Yeah, given the loud noises, it is quite likely that Valve is probably screwing at least 15,000-20,000 of their legit customers!
If Valve actually deactivated people without warning just because they used nocd they are making a big mistake. As you mentioned steam verification can be quite annoying, so what are the odds that 20K people out of all the total customers tried using nocd?
IMO if someone bought a copy of your game for about USD1.50/disc (that's about the going rate here), they aren't likely to kick up such a big fuss if it stops working. They'd grumble, curse in front of their PC, then just go get another game for USD1.50/disc. Heck some "unauthorized distributors" will even let you swap for another game (with the same number of discs) no questions asked.
I argue that even if it were 20,000 of such users it'll just be grumbles not huge protests - coz they know what they are getting.
Of course a large number of these 20,000 could be actual customers who bought the game and loaned a copy to a friend.
But if so I argue there's quite a big difference between deactivating 20,000 people who got USD1.50 copies from one or five legit USD50 purchases (possibly crackers may need more than one copy for their research..), and deactivating 20,000 people who made legit purchases at USD50 each and made one or two copies for their friends... If Valve can't tell the difference, LOL! I suspect the complaints would be louder from the 2nd group, and that's not the biggest problem...
Guess what happens when these group of people meet the people who are using the "properly" warezed version you are talking about? Imagine the conversation. Imagine the likely outcome!
It's no surprise that warez versions of software for non-online play would be possible unless you have stuff like "Trusted Computing/Palladium" AND the necessary legislation and controls - to prevent sale of hardware that bypasses TC or provides alternatives/choice.
IF it's part of the _gameplay_ to connect to a Central server occasionally then that makes things harder.
Then you'd have to change the keys/certs on the warez copy AND have a custom server for the warezed versions.
If it's part of the the gameplay to connect to a central server _frequently_ as part of a _community_ that would make warez versions of limited use/popularity. Because the _community_ would be a major part of the game value.
Thought of that too, but the disadvantage is that a method that relies on spoofing won't work on firewalls with antispoofing rules. A number do it semi-automatically based on static routes and such.
Of course, I doubt if most of the popular el-cheapo < USD50 NAT routers do antispoofing automatically. Some ISPs might also have ingress anti-spoofing filters (to prevent being a DDoS source and other nastiness).
Still responsible/clueful behaviour in these area is probably rare, so such spoofing stuff could work in many cases.
I was wondering whether I'd have to get off my lazy butt to implement such an app, but looks like these guys have finally got around to doing it. Phew:)
I was thinking that using UDP port 53 packets without relying on spoofing could work in even more scenarios.
Trouble I had difficulty with was determining the external dynamically NAT'ed source UDP port. The client doesn't know what source UDP port the NAT device assigns (assuming it assigns it dynamically). So how can the OTHER client send UDP "replies" to that source UDP port?
After all what happens if you have more than one device sending UDP packets with the same source ports - what happens when you NAT those packets? UDP source ports not assigned randomly by the NAT device?
How do these guys manage? Lots of sloppy "firewalls"/NATs out there?;)
I see: "We spend a gread deal of time in meetings" and "So, the issues as far as the design of the system are argued out in many meetings by the technical leadership, some of whom are first and second line managers and some of whom are STSM's and DE's [Distinguished Engineers --eds.] and Fellows. We eventually come to a level of consensus about which of the items that have been proposed are fundable and the remainder are not. "
How is that different from the other companies you have experience with?
Problem with putting stuff in your mouth is choking on it.
They even mentioned military use. Imagine colliding into something and choking to death on the gizmo.
Why don't they just stick the stuff into a suitable part of the brain and let the brain figure it out? Yah I know the brain moves around, let the thing move and flex around with the brain too then - and make it the same density as the brain tissue.
I was actually thinking about this more than 10 years ago - but then I was thinking it'd work if you put it into kids when they are very young so their brains can learn how to use it (and thus they get one or two s-video/VGA ports:) ). I assumed that adult brains would not be flexible enough.
