Quotulatiousness

April 23, 2011

A neat way to address software piracy

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

I still find it hard to believe that Cracked, of all the media entities from the pre-internet era, is worth visiting (and linking to). However, this is good stuff:

The [Arkham Asylum] developers included a little bit of extra code to detect when the game has been pirated, a common tactic used to track a company’s losses or simply mess with cheap people. The game is mostly unchanged when hacked, with one seemingly minor exception: Batman’s glider cape is hilariously unusable and has the aerodynamics of a piece of cardboard riddled with bullet holes.

It’s not that the cape is faulty, apparently; it’s simply that your version of Batman doesn’t know how to use it. Instead of gliding from one surface to another, Batman simply opens his wings over and over like a total ass-clown, causing him to lose altitude and fall down. It’s like you’re being forced to play with the pudgy Batman copycat from the beginning of The Dark Knight.

All the other gadgets still work, so you can always fight your way across the level on foot, right? Well, yeah, except that without the glider cape you’ll be completely stranded in a certain room — you know, the one filled with poisonous gas. That’s right, in the pirated version of Arkham Asylum, the always-prepared Dark Knight is such an useless idiot that he gets himself killed due to his shitty cape.

This trick gets misconstrued a lot as a simple game glitch, so you have people like this guy asking what’s wrong with his game at the official Eidos message board … only for the forum administrator to explain the situation and tell him: “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code [punk].

Is this where the “ponygirl” fetish got started?

Filed under: History, Humour, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:32

One of a series of “WTF?” postings at How to be a Retronaut may show the origin of the “ponygirl” fetish. (I would advise you not to Google Image Search for that . . . unless that’s what you are interested in):

QotD: The debunking problem in media

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:23

[. . .] the second issue is how people find out about stuff. We exist in a blizzard of information, and stuff goes missing: as we saw recently, research shows that people don’t even hear about retractions of outright fraudulent work. Publishing a follow-up in the same venue that made an initial claim is one way of addressing this problem (and when the journal Science rejected the replication paper, even they said “your results would be better received and appreciated by the audience of the journal where the Daryl Bem research was published”).

The same can be said for the New York Times, who ran a nice long piece on the original precognition finding, New Scientist who covered it twice, the Guardian who joined in online, the Telegraph who wrote about it three times over, New York Magazine, and so on.

It’s hard to picture many of these outlets giving equal prominence to the new negative findings that are now emerging, in the same way that newspapers so often fail to return to a debunked scare, or a not-guilty verdict after reporting the juicy witness statements.

All the most interesting problems around information today are about structure: how to cope with the overload, and find sense in the data. For some eyecatching precognition research, this stuff probably doesn’t matter. What’s interesting is that the information architectures of medicine, academia and popular culture are all broken in the exact same way.

Ben Goldacre, “I foresee that nobody will do anything about this problem”, Bad Science, 2011-04-23

Another fake war hero emerges

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:28

This time, it’s a 20-year-old woman in Minnesota:

The town of Cass Lake embraced Elizabeth McKenzie last month when she arrived at the high school in her Army uniform for a welcome home ceremony.

Though she isn’t a tribal member, the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe Honor Guard gave her a blanket and an eagle feather to honor her as a woman warrior for her service in Afghanistan. There was a tribal drum ceremony and a reception line. Accepting the town’s gratitude, McKenzie talked about the close calls she’d had and a war injury that brought her home. She led the march in the high school gym, carrying the American flag, and the local newspaper documented the hero’s return.

But none of it was true. The 20-year-old McKenzie was never injured in combat, had never been to Afghanistan, never been deployed anywhere. In fact, she’s never been in the military.

Now the 2009 grad of Cass Lake High School has been cited for impersonating an officer, which in Minnesota includes the military. And the people of Cass Lake are trying to recover from feeling duped by their own good intentions.

Google Easter egg hunt

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:18

A bit of light fluff for the Easter weekend: Another Dozen Google Easter Eggs.

QR on Demand With Goo.gl
Most Google easter eggs are played strictly for laughs, but this one’s actually useful: When you’re working with Google’s URL shortener, goo.gl, simply add “.qr” to any shortened URL to generate a scannable QR code for the Website in question

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