From what I have read, galactic collisions like this would mean little for most inhabitants of said galaxies except for a prettier night sky. Space is amazingly, vastly, mind-bogglingly big. The only thing "colliding" is dust and gas. Stars don't even, generally, come much closer to other stars than they would in a non-colliding galaxy. Clouds of dust are still mostly empty space, and solar wind would generally keep the area near the life zone of a star fairly clear anyway. However, a few tens of millions of years after the initial collision and star formation, I think a wave of supernova might make life a little unpleasant.
Well, you see, urm, how to break this to you? Might as well just come out with it: God is a sick sociopathic prankster. He created everything ~6,000 years ago, but made it all look much older just to fuck with people. He created all the light from these distant galaxies already on its way here, just so we would think the universe is older than the Bible says. Then he can laugh, "Ha-ha! You fell for it, you go to hell. Sorry, thanks for playing."
But the Bible also says to go out and know the universe He built, so the people who just believe that God made the world 6,000 years ago? They're going to hell too. Only the people who look at the world and come to the correct conclusion that God is a sick sociopathic prankster get into heaven. Which isn't much of a reward, seeing as how you have to spend all eternity with sick sociopathic prankster. Ah, well, what can you do? Is an eternity of Divine wedgies, purple nurples, and "Hey, pull my finger!" really all that bad?
Let's not forget size, looks, and sexual orientation. But as you say, money, and dare I say it, class make more of a difference. But I stand by my statement: members of the dominant social group (white men, especially well-off white men) don't understand the depth and impact of oppression that members of non-dominant social groups go through.
Ah, I was just being an ass. You are, of course, right. As witnessed by all the folks that history remembers as great and creative who were paupers in their day.
That was just my knee-jerk, "You call that being an asshole? No, THIS is being an asshole!" response.
Because we are the dominant society. We grow up without having toquestion what we are taught about ourselves and our place in society. Whenever minorities' beliefs conflict with the dominant culture, they are the ones who must question and change their beliefs.
The kind of oppression that minorities go through is almost incomprehensible to you and I. Have you ever been followed through a retail store by employees who were certain you were going to shoplift based on the color of your skin? Ever been told that no more than two of you and a group of friends could come into a store at one time?
Black or Brown Power shirts are fine. Making fun of accents is not quite fine, but not quite bad because there needs to be one way of speaking that is most understandable to everyone. Thus the midwest "standard american accent." I make fun of people from Wisconson or Massachusetts, too. Saying, "let's get rid of whoever" is never fine.
And race really is a red herring, anyway. Black, yellow, red or white, wherever you go, people know who "the man" is. And they don't like him.
I won't bother to reprint Maxo-Texas' links, but please people, this person is absolutely full of shit and has nothing to back it up with. No links, no papers, not even a "My college professor's uncle's dog said so." Nothing. Just complete made up "facts."
Look, I can do that too: Talk to any REAL slashdotter, and they will tell you that chewedtoothpick is full of shit. Chewedtootthpick's head is full of over 19' of topsoil. As chewedtoothpick will never, ever breed, he is not a part of the overpopulation problem.
Please, please, please mods: mod me down as offtopic or troll if you must. Just look at the thread: chewedtoothpick offers unverified opinions. Maxo-Texas comes back with referenced facts. Chewedtoothpick has NOTHING with which he can respond. Therefore, any sane person would determine that chewedtoothpick is making shit up and should not be modded informative.
Thank you. You may now commence to mod me down. My karma's been capped for years, you aren't even going to touch it. Just mod him down, too. I mean, Mexicans are wasteful? Has he even been there? It's a poor country, they can't afford to waste shit like we can! Look around, who do you see recycling cans you drop on the street? Who recycles all the cardboard boxes lying around? Here's a clue: it ain't white people. God, my head is going to explode if I even try to think about all the ways this asshat is wrong.
If you are white, making fun of another person's accent is racist. Of course, it isn't racism when Eddie Murphy or Dave Chapelle make fun of white people's accents. That's just hilarious.
If you are white, it's racist to even mention that hispanic people are moving into the country in large numbers. If you aren't white, it isn't racist to say, "Let's get rid of whitey."
