"Ah-ah, I know what you're thinking, punk. You're thinking, 'Did he fire six shots or only five?' And to tell you the truth, I've deleted that information in all the excitement. But being as this is a 5.5 caliber machine gun, a reasonably priced weapon for developing nations, and has nigh infinite ammo, you've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, PUNK?"
Anyone else find the wording amusing? "The robot also has a speaker to warn the intruder to surrender or get a perfect headshot." So either they get Microsoft Sam telling them to put their hands in the air or shot by someone who's played too much CS...
What happens when one of these things is hacked so that it begins firing randomly at x time though? That seems to me like it would be a likely, and dangerous, problem. One spy in your maintenance department and your army is gone.
Honestly this article is just scary, and I would elaborate if I wasn't half asleep...
I wouldn't be surprised if they had already figured it out, considering the solution is from NASA's early days. Put a tiny little bit of shielding on the thing and boom, no more radiation problem.
Someone remind me why this is lethal since it has an impossibly simple solution, doesn't yet exist, and won't carry passengers without a good deal of testing? Seems to me that complaining about a simple to solve problem for a technology that neither exists no has been tested is stupid. Oh no! Some new drug may or may not cause cancer if it wasn't tested by the FCC before being put into production! Quick, arrest the company owners for putting me in danger!
I agree completely. I have both a large (60 in.) non-HD and a medium (42 in.) HD T.V. in my house. When I play Gamecube I play on the large T.V., both to allow others to use the plasma and because I can see better on that T.V. because of my medium bad eyesight. Whenever we play X-box, and moreso with the -360, my friends are stupefied if I suggest we use the 60 in because "'it's not HD!" Honestly resolution only matters if you care more about graphics than gameplay, and if you do what in the world are you doing even thinking about a Wii?
You mean something like this? http://www.dxgaming.com.nyud.net:8080/?p=6 Don't remember where I first saw it and was surprised it wasn't bookmarked, really interesting.
Either that site is running a pathetic site, way too much code, or it's being slashdotted because it's running really slow...
No info on how the cards are "smart" I see...would've been nice to have something like that thrown in there, but it is an intreging article. Personally I think it's a great idea how they're starting the implementation, giving the cards to government employees pretty well eliminates the majority of the complaints as they'll get tested on people who work for the people doing the testing. Much better than making everyone get Smart ID's and it also removes the tricky issue of identifying people in order to give them their ID because the majority of these people will have already had at least a minor background search.
It would be nice to have more information, but I'm sure that'll follow soon enough. Nice plan and implementation by the government though.
Yeah, odd that it would be so biased...I mean I'm even interested in this, and I neither care about cell phones normally nor am an Apple fan.
I mean, when a *cring* Windows fan who doesn't care about cell phones is interested in an article like this you have to assume that the average consumer will be interesting...*hides from linux users*
Juliet1342 > Romeo Romeo, Wherefor art thou romeo?
Romeotheman12 > Sorry bout that, lagged out, stupid server...
Definatly an interesting concept, the key is going to be the players. If you get a bunch of RPers in the game who just want to have fun then it'll probably be a great time for all.
If, on the other hand, you get a bunch of lamers (which, somehow, I honestly can't see the type of people I consider lamers playing anything with shakespeare in it, so maybe this won't happen) it'll just devolve into another MMO where people exploit and do lame things.
I for one am hopefully optimistic, and if I was a bigger fan of shakespeare I'd probably watch this until it came out to see if I wanted it. Something tells me that basing a game around a historical figure like shakespeare will scare off all the people who normally make MMOs not so much fun...
*Stretches out* Okay, here goes nothing...
2006 October 13th
In regard to our company MR3 player prize virus infection
The Mcdonald's Co., Ltd. corporation August's recent prize promotion contained a virus in the MP3 player. It is possible that users could be infection just by connecting the prize to their PC. Therefore we ask that customers do not connect their prize MP3 player to their PC. In order to minimize customer annoyance we recommend you report the prize to us as soon as possible.
