Sometimes you'll come across writing that just won't make sense to you. That doesn't mean the writer or her readers are retards. Re-read what you don't understand and look for double-meanins. This is also called 'metaphor'.
When Hunter Thompson writes about travelling to Las Vegas and consuming an unhealthy (inhuman) amount of illicit drugs, he's commenting on the excessive consumerism that was running rampant in the 1970s.
Because you're comparing Thompson to MTV, I'll assume that you are also writing in some kind of metaphor, because I just don't understand that comparison and I'd otherwise have to think you are a retard.
ObL is a modern terrorist, using modern methods to operate and communicate
This is SO absurd. The legions of speculators on this situation who are suggesting Bin Laden and his crew used the internet and all this other technology are trying to pre-empt the Tom Clancy novelization of this attack. But these fantastic imaginings of how the hijackers communicated are not grounded in reality.
Take a look at the living conditions in Afghanistan. The Taliban's banning the use of computers is a little moot when no one can: A. Afford a computer. B. Afford the internet. C. Afford the electricity to power the computer. Osama Bin Laden and / or whoever organized this project is using the crudest of means in the most effective way possible. They don't have the luxury of spending money to write their own steganography software. Sure, Bin Laden is supposed to be rich, but he's spending that money on guns and bombs, not some la-la steganography program. There are so many other more likely means of communicating from the mountains of Afghanistan to Florida or New Jersey. Not that I think they did this, but they could have:
Purchased digitally encrypted cellphones from China or the Russian black market.
Written correspondence encoded with one-time pads.
Actual face-to-face visits.
Not a lot of communication needed to take place for this project, anyway. Once the plan was designed, why would the perpetrators need to contact their home base again?
I agree with perdida's comment about preventing steganography is like trying to prevent a germ warfare attack.
If you want to see how many attacks have been logged against your web server since the last time the access_log rolled over, here's a simple command line operation that will count the number of unique attackers your machine has encountered:
seth@soldier:/var/log/httpd > cat access_log |grep scripts| cut -f1 -d' ' |sort|uniq|wc -l
Although I've got a lot of requests coming in, throughout the day, I've only seen about 220 unique attacks.
I think you're right about the script kiddies comprimising the major news sites.
In fact, here on Slashdot, three days doesn't pass without some huge screed pasted on the main page by some leet haxor named Jon Katz. I don't know why Taco doesn't plug up whatever vulnerability that kid is exploiting to deface Slashdot.
Like I said, I think GWB is going to surprise a lot of people.
That's what I think a lot of us are afraid of.
Bush has the pointy heads around him
When a leader depends on the pointy heads around him for guidance, he is susceptible to extreme manipulation. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Emporer Hirohito was totally out of touch with what was going on. He was a figurehead for the military regime that controlled his puppet strings. I'm not saying that Bush has as forceful handlers as Hirohito, but it does help explain his pretty-much absurd championing for the ABM system he's trying to get developed. NO public support has been calling for an ABM system. That's obviously something that the denizens of the smoke-filled back rooms are pressuring him about.
Almost no president, with the exception of Bush, Sr,has significant foreign policy experience
Through Gore's experience as VP, I think he has gained substantial foregin policy experience that would have made him better prepared to guide the country through this situation with more rationality, and big-picture perspective than I expect Bush will. I am really hoping that Bush impresses me rather than surprises me.
Sure, not a lot of presidents were previously ambassadors, etc. but most of the best ones had studied foregin policy to some extent before they got behind the wheel. They understand how to forge comprimises in Congress. They understand how to build alliances with countries with competing interests. They know what American has to gain and lose depending on how foreign opinion of the country shifts. They learned a lot of this through history and also political science coursework, not MBA business school classes. At a minumum, many ex-presidents have fought or travelled overseas. Bush thinks he's bragging when he said he'd travelled to mexico prior to running for president. McCain or Gore both would have had a better perspective on world affairs than Bush. But like I said ealrier in this overly-winded post, I hope Bush impresses me rather than surprises me.
