Re:Feasibility of Panspermia
on
Space Lichens
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· Score: 3, Insightful
TFA says the layers are mineral based, and if there are enough layers I suppose the outer ones could ablate on reentry providing protection to the layers beneath. It's possible it would provide enough protection for some spores on the bottom most layers to survive.
What I've never understood about that theory, though, is how the life forms got off their home planet and onto an interstellar-bound rock.
Already done with mold
on
Space Lichens
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I think they already did this experiment under another name: MIR. My understanding is the primary reason they brought MIR down rather than rehabilitate it was the presence of mold that they could not kill using means that weren't also toxic to the cosmonauts.
They didn't describe the details of the flight. Was this a mission to the ISS? If so, I wonder how much risk they took by "opening" the box in the presence of the station? Could they have infected it with lichens, or more likely with "tramp mold" spores that may have accompanied the lichens?
Most of the time they sound OK, but sometimes I've heard buzzing artifacts when reencoding decompressed sound. A lot of it seems to depend on the MP3 encoder I use. I will say that the current LAME creates the fewest problems.
But yeah, you want the highest available bitrate for your original source. That'll make more difference than all the reencodings stacked together.
While your comment is a clever joke, it may not be far off the mark.
I am concerned about the standardization of the "refueling" functionality. If every fuel cell maker out there uses different valves, nozzles, ports, connectors, whatever for putting fuel in and removing the wastewater, we will jump directly into a confusing nightmare of incompatible plumbing. "Oh, yeah, my cell phone takes a 0.7mm bayonet fuelling nozzle, but my PDA takes a 0.05 inch tapered friction connector." So you still carry four little fuel tanks with you to power your cell phone, PDA, iPod and laptop.
A different question is what airline is going to let people take devices powered by flammable liquids on board, when they're already disallowing butane lighters?
I have a RAZR V3, and it's pretty but not very functional.
The Bluetooth flat-out sucks. I have to reboot my phone after transferring files to and from my PCs, because the stack gets corrupted and it can no longer accept connections. The phone has no OBEX client for browsing other devices. And when the Bluetooth does work and connect to my car kit, it remains connected for as long as the car is on. I can't use the Bluetooth from my Tungsten to get to the network because the phone is in session with the car. My Sony-Ericsson T637 would sort-of ignore the car's request to bind, and would just try a quick connect to its headset every time the phone rang.
Motorola's phone book application sucks. Their speed dial system consists of rearranging the order of entries on the SIM card.
The thing is sl-l-l-o-o-o-o-w to boot -- over a minute. Menu responsiveness is also dismal.
And, while the salesman told me that this phone would have video recording capability, it did not. Later RAZRs do have it, and apparently someone has the software available online to reflash it to add video.
It does have some bright spots, though. The audio quality is very, very good. The onboard camera is the best quality cell-phone camera I've ever seen (640x480 VGA, good brightness adjustment.) The screen is crystal clear, and visible in virtually every lighting condition. Voice recognition for voice dialing has been aggressively good. It can play MP3 ring tones in addition to the lame DRM-encumbered formats it came with. And it has pretty good battery life.
I threw a picture (unframed photograph) angrily from my cube in hopes that the annoying person looking at it would follow it and leave. I would have thrown the coworker out, too, but I was on the phone.
Well, that's where the truly heinous damage is done by this disgusting act. If you're taught from birth that God made you out of clay, you're going to believe that the evolution part of the class is the "garbage". Now the kids simply won't question it because they're hearing it in church AND they're hearing it at home. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
You can bet that mom and pop have prayed the gospel right into Junior Sixpack from birth through puberty. He doesn't stand a chance at independent thought so he will never question it; and anyone who does question it is a heathen commie democrat -- quick, pray for their souls.
I'm not sure how you extrapolated that. What makes you think the DRM code is going to be somehow "more resistant" to buffer exploits? It just shifts the focus from the "media viewer" portion to the "DRM decoder" portion of the software. But there are still buffers involved.
Besides, if you're passing "unprotected" content around you'll still have these issues. Not every JPG is going to suddenly be digitally signed and encrypted. Assuming the same "media viewer" application, you'll have the same bugs.
If anything, the DRM code just adds another layer of interpretation that's open to attack, making your system "less safe" rather than "more safe." More code == more potential for bugs.
Free? Pre-installed means it came with an OEM-licensed copy of Windows. The last time I built a machine, an OEM copy of XP Home Edition (SP2) cost me about $90 (I think.) Big makers work out better details, of course: I think if you delete XP from a Dell machine's configuration, they'll drop something like $33 from the total price.
