Okay, this is exactly what I was referring to when I said things like "nefarious" and "anal-retentive".

The sooner I get my PhD in computer engineering, the sooner I can do something about there being fewer stories like this.

I remember playing Prince of Persia quite fondly, back when I was in elementary school. Around 25 years ago. I went back and played it again as a 20-something some time ago, as well. Finally beat the damn thing. Video gaming is one of those skills that you definitely get better at with age. Don't let people say it's just a kid's hobby.

I would make levels for it, but I am dead sure that every little possibility had already been utilized, that while you could make more nefarious and harder levels requiring more anal-retentive precision in order to complete safely, those levels would not incorporate anything really "new" that wasn't already tried out within the original game. They really did present practically every edge-case of what the player is capable of doing, every different length and height of "leap of faith", and every confusing combination of trap floors and so on. There's nothing "new" you can do, here.

But I am still going to download that level editor and the next free copy of the game I can find, bitcheeessssss

"

Just always be ready with damage-control on the stuff you have sprinkled around online. Always be up front with yourself and your employers / whomever else whose opinion of your past internet activities could possibly ever matter enough to make you care that much about it / your employers.

They would mostly be concerned about the image that you reflect onto their company. I've thought of this some times. To me, the best idea is to form a website that is your "professional image" site, and do damage-control from there. Maybe package it very simply with a link off of the front page to "My Web Footprint, Q & A".

Start with a nice lead-in that captures the empathy of the audience.

Go into detail about things that you find cringe-worthy, and shrug them off as not being a very big deal and not being reflective of who you are, today. Explain the misconceptions in your mind that led to those past statements or behaviors, and let the audience know how glad you are that you aren't like that any more. If there's evidence of that, link to the evidence.

There, now you're not a potential liability, you're a success story that the corporation can be happy to link to and parade around as proof that they are in touch with real people, not just any people, upward-mobile people.

You have the opportunity to get out of it in ways that older folks who did things they're ashamed of in the 60's and 70's didn't have:

(1.) The opportunity to face it head-on by knowing fully well that it's easily discoverable information and by becoming your own blackmailer ahead of anyone else.

(2.) The opportunity to spin it however you want and make it into whatever sort of rags-to-riches, turned-over-a-leaf, now-I-know-what-the-salt-of-the-Earth-is-really-like sort of story you really think people want to see.

(3.) The opportunity to surround it with gay frog images and links to buy your published-on-demand memoirs of those weird times.

* The End *

... ?

    ^--- !!!

China is smart to do this. People are far too shut-in these days. Look how much entertainment has expanded and filtered in the niches of everyone's lives. It does not always have a positive effect on individuals (does the news even bother to cover stories of MMORPG recluses any more or is it now to be taken for granted?) and therefore nor does it always have a positive effect on populations.

Consider the effect that a film like "V for Vendetta" has had on activism itself. The iconic Guy Fawkes mask and the anonymized approach to public activism leaked directly from the film into peoples' lives, who took it seriously and decided to implement it in a fashion.

Consider the effect that video games have on what you decide to talk about with people when you're out shopping, or at work, or at school, just "hanging out", and so on. For many people, about the only people they wouldn't talk about their video games with would be their parents, who would grow weary of the subject and try to divert them to something "more productive". And that HAS to be a dwindling case, considering how many life long gamer are now parents of kids old enough to game passionately.

People fall in love with "weighted companion cubes" (despite the dead bodies inside). People spend a great deal of time meditating on whether the cake is a lie or whether there is no spoon.

When you add in a dimension of possible political opinion and conflict to an immersive game, it also adds those political opinions and conflicts to the discussion. With things in China as bad as they are right now, in many districts, it would be a bad idea to entertain people with some game depicting "the day after tomorrow" sort of mayhem that no doubt many of them wish was real today.

Because that is what they would be talking about around the water cooler, or out shopping, or while stocking the coal cellar, or while cooking, or at school. Especially the at school part, that's sort of what China's mostly concerned about. Remember it was students who were active in Tiananmen Square.

Every day, in the United States, I shake my head in shame at how many people are operating in their daily lives on a level of cinema fantasy running through their heads. It's not that they watch too many movies or that the content of the movies is wrong somehow, it's that they take what they've watched far too seriously and for whatever reason they've also adapted it to fit their self image and their perception of what their life actually is.

It's easy to defend these people as "needing heroes", and "needing to be heroes", and so on. But it's not easy to defend people who aren't aware of their surroundings and who aren't concerned with real events and real consequences in real life, no in any sense of the word "defend". And plenty of people -- who don't have self-image and self-esteem issues, or who aren't trying to take reality escapism to a whole different level -- enjoy their hero sagas and their epic struggles as things separate from real life. It's not those people that draw my concern, it's the growing number of others who get completely absorbed and proceed to live in a psychological bubble composed of entertainment imagery.

