Usenet is an excellent way to communicate "bad" things. I could go to the library, use a public computer, and post to newsgroups. Just post some innocent messages to a specific group -- nobody would think anything of it, 95% of Usenet is offtopic, spam, etc. so it would fit right in. Someone else could check the newsgroup, and read the message, looking for specific words.
For example, a code to "go ahead with the plan" might be as simple as the word "elephant." Then all I do when I want you to start your attack or your crime, is talk about my visit to the zoo. I could write an entire paragraph and only the word "elephant" is relevant, but completely innocent. Police would have no reason to be suspicious.
Like I said before, a smart criminal will be paranoid. The police really are out to get him, and when faced with life in a federal pound me in the ass prison, there is no such thing as being too safe.
Seriously, if I were planning a crime or terrorist act, you bet your ass I would encode all communication in some way -- whether it be encrypted emails or just a word code system over the phone that changes each time. This is similar to the Cold War days, when spies would leave innocent-looking messages in public places. Essentially, a non-computerized version of steganography.
Where there is a will, there is a way. Where there is a stupid or lazy criminal, there is a prison sentence.
I can't speak for other religions but coming to faith in Christ is all about personal responsibility. Jesus said, "Go and sin no more". Peter said, "Prepare you minds for action; be self controlled." Solomon said, "Have the wisdom to show restraint". The message of personal responibility is woven throughout the Bible.
Modern Christianity has about as much to do with the Bible's teachings as McDonald's does with health food.
Because for companies, sustaining growth is a requirement for active investment. Steady income, while nice for you or me, isn't enough for a corporation seeking investors' checks.
LEGO is privately owned and self-sustaining. There are no stockholders, there are no investors.
Tom's uses these: pair Networks. He uses about 20 dedicated servers, including database servers. I think "CPU" in the singular sense is a bit inaccurate.
Tom's hardware makes the list. It's a massive undertaking to create it. That's news.
Is it really news every time they update the list?
Yes, this is news. This is the time of year that many people, myself included, plan on buying computer upgrades. Based on Tom's charts, I can see my (older) CPU, compare it to newer CPUs using the video card, memory, etc. as a control, and decide if the upgrade is worth it. Although Tom talks about the latest and greatest all the time, only once or twice a year does he put things in perspective with older hardware. Personally, I want to see the same thing but with video cards, because Tom's article showed me that upgrading my CPU isn't worth the money.
Besides, Tom is talking about computer hardware. Nerds (myself included) love this stuff. So yes, this is news for nerds. And it does matter.
I'd like to know where this whole 'megabit' thing came from.
When transferring data over a serial connection, it makes more sense to measure bits as that is the most granular unit you transfer in a particular time. This is also why, for example, people use 'megabytes' to describe transfer over parallel ATA.
There are zerglings in World of Warcraft. If you had a beta account, you could get a special pet that no vendor sells. Also, some or all people who attend Blizzcon can get a special pet as well, including zerglings.
Disney just wants to make a profit. They have their reputation from the old days to rest on, and now they pretty much get by on name recognition. They make (most) movies on the cheapest budget and target audiences such as young teenagers that don't know any better. These young men and women drag their parents along to the theaters and the DVD stores to spend money. Disney makes tons of cash, and everything works fine for them.
This is not always true, however. For being cliched and unoriginal (based off an amusement park ride and every other pirate movie), Pirates of the Carribean was, in my opinion, an excellent movie. Besides outstanding acting and directing, the one man responsible for it not sucking was Jerry Bruckheimer. As far as producing goes, that man has the Midas touch. While I think there are too many CSI shows and they get old, he still does a good job producing them. He did a good job on Pirates of the Carribean. I haven't checked, but I hope he produces the sequel too.
I've heard it said, and it may just be FUD from the ISP's, but if multiple broadband ISP's (ignore the fact DSL and cable can be available in two places) were to compete in the same region then prices would be driven down in competition to a point to where the providers costs in laying in the infrastructure down are not going to be made up in profit.