Actually, they're not forgotten. For anyone interested in Cold War history, I highly recommend The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. Vasily Mitrokhin was an archivist for the KGB, and was dismayed that much of their history was being destroyed as a part of the routine workings of the KGB. So he made copies of many of the secret cases that he was responsible for storing. Once the iron curtain fell, he dug up his archive and delivered it to the Brits.
The most interesting part (to me) was that it completely validated the claims of various dissidents (such as Solzhenitsyn) as well as the Western governments regarding KGB coverups and lies. After hearing so much propaganda of this sort: "Soviets only steal technology, but the U.S.A. invents it", I was really curious to know what the truth was: exactly how unbalanced was the equation? Were the Soviets really that evil? To read his book and discover that the Western propaganda was almost completely factual was quite a revelation.
Oh, absolutely they'll pursue a lawsuit in that case. Any lawyer worth his fee would be all over that like flies on poop.
My father in law was sued because he had removed the guards on his own table saw, and while he was on vacation a trespasser cut off a couple of fingers with it. This wasn't even a case of "setting a booby trap" because he wasn't trying to physically harm anyone.
Doesn't matter if you think it's right or wrong -- our legal system is set up such that it's easy to file a suit.
Israel has used sonic weapons on a violent mob. It was reportedly more effective than tear gas and rubber bullets.
Wikipedia says that most "lethal sonic weapons" are science fiction, although they note that underwater sonic weapons are definitely lethal. High powered sonar has killed fish and whales, and there is speculation that some whales may use sound to stun prey.
No, the AP article claims the attack occurred 100 miles off the coast of Somalia. The pirate ships were within small arms range of the cruise ship. Among the weapons the pirates used included rocket-propelled-grenades. Some RPGs have sights calibrated to 250 meters, although when you're shooting at a target the size of a cruise ship, it's probably still effective a longer distance. In any case, LRAD has an longer effective range.
I don't think they should count the "pipeline bug."
That was a trojan. It was a deliberate attack on their system by an enemy. It didn't even arrive via the now classical "worm" or "virus" route, which would have implied that a "bug let it in the door." No, this one was deliberately planted carefully at the root. It's not a bug, it was an attack.
I don't think the distinction between 'OR' and 'XOR' is important. That they chose a 'NOT PC' is really the telling factor. Ten years ago when "average" PCs were a thousand dollars, and "average" Macs cost more than that, very few people owned more than one computer. But now, it doesn't require a financially crippling investment just to try one.
If Apple wants to call them all "switched", well, that's fine for marketing. But just having their foot in one million more doors, that's huge no matter what. And unless Apple pulls a huge boner, I would suspect most of those million will actually switch and stay switched. (At least until they get tired of Super Breakout.:-)
I dunno, I thought "The Buttles" sounded like a good name for a tribute band; perhaps to the Beatles, perhaps to the Rutles, or maybe to the Butthole Surfers.
Either that, or "buttle" is what the guy in the tuxedo is doing when he brings a tray of cocktails.
Oh, I understand exactly what you mean about the man-in-the-middle cheaters. I've seen people with little "radar" programs that pinpoint gameplayers from a top-down viewpoint, and they've even run them on sniffer programs on boxes further up the route, making them 100% invisible to the legitimate box playing a legitimate copy of the game. The trick is even older than online gaming (go back and watch the classic movie "The Sting" for my favorite example of a MITM attack.)
I think the biggest problem with your solution may actually be a lack of computrons on the server.
Consider the technical difficulties of shooting a bad guy through a knothole in a wooden fence. You have to have full data at the server regarding the viewport of the player, and of the enemies. You obviously weed out the enemies that are not in the "potential view" of the player. But for those who are behind the fence, what do you do? It might surprise you to know that my CPU does not even know the answer to that question -- my graphics card's GPU that does the task of 3d rendering. For that matter, it doesn't really consider "what" I see, either. It just paints layers, and hides stuff. Behind the knothole, it might paint the front of the bad guy, or it might not. Once you pull the trigger, yes, trajectories are computed and fences either block shots or permit them to pass. But for every bad guy lurking behind every bush? That's a helluva server load.
