You can't not get it. Spyware usually isn't installed willingly, but there are steps you can take to prevent getting spyware on your system. This is located on Verislime's servers and can't be avoided.
You can't remove it. Spyware, once installed, can usually be removed and the system put back to the way it was. While it can be difficult, it's usually possible for you to put your computer back to the way it was before you were infected. With this, the only way to remove it is to convince Verislime that it's in their best interest to get rid of it.
It represents abuse of what's supposed to be a public resource. This is like a utility company with a government monopoly selling your name to mailing lists: they've been granted power, and they're abusing it for profit.
Finally, and most importantly, it breaks DNS. The ability to check for a valid domain is an important spam-detection tool. With this, any query to DNS for a nonexistent.cc domain will return as if it were valid. Sitefinder breaks this, just so Verislime can get a few extra bucks of profit.
Maybe your friend was telling the truth, but there are ways other than spy satellites that said information could be obtained. First, it would be cheaper, easier and give better resolution to simply take an aerial photograph. A Cessna 172 (the ISO standard Generic Civilian Aircraft) and a decent 35 mm camera could take a crystal-clear shot of someone working on a roof, while a spysat would probably have difficulty resolving the logo on a pack of cigs. Also, spysat time is expensive and valuable; time in a small airplane is fairly cheap, or even free if the pilot's a friend.
Finally, even if it was a satellite snapshot, there's no way of telling if it really was your friend in the picture. For all you know, your friend's dad took a picture of a roofer in Russia taking a smoke break, then learned of your friend's smoking a different way and confronted him with the "evidence".
I imagine spysats are tightly controlled, and I know there are people who would raise major hell if they were used to spy on the US. I can't imagine that the people in charge of these things would risk the information getting out just so a coworker could watch his kid misbehaving.
Oh, you have a problem with the site's leanings? Sorry about that. I guess the editors just forgot to put up the latest motto, "News for thefatz, Stuff that caters to thefatz's worldview." If you don't like the political leanings here, then there are plenty of places you can go to get your political news and discussion fix. Face it, you came here. If you don't like it, you can leave.
The editors aren't required to cater to anyone's views, yours included. If you don't like it, leave and send Taco or somebody else important an email explaining why you left. If enough people do this, then advertising numbers will go down, and the site will eventually shrivel and die. However, judging by the number of people who hang around here complaining and never leave, that day will probably be far in the future.
The problem isn't that felons can or can't vote. It's that people who are likely to vote for Democrats are getting their voting rights taken away, and that people who are likely to vote for Republicans aren't. If the standard is fairly applied, there's no problem. However, if it's used to disenfranchise only one group, that goes against everything that America is supposed to stand for.
Another problem is that felons aren't the only ones being excluded. In the 2000 elections, there were people turned away from the polls because their name was the same as or similar to a convicted felon's, or even because of bad data entry which was never corrected. It's one thing that felons can't vote. It's quite another that law-abiding citizens can't vote because they're black, or their name is similar to someone who has commited a crime. That's just plain wrong.
The only radiation coming out of a normal CPU is in the radio wavelengths; it's ionizing radiation (up past visible light, into the UV) that is a danger to your reproductive system. As for heat, the only danger to your reproduction would come of holding it right next to your gonads - which would be unlikely for a man to do and would require major surgery for a woman. So, there's no technical reason for these people not to have kids. On the other hand, there are all sorts of social factors, if these people look anything like most overclockers.
Read the article, and take a look at good old Emule. No spyware (it's Free software), and right now it's taking up all of 9 megs of RAM on my XP box (from which I am typing this). The only complaints I have are that its high popularity overseas means foreign language files (look out for country codes in filenames), and that downloads take a while to "spool up" - you have to get "in line" to download from others, so it can take a while to get to the head of the line. However, its corruption handling is firstrate, and it's got useful features like comments on files that will help deal with fakes.
The only real technical problem is going through a router - if you have a "LowID" (basically, you're firewalled), you'll get miserable speed. However, Emule allows you to set its ports to whatever you wish, so you can have multiple clients, each with its own forwarded port on your router. BTW, you need to get started with a server: try Razorback 2 at 195.245.244.243:4661 ; it tends to have the most users and files (although it's possible to have sources across several servers, it's best to be connected to the biggest server for searching).
It's just for the pure "I've done it" factor. Doing something like running an ancient Unix on a GBA-based PDP-11 emulator has zero practical value, but is an interesting puzzle; essentially, it's adapting a square peg to fit into a round hole.
