It's A Binary World 2.0

Images

Eric Mesa — Sat, 25 May 2013 16:22:46 +0000

You may have noticed the images overlapping with the right-sidebar. That’s because I tend to write my posts ahead of time and I was expecting to have WordPress 3.6 and the new, wider theme by now. But I’ll keep going things this way because while it might be a bit uglier now, it’ll look nicer in a few weeks when the new theme is finally out.

Additionally, I’m making some changes in my screenshots page to make use of galleries. Hope you find the new method a bit more organized-looking.

System Failure or System Working Perfectly?

Eric Mesa — Fri, 24 May 2013 04:01:37 +0000

The Capitol

I keep hearing that the gun bill was killed in the Houses of Congress despite 90% of Americans wanting it to pass. Now, we know that polls can be rigged based on how the questions are asked. But, if we take as a starting point that this poll is accurate, what does that mean about our representative democracy system? There are basically two types of democracy – representative and direct. In a direct democracy we’d all vote on all the issues. In the representative democracy that we have, we vote on issues by proxy. We believe that Democrats or Republicans will vote a certain way on certain issues and we know where our candidates agree and disagree with their parties. So we elect them and expect them to vote as we would vote. So what does it mean when 90% of us want something and we still don’t get it? Is the system working correctly? Are we effectively saying they know better than us even though they were elected by us to serve as our proxy? And if it’s broken do we have any recourse short of the reprehensible idea of revolution?

A Magic Moment

Eric Mesa — Thu, 23 May 2013 04:01:06 +0000

Tony Hangs On

This photo is a great example of the magic moments you can capture when you’re not focused on getting kids to say “cheese”. Just hang back and go to the most telephoto you can and you’ll capture some magical moments.

Review: At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Eric Mesa — Wed, 22 May 2013 04:01:51 +0000

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although I enjoyed Bill Bryson’s other book A Short History of Nearly Everything, I actually didn’t know that when I picked this book up. I had heard the other book as an audio book so I didn’t remember the author’s name. Also, it was nearly 10 years ago. My interest in Bryson’s book came from the media blitz he did to promote it – including NPR’s Fresh Air and, if I’m not mistaken, The Colbert Report. I put it on my TO READ list here on GoodReads and waited for a chance to read the book. That chance came when I flew to Florida for a family visit. However, now that I know it was written by him, it explains the style of the book.

Bryson goes from room to room to explain its history – you can read as much in the book’s description. However, Bryson just uses this as a diving board from which to dive into various aspects of our social lives throughout history. And he does dive quite deep. I often found myself wondering “what chapter am I in?” This wasn’t a bad thing because Bryson writes in a very entertaining and informative style. Here’s an example: the chapter on the bedroom branched off into a discussion about sex and childbirth. A chapter I can’t even remember was about germ theory and how the British came to realize that cholera came from dirty waters, not smelly misma. Another spoke of a caveman found encased in ice.

That brings me to one potential criticism of the book – the author focuses on England and the USA. There is mention of other parts of Europe here and there – especially when explaining how we ended up with certain words in English. (As a bit of a word nerd, I truly enjoyed learning where words like animal husbandry and cabinet came from) I understand that Bryson is using his British home as the framing device for our journey through history, but it would have been extremely interesting if we could have had a compare and contrast with how homes evolved in The pre-Columbian Americas or in Asia. It might not be his style, but I would LOVE to see a followup book that explored this concept.

In short, the book delivers on its promise and then some! You learn all about how the modern, Western home (post-Roman; it’d also be interesting to see pre-Roman) came to be and how this affected and was affected by what was going on in the world. I would heartily recommend it any history buffs. It’s a pretty quick read – approximately 8 hours and you’ll learn a lot of great historical tidbits.

View all my reviews

Bitcoin Roundup

Eric Mesa — Tue, 21 May 2013 04:01:29 +0000

German Kids using inflationary money as blocks in 1923 – Bitcoin is supposed to be immune to this

Boing Boing pointed me to a few Bitcoin articles and then there was another one on Ars on 6 May. I’d be pretty surprised if you haven’t heard about Bitcoin; it’s been all over the news because of the crazy bubble the Bitcoin exchange rate was having recently. But, just in case, Bitcoin is a currency that exists entirely electronically. This is true of nearly all currencies nowadays (none of them are backed by anything but faith in the countries that issue them). The supply of Bitcoins is only increasing to a certain amount and then no more, preventing inflation. It’s main benefit is supposed to be that it’s completely anonymous. So is cash, but you can’t use cash online.

