I specialised in playing the Convoy assault map online against humans. No others maps, just that one. By specialising, stats-wise, typically I was in the top 200-400 assault players worldwide, rating a reasonably respectable 130; and I never, ever used an aimbot. One time I managed to get to 20th place in the weekly list, for a few hours anyway. Guess nobody *really* good played that day.
At the end of the Convoy level there's the button on the final crawler which has the missile, whilst the other team try to stop you; typically they camp out.
Anyway, I used to make a career of trying to finish the level; after battling my way to the crawler, often killing one or two on the way, I found that by jumping down the side of the crawler with the rocket launcher already loading I could suddenly appear and take out 1-2 of the enemy without them having much chance at all to get me.
Then I would fire the rocket launcher to where the enemy usually stood, often taking out another 1-2, and then with a bit of mad jumping, skipping and dodging with a bit of luck another 2 would fall to the rocket launcher splash; or flak cannon. Obviously it helps if they had been softened up before I got there, but it didn't always matter.
I would then rush over to the button and crouch behind a shield while the enemy respawn, without much hope of getting to me in time, whilst 6 dead bodies lay around the crawler. Sometimes a less cluefull defender would jump down into the crawler and shoot at me with something that couldn't penetrate the shield. That usually made it even funnier, since it probably meant they were using the wrong gun.
I felt like a game God when it worked. There's something about almost single-handedly taking out >6 campers/defenders in one spawn to make one feel good about a game.:-)
Presumably they had to change about two lines in the program; where it had the mass of the vehicle and the thrust of the lunar lander engine, and recompile/reassemble. Then they ran the program. Can't have been much more to it than that, if they got the answer in 2-3 hours...
If we made stuff that never failed, how would we ever know we'd done it? We only learn that we haven't successfuly made things that never fail when things fail, and when things fail then we need the best evidence as to how they fail so we can stop it happening again.
They are, but the ISPs can correlate spam against addresses and can unilaterally block it- as far as ISPs are concerned, spam costs them money; the spammers aren't paying them to carry spam.
It's going to be much, much harder for the spammers to get legitimate addresses, even if they buy/own domains; ISPs can be blocking new domains within minutes.
SMTP is working exactly as designed--but the design is broken.
I would agree with this, to an extent. If I can finger anything that is obviously broken in SMTP it is that it lacks verification of the sender domain (sender).
That makes it way too easy to fake out who sent the email in the first place, hence phishing and faked email headers. It also makes it impossible to use reputation as a spam fighting tool- the spam currently appears to be coming from all over the place, whereas in reality only a tiny, tiny fraction of the internet is involved; and they need to be muzzled.
You can't fix a fundamentally economic problem with any number of technical tools. It's like adding more epicycles to the earth-centered "perfect spheres" models of the universe.
The 'nice' thing about computers is that they can handle thousands of epicycles. Merely throwing computers at something often works fine.
In other words, I don't agree, and hold up naive Bayesian filtering as a pretty good temporary fix until we can finally nail the b******s inflicting this on us. Spam has no chance really, if the techies, and the ISPs, can finally get their act together on this. I see the light at the end of the tunnel. The war can be won.
No, I don't think you can patent the chemical, only the use of the chemical, and you have to say what exactly you want to use it for. So it depends on how Alice wrote the claim. If Alice claimed shining shoes then she has prior art.
In other words, Bob can indeed patent it, provided he doesn't cover what she invented.
But you are right, patents don't have to be exclusive. For example the steam engine in general was patented, based on vacuum. But Watt came along with a much more powerful design double acting piston. His patent was novel, so was allowed as a patent, but was covered by the earlier patent; so he could not use it until the earlier patent expired.
And that's the problem, there's no hard and fast line between novel and not novel. Ultimately it's for the court to decide what is and isn't novel.
The Futron Report seems to suggest that money can be made that way, the Russians have already sent up 2 orbital tourists and made money doing so. Basically most of the astronauts agree that microgravity is fun. Even the vomit comet is a blast.
There's a potential route from suborbital all the way to space hotels to lunar trips; that is mostly funding driven (i.e. suborbital profit is likely to lead to increased orbital flights, the technology is not really directly applicable, although it's quite closely related.)
Consider a Dyson vacuum cleaner- it's a cyclone dust extractor turned into a vacuum cleaner.
But, presumably cyclonic dust extraction is patented, and in this case it's an expired patent.
Now, that original patent presumably covers all uses of cyclonic dust extractors; which implicitly covers Dyson's specific use. But that patent, which is prior art, has expired; so if it does cover Dysons vacuum cleaner, then Dyson's patent isn't valid. You can't repatent what somebody else has patented, even if it has expired.
However, you can argue that using a cyclonic dust extractor in a portable use wasn't thought of by the applicant, so it is new.
But that's a judgement call. When does a general claim fail to cover a specific usage?
"That's for the court to decide."
Hmm. I don't agree with that. Being put in prison should be punishment enough, without the HIV risk.
