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Comment Okay... So this ISN'T fraud? (Score 1) 775

Why is PayPal the issue here? I looked at the demo of his game, and it appears to be a little 3d java applet where you put in blocks and take out blocks and nothing else happens. It appears to be of no more complexity than many college group software design projects.

What, pray tell, has he done, that merits him receiving Seven hundred and fifty thousand USD in contributions in sixteen days to promote and continue development of this app?

That values this java app at a $16M USD yearly revenue? I see no reason at all why it's unreasonable to set off an investigation into fraud or embezzling here. And if it is legit, hell, I need to get into making crappy Java apps.

Comment Re:Question for EVE players (Score 1) 620

Doot de doot de dooo... $1.09/hr if you're converting "Profits from playing the game" back to the USD you're saving if you're paying via in-game-purchased GTC. And it goes down from there if you're not really balls-to-the-walls on making ISK. And, of course, there's no legitimate channel to turn GTC into ISK. It's a one-way conversion.

Comment Re:Question for EVE players (Score 2, Interesting) 620

Adding to the above to provide a bit of sense of the scales of money here.

Allowing players to exchange real-world money for in-game money:
The current rate is (roughly) $35 -> 2x 30day PLEX -> 560 million isk. 560 million isk will get you 4-5 fully equipped and fitted battleships, or halfway to a equipped and fitted capital ship. Amusingly, as with any real-world currency conversion, exchange rates vary minute to minute, based on the current buy and sell orders on the market.

Allow players to buy their subscription using only in-game money:
It costs 280 million isk to buy 30d of game time. Operating efficiently in a profitable area, you can make about 25 million an hour hunting NPCs in 0.0 or running high level missions in empire. (You will need a character who's a year old or so to be able to fly the ships you need to use to do those things) So, all considered, you can play for free, if you're willing to put in about 16 hours of sweat equity per month. Of course, to get ahead in the game, you'll also need to pay expenses like ammunition, replacing lost or damaged ships, and you'll need to be growing wealth to buy more things in the future.

Comment Re:All of the 8 and 16bit machines were knowable (Score 1) 245

A C64 was exactly the same as every other one, a Tandy Coco was identical to the million others of it's kind. Later models tended to retain as close to 100% backward compatibility as possible so that it would be possible to even attempt to run code made for the computer you bought last year.

Now you buy a lot of PCs with the understanding that a year from now you won't be able to buy more of the exact model. Thank God that having identical hardware is no longer mandatory to ensure a program will run in the future.

There I fixed that for you.

Comment Re:What's with the stupid hat? (Score 4, Informative) 120

It just irritates me Americans just seem to instantly think of a 30 year old movie as the first thing that comes to mind when they think of Australia ... It's like they know nothing else about the place, except that.

Speaking as an American, I think you may be underestimating us. We also know about Outback Steakhouse.

Comment Re:Exactly backwards (Score 1) 50

There are existing rules and policies on the proper disclosure of material non-public information. The proper conduit is a formal press release by the corporate communications office of your company. A Facebook post or tweet is shockingly far from an appropriate method of disclosure of this type of information.

This is not just a "dumb regulation", it is a federal law with implications on securites fraud and insider trading. Your opinion, sir, is moronic.

Comment Re:Moronic commentary (Score 1) 50

And, if you work for any publicly traded company, and have access to material non-public information, then the exact same rule would apply.

Suppose you work for a company, and you tweet information about your company that has not been disclosed publicly through a formal press release, and which contains information that would cause someone to estimate the value of the company differently. If someone reads that, and makes an investing decision based on it (they buy, or sell, or short stock in your company) then, boom, you just broke the law by improperly releasing that information. If you disclose it to a small group of friends (say your Facebook circle), then they have you (and your friends) for insider trading. It won't just get you fired, it'll put you in jail.

Nothing about this is peculiar to brokerages.

Comment The future is already. (Score 3, Insightful) 664

Gmail wins mail.
Google docs provides a position in the office market.
Google Wave provides a shared, collaborative team synchronization system.
Google Voice provides a complete solution replacement for all phones.
Android positions Google in the handheld market.
Cell providers cut Google a sweet deal for ad revenue sharing (well documented already)
Cell providers cut Google a deal to resell wireless at their whim. (well documented)
Chromium OS excludes local storage, relies on cloud computing, ties to ubiquitous wireless data access resold by Google.

Screw the future. It's not "still coming." With Chromium OS, Google just implemented ubiquitous, disposable, always-on, wireless computing, collaborating, and calling for the masses, who need never again fear their computer breaking, their hard drive eating their data, or nearly anything else.
...and from this future there will be no escape.

Comment Re:We don't understand it but we can do it (Score 3, Interesting) 90

A scientist says, "This works, but I don't know why, How do I complete the theory?"
An engineer says, "This works, but I don't know why. How do I use it to build something that does what I want?"
A good engineer says, "This works, but I don't know why. How do I use it to build something that does what I want.. And, in what domain does my model break down and how do I make sure I don't get my system into that domain?"

Sizable chunks of control theory, frequency analysis, and some other core theoretical components of what we now consider to be solid engineering work were being applied long before the theoretical basis behind them was solidly proven to be correct from a pure mathematical standpoint.

Comment Re:Why can you not just read the rom?? (Score 2, Informative) 124

The ROM is not on a chip, it's burned into the CPU die itself. There are no memory access lines which reach it. It's only able to be read from within the CPU itself, and there is a CPU register which permanently disables that data path, once that specific register is written to. The last instruction in the boot ROM writes to that register, the boot ROM eats the poison pill, and the next instruction is the start instruction of your cartridge ROM.

The ROM was read out by beating the hell out of the processor electrically, during the exact clock cycle that the poison pill register is written, such that the write gets lost or scrambled, therefore the boot ROM remains accessible for readout.

Next time, RTFA before you ask stupid questions. "+4, Interesting"? Give me a break. Lazy idiot.

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