The first article Boing Boing pointed me to was by the respected hacker Dan Kaminsky. As a good big thinker, he was immediately able to make me see the problems with our current financial system that I hadn’t really spent much time considering.

I walked into a Jamba Juice recently, and was informed in no uncertain terms that if I attempted to use anything larger than a $20 bill, or if my credit card was demagnetized, no smoothie for me.

We do have credit cards. But credit cards change money from something anyone can give anyone (peer to peer) to something with a consumer class (client) and a merchant class (server). There are innovative startups that attempt to reverse that, and every time one of these systems pops up — Square, Stripe, Venmo — billions of dollars starts flowing through them.

We wouldn’t get this sort of growth without pent-up demand. But even the new systems find themselves failing — I love Paypal, but is there anyone who hasn’t either had their account suspended, or knows someone who has? I’ve certainly never had a $20 in my pocket go dark for 48 hours.

I’ve come up against these limitations here and there, but I hadn’t though about it in these terms. And, of course, Bitcoin is able to route around a lot of these issues by being electronic. I can accept them from others or send them to anyone around the world. And then Kaminsky had this to say about fraud and the financial system:

Fraud is what makes every money transfer system buggy. As a security professional, I am deeply aware of why Paypal blocks accounts, why credit cards limit who we can pay, why Jamba Juice doesn’t want to be on the hook for the validity of $100 bills and the loss of $95 in “change”: If these businesses aren’t paranoid and customer-hostile, they lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

Bitcoin’s fundamental principle of fraud management is one of denial. If we drop our wallet on the street, the U.S. government is not going to compensate us for our lost cash. Bitcoin attempts to make the same deal, to the point where it calls its stores of keys, “wallets.” If we drop our wallet on the street — heck, if someone picks it out of our pockets — the money’s gone.

There have been bitcoin thefts. A few years ago, I tried to break Bitcoin, and failed quite gloriously. The system and framework itself is preternaturally sound. But it too is built on the foundation of buggy technologies we call the internet, and so Bitcoin must experience failures from the code around it. Hackers don’t care whose code they broke on their way to bitcoin, any more than pickpockets care that they’re exploiting the manufacturer of one’s jeans or leather wallet. So they break the server below the money, or the web interface above it. They still win.

At least, that’s the theory. Reality is more complicated. Of all the millions of dollars of purloined bitcoin that’s floating around out there, not one Satoshi of it has been spent. That’s because while most other stolen property becomes relatively indistinguishable from its legitimate brethren, everybody knows the identity of this particular stolen wealth, and can track it until the end of time.

A pallet of $100 bills that disappears in Iraq is a socialized loss against everyone who holds dollars. A million dollars of lost bitcoin carries its identity, at least as a traceable taint. This loss remains privatized, and it can be sued for, forever.

There are a small number of choke points, which someday may be asked to honor these thefts. Will the currency translators accept the money? Will the mining pools? It’s really an open question. We just don’t know.

Perhaps the best way to think of stolen bitcoin is as stolen art. Sure, we can hang it anywhere. Don’t expect to sell it at Christie’s. A resource that loses its value as soon as it is stolen, may be one that isn’t stolen.

This quote was also in the original Boing Boing story and it leaves me confused. It’s under the heading “Bitcoin is not as secure as we think”, but this sounds amazing to me. Why is having a currency that can’t be stolen a bad thing? Right now I’m more than reluctant about having my cell phone tied to my payment system because it’s easy to lose or have stolen. But if I knew that nothing could happen with the money that was stolen I’d be happy. I’d be more than grateful if someone in the comments could explain to me what I’m missing.

He next mentions that the real issue with Bitcoin is turning it back into dollars. There are only a few places to do that. I have already recognized that as an issue as I’ve seen various issues arise up around this portals. After all, who cares if you have a billion USD worth of Bitcoins if the government doesn’t let you convert it to dollars. Of course, there might be ways around it – convert to some other currency then into dollars – but you probably end up running into the same issues as money launderers. You probably can’t do it in big enough amounts without attention being brought to you.

Perhaps I was just being too naive, but this section, talking about why Bitcoin is better than gold is somewhat scary. I had assumed we knew how much gold had been mined the way the the gold standard people talk about it.

