Why would you need to do that when the pictures are posted for anyone to see?
I mean, there are only two legit possiblities...you have the legal power to forever silence the people who took the pictures, and everyone who's got a copy, and keep them from ever distributing them, which is rather unlikely, or you don't have the power, in which case you just need to be checking the web page to see who's been identified.
There's no logical reason to take down the server or even copy it, unless you think they've put pictures and identities on it that haven't gone public. Which is unlikely, the way indymedia works. But even then, you don't need to take it down.
The real reason they did this is so they could do damage control without indymedia being able to react.
See, for the longest time, a few random people have been causing trouble at various protests. Just one or two. And the police have responding with force against all protesters. For some reason, even despite the police taking pictures to show the level of violence the protesters were using, the police would never go after the actual troublemakers.
Well, thanks to the internet, the protesters are taking pictures of the troublemakers and they're sticking up the pictures and saying 'Who the fuck is this person breaking this car window? If anyone knows who this is, tell us.'.
Well...they're undercover cops. Duh. Everyone suspected that, but that's what all this racket is about.
Logically, it makes no sense, if you've infiltrated an organization, and they post pictures of stuff, to say 'Hey, that's our undercover cops! Take those pictures down!'. That's just crazy. If they don't know they're undercover cops, don't tell them. If they do know, well, you're screwed anyway, pull them back in.
But these undercover cops are there to cause problems so the police can escalate the force used against the protesters. Having their faces plastered around is likely to be rather bad PR.
Except, of course, the traditional news is completely ignoring this.
Um...except no spammer would be stupid enough to use them as a distributed computer. They'd just calculate the hashcash as the spam goes out.
Or if they were really clever, they'd use machines behind port 25 firewalls to generate the hashcash, also. You don't need a 'distributed computer' for that, you just need to hand the firewalled machine a list of email addesses and the forged From address, and have it hand the hash+email address one at a time to different unfirewalled boxes. (Or, hey, multiple ones, because spam zombies often get blocked so they like to try repeatedly.)
I don't know what kind of goofy universe you'd need to want to use distributed computer when you need to figure out several million different 10 second computations. You just split up the damn list and hand it to the machines.
Why do you think users would suddenly start noticing their boxes wasting CPU time, when they apparently too fucking stupid to notice spam flooding their outgoing internet connection?
Microsoft products do have legal problems, and I'm not talking about antitrust ones! There was that SQL one a while back, and that DriveSpace patent from Stacker back in the DOS 6.2 days, and those are just the ones I can think of all the top of my head.
As those both were patent issues, both those could stop end users from using the product, or they'd risk being sued.
What you're saying is true about copyrights, but not about patents. Simply using a patented process is illegal, it doesn't matter if someone else gave you the software or you wrote it yourself.
Sharing copyrighted material doesn't waste the copyright owner's time, whereas spam does.
Now, stopping either one wastes time, but failure to stop spam would immediately destroy the internet. (I mean that exactly like it sounded. Within a day, the internet would melt.)
Whereas failure to stop copyright infringement wouldn't do anything. (Which is rather obvious, because you can basically get whatever mildly-popular copyrighted works you want via the internet for free right now.)
I don't think it's better indices, I think it's more indices, with sub-indices. (Boy, 'indices' sure looks silly.)
I think of it as a tree, and most knowledge of most people is under things like, oh, 'car stuff'. Whereas a car expert will have a 'car stuff', but no knowledge in it, he's have sub categories of 'types of cars sorted by engine', 'types of cars sorted by crappiness', 'types of Fords', 'car parts', 'the oil circulation system of cars', etc, etc.
Now, once you get into each index, it may, indeed, stored different ways. But there is a tree.
That's the thing about savants...they can create an index in real time, somehow. If they know about trains, you can ask them to tell you the longest name of a train, and they can almost immediately.
People who are born with serious brain deformities sometimes just magically start using other areas of their brain to do whatever we'd do in the broken parts.
