But changing out explorer.exe so you save maybe 6 megs of memory is nothing, especially as half those DLLs are just going to get loaded anyway when you try to save a file or whatever. Replacement shells are cool, but anyone who uses them to save memory while running anything but a single app with a custom interface is probably a bit delusional.(1) Memory usage != process size of your executables.
And the ability to kinda switch out one part of a Windows system is not the same as the ability to switch out basically any part of a Linux system for a minimialistic part.
And X isn't the only Linux GUI, or, at least, not the only Linux graphical option. You can use a framebuffer, and have a graphical web browser (links) and a graphical movie player (mplayer) in a very small amount of memory. I don't know of any 'GUIs', as in, point-and-click program-running interfaces, for the framebuffer, but I'm sure they exist. (Actually, you can run Gnome in the framebuffer, but that's not obviously useful for small-memory situations.)
Basically, you pick a point between 'wide choice of programs' and 'small memory'. People who run with 128 or over can just run everything. They can have Gnome or KDE running all the time, they can occasionally fire up an app from the other side, and have both sets of libraries loaded. People with 96 megs want to avoid that particular situtation, so just pick one or the other.
People with 64 megs want to pick some slim windows manager like blackbox or fluxbox or nextstep. (Nextstep is pretty impresive, feature-wise, more like Gnome or KDA than a pure Windows manager, yet is very small.)
People who insist on running X in 32 megs...well, they exist, but are going to swapping. Best to give up on that idea and use the framebuffer, which you can do at 16 megs also. But, like I said, that gives you a pretty full-fledged web browser with inline graphics and whatnot, and 'the' media player for Linux, mplayer, that can do anything. (And where I hear about running Linux on 'legacy hardware', around this point is where the line starts for me, 32-megs and under.)
At 8 megs and under, you're pretty much stuck in text mode. Yes, I said 'and under'. I've run Linux on a 4-meg 486-DX75. You might get an mp3 to play (1), and there is svgalib which could possibly let you view a picture or two, but that's about it for multimedia.
1) This situtation, however, does cover quite a few games, so using litestep to fit a specific 64-meg-requiring game into your 48-meg XP box (ugh) makes sense and works okay. However, this isn't really what the 'use old hardware' discussion is talking about, and considering how cheap memory has gotten, it's pretty silly to worry about the 10 megs you can slim out of a modern XP system right now. (And if you can't run out and buy memory for it, it's a good bet you're not going to be running any current games anyway. I have a 350Mhz AMD K6-2 that I could still buy memory for, and that bastard can't run anything. An MP3 takes up about 65% CPU!)
2) Erm, you can't play MP3s on a 50Mhz machine, but you could in 8 megs of memory on a 200Mhz machine, which would require a Pentium with 8 megs of memory, which is actually pretty damn unlikely hardware, so nevermind.
The cheerleader had already explained the system (System = code, accoding to the article)
Ah, yes. The alternate universe where explaining how something works equals code.
No, wait. That's a fucking stupid concept.
How the system works was not a secret. The only thing they needed to know is where the cards were stored, and when and in what order each picture would be called for. There was no damn 'code' they tricked someone into telling them, the fact that people in different seats had different instructions was rather self-obvious.
What they then had to do was sit down and reverse-engineer each picture, and then make their own picture. While this is, in fact, trivial today, in the 1960s without access to a computer it was incredibly time-consuming, probably involving some large graph paper.
Pretending that stunt required nothing but breaking into a room twice and a trip to Kinko's rather shows your ignorance.
And no one's asserting that the 80s stunt required less technical knowledge, that's your own little strawman. Sadly, everyone's thought of hacking into those electronic billboards since they showed up, so the originality isn't quite as much altering flip cards under people's noses, but it was still a very impressive trick to hack into that thing remotely.
And this extremely complicated 'stripping down' is, if you have enough disk space, merely not running X. That's it. That's the entire system change.
Of course, if you have a tiny amount of disk space, you have to remove some during the unstall using easily deselectably options, but as the IDE interface hasn't changed in a decade and half, and hard drives don't last forever, your easiest option might be to find an old 16 gig drive and slap it into a computer that originally came with a 100 meg one if you don't want to do any of that work.(1)
If these are being installed on computer that don't have LBA mode support in the BIOS, you just have to make sure you make a boot partition in the first 540 megs, then Linux will happy access the rest of the drive without the BIOS knowing about it.
