If a non-fiat cryptocurrency exists and is a major player 30 years from now then Bitcoin deserves a lions share of the credit. Bitcoin is much more than simply a currency. It's a proof of concept that went viral.
Sure thing, but that will not make bitcoin any less of a farce for actual transactions today.
The blockchain works. One can have a distributed ledger; proof of transfer of digital assets; transfer of funds quickly and easily with comparatively no overhead; one can have a digital wallet and bring funds around the world (if you've ever traveled abroad you'll recognize the usefulness).
One of bitcoins seemingly fatal shortcomings, as I see it, is that the wallets are MUCH too easy to steal. It has all this transparency and distributed leger to "prove transactions" but lacks any mechanism to prevent theft... and theft has been rampant. From MtGox and other exchanges being wiped clean, to wallet stealing malware going after individuals, etc. You can (rightfully) argue that this isn't a flaw of the bitcoin system and protocol per se... but it IS effectively a flaw of bitcoin in terms of the end user experience.
Re the gold rush mentality. Whatever. People get excited about many things for many reasons and gold rush fever is, to me, neither good nor bad.
I'm not bothered by people getting excited about it. I'm bothered by its early adopters and developers holding a large portion of the currency, essentially for 'free'.
"Here is this cryptocurrency, I just invented, and me and my friends printed ourselves thousands or millions of the finite number of coins before you even heard about it. You should all use it! Then our coins will be worth something and we get super rich off it." Frankly, that reeks... and is I think one of the reasons for the proliferation of cryptocurrencies... They reason..."Bitcoin mining is hard now, and why should bitcoin early adopters get all that free hoard? If new currencyX takes off and I'm in on the ground floor.... then I can get a free hoard for myself!"
THAT gold rush mentality is harming the entire model. Its not excitement about an "idea".
Now, the schisms- this is a problem. But there are always such problems even if there is a central authority.
Yet these schisms damage even neutral bitcoin user experience. When vocal MMO fans take to the forums to rail against a raid encounter script change or drop change or something, joe-rando can can still login and play and that tussle between players and developers is just background noise. Bitcoin schisms tend to paralyze or degrade the bitcoin network -- and transactions stop working properly.
Vendors are dropping bit coin right now, because the multi-minute processing times has made the currency difficult to use and unpleasant. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the trigger that motivated MS to turn it off.
They'd already built the code etc to support it... even if almost nobody was using it, it then has momentum just to stay the same -- someone has to actively take the steps to turn it off, publish updates, update FAQs etc, etc. Maybe processing delays were resulting repeated purchases or customer support costs or just negative feedback to the system?...
I'd say there is no surprise to see them vertically integrate; they're large enough to leverage the economies of scale of running their own storage for themselves; rather than to pay someone else to do it.
2- The gold-rush where wealth was distributed to speculative early adopter miners.
3- The schisms that seem to regularly threaten to tear it apart. Including the latest one which last I read was in a stalemate and bitcoin transaction times are now starting to get out of hand.
There's a lot to bitcoin.
Yes, there certainly is. But that doesn't make it any less farcical TODAY.
You sound like a someone in the 1990s who calls the internet a toy and that it would never be part of "real" business.
An analogy there might aptly compare Bitcoin to a single BBS a precursor to what came afterwards. After all, there are more crypto currencies than Bitcoin out there... and new ones being developed daily. 30 years from now, will anybody be using bitcoin? Or will it be a "compuserve"?
The windows 10 app has been a clusterfuck. For months the remote control worked, but video would freeze but audio would continue and then video would play catchup a few seconds later.
Finally they released an update that fixed that. But the remote control doesn't work. Can't even play/pause with it right now.
It used to launch full screen, now it launches windowed, every single time. That wouldn't be so bad except you can't put it into full screen until AFTER something is streaming; not while you are browsing the catalog.
I used to be able to bring up a title, and click on an actor and find titles with that actor... not anymore.
they are all currently lingual and thus (even mildly) subjective
Not really so with MtG, at least not anymore.
MtGO exists as an official implementation that can enforce the card rules and resolve card interactions, with current Oracle text and all official card interaction rulings etc laid down.
And new blocks are implemented as programmed code in MtGO as they come out. There's (likely?) a few edge cases that haven't been covered yet, but if it comes up a ruling will be made, and that will be that.
In terms of the AI, for it to play the game at a human level, it should need to parse the rules, card text, and card rulings into "the underlying rules" itself. It shouldn't simply be "given" the MtGO engine on a silver platter to evaluate interactions. But nevertheless the MtGO engine exists as an official reference point, and proof that a program is possible.
To properly handle that, the on-card rules would need to be simplified and have a computational equivalent that the computer can use to build a mesh of "rules in play."
This has been done. the MtG rules need not be simplified.
but often enough it comes down to what cards you draw
Of course. Luck is a factor. But it is a game of statistically improving your odds of getting a good hand. A deck that can go off in turn 4 and win, but requires a very specific draw that rarely comes up is a lousy deck. Deck building is the 'meta game'.
