Find a spare box (limited only by the available amount of wrapping paper, big boxes with obsurd labels ("beauty care" for a dude, "Windows 8" for a Linux advocate, or perhaps "Extreme Chores"). Print out your gift or some ad for your gift, maybe use a card or something, put it in the box. Extra points for lots of packing ~peanuts. Wrap box, label, etc.
I once did this. I asked the clerk at Best Buy if I could have one of the empty Windows Vista display boxes. I got it. Real gift went inside. The receipient knew how adamantly against Vista I was, so it definitely turned her head.
The Mixed Reality Lab at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan did this in 2009 (linked post dated 2010/10/01, research presented on Popular Science's "The Future Of" television show in their The Future of Sex episode, aired in 2009.
Proposition 35 - Oppose
Proposition 35 increases criminal penalties for sex offenses and imposes new restrictions on registered sex offenders. For example, the measure requires that registrants provide online screen names and information about their Internet service providers to law enforcement - even if their convictions are very old and have nothing to do with the Internet or children. This provision essentially eliminates the ability of registrants to engage in anonymous online speech and imposes a substantial burden whenever a registrant wants to use a new online platform to speech, infringing on registrants' First Amendment right to free speech.
This was buried in an otherwise good proposal (human trafficers should be registered as sex offenders) and wasn't even visible from the official voter guide summary. It has the same problems.
This proposition also passed and I believe goes into effect on in just over a week.
Kickstarter is merely crowdsourced venture capital. The whole philosophy behind venture capital is high risk, high reward. Most investments fail but a few make enough profit to overcome the others' losses. Some time in the 2000s dot-com bubble, the VC expectations I heard were one in fourteen investments should average 20x growth (while 14x growth would roughly break even), though I don't know how many investments such a group would have going concurrently (more would permit more variance).
Ironically enough, you can isolate the "moles" by listwashing, just like spammers do for spam traps.
You've already started the process: you know that three sevenths of your subscriber base is probably safe. In your next run, make sure each of the remaining four groups is subdivided again. Each time you find a group that isn't a mole, you've reduced the potential mole list. Eventually, you'll have just a few accounts and you can silently drop them from your service (or confront them, your call).
There was also an earlier comment on spammer abuse of your proxies that I'd like to expand upon. While it asks you about proxying port 25, there's also the potential for abuse with respect to port 80/443: 419ers are increasing their use of proxies to hide their identity from free webmail providers so they can get free passes on sending spam. If you're better at cracking down on them (by e.g. blocking access to yahoo and hotmail on your proxies), you'll probably have better luck overall.
Maybe you can combine the above two ideas: groups of subscribers known to contribute to getting blocked will get domains whose proxies can't use freemail.
You can have a Windows password with extended characters if you know the character code with something like ALT+KP0, then the three digit ANSII code on the keypad (at least as of Windows 2000), allowing things like Pâssw0rÐ (one capital, two extended, four lowercase, one number: eight characters albeit ~17 key presses)... it's unclear from my (very hasty) reading of the paper if that was considered, but I imagine that even if it was, that password would be signficantly more resource-intensive to crack.
I did the math, not sure why others haven't pointed this out yet. There are 189 nonspace printable characters in the 256-char ANSII code map. Adding one for space, that's 190:
You can do that with your server as well; take a look at fail2ban. Summary from that website:
Fail2ban scans log files (e.g./var/log/apache/error_log) and bans IPs that show the malicious signs -- too many password failures, seeking for exploits, etc. Generally Fail2Ban then used to update firewall rules to reject the IP addresses for a specified amount of time, although any arbitrary other action (e.g. sending an email, or ejecting CD-ROM tray) could also be configured. Out of the box Fail2Ban comes with filters for various services (apache, curier, ssh, etc).
You can have a Windows password with extended characters if you know the character code with something like ALT+KP0, then the three digit ANSII code on the keypad (at least as of Windows 2000), allowing things like Pâssw0rÐ (one capital, two extended, four lowercase, one number: eight characters albeit ~17 key presses)... it's unclear from my (very hasty) reading of the paper if that was considered, but I imagine that even if it was, that password would be signficantly more resource-intensive to crack. I had a friend whose password was a fully punctuated English sentence with a single extended character somewhere in the middle of it, probably 20+ characters including that one hard-to-locate hard-to-crack guy.
I still have a.zip file that I encrypted with a password using such a character. Gave up trying to brute force it after a week or so. At least my data's safe...
