loot opponents. I played Asheron's call on DarkTide with open PVP and opponent looting. I'm certainly no 'pussy' when it comes to risk.
In all of these games, when there is conflict, its almost always extremely one-sided. Few combats are between remotely balanced forces. And most of the time group-A knows it can't lose, while group-B knows it can't win and just wants to escape... and if its stuck around to fight its because it CAN'T escape. Nearly all combat in EVE falls into this category.
The trouble with EVE is that despite this potential adrenalin shot... EVE is still 99% tediously and drearily dull spreadsheet reading with a terrible UI and a lousying colour scheme and font. Interesting combat is rare.
Real competition is hard to find... if you want to go get blown up, that's easy, just wander off alone. But if you want to have a good fight? Good luck finding it in eve... anybody worth fighting will run if you outmatch them, or your group will flee from a group that outmatches you. Close-fights? Sure they happen... but its rare.
All the EVE advcotes will boast about how they aren't pussies, and how they love risk and a challenge. But they only love risk and challenge when they are heavily favored to win. What do they do when a stronger force shows up? They run away. God forbid they actually fight something that might beat them. Of course, this is the 'intelligent' thing to do in EVE, so you can't fault them.
IF anything it just shows how stupid eve is. Its called a greifer paradise because that's what the mechanics have dictated it must be. The game rewards preying on the weak, and brutally punishes standing up for yourself when outmatched. And a fair fight? Best to avoid those as much as possible too, as the risk of losing is great.
Get involved in 4 or 5 fair fights and there is an overwhelming chance you'll lose at least once. And you only need to lose once to wipe out any profit you might have made from the other 4.
Eve is a tediously slow game, punctuated by the occasional one-sided combat. Now and again you'll come away victorious from a difficult fight... or perhaps just escape a fight you shouldn't have, and this 'victory' will sustain you through the next patch of tedium.
I normally love games with risk and consequence. I still think eve is a waste of time.
and movie ticket costs a lot less than a computer game
I take my wife to a movie and it costs $21. More than World of Goo. If I take my 2 kids its closer to $40 bucks. If I buy popcorn and a drink...
If I could find a game which costs no more than a movie ticket, can be beaten in three hours and is fun, then I might actually buy it.
I'm curious why you are happy with a movie ticket that gives you 1.5 to 2 hrs out of it, but a game has to deliver at least 3 for the same price. I'm even more curious why you so rabidly value things in terms of dollars spent per hours of time it delivers. You are really limiting what you do. I mean... it looks like $5/hr is about your maximum. Your going to miss out on a lot of life with such a low limit.
At least they are on record as saying they will switch off the authentication if they do go down, so yeah I do believe that I've paid for something that I'll get to keep. Not quite buying it, but close enough.
That 'pledge' is utterly worthless. If they go into bankrupty protection, they are legally obligated not to diminish the value of their holdings to their creditors. Unlocking all the DRM would diminish the value of their holdings.
If they get bought out, it will be up to the new owners to decide what to do. Valve will have no say in the matter.
The upshot is they will not be able to honor that pledge in any realistic situation.
Unless you have a written CONTRACT that states they will unlock the DRM, you are pretty much guaranteed that they will be unable to honor it even if they wanted to. (How convenient for them.)
Remind me, which option are you advocating again?
I advocate buying the game in a box or online sans drm. There are alternatives to Valve's steam that I have no issue with whatsoever. If you buy a copy that comes with DRM I advocate cracking it to ensure you get to keep what you paid for. I fully support the developers getting paid. Where did you get the impression I thought otherwise.
Even assuming he did, $20 (or whatever) is basically too much to pay for 3 hours of entertainment. I can buy a novel for $7 and that'll provide at least 10.
So you'll never ride a roller coaster, see an NHL hockey game, attend a music concert, play a round of golf, go zip lining, parachuting, parasailing, fire an m16, eat in a classy restaurant, see an opera, or do anything else that costs more than $7/hr. Enjoy your sad little life.
I enjoy civ4 too, and think its a great game. But honestly World of Goo was more fun. Is having less fun for a longer period of time better value? Its kind of pathetic that you'd even make that sort of valuation.
Yes, length is not the only factor. But even assuming the game is fun, length/price is a very relevant consideration. I'd call it "value for money".
Sure. Price and length of play affects your purchasing decision. If you want to say WoG is too much money to justify you purchasing it that's fine. But what does that have to do with whether or not its a good game or not? If they lowered the price to $1 does that somehow change whether its a good game? Of course not. Its exactly the same game it was at $20. And you'll enjoy (or not enjoy it) exactly as much. The price affects your purchasing decision and that's about it.
