Heavier than the IBM Model M keyboards, at 6.2 lbs.? Heavier than the Xerox 820 keyboards, at 13 lbs.? Heavier than the Sol-20 terminal keyboards at 27 lbs.? [okay, so it was attached to the CPU, big deal, but I owned one of these and it was a heavy mother.]
I don't know about him, but *my* law degree starts with the initials, "IANAL". It sounds pretty prestigious, because I see a lot of other slashdot posters with the same law degree as me. It also seems to inspire confidence and awe, because everytime I open my arguments with these initials, the judge chuckles quietly and my opponents shake their heads in disbelief (regardless of whether they represent the plaintiff or the defendent). I know I still lose a lot of cases, but I'm sure that is because I'm merely a recent graduate... but hey, my legal fees are still very reasonable.
> Why is the north side of the Conciergerie whited out?
For that matter, why can't I see details for March Airforce Base, Edwards Airforce Base, Fort Irwin, or all those other interesting areas? Man, Google's a gyp!
Where's a future Russian like myself going to find "Nuclear Wessels" otherwise?
25.5% of women deciding to have an abortion want to postpone childbearing. 21.3% of women cannot afford a baby. 14.1% of women have a relationship issue or their partner does not want a child. 12.2% of women are too young (their parents or others object to the pregnancy.) 10.8% of women feel a child will disrupt their education or career. 7.9% of women want no (more) children. 3.3% of women have an abortion due to a risk to fetal health. 2.8% of women have an abortion due to a risk to maternal health.
What about the remaining 2.1% of women who get abortions...? Sorry, my mind does math even when I try not to. As someone who is actually cursed with Asperger's, I do a lot of math and programming tasks without consciously thinking about it, but in spite of that gift, I can't hold down a job! My condition prevents me from picking up subtle social cues, and it makes everyone I meet in corporate America nervous around me...
Excellent comment, sir, although the game was called Commend and Concur. It was the corporate office brown-nosing game, sir, but I'm sure in your vast experience and knowledge you already knew that, sir.
It was a simulation of sitting in long bored-room [sic] meetings where you lose points for falling asleep, but gain points and status for being agreeable to the lecturer's ideas, hence the name of the game.
I rank this game as follows: Addictiveness: 10 out of 10. At my current job I play this game for 8 hours a day in lieu of my real responsibilities, only breaking long enough to eat a 30 minute lunch. Every single day. Interface: 10 out of 10. Commend and Concur forgoes the traditional controller setup and makes use of verbal commands and body language to play the game. Certain system functions, like pausing, must be executing with undocumented verbal commands such as "I need to use the bathroom", but you cannot pause indefinitely. Immersion: 10 out of 10. Creepily realistic graphics - I couldn't tell the difference between this and real life. A.I.: 2 out of 10. The other humans in the meeting room are often devoid of life and anything creative to say. Programmers, please remedy this in the sequel. Playability: 10 out of 10. You can play this game without thinking-... wait! I am playing this game without thinking! In fact, I'm typing up this Slashdot comment while I'm playing this game.
This is the first instance of one extraterrestrial satellite photographing another
Aren't all satellites extraterrestrial? Do we have any *intra*terrestrial or *inter*terrestrial satellites? I guess, if they crash to earth, but then, after that, I guess they're not Satellites any more.
1. A lot of beautiful women would owe me sex. 2. Cleveland would win the World Series. 3. My boss would make me a vice president. 4. My dotcom options would be valid and profitable. 5. Slashdot posters would be lucid and intelligible. 6. George Lucas would retire the StarWars franchise. 7. Microsoft would GPL their entire code base. 8. SCO would fully support OSS once again. 9. The RIAA/MPAA would make financial restitution to all their victims. 10. ??? 11. Profit-...! Umm, where was I again?
Now, what's to prevent script kiddies, or heaven forbid, more knowledgeable malware writers, from coming up with new means to zombify your computer to add to the growing pool of spam gateways, ddos relays, or simply an all out porn repository?