To all those people saying goto is a loop: it's only effectively a loop. Goto itself is not a loop, it's an assembler's jump and can do lots of things that loops cannot (loops and conditionals are implemented as jumps). For example, goto has no sense of nesting (or scope) and can be called in the most unexpected of places. This is why it's present but considered taboo in most languages.
Also note that for maximum effect, you need a fixed-width font whose width equals its height and as much space between lines as is used between consecutive characters.
Of course, if this kind of thing interests you, there's more impressive things you can do for pretty effects in short snippets of code.
I read somewhere, probably here (a month or two ago?), a very interesting proposal (paraphrased):
Increase the number of H-1Bs and similar programs. Tax them. Pour money from that tax into education so we can compete in the next generation. This has numerous benefits: it levels the playing field, it invests in our future, and it encourages the kind of immigration that, once upon a time, made this country great.
Several of my coworkers are here on H-1Bs. They are very smart and very talented. Their presence and perspective helps my team's diversity and encourages us all to do better and be better people. If a tax were enacted that made them effectively cost more, we'd be happy to pay it for them*, and we'd think nothing of paying it when it comes to the next round of hiring (and not just for those reasons; we'd have to. The talent pool really is that small).
Consider the alternative; if there really isn't enough workers here in the States with the right education, and the tech industries can't attract them to the States, the tech industries will open offices in places they can attract this talent, outside of the States. Isn't that worse?
Nokia is a sinking ship; they can't do things well when handed them on a silver platter (look at all that Qt phone stuff; absolutely beautiful, but they did nothing with their alliance with Intel, letting Intel do all the dev work on MeeGo et al). Why would Apple want to buy Nokia except to gut it and use it as a manufacturing arm and discard everything else save Navteq? Is Navteq really worth burning pretty much ALL of their money to buy? IIRC, Samsung produces some of the iPhone's parts and Foxcon is on strike, so a change in manufacturing may be wise, but it still seems far too pricey to pull off, especially given all the anti-trust trouble it would create.
Liberati says the cameras aren't a case of Big Brother nor a cash grab, police are simply trying to keep the public safe from reckless drivers.
That's a hard sell; speeding tickets (et al) pay police/transit dept budgets. This makes it hard for the public to understand that the police are there to help. The problem with speeding is that it can be done safely, and there are plenty of people who regularly speed without risk of accidents. I've encountered more near-accidents created by Highway Patrol than by speeders (which is in part a public stupidity item -- the radar gun already clocked your speed well before you slammed on the breaks and forced the guy behind you to do likewise).
I'm a stats guy. I would support these cameras if they were used for statistical purposes, and I do not support them due to the current money flow. Here is my modest proposal:
Make (and advertise!) a policy ensuring that fines from safety enforcement (by police officer or camera) do not help the enforcement budget.
Such fines would instead fund traffic flow analysis (and perhaps safe driver programs).
Not all cameras (and other sensors) need to generate tickets, aggregate data works just fine without the fine. Cell carriers have data on phones that can help calculate aggregate numbers for highways and don't need to correlate identities to provide it.
Traffic flow analysis is used to figure out how to safely reduce drivers' commute times. This could include
Increased speed limits where that is deemed safe
Dynamic speed limits (with digital signs) based on time of day and/or congestion level
Better signage (tell people what lane they need!)
Better use of HOV lanes (which must be 2+ lanes wide so you can pass idiots)
Synchronized traffic lights that encourage throughput
Synchronized traffic lights that discourage throughput, with signs telling people where to go for through traffic
Realigning turn lanes
Prohibiting certain items during rush hour (e.g. no left turn week days 4:00p-6:00p)
Construction to better rework an intersection or ramp, etc. (Funds from fines won't be enough here)
I don't think that can happen. We'll always have lots of options, as it should be. The trick is to unify anyway. I'd like to see a single tool that controls GNOME/Gtk+ and KDE/Qt in a unified manner. Chaning one thing will change its equivilent in the other, ideally to such a degree that a user can't tell that his or her KDE environment is running a GNOME app or vice versa. Those of us that use XFCE already experience this to a limited degree, though we still need to run configuration tools for each of those separately. If, on the back-end, an app runs with a different toolkit, that's okay -- as long as it is transparent to the user.
From there, we just need better drivers and push-button deployment and autoconfiguration. Users need to be able to install and go, rather than going to some obscure website to figure out how to get their wifi or sound working. This needs to work better than Mac and Windows.