1. Summary of the Virus
A Trojan Horse virus/worm/spyware was discovered on the MP3 Players. When connected to the PC the virus will cause "the Chinese memo pad stands up" (???), a message that the virus has inspected your computer and so on. 7 cases have been recieved of this virus infecting computers in the 12 days since the MP3 Players were given out.
2. Customer correspondence
(1) We are informing our customers of the issue via direct calls to their homes, our companies home page, signs at our many locations and via local newspapers.
(2) There is a possibility that connecting the MP3 to your computer alone is enough to cause infection, therefore we advise winners to not connect the Player to their PC.as for this virus there is a possibility of being infected by the fact that this prize is connected to the personal computer. We have also created an anti-virus and put it on our site in the downloads section.
(3) concerning the MP3 player of the prize, making all item collect rapidly, as soon as to receive, be able to prepare you exchange with the new item.
MP3 inquiry Executive Office
Presently TEL. 03 - 5148 - 509924 hour systems
October 14th (Saturday) 9:00AM - TEL. 0120 - 221 - 04724 hour systems (October 22nd (day) to) TEL. 0120 - 221 - 0479: 00 - 21: 00 (October 23rd (month) from)
MacDonald
Home page Http://www.mcdonalds.co.jp/
3. Infection route of virus and cause of infection
The marketing store branch of McDonalds in Hong Kong apologizes for the infection. Concerning it's cause we are currently investigating that. We apologize again for any trouble, in the future we will strengthen our internal security so this doesn't happen again.
MP3 campaign summary
Of period: August 4th (gold) - 31 days (wood) [ prize dispatch target date: September 29th (gold) ]
Prize item: Original music entering MP3 player
The number of successful candidates: 10,000 people
Application method: At the private portable campaign sight it inputs the serial number which is stated in the drink of L size during period, challenges in the game. (???)
As you can tell I had some problems in two areas, I honestly have no idea what in the world those are supposed to mean. This is a very rough translation, coming from basicly translating a bad translation, but it's better than nothing...
A while ago popular science ran an article on the ISS. From what I remember (and my memory is far from perfect) the ISS has 3 gyros and originally had 3 spares. Over time the spares have been swapped in for busted originals so now there are no spares left. I'm 90% sure that's why they don't have any spares left, though my numbers may be off, they used em up and never replaced them.
So it is basicly just an RPG, you tell the computer what you want to do, computer tells you what happens. In that case it's still gonna suffer from the same problems as any other computer game, which are mentioned in another comment, that it won't allow creativity. It's a nice endevour he's on but you can't possibly think of everything.
I'm a little confused, what exactly is Interactive storytelling? The interview gives very little information, at least skimming it (perhaps it's buries somewhere, but I skimmed and didn't find it) and from what little I've seen it sounds just like an RPG. Am I missing some crucial step or is this guy just building GURPS on a computer?
Come on, does anyone really think that making the information a tiny bit harder to get is going to discourage real terrorists? Why do so many people persist in the idea that if we make the world hard to use that bad people won't be able to use it, bad people are the ones who will invest the time to learn how to work the system.
A change like this does one thing, inconvieniences those people who may have found some use for this program. It doesn't stop terrorist, it doesn't help the public, it doesn't even make a good public relations story.
How long before someone rebuilds the site to grab the graphics and translate them do you think? And how long after that before the govenment makes the data in those funny letters on forums at which point they may as well not even publish it.
Every time I think I've grasped the limit of stupidity it moves further and further away...
Is it surprising at all that Social Engineering is the best way to get a virus in? I'm actually surprised this is even an article, of course the main problem companies are going to have is their employees clicking things they shouldn't...
I don't remember exactly where I read it but there was an article about the hoax of nuclear winter and how it's physically impossible, in that article they mentioned that a nuclear blast kicks up quantities of all sorts of dust, the kind that falls back to the ground like rain in minutes, hours, days and even months later...they were obviously looking for very very fine radiactive dust which would remain airborn for quite a while while the larger fall-out did exactly what you said it would...
And by the way, Duck and Cover isn't exactly the most, how shall we put it, scientificly accurate source, seeing as how it was made by a government which was heavily biased towards not freaking people out...