I don't see having the servers doing basically full-time rendering as an economical anti-cheat measure. If they implement it, players will quickly learn that by hiding behind fences the servers will be overwhelmed, and they'll start lagging horribly. And once you say "well, if we're starting to lag badly, let's transmit data for enemies in the viewport" you've completely opened yourself back up to cheaters. They'll instantly learn that lurking behind the "knothole fence" will cause lag and give them back their peeking cheats. Nothing gained, except now your cheaters are in more defendable positions than your honest players.
It's a necessary trade-off. An FPS game that lags a lot will not be a commercial success, because the gameplay experience sucks. Jerky video and motion is no fun to look at, much less play. Not that it doesn't suck to have cheaters online, but I know from personal experience that I'd much rather take my chances with a cheating player than play on a laggy server.
Actually, I was kind of wondering "which" feds wanted to seize his Beemer, cuz I want to be a part of that crowd:
"Sweet ride, John, where'd you get that Viper?"
"Some kid wrote a spambot last week. I'm hoping to bring down this other worm author next week, I hear he's got a mint-condition '62 Vette."
"Nice. I got a Mercedes yesterday, but there's this Porsche, I mean virus author who has a Porsche, that I'm working on for tomorrow."
The real way to stop cheating is to never provide clients with more information than they should have and have the server run the state machine
Unfortunately the problem is more complex than this. Look at some of the cheats that are happening, and you'll see what I mean.
"See through walls" cheats (like display driver hacks)? Well, if you wait till the client can "see" the opponent without walls before sending the opponent's information through the network, you'll have horrible lag problems. Enemies will appear randomly popping out next to corners. Network latency is always going to make that a tough problem.
Aimbot cheats? If you can see your enemy to the point where you can fire your weapon, so can your aimbot. The server doesn't know who pulled the trigger.
Gold-farming cheats? If a human can mouse and keyboard his way around your landscape, so can a program. Again, server side control has nothing to do with it.
Ultimately it seems that every popular online game attracts people who want to cheat, and people clever enough to write code to do so. The only answer that's even remotely kept cheating to manageable levels has been the warden / punkbuster type of system scanners. Cheat authors constantly morph their products, trying to stay a step ahead of the wardens, and warden's authors must subscribe to every cheat author's websites, trying to keep up on the latest attacks.
And now the WoW cheaters are using Sony's recently revealed rootkits to hide their cheat code from the warden! As if WoW didn't have enough problems with the cheaters, now Sony is providing tools to make cheating easier. I personally hope their rootkit shenanigans cause cheaters to damage EQ-II's reputation. Anything that spanks Sony is a just and karmic response.
A rootkit is a tool that modifies the OS to make files invisible.
DRM is Digital Rights Management. It's the part that makes the discs uncopyable.
Their CD delivers both a DRM package and a rootkit to hide their DRM. Their uninstaller tool supposedly removes the rootkit portion, leaving the DRM code in place to continue to prevent copying. Although according to other posters, the software still leaves their machine in a corrupted state even after running the tool.
This isn't to say that their DRM code isn't destructive crapware. You appear to have simply confused the names of the different evil components.
The thing is, with the loss of local diversity the world will end up with just a few giant news organizations, and there won't be anyone left to investigate the local news. Sure, much of their news is already syndicated so you're already reading a lot of national feeds, but if the Slantinel goes away, who is going to report any local news at all? Do you think Reuters will hire a full-time Orlando reporter? The Associated Press?
They may be slanted but at least they're focused on news that's important to you. (And while they exist, you can at least pretend that someday they might investigate Hollings for his Mouske-ties.)
It's all pulpwood, grown expressly for the purpose of becoming newsprint. It's a farm crop, like corn or beans. And much of the newsprint is recycled, making it even less of an issue.
I'm not saying electronic delivery isn't much less of an expense (both in terms of resources and energy to make and deliver them), I'm just saying that it's not like anyone is denuding virgin forests of 200-year-old trees just to make a few bird cage liners.
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What I've never understood about that theory, though, is how the life forms got off their home planet and onto an interstellar-bound rock.
They didn't describe the details of the flight. Was this a mission to the ISS? If so, I wonder how much risk they took by "opening" the box in the presence of the station? Could they have infected it with lichens, or more likely with "tramp mold" spores that may have accompanied the lichens?
But yeah, you want the highest available bitrate for your original source. That'll make more difference than all the reencodings stacked together.