I propose the domain, mal.icio.us for exactly such acitivities.
If I gotta see "Attack of the Clones" again to know what the fuck is going on in "Revenge of the Sith", then count me out. It can't possibly be worth it.
I begin to get leery of movie sagas when you have to see a lot of extra sh*t just to make sense of the next installment that comes along (i.e. you had to see the Animatrix and play the video game Enter The Matrix in order to make any more sense(?) from the third Matrix movie).
I've just recently heard that Episode 3 won't make too much sense until you've watched Tartovsky's (of Dexter and Samurai Jack fame) Clone Wars and Clone Wars II. I can understand this next generation of merchandising, but Lucas, like the Wachowskis, is going to alienate a lot of fans if he has too much in-between story before the next movie. [Hint: you can't rent Clone Wars - you have to buy it]
It seems, these days, it's no longer enough to have watched the previous movie to understand what's going on the next SQL. You have to buy further into the Dark Si^h^h^h^h^h^h^h Franchise.
The next two had me shaking my head in disbelief. How could they go so wrong?
I heard an interesting story just the other day...
A guy walks into a bar, where he remembers drinking a spectacular beer fifteen years ago. Confident that the ownership of the establishment has not changed, he orders a beer. Upon taking a sip, he immediately spits it out.
"Hey Bartender!" the startled patron cries, "This beer tastes like piss!"
"That's not my problem," the bartender shrugs.
Three years later, the guy comes back to the bar and orders another beer, hoping it will be as good this time as it was eighteen years ago. The patron takes one sip and screams.
"Alright! Now that beer really tastes like piss!"
"Uh yeah," nods the bartender, "I peed in it, but it doesn't really matter now, because I have your money. I'll see you in three years."
The customer storms out. Three years later...
This is not a joke, folks: this is an analogy. George Lucas is the bartender, and any given one of us is the customer. My question to you is, are you going to buy another beer?
Crazy Headline indeed! Forget the Crack. Shuttle has a tank? Complete with turret and armor? Is it a small form factor? Will they call it the "XPC-1 Abrams"?
Funny you should mention that incident, because it presented an easy solution for one of China's biggest problems. (Sorry for getting OT here)
China had effected scrict financial penalties for having more than one child sometine last century. Unfortunately, the typical agricultural sector family unit survives by having cheap labor, in the form of extra children. However, in order not to incur legal penalties, these families often hide those extra kids. As these kids grew up, it quickly became apparent that these kids had no identity, and without identity, they wouldn't be able to find work or acquire government benefits. The PRC refused to ackowledge their existence.
Then, one day, the whole Tiananmen Square incident came about, and the PRC realized they could kill two birds with one stone. Rallying and arming as many "black children" [literal translation] as they could find on short notice, the PRC made a deal: "Kill one student protestor, and you may take possession of his identity. We will then cover the rest of your tuition and housing." After the bloodbath was over, all the "black children" were now legitimate, and since all students were accounted for, "no one" had really died. To this day, China can logistically claim there were no casualties in the incident. And what of the victim's families? They got a letter from school saying that their kids were striking off on their own and didn't want to see them again.
China's very good at understating a lot of facts. (I should know - I still have relatives there.)
> Assuming it works and is enforceable, of course.
I second that notion. Right now, I can count four unsecured wireless access points available in my domestic complex, with the manufacturer's default password still intact. Some of them have a Static IPs. All of them let me set a DMZ of my choice. What is to prevent me from telling the wireless AP that my computer should be DMZ by default? What is to prevent me from running a faux Ebay/PayPal/WaMu site from my neighbour's now-hijacked connection? Law Enforcement personnel would be hard pressed to get search warrants covering *every* resident in the complex, not to mention that the presence of vast sub-basements for our gym, racquetball court, and maintenance tunnels leave plenty of nooks and crannies to physically place the server without fear of accidental discovery.
