Unfortunately, that would mean the game would NEVER be released. See, a month passes, and then you have to wait two more weeks. that passes, you have to wait one more week. skip a few iterations,
1 femtosecond passes, but now you have to wait 0.5 femtoseconds.... It's a never-ending process, we'll never stop running out of halves. Therefore we will never actually reach the release date.
They already base your insurance premiums and deductibles, etc.. based on how good of a driver you are.
The current metric they use for determining "goodness" is "number of accidents you've been in", which is a MUCH better metric than "how much you speed".
Because honestly, I'd MUCH rather share the road with Mario Andretti (or some other pro racer) than a grandparent on their way to "the farmer's market".
I'm not saying that speeders, statistically, aren't a worse group of drivers. They are. They get in more accidents. But we ALREADY know about who gets in accidents. The speeders are already penalized! This will just cause a lot more false positives (and a lot more true positives, of course), making the road simultaneously safer, slower, and more boring.
And even if you lock religiously, GET A UNIQUE NUMBER ETCHED INTO THE FRAME. Driver's License # is a good one, or any other number that cops could backtrack to you. Occasionally, big bike theft rings will get busted, and cops will return every bike they can to the original owners.
I got lucky and found my stolen bike myself, but the fact that my DL# was etched into the frame meant the cops bought my story at face value.
I was walking to my car 2 days after the bike theft, and parked two spots over from me was a pickup with my bike in the back. I hopped into the bed to make sure, and... yep. I then surreptitiously deflated all four of his tires, and then walked off to find a cop (never around when you need one...) 45 minutes and two signatures later, and they'd released the "evidence" back to me, arrested the owner of the truck, and (best of all) the officer on the scene emailed me all the evidence photos. (Including a trophy shot of me sitting on the bike in his truck bed, giving a "thumbs up" to the camera)
http://cknox.homeip.net/bike/ (sorry, my bittorrent will make this page slow for you)
I was trying to find the site of a product called the "Stadium Buddy", but couldn't remember specific enough search terms. I confidently told my friends "oh, of course it's real. just google for recreational catheter". You know, because it's an external bladder you can wear to sporting events.
Whooooooa buddy were those the wrong search terms. I consider myself pretty jaded to the internet, but even I was shocked at the stuff that turns up. Erotic fiction about catheters? Even a quite illegal gay kiddie porn site from a guy who enjoys catheterizing and diapering preteens who are handcuffed in his basement.
I think your contest should be for "most screwed up query with innocent intentions". And must contain only true stories. Should be interesting...
So this is a cache of term papers? Or a site where you can watch people type term papers? Just kidding, of course. But okay, so I understand it's hard to make tokens, but easy to verify them. What good is that?
We did some research into using those dictionary algorithms to measure similarity of documents, and found that they're wildly innacurate for small stuff; it wasn't practical for our purposes, and we were doing resumes, which are often a bit longer than spam.
Yes, we have a tunnel system too, but most of the year it's full of rancid steam, and I bet there's nothing down there except new forms of fungal and bacterial life.
I once had a hankering to make a map of my dorm out of the architectural blueprints. Initially I wanted it so I could get wiring details for a complicated prank, but I couldn't find them.:-) Anyway, long story short, I found the right building and the right department, and had to give a reason for having the blueprints. I told the first guy I asked "I want them to have them out of curiosity", and he said they weren't allowed to give them out except for school projects. Then he asked if I was sure it wasn't for a school project, so I said "yeah, it's for my homework". He passed me up, and two more people forced me to say the magical phrase "for homework" before they'd cooperate. None of them acted like they wanted to be convinced... they just needed to hear the words.
I think that was this guy's problem. Sure, he has a legal RIGHT to the documents, but we live in the real world... people just want to hear the words that make them happy, and then they'll be cheerfully cooperative. He just needed to know how to play ball.
I'm way late to post, so this'll probably never get seen, but here's my 2 cents anyway.
At Texas A&M, CS majors are only a class away from a math minor. You might as well pick one up, esp. when 'communications and cryptography' is offered by the math department. Incidentally, that was the most fun class I ever took. We got to do our finals twice, first in class and later at home... The test grade was an average of the two.
Although 3D Graphics was offered by the CS dept, it almost should have been classified a math- we did far more pen-and-paper work than programming.
Shutup, you blathermouth! Bittorrent is one of the least secure protocols out there, it thrives on being the "new guy" and not getting noticed.
You WANT that site to get as popular as kazaa? The unwashed masses are the only ones the (RI|MP)AA care about, Napster worked fine until everybody and their uncle was on it.
I tried this out last week, it relatively sucked. Framerate was about 0.5 per second, visual defects were everywhere, just seemed like an interesting concept wrapped in bare proof-of-concept code.