One place that could really use the dev time is on polishing the use of external monitors. How many presentations, given by users of Mac, Windows, or even Linux and friends, have you been to where the first few minutes were consumed in getting the projector working? This should be low-haning fruit, and if Linux is the one to get there first (by which I mean without extensive tweaking required of the end user), people will notice.
Every time Firefox upgrades, it wipes out my login cookies. It forces me to re-login to my sites. Is there a way to turn this dictator off?
I would be very surprised if there were not. Chrome lets you turn it off. I'm sure if you use Iceweasel (the Debian Firefox derivative), this wouldn't be a problem (updates are managed by apt). There are third-party efforts like IceWeasel for Windows and Porting Icecat on Mac Using Fink (IceCat is the GNU port of Firefox, sharing quite a bit (even the name, originally) with Iceweasel), but they're horribly out of date.
You said
I just updated Firefox between my "Flash freezing" post above and this post here, and I didn't have to log into Slashdot again.
Slashdot works because its cookies do not expire with the session. Any cookies that expire with the session will be expired by a browser upgrade. This is because "resuming" a crashed or otherwise saved session isn't actually resuming, it is reopening to the browser's best ability. This does not include session cookies for security reasons.
I only see one publicly visible spam volume graph supporting this claim: SpamHaus CBL (look at the "Last quarter" graph).
SpamCop and SenderBase suggest the overall trend is still down, though I'm not convinced this is related to Grum -- it appears Grum just wasn't as major a player as people thought.
The other graphs I have bookmarked, from McAfee (click the "Historic Data" tab) and Symantec, are inconclusive.
Okay, so I explained the merits in my parent post. Now on to how to explain the genre itself.
I typically describe paper/dice RPGs as unbounded versions of video game RPGs. In a video game, if you are stuck in a hedge maze, you have to navigate your way out. In a paper/dice RPG, you can cut through the shrubbery, or if it's too stubborn, you can climb atop it and survey the maze. If confronted by a superior foe, you are forced to run or else die in a video game, but with a paper/dice game, you could talk your way out of the situation or come up with a clever workaround ("It's a good thing I brought this tasty meat!" *toss*).
It's this kind of out-of-the-box thinking that makes it so exciting, and that prevents me from ever being able to enjoy things like Everquest or World of Warcraft.
To turn this back to "justifying" your time playing as an adult, it still spurs imagination --and camaraderie-- for you and your group in ways that may otherwise fail to exist. It's the excuse to get together and network, to throw ideas around and escape the trappings of everyday life. It helps you focus on work and family by giving you a distraction (wind down the stress of everything else and just relax), leaving the opportunity for an "a ha" moment, hopefully that doesn't involve your streaking through the neighborhood buck-naked shouting Greek words.
Education and problem-solving are great ways to explain the merits of RPGs. For me, it opened windows into design and, eventually, software design.
In elementary school, I taught myself to research, spending hours in the public library pouring through books on swords and other historical weaponry aspiring to add them to D&D. From this, I learned to love research and history in general.
This also taught me about the necessity of balance; a weapon, spell, race, or class that was too powerful would be fun to think about, perhaps even fun for the individual using it, but not so fun for everybody else, or even that individual if given enough time. That said, players need to feel special, so the art to design is in creating balanced elements that do not appear balanced, so there must be pros pitted against cons; an underpowered weapon or other game mechanic would be dull and uninteresting. Game balance is something I have an intuitive understanding of, and this is because I started with all of this at such an early age. (This has even resulted in friends asking me for rulings on games that I'd never even heard of.)
This carried over to Magic: The Gathering when that fad landed; you need the proper balance of cards so you always have something you can afford to play while maintaining a lean 60-card (minimum size) deck so as to maximize the probability of drawing the card you need (the formulae everybody knows are the mana/spell ratio, typically 20-24 to 36-40, and having the maximum allowed number of instances (4) of a card in a deck, so your opening hand of seven cards should have two or three mana providers and roughly half of your 4x cards). This, along with understanding how to balance die rolls in game development, leads directly into probability.
RPGs are also a good way to meet people. They attract really smart people that aren't otherwise good at socializing and create a venue in which that barrier can be broken. Running a game as a Game Master (a.k.a. Dungeon Master, GM, DM) gives you leadership skills -- even management skills, as you're directly rewarding and punishing the players, as well as handling disputes and issues between them.