But from these research it seems like even adult brains are quite flexible!
"That's what ctrl-alt-delete is for. Turn the thing off at the BIOS screen..."
That works, except in mixed environments that have many windows servers controlled by KVMs. These scenarios are quite common. Then you might start disabling c-a-d in inittab. If you use FreeBSD you can use a different key seq.
I don't know about the others, but I don't use it coz it's too much work/too hard.
I actually tried to learn LISP (tried CLISP, cmucl). But I found it's just about as hard as java in getting things done - so many more things to build from scratch (I use CPAN, and perl - usually in that order;) ). So I figured I might as well learn something else - I'm obviously not good enough a programmer for LISP.
I'm far from the best, brightest and most hardworking programmer in the world. So I resort to prefab stuff made by better programmers. e.g. CPAN.
I had problems like finding the equivalent of a popular standard JDBC/DBI for Lisp with "drivers" for the popular DBs.
Even far newer languages like Python and Ruby have tons of common useful libraries freely available for people to use, after such a short space of time too.
With PHP you know you should use PEAR DB. With Java - it's JDBC. With Perl it's DBI. With Lisp?
If LISP is so powerful and LISP programmers want LISP to be more popular then why don't one or a few LISP wizards whip up 10% of CPAN in a week and make it free?
Why should every LISP programmer have to rewrite commonly used stuff from scratch? That's a big source of bugs, and a drain to already meagre programmer resources.
If LISP were that powerful, LISP programmers should have "spare cycles" to write tons of good and free stuff right?
Perl programmers seem to have plenty of "spare cycles" to write stuff like ACME::Bleach, Mason.
Same for Python programmers - stuff like spambayes, zope etc, just keep pouring out.
Or maybe LISP isn't so powerful and easy after all? In which case, thanks but no thanks.
He should use PEAR DB or whatever you call the PHP equivalent of JDBC.
It's a sign that the PHP devs didn't learn from other ppls mistakes. A bad sign (amongst many others indicating similar braindeadness - global track vars, addslashes etc).
They should have come out with something like PEAR DB from the start.
Java is useful if you intend to treat most developers like lego blocks.
Example scenario: you have one main guru programmer who writes the program in Human Language (e.g. English). And you have the other much cheaper developers (in-house or off-shore) who compile that to Java. After that the guru programmer(s) can move on to other stuff whilst the interchangeable and cheap programmers maintain it.
You appear to NEED a fair sized team for lots of Java stuff, which if done in some other language can be done by just one to three people. This can be considered a minus or a plus. Coz in many organizations if you are a Boss of 20 people, you outrank a Boss of 3 people (and probably get paid more too) - which is why MS has its uses;).
I find Java stuff to have a lot of "make-work" stuff. You need all these layers and layers of stuff because you have all these layers and layers of other stuff. And often these layers and layers of stuff _don't_help_very_much_ - diminishing returns. Sure it is more "organized", but now you have to change 3 different files to make one change, or something like that (e.g. code, data, metadata).
Whereas the LAMP style stuff is relatively simple - O/S, Webserver, Database, Programming Language. So what if it isn't N-Tier, or have "Enterprise Java Beans" or have built-in caching or some other buzzword, very often you don't need that stuff - you run out of bandwidth, or hit some other limit first. If you keep things simple you can often easily scale the webservers (and appservers) horizontally (keep adding them). So the bottleneck is usually the DB, and there are many known solutions for that.
You probably end up with similar scaling limits with a Java solution anyway (except the Java solution typically has more layers, complexity and work).
The disadvantage of the LAMP stuff is while you only need a very small team (of one sometimes), since after all the guru programmer codes most of it; the problem is if the guru programmer gets bored or wants to do something else, you have a problem - who's there to maintain it? The "lego brick" programmers may not be able to handle the job. So you need to get another guru programmer who costs as much and is just as likely to get bored.