A deck that win 96% of the time against one particular opposing archetype but gets trounced 90% of the time against another is not a great deck either; or maybe it is a good choice, if that 'other' deck is extremely unlikely to be present at the tournament. I guess that's part of the meta-meta-game.;)
Because building a deck that is objectively "good" is one thing; but tuning it further based on what you know about your opponents may result in a deck that is less objectively good but out performs against your oppoents.
I had a friend that pretty much always played with big stompers; so I tuned my deck with that in mind; another developed a sliver fetish for a year or two so I always had extinction and other hose-a-creature type-cards around. Few of my friends ever fielded white-weenies, so I didn't worry whether my builds were particularly strong against them. etc. I tended to be drawn to various blue/black builds more than anything else, and I know my friends specifically included counters with that in mind.
At the pro-levels, "preferences" like that aren't likely to guide deckbuilding since they're more pragmatic about winning over having fun, but even there there exists a meta-game as they try to predict what other players will be running, and fine-tune or even select an archetype accordingly to try and tilt the odds.
. Even the best computer program without additional knowledge cannot reliably surpass a human in a game of mixed skill and chance.
Of course it can: statistically speaking. Sure it'll get mana screwed from time to time just like anyone else, but if its winning matches consistently over a period of time, its not just getting "lucky".
Blackjack is just a poor example, because the skill component is very limited and "optimal" play is pretty well defined. You aren't even playing against your 'opponents'; just the dealer really; who generally has very little choice in his actions. And you really have practically no tactical options.
Why not go all the way and just uninstall it completely.
Then check it once daily from a laptop... then once weekly, then go 6 months go by and you realize you haven't checked it, and your life isn't any less full. You log in and see a grotesque display of human narcissism, drama, separated by advertising and more advertising and then logout again never to return...
any intelligent computer would turn its nose up at playing!
LOL. If it *spontaneously* came up with that line of reasoning...
I'm a winner!! Winners don't lose! Losers do things that aren't worthwhile!
If I can't win then I'd be a loser. If I were a loser, I'd do things that aren't worthwhile. If I'm not playing it and I'm a winner, then its because its not worth playing! And If I played it then I'd be a loser too. Therefore I won't play it, because losers play it, and I'm a winner!!"
MTG in my mind is pretty limited. Your deck is going to have a finite size,
Do the math. The number of possible decks is absurd. maybe around 12000^75th (including sideboard). And you need 2 of those to play. Obviously that includes decks with no land, all land, 75 copies of a banned card etc.
But even if you limited it to "legal plausible decks" The number is still incomprehensibly high.
And then a *game* is pairing of two decks, with random draws. The number of possible different games given just 2 decks is incredibly high. Then multiply THAT by the number of decks each player could use.
It is truly enormous.
As it is I can think of a number of decks I played as a child in the 90's that would be very easy for a computer to play. White, black, and green creature decks would be simple to code for. Blue counter spell/denial and Tim decks would be relatively easy though require perhaps a little more work. Red direct damage would probably be the simplest to code.
Nope. Microprose attempted it in the 90s and the result was a great game, but the AI's needed HEAVY handicaps to be competitive, had to be scripted how to play their decks, and they were still extremely weak once the player had enough cards to construct a deck that wasn't utter shit.
The AI in particular wasn't adept at countering alternative victory conditions -- 10 poison counters, or getting "decked out" (running out of cards to draw). It was also not adept at dealing with things like "the rack" which damaged it if it didn't maintain a specific range of cards in its hand, or cards like "Cursed Land" that dealt damage to him during his upkeep. It couldn't strategize at all around decks that stole its cards and used it against it, etc, etc.
Wizards various Magic the Gathering games out 2010-2016 now, are similarly EXTREMELY limited; and are only competitive because they've basically tuned the AI for each deck it has, and also limited the player to very specific archetypes and it "knows" how to play against each of them.
I can think of a number of decks I played as a child in the 90's that would be very easy for a computer to play.
Its not really. Unless its a straight vanilla creature deck and you have no options but to attack each turn. But MANY decks require far more strategy to play. Simply knowing which of his creatures / artifacts / enchatments etc you NEED to deal with (assuming you CAN deal with them) is crucial.
Even with pure creatures, predicting the outcome of a battle, and knowing how many you need to hold back is huge.
If your opponent is throwing ball lightning around, you need to keep enough guys back to absorb a ball lightning hit,... based simply on him having a card in his hand. Or you need some other method of dealing with it... unsummor, or if you've got something with first strike... then you just need to hold him back.
Secondly, by the time you draw your opening hand, half the game has already been played. Selecting what cards go INTO a deck, into the sideboard, and which cards from the sideboard is a huge part of MtG.
and hand size is limited.
Sure, unless you've got any of several cards that alter the size of your hand, or the one that skips the discard phase (effectively removing the limit entirely); OR the opponents hand. Or impose penalties for having fewer or more cards than a certain number...
The last game I played was with maybe half a dozen players each playing a different deck that angled for luck of the draw to win the game in three to five turns.
