And your company's assets go to the next of kin. And along the way a new "baby" is produced which does the same bad old thing again.
Won't work. Or it'll be too much like whack-a-mole.
What will work is for certain bad things, the _people_ in charge go to jail for it. Limited Liability is only for $$$.
As long as there is no immortality treatment, whether you are a poor man or rich man, 5 years in jail is significant.
In fact 5 years in low security jail probably hurts a rich man more than a poor man, since the rich man can't be enjoying all the luxuries he can afford. In contrast the poor man might actually have more food and shelter in jail than before.
If Mr CEO is caught approving/ordering "unauthorized modification of a computer system", Mr CEO goes to jail.
You can think of the World as Zimbabwe, and the US Government as Mugabe (the leader in Zimbabwe)
And the US citizens are supposed to be "Mugabe's" "Good Friends", and the rest of the world are just the usual bunch to be exploited.
So in the good old days, "Mugabe" would "print" money (USD), spend most of it and pass some of the money to his "Good Friends", while the rest of the world become poorer due to the devalued USD (inflation), since they are holding trillions of US Dollars to buy food, oil- and some of them even lent Mugabe (US Bonds) or each other money (also in USD).
Now the US citizens should figure out whether they are getting a fair deal from their Mugabe.
Keep in mind, more and more countries are starting to consider moving away from being so dependent on the USD and thus leaving "Zimbabwe". If this happens, then the US Gov cannot print money so easily anymore - otherwise the rest of the world would just laugh as the USD becomes worthless - since they aren't holding much of it.
Depending on what sort of software is running on those servers, and what those companies allow you to do, you could do _some_ testing with vmware server.
Stuff like vmware server is free. Download it and install it.
Create a windows guest with the required virtual hardware.
Install the cheapest licensed Windows SBS on it.
Make copies for testing different software configurations and scenarios.
The courts in my country are unlikely to smack me down as long as I don't run them all at the same time, but your country might be different so consult your lawyer:).
If just a single Windows SBS license costs too much money, you might be able to get away with something like Windows XP just to test the Microsoft Windows Update cycle for any "obvious problems".
Would be strange that you can't afford the USD600+ (inclusive of the 2 x 500GB drives for storing all those vmware images), if you're doing this as a business. Maybe you should bill those companies a bit more.
I'm assuming you have your own PC, and are not some person stuck with using library/cybercafe computers (in which case installing vmware server is out).
You'll still need a windows client of course, but you can also use that windows client in vmware server for testing various client configs as well.
BTW there are free linux distros that you can run vmware server on. So you spend money on 1 x windows client, 1 x windows server and 2 x 500GB (or even 1TB) hard drives.
Even if it's unencrypted it doesn't mean you can use them - depends on the laws in your country, and the unwritten laws in your area (it may be local custom to share WiFi, or not...).
In some places, it is local custom to put a jug (or other container) of water outside for any passerby to get a drink from (it's not considered trespassing or theft). And the courts et all will probably be rather harsh on you if you're caught tainting the water.
Which brings us to the next point- even if the SSID says "FreeWiFi" how do you know its safe to use? Not everyone has VPN tunnel endpoints.
That's the trouble with the current situation.
Firstly there is no easy way to know whether you are allowed to use a random open WiFi network, whose network it is and the terms and conditions of usage.
Secondly there is currently no easy way to _intentionally_ _allow_ "anonymous" public users to use an _encrypted_ WiFi network, in a manner where the users can't successfully decrypt each other's traffic. In theory it is technically possible, but there is no standard to make it _easy_ (well at least as easy as using an https website).
Some corrupt guy could have a salary of zero but still make lots of money from "contributions".
So it's not so simple. If nobody jails corrupt officials then your problem is bigger than salary.
I don't think there is anything wrong with paying them a high bonus, IF at the end of the term they are doing a good job. If they are found to be corrupt (or criminally negligent), they should be jailed.