Gold doesn’t have a teleporter like bitcoin, so it is just another commodity traded on electronic networks. People lie about how much stuff they really have all the time, and there’s no way to tell: Sometimes they know they’re lying (“naked shorts”), sometimes they don’t (“proven reserves”), but the point is, the supply can adapt to meet the demand.

Because everything’s backed by cryptographic keys in Bitcoin, one can actually prove s/he has access to a certain amount of it. We are either able to sign messages linked to the private keys, or we are not.

Thus, we end up with the Winklevii twins (of The Social Network/ Facebook fame, or notoriety) saying “We have elected to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.”

While most people see Bitcoin as an alternative to be free of the government, Kaminsky has this awesome analysis near the end:

Don’t think, by the way, that a thing like Bitcoin can’t be co-opted by governments. A global public ledger is a very good system for everyone seeing if taxes are being paid or not. The network could literally reject transactions that don’t include a tax declaration, and directly pay to a bitcoin account controlled by taxation services. Everything can be subverted.

The other main article linked by Boing Boing was by Ben Laurie. After reading it, I’m not sure if he is presenting an actual computationally correct problem with Bitcoin or if it’s all just a philosophical question. Basically he said that you need 51% of everyone to agree that a currency is valid by agreeing who holds what coins. So for Bitcoin to work 51% of all computers would need to be working on Bitcoin problems. If we had 1% of computing power and someone comes with 1.1%, they could say they own all the coins. Again, I’m not sure that works or if it’s just a philosophy experiment, but it could be bad for Bitcoin. Even though, as he explains in the paper, that’s not purely how Bitcoin works.

Finally, the Ars piece is about how US regulators claim they can regulate Bitcoin if they want to. Actually, if I read it correctly, the headline is a bit misleading. The regulators say that people are selling Derivatives and Hedges on Bitcoin and those could be regulated. Remember Derivatives and Hedges? They’re part of what destroyed the US economy when they were tied to housing. Really, I think the only issue here is when the banks and 401ks invest in this stuff. If it’s just random people trying to get rich – they’re mostly playing with the fakest of fake money anyway – betting on failure and selling shares in that or combining that with other things – so just let them fail hard and start putting their money into real things.

Disney Princess Culture Part 2: So this is what they hate about you, Disney

Eric Mesa — Mon, 20 May 2013 04:01:22 +0000

When I wrote my second fatherhood post, the one about Disney Princesses, I speculated that perhaps the problem most people had with the Disney Princesses was not the movies, but how the company marketed to kids. Since Scarlett is only one, my only exposure to the princesses has been through my own childhood and adulthood love of Disney movies. This Boing Boing post about the princess from Brave, Merida, proves the point – it’s the marketing that gets under everyone’s skin. Here’s the change from the movie version on the left to the marketing version on the right:

Merida’s Transformation from Movie version to Disney Princess version

Here’s how Rob at Boing Boing summarized how most people were feeling:

Gone are the wild tight curls, relaxed now into auburn waves. Her waist is cinched, her bust inflated: skinnier and sexier is the new Merida, star of Brave. And gone, in some of the new art, is that troublesome weapon: no fit thing for a Disney princess, after all.
…
There seems a deliciously vile bait-and-switch element to it all: design a character that will attract parents resistant to the traditional messaging, then recast it in same old mold once they’ve sold it to their daughters for you.

No one likes a bait and switch; no one likes to feel like a sucker. Especially when so much praise was heaped upon Merida for being unlike the usual princess. Now I’m starting to see the beef people have with Disney Princesses.

Change to Comments

Eric Mesa — Sat, 18 May 2013 04:01:23 +0000

In response to the fact that most of the spam comments on my site are on older articles and given that historically no one has commented on posts older than a couple years anyway, I’m enabling WordPress’ auto-close on comments for posts older than 2 years.

May The Genie Trapping Attempts Begin

Eric Mesa — Fri, 17 May 2013 04:01:45 +0000

Remember earlier this week when I said the gun control debate was now pointless? Apparently the State Department wants to pretend that what I said isn’t true. In a complete misunderstanding of how the Internet works, they have compelled the website holding the CAD designs for the 3D gun to remove the CAD file. The reasoning is that leaving it up would be exporting munitions (since everyone all over the world can go to a web page) This, of course, ignores the fact that it was already obtained over 100 000 times and is already on Bit Torrent. Oh well. I guess pointless moves are better than nothing in their eyes.

