Secure passwords would be nice, but people probably aren't going to go through the trouble.
I like the concept of locking an account after X failures to log in, but I always see stupid implementations of the idea. Most of the time, it's some value of X that is likely to annoy people who legitimately forgot their password and are going through their likely suspects. 5 times seems somewhat low for obscure sites you don't visit often, and I remember my girlfriend trying to log onto an important work related account where 1 failed attempt would lock the account for 24 (!) hours.
I could understand locking an account after like 20 tries or 5 tries in 1 second to try to prevent brute force attacks... or some tiered system where the more often you fail to input the correct password, the longer it will lock you out. Are there sites that implement this without warning of such a system?
I kind of doubt it would make that big of a difference. There will always be a weak point in security, and most of the time, the human factor is the weakest. Stupid people will be stupid people.
If the US government decided all of a sudden to change from driving on the right hand side to the left hand side of the road, don't you think people would be rightfully pissed about having to buy a new car, or get theirs converted? (Look! A car analogy that works!!)
Since a few people have complained about your car analogy, how's this for a better one: Most of the population has switched to flying vehicles, and the government has mandated that cars that can only travel on the ground are unsafe and too inefficient to be used.
Not all games benefit of course, but RTS would for sure and so should shooters - In multiplayer better teams have coordinated on voice channels for a decade already
Interestingly, FPS games aren't the best example of voice communication being that useful. In many of those games, you absolutely need to hear every sound that the game is making. If someone is yelling in your ear, you are likely to miss a key footstep or item-grab sound that would alert you to an enemy sneaking up behind you. For many of the teams playing competitively, voice communication is only used as a backup for when team-binds or an on-screen HUD isn't able to convey the necessary information.
Think about it - when you and a teammate are staring at a piece of armor, is it easier to say "I have 23 armor left, how much do you have?" or just hit a key that prints out your current health/armor/weapon/ammo to your team, let him do the same, then react accordingly? Implicitly knowing what to do is so incredibly important at the high level so that you can concentrate on what's going on in the game rather than communicating with teammates via voice chat.
Honestly, if we don't figure out interstellar travel within the next few thousand years (we'll say 10,000) my bets is that we simply won't figure it out ever.
I think you need to specify "fast interstellar travel" - I'd argue that we'll figure out some way to send relatively sustainable colonies out into space in hopes of reaching a suitable planet for life. This is, of course, assuming that no mass-extinction event occurs before that time...
Hrm. I hadn't thought about the drafted bills thing, but that's a good point. I'll disagree with you on bills outlawing cryptography though - intelligent people would be able to argue too strongly against such measures.
Could an event like this be the potential kick in the ass that we need to receive to make people realize that security on the internet needs to be taken seriously? Think about how many credit card #'s are stolen/year, and how common it is to hear about identity theft. Despite this, little is being done to prevent these rampant crimes outside of gimmicky solutions that are little more than band-aids.
I almost feel like if something occurred and caught the attention of the news for a few days, it may make companies take security more seriously.
I'm sure it depends on what he's defining as a close call. Honestly, how accurate can this system be? If the car was in an environment where nothing else was moving (and there was no slippery surface), then it sounds perfectly doable. But add in factors like other cars moving around just as fast as you, and it gets complicated. Do you really trust the system to know that a stationary object in your path isn't really a car that is temporarily crossing an intersection?
That's a nice little bald assertion you've got there. Were you planning to affix any content to that... or were you hoping it would stand on its own?
That's a nice little attack on his post you've got there. Were you planning to affix any content to that... or were you hoping it would stand on its own?
You can be lazy on calling people out on their ineffective arguments, but not many people will care if you don't provide any evidence to oppose such a post. And no, I don't care either way to comment on the topic, I'm just suggesting that your posts are as constructive to the conversation as this one is.
Lots of good information in parent's post that I've sort of imagined to be true but had no evidence - wish I had mod points for you.
As for my experience between the two sets of drivers, I've been switching back and forth between ATI and Nvidia graphics cards for the past 4-5 computers that I've built. Feature-wise, (recently) both of them are pretty smooth about dual monitors, setting up custom resolutions/refresh rates without needing programs like reforce, and all sorts of bells and whistles that I'll never use.