I strongly agree with you when you say this action requires a military punishing of those responsible. Considering that the previous bombing of the World Trade Center (which was admittedly less severe than today's attack) did not escalate things to a state of war, perhaps we (the US) will take a strong, rational approach to eliminating the group responsible for this. Then again, the US is in a dramatically different economic and political situation than we were in 1993.
As is evidenced by the Bush administration's "screw-em-if-they-don't-agree-with-us" isolationist approach to the ABM treaty and Kyoto Protocol, our leadership is probably the least-experienced we've had ever to deal with such an event. As citizens, we'll all need to resist the temptation to fuel the war hawks with spirited demands for revenge.
I don't expect we have any worry about these terrorists launching a nuclear attack. If they had that capability, today we would have seen it. This isn't a tit-for-tat exchange. Those folks were putting all they had into this assault. They know that with this attack, they've escalated matters to such a level that their organization will be destroyed. They have prompted a global response that would advocate any amount of military action necessary to seek out and punish those responsible. If it takes the US army driving tanks over every square inch of Afganistan (Not that we have evidence that Osama Bin Laden is responsible for this), it would be hard to find any government other than possibly the Taliban who would resist the US doing so. And the Taliban is not exactly poised to impose economic sanctions on the world powers to protest.
As for the difference between Gore and W... I think we all recognize that Bush isn't studied in world politics. Gore is. Bush is running his administration from 'gut instincts' making CEO-type decisions. This is exactly the kind of complicated world-issue that calls for a statesman of a leader, not the previous owner of a baseball team that never won a pennant.
I strongly agree with you when you say this is not a time for hysterical responses such as war, etc. Considering that the previous bombing of the World Trade Center (which was admittedly less severe than today's attack) did not escalate things to a state of war, perhaps we (the US) will take a strong, rational approach to eliminating the group responsible for this. Then again, the US is in a dramatically different economic and political situation than we were in 1993.
As is evidenced by the Bush administration's "screw-em-if-they-don't-agree-with-us" approach to the ABM treaty and Kyoto Protocol, our leadership is probably the least-experienced we've had ever to deal with such an event. As citizens, we'll all need to resist the temptation to fuel the war hawks with spirited demands for revenge.
I don't expect we have any worry about these terrorists launching a nuclear attack. If they had that capability, today we would have seen it. This isn't a tit-for-tat exchange. Those folks were putting all they had into this assault. They know that with this attack, they've escalated matters to such a level that their organization will be destroyed. They have prompted a global response that would advocate any amount of military action necessary to seek out and punish those responsible. If it takes the US army driving tanks over every square inch of Afganistan (Not that we have evidence that Osama Bin Laden is responsible for this), it would be hard to find any government other than possibly the Taliban who would resist the US doing so. And the Taliban is not exactly poised to impose economic sanctions on the world powers to protest.
I remember reading somewhere that when Apple announced the SuperDrive, that they said you'd be able to purchase DVD-R discs for $5.00 from the Apple Store. Looks like
they're still twice that. But, heck. $10.00 is still a pretty good deal for that much storage. I guess some retailers are offering them for less than $10. But I agree. $5.00 is the real convincing pricepoint for this storage medium.
Comparing the CNN article referenced by the original post and this ZDnet article, the ZD article has much more detail on the proposed applications for this technology. It also contradicts the CNN article in the price of the planes. CNN says it's estimated at $1 million, while ZD says $10 million.
One of the funnier quotes in the article is from some AT&T guy saying this technology "isn't ready for primetime." Heh..heh. No shit. It's a damn experiment. Of course AT&T is going to poo-poo anything that would enable a little company to leapfrog AT&T's kabillion-dollar infrastructure and compete with them for broadband service.
"Helios' "brain" is an Apple Computer Macintosh computer that would guide it back to Earth when necessary.
"
make some money off banner ads
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Taco, I recommend you sign up with one of those online casino sites and host banner ads on your server with the file name of/default.ida. You should be able to rack up a few thousand unique page views a day by pointing the scourge at the scourge (ala Fist Full of Dollars).