1) Incidentally, I like how Windows being incapable of being trimmed down, and Linux merely saying 'You have to deselect X and Gnome and KDE during the install, or, at least, stop them from running', means, according to MS, that they are exactly equal in capabilities. The only people installing Linux on extremely old computers know exactly what they are doing...no one's ever implied that end users should run out and install a standard current distro on a 486-50SX with 32 megs of memory and try to operate X, KDE, and Firefox at the same time.
No it isn't, people who think that do not understand the issue here, which is that we cannot verify what the computer recorded retrospectively. There is no way to say whether the computer correctly recorded the vote accepted - even if it manages to print this vote out correctly.
Erm, huh? There certainly is a way to verify the vote sit recorded. You count the printed ballots, and you count what the computer recorded. If they are the same, than the machine recorded them right.
People who think that would be the most logical way to do 'electronic' voting do, indeed, understand that computers cannot be trusted. That is the whole damn point of the paper.
And, yes, in any court, paper that was looked at by the person would be more trusted than an electronic record, and that, too, is the damn point of the paper. That's why I call the printout the 'ballot', and the electronic thing the 'record' of the ballot, and I suspect why the person I responded to also did that. The computer prints a ballot that contains only the names of the people you voted for, in nice, computer-readable type, so there's no question about who you voted for.
It solves every single existing problem with ballots, and it solves the new problems that electronic voting companies are trying to create so they can manipulate the vote. (1) And, on top of that, it lets you get early returns that should be trustworthy. (Although considering how fucked up the results of some voting machines have been, who knows?)
Before you start attacking people, maybe you should read what us 'you guys' actually say. We know exactly what you are talking about, and agree exactly with you.
1) Is this statement of fact too harsh for some people here? You say we can't just assume they want the power to manipulate the vote, and that all the proven abuses, the lies, the questionable elections aren't enough? Well, fuck you, pick a side, and stop making excuses for them. You're like one of those women who keeps 'falling down the stairs' and 'running into doors'. Read blackboxvoting.org and get a clue.
Yes, if repeated hitting F5 was illegal, sitting there encouraging people to hit F5 as they hit F5 could be illegal.
OTOH, the courts have never attempted to apply that logic long distance, nor have they upheld it on a bunch of acts that aren't illegal by themselves, but together are illegal. (Again, assuming it actually is illegal in the first place.)
For an example of how this hasn't stood up in the courts, calling someone's 1-800 repeatedly to harrass them is illegal. But posting someone's 1-800 number and asking people to call it isn't illegal, or, at least, no court has ever said it is. It can leave you liable to a civil suit, but it's not a crime.
However, that wasn't anywhere my point. I was just taking issue with someone that said 'telling someone to murder someone else' is illegal. It's not.
Ha. I had a Kenyan roommate on semester in college, and it drove him crazy when people called him 'African-American'. Not only did he consider himself Kenyan, not African, but he wasn't a frickin American either.
Of course, the fact something 'drove him crazy' should not be read as implying that he was not crazy to start with.
Funny how that is nowhere in the definition of "emulator", either in standard English, or the Computer Science / Software Engineering specialities.
First of all, 'emulator' is a jargon term. If it does have a meaning in standard English, that meaning is more than likely completely unrelated to computers at all.
Anyway. 'A software emulator allows computer programs to run on a platform (computer architecture and/or operating system) other than the one for which they were originally written. Unlike a simulation, which only attempts to reproduce a program's behavior, an emulation attempts to precisely model the state of the device being emulated.'.
And note that Wikipedia thinks all emulators are 'software emulators', that is, run in software.
If Wine weren't emulating Microsoft Windows, then whenever Windows was found to have a bug not mandated by Microsoft's published specifications, they wouldn't go ahead and copy it.
Sadly for your point, this bug was mandated by Microsoft's published specification. WMF operates by callbacks in the GDI. That is how WMF is supposed to work.
One of the things it could call allowed it execute random code. This is how that function is supposed to work.
There was no 'coding error' here, there was a problem in the implications of the specification not being fully thought out.
Although your point would be wrong even if it was an implimentation bug. They don't sit and write code for every behavior. They figure out what function calls are trying to do and recreate them. They could have trivially discovered the buggy behavior of the certain function call and coded WINE to do that without realizing it was a security error.
I thnk you're assuming that, for some reason, they operate off the documentation. Not only is that completely unrelated to whether or not something is an emulator, that is not what they do, because Windows API documentation is crap, because there are so many specical cases not mentioned.
So what you're saying is that a "software emulator" is by definition impossible, and that "hardware emulator" is a redundant phrase. Alrighty then.
That's funny, because those two phrases actually mean the same thing.
When people talk about 'software emulators', they mean an emulator written in software. When they talk about 'hardware emulators', they mean something that emulates hardware.