> Do not look at record-setting solar storms with remaining good eye.
Thanks for the advice. Instead, I'll use my new-fangled fluorine-carbide-chlorate-powered telescope that throws off several million metric tons of CFCs every moment it's in operation...
Yep, looks like the sun is destroying the ozone layer, according to my observations.
He worries that thieves will eventually do to him what sheriffs detectives in Los Angeles say they've done to more than 700 other people -- reroute his mail, ring up credit card debts, buy a car or even commit a felony in his name.
As if the thieves themselves weren't bad enough? Now I can't trust my sheriff's department! Why, just the other day, I gave some officer all my financial data over his website. Why would they do a thing like this? </sarcasm>
As those of your who live in beachfront houses already know, salt tends to destroy lots of things around the house. My office was in a Malibu beach house right up against the ocean, and all machines we got were completely rusted over within the year. Maybe manufacturers don't think about corrosive elements in the air...
Do you know how many times things like this have required me to use some browser other than Lynx or Links? You're blatantly discriminating against us terminal users. Then we have to find someone running a GUI envoronment. Oh! The insensitivity!
I consider the term Parallel Universe to be rather misleading, as it may be possible that there are other universes out there, but are just so far away from our own as to be undetectable.
Also, who's to say that the laws of Physics to which we are accustomed are universal (no pun intendeded)? I've met theorists who suspect that our laws of Physics are a by-product of the formation of our own universe, and the reason we don't see too many others is that they often form with a set of physical rules that are not stable. Even if we were to find another universe with a stable set of rules, even a few changes in the certain laws of Physics would destroy our beings the moment we arrived. In our Big Bang, matter won out over antimatter. What defines antimatter, for instance? Could another universe possess matter of an opposite polarity? What if opposite charges repel instead of attract? What if we had to cope with more or less than 3 physical axes of spatial dimension?
The end of the Universe is so far away in the distant future, it's nearly pointless to speculate what we're going to be doing when it happens. There are so many other ways the human race can cease to exist (with much greater probability happening).
I simply gave up and started to take matters into my own hands.
I'm creating minor software package called Dolfin, to combat Phishing scams. It just some basic Python with a MySQL backend, and it works like this: I have a huge list of common first names and a huge list of common last names. When I find a Phishing page, I pull up a random last name, a random first name, and create a random 16-digit Visa Number, complete with a random expiration date... plus any other random data a Phishing form might ask for. An endless loop plugs in this data as fast as the associated machine can handle, which, on my semi-disposable 166MHz Pentium, comes out to twice a second.
What I would love is a means of doing this in a distributed effort/attack. Imagine the look on a Phisher's face when he wakes up one morning and finds out he has to sift through millions of bogus financial records just to find a single legitimate one! If interested write me at s_kevin_5_21@yahoo.com (remove all underscores).
specific pesticides (i.e., Round-Up, also made by Monsanto). That allows the farmers to use those pesticides freely, killing everything else, but leaving their crops unharmed.
Round-Up is a pesticide? Every plant I spray it on seems to die in a few days... or are you implying that Monsanto considers every crop they do not distribute as a "pest"?
Slashdot Mirror
Heavier than the IBM Model M keyboards, at 6.2 lbs.?
Heavier than the Xerox 820 keyboards, at 13 lbs.?
Heavier than the Sol-20 terminal keyboards at 27 lbs.? [okay, so it was attached to the CPU, big deal, but I owned one of these and it was a heavy mother.]
Solomon Kevin Chang
> What school of law did you attend again?
I don't know about him, but *my* law degree starts with the initials, "IANAL". It sounds pretty prestigious, because I see a lot of other slashdot posters with the same law degree as me. It also seems to inspire confidence and awe, because everytime I open my arguments with these initials, the judge chuckles quietly and my opponents shake their heads in disbelief (regardless of whether they represent the plaintiff or the defendent). I know I still lose a lot of cases, but I'm sure that is because I'm merely a recent graduate... but hey, my legal fees are still very reasonable.