The only noticeable difference between the two that I've seen is that when the graphics card is having issues, ATI has a "VPU recovery" feature that is likely to prevent your computer from getting a BSOD, whereas Nvidia will just BSOD.
I had an MSI motherboard (RS480-M2, iirc) that was having all sorts of issues despite replacing literally every piece of hardware in the tower. Turns out that any time I had a video card in the PCI-E slot, it would do weird things - and I even RMA'd the motherboard before figuring this out. Of course, I discovered this way too late. On-Board video worked fine, but my Nvidia card would BSOD (but worked fine in other computers), and the ATI card would go to black screens in games, then eventually reset itself and give me the VPU recovery error message.
That feature alone seems like a major improvement over Nvidia's cards, but given that it rarely happens, it isn't a determining factor in which card I will select. Since that POS MSI board, I've only had one VPU recovery error, and I'm not even sure why that one happened yet...
Is it fixed for you yet? I had no problems with SMS yesterday, and I made one call (turns out the place was closed, so no one answered). AT&T seemed to be working fine for me yesterday, so maybe your phone coincidentally is having issues.
The difference is that it's very effective at doing its job. Do you think BitTorrent would be a concern for lawmakers if it took people a month to download a given movie? Since it would be _inherently_ less popular, it would not be a concern. No one would bother.
My point is that mainstream filesharing methods (today, BitTorrent; at one point, Napster) get hit the hardest and receive the most attention because they are the most convenient for everyone involved in the process of illegal file sharing.
The reason that BitTorrent is getting more attention is because it's more practical for the illegal spread of such files. HTTP/FTP involves the use of specific servers that have limited bandwidth, so it can't send to unlimited users. BitTorrent doesn't have that problem since the users are sending the data as well (assuming that enough people don't mind seeding for a small period of time after they finish their download).
I actually didn't state that I can tell the difference between 160hz and 100hz, although I generally can. I always hear people say that human eyes can only see 30-60 frames per second, but they forget that there is a lot more going on for a computer than just the screen refresh rate. If the game is in a hectic area that requires more computation, FPS will be lower in the game, and if your FPS drops below 60 while your refresh rate is at 60, it will cause some frames to be shown more than once per refresh. The higher the refresh rate, the less likely you are to notice such events.
Also, if your refresh rate is higher and you aren't using "wait for vertical sync", the your mouse inputs will make a difference on the screen quicker. I also happen to run my mouse at 1000hz...
Once again, I'm fully aware that I'm in the minority.
I prefer 800x600 because my CRT has much higher refresh rates at that resolution. Even if I get solidly high FPS at 1680x1050, running the game at 60-75hz seems so jerky compared to the 160hz that my eyes are used to. That being said, I'm fully aware that I'm in the minority.
The information that he's asking for is very basic, and it is available. The class I took in Nuclear Engineering while I was in college was full of exact numbers and equations that someone like him could get the most out of. I have no doubt that the same equations are available online at various resources.
The closely held information that is relevant to constructing nuclear weapons has much less to do with radiation than it does to do with the physical structure of the bomb.
There's something very important to understand here - not all knowledge about nuclear physics leads to making weapons. Infact, very little of it does. That's something that most people who oppose nuclear energy need to understand:(.
These people seeking to censor too much find themselves in indefensible positions when light is shined on them.
Does that imply that there exists a line where it is alright to censor things? I only ask because it seems like the rest of your post is in general suggesting that there is not. After all, if there was a reasonable line where censorship can be applied, then this could accurately be called an outbreak of common sense when they realize that they stepped past that line, right?
If traffic isn't bad, I'll pick up the phone to tell the caller I'm currently driving and will get back to them later (I'll ignore the call if it's an ugly area). But if anyone else is in the car, I ask them to pick up the phone for me and tell the caller that I'm driving. Doesn't really matter who it is - I've had friends pick up the call from my GF when they hadn't met her yet.