The lego brick Java programmers don't seem to get bored maybe because they get the feeling of satisfaction coz they are definitely doing lots of work and achieving a "lot" - (remember there are lots of layers to glue together- N-tier;) ). Or they don't care - it's just a job after all - that's what they got the java certification for.
Last but not least of all - it may not even matter at all whether you go LAMP or J2EE.
Coz amongst the most important bunch on the team are the graphic design/art people. It doesn't matter to the client or PHB how cruddy the architecture is - if the software _looks_ great, you are more than 50% done. It doesn't matter if your architecture handles up to 1000 transactions a second on an el-cheapo dell server, and scales very well. If the widgets look ugly you're unlikely to win the project.
After all not many can tell whether a software/system architecture is ugly or not. Whereas very many can agree and tell you immediately that a widget/icon/colour/layout is ugly. And that includes the people in charge of approving stuff.
Well maybe the employees were very responsible and hardly surfed?:). Or they had ad blockers...
The newspaper ads that actually get me are the advertorials. Often I can totally NOT see a full page pictorial ad. Until someone mentions it - "didn't you see the XYZ ad?", Me - "Huh? What ad?". It's like I "browse with images off".
Whereas, the ones with lots of text, I often stumble into reading them - they look just like a newspaper article. Some probably better written and more informative;).
"Or perhaps fuel cells, in which case you've built a hybrid car anyway"
Hybrid cars = internal combustion engine + electric motor.
No need for hybrid - if the fuel cells are hydrocarbon fuel cells, or hydrogen fuel cells + carbon fuel cells. You can leave out the internal combustion engines.
In which case you get an electric motor car that is powered by petrol/diesel/biodiesel - just fill up at the usual fuel stations.
Current issues are contaminants in the fuel poisoning the various catalysts or fuel cells. Also max sustained power output of the fuel cells. You need high output to run a car.
You'd still need batteries or some other way to store power from regenerative braking - which is where a lot of the efficiency gains come from, and for "sprinting", but you no longer need such a high capacity battery - tens of KM on battery charge should be good enough (have to take into consideration hilly places).
Washing clothes by hand _alone_ is not much fun. But I can understand how it might be fun in a community.
The Amish may be taking things to an extreme, but I think there are at least a few things we can learn from them.
AFAIK most of us don't really have that much time in this world.
Playing games/doing stuff all by yourself isn't as fun as doing stuff with friends.
Spending most of your life earning money just to stay in the same spot on the Modern Life Treadmill (and making the Billionaire Boss even richer - but not that much happier either) isn't a good goal in life.
Making more and more friends is a good goal in life. After all if it turns out there is eternal life, it'll be more fun to have friends for eternity than to just to have things (counting your billions gets boring after a while). If there isn't eternal life, I still don't see a big minus with having more friends:).
Erm. Did that for April 1st this year where I worked.
I set things up so that *.doubleclick.net etc resolved to a webserver in the company, and the webserver served up "localized content".
So tons of ads were replaced by the company logo:).
Surprising how few noticed! No I didn't get fired.
Maybe I should have served up announcements instead of just the company logo. e.g. "The Company Is Your Friend". "Staff Meeting at 2PM". "You There! Stop Surfing!". "Exploit e-Business Initiatives". "Da Boss is In The Building!";).
Anyway this would save bandwidth and be possibly useful - you could also extend it and customize content on a per user/IP basis.
Other access he may need is the necessary rights/method in order to gracefully shutdown the system (logged of course).
Probably may wish to have one or two other user accounts too - so content that is to be "hard to change" can be owned by another account - just "read only" by the webserver.
It may not be politics - it may be the sysadmin thinks pariahdecss has not presented sufficient evidence of competency and responsibility in order to be trusted with having root privilege.
Since there are fewer planes, it is more likely that idiots flying planes tend to kill themselves first before managing to kill other pilots, or never get licensed.