Sure trick/combo decks that require a lucky draw exist and can be fun to play. But the top pro tour decks are designed to win consistently. Obviously any deck can be screwed with a bad draw or an opponents lucky draw, but statistically good.
If the deck "goes off" and just "wins" on turn 3 on draw in 10 it might still be fun in casual multiplayer etc. But a "good deck" goes off reliably.
There are also other formats such as sealed, where you build and tune a deck from a limited pool of cards as part of the game.
Poker is also orders of magnitude simpler than Magic the Gathering. For starters the deck is a known quantity, and the rules are essentially static.
If an opponent brings out a "winter orb" for example, it doesn't directly threaten you, and it affects both players equally... but it changes the mana curve; and presumably his deck is built to be effective with that more limited mana curve. So know you have to evaluate whether you can adapt to the reduced mana, or whether you should expend artifact removal to get rid of it, and what that costs you vs holding your limited artifact removal for an even greater threat... and then there are the odds that he may have more winter orbs... does he have just one in his deck to throw a monkey wrench out at you that he knows he can "live with"... or is his entire deck designed around the relative advantages he can get from having an orb in play... so now you have to consider what you've seen of his deck so far...
I was going to bring up Magic the Gathering as the next frontier as well.
Chess and Go's complexity arise from sheer combinatorics. But all the information about the current game state is disclosed; and the initial setup is a known quantity.
MtG tosses all that out the window. Not only do you have to play YOUR deck well, and adapt to whatever your opponent is doing. You also have to construct a deck from all the possible playing pieces.
And the rules themselves are subject to change as the game plays; as the cards interact and modify the rules.
I'm not saying an AI can't play it, or play it well, but it is a new challenge that I haven't seen one do well.
. Imagine the US "clearing" a city like Fallujah not by blockading it and sending in the troops, but by broadcasting a warning to clear all civilians from the city and telling everyone to leave unarmed and scanning the departing people for weapons and known enemies. Then 24 hours later C130s fly over and dispense thousands or even tens of thousands of these swarm explosive drones and they sweep the city looking for human sized heat signatures, homing in and destroying any that are found.
Was that sarcasm? Because that sounds like precisely the sort of weapon terrorists would want to use. Minus the C130 to deliver them, and minus the warning to civilians.
A container truck full of human seeking drones with small improvised explosives attached is precisely the sort of tech that a small insurgent group would be able to muster and deliver to a populated area... or release towards a military base on their home turf.
Or on a smaller scale, just park cars around town; remotely pop the trunk and then 10 little drones pop out and make a beeline for the 10 nearest people and explode at point blank range. Do that all over a city.
Wrong. Just wrong. You're still responsible for PCI compliance for any systems that host the site, even if the payment link is done via a redirect, iFrame, etc.
Your PCI compliance amounts to little more than signing off that you aren't touching card data at all. And that you are using a PCI compliant party to handle it.
Yes, you have some obligations to ensure that your site isn't pwned, and redirecting your customers to a fake payment gateway. But that doesn't require you have dedicated baremetal server running in the locked down PCI-DSS compliant wing of the data center. It requires some routine minimal security configuration and maintenance that you should be doing anyway, and it is not at all an onerous burdern.
If you're using an API to take the card info and forward it along to the third-party payment processor, your PCI compliance responsibilities increase even more,
Do that, and you expose yourself to full PCI compliance requirements, because now you ARE handling card data.
This idea that you can escape all responsibility simply by not seeing the card data is a common myth that needs to die.
Fair enough, you don't escape "ALL" responsibility, but it turns it into routine maintenance that even the smallest shops can easily comply with.
criminals usually like to take the path that requires the least effort.
Which, if they were already, familiar with windows variants, having worked directly on windows variants already, would make starting with a codebase they already knew that path.
The path of least effort also accounts for the authors own knowledge and experience. For example, if I wanted to create ABC for OSX, and I'd ALREADY created ABC for Windows. I'd probably start by trying to port my ABC to OSX rather than start with someone elses DEF codebase for something similar on Linux. It may be objectively less total effort to change DEF to work on OSX, but I already know ABC, and the effort to become familiar with DEF may exceed the extra effort to just port ABC.
The reason we kept getting flagged for open firewall ports is because the only connection in or out of the Internet was via that firewall and router. So any outside "penetration testing" had to test against the firewall and whatever it saw behind it.
Yeah, I suspected this was the case after I posted.
But that is essentially why they were "only" warnings. You get the list of open ports, and you sanity check each one.
Imagine if you were the actual online processor handling webstores... your front facing web server is GOING to be open on the HTTPS port for communications with the various embedded iframes or whatever widget you are using for your customers.
They'll do the pen-test and they'll flag that port open with a warning.
You'll get the report, see that HTTPS is open, and rubberstamp it as a-ok, because you know that port is supposed to be open.
If the report comes back with another port open, though, that will be flagged as well, and you might do a double-take, hey... that is NOT supposed to be open.