Personally, I think race is a red herring, an idea designed to keep the working class of all races from recognizing their true enemy: the hereditary owning class. Damn richers! Kill all dollarheads!
Well, geez, why did you think I put that last part in there? As an Anarcho-Syndicalist, I think holding a (perhaps metaphorical) gun to someone's head is not an ethical option. But withdrawal of the reward of membership in the group is.
It seems to me that private ownership of natural resources can only be accomplished with a gun, and that's why I'm an Anarcho-Syndicalist, not an Anarcho-Capitalist like Dada. Private ownerhsip of natural resources is theft, enforced by an external agency through the threat of deadly force. Everyone is entitled to the fruits of their own labor. Natural resources are not created through labor, they existed for all to freely use before anyone fenced them off. The person who initially fenced them off is guilty of theft, and every owner after that is guilty of knowingly buying stolen property.
What if you are paying for advertisements on a per click basis? That's how a lot of places do it. Are you saying not to advertise on those sites?
Of course if you are paying X amount of money for an ad, and that ad generates a verifiable Y amount of sales, and Y is less than X, then ditch the ad. Duh. How about telling us how not to get into that situation in the first place, as the article is trying to do?
In print publishing, you know what a publication's circulation is, and most reputable publications can tell you quite a bit about their demographic. From that, you can determine how much a particular amount of ad space is worth to you. The article is saying that, online, current "circulation" measurements aren't accurate. Do you have a solution for that? Because Dada sure didn't, and that was what I was trying to point out.
Saying that advertising is about the bottom line is about as helpful as saying that breathing is about inhaling, then exhaling. The question is, how do you determine what a particular ad on a particular site is worth? The original post says nothing about that, yet that is what the article is about.
How do you determine, before placing an ad, whether that ad is worth what the site is asking?
Of course you can't measure profits from advertising any easier in other media. I never said that. Answer me this: how, under Dada's suggestion, would one determine if the advertising dollar is working? How would one use his +5 insightful method to determine where to advertise in the first place?
What about click fraud? But yes, the real issue is determining the value of a potential advertisement, which is determined by traffic to a proposed advertising site. So, why did Dada get marked as insightful? He, as I mentioned, said nothing of use. I'm sure his answer would be something along the lines of "The free market fixes everything!"
Perhaps advertising cooperatives like the almond growers have, run by the advertisers, freely sharing information about potential ad sites would work. There we are, free market solution, free of charge. Funny how the most efficient free market solutions end up looking a lot like socialism. Only not enforced by an external agency, of course.
You said: If you're a big company, you gauge your profits NOT on what others say but what you actually witness through numbers paid and profits made. If you don't make a profit, the traffic reports mean NOTHING. If you make MORE profits than you were expecting, the traffic reports mean NOTHING.
Great. Now, how do you measure profits made from advertising, because as I understand it, that is the issue under discussion here. You have taken the problem and restated it without adding anything of value to the discussion. I think you must not have read the article. How do you measure profits accruing from one advertising source over another? If you have some new and better way of doing that, you could make a million. If you don't, well, you have added nothing to the discussion except to restate the problem.
Wow, how very conceited. Virtual crap is still crap, and people want entertainment, not crap. If making crap is entertaining to you, well and good. Just don't expect us all to look in your toilet and applaud. The difference between "content creators" like you, and the people at, say, Blizzard is that the people at Blizzard are getting paid while you are paying for the privilege of creating crap. Making crap on 2nd life no more makes you creative than paying to have a book published by a vanity press makes you a good writer.
If you were any good, people would be paying you, not the other way around. Second Life is for people who have no first life, not for "creative" people. Real creative people get paid for their creativity in this world, where it actually matters.
FTFA: This bug can be exploited both locally or remotely (via a remote X client or an X client which visits a malicious web page).
So we have three possible routes to privilege escalation. One, the person already has shell access. This is rather rare these days. In any case, you can restrict access to X to only those people you trust or can hold accountable. Two, a remote X client. Who allows remote X connections these days? Require shell access with X connection tunneling through SSH and see #1, above.
