skolor

This argument just doesn't make sense. Its trivial to make this search, the OP just put a nice wrapper around it. There are two possible choices he could have made:

Something shocking, like "playing hooky", that could get people in trouble. In this case, people will get in trouble, because someone will find out they were playing hooky and report them. However, because people are directly being effected, a shit-storm will be caused, and people will accept that this is a problem faster.

On the other hand, the examples could have been something trivial, such as "Weight". It may get people annoyed about it, but no one is going to lose their job. And since they won't lose their job, they won't be pissed, and Facebook can drag their feet.

The best part is, anyone with malicious intent could make these searches on their own. Exposing it to the public just forces someone to take action.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but this doesn't, actually, do anything. As far as I knew, your MAC address was only relevant on the given network you are on. So, if you're on a Wireless network, this is useful, Google knows where that access point is, roughly.

This does not, as the article seems to imply, let Google "cross reference the Mac address of a user's connection with their real identity and virtual identity". As far as I know, a website does not have the capability of pulling the Wireless MAC address from a router, through the browser.

(Please note, this may be incorrect, as I am not an expert in networking, or web browsers, however, I have dabbled in both, and have at least a working knowledge of both) A MAC address is used in communication on a Network. It is a unique "code" for each network interface. In theory, it should only be available to those on your direct network. Unless there is some sort of protocol I am un-aware of, routing across networks must be done by IP address, so outside of your own network the MAC address is useless.

Now, when it trying to cross reference a MAC address (tied to the hardware) with a user account, I don't see how Google could find the Wireless MAC address from one of their servers. Unless they use an exploit to run MAC address gathering code from the browser, I can't see any way for them to get that information to cross reference the user.

On top of that, this would only be slightly more accurate than the exist GeoIP databases. Your wireless access point has a range of roughly 100 feet or more. A GeoIP database can be accurate to the block you live on. It seems fairly comparable.

Looking at their "app store" it looks like exactly what it sounds like. Web Crawling. You don't need a nefarious goal to go out and crawl, it just seems rather inaccessible to the common person.

While it would require quite a bit more structure than this, imagine an "application" which would take a keyword/topic, and start crawling the web, looking for links mentioning it. Pages involving that topic/keyword would be ranked higher, as would their children. Basically, a reverse PageRank. No, it isn't the way things are done right now, but it could/does have a place, however obscure it might be.

To make sure I understand this, BetFair is a simple betting platform. People make bets, and other people take those bets. What he proposes to do is play both sides of an event, and hope that some takes both of them. That way, regardless of the outcome, he turns a small profit.If I understand this right, he's basically just doing arbitrage on the betting market.

What? After reading that, all I got was "You can't be an expert when innovating". Ok, I can buy that. I don't, however, understand where on Earth he got the idea that the blogger is any different from the other people he listed at the end. Unless there's something I'm missing, no one ever said you should wait until you were an "expert" in something before you tried to be successful at it. The focus of this "expert" movement, if you can call it that, is to strive to become an expert in something, rather than being a jack of all trades, so to speak.

I hate to always be the person to ask for things, but does anyone have good resources on how to get started with this kind of stuff?

FTA: the rest went back into Breadpig, Inc. to purchase more inventory and fund our next project, the xkcd book, xkcd: volume 0.

From the recent kerfuffle over Amazon eBooks, it seems that an average book takes about $10,000-15,000 to get from a basic idea to a published copy (at least that was a number that was quoted more than once). Its not an administrative overhead, its re-investing 50% so they can do it again.

In that case, put some sort of contact info in your profile. I went to go send you an email, just to see what would happen, but the lack of contact didn't help anything.

I'm not convinced that using Wordpress is what directly caused this. From the article, this was a "quite popular website". If someone from, say, Google, got a keylogger on their computer, especially one that directly faces the internet, I would be considerably more inclined to assume it was a targetted attack, rather than just a random infection.

Just telling someone to use something else doesn't help at all. Telling a user to stop using Windows because they get infected often may help if they were simply downloading stuff they shouldn't, but if they were actually being attacked, moving to Linux, since they will know much less about keeping it even remotely secure, would lead to a potentially far more dangerous infection.

