I saw this explained really well somewhere, and I can't remember where it was, curse my failing brain. I'll try to paraphrase, but I may get some of it wrong.

Basically, this guy was an active troll on the forums, taunting more or less constantly. Despite the claims in this article, he got killed a LOT, a lot a lot, until he figured out one of the cheaper exploits in the game.

I gather that the heroes-versus-villains PVP is kind of a long... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:39 PM on July 8, 2009

an existential challenge?

Oh, bullshit. Existential challenge my ass.

If you notice, Google almost always fails at everything except search. But even if they were brilliant, impossibly brilliant, why on earth would you think that Google has a chance when neither Linux nor Apple have successfully dislodged Microsoft from the desktop? It's not like, working from scratch, they're going to come even... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:10 AM on July 8, 2009

Do yourself a favor and pick this up on DVD -- the quality of this streaming source is pretty bad. The real thing is so much better.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:15 PM on July 7, 2009

All in all, a crappy, out-of-control system and evidence of how something that seems harmless at first glance can really be misused and get out of hand.

This was exactly the sort of criticism that was leveled at the idea of Social Security numbers, that they would become a national ID card, and destroy privacy. But the objections were sneered at, we started the program anyway, and here we are, sixty years later, with a national ID that really fouls us... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:56 PM on July 6, 2009

Read the original story if you can. THIS is why I distrust investment bankers.

pyramid termite: of course there's more involved than Goldman. But they're probably the biggest players.

Matt Taibbi has written on this theme before... he understands just how fucked up things are in the financial system better than most. He's not a shill, except maybe on your behalf.

Normally, in capitalism, most activity is... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:14 AM on July 6, 2009

The NY Times Link Generator claims that this is a reg-free link.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:01 AM on July 5, 2009

I won't miss it much. It was just too expensive to be of much value to me when I was young, and even with the special package to download and read things offline, it wasn't all that great.

For me, at least, Compuserve was something you used, it wasn't something you loved.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:59 PM on July 3, 2009

Thought about posting this myself: bad news; murderer goes free, but good news: if you break a website's Terms of Service, you're no longer committing a crime.

As much as it bothers me to see her skate, that's the right outcome.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:13 AM on July 3, 2009

Social Security is invested in the safest securities on the market, US Gov't Bonds.

hah! Social Security has a bunch of IOUs from the government that they can't trade to anyone else. Calling them 'bonds' is stupid.

What they're SUPPOSED to have is hundreds of billions of dollars of assets that they can use to pay retirements without impacting the budget. But Congress stole all that money, and all those bonds are just IOUs... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 1:33 AM on July 3, 2009

DoctorFedora: OHHHHHHH

NOW I get it!
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:58 PM on July 2 [3 favorites +] [!]

On preview: in response to ericb

I think, DoctorFedora, that you're a little confused about what "on preview" means. :-)
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:55 PM on July 2, 2009

The reason Goldman is able to do these things is because the Fed backstops them 1000%. They provide the fuel, the lack of oversight, and a bottomless checkbook to bail things out when they go bad.

Goldman is the how; the management at the Federal Reserve is the why.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:09 PM on July 1, 2009

Strangely, it never occurred to anyone there that all of the various misfortunes might just be the sort of shit that happens in an unregulated universe.

Parasite, that's the hard-wired motive seeker in the brain, part of our Theory of Mind. We evolved to understand the motives of other people (and, probably, of prey animals) -- it's one of the things that makes us most human. It's related to pattern seeking. Just like the pattern seeker often sees... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:30 AM on July 1, 2009

Either your individual, single vote makes or breaks a tie, or it does not. If it does not, it does not. It doesn't matter the margin by which is doesn't, whether that's 300 votes or a billion, only that it does not. There's no almost.

As Mahatma Gandhi said, "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."

