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http://www.koksu.kz/koksu/gb_en/ecology.html
Gamma rays shielding. A layer of shaly shungite provides a more effective level of shielding than equally thick layers of concrete or aluminium. Shungite shields can be used in the areas of potential ecological disasters, such as oil pipelines, gas-condensate reservoirs, handling grounds for combustible materials, sump and sewage tanks, etc. A promising area of shungite application is seen to be the construction of chemical and radioactive waste storages.

http://lists.drizzle.com/pipermail/rockhounds/2009-January/027781.html
Shungite occurs in rocks as 1 mm to 20 cm clasts of lustrous shungite that probably represent redeposited, oxidised oil derived from oil spills.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016913680300043X
The shungite-bearing rocks were accumulated within a volcanic continental rift setting, in a non-euxinic, brackish-water, lagoonal environment developed on the rifted margin of the Archaean craton. The occurrences of shungite-bearing rocks represent a combination of a petrified oil field, petrified organosiliceous diapirs and oil spills.

You're right!

For centuries everyone knew what "marriage" meant, and what it didn't mean.
For centuries everyone knew marriage was simply a union between 2 people.

Then bigots twisted the meaning of the word to prevent people who love each other from getting married!

http://www.drizzle.com/~slmndr/salamandir/pubs/irishtimes/opt3.htm

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/1998/0811/98081100088.html

Look to history! The church used to give their blessing to gays!

Now to point out that this is way way way off topic and we should both be modded down to get this drivel off the page.

You make it sound so easy but there really a lot of, not apparent - if you're dumb like me - complexity involved. For example can I bitch this story? http://www.drizzle.com/~scottb/gdc/continuous-world.htm

Take a look at this neat paper The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege.

It explains a great detail of the issues surrounding a system like this. The more interesting issues are as others have mentioned are memory and disk i/o management, but also there's another lovely curiosity in there... floating point numbers begin to quantize more and more the further you get away from the origin. It means it's impossible to have a global coordinate system.

Enjoy.

If you want the technical details, read The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege (a fascinating read).

To avoid floating-point problems and to allow continuous loading, the world was split up into nodes with specified transformations between them. This resulted in a world that often cannot be mapped, as it would pass through itself. There were also many tricks that were used to fit the huge number of objects in memory. Many things self-destruct, or disappear if out of sight for more that a few minutes.

Get a clue. The weakness in WEP has everything to do with a vulnerability in RC4 (specifically this one). The vulnerability is due to the fact that there is a weakness in RC4's key scheduling algorithm that allows an attacker to obtain the whole key from only a very few bits that just happen to be in the first 24-bits of the key. Since the IV does repeat, it is easy to obtain packets with the weak key bits. However, if WEP did not use RC4, that vulnerability wouldn't be there and you couldn't break WEP using that attack.

If I may make a suggestion -- I've been with Drizzle Internet for over five years. I run fully self-hosted, including two authoritative DNS boxen, and Drizzle has never had an issue with it.

When I first called them up, I told them "Look, all I want is a DSL pipe and six static IP's. I'll do the rest." They said "No problem... Let me get an installation date for you."

Uptime has been incredible. I've only had two notable outages. First was when some chain-link fence grunts drove a fencepost through an underground phone cable (knocking out everyone in my neighborhood in the process), and the other was a bad network switch in their data center, which was promptly replaced.

No matter what you decide, happy hunting.

Okay! Here's some help.

You've joined the ranks of Mozilla Firebird, and Jetty, the Tads Virtual Machine by trying to make a new project with exactly the same name as an already existing, extremely popular project.

How about you rename it to something that isn't taken?

GINAC=>GINAC is not a computer algebra system

Step #1 of picking a name for any OSS is looking for it on Google.

"It consists of the observation that when the same secret part of the key is used with numerous different exposed values, an attacker can rederive the secret part by analyzing the initial word of the keystreams with relatively little work. This concatenation of a long term secret part with an attacker visible part is a commonly used mode of RC4, and in particular it is used in the WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) protocol, which protects many wireless networks.