That's not true for cars. So even if you do everything right, the chances of you dying because of what some OTHER idiot does is much higher.
That said I've seen statistics that claim driving is about as safe as flying on commercial airliners on a per _trip_ basis. Not on a per _distance_ basis (flying on a commercial airliner is safer).
So you're probably right - if typical airliner pilots are more skillful, professional and trained than the typical driver then landing/takeoff is more difficult than driving.
What if you caught a cold from one of those creatures and suddenly got GeneCorpXYZ DNA in you?
Then one day GeneCorpXYZ finds out you have that DNA and:
1) You get sued by GeneCorpXYZ 2) Meanwhile GeneCorpXYZ gets a court injunction on you to stop you from reproducing potentially unlicensed genetic material, or taking part in activities that may result in such reproduction. 3) Your children also get a similar court order. And they may end up being part/whole property of GeneCorpXYZ.
While you are at it, you may wish to go through the Adobe Acrobat Reader preferences and turn off the "Allow File Open Links"/"Allow file Open Actions and Launching File Attachments" or whatever they call it in your version and the other "ripe for future security problem" features (e.g. cross document links).
Crashes are a general indicator of code quality, and security.
More crashes = lower code quality = lower security.
I'd rather UPGRADE from IE, not downgrade. And it better be a significant upgrade to be worth the costs of upgrading/switching.
So far Firefox does NOT appear to be significantly more secure than IE esp if both browsers are configured by expert hands.
Didn't you see the recent bugtraq post about randomly generated malformed HTML being more likely to crash Firefox than IE? THAT is a bad sign.
Working in IT security, I expect most software to have bad/terrible security bugs, and most do. Most programmers suck (including me).
But I don't recommend or intend to use most software that I test or encounter. Definitely NOT!
If you're on windows, you can't practically get rid of IE anyway. So if Firefox really isn't much better - and is only better because hackers aren't targetting it yet, why bother? Just keep IE patched and configured (set the My Computer zone to something like high security for normal users and you'd be fine for most things - the admin account can have it as default, since you don't browse untrusted sites as admin).
One sure can sneak 20 nukes into US cities. The main difficulty is getting hold of nukes without getting tracked/caught. AFAIK isn't a great supply of nukes (not that I've really checked though).
IF you ever get hold of nukes I'm sure you can successfully sneak a fair number of them into US cities.
After all, despite the billion dollar war on drugs, hundreds of _tons_ of cocaine get in on a yearly basis. And so far they only seize tens of tons a year? What do you think - the US Gov intentionally lets the drugs through just to not show how good they are in stopping the real bad stuff? Perhaps, but not very likely IMO.
If they ever manage to build the space elevator AND it's actually used the way it's advertised (lots of launches). I'm sure people could sneak a bomb onto it _if_ they really wanted to.
More traffic = more opportunities.
If there's minimal traffic, why should people waste time blowing it up? It's already caused enough damage just through massive waste of resources:).
BTW - US cities? Why bother with nuking US cities? Think! If you had nukes and were really EVIL and wanted to cause trouble to the US there are maybe two top targets that come to mind and they aren't in the US. I can think of others too, but you only need to nuke either one in certain ways/scenarios and the US will have more problems.
More "bang for the buck".
I'm not going to name them though. The world would be pretty screwed up too.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, given the loud noises, it is quite likely that Valve is probably screwing at least 15,000-20,000 of their legit customers!
If Valve actually deactivated people without warning just because they used nocd they are making a big mistake. As you mentioned steam verification can be quite annoying, so what are the odds that 20K people out of all the total customers tried using nocd?
IMO if someone bought a copy of your game for about USD1.50/disc (that's about the going rate here), they aren't likely to kick up such a big fuss if it stops working. They'd grumble, curse in front of their PC, then just go get another game for USD1.50/disc. Heck some "unauthorized distributors" will even let you swap for another game (with the same number of discs) no questions asked.