Search for them on google if you don't believe me. Feel free to find any counter examples, because I'm not seeing them. No one ever uses the term 'software emulator' to mean 'thing that emulates software', because no one talks about emulating software at all.
OTOH, chipmakers and IC designers do use the term 'hardware emulator' to refer to hardware-aided simulations. You can argue this proves me wrong, but I didn't say all emulations were in software, I said they were at a 'different level', and using a bunch of cobbled-together relays and whatnot controlled by a computer to operate the display of a stereo is certainly a different level than a finished integrated circuit to do so. (Whereas, for example, using a different IC that mimics the first is not.)
Not in the US. To incite something, you actually have to be there helping encourage it along at that exact time, and it has to be obvious as to what is about to happen.
Otherwise it runs into 1st amendment issues. It is not 'incitement' to merely tell others what to do, you basically have to be directing their actions as they do them.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Second sentence of the 14th amendment, ratified in 1868.
All of that said, getting folks to click "refresh" is about as legal as suggesting that folks grab free brochures from a stand so as to exhaust the supply of brochures, except that printing more brochures and refreshing the stand are both more expensive to do than restarting a server.
Erm...so it's entirely legal?
It is, in fact, so legal, that a few places that have had problems with it have actually passed laws saying that if a sign says something is free, it should be interpeted as meaning 'free for one per person per day', unless otherwise stated, because it is otherwise legal to walk up and take all of them.
And as they couldn't charge the people actually running off with all of them under any existing law, they would rather obviously have problems trying to charge people who merely told others to do this.
There is also a little know aspect to crime. Namely, the crime the person is charged with has to be possible the way you're trying to do it.
In most cases, this doesn't matter, because usually a crime happens when something does happen.
So a serious question here is: With the number of people in the channel, would it have been possible for him to disrupt or impair the website in any way?
If the answer is no, he has not committed a crime. Anymore than someone caught attempting to walk through a wall is committing breaking and entering.
Barring an explicit illegalization of the attempt, merely starting to do something illegal is illegal, but with a specific law, it's only illegal only if you actually could pull it off that way. If you can't, it's a 'mistake of fact'.(1)
Some crimes, of course, are merely the intent to do X combined with actions you believe will result in X, like, I believe, attempted murder, and all other 'attempted' crimes. But I don't think there's any such thing as 'attempted DDoS'.
Of course, some people are walking around claiming that any access of the website is impairment, which makes eveyone criminals. No. Impairment is not responding in 2 seconds instead of 1, anymore than it is impairing firefighters (another crime) if you have your shower running when they need water.
1) Standard example of this: Trying to steal something you actually own. It's not illegal. (No, it's not not illegal because you don't 'press charges'. It's not illegal regardless.)
If you can 'disrupt' service by using something repeatedly, by that logic I can have the person in front of me buying the last soda at the drink machine at the DMV arrested. Hey, look, the electronic device can no longer perform its intended function!
Not only is refreshing a web page not a felony, but telling someone to shoot someone else is not a felony, either, so your attempted point is almost entirely gibberish.
It is illegal to pay someone to kill someone else, or even attempt to do so.
But it is perfectly legal to seriously suggest someone go kill someone else for other reasons.
Of course, any planning on your part could make you an accessory and part of a criminal conspiracy.
Barring that, for it to be illegal, it has to be very obviously someone means to commit the crime at that exact moment, with you standing there and encouraging them. Anything else is legal.
You can stand in town urge lynching all the (insert racial slur here) you want, but it's only illegal if you go along with the mob, encouraging them as they actually do it.
However, in these circumstances, for this to even vaguely apply, you'd have to assert that repeatedly hitting F5 on a webpage is any sort of crime.
That logic is crazy. That makes Perl on Windows a 'perl emulator', or Gnome libraries on Windows a 'Gnome emulator'.
An emulator is a replimentation, but it is not a mere reimplimentation of something. They are reimplimentations at different levels. Normally it's with parts of hardware mimicked by software.
Wine is at basically the same level as the original Windows...it's a bunch of libraries that have functions in them. These libraries do stuff, and sometimes talk to the OS. (And, in the case of Wine, X.)
There are a few parts of it where you could argue there is 'emulating' going on, where the software doesn't actually talk to any hardware, it just claims to, but wine is not itself an emulator, even if small parts are.
1) Whether there is anything beside that that could legitimately be called an emulator is an interesting question.
I think you're supposed to be irked by that. That's why they do it the second time.