Three, you are running an X based web browser and visit a malicious web page. Okay, to prove this is not an issue, let me quote from the article again:
The NVIDIA binary blob driver does not check this
calculation against the size of the allocated buffer. As a result,
a short sequence of user-supplied glyphs can be used to trick the
function into writing to an arbitrary location in memory.
It is important to note that glyph data is supplied to the X server
by the X client. Any remote X client can gain root privileges on
the X server using the proof of concept program attached.
It is also trivial to exploit this vulnerability as a DoS by causing
an existing X client program (such as Firefox) to render a long text
string. It may be possible to use Flash movies, Java applets, or
embedded web fonts to supply the custom glyph data necessary for
reliable remote code execution.
Okay, to work, the exploit needs to provide glyph data to be rendered. From the sound of it, without being able to supply arbitrary glyph data, the best that an attacker can accomplish is a DoS for as long as you are visiting that site. So, practice safe browsing, turn off embedded fonts, Flash, and Java for untrusted sites.
I am predicting that this exploit will not affect many people.
Well, I started on a TRS-80 Model I, not a Commodore 16, but that was the family computer. My first computer that was just mine was a Commodore 64. Remember the big tech book that told you what every location in ROM was for? I knew that computer better than any other computer I've ever worked with.
You forgot some of my favorite games, though, like The Temple of Apshai series, all the Infocom games, Loderunner, Ultima II & III, Bard's Tale, Wizardry, and Adventure Construction Set. I was on lots of BBSs, trading games my friends and I had cracked ourselves (Note: I was a kid! I haven't pirated software since I was first paid for a line of code.)
I did write an AI in BASIC. Okay, I typed in a version of Eliza I found in a magazine... My friends and I tried writing an RPG but only got halfway done before Ultima III came out and we lost interest. But I did use an AD&D character generator I had originally written for the TRS-80 for years.
Borders are only for people. With NAFTA and GATT, there are very few barriers towards capital or goods crossing borders. This means money will follow poverty. That poor area will export the excess goods, becoming wealthy. At which point, capital will move to the next poor area. Since people can't move to follow the jobs, once rich areas will become poor again after the capital flees. At this point, borders are all about maintaining a cheap labor pool.
Usually when private industry impacts the environment, it's about trillions and trillions of dollars worth of industrial imposition on every last aspect of individual lives. Anything from cancer, to global warming, to habitat destruction, to overfishing. In fact, it's not uncommon for companies to exploit the environment without paying the full cost of the externalities they impose on the rest of us. Are you sure that there isn't a more appropriate description: people everywhere fight to keep big money from raping them?
"I tap my 'Ghostbusters' and my 'Stripes' to power my Bill Murray's Sarcastic Comment Attack..."
"Well, I counter with my Renee Zellweger's Pinchy Faced Squint Attack, so let's see, my Zellweger is destroyed, but your Murray takes six points of damage, and I tap my 'Showgirls' to power a Flashbulb of the Paparazzi and finish him off."
"Damn! Your turn..."
Re:Deleted Scenes from the Interview
on
Ballmer Sounds Off
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Corporations used to have severe limits and no rights. Corporations were created by the European Monarchies when they realized that the new merchant class had supplanted the nobility as the power they must court. They kings of european states knew they would need financial help to realize their dreams of empire, and that help could only come from the merchants.
But the monarchs knew that a corporation was essentially a landless, peasantless fiefdom. Corporations would have enormous power, so in exchange for the limited liability which would attract investors to risky, long term projects like colonization, they would say that corporations could only do the business for which they were chartered, in the region their charter covered. The East India company could neither trade in the Americas nor grow crops in the East Indies. And corporations were limited to the lifespan of the original founders: when the last of them had died or sold their shares, the corporation would be dissolved.
Finally, a corporation had no legal rights as a person seperate from its officers. This was one of the biggest limitations, and one of the last to go. But money buys power, and over time the concentration of money available to corporations allowed them to buy politicians who would enact legeslation expanding their power, allowing them to make more money and buy more laws in a vicious cycle.