In a perfectly capitalistic economy this is true, but the majority of telecommunication companies are cartels. They fix prices above the competetive level, competing more on who can service specific addresses than on pricing or services. Additionally, they may compete in different market segments -- one company may be cheaper but offer only slower (e.g. 512kbps) service, while another is more expensive but only offers 1.5mbps service. One caters to people on a tighter budget, the other caters to people with more disposable income.
In this country we really do have good infrastructure. Our backbones are typically high bandwidth even considering the amount of traffic they carry. Many large ISPs and hosting providers offer vast quantities of bandwidth, of which only a fraction is used. The real problem is the last mile: while your local ISP may have an OC-12 pipe coming in, they only use a quarter of it for one of several reasons. The last mile of copper might be too old or low quality to support faster speeds, it might be an artificial limitation designed to boost revenue (artificial scarcity), or they just don't want to raise consumers' expectations which could upset the whole market.
In any event, the issue isn't about what we as consumers want, or what technology is available, or what is best for us, it is about what makes the companies money. After all, these are corporations, they exist to earn profit and return value to the stockholders.
As a parent, I am more concerned about my child joining a religion and wasting hours of his life in a church each day like some people here in the Bible Belt do. Sex and violence are more fun than church. I would rather my son do what I did when I was young: run around beating up/getting beaten up by his siblings, or getting drunk and laid once he's old enough. That is more fun than church, and teaches real world lessons such as how to fight, which whiskeys taste good and which ones hurt the morning after, etc.
The real issue is why the government needs to hold children's hands when their parents or legal guardians should be? I'll be damned if I will let my child buy video games, DVDs, Playboys, etc. on his own. Sure, I'll expose him to some adult material to acclimate him so he doesn't go nuts on his 18 and 21 birthdays, but it is my job as Dad to make sure he does what he is supposed to. I don't want the government trying to do my job for me.
Did you break into the video game industry to bash their heads in with a baseball bat? If so, I know a Mr. Jack Thompson that wants to speak with you...
Also- currently we're not engineering things at a molecular level. or rather we are, but not on a molecule by molecule basis that some people tend to assume we're working with.
This is what I meant. Rather than engineering steel by "measure this much iron, this much carbon, etc and smelt it all in a big pot," nanotech is about taking elements and getting them to do what we want on a smaller scale -- rather than melting stuff in a pot, use various techniques to get molecules to align certain ways, create crystals or buckeyballs or whatever the latest thing is. Like you mentioned, coating with a layer of molecules -- obviously we aren't placing them one at a time, but stacking the deck as far as what molecules used and exploiting their properties so they only layer one or two deep. That may not be nanotech, but it is a similar idea.
Sometime ago I heard that to pull off the space elevator.. the material cost would be massive that we didnt have enough steel cable to do such a thing and only experimental substances (like spiderweb yarn) would meet the challenge of providing that much material.
Steel is extremely dense. The sheer quantity of steel needed would mean the elevator would collapse under its own weight. That is why nobody plans on using steel cables. Instead, carbon nanotubes are the way to go. Essentially, these are thin strands of carbon engineered in such a way that they are light and strong. A strand the thickness of a human hair has the strength of a steel girder, but weighs around 0.00001% as much. Nanotechnology means more than just making things small, it also means building life-size objects but engineering them at the molecular level to have special properties, such as high strength or low density.
Back when MD5 started coming under heavy attack earlier this year, I figured an easy way to make cracking hash codes more difficult: use multiple hashes.
For example, rather than publishing an MD5 hash of a file, publish a hash that is a concatenation of MD5, SHA1, and whatever else is considered sufficient by today's standards. Finding a weakness in one algorithm is difficult. Finding a weakness in two is more difficult. Exploiting both simultaneously would be monstrously difficult, to the point that it would not be feasible without some major breakthroughs in hacking these algorithms.
Of course, hashing has some inherent issues. The only real secure method of encryption is a one-time pad. However, this is not feasible. Hashes are designed to make it very difficult to compromise a source string and not be noticed. Nothing is 100% foolproof.
To me, it's pretty scary that someone would just commit an action just because that someone was trained to follow instructions only, and to never question.
Military members are obligated to follow lawful orders from those above them. They have to ask themselves "is this legal? Does it mesh with the Uniform Code of Military Justice? Rules of engagement? Geneva Conventions?" Something tells me that inputting personal information because of an email does not necessarily qualify as an unlawful order.
