That's BS. Practice with a weapon as similar to the one you fight with as possible. That way, when you get to the real fight, you are comfortable and familiar with it in your hand. It's like training for Vietnam jungle and then shipping off to Iraq.
What you should practice against (and what you're trying to say) is to make your opponents as varied as possible in practice, or preferably (extension of the above principle) as near to your actual opponents as possible. cf. Sun Tzu: "Know thyself, and know thy enemy, and of a hundred battles you will be the victor. Know thyself, but not thy enemy, and even will be your losses and victories. Do not know thyself, and wallow in defeat forever."
The interesting thing about that particular wargame wasn't the communications, but the blue team "unsinking" a carrier that had been taken out by a massed small boat attack. Submarines...and targets.
The point is that Reyes used regression to attempt to control for those factors. The instrumental variable is the legal regime of the several states, and unless you can show a correlation between legal regimes and what states were hardest hit by inflation/economic issues (or have a good reason to worry about heteroscedasticity), then this isn't a concern.
The paper (if I remember right, it's been a while since I studied this in her class) finds that states with less stringent lead laws before the passage of a national lead law had greater drops in crime 17-20 years later than states with more stringent lead laws. It's a very similar approach to the subject as the paper cited in Freakonomics on abortion laws, but this paper includes that data in the robustness testing (and found that the r-squared on the abortion factor is only about a third of what it is in the earlier paper, but still significant).
While there may be a lot of things to which you can tie a drop in crime, it is useful to try to account for ones that can be controlled by government policy - like lead content in gasoline and paint. It provides a rationale for changes in public policy that isn't based on emotion, but on logic and math.
Looking Glass did an amazing job with all of their hybrid FPSes - the Thief and System Shock games (I hear good stuff about BioShock too). I didn't even finish Thief the first time I played through - I was stuck in the catacombs where the undead keep coming back to life and there are traps all over the damn place, and I just couldn't stand to keep going because my save was low on life and out of arrows. Only game that ever made me quit in fear (granted, I was 13 at the time).
I eventually came back to it a few years later and managed to get through, then play through Thief 2 (not as scary, IMO) and 3. I still remember the Cradle level with a shudder.
System Shock 2, which I was just playing through recently in preparation for BioShock, does a great job with their semirandom respawns and Resident Evil-esque ammo supply. Granted, it forces you to use the damned wrench for most of the early game, but the sound effects were incredible - suddenly you've got a hybrid right behind you moaning, "Runnn..." and swinging a pipe at your face. Too bad the later levels were rushed and didn't capture that same feeling - once you're carrying around an automatic rifle and power armor, there's much less fear and much more run-n-gun.
More FPS publishers would do well to emulate Looking Glass.
Except that by your own admission, you know what "break once, distribute everywhere" means. Even if recording in theatres is illegal, the thieves only have to get away with it ONCE. In other words, it becomes a highly ineffective, highly intrusive law, which to me is a bad law.
If the law makes no difference on whether wholesale recordings of theatre productions are distributed in violation of copyright, then the negative effects outweigh the positive ones.
Is there a rule on copyright for those raised from the dead? What is the IP law on Lazarus?
From a non-mythical standpoint, one could create an IP, be legally declared "dead" and then appear (say, after disappearing in a plane crash...washing up on a desert island and befriending a beach ball) alive - when does that copyright expire? Author's legal death+75 or author's actual death+75?
Backwards: C intercepts A's public key. Therefore C can send encrypted data to A. C then passes a modified key to B, allowing B to send encrypted data to C (and similarly for the opposite direction). If C intercepts one direction, but does not intercept the other, the attack may or may not be detected...but C can only read from the side that it has sent a modified public key.
Sending someone a public key that decrypts YOUR transmission is Authentication, not Encryption. Key transmission must be done in the clear or PKE won't work by itself.
Apparently he didn't know his rights quite well enough - refusing to consent to a voluntary search is not grounds for a warrant; he should have asked the police officer if he was being arrested, and if not whether the officer had any further questions. If the officer had nothing else to talk about, then he was free to go and should have asserted that fact. The police will hassle you about it, but there really is nothing they can do at that point absent actual probable cause.
