Both FFXI and WoW are doing a good job at cleaning up farmers accounts right now, but that only fixes part of the problem.
There are money sinks in the game, but the ease of making cash, if that's your intent, far exceeds the money sinks. Once you have an epic mount, there's really nothing to buy again. If you farmed at the same rate as you did to purchase your epic mount 6 months ago, how much money would you have now? TONS.
And really, there is very little damage that has been done by farmers in WoW.
Consider, 30,000 accounts in WoW and 30M gold removed. That's 1000g per account. woo-hoo. I have a lot of gold on my account, with a boatload of resources, and it is all legitimate without excessive AH farming or whatever poor excuse that people want to claim is broken when others have more cash. It's just obtained through playing.
Let's say Blizzard did NOT remove the gold in this latest round of bannings, and instead spread it out amongst the existing accounts. Guess how much your share is? 5g. Per account, that's to spread across your 30 characters. If magically everyone got 5g spread out across their characters, how much effect would that have on the economy? None
People blame farmers for increasing AH prices, when actually they provide MORE items, which drives down the price of AH items. Other non-gold-selling people buy these items and mark them up, and THAT increases the price of the AH. But when farmers sell more stuff, the price comes back down. There is actually a synergism between the TOS-breaking gold sellers/farmers, and the non-TOS-breaking players who just buy low and sell high. If enough AH-farmers buy all the items and remark them, they encourage people to buy gold, which encourages the farmers to farm gold and items, which puts more items on the AH, which is bought by the AH farmers, which is remarked at higher prices, which purchased gold is being used to buy. The AH farmers make a killing, and they aren't breaking the TOS. Yet, they are the impetus for gold purchasing. This is what's breaking the economy but it's far too easy to point at the chinese farmers as a scapegoat.
If the economy can be broken by normal means (not counting dupe bugs, server crashing, etc), then it is a sign of a broken economy. Gold farmers can speed up the decline of a broken economy, but they do not break it per se.
I think the best fix WoW can do for the economy is to limit each account to 10 items on the auctionhouse at any time, or perhaps charge a much higher fee for more than 10. Like 5% for up to 10, 10% 11-20, and 25% of the sale price for any items if you have 21+ listed when it sells.
Yep,/. has done this to a spammer after he made an annoying interview bragging about how awesome he is and the only thing he has to worry about is the pile of money falling on him.
Shortly after, someone posted his physical address and lo! he started receiving a LOT of junk mail. Like, a DOS on the postal service amount of junk mail.
the reach of the FDA *is* surprisingly broad. For example contact lenses and tampons are regulated by the FDA... and they are neither food nor drugs.
Both of which (tampons and contact lenses) can mess you up if done irresponsibly.
It's a good thing to get some basic protections against ignorant use of this before we end up with another form of pollution (BT corn? Resistant bacteria? Resistant wind-pollinated weeds?)
A recent test showed that one type of nano particle killed fish when some was put in the water (and yes I realize you can kill them with enough salt or dirt or any particle), the question remains, What toxins do we have to tolerate from businesses trying to make a buck before laying down some basic responsibilities? How much do we have to let irresponsible people destroy the environment, making a potentially irreversable buildup? Instead, how about companies have to prove their product can't result in a form of pollution, and will clean it up if it gets out, and the board/owners will be held criminally responsible.
Companies making these are interested in one thing: making money. The health implications of letting someone are severe, and science firms definitely do not qualify high on my list of responsible companies (cf Monsanto, some drug companies, many others). Consider how dangerous it is to inhale enriched uranium (even a tiny, tiny particle which will cause cancer), and consider the regulations and procedures required by law just due to health concerns (ignoring the weapon issues).
Reading brainwaves is like counting on Bluetooth as being a local network that can't be examined from far away. It's like counting on a license plate as not readable from a satellite.
When they make sensors that can easily read the pattern of your thought to log you in, guess what... you're broadcasting that thought. Literally. If it can be measured, it can be measured from farther away than anticipated.
This potential new technology has the same old security flaws.
Yeah, I gotta agree that the FSF has an extremely narrow political view. Linking doesn't make a piece of software "depend" on the OSS kernel... clearly the drivers already exist on non OSS platforms. That's such a remote connection it's like claiming my personal documents created with Vi are open source.
"Where do you fall on this issue?" I'll tell you exactly: Without Linux drivers.
It's nice to have a laundry tag, however these can have the biases desired by a software house. They can claim it doesn't collect personal information while requiring a website login that collects personal information, for instance.
This system would only work well if an independent agency made the tag, and did it in such a way that the tag itself wasn't binding, and couldn't be used against the company (or the agency making the tag). In other words, I believe this is either highly-biased, or a legal land mine to step around.