In your case, the open ports list you know are port forwarded to legitimate services on diffrent machines, so you can disregard them. But if that warning list came in one year with a port you weren't aware of... you'd follow up, and investigate it. That is the point of the port flagging and warning... not because you can't have open ports and be in compliance, but because you should be aware of each one, what it is for, and where it goes.
I'm not 'surprised' by it, but I'd have expected it to be derived from a windows variant, simply because there are so many more of them out there, that I'd have thought someone targeting OSX would be coming from Windows and have familiarity with a windows version, and would make that their starting point.
Yes the relative similarity of OSX to *nix makes it perhaps slightly less effort to port; but the relative lack of *nix ones means that I'd still have put better odds on a windows port.
Yes and no. It's a good set of requirements, if read and implemented by competent IT people looking to achieve security.
But you are also right, if its read by a team of lawyers looking to minimally slide through, and audited by a team of lawyers looking to let you slide through those loopholes for their rubberstamped "PASS"... then yes, you end up with with a worthless rubber stamped facsimile of a secure system.
Lol, I never even made that connection. But that was full service as they were laundering bills; I was thinking more the complete DIY places with the coin-op wash wands & coin-op vaccuums.
The problem is that he'd be limited to buying fast food with his earnings for the next 50 years because I don't know how much effort you'd need to actually turn that much money into a more portable form.
The classical way would be work through a coinop car wash or laundromat partner and then launder it through them by inflating the sales over a few years.
A small family owned business can't be PCI compliant UNLESS they outsource the compliance. PCI compliance for any on-premises card information handling requires multiple individual staff (one IT person can't 'audit' himself) responsible for different roles.
Honestly it all makes a lot of good sense.
Once you switch to an external card processor, life gets pretty simple. PCI compliance is on them not you. For example, an online business with a webstore, the staff never have to touch card information, so you are compliant as long as your procedures stipulate that you don't.
For a more retail place, bring in a payment terminal, and its pretty much plug and play.
As soon as you start entering card numbers into your own computer, then you have to start taking steps to ensure the computers aren't pwned. Virus installed and up to date, firewalled, secure network, etc. But if you don't want to deal with it, don't enter card information into your computers, and just use a payment terminal.
And I believe one of their demands was that "any computer connecting to the card processing site had to be isolated from the rest of the local network". That was, IMO, overkill and created as many security issues as it solved
In a mom and pop, it's probably all of them anyway, and the one LAN server they talk to is PART of their local area network. (Think larger businesses, where one department might handle cards but another doesn't. The computers from the other department shouldn't be on the same lan. All the computers should still be able to talk to your WSUS server though.
Sufficient segregation can be achieved with VLANs and a router. It's not that they aren't allowed to talk to your WSUS server, its that the 30 workstations in marketing can't talk to them. Then you just have to audit your server for PCI compliance but allows you to ignore those 30 marketing PCs for PCI compliance.
and I wanted some kind of way to do remote administration or maintenance on these boxes,
A typical VPN setup should have been fine, especially if you restricted the inbound ip ranges.
You definitely made the right choice using an external processor; you probably could have gotten through without fudging (and your network would have been genuinely slightly more secure if you'd done something along the lines of what i outlined.)
(I remember them always flagging a "warning" because our firewall allowed connections through ports necessary for regular business operations.
I'm not sure what this would be. Why would your firewall have wide open public facing to systems that were handling card data?
Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients.
Quite. But plagiarism is as much about stealing credit, as it is about copyright.
Ethically (if not legally), if I collect a bunch of recipes off the web and publish them in a book, its a pretty douche move if I present them like they were in anyway "my recipes".
Apple tends to choose under powered systems because they protect users from short battery life.
In an imac or desktop computer?
They are protecting regular users from having a cord to a tower under their desk were all the high performance parts are, and giving them a laptop built into a screen instead.
Mac Pros cost a wild bundle because they are "workstations" with xeons and CAD certified graphics cards marketed to people with those specific needs or just too much money. In any case they are a great way to spend a LOT of money on all the wrong specs for an optimal gaming system.
You can get a good gaming computer that the oculus rift supports for $1500 if you buy the right parts. Apple just doesn't give you the right parts... at any price or in any configuration.
If a high end Mac won't support it. You will need a higher end PC which will be beyond most people's budgets.
Not even slightly. Because iMacs have basically shit graphics and aren't upgradeable due to being all in one.
And the mac pros have specialist workstation graphics cards certified for CAD etc; which are extremely expensive, and very good for CAD, but not so great for games; and they also ship with Xeons etc which push the price way up.
Meanwhile a basic PC tower with a decent i5/i7 and a highend video card can be had for $1500 or less.
Slashdot Mirror
If a non-fiat cryptocurrency exists and is a major player 30 years from now then Bitcoin deserves a lions share of the credit. Bitcoin is much more than simply a currency. It's a proof of concept that went viral.
Sure thing, but that will not make bitcoin any less of a farce for actual transactions today.
