Are you kidding me? If I had a submission posted, that would make me cool, and that would begin the slow unraveling of the very fabric of space-time.
Doesn't this sorta count as getting a submission accepted? C'mon, you got Slashdotted, that's gotta be worth something towards geeky coolness.
That and space-time unravelling might not be bad about now since I need to study for three classes in the span of eight hours and didn't bother sleeping last night. I think some unravelling of the space-time continumm might help about now...:)
Re:Media on Pocket PC
on
Pocket PC 2002
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You can also watch DivX movies on your Pocket PC. Not really sure why anyone would want to, but I've downloaded the player to my iPaq and it definately works and has an almost-acceptable framerate - works best with movies where little changes.
If you have a Pocket PC, check it out. It's kinda useless, but it's still fun...
I was actually screwing around with writing something like this. It's based on Perl.
The basic Installer module would have simple functions for doing things like extracting files from a tarball, substituting strings in skeleton configuration files, and downloading stuff from the Internet. (Ultimately, it would be nice to allow something to say "I require Library X v 1.1.2" and the installer to check the dependency and then, if needed, tell the user: "You need Library X, would you like to download it now?" or "You need to upgrade Library X, download the upgrade?" by doing an apt-like lookup.)
The thing that was cool about my design is that in the "installer" Perl script, you specify basic information about the information you want to collect and the processes you are running, and it gets displayed via another module which you know nothing about.
What made this nice is that the base-line installer was CLI only - displayed strings straight out, ignored graphics, asked information via ReadLine. I had plans for an ncurses module for a slightly more graphical environment as well as plans for a GNOME or KDE environment.
(Realistically, only the GNOME one will likely be completed simply because GNOME already has Perl bindings, and AFAIK KDE does not.)
Oh, and for the inevitable "why Perl?" questions, there are several:
It must be "cross-platform" - without compiling. Most if not all Linux distros include Perl.
It needs to be simple to write.
I know Perl much better than, say, Python.
Yeah, other languages may be up to the task, but Perl's fairly simple. (As long as you don't do any OO-module based stuff, like I was in this project... Actually, using Perl Objects isn't difficult, but writing them is annoying.)
I kinda put this on hold, but if other people are interested, I can try and revive it - it's very-pre-alpha and really pre-planning - there's a lot of ideas and very little implementation.
(That and my current pet-project is an SPC player based on zSNES's SPC emulation. Neither have anything released - yet.)
Ask your mom if she cares that she can't copy it to her computer or an MP3 player.
"Hey, Mom, would you care if you can't play CDs on your computer?"
"Uh, YES, don't you remember? That's how I play all my CDs."
"Hey, Dad, would you care that you can't rip CDs to your computer?"
"Well, yes, because I copy all my CDs to MP3s so I don't need a CD changer to listen to them in sequence."
I suppose my parents may be weird though. After all, my Dad listens to country... (and he's got *all* his CDs on his computer as MP3s, but then again, he works for Digital - er, Compaq - er, HP). My Mom does some work with editting webpages, so I guess she can be considered a "technical" type.
But I know many people who I wouldn't consider a "nerd" who use their computer to play CDs straight. And they'll be mightly pissed if they can't listen to their new CDs on their $2000 laptop...
Don't forget, computers are slowly becoming "entertainment centers." My Mom basically gave up on her little CD player she used to use to play CDs and now (would) play her CDs via her CD-ROM drive -- except that she uses AudioGalaxy now. (And the incident with the CD-ROM door being stuck shut. Ignoring that...) Her computer sounds better than her small "portable stereo."
My sister (who is definately not a tech-type at all) uses her computer to play CDs - which, considering she only uses it for homework any other time should tell you something. (Although she has a "real" CD-player now she uses instead. It's a portable CD-player with headphones which is the real selling point.)
Many people who own a computer - a growing portion of the population - especially in the "pop music" set - end up playing CDs through it. Sometimes it's because the computer is in a separate room from the stereo and they want to listen to music while doing homework. Sometimes it's because they want to rip the 2-CD set and listen straight through them without swapping disks.
