We played with the alphabet shift 'secret' messages in second grade, the teachers taught it to us.
By the time I was in high school I'd invented an ugly bit manipulation that had almost certainly been created and thrown away by real cryptologists and cypherpunks decades ago. But it was fun for messing with my friends, none of whom were the previously mentioned cypherpunks or cryptologists.
These days I'd use one made by an expert rather than my weak attempts. Anything that'll take a server farm more than a week to decode is strong enough. I don't have anything to hide, I just don't like people sneaking peeks at my undies, so I want it to be a lot more inconvenient for them than for me.
I can imagine some spook having spent a week or more decoding an encrypted file I was carrying around, then suddenly pounding his head on the keyboard in frustration as he reads the results of decryption, some poorly written short story I'm too disappointed in to show to anyone, but too invested to just throw it away. Or maybe it just contains the password for the encryption and a reminder to not forget it...
It sure seems as though they have many people that would like to use one, but fortunately the people smart enough to make one knows that the primary targets the rest of their groups want to nuke are too bloody close. It's sitting in a fiberglass bathtub floating in the middle of the ocean with someone you hate, and the two of you are sticking each other with penknives. Only the dumbest sadomasochist on the planet would toss a grenade in his enemies lap under those circumstances.
Then there's the whole blow up the Americans thing, which doesn't have that problem, unless your Canada, Mexico, or Cuba, and even then, only with certain targets in the USA. Of course, getting the people and parts assembled in the USA would be rather difficult, especially now, and smuggling in a completed unit would be perceived as even harder. As to getting the fissionable material, it can be done, but if you want the good stuff it's not easy, not even for a recognized nation. Most of the worlds countries try to keep an eye on anyone either accumulating fissionable materials, or trying to refine them.
Just as a side note, I'm pretty sure I know a few dozen people that might be able to build a working nuke, minus the fissionables. I also believe they could refine a usable core from pitchblend, not die from the radiation or toxicity, and might be able to keep anyone from picking it up on sensors. (Attempting to get the pitchblend is a whole different story.) Yet I'm not worried. I know these people would rather have a plutonium-oxide enema than build a W.M.D. that some idiot might use. If there were somehow coerced into it, they would engineer an "accident" to get as many of the scum as possible while destroying the materials. The scientists that worked on the Manhattan Project didn't really comprehend what they were doing, and it was a desperate time, so they did something they would never have contemplated if they knew the repercussions it held.
IMO (I don't believe in the inherent goodness of man or that all evil comes from any one source. I believe that everyone has both good and evil in different measures. That's why I don't think tempting fate with fanatics is ever a good idea, but on the other hand, rational intelligent people will tend to impede large scale atrocities and killing if they are able to.)
There is a case where a judge declared a mistrial because one of the lawyers used a big $2 word that few average people would understand. They wouldn't define/explain the word to the jury, nor even let them look in a dictionary, so one of them used his phone to check an online dictionary. That's the whole reason the judge declared a mistrial. I think that judge in particular needs to get whacked with a clue-by-four.
In my opinion there does need to be some standard rules regarding the use of these devices, but completely banning them is not a good choice. Even so, a single stupid or technophobic judge will screw over anything no matter what.
(ianal) unless of course it's used for purposes of harassment, especially if no legal action is intended by the asking party. Besides, even if it's legal, it doesn't make it right.
I'm betting they'll get a lot of cancellations demanding a full refund. After all, they threw away 90% (appx) of the reason most people would have wanted it.
I'm sure there's something somebody is willing to pay for on the remaining dross, but probably not much. (I know what channels I watch, and what my daughter watches, and those went bye bye in what looked like a major bait and switch scam. Hope they have their papers in order and get the donuts out of the building, there are probably going to be investigators snooping around there soon.)
Of course Joe Sixpack would have a total snitfit if he knew the sun was radioactive, and that he's exposed to radiation his entire life, especially when outside during the day at high altitudes.
The big question is how much radiation of what type your exposed to in what amount of time. From what I hear, the radiation from the Fukushima plant is essentially no big deal unless you're dancing in the material release. The rate at which intensity reduces with distance is huge! (There's math for it, but the only thing most people care about is that it goes down really really fast with distance.) As to the explosions, that's just the hydrogen and oxygen released from the water breaking down because of the extreme heat of the core. It has nothing to do with radiation.
I bet you've gotten more radiation from that old watch with the glowing dial you, your dad, or your grandfather had and let you wear. Those old watches glowed because of Radium paint. Yep, radioactive.
