Crime is everywhere, yet we don't have ID and papers check points on every street to stop criminal activities. But on the net there are tons of virtual id checkpoints and some people won't stand for it.
Yes but in the real world we have faces. On the internet we do not. In order to have a comparable level of security the internet may have to have these checkpoints because it lacks fundamental identification methods like facial recognition.
P.S. Censorship is sometimes a good thing. Read any history book on WWII and find out how control of important information saved hundreds and thousands of lives.
P.P.S. Copyright law is currently protecting a lot of free software so its occasionally useful too.
This sounds a lot like current security methods for secure installations like large banks. The basic idea is that someone will be able to get into your secure site if they're determined enough. There is always a security hole somewhere so getting in is the (relatively) easy part. You break in, you snoop, you go for the goodies. But you can't get out. Secure installations are designed to prevent crooks from leaving not from entering. They are traps. According to security individuals this is a much more efficient method of security because once you catch the crook you can find out how he got in and fix/monitor the hole.
Is this "entrapment"? Not in the legal sense. Legal entrapment would be hiring the "hacker" to break into your honeypot. Or saying, "I bet you can't break into this box" or such. This is not the case, though. If you simply have a honeypot and the "hacker" is breaking in uninvited this is not entrapment in the legal sense.
The problem is that this technique won't work as well online. The "hacker" can always just hang up and he's gone no matter how tight your e-trap. It may, however, allow you to flag hackers and find security holes much more quickly, so its still worth a try.
I believe the reasoning that was established in the council meeting was that Sauron had too many resources. Good was to badly outnumbered by evil. Their only option was try to sneak the ring into Mordor and destroy it because a frontal assault would have been crushed. The Fellowship was an eminently capable group although I don't understand why they didn't send an elf-lord instead of Legolas.
So the new question is why wasn't the ring given to a group of well-trained elven commandos to sneak it into Mordor instead of a group of hobbits.
If they do put together a player for linux can they please use a better UI? I'm sorry but I really can't stand the way quicktime for windows looks. The thumbwheel for volume, the pull down thing, its so anti-intuitive. I'd much rather have a simple easy interface that isn't so cluttered and silly.
The question is did Mattel get the rights to the code after the settlement, or did the court rule Mattel has always had rights to the code. If they simply recieved the rights to the code at the time of settlement then their screwed because it was already GPLed. If they always had the rights to the code, and the case just confirmed it, then the code was GPLed illegally. The license is invalid and Mattel owns all the code, period.
I consider this to a bad omen for the results of the trial. If Judge Jackson was going to issue any ground-breaking and lasting changes which would truly effect Microsoft's monopoly power, he wouldn't be acting so chummy with MS. My guess is that MS is going to pay a big fine and have more government scrutiny with nothing that will truly solve the MS problem.
Do you really think there would still be a settlement discussion if MS was going to be broken up some how? I think the best that we can hope for is requirements allowing application interoperability and maybe openning a few APIs. Sooner or later MS will stop doing what they're supposed to again, but by that time no one will care.
Good joke, but I think some people actually really believe this. This kind of elitist, I-don't-need-no-instruction-manual, attitude is what is keeping linux off of the average users desktop. Wow, some people actually don't want to have to read the code to figure things out.:)
I agree and I personally didn't care for much of Spacey's performance in the movie. I found his performance at the beginning of the movie to be wooden and 2 dimensional. Only after he started getting wierd does his character seem to have any life to him at all. Maybe he did it on purpose, maybe not, the fact is I really didn't like it. It was nowhere near as good as his performance in The Usual Suspects.
Granted though, American Beauty deserved the award much more than Shakespeare in Love did last year. I was insulted when it won best picture. If I was a WWII vet I would have actively boycotted the Oscars. Saving Private Ryan was such an incredible film. I left there with a whole new respect for my grandparents generation. I mean the movie gave veterans flashbacks when they saw it... SiL was just a good movie in comparison and thats not a good enough reason to give it the Oscar.
Last time I checked the motto of every successful game company was publish or perish. You can't make money with something until its on store shelves.