I argue that even if it were 20,000 of such users it'll just be grumbles not huge protests - coz they know what they are getting.
Of course a large number of these 20,000 could be actual customers who bought the game and loaned a copy to a friend.
But if so I argue there's quite a big difference between deactivating 20,000 people who got USD1.50 copies from one or five legit USD50 purchases (possibly crackers may need more than one copy for their research..), and deactivating 20,000 people who made legit purchases at USD50 each and made one or two copies for their friends... If Valve can't tell the difference, LOL! I suspect the complaints would be louder from the 2nd group, and that's not the biggest problem...
Guess what happens when these group of people meet the people who are using the "properly" warezed version you are talking about? Imagine the conversation. Imagine the likely outcome!
It's no surprise that warez versions of software for non-online play would be possible unless you have stuff like "Trusted Computing/Palladium" AND the necessary legislation and controls - to prevent sale of hardware that bypasses TC or provides alternatives/choice.
IF it's part of the _gameplay_ to connect to a Central server occasionally then that makes things harder.
Then you'd have to change the keys/certs on the warez copy AND have a custom server for the warezed versions.
If it's part of the the gameplay to connect to a central server _frequently_ as part of a _community_ that would make warez versions of limited use/popularity. Because the _community_ would be a major part of the game value.
Yah, keep seeing all these stupid requests on my firewall. Wonder if one could send a very "exceptional response" to stop a dumb client...
;).
Maybe someone should look for weaknesses in the source code or something
What happens then if you have two or more machines using the same UDP source port behind the NAT device?
Thought of that too, but the disadvantage is that a method that relies on spoofing won't work on firewalls with antispoofing rules. A number do it semi-automatically based on static routes and such.
:)
;)
Of course, I doubt if most of the popular el-cheapo < USD50 NAT routers do antispoofing automatically. Some ISPs might also have ingress anti-spoofing filters (to prevent being a DDoS source and other nastiness).
Still responsible/clueful behaviour in these area is probably rare, so such spoofing stuff could work in many cases.
I was wondering whether I'd have to get off my lazy butt to implement such an app, but looks like these guys have finally got around to doing it. Phew
I was thinking that using UDP port 53 packets without relying on spoofing could work in even more scenarios.
Trouble I had difficulty with was determining the external dynamically NAT'ed source UDP port. The client doesn't know what source UDP port the NAT device assigns (assuming it assigns it dynamically). So how can the OTHER client send UDP "replies" to that source UDP port?
After all what happens if you have more than one device sending UDP packets with the same source ports - what happens when you NAT those packets? UDP source ports not assigned randomly by the NAT device?
How do these guys manage? Lots of sloppy "firewalls"/NATs out there?
Could you elaborate on the differences?
I see:
"We spend a gread deal of time in meetings"
and
"So, the issues as far as the design of the system are argued out in many meetings by the technical leadership, some of whom are first and second line managers and some of whom are STSM's and DE's [Distinguished Engineers --eds.] and Fellows. We eventually come to a level of consensus about which of the items that have been proposed are fundable and the remainder are not. "
How is that different from the other companies you have experience with?
Problem with putting stuff in your mouth is choking on it.
:) ). I assumed that adult brains would not be flexible enough.
They even mentioned military use. Imagine colliding into something and choking to death on the gizmo.
Why don't they just stick the stuff into a suitable part of the brain and let the brain figure it out? Yah I know the brain moves around, let the thing move and flex around with the brain too then - and make it the same density as the brain tissue.
I was actually thinking about this more than 10 years ago - but then I was thinking it'd work if you put it into kids when they are very young so their brains can learn how to use it (and thus they get one or two s-video/VGA ports
But from these research it seems like even adult brains are quite flexible!
Check this <a href="http://science.slashdot.org/science/03/01/0<nobr>3<wbr></wbr></nobr> <nobr> <wbr></wbr></nobr>/1336238.shtml?tid=134">out</a>
"That's what ctrl-alt-delete is for. Turn the thing off at the BIOS screen..."