Now, a corporation has always been able to own things, and to owe money. Seperating ownership and liability was the whole purpose of corporations and the thing that made them different from partnerships. But in exchange for that, severe limits were originally placed on what they could do. Now those limits have been erased and corporations have all the benefits with none of the societal responsibilities.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I have read, galactic collisions like this would mean little for most inhabitants of said galaxies except for a prettier night sky. Space is amazingly, vastly, mind-bogglingly big. The only thing "colliding" is dust and gas. Stars don't even, generally, come much closer to other stars than they would in a non-colliding galaxy. Clouds of dust are still mostly empty space, and solar wind would generally keep the area near the life zone of a star fairly clear anyway. However, a few tens of millions of years after the initial collision and star formation, I think a wave of supernova might make life a little unpleasant.
Well, you see, urm, how to break this to you? Might as well just come out with it: God is a sick sociopathic prankster. He created everything ~6,000 years ago, but made it all look much older just to fuck with people. He created all the light from these distant galaxies already on its way here, just so we would think the universe is older than the Bible says. Then he can laugh, "Ha-ha! You fell for it, you go to hell. Sorry, thanks for playing."
But the Bible also says to go out and know the universe He built, so the people who just believe that God made the world 6,000 years ago? They're going to hell too. Only the people who look at the world and come to the correct conclusion that God is a sick sociopathic prankster get into heaven. Which isn't much of a reward, seeing as how you have to spend all eternity with sick sociopathic prankster. Ah, well, what can you do? Is an eternity of Divine wedgies, purple nurples, and "Hey, pull my finger!" really all that bad?
I don't remember, I think it was a version of Eliza. Was AVAIL an Eliza clone?
Let's not forget size, looks, and sexual orientation. But as you say, money, and dare I say it, class make more of a difference. But I stand by my statement: members of the dominant social group (white men, especially well-off white men) don't understand the depth and impact of oppression that members of non-dominant social groups go through.
Ah, I was just being an ass. You are, of course, right. As witnessed by all the folks that history remembers as great and creative who were paupers in their day.
That was just my knee-jerk, "You call that being an asshole? No, THIS is being an asshole!" response.
Because we are the dominant society. We grow up without having toquestion what we are taught about ourselves and our place in society. Whenever minorities' beliefs conflict with the dominant culture, they are the ones who must question and change their beliefs.
The kind of oppression that minorities go through is almost incomprehensible to you and I. Have you ever been followed through a retail store by employees who were certain you were going to shoplift based on the color of your skin? Ever been told that no more than two of you and a group of friends could come into a store at one time?
Black or Brown Power shirts are fine. Making fun of accents is not quite fine, but not quite bad because there needs to be one way of speaking that is most understandable to everyone. Thus the midwest "standard american accent." I make fun of people from Wisconson or Massachusetts, too. Saying, "let's get rid of whoever" is never fine.
And race really is a red herring, anyway. Black, yellow, red or white, wherever you go, people know who "the man" is. And they don't like him.
I won't bother to reprint Maxo-Texas' links, but please people, this person is absolutely full of shit and has nothing to back it up with. No links, no papers, not even a "My college professor's uncle's dog said so." Nothing. Just complete made up "facts."
Look, I can do that too: Talk to any REAL slashdotter, and they will tell you that chewedtoothpick is full of shit. Chewedtootthpick's head is full of over 19' of topsoil. As chewedtoothpick will never, ever breed, he is not a part of the overpopulation problem.
Please, please, please mods: mod me down as offtopic or troll if you must. Just look at the thread: chewedtoothpick offers unverified opinions. Maxo-Texas comes back with referenced facts. Chewedtoothpick has NOTHING with which he can respond. Therefore, any sane person would determine that chewedtoothpick is making shit up and should not be modded informative.
Thank you. You may now commence to mod me down. My karma's been capped for years, you aren't even going to touch it. Just mod him down, too. I mean, Mexicans are wasteful? Has he even been there? It's a poor country, they can't afford to waste shit like we can! Look around, who do you see recycling cans you drop on the street? Who recycles all the cardboard boxes lying around? Here's a clue: it ain't white people. God, my head is going to explode if I even try to think about all the ways this asshat is wrong.
A deep, unwavering belief that all hippies hate all nuclear power is a sure sign that you're missing something.