Not that the Simpsons haven't done things like that. I seem to recall Sideshow Bob stepping on a few rakes in a row. However, they chickened out and cut to black after they showed he was surrounded by a field of them. On Family Guy, he'd have stepped on every single one of them, on screen.
It's not a matter of intelligence. Family Guy has almost as many obscure references as Futurama, although normally in literary and political fields instead of scientific.
It's a matter of what kind of humor you find funny. And as humor is basically when you expect one thing and get something else, so it's really a matter of what you expect. Did you expect Peter to bang his shin? No, ergo, it's funny. And then, thanks to years to watching TV, you expect them to show you a few seconds of it and then cut away...and they don't. Ergo, funny again.
I've come to the conclusion that Family Guy is only funny if you know comedy conventions well enough that you can basically predict a joke two seconds in advance within every scene in the Simpsons. Family Guy goes and does 'the wrong thing' one of ten times, like having nonsensical flashbacks that aren't funny, or, at least, are only funny because they don't fit. Or they when they add a laugh track and have the characters react like they're actually filming in front of real audience laughter. Or the many musical numbers, which show up without following any of the normal rules of musicals, like actually having an emotional point or even being about something relevant.
However, Family Guy breaks the standard expectation of comedy enough that quite a few people actually get annoyed at it while watching, which makes it rather unfunny to them. Don't think when I say it 'breaks the rules' that that somehow magically makes it the funniest show in the world. The rules of comedy have come about for a reason.
Of course, Family Guy also includes plenty of standard jokes and some semblence of a plot. Go too crazy, and people will stop expecting normality, and thus nothing will be funny at all.
And, FYI. The cancellation of Futurama was for one reason and one reason only...Fox. That is the entirely of the reason of the cancellation. 80% of the people who found The Simpsons funny and managed to watch Futurama a few times liked it. If Fox had put it with the Simpsons as a lead-in for the three years it was aired, right now we'd be talking about the cancellation of The Simpsons and the takeover of its position in television by Futurama. Instead, they moved it around, failed to promote it, and preempted it by other stuff. (You can't blame them, they are legally required to do that every sci-fi show they air. It's a little known FCC regulation.)
And Futurama had vastly more standard audience than Family Guy. Family Guy was just brought back because of the crazy ratings it got on the Cartoon Network, airing along with insane shows like Sealab 2021 and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Cartoon Network found a really weird niche that was perfect for Family Guy, and probably the only place on TV where it would get better ratings than Futurama when aired next to it.
If you treat Family Guy as a copy of the Simpsons, you will be disappointed. Family Guy is, in many ways, a parody. Not of whatever obvious thing they are parodying, but itself and other shows that parody things.
When Peter bangs his shin and they spend 45 seconds on him sucking air through his teeth and wincing, it isn't because they think that would be funny for 45 seconds, or they needed to pad the show out. (There are a lot better things to pad a show with.) It's quite obviously not funny that long, which is the point.
And doing that twice would clearly be overkill, which is why they do, indeed, do it twice.
See, the real difference is that the Simpsons starts with a funny plot, and then adds gags.
Family Guy, OTOH, is making fun of every level. Yeah, there are funny gags, but there are funny meta-jokes, where they make fun of themselves and their own plot, there is anti-humor, where everyone expects a joke, so it's actually funnier there's not one, or that the joke is extremely unfunny, and some things just basically make no sense at all, like Brian and Stewie talking.
Obviously, that's not for everyone. But don't go watching Family Guy and expect a sitcom.
By 'taking' and 'counting', I actually meant the process of the 'moving a vote from human hands into a number somewhere', not 'get people to vote when you suspect you know how they will vote' or even 'pay them off in order to vote a certain way'.
The second of that is fine. The last of that is vile and illegal, although I am not such if it really is 'traitorous'.
The first, however, completely corrupting the entire system, is certainly traitorous.
There's a difference btween burning down your house for insurance money and burning down a military supply depot so the Canadians can invade. The first is illegal. The second is treason. Likewise, minor electon tampering is certainly illegal. But wholesale election tampering is treason, as one of the basises for the US is free elections.
In the UK, if I am a candidate in an election I can watch each vote being counted, right there in the countroom. I don't have to trust a bureaucrat who doesn't know what he is doing to make sure the count is done properly. Because I can see the votes, and they are not hidden in the bowels of a machine or of a computer, I can be personally assured that no attempt has been made to disenfranchise my voters. How can you even begin to provide that guarantee with automated vote counting ?
I don't get why you guys are coming off with this kind of response KNOWING how in Florida 2000 we all got to see how it did NOT work
Well, there's your confusion. You think this is some sort of idiotic mistake.