Out of curiousity, did any of those ISP's back in the mid 90's that offered lifetime internet access for one large initial fee survive the dotcom era?

Yeah, Eskimo North is still around and doing well, and I think Drizzle is also doing well too.

I think the post may have been referring, vaguely, to Scott Bilas' talk at GDC a few years back about game object scripting. Indeed, it was not Python, but "Skrit", an in-house language. I found a link to the slides from the talk here...

http://www.drizzle.com/~scottb/gdc/game-objects.pp t

According to the talk, most of the "game" code (i.e. "non-engine" code) was written in Skrit.

Flash is a good alternative, but just make sure you use Actionscript 2. The IDE is poor so use your own wherever possible.

What about Flash? is a great paper on wiritng games in Flash, from a programmers perspective.

The real advice I'd give once you've decided what tools to use, is to finish the project. Games aren't easy to write as they end up in play testing and bug hunting like any other app so put in the hours and finish off the game. If you never do it again at least you have a working game.

Yes, they exist - and your favourite hobbies might appear as totally bizarre to them (amongst others) as to you. Some petrified wood is opalescent and quite beautiful when polished up. I'm not specifically a fan of it, but dear old Dad is a rock-hound and has some breath-taking pieces in his collection.

Port knocking is an excellent way to greatly reduce the probability that someone will be able to use a newly discovered exploit from using it against your server before an update is available to fix the exploit.

• cryptographic flaws which allow snooping of protected communications
• man-in-the middle attacks
• stream insertion or corruption possibilities
• ...

Out of curiosity, why?

I don't recall the details, but an attack was found a few years ago that allows the key to be recovered if the attacker can get the first few bytes of the keystream. Doing it requires the first few bytes of many related keystreams, and getting the keystream from the ciphertext requires that the attacker have the plaintext. With WEP, RC4 is rekeyed for every packet, and the first few bytes of each packet are highly predictable, so an eavesdropper can fairly easily gather enough data to mount the attack.

Got any links so I can read up on the why and wherefore?

Google turns up plenty. Here is the original paper, which has all of the dirty details. Here is a paper that describes how to use it to attack WEP. And, of course, if you'd like to read code that implements the attack, look at Airsnort.

I have to turn to web-authors like Elf Sternberg (especially JournaL Entries stories: "Turing Attraction ", "Dormant Ghosts", "Honest Desires", "Separate Electricities", "Separate Responsibilities", "Separate, Together", "Cheyenne", "Dual Life", "Existence", "Vengeance Angel", "Rebellious Angel", "Local Effects") and DB Story among others to find writers consistently speculating on the more sexual, relationship, and self-willed aspects of robots we might possibly build. These authors, I should note, have decidedly different approaches to this subject -- which is why I like them both.

Do you include this type of fiction in your study of a future with robots in society, and what do you feel will make robots successful in a mass production, affordable sense for the average person?

(I'm reminded of the early days of home computers when one was told they should spend hundreds of $$$s for a machine to keep track of their recipies, when a small metal box holding 3x5 cards continues to be a better solution for most people to this day.)

I realize that many here a loathe to give a nod to a Microsoft published product that only runs on DirectX, but Dungeon Siege by Gas Powered Games is remarkable for its constant streaming of a huge 3D RPG environment from starting the game with a hoe to the final boss showdown with no loading screens. They used some tricks as described in this whitepaper to achieve the effect. Although they had to linearize the content to a large degree, the idea of traversing a tree structure of content, constantly streaming in upcoming nodes is one that more developers could adhere to in creating continuous worlds.

With no doubt, this must be the biggest security hole I have seen lately. 802.11g directly to the hard drive. Bravo. Is this an April Fool's joke posted prematurely or are they really out of their minds thinking that anyone would be so stupid to buy such a hard drive, which is basically asking to be cracked? I find it insulting. I hope script kiddies will have lots of fun.