Now how long has diakatana been in development? I could see Unreal taking 4 years, they had to develop their own engine (and wait for hardware to be good enough to run it). Half-life was similar. They did a ton of work on the quake engine, running characters off bone structure, adding AI, etc. What's Daikatana doing to justify the long wait? Its hard for me to believe that its graphics are going to beat QIII since it has to be using an older engine. Its hard for me to believe its gameplay is going to beat Half-life, or Valve's upcoming TF game for multiplayer. So in short its most likely going to come out too little too late.
This is perhaps one of the stupidest ideas I have ever heard. Lets design a piece of potentially lethal military equipment through the internet. That way there's no security and no way to provide it. In fact you probably can't tell if the other guys on your team are working for the CIA, the Iraqi's, or Erols internet.
Not only that, but in the end practically anyone can get the final design and build it if they have the resources. That means any third world dictator can make one. And, since most third world dictators are in power because the military supports them, they actually have R&D budgets. Hussein payed the greatest ballistic scientist of this century to develop a gun capable of shooting things to orbit. He would have succeeded if Masad hadn't killed the scientist and the US hadn't destroyed his cannon in the Gulf War before it was assembled.
Also, since the plans are freely broadcast you can pinpoint all the weaknesses of the system before if sees combat. You are now able to pick and choose the best weapons to kill it and its operator...
Information is power and power misused kills. Sometimes secrecy and censorship is necessary not to oppress the masses but to protect them from things which are far worse than lack of speech. Things like lack of life.
Right, sounds like this is simply an excuse to try to sell more D&D. The problem is that as roleplaying goes D&D sucks. The system is bulky for anything except dungeon crawls, slow, unrealistic, etc., etc. This is coupled with the fact that it used a class-based character creation system. The reason I can't bear to play anymore is that its damn near impossible to come up with a D&D character thats not 2 dimensional. If they fix all the problems then maybe I'll think about buying it. To problem is that I can prolly do something better with GURPS or even create my own gaming system that will work better than D&D.
First, humans are not going to be replaced by thinking machines any time soon. Modern computers are not much smarter than insects or earthworms. We've just taught them to do interesting things with what they have. Even if computers keep doubling in speed every year, its going to a while before they are anywhere near sentience. Last time I looked at numbers a single human brain could kick the crap out of every computer on the planet combined in shear processing power. I'm not sure if this is still true or not, but you get my point. We're smarter than we look.
Someone is bound to reply that humans only use 5% of our brainpower or some such crap. The truth, of course, is that we only use 5% of our brains for conscious thought. We're using the rest of it for other things like our senses, reflexes, motor control, memory, etc. I mean, can you imagine how much processor power it must take to run the sense of touch in real time? All those microscopic nerve receptors per square inch all over your body... Think about it.
If something is going to come along and wipe us out we probably have only to look at our nearest neighbor to see what they look like. Humans have the power to basically destroy all life on this planet. And we're really not quite bright enough to use it wisely. We have a real tendency to change things and "make them better" before we really understand what they were in the first place. Take the Kissimee (sp?) River in Florida, it was really twisty so some civil engineers straightened it for better boat traffic. By doing so they killed over 90% of the rivers indigenous life, turns out the twists acted as a natural scrubbing system to keep the river healthy. Oops.
Plus we have this lovely moral slide our society is on. Lots of people are saying that old pre-industrial religious codes of morality are obsolete. They may have a point, today's world looks little like the world of, say, 1st century Israel. We have industrial societies not agrarian ones. But these same people are also missing some things. One, they are removing moral codes, not replacing them with more relevant ones. This is creating societies devoid of rules of conduct. Such societies tend to fall rather frequently. Look at, say, most 19th century utopian movements for examples. Or the current problems in Russia. Two, human nature hasn't changed. We are basically the same people who committed the attrocities from the past. 50 years ago humans committed the Holocaust, before that it was the bloodyness of the Reign of Terror, the Crusades, etc. If I knew some Asian and African examples I would use them too. Sure we've become more sophisticated, but we haven't genetically changed at all. These "old" rules are what worked for us back then, and at least the spirit and philosophy of them should work for us now even if the specifics need a little updating.
So what happens if the overall amoral trend continues. Well, as I said before, without morals to self-regulate a society, the society tends to collapse. The problem is today we have a global society. If an important part goes it has the possibility to take the rest of us with it. Insert chances for horrible military confrontation/nuclear onslaught here.