And as to all the Chernobyl references/fears. Don't. Chernobyl was a completely different situation with a plant that wasn't designed to be massively disaster survivable. A friend of mine years got leukemia from that disaster. When I knew him about half the people on the same crew that day were already dead. He was on 100% disability at the time. And no, a nuclear power plant can't explode like a nuclear bomb, that's just Hollywood silliness. Although to anyone close enough for the radiation to knock out radio communication, it looks like a nuke detonation to the radiation sensors.
I really wish people would stop trying to hype things and make people afraid. There are real issues and dangers here, but when you whip the crowds up into a mindless frenzy like headless chickens with rhetoric and hype they ignore what needs to actually dealt with as they go off on their misguided quixotic crusades against the wrong things.
Since I keep my tables indoors, they don't get all that much light, and that's not even counting all the stuff on the table. I'd be better off hanging a 1'sq panel outside and run a wire inside to a charge station.
Don't forget about the huge amounts of money they threw at hardware and media producers/distributors. (Sony wanted a bigger chunk of the HD-DVD royalties, and the other companies said no, so Sony went and made a new version to compete with them, and then started paying off 3rd parties to provide blu-ray instead of hd-dvd offerings.)
I played with one for about 1.5 minutes before my friends drug me away. Can't say I'm impressed with it, but then again, I barely had time to play with it at all. Totally unlike istuff and android was about the only impression I got in that short time.
Don't forget this is slashdot where any praise of something MS does is likely to get you modded a troll, which itself is actually trolling.
Like most companies, MS has done good and bad things, sometimes with the exact same action. To blindly label all Microsoft as evil and all things Linux as good is just illogical, unjust, and rather stupid. Unfortunately there's a lot of that around here.
So here's a few opinions bound to start the flaming from the mindless:
Microsoft has done many good things over the years.
Linux isn't the ultimate OS, and has less than even chance of ever becoming it.
Macs breakdown and have plenty of bugs and crashes.
Too much choice bogs things down.
Microsoft has done some rather heinous things over the years.
A properly updated and configured Linux makes a really good desktop.
Apples 'think like we want you to' design of products works well for many people.
The lack of choices can be frustrating to anyone that's creative, or knows what they really want.
The gasoline corps are laughing all the way to the bank with giant crocodiles tears for the current 'crisis'.
Asbestos Undies upgraded with Nomex PJs, I'm ready for you:D
Of course that's like comparing a new 2010 Corvette Grand Sport to a new 1932 Ford Coup. One is an old tech car even though it's still nice and shiny. The capabilities of phones and mp3 players (other than touchscreen and pocketablity), are far inferior to those of a modern desktop or laptop no matter how you slice it. They don't have the storage, the screen res, the graphics processing power, the raw cpu power, the memory, etc. Sure, they've got some great games, and they've got 3000 slightly different versions of Tetris and Bejeweled.
I guess the short of it can be summed up like this: The istuff (phone/pod/pad) platform does have a number of games (even after you eliminate minor variations) it can in no significant way compare to the games that take advantage of even a small portion of the capabilities available to a platform such as a modern Mac or PC.
Now please redirect your attention to the main subject of the thread, Direct3D vs OpenGL.
That's not because of a flaw in the patent system, just a massive flaw in the patent examiners. (Incompetence, Corruption, Overworked, or Laziness, your call.)
It can easily (especially using historical documents and interviews) be argued that computers us the "potential differences (voltage)" to represent the numbers of 1 and 0 as designed by the humans that conceived of them.
It's not up to Swiss Cheese status, but they keep finding more and more gigantic holes, this is just the latest and currently the one with the largest estimated size. Let's see what they find next year...
The one way trip time for a radio signal between the Earth to the Moon is about 1.3 seconds if I remember correctly. Hollywood never shows it, but then again they have people on radios from Mars in real time and that's something like a 20 minutes to a half hour one way. Just imagine calling home from Mars. You dial the number, then wait a half hour before it starts ringing on Earth so someone will pick it up, by the time you hear them saying "hello", about an hour has gone by. Not very reasonable. The 1.3 seconds to the Moon would drive most computer communication protocols nuts, especially since they won't know if the other end has even received a packet for a bit more than 2 and a half seconds. Someone out there has written an interplanetary protocol, but I don't believe it's actually been implemented for anything. As a side note, NASA uses their own custom stuff to talk to their probes. They even have to take into account doppler shift due to the relative speeds and trajectories of their probes and receivers. It can get really messy if you haven't planned for it.