I once took a class on Tolkien. This launched my interest in linguistics; Tolkien wasn't that great a writer, but he created an immaculate world with unrivaled depths. This stemmed from his linguistics background -- he only created Middle Earth because he had pet languages he was constructing and they needed histories to be complete.
As an adult, I can say that the skills RPGs taught me --balance, probability, research, history, leading, socializing, and others-- have made me a star player in the workforce and in social circles. I am a software engineer who can actually express himself, be it in person, in front of an audience, or in writing. This is not at all common, and it gives me an unfair advantage (a lack of balance? Does that make me a power-gamer?)
Lots of companies struggle quite a bit to get proper branding and good press. It's really really hard, and often difficult for executives to understand the investment effort it requires. This leaves us in a pickle with Intellectual Ventures, because it's hard to even understand whether they are the "good guys" they purport to being.
Maybe it would make sense for them to state some policies on what they will and will not pursue when it comes to their IP enforcement team (trolls). If they really want to push for innovation, they could make a statement like that they will never pursue use of their patented mechanisms in GPL-compatible software.
I mention the GPL rather than OSI-approved because the GPL's clauses prevent closed-source derivatives, which ensures profitability of salable goods derived from such things. This model was quite successful (read: profitable) for Qt (before Nokia relicensed it LGPL).
Permitting and encouraging Free Software stimulates innovation. It would likely also lead to derivative patents, which (assuming they share them appropriately) would be mutually beneficial to the F/OSS developer and to Intellectual Ventures.
Of course, this is assuming software patents aren't stricken down, which would be better for everybody except Intellectual Ventures.
I'm mostly responding to this comment because it has one of my main points.
Computer Science uses several types of math. Logic and discrete math are the fundamental concepts at the core of CS. They are the reason CS is so often found as a degree offered by collegiate Mathematics departments.
Computer science also heavily depends on linear algebra and (mathematical) statistics, the latter of which depends on calculus. Big data is one of the big up-and-coming fields within CS. To understand it, you'll need to understand statistics as well as various machine learning concepts. This involves information retrieval, probability theory, and a number of other advanced mathematical subjects.
The problem is that universities consider calculus to be the end of the math requirements. My CS major required Discrete Math, Symbolic Logic (an attempt at logic and set theory), Calculus 2, Physics 2, EE 1, Probability, and Linear Algebra. It should have introduced new advanced courses and required them, e.g. Discrete Logic 3 (Discrete Math + Symbolic Logic), Calc 1, Probability, Statistics 1, Linear Algebra 1, plus any two electives that require one of those (e.g. Stats 2, Machine Learning, Calc 2, Linear Algebra 2).
Because so many programmers suck at math, many employers will take an applicant with a Math degree (ideally dual-major CS/Math) over a slightly more qualified general programmer with just a CS degree. This is because the CS major is less likely to be able to grasp at advanced mathematical concepts inherent in advanced algorithms, optimizations, etc. It also follows the stereotype of math being "harder."
When I interview candidates on technical prowess, the code portion is just having them tell me what something does. I then give them math problems. When I started doing this, I was surprised at how much the applicants struggled; my current questions start far simpler before winning the harder question (which is about Bayes theory, taken from An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem).
(Full disclosure: I do not have a math degree. This is in part because I was not at all interested in taking any more calculus.)
If you're on a *nix system like Mac or Linux, you can check against the file (after downloading and unraring) with:
echo Type password and hit enter;stty -echo; read p; echo -n "$p" |shasum |cut -c6-40 |sed 's/$/$/' |grep -f- SHA1.txt; unset p; stty echo
If there is output, your password is probably exposed.
You can verify this methodology with any of the common passwords (like "password" sans quotes). Note that this isn't perfect; if it has a hit, it might have overlapped on the first five characters. There's also no guarantee that this is a full list (which is to say, change your password even if you don't find it here).
I really hope they revise this back to its original intent of corporate brands rather than generics. Then again, one could argue that domains have become brands rather than the other way around, e.g. "flowers.com," which has no meaning without the TLD, so I suppose you could indeed have DotFlowers for the *.flowers TLD. Wow, this is messy.
I can't find it in a quick search online, but didn't Nokia (or some group pseudo-supported by Nokia) commit to allowing all of their Windows phones to be flashable to Maemo and/or one of its successors (Harmatten, MeeGo, Tizen)?
