I'm basically responding to a whole slew of comments here, so I re-parented it. This is from my perspective of a middle-of-the-road poker player.
It's noted in the article that you might be able to get away with writing your own client by claiming you run Linux and there isn't one-- this is a questionable argument, but more importantly, Linux geeks aren't left out of the online poker business. http://www.pokerroom.com's java clients run on Windows, Mac, or Linux.
Honestly, I think it would be _trivial_ to write a poker client that could kick the stuffing out of any human player. A simple Q-learner would be excellent for the project. The trouble is twofold: For one, you need an insane amount of space to keep track of the current game state-- not just what's happened in this hand, but in previous hands, because that matters; your play against a bunch of tight aggressive players needs to be different from what you can do against loose passive players. For two, since the state space is so monstrous, training would take a positively mind-boggling amount of time, which would be expensive, since you can't train a poker bot in a funny-money game; the game's too different.
On the other hand, you could build a poker bot that played a nice basic strategy. A decent poker player can beat this, but it would take money from the fish. So it's only something you need to worry about if you were going to be losing money at the poker tables anyhow.
The poker 'bot not responding to conversation is not a big deal: host it from Abu Dhabi and he just doesn't speak English.
Regarding a crooked house: Reputable online poker sites are vetted by third-parties, so whether or not you can trust the house to deal the cards randomly isn't a huge issue. And if the house does use bots as shills, it's effectively the same thing to a decent player as a normal person using a bot. Note that many gaming commissions do require a gaming house to identify shills upon request, but there's no guarantee that the online poker site you play at has such a rule. That said, there's _huge_ money in online poker for the house; there's no odds in it for them for someone to notice the house is rigged/has shill players which would drive off clientele to other sites.
More of a thought than a comment: In the higher levels of poker, Mike Caro notes that you're considered to be doing well if you can make one or two big bets an hour-- so if you're playing a $25-50 game, you're doing well if you average $50-$100 an hour. On the other hand, players are less experienced at a $2-4 or a $3-6 game. So where do you put your 'bot? If it's hugely good, do you put it at the 25-50 game? Or is it better off joining a bunch of $3-6 games (since there will be many more of these...) and netting more than one or two big bets an hour from the neophytes?
(Side note: If anyone is interested in playing some online poker and wants a bonus on their first deposit, drop a reply to this with your name and email address, and I'll send a referral out. We both get a bonus from this.)
There's actually two sides to it...
on
Steel Bolt Hacking
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've found over the years, simply being self-taught, that there are very few locks I can't get into using stuff I carry on me or stuff that's easy to find (leatherman tool, paperclip, sewing needle, whatever.)
There's a much larger number of locks that I can't get into without making it patently obvious somebody broke in. This is something I haven't been as successful in teaching myself.
The former is engineering. The latter, that's art.
Now, I know I've griped often that the phone applet on this thing sucks, but I think turning the thing into a more cellphone-like device is the wrong answer. How about just fixing the phone app? Like, say, using a different button to hang up a call than the one your thumb naturally finds when you hold it?
Losing the keyboard means they lose me, at least. I use my blueberry to SSH into a Unix machine. I do not want to try to be typing on a bash command line and having it try to use predictive text to figure out what I'm meaning...
Just as a quick nitpick, you're not taking ~your tax dollars~ and spending them how you like if you get vouchers.
See, you have kids. Which means you get a tax break for having kids. I have no kids. I don't get that tax deduction. But, oddly, you're more of a financial burden on society than I am, since society needs to educate your children, but I'm the one who has to pay for it.
I agree, since it's your kid, it'd be nice to be able to do it how you like it. But don't forget that those aren't your tax dollars educating your kid-- they're mine.
Imagine putting the crew chief in the car-- and basically replacing him with a very small shell script.
Is the car pushing on entry? Back off the front repulsors a few volts. Dial a volt or two into the back... Adjust wedge on the fly.