The fingering charts don't grow on trees. You mean you want to pay less than the price of the song for the song plus the five fingering charts included (one for each difficulty level, plus co-op).
I'm sure they'd be happy to let you play your LEGAL PURCHASED mp3 in Guitar Hero...but have fun being like the five year old at the arcade who doesn't have any money and "plays" the demo...
Robert Mugabe should and hopefully will be dealt with by his own people. Same for Tony Blair. And I fully agree that Mugabe is a criminal, while I don't see that as clearly with regards to Tony Blair.
What you ignore in your reasoning however is that as long as the UK deals with this itself, the ICC is effectively powerless.
Which is what I'm trying to get at - Blair shouldn't be "dealt with" by his own country's justice system, as he hasn't really done anything criminal; Mugabe can't be, because he's a tyrannical dictator. The UK (and the US) already have robust, mature and independent criminal justice systems...many LDCs and dictatorial regimes do not. The fear here, and I don't think it qualifies as FUD, is that placing the US under the influence of a system that could place both Blair and Mugabe in similar jeopardy (or worse, Blair but not Mugabe) would be immoral. I use the HRC as an example of how that could happen.
As far as your point about the US veto and Israel: yes, the US is very protective of Israel, but I hesitate to put the Israelis on the same level as the other nations I mentioned. It's a matter of scale.
The problem, of course, is that some one-third of the countries in the world are "free", according to Freedom House. This makes any international system subject to the concerted actions of blocs of undemocratic nations. Look at the UN Human Rights Commission, which has made almost all of its injunctions against Israel, rather than Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma, or Uzbekistan - amongst others - which deserve far more criticism. Why? Because the OIC votes as a bloc to block (heh!) punitive measures against its members and affiliates, and to ram forward its own agendas.
The ICC would be subject to similar pressures - it wouldn't be Robert Mugabe standing trial, but Tony Blair (for example, and no matter what you think of Blair's decision to go along with the invasion, he's no Mugabe) - the U.S. fears frivolous accusations being given the weight of international law. We (the U.S.) should have no obligation to join an unjust international association just for the sake of being "international".
Because a keypad is a single point of failure. Would you want to enter just your PIN to access an ATM? We do this when ordering from online stores, which is one reason that identity theft has increased in the internet age - in a brick-and-mortar store you have to swipe the physical card, while now you just need the numbers on the front and back (and the address of your victim).
Adding a PIN to the card means that the attacker has to compromise two systems - the physical card and the number in the person's head (provided a secure transmission between input device and security check device, which is usually but not always an acceptable assumption). This is significantly harder than compromising either of those two systems alone. Including a biometric of some kind - fingerprint, retina - would be a way to increase the security of the system further...though too many systems I've seen think that the biometric is a substitute, not a complement, to a secure PIN/pass system.
Again: Something you have Something you know Something you are
A reasonable way to use a serial prox card would be to combine it with a PIN - even a short one - to prevent someone who has a cloned card from getting in without social engineering.
Something you know Something you have Something you are
It should be noted that the creator of "Tetris", one of the games the rapper mentions, never saw much money for his creation. The Soviet government got most of it, up until the collapse of the USSR. So referencing it in the song is pretty FUDish - there really was no incentive to create in the Eastern Bloc.
I dunno, I really hate the GC controller - the D-Pad is TINY - and while I don't have a Wii yet, I'd hope that Nintendo would go back to the full-size D-Pad from the NES/SNES/N64 with the CC...especially since the CC has the D-Pad in the primary left position, rather than the secondary position like the GC controller (and the Xbox controller). Is this the case or am I going to be hunting for a 3rd party CC?
My worst memories of GC were trying to play Soul Calibur 3 and never being able to do the B+X or B+Y moves because the HUGE ASS A button was in the way. Terrible controller design for anything but the 1st party games (and Res Evil 4). After a few rounds of SC3, I managed to convince people to play the Xbox version instead.