Fact is, the same people are getting voted in so that means they're doing a good enough job for the voters.
If people really disagree, they should either vote or get someone else to be a candidate.
And could prove to be very amusing for a future slashdot submission if they encounter a BOFH.
There are just so many things that could be done.
They're planning on taking data from some site and pumping it to others and they have _ZERO_ assurance that it's going to be good data and continue to be good data.
When you do stupid stuff like this, if you're not careful very bad things could happen (SQL injection, maybe even malware slipped in) and they could just go "nope not us", and while you could try to sue them it's pretty darn hard to prove since you requested the "bomb", and it only appears once and never appears again.
If you're lucky it's just going to be goatse/tubgirl.
If you're not, it could be a lot worse. Just imagine the BOFH thinking "What should I do today to them and their users" and rubbing his hands with glee.
"Never underestimate several people in a small capsule farting over many days"
That's the thing, perhaps NASA is selecting from the wrong pool of people to put into small capsules for long periods of time.
Instead of picking from the usual air force sort of people maybe they should be picking candidates from nuclear submarines.
Might be easier to find a submariner that can be trained to fly than to find an air force sort of person willing to put up with being stuck in a claustrophobic tube for months with no way out except "Mission over" or death.
You can't easily parallize two things waiting for the same key combo (e.g. both say press ctrl-a for config, and they are different stuff).
"Does Windows really have to wait until I make a decision before reading files off the disk"
Maybe it doesn't have to if your decision/option is between Safe Mode and Normal Mode.
But if your decision options includes "Step By Step Confirmation", it gets a bit trickier.
Since if someone wants to pick that option it could mean stuff is going wrong, and they'd want to do things one step at a time, and so one of the decision points might be:
"Do file preloading/cache ahead Y/N?"
Since that could be one of the things broken...
The more features and choices there are, the more decision points you will have. How you present and make those accessible is the difficult part.
One sign of a good design is not how many features and options you have, but how good the defaults are (a lot of OSS stuff has bad defaults). It takes a LOT of effort to figure out what the defaults should be.
"This is a very stupid idea, why the hell should people be worried about "interpreting" the Koran and the Hadith? Do you place that burden on the Christians as well? Shit, leave people alone man"
Why the muslims should be worried about interpreting the Koran? Because a fair number of extremist muslims are already doing their interpreting and you can see the _violent_ results of it.
If you're stupid enough to believe the extremists would leave people alone, you can skip the rest of this post.
The moderate muslims keep saying "that's not what the Koran says", but the extremists say "we are right, that is what the Koran says".
Can both be right?
Given the level of violence the extremists are willing to do, I'd say the moderates should actively resolve the issue as soon as possible and provide a verse by verse refutation of what the extremists believe - show clearly that the Koran says the extremists are doing the wrong thing so that OTHER muslims less familiar with the Koran will know AND more importantly _why_.
As for the Christians, yes the Christians should be reading and understanding what the Bible says. If they have understood (not just a surface/cursory understanding) and find they cannot live with what it says, then they should not be Christians.
Lastly if Christians believe that the Bible is from God (or at least contains words from God) AND that God is good/loving. Then why should it be a burden as you say?
Indonesia? Go ask Yusman Roy how tolerant things are there.
He's a muslim preacher that got jailed for conducting worship services in Indonesian (and Arabic) instead of just Arabic alone.
Seems he got the bright idea that his fellow indonesians should actually _understand_ what he is saying (most Indonesians don't understand Arabic).
He got jailed for inciting hatred. Great way of keeping Indonesia "peaceful" - jailing such people who incite hatred.
They burn down churches regularly in Indonesia. And christian villages. If they do those things to what the Koran claims are People of The Book (and thus should be treated better), it does make one wonder what the chances are for the hindus who are likely to be regarded as polytheists, and for the atheists.
