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i have some questions for these people.

how often does a spike of statistically significant magnitude occur? what magnitude do they require to deem it significant?

similarly, how many "false positives" have they had? how many major (and how do they define major?) events without a spike? how many significant spikes without an event?

was there a spike leading up to predictable events? the world series? the super bowl? the inauguration of king george?

conversely, was there a spike on a day in which nothing much at all happened?

finally, have they ever heard of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy? (although in this case i suppose it should be " pre hoc ergo propter hoc")

Did you ever see Fight Club? Remember the car company's formula for doing a recall or not? If the cost of settling a class-action suit would be less than the cost of the recall, then they don't do one. So, if they are never sued, they'd never even think about doing a recall.

It's a movie; it is not real. The circumstances in Fight Club are the sort that result in punitive damages. That's what punitive damages are for: they present an unlimited liability to prevent making a calous financial judgement about an ethical decision.

Attn MPAA/RIAA: You're WRONG and you're a GROTESQUELY UGLY FREAK.

Is it celebrated as public drunkenness day throughout the country? No.

Then why present it as a counterexample?

YOU FAIL AT EVERYTHING. QUIT AT LIFE.

Now when you Google "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys ", you get the French court system.

Bush submitted to congress exactly 3 reasons for going to war with Iraq:

1. Iraq posed a military threat to the US
2. War was necessary to enforce UN regulations
3. Iraq's support of terrorists

See his statement here.

I'd suggest a doubling delay time; start with a delay of 60 seconds -- a normal browser timeout-- after the fifth failure trying to load an image. If the picture doesn't load the next time, a two minute delay. Try again, four minutes. Probably cap it at 1024 minutes-- a little under a day, just because. In any case, such a delay would prevent a temporary /.ing from being only temporary, or prevent a 419er from making the problem go away by turning off his site for a day. On the other hand, it reduces load on a mistargetted site ~1000 fold, provided they don't have a similarly named image file.

Of course, it's only a question of time before some 419 site maker begin using the same tricks as p0rn sites do to prevent picture leeching (not work safe) from working, and hand back a 1x1 white bitmap to any off-site picture request. At which point, the Lad Vampire will need to check the next pocket.

[With interleaved decoder and coded content] it's even harder to tell what's content and what's not!

As I've said, source code in any programming language that uses US-ASCII encoding will have bit 7 clear throughout. This is a strong correlation in bit 7, a method of framing which I think any future scholar would have little or no trouble discovering.

I'm going to pretend your source of insight for this conversation isn't a bad science fiction movie.

I'm going to pretend that a lot of engineers working on breakthrough technology didn't receive inspiration from speculative fiction. Without the Dick Tracy comics, for instance, do you think anybody would have bothered trying to squeeze a PDA into a wristwatch form factor?

If you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, why don't you stop talking?

Then please explain why you feel that I don't know what the intercourse I'm talking about. I am willing to learn.

Indeed. It reminds me of the Chris Rock bit, "What do you want, a cookie?". It's what you're SUPPOSED to do.

There are a number of different dialects of English, and I'm expect there's one where both gray and colour are correct. [hint Scotland]

You're suffering from an almost autistic lack of ability to perceive that somethings may be different for other people than they are for yourself.

I hate this kind of "logic."

Oh drats! You found us out! Me and ol' George's academic staff are in on it together! Shhhh! Tell noone!

You discontinue your shallow analysis at the point at which the US installed missiles in Turkey. Thus, obviously in your analysis this is the cause - you refuse to consider any other factors (the conduct of the Soviet Union following WWII, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the massacare of millions of innocent Germans, Kruschev's posturing, etc). If you start your account of history with an action by one party, by your account everything is a result of that action. But this is only because you are distorting the truth.