Similarly, if I find out someone is driving when I call them, I try to get off the phone as soon as I can - it makes me nervous thinking about the multitasking they have to do. If the conversation has to go on, I try to let them do all of the talking so that they don't have to think about what I'm saying, and they can appropriately direct their attention to the road.
I am incredibly far from knowing anything about economics and the housing market in general, but I'd like to see if the gist of what I picked up is more or less right, so I'll give it a shot...
There wasn't any money actually lost - it's that banks were trading CDSs and assuming that they had great value, when now everyone realized that they have absolutely no value. It seems like the bailout is giving those banks the money they thought they had so that they can continue business as usual.
Someone please correct me if (where) I'm wrong or oversimplifying something.
If you competitively play any fast-paced first person shooter (as I do), then you will have a computer capable of more than 60 fps in whatever game you are playing, or you will turn settings down to get more fps.
4ms is incredibly noticeable to people like me who run their mice at 500-1000hz, get between 125 to 500fps in their game, and are used to CRT's. I can't play QuakeWorld on my Samsung 206BW (2ms response time) at nearly the level I can on my 19" CRT that runs at 160hz at 800x600. And I only spent $35 on the CRT since a friend wanted to get rid of it.
Dag, a top player in Sweden, uses a 22" CRT and runs at 800x600@240hz. Def, widely considered the top North American player for ~5 years straight, only switched to an LCD after he went inactive and no longer takes the game seriously.
At LAN tournaments for these games, whenever organizers choose to use LCD's, there is always backlash from the competitors who don't want to play under crippled conditions. It hurts one's ability to play way more than having a lower end mouse or computer does.
Yes, the picture is clear, yes the resolution is nice, yes the colors are nice, but LCDs aren't made for FPS games. As I originally said - it depends on the situation.
Depends on the situation. For playing games, I'll be sticking with CRTs for a few more years to come. LCD response times and refresh rates are way behind CRTs. Refresh rates are coming along, but response rates of LCDs are so much worse that it isn't funny.
Secure passwords would be nice, but people probably aren't going to go through the trouble.
I like the concept of locking an account after X failures to log in, but I always see stupid implementations of the idea. Most of the time, it's some value of X that is likely to annoy people who legitimately forgot their password and are going through their likely suspects. 5 times seems somewhat low for obscure sites you don't visit often, and I remember my girlfriend trying to log onto an important work related account where 1 failed attempt would lock the account for 24 (!) hours.
I could understand locking an account after like 20 tries or 5 tries in 1 second to try to prevent brute force attacks... or some tiered system where the more often you fail to input the correct password, the longer it will lock you out. Are there sites that implement this without warning of such a system?
I kind of doubt it would make that big of a difference. There will always be a weak point in security, and most of the time, the human factor is the weakest. Stupid people will be stupid people.
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/ has a nice introduction to what AC was talking about.
If the US government decided all of a sudden to change from driving on the right hand side to the left hand side of the road, don't you think people would be rightfully pissed about having to buy a new car, or get theirs converted?
(Look! A car analogy that works!!)
Since a few people have complained about your car analogy, how's this for a better one:
Most of the population has switched to flying vehicles, and the government has mandated that cars that can only travel on the ground are unsafe and too inefficient to be used.
Not all games benefit of course, but RTS would for sure and so should shooters - In multiplayer better teams have coordinated on voice channels for a decade already
Interestingly, FPS games aren't the best example of voice communication being that useful. In many of those games, you absolutely need to hear every sound that the game is making. If someone is yelling in your ear, you are likely to miss a key footstep or item-grab sound that would alert you to an enemy sneaking up behind you. For many of the teams playing competitively, voice communication is only used as a backup for when team-binds or an on-screen HUD isn't able to convey the necessary information.
Think about it - when you and a teammate are staring at a piece of armor, is it easier to say "I have 23 armor left, how much do you have?" or just hit a key that prints out your current health/armor/weapon/ammo to your team, let him do the same, then react accordingly? Implicitly knowing what to do is so incredibly important at the high level so that you can concentrate on what's going on in the game rather than communicating with teammates via voice chat.
Honestly, if we don't figure out interstellar travel within the next few thousand years (we'll say 10,000) my bets is that we simply won't figure it out ever.