As for Malaysia, the muslims there also don't know very much about their religion (it's all in Arabic, and most don't understand it and the people at the top like it that way).
They're like the lower rung scientologists who don't have access to the top level documents. By the time they have access they've got enough power that they're probably have become part of the problem themselves;).
Only the Leaders are supposed to be able to interpret stuff, and that's the way they like it.
There is a big conflict between secularism + the near worship of Ataturk and actually following what the Koran says, based on very popular interpretations of Islam.
The muslims in Turkey who think they can have secularism, "The Ataturk Way" etc are either ignorant about their own religion (which is very common) or in denial.
If they really want to keep things as much as they are now, they are going to have to _actively_ work very hard to see if there is some other way to interpret the Koran (and the Hadith if they are Sunnis).
They can't just sit by passively.
If they are muslims, there are no other options but what I say - follow the existing popular interpretations of Islam (which means the Turkish secular way is OUT), or find a new and acceptable way of interpreting what the Koran says (good luck with that).
You might say change religion, but go look up Apostasy and Islam and you'll see it's not quite as easy as that.
Yeah, but as you add more types of hardware it starts to get messy.
Say if you had two SCSI controllers and they both decided to use CTRL-A to enter their config screen.
You hold CTRL-A down, power on the machine and instantly you see the first SCSI controller's screen. No way to configure the second SCSI controller:).
You press escape, the machine reboots (that's what they all do, it appears easier to do than going to the next boot step) while you're still holding ctrl-a down and you see the first controller's screen;).
In theory someone (e.g. Intel) could create some new fancy standard where all compliant devices never wait for human response on booting, and in order to configure them you must hold down some key on boot to launch a super menu, that can itself launch the appropriate firmware "config" routine.
That'll be nice. I hate waiting for all that crap when booting up servers. But I don't have a big enough stick to make Adaptec and friends do things differently.
Sometimes though there might actually be something wrong, but before the docs figure it out after weeks of tests, the mind+body has repaired it already.
After all, your body repairs a lot of stuff without help from doctors. There are reasons why you're not falling apart as rapidly as an AIDS patient.
Go ask Doctors - even cancers can just vanish in some cases, cancers that were proven to exist etc.
And that's why the many good doctors don't like to do so many tests. Because with all the tests you can do, you're almost certain to find something wrong especially with someone more than 20 years old.
Then the trouble is, you don't know if the body is going to repair it or not, and there's great pressure to go do something about it, and sometimes that something is quite damaging - e.g. chemotherapy (which often does work, but it typically nearly kills you in the process or should I say as part of the process;) ).
That's also why sometimes they say - ok let's just monitor it and see what happens in a few months - because if the body repairs it, or it turns out to be benign, there's no need to do some _crude_ modern medical procedure (like slit him open and rip it out and hope he doesn't get infected[1] by that super hospital bacteria that we can't kill our antibiotics).
Cars rarely repair themselves but bodies do it most of the time.
On the flip side sometimes there really is something wrong, but the medical tech isn't good enough to detect it yet - though the patient has noticed something is not quite right. So the doctors have to wait till it gets bad enough or the patient recovers by himself/herself;).
Lastly, given the strength of the placebo effect - actual chemicals and hormones are released, I'm not surprised if your mind can make you physically sick - just by believing you are sick.
[1] Don't let them touch your tubes and stuff if they clearly haven't washed their hands...
"If it took long enough for you to notice then something must have been wrong"
Actually that is one of the reasons why things are still slow in general - because though CPUs and hardware get faster and faster, we're still living in a human world. So the "human notice" times remain important.
Lots of programmers have their programs wait for one second if they have to wait a minimum time for hardware or for other reasons, after all most seem to think "it's only one second".
A few 1 seconds here and it all adds up.
Silly? Maybe in many cases, BUT often you really do have to wait in seconds because it says "press ctrl-A for SCSI controller config" and so if the computer does not wait _seconds_ for the human and only waits _milliseconds_, the human is also going to be pissed off.