That works, except in mixed environments that have many windows servers controlled by KVMs. These scenarios are quite common. Then you might start disabling c-a-d in inittab. If you use FreeBSD you can use a different key seq.
"Why does nobody use it?"
;) ). So I figured I might as well learn something else - I'm obviously not good enough a programmer for LISP.
I don't know about the others, but I don't use it coz it's too much work/too hard.
I actually tried to learn LISP (tried CLISP, cmucl). But I found it's just about as hard as java in getting things done - so many more things to build from scratch (I use CPAN, and perl - usually in that order
I'm far from the best, brightest and most hardworking programmer in the world. So I resort to prefab stuff made by better programmers. e.g. CPAN.
I had problems like finding the equivalent of a popular standard JDBC/DBI for Lisp with "drivers" for the popular DBs.
Even far newer languages like Python and Ruby have tons of common useful libraries freely available for people to use, after such a short space of time too.
With PHP you know you should use PEAR DB. With Java - it's JDBC. With Perl it's DBI. With Lisp?
If LISP is so powerful and LISP programmers want LISP to be more popular then why don't one or a few LISP wizards whip up 10% of CPAN in a week and make it free?
Why should every LISP programmer have to rewrite commonly used stuff from scratch? That's a big source of bugs, and a drain to already meagre programmer resources.
If LISP were that powerful, LISP programmers should have "spare cycles" to write tons of good and free stuff right?
Perl programmers seem to have plenty of "spare cycles" to write stuff like ACME::Bleach, Mason.
Same for Python programmers - stuff like spambayes, zope etc, just keep pouring out.
Or maybe LISP isn't so powerful and easy after all? In which case, thanks but no thanks.
He should use PEAR DB or whatever you call the PHP equivalent of JDBC.
It's a sign that the PHP devs didn't learn from other ppls mistakes. A bad sign (amongst many others indicating similar braindeadness - global track vars, addslashes etc).
They should have come out with something like PEAR DB from the start.
Java is useful if you intend to treat most developers like lego blocks.
;).
.
;) ). Or they don't care - it's just a job after all - that's what they got the java certification for.
Example scenario: you have one main guru programmer who writes the program in Human Language (e.g. English). And you have the other much cheaper developers (in-house or off-shore) who compile that to Java. After that the guru programmer(s) can move on to other stuff whilst the interchangeable and cheap programmers maintain it.
You appear to NEED a fair sized team for lots of Java stuff, which if done in some other language can be done by just one to three people. This can be considered a minus or a plus. Coz in many organizations if you are a Boss of 20 people, you outrank a Boss of 3 people (and probably get paid more too) - which is why MS has its uses
I find Java stuff to have a lot of "make-work" stuff. You need all these layers and layers of stuff because you have all these layers and layers of other stuff. And often these layers and layers of stuff _don't_help_very_much_ - diminishing returns. Sure it is more "organized", but now you have to change 3 different files to make one change, or something like that (e.g. code, data, metadata)
Whereas the LAMP style stuff is relatively simple - O/S, Webserver, Database, Programming Language. So what if it isn't N-Tier, or have "Enterprise Java Beans" or have built-in caching or some other buzzword, very often you don't need that stuff - you run out of bandwidth, or hit some other limit first. If you keep things simple you can often easily scale the webservers (and appservers) horizontally (keep adding them). So the bottleneck is usually the DB, and there are many known solutions for that.
You probably end up with similar scaling limits with a Java solution anyway (except the Java solution typically has more layers, complexity and work).
The disadvantage of the LAMP stuff is while you only need a very small team (of one sometimes), since after all the guru programmer codes most of it; the problem is if the guru programmer gets bored or wants to do something else, you have a problem - who's there to maintain it? The "lego brick" programmers may not be able to handle the job. So you need to get another guru programmer who costs as much and is just as likely to get bored.