The point of this tirade? Don't get cocky, at their height the Romans ruled all of the known ancient world. But they didn't need computers to come along an kill them, they did it themselves. It just took them a while.
Actually some games (like starcraft) are slow in releasing demos. In fact the demo for starcraft didn't come out until well into the game's release. I still downloaded and played it, mostly because all the levels and storylines were new (the demo was set as a prequel). However, depending how much was gutted out of the original game the demo may not be worth the time to download.
I got a warez copy of starcraft to see if it was any good. I liked it so I went out and bought a copy of starcraft/broodwar battle chest. I know some other people who use warez like this too.
The question is: Are they publicly misrepresenting these sites? If you simply get a "this site has been blocked" message (without a reason why) then this is not a public misrepresentation is it? You imply something but implications do not hold up in court well. The misrepresentation is in a database that is deliberately encrypted so that the public can't see it.
Harm in the legal sense must be monetarily quantifiable. You cannot award damages in units of prestige or esteem. Denying access to a free essay causes no real monetary harm.
Is what Mattel doing wrong? Yes. Is it libel? Maybe, its a grey area. Can you prove it in court? No. The burden of proof is upon you the accuser and I really, really doubt you can convince a judge of both public misrepresentation and some for of compensatible harm.
Is it just me or did that article sound like a press release straight from netscape with no effort put in to remove the mindless netscape drivel in order to create a balanced article? Whats Next?
Yahoo Reports
Microsoft Corp has announced that Bill Gates has ascended to the right hand of the God today. This ascendence took place at the Gazeebo of the Rock located in the heart of Microsoft's Redmond campus. Microsoft urges its shareholders not worry about the loss of the chairman since he will reportedly descend from heaven with the divine inspiration for all future MS products. First among these will be IE 6.0 which, in a stunning announcement from MS, is going to be released to beta testers in 24 days.
CEO Steve Ballmer replied to all questions about the new product at a press conference saying, "IE6 will be a new paradigm in web browsers. It will be a cadillac of browsers, large and roomy with many features." When asked about some of these magnificent features Ballmer replied by saying, "Ummm... well... It has a wonderful soothing blue screen which appears at regular intervals to calm the user and prevent them from over-working themselves. We will also be including that cute paperclip into IE because everyone loves it so much."
Confirmation of divine intervention in Microsoft's product line was made by Pope John Paul II as he stood on a pile of unrelated money. The Pope was reported as saying "Direct divine intervention is the only thing that could give Microsoft high quality products." The pope then returned to writing his next sermon on his Jesux workstation.
I think a libel case would be hard to prove. Are they listing these sites improperly? Yes. Is this wrong? Yes. Is this libel? Probably not. Lying is not libel. IANAL, but to me libel requires some level of slander or defamation. It would also have to be public. While wrong, mislisting a site on an internal database no one will ever see unless they unencrypt it is hard to construe as libel. Maybe if the user was told the site was blocked for an incorrect reason or something. The issue here is that the blockee would have to prove the blocker harmed them in some way with deliberate untruths. Thats pretty hard to do.
My question is, why encrypt a blocking file? There is no point to preventing the user from not seeing it. My guess is that they don't want their competitors to simply steal it, which is a valid concern considering the man hours necessary to compile this list. However incorrectly blocking sites is not the way to go about it.
Congrats to whoever submitted this story. Its the first YRO I have actually cared about in a while and to think I was going to start ignoring them completely. I stand corrected.
Ok this is off legos topic, but hopefully interesting none the less.
Here's a cool/interesting idea for a game. A huge networked first person shooter/strategy game. Instead of having stupid units controlled by crappy AI you have smart units run by people that a commander passes orders to via chain of command. Basically you'd have lots of quakers and a couple of commanders who can see the whole battlefield from their command posts.
Think about it, if the enemy knocks out the command post the commander has to stramble and that team loses coordination. The game isn't a predictable strategy since the players skill levels effect how well their units perform. A good weak unit can possibly beat a crappily played strong one.
I looked at some stuff on the new Team Fortress that Valve is putting out and I was wondering if it would be anything like this.