That's a little bit of a stretch. MMOs aren't characterized by the game itself, but by the community. That's like saying Facebook is susceptible to piracy because there are clones of it.

I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who posted stuff here, I've been looking for these kinds of resources for a while now, but never really asked.

Oh, and I thought I would share this: http://users.cs.dal.ca/~inkpen/CSCI4161/4161_lecture4.pdf , it looks like a presentation on "Non-Designer's Design Book" that a lot of people have mentioned.

It would largely depend on how gracefully you degrade your service to those other 200 users. Take any game server with the concept of queues. They could (depending on the game, I know this isn't universal) take in more players than they allow at a time, but the quality would drop significantly. Instead, they give you a number, and say "You are number X in line. Please wait". While it isn't great, and is very frustrating for players, it is a decent solution.

On the other hand, you have Monopoly Street View, which launched with a massively higher number of players than they expected. The end result was a game that was playable for a very, very small group of people, and no one else even knew what was going on.

In general, you need to be able to balance the two. There should be a point where you have an absolute cutoff, no more users/requests beyond that, but you should also have a sliding scale. Of course a server only processing one request at a time will be faster, but you need to be able to degrade somewhat, while still providing good service.

I don't have a lot of experience programming, at least not professionally. I tend to hack a lot of quick scripts together, and have recently started working on some larger projects.

Anyway, I figured it would be worth giving this a shot. I went on Craigslist, browsed through the gigs, and picked one that looked promising. I made a quick estimate of my time, doubled it, and sent off an email to him. 6 sentences, and I used the word "simple" in 2 of them, and I made sure to use a "indifferent" attitude. The lister got back to me within 15 minutes saying that my price was "too much", that he had been quoted prices for less than a third of that. And then he proceeded to give me his number, and told me to call him and discuss what needed to be done for the project.

Not that it means anything, but the 20 minutes I spent looking at craigslist during my lunch break due to this post seem to have been well worth it (although, admittedly, I barely skimmed the actual post, and just read the comments here in detail).

I'm always a little confused about how much people love to bash WoW, and call it such a waste of time. Sure, there are people who throw away massive amounts of time into the game, but there are plenty of other people who play a reasonable amount.

I spend 2 evenings a week raiding, with 1-2 hours throughout the week (plus another hour or two on the weekends, when I can) doing other things. Twice a week, a group of 10 friends get together, log onto WoW and a Ventrilo server, and mess around for a few hours. I think of it a lot like a bowling/poker night for some guys, except you're significantly more likely to invite a new, potentially interesting person to a WoW raid than you are to your weekly game.

Honestly, I find the whole "If it does not have direct monetary value, or somehow advance my career/list of contacts, it isn't worth doing" stance that many people take rather disturbing. No, playing WoW doesn't directly benefit me, but the indirect benefits have been pretty awesome. I've kept in touch with several old friends I otherwise wouldn't have, met a lot of interesting people, and it gives me something I can talk about with at least 10% of the population. And that's all on top of just playing a well designed, pretty fun game.

It sounds obvious, but go out and talk to people. As a slowly reforming introvert, just sitting down and talking to a random person can do crazy things to the way you think.

The "All Amazon was saying" is because, reading the article with little-to-no outside information about the situation, the author makes it sound like Amazon isn't setting a price ceiling, but an absolute price. I was trying to verify that that was the case, since the article seems to be saying that the only price point will be $9.99.

I seem to remember a price point being thrown around in one of the threads here that The Publisher/Author share 30% of the price of the book, the distributor takes ~40%, and the marketplace (Amazon, bookstore) takes 30%. From what I've read from these posts, it seems like the Publishers were fighting over the wrong thing entirely. If Amazon is acting like both Distributor and Marketplace, they currently take 70% of the sale price of an eBook. Why are Publishers arguing about the total price, rather than their cut of it?

Looking at the recent move, Amazon now offering 70% to the publisher, with the requirement that they get the lowest price point, and that that price point is less than $10, it seems like that should have been what the publishers were fighting for the entire time. If both distribution and selling of the book are being by the same company, for the same effort as just selling the book, there's no real reason for them to be double-dipping and taking that huge of a portion of the sale price.