All things considered, I'd much rather see a movie featuring Elf Sternberg's A.I.'s or DB_Story's fembots.

I mean, aren't there stories about robots doing anything else worth telling besides running amok and killing people.

(Note to producers of I.R. Hey, its been done.)

For the record: The Catholic church used to condone gay marriage.

Before misleadingly filling your comment with "IETF", maybe you should read a few IETF documents and join their working groups yourself.

I will gladly admit that mDNS doesn't have to be crap in itself, and may be cool, but Apple's proposed implementation is NOT going through the IETF standards process.

And Apple IS hijacking the .local tld, and not only did the IETF never recommended that it be reserved for Apple's Rendezvous, but in fact, had "concerns about multicast storms resulting from site-wide mDNS usage, as well as concerns about cache pollution" (among others).

What they eventually adopted in the standards track is LLMNR.

LLMNR also doesn't require suddenly taking over a widely used tld.

Also: "Rendezvous is an individual submission that is not a work item of any IETF working group, and is currently not an IETF standard. While it is possible for an individual submission to become an IETF standard, this is unlikely in this case because an existing WG (DNSEXT) is already working on a competing protocol (LLMNR), which has just completed DNSEXT WG last call."

See the LLMNR FAQ.

[Adult Material Warning]
Elf Sternberg and DB Story
[/Adult Material Warning]

have written a lot of enjoyable speculative fiction on this subject. I agree with them that in the same way the Sony Betamax became a guaranteed success when people became able to watch porn/erotica in the privacy of their own homes, it will be sex that successfully sells A.I. robots to the masses. And the pressures to be ahead of competitors will inevitably lead to robot minds comparable to human minds.

Even Scientific American's turn of the millennium issue three and a half years ago had a big article predicting human level artificial intelligence within 30 years or so. I hope these predictions are a bit more accurate than that for flat-screen, hang on the wall televisions that were 5 years away for the last 25.

Slashdot had a long discussion on WiFi security late last hear (Replacing WEP for Wireless Security). ComputerBits has a relatively short overview (Wireless Hot Spot Security) for those who prefer something more organized. Then there's the Unoffical 802.11 Security Page, the website of the WiFi Alliance (the industry group for 802.11) and a nifty google search on WiFi Security.

Not until Drizzle's network guru calls me up and tells me "Hey, we're switching over to IPv6, you'll need to update your DNS boxen."

I've tried -- hard -- to understand the IPv6 FAQ, the structure of IPv6 setups, and how those setups relate to DNS. Maybe I'm dense, maybe I just don't work well with the FAQ the way it's written, but so far I've not had much luck.

I will say that the FAQs seem to put out nothing but pure theory, and they expect the reader to make the intuitive leap as to how to set up v6 for their own network.

I definitely don't work like that. I usually need to be shown, explicitly, HOW to do something first (as in comparing what my v4 and v6 DNS setups would look like side-by-side), and my gray matter will then pick up the theory along the way.

In other words: If someone can show me, in a PRACTICAL manner instead of bombarding me with the theoreticals first, how to make the switch and how my current addresses relate to IPv6, then I will create the appropriate setup for my domains and keep it mothballed until the time comes to use it.

Until then, well... my current setup is definitely not broken. I don't see any reason to "fix" it.

A quick paragraph, to teaze everyone, *snarf:

"Hey," Wilycat said, "It's our old starship. Why are you bringing us here?"

"Because," Wilykit said testily, landing her board on the large rock to the left of the main airlock. She jumped off and walked over to the door. "Come on."

Wilycat shook his head and said "I don't like this."

"You'll like it," Wilykit replied, turning on her electric torch. "Trust me." She led him through the corridors to the crew cabins, shoving aside one of the unpowered doors.

"Hey," Wilycat said, "Why are we in Liono's room?"

"Because he had the biggest bed, silly."

"I still don't know what you're planning."