Legal digital music is becoming a way of life for the "younger" generation. Go through practically any college and you'll find that most of the music pumping these days is either a mix CD or straight MP3s being played through a high-fi stereo system. (With more colleges requiring computers, college students stick with the tool that works - if we can't spend $500 on a stereo, we'll use the $1000 computer we had to get instead...) It may not be near 50% of music listeners yet, but it's at least 10% - which is a lot of listeners to potentially permentantly alienate.
The users created when XP installed are automatically "root." And no, at install time, you are not given the option of making them "regular" users.
(Specifically, it lists five text fields into which usernames are entered - these users do not get passwords unless you change the way in which login is handled. This is for the Windows XP Professional install, and not Home Edition - Home Edition probably does the same thing, though. I haven't really found there to be a big difference between Home Edition and Professional. (Although admittably this was RC2, but feature changes were not slated at that point, so it probably holds true with the release builds.))
Which probably means that unless the OEMs take action to make sure Joe Consumer's XP box doesn't create Administrator (root) accounts when they first start up their new PC, the average consumer will be running every program as root.
Well, it does install by default if you install Personal Web Server (which, in reality, is just a incredibly-dumbed-down GUI for www-IIS).
I do know of a few people who run Personal Web Server on their DSL/cable machines and don't really use it for anything, but installed it "because they could." These are the type of idiots being really hurt by these worms - the people who installed it for no good reason (with some original purpose, as you point out) and then kinda just leave it running even after they no longer need it.
(Like the ASP test machine I had for a while - damn, I hate VBScript...)
Or, if you refuse to read through it, just read this:
Based on the foregoing, I believe Dmitry Sklyarov, employee of Elcomsoft and the individual listed on the Elcomsoft software products as the copyright holder of the program sold and produced by Elcomsoft, known as the Advanced eBook Processor, has willfully and for financial gain imported, offered to the public, provided, and otherwise trafficked in a technology, product, service, and device that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumvention a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under Title 17, namely books distributed in a form readable by the Adobe eBook Reader, in violation of Title 17, United States Code, Section 1201(b)(1)(A) and Title 18, United States Code, Section 2.
That is literally why he was arrested.
For distributing an illegal program in the United States. It basically works that since Dmitry as a part of Elcomsoft imports the illegal software into the United States, he and the company are both guilty of illegal acts under the DMCA. I'm not sure why that works, but make no mistake - Dmitry was part of the trafficing of the software into the United States.
Imagine Carl Djerassi, inventor of the birth-control pill, arrested at an endocrinology conference in Japan during the decades before 1999, when oral contraceptives were illegal there.
You mean that Carl Djerassi was selling birth-control pills in Japan while they were illegal? I didn't know that...
Seriously, the analogy doesn't hold because Dmitry was arrested because the Advanced eBook Processor could be bought in the United States.
There have been far too many Dmitry supporters who have been messing with the facts to try and drum up support for Dmitry - this does not help as it makes it trivial for anyone who wants Dmitry to lose to rip apart pro-Dmitry arguments and make Dmitry supporters seem like fools to the average citizen, hurting support.
I'd like to see the DCMA overturned, but lying about the facts isn't going to help it. Showing the injustice in the law might, but only if you ensure that the facts used are correct.
(Note: this rant isn't really addressed to the parent poster but to the many Free-Dmitry supporters who have been mis-representing Dmitry's arrest as related to speech, or in this case mis-representing the case as being related to activities in Russia when the reality is that it involves the "importation" of the AeBP into the United States.)
Assuming this is the same poll mentioned on Politech, then the question was "Should Encryption
Laws Be Reduced To Aid CIA/FBI Surveillance?" Many people think people interpretted that as "Should laws be passed to aid CIA/FBI surveillance of terrorists?" - how many people would object to that? After all, they must work, or they wouldn't be asking, right? (Note that the 72% figure seems to come from "Would reduced encryption aid the CIA/FBI?" and not "do you support it?" from my reading of the poll. YMMV:))
For those too lazy to check the link, highlights are:
Attack suspected terrorists like bin
Laden even if we're not sure they're
responsible for last week's attack?