I went around cube to cube (hey, I was on break) sharing the gist of the headline, and I got a unanimous [pardon the french] "about fucking time" from EVERY SINGLE person, except one guy who just clapped slowly. He's an odd one...
At my workplace, we run about about two hundred corporate websites. The majority of those are on three boxes from Penguin computing, and the bare minimum required by our contract with IBM are on the z-series. At first we thought it would be a great deal, and looked forward to moving all of our sites over to the high-performance IBM machine. But it failed EVERY SINGLE test we could think to throw at it, except trying to brute-force an RSA key.
They're great number crunchers, but they don't hold up under any kind of pressure as a web server. We had the z-series with no sites on it run benchmarks and compare to our development box with 20 sites hosted, and the development box (Penguin Computing) kicked its ASS.
Every time one of our developers has to ssh into the IBM machine, they yell "Cover me, I'm going in". Our running gag is, if they're not done editing the apache config or whatever in ten minutes, we'll have to send in a rescue team.
My rational, scientific, carefully measured opinion is that the IBM z-series SUCKS. HARD.
Gee, I sure wish I wouldn't get in trouble for sharing our benchmark data with you. Oh well, you'll have to take my word for it and hope the majority agrees.
Perhaps some observant legislator will draw a parallel between the benefits of DNA research that have already been reaped without any of the scary "uber-monster" side effects, and use that to help lift the ban on human stem cell research?
And, lets be honest, a Spam from allstate is a heckuva lot better than "PLEASE HER WITH YOUR LONGER FIRMER ROD 9XGZ4P"
At least then there will be real reputation on the line and a responsive "please remove me" link. And I won't have to close my inbox when mom walks into the room because "You wouldn't be getting that porn spam if they didn't think you liked it in the first place. You know that stuff's not healthy, don't you?"
I don't mean to contradict you; I agree that the space shuttle is old, and that technology has marched an awful long distance since then. But my Real-time computing prof was one of the people who helped design the computer systems on the modern space shuttle. They're old 386s (5 of them), but they really are the best tool for the job. 1.) Since their circuits were larger, they were less vulnerable to space radiation. 2.) They were plenty fast enough for what was needed. 3.) Their faults and strengths and weaknesses are COMPLETELY known. NASA won't send up anything that they think they don't know everything about.
Whenever one of the computers makes a decision about something, two others also make the same decision. A fourth computer treats each of the three as a vote, and the majority rules. A fifth acts as a backup for the fourth. How's that for a stable system?
Yes, the space shuttle is old. But it's VERY well designed, and its flaws are poor fuel economy and it's weak material structure. Modern computers and all our other whiz-bang gadgetry aren't likely to be near as useful as a stronger or lighter construction material, or a better launch mechanism.
Re:Waaa waaaa "privacy concerns"
on
Walmart to Push RFID
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Maybe you're just trolling, I can't tell. But I think the whole point of RFID is it's automatic. Sure, they could look at the box, and sure, they're already tracking barcodes. But with RFID, they can track all purchases and even the path a product takes throughout the store.
There's a hypthetical store that can track every thought you have, and present individually targeted ads that are so personally tailored that they can instantly create demand for every products at once. The "evil" store.
And there's a hypothetical store that just has its products on a well organized series of tables, and you just grab what you want and leave cash in a bucket on the honor system. The "good" store.
Nobody's suggesting that Walmart is the evil store, or that they suck because they're not just like the good store. What they're suggesting is that "good" stores are trying as hard as they can to become "evil", and our beloved technology is helping. THAT'S what people are upset about.
the incrdible similarities between Douglas Adams's "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" (far funnier and less silly than the hitchhiker trilogy) and this episode of Dr. Who? I can't decide if this is the inspiration for Dirk, if Dirk is the inspiration for this, or if it's a crossover.
For those who found him interesting, the character of Professor Chronotus is fleshed out a lot more fully in the novel.
My roommate in college and I wanted to hack somebody's hotmail account once, so we searched the internet for methods to do so. I stumbled across this, and promptly fired my own login and password off.
Five seconds later, my roommate and I looked at each other and cracked up, realizing how stupid that was. Then we registered the account "RetrievalBot" and sent out emails to all of our friends with a tailored scam message. Long story short, we got the password we wanted, plus about fifteen more.:-)
Are you aware of the excellent game "Halo" for the X-Box? And of the large number of similarities it displays to your Ringworld? I realize the plotline of the game is different, but it's almost as if somebody said "Let's take Ringworld and change the story into a fairly mindless shooter." Yes, there are many differences, but my main question is - Do you keep an eye out for ripoffs? Do you care about them?
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, that would mean the game would NEVER be released. See, a month passes, and then you have to wait two more weeks. that passes, you have to wait one more week. skip a few iterations,
1 femtosecond passes, but now you have to wait 0.5 femtoseconds.... It's a never-ending process, we'll never stop running out of halves. Therefore we will never actually reach the release date.