There's a case of a person who had a brain that was about a third normal size, and no one even realized it until he was 20 or so and got x-rayed for a head injury.
Oh, I agree. The last thing I want is sympathy for Wal-Mart. Like I said, I used to work there!
However, it's not Wal-Mart that gets hurts when people spend time price matching forty items, saving a grand total of 13 dollars. It's the people who are price matching (Well, okay, they can hurt themselves, no objections there.), but it's also the cashiers, and the people behind them in line.
Wal-Mart couldn't care less, Wal-Mart doesn't hurt at all on that. I care.
Note: If your local Wal-Mart is not a Super Wal-Mart, in a poorish area, you do not know what I'm talking about. Normal Wal-Marts do a single price match every hour or so, usually for entirely reasonable amounts. Super Wal-Marts have grocery shoppers that come in and do dozens of price matches for trivial amounts. There are people who sit down with their shopping list and five flyers from local grocery stores, and carefully mark things off.
I once got right behind a person like that in the express lane. Sure, they were under the item limit, but half the items were price matched, most for about a dollar, and they had no idea which one was in what flyer, so they had to look through them all. I was halfway tempted to say 'Look, I'll give you twenty dollars if you'll just stop price matching.'.
And then, of course, they paid by carefully writing out a check. Fuckers. You don't write checks in the express lane for less than fifty dollars. (Hell, you don't write checks at all, you let them print on your check.) Luckily, self-checkouts have almost completely stopped my interaction with these people.
None of this is helped, of course, by Wal-Mart's idea of cost cutting, which can be summed up as 'have less cashiers working than we need'.
(Obligatory way to rip off Wal-Mart, in case anyone thinks I'm defending them: Pay for a soft drink or candy with a debit card, get cash back. They end up eating the ATM fee your bank charges. To drive the point home, if you need 100 dollars cash back, do it 5 times, so they eat five times the fees. Use a self-checkout, though, as to not annoy the horribly-underpaid cashier. Or at least let them in on the joke...80% of them will love it, if they aren't busy.)
There are two ways to stop asteroids. You can blow them up, or you can turn them. Both these work better the farther away you get, and stop working really close.
If you have something that can turn asteroids, yeah, you could turn the towards earth, and you could even turn them towards a certain part of earth. (Or, at least, wait until you got the right one, and turn it.)
If you've got way to blown them up when they're a quarter AU away from earth, no, you can't really hurt the earth with said asteroids.
Of course, now the problem is, you've got a way to blow things up sitting in space. Doh.
Weapons of mass destruction supposed to be anything is generally regarded as unable to be used without incuring unacceptable civilian casualties. Not worrying about civilian casualties is illegal. (Which, BTW, is why quite a few people have pointed out that the operators standing watch at nuclear silos with missiles aimed at cities are committing a war crime. Just planning to wipe out a city is illegal.)
Anyway, nukes are too big, biological weapons are too indescriminate, and radioactive material spreads too easily. That's what 'mass destruction' is talking about.
However, for some reason, all chemical weapons are generally included under the WMD banner. All chemical and biological weapons are forbidden in war, but I'm not entirely certain if all chemical weapons are technically WMDs, because there are certainly chemical weapons that can be directed against only soldiers. (Hell, tear gas and pepper spray are chemical weapons.)
Even more technically, you don't have a war on a country, you have a war with a country.
And countries go to war with each other when they have conflicting desires, usually it being that they both want sole possession of something, like Poland or oil or Helen of Troy.
Which is why the 'War on Drugs' or the 'War on Poverty' or 'The War on Terror' is insane. None of those nouns want to take over part of this country, or access to oil reserves, or anything like that....because they are not people or organizations, and thus cannot want things.
And even the organizations closely related to those things do not want something the US wants. Drug dealers want to make money, drugs are the means to that. And terrorists don't want to attack the US, they want something else and attacking the US is the means. (Well, okay, they may, indeed, want to attack the US, but they don't want to attack the US because the US currently has possession of something of theirs and they want to take it back by force.)