After reviewing my apache access_log for the past few days, I noticed that I'm getting a huge amount of traffic from http requests asking for/default.ida. I'm wondering if there's some way I can hook up with one of those casino web advertisers and host their banner ads on my docroot as/index.ida... Seems to be a lot of unique IPs requesting this file.. In other words, point the scourge at the scourge and make money from it
Fist Full of Dollars style.
I fully agree with you. This deserves to smack across the face of BG himself like a french-thrown pie... But it's not.
I was startled by the effectiveness of whatever calls from Microsoft's PR department that resulted in this Reuters spin:
"Computers running Windows 95, 98 and ME are not vulnerable to the worm."
As if those are the only computer OS's in the world! And while the article triumphs the safety of those Microsoft products, it fails to mention that this whole problem relates only to a given microsoft product (IIS). The pointer given in the article isn't even aimed at microsoft.com.. it's digitalisland.com/codered. What a smokescreen!
Isn't it funny that when a piece of hardware is deemed faulty, the company that makes it will issue a recall at great expense to the manufacturer. When Microsoft's products are deemed faulty, the product is repaired at great expense to the consumer.
Yeah, you get your ass destroyed by the US courts.
By your reasoning, I could sit in a boat in international waters (12 miles offshore) and shoot rich americans bobbing around in their sailboats out in the carribean. "Oh, there's no law out in the ocean. What crime is it to kill some people?!?"
surfing porn in the us doesn't impact the Chinese, so they're not going to arrest you when you visit there. Just like if you smoke pot in Amsterdam, they're not going to arrest you when you return to the US.
However, if you slashed the throat of your fiance while visiting Sierra Leone, and she's an American citizen, I think the US authorities would have something to say to you when you come home.
I get kind of nervous when I think about nutjobs running countries...
So do I. Especially when I hear about Star Wars and remember that before he got elected, the current US president couldn't even name the leaders of the nations this 60 Billion-dollar system would 'protect' us from.
If they formed a consortium and bought a real-end user OS like Be or splintered AtheOS, and sunk a few million a month into it, MS *would* surely respond.
I'm not sure which industry analyst you're quoting when you describe BeOS as a 'real end-user OS'. Last time I checked, BeOS was attempting to sell their OS in th embedded market. It was a fun junket, but alas, it suffers from exactly the monopoly you refuse to admit is stifling competition. There are few apps available for BeOS. Way fewer than Linux or BSD. It suffers from the vicious circle that any other OS faces when trying to enter the Microsoft-dominated OS arena. No users -> no developers -> no apps -> no users. 'a few million a month'? Are you kidding? Linux and BSD have dozens of thousands of developers coding software 24/7 for FREE and neither of those OS's have kicked Bill Gates in the teeth. Do you really think someone can come along and invest a few million a month to make a credible threat to Microsoft? What the heck has redhat been doing?!
Keep in mind that a major factor behind Dell and Compaq's sales figures is the OS and apps that run on their products. If they were to start playing games by only shipping BeOS, there would be a hell of a lot more layoffs coming at those companies than the 1500 that Compaq announced yesterday.
You know, the more I think about this comment, the more I recognize the irony of your argument. You are touting BeOS and AtheOS as a 'real end-user OS'. Let's temporarily assume that these are superior end-user operating systems as you suggest. The very fact that neither of them are stomping Microsoft out of business serves to illustrate that the market is controlled by Microsoft's monopoly. The better mousetrap, BeOS and AtheOS, does not win. Consumers suffer by having an inferior product foisted upon them.
THEORY! until we
have 50 years of data you cant say dick about what is or isnt happening on a global scale to the temperature.
For starters, I am pretty sure we have 50 years of data, but I'm willing to ignore that in order to highlight the fallacy of this logic.
When you're working with finite resources, does it make sense to ignore the exhaustion of those resources because you don't think you're properly measuring the rate of exhaustion? Imagine driving down the highway in a fine 19-foot Ford Excursion that happens to have a flaky gas guage. It reads 1/4 tank left, but do mistrust the reliability of that guage and mash on the gas pedal for another 20 miles (two gallons of gas), or do you pull over and refill the tank?