*cough cough* Shortpacked did something like that *cough cough*
Linky -> http://www.shortpacked.com/d/20051026.html, read back 1 comic and forward I think 2 comics to get the full story...quite funny.
PS: Shortpacked is a webcomic, it's about a toy store...a very odd toy store.
I got myself a shuffle a couple months ago and put a bunch of songs on it, played it almost every day, at least once a day, sometimes more, for almost 2 months...never noticed a single bias of any kind (other than a small bias towards playing newer songs if you turn it on in shuffle mode).
However, I ran my songs through a couple filters to remove all traces of information that I didn't put in (I.E. Ingrained bands, other data apple might put in songs from the ITunes library) so perhaps the shuffle uses a psedu-random generator, weighed towards ITunes songs or something.
Or, as someone said earlier, perhaps it's just your perception. If you have 5 songs from a certain band, and 130 songs you'd think it would be 65 songs between them, but that's not even close to true. In a full random generator you'd get bursts of lots of a certain band, followed by breaks between that band's songs. So it would seem like there was very little time between that band's songs, when really you're just forgetting the times that you didn't hear that band for a long time.
Or maybe Apple is out to force you to listen to certain bands, 'cause you know they make a penny every time you hear the song...*end sarcasm*...seriously though, what would make Apple program the shuffle to favor certain bands? Maybe some money from those bands, but it would have to be a good amount, and who wants to pay to make sure you listen to them a lot, they don't make money when you hear them either. No one stands to benefit from forcing you to listen to the same band a hundred times so why would they go out of their way to add that to the programming? As a new programmer I'm 99% sure it's harder to program a random generator that's intentionally weighed over one that's not.
Did anyone else do a double take after reading the first half of this title? US Gov. crippled by sex had me going "Meh, not all that...WHAT!?"
Here's a question though, how many full time workers would have to be checking on those 50 workers internetting to equal the amount of man-hours they spent checking this? Face facts, if you give people a PC with an internet connection, they're gonna go where they want if they have some free time.
You're missing knowledge of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Series! Heracy! Arrest Him!
Seriously though, it's a pretty funny (thought vastly overused) joke that makes sense if you've read the Hitchhiker's Guide books...
Wouldn't that be more like "Skip the elevator, bring the second floor to you?" since stairs implies more work on your part?
Besides that transporter technology is much, MUCH further off that space elevator, we've teleported single photons, we haven't teleported anything with mass yet, much less anything bigger than a single atom. Even with Murphy's law were at least decades, probably more like centuries, from having enough computing power...
What strange theory is that based on? I highly doubt that gravity's gonna give up the athmosphere just because there's a line leading out, that makes little logical sense...
Perhaps if the athmosphere was made up of something that stuck to itself really well, like water, then that might be a minor possibility but as it stands air doesn't stick to air so it can't possibly climb up anything...
If it could then there should've been all sorts of mishaps with the first skyscraper as it would've drabbed the bottom troposphere up to the top of the troposphere, or even potentially higher, changing weather as we know it
My bank's drive through has brail on the keypad...you know, for all the blind drivers
Seriously though, I don't think they manufacture special drive through atms, they're probably just the normal ones in a different box.
(Believe it or not I had actually wondered why there was brail on the drive through, then I read this post and figured out why it made sense, then realized it was the answer to my own question)
You mean something like the PS3 list?
http://www.brittlefish.com/2006/07/07/ps3-or/
It is based on estimates, but they estimated the Wii launch price to be $250 so they're good estimates
Something like the strategy used by one of the charactors in Tom Clancy's Executive Orders (and probably used by real spy operations, but I can't find data on that anywhere). The charactor in question has to give someone his phone number, without actually writing his phone number down there so he wrote a number 1 digit off from his and put a dot over the number to add 1 too.
I don't know if I'm part of a demographic or what but I've never seen an episode of FireFly, haven't seen Serinity (yet, soon as it's on a movie channel I have I'm watching it) but I do want to see them. I'll probably watch 2-3 of the episodes during this marathon and that might convince me to buy the DVD so I guess the Sci-Fi marathon is for people like me, too lazy to watch the show the first time, too cheap to buy the DVD's without knowing that I'll like it, and without a friend who's even heard of the series.