You might as well ask why some people love diabolical puzzles - it's simply something they enjoy doing. While there may well be a learning experience involved, the sheer joy of seeing a command prompt on some oddball specialized hardware after 90 hours of hacking really is enough for some people.
How do you think that spam doesn't cost ISPs money? If you think about the numbers for a moment, it's obvious that spam chews up lots and lots of bandwidth and server resources. For example: take a small local ISP, with 5000 customers. On average, each user gets 20 spams/day, with each spam being about 10k each. This works out to 1 gigabyte of spam every day, with fairly conservative numbers. Of course, large ISPs will be hit harder, and could easily see tens or hundreds of gigabytes of spam per day. Bandwidth isn't cheap, and spammers use every bit they can get their hands on.
Of course, an ISP might make some money from "pink contracts," which are contracts, sold at a high price, that exempt the spammer from the normal terms of service and ensure immunity from customer complaints. However, it's only a small minority of ISPs that would even consider doing business with a spammer in this way; most ISPs, even aside from ethical concerns, couldn't afford to have mail from their servers or IPs filtered out. It's only ISPs that cater exclusively to spammers and massive providers like uu.net (that no one in their right mind would filter) that can afford to work with spammers.
As for your solutions, both involve some loss that may preclude its implementation by ISPs. Greylisting assumes that a legit mailserver will always resend a failed message, which may result in said message disappearing into the ether; implementing a greet_pause means that legitimate users sending large volumes of mail are inconvenienced and does little to hinder spammers, who can simply CC/BCC several people in each message. There's no perfect, one-shot solution to spam. You can basically choose two of three ideal features for a filter: fast, accurate, and effective.
First of all, I'm a college student, and I vote. Every election, local or national. I look through the voter's pamphlet, visit candidates' websites, and generally try to make an informed choice. By doing that, I'm doing my "civic duty" better than many middle-aged adults.
Second, I think the youth vote will be far more of a factor in this election than it has been in the past. An example: Among my circle of friends, I'm known as someone who is very politically active, and thus has been the go-to guy to get registered to vote. I have helped register many friends (and friends of friends, and so on), including several who have never shown any political inclination before. As might be expected, these people are planning to vote Kerry in droves. Quite simply, they think Bush is a reckless cowboy, and feel that he is selling out their futures with reckless defecit spending. While the 18-25 turnout may be lower than the national average, I think that it will turn out to be one of the decisive groups in this election.
The problem of manipulating very large integers is something of a computer science "classic." It becomes important in science applications, databases, and encryption (how well do you think your data would be protected if you could only use a 32-bit or 64-bit key?). A couple of solutions:
Simply create an array of integers. Each one is set to 1 or 0, and the array is treated as a very large binary number. With a bit of binary arithmetic knowledge, it's trivial to code functions for the various math functions (add, subtract, multiply, divide, modulus, shift left/right, boolean logic, etc). Of course, this is a very inefficient and wasteful method, but it's easy to understand and implement. 1st year compsci students love it; it's somewhat similar to bubblesort in this regard.
A more refined version of the same solution would be to create another array of integers, but this time "fill" each integer completely before spilling over into the next. This solution isn't as intuitive, because it requires you to think of ints as simply chunks of bits rather than independent numbers, but does work more efficiently. Again, with basic binary arithmetic knowledge, it's possible to write functions to handle normal integer math.
If you want to know all the grisly details, they are, as always, in Knuth. While most languages have library functions to handle this sort of stuff, it's still good to understand how it works.
At least in listening situations, overloading of your amp should never happen. The goal in listening is to get the best sound reproduction possible; thus, any distortion (which happens when any amp is overloaded) has a negative impact on the goal - a perfect recording-to-ears interface.
The only real place where this has any impact is in recording and performance; amps are frequently overdriven to provide a "fuzzy" effect - guitarists will know exactly what I'm talking about here. There, tubes and transistors sound quite different, and tubes do sound quite a bit nicer.
I'm sick of all the "audiophiles" who claim that a non-overdriven tube amp provides a better reproduction of any given sound than a similar, transistor-based amp. The fact of the matter is, transistors provide a better sound reproduction, as there's less interference from things like the tube's heater or outside magnetic fields. Whether it sounds better or not is up to you, but don't try to tell me that it's a better reproduction.
If you think that correlation implies causation, then I have an Eternal Life Braclet to sell to you.