I am concerned about the standardization of the "refueling" functionality. If every fuel cell maker out there uses different valves, nozzles, ports, connectors, whatever for putting fuel in and removing the wastewater, we will jump directly into a confusing nightmare of incompatible plumbing. "Oh, yeah, my cell phone takes a 0.7mm bayonet fuelling nozzle, but my PDA takes a 0.05 inch tapered friction connector." So you still carry four little fuel tanks with you to power your cell phone, PDA, iPod and laptop.
A different question is what airline is going to let people take devices powered by flammable liquids on board, when they're already disallowing butane lighters?
The Bluetooth flat-out sucks. I have to reboot my phone after transferring files to and from my PCs, because the stack gets corrupted and it can no longer accept connections. The phone has no OBEX client for browsing other devices. And when the Bluetooth does work and connect to my car kit, it remains connected for as long as the car is on. I can't use the Bluetooth from my Tungsten to get to the network because the phone is in session with the car. My Sony-Ericsson T637 would sort-of ignore the car's request to bind, and would just try a quick connect to its headset every time the phone rang.
Motorola's phone book application sucks. Their speed dial system consists of rearranging the order of entries on the SIM card.
The thing is sl-l-l-o-o-o-o-w to boot -- over a minute. Menu responsiveness is also dismal.
And, while the salesman told me that this phone would have video recording capability, it did not. Later RAZRs do have it, and apparently someone has the software available online to reflash it to add video.
It does have some bright spots, though. The audio quality is very, very good. The onboard camera is the best quality cell-phone camera I've ever seen (640x480 VGA, good brightness adjustment.) The screen is crystal clear, and visible in virtually every lighting condition. Voice recognition for voice dialing has been aggressively good. It can play MP3 ring tones in addition to the lame DRM-encumbered formats it came with. And it has pretty good battery life.
I threw a picture (unframed photograph) angrily from my cube in hopes that the annoying person looking at it would follow it and leave. I would have thrown the coworker out, too, but I was on the phone.
Well, that's where the truly heinous damage is done by this disgusting act. If you're taught from birth that God made you out of clay, you're going to believe that the evolution part of the class is the "garbage". Now the kids simply won't question it because they're hearing it in church AND they're hearing it at home. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
You can bet that mom and pop have prayed the gospel right into Junior Sixpack from birth through puberty. He doesn't stand a chance at independent thought so he will never question it; and anyone who does question it is a heathen commie democrat -- quick, pray for their souls.
Besides, if you're passing "unprotected" content around you'll still have these issues. Not every JPG is going to suddenly be digitally signed and encrypted. Assuming the same "media viewer" application, you'll have the same bugs.
If anything, the DRM code just adds another layer of interpretation that's open to attack, making your system "less safe" rather than "more safe." More code == more potential for bugs.
In no case is it ever 'free.'
So exactly what is a shady pixel, and how does a pixel become shadier? Are there degrees of shadiness?
Let's say you have two pixels: one pixel threatens people on the sidewalk for money, and the other pixel runs a numbers racket. Which one is shadier?
The most interesting part (to me) was that it completely validated the claims of various dissidents (such as Solzhenitsyn) as well as the Western governments regarding KGB coverups and lies. After hearing so much propaganda of this sort: "Soviets only steal technology, but the U.S.A. invents it", I was really curious to know what the truth was: exactly how unbalanced was the equation? Were the Soviets really that evil? To read his book and discover that the Western propaganda was almost completely factual was quite a revelation.
My father in law was sued because he had removed the guards on his own table saw, and while he was on vacation a trespasser cut off a couple of fingers with it. This wasn't even a case of "setting a booby trap" because he wasn't trying to physically harm anyone.
Doesn't matter if you think it's right or wrong -- our legal system is set up such that it's easy to file a suit.
Wikipedia says that most "lethal sonic weapons" are science fiction, although they note that underwater sonic weapons are definitely lethal. High powered sonar has killed fish and whales, and there is speculation that some whales may use sound to stun prey.
No, the AP article claims the attack occurred 100 miles off the coast of Somalia. The pirate ships were within small arms range of the cruise ship. Among the weapons the pirates used included rocket-propelled-grenades. Some RPGs have sights calibrated to 250 meters, although when you're shooting at a target the size of a cruise ship, it's probably still effective a longer distance. In any case, LRAD has an longer effective range.
That was a trojan. It was a deliberate attack on their system by an enemy. It didn't even arrive via the now classical "worm" or "virus" route, which would have implied that a "bug let it in the door." No, this one was deliberately planted carefully at the root. It's not a bug, it was an attack.