For a similar reason a windows PC can't boot faster than the X seconds for you to press F8 to enter "Safe Mode". Well it can, but it'll have to be "hold F8 down while booting", and that means some changes in the keyboard hardware and config stuff, some user education etc etc.
Also often the threshold for determining that something has gone wrong is more _human_ related. Say a hard drive has gone slightly flaky and takes a bit longer to spin up for whatever reason.
How long will a human wait for a harddrive to spin up? Pretty long in many cases. Even if it takes 30 seconds, they might still wait.
The BIOS could just assume it's dead, after all it's not behaving like a _normal_ hard drive. But the specs for _failure_ are often human related - they are determined by how long it is expected that a human will wait.
It's just like network connectivity timeouts are in the order of tens of seconds. Instead of say minutes. A tree might be willing to wait minutes or even days, but most humans don't want to wait minutes.
They're not in the order of milliseconds because the speed of light is too slow (light takes more than a few milliseconds to cross the world) and people are willing to wait seconds.
Researchers are trying to figure out whether neutrinos are straight or bi, they think this might help explain why the rest of the universe is mostly straight (allegedly).
Except most of them are not even sure what >90% of the universe is made of, so what makes them so sure that the rest of the universe is mostly straight?
"after all once you complete the story all you have is grind"
You could go around helping noobs:). They're annoying sometimes though, fortunately you can often leave them dead and still complete the mission.
In Guild Wars players don't really create much extra content.
There are more private/3rd party WoW servers, with player created content. Of course Blizzard keeps trying to shut those down...
I'm wondering if Guild Wars PvP might take off bigger time if Guild Wars just only required the account authentication and license verification to go via their servers, and then users can play on their own servers with hopefully lower ping.
The other thing is Anet keep changing the Guild Wars skills every two weeks or so, often very drastically. People don't change the rules of counterstrike, starcraft every two weeks, or pro tennis. How can you take PvP seriously if they do that? It's like playing Calvinball.
Yeah unfortunately that RFC also says.localhost is reserved to point to 127.0.0.1,.test is for testing,.example is for examples and.invalid is to be clearly invalid.
So they don't help with having a "RFC1918" style TLD. You can't do the equivalent of http://here/.
If you notice most people using WiFi at cafes and restaurants, just "go straight to the Internet/Web".
There is no real difference between one cafe and another, other than download speeds and latency.
However if people can go to stuff like http://whats.here/ and http://whos.here/, then places that provide free and open internet access might be able to distinguish themselves, WITHOUT interfering much with connectivity.
Without a TLD like that, it is hard for users to get information about the provider, unless the provider forcibly redirects users to a webpage first. While forced redirection is useful in many cases, I think it would be good to have one more way of doing things.
Even in places without internet connectivity, it might be useful. I could "pretend" to have telekinesis by bookmarking urls like https://control.here/airconditioner?location=room1&temp=25 (my client cert or HTTP AUTH credentials will tell the locality control server whether I am one of the users allowed to set it or not).
It will actually look like telekinesis if your superPDA+Phone used to access those urls is mind/brain controlled.
Slashdot Mirror
And your company's assets go to the next of kin. And along the way a new "baby" is produced which does the same bad old thing again.
Won't work. Or it'll be too much like whack-a-mole.
What will work is for certain bad things, the _people_ in charge go to jail for it. Limited Liability is only for $$$.
As long as there is no immortality treatment, whether you are a poor man or rich man, 5 years in jail is significant.
In fact 5 years in low security jail probably hurts a rich man more than a poor man, since the rich man can't be enjoying all the luxuries he can afford. In contrast the poor man might actually have more food and shelter in jail than before.
If Mr CEO is caught approving/ordering "unauthorized modification of a computer system", Mr CEO goes to jail.
No bullshit of "just fining the company".
And now it's Bada-Bada-Boom-Crash!