The only way to determine the cause of an effect is via scientific experimentation - a double-blind study with experimental and control groups. We could, for example, take 100 mice, leave 50 in "normal" cages, and put the other 50 in cages near to a broadband EM source. Then, we examine the rate of cancer in each group - if it goes up, then and only then can we say that "electromagnetic radiation (at a certain level) causes cancer in mice, which are similar enough to humans that we can safely say to stay away from EM sources."
There could well be many other reasons for the higher cancer rates reported in the 20th century - in addition to all the reasons you have mentioned, people have started to live much longer; if you die from cholera or typhoid fever at 25, you won't live long enough to die from cancer at 65. Also, the broad penetration of medical care into the working class, as compared to the 19th century, means that deaths which previously had no known cause might now be easily diagnosed as cancer. There are many reasons why reported cancer rates might go up - an actual rise in the cancer rate is only one of them.
Well, the "better quality" Ciscos are certainly computers in the Turing machine sense - they're just not very similar to your desktop machine. Rather, they use extremely specialized high-speed buses and processors to shuffle data around at amazing speed. Simply put, there's no way a 32-bit/33 MHz PCI bus will keep up with an OC-48's worth of data coming in constantly; a high-end Cisco will handle it easily. IOS (Cisco's proprietary OS) won't run on anything but Cisco hardware, either - the hardware and software are tuned to take advantage of each other's capabilities and thus do use hardware acceleration.
While a Linux box or similar commodity hardware can do a good job in non-demanding situations, you start running into bus-bandwidth issues when you get into really high-speed networking. The only real reasons to use a Cisco router on a small, low-throughput internal network are consistency and Cisco's support, which is truly excellent.
The one Cisco product line that does use standard off-the-shelf hardware is their firewall line. There, the fact that firewalls need to be able to cope with complex rule sets means that tuning the hardware for one set of circumstances will probably result poorly. Thus, the extensible and customizable nature of the PC architecture wins out over the highly specialized router architecture. Also, it means that it's possible to pirate the software and run it on other PCs - something Cisco certainly doesn't like and will probably come down hard on, legally speaking. I would imagine that has something to do with the incident you're thinking of, where their software was "warez'd;" the latest version of IOS is not hard to obtain, since Cisco makes most of their money on hardware and support contracts.
You would do well to realize that gameplay and graphics are independent of each other. After all, Nethack has some of the worst graphics around, but the gameplay is incredibly deep; almost any concievable action has been implemented by the Devteam. On the other hand, Morrowind has both immersive, open-ended gameplay and pretty graphics. My point? It's certainly possible for a newer game to have good gameplay, and graphics just don't enter into the gameplay equation.
I doubt that anyone would state that simply because a game has outmoded graphics, its gameplay must be excellent. However, it is true that in an era when computers were only capable of simple graphics, pretty boxshots weren't enough to sell a game. Instead, developers had to focus on other elements to make their games sell - gameplay was a prime marketing tool. In addition, when games were small enough to be created by one developer or a small team, it was possible for someone to put years of work into their game - crafting a game to their ideals, not simply completing a product and rushing it out the door. Finally, simple nostalgia comes into play - when comparing today's selection of games to "the classics," people will almost certainly forget about the metric tons of crap games that have always inhabited the market - instead, each new release will be measured against the best of everything that came before. While this isn't exactly fair to the new games, it is nonetheless pervasive throughout all walks of life; people always reminisce about the "good old days" and forget about all the things that made them not so good.
The BMW M3's sequential manual gearbox isn't a standard manual (at least from the user's point of view). Instead, it's like the gearbox in an F1 car - it's got the "guts" of a standard manual tranny, but the clutch and gear selection are computer-controlled; the user selects gears via steering-wheel mounted paddles or simply lets the computer do the thinking. This means you get the efficiency and control of a manual, but a good deal of the convenience of an automatic.
Of course, BMW has programmed the gearbox for maximum clutch and tire life - that is, it lets out the clutch slowly at low RPMs to reduce wear and tear on the clutch and not cause any wheelspin. However, when racing, clutch and tire life are secondary to getting a quick start - thus, you can use this easter egg to do the equivalent of popping the clutch on a straight manual tranny. Of course, I'm sure that the fact you've done this is recorded all over the ECU, and if you bring in the car for a warranty clutch replacement at 10,000 miles, the dealer will have some pointed questions to ask. Technology, as always, marches on;).