It is not a mistake, it is not poor implimentation, it is not money-grubbing company putting profit ahead of reliablity.
It is delibrate, it is designed to make elections stealable. It has always been designed as such. There has never been any other reason to promote elections we have no record of except what a computer says.
Courts have blatantly ignored abuses. Election officials have blatantly ignored courts. Machines have been certified in blatant disregard of laws.
You think we're in crisis because our President thinks he can secretly break the law when we're at war? No. We've been in a damn constitutional crisis for a long time because of eletronic voting machines deciding elections.
It has literally taken us six years to straighten this whole mess out, and instead of lining the goddamn traitors up and shooting them, we're apparently going to say 'Hey, wait, you need to make these machines better.'. Every. Single. One. of those companies should get the corporate death penalty, and charges should be filed against company officials who helped subvert the election process.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the article was implying that area 51 was actually cut out of all the images, and thus no one has it.
But changing out explorer.exe so you save maybe 6 megs of memory is nothing, especially as half those DLLs are just going to get loaded anyway when you try to save a file or whatever. Replacement shells are cool, but anyone who uses them to save memory while running anything but a single app with a custom interface is probably a bit delusional.(1) Memory usage != process size of your executables.
And the ability to kinda switch out one part of a Windows system is not the same as the ability to switch out basically any part of a Linux system for a minimialistic part.
And X isn't the only Linux GUI, or, at least, not the only Linux graphical option. You can use a framebuffer, and have a graphical web browser (links) and a graphical movie player (mplayer) in a very small amount of memory. I don't know of any 'GUIs', as in, point-and-click program-running interfaces, for the framebuffer, but I'm sure they exist. (Actually, you can run Gnome in the framebuffer, but that's not obviously useful for small-memory situations.)
Basically, you pick a point between 'wide choice of programs' and 'small memory'. People who run with 128 or over can just run everything. They can have Gnome or KDE running all the time, they can occasionally fire up an app from the other side, and have both sets of libraries loaded. People with 96 megs want to avoid that particular situtation, so just pick one or the other.
People with 64 megs want to pick some slim windows manager like blackbox or fluxbox or nextstep. (Nextstep is pretty impresive, feature-wise, more like Gnome or KDA than a pure Windows manager, yet is very small.)
People who insist on running X in 32 megs...well, they exist, but are going to swapping. Best to give up on that idea and use the framebuffer, which you can do at 16 megs also. But, like I said, that gives you a pretty full-fledged web browser with inline graphics and whatnot, and 'the' media player for Linux, mplayer, that can do anything. (And where I hear about running Linux on 'legacy hardware', around this point is where the line starts for me, 32-megs and under.)
At 8 megs and under, you're pretty much stuck in text mode. Yes, I said 'and under'. I've run Linux on a 4-meg 486-DX75. You might get an mp3 to play (1), and there is svgalib which could possibly let you view a picture or two, but that's about it for multimedia.
1) This situtation, however, does cover quite a few games, so using litestep to fit a specific 64-meg-requiring game into your 48-meg XP box (ugh) makes sense and works okay. However, this isn't really what the 'use old hardware' discussion is talking about, and considering how cheap memory has gotten, it's pretty silly to worry about the 10 megs you can slim out of a modern XP system right now. (And if you can't run out and buy memory for it, it's a good bet you're not going to be running any current games anyway. I have a 350Mhz AMD K6-2 that I could still buy memory for, and that bastard can't run anything. An MP3 takes up about 65% CPU!)
2) Erm, you can't play MP3s on a 50Mhz machine, but you could in 8 megs of memory on a 200Mhz machine, which would require a Pentium with 8 megs of memory, which is actually pretty damn unlikely hardware, so nevermind.
Ah, yes. The alternate universe where explaining how something works equals code.
No, wait. That's a fucking stupid concept.
How the system works was not a secret. The only thing they needed to know is where the cards were stored, and when and in what order each picture would be called for. There was no damn 'code' they tricked someone into telling them, the fact that people in different seats had different instructions was rather self-obvious.
What they then had to do was sit down and reverse-engineer each picture, and then make their own picture. While this is, in fact, trivial today, in the 1960s without access to a computer it was incredibly time-consuming, probably involving some large graph paper.
Pretending that stunt required nothing but breaking into a room twice and a trip to Kinko's rather shows your ignorance.
And no one's asserting that the 80s stunt required less technical knowledge, that's your own little strawman. Sadly, everyone's thought of hacking into those electronic billboards since they showed up, so the originality isn't quite as much altering flip cards under people's noses, but it was still a very impressive trick to hack into that thing remotely.