I haven't really been following this situation, and I'm far from an economics expert, so I have a few questions for anyone who understands this stuff better than I do:

First off, I'm not quite sure about what the issue is. I seem to remember that Amazon said they wanted a hard ceiling, no books selling for >$10. The article claims that what the publisher wants is the ability o change book prices based on demand. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that all Amazon was saying was "You know the $10-15 range you wanted to price eBooks at? You can't do that."

Second is more of an economics question. The article mentions Price Fixing in relation to gas prices, and how fixing the prices caused gas prices to go up due to hoarding. How does that work in a Monopoly, where the publisher not only controls the only source of the books, but can also make more of a single work at a negligible cost? (Yes, I understand that there is an outlay at the beginning, but after that the cost of producing additional copies of the eBook is nearly non-existent. You don't have to keep a stock of the eBooks that you can potentially lose money on, you don't have to pay in advance to have each copy produced. This changes things, but I don't know how.)

At the very least I hope these go to Market. This doesn't seem all that useful (at least not to me), but a USB device that can communicate via GSM sounds like it would be very fun to play with.

That would be very hard to separate. There are very few professors who (in my experience) are professors simply because they want to teach students. The vast majority of them see teaching as simply a requirement to do research.

One of the key factors in combining the two is that you are not learning from someone who kind of studied the subject a decade or two previous like you would in high school, you're being taught by someone who is actively research the subject (or a similar subject).

Agreed. Comparing the $160 early 1900s Yale tuition that that of today's Yale is a little ridiculous. Yale and the like were the only real universities in the country. It would be better to compare to a public University (assuming we're still talking about someone trying to pay their way through college, that seems to be the place they would be going to). You're not looking at $40k a year, you're looking at ~$7000 (http://www.collegeboard.com/student/pay/add-it-up/4494.html).

And going by his math to pay for it, at 12 hours a day, for 32 days, you're looking at 384 total hours of work to pay for a year's tuition. To pay for a public school in the same number of hours worked, you would have to be making roughly $18 an hour, or a yearly salary of ~$38k (pre-tax, but that's a different issue entirely). Turns out college education is going to be roughly the same cost as it was then, if you're going to a public school.

I had a student in one of my classes explain this to me at one point. Every semester when it came time to pay his tuition bill, he would simply max out all of his credit cards paying the bill. The university system would let you pay as much as you wanted, and if you had a balance a week after tuition was due they would send you a check for the balance. While it was primarily in place for students receiving scholarship money, he used it to rack up huge rewards on his credit card.

By the time he was a junior (when I had met him) it had gotten him good enough credit he had over a $15,000 limit, so 3 times a year he would pay that to the school, they would pull out their $15 credit card fee, and then deposit it straight into bank account, which he would use to pay off the credit card.

If you know what you're doing, I wouldn't be surprised if you can force a dump of the data for it from Windows, without any other tools. At the very least, if you can create a BSOD (or, I suppose if the computer has had one before), the default (at least for Windows 7 Enterprise) is to create a kernel dump.

All this shows is that its not safe to leave your computer running if you have full disk encryption. Its no different than logging into, say, Facebook at a public computer and walking away. If you're already in, it isn't that difficult to steal/change the password.

Looking at that privacy policy, and it looks like exactly what they should be doing. There isn't much of a point in keeping personally identifiable information beyond a certain point, at least not something which directly leads back to you.

The only data analysis that would benefit from keeping identifying information would be to create a model for how users go about the internet, and google already has some very good models of that. This is just conjecture, but I would assume that being able to create geographic based models is far more useful than per-user models, which is something they keep.

Its an interesting, but ultimately pointless site. I would assume they take various statistics like "1 child is born every 6 seconds" or what have you, and then start counting from there, with some sort of timer running to update all the counts.

It seems like someone decided they wanted to learn... some sort of javascript. They decided to obfuscate large portions of it, but it looks to my rather un-educated guessing to be jQuery. I do have a question though, it has several "today" counts. When does the day start? Is it based off of your computer's time, or off their server's?

The problem is it isn't just a grey area. Its a grey area that large corporations are using to push around the "little guys" with.

As for helping, its one guy doing the most he can. Its certainly more than I would be willing to do.