All times will vary depending on the exact positions between the two bodies since they are orbiting the sun in different orbits, and if you want to communicate with something on the other side of the sun from you, you can't, at least not directly. To do that trick you have to send the signal to something else that can see both you and your intended recipient so they can relay it, which means a longer route and so a longer delay in any communications.
Sci-Fi is so much easier with Ansibles, Sub-space Radios, and other types of instant communications.
I hate it when anything is differentiated by whether or not it's acronym is capitalized or not. If you're that freaking similar, you need a new acronym.
It's not so much the 'nanny state' in my opinion, but more like 'big brother'. Nanny's take care of the sick and injured, etc. Some people, especially republican politicians, seem to have some kind of hatred for the poor getting basic needs dealt with using government money. On the other hand, 'Big Brother' is straight out of the novel 1984. It's a totalitarian state that snoops on everything it's slaves, err, 'citizens' do. I think that's considered fascist (fascism) by the people that study that stuff.
(IANAL) Try a laser pointed at the camera, since they aren't supposed to be peering in your window, if their camera is being blinded by the laser, it's only possible if they point it where it isn't supposed to be. For them to charge you with attempting to blind the camera, they have to admit they were using it in an illegal fashion and that you were protecting yourself from their illegal and warrantless invasion of privacy.
I'd suggest a very low powered one (like a laser pointer) that has a power plug, those batteries run down rather fast when left on indefinitely. There are places you can buy those, or the power mod kits. Don't know if Thinkgeek has them specifically, but lots of places sell lasers. Just google it. I say low power, so it doesn't damage the camera unless the idiots leave it pointed at your window for an extended period of time. That way they can't go after you for vandalism or destruction of government property.
Please note that I'm guessing the line of sight from your window to the camera doesn't include peoples headspace. (unless your window is very close to the sidewalk and on the ground floor, or lower.)
Slashdot Mirror
We played with the alphabet shift 'secret' messages in second grade, the teachers taught it to us.
By the time I was in high school I'd invented an ugly bit manipulation that had almost certainly been created and thrown away by real cryptologists and cypherpunks decades ago. But it was fun for messing with my friends, none of whom were the previously mentioned cypherpunks or cryptologists.
These days I'd use one made by an expert rather than my weak attempts. Anything that'll take a server farm more than a week to decode is strong enough. I don't have anything to hide, I just don't like people sneaking peeks at my undies, so I want it to be a lot more inconvenient for them than for me.
I can imagine some spook having spent a week or more decoding an encrypted file I was carrying around, then suddenly pounding his head on the keyboard in frustration as he reads the results of decryption, some poorly written short story I'm too disappointed in to show to anyone, but too invested to just throw it away. Or maybe it just contains the password for the encryption and a reminder to not forget it...
It sure seems as though they have many people that would like to use one, but fortunately the people smart enough to make one knows that the primary targets the rest of their groups want to nuke are too bloody close.
It's sitting in a fiberglass bathtub floating in the middle of the ocean with someone you hate, and the two of you are sticking each other with penknives. Only the dumbest sadomasochist on the planet would toss a grenade in his enemies lap under those circumstances.
Then there's the whole blow up the Americans thing, which doesn't have that problem, unless your Canada, Mexico, or Cuba, and even then, only with certain targets in the USA. Of course, getting the people and parts assembled in the USA would be rather difficult, especially now, and smuggling in a completed unit would be perceived as even harder. As to getting the fissionable material, it can be done, but if you want the good stuff it's not easy, not even for a recognized nation. Most of the worlds countries try to keep an eye on anyone either accumulating fissionable materials, or trying to refine them.
Just as a side note, I'm pretty sure I know a few dozen people that might be able to build a working nuke, minus the fissionables. I also believe they could refine a usable core from pitchblend, not die from the radiation or toxicity, and might be able to keep anyone from picking it up on sensors. (Attempting to get the pitchblend is a whole different story.) Yet I'm not worried. I know these people would rather have a plutonium-oxide enema than build a W.M.D. that some idiot might use. If there were somehow coerced into it, they would engineer an "accident" to get as many of the scum as possible while destroying the materials.
The scientists that worked on the Manhattan Project didn't really comprehend what they were doing, and it was a desperate time, so they did something they would never have contemplated if they knew the repercussions it held.
IMO
(I don't believe in the inherent goodness of man or that all evil comes from any one source. I believe that everyone has both good and evil in different measures. That's why I don't think tempting fate with fanatics is ever a good idea, but on the other hand, rational intelligent people will tend to impede large scale atrocities and killing if they are able to.)