I also neglected to consider the position of Uranus and all its sattelites at the time, the edicts of King Richard the 1st and the fashion sense of Katarina The Great. The specific question we were discussing was Cuban Missile Crisis. Not what Stalin ate for breakfast on May the 7th in 1934. If the question was "who was the first to draw blood, the USSR or the West" the answer is ... the West. You see, when the 1918 Bolshevik Revolution against the Tzar and his buddies occured with the subsequent civil war, the USA (and others, including Canada - then still under British command) sent (using an excuse of "rescuing" Czech troops) an expeditionary force to "limit" the Bolsheviks in the East and if possible to put them down. The US troops actually fought the Red Army. On Russian soil. Using bullets too. Real ones. People got killed dead. There is your "first punch". Since you asked, I am only pleased to oblidge. And you are welcome!

[pathetic attempts at ridicule of the GWU research snipped]

Your credentials in this regard as compared to the GWU researchers are nil. Zippo. Nada. You are only making yourself look more idiotic by trying to refute them. If you have problems with that research, email the contact on that page, I am sure as soon as you provide appropriate historical evidence, they will update their findings in your favor. Until then, you just make me laugh.

I'm interested to know - which parts do you think were fabrications?

The parts dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis being percipitated by the Berlin Wall for example.

That the USSR slaughtered millions of innocent Germans after WWII in an act of "retributive justice" (this is thoroughly documented - I suggest you look up the words "Berlin Airlift" for starters)?

This is quite a study in hipocrisy here. Perheaps you never heard of bombing of Dresden? As to USSR slaughtering "millions of innocent Germans" neither you or I have any right to pass any sort of moral judgement on a nation who lost over 20 million people to the German Army, an army which commited unspeakable acts of evil against truly innocent (as in not complicit in Hitler's plan) civilians in their campaign. Having said that, I never heard of any mass murder of German civilians after the WWII by the USSR and the Berlin Airlift was due to isolation of West Berlin geographically within East Germany, who in an escalation of tit-for-tat bravado, refused passage to trains from West Germany. Perheaps you will be so kind as to provide some info on this "retributive justice" phenomenon with millions of dead German civilians everywhere.

That the USSR erected the Berlin Wall (I suggest you pay a visit to reality for that one)?

Actually, it was East Germany who asked for and got the wall.

That Kruschev did not wish to expand control of the USSR?

Now this is pretty funny. Khrustchev?! How about this. Something about "peaceful coexistence", visits to the USA etc.

E2 to the rescue:

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Cussing%20in% 20Hindi

There is a big difference between what otaku think of as anime and what Americans think of as cartoons.

There is not much difference between what Americans think of as cartoons and what Japanese think of as anime - ever been to Japan?

Win9x uses HW memory protection?

Whether the ions in the solar wind worked as an attractive force towards the rest of the galaxy would depend on whether they had enough energy to move out that far. If they had enough energy, then at least that would give me an opening to advocate pushing gravity again, which by the way is also a cool thing to simulate on a zBox.

Horses and donkeys, of course, can cross-breed to create mules. I recall from one college class (physical anthropology) a discussion about the fact that, in principle, humans and chimps could also cross-breed, though of course the offspring would (like a mule) be sterile. As discussed here: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=152885 2&lastnode_id=1694132 the number of chromosomes don't necessarily need to be the same, as long as the chromosomes are "homologous" and the male has the fewer number of chromosomes. So in theory we could make a human chimera via simple cross-breeding.

From the "everything2.com" article referenced above:

"liger = male lion + female tiger
tigon or tiglon = male tiger + female lion

mule = male donkey + female horse
hinny = male horse + female donkey (jenny)

zorse = zebra + horse
zonkey or zebrass = zebra + donkey (ass)
cama = camel + llama
catalo or beefalo = buffalo + cattle
yakalo = yak + buffalo
wholphin = whale + dolphin (specifically a false killer whale and a bottlenose dolphin)

Toast of Botswana = goat + sheep
Obviously this deserves some clarification. While a sheep can be impregnated by a goat, the kid/lamb is always stillborn... except in one case in the early 1990s. This animal was nicknamed the Toast of Botswana. Since it was the only one ever known to have lived, no other name has been given to a goat/sheep combination."

When I got "promoted" from network administrator to project manager. A Network Administrator's Guide to Project Management

It's people like you that succumb to number three.

is this a new Amiga in name only? Or is it somehow compatible with all the old software from the 80's? Or.. what's the connection with this new Amiga and the classic Amigas?