And the sick thing is, you don't even have to make the driver do it. A few sensors on various wheels and currently available computing horsepower and it'll know on its own. A car that dynamically adjusts itself to optimal handling as the weather changes, the track temperature changes, the fuel load changes, the tires lose grip.
Sort of. Yes, you could remap the console-- but then you'd have to do away with one of the other keys that's also handy to have. Doing Unixy things on thumboards is always likely to be a problem-- the reduced size means a) you can only fit so many keys on the unit, and b) you can only get so many labels on a given key. (and you can't expect people to chord stuff when they can't see what they're doing...)
My Blueberry has room for only 34 keys-- note that's not even one for every letter and number.:-/ You can do some fun stuff on the remote end to effectively get back ~, but you'd have to give up, say, # to get it.
I currently carry a 'blueberry'-- the RIM 7280. The keyboard's not that bad until you try to use the thing as your UNIX terminal and have to type characters like ~ and |. (It's still better than nothing).
I find the 7280 makes a neat toy, a passable handheld, and a lousy phone. On the other hand, some of my cow-orkers have Treo 600s and have had what seems to be an overly large number of hardware issues. Otherwise they seem to like them.
I like the idea of the Treo 650, and may switch when it comes out. The RIM 7280 really needs a bigger screen with more resolution.
Do I want billboards all over my games, so while I'm eliminating the Zerg, they're running past a big ad for a Volvo? Not really.
On the other hand, remember the original Castle Wolfenstein? To regain health, you'd eat a meal that someone left out. Does it hugely change gameplay if, in a more modern setting, to regain health the object you grab looks like a bag of Doritos and a can of Pepsi? Not really.
Done well, in-game advertising can actually yield a more realistic feel-- if I'm playing an FPS set in modern times, I should be walking past Coke machines and USA today newspaper boxes and have a UPS truck drive by. It's reality, and having them say "Cola!" "News!" and "Package Smashers!" detracts from the realistic feel of the game....but y'all are probably right. What we're gonna get instead is a cut-scene in Fallout making sure we realize our Pip-Boy runs Microsoft Pocket PC 2025...
Firewalls won't help. If it runs Windows, some idiot's going to bring in a CD full of pictures from his latest vacation and the CD's going to be infected with MyDoom or (heck, probably and...) Sobig or any number of other nasties. Or it's going to be something he wants to print on the nice laser printer at the office.... there's a hundred ways to get infected just by clueless users.
Pretty soon, the internal network's either too busy generating random traffic to do anything else-- and even if the Big Iron of the business, the dialysis machines and heart-lung devices and all those wonderful things that better damned well not break work fine, you've still got the terminal the nurse sits in front of that keeps track of when to issue you your shot that keeps you alive spending half its time rebooting because it's got Sasser.
This is not a problem a firewall can solve, and it's pretty darned big: You can't go throwing software around willy-nilly to solve this problem (even though the real problem is that the users _are_ throwing software around willy-nilly), so you can't just go "oooh! A next-day patch from Microsoft, let's hope their two hours worth of QA before it walked out the door was good enough!".
Indeed. Back in the '90s, a Geo/Chevy Prism was the same car as a Toyota Corolla. The same workers at the same factory in Fremont, California built the same cars, and slapped a different logo on 'em when they were done.
Corollas sold for a few thousand more than Prisms-- because Geos suck, and Toyotas don't.
The odd thing is: Prisms got worse reliability ratings than Corollas, too. Same car, same assembly line, but somehow, people decided their Geo sucked harder than other people believed their Toyotas sucked. Nothing to do with the vehicle, it's all perception...
The last four video cards I've purchased, dating back to 2000, all had TV-out. Getting gaming on my TV's easy: plug up an S-Video cable, turn on the PC.
Is it just that someone's figured out how to market the stuff we've all had (admittedly, some of us unwittingly...) for the past half a decade or so?
That said, I don't use S-Video out for gaming. I use it for movies...