There is a case where a judge declared a mistrial because one of the lawyers used a big $2 word that few average people would understand. They wouldn't define/explain the word to the jury, nor even let them look in a dictionary, so one of them used his phone to check an online dictionary. That's the whole reason the judge declared a mistrial.
I think that judge in particular needs to get whacked with a clue-by-four.
In my opinion there does need to be some standard rules regarding the use of these devices, but completely banning them is not a good choice. Even so, a single stupid or technophobic judge will screw over anything no matter what.
(ianal) unless of course it's used for purposes of harassment, especially if no legal action is intended by the asking party.
Besides, even if it's legal, it doesn't make it right.
Agreed. The show is (was) fun to listen to, even if it's mostly nuts, but Art somehow made it seem interesting, George doesn't imo.
I lived in Austin for a year. The stupidity level was worse than radiation at Chernobyl. Austin is not, in my opinion, a place worth living in.
I'm betting they'll get a lot of cancellations demanding a full refund. After all, they threw away 90% (appx) of the reason most people would have wanted it.
I'm sure there's something somebody is willing to pay for on the remaining dross, but probably not much. (I know what channels I watch, and what my daughter watches, and those went bye bye in what looked like a major bait and switch scam. Hope they have their papers in order and get the donuts out of the building, there are probably going to be investigators snooping around there soon.)
Of course Joe Sixpack would have a total snitfit if he knew the sun was radioactive, and that he's exposed to radiation his entire life, especially when outside during the day at high altitudes.
The big question is how much radiation of what type your exposed to in what amount of time. From what I hear, the radiation from the Fukushima plant is essentially no big deal unless you're dancing in the material release. The rate at which intensity reduces with distance is huge! (There's math for it, but the only thing most people care about is that it goes down really really fast with distance.)
As to the explosions, that's just the hydrogen and oxygen released from the water breaking down because of the extreme heat of the core. It has nothing to do with radiation.
I bet you've gotten more radiation from that old watch with the glowing dial you, your dad, or your grandfather had and let you wear. Those old watches glowed because of Radium paint. Yep, radioactive.
And as to all the Chernobyl references/fears. Don't. Chernobyl was a completely different situation with a plant that wasn't designed to be massively disaster survivable. A friend of mine years got leukemia from that disaster. When I knew him about half the people on the same crew that day were already dead. He was on 100% disability at the time. And no, a nuclear power plant can't explode like a nuclear bomb, that's just Hollywood silliness. Although to anyone close enough for the radiation to knock out radio communication, it looks like a nuke detonation to the radiation sensors.
I really wish people would stop trying to hype things and make people afraid. There are real issues and dangers here, but when you whip the crowds up into a mindless frenzy like headless chickens with rhetoric and hype they ignore what needs to actually dealt with as they go off on their misguided quixotic crusades against the wrong things.
Popular with tween girls, but otherwise completely useless?
Don't you mean: Charm Monster, Charm Person, Disintegrate, Fear, Finger of Death, Flesh to Stone, Inflict Moderate Wounds, Sleep, Slow, Telekinesis, and Antimagic Cone.
I had to use 3.5 stats since I can't find an old v1 mm.
(Contrary to popular belief, they do have a blind spot, unfortunately it's directly beneath them.)
Since I keep my tables indoors, they don't get all that much light, and that's not even counting all the stuff on the table. I'd be better off hanging a 1'sq panel outside and run a wire inside to a charge station.
Don't forget about the huge amounts of money they threw at hardware and media producers/distributors.
(Sony wanted a bigger chunk of the HD-DVD royalties, and the other companies said no, so Sony went and made a new version to compete with them, and then started paying off 3rd parties to provide blu-ray instead of hd-dvd offerings.)
I played with one for about 1.5 minutes before my friends drug me away. Can't say I'm impressed with it, but then again, I barely had time to play with it at all.
Totally unlike istuff and android was about the only impression I got in that short time.
Don't forget this is slashdot where any praise of something MS does is likely to get you modded a troll, which itself is actually trolling.
:D
Like most companies, MS has done good and bad things, sometimes with the exact same action. To blindly label all Microsoft as evil and all things Linux as good is just illogical, unjust, and rather stupid. Unfortunately there's a lot of that around here.
So here's a few opinions bound to start the flaming from the mindless:
Microsoft has done many good things over the years.
Linux isn't the ultimate OS, and has less than even chance of ever becoming it.
Macs breakdown and have plenty of bugs and crashes.
Too much choice bogs things down.
Microsoft has done some rather heinous things over the years.
A properly updated and configured Linux makes a really good desktop.