Naaw, this appears to have picked up alot of the legacy stuff from the original Amiga (as has been discussed here)...as well as much of what became lameness as it became outdated. Still no protected memory (which I find outlandish -- this is why I found MacOS pre 10 so useless). I think this was left out so that it would run legacy software, but I'm not 100% sure. It still uses MUI, which I find to be ugly (even though I was an early adopter and actually bought it back in the day). The interface is still very Amiga, and I'm guessing that the functionality of the interface is still Amiga (left button for clicking and right button for pulldown menus). I think that future revisions will also get Arexx, a scripting language based on IBM's Rexx. Probably kept AmigaDOS too, which was similar to a Unix shell.

Don't get me wrong, I was a total Amiga fanboy back in the day...and I'm still nostalgic about the platform, but from the reivew, it seems like too little too late. IMO, the Amiga saw its end of life when 24-bit graphics cards for Wintel were less than $100. At that point, Amiga's AGA graphics (imo, the strongest part of the system) were insufficent to compete in the desktop arena. It could do 8-bit graphics, albeit horribly slowly, whereas even the cheapest Wintel cards could do 8-bit farily quickly. The later AGA Amigas could display 18-bit images using HAM8 mode (Hold and Modify). This was essentially a pallete shifting hack to allow more colors to be displayed at once.

The Amiga was a really neat platform for its day -- but after reading that article, it really clings to the original AmigaOS (the cool stuff as well as the flaws). I'm just not sure what it will bring to the table for anyone -- especially without protected memory.

If you are under 21, you have all the time in the world to pickup a musical instrument.

In fact, it's not as much the people under 21 who are playing but rather the people under 21 who are listening. Most establishments in my area where people of any age play live music are considered bars, and independent bands can't afford to get on commercial radio, so how would kids in high school learn that local indie bands exist? The way to reduce the RIAA's power to buy laws is to get the teen-age masses to stop buying its members' records; how can we go about doing this?

I do know how to read music - took some music composition in college

Yes, we have no original melodies. I used to write music; then I read about Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976), which held that subconsciously copying something you heard a decade ago is infringement. When were you studying music in college? Was it before Bright Tunes and other judicial decisions that expanded the scope of what is considered misappropriation of melody? Is it even possible to create an original melody anymore?

"There's a message here for anybody running an affiliate program; you need to monitor what the third parties are doing," she said. "If you are using a business model that recruits others, you are strictly liable for the practices of those third parties. It's not just the people who push the button. It's the business that provides the financial incentive. The law is clear and strict."

So how does this apply to the poor company that gets Joe-jobbed?
I see this a boon to those that practice that form of spam.

B.

Socrates ranked democracy as the second worst form of government, second only to tyranny, because the masses are stupid, easily swayed, easily bribed. Western political philosophy is based on his ideas and rhetoric. For example, the majority of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, despite multiple investigations, American-led, Bush-led, British-led and UN-led. Are you going to go against the majority? Does that make you an elitist, or an oligarch? According to the ideology of a democracy, whatever the majority decides, goes. Constitutions, a relatively recent invention, won't help, the masses will just amend it to their will.

Secular humanism SOMETIMES works, but you have that giant eyesore of an exception (yes, Godwin's law interrupts here), and would Communism's failings count as well?

I'm not saying all theocratic governments are sane. Obviously not. Iran has issues applying greater democratic freedoms to their government, which at the moment gives the clerics an unequal balance of power. The Taliban's government was full of problems as well. A theocracy simply means a state religion. It doesn't exclude democratic ideas within it though. Greece therefore is a theocracy, but I don't hear a lot of criticism of them. Comparing one theocratic government to another is only going to be moral relativism in the end.

I don't think democrats (small 'd') have the authority to claim their system is the best, when it seems morally blind. What about when two democracies engage in war with one another, with the majority of each supporting it?

That's not to say I don't support democracy and democratic reform. Many modern theocrats of today want democracy within their system as well. Go read the Constitution of Iran sometime. Also, look at the original Islamic state, that was a democratic theocracy.