Think of your favorite movies. Do you watch them again? Do you own them on DVD? Do you buy movies on DVD that you don't want to watch more than once? Why not?
I've enjoyed many movies and books that I have no real intention of ever watching or reading again. Just because I don't want to buy a movie or book or game and watch / read / play it over and over again doesn't mean it sucked.
Replay-value is an important part of a purchase decision
Exactly. Its a factor in a PURCHASING DECISION. What does that have to do with whether it was a good game? Is starcraft II a good game? Most people say it is? Would it be any less good if the price was $2000? Of course not, it would be exactly as good as it is at $60, and if you pick it up for $15 3 years from now, it will be just as good then too. You might not buy it at $2000, and people who might not buy it today might buy it at $15... but that's a separate issue entirely. Like replay-value, price is a factor in a *purchasing decision*.
They have nothing to do with whether the game was actually good.
In other words the quality of a game has absolutely nothing to do with how much money is in YOUR pocket today.
and anyone who thinks otherwise is flat-out wrong.
Your right. I guess everyone else is flat-out wrong, and the guy who didn't like it because it didn't enough replay value and therefore sucks must be rigth. Give me break.
Besides, it didn't merely win awards. It was a roaring success by virtually every metric. When a small indie game is a break away mainstream success... its pretty safe to say it was a good game.
If you didn't like it, that's fine. Most people think it was a good game. And when it comes to a subjective measurement like "what is good"... "most people liked it" is what matters.
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Odds are given as win ratios. So 1:10 means you get paid your initial bet plus 10%. I'm assuming you used this service in your probability class.
Lol. Quite Right. Not sure where my head was just now. I actually did well in statistics. :)
Bet $1Billion you will get an F, then don't show up for the exam.
Gee, I wonder what they've set the odds on someone betting they'd get an F and then going and getting an F.
If it were me I'd make it 1:1.
On second thought... if you really thought this was clever I'll set the payout odds at 1:10. (That's right 1:10 not 10:1 -- so if you are dumb enough to place that bet I'll keep 90% of your cash if you win, and all of it if you manage to lose.)
This is a slick trick to get the taxpayers to provide the extra security and snooping for them.
They are trying to nab fly-by-night (literally) vendors of unauthorized / counterfeit goods.
These people don't have business address, name tags, and take cash. They are clearly in the wrong here. Shouldn't there be some sort of appropriate method of suing them for the trademarks violated, and the counterfeit goods they are hawking?
I understand John/Jane Doe cases where it is clear a crime has been committed, but to file a lawsuit before the supposed crime can even be committed let alone proven to have occurred seems to go well beyond the intent of any law and should not be permitted.
That was my initial take on it too. However:
a) the lawsuit is just a practical method of getting their ducks in a row so that they can have police support in getting the names of the people who are doing this, because they have no other way.
b) no crime has been committed. this is a civil suit. the police don't generally get involved in civil suits without a court order. yet the police seem to be required because the trademark holders have no legal method of extracting the identity of the counterfeiters.
Planning to commit a felony is against the law in itself, so those sorts of situations are already covered, as long as it can be proved that the plans were actually in place.
Trademark infringement is not a felonly. "Planning to infringe trademark" isn't either.
So all that said, there seems to be a loophole that the infringers were abusing. We're not committing a crime so the police won't get involved. And we can't be sued because they don't know who we are. HaHa!
My sympathies lie with the rights holder here. And pre-suing them so that they can get police support identifying them seems a bit twisted but in all honesty... a fairly reasonable approach to the problem.
The only other alternative I can think of is that they hire a private investigator to tail these people to identify them, eat the cost, and then sue for damages including the cost of the PI. I actually prefer this alternative... but PI's quasi-law-enforcement status also give me the creeps. Twisted either way.
What if they show up *every night at midnight* and commit acts that resulted in damages to you? You call the police they eventually arrive. You could try and sue them but you don't know who they are and they vanish into the woodwork.
So you know they are coming (remember that they ALWAYS come), you file this suit which is essentially a funky way of asking the police to be there ahead of time, so that they can actually get their names etc, so that you can actually successfully sue them for the damages they cause you by violating your trademarks with their bootleg counterfeit goods...
Quite bluntly, they should be able to ask for police support to snag fly-by-night counterfeiters. Maybe the mechanism shouldn't be "pre-suing them" but do we have a better mechanism?