Urban myth? Look here. 12dB gain is hardly an urban myth.
The difference between your speculations and reality is that "Pringles cantennas" simply use the Pringles can as a housing for a "shotgun" Yagi antenna. Anything which relies solely on the Pringles can will do a whole lot of nothing, but it's possible to use several different varieties of ordinary cans (Pringles, beef soup, etc) to house a good antenna.
While it's certainly better for anyone just looking for gain without any hassle to get a premanufactured product like the Super Cantenna, a large part of geekdom is the ability (or at least desire) to MacGyver things like a high-gain directional antenna from parts obtained at the hardware and grocery stores. Believe it or not, some people would rather spend 20 hours and $50 designing, building, tuning and tweaking an antenna rather than simply dropping $20 on a premanufactured one. Some people would simply rather do things themselves.
Have you ever actually played an arcade game (and I don't mean via MAME, I mean played a real game in a real cabinet)? The controls have a certain "feel" to them that simply cannot be easily replicated. This is mostly due to the fact that while almost all keyboards, joypads and the like on the market use rubber dome switches, arcade machines (and, presumably, the X-arcade) use microswitches designed to be hammered upon by excited and frustrated kids.
Obviously, the parts in this thing aren't cheap, and since it's a fairly small-run item, each customer has to bear a significant portion of the manufacturing costs. Still, there are a lot of kids who cut their teeth on '80s arcade games who are just now becoming sucessful in the corporate world. These people have money to spend, and are willing to spend it to create a nostalgic experience.
Basically, it's a hobby item. You might not spend $5000 on an elaborate model train setup, but there are enough model train fanatics in the world to support a small industry. The situation with the X-arcade is similar - while the customer base certainly isn't mainstream or huge, it is dedicated, has money, and is large enough to support an (apparently) successful business producing replica arcade controllers for the PC.
"Amazing job" is an understatement. When I see that picture of the N-number (civilian) on the aircraft as it ascends to levels that only governments could achive not 40 years ago, it simply floors me.
Also, if Scaled is reading this, it would be an incredible PR stunt if you could get Chuck Yeager on the second X-Prize flight. Considering how royally he was ripped off by NASA (he was considered by most of his colleagues to be the best among them, but wasn't selected for the space program because he didn't go to college) it would be wonderful if he could go up on the first private spacecraft. Just a thought;-).
Oh, and feel free to steal my idea without taking credit. I couldn't care less, as long as he gets his due.
MiG-25 (high speed, high altitude interceptor): ~90,000 feet, and the highest most civilians can go. A few entrepreneurs bought these interceptors from ex-Soviet republics hard up for money. If you've got the money, they'll take you up to about 17 miles and Mach 3.
U-2 (spy plane): The US military won't say anything but 'greater than 90,000 feet.' I've personally heard from fairly reliable sources that the real figure is between 90,000 and 95,000 feet.
North American X-15 (research/rocket plane): 354,200 ft. Same mission as the X-2. Still holds the altitude record for a piloted aircraft (although I have a feeling that will be broken soon). This plane actually broke the US Air Force's 50-mile definition of space 12 times and the international FAI (Federation Aeronautique Internationale) definition of 100 km twice. It is the closest thing the Space Shuttle has to a direct ancestor.
I don't know where you got your definition of 75 miles for the edge of space. The USAF awards astronaut wings to any pilot who goes past 50 miles, and the FAA, the FAI, and most importantly the X-Prize backers consider space to start at 100 km, or roughly 62 miles. While Spaceship One does have a good long ways to go, it's not quite as long as you describe it.
Admittedly, there are still some damnable apps that will reinsert their startup program into your registry. If they don't have an option to disable their run-on-startup crap (note that even Realplayer and Quicktime do) I would suggest uninstalling that app unless it's absolutely essential to your system. Even if you have one or two apps that skirt the malware line in this fashion, though, it's still not too hard to get rid of 90% of the crap that infests the average system.
I do agree that I don't need every app on my system to have its own autoupdater. It's sad that my Windows 2k box, when all my apps have their systray crap on, can have a systray that takes up a good THIRD of a 1024x768 display's taskbar. Programmers everywhere should realize that their apps are never going to be the only ones running on a machine; they need to learn to share effectively. Perhaps too many programmers didn't pay attention in elementary school.
Because a map and decent compass don't cost more than about $25, require batteries, die when they get wet (you can easily get waterproof maps), or lose signal under heavy cover.