People have studied the effects of separation on identical twins. The thing is, with people at least, that identical twins living together react to each other and try top develop their own identities. Turns out that if you separate twins they develop into really remarkable similar people, right down to what they name their kids sometimes, but if you leave them together they don't. I suppose separation is genetic and non-separation is conditioning.
The first thing you have to remember about HS is that your teachers are Teachers. They have degrees in education not in CS or math or whatever it is they probably teach. Even the science/math/comp teachers are mostly users and not techies or programmers. This is how it was in my HS, I expect its how it is in yours.
Also, because of the budget drain computer systems usually cause, HS computers tend to be behind the times. My HS had 3 or 4 labs and it updated 1 per year. If you do the math that means at least one lab is using dated 3 year old equipment. It just costs too much to keep many systems current if you want a whole lab of them. A lab upgrade probably costs as much as 1 or 2 faculty members depending on their age, experience, and the current teachers contract.
However, linux has many advantages that a HS can exploit in some applications. Compiler access for teaching programming and the ability to run on legacy hardware to name only a couple. Remember while colleges only act poor, HS actually are poor. Free software is very attractive if the school thinks it can get away with it.
Strategies for talking about linux in HS. (1) Talk to someone who will listen, don't waste your breathe on an idiot. (2)Talk to science and math teachers, they have the most to gain from easy compiler access and free software. (3)Don't push StarOffice or productivity applications, because linux lags behind in them no matter what/. seems to believe. (4)Work your way up the ladder. Talk to a teacher first, then his department boss, etc. (5)Do not insult teachers or make them look stupid. If you question their authority or make them look stupid they will have to shut you down on principle. Don't do it. (6)Try leading on teachers. Ask your teachers about linux and try to get them to research it so they can teach it to you. It might work. (7) When in doubt, suck up.
While I agree with most of your reasoning the following is absolute crap.
The ship is pelted by fragments of rock. Also, the ship is conveniently NOT plated with any sort of protective layer thick enough to prevent cosmic pebbles from penetrating the ship, the magic SGI display, and neatly through someone's hand. No matter, we'll patch it up with our Magic Goo(tm).
Lets start with space rocks. How fast do things in space move? Answer: really goddamm fast. We are talking about huge velocities, thousands of mph. Those little chunks of rock make a bullet look downright pokey and some of them could potentially be the size of a spacecraft. Thats a lot of kinetic energy and a lot of momentum. The good side of it is that such rocks should be very far apart because space is big.
Now we also have the inherent problems of space flight. (1) Every lb. in space cost $. Lots of $. (2) Any armor that would stop even the tiny asteroids mentioned above would be incredibly heavy. (3) The heavier the ship, the longer the flight, the more supplies you need, etc, etc. This, coupled with the unlikelihood of getting hit by asteroids, makes armor a losing proposition.
So if you were going to build an interplanetary ship, how would you build it? (1) As little superfluous weight as possible, so the trip is faster or the payload of useful equipment is bigger. (2) No armor because it won't do any good anyway. (3) Magic goo/patches/spare parts to fix any problems with the ship.
Why? Because its more cost and weight effective. The big rocks will just kill you, period. The little rocks will fly straight through your ship like ice picks. They will trash anything they come in contact with, but they're small so they won't come into contact with much, especially considering the flimsy construction of a space vehicle optimized for low weight. So you replace whatever was damaged with spare parts, patch the small holes in the ship, keep going. Or you die if you can't. Its that simple.
Note: I have not seen the movie. I'm just giving good engineering logic. How many space probes have we lost to asteroids? None? So they shouldn't be considered a huge design issue then should they?
Also note: While this is definitely not as good a movie as 2001, I would wager many of the the same criticisms could be made about 2001 as were made about Mission to Mars.
I'm still betting that something proprietary will be required to run MS Office on Linux if it ever gets to linux. Why? Because then MS can charge you for Office and MDE (Microsoft Desktop Environment) which it would run on. This would give them added control over all kinds of things and if MDE is proprietary it allows them to cut out huge amount of their GPLed competition. It would basically be the windos racket all over again, only in the applications devision.
Slashdot Mirror
Crime is everywhere, yet we don't have ID and papers check points on every street to stop criminal activities. But on the net there are tons of virtual id checkpoints and some people won't stand for it.