1) Net neutrality extends further than your ISP. You only have "control" over who provides you the last leg.
2) Control in #1 is quoted, because you may only have one viable option. Lucky if you have two. Very lucky if you have more than 2.
3) Most smaller DSL providers, fixed wireless, etc are backended onto one of the few major telcos. They are often at the mercy of these back end providers, and in turn the end user has no control either.
Regulatory oversight is needed when an industry is a monopoly or oligopoly (few participants, high barriers to entry, etc). Telecom is such an industry. The FCC may not be perfect, but it is necessary.
They already have far more insight into how the troops operate than we do. They actually are on the receiving end of those operations. We need this insight more than they do.
It was just one example out of an entire speech, out of his career. Its not like there aren't plenty others.
I agree. Its the best alternative if you need total security. Boot off a live CD from a diskless machine. (or at least set the hard drives as read-only).
But its a hassle to boot off a live CD.
My VM method realizes nearly all of the benefits of a live CD with a lot more convenience, since you can run it in antoher window along with everything else you are doing. Its more than secure enough for my purposes (keeps the kids from stumbling into it, and acts as a firewall for malware coming through the browser).
Don't the changes still get written to disk though?
Its more or less a like a snapshot, and all 'new' disk writes are written to a separate file to be optionally merged back into the disk image. If you decide to discard them, then the file just gets deleted. I suppose some sort of disk forensics done on the freed space before its overwritten might be able to recover something.
It depends what you are looking for. When I want private / secure browsing, I just don't want any traces of it in my main browser, I don't want my kids to stumble over it, and I don't want any malware to get through. So a linux VM is covers all my needs.
I like a VM, because I can continue doing everything else I was doing, alongside without having to worry about it.
I'm not downloading stuff that I'm overly worried about concealing all traces of my browsing from some sort of competent law enforcement forensics.
If I -were- doing that, then yeah, I'd take things to another level. I'd probably go with a diskless station booting from a LiveCD or something, with an encrypted usb drive to save anything I wanted to keep.
The ram disk option seems like a better route since you're ensured that those contents are truly gone once they're deleted or the machine looses power. In today's world it's trivial to put an extra 1GB or so towards a ram disk, and most people could web browse from that just fine.
I'm concerned about a ramdisk because I don't know enough about them. Can they have portions swapped as part of your operating systems normal memory management? If they can, then there is a possibility of information leaking onto your hard drive in the same way there is with deleted changes from a VM snapshot.
I'm also concerned because simply copying everything to a ram disk and running it from there means I have to know more about the application than I necessarily do. For example, Firefox saves stuff into my user profile... simply copying the profile and the executable to a ram disk isn't going to change this behaviour, I need to make sure it knows to read and save things to the ram disk profile. And I need to be sure that there is nowhere else that it saves information to that I didn't redirect.
There is also the issue for 'leakage' if an external program is launch. (Say I click on a Word document link...) and a browser on a ram disk provides no security vs a malware infection.
A VM gaurds against a lot of this leakage, and the only real risk, is, as you pointed out, that you should run a secure erase on the free space when your done.
If complete security is your goal (vs my personal lesser goal) than the diskless liveCD option would be the way to go. No matter what happens, when it shuts down there are no traces, because there is no disk to leave them on.
When I want to browse in high security / high privacy I use a virtual machine and delete all changes when shutting it down. (ie so the vm is in precisely the same state it was in when i turned it on.) This also gives me some reasonably good protection from viruses/malware/ and other crud, since unless it manages to break out of the VM, it goes away when I shut the VM down.
Pretty much every network textbook in existence uses the analogy of "pipes" when describing latency and bandwidth. "Tubes" and "pipes" are essentially the same thing, so if Stevens was wrong, then so are all the major network experts who write the textbooks. And "clogged tubes" is a pretty good analogy for congestion along a route.
Right. If this is how an average pay person, even a senator views the internet its not the end of the world.
Part of his comments included this sentence: "I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday." refering to an email message. Its ok for *MY* grand father to say he received an "internet", or to have a view of the internet strictly in terms of tubes.
However, its not really forgivable that the man responsible for authoring legislation like the "Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006" to not be clear on the difference between an email and the internet to have such a lay understanding of the subject.
It sounds like CCP are building quite a good simulation, regardless of whether or not it makes for a good game.
Sure its a "great" simulation. Like most of real life though, its a not especially fun.