I use GPS when I go hiking, but I would never trust it with my life; my compass, on the other hand, has been dropped, stepped on, crushed and generally ill-treated for about 15 years and has served me faithfully through all that time (although I have had to adjust the declination after a few of the really rough treatments). GPS is an incredibly useful tool, but it's never a good idea to trust your life to something whose batteries might go dead on you, especially when an excellent backup is easy to use, weighs only a few ounces, and can be had cheaply.
After following the links provided above, I see that to be the case. However, the principle remains the same: if you feel like something might be a scam, then just don't go through with it. For all we know, the buyer might have simply chosen an escrow service without examining them closely; definately a Really Bad Idea, but one that would fall under stupidity rather than theft or malicious intent. If you feel the buyer and the escrow service are working to rip you off, then email the buyer and tell him or her that you are worried about the escrow service and you've had good experience with [reputable escrow agent] in the past.
Don't simply assume the buyer is ripping you off because the escrow agent fakes a Verisign cert - if the buyer is willing to change to a different service, do so; otherwise, simply tell them you don't trust that escrow agent and you won't go through with the transaction if they don't switch. All I see in the PDF is one passing mention of "[D]o you know if the site has a strong digital defense?" That's probably not the best way to let the buyer know you don't trust the escrow service. Instead, come forth with solid reasons (i.e. they fake their cert) instead of one nebulous question.
Reading the account posted at SA, I think the chances are probably about 75% in favor of the buyer's being a scammer. Good odds, no doubt about that. Still, do you want to take the risk of sticking someone innocent with several hundred pounds in customs and shipping fees? To me, this is a clear case of vigilante "justice" overstepping its bounds. If you are worried about a scam, tell the other party and simply refuse the transaction if they continue to act suspicious. Don't try to "scam the scammer" when you might just be scamming an innocent person instead.
Why? I admit that page gave me one hell of a chuckle, but it seems that whoever sold the fake "powerbook" is now themselves a scammer.
While there are no details on the site, I'd imagine that it was one of the scams all too common on Ebay and the like these days - I'll send you a (fraudulent) cashiers check for $500 over the item's cost, and you send me $500 cash along with the item; when the check bounces, the seller is left liable for the money and has sent an item out for free as well. Of course, this is a despicable action on the buyer's part, but the seller has no evidence of a crime until he or she is sent a fraudlent cashier's check.
All they have to go on is the suspicion a crime will be commited in the near future. Thus, the legal and ethical thing to do would be to either refuse the transaction, or take the check and wait for it to clear (note: that usually takes several days at minimum after you get the money in your bank account). After the check failed to clear, of course, you could feel free to send whatever you liked; it would be a "gift" and the buyer simply would not have paid for the item they bid on. In addition, the police and bank would probably be quite interested in a fraudulent cashier's check and (now proven) scam artist.
The point? In fighting with monsters, take care not to become one yourself. For all you know, the deal was legitimate and you just took some poor bastard's money and sent him $5 worth of crap. If you are worried about a scam, the proper thing to do is to simply back out of the transaction and report it to the proper authorities, not to try to defraud the scammer yourself. While vigilante justice is tempting (and probably justified in this case, if my assumptions are correct), it has a way of eventually encompassing the innocent as well. After all, it would be only too easy for scammers to take others' money and send them nothing if this became commonplace - all they would have to do is argue that "I thought it was a scam, honest!"
So how long before companies/gov't are taken "hostage" by rented DOS machines?
It's already happening. Plenty of online casinos have been the victims of blackmail from DDoS attackers - basically, the DDoS'ers are running a protection racket. I've heard that the Russian organized crime syndicates may be involved; obviously, this is only speculation by myself and others.
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Finally, even if it was a satellite snapshot, there's no way of telling if it really was your friend in the picture. For all you know, your friend's dad took a picture of a roofer in Russia taking a smoke break, then learned of your friend's smoking a different way and confronted him with the "evidence".
I imagine spysats are tightly controlled, and I know there are people who would raise major hell if they were used to spy on the US. I can't imagine that the people in charge of these things would risk the information getting out just so a coworker could watch his kid misbehaving.
The editors aren't required to cater to anyone's views, yours included. If you don't like it, leave and send Taco or somebody else important an email explaining why you left. If enough people do this, then advertising numbers will go down, and the site will eventually shrivel and die. However, judging by the number of people who hang around here complaining and never leave, that day will probably be far in the future.