Socrates ranked democracy as the second worst form of government, second only to tyranny, because the masses are stupid, easily swayed, easily bribed. Western political philosophy is based on his ideas and rhetoric. For example, the majority of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, despite multiple investigations, American-led, Bush-led, British-led and UN-led. Are you going to go against the majority? Does that make you an elitist, or an oligarch? According to the ideology of a democracy, whatever the majority decides, goes. Constitutions, a relatively recent invention, won't help, the masses will just amend it to their will.

Secular humanism SOMETIMES works, but you have that giant eyesore of an exception (yes, Godwin's law interrupts here), and would Communism's failings count as well?

I'm not saying all theocratic governments are sane. Obviously not. Iran has issues applying greater democratic freedoms to their government, which at the moment gives the clerics an unequal balance of power. The Taliban's government was full of problems as well. A theocracy simply means a state religion. It doesn't exclude democratic ideas within it though. Greece therefore is a theocracy, but I don't hear a lot of criticism of them. Comparing one theocratic government to another is only going to be moral relativism in the end.

I don't think democrats (small 'd') have the authority to claim their system is the best, when it seems morally blind. What about when two democracies engage in war with one another, with the majority of each supporting it?

That's not to say I don't support democracy and democratic reform. Many modern theocrats of today want democracy within their system as well. Go read the Constitution of Iran sometime. Also, look at the original Islamic state, that was a democratic theocracy.

Islam doesn't NEED instructions on how to act civilized.

Colombia is 95% Catholic, yet they have a massive, massive drug problem. And they have terrorism too. Should I blame Christianity? How come Cocaine comes from the Catholic countries anyway? You won't see Iran manufacturing it anytime soon.

The believers of Islam don't rape 72 virgins in heaven either. The virgins are only a minor perk of Paradise anyway.

Fatwas aren't issued to anyone who questions Islam, but the Ayatollah of Iran said Salman Rushdie should be killed for purposely insulting the religion. That was his view, and other countries didn't second him.

Female genital mutilation is not an Islamic thing. It's an African thing. African Pagans still do it, and so do some African and Egyptian Christians.

You remember people dancing in the street? Iran and many other Muslim countries held candlelight vigils for the 9/11 victims. There was TONS of condemnations of terrorism from all over the globe and Islamic groups issue condemnations very often.

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=109089

You suck. http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=831460

Oh yes, did I mention it's more fun as well?

Go watch The Revolution will not be televised and tell me what you think. Did he resign or was he thrown out of office by a coup? He doesn't look like such a bad man to me, and his critics look like elitist snobs. I even found a review.

Now, anywhere else on the web, you'd expect that the link in there would point to further information on that specific criticism of Wikipedia. But, instead it points to a page defining the term "critic"! How useless is that?

First, I myself said that correlation does not imply causation. Don't try to beat me over the head with my own words. Second, the Japanese who couldn't handle the carb-rich diet probably didn't have too many offspring. Third, they eatlots of rice, but they don't tend to be such pigs and eat both less and slower than we americans.

Next, let us examine your statement about athletes. Yes, they eat carbs. However, they have two things giong for them that others do not. First, they are very active, which as you should know increases your metabolic rate. Second, they're not eating that kind of food all the time, unless they're trying to gain weight. Carbo loading is used to provide large amounts of energy for physical activity.

Now, the worst thing you can do to yourself is mix lots of carbs and fat. Fat is more energy dense by volume than carbs, and carbs will make sure that your body wants to store fat - you know, the thing it stops doing during ketosis. Japanese food is usually pretty low fat and the portions are not excessively large.

