The point of the original poster was that, even if the beam is left on and the assailants are severely injured as a result, that's no worse than the current common practice of drowning them in a hail of hot lead, which also causes rather severe injuries.
A better idea is to create a magnetic field and fill it with plasma. That would be quite easy if you could make a fusion reactor the size of a cucumber...
Maybe it would be clearer if it were "Directed-Energy Directorate". It is a directorate that deals with directed-energy devices.
Directed energy is energy which is directed to go in some particular direction -- that is, energy which is aimed at some target. This is as opposed to undirected energy, which flows forth in all directions, like a bomb.
Note that bombs with shaped charges, such as the one used to blast a hole into the hull of the USS Cole, are also a sort of directed energy, though I don't know if the Directed Energy Directorate handles that sort of thing. A shaped charge is an explosive charge whose explosive force goes mostly in one particular direction, rather than in all directions as with a conventional bomb. Shaped charges have been used at least since World War II in anti-tank weapons, though many modern tanks are equipped with a type of armor that is highly resistant -- if not impervious -- to shaped charges. Details of how this armor works is highly classified for obvious reasons.
Mind you, this is a 3W laser. That's not a whole hell of a lot of power. Most night lights consume more. Considering such a low-power laser could do that kind of damage, imagine what a big (100W, perhaps) laser could do. (Of course, you have issues of cooling and so forth, but that's not the point.)
Wouldnt this mean that we could also make a large microwave, and use it as some sort of weapon (not realy).
You don't need a "large" microwave for that. The magnetron in a typical microwave oven is more than enough to cook someone, or so I'm told. Since the magnetron emits a coherent microwave beam, you can aim it at someone's head for maximum effect.
They can see where all the holes that hackers/modders are exploiting in the console are.
What's wrong with that? That's a lot like how Open Source security works -- people find bugs in your code, they publish the bugs, you get to fix them.
They can "slipstream" secutity updates into future games and break the above.
Fine. Let them. After enough iterations they'll figure out that it's futile. Anyway, isn't it their right to do so?
They get some PR karma for not going after an academic/researcher who is doing benefit for the "public good" (i.e. fixing security holes that could "JEAPORDIZE NATIONAL SECURITY"
That PR karma seems deserved to me.
They know what works and what doesn't for security in future products.
Yeah -- nothing and everything, respectively.
Re:But spam itself is just a symptom of fraud
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Well, instead of "someone I know", it could be more generalized to just "someone in the web-of-trust".
How does a newbie get into the web of trust, then?
Re:How SMTP handles addressing (was Re:Yeah, right
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Is there ANY conceivable legitimate reason for this?!
Yes. Mailing lists.
Re:But spam itself is just a symptom of fraud
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Blacklists should work, and we should be working toward removing the obstacles that are keeping their effectiveness down. Someone shouldn't be able to dodge the effects of a blacklist just by switching ISPs. I wish there were some way of associating a mail with a real identity.
That isn't the biggest problem. Blacklists can be updated quickly. As was mentioned in the article, a spammer can easily get blacklisted mere days after changing ISPs. That can get very expensive very quickly. The biggest problem is that the blacklists are either going commercial (cf. MAPS), thus making them essentially useless, or are being DoSed, sued, and/or legislated out of existence (cf. ORBS). The latter is especially troubling. Spammers can use denial of service against blacklists (using their cash to hire 31337 h4X0R D00DZ), or, failing that, file suit against the blacklist operators and drag out the process until the defendant(s) run out of money and shut down.
Another thing I would like to see, is the converse of the above. If mainstream mail clients were to more tightly integrate PGP/GPG so that more people (even Joe Schmoe's grandmother) could easily use it, that would help. If a large fraction of mail had signatures, then people could begin to filter on the basis of "someone I know" vs "stranger." Then, perhaps after a few decades, people could just automatically ignore all mail that doesn't have some sort of provable reputation associated with it.
This only works if you're willing to communicate only with people you already know. This is ineffective for corporate email addresses, where people are often contacted (for legitimate reasons) by people they don't know.
The main benefit that I see to ant- spam laws is that it would put pressure on ISPs to get rid of the spammers. Spammers aren't going to file lawsuits against ISPs to let them continue an illegal operation.
They already have, and I see no reason for them to stop.
They aren't going to pack up and physically move to Korea, either.
Why not? It's a lot safer there.
How SMTP handles addressing (was Re:Yeah, right.)
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That's because of the way SMTP handles addressing of mail messages. When an SMTP server is connected to by an SMTP client (which might be another SMTP server, a mail reader, etc), a protocol exchange something like this takes place (S: denotes a line sent from the server, C: denotes a line sent from the client):
S: <some greeting stuff> C: EHLO <client's host name> S: <various information about the server> C: MAIL FROM: <sender's email address> S: <acknowledgement> C: RCPT TO: <recipient email addresses> S: <acknowledgement> C: DATA S: <acknowledgement> C: <headers and body of the email> C:. S: <acknowledgement>
As you can see, the list of recipients of the email is not determined by anything in its header; rather, this is determined from the list of recipients on the RCPT TO: line. Mail readers implement Bcc by inserting the Bcc'd addresses into the RCPT TO: list without mentioning them in the headers of the email itself.