Another problem is that felons aren't the only ones being excluded. In the 2000 elections, there were people turned away from the polls because their name was the same as or similar to a convicted felon's, or even because of bad data entry which was never corrected. It's one thing that felons can't vote. It's quite another that law-abiding citizens can't vote because they're black, or their name is similar to someone who has commited a crime. That's just plain wrong.
The only radiation coming out of a normal CPU is in the radio wavelengths; it's ionizing radiation (up past visible light, into the UV) that is a danger to your reproductive system. As for heat, the only danger to your reproduction would come of holding it right next to your gonads - which would be unlikely for a man to do and would require major surgery for a woman. So, there's no technical reason for these people not to have kids. On the other hand, there are all sorts of social factors, if these people look anything like most overclockers.
The only real technical problem is going through a router - if you have a "LowID" (basically, you're firewalled), you'll get miserable speed. However, Emule allows you to set its ports to whatever you wish, so you can have multiple clients, each with its own forwarded port on your router. BTW, you need to get started with a server: try Razorback 2 at 195.245.244.243:4661 ; it tends to have the most users and files (although it's possible to have sources across several servers, it's best to be connected to the biggest server for searching).
You might as well ask why some people love diabolical puzzles - it's simply something they enjoy doing. While there may well be a learning experience involved, the sheer joy of seeing a command prompt on some oddball specialized hardware after 90 hours of hacking really is enough for some people.
Of course, an ISP might make some money from "pink contracts," which are contracts, sold at a high price, that exempt the spammer from the normal terms of service and ensure immunity from customer complaints. However, it's only a small minority of ISPs that would even consider doing business with a spammer in this way; most ISPs, even aside from ethical concerns, couldn't afford to have mail from their servers or IPs filtered out. It's only ISPs that cater exclusively to spammers and massive providers like uu.net (that no one in their right mind would filter) that can afford to work with spammers.
As for your solutions, both involve some loss that may preclude its implementation by ISPs. Greylisting assumes that a legit mailserver will always resend a failed message, which may result in said message disappearing into the ether; implementing a greet_pause means that legitimate users sending large volumes of mail are inconvenienced and does little to hinder spammers, who can simply CC/BCC several people in each message. There's no perfect, one-shot solution to spam. You can basically choose two of three ideal features for a filter: fast, accurate, and effective.
Second, I think the youth vote will be far more of a factor in this election than it has been in the past. An example: Among my circle of friends, I'm known as someone who is very politically active, and thus has been the go-to guy to get registered to vote. I have helped register many friends (and friends of friends, and so on), including several who have never shown any political inclination before. As might be expected, these people are planning to vote Kerry in droves. Quite simply, they think Bush is a reckless cowboy, and feel that he is selling out their futures with reckless defecit spending. While the 18-25 turnout may be lower than the national average, I think that it will turn out to be one of the decisive groups in this election.
If you want to know all the grisly details, they are, as always, in Knuth. While most languages have library functions to handle this sort of stuff, it's still good to understand how it works.
The only real place where this has any impact is in recording and performance; amps are frequently overdriven to provide a "fuzzy" effect - guitarists will know exactly what I'm talking about here. There, tubes and transistors sound quite different, and tubes do sound quite a bit nicer.
I'm sick of all the "audiophiles" who claim that a non-overdriven tube amp provides a better reproduction of any given sound than a similar, transistor-based amp. The fact of the matter is, transistors provide a better sound reproduction, as there's less interference from things like the tube's heater or outside magnetic fields. Whether it sounds better or not is up to you, but don't try to tell me that it's a better reproduction.
The only way to determine the cause of an effect is via scientific experimentation - a double-blind study with experimental and control groups. We could, for example, take 100 mice, leave 50 in "normal" cages, and put the other 50 in cages near to a broadband EM source. Then, we examine the rate of cancer in each group - if it goes up, then and only then can we say that "electromagnetic radiation (at a certain level) causes cancer in mice, which are similar enough to humans that we can safely say to stay away from EM sources."
There could well be many other reasons for the higher cancer rates reported in the 20th century - in addition to all the reasons you have mentioned, people have started to live much longer; if you die from cholera or typhoid fever at 25, you won't live long enough to die from cancer at 65. Also, the broad penetration of medical care into the working class, as compared to the 19th century, means that deaths which previously had no known cause might now be easily diagnosed as cancer. There are many reasons why reported cancer rates might go up - an actual rise in the cancer rate is only one of them.