Of course, this information is probably not going to be that useful in the future. ;)
A 486 compiles just add NOPs, to do something with the timing, I don't know exactly what. So they'll run a bit slower, but will run.
Your shell!=your GUI, dumbass. Replacing explorer.exe is almost completely pointless...it takes up slightly less than 10 megs on my machine.
Of course, if you have a tiny amount of disk space, you have to remove some during the unstall using easily deselectably options, but as the IDE interface hasn't changed in a decade and half, and hard drives don't last forever, your easiest option might be to find an old 16 gig drive and slap it into a computer that originally came with a 100 meg one if you don't want to do any of that work.(1)
If these are being installed on computer that don't have LBA mode support in the BIOS, you just have to make sure you make a boot partition in the first 540 megs, then Linux will happy access the rest of the drive without the BIOS knowing about it.
1) Incidentally, I like how Windows being incapable of being trimmed down, and Linux merely saying 'You have to deselect X and Gnome and KDE during the install, or, at least, stop them from running', means, according to MS, that they are exactly equal in capabilities. The only people installing Linux on extremely old computers know exactly what they are doing...no one's ever implied that end users should run out and install a standard current distro on a 486-50SX with 32 megs of memory and try to operate X, KDE, and Firefox at the same time.
Erm, huh? There certainly is a way to verify the vote sit recorded. You count the printed ballots, and you count what the computer recorded. If they are the same, than the machine recorded them right.
People who think that would be the most logical way to do 'electronic' voting do, indeed, understand that computers cannot be trusted. That is the whole damn point of the paper.
And, yes, in any court, paper that was looked at by the person would be more trusted than an electronic record, and that, too, is the damn point of the paper. That's why I call the printout the 'ballot', and the electronic thing the 'record' of the ballot, and I suspect why the person I responded to also did that. The computer prints a ballot that contains only the names of the people you voted for, in nice, computer-readable type, so there's no question about who you voted for.
It solves every single existing problem with ballots, and it solves the new problems that electronic voting companies are trying to create so they can manipulate the vote. (1) And, on top of that, it lets you get early returns that should be trustworthy. (Although considering how fucked up the results of some voting machines have been, who knows?)
Before you start attacking people, maybe you should read what us 'you guys' actually say. We know exactly what you are talking about, and agree exactly with you.
1) Is this statement of fact too harsh for some people here? You say we can't just assume they want the power to manipulate the vote, and that all the proven abuses, the lies, the questionable elections aren't enough? Well, fuck you, pick a side, and stop making excuses for them. You're like one of those women who keeps 'falling down the stairs' and 'running into doors'. Read blackboxvoting.org and get a clue.
OTOH, the courts have never attempted to apply that logic long distance, nor have they upheld it on a bunch of acts that aren't illegal by themselves, but together are illegal. (Again, assuming it actually is illegal in the first place.)
For an example of how this hasn't stood up in the courts, calling someone's 1-800 repeatedly to harrass them is illegal. But posting someone's 1-800 number and asking people to call it isn't illegal, or, at least, no court has ever said it is. It can leave you liable to a civil suit, but it's not a crime.
However, that wasn't anywhere my point. I was just taking issue with someone that said 'telling someone to murder someone else' is illegal. It's not.
Of course, the fact something 'drove him crazy' should not be read as implying that he was not crazy to start with.
First of all, 'emulator' is a jargon term. If it does have a meaning in standard English, that meaning is more than likely completely unrelated to computers at all.
Anyway. 'A software emulator allows computer programs to run on a platform (computer architecture and/or operating system) other than the one for which they were originally written. Unlike a simulation, which only attempts to reproduce a program's behavior, an emulation attempts to precisely model the state of the device being emulated.'.
And note that Wikipedia thinks all emulators are 'software emulators', that is, run in software.
If Wine weren't emulating Microsoft Windows, then whenever Windows was found to have a bug not mandated by Microsoft's published specifications, they wouldn't go ahead and copy it.
Sadly for your point, this bug was mandated by Microsoft's published specification. WMF operates by callbacks in the GDI. That is how WMF is supposed to work.
One of the things it could call allowed it execute random code. This is how that function is supposed to work.
There was no 'coding error' here, there was a problem in the implications of the specification not being fully thought out.
Although your point would be wrong even if it was an implimentation bug. They don't sit and write code for every behavior. They figure out what function calls are trying to do and recreate them. They could have trivially discovered the buggy behavior of the certain function call and coded WINE to do that without realizing it was a security error.