Solomon Chang
> Why is the north side of the Conciergerie whited out?
For that matter, why can't I see details for March Airforce Base, Edwards Airforce Base, Fort Irwin, or all those other interesting areas? Man, Google's a gyp!
Where's a future Russian like myself going to find "Nuclear Wessels" otherwise?
Solomon Chang
Will someone please tell me how an artificial heart qualifies as either a Food or a Drug?
Or, for that matter, how we ever allowed a single organization to both regulate distribution of broadcast frequencies *and* broadcast content? (FCC)
Solomon Kevin Chang
25.5% of women deciding to have an abortion want to postpone childbearing.
21.3% of women cannot afford a baby.
14.1% of women have a relationship issue or their partner does not want a child.
12.2% of women are too young (their parents or others object to the pregnancy.)
10.8% of women feel a child will disrupt their education or career.
7.9% of women want no (more) children.
3.3% of women have an abortion due to a risk to fetal health.
2.8% of women have an abortion due to a risk to maternal health.
What about the remaining 2.1% of women who get abortions...?
Sorry, my mind does math even when I try not to. As someone who is actually cursed with Asperger's, I do a lot of math and programming tasks without consciously thinking about it, but in spite of that gift, I can't hold down a job! My condition prevents me from picking up subtle social cues, and it makes everyone I meet in corporate America nervous around me...
Maybe I *should* move to Silicon Valley.
Solomon
Excellent comment, sir, although the game was called Commend and Concur. It was the corporate office brown-nosing game, sir, but I'm sure in your vast experience and knowledge you already knew that, sir.
It was a simulation of sitting in long bored-room [sic] meetings where you lose points for falling asleep, but gain points and status for being agreeable to the lecturer's ideas, hence the name of the game.
I rank this game as follows:
Addictiveness: 10 out of 10. At my current job I play this game for 8 hours a day in lieu of my real responsibilities, only breaking long enough to eat a 30 minute lunch. Every single day.
Interface: 10 out of 10. Commend and Concur forgoes the traditional controller setup and makes use of verbal commands and body language to play the game. Certain system functions, like pausing, must be executing with undocumented verbal commands such as "I need to use the bathroom", but you cannot pause indefinitely.
Immersion: 10 out of 10. Creepily realistic graphics - I couldn't tell the difference between this and real life.
A.I.: 2 out of 10. The other humans in the meeting room are often devoid of life and anything creative to say. Programmers, please remedy this in the sequel.
Playability: 10 out of 10. You can play this game without thinking-... wait! I am playing this game without thinking! In fact, I'm typing up this Slashdot comment while I'm playing this game.
Solomon Kevin Chang
This is the first instance of one extraterrestrial satellite photographing another
Aren't all satellites extraterrestrial? Do we have any *intra*terrestrial or *inter*terrestrial satellites? I guess, if they crash to earth, but then, after that, I guess they're not Satellites any more.
Solomon
like any other frontier they are going to need a military presence to keep the "Indians" from scalping us.
Not if we outsource our labor overseas...
Solomon Kevin Chang
Because then:
1. A lot of beautiful women would owe me sex.
2. Cleveland would win the World Series.
3. My boss would make me a vice president.
4. My dotcom options would be valid and profitable.
5. Slashdot posters would be lucid and intelligible.
6. George Lucas would retire the StarWars franchise.
7. Microsoft would GPL their entire code base.
8. SCO would fully support OSS once again.
9. The RIAA/MPAA would make financial restitution to all their victims.
10. ???
11. Profit-...! Umm, where was I again?
Solomon Kevin Chang
Two organizations can have the same abbreviation trademarked too, they just can't be in the same categories
There's a happy medium somewhere... Haven't you ever watched Animal Face Off on the Discovery Channel?