So if an MP3 is a material object and can thus be resold, what does this say about copying it?
In The New Yankee Workshop, host Norm Abram buys a piece of furniture and then brings it back to his shop. He then makes a very near exact replica of it and often donates or sells the replica. We have just concluded that an MP3 is a similar material object. What does this say about piracy? Is Norm a furniture pirate?
What does this say about software license agreements? Ignoring software patents, is it still illegal for me to reverse compile a piece of software to see how it works and then implement a piece of it in another project? Or is it not so material?
Slashdot Mirror
Find a spare box (limited only by the available amount of wrapping paper, big boxes with obsurd labels ("beauty care" for a dude, "Windows 8" for a Linux advocate, or perhaps "Extreme Chores"). Print out your gift or some ad for your gift, maybe use a card or something, put it in the box. Extra points for lots of packing ~peanuts. Wrap box, label, etc.
I once did this. I asked the clerk at Best Buy if I could have one of the empty Windows Vista display boxes. I got it. Real gift went inside. The receipient knew how adamantly against Vista I was, so it definitely turned her head.
The Mixed Reality Lab at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan did this in 2009 (linked post dated 2010/10/01, research presented on Popular Science's "The Future Of" television show in their The Future of Sex episode, aired in 2009.
The only reference to it remaining on the PopSci.com is Video: Japanese Robot Torso Hugs You Back dated 2011/06/23.
This was buried in an otherwise good proposal (human trafficers should be registered as sex offenders) and wasn't even visible from the official voter guide summary. It has the same problems.
This proposition also passed and I believe goes into effect on in just over a week.
Kickstarter is merely crowdsourced venture capital. The whole philosophy behind venture capital is high risk, high reward. Most investments fail but a few make enough profit to overcome the others' losses. Some time in the 2000s dot-com bubble, the VC expectations I heard were one in fourteen investments should average 20x growth (while 14x growth would roughly break even), though I don't know how many investments such a group would have going concurrently (more would permit more variance).
Ironically enough, you can isolate the "moles" by listwashing, just like spammers do for spam traps.
You've already started the process: you know that three sevenths of your subscriber base is probably safe. In your next run, make sure each of the remaining four groups is subdivided again. Each time you find a group that isn't a mole, you've reduced the potential mole list. Eventually, you'll have just a few accounts and you can silently drop them from your service (or confront them, your call).
There was also an earlier comment on spammer abuse of your proxies that I'd like to expand upon. While it asks you about proxying port 25, there's also the potential for abuse with respect to port 80/443: 419ers are increasing their use of proxies to hide their identity from free webmail providers so they can get free passes on sending spam. If you're better at cracking down on them (by e.g. blocking access to yahoo and hotmail on your proxies), you'll probably have better luck overall.
Maybe you can combine the above two ideas: groups of subscribers known to contribute to getting blocked will get domains whose proxies can't use freemail.
You can have a Windows password with extended characters if you know the character code with something like ALT+KP0, then the three digit ANSII code on the keypad (at least as of Windows 2000), allowing things like Pâssw0rÐ (one capital, two extended, four lowercase, one number: eight characters albeit ~17 key presses) ... it's unclear from my (very hasty) reading of the paper if that was considered, but I imagine that even if it was, that password would be signficantly more resource-intensive to crack.
I did the math, not sure why others haven't pointed this out yet. There are 189 nonspace printable characters in the 256-char ANSII code map. Adding one for space, that's 190:
190^14 combinations / (348 * 10^9 pw/sec) / 86400 sec/day / 365.2425 day/yr == 7275722393956 years
A long time. BUT even base64 is too complex for this purported rate:
64^14 combinations / (348 * 10^9 pw/sec) / 86400 sec/day / 365.2425 day/yr == 2188329 years
What am I doing wrong?
You can have a Windows password with extended characters if you know the character code with something like ALT+KP0, then the three digit ANSII code on the keypad (at least as of Windows 2000), allowing things like Pâssw0rÐ (one capital, two extended, four lowercase, one number: eight characters albeit ~17 key presses) ... it's unclear from my (very hasty) reading of the paper if that was considered, but I imagine that even if it was, that password would be signficantly more resource-intensive to crack. I had a friend whose password was a fully punctuated English sentence with a single extended character somewhere in the middle of it, probably 20+ characters including that one hard-to-locate hard-to-crack guy.
I still have a .zip file that I encrypted with a password using such a character. Gave up trying to brute force it after a week or so. At least my data's safe...