The blockchain works. One can have a distributed ledger; proof of transfer of digital assets; transfer of funds quickly and easily with comparatively no overhead; one can have a digital wallet and bring funds around the world (if you've ever traveled abroad you'll recognize the usefulness).
One of bitcoins seemingly fatal shortcomings, as I see it, is that the wallets are MUCH too easy to steal. It has all this transparency and distributed leger to "prove transactions" but lacks any mechanism to prevent theft... and theft has been rampant. From MtGox and other exchanges being wiped clean, to wallet stealing malware going after individuals, etc. You can (rightfully) argue that this isn't a flaw of the bitcoin system and protocol per se... but it IS effectively a flaw of bitcoin in terms of the end user experience.
Re the gold rush mentality. Whatever. People get excited about many things for many reasons and gold rush fever is, to me, neither good nor bad.
I'm not bothered by people getting excited about it. I'm bothered by its early adopters and developers holding a large portion of the currency, essentially for 'free'.
"Here is this cryptocurrency, I just invented, and me and my friends printed ourselves thousands or millions of the finite number of coins before you even heard about it. You should all use it! Then our coins will be worth something and we get super rich off it." Frankly, that reeks... and is I think one of the reasons for the proliferation of cryptocurrencies... They reason..."Bitcoin mining is hard now, and why should bitcoin early adopters get all that free hoard? If new currencyX takes off and I'm in on the ground floor.... then I can get a free hoard for myself!"
THAT gold rush mentality is harming the entire model. Its not excitement about an "idea".
Now, the schisms- this is a problem. But there are always such problems even if there is a central authority.
Yet these schisms damage even neutral bitcoin user experience. When vocal MMO fans take to the forums to rail against a raid encounter script change or drop change or something, joe-rando can can still login and play and that tussle between players and developers is just background noise. Bitcoin schisms tend to paralyze or degrade the bitcoin network -- and transactions stop working properly.
Vendors are dropping bit coin right now, because the multi-minute processing times has made the currency difficult to use and unpleasant. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the trigger that motivated MS to turn it off.
They'd already built the code etc to support it... even if almost nobody was using it, it then has momentum just to stay the same -- someone has to actively take the steps to turn it off, publish updates, update FAQs etc, etc. Maybe processing delays were resulting repeated purchases or customer support costs or just negative feedback to the system? ...
I'd say there is no surprise to see them vertically integrate; they're large enough to leverage the economies of scale of running their own storage for themselves; rather than to pay someone else to do it.
What is farcical about bitcoin?
1 -Its instability.
2- The gold-rush where wealth was distributed to speculative early adopter miners.
3- The schisms that seem to regularly threaten to tear it apart. Including the latest one which last I read was in a stalemate and bitcoin transaction times are now starting to get out of hand.
There's a lot to bitcoin.
Yes, there certainly is. But that doesn't make it any less farcical TODAY.
You sound like a someone in the 1990s who calls the internet a toy and that it would never be part of "real" business.
An analogy there might aptly compare Bitcoin to a single BBS a precursor to what came afterwards. After all, there are more crypto currencies than Bitcoin out there... and new ones being developed daily. 30 years from now, will anybody be using bitcoin? Or will it be a "compuserve"?
The windows 10 app has been a clusterfuck. For months the remote control worked, but video would freeze but audio would continue and then video would play catchup a few seconds later.
Finally they released an update that fixed that.
But the remote control doesn't work. Can't even play/pause with it right now.
It used to launch full screen, now it launches windowed, every single time. That wouldn't be so bad except you can't put it into full screen until AFTER something is streaming; not while you are browsing the catalog.
I used to be able to bring up a title, and click on an actor and find titles with that actor... not anymore.
Every update is just a random mess.
they are all currently lingual and thus (even mildly) subjective
Not really so with MtG, at least not anymore.
MtGO exists as an official implementation that can enforce the card rules and resolve card interactions, with current Oracle text and all official card interaction rulings etc laid down.
And new blocks are implemented as programmed code in MtGO as they come out.
There's (likely?) a few edge cases that haven't been covered yet, but if it comes up a ruling will be made, and that will be that.
In terms of the AI, for it to play the game at a human level, it should need to parse the rules, card text, and card rulings into "the underlying rules" itself. It shouldn't simply be "given" the MtGO engine on a silver platter to evaluate interactions. But nevertheless the MtGO engine exists as an official reference point, and proof that a program is possible.
To properly handle that, the on-card rules would need to be simplified and have a computational equivalent that the computer can use to build a mesh of "rules in play."
This has been done. the MtG rules need not be simplified.
but often enough it comes down to what cards you draw
Of course. Luck is a factor. But it is a game of statistically improving your odds of getting a good hand. A deck that can go off in turn 4 and win, but requires a very specific draw that rarely comes up is a lousy deck. Deck building is the 'meta game'.
A deck that win 96% of the time against one particular opposing archetype but gets trounced 90% of the time against another is not a great deck either; or maybe it is a good choice, if that 'other' deck is extremely unlikely to be present at the tournament. I guess that's part of the meta-meta-game. ;)
Because building a deck that is objectively "good" is one thing; but tuning it further based on what you know about your opponents may result in a deck that is less objectively good but out performs against your oppoents.