The iPhone as announced is a GSM phone. Cingular (and I think, T-Mobile) use GSM, and Cingular (only) uses TDMA. Sprint, Verizon, etc use CDMA. You can't use an iPhone with CDMA. That's all protocol - no locking required.
The rest of the world uses GSM, so if Apple wants to sell internationally, it makes sense to use Cingular here.
To be fair, the SureFires are self-defense flashlights. I keep one in my car in the door compartment. They're meant to create an extremely bright light to blind an attacker, and for that job they work well. Easier to use and safer (more range) than a knife, and the cops won't look twice at a guy with a flashlight on his keychain.
They're definitely not general-purpose lights - you want that very bright light for when you need it. Also, $300 is definitely for their top-of-the-line version - there are good tactical LED flashlights for $60.
I'm reminded of my attempts to play the original Tactics Ogre (SNES). I gave up when I realized that:
1. A level 8 hitting a level 9 will do about 10 points of damage to a 100 HP character.
2. A level 9 hitting a level 8 will do about 40 points of damage.
3. A single level 11 will kill a squad of level 8s without breaking a sweat.
4. Every single battle in the game increases the level of the enemies.
Basically, it was a grind-or-die kind of game, which was too bad - the AI seemed decently smart (lost a lot of mages before I figured out the best ways to put up a shield wall of fighters) when it was a fair fight (my team the same level as theirs). The length of the "game" didn't really matter, because the game system wasn't fun for more than the first few battles.
Luckily, Square poached their devs and fixed that with FF Tactics, which remains one of the best SRPGs out there...
I had been holding off on buying an iPod or any other mp3 player for a while because my Mindisc still ran (great hardware, crappy software...though the hiMD update fixed a lot of issues I had with it), and I was thinking of looking for one in the next few months.
Then I lost my phone, and learned that I could get a refurb Treo 650 from Cingular (and I'm sure the other cell co's have similar deals) for less than half of what an iPod costs. Music player? check. PDA? check. Phone? check. I dislike carrying around more than I have to - five belt-clipped gadgets is so 1997. A 1 GB SD card isn't expensive, so I can even get minidisc-like swapping for my music files, and I need to carry around my cell phone anyway. The sound quality is quite good with a stereo adapter and decent headphones - at least on par with the three iPods I've had to "fix" for others.
I'm surprised at how many people buy these standalone gadgets, as I much prefer the all-in-one solution (which the Treo does well). I still use the MD player, even, when I want to work out, but I'm starting to see the allure of the flash-based players.
I think FF7 did a pretty decent job of letting you go through the game without a strategy guide...mostly because the Materia system didn't require a whole lot of planning.
If you want a game that's impossible without a strategy guide, I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned FF8. The first time I tried the game, I gave up about an hour into it because it seemed like all I did was sit and Draw Draw Draw Heal Draw Draw...just to get some stat bonuses, and then I was still getting my ass handed to me. Then I read a strategy guide, learned that you can convert cards into items and items into spells (not mentioned in the help, as far as I could tell) and blew through the game after a few billion matches of triple triad in the beginning. Nevermind that random people held the TT cards you needed to do much of anything on the fourth disc, and you had NO WAY OF KNOWING who had what card until they played it (which sometimes took five or six or fifteen games)...or the joy of trying to find some of the tougher GFs, or any of a number of annoyances. Granted, everyone hated FF8, and FF9 was a bit of a 'return to the roots'...but it really soured me on the franchise.
I've given up on FF-style games since (just don't enjoy them like I used to, *sniff*), but I harbor a deep and abiding hatred of that one game.
Slashdot Mirror
That's BS. Practice with a weapon as similar to the one you fight with as possible. That way, when you get to the real fight, you are comfortable and familiar with it in your hand. It's like training for Vietnam jungle and then shipping off to Iraq.