Rick Berman obviously never saw any classic Trek, so anything that happened there never really happened in the Bermanverse.:)
Slightly more seriously, I'm glad to see uncharted ground. With the removal of Brannon Braga as "show runner" on Enterprise (replaced with Manny Coto), it may well step up a notch. If he brings in someone else to handle the Romulan movie, not an unreasonable thing to do for a completely new aspect of Trek, it may be done well. (Is it possible that this was the treatment Joe Straczynski and... uh, whassisface from Dark Skies? turned in?)
After all, remember, Berman was in charge even through the hey-day of TNG and early DS9. Berman's problem may not be that he doesn't know decent science fiction from a hole in the ground; it may be that he can't seem to hire people who know decent science fiction from a hole in the ground...
you stop people from buying cheaper chips and overclocking them
Of course, you and I, the enthusiasts, aren't the people Intel is worried about when they turn off overclocking. (After all, we've already moved to AMD, right?)
The problem is grey-market processors. If the processors (or RAM) are easily overclockable, then Tiawancorp Computers may buy 3 gigafoo parts, overclock them to 4 gigafoo, and sell them in computers "with 4 gigafoo parts!" to unsuspecting consumers.
The hazard here isn't just that Intel loses money-- after all, for every three people you know who overclock processors and have rock stable systems, there's always that guy who can't get the darned thing through much past a boot before the thing locks up. Intel systems become known as "unreliable", which is definitely not a position Intel wants to be in.
Losing money _and_ losing your reputation is a heck of a double-whammy. I can't say I blame them for wanting to stop overclocking.
I just can't imagine why they'd do it in a mechanism that could be defeated by the motherboard manufacturers....
(check's in the mail, Transgaming...) and I can see where she's coming from.
My biggest gripe is the fact that the emulation has a problem with breaking copy protection. Best I can tell, the first thing you have to do to get a WineX game working is go find a no-CD crack. (Make sure your cookie and pop-up shields are up; you're gonna need 'em...) Since most folks think of no-CD cracks as evil pirate stuff, no "legitimate" board would ever serve them (hey, Transgaming... your product kinda _requires_ 'em, why not chase 'em down and make 'em available to subscribers?) and they seem to be tough to find. Google for a civilization III no-CD crack and most of what you get are forum posts asking where to get one...
But even before you run into that problem, you find that you're still missing parts-- Installshield, ferinstance, uses parts of DCOM98, which aren't emulated by WineX. That's OK; you can get your hands on those directly from Microsoft.
Once you've got that working, part of the nature of the beast is that the error messages are going to be cryptic. Back to the Civilization example, when I'd run
cvswinex c/Program\ Files/.../Civilization3.exe
it crashed horribly, basically telling me "Hey, you should probably fire up a debugger..." Not WineX's fault, mind you, how is it supposed to know that your current working directory needs to be the same place as the Civilization executable, and Civ crashes if it ain't? Oh, and when you ran it before the no-CD crack, it was happy to actually hand you a window that said, "Hey, I refuse to run in a debugger because I think you're trying to break my copy protection!" So you're thinking the no-CD crack is broken up front, which sends you barking up the wrong tree.
None of this, mind, is documented in the Civ forum on Transgaming's site, aside from the need for a no-CD crack.
Now that it's running, it works pretty well (I've found one minor broken feature), but it was a chore getting it that way...
Is there a desk in your cube? Did you pay for the desk? No.
Is there a workstation in your cube? Did you pay for the workstation? No.
Is there a phone in your cube? Did you pay for the phone? No.
If it's at the office and you need it to get your job done, the company paid for it, right?
So if it's at home, and you need it to do your job, the company should pay for it. If they don't want to pay for it, then you obviously don't need it to do your job, so your job function obviously doesn't include off-hours support.
I'm pretty sure that instead of buying enough of the right types of extension cables for the keyboards and mouses for this all to work and not have the four users right on top of each other, it may well be cheaper to just buy 'em each a cheapass Dell.
If you're sharing a PC four ways, you're not exactly looking for high performance, and when you figure up the cost of buying monitors, keyboards, mice, and extension cables for everyone, I get to wondering just how much the rest of the computer costs. I mean, Dell's selling their low-end at the moment under $500. Sure, it's low-end, but that's what you're looking for if you're sharing a machine four ways...