I was looking at my neighborhood and there is a line a mile or two East of my house where Google is using imagery from two different years. In one, the grass is green, you can see trees living, everything is happy. Across that line, everything is dead, and it looks like a wasteland. I guess one picture was taken during a dry spell, the other during a year with lots of rain.
That's a Commie holiday. We don't support Commie holidays here in the US.
No, we "celebrate" Labor Day by forcing our blue collar workers to their jobs to run the retail stores while everyone else enjoys sales, promotions, and extended shopping hours.
Personally, I think children should be mature enough to see breasts when they're less than a month old. Its often their primary source of nutrition, after all. If they were mature enough to handle it then, why aren't they mature enough to handle it as a teenager? And honestly, everyone has breasts. Some are larger than others...
I think the distinction is between breastfeeding and sexual function. A small child views breasts as a food source, while a teenage boy views them as something fun to play with. As a society, we have come to the conclusion that sex is taboo despite what the TV says, and anything with a sexual connotation needs to be locked up and hidden from public view.
While I strongly disagree with this point, I think it is the overriding concern to the silent majority of the U.S. as well as our lawmakers. This is why, for example, a child is allowed to purchase or borrow (from a library) a book on anatomy that describes, with pictures, how breastfeeding works, but not allowed to do the same with softcore porn that shows the same thing.
Of course, this is also why, while growing up, my friends and I stole Playboys from our parents and older siblings and gawked at them on the playground. I know one guy who even jerked off on the playground during recess to a Playboy. I wasn't there to witness the horrified reactions of the teachers monitoring the playground, but I did see his parents escort him out of the principal's office an hour later with a big shit-eating grin on his face. That boy had cahones. He probably wound up as a male stripper or porn star or something. That or molesting small children.
You know I do not understand how a game in which you intentionally break the law and murder people is rated "M", but as soon as you add siulated sex between consenting adults it is rated "A". Not to mention that from the clips I've seen it is poory simulated sex at that.
From the article, the difference between M and AO is one year. One fucking year: 17 for M, 18 for AO. I could see if this were a T (13+) game with adult content unlocked by modders, but it sounds to me there are two issues. First, in the specific case of GTA, this is pissing and moaning about a very small, inconsequential difference. Second, those two rating are redundant.
The film industry has R and NC-17. The only difference is that I can take a minor into an R movie but not an NC-17 movie. With video games there is no such distinction, making AO redundant. If anything, make AO require age 21+. Then classify hard core porn games (like those Anime tentacle rape games) and extremely violent games (the ones that are violent for the sake of being violent and are excessively graphic) with the AO rating.
Speaking of Anime games, the example cited in the article, Water Closet: The Forbidden Chamber, looks like an interesting game. It is so interesting that I think I will pass on it. I can just imagine it now. The final level probably involves tubgirl and tentacles... I think I'll stop now.
All High Definition TV is Digital TV. Not all Digital TV is High Definition.
Mostly correct. I have a HDTV and an HD cable box. The video signal is analog because it is transmitted over component video, thanks to my cable box not having DVI (morons). The audio is digital over fiber. I am more upset by the fact that half my HD channels are SD, not wide screen, and analog audio. I may as well not be watching HDTV. For example, ABCHD is usually a SDTV signal broadcast at 1080i, although movies are usually HD with Dolby Digital.
Maybe not cheaper per megabyte, but still cheap and disposable. You can give someone a floppy & not really care if you get it back.
If I am transferring files beteen home and work, or want access to sensitive data from any location, I use my USB drive. If I want to give files to someone, I either email them or upload them to my FTP server and give a link. Anything that would fit on a floppy will easily fit in an email, a Samba share, FTP, etc.
I understand that floppies may have limited utility for some people, but I think we have made significant progress in networking and bandwidth to offset that utility.
Slashdot Mirror
Women on the internet are faking it as men.
My wife uses the Internet. I guess that means we're homosexuals, right?