"Come here," Wilykit said. "What?" "And take off your clothes."

"WHAT?" Wilycat complained. "Oh come on, Wilycat! We never wore clothes until Jagua made us those armored uniforms. Take them off."

"But that was years ago!" Wilycat exclaimed.

"That's the point," Wilykit said. "I want to see something." "Okay, but only if you take off yours too."

"That's a deal," Wilykit replied, eagerly stripping off her uniform and tossing it too the floor. Wilycat was a little slower in removing his own.

Naked, he looked a little skinny, but then he was only fifteen, and he was on the same exercise regimen all the Thundercats were. They never knew when an enemy might strike out at them.

Wilykit, on the other hand, was actually growing quite nicely, her small breasts budding out only slightly. She smiled at her brother and said "Come here and sit down."

Wilycat walked nervously over to his sister. He sat down on the old and dusty bed, and when he did she grabbed him by the shoulders and threw him down. "Hey!" he shouted again. Wilykit threw her leg over his supine form, straddling him.

"Now I gotcha!" she said. "Mummra?" Wilycat's eyes were wild with fear. She had even convinced him to leave his powerpills over there on the floor!

"No, not Mummra, silly," Wilykit said. "Just me. I wanna try something." "Wha...What?" he stammered.

"I saw Cheetara doing this to Tigra, and I wondered why." She slid down his body slowly, reaching his crotch. His cock was shrivled and retracted into it's prepuce with fear. She nibbled at it gently with her lips, sliding along the length she felt within his Thunderan sheath.

"Wilykit..." Wilycat breathed deeply. "What are you doing?" "Does it hurt?" She asked, looking up along the length of his body.

"Well, no," he admitted. "Then let's keep trying."

Doesn't this sound fun? All the kids say: NO! All the heathens say: YES!

Your Rights and the Police says more, though it's not updated for these days of diminishing rights. And this page only applies to the US, of course ;)

They ask you who you are and where you're going--and, AFAIK, it's a misdemanor to not tell them who you are.

Now, if you don't tell them that could be considered probable cause for searching you. Hell, might even get you arrested -- but being arrested isn't the same as doing anything wrong. But this is a much better description of your rights than what I just said.

Hi,

The other writers who you've allowed to work in the Man-Kzin Wars series have added quite a bit to the health and breadth of your "Known Space" universe. Thank you for opening it up for others to play!

I've heard that you take a dim view of fan fiction -- please, correct me if I'm wrong. One of the better bits of fan fiction that I read invloved gay Kzin. The logic was solid and the story was interesteing (if a bit uncomfortable). Where do you draw the line? Who would you allow to publish?

Thanks!
e.

Was your cease-and-desist regarding Elf Sternberg's The Only Fair Game motivated more by a personal aversion to the content, or a desire to retain control over "your universe"? How does this jibe with your statement in Ringworld Engineers that "If you want more Known Space stories, you'll have to write them yourself"?

Could you detail a real-world attack that would break the security of the network I described above?

As far as the SSID is concerned: "Some access-point vendors, including Cisco, offer the option to disable SSID broadcasts in the beacon messages. The SSID can still be determined by sniffing the probe response frames from an access point".

For a description of a real-world attack on WEP, I would recommend "Using the Fluhrer, Mantin, and Shamir Attack to Break WEP" by Stubblefield, Ioannidis, and Rubin. They showed it was possible to recover a 104-bit key in a few hours...

I gotta say, Sternberg's "The Journal Entries of Kennet R'Yal Shardik, et.al., and Related Tales" are the best sci-fi value I've ever found. You can't beat free.

Heres a few of my favorites.

(that last one was posted to Fark a couple months back, which is how I found this whole thing)

I gotta say, Sternberg's "The Journal Entries of Kennet R'Yal Shardik, et.al., and Related Tales" are the best sci-fi value I've ever found. You can't beat free.

Heres a few of my favorites.