Of course, my real reason for thinking this is a bad idea is it's bad enough when someone's hard disk dies and the user's machine is down 'til FedEx shows up the next day. It'd suck even harder to have four users who won't leave you alone...
As an example, the highway test dates back from when the maximum highway speed in the US was 55 MPH. Now that most of us live pretty near a place where they can do at least 65 on the highway, the EPA test probably ought to be updated as well.The current EPA highway test has an average speed of 48 mph.
But since you asked for useless data points: My '03 Hemi Ram gets just about the same mileage as the EPA said it would (12/27), which surprised the heck out of me, 'cause I'm always 10-20% low. (Hey, I drive a 350 horsepower truck. Of _course_ I use the loud pedal...) Then I got a used '95 Miata and I get better mileage than the EPA expected. I don't _think_ I'm slowing down in my old age...
I'm doubly surprised about the Miata. The top gear is so low it's _got_ to have been designed to ace the 48mph average speed EPA highway test, but somehow I still do slightly better than what the EPA expects on the highway and I match the city figures... even with a weekend at the autocross...
There's a huge difference between "You can set up your own network" and "You can set up your own crap on our network."
You can set up WAPs all you want. You just can't plug 'em into their hardware. If Bellsloth'll run you DSL to the dorms, plug it into that and have at... The ruling doesn't say they have to allow you to plug into their network. It says they can't tell you you can't have your own WAPs hooked into your own network.
It's almost like they anticipated this sort of thing. Or, like, thought out their design beforehand. Crazy concept, no ?
Except the design's still flawed: If I'm a spammer, I don't _care_ that your machine's only a zombie for a few hours, and I don't care that it can't send quite as much spam as it used to. The zombies are already sending multiple spams to each address; do you really think when you look through your spambox that there's really forty people who want to sell you viagra from their canadian pharmacy today alone?
So now, instead of sending 40 messages to each address I know about, I only have the computational horsepower to send 4. I'm still making piles of money. Indeed, since my viruses didn't tell me how many people they sent spam to, I'm obviously not billing by the message, anyhow, so my profits don't change.
And given that I was just talking to someone whose computer was infected by Sasser and rebooting every fifteen minutes who thought, "Gee, this really sucks, I wish there were something I could do about this lsass.exe message", I find the idea that people will notice their machine being slow and get them fixed questionable, as well.
FRO or no, I stand by my original message: The spammers don't care, because it's _your_ machine.
...a relatively small, cheap speaker, each device will instead have a relatively large, expensive widget to use our nerves as cat-5 (human-5?) so we only have to shlep around one little speaker?
Slashdot Mirror
...it's the twenty-first century and I still don't have my flying car and I still don't have my rocket belt.
Why bother asking what the vehicles of the future are going to look like; we still don't have the vehicles of yesterday's future!
(Side note: If anyone is interested in playing some online poker and wants a bonus on their first deposit, drop a reply to this with your name and email address, and I'll send a referral out. We both get a bonus from this.)
I've found over the years, simply being self-taught, that there are very few locks I can't get into using stuff I carry on me or stuff that's easy to find (leatherman tool, paperclip, sewing needle, whatever.)
There's a much larger number of locks that I can't get into without making it patently obvious somebody broke in. This is something I haven't been as successful in teaching myself.
The former is engineering. The latter, that's art.
-JDF
Now, I know I've griped often that the phone applet on this thing sucks, but I think turning the thing into a more cellphone-like device is the wrong answer. How about just fixing the phone app? Like, say, using a different button to hang up a call than the one your thumb naturally finds when you hold it?
Losing the keyboard means they lose me, at least. I use my blueberry to SSH into a Unix machine. I do not want to try to be typing on a bash command line and having it try to use predictive text to figure out what I'm meaning...
-JDF
Just as a quick nitpick, you're not taking ~your tax dollars~ and spending them how you like if you get vouchers.