Slashdot Mirror
"Ah-ah, I know what you're thinking, punk. You're thinking, 'Did he fire six shots or only five?' And to tell you the truth, I've deleted that information in all the excitement. But being as this is a 5.5 caliber machine gun, a reasonably priced weapon for developing nations, and has nigh infinite ammo, you've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, PUNK?"
I for one...oh never mind, it's way too easy...
Anyone else find the wording amusing? "The robot also has a speaker to warn the intruder to surrender or get a perfect headshot." So either they get Microsoft Sam telling them to put their hands in the air or shot by someone who's played too much CS...
What happens when one of these things is hacked so that it begins firing randomly at x time though? That seems to me like it would be a likely, and dangerous, problem. One spy in your maintenance department and your army is gone.
Honestly this article is just scary, and I would elaborate if I wasn't half asleep...
I wouldn't be surprised if they had already figured it out, considering the solution is from NASA's early days. Put a tiny little bit of shielding on the thing and boom, no more radiation problem.
Someone remind me why this is lethal since it has an impossibly simple solution, doesn't yet exist, and won't carry passengers without a good deal of testing? Seems to me that complaining about a simple to solve problem for a technology that neither exists no has been tested is stupid. Oh no! Some new drug may or may not cause cancer if it wasn't tested by the FCC before being put into production! Quick, arrest the company owners for putting me in danger!
I agree completely. I have both a large (60 in.) non-HD and a medium (42 in.) HD T.V. in my house. When I play Gamecube I play on the large T.V., both to allow others to use the plasma and because I can see better on that T.V. because of my medium bad eyesight. Whenever we play X-box, and moreso with the -360, my friends are stupefied if I suggest we use the 60 in because "'it's not HD!" Honestly resolution only matters if you care more about graphics than gameplay, and if you do what in the world are you doing even thinking about a Wii?
You mean something like this? http://www.dxgaming.com.nyud.net:8080/?p=6 Don't remember where I first saw it and was surprised it wasn't bookmarked, really interesting.
Either that site is running a pathetic site, way too much code, or it's being slashdotted because it's running really slow...
No info on how the cards are "smart" I see...would've been nice to have something like that thrown in there, but it is an intreging article. Personally I think it's a great idea how they're starting the implementation, giving the cards to government employees pretty well eliminates the majority of the complaints as they'll get tested on people who work for the people doing the testing. Much better than making everyone get Smart ID's and it also removes the tricky issue of identifying people in order to give them their ID because the majority of these people will have already had at least a minor background search.
It would be nice to have more information, but I'm sure that'll follow soon enough. Nice plan and implementation by the government though.
Yeah, odd that it would be so biased...I mean I'm even interested in this, and I neither care about cell phones normally nor am an Apple fan.
I mean, when a *cring* Windows fan who doesn't care about cell phones is interested in an article like this you have to assume that the average consumer will be interesting...*hides from linux users*
Juliet1342 > Romeo Romeo, Wherefor art thou romeo? Romeotheman12 > Sorry bout that, lagged out, stupid server... Definatly an interesting concept, the key is going to be the players. If you get a bunch of RPers in the game who just want to have fun then it'll probably be a great time for all. If, on the other hand, you get a bunch of lamers (which, somehow, I honestly can't see the type of people I consider lamers playing anything with shakespeare in it, so maybe this won't happen) it'll just devolve into another MMO where people exploit and do lame things. I for one am hopefully optimistic, and if I was a bigger fan of shakespeare I'd probably watch this until it came out to see if I wanted it. Something tells me that basing a game around a historical figure like shakespeare will scare off all the people who normally make MMOs not so much fun...