What you should practice against (and what you're trying to say) is to make your opponents as varied as possible in practice, or preferably (extension of the above principle) as near to your actual opponents as possible. cf. Sun Tzu: "Know thyself, and know thy enemy, and of a hundred battles you will be the victor. Know thyself, but not thy enemy, and even will be your losses and victories. Do not know thyself, and wallow in defeat forever."
The interesting thing about that particular wargame wasn't the communications, but the blue team "unsinking" a carrier that had been taken out by a massed small boat attack. Submarines...and targets.
He said "jumped the shark", didn't he?
I believe GP is referring to bovine methane release.
Cow farts.
The point is that Reyes used regression to attempt to control for those factors. The instrumental variable is the legal regime of the several states, and unless you can show a correlation between legal regimes and what states were hardest hit by inflation/economic issues (or have a good reason to worry about heteroscedasticity), then this isn't a concern.
The paper (if I remember right, it's been a while since I studied this in her class) finds that states with less stringent lead laws before the passage of a national lead law had greater drops in crime 17-20 years later than states with more stringent lead laws. It's a very similar approach to the subject as the paper cited in Freakonomics on abortion laws, but this paper includes that data in the robustness testing (and found that the r-squared on the abortion factor is only about a third of what it is in the earlier paper, but still significant).
While there may be a lot of things to which you can tie a drop in crime, it is useful to try to account for ones that can be controlled by government policy - like lead content in gasoline and paint. It provides a rationale for changes in public policy that isn't based on emotion, but on logic and math.
Looking Glass did an amazing job with all of their hybrid FPSes - the Thief and System Shock games (I hear good stuff about BioShock too). I didn't even finish Thief the first time I played through - I was stuck in the catacombs where the undead keep coming back to life and there are traps all over the damn place, and I just couldn't stand to keep going because my save was low on life and out of arrows. Only game that ever made me quit in fear (granted, I was 13 at the time).
I eventually came back to it a few years later and managed to get through, then play through Thief 2 (not as scary, IMO) and 3. I still remember the Cradle level with a shudder.
System Shock 2, which I was just playing through recently in preparation for BioShock, does a great job with their semirandom respawns and Resident Evil-esque ammo supply. Granted, it forces you to use the damned wrench for most of the early game, but the sound effects were incredible - suddenly you've got a hybrid right behind you moaning, "Runnn..." and swinging a pipe at your face. Too bad the later levels were rushed and didn't capture that same feeling - once you're carrying around an automatic rifle and power armor, there's much less fear and much more run-n-gun.
More FPS publishers would do well to emulate Looking Glass.
Except that by your own admission, you know what "break once, distribute everywhere" means. Even if recording in theatres is illegal, the thieves only have to get away with it ONCE. In other words, it becomes a highly ineffective, highly intrusive law, which to me is a bad law.
If the law makes no difference on whether wholesale recordings of theatre productions are distributed in violation of copyright, then the negative effects outweigh the positive ones.
Oh, where the hell is my Fallout 2 CD. I must try this.
Is there a rule on copyright for those raised from the dead? What is the IP law on Lazarus?
From a non-mythical standpoint, one could create an IP, be legally declared "dead" and then appear (say, after disappearing in a plane crash...washing up on a desert island and befriending a beach ball) alive - when does that copyright expire? Author's legal death+75 or author's actual death+75?
Backwards: C intercepts A's public key. Therefore C can send encrypted data to A. C then passes a modified key to B, allowing B to send encrypted data to C (and similarly for the opposite direction). If C intercepts one direction, but does not intercept the other, the attack may or may not be detected...but C can only read from the side that it has sent a modified public key.
Sending someone a public key that decrypts YOUR transmission is Authentication, not Encryption. Key transmission must be done in the clear or PKE won't work by itself.
Apparently he didn't know his rights quite well enough - refusing to consent to a voluntary search is not grounds for a warrant; he should have asked the police officer if he was being arrested, and if not whether the officer had any further questions. If the officer had nothing else to talk about, then he was free to go and should have asserted that fact. The police will hassle you about it, but there really is nothing they can do at that point absent actual probable cause.
c hes_without_a_warrant
IANAL, but wikibooks backs me up on this one: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/US_Criminal_Law/Sear
(U.S. v. Fuentes)
The fingering charts don't grow on trees. You mean you want to pay less than the price of the song for the song plus the five fingering charts included (one for each difficulty level, plus co-op).