The lego brick Java programmers don't seem to get bored maybe because they get the feeling of satisfaction coz they are definitely doing lots of work and achieving a "lot" - (remember there are lots of layers to glue together- N-tier
Last but not least of all - it may not even matter at all whether you go LAMP or J2EE.
Coz amongst the most important bunch on the team are the graphic design/art people. It doesn't matter to the client or PHB how cruddy the architecture is - if the software _looks_ great, you are more than 50% done. It doesn't matter if your architecture handles up to 1000 transactions a second on an el-cheapo dell server, and scales very well. If the widgets look ugly you're unlikely to win the project.
After all not many can tell whether a software/system architecture is ugly or not. Whereas very many can agree and tell you immediately that a widget/icon/colour/layout is ugly. And that includes the people in charge of approving stuff.
Well maybe the employees were very responsible and hardly surfed? :). Or they had ad blockers...
;).
The newspaper ads that actually get me are the advertorials. Often I can totally NOT see a full page pictorial ad. Until someone mentions it - "didn't you see the XYZ ad?", Me - "Huh? What ad?". It's like I "browse with images off".
Whereas, the ones with lots of text, I often stumble into reading them - they look just like a newspaper article. Some probably better written and more informative
"Or perhaps fuel cells, in which case you've built a hybrid car anyway"
Hybrid cars = internal combustion engine + electric motor.
No need for hybrid - if the fuel cells are hydrocarbon fuel cells, or hydrogen fuel cells + carbon fuel cells. You can leave out the internal combustion engines.
In which case you get an electric motor car that is powered by petrol/diesel/biodiesel - just fill up at the usual fuel stations.
Current issues are contaminants in the fuel poisoning the various catalysts or fuel cells. Also max sustained power output of the fuel cells. You need high output to run a car.
You'd still need batteries or some other way to store power from regenerative braking - which is where a lot of the efficiency gains come from, and for "sprinting", but you no longer need such a high capacity battery - tens of KM on battery charge should be good enough (have to take into consideration hilly places).
Washing clothes by hand _alone_ is not much fun. But I can understand how it might be fun in a community.
:).
The Amish may be taking things to an extreme, but I think there are at least a few things we can learn from them.
AFAIK most of us don't really have that much time in this world.
Playing games/doing stuff all by yourself isn't as fun as doing stuff with friends.
Spending most of your life earning money just to stay in the same spot on the Modern Life Treadmill (and making the Billionaire Boss even richer - but not that much happier either) isn't a good goal in life.
Making more and more friends is a good goal in life. After all if it turns out there is eternal life, it'll be more fun to have friends for eternity than to just to have things (counting your billions gets boring after a while). If there isn't eternal life, I still don't see a big minus with having more friends
Erm. Did that for April 1st this year where I worked.
:).
;).
I set things up so that *.doubleclick.net etc resolved to a webserver in the company, and the webserver served up "localized content".
So tons of ads were replaced by the company logo
Surprising how few noticed! No I didn't get fired.
Maybe I should have served up announcements instead of just the company logo. e.g. "The Company Is Your Friend". "Staff Meeting at 2PM". "You There! Stop Surfing!". "Exploit e-Business Initiatives". "Da Boss is In The Building!"
Anyway this would save bandwidth and be possibly useful - you could also extend it and customize content on a per user/IP basis.
Apparently pariahdecss is in charge of/responsible for the webserver and it's the sole app there.
If the UPS/power supply/something makes funny noises or whatever, someone might want to go shut it down gracefully.
Might as well allow pariahdecss to do it.
Other access he may need is the necessary rights/method in order to gracefully shutdown the system (logged of course).
Probably may wish to have one or two other user accounts too - so content that is to be "hard to change" can be owned by another account - just "read only" by the webserver.
It may not be politics - it may be the sysadmin thinks pariahdecss has not presented sufficient evidence of competency and responsibility in order to be trusted with having root privilege.