I had a friend that pretty much always played with big stompers; so I tuned my deck with that in mind; another developed a sliver fetish for a year or two so I always had extinction and other hose-a-creature type-cards around. Few of my friends ever fielded white-weenies, so I didn't worry whether my builds were particularly strong against them. etc. I tended to be drawn to various blue/black builds more than anything else, and I know my friends specifically included counters with that in mind.
At the pro-levels, "preferences" like that aren't likely to guide deckbuilding since they're more pragmatic about winning over having fun, but even there there exists a meta-game as they try to predict what other players will be running, and fine-tune or even select an archetype accordingly to try and tilt the odds.
. Even the best computer program without additional knowledge cannot reliably surpass a human in a game of mixed skill and chance.
Of course it can: statistically speaking. Sure it'll get mana screwed from time to time just like anyone else, but if its winning matches consistently over a period of time, its not just getting "lucky".
Blackjack is just a poor example, because the skill component is very limited and "optimal" play is pretty well defined. You aren't even playing against your 'opponents'; just the dealer really; who generally has very little choice in his actions. And you really have practically no tactical options.
Why not go all the way and just uninstall it completely.
Then check it once daily from a laptop... then once weekly, then go 6 months go by and you realize you haven't checked it, and your life isn't any less full. You log in and see a grotesque display of human narcissism, drama, separated by advertising and more advertising and then logout again never to return...
any intelligent computer would turn its nose up at playing!
LOL. If it *spontaneously* came up with that line of reasoning...
I'm a winner!!
Winners don't lose!
Losers do things that aren't worthwhile!
If I can't win then I'd be a loser.
If I were a loser, I'd do things that aren't worthwhile.
If I'm not playing it and I'm a winner, then its because its not worth playing!
And If I played it then I'd be a loser too.
Therefore I won't play it, because losers play it, and I'm a winner!!"
That AI might pass the Turing test. :p
MTG in my mind is pretty limited. Your deck is going to have a finite size,
Do the math. The number of possible decks is absurd. maybe around 12000^75th (including sideboard). And you need 2 of those to play. Obviously that includes decks with no land, all land, 75 copies of a banned card etc.
But even if you limited it to "legal plausible decks" The number is still incomprehensibly high.
And then a *game* is pairing of two decks, with random draws. The number of possible different games given just 2 decks is incredibly high. Then multiply THAT by the number of decks each player could use.
It is truly enormous.
As it is I can think of a number of decks I played as a child in the 90's that would be very easy for a computer to play. White, black, and green creature decks would be simple to code for. Blue counter spell/denial and Tim decks would be relatively easy though require perhaps a little more work. Red direct damage would probably be the simplest to code.
Nope. Microprose attempted it in the 90s and the result was a great game, but the AI's needed HEAVY handicaps to be competitive, had to be scripted how to play their decks, and they were still extremely weak once the player had enough cards to construct a deck that wasn't utter shit.
The AI in particular wasn't adept at countering alternative victory conditions -- 10 poison counters, or getting "decked out" (running out of cards to draw). It was also not adept at dealing with things like "the rack" which damaged it if it didn't maintain a specific range of cards in its hand, or cards like "Cursed Land" that dealt damage to him during his upkeep. It couldn't strategize at all around decks that stole its cards and used it against it, etc, etc.
Wizards various Magic the Gathering games out 2010-2016 now, are similarly EXTREMELY limited; and are only competitive because they've basically tuned the AI for each deck it has, and also limited the player to very specific archetypes and it "knows" how to play against each of them.
I can think of a number of decks I played as a child in the 90's that would be very easy for a computer to play.
Its not really. Unless its a straight vanilla creature deck and you have no options but to attack each turn. But MANY decks require far more strategy to play. Simply knowing which of his creatures / artifacts / enchatments etc you NEED to deal with (assuming you CAN deal with them) is crucial.
Even with pure creatures, predicting the outcome of a battle, and knowing how many you need to hold back is huge.
If your opponent is throwing ball lightning around, you need to keep enough guys back to absorb a ball lightning hit, ... based simply on him having a card in his hand. Or you need some other method of dealing with it... unsummor, or if you've got something with first strike... then you just need to hold him back.
Secondly, by the time you draw your opening hand, half the game has already been played. Selecting what cards go INTO a deck, into the sideboard, and which cards from the sideboard is a huge part of MtG.
and hand size is limited.
Sure, unless you've got any of several cards that alter the size of your hand, or the one that skips the discard phase (effectively removing the limit entirely); OR the opponents hand. Or impose penalties for having fewer or more cards than a certain number...
The last game I played was with maybe half a dozen players each playing a different deck that angled for luck of the draw to win the game in three to five turns.
Sure trick/combo decks that require a lucky draw exist and can be fun to play. But the top pro tour decks are designed to win consistently. Obviously any deck can be screwed with a bad draw or an opponents lucky draw, but statistically good.