They already base your insurance premiums and deductibles, etc.. based on how good of a driver you are.
The current metric they use for determining "goodness" is "number of accidents you've been in", which is a MUCH better metric than "how much you speed".
Because honestly, I'd MUCH rather share the road with Mario Andretti (or some other pro racer) than a grandparent on their way to "the farmer's market".
I'm not saying that speeders, statistically, aren't a worse group of drivers. They are. They get in more accidents. But we ALREADY know about who gets in accidents. The speeders are already penalized! This will just cause a lot more false positives (and a lot more true positives, of course), making the road simultaneously safer, slower, and more boring.
And even if you lock religiously, GET A UNIQUE NUMBER ETCHED INTO THE FRAME. Driver's License # is a good one, or any other number that cops could backtrack to you. Occasionally, big bike theft rings will get busted, and cops will return every bike they can to the original owners.
I got lucky and found my stolen bike myself, but the fact that my DL# was etched into the frame meant the cops bought my story at face value.
I was walking to my car 2 days after the bike theft, and parked two spots over from me was a pickup with my bike in the back. I hopped into the bed to make sure, and... yep. I then surreptitiously deflated all four of his tires, and then walked off to find a cop (never around when you need one...) 45 minutes and two signatures later, and they'd released the "evidence" back to me, arrested the owner of the truck, and (best of all) the officer on the scene emailed me all the evidence photos. (Including a trophy shot of me sitting on the bike in his truck bed, giving a "thumbs up" to the camera)
http://cknox.homeip.net/bike/ (sorry, my bittorrent will make this page slow for you)
or a tilt switch. just because the mouse is high-tech doesn't mean you need to make it as complex as possible.
I was trying to find the site of a product called the "Stadium Buddy", but couldn't remember specific enough search terms. I confidently told my friends "oh, of course it's real. just google for recreational catheter". You know, because it's an external bladder you can wear to sporting events.
Whooooooa buddy were those the wrong search terms. I consider myself pretty jaded to the internet, but even I was shocked at the stuff that turns up. Erotic fiction about catheters? Even a quite illegal gay kiddie porn site from a guy who enjoys catheterizing and diapering preteens who are handcuffed in his basement.
I think your contest should be for "most screwed up query with innocent intentions". And must contain only true stories. Should be interesting...
So this is a cache of term papers? Or a site where you can watch people type term papers? Just kidding, of course. But okay, so I understand it's hard to make tokens, but easy to verify them. What good is that?
You reminded me of a variation on an old blond joke-
"Understand the DMCA? Heck, I can't even spell it!"
Sure, there's another source. They also get a lot from people logging out of hotmail. :-)
That a funny analogy; actually, I was comparing using hotmail with eating 40 lemons YEARS ago.
We did some research into using those dictionary algorithms to measure similarity of documents, and found that they're wildly innacurate for small stuff; it wasn't practical for our purposes, and we were doing resumes, which are often a bit longer than spam.
Yes, we have a tunnel system too, but most of the year it's full of rancid steam, and I bet there's nothing down there except new forms of fungal and bacterial life.
:-) Anyway, long story short, I found the right building and the right department, and had to give a reason for having the blueprints. I told the first guy I asked "I want them to have them out of curiosity", and he said they weren't allowed to give them out except for school projects. Then he asked if I was sure it wasn't for a school project, so I said "yeah, it's for my homework". He passed me up, and two more people forced me to say the magical phrase "for homework" before they'd cooperate. None of them acted like they wanted to be convinced... they just needed to hear the words.
I once had a hankering to make a map of my dorm out of the architectural blueprints. Initially I wanted it so I could get wiring details for a complicated prank, but I couldn't find them.
I think that was this guy's problem. Sure, he has a legal RIGHT to the documents, but we live in the real world... people just want to hear the words that make them happy, and then they'll be cheerfully cooperative. He just needed to know how to play ball.
I'm way late to post, so this'll probably never get seen, but here's my 2 cents anyway.
At Texas A&M, CS majors are only a class away from a math minor. You might as well pick one up, esp. when 'communications and cryptography' is offered by the math department. Incidentally, that was the most fun class I ever took. We got to do our finals twice, first in class and later at home... The test grade was an average of the two.
Although 3D Graphics was offered by the CS dept, it almost should have been classified a math- we did far more pen-and-paper work than programming.
Shutup, you blathermouth! Bittorrent is one of the least secure protocols out there, it thrives on being the "new guy" and not getting noticed.
You WANT that site to get as popular as kazaa? The unwashed masses are the only ones the (RI|MP)AA care about, Napster worked fine until everybody and their uncle was on it.