Since there are fewer planes, it is more likely that idiots flying planes tend to kill themselves first before managing to kill other pilots, or never get licensed.
That's not true for cars. So even if you do everything right, the chances of you dying because of what some OTHER idiot does is much higher.
That said I've seen statistics that claim driving is about as safe as flying on commercial airliners on a per _trip_ basis. Not on a per _distance_ basis (flying on a commercial airliner is safer).
So you're probably right - if typical airliner pilots are more skillful, professional and trained than the typical driver then landing/takeoff is more difficult than driving.
I believe private planes have different stats.
What if you caught a cold from one of those creatures and suddenly got GeneCorpXYZ DNA in you?
Then one day GeneCorpXYZ finds out you have that DNA and:
1) You get sued by GeneCorpXYZ
2) Meanwhile GeneCorpXYZ gets a court injunction on you to stop you from reproducing potentially unlicensed genetic material, or taking part in activities that may result in such reproduction.
3) Your children also get a similar court order. And they may end up being part/whole property of GeneCorpXYZ.
While you are at it, you may wish to go through the Adobe Acrobat Reader preferences and turn off the "Allow File Open Links"/"Allow file Open Actions and Launching File Attachments" or whatever they call it in your version and the other "ripe for future security problem" features (e.g. cross document links).
Only turn them on if you need them.
Crashes are a general indicator of code quality, and security.
More crashes = lower code quality = lower security.
I'd rather UPGRADE from IE, not downgrade. And it better be a significant upgrade to be worth the costs of upgrading/switching.
So far Firefox does NOT appear to be significantly more secure than IE esp if both browsers are configured by expert hands.
Didn't you see the recent bugtraq post about randomly generated malformed HTML being more likely to crash Firefox than IE? THAT is a bad sign.
Working in IT security, I expect most software to have bad/terrible security bugs, and most do. Most programmers suck (including me).
But I don't recommend or intend to use most software that I test or encounter. Definitely NOT!
If you're on windows, you can't practically get rid of IE anyway. So if Firefox really isn't much better - and is only better because hackers aren't targetting it yet, why bother? Just keep IE patched and configured (set the My Computer zone to something like high security for normal users and you'd be fine for most things - the admin account can have it as default, since you don't browse untrusted sites as admin).
One sure can sneak 20 nukes into US cities. The main difficulty is getting hold of nukes without getting tracked/caught. AFAIK isn't a great supply of nukes (not that I've really checked though).
:).
IF you ever get hold of nukes I'm sure you can successfully sneak a fair number of them into US cities.
After all, despite the billion dollar war on drugs, hundreds of _tons_ of cocaine get in on a yearly basis. And so far they only seize tens of tons a year? What do you think - the US Gov intentionally lets the drugs through just to not show how good they are in stopping the real bad stuff? Perhaps, but not very likely IMO.
If they ever manage to build the space elevator AND it's actually used the way it's advertised (lots of launches). I'm sure people could sneak a bomb onto it _if_ they really wanted to.
More traffic = more opportunities.
If there's minimal traffic, why should people waste time blowing it up? It's already caused enough damage just through massive waste of resources
BTW - US cities? Why bother with nuking US cities? Think! If you had nukes and were really EVIL and wanted to cause trouble to the US there are maybe two top targets that come to mind and they aren't in the US. I can think of others too, but you only need to nuke either one in certain ways/scenarios and the US will have more problems.
More "bang for the buck".
I'm not going to name them though. The world would be pretty screwed up too.
On improving reading ability, analytical and logical thinking amongst the general population?
:)
Looks like a more urgent issue.
"The highest you're going to get to break an elevator cable is a few km above the surface"
Not if you use the elevator itself...
"Anything a terrorist does to a cable will be done to less than 0.01% of the cable"
"Anything they can do is recoverable"
LOL.
Sneak a nice big bomb into a satellite/space vehicle/payload, put it on one of the lifts and blow it up part of the way.