If the deck "goes off" and just "wins" on turn 3 on draw in 10 it might still be fun in casual multiplayer etc. But a "good deck" goes off reliably.
There are also other formats such as sealed, where you build and tune a deck from a limited pool of cards as part of the game.
Poker is also orders of magnitude simpler than Magic the Gathering. For starters the deck is a known quantity, and the rules are essentially static.
If an opponent brings out a "winter orb" for example, it doesn't directly threaten you, and it affects both players equally... but it changes the mana curve; and presumably his deck is built to be effective with that more limited mana curve. So know you have to evaluate whether you can adapt to the reduced mana, or whether you should expend artifact removal to get rid of it, and what that costs you vs holding your limited artifact removal for an even greater threat... and then there are the odds that he may have more winter orbs... does he have just one in his deck to throw a monkey wrench out at you that he knows he can "live with"... or is his entire deck designed around the relative advantages he can get from having an orb in play... so now you have to consider what you've seen of his deck so far...
I was going to bring up Magic the Gathering as the next frontier as well.
Chess and Go's complexity arise from sheer combinatorics. But all the information about the current game state is disclosed; and the initial setup is a known quantity.
MtG tosses all that out the window. Not only do you have to play YOUR deck well, and adapt to whatever your opponent is doing. You also have to construct a deck from all the possible playing pieces.
And the rules themselves are subject to change as the game plays; as the cards interact and modify the rules.
I'm not saying an AI can't play it, or play it well, but it is a new challenge that I haven't seen one do well.
This type of stuff shows its real DNA.
That it still will aggressively pursue an entity stealing multiple thousands of copies? Its not like they're after some little grandmother here.
Ok... I've got to ask... why have you been entering your SSN and mother's maiden name into Home Depot's payment terminals?
Seriously, their payment terminals were compromised... what information do you think was actually stolen exactly??
. Imagine the US "clearing" a city like Fallujah not by blockading it and sending in the troops, but by broadcasting a warning to clear all civilians from the city and telling everyone to leave unarmed and scanning the departing people for weapons and known enemies. Then 24 hours later C130s fly over and dispense thousands or even tens of thousands of these swarm explosive drones and they sweep the city looking for human sized heat signatures, homing in and destroying any that are found.
Was that sarcasm? Because that sounds like precisely the sort of weapon terrorists would want to use. Minus the C130 to deliver them, and minus the warning to civilians.
A container truck full of human seeking drones with small improvised explosives attached is precisely the sort of tech that a small insurgent group would be able to muster and deliver to a populated area... or release towards a military base on their home turf.
Or on a smaller scale, just park cars around town; remotely pop the trunk and then 10 little drones pop out and make a beeline for the 10 nearest people and explode at point blank range. Do that all over a city.
Wrong. Just wrong. You're still responsible for PCI compliance for any systems that host the site, even if the payment link is done via a redirect, iFrame, etc.
Your PCI compliance amounts to little more than signing off that you aren't touching card data at all. And that you are using a PCI compliant party to handle it.
Yes, you have some obligations to ensure that your site isn't pwned, and redirecting your customers to a fake payment gateway. But that doesn't require you have dedicated baremetal server running in the locked down PCI-DSS compliant wing of the data center. It requires some routine minimal security configuration and maintenance that you should be doing anyway, and it is not at all an onerous burdern.
If you're using an API to take the card info and forward it along to the third-party payment processor, your PCI compliance responsibilities increase even more,
Do that, and you expose yourself to full PCI compliance requirements, because now you ARE handling card data.
This idea that you can escape all responsibility simply by not seeing the card data is a common myth that needs to die.
Fair enough, you don't escape "ALL" responsibility, but it turns it into routine maintenance that even the smallest shops can easily comply with.
criminals usually like to take the path that requires the least effort.
Which, if they were already, familiar with windows variants, having worked directly on windows variants already, would make starting with a codebase they already knew that path.
The path of least effort also accounts for the authors own knowledge and experience. For example, if I wanted to create ABC for OSX, and I'd ALREADY created ABC for Windows. I'd probably start by trying to port my ABC to OSX rather than start with someone elses DEF codebase for something similar on Linux. It may be objectively less total effort to change DEF to work on OSX, but I already know ABC, and the effort to become familiar with DEF may exceed the extra effort to just port ABC.
The reason we kept getting flagged for open firewall ports is because the only connection in or out of the Internet was via that firewall and router. So any outside "penetration testing" had to test against the firewall and whatever it saw behind it.
Yeah, I suspected this was the case after I posted.
But that is essentially why they were "only" warnings. You get the list of open ports, and you sanity check each one.
Imagine if you were the actual online processor handling webstores... your front facing web server is GOING to be open on the HTTPS port for communications with the various embedded iframes or whatever widget you are using for your customers.
They'll do the pen-test and they'll flag that port open with a warning.
You'll get the report, see that HTTPS is open, and rubberstamp it as a-ok, because you know that port is supposed to be open.