Oh yeah, here's another one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXBcmqwTV9s
"Please stop letting Rush and Fox news think for you."
Yeah this is funnier and probably more accurate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzJmTCYmo9g
Note: I believe this video was done in 2007.
You can think of the World as Zimbabwe, and the US Government as Mugabe (the leader in Zimbabwe)
And the US citizens are supposed to be "Mugabe's" "Good Friends", and the rest of the world are just the usual bunch to be exploited.
So in the good old days, "Mugabe" would "print" money (USD), spend most of it and pass some of the money to his "Good Friends", while the rest of the world become poorer due to the devalued USD (inflation), since they are holding trillions of US Dollars to buy food, oil- and some of them even lent Mugabe (US Bonds) or each other money (also in USD).
Now the US citizens should figure out whether they are getting a fair deal from their Mugabe.
Keep in mind, more and more countries are starting to consider moving away from being so dependent on the USD and thus leaving "Zimbabwe". If this happens, then the US Gov cannot print money so easily anymore - otherwise the rest of the world would just laugh as the USD becomes worthless - since they aren't holding much of it.
Depending on what sort of software is running on those servers, and what those companies allow you to do, you could do _some_ testing with vmware server.
:).
Stuff like vmware server is free. Download it and install it.
Create a windows guest with the required virtual hardware.
Install the cheapest licensed Windows SBS on it.
Make copies for testing different software configurations and scenarios.
The courts in my country are unlikely to smack me down as long as I don't run them all at the same time, but your country might be different so consult your lawyer
If just a single Windows SBS license costs too much money, you might be able to get away with something like Windows XP just to test the Microsoft Windows Update cycle for any "obvious problems".
Would be strange that you can't afford the USD600+ (inclusive of the 2 x 500GB drives for storing all those vmware images), if you're doing this as a business. Maybe you should bill those companies a bit more.
I'm assuming you have your own PC, and are not some person stuck with using library/cybercafe computers (in which case installing vmware server is out).
You'll still need a windows client of course, but you can also use that windows client in vmware server for testing various client configs as well.
BTW there are free linux distros that you can run vmware server on. So you spend money on 1 x windows client, 1 x windows server and 2 x 500GB (or even 1TB) hard drives.
Even if it's unencrypted it doesn't mean you can use them - depends on the laws in your country, and the unwritten laws in your area (it may be local custom to share WiFi, or not...).
In some places, it is local custom to put a jug (or other container) of water outside for any passerby to get a drink from (it's not considered trespassing or theft). And the courts et all will probably be rather harsh on you if you're caught tainting the water.
Which brings us to the next point- even if the SSID says "FreeWiFi" how do you know its safe to use? Not everyone has VPN tunnel endpoints.
That's the trouble with the current situation.
Firstly there is no easy way to know whether you are allowed to use a random open WiFi network, whose network it is and the terms and conditions of usage.
Secondly there is currently no easy way to _intentionally_ _allow_ "anonymous" public users to use an _encrypted_ WiFi network, in a manner where the users can't successfully decrypt each other's traffic. In theory it is technically possible, but there is no standard to make it _easy_ (well at least as easy as using an https website).
There's official $$$ and unofficial $$$.
Some corrupt guy could have a salary of zero but still make lots of money from "contributions".
So it's not so simple. If nobody jails corrupt officials then your problem is bigger than salary.
I don't think there is anything wrong with paying them a high bonus, IF at the end of the term they are doing a good job. If they are found to be corrupt (or criminally negligent), they should be jailed.
Fact is, the same people are getting voted in so that means they're doing a good enough job for the voters.
If people really disagree, they should either vote or get someone else to be a candidate.
Well imagine everyone packed like sardines in a subway train.
If there isn't a cell/microcell available, all their phones will be transmitting at max power to try to find an available cell.
I wonder what the RF safety specs say about that scenario.