Apples 'think like we want you to' design of products works well for many people.
The lack of choices can be frustrating to anyone that's creative, or knows what they really want.
The gasoline corps are laughing all the way to the bank with giant crocodiles tears for the current 'crisis'.
Asbestos Undies upgraded with Nomex PJs, I'm ready for you
Of course that's like comparing a new 2010 Corvette Grand Sport to a new 1932 Ford Coup. One is an old tech car even though it's still nice and shiny.
The capabilities of phones and mp3 players (other than touchscreen and pocketablity), are far inferior to those of a modern desktop or laptop no matter how you slice it. They don't have the storage, the screen res, the graphics processing power, the raw cpu power, the memory, etc.
Sure, they've got some great games, and they've got 3000 slightly different versions of Tetris and Bejeweled.
I guess the short of it can be summed up like this: The istuff (phone/pod/pad) platform does have a number of games (even after you eliminate minor variations) it can in no significant way compare to the games that take advantage of even a small portion of the capabilities available to a platform such as a modern Mac or PC.
Now please redirect your attention to the main subject of the thread, Direct3D vs OpenGL.
Any plane with such crappy EM shielding is a scary thing and shouldn't be in the air with or near people.
That's not because of a flaw in the patent system, just a massive flaw in the patent examiners. (Incompetence, Corruption, Overworked, or Laziness, your call.)
It can easily (especially using historical documents and interviews) be argued that computers us the "potential differences (voltage)" to represent the numbers of 1 and 0 as designed by the humans that conceived of them.
It's not up to Swiss Cheese status, but they keep finding more and more gigantic holes, this is just the latest and currently the one with the largest estimated size. Let's see what they find next year...
Actually there are international agreements that cover various extra-terrestrial endeavors, especially those regarding the Moon.
The one way trip time for a radio signal between the Earth to the Moon is about 1.3 seconds if I remember correctly.
Hollywood never shows it, but then again they have people on radios from Mars in real time and that's something like a 20 minutes to a half hour one way.
Just imagine calling home from Mars. You dial the number, then wait a half hour before it starts ringing on Earth so someone will pick it up, by the time you hear them saying "hello", about an hour has gone by. Not very reasonable.
The 1.3 seconds to the Moon would drive most computer communication protocols nuts, especially since they won't know if the other end has even received a packet for a bit more than 2 and a half seconds. Someone out there has written an interplanetary protocol, but I don't believe it's actually been implemented for anything.
As a side note, NASA uses their own custom stuff to talk to their probes. They even have to take into account doppler shift due to the relative speeds and trajectories of their probes and receivers. It can get really messy if you haven't planned for it.
All times will vary depending on the exact positions between the two bodies since they are orbiting the sun in different orbits, and if you want to communicate with something on the other side of the sun from you, you can't, at least not directly. To do that trick you have to send the signal to something else that can see both you and your intended recipient so they can relay it, which means a longer route and so a longer delay in any communications.
Sci-Fi is so much easier with Ansibles, Sub-space Radios, and other types of instant communications.
I kind of like how Kato did it in the Green Hornet movie, but how many of us have armored cars with rocket launchers?
I hate it when anything is differentiated by whether or not it's acronym is capitalized or not. If you're that freaking similar, you need a new acronym.
It's not so much the 'nanny state' in my opinion, but more like 'big brother'. Nanny's take care of the sick and injured, etc. Some people, especially republican politicians, seem to have some kind of hatred for the poor getting basic needs dealt with using government money. On the other hand, 'Big Brother' is straight out of the novel 1984. It's a totalitarian state that snoops on everything it's slaves, err, 'citizens' do. I think that's considered fascist (fascism) by the people that study that stuff.
(IANAL)
Try a laser pointed at the camera, since they aren't supposed to be peering in your window, if their camera is being blinded by the laser, it's only possible if they point it where it isn't supposed to be. For them to charge you with attempting to blind the camera, they have to admit they were using it in an illegal fashion and that you were protecting yourself from their illegal and warrantless invasion of privacy.
I'd suggest a very low powered one (like a laser pointer) that has a power plug, those batteries run down rather fast when left on indefinitely. There are places you can buy those, or the power mod kits. Don't know if Thinkgeek has them specifically, but lots of places sell lasers. Just google it.
I say low power, so it doesn't damage the camera unless the idiots leave it pointed at your window for an extended period of time. That way they can't go after you for vandalism or destruction of government property.
Please note that I'm guessing the line of sight from your window to the camera doesn't include peoples headspace. (unless your window is very close to the sidewalk and on the ground floor, or lower.)