I will point out that, duh, it's an act of war to shoot down other country's satellites. In addition, I'm pretty certain that attacking a spacecraft of another country is explicitly illegal under some space treaties. (Hell, it's illegal not to return astronauts if they land in your country, even on purpose.) Of course, if it had WMD in it, the UN would allow the action.
But given that we could shoot down satellites from the earth, it seems rather stupid to build a satellite that does that. If there truly were WMD satellites, we could take them out without any problems anyway. (Hell, we could probably take out WMD satellites with existing satellites, via the little known tactic of 'ramming'.)
But there aren't any WMD satellites, because no one wants to start that shit.
What the US is doing is a bit akin to massing troups on the border and claiming you're doing it purely in self defense, because the other country is going to invade. Well, okay, but you're the one sticking the troups there, you're the one making everyone nervous. They don't appear to have any troups, but they sure as hell are going to get some.
With space based weapons, you don't have to get an aircraft into the area. You look at the area from space, and drop a crowbar on them. (And, yes, before anyone complains, no one is proposing actual crowbars. I've been imagining long ceramic rods, personally. You certainly want something that won't melt.)
And, yes, the only real objection is the cost of this. But, hey, have to spend that budget surplus anywhere, ever since we got rid of the debt.
Um, how are 500 pounds of TNT you can randomly drop on a battlefield, are completely undetectable by radar, and even if they weren'y, can't be blocked by air power not good at defeating a conventional army?
'Hey, look, an enemy camp! Let's flatten it!' 'Hey, look, the enemy are holed up in that building. Clear out the surrounding area and let's flatten it!'
It's like shelling the enemy, except more powerful and you can't get shelled back or bombed or taken out by conventional arms. Sounds like a damn good way of taking out a conventional army to me!
Yes, and if a guy started beating me up, I might ignore the law and beat him back.
What, exactly, is your point? That it's okay to run around breaking the law, because it would be okay to break the law if other people broke it? Huh?
No one should be putting weapons platforms in space. If people starting doing so, they are bad people. If other countries respond in kind, they can be judged at that time. It doesn't stop the first country from being bad.
Taking out asteroids via nuclear missiles based in space is just silly. There's absolutely no advantage to it, and plenty of disadvantage. (For example, how would you maintain them? We don't have any nukes we can just set and forget.)
The military advantage of putting things in space is one thing only: From space, you can hit the earth with rocks and have the effect of hitting it with a nuke. In fact, you might get more bang for the ounce by using rocks instead of nukes. (For one thing, you don't have to protect rocks on reentry, whereas a nuclear missle needs not only to not go off during reenty, but to be able to go off at the end.)
But orbit is only an advantage if you're attacking the earth. We're pretty much screwed no matter what if an asteroid hits, but if we chose to use a nuclear missile against it, there's absolutely no reason we can't launch one from earth.
Hell, we don't allow it from our police departments. Guess what happens if they fake information to get a search warranty, and discover actual incriminating evidence? We throw that evidence out.
The old expression 'It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.' only works until they get tired of it, and we got tried of it with our government a long time ago in most matters. We don't let them do the wrong thing just because they'll end up with good results.
It's even crazier with Iraq, because we already knew about the tyranny. We already didn't consider overthrowing them. So permission was already asked, and denied.
Check the statistics on the disparity between men and women. You can't let a hundred million Chinese men run around without women...they get very pissed. And it's just going to get worse unless they're willing to dump stupid-ass traditions.
I'm now reminded of, I think it was a Neal Stephenson book, about a future in which China had mandatory sex changes for random men.
Note if you managed to skip getting the address book with Wesker's number earlier, Chris won't be able to call him. (Duh.)
So you'll have to lower the elevator first, go up, talk to Jennifer to get the address book, and then come back and have Chris telephone Wesker, and then do the elevator again to go find him. It's a lot harder to get the address book as Barry, though. Keep talking about the lake, and if she starts acting weird and asking personal questions about Barry, abort the conversation...she's figured out something is wrong. You can just start the conversation over again, though. Do not tell her what's going on.