If Apple wants to call them all "switched", well, that's fine for marketing. But just having their foot in one million more doors, that's huge no matter what. And unless Apple pulls a huge boner, I would suspect most of those million will actually switch and stay switched. (At least until they get tired of Super Breakout. :-)
Either that, or "buttle" is what the guy in the tuxedo is doing when he brings a tray of cocktails.
I think the biggest problem with your solution may actually be a lack of computrons on the server.
Consider the technical difficulties of shooting a bad guy through a knothole in a wooden fence. You have to have full data at the server regarding the viewport of the player, and of the enemies. You obviously weed out the enemies that are not in the "potential view" of the player. But for those who are behind the fence, what do you do? It might surprise you to know that my CPU does not even know the answer to that question -- my graphics card's GPU that does the task of 3d rendering. For that matter, it doesn't really consider "what" I see, either. It just paints layers, and hides stuff. Behind the knothole, it might paint the front of the bad guy, or it might not. Once you pull the trigger, yes, trajectories are computed and fences either block shots or permit them to pass. But for every bad guy lurking behind every bush? That's a helluva server load.
I don't see having the servers doing basically full-time rendering as an economical anti-cheat measure. If they implement it, players will quickly learn that by hiding behind fences the servers will be overwhelmed, and they'll start lagging horribly. And once you say "well, if we're starting to lag badly, let's transmit data for enemies in the viewport" you've completely opened yourself back up to cheaters. They'll instantly learn that lurking behind the "knothole fence" will cause lag and give them back their peeking cheats. Nothing gained, except now your cheaters are in more defendable positions than your honest players.
It's a necessary trade-off. An FPS game that lags a lot will not be a commercial success, because the gameplay experience sucks. Jerky video and motion is no fun to look at, much less play. Not that it doesn't suck to have cheaters online, but I know from personal experience that I'd much rather take my chances with a cheating player than play on a laggy server.
And it's also theoretically impossible to get this far in life without a sense of humor.
I guess we were both wrong.
"Sweet ride, John, where'd you get that Viper?"
"Some kid wrote a spambot last week. I'm hoping to bring down this other worm author next week, I hear he's got a mint-condition '62 Vette."
"Nice. I got a Mercedes yesterday, but there's this Porsche, I mean virus author who has a Porsche, that I'm working on for tomorrow."
Yeah, I could do that.
Unfortunately the problem is more complex than this. Look at some of the cheats that are happening, and you'll see what I mean.
"See through walls" cheats (like display driver hacks)? Well, if you wait till the client can "see" the opponent without walls before sending the opponent's information through the network, you'll have horrible lag problems. Enemies will appear randomly popping out next to corners. Network latency is always going to make that a tough problem.
Aimbot cheats? If you can see your enemy to the point where you can fire your weapon, so can your aimbot. The server doesn't know who pulled the trigger.
Gold-farming cheats? If a human can mouse and keyboard his way around your landscape, so can a program. Again, server side control has nothing to do with it.
Ultimately it seems that every popular online game attracts people who want to cheat, and people clever enough to write code to do so. The only answer that's even remotely kept cheating to manageable levels has been the warden / punkbuster type of system scanners. Cheat authors constantly morph their products, trying to stay a step ahead of the wardens, and warden's authors must subscribe to every cheat author's websites, trying to keep up on the latest attacks.
And now the WoW cheaters are using Sony's recently revealed rootkits to hide their cheat code from the warden! As if WoW didn't have enough problems with the cheaters, now Sony is providing tools to make cheating easier. I personally hope their rootkit shenanigans cause cheaters to damage EQ-II's reputation. Anything that spanks Sony is a just and karmic response.
2 row(s) returned.
A rootkit is a tool that modifies the OS to make files invisible.
DRM is Digital Rights Management. It's the part that makes the discs uncopyable.
Their CD delivers both a DRM package and a rootkit to hide their DRM. Their uninstaller tool supposedly removes the rootkit portion, leaving the DRM code in place to continue to prevent copying. Although according to other posters, the software still leaves their machine in a corrupted state even after running the tool.
This isn't to say that their DRM code isn't destructive crapware. You appear to have simply confused the names of the different evil components.
They may be slanted but at least they're focused on news that's important to you. (And while they exist, you can at least pretend that someday they might investigate Hollings for his Mouske-ties.)
I'm not saying electronic delivery isn't much less of an expense (both in terms of resources and energy to make and deliver them), I'm just saying that it's not like anyone is denuding virgin forests of 200-year-old trees just to make a few bird cage liners.