Case in point, "thug life", which is a cultural mainstream even in neighborhoods where there's no threat of actual gang activity and where there are plenty of opportunities for a better life. It's even a mainstream with little white upper class girls in grade school who obviously aren't going to cap anybody and if they wanted to count stacks they could learn accounting and investment from their millionaire parents. There's something lacking in someone's life besides monetary value and secure social networks, when they emulate being a thug ostensibly in pursuit of money and social standing, even when they have ready access to plenty of both.

It's expensive to get a rich man's money, but, it's cheap to fill a poor man's pockets.

Anonymity doesn't entail vitriol nor vice versa. I'm occasionally vitriolic and I use my actual name on forums and comment sections. I couldn't care if people are "scared away from the service" by that. I get way too many pluses, likes, and other positive responses to give a crap.

At any rate. If some web site tries to make you give a "real name" just fake it. There's nothing they can put in your way to ensure reality that you can't just get around, spoof out, or otherwise hack.

The whole thing about nasty shysters hiding behind pseudonyms is older than the world wide web. It's the darker side of anonymity. But there's no getting rid of it. If you try to get rid of the xBADxCATx13x 's in the world you're just going to be inundated with Ron Chauls III 's and Franklin Scarlet's and so on.

Good point. In other words, "try to assemble the Mac Pro by buying the individual components piecemeals and see if you can beat the cost of a factory Mac Pro."

I think OP meant, "live as slaves -- as equals, or face extinction". I think they meant to describe living in slavery as essentially making all of us (slaves) equal. I don't think the slave-owners were intended to be included in the equality.

It's not about what costs less to you
or saves you damn money, idiots.
It's about using less electricity.

So what if you calculate the lifetime
per each type of bulb, cost of each
type, cost of electricity used, etc.

It's not about the cost to you -- it was
a measure taken for the sake of
reducing power consumption.

It can be unnerving to have your snake go into hibernation. Not much information about it is readily available online, except in the form of forcing snakes into hibernation using refrigerators and that's for the sake of instigating them to breed more copiously immediately after coming out of hibernation. Our snake has been in hibernation for a month, now.

Couldn't you just create a computer generator for this audio, that uses a PRNG to intersperse pauses and other variations? You could create a much wider variety of conditions to put your parser through by controlling how much variation is in the length of each beep, pauses between beeps, pauses between letters. You could create a really bungling case or create a perfect case, and anything in between. Why not just do that?

Won't *noticeably* moisten the things they contact, you mean.

I don't need this abuse from you. Why don't you go work for the snake-oil company if they're so cutting edge that water isn't wet.

It just seems so, so stupid to me that in the search for real encryption, we have to rely on pseudo-randomness, so then the entire point of contention comes down to a matter of how much "pseudo" we're willing to accept. My theory is that as science goes deeper into math and logic, we're going to result in consecutively more "reliable" PRNG but those will always be dismissed by later science, and will always raise the point of contention. It's not worth getting worked up over, and it's certainly never worth placing so much investment in that that same and inevitable contention is going to seem dearly costly in retrospect. People are, by and large, stupid. If we want truly random results, we should utilize something like a photon interference field which is more or less considered to be completely random. Or the emission of particles from certain stable isotopes which are known to closely adhere to certain probabilities over time but are also known to be truly random. Then we would be forced to develop methods of encryption based on true randomness, which is only an impossibility as long as we continue to believe (within our limited paradigm) that it is so.

Gee. You other nerds on Slashdot, you're all so THMART.

Except when you're arguing with somebody who's actually aced a college level course in Anthropology.

"The larynx, or voice box, sits lower in the throat in humans than in chimps, one of several features that enable human speech. Human ancestors evolved a descended larynx roughly 350,000 years ago. We also possess a descended hyoid bone -- this horseshoe-shaped bone below the tongue, unique in that it is not attached to any other bones in the body, allows us to articulate words when speaking. "

http://www.livescience.com/15689-evolution-human-special-species.html [livescience.com]

btw -- FYFY (fixed you for you)

BTW, NONE of the shit you or the other guy said knocked down what I was saying about chimps -- they're not going to be human. Get over it. God, I can't get some of you geeks. Next time try somebody in your own high school.

I can't help but imagine you protested my remarks out of some desire to live out some fantasy related to your formative-years viewing of a "planet of the apes" sequel.