*Stretches out* Okay, here goes nothing... 2006 October 13th In regard to our company MR3 player prize virus infection The Mcdonald's Co., Ltd. corporation August's recent prize promotion contained a virus in the MP3 player. It is possible that users could be infection just by connecting the prize to their PC. Therefore we ask that customers do not connect their prize MP3 player to their PC. In order to minimize customer annoyance we recommend you report the prize to us as soon as possible. 1. Summary of the Virus A Trojan Horse virus/worm/spyware was discovered on the MP3 Players. When connected to the PC the virus will cause "the Chinese memo pad stands up" (???), a message that the virus has inspected your computer and so on. 7 cases have been recieved of this virus infecting computers in the 12 days since the MP3 Players were given out. 2. Customer correspondence (1) We are informing our customers of the issue via direct calls to their homes, our companies home page, signs at our many locations and via local newspapers. (2) There is a possibility that connecting the MP3 to your computer alone is enough to cause infection, therefore we advise winners to not connect the Player to their PC.as for this virus there is a possibility of being infected by the fact that this prize is connected to the personal computer. We have also created an anti-virus and put it on our site in the downloads section. (3) concerning the MP3 player of the prize, making all item collect rapidly, as soon as to receive, be able to prepare you exchange with the new item. MP3 inquiry Executive Office Presently TEL. 03 - 5148 - 509924 hour systems October 14th (Saturday) 9:00AM - TEL. 0120 - 221 - 04724 hour systems (October 22nd (day) to) TEL. 0120 - 221 - 0479: 00 - 21: 00 (October 23rd (month) from) MacDonald Home page Http: //www.mcdonalds.co.jp/
3. Infection route of virus and cause of infection
The marketing store branch of McDonalds in Hong Kong apologizes for the infection. Concerning it's cause we are currently investigating that. We apologize again for any trouble, in the future we will strengthen our internal security so this doesn't happen again.
MP3 campaign summary
Of period: August 4th (gold) - 31 days (wood) [ prize dispatch target date: September 29th (gold) ]
Prize item: Original music entering MP3 player
The number of successful candidates: 10,000 people
Application method: At the private portable campaign sight it inputs the serial number which is stated in the drink of L size during period, challenges in the game. (???)
As you can tell I had some problems in two areas, I honestly have no idea what in the world those are supposed to mean. This is a very rough translation, coming from basicly translating a bad translation, but it's better than nothing...
A while ago popular science ran an article on the ISS. From what I remember (and my memory is far from perfect) the ISS has 3 gyros and originally had 3 spares. Over time the spares have been swapped in for busted originals so now there are no spares left. I'm 90% sure that's why they don't have any spares left, though my numbers may be off, they used em up and never replaced them.
So it is basicly just an RPG, you tell the computer what you want to do, computer tells you what happens. In that case it's still gonna suffer from the same problems as any other computer game, which are mentioned in another comment, that it won't allow creativity. It's a nice endevour he's on but you can't possibly think of everything.
I'm a little confused, what exactly is Interactive storytelling? The interview gives very little information, at least skimming it (perhaps it's buries somewhere, but I skimmed and didn't find it) and from what little I've seen it sounds just like an RPG. Am I missing some crucial step or is this guy just building GURPS on a computer?
Come on, does anyone really think that making the information a tiny bit harder to get is going to discourage real terrorists? Why do so many people persist in the idea that if we make the world hard to use that bad people won't be able to use it, bad people are the ones who will invest the time to learn how to work the system. A change like this does one thing, inconvieniences those people who may have found some use for this program. It doesn't stop terrorist, it doesn't help the public, it doesn't even make a good public relations story. How long before someone rebuilds the site to grab the graphics and translate them do you think? And how long after that before the govenment makes the data in those funny letters on forums at which point they may as well not even publish it. Every time I think I've grasped the limit of stupidity it moves further and further away...
Is it surprising at all that Social Engineering is the best way to get a virus in? I'm actually surprised this is even an article, of course the main problem companies are going to have is their employees clicking things they shouldn't...
I don't remember exactly where I read it but there was an article about the hoax of nuclear winter and how it's physically impossible, in that article they mentioned that a nuclear blast kicks up quantities of all sorts of dust, the kind that falls back to the ground like rain in minutes, hours, days and even months later...they were obviously looking for very very fine radiactive dust which would remain airborn for quite a while while the larger fall-out did exactly what you said it would... And by the way, Duck and Cover isn't exactly the most, how shall we put it, scientificly accurate source, seeing as how it was made by a government which was heavily biased towards not freaking people out...
