Forgot your password?

typodupeerror

Comment: Re:insure? (Score 1) 485

by thesandtiger (#43752003) Attached to: Larry Page: You Worry Too Much About Medical Privacy

Are you in favor of laws that require emergency responders to render aid in cases of immediately life threatening scenarios, or of emergency rooms to provide treatment regardless of ability to pay? How about the right to due process when arrested and all the people that forces to provide labor? What about polling staff etc. when it comes time to exercise your right to vote?

The Almighty Buck

Integer Overflow Bug Leads To Diablo III Gold Duping 160

Posted by Soulskill
from the many-foreheads-were-slapped dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "Online economies come with their own issues. Case in point is the Auction House for Diablo III, a massively multiplayer game in which players can pay for items in either in-game gold or real-world dollars. Thanks to a bug in the game's latest patch, players could generate massive amounts of virtual gold with little effort, which threatened to throw the in-game economy seriously out of whack. Diablo series publisher Blizzard took corrective steps, but the bug has already attracted a fair share of buzz on gaming and tech-news forums. 'We're still in the process of auditing Auction House and gold trade transactions,' read Blizzard's note on the Battle.net forums. 'We realize this is an inconvenience for many of our players, and we sincerely apologize for the interruption of the service. We hope to have everything back up as soon as possible.' Blizzard was unable to offer an ETA for when the Auction House would come back. 'We'll continue to provide updates in this thread as they become available.' Diablo's gold issue brings up (however tangentially) some broader issues with virtual currencies, namely the bugs and workarounds that can throw an entire micro-economy out of whack. But then again, 'real world' markets have their own software-related problems: witness Wall Street's periodic 'flash crashes' (caused, many believe, by the rise of ultra-high-speed computer trading)." It seems likely the gold duping was due to a simple integer overflow bug. A late change added to the patch allowed users to sell gold on the Real Money Auction House in stacks of 10 million rather than stacks of 1 million. On the RMAH, there exists both a cap ($250) and a floor ($0.25) for the value of auctions. With stacks of 1 million and a floor of $0.25, a seller could only enter 1 billion gold (1,000 stacks) while staying under the $250 cap. When the gold stack size increased, the value of gold dropped significantly. At $0.39 per 10 million, a user could enter values of up to 6.4 billion gold at a time. Unfortunately, the RMAH wasn't designed to handle gold numbers above 2^31, or 2,147,483,648 gold. Creating the auction wouldn't remove enough gold, but canceling it would return the full amount.

Comment: Re: Speculation (Score 1) 293

by thesandtiger (#43520291) Attached to: Drug Site Silk Road Says It Will Survive Bitcoin's Volatility

Helping people who have immediate needs and en encouraging them to learn to be self-sufficient once the immediate needs are met is not cultivating dependency, and I honestly have no idea where, other than your ass, you pulled out the idea that I would think otherwise.

People who are in immediate need tend to make very stupid decisions in order to solve their immediate problem - a person who does not know where their next meal will come from or where they will sleep that day is, by and large, not going to be coming up with a master plan for long-term self-sufficiently.

Further, people who are in programs where they receive welfare often have a very difficult time making the transition to self-sufficiency because idiots such as yourself have helped shape policy to the point where in many situations a person who does get part-time work winds up having their benefits cut more than the part-time work will give them, to the point where they will not be viable. And, of course, idiots such as yourself seem to constantly suggest incredibly stupid policies like drug-testing for welfare recipients (which saves very little, if anything) and cutting programs that will help recipients learn useful skills etc.

You're an idiot who compares human beings to wild animals. I find you icky as a result.

Comment: Re: A different perspective. (Score 1) 546

by thesandtiger (#43507023) Attached to: Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It

There is no possible way I can respond to any of your comments except to say that you very clearly are in significant distress. I sympathize with your pain, but I am not the appropriate person to help you with it, so I can only urge you in the strongest possible way to seek professional help as soon as you are able. I can't imagine Slashdot is the appropriate place to deal with this, nor can I imagine it being particularly helpful for your situation. Good luck.

Comment: Re:I sell actual things in Bitcoin (Score 1) 293

by thesandtiger (#43502933) Attached to: Drug Site Silk Road Says It Will Survive Bitcoin's Volatility

I would say that the reason for the downward pressure on bitcoin is the laughably amateurish state of the exchanges and the rampant scamming that's going on all over the place.

Actually, I think bitcoin has been good for one thing (I mean, other than a good laugh): demonstrating exactly what would happen if you had a truly unregulated economy. MASSIVE scamming going on with a whole bunch of people doing their level best to leave the next guy holding the bag when it all comes crashing down.