Yesterday we discovered the Mac OSX "challenge" was not an activity authorized by the UW-Madison. Once the test came to the attention of our CIO, she ended it. The site, test.doit.wisc.edu, will be removed from the network tonight. Our primary concern is for security and network access for UW services. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused to the community.
The CIO of UW-Madison has managed to get test.doit.wisc.edu website defaced.
The new "ADVISE" initiative isn't meant to gather e-mails. It only gathers publicaly available data.
The article was misleading when they claimed how bad it would be if a data mining program were to examine financial records or emails or buying groceries or other private information. This program does none of that. Financial records in the public domain, such as public companies, could (potentially) be examined, but only things in the public record such as reports and newspapers.
The real question is, should collections of public information be private, due to the ability to correlate?
Generally, you attempt to protect the identifying piece of information, so that an individual cannot be deduced. But as more information becomes public, and information mining techniques advance, should the collection become private data?
(I'd recommend against trying to get a law passed to promote privacy. That has a very high likelihood of backfiring.)
I just hope the "owners" can put aside huge profits for once, and make the drug available for as near cost as practicable.... considering the stock tripled yesterday, I have my doubts. That's got to be one of the cheapest stock boosts in history.
1. Leak a rumor to the press to start the 48h clock on insider trading 2. triple the value of your stock options. 3. Profit.
A funny thing I noted is the "if you're giving a strong (audio) input the phone will emit with more power"... come on, this would be true with pure analog phones, but GSM is not and that make this claim plain wrong
Most likely, it sends a low-bandwidth "no transmission" during times of no talking, and is probably somewhere around the output power of "standby" mode. No reason to saturate the digital airwaves with 00000000 when there's no sound.
The radio in the background simply makes sure both phones are actually transmitting.
And of course the law of embarassing the smartass comes to play... the moment I hit submit, I accidently erase part of the closing tag and bold most of the comment.
1. Never underestimate the Proximity of Genius effect.
I've personally seen this happen all the time. Someone tells me "this doesn't work" and the moment I type the same command or push in the PCMCIA card myself or whatever, it suddenly works. We dubbed it the Proximity of Genius Effect and is similar to the following koan:
The Master walked into the room and watched a student power-cycle a machine several times in hopes of getting it working. The Master approached the student, hit him upside the head and declared "Idiot! You cannot simply power-cycle a machine and expect it to work without having any idea what is wrong!" Then the Master turned the machine off and back on. And it worked. The student was enlightened.
From TFA: "Engineuity is currently in the advanced stages of the incubator program of the Chief Scientist in Israel, and is seeking investors that will allow it to develop a full scale prototype."
Does this remind anyone of the 100MPG Carburetor from the 70's or the steam injectors that increase mpg by 300%?
I'm sure the investors will be getting several letters like this, spaced a couple months apart: "The Israeli department of export control has required several prototypes to prove the safety, and we will need further backing. If you can contribute further, we will give you 150% stock for every dollar you send."
Followed by: "The Israeli Security Administration has confiscated and classified all our technology. We regret that the government has seized all our assets, bank accounts, property, and our 3 working prototypes. We were forced to agree to a gag-order or face jail for non-compliance. This is the last communication we are allowed to send."
are we nearing the time when we all need to worry about our genetic privacy?
This is a perfect thing for Emily Litella:
Chevy Chase: Here to reply to a recent slashdot article is Emily Litella.
Emily Litella: Hello. I'm here to speak out against discrimination based on genital privacy. I think it's a horrible, horrible thing when you don't have genital privacy. Imagine trying to use the restroom! Considering the amount of porn on the Internet, it's clear we're not all interested in genital privacy but consider that --
Chevy: Excuse me, Ms Litella... the article is on "GENETIC" privacy... you know, to prevent discrimination based on your DNA.
Making a professional-quality movie is generally not cheap. The cost of a single lens on a pro movie camera could put you through college for a year, easily. Film ain't cheap, either.
But with evolving technology, even a crappy 1.7Ghz computer will be better than the old technology of Xacto knives and splicing tape.
So, dream of making an independent film all you want, but it's your script, the directing, and the acting that'll make the film, not the post production work.
I've found that the divx codec encodes excellent compressed movies of games (things with lots of explosions combined with text and lots of motion) which is my primary usage of movie software.
Is divx export available in this? I know about Xvid project and would love to know if it works with Cinelerra.
Doing such a maneuver is a political statement, and nothing else. And like most political statements, I don't necessarily support your view of the world. The hip culture helped produce a nice, open license. But now RMS sounds like he's trying to enforce a hip culture, not a software license. Screw that.
If this does turn out to be indeed true, I will not be using successive GPLs, and will only use previous versions. And hell, I'll add my own clause that successive GPL versions cannot be used on my code.
Slashdot Mirror
Both FFXI and WoW are doing a good job at cleaning up farmers accounts right now, but that only fixes part of the problem.