I'm sure they'd be happy to let you play your LEGAL PURCHASED mp3 in Guitar Hero...but have fun being like the five year old at the arcade who doesn't have any money and "plays" the demo...
I don't disagree about your last point.
Robert Mugabe should and hopefully will be dealt with by his own people. Same for Tony Blair. And I fully agree that Mugabe is a criminal, while I don't see that as clearly with regards to Tony Blair.
What you ignore in your reasoning however is that as long as the UK deals with this itself, the ICC is effectively powerless.
Which is what I'm trying to get at - Blair shouldn't be "dealt with" by his own country's justice system, as he hasn't really done anything criminal; Mugabe can't be, because he's a tyrannical dictator. The UK (and the US) already have robust, mature and independent criminal justice systems...many LDCs and dictatorial regimes do not. The fear here, and I don't think it qualifies as FUD, is that placing the US under the influence of a system that could place both Blair and Mugabe in similar jeopardy (or worse, Blair but not Mugabe) would be immoral. I use the HRC as an example of how that could happen.
As far as your point about the US veto and Israel: yes, the US is very protective of Israel, but I hesitate to put the Israelis on the same level as the other nations I mentioned. It's a matter of scale.
The problem, of course, is that some one-third of the countries in the world are "free", according to Freedom House. This makes any international system subject to the concerted actions of blocs of undemocratic nations. Look at the UN Human Rights Commission, which has made almost all of its injunctions against Israel, rather than Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma, or Uzbekistan - amongst others - which deserve far more criticism. Why? Because the OIC votes as a bloc to block (heh!) punitive measures against its members and affiliates, and to ram forward its own agendas.
The ICC would be subject to similar pressures - it wouldn't be Robert Mugabe standing trial, but Tony Blair (for example, and no matter what you think of Blair's decision to go along with the invasion, he's no Mugabe) - the U.S. fears frivolous accusations being given the weight of international law. We (the U.S.) should have no obligation to join an unjust international association just for the sake of being "international".
Because a keypad is a single point of failure. Would you want to enter just your PIN to access an ATM? We do this when ordering from online stores, which is one reason that identity theft has increased in the internet age - in a brick-and-mortar store you have to swipe the physical card, while now you just need the numbers on the front and back (and the address of your victim).
Adding a PIN to the card means that the attacker has to compromise two systems - the physical card and the number in the person's head (provided a secure transmission between input device and security check device, which is usually but not always an acceptable assumption). This is significantly harder than compromising either of those two systems alone. Including a biometric of some kind - fingerprint, retina - would be a way to increase the security of the system further...though too many systems I've seen think that the biometric is a substitute, not a complement, to a secure PIN/pass system.
Again:
Something you have
Something you know
Something you are
A reasonable way to use a serial prox card would be to combine it with a PIN - even a short one - to prevent someone who has a cloned card from getting in without social engineering.
Something you know
Something you have
Something you are
It should be noted that the creator of "Tetris", one of the games the rapper mentions, never saw much money for his creation. The Soviet government got most of it, up until the collapse of the USSR. So referencing it in the song is pretty FUDish - there really was no incentive to create in the Eastern Bloc.
Weapons of mass destruction-related programs?
I dunno, I really hate the GC controller - the D-Pad is TINY - and while I don't have a Wii yet, I'd hope that Nintendo would go back to the full-size D-Pad from the NES/SNES/N64 with the CC...especially since the CC has the D-Pad in the primary left position, rather than the secondary position like the GC controller (and the Xbox controller). Is this the case or am I going to be hunting for a 3rd party CC?
My worst memories of GC were trying to play Soul Calibur 3 and never being able to do the B+X or B+Y moves because the HUGE ASS A button was in the way. Terrible controller design for anything but the 1st party games (and Res Evil 4). After a few rounds of SC3, I managed to convince people to play the Xbox version instead.