(that last one was posted to Fark a couple months back, which is how I found this whole thing)

I gotta say, Sternberg's "The Journal Entries of Kennet R'Yal Shardik, et.al., and Related Tales" are the best sci-fi value I've ever found. You can't beat free.

Heres a few of my favorites.

(that last one was posted to Fark a couple months back, which is how I found this whole thing)

I gotta say, Sternberg's "The Journal Entries of Kennet R'Yal Shardik, et.al., and Related Tales" are the best sci-fi value I've ever found. You can't beat free.

Heres a few of my favorites.

(that last one was posted to Fark a couple months back, which is how I found this whole thing)

I gotta say, Sternberg's "The Journal Entries of Kennet R'Yal Shardik, et.al., and Related Tales" are the best sci-fi value I've ever found. You can't beat free.

Heres a few of my favorites.

(that last one was posted to Fark a couple months back, which is how I found this whole thing)

I gotta say, Sternberg's "The Journal Entries of Kennet R'Yal Shardik, et.al., and Related Tales" are the best sci-fi value I've ever found. You can't beat free.

Heres a few of my favorites.

(that last one was posted to Fark a couple months back, which is how I found this whole thing)

I gotta say, Sternberg's "The Journal Entries of Kennet R'Yal Shardik, et.al., and Related Tales" are the best sci-fi value I've ever found. You can't beat free.

Heres a few of my favorites.

(that last one was posted to Fark a couple months back, which is how I found this whole thing)

I gotta say, Sternberg's "The Journal Entries of Kennet R'Yal Shardik, et.al., and Related Tales" are the best sci-fi value I've ever found. You can't beat free.

Heres a few of my favorites.

(that last one was posted to Fark a couple months back, which is how I found this whole thing)

Reading the paper, I get the impression that this is mostly typical undergraduate hand-wringing about the gulf between academia and industry. That's fine, as far as it goes, and I've certainly indulged in my fair share of it. However, as an occasional student of stuff other than computer science, I'm a bit worried by their choice of terminology.

To sum up: Post-freaking-modernism??? Do these people have any idea what a plague on the humanities the loose collection of intellectual conceits known as "postmodernism" has been?

I've tried my hand at reading Foucault/Derrida/Barthes/etc., and their secondary sources. It's exceptionally difficult, but not in the way that, say, a complex algorithm is difficult. It's difficult in the way religious texts, or David Lynch movies are difficult; i.e., the difficulty is a smokescreen to keep the reader from catching on that this is all a bunch of bullshit.

This sort of deal typically begins with, "I will argue that {truth,reason,science,gender} is {non-existent,socially constructed,a masculinist plot}." Several hundred extraordinarily poorly written pages follow in which the author, in varying degrees of good faith, actually tries to argue these points. Of course, if truth is socially constructed, we all have no basis upon which to discuss anything. Rather than calling one another on it, the postmodernists collectively wink at one another, and promise to take one another seriously, and quote one another every chance they get. It's academics by pyramid scheme.

I understand why humanities people, even bright ones, fall for this routine, since they might go through all of their undergraduate and graduate education without encountering a single academic who hasn't drunk from postmodernism's poisoned cup; but why on earth would computer scientists be visiting this curse on a journal I subscribe to?

To those posters above tempted to give in to the siren song of self-referentiality, who might be thinking, "Hey, some of my CS classes are boring, maybe we need some of this radical 'postmodern' stuff to kick boring old CS in the pants," remember: computer science is very, very young. New ideas and techniques are thick on the ground in fields as diverse as graphics, systems, theory, AI, and software engineering. Literary critics eventually turned to postmodernism in part because it seemed like there was nothing left to say, and this postmodernism stuff, bullshit or not, was at least different. In computer science, we are still learning how to write a well-structured novel.

It would be nice if we also had something like free literary universes. I mean, you could write fiction which would add to an existing universe and its storylines.

Aside from fanfic with its dubious legal status and contention with "canon", there is one example of this very idea which Slashdot readers may be familiar with: the Cthulhu Mythos.