This should work in most advanced POSIX shells (though /bin/sh won't support $RANDOM if it's dash or some other leaner version)
while :; do [ $((RANDOM%2)) = 0 ] && printf / || printf \\; done
To all those people saying goto is a loop: it's only effectively a loop. Goto itself is not a loop, it's an assembler's jump and can do lots of things that loops cannot (loops and conditionals are implemented as jumps). For example, goto has no sense of nesting (or scope) and can be called in the most unexpected of places. This is why it's present but considered taboo in most languages.
Also note that for maximum effect, you need a fixed-width font whose width equals its height and as much space between lines as is used between consecutive characters.
Of course, if this kind of thing interests you, there's more impressive things you can do for pretty effects in short snippets of code.
I read somewhere, probably here (a month or two ago?), a very interesting proposal (paraphrased):
Increase the number of H-1Bs and similar programs. Tax them. Pour money from that tax into education so we can compete in the next generation. This has numerous benefits: it levels the playing field, it invests in our future, and it encourages the kind of immigration that, once upon a time, made this country great.
Several of my coworkers are here on H-1Bs. They are very smart and very talented. Their presence and perspective helps my team's diversity and encourages us all to do better and be better people. If a tax were enacted that made them effectively cost more, we'd be happy to pay it for them*, and we'd think nothing of paying it when it comes to the next round of hiring (and not just for those reasons; we'd have to. The talent pool really is that small).
Consider the alternative; if there really isn't enough workers here in the States with the right education, and the tech industries can't attract them to the States, the tech industries will open offices in places they can attract this talent, outside of the States. Isn't that worse?
* I do not speak for my employer, yada yada yada
Nokia is a sinking ship; they can't do things well when handed them on a silver platter (look at all that Qt phone stuff; absolutely beautiful, but they did nothing with their alliance with Intel, letting Intel do all the dev work on MeeGo et al). Why would Apple want to buy Nokia except to gut it and use it as a manufacturing arm and discard everything else save Navteq? Is Navteq really worth burning pretty much ALL of their money to buy? IIRC, Samsung produces some of the iPhone's parts and Foxcon is on strike, so a change in manufacturing may be wise, but it still seems far too pricey to pull off, especially given all the anti-trust trouble it would create.
From the article,
Liberati says the cameras aren't a case of Big Brother nor a cash grab, police are simply trying to keep the public safe from reckless drivers.
That's a hard sell; speeding tickets (et al) pay police/transit dept budgets. This makes it hard for the public to understand that the police are there to help. The problem with speeding is that it can be done safely, and there are plenty of people who regularly speed without risk of accidents. I've encountered more near-accidents created by Highway Patrol than by speeders (which is in part a public stupidity item -- the radar gun already clocked your speed well before you slammed on the breaks and forced the guy behind you to do likewise).
I'm a stats guy. I would support these cameras if they were used for statistical purposes, and I do not support them due to the current money flow. Here is my modest proposal:
I don't think that can happen. We'll always have lots of options, as it should be. The trick is to unify anyway. I'd like to see a single tool that controls GNOME/Gtk+ and KDE/Qt in a unified manner. Chaning one thing will change its equivilent in the other, ideally to such a degree that a user can't tell that his or her KDE environment is running a GNOME app or vice versa. Those of us that use XFCE already experience this to a limited degree, though we still need to run configuration tools for each of those separately. If, on the back-end, an app runs with a different toolkit, that's okay -- as long as it is transparent to the user.
From there, we just need better drivers and push-button deployment and autoconfiguration. Users need to be able to install and go, rather than going to some obscure website to figure out how to get their wifi or sound working. This needs to work better than Mac and Windows.
One place that could really use the dev time is on polishing the use of external monitors. How many presentations, given by users of Mac, Windows, or even Linux and friends, have you been to where the first few minutes were consumed in getting the projector working? This should be low-haning fruit, and if Linux is the one to get there first (by which I mean without extensive tweaking required of the end user), people will notice.
GP said
Every time Firefox upgrades, it wipes out my login cookies. It forces me to re-login to my sites. Is there a way to turn this dictator off?
I would be very surprised if there were not. Chrome lets you turn it off. I'm sure if you use Iceweasel (the Debian Firefox derivative), this wouldn't be a problem (updates are managed by apt). There are third-party efforts like IceWeasel for Windows and Porting Icecat on Mac Using Fink (IceCat is the GNU port of Firefox, sharing quite a bit (even the name, originally) with Iceweasel), but they're horribly out of date.