Favor: 54%
Oppose: 40%
Attack terrorist bases and countries that support them even if there is a high likelihood for civilian casualties?
Favor: 71%
Oppose: 21%
Fav/Unfav Ratings ----Fav---- ---Unfav--- Very Mostly Mostly Very Military 58% 36% 2% 2% FBI 37 48 9 3 CIA 28 44 9 6
How Confident That National And Local Law Enforcement Can Stop Terrorist Plots In The U.S.?
Very: 32%
Somewhat: 42%
Not Too Confident: 17%
Not At All: 7%
How Much Would The Following Prevent Similar Terrorist Attacks?
Reduce encryption to aid CIA/FBI.
Very Much: 35%
Somewhat: 37%
Not Much: 12%
Not at All: 9%
Should Encryption Laws Be Reduced To Aid CIA/FBI Surveillance?
Yes: 54%
No: 39%
U.S. Put Arabs and Arab-Americans Under Special Surveillance?
[N]o preident in over 100 years has been foolish enough to micromanage the military.
This is Bush. I think I can leave everyone to their own Bush jokes. >:)
A broad goal: bomb the Middle East out of existance. Nuke Afghanistan. Don't forget, a broad goal can also define the seriousness of the attack - if the President wants a firebombing of Afghanistan, then he can order it. It's a very broad order, and the military will figure out the details.
Fortunately, such a goal is highly unlikely now, but it's still a possibility if the politicians decide that the military solution needs to be beefed up. They have the power to do so.
Could it be possile that the military doesn't pick it's targets ba[s]ed on CNN polls?
Yeah, but it's quite possible that Commander in Chief George W. Bush might. Don't forget, ultimately, the military gets their orders from Congress and the President.
Basically, Congress has to give permission for the President to use military force (which I believe has already happened), and once that has happened, the President is in basically complete control over the direction the military compaign goes. Which means that it's quite possible that the politicians will decide that bombing Kabul is the best choice of action to please the people.
Which would be a very bad thing indeed; although if we're all lucky, Bush's advisors will direct him in a less severe course of action.
In a similar vein to the wonderful Comment Filters, Slashcode breaks up long bits of text and inserts spaces into them.
Slashcode is (now) smart enough not to do that to actual links. The link you want is to this document and cannot be specified correctly in plain text because it is too long and a space gets inserted between the n and g in planning.
Although a standard <A HREF="URL"> style link works perfectly and should be used when posting links via HTML:).
In relation to How good were the Pilots? I have to wonder if the terrorist pilots were really as good as speculated. It's possible that the terrorists first demands were "take us to $TARGET_CITY" - after nearing the destinations, they disposed of the pilots (ordered them back, killed them, whatever) and took control there.
That would mean that the skill in navigating and long range flying wasn't necessary, just enough skill to direct the plane into the tower - which is fairly hard in and of itself, but may be easier than the other approaches. I really don't know how hard it is to fly a big jet - I can say after having been allowed to hold the yoke of a small Cesna, that controlling a small plane isn't that difficult - keeping it level and making small, careful, turns is fairly easy - making large turns is almost definately harder as my stall-into-the-cornfield experiences in Flight Simulator have proven.
Or, to make this a little more fun, try the following (it won't do anything nasty if you don't have Javascript enabled, and will just popup a dialog and throw up a new Slashdot window if you do). This is just an example to prove you can do active content:)
Um, yeah, Taco posts what - three stories a day? Tops? Once he's decided "I'll accept this story," how hard can it possibly be to send a form e-mail to the webmaster? (Dear Server Admin, we're about to kill your webserver. Mind if we cache the content?)
After all, Taco in the FAQ mentions that basically, if the site has ads, usually it can withstand a Slashdotting. Assuming Taco actually checks the links in the story (hahahaha - *cough* - excuse me - anyway), he should get a fairly good idea whether or not the site can withstand a Slashdotting.
If he's already accepted the story, it's only a little more actual work to contact the webmaster, which I would see as common courtesy considering that all of the editors (Tacos) are fully aware that a good Slashdotting will bring something like 10 hits a second - enough to flood a DSL connection or other poorly connected server.