And could prove to be very amusing for a future slashdot submission if they encounter a BOFH.
There are just so many things that could be done.
They're planning on taking data from some site and pumping it to others and they have _ZERO_ assurance that it's going to be good data and continue to be good data.
When you do stupid stuff like this, if you're not careful very bad things could happen (SQL injection, maybe even malware slipped in) and they could just go "nope not us", and while you could try to sue them it's pretty darn hard to prove since you requested the "bomb", and it only appears once and never appears again.
If you're lucky it's just going to be goatse/tubgirl.
If you're not, it could be a lot worse. Just imagine the BOFH thinking "What should I do today to them and their users" and rubbing his hands with glee.
Just slightly tampered data will be bad enough.
"Never underestimate several people in a small capsule farting over many days"
That's the thing, perhaps NASA is selecting from the wrong pool of people to put into small capsules for long periods of time.
Instead of picking from the usual air force sort of people maybe they should be picking candidates from nuclear submarines.
Might be easier to find a submariner that can be trained to fly than to find an air force sort of person willing to put up with being stuck in a claustrophobic tube for months with no way out except "Mission over" or death.
Antibiotics are NOT a placebo. In addition to the bacterial resistance problem, there are lots of potential nasty side effects with some antibiotics.
Placebo(TM) has been shown to benefit at least 35% of patients in clinical trials.
All? Some yes, not all.
You can't easily parallize two things waiting for the same key combo (e.g. both say press ctrl-a for config, and they are different stuff).
"Does Windows really have to wait until I make a decision before reading files off the disk"
Maybe it doesn't have to if your decision/option is between Safe Mode and Normal Mode.
But if your decision options includes "Step By Step Confirmation", it gets a bit trickier.
Since if someone wants to pick that option it could mean stuff is going wrong, and they'd want to do things one step at a time, and so one of the decision points might be:
"Do file preloading/cache ahead Y/N?"
Since that could be one of the things broken...
The more features and choices there are, the more decision points you will have. How you present and make those accessible is the difficult part.
One sign of a good design is not how many features and options you have, but how good the defaults are (a lot of OSS stuff has bad defaults). It takes a LOT of effort to figure out what the defaults should be.
"This is a very stupid idea, why the hell should people be worried about "interpreting" the Koran and the Hadith? Do you place that burden on the Christians as well? Shit, leave people alone man"
Why the muslims should be worried about interpreting the Koran? Because a fair number of extremist muslims are already doing their interpreting and you can see the _violent_ results of it.
If you're stupid enough to believe the extremists would leave people alone, you can skip the rest of this post.
The moderate muslims keep saying "that's not what the Koran says", but the extremists say "we are right, that is what the Koran says".
Can both be right?
Given the level of violence the extremists are willing to do, I'd say the moderates should actively resolve the issue as soon as possible and provide a verse by verse refutation of what the extremists believe - show clearly that the Koran says the extremists are doing the wrong thing so that OTHER muslims less familiar with the Koran will know AND more importantly _why_.
As for the Christians, yes the Christians should be reading and understanding what the Bible says. If they have understood (not just a surface/cursory understanding) and find they cannot live with what it says, then they should not be Christians.
Lastly if Christians believe that the Bible is from God (or at least contains words from God) AND that God is good/loving. Then why should it be a burden as you say?
It should be a _privilege_.
Indonesia? Go ask Yusman Roy how tolerant things are there.
;).
He's a muslim preacher that got jailed for conducting worship services in Indonesian (and Arabic) instead of just Arabic alone.
Seems he got the bright idea that his fellow indonesians should actually _understand_ what he is saying (most Indonesians don't understand Arabic).
He got jailed for inciting hatred. Great way of keeping Indonesia "peaceful" - jailing such people who incite hatred.
They burn down churches regularly in Indonesia. And christian villages. If they do those things to what the Koran claims are People of The Book (and thus should be treated better), it does make one wonder what the chances are for the hindus who are likely to be regarded as polytheists, and for the atheists.