If you are white, making fun of another person's accent is racist. Of course, it isn't racism when Eddie Murphy or Dave Chapelle make fun of white people's accents. That's just hilarious.
If you are white, it's racist to even mention that hispanic people are moving into the country in large numbers. If you aren't white, it isn't racist to say, "Let's get rid of whitey."
Personally, I think race is a red herring, an idea designed to keep the working class of all races from recognizing their true enemy: the hereditary owning class. Damn richers! Kill all dollarheads!
Grrr. That was what I meant to say. Damn you brain, you've failed me for the last time!
Well, geez, why did you think I put that last part in there? As an Anarcho-Syndicalist, I think holding a (perhaps metaphorical) gun to someone's head is not an ethical option. But withdrawal of the reward of membership in the group is.
It seems to me that private ownership of natural resources can only be accomplished with a gun, and that's why I'm an Anarcho-Syndicalist, not an Anarcho-Capitalist like Dada. Private ownerhsip of natural resources is theft, enforced by an external agency through the threat of deadly force. Everyone is entitled to the fruits of their own labor. Natural resources are not created through labor, they existed for all to freely use before anyone fenced them off. The person who initially fenced them off is guilty of theft, and every owner after that is guilty of knowingly buying stolen property.
What if you are paying for advertisements on a per click basis? That's how a lot of places do it. Are you saying not to advertise on those sites?
Of course if you are paying X amount of money for an ad, and that ad generates a verifiable Y amount of sales, and Y is less than X, then ditch the ad. Duh. How about telling us how not to get into that situation in the first place, as the article is trying to do?
In print publishing, you know what a publication's circulation is, and most reputable publications can tell you quite a bit about their demographic. From that, you can determine how much a particular amount of ad space is worth to you. The article is saying that, online, current "circulation" measurements aren't accurate. Do you have a solution for that? Because Dada sure didn't, and that was what I was trying to point out.
Saying that advertising is about the bottom line is about as helpful as saying that breathing is about inhaling, then exhaling. The question is, how do you determine what a particular ad on a particular site is worth? The original post says nothing about that, yet that is what the article is about.
How do you determine, before placing an ad, whether that ad is worth what the site is asking?
Of course you can't measure profits from advertising any easier in other media. I never said that. Answer me this: how, under Dada's suggestion, would one determine if the advertising dollar is working? How would one use his +5 insightful method to determine where to advertise in the first place?
What about click fraud? But yes, the real issue is determining the value of a potential advertisement, which is determined by traffic to a proposed advertising site. So, why did Dada get marked as insightful? He, as I mentioned, said nothing of use. I'm sure his answer would be something along the lines of "The free market fixes everything!"
Perhaps advertising cooperatives like the almond growers have, run by the advertisers, freely sharing information about potential ad sites would work. There we are, free market solution, free of charge. Funny how the most efficient free market solutions end up looking a lot like socialism. Only not enforced by an external agency, of course.
You said: If you're a big company, you gauge your profits NOT on what others say but what you actually witness through numbers paid and profits made. If you don't make a profit, the traffic reports mean NOTHING. If you make MORE profits than you were expecting, the traffic reports mean NOTHING.
Great. Now, how do you measure profits made from advertising, because as I understand it, that is the issue under discussion here. You have taken the problem and restated it without adding anything of value to the discussion. I think you must not have read the article. How do you measure profits accruing from one advertising source over another? If you have some new and better way of doing that, you could make a million. If you don't, well, you have added nothing to the discussion except to restate the problem.
Sorry if that sounds harsh, I don't mean it to.
Wow, how very conceited. Virtual crap is still crap, and people want entertainment, not crap. If making crap is entertaining to you, well and good. Just don't expect us all to look in your toilet and applaud. The difference between "content creators" like you, and the people at, say, Blizzard is that the people at Blizzard are getting paid while you are paying for the privilege of creating crap. Making crap on 2nd life no more makes you creative than paying to have a book published by a vanity press makes you a good writer.
If you were any good, people would be paying you, not the other way around. Second Life is for people who have no first life, not for "creative" people. Real creative people get paid for their creativity in this world, where it actually matters.