You alone don't matter, but you with other people who think like you can change... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:44 PM on June 30, 2009

I'm of the opinion that this was the right overall decision. For whatever reason, out of that small pool of participants, one group did disproportionately well, and the City threw away the test result because they didn't like the skin color of the people who passed. That's about as racist as it gets.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:53 PM on June 29, 2009

Malor that's a pretty slanted way of portraying the case.

I really don't think it is, in that New Haven didn't even vaguely approach the problem properly. They didn't even allow for the possibility that their small-sampling-size hiring pool might really have talent distributed in that way. That thought didn't, as far as I can tell, even cross their minds -- that the test might be right.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:09 PM on June 29, 2009

Having a test that you can only be promoted if an ancestor was a firefighter is completely race-neutral.

You should be embarrassed about posting something that stupid.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:45 PM on June 29, 2009

So, in other words, no matter how damaged someone is by their upbringing, no matter if they're even literate, we should promote them anyway, because their skin is black.

How about fixing the fucking schools instead? All this approach nets us is a bunch of idiots in jobs they're not qualified for. Putting unqualified people in jobs is a disaster, because then they get promoted and start hiring and truly making policy decisions themselves, and there's no guarantee... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:04 AM on June 30, 2009

You know, I've been thinking about this awhile, and I really think Wikipedia crossed a line here. There's a difference between voluntarily remaining silent yourself about something, and actively working to suppress the expression of others, particularly when you know that that person is correct.

Regardless of what damage they think it might do, I don't think anyone should have that right, and the fact that they were wiling to exercise it here makes me very, very... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:09 AM on June 29, 2009

This seems a touch hyperbolic. It's not like they were asking for the information to be censored forever, they merely asked for it to be delayed while they made efforts to address the situation. In this, it's not at all unlike the situation with computer security bugs: it's deeply frowned on in the industry to release exploits before you've given the companies involved a chance to address them. Nearly all reputable security forums and wikis ban posting exploits before the companies have... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:44 AM on June 29, 2009

Avenger's right -- we have an enormously long and storied history in the area. The CIA has been running actual WARS on our behalf for decades.

Possibly the most easily readable book I know on the subject is Confessions of an Economic Hitman. I just had a long argument with a denier on another board, and actually went and looked up some of the things the denier criticized as being impossible, and in each case, the easily-available evidence backed... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:24 PM on June 28, 2009

A thought that comes to mind that if it really wasn't us, it might be China. They want resources very badly, and they sure seem to be spreading a lot of money around these days. They could be learning from us.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:30 PM on June 28, 2009

Malor: do you think it could also be the doing of the Hondurans themselves, or does it necessarily have to be a shadowy superpower pulling the strings?

At the time I posted, I didn't know anything about the situation, so I shouldn't have put up that second muse until I'd learned more about what happened. I was assuming the shouters-of-CIA had a reason to suspect intervention other than just our past history. We've been involved there before, though... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:02 PM on June 28, 2009

Interesting idea. I think. The author does a remarkably poor job of explaining anything of actual note. He kinda-sorta explains Lorentz invariance, but then doesn't even start to explain where it's possibly wrong or why, or what it would actually mean to observers.

As far as I can see, he expresses almost no useful information himself. It's not a summary article. It's a vague, handwavy, half-assed description of papers that neither we nor the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:45 PM on June 27, 2009

I don't understand why Doom 3 and Quake 4 were not hailed as masterpieces.

Because I don't think they were. I didn't even bother with Q4, but Doom 3 was amazing graphics, cool shadows, and endless "monster closets". No story, mildly annoying weapons, repetitive, and very difficult.

This formula worked okay in the early days, but we've moved on, and they haven't. Taken purely on their own merits, their games are... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:38 AM on June 25, 2009

Ultima Underworld is not the first 3d game. it is the first 3d rpg. hovertank beat it by a year (also developed by id) and even that's not the first.

