robinh

It's kinda cute how Google is down for twenty seconds and there's already a thread on the front page with 40+ points and 15+ comments

Edit: and it's up again already (at least for me). No more need to panic, people.

I feel inclined to agree. The same thing happened to MySpace, and (in the Netherlands) to Hyves. I'm sure there are more examples.

Not that there's anything wrong with board games - I agree with all the points you mentioned - but have you ever tried some of the text-based games on your netbook? There are a lot of them out there, most of them are free, and some are pretty awesome.

Not only that, but MtGox handles over 80% of all bitcoin trade. No wonder it's plummeting; every currency would be greatly affected by something like that.

The ISO-8859-1 ASCII-based character encoding contains an Ö, too. That's not even Unicode. It may not be in the first seven bits of the ASCII alphabet, but it's so widely implemented that not supporting it is just as ridiculous as not supporting the apostrophe.

I'm not very well-versed in economics, but would setting prices to a relatively non-changing BTC value not actually be a good thing to stabilize its value, if enough people were to do that?

That was what I was trying to ask: can you do both, or would that be absurdly impractical/impossible? Alternatively, can't they do only a POST and somehow generate URLs dynamically based on the search query?

Could they not set those parameters in a POST request so they don't show up in the URL?

"You would. But that doesn't mean that everyone would."

Sure, but those things only need to be built once.

Quite possibly. I think we'd just call it 'automated plastic surgery', though.

Could you post a link to this study?

I've done some reversing, and this is EA, so... let's say it's not going to be something that'll be cracked in a weekend.

Honest quess: information and code from private repositories?

Fair enough. When I'm looking for a keyboard, I always try to make sure that at least the keys are all in the right place and are of the right size. (For example, I should not be able to accidentally hit '\' because some hippo thought the return key was too big.)

I didn't mean any of that. I meant that DRM is the reason one would implement constant-onlineness into a game that should also (mostly, even) work as a single player game. My apologies if my use of the word 'issue' suggested something different.

There is a significant difference between wanting to do something locally and an internet connection being required and wanting to do something on the internet because it works better than what you have locally.

"I mean, besides the DRM."

But that's the core issue, really.

What exactly counts as a good keyboard? I've never had any trouble with my XPS, and don't really see how one could mess up a laptop's keyboard (then again, I haven't had that many laptops). Although some of the cheaper laptop's keyboards seem clunky.

I think the solution to this problem probably doesn't involve trying to track down these bad nodes. Rather, more people should host Tor nodes, so as to reduce the chance of someone connecting to a bad one. As big as intelligence agencies are, they cannot operate too many nodes easily - the more nodes they operate, the bigger the chance that someone notices suspicious activity going on. On the other hand, there are a lot more civilians who can host Tor nodes without it being suspicious, thus dealing with the threat of intelligence agencies.

I'm curious about what the exact ratios would be, if there were a way to find this out (probably not).

Unfortunately, even Tor is not perfect. It obviously cannot prevent end-to-end correlation, and it also turns out to be very hard to do Tor right (e.g. not leaking information in the data streams).

Eh, I was mostly responding to the 'grandma using an iPad' part. It's quite possible that Tor will eventually be what everyone uses for anonymity on the internet, but it might well turn out out to be something different. Hence the 'something like'. ;)

But wasn't there something a while back about how people had to comply with US law if they owned a .com/.net/.org domain, since these were managed in the US?

The answer might be something like Tor.

Would in-game achievements also count?

Not sure why you're being downvoted, as it seems like a legitimate question, but...

I don't think so. It seems logical that Google's been keeping statistics about this sort of thing, so it doesn't surprise me that they keep track of such things as 'average queries per second'.

While it's an interesting idea, you're basically just basing that on a load of unfounded assumptions about the people who manage these companies.

Hm... What would be easier to convince schools to do:

A.) download this software package (say, Python) that allows kids to learn how to program. B.) buy a dozen $40 mini-computers kids can use to learn how to program.

Most schools I know of would pick option A.

Not a bully, but a bullied person who is still forced to sometimes interact with his former bullies. In my case, these people are quite functional in society, and when confronted laugh it off - seeing it is one big joke that isn't to be taken too seriously.

It may be understandable that to this day, I honestly still feel my blood boil when bullying gets mentioned.

I think it may very well be the other way around. Example: I used to do sports. Then the bullies came. Then I stopped doing sports because that's where they were.

Also, American and Western culture are used practically interchangeably. I find this quite ironic.