Yes but in the real world we have faces. On the internet we do not. In order to have a comparable level of security the internet may have to have these checkpoints because it lacks fundamental identification methods like facial recognition.
P.S. Censorship is sometimes a good thing. Read any history book on WWII and find out how control of important information saved hundreds and thousands of lives.
P.P.S. Copyright law is currently protecting a lot of free software so its occasionally useful too.
This sounds a lot like current security methods for secure installations like large banks. The basic idea is that someone will be able to get into your secure site if they're determined enough. There is always a security hole somewhere so getting in is the (relatively) easy part. You break in, you snoop, you go for the goodies. But you can't get out. Secure installations are designed to prevent crooks from leaving not from entering. They are traps. According to security individuals this is a much more efficient method of security because once you catch the crook you can find out how he got in and fix/monitor the hole.
Is this "entrapment"? Not in the legal sense. Legal entrapment would be hiring the "hacker" to break into your honeypot. Or saying, "I bet you can't break into this box" or such. This is not the case, though. If you simply have a honeypot and the "hacker" is breaking in uninvited this is not entrapment in the legal sense.
The problem is that this technique won't work as well online. The "hacker" can always just hang up and he's gone no matter how tight your e-trap. It may, however, allow you to flag hackers and find security holes much more quickly, so its still worth a try.
I believe the reasoning that was established in the council meeting was that Sauron had too many resources. Good was to badly outnumbered by evil. Their only option was try to sneak the ring into Mordor and destroy it because a frontal assault would have been crushed. The Fellowship was an eminently capable group although I don't understand why they didn't send an elf-lord instead of Legolas.
So the new question is why wasn't the ring given to a group of well-trained elven commandos to sneak it into Mordor instead of a group of hobbits.
If they do put together a player for linux can they please use a better UI? I'm sorry but I really can't stand the way quicktime for windows looks. The thumbwheel for volume, the pull down thing, its so anti-intuitive. I'd much rather have a simple easy interface that isn't so cluttered and silly.
The question is did Mattel get the rights to the code after the settlement, or did the court rule Mattel has always had rights to the code. If they simply recieved the rights to the code at the time of settlement then their screwed because it was already GPLed. If they always had the rights to the code, and the case just confirmed it, then the code was GPLed illegally. The license is invalid and Mattel owns all the code, period.
I think I'll build my ship out of caverite thank you. It's as plausible and involves less math.
I consider this to a bad omen for the results of the trial. If Judge Jackson was going to issue any ground-breaking and lasting changes which would truly effect Microsoft's monopoly power, he wouldn't be acting so chummy with MS. My guess is that MS is going to pay a big fine and have more government scrutiny with nothing that will truly solve the MS problem.
Do you really think there would still be a settlement discussion if MS was going to be broken up some how? I think the best that we can hope for is requirements allowing application interoperability and maybe openning a few APIs. Sooner or later MS will stop doing what they're supposed to again, but by that time no one will care.
Good joke, but I think some people actually really believe this. This kind of elitist, I-don't-need-no-instruction-manual, attitude is what is keeping linux off of the average users desktop. Wow, some people actually don't want to have to read the code to figure things out. :)
I agree and I personally didn't care for much of Spacey's performance in the movie. I found his performance at the beginning of the movie to be wooden and 2 dimensional. Only after he started getting wierd does his character seem to have any life to him at all. Maybe he did it on purpose, maybe not, the fact is I really didn't like it. It was nowhere near as good as his performance in The Usual Suspects.
Granted though, American Beauty deserved the award much more than Shakespeare in Love did last year. I was insulted when it won best picture. If I was a WWII vet I would have actively boycotted the Oscars. Saving Private Ryan was such an incredible film. I left there with a whole new respect for my grandparents generation. I mean the movie gave veterans flashbacks when they saw it... SiL was just a good movie in comparison and thats not a good enough reason to give it the Oscar.
Last time I checked the motto of every successful game company was publish or perish. You can't make money with something until its on store shelves.
Now how long has diakatana been in development? I could see Unreal taking 4 years, they had to develop their own engine (and wait for hardware to be good enough to run it). Half-life was similar. They did a ton of work on the quake engine, running characters off bone structure, adding AI, etc. What's Daikatana doing to justify the long wait? Its hard for me to believe that its graphics are going to beat QIII since it has to be using an older engine. Its hard for me to believe its gameplay is going to beat Half-life, or Valve's upcoming TF game for multiplayer. So in short its most likely going to come out too little too late.