Besides, simply doing something like: actual link (cache) would solve the "not linking to real site" problem, and would help immensily with sites that can't handle the load - if he's accepted the story, then he can go through with contacting the admin.
Unless Taco doesn't bother checking the links. And only hits "post." (Given the number of "This is the correct link (Score: 5, Insightful)" posts I've seen, this seems to be quite likely - unless Slashcode breaks links in stories, which I doubt, since most of the correct links involved missing "/"es or other characters and not inserted spaces.)
Oh, come now - you know that'll never happen. It breaks the First Rule of Slashdot: It would require Taco do actually do some work.
You see, Taco explains nicely in the FAQ that he doesn't want to cache linked content because that might require him actually contacting the linkee. And waiting for a reply (the horrors!). After all, contacting the webmaster and ensuring that you won't be fucking over some poor sucker who happens to be hosting some interesting stuff off his personal computer requires effort.
Remember the article that was supposed to be linked to a CNN article? But was really linked to Hooters? Do you really think that someone who pays that little attention to what he's doing would really go through the effort of caching the content?
I suppose I should sum it up by saying that yeah, this is flamebait, but I feel the need to vent my anger at the non-answers in the FAQ about caching content which basically boils down to "we're far too lazy to contact the webmaster of the linked site" - in almost all cases mentioned in the FAQ, it would still be possible to cache the content - all that needs to be done is to ask the webmaster of the linked site! (At the very least, the admin would know what's coming...)
Which Taco dismisses (quote: "I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?" answer: YES, damnit!!!) since he'd rather post the story right-now-immediately instead of let people actually access the content we're supposed to discuss in these here comments.
Now if only the @#%$! package writers would use that it might be useful... it's not really feasible to move all the software your distro decided belongs in/usr and/usr/share to/opt - especially since most OSS packages have the directory where they think the datafiles are implemented #defined at compile time.
Maybe a new standard should specify an environment variable like PACKAGES which specifies the directory to look in for datafiles...
(IE, PACKAGES=/opt would mean NS looks in/opt/netscape-4 for it's files, and PACKAGES=/apps would make it look in/apps/netscape-4.)
Well, if you run into dependency hell using rpm -e or apt-get remove, you're going to have much bigger problems if you just blow away a directory. If you rm -rf/usr/apps/glibc, you're going to be in a world of hurt.
I think the last time this happened, there were two packages, one was the main program, the other was the "plugins" or something. The Plugins depended on the main package, and for some dumb reason, the main package depended on the plugins. Awesome. I think there were several packages that shouldn't have been separate that all depended on each other and needed to be removed. (And for added fun, Package A requires Package B requires Package C requires the package I want to delete...)
Yeah, that's a good idea. If I were redesigning an operating system, I'd do that. (I also wouldn't call that top-level dir/usr).
Neither would I, I'd call it either/apps or/Applications, but to keep it in the current Linux-distro world, I used a/usr/apps example. (Oh, hell, why not call it/apps and symlink/Applications to it and...)
I think the original poster confused his message, what I think he meant to say was that he wished that programs would stop placing themselves is/usr/bin (or/usr/local/bin or whereever).
I think being able to run Netscape via "netscape &" is a good thing. I've also found it very nice to be able to "gimp somefile.png &" as well. However, when it comes to manually removing some old program, having to search for the three binaries it added is annoying - it'd be nice to be able to "rm -rf/path/to/old/app" to blow some useless piece of software away, especially since most OSS packages wind up not having nice uninstallers. (Yeah, you can "rpm -e", and I'm sure there's an apt-get equivilent (apt-remove?:)) - but you then frequently run into dependency hell. And even if you don't, rpm at least seems to have issues removing packages. (It misses some helper files, refusing to do so because of some broken dependency, the like.))