Usenet is an excellent way to communicate "bad" things. I could go to the library, use a public computer, and post to newsgroups. Just post some innocent messages to a specific group -- nobody would think anything of it, 95% of Usenet is offtopic, spam, etc. so it would fit right in. Someone else could check the newsgroup, and read the message, looking for specific words.
For example, a code to "go ahead with the plan" might be as simple as the word "elephant." Then all I do when I want you to start your attack or your crime, is talk about my visit to the zoo. I could write an entire paragraph and only the word "elephant" is relevant, but completely innocent. Police would have no reason to be suspicious.
Like I said before, a smart criminal will be paranoid. The police really are out to get him, and when faced with life in a federal pound me in the ass prison, there is no such thing as being too safe.
Seriously, if I were planning a crime or terrorist act, you bet your ass I would encode all communication in some way -- whether it be encrypted emails or just a word code system over the phone that changes each time. This is similar to the Cold War days, when spies would leave innocent-looking messages in public places. Essentially, a non-computerized version of steganography.
Where there is a will, there is a way. Where there is a stupid or lazy criminal, there is a prison sentence.
I can't speak for other religions but coming to faith in Christ is all about personal responsibility. Jesus said, "Go and sin no more". Peter said, "Prepare you minds for action; be self controlled." Solomon said, "Have the wisdom to show restraint". The message of personal responibility is woven throughout the Bible.
Modern Christianity has about as much to do with the Bible's teachings as McDonald's does with health food.
Because for companies, sustaining growth is a requirement for active investment. Steady income, while nice for you or me, isn't enough for a corporation seeking investors' checks.
LEGO is privately owned and self-sustaining. There are no stockholders, there are no investors.
Tom's uses these: pair Networks. He uses about 20 dedicated servers, including database servers. I think "CPU" in the singular sense is a bit inaccurate.
Tom's hardware makes the list.
It's a massive undertaking to create it.
That's news.
Is it really news every time they update the list?
Yes, this is news. This is the time of year that many people, myself included, plan on buying computer upgrades. Based on Tom's charts, I can see my (older) CPU, compare it to newer CPUs using the video card, memory, etc. as a control, and decide if the upgrade is worth it. Although Tom talks about the latest and greatest all the time, only once or twice a year does he put things in perspective with older hardware. Personally, I want to see the same thing but with video cards, because Tom's article showed me that upgrading my CPU isn't worth the money.
Besides, Tom is talking about computer hardware. Nerds (myself included) love this stuff. So yes, this is news for nerds. And it does matter.
I'd like to know where this whole 'megabit' thing came from.
When transferring data over a serial connection, it makes more sense to measure bits as that is the most granular unit you transfer in a particular time. This is also why, for example, people use 'megabytes' to describe transfer over parallel ATA.
There are zerglings in World of Warcraft. If you had a beta account, you could get a special pet that no vendor sells. Also, some or all people who attend Blizzcon can get a special pet as well, including zerglings.
Wasnt the pandaren a joke for aprils fools? I doubt those count.
There is a Panda hero in Warcraft 3. I think it started out as a joke, but turned out to be real -- sort of like the secret cow level in Diablo 2.
Disney realeases bad movies anyways.
Disney just wants to make a profit. They have their reputation from the old days to rest on, and now they pretty much get by on name recognition. They make (most) movies on the cheapest budget and target audiences such as young teenagers that don't know any better. These young men and women drag their parents along to the theaters and the DVD stores to spend money. Disney makes tons of cash, and everything works fine for them.
This is not always true, however. For being cliched and unoriginal (based off an amusement park ride and every other pirate movie), Pirates of the Carribean was, in my opinion, an excellent movie. Besides outstanding acting and directing, the one man responsible for it not sucking was Jerry Bruckheimer. As far as producing goes, that man has the Midas touch. While I think there are too many CSI shows and they get old, he still does a good job producing them. He did a good job on Pirates of the Carribean. I haven't checked, but I hope he produces the sequel too.
I've heard it said, and it may just be FUD from the ISP's, but if multiple broadband ISP's (ignore the fact DSL and cable can be available in two places) were to compete in the same region then prices would be driven down in competition to a point to where the providers costs in laying in the infrastructure down are not going to be made up in profit.