There are money sinks in the game, but the ease of making cash, if that's your intent, far exceeds the money sinks. Once you have an epic mount, there's really nothing to buy again. If you farmed at the same rate as you did to purchase your epic mount 6 months ago, how much money would you have now? TONS.
And really, there is very little damage that has been done by farmers in WoW.
Consider, 30,000 accounts in WoW and 30M gold removed. That's 1000g per account. woo-hoo. I have a lot of gold on my account, with a boatload of resources, and it is all legitimate without excessive AH farming or whatever poor excuse that people want to claim is broken when others have more cash. It's just obtained through playing.
Let's say Blizzard did NOT remove the gold in this latest round of bannings, and instead spread it out amongst the existing accounts. Guess how much your share is? 5g. Per account, that's to spread across your 30 characters. If magically everyone got 5g spread out across their characters, how much effect would that have on the economy?
None
People blame farmers for increasing AH prices, when actually they provide MORE items, which drives down the price of AH items. Other non-gold-selling people buy these items and mark them up, and THAT increases the price of the AH. But when farmers sell more stuff, the price comes back down. There is actually a synergism between the TOS-breaking gold sellers/farmers, and the non-TOS-breaking players who just buy low and sell high. If enough AH-farmers buy all the items and remark them, they encourage people to buy gold, which encourages the farmers to farm gold and items, which puts more items on the AH, which is bought by the AH farmers, which is remarked at higher prices, which purchased gold is being used to buy. The AH farmers make a killing, and they aren't breaking the TOS. Yet, they are the impetus for gold purchasing. This is what's breaking the economy but it's far too easy to point at the chinese farmers as a scapegoat.
If the economy can be broken by normal means (not counting dupe bugs, server crashing, etc), then it is a sign of a broken economy. Gold farmers can speed up the decline of a broken economy, but they do not break it per se.
I think the best fix WoW can do for the economy is to limit each account to 10 items on the auctionhouse at any time, or perhaps charge a much higher fee for more than 10. Like 5% for up to 10, 10% 11-20, and 25% of the sale price for any items if you have 21+ listed when it sells.
Shortly after, someone posted his physical address and lo! he started receiving a LOT of junk mail. Like, a DOS on the postal service amount of junk mail.
Unfortunately, morality is generally what the masses think is moral. Thus, mob rule dictating morality carries a lot of weight. cf: French revolution.
the reach of the FDA *is* surprisingly broad. For example contact lenses and tampons are regulated by the FDA ... and they are neither food nor drugs.
Both of which (tampons and contact lenses) can mess you up if done irresponsibly.
It's a good thing to get some basic protections against ignorant use of this before we end up with another form of pollution (BT corn? Resistant bacteria? Resistant wind-pollinated weeds?)
A recent test showed that one type of nano particle killed fish when some was put in the water (and yes I realize you can kill them with enough salt or dirt or any particle), the question remains, What toxins do we have to tolerate from businesses trying to make a buck before laying down some basic responsibilities? How much do we have to let irresponsible people destroy the environment, making a potentially irreversable buildup? Instead, how about companies have to prove their product can't result in a form of pollution, and will clean it up if it gets out, and the board/owners will be held criminally responsible.
Companies making these are interested in one thing: making money. The health implications of letting someone are severe, and science firms definitely do not qualify high on my list of responsible companies (cf Monsanto, some drug companies, many others). Consider how dangerous it is to inhale enriched uranium (even a tiny, tiny particle which will cause cancer), and consider the regulations and procedures required by law just due to health concerns (ignoring the weapon issues).
Reading brainwaves is like counting on Bluetooth as being a local network that can't be examined from far away. It's like counting on a license plate as not readable from a satellite.
When they make sensors that can easily read the pattern of your thought to log you in, guess what... you're broadcasting that thought. Literally. If it can be measured, it can be measured from farther away than anticipated.
This potential new technology has the same old security flaws.
Yeah, I gotta agree that the FSF has an extremely narrow political view. Linking doesn't make a piece of software "depend" on the OSS kernel... clearly the drivers already exist on non OSS platforms. That's such a remote connection it's like claiming my personal documents created with Vi are open source.
"Where do you fall on this issue?"
I'll tell you exactly: Without Linux drivers.
Get yourself 3 projectors and a huge wrap-around screen (hell, white cardboard). VGA is fine on projectors, and you can blend the edges.
Talk about immersive... imagine a driving game on that.
It's nice to have a laundry tag, however these can have the biases desired by a software house. They can claim it doesn't collect personal information while requiring a website login that collects personal information, for instance.
This system would only work well if an independent agency made the tag, and did it in such a way that the tag itself wasn't binding, and couldn't be used against the company (or the agency making the tag). In other words, I believe this is either highly-biased, or a legal land mine to step around.
Reverse Beer Goggles!