The Mythos was begun by H. P. Lovecraft, who encouraged his fans to write stories in his settings. (There was little audience for the horror-SF genre at the time, and every good story was a boon to its popularity.) After Lovecraft's death, and to the present day, followers have continued to write and publish stories featuring Lovecraft's strange gods and cosmic horrors.

Like more commercially produced shared settings such as Star Trek, the Mythos and associated tales have spawned movies, magazines, and even a roleplaying game.

Sad to say, Lovecraft died in obscurity and poverty, which does not say much for starting a freely expandable universe as a means of employment. Nonetheless, it has certainly been a success in terms of storytelling.

(Lovecraft was by no means the only author who has invited fans to write in his universe. Another, rather more recently, told his readers to go ahead and write stories in his universe -- and then rescinded the offer after a fan wrote a story that offended him! The author in question was Larry Niven; the universe was Known Space; the fan was Elf Sternberg; the story was "The Only Fair Game".)

From the writings of (the great) Elf Sternberg, comes the term "brace". It's used to mean "backing up one's state-of-mind in case of mishap to the original instance".

From one of his stories:

"You could have been killed. You're not braced. If you had gone headfirst into one of those rocks we wouldn't have you anymore."

Of course in that universe, cloning (replacements) is a non-issue.

Here it is.

I've been working on getting stuff like this online.

So far, I've gotten, Matthew Russo's zplet working with a CGI front-end.

Next on the list is jetty, though this will probably take a bit (lot) more work, as its not very polished at the moment.

Anyway...I put MY favorite Inform games (those that work with the z-machine interpreter) online at this location.

I just added the competition's zcode section as well - it's
here.

Have fun!

One note: the reason that the applet asks for read/write permission is so that you can save. Its a security risk for you, perhaps, but why live your life in fear?

Don't. They got progressively worse with each book.

What the original poster only gave subtle reference to: You might be interested in some* of this man's spun-off short stories.

* very strong emphasis on some.

That's the impression I get, anyway. This is a story? This is something that matters? C'mon.

If you don't know who Sokal are, you should read up.

Added point, anyone interested in wireless security should read this page.

SealBeater

...has alot more info on the security issues concerning this protocol.

The Unofficial 802.11 Security Web Page

I used a smaller ISP (drizzle ) in Seattle, and although you can get whatever ISP you want, they do make it as difficult as hell. It can take a month to get everything working right. Drizzle has a person that works there whose job it is to deal with Qwest. If you get Qwest.net, and now MSN, it goes smoothly. If it wasnt for the fact that I know the technology, I know the business and that both of my brothers install their equipment, I would find it too much of a pain in the ass to bother. I forst got connected to drizzle through Covad DSL and they were much better to deal with. They treated DSL exactly like it was supposed to be treated: like a T1. You get your circuit and then you get your ISP. Qwest is the local loop provider. That's it, and I make sure they know it.

Must agree, Speakeasy is a great DSL provider, just as Drizzle is another one I recommend to cool people in Seattle who got burned by @Home.

And we should note that we'll all miss the Speakeasy cafe that burned down in that fire - luckily most of their servers were in another location so their network never dropped.

As we suffer through the dot com crashes, it's nice to see some of the good guys surviving.

-

-

See what happens when your morning is full of meetings? Sheesh...

Anyway, although now it's looking old and stale, I still consider the following paper of mine, which was published a few years ago, to be relevant to this topic (IOW, things haven't changed enough since then to make it irrelevant):

Examining the Validity of World-Wide Web Usage Statistics

Enjoy...

Hmm, I suppose this could be a Troll, but I'll bite (a little) anyway...

I for one wait for Jesus Christ to come back. How do I know He will come back? Because He told us He would.

Yet your faith, Anonymous Coward, is not strong enough to associate an identity with? Why, are you more concerned with earthly acceptance than divine acceptance? Bah... If you have faith, prove it by not hiding.

''