See, you have kids. Which means you get a tax break for having kids. I have no kids. I don't get that tax deduction. But, oddly, you're more of a financial burden on society than I am, since society needs to educate your children, but I'm the one who has to pay for it.
I agree, since it's your kid, it'd be nice to be able to do it how you like it. But don't forget that those aren't your tax dollars educating your kid-- they're mine.
-JDF
From my amateur race car driver's perspective.
Imagine putting the crew chief in the car-- and basically replacing him with a very small shell script.
Is the car pushing on entry? Back off the front repulsors a few volts. Dial a volt or two into the back... Adjust wedge on the fly.
And the sick thing is, you don't even have to make the driver do it. A few sensors on various wheels and currently available computing horsepower and it'll know on its own. A car that dynamically adjusts itself to optimal handling as the weather changes, the track temperature changes, the fuel load changes, the tires lose grip.
-JDF
Sort of. Yes, you could remap the console-- but then you'd have to do away with one of the other keys that's also handy to have. Doing Unixy things on thumboards is always likely to be a problem-- the reduced size means a) you can only fit so many keys on the unit, and b) you can only get so many labels on a given key. (and you can't expect people to chord stuff when they can't see what they're doing...)
:-/ You can do some fun stuff on the remote end to effectively get back ~, but you'd have to give up, say, # to get it.
My Blueberry has room for only 34 keys-- note that's not even one for every letter and number.
-JDF
-JDF
I currently carry a 'blueberry'-- the RIM 7280. The keyboard's not that bad until you try to use the thing as your UNIX terminal and have to type characters like ~ and |. (It's still better than nothing).
I find the 7280 makes a neat toy, a passable handheld, and a lousy phone. On the other hand, some of my cow-orkers have Treo 600s and have had what seems to be an overly large number of hardware issues. Otherwise they seem to like them.
I like the idea of the Treo 650, and may switch when it comes out. The RIM 7280 really needs a bigger screen with more resolution.
-JDF
Do I want billboards all over my games, so while I'm eliminating the Zerg, they're running past a big ad for a Volvo? Not really.
...but y'all are probably right. What we're gonna get instead is a cut-scene in Fallout making sure we realize our Pip-Boy runs Microsoft Pocket PC 2025...
On the other hand, remember the original Castle Wolfenstein? To regain health, you'd eat a meal that someone left out. Does it hugely change gameplay if, in a more modern setting, to regain health the object you grab looks like a bag of Doritos and a can of Pepsi? Not really.
Done well, in-game advertising can actually yield a more realistic feel-- if I'm playing an FPS set in modern times, I should be walking past Coke machines and USA today newspaper boxes and have a UPS truck drive by. It's reality, and having them say "Cola!" "News!" and "Package Smashers!" detracts from the realistic feel of the game.
-JDF
Real Life is already a cartoon!
Firewalls won't help. If it runs Windows, some idiot's going to bring in a CD full of pictures from his latest vacation and the CD's going to be infected with MyDoom or (heck, probably and...) Sobig or any number of other nasties. Or it's going to be something he wants to print on the nice laser printer at the office.... there's a hundred ways to get infected just by clueless users.
Pretty soon, the internal network's either too busy generating random traffic to do anything else-- and even if the Big Iron of the business, the dialysis machines and heart-lung devices and all those wonderful things that better damned well not break work fine, you've still got the terminal the nurse sits in front of that keeps track of when to issue you your shot that keeps you alive spending half its time rebooting because it's got Sasser.
This is not a problem a firewall can solve, and it's pretty darned big: You can't go throwing software around willy-nilly to solve this problem (even though the real problem is that the users _are_ throwing software around willy-nilly), so you can't just go "oooh! A next-day patch from Microsoft, let's hope their two hours worth of QA before it walked out the door was good enough!".
-JDF
Indeed. Back in the '90s, a Geo/Chevy Prism was the same car as a Toyota Corolla. The same workers at the same factory in Fremont, California built the same cars, and slapped a different logo on 'em when they were done.
Corollas sold for a few thousand more than Prisms-- because Geos suck, and Toyotas don't.