I'm confused. Unless the article is wrong, "It's also illegal to break the DRM that restricts copying of DVDs" seems to state that he did break a law.

It makes quite a bit of sense to do a stunt like this, although I certainly would not be willing to be the person to risk it. The way most of the anti-piracy outfits work is to make vague claims about the legality of various actions, and demand a settlement. Sure, its cheaper to do that for both parties, but if they're just waving about a threat that has never been upheld (or not upheld) in court, it creates problems.

But the goalposts haven't moved at all. There's simply a vendor on the sidelines selling rocket boots for 25 cents. Its not like these games start you off on a path, tell you "oh, once you've played for X long you'll be able to get Y," and then changing it so that once you get to X you find out that you also have to spend a dollar to get Y (some of these games might, but the ones I've played haven't, they've all been very clear up front what costs money and what doesn't). Most of them don't even make it so that you can't get to the goalposts without paying money, they just make it take considerably longer.

I fail to see how charging money for faster progress is taking advantage of idiocy. As another example, look at television programming. I can get a half dozen broadcast channels for free. If I want more, and want to get more out of my tv watching experience by having more choice in it, I have to pay for cable, who then offers me various packages, depending on how much each of those channels is worth to me.

It doesn't make it idiocy to value things differently than other people. I value $10 a month more than HBO. Does that make all of the people who pay for HBO idiots? Does that make all it blackmail for the cable company to offer a trial of HBO when I sign up (admittedly, that practice is slightly shady, due to the difficulty to stop the channels after the trial, but that is a completely different issue)? Just because you put more value on your money than others do on a shiny digital fish doesn't make them an idiot, it makes them someone who values shiny digital fish.

-To your edit:

Well, if that was the way things were from the start, sure. Say you go to the arcade, and pick out your game to play. To make this all fit well, lets pick tetris. As long as you know from the start there are various "powerups" you can buy throughout the game, it seems totally fair. Its 1 quarter to start the game. Later in, you can buy various powerups, like double points for one level for another quarter, or the ability to choose your next block for a quarter.

Does it make things different? Yes. But it certainly doesn't make them unfair. The options are open to everyone, those at the top and those trying to get there. Its fair, but is a little shady.

I believe that is strongly tied to why they have become so popular so fast. You can go into the game, pick it up, and become fairly good quickly. If you continue on with it, you slowly get better as time goes on. You then get a friend to join, and they have to start at the beginning. They could spend the days/weeks it took for you to get that far, or they can spend $5 and get there in a tiny fraction of the time.

To generalize it, its easy to get a handful of people to do something. If you offer it to them for free, there are plenty of people who will go out of their way to advance as far as possible. Once those people start getting friends involved, the friends will want to get that far too. By offering them a quick advancement in exchange for money, you can then make a tidy profit.

How on earth is that blackmail?

From the couple of games like this I've played, it is still entirely possible to hit the limits of the game without spending a dime. It will cost you quite a bit more time and effort, but still possible.

Its more akin to an arcade game where the first play is free, but if you want a continue you have to pay a quarter each time. Sure, its a little bit shady, but its still a valid way to get money from a user. Look at all the sites/service that use a freemium model. Look at things like DropBox. Is that blackmail, since you will eventually fill up your free 2gb, and have to pay for it if you want more?

If someone is complaining about your service, it may be a good idea to listen to them. All of the "Blah, blah, if you want it you should be able to create your own super successful site" posts are really rather pointless. Yes, site/company owners have to make some tough decisions about their product, and how users can access/use it. There are going to be complaints, and there are going to be users who disagree. Telling your users to "shut the fuck up" when they're saying they disagree when you've gone from supporting them to destroying what they've built without telling them anything about it seems to be rather harsh.

Its easy to come out and say "Oh, he can do anything he wants because its his company, and if you don't like it just leave". It takes a hell of a lot more effort to actually put the finger on why a move like this (blocking an entire site which hosts various mashups, over 2000 targeting just Craigslist, without notifying the users or having any real method of notifying the "developers" why it was done, or what they can do about it) and trying to point out to the people who actually could do something about it.

As a tip, if you're getting that much flak from your users that you have to start flaming users on the internet about it, you're probably doing something wrong.