It'd really be nice to have applications in individual directories, say something like "/usr/apps/Mozilla" for Mozilla, "/usr/apps/Galeon" for Galeon, "/usr/apps/Gimp" for the Gimp - all of them containing all the data-files needed, instead of "/usr/share". As far as I can tell based on old docs, this splitting of apps into several directories is based on the older idea of having "local" apps and apps available over a network-mounted path. Which is fine, of course, but there's really no reason why there couldn't be a "local app" store and a "network app" store or something. It'd make managing applications so much easier, since you'd know that the perl libs were is "/usr/app/perl" and not have to look for "/usr/lib/perl/perl-5.6.1/site_perl" or whereever for Perl modules.
And if you wanna do it on your iPaq, you can look at the list of supported cards here, or try the list of Compaq cards. Since the iPaq expansion port is basically a PCMCIA, Linux on the iPaq's gotta be able to do something with wireless LAN as well.
(I haven't tried it yet, but the WL110 looks to be the best solution for 802.11. I plan on getting it to work with my schools wireless LAN - I've tried, and Pocket Internet Explorer is capable of rendering Slashdot natively - dunno about Linux solutions, my serial port is toast so I can't put Linux on the iPaq - yet. (And no, the iPaq didn't fry it - my UPS did, AFAIK:)))
6.1 - notice the newer "modern" theme - 6.0 was either the hideous original modern which was basically solid blue with dull cyan buttons or the middle-aged "modern" which was bluer than that and featured fuzzy arrows on the scroll bar.
And I first noticed this on the default Netscape.com homepage after installing NS6.1 - you'd think someone else would have noticed it.
You wouldn't be referring to Unreal Memory Leak by UT would you? The game that under Windows will run for hours without a problem (and I've done this) but even when run as the only application under Linux eats up all available memory after a half-hour on a machine with 256MB?
(And leaves my system in a nice, stable state - you may wanna check with your sound card manufactorer and upgrade to the latest drivers - sounds like you've got some issues with the current ones.)
Yeah, I really see the increase of performance under Linux... at least with Linux, I can killall -9 ut to stop it, while under Windows - wait, I've never had a problem under Windows that requires me to kill it. I just choose "Exit."
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't this sorta count as getting a submission accepted? C'mon, you got Slashdotted, that's gotta be worth something towards geeky coolness.
That and space-time unravelling might not be bad about now since I need to study for three classes in the span of eight hours and didn't bother sleeping last night. I think some unravelling of the space-time continumm might help about now... :)
If you have a Pocket PC, check it out. It's kinda useless, but it's still fun...
Funny you should say that. I recently checked, and the Flash-memory devices I have all use Intel Flash ROM.
The basic Installer module would have simple functions for doing things like extracting files from a tarball, substituting strings in skeleton configuration files, and downloading stuff from the Internet. (Ultimately, it would be nice to allow something to say "I require Library X v 1.1.2" and the installer to check the dependency and then, if needed, tell the user: "You need Library X, would you like to download it now?" or "You need to upgrade Library X, download the upgrade?" by doing an apt-like lookup.)
The thing that was cool about my design is that in the "installer" Perl script, you specify basic information about the information you want to collect and the processes you are running, and it gets displayed via another module which you know nothing about.
What made this nice is that the base-line installer was CLI only - displayed strings straight out, ignored graphics, asked information via ReadLine. I had plans for an ncurses module for a slightly more graphical environment as well as plans for a GNOME or KDE environment.
(Realistically, only the GNOME one will likely be completed simply because GNOME already has Perl bindings, and AFAIK KDE does not.)
Oh, and for the inevitable "why Perl?" questions, there are several:
Yeah, other languages may be up to the task, but Perl's fairly simple. (As long as you don't do any OO-module based stuff, like I was in this project... Actually, using Perl Objects isn't difficult, but writing them is annoying.)
I kinda put this on hold, but if other people are interested, I can try and revive it - it's very-pre-alpha and really pre-planning - there's a lot of ideas and very little implementation.
(That and my current pet-project is an SPC player based on zSNES's SPC emulation. Neither have anything released - yet.)
"Hey, Mom, would you care if you can't play CDs on your computer?"
"Uh, YES, don't you remember? That's how I play all my CDs."
"Hey, Dad, would you care that you can't rip CDs to your computer?"
"Well, yes, because I copy all my CDs to MP3s so I don't need a CD changer to listen to them in sequence."