I can't remember any true 3D games on 8-bit computers. Three early examples I can remember from the 16-bit era are ArcticFox on the Amiga (1986), Carrier Command on the same platform, and Starglider on the ST. I can't tell for sure which came out first. Carrier Command and Arcticfox were actually... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:31 PM on June 25, 2009

Typically, games like Elite used sprites anyway; they were somewhat like the 2.5D Doom in that regard. Enemy ships were a point entity with a facing graphic with multiple pre-drawn rotations, not independent 3D objects.

There is no real difference, as far as I know, between what Arcticfox was offering and what Ultima Underworld was offering. Arcticfox definitely had height, and you could impact on and be forced to drive around real 3D objects in the game. You also... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:49 PM on June 25, 2009

boo_radly, I was just coming to quote that line. Throwing that card in that way means that Asher is guilty, guilty, guilty.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:52 PM on June 25, 2009

*radley, sorry, didn't preview.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:52 PM on June 25, 2009

I think I've probably said this before, but remember that old riddle? The one about the chicken or the egg? I finally figured out which came first.

It was the egg, laid by something that wasn't quite a chicken.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:56 PM on June 22, 2009

<announcer voice>

It's the all-new game show: Deal..... with the Devil!

In which ordinary people, like you and me, attempt to bargain away their immortal souls to the Prince of Darkness for great prizes and cash!

</announcer voice>

(stolen from a Mooney's Module cartoon in the 1980s sometime.)
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 1:24 PM on June 22, 2009

DU, that's precisely how I reacted, except I think one level further. The difficulty ramp goes just about vertical, and you end up wasting ridiculous amounts of time, because you either die or your clones don't do the right thing because you're off by a pixel. Get a single thing wrong by even the tiniest iota, and you have to start the whole level over.

Not fun.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:37 PM on June 21, 2009

Look, if I'm going to be force to pay for others' healthcare, why should those others be forced to take better care of themselves?

Because they have a property interest in their own body; there's no property that's more uniquely theirs. If society chooses to provide a health-care service for that property, that's fine, but that's society's choice. It's a gift; it doesn't get to include behavior-controlling strings.

You... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:40 AM on June 21, 2009

I'm tied for first place in "Most Records Not Held".
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:57 PM on June 20, 2009

If you want secure email, use encryption. It's so much easier then trying to get secure voice communication.

Note that Homeland Security has copies of the master encryption keys, so they can do man-in-the-middle attacks against any SSL entity, anywhere, unless you refuse to trust the Versign root authorities.

You can do secure email and web transactions, but Verisign can't be anywhere in the trust chain, or... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:50 PM on June 17, 2009

I screwed up, upthread, and misremembered which keys had been requested by the government. Further, when I started really digging, I can't find evidence that the government actually GOT the keys, just that they were asking for them.

Specifically, they were asking for the DNSSEC master keys. One article is here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/03/dns_master_key_controversy/

DNSSEC is not SSL. Rather, it's the new... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 2:54 PM on June 20, 2009

I used to use a trackball, and really loved it, but I got tendinitis in my thumb tendon, and that exacerbated it pretty badly. And thumb trackballs are inferior for FPSes; you don't have the fine level of control. Thumbs just aren't as good as fingers for that.

The finger-driven trackballs look really nice; they'd give you all the precision of a mouse. But it would be very hard to push multiple buttons at once, which is important in some games. So, again, I think... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:02 PM on June 17, 2009

This is Second Life he's talking about ... what else is there to do?

Anyone who finds a Lego set boring is, I think, missing something.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 1:48 PM on June 17, 2009

They're right about the TI 99/4A, but they missed some more weirdness about it.

First, they say that the TI-99/4 had an 'unpopular chiclet keyboard', but this wasn't the primary reason to ship the 4A. The big, important reason to ship the 4A was to add lower case. Seriously. The regular 4 only had uppercase. The 4A had a much better keyboard, too, but the addition of the shift and capslock keys was the real reason to buy it.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:34 PM on June 15, 2009

Kyol: The Amiga 500 we had when I was growing up (the first non-Atari machine in the family) had a sidecar for a 20meg HD and memory expansion, probably a whopping 2 megs or so, tops.