5 Tips for a More Successful 365 Project

Eric Mesa — Thu, 16 May 2013 04:01:01 +0000

One of the biggest trends on flickr is to start a 365 Project. This usually means taking one self-portrait a day for an entire year. This project is often misunderstood by those outside of flickr, especially since they’re used to the selfie-culture of MySpace and Facebook. It’s not a vanity project. A 365 Project is about taking the adage about becoming a better writer through writing every day to photography. It also has a special bonus of teaching the photographer what it’s like to be the subject. Many of us photo-geeks are behind the camera way more often than we’re in front of it. Sometimes we struggle with how to communicate to our subjects how to achieve the vision we have in our head. By being both the photographer and the subject, we learn to appreciate both points of view.

Unfortunately, the 365 Project is also the most often abandoned project on flickr. Lots of people start with a lot of energy and can’t make it past a month or two. So I wanted to put together a few tips to help get you through the process.

1. Don’t Worry if It’s Boring

Some people out there have some pretty incredible 365 images. So it can be discouraging when all you can think of is something like this:

Don’t worry about it. Because it’s when you get fixated on how good or bad the photo is that you miss the point. By making sure you participate every day, you don’t fall out of the project. It’s very hard to be creative every single day. Don’t get hung up on it. Just shoot. Otherwise you can’t get to better photos like this one:
Also, sometimes the simplest ones can end up becoming your favorites when you go back and visit the images later. This is one of my favorite simple images and it’s my current profile photo on Steam:

2. Use it to learn Equipment or Techniques

One of the best uses I got out of my 365 Project was learning how to work with lighting. I had a lighting kit and built up some backgrounds and then made some images I really loved as I learned the different lighting techniques:

3. Reenact Famous Scenes

There might be some movies or books that you could try to replicate. I decided to do this with Bible scenes and ended up with one of my most complex images ever, a recreation of The Last Supper:

4. Tell a story or choose a theme

Depending on how good you are on telling stories, you might choose a series of week-long stories or do one story that spans the entire year. I ended my 365 with a story. Here’s the first image and you can follow along on flickr to see how it ends:

Or try out a theme. One of the most popular is the Seven Deadly Sins.

5. Join a group

One of the ways I was able to keep getting new ideas was to join a few 365 groups. Some of them are generic 365 groups and I could see what others were doing and sometimes that would spur some creativity in me. Other groups are challenge based like Macro Monday or Half-Nekked Thursday. They give you a theme to aim for every day.

Hopefully these tips can help keep you motivated. I think completing my 365 was one of the biggest accomplishments I’ve had outside of work and school. It was hard while I was doing it, but it was great to have finished. In fact, I was so proud of it, that I even had it made into a book. It’s a great documentation of a time in my life when a lot of changes were happening so it’s great for more than one reason and I’d recommend it to everyone who wants to improve their photography.

Is This Really Endemic? Restaurant No-Shows

Eric Mesa — Wed, 15 May 2013 04:01:59 +0000

On 30 April of this year I came across an article on Eater about how restaurants can deal with No-Shows. I didn’t even know this was a big enough thing that restaurants have multiple strategies to deal with it. Every time I’ve made a reservation to a restaurant, I’ve gone. I set reservations because I (or I and my wife and whoever else is involved) have decided to go out to eat and want to be sure we’ll not have to wait too long to be seated. Or, in the of exclusive restaurants, ensure we’ll actually get a table. I could understand people not showing up because of a life event – someone gets sick or dies. But I don’t understand the mindset of making a reservation without an intention to attend. Additionally, the biggest reason I make reservations is, as stated above, to ensure I get a table in a reasonable amount of time. Nearly every place I’ve ever made reservations at has a line out the door and even with a reservation I sometimes have to wait 15-30 minutes for my table. That said, they wouldn’t write this whole article if there weren’t a bunch of people skipping out on reservations so I wanted to answer their suggestions.