This is perhaps one of the stupidest ideas I have ever heard. Lets design a piece of potentially lethal military equipment through the internet. That way there's no security and no way to provide it. In fact you probably can't tell if the other guys on your team are working for the CIA, the Iraqi's, or Erols internet.
Not only that, but in the end practically anyone can get the final design and build it if they have the resources. That means any third world dictator can make one. And, since most third world dictators are in power because the military supports them, they actually have R&D budgets. Hussein payed the greatest ballistic scientist of this century to develop a gun capable of shooting things to orbit. He would have succeeded if Masad hadn't killed the scientist and the US hadn't destroyed his cannon in the Gulf War before it was assembled.
Also, since the plans are freely broadcast you can pinpoint all the weaknesses of the system before if sees combat. You are now able to pick and choose the best weapons to kill it and its operator...
Information is power and power misused kills. Sometimes secrecy and censorship is necessary not to oppress the masses but to protect them from things which are far worse than lack of speech. Things like lack of life.
We've got tanks that can roll over landmines, and the worst thing that happens to the crew is they wet their pants
Actually the only way an Abrams tank crew knows when they've hit a land mine is when they run off the track a couple seconds later.
Right, sounds like this is simply an excuse to try to sell more D&D. The problem is that as roleplaying goes D&D sucks. The system is bulky for anything except dungeon crawls, slow, unrealistic, etc., etc. This is coupled with the fact that it used a class-based character creation system. The reason I can't bear to play anymore is that its damn near impossible to come up with a D&D character thats not 2 dimensional. If they fix all the problems then maybe I'll think about buying it. To problem is that I can prolly do something better with GURPS or even create my own gaming system that will work better than D&D.
First, humans are not going to be replaced by thinking machines any time soon. Modern computers are not much smarter than insects or earthworms. We've just taught them to do interesting things with what they have. Even if computers keep doubling in speed every year, its going to a while before they are anywhere near sentience. Last time I looked at numbers a single human brain could kick the crap out of every computer on the planet combined in shear processing power. I'm not sure if this is still true or not, but you get my point. We're smarter than we look.
Someone is bound to reply that humans only use 5% of our brainpower or some such crap. The truth, of course, is that we only use 5% of our brains for conscious thought. We're using the rest of it for other things like our senses, reflexes, motor control, memory, etc. I mean, can you imagine how much processor power it must take to run the sense of touch in real time? All those microscopic nerve receptors per square inch all over your body... Think about it.
If something is going to come along and wipe us out we probably have only to look at our nearest neighbor to see what they look like. Humans have the power to basically destroy all life on this planet. And we're really not quite bright enough to use it wisely. We have a real tendency to change things and "make them better" before we really understand what they were in the first place. Take the Kissimee (sp?) River in Florida, it was really twisty so some civil engineers straightened it for better boat traffic. By doing so they killed over 90% of the rivers indigenous life, turns out the twists acted as a natural scrubbing system to keep the river healthy. Oops.
Plus we have this lovely moral slide our society is on. Lots of people are saying that old pre-industrial religious codes of morality are obsolete. They may have a point, today's world looks little like the world of, say, 1st century Israel. We have industrial societies not agrarian ones. But these same people are also missing some things. One, they are removing moral codes, not replacing them with more relevant ones. This is creating societies devoid of rules of conduct. Such societies tend to fall rather frequently. Look at, say, most 19th century utopian movements for examples. Or the current problems in Russia. Two, human nature hasn't changed. We are basically the same people who committed the attrocities from the past. 50 years ago humans committed the Holocaust, before that it was the bloodyness of the Reign of Terror, the Crusades, etc. If I knew some Asian and African examples I would use them too. Sure we've become more sophisticated, but we haven't genetically changed at all. These "old" rules are what worked for us back then, and at least the spirit and philosophy of them should work for us now even if the specifics need a little updating.