You said
I just updated Firefox between my "Flash freezing" post above and this post here, and I didn't have to log into Slashdot again.
Slashdot works because its cookies do not expire with the session. Any cookies that expire with the session will be expired by a browser upgrade. This is because "resuming" a crashed or otherwise saved session isn't actually resuming, it is reopening to the browser's best ability. This does not include session cookies for security reasons.
I only see one publicly visible spam volume graph supporting this claim: SpamHaus CBL (look at the "Last quarter" graph).
SpamCop and SenderBase suggest the overall trend is still down, though I'm not convinced this is related to Grum -- it appears Grum just wasn't as major a player as people thought.
The other graphs I have bookmarked, from McAfee (click the "Historic Data" tab) and Symantec, are inconclusive.
Okay, so I explained the merits in my parent post. Now on to how to explain the genre itself.
I typically describe paper/dice RPGs as unbounded versions of video game RPGs. In a video game, if you are stuck in a hedge maze, you have to navigate your way out. In a paper/dice RPG, you can cut through the shrubbery, or if it's too stubborn, you can climb atop it and survey the maze. If confronted by a superior foe, you are forced to run or else die in a video game, but with a paper/dice game, you could talk your way out of the situation or come up with a clever workaround ("It's a good thing I brought this tasty meat!" *toss*).
It's this kind of out-of-the-box thinking that makes it so exciting, and that prevents me from ever being able to enjoy things like Everquest or World of Warcraft.
To turn this back to "justifying" your time playing as an adult, it still spurs imagination --and camaraderie-- for you and your group in ways that may otherwise fail to exist. It's the excuse to get together and network, to throw ideas around and escape the trappings of everyday life. It helps you focus on work and family by giving you a distraction (wind down the stress of everything else and just relax), leaving the opportunity for an "a ha" moment, hopefully that doesn't involve your streaking through the neighborhood buck-naked shouting Greek words.
Education and problem-solving are great ways to explain the merits of RPGs. For me, it opened windows into design and, eventually, software design.
In elementary school, I taught myself to research, spending hours in the public library pouring through books on swords and other historical weaponry aspiring to add them to D&D. From this, I learned to love research and history in general.
This also taught me about the necessity of balance; a weapon, spell, race, or class that was too powerful would be fun to think about, perhaps even fun for the individual using it, but not so fun for everybody else, or even that individual if given enough time. That said, players need to feel special, so the art to design is in creating balanced elements that do not appear balanced, so there must be pros pitted against cons; an underpowered weapon or other game mechanic would be dull and uninteresting. Game balance is something I have an intuitive understanding of, and this is because I started with all of this at such an early age. (This has even resulted in friends asking me for rulings on games that I'd never even heard of.)
This carried over to Magic: The Gathering when that fad landed; you need the proper balance of cards so you always have something you can afford to play while maintaining a lean 60-card (minimum size) deck so as to maximize the probability of drawing the card you need (the formulae everybody knows are the mana/spell ratio, typically 20-24 to 36-40, and having the maximum allowed number of instances (4) of a card in a deck, so your opening hand of seven cards should have two or three mana providers and roughly half of your 4x cards). This, along with understanding how to balance die rolls in game development, leads directly into probability.
RPGs are also a good way to meet people. They attract really smart people that aren't otherwise good at socializing and create a venue in which that barrier can be broken. Running a game as a Game Master (a.k.a. Dungeon Master, GM, DM) gives you leadership skills -- even management skills, as you're directly rewarding and punishing the players, as well as handling disputes and issues between them.
I once took a class on Tolkien. This launched my interest in linguistics; Tolkien wasn't that great a writer, but he created an immaculate world with unrivaled depths. This stemmed from his linguistics background -- he only created Middle Earth because he had pet languages he was constructing and they needed histories to be complete.
As an adult, I can say that the skills RPGs taught me --balance, probability, research, history, leading, socializing, and others-- have made me a star player in the workforce and in social circles. I am a software engineer who can actually express himself, be it in person, in front of an audience, or in writing. This is not at all common, and it gives me an unfair advantage (a lack of balance? Does that make me a power-gamer?)
Lots of companies struggle quite a bit to get proper branding and good press. It's really really hard, and often difficult for executives to understand the investment effort it requires. This leaves us in a pickle with Intellectual Ventures, because it's hard to even understand whether they are the "good guys" they purport to being.