I wonder if they will find the right conditions to cause player-run high-sec areas to develop that mirror modern life, or the class of "sporting" games that you describe inside of them.
Doubt it. Players who want that are better served playing a different game where other players want that.
Who cares? If you fight an equal enemy and come out victorious 4 times out of 5 you're playing one heck of a game. Which for those of us who are in the mercenary business means contracts, reputation and more money.
That's only "profitable" if you are extremely bad at math, or your group is deliberately flying cheap cruddy disposable ships... Zerging FTW! Yawn. Been there done that.
The weak tend to have very little of value worth stealing and destroying. The game rewards preying on the stupid, the ignorant and the undefended.
The stupid, ignorant, and undefended ARE the weak. How hard do you plan to argue that you agree with me here?
Not necessarily. Some of my most memorable fights were in heavily outnumbered situations, either because I simply *couldn't* disengage or because I decided to take the bait and spring the trap. And yes, fighting 3 battleships in your single one is *fun*.
Exactly. Those are indeed the most memorable and the most fun memories I have in EVE too. Its poor game design that the most memorable and fun moments are the ones you really can't afford to deliberately get into very often, and you spend hours upon hours doing essentially nothing waiting for those moments.
Sorry, but clearly EVE isn't for you. As per my post above, you're a victim...by choice
Are you reading what I wrote? I was very successful at EVE. Get it through your skull that I was anything but the "victim". I was good at EVE, I was successful at EVE, and I *still* think it was mostly a lousy boring game.
If EVE players are so risk averse how come I keep hearing FC's and fleet members saying the equivalent of 'screw the odds, let's go get ourselves blown up'.
One of
a) Because the value of their currently equipped ship is a fraction of the players total worth.
b) Becuase they don't feel they will really lose that day.
c) Because they are so tired of the endless tedium that even losing an expensive/valuable ship beats sitting around on their collective thumbs any longer.
You might be surprised how often its c. ;)
And if you don't like it, go play with your Barbie dolls on that Teletubbie themed game WoW where...
Seriously. You can take your arrogance and stuff it. I -just- came off a round of Travian, having belonged to, and then later leading an alliance for the last several months until the round ended. *My alliance won*.
If this game were EVE... Imagine logging in one day, and finding all your ships destroyed. All your ISK gone. No insurance. No clones. No implants. Nothing. You may as well have created a brand new account, except that new players have more than you. You can be ZEROED without even being online. No safe zones, no space stations you can't be touched in, no high-security space.
Trying to play the 'carebear' card on me is just laughable.
Relatively speaking, EVE is the barbie-doll & teletubby filled carebear-land.
Not that I'm saying travian is the game to mimic. (Its a browser game so the graphics aren't exactly notable.) And its got a raft of serious flaws of its own. But one thing I did like was the structure of it being played in year long rounds... you can get eliminated and restart fresh on another server or the next round and try again with a clean slate. And I liked their being an endgame. Its not an endless pointless treadmill.
Obviously you haven't played much.
LMAO. Sure buddy.
But the point is that in Eve, you typically don't know if you're going into a fair or unfair fight and who's actually going to have the advantage when all is said and done. You don't know if on the other side of the next gate there's a fleet ten times your size that's covered the area in warp bubbles.
Any significant sized fleet running around with their best ships is scouting heavily, checking neighboring systems, the other sides of jump points, and monitoring the chatter. If you are in a significant fleet and you get 'surprised' by a fleet 10x the size, your probably doing something wrong.
The UI is anything but terrible in my opinion.
The fact that you can't see what's wrong with it is just sad. Its clumsy to a fault. I freely admit I don't play it NOW, but for the years I did play it they never addressed any of its glaring short-comings. Perhaps its gotten better. I don't really care enough to find out.
The only spreadsheet-like reading I ever do is the market, and that's simply as efficiently laid out as I can imagine it.
I can imagine several improvements.
Lousy font. Lousy choice of colors for actually reading. Lousy filter/sort controls. You need to dump to excel to get anything remotely interesting done without going blind, especially for working with data from multiple systems. And I'm not paying a monthly fee to watch travelling animations, docking animations, and play with excel... with the occasional short one-sided battle thrown in.
"So you're saying that retreating when you're outmatched, and doing everything you can to make sure you win a conflict before you commit to it, are only "intelligent" in the context of a game that you claim is broken?"
When I want to win a war, I'll take that to heart. When I play a game, I'd like to have a sporting chance, and for my opponents to likewise have a sporting chance. Most games go out of their way to match players of similar skill levels, or at least provide incentives to players to engage other players in what would be an actual challenge.