I thnk you're assuming that, for some reason, they operate off the documentation. Not only is that completely unrelated to whether or not something is an emulator, that is not what they do, because Windows API documentation is crap, because there are so many specical cases not mentioned.
So what you're saying is that a "software emulator" is by definition impossible, and that "hardware emulator" is a redundant phrase. Alrighty then.
That's funny, because those two phrases actually mean the same thing.
When people talk about 'software emulators', they mean an emulator written in software. When they talk about 'hardware emulators', they mean something that emulates hardware.
Search for them on google if you don't believe me. Feel free to find any counter examples, because I'm not seeing them. No one ever uses the term 'software emulator' to mean 'thing that emulates software', because no one talks about emulating software at all.
OTOH, chipmakers and IC designers do use the term 'hardware emulator' to refer to hardware-aided simulations. You can argue this proves me wrong, but I didn't say all emulations were in software, I said they were at a 'different level', and using a bunch of cobbled-together relays and whatnot controlled by a computer to operate the display of a stereo is certainly a different level than a finished integrated circuit to do so. (Whereas, for example, using a different IC that mimics the first is not.)
Otherwise it runs into 1st amendment issues. It is not 'incitement' to merely tell others what to do, you basically have to be directing their actions as they do them.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Second sentence of the 14th amendment, ratified in 1868.
Erm...so it's entirely legal?
It is, in fact, so legal, that a few places that have had problems with it have actually passed laws saying that if a sign says something is free, it should be interpeted as meaning 'free for one per person per day', unless otherwise stated, because it is otherwise legal to walk up and take all of them.
And as they couldn't charge the people actually running off with all of them under any existing law, they would rather obviously have problems trying to charge people who merely told others to do this.
In most cases, this doesn't matter, because usually a crime happens when something does happen.
So a serious question here is: With the number of people in the channel, would it have been possible for him to disrupt or impair the website in any way?
If the answer is no, he has not committed a crime. Anymore than someone caught attempting to walk through a wall is committing breaking and entering.
Barring an explicit illegalization of the attempt, merely starting to do something illegal is illegal, but with a specific law, it's only illegal only if you actually could pull it off that way. If you can't, it's a 'mistake of fact'.(1)
Some crimes, of course, are merely the intent to do X combined with actions you believe will result in X, like, I believe, attempted murder, and all other 'attempted' crimes. But I don't think there's any such thing as 'attempted DDoS'.
Of course, some people are walking around claiming that any access of the website is impairment, which makes eveyone criminals. No. Impairment is not responding in 2 seconds instead of 1, anymore than it is impairing firefighters (another crime) if you have your shower running when they need water.
1) Standard example of this: Trying to steal something you actually own. It's not illegal. (No, it's not not illegal because you don't 'press charges'. It's not illegal regardless.)
If you can 'disrupt' service by using something repeatedly, by that logic I can have the person in front of me buying the last soda at the drink machine at the DMV arrested. Hey, look, the electronic device can no longer perform its intended function!
It is illegal to pay someone to kill someone else, or even attempt to do so.
But it is perfectly legal to seriously suggest someone go kill someone else for other reasons.
Of course, any planning on your part could make you an accessory and part of a criminal conspiracy.
Barring that, for it to be illegal, it has to be very obviously someone means to commit the crime at that exact moment, with you standing there and encouraging them. Anything else is legal.
You can stand in town urge lynching all the (insert racial slur here) you want, but it's only illegal if you go along with the mob, encouraging them as they actually do it.
However, in these circumstances, for this to even vaguely apply, you'd have to assert that repeatedly hitting F5 on a webpage is any sort of crime.
An emulator is a replimentation, but it is not a mere reimplimentation of something. They are reimplimentations at different levels. Normally it's with parts of hardware mimicked by software.
Wine is at basically the same level as the original Windows...it's a bunch of libraries that have functions in them. These libraries do stuff, and sometimes talk to the OS. (And, in the case of Wine, X.)
There are a few parts of it where you could argue there is 'emulating' going on, where the software doesn't actually talk to any hardware, it just claims to, but wine is not itself an emulator, even if small parts are.
1) Whether there is anything beside that that could legitimately be called an emulator is an interesting question.
In what universe is localhost 'world-facing'?
Not that the Simpsons haven't done things like that. I seem to recall Sideshow Bob stepping on a few rakes in a row. However, they chickened out and cut to black after they showed he was surrounded by a field of them. On Family Guy, he'd have stepped on every single one of them, on screen.
It's not a matter of intelligence. Family Guy has almost as many obscure references as Futurama, although normally in literary and political fields instead of scientific.