Yeah, I was thinking about that, reading later into the thread. I wasn't really thinking about the Amiga because I don't think of it as a failure -- it was an unbelievable success, really, and if Apple had been behind it, with their amazing marketing and laser focus on... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:43 AM on June 16, 2009

Ah, yeah, I could see where that could easily get flaky. Sounds like you really went to the nines with that machine. If you were actually replacing graphic chips, you went way past anything I did with a 500.

Myself, I switched up to a 2000 in about '89, installed an XT Bridgeboard (I couldn't afford the super-cool AT Bridgeboards), and ran a BBS off of it. I had two hard drives, one for the PC side, and one for the Amiga side. The PC ran WWIV all the time, and I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:54 PM on June 16, 2009

Cortex, if you're interested in Amiga emulation, there's a good payware package at Amiga Forever. It comes with everything you need to emulate almost any Amiga ever done, including fully licensed and paid-for Amiga ROMs. You can get all the pieces and do it yourself for free (WinUAE + ROMS + software + quite a bit of fiddling time), but getting the ROMS legitimately can be pretty difficult. Cloanto's got everything ready to go for anywhere from $10 to $50, mostly depending on how many ROMs... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:06 PM on June 16, 2009

He knows he's a slumlord, but he's okay with it, because fixing the carpets is a bad investment.

Okay then.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:41 PM on June 15, 2009

This is a lot less serious than real-life bank failures, and not just because of the fact that it's all pretend money for pretend goods anyway.

Why? Because as far as I can tell, Ebank doesn't and can't engage in fractional-reserve banking, which is what real banks do. In real life, a bank might have $10,000 in deposits, but it will actually lend out $200,000 or more, $5 at a time. Basically, they kite checks, knowing that not everyone will want their $5 all at once.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:34 AM on June 15, 2009

What are you going on about? Fractional reserve means that if they receive $200,000 in deposits, they can lend out $180,000 (10% reserve in the US).

Hah! Man, are you ever clueless. Current Federal Reserve deposit requirements are about 2.5%. Banks lend out WAY more than they take in deposits. WAY more.

Fractional Reserve Banking on Wikipedia.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:53 AM on June 15, 2009

Oh, I get it -- you've got it backwards. A 10% reserve requirement doesn't mean that they can lend $180,000 on $200,000. It means they can lend two million, keeping 10% in reserve.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:54 AM on June 15, 2009

No, not really, I was just avoiding that issue because it would make the post too complex, and really didn't matter in this context.

A paragraph explaining that it was 'even less real' than dollars would have been a waste of time, both for me and for you.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:12 AM on June 15, 2009

Oops, you're correct; fractional reserve banking doesn't let any individual bank lend out more than it has. I remembered this incorrectly, because as a whole SYSTEM, you end up with money being multiplied a very great deal, in an amount equal to 1/reserve percentage. Bank A lends out 90 cents; bank B takes those deposits and lends out 81 cents, and so on. If you have a 10% reserve ratio, you end up with ten dollars in the economy for every real dollar that exists, but if and only if the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:02 PM on June 15, 2009

explosion: btw, I'm sorry I called you clueless. You were right, and I was wrong.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:04 PM on June 15, 2009

Wow, there's some great stuff here.

I particularly liked this one.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:50 AM on June 13, 2009

I have no idea if it's great or not, nimwunnan, and I'm not really a fan, haven't not been exposed before. But that picture I linked to a few comments back made me laugh out loud -- it changed from a fairly routine painting to a whole bunch of possible stories all at once. There's just a remarkable number of things that could be going on there, and I found it quite delightful to imagine some of them.

Painting that make you laugh are at least good.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 1:00 PM on June 13, 2009