Out of curiosity, how would you rate this guy?
Who knows. Do you think he'd go to chess tournaments, poison the referees, assassinate his opponents, hack the match-maker to pit himself against retarded children, and then run and hide in a bush when a Kasparov his assassins missed shows up?
Its a perfectly valid strategy in war, its a lousy format for a chess tournament that wouldn't be much fun for the majority of the participants. ;)
Except that in this case, the tax breaks are pretty much all to get the oil companies to do things that aren't profitable to them.
Don't forget that the tax breaks ~make~ those things profitable. Otherwise the companies still wouldn't do them. And often 'profitable' is a relative term. Many of these things that tax breaks incent actually ARE profitable... they just aren't profitable enough, or as profitable as doing something else.
Bottom line, the breaks enable the oil companies to profit more than they'd profit without them. They wouldn't follow the carrot if it was less profitable to ignore it and just do there own thing.
At best, it allows the oil industry to involve itself in areas it wouldn't otherwise be involved in and do the things that the government wants them to do.
But that what all tax breaks claim to be. Including the tax rebate on hybrids. I'm not sure you are making an argument.
Indeed. Any time the government doesn't heavily tax something, it amounts to a subsidy.
Indeed. When the government taxes companies producing something markedly less than it taxes companies producing other competing things BECAUSE they are producing that something, that creates a set of market distortions towards producing that something in PRECISELY the same way and to precisely the same degree as a subsidy.
The only difference is in one's mind; the market can't tell them apart.
That tax rebate basically means that the rest of us are paying for part of your car.
Government also directly subsidizes oil and gas consumption through preferential treatment in tax codes, tax credits to oil companies, tax deductions on their revenue. So, if we're going to piss and moan about where that $1500 rebate came from for the hybrid, I guess we should delve into the billions of goverment subsidies on the oil and gas industry too.
After all, "If a technology is truly worth owning then it should stand alone without any government programs that hide the true costs."
Its rather ridiculous to say something like that, don't you think? Given the incredible level of subsidies america's gasoline powered car culture rests on?
We like a challenge. When I take my favorite ship into combat there's a substantial risk of losing it. Higher risks make the rewards of victory that much sweeter.
Yawn. If you really thought there was a 'substantial risk of losing it' you wouldn't take it out, unless you already had a backup that was nearly as good, if not better, or enough isks lying around that you could afford to lose it.
Higher risks make the rewards of victory that much sweeter.
Indeed. I'm no stranger to risk, I've played EVE, I played Diablo2 online "Hardcore" (permadeath) with level 85+ characters in Hell (and not just safe hillz runs) and I lost them time and again, along with piles of difficult/impossible to replace sets, uniques, and rares.
I played Everquest on Rallos Zek - with open PVP and the ability to loot opponents. I played Asheron's call on DarkTide with open PVP and opponent looting. I'm certainly no 'pussy' when it comes to risk.
In all of these games, when there is conflict, its almost always extremely one-sided. Few combats are between remotely balanced forces. And most of the time group-A knows it can't lose, while group-B knows it can't win and just wants to escape... and if its stuck around to fight its because it CAN'T escape. Nearly all combat in EVE falls into this category.
The trouble with EVE is that despite this potential adrenalin shot... EVE is still 99% tediously and drearily dull spreadsheet reading with a terrible UI and a lousying colour scheme and font. Interesting combat is rare.
Real competition is hard to find... if you want to go get blown up, that's easy, just wander off alone. But if you want to have a good fight? Good luck finding it in eve... anybody worth fighting will run if you outmatch them, or your group will flee from a group that outmatches you. Close-fights? Sure they happen... but its rare.
All the EVE advcotes will boast about how they aren't pussies, and how they love risk and a challenge. But they only love risk and challenge when they are heavily favored to win. What do they do when a stronger force shows up? They run away. God forbid they actually fight something that might beat them. Of course, this is the 'intelligent' thing to do in EVE, so you can't fault them.
IF anything it just shows how stupid eve is. Its called a greifer paradise because that's what the mechanics have dictated it must be. The game rewards preying on the weak, and brutally punishes standing up for yourself when outmatched. And a fair fight? Best to avoid those as much as possible too, as the risk of losing is great.
Get involved in 4 or 5 fair fights and there is an overwhelming chance you'll lose at least once. And you only need to lose once to wipe out any profit you might have made from the other 4.