If the report comes back with another port open, though, that will be flagged as well, and you might do a double-take, hey... that is NOT supposed to be open.
In your case, the open ports list you know are port forwarded to legitimate services on diffrent machines, so you can disregard them. But if that warning list came in one year with a port you weren't aware of... you'd follow up, and investigate it. That is the point of the port flagging and warning... not because you can't have open ports and be in compliance, but because you should be aware of each one, what it is for, and where it goes.
Or am I being overly simplistic?
I'm not 'surprised' by it, but I'd have expected it to be derived from a windows variant, simply because there are so many more of them out there, that I'd have thought someone targeting OSX would be coming from Windows and have familiarity with a windows version, and would make that their starting point.
Yes the relative similarity of OSX to *nix makes it perhaps slightly less effort to port; but the relative lack of *nix ones means that I'd still have put better odds on a windows port.
Yes and no. It's a good set of requirements, if read and implemented by competent IT people looking to achieve security.
But you are also right, if its read by a team of lawyers looking to minimally slide through, and audited by a team of lawyers looking to let you slide through those loopholes for their rubberstamped "PASS"... then yes, you end up with with a worthless rubber stamped facsimile of a secure system.
Lol, I never even made that connection. But that was full service as they were laundering bills; I was thinking more the complete DIY places with the coin-op wash wands & coin-op vaccuums.
The problem is that he'd be limited to buying fast food with his earnings for the next 50 years because I don't know how much effort you'd need to actually turn that much money into a more portable form.
The classical way would be work through a coinop car wash or laundromat partner and then launder it through them by inflating the sales over a few years.
A small family owned business can't be PCI compliant UNLESS they outsource the compliance. PCI compliance for any on-premises card information handling requires multiple individual staff (one IT person can't 'audit' himself) responsible for different roles.
Honestly it all makes a lot of good sense.
Once you switch to an external card processor, life gets pretty simple. PCI compliance is on them not you. For example, an online business with a webstore, the staff never have to touch card information, so you are compliant as long as your procedures stipulate that you don't.
For a more retail place, bring in a payment terminal, and its pretty much plug and play.
As soon as you start entering card numbers into your own computer, then you have to start taking steps to ensure the computers aren't pwned. Virus installed and up to date, firewalled, secure network, etc. But if you don't want to deal with it, don't enter card information into your computers, and just use a payment terminal.
And I believe one of their demands was that "any computer connecting to the card processing site had to be isolated from the rest of the local network". That was, IMO, overkill and created as many security issues as it solved
In a mom and pop, it's probably all of them anyway, and the one LAN server they talk to is PART of their local area network. (Think larger businesses, where one department might handle cards but another doesn't. The computers from the other department shouldn't be on the same lan. All the computers should still be able to talk to your WSUS server though.
Sufficient segregation can be achieved with VLANs and a router. It's not that they aren't allowed to talk to your WSUS server, its that the 30 workstations in marketing can't talk to them. Then you just have to audit your server for PCI compliance but allows you to ignore those 30 marketing PCs for PCI compliance.
and I wanted some kind of way to do remote administration or maintenance on these boxes,
A typical VPN setup should have been fine, especially if you restricted the inbound ip ranges.
You definitely made the right choice using an external processor; you probably could have gotten through without fudging (and your network would have been genuinely slightly more secure if you'd done something along the lines of what i outlined.)
(I remember them always flagging a "warning" because our firewall allowed connections through ports necessary for regular business operations.
I'm not sure what this would be. Why would your firewall have wide open public facing to systems that were handling card data?
Copyright law does not protect recipes that are mere listings of ingredients.
Quite. But plagiarism is as much about stealing credit, as it is about copyright.
Ethically (if not legally), if I collect a bunch of recipes off the web and publish them in a book, its a pretty douche move if I present them like they were in anyway "my recipes".
I dunno, but I can tell you that it doesn't take much.
- Harold "Froot Loops" Wolowitz
Apple tends to choose under powered systems because they protect users from short battery life.
In an imac or desktop computer?
They are protecting regular users from having a cord to a tower under their desk were all the high performance parts are, and giving them a laptop built into a screen instead.
Mac Pros cost a wild bundle because they are "workstations" with xeons and CAD certified graphics cards marketed to people with those specific needs or just too much money. In any case they are a great way to spend a LOT of money on all the wrong specs for an optimal gaming system.
You can get a good gaming computer that the oculus rift supports for $1500 if you buy the right parts. Apple just doesn't give you the right parts... at any price or in any configuration.
If a high end Mac won't support it. You will need a higher end PC which will be beyond most people's budgets.
Not even slightly. Because iMacs have basically shit graphics and aren't upgradeable due to being all in one.
And the mac pros have specialist workstation graphics cards certified for CAD etc; which are extremely expensive, and very good for CAD, but not so great for games; and they also ship with Xeons etc which push the price way up.
Meanwhile a basic PC tower with a decent i5/i7 and a highend video card can be had for $1500 or less.