This confused me quite a bit, because all the walkthroughs assumed I had gotten the address book already. But it is possible to get to this point without it, you just had to get the phone number for Senator Clark from the trashcan instead of the address book.
As an aside, it's possible to almost completely skip the body switch...you can put it off till the evening, when Wesker is already there (He comes regardless of Chris calling him.), and he'll switch you back immediately. You just have to go to the poolhouse the other way, which you aren't supposed to learn until after the body switch. (You do eventually have to do the body switch, because you can't get into the lab otherwise...and, no, you can't put it off until Barry leaves. He won't.)
I used to work at Wal-Mart, and I agree...price matching is just stupid.
I mean, I understand if you see some amazing deal aon a certain product, and when you come in to Wal-Mart for something else you grab it also. Whatever.
But it was people who would bring in, like, ads from four difference grocery stores (This was a Super Wal-Mart.) and have carefully marked the cheapest price for an entire shopping cart worth of crap. If you're going to spend that much time figuring out which stores have the cheapest price, why don't you save everyone else some time and shop there?
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I mean, there are only two legit possiblities...you have the legal power to forever silence the people who took the pictures, and everyone who's got a copy, and keep them from ever distributing them, which is rather unlikely, or you don't have the power, in which case you just need to be checking the web page to see who's been identified.
There's no logical reason to take down the server or even copy it, unless you think they've put pictures and identities on it that haven't gone public. Which is unlikely, the way indymedia works. But even then, you don't need to take it down.
The real reason they did this is so they could do damage control without indymedia being able to react.
Well, thanks to the internet, the protesters are taking pictures of the troublemakers and they're sticking up the pictures and saying 'Who the fuck is this person breaking this car window? If anyone knows who this is, tell us.'.
Well...they're undercover cops. Duh. Everyone suspected that, but that's what all this racket is about.
Logically, it makes no sense, if you've infiltrated an organization, and they post pictures of stuff, to say 'Hey, that's our undercover cops! Take those pictures down!'. That's just crazy. If they don't know they're undercover cops, don't tell them. If they do know, well, you're screwed anyway, pull them back in.
But these undercover cops are there to cause problems so the police can escalate the force used against the protesters. Having their faces plastered around is likely to be rather bad PR.
Except, of course, the traditional news is completely ignoring this.
Or if they were really clever, they'd use machines behind port 25 firewalls to generate the hashcash, also. You don't need a 'distributed computer' for that, you just need to hand the firewalled machine a list of email addesses and the forged From address, and have it hand the hash+email address one at a time to different unfirewalled boxes. (Or, hey, multiple ones, because spam zombies often get blocked so they like to try repeatedly.)
I don't know what kind of goofy universe you'd need to want to use distributed computer when you need to figure out several million different 10 second computations. You just split up the damn list and hand it to the machines.
Why do you think users would suddenly start noticing their boxes wasting CPU time, when they apparently too fucking stupid to notice spam flooding their outgoing internet connection?
As those both were patent issues, both those could stop end users from using the product, or they'd risk being sued.
What you're saying is true about copyrights, but not about patents. Simply using a patented process is illegal, it doesn't matter if someone else gave you the software or you wrote it yourself.
They're standing around on street corners handing out free samples to little black children like candy.
WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!
Now, stopping either one wastes time, but failure to stop spam would immediately destroy the internet. (I mean that exactly like it sounded. Within a day, the internet would melt.)
Whereas failure to stop copyright infringement wouldn't do anything. (Which is rather obvious, because you can basically get whatever mildly-popular copyrighted works you want via the internet for free right now.)
Admit it. You were going to do that anyway.