I was about to reply and give you another refutation, but after reading your smartass remark about the splash screen on point 5, I've arrived at the conclusion that doing so is futile. Maybe when you grow up I'll be able to tolerate you.
XHTML 1.0 Transitional has a "target" attribute for the "a" element. I see nothing in the XHTML 1.0 spec about this attribute, which means, AFAIK, that the definition of this attribute is the same as HTML 4.0. Therefore, it follows that you are, in fact, permitted to use it.
Note that, as in HTML 4.0, XHTML 1.0's Strict DTD does not include the "target" attribute. The Transitional DTD is required for this feature.
First things first: if I had mod points right now, I'd have modded you down as Troll. Twice.
Since I don't have mod points, I'll just give you some counter-arguments.
I'd say about one out of seven pages loads improperly, not because the site isn't standards-compliant, but because Mozilla's rendering engine doesn't play nice. I'm talking about the white spaces that appear after you resize a window, only to be filled in with content when you scoll the window. Stupid, retarded crap like that.
Which version are you using? M1?
Also, everyone raves about the ability to kill popups. But they don't rave about all the links that just do nothing when you click on them because Mozilla isn't smart enough to follow popup links in the same window.
If you open popups in new windows the right way (that is, target="_blank"), the links work perfectly. If you use JavaScript, Mozilla really has no way of knowing what the hell to do with the links (since you could pop up a window and then run some other code, which assumes that the old page is still open, which it wouldn't be if it's been replaced!).
Or what about all the links that open new windows, but then just hang indefinitely?
More JavaScript trickery that doesn't work in Mozilla. If you use sites like that, you frankly deserve them not to work.
What is with that clumsy profile manager? It still runs like a goddamn add-on that isn't properly integrated.
Define "properly integrated".
And don't even get me started on the *IDIOTIC* layout of the preference panels in Mozilla, which are another unwelcome hold over from Netscape.
What exactly is wrong with them?
You only think it's good because it's not made by Microsoft.
No, I "only" think it's good because it works, and does so very well. There are many Free browsers available; if Mozilla were nearly as poor as you seem to think it is, I would use something else.
And what is with that childish splash screen? I can almost see where the geek used photoshop's finger tool to make the dragon's firebreath effect. Grow up.
How superficial. Grow up.
And what about the agonizingly long time Mozilla takes to start up?
I'm having a hard time believing its load time is even close to "agonizingly long" on a dual G4 machine. Perhaps something is amiss with your operating system? (Hint: OS X sucks. Use Linux. Everything works much better that way. I know, I've used both on the same machine.)
IPsec would be great if there were proper Linux support for it, meaning Linux can talk IPsec with any host it contacts. (At present, you need a user-space tunneling program.)
Call be a skeptic (or a fool) but I don't think there is any feasible way of getting antimatter because antimatter tends to cancel itself out with matter in our universe, so as far as we know there's no natural way to get enough of it where you want it for power generation. And creating it should take more energy than you would get from cancelling it out, I think, due to the second law of thermodynamics. It certainly wouldn't produce more energy than creating it.
You're right, and that's what I meant when I said the problem is where to get/make it. The only feasible way to get antimatter would be to somehow turn matter into antimatter.
Those synchronization issues and such were resolved a long time ago.
Today's computers run at a variety of different speeds. Some of those speeds the result of over/underclocking only, and no processors are rated at such speeds. Software must therefore not rely on the machine running at any particular speed.
In modern multitasking operating systems, the speed of the machine is effectively random, since each process may be suspended and resumed at any time. Therefore, user-space programs cannot rely on the machine running at a constant speed.
Many modern low-power processors (such as those used in laptops) are capable of altering their clock speed on the fly, to conserve power when load is light. Therefore, even the kernel cannot rely on the machine running at a constant speed.
There are some other reasons, but I think I've made my point. Note that some problems relating to processor speed may be resolved by using the computer's real-time clock as a point of reference, which is independent of processor speed.
You'll be surprised at how much energy it still generated by coal. Obsolete you heat your house doesnt' mean obsolete in the energy industry.
Well then, perhaps it should be!
Nuclear waste is material that has been used in a reactor but is discarded because it can't be used anymore to generate power.
Even though it's radiating it doesn't mean it can be used in a reactor. There is a reason why the reactors get rid of it. It's a similar reason as why they are not using human farts to power cars.
Of course it can't be used in a reactor. That's not what nuclear reactors are designed to do. That doesn't mean nuclear waste isn't an excellent energy source if applied correctly. When properly configured, nuclear waste can reach a surface temperature of thousands of degrees, and stay close to that temperature for decades without further intervention.
Linux supports many kinds of authentication via PAM.
Not the least of which being Kerberos 5 that Microsoft is all up in arms about. And this Kerberos 5 is the real deal, not a lobotomized^Wembraced-and-extended implementation.