As for Malaysia, the muslims there also don't know very much about their religion (it's all in Arabic, and most don't understand it and the people at the top like it that way).
They're like the lower rung scientologists who don't have access to the top level documents. By the time they have access they've got enough power that they're probably have become part of the problem themselves
Only the Leaders are supposed to be able to interpret stuff, and that's the way they like it.
Why surprised? It's practically inevitable.
As you said: "it is predominantly Islamic"
There is a big conflict between secularism + the near worship of Ataturk and actually following what the Koran says, based on very popular interpretations of Islam.
The muslims in Turkey who think they can have secularism, "The Ataturk Way" etc are either ignorant about their own religion (which is very common) or in denial.
If they really want to keep things as much as they are now, they are going to have to _actively_ work very hard to see if there is some other way to interpret the Koran (and the Hadith if they are Sunnis).
They can't just sit by passively.
If they are muslims, there are no other options but what I say - follow the existing popular interpretations of Islam (which means the Turkish secular way is OUT), or find a new and acceptable way of interpreting what the Koran says (good luck with that).
You might say change religion, but go look up Apostasy and Islam and you'll see it's not quite as easy as that.
Yeah, but as you add more types of hardware it starts to get messy.
:).
;).
Say if you had two SCSI controllers and they both decided to use CTRL-A to enter their config screen.
You hold CTRL-A down, power on the machine and instantly you see the first SCSI controller's screen. No way to configure the second SCSI controller
You press escape, the machine reboots (that's what they all do, it appears easier to do than going to the next boot step) while you're still holding ctrl-a down and you see the first controller's screen
In theory someone (e.g. Intel) could create some new fancy standard where all compliant devices never wait for human response on booting, and in order to configure them you must hold down some key on boot to launch a super menu, that can itself launch the appropriate firmware "config" routine.
That'll be nice. I hate waiting for all that crap when booting up servers. But I don't have a big enough stick to make Adaptec and friends do things differently.
Sometimes though there might actually be something wrong, but before the docs figure it out after weeks of tests, the mind+body has repaired it already.
;) ).
;).
After all, your body repairs a lot of stuff without help from doctors. There are reasons why you're not falling apart as rapidly as an AIDS patient.
Go ask Doctors - even cancers can just vanish in some cases, cancers that were proven to exist etc.
And that's why the many good doctors don't like to do so many tests. Because with all the tests you can do, you're almost certain to find something wrong especially with someone more than 20 years old.
Then the trouble is, you don't know if the body is going to repair it or not, and there's great pressure to go do something about it, and sometimes that something is quite damaging - e.g. chemotherapy (which often does work, but it typically nearly kills you in the process or should I say as part of the process
That's also why sometimes they say - ok let's just monitor it and see what happens in a few months - because if the body repairs it, or it turns out to be benign, there's no need to do some _crude_ modern medical procedure (like slit him open and rip it out and hope he doesn't get infected[1] by that super hospital bacteria that we can't kill our antibiotics).
Cars rarely repair themselves but bodies do it most of the time.
On the flip side sometimes there really is something wrong, but the medical tech isn't good enough to detect it yet - though the patient has noticed something is not quite right. So the doctors have to wait till it gets bad enough or the patient recovers by himself/herself
Lastly, given the strength of the placebo effect - actual chemicals and hormones are released, I'm not surprised if your mind can make you physically sick - just by believing you are sick.
[1] Don't let them touch your tubes and stuff if they clearly haven't washed their hands...
I suspect some IBM desktops did stuff like that - assumed the previous hardware config unless someone or something "yelled" at it.
I could be wrong though - just vaguely remembering something like that.
"If it took long enough for you to notice then something must have been wrong"
Actually that is one of the reasons why things are still slow in general - because though CPUs and hardware get faster and faster, we're still living in a human world. So the "human notice" times remain important.