I think of it as a tree, and most knowledge of most people is under things like, oh, 'car stuff'. Whereas a car expert will have a 'car stuff', but no knowledge in it, he's have sub categories of 'types of cars sorted by engine', 'types of cars sorted by crappiness', 'types of Fords', 'car parts', 'the oil circulation system of cars', etc, etc.
Now, once you get into each index, it may, indeed, stored different ways. But there is a tree.
That's the thing about savants...they can create an index in real time, somehow. If they know about trains, you can ask them to tell you the longest name of a train, and they can almost immediately.
There's a case of a person who had a brain that was about a third normal size, and no one even realized it until he was 20 or so and got x-rayed for a head injury.
However, it's not Wal-Mart that gets hurts when people spend time price matching forty items, saving a grand total of 13 dollars. It's the people who are price matching (Well, okay, they can hurt themselves, no objections there.), but it's also the cashiers, and the people behind them in line.
Wal-Mart couldn't care less, Wal-Mart doesn't hurt at all on that. I care.
Note: If your local Wal-Mart is not a Super Wal-Mart, in a poorish area, you do not know what I'm talking about. Normal Wal-Marts do a single price match every hour or so, usually for entirely reasonable amounts. Super Wal-Marts have grocery shoppers that come in and do dozens of price matches for trivial amounts. There are people who sit down with their shopping list and five flyers from local grocery stores, and carefully mark things off.
I once got right behind a person like that in the express lane. Sure, they were under the item limit, but half the items were price matched, most for about a dollar, and they had no idea which one was in what flyer, so they had to look through them all. I was halfway tempted to say 'Look, I'll give you twenty dollars if you'll just stop price matching.'.
And then, of course, they paid by carefully writing out a check. Fuckers. You don't write checks in the express lane for less than fifty dollars. (Hell, you don't write checks at all, you let them print on your check.) Luckily, self-checkouts have almost completely stopped my interaction with these people.
None of this is helped, of course, by Wal-Mart's idea of cost cutting, which can be summed up as 'have less cashiers working than we need'.
(Obligatory way to rip off Wal-Mart, in case anyone thinks I'm defending them: Pay for a soft drink or candy with a debit card, get cash back. They end up eating the ATM fee your bank charges. To drive the point home, if you need 100 dollars cash back, do it 5 times, so they eat five times the fees. Use a self-checkout, though, as to not annoy the horribly-underpaid cashier. Or at least let them in on the joke...80% of them will love it, if they aren't busy.)
If you want more than five items at the price of another store, buy them at that store.
There are two ways to stop asteroids. You can blow them up, or you can turn them. Both these work better the farther away you get, and stop working really close.
If you have something that can turn asteroids, yeah, you could turn the towards earth, and you could even turn them towards a certain part of earth. (Or, at least, wait until you got the right one, and turn it.)
If you've got way to blown them up when they're a quarter AU away from earth, no, you can't really hurt the earth with said asteroids.
Of course, now the problem is, you've got a way to blow things up sitting in space. Doh.
Anyway, nukes are too big, biological weapons are too indescriminate, and radioactive material spreads too easily. That's what 'mass destruction' is talking about.
However, for some reason, all chemical weapons are generally included under the WMD banner. All chemical and biological weapons are forbidden in war, but I'm not entirely certain if all chemical weapons are technically WMDs, because there are certainly chemical weapons that can be directed against only soldiers. (Hell, tear gas and pepper spray are chemical weapons.)
And countries go to war with each other when they have conflicting desires, usually it being that they both want sole possession of something, like Poland or oil or Helen of Troy.
Which is why the 'War on Drugs' or the 'War on Poverty' or 'The War on Terror' is insane. None of those nouns want to take over part of this country, or access to oil reserves, or anything like that....because they are not people or organizations, and thus cannot want things.
And even the organizations closely related to those things do not want something the US wants. Drug dealers want to make money, drugs are the means to that. And terrorists don't want to attack the US, they want something else and attacking the US is the means. (Well, okay, they may, indeed, want to attack the US, but they don't want to attack the US because the US currently has possession of something of theirs and they want to take it back by force.)