The first one is to not take reservations. You know what this gets you? It means I don’t go to your restaurant. I value my time and I appreciate restaurants that value my time. The lobby area is usually not amenable to socializing or eating. So if I’m out with friends I want to get to our table so we can talk and have fun. If I’m with my family, I want to eat and GTFO so I can get back to having fun. And the larger my party is, the more I NEED a restaurant that takes reservations because we require more empty tables to make up our eating area. So on the times that would have been most lucrative for the restaurant – parties of 10-15 people – I avoided them due to a lack of reservations. And the workers REALLY missed out because usually if it’s that many of us, it’s my in-laws. And they usually insist on paying. And they tend to tip 20-25%. (They really value good service)

Overbooking is somewhat dangerous. My wife and I are fiercely loyal. We’re also fiercely shunning. There are restaurants we have completely sworn off because of a bad to horrible experience there. And one of our peeves is not being seated within a reasonable time with reservations. Now, we’re intelligent folks. We understand that managing restaurant flow is an art. You have no idea how long your customers are going to take. My mother, when out with only adults, might be at the table for 2-3 hours. My wife and I have closed two restaurants when eating out with her friends. My father-in-law insists on leaving the second the check is completed. And he’s asking for the check the second he’s done eating. So if I have a reservation for 2000, a busy time, I can tolerate being seated at 2015 or even 2020. But after 2030, I start wondering and commenting aloud on what the purpose of reservations are if I’m not seated at that time. After all, when I go out to eat I like to enjoy my food, so I often make sure not to eat any snacks. I want my stomach ready to receive as much food from your restaurant as possible. So I’m usually hungry as I stand there.

Requiring credit cards is OK. As I said, I always make my reservations with the intention of fulfilling them. But you better have a rational way for me to cancel without penalty. If I get the flu a few days ahead and call you, I better be able to get all my money back. And, ideally, you’d combine this with the next suggestion of tracking cancelers. Because I believe everyone should get one freebie. If I get sick on that day or get in a car crash or my mom dies or something and you charge me for not showing up like some kind of jerk – you can be your food I will never show up at your restaurant again. And I may be a lowly blogger, but for something like that, I’d do my best to make sure it gets out there – because that’s a jerk move. And by tracking, you’d be able to know that it’s not like I’m on my third mother dying, if you catch my drift.

The pre-paid ticket system COULD be weird. I’m not completely against it, unless it ends up becoming something where the tickets are sold on the second-hand market at a premium. Like if one guy can buy most of the tickets and then sell them for more – I don’t care how awesome your food is supposed to be. It could literally be orgasm-inducing and I wouldn’t go. I know damn-well that my wife wouldn’t let me spend more for food than the food actually costs – which is what the ticket system would represent – buying a ticket to a fixed price menu.

Public shaming would only work together with tracking. Again, don’t be a jerk if you don’t know all the details. If I’m already depressed because my mom died, I’m not going to feel a whole lot better because some jerk called me out on twitter or Facebook. That’s the kind of stuff that could lead to the mentally unbalanced taking revenge. Don’t do it. It’s tacky.

Again, I’m not in the restaurant business so maybe this is a HUGE problem. I’ve never seen any evidence of that in any of the restaurants I’ve been to that range from medium class to high class. They always seem to be packed and have tons of people trying to get in. But if you do feel that you need to take these steps – beware. I’m sure I’m not the only person out there you might be shunning from your restaurant. And, really, your goal as a businessman (or woman) is to make as much money as possible so you shouldn’t be turning people away.

Kinda Makes the Whole Gun Control Debate Pointless

Eric Mesa — Tue, 14 May 2013 04:01:20 +0000

The Liberator – the world’s first working 3D Printed Gun

I’m sorry Obama, Sandyhook victims, and everyone else. You’ve already lost the gun issue. Not because of politicians, but because of technology. We have working 3D printed guns. It’s over. On 6 May my RSS feed reader was ablaze with articles about the working 3D-printed gun including this article from Ars, another article from ars, and one from Boing Boing. This is the same guy who previously created the ability to hold more bullets in semi-automatic guns using 3D printing. The articles all made sure to mention that the CAD files that were uploaded for this new gun had a section that was purposely made of metal to ensure it could be detected by magnetometers. Only one article mentioned that this was a bull-crap attempt at not getting too much flack from anti-gun people. Because there’s no reason why someone who got the CAD files couldn’t change that to be made of plastic and have a nearly undetectable gun. The gun only fires a few rounds, but under the right circumstances that could be more than enough.