I think you need to specify "fast interstellar travel" - I'd argue that we'll figure out some way to send relatively sustainable colonies out into space in hopes of reaching a suitable planet for life. This is, of course, assuming that no mass-extinction event occurs before that time...
Hrm. I hadn't thought about the drafted bills thing, but that's a good point. I'll disagree with you on bills outlawing cryptography though - intelligent people would be able to argue too strongly against such measures.
Could an event like this be the potential kick in the ass that we need to receive to make people realize that security on the internet needs to be taken seriously? Think about how many credit card #'s are stolen/year, and how common it is to hear about identity theft. Despite this, little is being done to prevent these rampant crimes outside of gimmicky solutions that are little more than band-aids.
I almost feel like if something occurred and caught the attention of the news for a few days, it may make companies take security more seriously.
I'm sure it depends on what he's defining as a close call. Honestly, how accurate can this system be? If the car was in an environment where nothing else was moving (and there was no slippery surface), then it sounds perfectly doable. But add in factors like other cars moving around just as fast as you, and it gets complicated. Do you really trust the system to know that a stationary object in your path isn't really a car that is temporarily crossing an intersection?
That's a nice little bald assertion you've got there. Were you planning to affix any content to that... or were you hoping it would stand on its own?
That's a nice little attack on his post you've got there. Were you planning to affix any content to that... or were you hoping it would stand on its own?
You can be lazy on calling people out on their ineffective arguments, but not many people will care if you don't provide any evidence to oppose such a post. And no, I don't care either way to comment on the topic, I'm just suggesting that your posts are as constructive to the conversation as this one is.
Lots of good information in parent's post that I've sort of imagined to be true but had no evidence - wish I had mod points for you.
As for my experience between the two sets of drivers, I've been switching back and forth between ATI and Nvidia graphics cards for the past 4-5 computers that I've built. Feature-wise, (recently) both of them are pretty smooth about dual monitors, setting up custom resolutions/refresh rates without needing programs like reforce, and all sorts of bells and whistles that I'll never use.
The only noticeable difference between the two that I've seen is that when the graphics card is having issues, ATI has a "VPU recovery" feature that is likely to prevent your computer from getting a BSOD, whereas Nvidia will just BSOD.
I had an MSI motherboard (RS480-M2, iirc) that was having all sorts of issues despite replacing literally every piece of hardware in the tower. Turns out that any time I had a video card in the PCI-E slot, it would do weird things - and I even RMA'd the motherboard before figuring this out. Of course, I discovered this way too late. On-Board video worked fine, but my Nvidia card would BSOD (but worked fine in other computers), and the ATI card would go to black screens in games, then eventually reset itself and give me the VPU recovery error message.
That feature alone seems like a major improvement over Nvidia's cards, but given that it rarely happens, it isn't a determining factor in which card I will select. Since that POS MSI board, I've only had one VPU recovery error, and I'm not even sure why that one happened yet...
Is it fixed for you yet? I had no problems with SMS yesterday, and I made one call (turns out the place was closed, so no one answered). AT&T seemed to be working fine for me yesterday, so maybe your phone coincidentally is having issues.
The difference is that it's very effective at doing its job. Do you think BitTorrent would be a concern for lawmakers if it took people a month to download a given movie? Since it would be _inherently_ less popular, it would not be a concern. No one would bother.
My point is that mainstream filesharing methods (today, BitTorrent; at one point, Napster) get hit the hardest and receive the most attention because they are the most convenient for everyone involved in the process of illegal file sharing.
The reason that BitTorrent is getting more attention is because it's more practical for the illegal spread of such files. HTTP/FTP involves the use of specific servers that have limited bandwidth, so it can't send to unlimited users. BitTorrent doesn't have that problem since the users are sending the data as well (assuming that enough people don't mind seeding for a small period of time after they finish their download).
My super human indeed...
I actually didn't state that I can tell the difference between 160hz and 100hz, although I generally can. I always hear people say that human eyes can only see 30-60 frames per second, but they forget that there is a lot more going on for a computer than just the screen refresh rate. If the game is in a hectic area that requires more computation, FPS will be lower in the game, and if your FPS drops below 60 while your refresh rate is at 60, it will cause some frames to be shown more than once per refresh. The higher the refresh rate, the less likely you are to notice such events.