The odd thing is: Prisms got worse reliability ratings than Corollas, too. Same car, same assembly line, but somehow, people decided their Geo sucked harder than other people believed their Toyotas sucked. Nothing to do with the vehicle, it's all perception...
-JDF
The last four video cards I've purchased, dating back to 2000, all had TV-out. Getting gaming on my TV's easy: plug up an S-Video cable, turn on the PC.
Is it just that someone's figured out how to market the stuff we've all had (admittedly, some of us unwittingly...) for the past half a decade or so?
That said, I don't use S-Video out for gaming. I use it for movies...
-JDF
Rick Berman obviously never saw any classic Trek, so anything that happened there never really happened in the Bermanverse. :)
Slightly more seriously, I'm glad to see uncharted ground. With the removal of Brannon Braga as "show runner" on Enterprise (replaced with Manny Coto), it may well step up a notch. If he brings in someone else to handle the Romulan movie, not an unreasonable thing to do for a completely new aspect of Trek, it may be done well. (Is it possible that this was the treatment Joe Straczynski and... uh, whassisface from Dark Skies? turned in?)
After all, remember, Berman was in charge even through the hey-day of TNG and early DS9. Berman's problem may not be that he doesn't know decent science fiction from a hole in the ground; it may be that he can't seem to hire people who know decent science fiction from a hole in the ground...
-JDF
it looks like exactly 210 members of the House of Representatives need immediate replacement. ...no matter which side of the debate you're on...
-JDF
you stop people from buying cheaper chips and overclocking them
Of course, you and I, the enthusiasts, aren't the people Intel is worried about when they turn off overclocking. (After all, we've already moved to AMD, right?)
The problem is grey-market processors. If the processors (or RAM) are easily overclockable, then Tiawancorp Computers may buy 3 gigafoo parts, overclock them to 4 gigafoo, and sell them in computers "with 4 gigafoo parts!" to unsuspecting consumers.
The hazard here isn't just that Intel loses money-- after all, for every three people you know who overclock processors and have rock stable systems, there's always that guy who can't get the darned thing through much past a boot before the thing locks up. Intel systems become known as "unreliable", which is definitely not a position Intel wants to be in.
Losing money _and_ losing your reputation is a heck of a double-whammy. I can't say I blame them for wanting to stop overclocking.
I just can't imagine why they'd do it in a mechanism that could be defeated by the motherboard manufacturers....
-JDF
(check's in the mail, Transgaming...) and I can see where she's coming from.
My biggest gripe is the fact that the emulation has a problem with breaking copy protection. Best I can tell, the first thing you have to do to get a WineX game working is go find a no-CD crack. (Make sure your cookie and pop-up shields are up; you're gonna need 'em...) Since most folks think of no-CD cracks as evil pirate stuff, no "legitimate" board would ever serve them (hey, Transgaming... your product kinda _requires_ 'em, why not chase 'em down and make 'em available to subscribers?) and they seem to be tough to find. Google for a civilization III no-CD crack and most of what you get are forum posts asking where to get one...
But even before you run into that problem, you find that you're still missing parts-- Installshield, ferinstance, uses parts of DCOM98, which aren't emulated by WineX. That's OK; you can get your hands on those directly from Microsoft.
Once you've got that working, part of the nature of the beast is that the error messages are going to be cryptic. Back to the Civilization example, when I'd run
cvswinex c/Program\ Files/.../Civilization3.exe
it crashed horribly, basically telling me "Hey, you should probably fire up a debugger..." Not WineX's fault, mind you, how is it supposed to know that your current working directory needs to be the same place as the Civilization executable, and Civ crashes if it ain't? Oh, and when you ran it before the no-CD crack, it was happy to actually hand you a window that said, "Hey, I refuse to run in a debugger because I think you're trying to break my copy protection!" So you're thinking the no-CD crack is broken up front, which sends you barking up the wrong tree.
None of this, mind, is documented in the Civ forum on Transgaming's site, aside from the need for a no-CD crack.