I think the complaint about "configurations of individual permissions" refers to some additional refinement of permissions in Windows. In reality, the Unix permissions scheme adapts fairly well to real-world issues, providing good security without too much inconvenience. The Windows permission scheme, in contrast, appears over-complicated, poorly understood by Windows admins, and frequently ignored/bypassed.
Actually, the Windows permission scheme is occasionally useful, though usually Unix permissions are more than sufficient. The only time I've ever wanted to have filesystem ACLs was for the Web server root, and even then it was more of a "it'd be nice, but who cares" kind of thing.
The situation is only somewhat better than Windows for Linux to be fair. First off most drivers are delivered with an MD5 checksum, which is good enough for most uses.
The kernel sources available on kernel.org are all GnuPG signed. This is generally regarded to be far more secure than anything Microsoft has ever come up with. I don't think that's exactly "only somewhat better than Windows".
and we don't even know where to store our current nuclear waste.
How about storing that nuclear waste in power plants and using it as an energy source in its own right? With all the radiation bouncing around inside the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, we'd have a stable power source for centuries, or perhaps even millennia.
For that matter, using a nuclear battery (which is a battery version of the above) to power a car is also a good idea. In such small quantities it's no worse than the liquid napalm, lead, acid, and various other hazardous materials cars currently carry. I doubt Big Oil would like this plan very much, though, since they can't just turn into Big Hydrogen and continue operating.
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The point of the original poster was that, even if the beam is left on and the assailants are severely injured as a result, that's no worse than the current common practice of drowning them in a hail of hot lead, which also causes rather severe injuries.
A better idea is to create a magnetic field and fill it with plasma. That would be quite easy if you could make a fusion reactor the size of a cucumber...
Directed energy is energy which is directed to go in some particular direction -- that is, energy which is aimed at some target. This is as opposed to undirected energy, which flows forth in all directions, like a bomb.
Note that bombs with shaped charges, such as the one used to blast a hole into the hull of the USS Cole, are also a sort of directed energy, though I don't know if the Directed Energy Directorate handles that sort of thing. A shaped charge is an explosive charge whose explosive force goes mostly in one particular direction, rather than in all directions as with a conventional bomb. Shaped charges have been used at least since World War II in anti-tank weapons, though many modern tanks are equipped with a type of armor that is highly resistant -- if not impervious -- to shaped charges. Details of how this armor works is highly classified for obvious reasons.
Mind you, this is a 3W laser. That's not a whole hell of a lot of power. Most night lights consume more. Considering such a low-power laser could do that kind of damage, imagine what a big (100W, perhaps) laser could do. (Of course, you have issues of cooling and so forth, but that's not the point.)
I was about to reply and give you another refutation, but after reading your smartass remark about the splash screen on point 5, I've arrived at the conclusion that doing so is futile. Maybe when you grow up I'll be able to tolerate you.
Note that, as in HTML 4.0, XHTML 1.0's Strict DTD does not include the "target" attribute. The Transitional DTD is required for this feature.
Since I don't have mod points, I'll just give you some counter-arguments.
Which version are you using? M1? If you open popups in new windows the right way (that is, target="_blank"), the links work perfectly. If you use JavaScript, Mozilla really has no way of knowing what the hell to do with the links (since you could pop up a window and then run some other code, which assumes that the old page is still open, which it wouldn't be if it's been replaced!). More JavaScript trickery that doesn't work in Mozilla. If you use sites like that, you frankly deserve them not to work. Define "properly integrated". What exactly is wrong with them? No, I "only" think it's good because it works, and does so very well. There are many Free browsers available; if Mozilla were nearly as poor as you seem to think it is, I would use something else. How superficial. Grow up. I'm having a hard time believing its load time is even close to "agonizingly long" on a dual G4 machine. Perhaps something is amiss with your operating system? (Hint: OS X sucks. Use Linux. Everything works much better that way. I know, I've used both on the same machine.)Or is there a patch or something for this?
The technology does exist; a Google search for "nuclear battery" turned up this, among other things.
- Today's computers run at a variety of different speeds. Some of those speeds the result of over/underclocking only, and no processors are rated at such speeds. Software must therefore not rely on the machine running at any particular speed.
- In modern multitasking operating systems, the speed of the machine is effectively random, since each process may be suspended and resumed at any time. Therefore, user-space programs cannot rely on the machine running at a constant speed.
- Many modern low-power processors (such as those used in laptops) are capable of altering their clock speed on the fly, to conserve power when load is light. Therefore, even the kernel cannot rely on the machine running at a constant speed.
There are some other reasons, but I think I've made my point. Note that some problems relating to processor speed may be resolved by using the computer's real-time clock as a point of reference, which is independent of processor speed.I'm surprised that benchmark wasn't done by Mindcraft.
For that matter, using a nuclear battery (which is a battery version of the above) to power a car is also a good idea. In such small quantities it's no worse than the liquid napalm, lead, acid, and various other hazardous materials cars currently carry. I doubt Big Oil would like this plan very much, though, since they can't just turn into Big Hydrogen and continue operating.