Italian cuisine is anything but healthy. It is high in both fat and carbs and you traditionally see a lot of both heart disease and obesity in the italian population. It's not so obvious in America now because just about everyone is fat. The link between carbohydrates is well known; for example read this excerpt from a writeup I did for Everything2:

As far back as 1825, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in "The Physiology of Taste" that "floury and feculent substances which man makes the prime ingredients of his daily nourishment" were responsible for obesity -- A conclusion he came to after listening to various "stout parties" wax lyrical on the subjects of bread, rice, and potatoes. Ancel Keys, a University of Minnesota physician will back Jean up on this. In a study of Neapolitans ate a little lean meat once or twice a week, and subsisted mainly on bread and pasta. He wrote that "There was no evidence of nutritional deficiency, but the working-class women were fat."
How the government fattened America

As for the healthiness of the Atkins diet, Dr. Atkins lived for 72 years with a congenital heart defect and died because he slipped on ice and hit his head. He was on his own diet. There are two lessons here: It is clearly possible to be healthy when on the Atkins diet, and you should salt a walk if you're old and it's icy.

All carbs and no fat is a whole lot more dangerous than all fat (and protein, and fiber) and no carbs.

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=etc.

Seems like a flawed analogy to me. Quantum physics has actually been very good for producing accurate predictions for experiments. The problem has not been an inability to get the right answer but rather that some questions, like how classical features emerge from quantum mechanics, are so complex that it's just taken a long time to figure out what quantum theory predicts. That's a completely different situation than the case of astronomy and epicycles, where they had to make ad hoc additions to the theory to agree with data. This new work by Zurek is not adding anything to quantum theory, just working out some answers to complex questions using our existing theory.

From article summary: Interesting times, indeed.

"May you live in interesting times"! Aha! I get it! It's a clever ancient Chinese proverb with a double-meaning!

Wait - no it isn't.

Brought to you by the Slashdot FactCheck 2004 coalition - preventing inaccuracy before it starts!

Standing
on a mountaintop in northern Siberia under the rapidly descending bulk
of asteroid McAlmont, with a calculating expression and a baseball bat

Everything2 is not without it's uses. Due to the apparently much less strict standards they hold things to (or don't), there are some damn funny articles there that would never survive on Wikipedia.

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=594442 &lastnode_id=124
How to turn your Hyundai Excel into a race car.

> So, you poor Wikipedians, finish your sorry library project and create something much more unique.

I don't know... I decided to take a quick look at everything2 because I had not before, and wikipedia impresses me every time I check it out. I happen to come from Marion, OH, home of Warren G. Harding. (Sure, the rest of the planet thinks the guy was a terrible president but in Marion he's a home town boy and worshipped!) Anyways, I looked him up on both. I have to say that the Wikipedia Article looks much nicer than the the Everything2 article, contains more info, links, etc... I'd be happy to see a counter-example though!

Wiki this, Wiki that, I still believe that Everything2 is the better concept, more fun and is suffering from less editorial wrangling. It's also a much more fun place to hang out, has more off beat entries and rewards its users for good content.

Oh yes, did I mention that it also has a "sumbit" button?

So, you poor Wikipedians, finish your sorry library project and create something much more unique.

Cheers, and happy impeaching of Bush.

the heartbreaking story of the boy with just a burlap sack for a body. It's a Christmas classic. (It is not to be confused with what is probably the saddest thing ever, which probably is.)

More seriously: I'm still most impressed by the eight new parts in the six-month-old. It's like a flawless victory in a game of Operation, without the annoying buzzer sound!

the heartbreaking story of the boy with just a burlap sack for a body. It's a Christmas classic. (It is not to be confused with what is probably the saddest thing ever, which probably is.)

More seriously: I'm still most impressed by the eight new parts in the six-month-old. It's like a flawless victory in a game of Operation, without the annoying buzzer sound!

The 'text' part of reading should stay in 2D land, but think about the visual feedback of flipping a page, or seeing how thick the side of the book is.

What book? There is no book! There is no page, either!

See, that's the thing -- usually when somebody comes up with a 3D interface, they try to make it similar to some real-world object (e.g. books or rooms or radios). But the real question is, is that metaphor useful? Why should the text I'm reading be presented as if it's a book? In a computer, what do pages mean?

The real innovation in computer interfaces will come when we realize we aren't trying to interact with things, we're trying to interact with information. Books are not information; they're just containers for it -- and suboptimal ones at that. Why would you want to interact with a virtual book when there's an infinite number of other ways that are likely to be better?