I tried this out last week, it relatively sucked. Framerate was about 0.5 per second, visual defects were everywhere, just seemed like an interesting concept wrapped in bare proof-of-concept code.
I went around cube to cube (hey, I was on break) sharing the gist of the headline, and I got a unanimous [pardon the french] "about fucking time" from EVERY SINGLE person, except one guy who just clapped slowly. He's an odd one...
At my workplace, we run about about two hundred corporate websites. The majority of those are on three boxes from Penguin computing, and the bare minimum required by our contract with IBM are on the z-series. At first we thought it would be a great deal, and looked forward to moving all of our sites over to the high-performance IBM machine. But it failed EVERY SINGLE test we could think to throw at it, except trying to brute-force an RSA key.
They're great number crunchers, but they don't hold up under any kind of pressure as a web server. We had the z-series with no sites on it run benchmarks and compare to our development box with 20 sites hosted, and the development box (Penguin Computing) kicked its ASS.
Every time one of our developers has to ssh into the IBM machine, they yell "Cover me, I'm going in". Our running gag is, if they're not done editing the apache config or whatever in ten minutes, we'll have to send in a rescue team.
My rational, scientific, carefully measured opinion is that the IBM z-series SUCKS. HARD.
Gee, I sure wish I wouldn't get in trouble for sharing our benchmark data with you. Oh well, you'll have to take my word for it and hope the majority agrees.
Perhaps some observant legislator will draw a parallel between the benefits of DNA research that have already been reaped without any of the scary "uber-monster" side effects, and use that to help lift the ban on human stem cell research?
(hint hint)
It's also one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors.
5 53 380966/104-8946945-3423112?v=glance
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
Early to rise,
and early to bed
makes a man healthy
but socially dead.
And, lets be honest, a Spam from allstate is a heckuva lot better than "PLEASE HER WITH YOUR LONGER FIRMER ROD 9XGZ4P"
At least then there will be real reputation on the line and a responsive "please remove me" link. And I won't have to close my inbox when mom walks into the room because "You wouldn't be getting that porn spam if they didn't think you liked it in the first place. You know that stuff's not healthy, don't you?"
I don't mean to contradict you; I agree that the space shuttle is old, and that technology has marched an awful long distance since then. But my Real-time computing prof was one of the people who helped design the computer systems on the modern space shuttle. They're old 386s (5 of them), but they really are the best tool for the job.
1.) Since their circuits were larger, they were less vulnerable to space radiation.
2.) They were plenty fast enough for what was needed.
3.) Their faults and strengths and weaknesses are COMPLETELY known. NASA won't send up anything that they think they don't know everything about.
Whenever one of the computers makes a decision about something, two others also make the same decision. A fourth computer treats each of the three as a vote, and the majority rules. A fifth acts as a backup for the fourth. How's that for a stable system?
Yes, the space shuttle is old. But it's VERY well designed, and its flaws are poor fuel economy and it's weak material structure. Modern computers and all our other whiz-bang gadgetry aren't likely to be near as useful as a stronger or lighter construction material, or a better launch mechanism.
Maybe you're just trolling, I can't tell. But I think the whole point of RFID is it's automatic. Sure, they could look at the box, and sure, they're already tracking barcodes. But with RFID, they can track all purchases and even the path a product takes throughout the store.
There's a hypthetical store that can track every thought you have, and present individually targeted ads that are so personally tailored that they can instantly create demand for every products at once. The "evil" store.
And there's a hypothetical store that just has its products on a well organized series of tables, and you just grab what you want and leave cash in a bucket on the honor system. The "good" store.
Nobody's suggesting that Walmart is the evil store, or that they suck because they're not just like the good store. What they're suggesting is that "good" stores are trying as hard as they can to become "evil", and our beloved technology is helping. THAT'S what people are upset about.
the incrdible similarities between Douglas Adams's "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" (far funnier and less silly than the hitchhiker trilogy) and this episode of Dr. Who? I can't decide if this is the inspiration for Dirk, if Dirk is the inspiration for this, or if it's a crossover.
For those who found him interesting, the character of Professor Chronotus is fleshed out a lot more fully in the novel.
My roommate in college and I wanted to hack somebody's hotmail account once, so we searched the internet for methods to do so. I stumbled across this, and promptly fired my own login and password off.
:-)
Five seconds later, my roommate and I looked at each other and cracked up, realizing how stupid that was. Then we registered the account "RetrievalBot" and sent out emails to all of our friends with a tailored scam message. Long story short, we got the password we wanted, plus about fifteen more.
Are you aware of the excellent game "Halo" for the X-Box? And of the large number of similarities it displays to your Ringworld? I realize the plotline of the game is different, but it's almost as if somebody said "Let's take Ringworld and change the story into a fairly mindless shooter." Yes, there are many differences, but my main question is - Do you keep an eye out for ripoffs? Do you care about them?