In a perfectly capitalistic economy this is true, but the majority of telecommunication companies are cartels. They fix prices above the competetive level, competing more on who can service specific addresses than on pricing or services. Additionally, they may compete in different market segments -- one company may be cheaper but offer only slower (e.g. 512kbps) service, while another is more expensive but only offers 1.5mbps service. One caters to people on a tighter budget, the other caters to people with more disposable income.
In this country we really do have good infrastructure. Our backbones are typically high bandwidth even considering the amount of traffic they carry. Many large ISPs and hosting providers offer vast quantities of bandwidth, of which only a fraction is used. The real problem is the last mile: while your local ISP may have an OC-12 pipe coming in, they only use a quarter of it for one of several reasons. The last mile of copper might be too old or low quality to support faster speeds, it might be an artificial limitation designed to boost revenue (artificial scarcity), or they just don't want to raise consumers' expectations which could upset the whole market.
In any event, the issue isn't about what we as consumers want, or what technology is available, or what is best for us, it is about what makes the companies money. After all, these are corporations, they exist to earn profit and return value to the stockholders.
As a parent, I am more concerned about my child joining a religion and wasting hours of his life in a church each day like some people here in the Bible Belt do. Sex and violence are more fun than church. I would rather my son do what I did when I was young: run around beating up/getting beaten up by his siblings, or getting drunk and laid once he's old enough. That is more fun than church, and teaches real world lessons such as how to fight, which whiskeys taste good and which ones hurt the morning after, etc.
The real issue is why the government needs to hold children's hands when their parents or legal guardians should be? I'll be damned if I will let my child buy video games, DVDs, Playboys, etc. on his own. Sure, I'll expose him to some adult material to acclimate him so he doesn't go nuts on his 18 and 21 birthdays, but it is my job as Dad to make sure he does what he is supposed to. I don't want the government trying to do my job for me.
Did you break into the video game industry to bash their heads in with a baseball bat? If so, I know a Mr. Jack Thompson that wants to speak with you...
Also- currently we're not engineering things at a molecular level. or rather we are, but not on a molecule by molecule basis that some people tend to assume we're working with.
This is what I meant. Rather than engineering steel by "measure this much iron, this much carbon, etc and smelt it all in a big pot," nanotech is about taking elements and getting them to do what we want on a smaller scale -- rather than melting stuff in a pot, use various techniques to get molecules to align certain ways, create crystals or buckeyballs or whatever the latest thing is. Like you mentioned, coating with a layer of molecules -- obviously we aren't placing them one at a time, but stacking the deck as far as what molecules used and exploiting their properties so they only layer one or two deep. That may not be nanotech, but it is a similar idea.
Sometime ago I heard that to pull off the space elevator .. the material cost would be massive that we didnt have enough steel cable to do such a thing and only experimental substances (like spiderweb yarn) would meet the challenge of providing that much material.
Steel is extremely dense. The sheer quantity of steel needed would mean the elevator would collapse under its own weight. That is why nobody plans on using steel cables. Instead, carbon nanotubes are the way to go. Essentially, these are thin strands of carbon engineered in such a way that they are light and strong. A strand the thickness of a human hair has the strength of a steel girder, but weighs around 0.00001% as much. Nanotechnology means more than just making things small, it also means building life-size objects but engineering them at the molecular level to have special properties, such as high strength or low density.
Back when MD5 started coming under heavy attack earlier this year, I figured an easy way to make cracking hash codes more difficult: use multiple hashes.
For example, rather than publishing an MD5 hash of a file, publish a hash that is a concatenation of MD5, SHA1, and whatever else is considered sufficient by today's standards. Finding a weakness in one algorithm is difficult. Finding a weakness in two is more difficult. Exploiting both simultaneously would be monstrously difficult, to the point that it would not be feasible without some major breakthroughs in hacking these algorithms.
Of course, hashing has some inherent issues. The only real secure method of encryption is a one-time pad. However, this is not feasible. Hashes are designed to make it very difficult to compromise a source string and not be noticed. Nothing is 100% foolproof.
To me, it's pretty scary that someone would just commit an action just because that someone was trained to follow instructions only, and to never question.