The CIO of UW-Madison has managed to get test.doit.wisc.edu website defaced.
The new "ADVISE" initiative isn't meant to gather e-mails. It only gathers publicaly available data.
The article was misleading when they claimed how bad it would be if a data mining program were to examine financial records or emails or buying groceries or other private information. This program does none of that. Financial records in the public domain, such as public companies, could (potentially) be examined, but only things in the public record such as reports and newspapers.
The real question is, should collections of public information be private, due to the ability to correlate?
Generally, you attempt to protect the identifying piece of information, so that an individual cannot be deduced. But as more information becomes public, and information mining techniques advance, should the collection become private data?
(I'd recommend against trying to get a law passed to promote privacy. That has a very high likelihood of backfiring.)
I just hope the "owners" can put aside huge profits for once, and make the drug available for as near cost as practicable. ... considering the stock tripled yesterday, I have my doubts. That's got to be one of the cheapest stock boosts in history.
1. Leak a rumor to the press to start the 48h clock on insider trading
2. triple the value of your stock options.
3. Profit.
The beauty is there's no '???' in this equation.
A funny thing I noted is the "if you're giving a strong (audio) input the phone will emit with more power" ... come on, this would be true with pure analog phones, but GSM is not and that make this claim plain wrong
Most likely, it sends a low-bandwidth "no transmission" during times of no talking, and is probably somewhere around the output power of "standby" mode. No reason to saturate the digital airwaves with 00000000 when there's no sound.
The radio in the background simply makes sure both phones are actually transmitting.
Say goodbye to WASD (not very manly-sounding on those frag-fests, is it?)
Behold: BeFG
GAME OVER
And of course the law of embarassing the smartass comes to play... the moment I hit submit, I accidently erase part of the closing tag and bold most of the comment.
I've personally seen this happen all the time. Someone tells me "this doesn't work" and the moment I type the same command or push in the PCMCIA card myself or whatever, it suddenly works. We dubbed it the Proximity of Genius Effect and is similar to the following koan:
2-9 are generally just variations of #1.
Look at the goofy face on that guy... you definitely need some facial recognition to cue sounds of hordes of screaming groupies, too.
Maybe add an automatic air-panty-launcher....
Grats! You're right, of course.
From TFA: "Engineuity is currently in the advanced stages of the incubator program of the Chief Scientist in Israel, and is seeking investors that will allow it to develop a full scale prototype."
Does this remind anyone of the 100MPG Carburetor from the 70's or the steam injectors that increase mpg by 300%?
I'm sure the investors will be getting several letters like this, spaced a couple months apart:
"The Israeli department of export control has required several prototypes to prove the safety, and we will need further backing. If you can contribute further, we will give you 150% stock for every dollar you send."
Followed by:
"The Israeli Security Administration has confiscated and classified all our technology. We regret that the government has seized all our assets, bank accounts, property, and our 3 working prototypes. We were forced to agree to a gag-order or face jail for non-compliance. This is the last communication we are allowed to send."
Darn, and I just sent them my "genetic registration" in a small jar.
are we nearing the time when we all need to worry about our genetic privacy?
This is a perfect thing for Emily Litella:
Chevy Chase: Here to reply to a recent slashdot article is Emily Litella.
Emily Litella: Hello. I'm here to speak out against discrimination based on genital privacy. I think it's a horrible, horrible thing when you don't have genital privacy. Imagine trying to use the restroom! Considering the amount of porn on the Internet, it's clear we're not all interested in genital privacy but consider that --
Chevy: Excuse me, Ms Litella... the article is on "GENETIC" privacy... you know, to prevent discrimination based on your DNA.
Emily: Oh. That's very important too. Nevermind.
That's okay, you can do it back. Just install this on your car to drive through red lights and avoid the photograph.
Now, we merely need to mount these on the heads of sharks and.... Muhahahhaha!
Muahahahahha!
Making a professional-quality movie is generally not cheap. The cost of a single lens on a pro movie camera could put you through college for a year, easily. Film ain't cheap, either.
But with evolving technology, even a crappy 1.7Ghz computer will be better than the old technology of Xacto knives and splicing tape.
So, dream of making an independent film all you want, but it's your script, the directing, and the acting that'll make the film, not the post production work.
I've found that the divx codec encodes excellent compressed movies of games (things with lots of explosions combined with text and lots of motion) which is my primary usage of movie software.
Is divx export available in this? I know about Xvid project and would love to know if it works with Cinelerra.
Doing such a maneuver is a political statement, and nothing else. And like most political statements, I don't necessarily support your view of the world. The hip culture helped produce a nice, open license. But now RMS sounds like he's trying to enforce a hip culture, not a software license. Screw that.
If this does turn out to be indeed true, I will not be using successive GPLs, and will only use previous versions. And hell, I'll add my own clause that successive GPL versions cannot be used on my code.