Jonathan Hickman, writer on Fantastic Four and Avengers, tweeted that this is the beginning of the end of being able to declare things illegal. I tend to agree with him. The government can make an effort to stop the proliferation of CAD files for things it doesn’t want private citizens to build, but there isn’t an effective way to do that. Look at the horrible job they’re doing of keeping music and movies from being shared. And if they were somehow able to make it so it couldn’t spread online, it’d be all but impossible to prevent its spread via USB sticks and other offline media. If they tried to force Microsoft and Apple to make this (or any other contraband) unspreadable via USB, people would turn to Linux and BSD. If they tried to make the 3D printers unable to print it, people would come up with custom ROMs. 3D Printing may end up being the most disruptive technology to society since the printing press.

So, just stop worrying about gun control. Who will run background checks when people can print their own guns?

note: for the record, I’m for gun control and all that. I just think it’s pointless at this point given technology

Becoming Fully Human

Eric Mesa — Mon, 13 May 2013 04:01:16 +0000

My favorite thing about being a first-time father is watching Scarlett’s mind develop and acquire the skills necessary to be human. Anyone who paid a passing attention in biology class knows that humans are born more immature and less capable than almost every other animal. It has to do with walking upright shrinking the female pelvis while the ever-growing brain required a larger head. The result is that kids have to be born before their heads would be so large we’d be exploding from our mother’s vaginas like a horrible, horrible version of Alien. (As it is, quite a few women need an episiotomy to have a safe childbirth) And I’m not the only one to find this transformation into humanity so incredible as to refer to babies as not quite human. Jonathan Coulton mentions this in a throwaway line about his living situation while recording his song, The Presidents:

My studio stuff was all in my daughter’s room. She was still just a dumb baby for the first part of Thing a Week, but it got harder to keep my stuff in her room the more she turned into an actual child.

The most recent thing I’ve noticed and which melts my fatherly heart is that Scarlett seems to have started discovery of empathy sometime in April. Whereas she previously was was vehemently against snuggling and being hugged, she suddenly wanted to put her head on my shoulder and feel calm as I hugged her. I was seriously confused before this point why every time I (or anyone else) hugged or snuggled her, she seemed desperate to escape. And she’s also made the connection that hugging is something to be done with entities you feel an affinity for, including her dolls and stuffed animals which she doesn’t yet distinguish from being real. She has a special place in her little heart for her green dragon. Every time she sees it, she hugs the heck out of it. Second to that is her pink penguin. There are other stuff animals she variously hugs, but those are her favorites. It’s incredibly hard to catch this cute gesture on camera. It typically doesn’t last very long (toddler attention spans and all) and even with my dSLR, I need time to focus. My wife got the best shot so far:

Scarlett Hugs her Dragons

Originally I was only going to write about how she’s been learning this whole empathy angle, but in the past 2 weeks or so she’s started to display a new emotion – jealousy. I mention it here because it manifests most often in a way nearly all parents will be familiar. She might be ignoring her green dragon. As soon as I pick it up and start hugging it – she wants it. She’d be in full-on “mine” mode if she was talking already. Danielle recounted to me last week that it’s starting to expand to items she doesn’t outright own. At the library she was done with a rocking horse until another kid started using it. She started yelling at the girl in baby gibberish. Perhaps it’s a good thing she’s not talking yet.

Too Big to Fail? Perhaps not for long

Eric Mesa — Fri, 10 May 2013 04:01:56 +0000

Citi Bank is one of those too big to fail banks

Matt Taibbi wrote a story on 1 May about how there is a possibility of the end of banks that are too big to fail. The biggest issue I have with the way the financial crisis has been dealt with is the complete hypocrisy. Now, I’m not so naive as to fail to realize that politicians just say what they will and hope that people don’t look at what their saying either because of party bias or the media doesn’t cover it so they can worry about the latest media tart’s exploits. After all, the biggest retort to every bit of legislation to help the vulnerable (whether that be the environment or the poor) is that the free market should be allowed to work. Well, in a free market a lot of banks would have gone bust and perhaps we would have learned out lessons. Of course, the big difference this time is the money involved. Money can turn any politician into a hypocrite instantly. So I’m glad to read in this article that some politicians are attempting to pass a law that would require the riskiest of banks to hold more money in reserve. Because I understand why the government has to bail out the banks – we don’t want a global collapse to lead to the end of our awesome first world luxurious life. But rather than need a bail out or financial collapse, what if we just had a system where banks could fail and it wouldn’t destroy the system. Taibbi goes off on a huge tangent about how the content of a Standard and Poor white paper on this bill means that Wall Street is actually scared of the bill. It’s a good read if you don’t have blood pressure problems. Unfortunately, the article ends with the prediction that it probably won’t even make it out of committee, but at least someone is trying.