Take the example of a web "page." It's not (usually) just a page, it's a complete group of thoughts. I don't need to see how "thick" it is to know how long it is; the metaphor of the shrinking scrollbar is more useful. Also, with a normal book you can only go forwards or backwards; with hypertext you can go in any direction. As far as a really good interface for information goes, look at the "Chaos" feature of Everything2. See how it uses the idea of "near" to group nodes of information? Now, imagine that each node is a star, and the group of nodes as a constellation in the galaxy of human knowledge. Now, imagine using an interface that works sort of like Celestia to navigate that galaxy. Doesn't that sound like a better metaphor than a book?

A book is linear, but information (which is what a book is designed to convey, right?) is a graph. Wouldn't a representation using a graph be better than a linear one?

Ok, first, Minimo is a red herring. I wasn't talking about embedded browsers. I honestly have no idea if it's any good, though it's likely if nothing else it's too new to be good. And for all I know, Opera may always be the best in that arena.

"You mention several different gesture packages as "innovation" even though it came after Opera's. That's not innovation. That's confusion."

This is a matter of taste. What you call confusion I call choice. There is an extension for mouse gestures like those in Opera, or you can use, for example, pie menus. I like the latter a bit better, though both are nice. It is a nice thing to have a range of options.

"Bayesian filtering was not invented nor implemented first by Mozilla. By the way, I heard that Mozilla's filtering isn't really Bayesian, but who cares, as long as we can use buzzwords, eh?"

My point was that it was implemented in Mozilla before the any other popular desktop mail client I was aware of, including the integrated mail client in Opera. As to whether it's Baysian, its behavior would seem consistent with being Baysian, but it would be difficult to be sure (though you could look at the source). But I don't really care if it's "Baysian", just that it does a pretty good job for me, which made it an advantage of Mozilla.

I switched from using my paid for version of Opera 6.x over to Mozilla, back before Opera 7 was released. That's about all I can tell you about when I switched. As for why: For a few months I used each and sort of alternated. I found Mozilla seemed a little slower (but not terribly) but pages rendered and behaved properly in Mozilla more often. That was really the main reason I switched. At the time my impression was that Mozilla had a similar feature set with more choice, and it looked to me like they'd be adding features more quickly. It was quite a while ago and I didn't take notes or anything, so I really couldn't tell you the specifics of what features it was I was interested in at the time.

When Opera 7 came out, I considered switching back again, and I tried out the ad supported version. I found the features fairly comparable, though I recall that search customization and the password manager seemed to be less well documented, which I found annoying. But ultimately it was the fact that I couldn't see putting up with banner ads or paying the money to have a product comperable to the free one.

This all comes down to a lot of subjective judgements. I think which you choose is a function of a lot of things. It has to do with which features you prize, how much you value choice in features, how much disposable income you can devote to purchasing software (or how much you dislike banner ads), and a host of other things. I found that Mozilla fit the things that I wanted as well or better for a lower price. I can easily see people who prize some of the unique usability features of Opera more than I do, and who have money to spend on a web browser, choosing Opera. Again, that's why I think it will continue to have a niche market but never become dominant, in a situation much analogous to Macs.

I keep hoping someday, someone, somewhere will really bring all these EULA's that we are all subjected to each and everytime we install something, under a microscope and start really questioning the legality of said EULA's.

Guess what? That someone is you. In a very real sense, every time you agree to a EULA by clicking that button, you are establishing a contract. This has been tried in court and supported. If you're in the USA, unless you happen to be in Louisana, you're covered under the Uniform Commercial Code. You gain a benefit (software), the other person gains a benefit (advertises to you), there's a written statement to the terms (EULA), and both parties agree. Hell, it's a contract.

There's a problem here, yes, and that problem is you. Read your EULAs and refuse to install software whose EULA you disagree with. Refuse to install software whose EULA is too long for you to read. Another poster joked about the length of the GPL. I wouldn't joke. If those terms are put before you and you must accept them before you can use the software, you are bound by that contract. Have you honestly read the GPL? Any EULA?