I suppose my parents may be weird though. After all, my Dad listens to country... (and he's got *all* his CDs on his computer as MP3s, but then again, he works for Digital - er, Compaq - er, HP). My Mom does some work with editting webpages, so I guess she can be considered a "technical" type.
But I know many people who I wouldn't consider a "nerd" who use their computer to play CDs straight. And they'll be mightly pissed if they can't listen to their new CDs on their $2000 laptop...
Don't forget, computers are slowly becoming "entertainment centers." My Mom basically gave up on her little CD player she used to use to play CDs and now (would) play her CDs via her CD-ROM drive -- except that she uses AudioGalaxy now. (And the incident with the CD-ROM door being stuck shut. Ignoring that...) Her computer sounds better than her small "portable stereo."
My sister (who is definately not a tech-type at all) uses her computer to play CDs - which, considering she only uses it for homework any other time should tell you something. (Although she has a "real" CD-player now she uses instead. It's a portable CD-player with headphones which is the real selling point.)
Many people who own a computer - a growing portion of the population - especially in the "pop music" set - end up playing CDs through it. Sometimes it's because the computer is in a separate room from the stereo and they want to listen to music while doing homework. Sometimes it's because they want to rip the 2-CD set and listen straight through them without swapping disks.
Legal digital music is becoming a way of life for the "younger" generation. Go through practically any college and you'll find that most of the music pumping these days is either a mix CD or straight MP3s being played through a high-fi stereo system. (With more colleges requiring computers, college students stick with the tool that works - if we can't spend $500 on a stereo, we'll use the $1000 computer we had to get instead...) It may not be near 50% of music listeners yet, but it's at least 10% - which is a lot of listeners to potentially permentantly alienate.
(Specifically, it lists five text fields into which usernames are entered - these users do not get passwords unless you change the way in which login is handled. This is for the Windows XP Professional install, and not Home Edition - Home Edition probably does the same thing, though. I haven't really found there to be a big difference between Home Edition and Professional. (Although admittably this was RC2, but feature changes were not slated at that point, so it probably holds true with the release builds.))
Which probably means that unless the OEMs take action to make sure Joe Consumer's XP box doesn't create Administrator (root) accounts when they first start up their new PC, the average consumer will be running every program as root.
I do know of a few people who run Personal Web Server on their DSL/cable machines and don't really use it for anything, but installed it "because they could." These are the type of idiots being really hurt by these worms - the people who installed it for no good reason (with some original purpose, as you point out) and then kinda just leave it running even after they no longer need it.
(Like the ASP test machine I had for a while - damn, I hate VBScript...)
Or, if you refuse to read through it, just read this:
That is literally why he was arrested. For distributing an illegal program in the United States. It basically works that since Dmitry as a part of Elcomsoft imports the illegal software into the United States, he and the company are both guilty of illegal acts under the DMCA. I'm not sure why that works, but make no mistake - Dmitry was part of the trafficing of the software into the United States.
You mean that Carl Djerassi was selling birth-control pills in Japan while they were illegal? I didn't know that...
Seriously, the analogy doesn't hold because Dmitry was arrested because the Advanced eBook Processor could be bought in the United States.
There have been far too many Dmitry supporters who have been messing with the facts to try and drum up support for Dmitry - this does not help as it makes it trivial for anyone who wants Dmitry to lose to rip apart pro-Dmitry arguments and make Dmitry supporters seem like fools to the average citizen, hurting support.
I'd like to see the DCMA overturned, but lying about the facts isn't going to help it. Showing the injustice in the law might, but only if you ensure that the facts used are correct.
(Note: this rant isn't really addressed to the parent poster but to the many Free-Dmitry supporters who have been mis-representing Dmitry's arrest as related to speech, or in this case mis-representing the case as being related to activities in Russia when the reality is that it involves the "importation" of the AeBP into the United States.)
For those too lazy to check the link, highlights are:
Attack suspected terrorists like bin Laden even if we're not sure they're responsible for last week's attack?
Favor: 54%
Oppose: 40%
Attack terrorist bases and countries that support them even if there is a high likelihood for civilian casualties?