Now that it's running, it works pretty well (I've found one minor broken feature), but it was a chore getting it that way...
Is there a desk in your cube? Did you pay for the desk? No.
Is there a workstation in your cube? Did you pay for the workstation? No.
Is there a phone in your cube? Did you pay for the phone? No.
If it's at the office and you need it to get your job done, the company paid for it, right?
So if it's at home, and you need it to do your job, the company should pay for it. If they don't want to pay for it, then you obviously don't need it to do your job, so your job function obviously doesn't include off-hours support.
I'm pretty sure that instead of buying enough of the right types of extension cables for the keyboards and mouses for this all to work and not have the four users right on top of each other, it may well be cheaper to just buy 'em each a cheapass Dell.
If you're sharing a PC four ways, you're not exactly looking for high performance, and when you figure up the cost of buying monitors, keyboards, mice, and extension cables for everyone, I get to wondering just how much the rest of the computer costs. I mean, Dell's selling their low-end at the moment under $500. Sure, it's low-end, but that's what you're looking for if you're sharing a machine four ways...
Of course, my real reason for thinking this is a bad idea is it's bad enough when someone's hard disk dies and the user's machine is down 'til FedEx shows up the next day. It'd suck even harder to have four users who won't leave you alone...
-JDF
As an example, the highway test dates back from when the maximum highway speed in the US was 55 MPH. Now that most of us live pretty near a place where they can do at least 65 on the highway, the EPA test probably ought to be updated as well.The current EPA highway test has an average speed of 48 mph.
But since you asked for useless data points: My '03 Hemi Ram gets just about the same mileage as the EPA said it would (12/27), which surprised the heck out of me, 'cause I'm always 10-20% low. (Hey, I drive a 350 horsepower truck. Of _course_ I use the loud pedal...) Then I got a used '95 Miata and I get better mileage than the EPA expected. I don't _think_ I'm slowing down in my old age...
I'm doubly surprised about the Miata. The top gear is so low it's _got_ to have been designed to ace the 48mph average speed EPA highway test, but somehow I still do slightly better than what the EPA expects on the highway and I match the city figures... even with a weekend at the autocross...
-JDF
I'm so going to take advantage of this.
Next time I switch ISPs, I'm keeping 127.0.0.1!
-JDF
There's a huge difference between "You can set up your own network" and "You can set up your own crap on our network."
You can set up WAPs all you want. You just can't plug 'em into their hardware. If Bellsloth'll run you DSL to the dorms, plug it into that and have at... The ruling doesn't say they have to allow you to plug into their network. It says they can't tell you you can't have your own WAPs hooked into your own network.
-JDF
It's almost like they anticipated this sort of thing. Or, like, thought out their design beforehand. Crazy concept, no ?
Except the design's still flawed: If I'm a spammer, I don't _care_ that your machine's only a zombie for a few hours, and I don't care that it can't send quite as much spam as it used to. The zombies are already sending multiple spams to each address; do you really think when you look through your spambox that there's really forty people who want to sell you viagra from their canadian pharmacy today alone?
So now, instead of sending 40 messages to each address I know about, I only have the computational horsepower to send 4. I'm still making piles of money. Indeed, since my viruses didn't tell me how many people they sent spam to, I'm obviously not billing by the message, anyhow, so my profits don't change.
And given that I was just talking to someone whose computer was infected by Sasser and rebooting every fifteen minutes who thought, "Gee, this really sucks, I wish there were something I could do about this lsass.exe message", I find the idea that people will notice their machine being slow and get them fixed questionable, as well.
FRO or no, I stand by my original message: The spammers don't care, because it's _your_ machine.
-JDF
who is sending the spam. It's the million zillion drones he's gotten infected with the latest Windows virus.
So making a cost for sending spam doesn't help computationally or otherwise, because he's not even sending the spam anymore.
-JDF
...a relatively small, cheap speaker, each device will instead have a relatively large, expensive widget to use our nerves as cat-5 (human-5?) so we only have to shlep around one little speaker?
They are kidding, right?
-JDF