Lots of programmers have their programs wait for one second if they have to wait a minimum time for hardware or for other reasons, after all most seem to think "it's only one second".
A few 1 seconds here and it all adds up.
Silly? Maybe in many cases, BUT often you really do have to wait in seconds because it says "press ctrl-A for SCSI controller config" and so if the computer does not wait _seconds_ for the human and only waits _milliseconds_, the human is also going to be pissed off.
For a similar reason a windows PC can't boot faster than the X seconds for you to press F8 to enter "Safe Mode". Well it can, but it'll have to be "hold F8 down while booting", and that means some changes in the keyboard hardware and config stuff, some user education etc etc.
Also often the threshold for determining that something has gone wrong is more _human_ related. Say a hard drive has gone slightly flaky and takes a bit longer to spin up for whatever reason.
How long will a human wait for a harddrive to spin up? Pretty long in many cases. Even if it takes 30 seconds, they might still wait.
The BIOS could just assume it's dead, after all it's not behaving like a _normal_ hard drive. But the specs for _failure_ are often human related - they are determined by how long it is expected that a human will wait.
It's just like network connectivity timeouts are in the order of tens of seconds. Instead of say minutes. A tree might be willing to wait minutes or even days, but most humans don't want to wait minutes.
They're not in the order of milliseconds because the speed of light is too slow (light takes more than a few milliseconds to cross the world) and people are willing to wait seconds.
Researchers are trying to figure out whether neutrinos are straight or bi, they think this might help explain why the rest of the universe is mostly straight (allegedly).
Except most of them are not even sure what >90% of the universe is made of, so what makes them so sure that the rest of the universe is mostly straight?
Well you can "kind of" do stuff like that in Guild Wars.
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/%22You_Move_Like_a_Dwarf!%22
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Slippery_Ground
There also used to be this:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/index.php?title=Tease&oldid=935123
But I guess it wasn't popular (or was too annoying, or both ;) ), so it got changed.
And this is funny (and useful):
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/%22I_Meant_to_Do_That!%22
"after all once you complete the story all you have is grind"
:). They're annoying sometimes though, fortunately you can often leave them dead and still complete the mission.
You could go around helping noobs
In Guild Wars players don't really create much extra content.
There are more private/3rd party WoW servers, with player created content. Of course Blizzard keeps trying to shut those down...
I'm wondering if Guild Wars PvP might take off bigger time if Guild Wars just only required the account authentication and license verification to go via their servers, and then users can play on their own servers with hopefully lower ping.
The other thing is Anet keep changing the Guild Wars skills every two weeks or so, often very drastically. People don't change the rules of counterstrike, starcraft every two weeks, or pro tennis. How can you take PvP seriously if they do that? It's like playing Calvinball.
Yeah unfortunately that RFC also says .localhost is reserved to point to 127.0.0.1, .test is for testing, .example is for examples and .invalid is to be clearly invalid.
So they don't help with having a "RFC1918" style TLD. You can't do the equivalent of http://here/.
If you notice most people using WiFi at cafes and restaurants, just "go straight to the Internet/Web".
There is no real difference between one cafe and another, other than download speeds and latency.
However if people can go to stuff like http://whats.here/ and http://whos.here/, then places that provide free and open internet access might be able to distinguish themselves, WITHOUT interfering much with connectivity.
Without a TLD like that, it is hard for users to get information about the provider, unless the provider forcibly redirects users to a webpage first. While forced redirection is useful in many cases, I think it would be good to have one more way of doing things.
Even in places without internet connectivity, it might be useful. I could "pretend" to have telekinesis by bookmarking urls like https://control.here/airconditioner?location=room1&temp=25 (my client cert or HTTP AUTH credentials will tell the locality control server whether I am one of the users allowed to set it or not).
It will actually look like telekinesis if your superPDA+Phone used to access those urls is mind/brain controlled.