So what happens if the overall amoral trend continues. Well, as I said before, without morals to self-regulate a society, the society tends to collapse. The problem is today we have a global society. If an important part goes it has the possibility to take the rest of us with it. Insert chances for horrible military confrontation/nuclear onslaught here.
The point of this tirade? Don't get cocky, at their height the Romans ruled all of the known ancient world. But they didn't need computers to come along an kill them, they did it themselves. It just took them a while.
Actually some games (like starcraft) are slow in releasing demos. In fact the demo for starcraft didn't come out until well into the game's release. I still downloaded and played it, mostly because all the levels and storylines were new (the demo was set as a prequel). However, depending how much was gutted out of the original game the demo may not be worth the time to download.
I got a warez copy of starcraft to see if it was any good. I liked it so I went out and bought a copy of starcraft/broodwar battle chest. I know some other people who use warez like this too.
The question is: Are they publicly misrepresenting these sites? If you simply get a "this site has been blocked" message (without a reason why) then this is not a public misrepresentation is it? You imply something but implications do not hold up in court well. The misrepresentation is in a database that is deliberately encrypted so that the public can't see it.
Harm in the legal sense must be monetarily quantifiable. You cannot award damages in units of prestige or esteem. Denying access to a free essay causes no real monetary harm.
Is what Mattel doing wrong? Yes. Is it libel? Maybe, its a grey area. Can you prove it in court? No. The burden of proof is upon you the accuser and I really, really doubt you can convince a judge of both public misrepresentation and some for of compensatible harm.
Is it just me or did that article sound like a press release straight from netscape with no effort put in to remove the mindless netscape drivel in order to create a balanced article? Whats Next?
Yahoo Reports
Microsoft Corp has announced that Bill Gates has ascended to the right hand of the God today. This ascendence took place at the Gazeebo of the Rock located in the heart of Microsoft's Redmond campus. Microsoft urges its shareholders not worry about the loss of the chairman since he will reportedly descend from heaven with the divine inspiration for all future MS products. First among these will be IE 6.0 which, in a stunning announcement from MS, is going to be released to beta testers in 24 days.
CEO Steve Ballmer replied to all questions about the new product at a press conference saying, "IE6 will be a new paradigm in web browsers. It will be a cadillac of browsers, large and roomy with many features." When asked about some of these magnificent features Ballmer replied by saying, "Ummm... well... It has a wonderful soothing blue screen which appears at regular intervals to calm the user and prevent them from over-working themselves. We will also be including that cute paperclip into IE because everyone loves it so much."
Confirmation of divine intervention in Microsoft's product line was made by Pope John Paul II as he stood on a pile of unrelated money. The Pope was reported as saying "Direct divine intervention is the only thing that could give Microsoft high quality products." The pope then returned to writing his next sermon on his Jesux workstation.
Source: Microsoft Corporation
I think a libel case would be hard to prove. Are they listing these sites improperly? Yes. Is this wrong? Yes. Is this libel? Probably not. Lying is not libel. IANAL, but to me libel requires some level of slander or defamation. It would also have to be public. While wrong, mislisting a site on an internal database no one will ever see unless they unencrypt it is hard to construe as libel. Maybe if the user was told the site was blocked for an incorrect reason or something. The issue here is that the blockee would have to prove the blocker harmed them in some way with deliberate untruths. Thats pretty hard to do.
My question is, why encrypt a blocking file? There is no point to preventing the user from not seeing it. My guess is that they don't want their competitors to simply steal it, which is a valid concern considering the man hours necessary to compile this list. However incorrectly blocking sites is not the way to go about it.
Congrats to whoever submitted this story. Its the first YRO I have actually cared about in a while and to think I was going to start ignoring them completely. I stand corrected.
Ok this is off legos topic, but hopefully interesting none the less.
Here's a cool/interesting idea for a game. A huge networked first person shooter/strategy game. Instead of having stupid units controlled by crappy AI you have smart units run by people that a commander passes orders to via chain of command. Basically you'd have lots of quakers and a couple of commanders who can see the whole battlefield from their command posts.
Think about it, if the enemy knocks out the command post the commander has to stramble and that team loses coordination. The game isn't a predictable strategy since the players skill levels effect how well their units perform. A good weak unit can possibly beat a crappily played strong one.
I looked at some stuff on the new Team Fortress that Valve is putting out and I was wondering if it would be anything like this.