Maybe it would make sense for them to state some policies on what they will and will not pursue when it comes to their IP enforcement team (trolls). If they really want to push for innovation, they could make a statement like that they will never pursue use of their patented mechanisms in GPL-compatible software.
I mention the GPL rather than OSI-approved because the GPL's clauses prevent closed-source derivatives, which ensures profitability of salable goods derived from such things. This model was quite successful (read: profitable) for Qt (before Nokia relicensed it LGPL).
Permitting and encouraging Free Software stimulates innovation. It would likely also lead to derivative patents, which (assuming they share them appropriately) would be mutually beneficial to the F/OSS developer and to Intellectual Ventures.
Of course, this is assuming software patents aren't stricken down, which would be better for everybody except Intellectual Ventures.
I'm mostly responding to this comment because it has one of my main points.
Computer Science uses several types of math. Logic and discrete math are the fundamental concepts at the core of CS. They are the reason CS is so often found as a degree offered by collegiate Mathematics departments.
Computer science also heavily depends on linear algebra and (mathematical) statistics, the latter of which depends on calculus. Big data is one of the big up-and-coming fields within CS. To understand it, you'll need to understand statistics as well as various machine learning concepts. This involves information retrieval, probability theory, and a number of other advanced mathematical subjects.
The problem is that universities consider calculus to be the end of the math requirements. My CS major required Discrete Math, Symbolic Logic (an attempt at logic and set theory), Calculus 2, Physics 2, EE 1, Probability, and Linear Algebra. It should have introduced new advanced courses and required them, e.g. Discrete Logic 3 (Discrete Math + Symbolic Logic), Calc 1, Probability, Statistics 1, Linear Algebra 1, plus any two electives that require one of those (e.g. Stats 2, Machine Learning, Calc 2, Linear Algebra 2).
Because so many programmers suck at math, many employers will take an applicant with a Math degree (ideally dual-major CS/Math) over a slightly more qualified general programmer with just a CS degree. This is because the CS major is less likely to be able to grasp at advanced mathematical concepts inherent in advanced algorithms, optimizations, etc. It also follows the stereotype of math being "harder."
When I interview candidates on technical prowess, the code portion is just having them tell me what something does. I then give them math problems. When I started doing this, I was surprised at how much the applicants struggled; my current questions start far simpler before winning the harder question (which is about Bayes theory, taken from An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem).
(Full disclosure: I do not have a math degree. This is in part because I was not at all interested in taking any more calculus.)
Or simply:
grep `echo -n l1nkedIn | shasum | cut -c 6-40` SHA1.txt
00000a96145d2b6cb64130434758febbe498b123
That puts your password into both the process list and your command history. My method does neither.
If you're on a *nix system like Mac or Linux, you can check against the file (after downloading and unraring) with:
echo Type password and hit enter;stty -echo; read p; echo -n "$p" |shasum |cut -c6-40 |sed 's/$/$/' |grep -f- SHA1.txt; unset p; stty echo
If there is output, your password is probably exposed.
You can verify this methodology with any of the common passwords (like "password" sans quotes). Note that this isn't perfect; if it has a hit, it might have overlapped on the first five characters. There's also no guarantee that this is a full list (which is to say, change your password even if you don't find it here).
I really hope they revise this back to its original intent of corporate brands rather than generics.
Then again, one could argue that domains have become brands rather than the other way around, e.g. "flowers.com," which has no meaning without the TLD, so I suppose you could indeed have DotFlowers for the *.flowers TLD.
Wow, this is messy.
I don't believe any such commitment was made. That might have been a dream you had.
And still have.
I can't find it in a quick search online, but didn't Nokia (or some group pseudo-supported by Nokia) commit to allowing all of their Windows phones to be flashable to Maemo and/or one of its successors (Harmatten, MeeGo, Tizen)?
So if an MP3 is a material object and can thus be resold, what does this say about copying it?
In The New Yankee Workshop, host Norm Abram buys a piece of furniture and then brings it back to his shop. He then makes a very near exact replica of it and often donates or sells the replica. We have just concluded that an MP3 is a similar material object. What does this say about piracy? Is Norm a furniture pirate?
What does this say about software license agreements? Ignoring software patents, is it still illegal for me to reverse compile a piece of software to see how it works and then implement a piece of it in another project? Or is it not so material?