Solomon Chang
> and a del.icio.us-enabled version of BBC News
Now, what's to prevent script kiddies, or heaven forbid, more knowledgeable malware writers, from coming up with new means to zombify your computer to add to the growing pool of spam gateways, ddos relays, or simply an all out porn repository?
I propose the domain, mal.icio.us for exactly such acitivities.
Solomon Chang
You mean a virgin porn site?
A lot of them are already labelled exactly that-... oh wait...
(Sorry, OT, I know, but I couldn't resist)
Solomon
If I gotta see "Attack of the Clones" again to know what the fuck is going on in "Revenge of the Sith", then count me out. It can't possibly be worth it.
I begin to get leery of movie sagas when you have to see a lot of extra sh*t just to make sense of the next installment that comes along (i.e. you had to see the Animatrix and play the video game Enter The Matrix in order to make any more sense(?) from the third Matrix movie).
I've just recently heard that Episode 3 won't make too much sense until you've watched Tartovsky's (of Dexter and Samurai Jack fame) Clone Wars and Clone Wars II. I can understand this next generation of merchandising, but Lucas, like the Wachowskis, is going to alienate a lot of fans if he has too much in-between story before the next movie. [Hint: you can't rent Clone Wars - you have to buy it]
It seems, these days, it's no longer enough to have watched the previous movie to understand what's going on the next SQL. You have to buy further into the Dark Si^h^h^h^h^h^h^h Franchise.
Solomon Kevin Chang
The next two had me shaking my head in disbelief. How could they go so wrong?
I heard an interesting story just the other day...
A guy walks into a bar, where he remembers drinking a spectacular beer fifteen years ago. Confident that the ownership of the establishment has not changed, he orders a beer. Upon taking a sip, he immediately spits it out.
"Hey Bartender!" the startled patron cries, "This beer tastes like piss!"
"That's not my problem," the bartender shrugs.
Three years later, the guy comes back to the bar and orders another beer, hoping it will be as good this time as it was eighteen years ago. The patron takes one sip and screams.
"Alright! Now that beer really tastes like piss!"
"Uh yeah," nods the bartender, "I peed in it, but it doesn't really matter now, because I have your money. I'll see you in three years."
The customer storms out. Three years later...
This is not a joke, folks: this is an analogy. George Lucas is the bartender, and any given one of us is the customer. My question to you is, are you going to buy another beer?
Solomon Kevin Chang
> Codenamed Eiger and Mönch
These are only the pre-release names. When they hit the shelves, these MS products will be named Auschwitz and Dachau.
Solomon
Crazy Headline indeed! Forget the Crack. Shuttle has a tank? Complete with turret and armor? Is it a small form factor? Will they call it the "XPC-1 Abrams"?
Solomon Chang
Funny you should mention that incident, because it presented an easy solution for one of China's biggest problems. (Sorry for getting OT here)
China had effected scrict financial penalties for having more than one child sometine last century. Unfortunately, the typical agricultural sector family unit survives by having cheap labor, in the form of extra children. However, in order not to incur legal penalties, these families often hide those extra kids. As these kids grew up, it quickly became apparent that these kids had no identity, and without identity, they wouldn't be able to find work or acquire government benefits. The PRC refused to ackowledge their existence.
Then, one day, the whole Tiananmen Square incident came about, and the PRC realized they could kill two birds with one stone. Rallying and arming as many "black children" [literal translation] as they could find on short notice, the PRC made a deal: "Kill one student protestor, and you may take possession of his identity. We will then cover the rest of your tuition and housing." After the bloodbath was over, all the "black children" were now legitimate, and since all students were accounted for, "no one" had really died. To this day, China can logistically claim there were no casualties in the incident. And what of the victim's families? They got a letter from school saying that their kids were striking off on their own and didn't want to see them again.
China's very good at understating a lot of facts. (I should know - I still have relatives there.)
Solomon Kevin Chang
> Assuming it works and is enforceable, of course.