Favor: 71%
Oppose: 21%
Fav/Unfav Ratings ----Fav---- ---Unfav---
Very Mostly Mostly Very
Military 58% 36% 2% 2%
FBI 37 48 9 3
CIA 28 44 9 6
How Confident That National And Local Law Enforcement Can Stop Terrorist Plots In The U.S.?
Very: 32%
Somewhat: 42%
Not Too Confident: 17%
Not At All: 7%
How Much Would The Following Prevent Similar Terrorist Attacks?
Reduce encryption to aid CIA/FBI.
Very Much: 35%
Somewhat: 37%
Not Much: 12%
Not at All: 9%
Should Encryption Laws Be Reduced To Aid CIA/FBI Surveillance?
Yes: 54%
No: 39%
U.S. Put Arabs and Arab-Americans Under Special Surveillance?
Agree: 32%
Disagree: 62%
This is Bush. I think I can leave everyone to their own Bush jokes. >:)
Fortunately, such a goal is highly unlikely now, but it's still a possibility if the politicians decide that the military solution needs to be beefed up. They have the power to do so.
Yeah, but it's quite possible that Commander in Chief George W. Bush might. Don't forget, ultimately, the military gets their orders from Congress and the President.
Basically, Congress has to give permission for the President to use military force (which I believe has already happened), and once that has happened, the President is in basically complete control over the direction the military compaign goes. Which means that it's quite possible that the politicians will decide that bombing Kabul is the best choice of action to please the people.
Which would be a very bad thing indeed; although if we're all lucky, Bush's advisors will direct him in a less severe course of action.
Slashcode is (now) smart enough not to do that to actual links. The link you want is to this document and cannot be specified correctly in plain text because it is too long and a space gets inserted between the n and g in planning.
Although a standard <A HREF="URL"> style link works perfectly and should be used when posting links via HTML :).
That would mean that the skill in navigating and long range flying wasn't necessary, just enough skill to direct the plane into the tower - which is fairly hard in and of itself, but may be easier than the other approaches. I really don't know how hard it is to fly a big jet - I can say after having been allowed to hold the yoke of a small Cesna, that controlling a small plane isn't that difficult - keeping it level and making small, careful, turns is fairly easy - making large turns is almost definately harder as my stall-into-the-cornfield experiences in Flight Simulator have proven.
Find your "XF86Config" file (or "XF86Config-4" if it exists). Find "Section "InputDevice"". Add the following line to it:
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Scroll with the wheel. (Most distros do this by default, and it seems to work normally on my default Ximian Gnome 1.4 install on Mandrake 8.0.)
Try it.
The "source" is:
<script>
alert("This site has a cross-site scripting vulnerability!")
window.open("http://slashdot.org/")
</script>
You can be much more nasty with this, popping up goatse.cx or whatever. Basically, it's possible to do anything JavaScript allows you to do.
After all, Taco in the FAQ mentions that basically, if the site has ads, usually it can withstand a Slashdotting. Assuming Taco actually checks the links in the story (hahahaha - *cough* - excuse me - anyway), he should get a fairly good idea whether or not the site can withstand a Slashdotting.
If he's already accepted the story, it's only a little more actual work to contact the webmaster, which I would see as common courtesy considering that all of the editors (Tacos) are fully aware that a good Slashdotting will bring something like 10 hits a second - enough to flood a DSL connection or other poorly connected server.
Besides, simply doing something like: actual link (cache) would solve the "not linking to real site" problem, and would help immensily with sites that can't handle the load - if he's accepted the story, then he can go through with contacting the admin.
Unless Taco doesn't bother checking the links. And only hits "post." (Given the number of "This is the correct link (Score: 5, Insightful)" posts I've seen, this seems to be quite likely - unless Slashcode breaks links in stories, which I doubt, since most of the correct links involved missing "/"es or other characters and not inserted spaces.)
You see, Taco explains nicely in the FAQ that he doesn't want to cache linked content because that might require him actually contacting the linkee. And waiting for a reply (the horrors!). After all, contacting the webmaster and ensuring that you won't be fucking over some poor sucker who happens to be hosting some interesting stuff off his personal computer requires effort.