So we have three possible routes to privilege escalation. One, the person already has shell access. This is rather rare these days. In any case, you can restrict access to X to only those people you trust or can hold accountable. Two, a remote X client. Who allows remote X connections these days? Require shell access with X connection tunneling through SSH and see #1, above.
Three, you are running an X based web browser and visit a malicious web page. Okay, to prove this is not an issue, let me quote from the article again:
Okay, to work, the exploit needs to provide glyph data to be rendered. From the sound of it, without being able to supply arbitrary glyph data, the best that an attacker can accomplish is a DoS for as long as you are visiting that site. So, practice safe browsing, turn off embedded fonts, Flash, and Java for untrusted sites.
I am predicting that this exploit will not affect many people.
Well, I started on a TRS-80 Model I, not a Commodore 16, but that was the family computer. My first computer that was just mine was a Commodore 64. Remember the big tech book that told you what every location in ROM was for? I knew that computer better than any other computer I've ever worked with.
You forgot some of my favorite games, though, like The Temple of Apshai series, all the Infocom games, Loderunner, Ultima II & III, Bard's Tale, Wizardry, and Adventure Construction Set. I was on lots of BBSs, trading games my friends and I had cracked ourselves (Note: I was a kid! I haven't pirated software since I was first paid for a line of code.)
I did write an AI in BASIC. Okay, I typed in a version of Eliza I found in a magazine... My friends and I tried writing an RPG but only got halfway done before Ultima III came out and we lost interest. But I did use an AD&D character generator I had originally written for the TRS-80 for years.
I want to go find my old Commodore 64 and hug it.
Borders are only for people. With NAFTA and GATT, there are very few barriers towards capital or goods crossing borders. This means money will follow poverty. That poor area will export the excess goods, becoming wealthy. At which point, capital will move to the next poor area. Since people can't move to follow the jobs, once rich areas will become poor again after the capital flees. At this point, borders are all about maintaining a cheap labor pool.
Usually when private industry impacts the environment, it's about trillions and trillions of dollars worth of industrial imposition on every last aspect of individual lives. Anything from cancer, to global warming, to habitat destruction, to overfishing. In fact, it's not uncommon for companies to exploit the environment without paying the full cost of the externalities they impose on the rest of us. Are you sure that there isn't a more appropriate description: people everywhere fight to keep big money from raping them?
Floyd!!!! NOOooooooo!!!!!! Can I be a wuss and admit that the ending made me cry? Best Infocom game ever.
Everything looks like a nail, doesn't it?
I can see it now...
"I tap my 'Ghostbusters' and my 'Stripes' to power my Bill Murray's Sarcastic Comment Attack..."
"Well, I counter with my Renee Zellweger's Pinchy Faced Squint Attack, so let's see, my Zellweger is destroyed, but your Murray takes six points of damage, and I tap my 'Showgirls' to power a Flashbulb of the Paparazzi and finish him off."
"Damn! Your turn..."
Corporations used to have severe limits and no rights. Corporations were created by the European Monarchies when they realized that the new merchant class had supplanted the nobility as the power they must court. They kings of european states knew they would need financial help to realize their dreams of empire, and that help could only come from the merchants.
But the monarchs knew that a corporation was essentially a landless, peasantless fiefdom. Corporations would have enormous power, so in exchange for the limited liability which would attract investors to risky, long term projects like colonization, they would say that corporations could only do the business for which they were chartered, in the region their charter covered. The East India company could neither trade in the Americas nor grow crops in the East Indies. And corporations were limited to the lifespan of the original founders: when the last of them had died or sold their shares, the corporation would be dissolved.
Finally, a corporation had no legal rights as a person seperate from its officers. This was one of the biggest limitations, and one of the last to go. But money buys power, and over time the concentration of money available to corporations allowed them to buy politicians who would enact legeslation expanding their power, allowing them to make more money and buy more laws in a vicious cycle.
Now, a corporation has always been able to own things, and to owe money. Seperating ownership and liability was the whole purpose of corporations and the thing that made them different from partnerships. But in exchange for that, severe limits were originally placed on what they could do. Now those limits have been erased and corporations have all the benefits with none of the societal responsibilities.