While a Linux box or similar commodity hardware can do a good job in non-demanding situations, you start running into bus-bandwidth issues when you get into really high-speed networking. The only real reasons to use a Cisco router on a small, low-throughput internal network are consistency and Cisco's support, which is truly excellent.
The one Cisco product line that does use standard off-the-shelf hardware is their firewall line. There, the fact that firewalls need to be able to cope with complex rule sets means that tuning the hardware for one set of circumstances will probably result poorly. Thus, the extensible and customizable nature of the PC architecture wins out over the highly specialized router architecture. Also, it means that it's possible to pirate the software and run it on other PCs - something Cisco certainly doesn't like and will probably come down hard on, legally speaking. I would imagine that has something to do with the incident you're thinking of, where their software was "warez'd;" the latest version of IOS is not hard to obtain, since Cisco makes most of their money on hardware and support contracts.
I doubt that anyone would state that simply because a game has outmoded graphics, its gameplay must be excellent. However, it is true that in an era when computers were only capable of simple graphics, pretty boxshots weren't enough to sell a game. Instead, developers had to focus on other elements to make their games sell - gameplay was a prime marketing tool. In addition, when games were small enough to be created by one developer or a small team, it was possible for someone to put years of work into their game - crafting a game to their ideals, not simply completing a product and rushing it out the door. Finally, simple nostalgia comes into play - when comparing today's selection of games to "the classics," people will almost certainly forget about the metric tons of crap games that have always inhabited the market - instead, each new release will be measured against the best of everything that came before. While this isn't exactly fair to the new games, it is nonetheless pervasive throughout all walks of life; people always reminisce about the "good old days" and forget about all the things that made them not so good.
Of course, BMW has programmed the gearbox for maximum clutch and tire life - that is, it lets out the clutch slowly at low RPMs to reduce wear and tear on the clutch and not cause any wheelspin. However, when racing, clutch and tire life are secondary to getting a quick start - thus, you can use this easter egg to do the equivalent of popping the clutch on a straight manual tranny. Of course, I'm sure that the fact you've done this is recorded all over the ECU, and if you bring in the car for a warranty clutch replacement at 10,000 miles, the dealer will have some pointed questions to ask. Technology, as always, marches on ;).
The difference between your speculations and reality is that "Pringles cantennas" simply use the Pringles can as a housing for a "shotgun" Yagi antenna. Anything which relies solely on the Pringles can will do a whole lot of nothing, but it's possible to use several different varieties of ordinary cans (Pringles, beef soup, etc) to house a good antenna.
While it's certainly better for anyone just looking for gain without any hassle to get a premanufactured product like the Super Cantenna, a large part of geekdom is the ability (or at least desire) to MacGyver things like a high-gain directional antenna from parts obtained at the hardware and grocery stores. Believe it or not, some people would rather spend 20 hours and $50 designing, building, tuning and tweaking an antenna rather than simply dropping $20 on a premanufactured one. Some people would simply rather do things themselves.
Obviously, the parts in this thing aren't cheap, and since it's a fairly small-run item, each customer has to bear a significant portion of the manufacturing costs. Still, there are a lot of kids who cut their teeth on '80s arcade games who are just now becoming sucessful in the corporate world. These people have money to spend, and are willing to spend it to create a nostalgic experience.
Basically, it's a hobby item. You might not spend $5000 on an elaborate model train setup, but there are enough model train fanatics in the world to support a small industry. The situation with the X-arcade is similar - while the customer base certainly isn't mainstream or huge, it is dedicated, has money, and is large enough to support an (apparently) successful business producing replica arcade controllers for the PC.
Also, if Scaled is reading this, it would be an incredible PR stunt if you could get Chuck Yeager on the second X-Prize flight. Considering how royally he was ripped off by NASA (he was considered by most of his colleagues to be the best among them, but wasn't selected for the space program because he didn't go to college) it would be wonderful if he could go up on the first private spacecraft. Just a thought ;-).
Oh, and feel free to steal my idea without taking credit. I couldn't care less, as long as he gets his due.
- MiG-25 (high speed, high altitude interceptor): ~90,000 feet, and the highest most civilians can go. A few entrepreneurs bought these interceptors from ex-Soviet republics hard up for money. If you've got the money, they'll take you up to about 17 miles and Mach 3.
- U-2 (spy plane): The US military won't say anything but 'greater than 90,000 feet.' I've personally heard from fairly reliable sources that the real figure is between 90,000 and 95,000 feet.