Remember the article that was supposed to be linked to a CNN article? But was really linked to Hooters? Do you really think that someone who pays that little attention to what he's doing would really go through the effort of caching the content?
I suppose I should sum it up by saying that yeah, this is flamebait, but I feel the need to vent my anger at the non-answers in the FAQ about caching content which basically boils down to "we're far too lazy to contact the webmaster of the linked site" - in almost all cases mentioned in the FAQ, it would still be possible to cache the content - all that needs to be done is to ask the webmaster of the linked site! (At the very least, the admin would know what's coming...)
Which Taco dismisses (quote: "I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?" answer: YES, damnit!!!) since he'd rather post the story right-now-immediately instead of let people actually access the content we're supposed to discuss in these here comments.
Now if only the @#%$! package writers would use that it might be useful... it's not really feasible to move all the software your distro decided belongs in /usr and /usr/share to /opt - especially since most OSS packages have the directory where they think the datafiles are implemented #defined at compile time.
Maybe a new standard should specify an environment variable like PACKAGES which specifies the directory to look in for datafiles...
(IE, PACKAGES=/opt would mean NS looks in /opt/netscape-4 for it's files, and PACKAGES=/apps would make it look in /apps/netscape-4.)
I think the last time this happened, there were two packages, one was the main program, the other was the "plugins" or something. The Plugins depended on the main package, and for some dumb reason, the main package depended on the plugins. Awesome. I think there were several packages that shouldn't have been separate that all depended on each other and needed to be removed. (And for added fun, Package A requires Package B requires Package C requires the package I want to delete...)
Yeah, that's a good idea. If I were redesigning an operating system, I'd do that. (I also wouldn't call that top-level dir /usr).
Neither would I, I'd call it either /apps or /Applications, but to keep it in the current Linux-distro world, I used a /usr/apps example. (Oh, hell, why not call it /apps and symlink /Applications to it and...)
I think being able to run Netscape via "netscape &" is a good thing. I've also found it very nice to be able to "gimp somefile.png &" as well. However, when it comes to manually removing some old program, having to search for the three binaries it added is annoying - it'd be nice to be able to "rm -rf /path/to/old/app" to blow some useless piece of software away, especially since most OSS packages wind up not having nice uninstallers. (Yeah, you can "rpm -e", and I'm sure there's an apt-get equivilent (apt-remove? :)) - but you then frequently run into dependency hell. And even if you don't, rpm at least seems to have issues removing packages. (It misses some helper files, refusing to do so because of some broken dependency, the like.))
It'd really be nice to have applications in individual directories, say something like "/usr/apps/Mozilla" for Mozilla, "/usr/apps/Galeon" for Galeon, "/usr/apps/Gimp" for the Gimp - all of them containing all the data-files needed, instead of "/usr/share". As far as I can tell based on old docs, this splitting of apps into several directories is based on the older idea of having "local" apps and apps available over a network-mounted path. Which is fine, of course, but there's really no reason why there couldn't be a "local app" store and a "network app" store or something. It'd make managing applications so much easier, since you'd know that the perl libs were is "/usr/app/perl" and not have to look for "/usr/lib/perl/perl-5.6.1/site_perl" or whereever for Perl modules.
(I haven't tried it yet, but the WL110 looks to be the best solution for 802.11. I plan on getting it to work with my schools wireless LAN - I've tried, and Pocket Internet Explorer is capable of rendering Slashdot natively - dunno about Linux solutions, my serial port is toast so I can't put Linux on the iPaq - yet. (And no, the iPaq didn't fry it - my UPS did, AFAIK
And I first noticed this on the default Netscape.com homepage after installing NS6.1 - you'd think someone else would have noticed it.
I'm talking about this.
(And leaves my system in a nice, stable state - you may wanna check with your sound card manufactorer and upgrade to the latest drivers - sounds like you've got some issues with the current ones.)
Yeah, I really see the increase of performance under Linux... at least with Linux, I can killall -9 ut to stop it, while under Windows - wait, I've never had a problem under Windows that requires me to kill it. I just choose "Exit."