But given that we could shoot down satellites from the earth, it seems rather stupid to build a satellite that does that. If there truly were WMD satellites, we could take them out without any problems anyway. (Hell, we could probably take out WMD satellites with existing satellites, via the little known tactic of 'ramming'.)
But there aren't any WMD satellites, because no one wants to start that shit.
What the US is doing is a bit akin to massing troups on the border and claiming you're doing it purely in self defense, because the other country is going to invade. Well, okay, but you're the one sticking the troups there, you're the one making everyone nervous. They don't appear to have any troups, but they sure as hell are going to get some.
And, yes, the only real objection is the cost of this. But, hey, have to spend that budget surplus anywhere, ever since we got rid of the debt.
'Hey, look, an enemy camp! Let's flatten it!' 'Hey, look, the enemy are holed up in that building. Clear out the surrounding area and let's flatten it!'
It's like shelling the enemy, except more powerful and you can't get shelled back or bombed or taken out by conventional arms. Sounds like a damn good way of taking out a conventional army to me!
What, exactly, is your point? That it's okay to run around breaking the law, because it would be okay to break the law if other people broke it? Huh?
No one should be putting weapons platforms in space. If people starting doing so, they are bad people. If other countries respond in kind, they can be judged at that time. It doesn't stop the first country from being bad.
The military advantage of putting things in space is one thing only: From space, you can hit the earth with rocks and have the effect of hitting it with a nuke. In fact, you might get more bang for the ounce by using rocks instead of nukes. (For one thing, you don't have to protect rocks on reentry, whereas a nuclear missle needs not only to not go off during reenty, but to be able to go off at the end.)
But orbit is only an advantage if you're attacking the earth. We're pretty much screwed no matter what if an asteroid hits, but if we chose to use a nuclear missile against it, there's absolutely no reason we can't launch one from earth.
Hell, we don't allow it from our police departments. Guess what happens if they fake information to get a search warranty, and discover actual incriminating evidence? We throw that evidence out.
The old expression 'It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.' only works until they get tired of it, and we got tried of it with our government a long time ago in most matters. We don't let them do the wrong thing just because they'll end up with good results.
It's even crazier with Iraq, because we already knew about the tyranny. We already didn't consider overthrowing them. So permission was already asked, and denied.
Check the statistics on the disparity between men and women. You can't let a hundred million Chinese men run around without women...they get very pissed. And it's just going to get worse unless they're willing to dump stupid-ass traditions.
I'm now reminded of, I think it was a Neal Stephenson book, about a future in which China had mandatory sex changes for random men.
So you'll have to lower the elevator first, go up, talk to Jennifer to get the address book, and then come back and have Chris telephone Wesker, and then do the elevator again to go find him. It's a lot harder to get the address book as Barry, though. Keep talking about the lake, and if she starts acting weird and asking personal questions about Barry, abort the conversation...she's figured out something is wrong. You can just start the conversation over again, though. Do not tell her what's going on.
This confused me quite a bit, because all the walkthroughs assumed I had gotten the address book already. But it is possible to get to this point without it, you just had to get the phone number for Senator Clark from the trashcan instead of the address book.
As an aside, it's possible to almost completely skip the body switch...you can put it off till the evening, when Wesker is already there (He comes regardless of Chris calling him.), and he'll switch you back immediately. You just have to go to the poolhouse the other way, which you aren't supposed to learn until after the body switch. (You do eventually have to do the body switch, because you can't get into the lab otherwise...and, no, you can't put it off until Barry leaves. He won't.)
I mean, I understand if you see some amazing deal aon a certain product, and when you come in to Wal-Mart for something else you grab it also. Whatever.
But it was people who would bring in, like, ads from four difference grocery stores (This was a Super Wal-Mart.) and have carefully marked the cheapest price for an entire shopping cart worth of crap. If you're going to spend that much time figuring out which stores have the cheapest price, why don't you save everyone else some time and shop there?