People have studied the effects of separation on identical twins. The thing is, with people at least, that identical twins living together react to each other and try top develop their own identities. Turns out that if you separate twins they develop into really remarkable similar people, right down to what they name their kids sometimes, but if you leave them together they don't. I suppose separation is genetic and non-separation is conditioning.
The first thing you have to remember about HS is that your teachers are Teachers. They have degrees in education not in CS or math or whatever it is they probably teach. Even the science/math/comp teachers are mostly users and not techies or programmers. This is how it was in my HS, I expect its how it is in yours.
Also, because of the budget drain computer systems usually cause, HS computers tend to be behind the times. My HS had 3 or 4 labs and it updated 1 per year. If you do the math that means at least one lab is using dated 3 year old equipment. It just costs too much to keep many systems current if you want a whole lab of them. A lab upgrade probably costs as much as 1 or 2 faculty members depending on their age, experience, and the current teachers contract.
However, linux has many advantages that a HS can exploit in some applications. Compiler access for teaching programming and the ability to run on legacy hardware to name only a couple. Remember while colleges only act poor, HS actually are poor. Free software is very attractive if the school thinks it can get away with it.
Strategies for talking about linux in HS. (1) Talk to someone who will listen, don't waste your breathe on an idiot. (2)Talk to science and math teachers, they have the most to gain from easy compiler access and free software. (3)Don't push StarOffice or productivity applications, because linux lags behind in them no matter what /. seems to believe. (4)Work your way up the ladder. Talk to a teacher first, then his department boss, etc. (5)Do not insult teachers or make them look stupid. If you question their authority or make them look stupid they will have to shut you down on principle. Don't do it. (6)Try leading on teachers. Ask your teachers about linux and try to get them to research it so they can teach it to you. It might work. (7) When in doubt, suck up.
While I agree with most of your reasoning the following is absolute crap.
The ship is pelted by fragments of rock. Also, the ship is conveniently NOT plated with any sort of protective layer thick enough to prevent cosmic pebbles from penetrating the ship, the magic SGI display, and neatly through someone's hand. No matter, we'll patch it up with our Magic Goo(tm).
Lets start with space rocks. How fast do things in space move? Answer: really goddamm fast. We are talking about huge velocities, thousands of mph. Those little chunks of rock make a bullet look downright pokey and some of them could potentially be the size of a spacecraft. Thats a lot of kinetic energy and a lot of momentum. The good side of it is that such rocks should be very far apart because space is big.
Now we also have the inherent problems of space flight. (1) Every lb. in space cost $. Lots of $. (2) Any armor that would stop even the tiny asteroids mentioned above would be incredibly heavy. (3) The heavier the ship, the longer the flight, the more supplies you need, etc, etc. This, coupled with the unlikelihood of getting hit by asteroids, makes armor a losing proposition.
So if you were going to build an interplanetary ship, how would you build it? (1) As little superfluous weight as possible, so the trip is faster or the payload of useful equipment is bigger. (2) No armor because it won't do any good anyway. (3) Magic goo/patches/spare parts to fix any problems with the ship.
Why? Because its more cost and weight effective. The big rocks will just kill you, period. The little rocks will fly straight through your ship like ice picks. They will trash anything they come in contact with, but they're small so they won't come into contact with much, especially considering the flimsy construction of a space vehicle optimized for low weight. So you replace whatever was damaged with spare parts, patch the small holes in the ship, keep going. Or you die if you can't. Its that simple.
Note: I have not seen the movie. I'm just giving good engineering logic. How many space probes have we lost to asteroids? None? So they shouldn't be considered a huge design issue then should they?
Also note: While this is definitely not as good a movie as 2001, I would wager many of the the same criticisms could be made about 2001 as were made about Mission to Mars.
I'm still betting that something proprietary will be required to run MS Office on Linux if it ever gets to linux. Why? Because then MS can charge you for Office and MDE (Microsoft Desktop Environment) which it would run on. This would give them added control over all kinds of things and if MDE is proprietary it allows them to cut out huge amount of their GPLed competition. It would basically be the windos racket all over again, only in the applications devision.
Why... do... your... astronauts... talk... like... William... Shatner... ?