It's a matter of what kind of humor you find funny. And as humor is basically when you expect one thing and get something else, so it's really a matter of what you expect. Did you expect Peter to bang his shin? No, ergo, it's funny. And then, thanks to years to watching TV, you expect them to show you a few seconds of it and then cut away...and they don't. Ergo, funny again.
I've come to the conclusion that Family Guy is only funny if you know comedy conventions well enough that you can basically predict a joke two seconds in advance within every scene in the Simpsons. Family Guy goes and does 'the wrong thing' one of ten times, like having nonsensical flashbacks that aren't funny, or, at least, are only funny because they don't fit. Or they when they add a laugh track and have the characters react like they're actually filming in front of real audience laughter. Or the many musical numbers, which show up without following any of the normal rules of musicals, like actually having an emotional point or even being about something relevant.
However, Family Guy breaks the standard expectation of comedy enough that quite a few people actually get annoyed at it while watching, which makes it rather unfunny to them. Don't think when I say it 'breaks the rules' that that somehow magically makes it the funniest show in the world. The rules of comedy have come about for a reason.
Of course, Family Guy also includes plenty of standard jokes and some semblence of a plot. Go too crazy, and people will stop expecting normality, and thus nothing will be funny at all.
And, FYI. The cancellation of Futurama was for one reason and one reason only...Fox. That is the entirely of the reason of the cancellation. 80% of the people who found The Simpsons funny and managed to watch Futurama a few times liked it. If Fox had put it with the Simpsons as a lead-in for the three years it was aired, right now we'd be talking about the cancellation of The Simpsons and the takeover of its position in television by Futurama. Instead, they moved it around, failed to promote it, and preempted it by other stuff. (You can't blame them, they are legally required to do that every sci-fi show they air. It's a little known FCC regulation.)
And Futurama had vastly more standard audience than Family Guy. Family Guy was just brought back because of the crazy ratings it got on the Cartoon Network, airing along with insane shows like Sealab 2021 and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Cartoon Network found a really weird niche that was perfect for Family Guy, and probably the only place on TV where it would get better ratings than Futurama when aired next to it.
If you treat Family Guy as a copy of the Simpsons, you will be disappointed. Family Guy is, in many ways, a parody. Not of whatever obvious thing they are parodying, but itself and other shows that parody things.
When Peter bangs his shin and they spend 45 seconds on him sucking air through his teeth and wincing, it isn't because they think that would be funny for 45 seconds, or they needed to pad the show out. (There are a lot better things to pad a show with.) It's quite obviously not funny that long, which is the point.
And doing that twice would clearly be overkill, which is why they do, indeed, do it twice.
See, the real difference is that the Simpsons starts with a funny plot, and then adds gags.
Family Guy, OTOH, is making fun of every level. Yeah, there are funny gags, but there are funny meta-jokes, where they make fun of themselves and their own plot, there is anti-humor, where everyone expects a joke, so it's actually funnier there's not one, or that the joke is extremely unfunny, and some things just basically make no sense at all, like Brian and Stewie talking.
Obviously, that's not for everyone. But don't go watching Family Guy and expect a sitcom.
No. The people scheduling sports are assholes, not clueless.
The second of that is fine. The last of that is vile and illegal, although I am not such if it really is 'traitorous'.
The first, however, completely corrupting the entire system, is certainly traitorous.
There's a difference btween burning down your house for insurance money and burning down a military supply depot so the Canadians can invade. The first is illegal. The second is treason. Likewise, minor electon tampering is certainly illegal. But wholesale election tampering is treason, as one of the basises for the US is free elections.
Except, apparently, companies providing the machines.
I don't get why you guys are coming off with this kind of response KNOWING how in Florida 2000 we all got to see how it did NOT work
Well, there's your confusion. You think this is some sort of idiotic mistake.
It is not a mistake, it is not poor implimentation, it is not money-grubbing company putting profit ahead of reliablity.
It is delibrate, it is designed to make elections stealable. It has always been designed as such. There has never been any other reason to promote elections we have no record of except what a computer says.
Courts have blatantly ignored abuses. Election officials have blatantly ignored courts. Machines have been certified in blatant disregard of laws.
You think we're in crisis because our President thinks he can secretly break the law when we're at war? No. We've been in a damn constitutional crisis for a long time because of eletronic voting machines deciding elections.
It has literally taken us six years to straighten this whole mess out, and instead of lining the goddamn traitors up and shooting them, we're apparently going to say 'Hey, wait, you need to make these machines better.'. Every. Single. One. of those companies should get the corporate death penalty, and charges should be filed against company officials who helped subvert the election process.