Military members are obligated to follow lawful orders from those above them. They have to ask themselves "is this legal? Does it mesh with the Uniform Code of Military Justice? Rules of engagement? Geneva Conventions?" Something tells me that inputting personal information because of an email does not necessarily qualify as an unlawful order.
I was looking at my neighborhood and there is a line a mile or two East of my house where Google is using imagery from two different years. In one, the grass is green, you can see trees living, everything is happy. Across that line, everything is dead, and it looks like a wasteland. I guess one picture was taken during a dry spell, the other during a year with lots of rain.
That's a Commie holiday. We don't support Commie holidays here in the US.
No, we "celebrate" Labor Day by forcing our blue collar workers to their jobs to run the retail stores while everyone else enjoys sales, promotions, and extended shopping hours.
Celebrate Labor Day by working! Amazing!
Personally, I think children should be mature enough to see breasts when they're less than a month old. Its often their primary source of nutrition, after all. If they were mature enough to handle it then, why aren't they mature enough to handle it as a teenager? And honestly, everyone has breasts. Some are larger than others...
I think the distinction is between breastfeeding and sexual function. A small child views breasts as a food source, while a teenage boy views them as something fun to play with. As a society, we have come to the conclusion that sex is taboo despite what the TV says, and anything with a sexual connotation needs to be locked up and hidden from public view.
While I strongly disagree with this point, I think it is the overriding concern to the silent majority of the U.S. as well as our lawmakers. This is why, for example, a child is allowed to purchase or borrow (from a library) a book on anatomy that describes, with pictures, how breastfeeding works, but not allowed to do the same with softcore porn that shows the same thing.
Of course, this is also why, while growing up, my friends and I stole Playboys from our parents and older siblings and gawked at them on the playground. I know one guy who even jerked off on the playground during recess to a Playboy. I wasn't there to witness the horrified reactions of the teachers monitoring the playground, but I did see his parents escort him out of the principal's office an hour later with a big shit-eating grin on his face. That boy had cahones. He probably wound up as a male stripper or porn star or something. That or molesting small children.
You know I do not understand how a game in which you intentionally break the law and murder people is rated "M", but as soon as you add siulated sex between consenting adults it is rated "A". Not to mention that from the clips I've seen it is poory simulated sex at that.
From the article, the difference between M and AO is one year. One fucking year: 17 for M, 18 for AO. I could see if this were a T (13+) game with adult content unlocked by modders, but it sounds to me there are two issues. First, in the specific case of GTA, this is pissing and moaning about a very small, inconsequential difference. Second, those two rating are redundant.
The film industry has R and NC-17. The only difference is that I can take a minor into an R movie but not an NC-17 movie. With video games there is no such distinction, making AO redundant. If anything, make AO require age 21+. Then classify hard core porn games (like those Anime tentacle rape games) and extremely violent games (the ones that are violent for the sake of being violent and are excessively graphic) with the AO rating.
Speaking of Anime games, the example cited in the article, Water Closet: The Forbidden Chamber, looks like an interesting game. It is so interesting that I think I will pass on it. I can just imagine it now. The final level probably involves tubgirl and tentacles... I think I'll stop now.
Was there a "How it Works... The Woman" version of those books too?
No, there are some mysteries of the universe that cannot be explained.
All High Definition TV is Digital TV. Not all Digital TV is High Definition.
Mostly correct. I have a HDTV and an HD cable box. The video signal is analog because it is transmitted over component video, thanks to my cable box not having DVI (morons). The audio is digital over fiber. I am more upset by the fact that half my HD channels are SD, not wide screen, and analog audio. I may as well not be watching HDTV. For example, ABCHD is usually a SDTV signal broadcast at 1080i, although movies are usually HD with Dolby Digital.
Maybe not cheaper per megabyte, but still cheap and disposable. You can give someone a floppy & not really care if you get it back.
If I am transferring files beteen home and work, or want access to sensitive data from any location, I use my USB drive. If I want to give files to someone, I either email them or upload them to my FTP server and give a link. Anything that would fit on a floppy will easily fit in an email, a Samba share, FTP, etc.
I understand that floppies may have limited utility for some people, but I think we have made significant progress in networking and bandwidth to offset that utility.