Eve is a tediously slow game, punctuated by the occasional one-sided combat. Now and again you'll come away victorious from a difficult fight... or perhaps just escape a fight you shouldn't have, and this 'victory' will sustain you through the next patch of tedium.
I normally love games with risk and consequence. I still think eve is a waste of time.
Every book takes more than 3 hours than read
1) So what?
and movie ticket costs a lot less than a computer game
I take my wife to a movie and it costs $21. More than World of Goo. If I take my 2 kids its closer to $40 bucks. If I buy popcorn and a drink...
If I could find a game which costs no more than a movie ticket, can be beaten in three hours and is fun, then I might actually buy it.
I'm curious why you are happy with a movie ticket that gives you 1.5 to 2 hrs out of it, but a game has to deliver at least 3 for the same price. I'm even more curious why you so rabidly value things in terms of dollars spent per hours of time it delivers. You are really limiting what you do. I mean... it looks like $5/hr is about your maximum. Your going to miss out on a lot of life with such a low limit.
At least they are on record as saying they will switch off the authentication if they do go down, so yeah I do believe that I've paid for something that I'll get to keep. Not quite buying it, but close enough.
That 'pledge' is utterly worthless. If they go into bankrupty protection, they are legally obligated not to diminish the value of their holdings to their creditors. Unlocking all the DRM would diminish the value of their holdings.
If they get bought out, it will be up to the new owners to decide what to do. Valve will have no say in the matter.
The upshot is they will not be able to honor that pledge in any realistic situation.
Unless you have a written CONTRACT that states they will unlock the DRM, you are pretty much guaranteed that they will be unable to honor it even if they wanted to. (How convenient for them.)
Remind me, which option are you advocating again?
I advocate buying the game in a box or online sans drm. There are alternatives to Valve's steam that I have no issue with whatsoever. If you buy a copy that comes with DRM I advocate cracking it to ensure you get to keep what you paid for. I fully support the developers getting paid. Where did you get the impression I thought otherwise.
Even assuming he did, $20 (or whatever) is basically too much to pay for 3 hours of entertainment. I can buy a novel for $7 and that'll provide at least 10.
So you'll never ride a roller coaster, see an NHL hockey game, attend a music concert, play a round of golf, go zip lining, parachuting, parasailing, fire an m16, eat in a classy restaurant, see an opera, or do anything else that costs more than $7/hr. Enjoy your sad little life.
I enjoy civ4 too, and think its a great game. But honestly World of Goo was more fun. Is having less fun for a longer period of time better value? Its kind of pathetic that you'd even make that sort of valuation.
Yes, length is not the only factor. But even assuming the game is fun, length/price is a very relevant consideration. I'd call it "value for money".
Sure. Price and length of play affects your purchasing decision. If you want to say WoG is too much money to justify you purchasing it that's fine. But what does that have to do with whether or not its a good game or not? If they lowered the price to $1 does that somehow change whether its a good game? Of course not. Its exactly the same game it was at $20. And you'll enjoy (or not enjoy it) exactly as much. The price affects your purchasing decision and that's about it.
Think of your favorite movies. Do you watch them again? Do you own them on DVD? Do you buy movies on DVD that you don't want to watch more than once? Why not?
I've enjoyed many movies and books that I have no real intention of ever watching or reading again. Just because I don't want to buy a movie or book or game and watch / read / play it over and over again doesn't mean it sucked.
Replay-value is an important part of a purchase decision
Exactly. Its a factor in a PURCHASING DECISION. What does that have to do with whether it was a good game? Is starcraft II a good game? Most people say it is? Would it be any less good if the price was $2000? Of course not, it would be exactly as good as it is at $60, and if you pick it up for $15 3 years from now, it will be just as good then too. You might not buy it at $2000, and people who might not buy it today might buy it at $15... but that's a separate issue entirely. Like replay-value, price is a factor in a *purchasing decision*.
They have nothing to do with whether the game was actually good.
In other words the quality of a game has absolutely nothing to do with how much money is in YOUR pocket today.
and anyone who thinks otherwise is flat-out wrong.
Your right. I guess everyone else is flat-out wrong, and the guy who didn't like it because it didn't enough replay value and therefore sucks must be rigth. Give me break.
Besides, it didn't merely win awards. It was a roaring success by virtually every metric. When a small indie game is a break away mainstream success... its pretty safe to say it was a good game.
If you didn't like it, that's fine. Most people think it was a good game. And when it comes to a subjective measurement like "what is good" ... "most people liked it" is what matters.