- North American X-15 (research/rocket plane): 354,200 ft. Same mission as the X-2. Still holds the altitude record for a piloted aircraft (although I have a feeling that will be broken soon). This plane actually broke the US Air Force's 50-mile definition of space 12 times and the international FAI (Federation Aeronautique Internationale) definition of 100 km twice. It is the closest thing the Space Shuttle has to a direct ancestor.
I don't know where you got your definition of 75 miles for the edge of space. The USAF awards astronaut wings to any pilot who goes past 50 miles, and the FAA, the FAI, and most importantly the X-Prize backers consider space to start at 100 km, or roughly 62 miles. While Spaceship One does have a good long ways to go, it's not quite as long as you describe it.- Start -> Run -> regedit
- Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE \Microsoft \CurrentVersion \Windows \Run
- Lean on the Delete key until satisfied.
Admittedly, there are still some damnable apps that will reinsert their startup program into your registry. If they don't have an option to disable their run-on-startup crap (note that even Realplayer and Quicktime do) I would suggest uninstalling that app unless it's absolutely essential to your system. Even if you have one or two apps that skirt the malware line in this fashion, though, it's still not too hard to get rid of 90% of the crap that infests the average system.I do agree that I don't need every app on my system to have its own autoupdater. It's sad that my Windows 2k box, when all my apps have their systray crap on, can have a systray that takes up a good THIRD of a 1024x768 display's taskbar. Programmers everywhere should realize that their apps are never going to be the only ones running on a machine; they need to learn to share effectively. Perhaps too many programmers didn't pay attention in elementary school.
I use GPS when I go hiking, but I would never trust it with my life; my compass, on the other hand, has been dropped, stepped on, crushed and generally ill-treated for about 15 years and has served me faithfully through all that time (although I have had to adjust the declination after a few of the really rough treatments). GPS is an incredibly useful tool, but it's never a good idea to trust your life to something whose batteries might go dead on you, especially when an excellent backup is easy to use, weighs only a few ounces, and can be had cheaply.
Don't simply assume the buyer is ripping you off because the escrow agent fakes a Verisign cert - if the buyer is willing to change to a different service, do so; otherwise, simply tell them you don't trust that escrow agent and you won't go through with the transaction if they don't switch. All I see in the PDF is one passing mention of "[D]o you know if the site has a strong digital defense?" That's probably not the best way to let the buyer know you don't trust the escrow service. Instead, come forth with solid reasons (i.e. they fake their cert) instead of one nebulous question.
Reading the account posted at SA, I think the chances are probably about 75% in favor of the buyer's being a scammer. Good odds, no doubt about that. Still, do you want to take the risk of sticking someone innocent with several hundred pounds in customs and shipping fees? To me, this is a clear case of vigilante "justice" overstepping its bounds. If you are worried about a scam, tell the other party and simply refuse the transaction if they continue to act suspicious. Don't try to "scam the scammer" when you might just be scamming an innocent person instead.
While there are no details on the site, I'd imagine that it was one of the scams all too common on Ebay and the like these days - I'll send you a (fraudulent) cashiers check for $500 over the item's cost, and you send me $500 cash along with the item; when the check bounces, the seller is left liable for the money and has sent an item out for free as well. Of course, this is a despicable action on the buyer's part, but the seller has no evidence of a crime until he or she is sent a fraudlent cashier's check.
All they have to go on is the suspicion a crime will be commited in the near future. Thus, the legal and ethical thing to do would be to either refuse the transaction, or take the check and wait for it to clear (note: that usually takes several days at minimum after you get the money in your bank account). After the check failed to clear, of course, you could feel free to send whatever you liked; it would be a "gift" and the buyer simply would not have paid for the item they bid on. In addition, the police and bank would probably be quite interested in a fraudulent cashier's check and (now proven) scam artist.
The point? In fighting with monsters, take care not to become one yourself. For all you know, the deal was legitimate and you just took some poor bastard's money and sent him $5 worth of crap. If you are worried about a scam, the proper thing to do is to simply back out of the transaction and report it to the proper authorities, not to try to defraud the scammer yourself. While vigilante justice is tempting (and probably justified in this case, if my assumptions are correct), it has a way of eventually encompassing the innocent as well. After all, it would be only too easy for scammers to take others' money and send them nothing if this became commonplace - all they would have to do is argue that "I thought it was a scam, honest!"
Jeez, you must be really new here, huh?