No? Fine. But ignorance does not remove your contractual obligation.

Technically, the holiday is called (chet) (nun) (vav) (kaf) (hay) in Hebrew (see the Hebrew alphabet for info on how to write the letters). Hannukah, Hanukkah, Chanukah, Chanuka, etc., are all transliterations. The first letter is pronounced like a guttural H that is usually written "ch" in German and Welsh.

Any Middle Eastern or Asian language (or any language not written in ASCII-friendly letters, for that matter) has a whole bunch of transliteration methods. It's up to each writer/editor to pick one and stay with it.

Well, Im not surprised either that the average blogger is rather boring, even with Antarctica as the setting. My favorite Antarctic blogger, or rather, noder, is iceowl. Nothing like E2 when it comes to finding good writers.

Inverse Impulse Response? Forget about triangulation, you could easily place a DSP in a camera to figure out where the sound came from and and track it's source.

(Shamelesly copied from my writeup at everything2.com: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=167965 9)

There is a very simple way to avoid exploitation while using Windows Update.

If on broadband (Cable modem or DSL), buy a hardware firewall.
Most Internet sharing devices have built-in firewalls that act as one-way doors to the Internet. You can go out to the net, but people on the net can't get back in. For less than $100.00 (Canadian, one time) you can get better protection than any "software firewall" can provide, and without renewing subscription costs. Even for a single computer, it's well worth the investment.

If on dial-up, turn on the built-in Internet Connection Firewall on your dial-up connection.
Windows XP as first released comes with a silent firewall program already installed. Make sure you turn it on! Sadly, AOL dial-up users can't use it.

(Yes, I read the PDF file that describes how XP SP1 doesn't have a firewall turned on by default. If I sell you a lock and you don't lock it before someone steals your stuff, you can't sue me for selling you a defective lock!)

Use Windows Update Only until it says it's done.
Don't do any production work, don't check e-mail, don't surf any other web sites, until Windows Update tells you that you don't need any more critical updates.

That's it, really. Get behind some kind of firewall and patch your system first. After that, start using the tools included in Windows XP, such as Automatic Updates, to let the system keep itself updated.

Other routine precauctions include: Use the hardware firewall at all times, create a Limited User account for yourself and do your production work there, stick with applications and devices Designed for Windows XP, and (as The Register is fond of saying) wear a regulation tinfoil hat.

Someone has already written an Everything2 writeup on this.

And someone else has marked it for destruction...

Gygax started making noise about people deviating from the rules quite a while before 2nd Ed. He even went so far as to claim that anyone who modified the rules at all was no longer playing Dungeons & Dragons. I can't find the exact cite, but I think this paragraph from A Brief History of Roleplaying Games hints at what I'm talking about:

[In 1974] the combination of rules scarcity and individual creativity resulted in many campaigns being very different from what Arneson and Gygax may have intended. Some players, such as Steve Marsh, got into contact with Gygax and the TSR staff, and endeavored to get clarifications. To the extent they were able, Gygax and Arneson offered their opinions. Ultimately, however, games and campaigns developed that were as idiosyncratic as the players and referees themselves. A brisk business was done on convention panels trying to resolve this or that aspect of the rules, but the cat was out of the bag. Had TSR had the position of respectability of Wargames Research Group in Great Britain, it might have been able to issue definitive rulings about How to Play. But this was not to be, at least initially, and it seems from articles and opinions printed at the time that this question vexed Gygax severely. He would attempt to revisit it later, with the development of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D).

Please remember that the IRA that fought in the War of Independence is not the same organisation as the Provisional IRA that has conducted a terrorist campaign in Northern Ireland in recent years. So it's unfair to say that "the British government would have us think that your grandfather was a terrorist". Most people in the UK are fully aware of the appalling acts committed in our name in Ireland, and few (apart from a few rabid Unionists) would say that the Republican movement of the time didn't have a legitimate cause. The provos are an entirely different matter, and one shouldn't be confused with the other.

As for the "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, others have done a better job than I could of that.