Comment: Re:Anti sexist policies are almost always sexist (Score 3, Insightful) 546

by thesandtiger (#43499931) Attached to: Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It

That's the thing, though - telling people to just suck it up and deal is a shitty response because it basically lowers everyone.

Why should anyone, regardless of gender, tolerate being treated poorly where they work? There's no law of physics that states that work has to be a soul destroying experience or that employees need to take shit and like it.

I find it pretty depressing that so many people are behaving like putting up with abuse is a *good* thing.

Comment: Re:A different perspective. (Score 1) 546

by thesandtiger (#43499869) Attached to: Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It

Nah, more like I found the first reasonable opportunity to thank them for their time and the opportunity, explain that I didn't really feel like it was going to be a good match, and that I hoped they found someone who was a good fit.

I suppose I could have done a "shut it down!" kind of thing complete with slammed doors or something, which would have been fun but not terribly professional.

Comment: Re:A different perspective. (Score 1) 546

by thesandtiger (#43499721) Attached to: Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It

Actually, that's what I was talking about with affirmative action being "good intention, awful implementation" - government hiring is often based on factors other than qualifications because the government is under no obligation to turn a profit or perform at any particular level.

However, that's not applicable to non-governmental firms that are not doing government business. Some may have quotas, but I find it very unlikely that they will have hard and fast quotas when it comes to hiring a very in-demand skillset in a very competitive sector, and when a bad hire can have a very bad downside. Certainly it would not happen repeatedly to the point where it is a systemic problem - there simply aren't enough female applicants to go around for it to actually BE a problem where men find themselves systemically discriminated against in hiring for highly skilled and in-demand roles.

Comment: Re:A different perspective. (Score 1) 546

by thesandtiger (#43499629) Attached to: Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It

Except that's really not true in this context.

The article and my response is about hiring skilled workers in a very in-demand field in which there really are NOT a lot of female applicants.

If a guy is finding it hard to find a job in this industry because he is somehow unlucky enough to be applying for jobs that the vanishingly small number of female applicants are also hiring for at the vanishingly small number of technology firms that are actually using some kind of arbitrary quota system for skilled technologists, then I would venture to say the problem is that said guy is living in an alternate universe, because that in no way, shape, or form represents the reality we live in.

For unskilled jobs, yes, I'm absolutely sure people run afoul of quotas all the time. For jobs in fields where there is a surplus of skilled workers, yes, I'm absolutely sure people run afoul of quotas all the time. But for jobs in fields where skilled workers are in short supply and there is high demand? Nope, sorry, not buying it as a systemic problem.

Comment: Re:A different perspective. (Score 1) 546

by thesandtiger (#43499583) Attached to: Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It

Why? Just as I'm not responsible for the behavior of any individual but myself, I'm also not responsible for the behavior of any organization I'm not a part of.

You're making my point - you're holding me accountable for, or at least suggesting that I have a responsibility to take action about behaviors I had nothing to do with, which is ridiculous.

Comment: Re:A different perspective. (Score 2) 546

by thesandtiger (#43499527) Attached to: Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It

I'm actually quite consistent: When there is some way to differentiate individuals, I treat them as individuals. When there is literally no way to differentiate individuals, I have no obligation to try and make any distinction.

As far as I know, you're the same person who called me a cunt in another post because you have chosen to post in such a way that I literally have no way of knowing otherwise. Shame on you for using such language!

Comment: Re:A different perspective. (Score 1) 546

by thesandtiger (#43499487) Attached to: Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It

No, the fact that someone was hired does not mean they're hot shit. It means they were hired.

My point was about the converse: If someone is not being hired in a field as in-demand as the one that is the subject of this article, then it's more probable that they aren't very good at their job than it is that they are somehow having their jobs sniped by the tiny pool of female candidates for said positions.

Comment: Re:A different perspective. (Score 1) 546

by thesandtiger (#43499305) Attached to: Changing the Ratio of Women In Tech: How Etsy Did It

Oh, for sure - people absolutely tend to stereotype. It's incredibly convenient when you're dealing with people in the abstract, but it really, really sucks as a tool when you're dealing with people on an individual basis. Thus the whole problem.

I absolutely can see where they're coming from, and actually, I have great sympathy for them. I also have some biases/stereotypes that go through my mind when I meet individuals who fall into certain categories, but I make a conscious (and sometimes incredibly DIFFICULT, and sometimes failed) effort not to apply my biases to them or to make them answer for it. I'm not perfect, far from it, but I make the effort. The point here is that if people make the effort, things will get a little better.

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

Working...