Mid-April to Mid-May Photojojo

Eric Mesa — Thu, 09 May 2013 04:01:55 +0000

It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

Scarlett’s only 2-2.5 months old in these photos and the most striking things are how tiny she is and how much in awe she seems of the world around her. No mean feat considering how tiny she remains compared to her peers. But it definitely takes a lot more to astound her than it did a year ago.

Giving them a taste of their own medicine

Eric Mesa — Wed, 08 May 2013 04:01:02 +0000

It is a fact of life that things will be bootlegged. (commonly called pirated, but this is one area where I strongly agree with rms. Piracy is a horrible thing where people get kidnapped on the ocean and die. I have in-law relatives who have died from pirates. So I don’t find it cute to compare that with people who acquire things without paying for them) We usually think of digital items, but go to Chinatown in New York and you’ll see the same thing going on with physical objects. So what’s a company to do? My least favorite route is digital restrictions management (DRM) because it just makes things a real pain in the butt for legitimate users. (It also makes criminals of people who just want to rip their DVDs and BluRays to their laptops or media centers) My favorite tactic (which works best with games, but I’ve seen it with music and movies), is to mess with the person who didn’t pay for it. I’ve seen games that are extremely mean about it (mean being in the eye of the beholder since these people didn’t pay for the game) where they make it so that the final bad guy is unbeatable (after all those hours!). Others glitch out halfway through. Game Dev Tycoon developer Greenheart Games was able to use the subject of their game (in which you’re a game developer – META!) to come up with a unique solution. On the same day the game came out, they started a torrent with a slightly modified version of the game. It works just like the paid version for a while. Then you get this message from your developers:

Greenheart Games – Game Dev Tycoon – Message in Illicit Copies of the Game

That says:”Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game, they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buying it legally. If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt.” Of course, whenever developers make glitched up illicit versions of their games, the developers have a good time laughing at the complaints in the forums that only they know tip them off that the posters are running illicit software. But, this was even better because you can always count on the Internet to fail when it comes to irony. Here are quotes from their forums:

Guys I reached some point where if I make a decent game with score 9-10 it gets pirated and I can’t make any profit. It barely sells 100k units…I am during the Xbox 1 and the PS2 gen. Back in the 80s and 90s I could easily make a 1m sales with a 9-10 game but now its not possible due to the piracy. It says bla bla our game got pirated stuff like that. Is there some way to avoid that? I mean can I research a DRM or something…

So far I am going no where. My profit is little to none. If I make an average game 5-7 I get some cash which is understandable but then if I make an 9-10 game I earn the same cash because I get the message for the piracy…

For the past 6-7 games I ended up with the same amount of money or a few grand less.

So what I have to do now? There’s no point in inventing a new engine because the revolutionary game made out of it will get pirated and I will not be able to cover my expenses.

What are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me! I had like 5m and then people suddenly started pirating everything I made, even if I got really good ratings (that I usually get) Not fair.

Remember, these complaints are coming from people who didn’t pay for the game themselves.The developers have a great blog post about this process and how they believe if things don’t change we’re just going to get more and more crappy online games. It’s a good read. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Greenheart Studios, but I do applaud them for taking this method of dealing with illicit users. I enjoy not having to worry about DRM or how many computers I can install the game on.

Ars, whose gaming articles I usually enjoy, ran a weird followup article entitled Piracy or baiting? In it they considered whether Greenheart Games could go after the illicit users or if the fact they put it onto Bittorrent themselves meant it was meant to be obtained that way. I doubt that could be true, because the entire music industry standard around 2005 was seeding the P2P networks with messed up MP3s. I don’t think anyone could have argued it was, therefore, ok to be trying to obtain those files. Either way, it gets beside the point (which Ars itself pointed out early in the article) that these guys are trying to play games without compensating the two-man team that worked on it. It’s not any less illegal to do it from big companies, but they’ve already built that into the price. You’re disproportionately hurting small developers when you play their games without paying.

I’d prefer for more and more developers to take to this tactic rather than DRM so I always get excited when I hear these kinds of stories.