By dodging responsibility for global climate change for the next 50 years, we are increasing the likelyhood that the human self-destruct sequence has already been initiated and there's nothing that can be done.
I also find it equally insane that people will use our economy as justification for continued environmental irresponsibility. This is not at all different than the arguments presented by slavery proponents who claimed (claim) that economic survivial depended on the use of slave labor. Although we don't have 50 years of evidence to prove that the U.S. economy depends on deforestation in Idaho or drilling oil in Alaskan Wildlife preserves, I have to ask at what cost comes this economy of ours? Aren't we selling the quality of life for future generations so that we can drive our SUVs today?
During the slow evolution towards a totalitarian state, at what point should people say, "Hey, now that really crosses the line!"? Do we wait until jews and homosexuals are required to wear patches on their clothes? Do we wait until internment camps are built?
Would you not complain if the govt. put sewage sniffers in pipes to detect the urine of Americans using drugs? You have a few friends over for a party and some of them are pot smokers, so their urine triggers the attention of the sewage monitors. The next day, the cops are knocking on your door with probable cause to search your house for illegal substances. Whoops! Look what they found under your bed! A Real Doll. That was quite a hoo-hah for the boys in blue!
Would you mind if Tampa also added mechanical narcotics sniffers in public corridors? Using the same technology they use in airports to catch drug smugglers / bombs in suitcases, they could sniff your person for trace amounts of narcotics. Wanna play a practical joke on a bunch of people? Rub your currency with pot before you spend it. Somewhere down the line people would get detained by the sniffers over the money you had 'tagged'.
Due to your use of the phrase "hire car" I'm assuming this mathematical error is due to your familiarity with the metric system and lack thereof with miles and hours.
Travelling across the US in 2 minutes would be measured by multiplying 30 times the width of the country (~3000). This trip would average 90,000 mph. If this American motorist were driving the typical greenhouse-gas emitting SUV, the trip would consume 7500 gallons of gasoline.
"I can guarentee that my children will be starting out
with an oldie 8bit computer and some interesting games the first second they show interest in computers."
While I'm certain your fond memories of your early computer explorations are just as hearttouching as my own, I think your plan to shackle your own children to 20+ year-old technology is the best way to snuff out that interest as soon as it crops up. Consider how your introduction to computers would have been had someone restricted you to using 20+ year-old technology. In 1978, that would have been slide-rules. Would you have gotten so excited about computers if you knew your neighbors were playing Wizardry and saving their data on 5 1/4" floppy disks while you're having to write a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper playing whatever games you can play with a slide rule?
If youre kids are watching movies like Shrek and playing games on PS2 that illustrate what computers can create, handing them an old Commodore 64 or Apple IIe is going to disappoint them beyond belief.
I'm not advocating you give your kids the best and shiniest computer. Give 'em something that enables a soft introduction, but provides limitless opportunities for exploration. I'm not quite sure the Linux desktop is quite there yet, but Mac OS X probably is. I am not suggesting this as a flame, either. I had a run-in with setting up my computer-illiterate roommate with a linux box as his first computer. He became frustrated with not knowing how to download and install anything, and cdrom burning was just not intuitive enough for him. He got fed up and resigned himself to 'not being smart enough for computers.'
You've got an interesting cable box. I haven't seen anything like it. I doubt, however, that you'll be able to move the mpeg stuff off of it to a computer. If USB is the fastest I/O, then the box would have to cache the mpeg somewhere. USB doesn't have the bandwidth to stream real-time mpeg video at the resolution of a tv set (less than a computer monitor, but greater than you little webcam dealy). Since your cable box doesn't have a hard drive in your description, this doesn't sound feasible. Perhaps that smartcard port could be filled with wireless ethernet or something? Good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you get your ass destroyed by the US courts.
By your reasoning, I could sit in a boat in international waters (12 miles offshore) and shoot rich americans bobbing around in their sailboats out in the carribean. "Oh, there's no law out in the ocean. What crime is it to kill some people?!?"
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