Don't be fatuous, Jeffrey.
The iPhone as announced is a GSM phone. Cingular (and I think, T-Mobile) use GSM, and Cingular (only) uses TDMA. Sprint, Verizon, etc use CDMA. You can't use an iPhone with CDMA. That's all protocol - no locking required.
The rest of the world uses GSM, so if Apple wants to sell internationally, it makes sense to use Cingular here.
To be fair, the SureFires are self-defense flashlights. I keep one in my car in the door compartment. They're meant to create an extremely bright light to blind an attacker, and for that job they work well. Easier to use and safer (more range) than a knife, and the cops won't look twice at a guy with a flashlight on his keychain.
They're definitely not general-purpose lights - you want that very bright light for when you need it. Also, $300 is definitely for their top-of-the-line version - there are good tactical LED flashlights for $60.
I'm reminded of my attempts to play the original Tactics Ogre (SNES). I gave up when I realized that: 1. A level 8 hitting a level 9 will do about 10 points of damage to a 100 HP character. 2. A level 9 hitting a level 8 will do about 40 points of damage. 3. A single level 11 will kill a squad of level 8s without breaking a sweat. 4. Every single battle in the game increases the level of the enemies. Basically, it was a grind-or-die kind of game, which was too bad - the AI seemed decently smart (lost a lot of mages before I figured out the best ways to put up a shield wall of fighters) when it was a fair fight (my team the same level as theirs). The length of the "game" didn't really matter, because the game system wasn't fun for more than the first few battles. Luckily, Square poached their devs and fixed that with FF Tactics, which remains one of the best SRPGs out there...
Like John Kerry before the midterm elections, somebody needs to stop these Sony execs from talking to anyone for a few weeks.
I had been holding off on buying an iPod or any other mp3 player for a while because my Mindisc still ran (great hardware, crappy software...though the hiMD update fixed a lot of issues I had with it), and I was thinking of looking for one in the next few months. Then I lost my phone, and learned that I could get a refurb Treo 650 from Cingular (and I'm sure the other cell co's have similar deals) for less than half of what an iPod costs. Music player? check. PDA? check. Phone? check. I dislike carrying around more than I have to - five belt-clipped gadgets is so 1997. A 1 GB SD card isn't expensive, so I can even get minidisc-like swapping for my music files, and I need to carry around my cell phone anyway. The sound quality is quite good with a stereo adapter and decent headphones - at least on par with the three iPods I've had to "fix" for others. I'm surprised at how many people buy these standalone gadgets, as I much prefer the all-in-one solution (which the Treo does well). I still use the MD player, even, when I want to work out, but I'm starting to see the allure of the flash-based players.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_d own
Actually, it's a little older than Pratchett. Besides, Pratchett's turtle doesn't stand on another turtle - it swims. That's what turtles do.
I think FF7 did a pretty decent job of letting you go through the game without a strategy guide...mostly because the Materia system didn't require a whole lot of planning.
If you want a game that's impossible without a strategy guide, I'm amazed that nobody has mentioned FF8. The first time I tried the game, I gave up about an hour into it because it seemed like all I did was sit and Draw Draw Draw Heal Draw Draw...just to get some stat bonuses, and then I was still getting my ass handed to me. Then I read a strategy guide, learned that you can convert cards into items and items into spells (not mentioned in the help, as far as I could tell) and blew through the game after a few billion matches of triple triad in the beginning. Nevermind that random people held the TT cards you needed to do much of anything on the fourth disc, and you had NO WAY OF KNOWING who had what card until they played it (which sometimes took five or six or fifteen games)...or the joy of trying to find some of the tougher GFs, or any of a number of annoyances. Granted, everyone hated FF8, and FF9 was a bit of a 'return to the roots'...but it really soured me on the franchise.
I've given up on FF-style games since (just don't enjoy them like I used to, *sniff*), but I harbor a deep and abiding hatred of that one game.