*cough cough* Shortpacked did something like that *cough cough* Linky -> http://www.shortpacked.com/d/20051026.html, read back 1 comic and forward I think 2 comics to get the full story...quite funny. PS: Shortpacked is a webcomic, it's about a toy store...a very odd toy store.
I got myself a shuffle a couple months ago and put a bunch of songs on it, played it almost every day, at least once a day, sometimes more, for almost 2 months...never noticed a single bias of any kind (other than a small bias towards playing newer songs if you turn it on in shuffle mode). However, I ran my songs through a couple filters to remove all traces of information that I didn't put in (I.E. Ingrained bands, other data apple might put in songs from the ITunes library) so perhaps the shuffle uses a psedu-random generator, weighed towards ITunes songs or something. Or, as someone said earlier, perhaps it's just your perception. If you have 5 songs from a certain band, and 130 songs you'd think it would be 65 songs between them, but that's not even close to true. In a full random generator you'd get bursts of lots of a certain band, followed by breaks between that band's songs. So it would seem like there was very little time between that band's songs, when really you're just forgetting the times that you didn't hear that band for a long time. Or maybe Apple is out to force you to listen to certain bands, 'cause you know they make a penny every time you hear the song...*end sarcasm*...seriously though, what would make Apple program the shuffle to favor certain bands? Maybe some money from those bands, but it would have to be a good amount, and who wants to pay to make sure you listen to them a lot, they don't make money when you hear them either. No one stands to benefit from forcing you to listen to the same band a hundred times so why would they go out of their way to add that to the programming? As a new programmer I'm 99% sure it's harder to program a random generator that's intentionally weighed over one that's not.
Did anyone else do a double take after reading the first half of this title? US Gov. crippled by sex had me going "Meh, not all that...WHAT!?" Here's a question though, how many full time workers would have to be checking on those 50 workers internetting to equal the amount of man-hours they spent checking this? Face facts, if you give people a PC with an internet connection, they're gonna go where they want if they have some free time.
You're missing knowledge of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Series! Heracy! Arrest Him! Seriously though, it's a pretty funny (thought vastly overused) joke that makes sense if you've read the Hitchhiker's Guide books...
Wouldn't that be more like "Skip the elevator, bring the second floor to you?" since stairs implies more work on your part? Besides that transporter technology is much, MUCH further off that space elevator, we've teleported single photons, we haven't teleported anything with mass yet, much less anything bigger than a single atom. Even with Murphy's law were at least decades, probably more like centuries, from having enough computing power...
What strange theory is that based on? I highly doubt that gravity's gonna give up the athmosphere just because there's a line leading out, that makes little logical sense... Perhaps if the athmosphere was made up of something that stuck to itself really well, like water, then that might be a minor possibility but as it stands air doesn't stick to air so it can't possibly climb up anything... If it could then there should've been all sorts of mishaps with the first skyscraper as it would've drabbed the bottom troposphere up to the top of the troposphere, or even potentially higher, changing weather as we know it
My bank's drive through has brail on the keypad...you know, for all the blind drivers Seriously though, I don't think they manufacture special drive through atms, they're probably just the normal ones in a different box. (Believe it or not I had actually wondered why there was brail on the drive through, then I read this post and figured out why it made sense, then realized it was the answer to my own question)
You mean something like the PS3 list? http://www.brittlefish.com/2006/07/07/ps3-or/ It is based on estimates, but they estimated the Wii launch price to be $250 so they're good estimates
Something like the strategy used by one of the charactors in Tom Clancy's Executive Orders (and probably used by real spy operations, but I can't find data on that anywhere). The charactor in question has to give someone his phone number, without actually writing his phone number down there so he wrote a number 1 digit off from his and put a dot over the number to add 1 too.
I don't know if I'm part of a demographic or what but I've never seen an episode of FireFly, haven't seen Serinity (yet, soon as it's on a movie channel I have I'm watching it) but I do want to see them. I'll probably watch 2-3 of the episodes during this marathon and that might convince me to buy the DVD so I guess the Sci-Fi marathon is for people like me, too lazy to watch the show the first time, too cheap to buy the DVD's without knowing that I'll like it, and without a friend who's even heard of the series.