I second that notion. Right now, I can count four unsecured wireless access points available in my domestic complex, with the manufacturer's default password still intact. Some of them have a Static IPs. All of them let me set a DMZ of my choice. What is to prevent me from telling the wireless AP that my computer should be DMZ by default? What is to prevent me from running a faux Ebay/PayPal/WaMu site from my neighbour's now-hijacked connection? Law Enforcement personnel would be hard pressed to get search warrants covering *every* resident in the complex, not to mention that the presence of vast sub-basements for our gym, racquetball court, and maintenance tunnels leave plenty of nooks and crannies to physically place the server without fear of accidental discovery.
Solomon Chang
> Do not look at record-setting solar storms with remaining good eye.
Thanks for the advice. Instead, I'll use my new-fangled fluorine-carbide-chlorate-powered telescope that throws off several million metric tons of CFCs every moment it's in operation...
Yep, looks like the sun is destroying the ozone layer, according to my observations.
Solomon Chang
From the article text:
He worries that thieves will eventually do to him what sheriffs detectives in Los Angeles say they've done to more than 700 other people -- reroute his mail, ring up credit card debts, buy a car or even commit a felony in his name.
As if the thieves themselves weren't bad enough? Now I can't trust my sheriff's department! Why, just the other day, I gave some officer all my financial data over his website. Why would they do a thing like this? </sarcasm>
Solomon Chang
As those of your who live in beachfront houses already know, salt tends to destroy lots of things around the house. My office was in a Malibu beach house right up against the ocean, and all machines we got were completely rusted over within the year. Maybe manufacturers don't think about corrosive elements in the air...
Solomon Chang
Do you know how many times things like this have required me to use some browser other than Lynx or Links? You're blatantly discriminating against us terminal users. Then we have to find someone running a GUI envoronment. Oh! The insensitivity!
Solomon Chang
I consider the term Parallel Universe to be rather misleading, as it may be possible that there are other universes out there, but are just so far away from our own as to be undetectable.
Also, who's to say that the laws of Physics to which we are accustomed are universal (no pun intendeded)? I've met theorists who suspect that our laws of Physics are a by-product of the formation of our own universe, and the reason we don't see too many others is that they often form with a set of physical rules that are not stable.
Even if we were to find another universe with a stable set of rules, even a few changes in the certain laws of Physics would destroy our beings the moment we arrived.
In our Big Bang, matter won out over antimatter. What defines antimatter, for instance? Could another universe possess matter of an opposite polarity? What if opposite charges repel instead of attract? What if we had to cope with more or less than 3 physical axes of spatial dimension?
The end of the Universe is so far away in the distant future, it's nearly pointless to speculate what we're going to be doing when it happens. There are so many other ways the human race can cease to exist (with much greater probability happening).
Solomon
I simply gave up and started to take matters into my own hands.
I'm creating minor software package called Dolfin, to combat Phishing scams. It just some basic Python with a MySQL backend, and it works like this: I have a huge list of common first names and a huge list of common last names. When I find a Phishing page, I pull up a random last name, a random first name, and create a random 16-digit Visa Number, complete with a random expiration date... plus any other random data a Phishing form might ask for. An endless loop plugs in this data as fast as the associated machine can handle, which, on my semi-disposable 166MHz Pentium, comes out to twice a second.
What I would love is a means of doing this in a distributed effort/attack. Imagine the look on a Phisher's face when he wakes up one morning and finds out he has to sift through millions of bogus financial records just to find a single legitimate one! If interested write me at s_kevin_5_21@yahoo.com (remove all underscores).
Solomon Kevin Chang
specific pesticides (i.e., Round-Up, also made by Monsanto). That allows the farmers to use those pesticides freely, killing everything else, but leaving their crops unharmed.
Round-Up is a pesticide? Every plant I spray it on seems to die in a few days... or are you implying that Monsanto considers every crop they do not distribute as a "pest"?
Solomon Chang