Also, if your refresh rate is higher and you aren't using "wait for vertical sync", the your mouse inputs will make a difference on the screen quicker. I also happen to run my mouse at 1000hz...
Once again, I'm fully aware that I'm in the minority.
I prefer 800x600 because my CRT has much higher refresh rates at that resolution. Even if I get solidly high FPS at 1680x1050, running the game at 60-75hz seems so jerky compared to the 160hz that my eyes are used to. That being said, I'm fully aware that I'm in the minority.
What? No.
The information that he's asking for is very basic, and it is available. The class I took in Nuclear Engineering while I was in college was full of exact numbers and equations that someone like him could get the most out of. I have no doubt that the same equations are available online at various resources.
The closely held information that is relevant to constructing nuclear weapons has much less to do with radiation than it does to do with the physical structure of the bomb.
There's something very important to understand here - not all knowledge about nuclear physics leads to making weapons. Infact, very little of it does. That's something that most people who oppose nuclear energy need to understand :(.
Plus, I along with many, many others would not like to have my reproductive organs anywhere near such a device.
Wait... did you just invoke Rule # 34?
These people seeking to censor too much find themselves in indefensible positions when light is shined on them.
Does that imply that there exists a line where it is alright to censor things? I only ask because it seems like the rest of your post is in general suggesting that there is not. After all, if there was a reasonable line where censorship can be applied, then this could accurately be called an outbreak of common sense when they realize that they stepped past that line, right?
/me telefrags you
If traffic isn't bad, I'll pick up the phone to tell the caller I'm currently driving and will get back to them later (I'll ignore the call if it's an ugly area). But if anyone else is in the car, I ask them to pick up the phone for me and tell the caller that I'm driving. Doesn't really matter who it is - I've had friends pick up the call from my GF when they hadn't met her yet.
Similarly, if I find out someone is driving when I call them, I try to get off the phone as soon as I can - it makes me nervous thinking about the multitasking they have to do. If the conversation has to go on, I try to let them do all of the talking so that they don't have to think about what I'm saying, and they can appropriately direct their attention to the road.
I am incredibly far from knowing anything about economics and the housing market in general, but I'd like to see if the gist of what I picked up is more or less right, so I'll give it a shot...
There wasn't any money actually lost - it's that banks were trading CDSs and assuming that they had great value, when now everyone realized that they have absolutely no value. It seems like the bailout is giving those banks the money they thought they had so that they can continue business as usual.
Someone please correct me if (where) I'm wrong or oversimplifying something.
Thanks. TinyURL is blocked where I work for no good reason...
Reason for restriction: Forbidden Category "Hacking/Proxy Avoidance Systems"
If you competitively play any fast-paced first person shooter (as I do), then you will have a computer capable of more than 60 fps in whatever game you are playing, or you will turn settings down to get more fps.
4ms is incredibly noticeable to people like me who run their mice at 500-1000hz, get between 125 to 500fps in their game, and are used to CRT's. I can't play QuakeWorld on my Samsung 206BW (2ms response time) at nearly the level I can on my 19" CRT that runs at 160hz at 800x600. And I only spent $35 on the CRT since a friend wanted to get rid of it.
Dag, a top player in Sweden, uses a 22" CRT and runs at 800x600@240hz. Def, widely considered the top North American player for ~5 years straight, only switched to an LCD after he went inactive and no longer takes the game seriously.
At LAN tournaments for these games, whenever organizers choose to use LCD's, there is always backlash from the competitors who don't want to play under crippled conditions. It hurts one's ability to play way more than having a lower end mouse or computer does.
Yes, the picture is clear, yes the resolution is nice, yes the colors are nice, but LCDs aren't made for FPS games. As I originally said - it depends on the situation.
Depends on the situation. For playing games, I'll be sticking with CRTs for a few more years to come. LCD response times and refresh rates are way behind CRTs. Refresh rates are coming along, but response rates of LCDs are so much worse that it isn't funny.