Still, it's interesting and amusing to wonder whether they'll have to keep him in solitary to keep him away from the nonces on account of the violence they'd do to him...:-)
I think that most of the in-house software will not be open-sourced. First of all, there's always the chance that the programs would benefit the competition.
Yes, but consider it the other way around, because your company had to write it, it costs your company to write and maintain it. So what you are actually saying is that it is better for companies to spend more writing and maintaining multiple toolsets than to get together and write one between them.
Remember that since they are the competition, they will generally need the same tools.
Yeah, you wouldn't want to do this with your core competencies; I don't see companies open sourcing their cash cows. Peripheral stuff, timesheets and other things, maybe. Isn't Linux peripheral in most cases?
Given the trivial ease of purchasing SenderID keys from Microsoft and their lack of association with an actual From: header line, and the ease of breaking into many thousands of zombied Windows machines worldwide and sending spam from them now,
it's a trivial matter to simply steal SenderID keys from small corporate Windows servers.
I don't agree with this. The senderId keys wouldn't be on most machines, only the email servers, which presumably would be better protected, and atleast in principle they can be repudiated in real time if a particular key owner starts spamming, or if a spammer makes it look like that. So spammers would soon run out of useable senderIds.
So, stealing serverIds doesn't help as much as you seem to think it does. serverIds aren't like from or Mail FROM addresses, there's a finite number, and they can be managed. That matters.
Also, serverId implementation implies that all the mail from a domain has to go through a mail server, hence prefiltering of the mail for spam can be performed at the same time (as in when a server gets dodgy looking email, the server goes- yep, sent it, but sticks it in a file for the admin to authorise/ditch). Prefiltering of email before it goes onto the internet has got to be a good idea (my ISP blocks email, unless it routes through their servers already, presumably for these kinds of reasons).
Mail with a particular serverId can be correlated against spam; and atleast nobody else has to accept mail from a serverId with a high spam ratio.
Open Source servers don't implement crypto-signed email headers, so spammers continue to use those servers to send spam.
The IETF standard for crypto-signed email headers was substantially derailed by Microsoft not wanting to 'play nicely' with the extremely large proportion of the email servers out there that run on open source.
So, Microsoft imposed licensing requirements that the open source community couldn't meet. Yeah, to that extent, I blame Microsoft. That's not an Open Source failure, it's a deliberate licensing decision by Microsoft to write the license that way; even after it was clear what the effect would be- ultimately to help spammers.
Actually, Microsoft tied up the technology to implement cryptographically signed email headers in patents, so that others; noteably open source email servers, couldn't use it.
That means that spammers have continued to be able to fake the headers out, and it makes it harder to filter off the spam (particularly on the send side of email- in other words, stopping spam enter the internet in the first place).
So, Microsoft have taken the decision to fund lawyers, rather than fund technology that is likely to massively reduce spam; Microsoft have sided with a bunch of lawyers.
"Polonsky reportedly is in negotiations to fly at a bargain price of $8 million, reportedly because the seat opened up on short notice last month when Russian officials rejected American businessman Gregory Olsen on medical grounds."
Incidentally, 'tourists' without a pulse are a perfectly legitimate business, there's been some launches for the space burial business.
Yeah, but hundreds or even thousands of people work on the linux kernel, and it's mostly just a rewrite of Unix.
How many work on Hurd? A dozen?
And they're doing something that nobody has done before, that nearly always takes longer.
And you can reasonably argue that that kind of debugging will get easier as more people do it; the tools to help will get improved and techniques will be developed to the point where it's not so bad. But I do agree that a fully multitasking system is harder, Linux tends to run non preemptible which is easier to write.
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Flames! 3 inches high! Firebrigade! And drama!
That was a suborbital launch. This is an orbital launch; so they'll actually be able to measure how well it works in practice.
"Eventually when Longhorn ships version 3, it may actually work, mostly; but please don't try to turn off auto-updates, because you can't anyway."
So yeah, don't buy anything else until then, cuz that wouldn't make sense!
At the end of the Convoy level there's the button on the final crawler which has the missile, whilst the other team try to stop you; typically they camp out.
Anyway, I used to make a career of trying to finish the level; after battling my way to the crawler, often killing one or two on the way, I found that by jumping down the side of the crawler with the rocket launcher already loading I could suddenly appear and take out 1-2 of the enemy without them having much chance at all to get me.
Then I would fire the rocket launcher to where the enemy usually stood, often taking out another 1-2, and then with a bit of mad jumping, skipping and dodging with a bit of luck another 2 would fall to the rocket launcher splash; or flak cannon. Obviously it helps if they had been softened up before I got there, but it didn't always matter.
I would then rush over to the button and crouch behind a shield while the enemy respawn, without much hope of getting to me in time, whilst 6 dead bodies lay around the crawler. Sometimes a less cluefull defender would jump down into the crawler and shoot at me with something that couldn't penetrate the shield. That usually made it even funnier, since it probably meant they were using the wrong gun.
I felt like a game God when it worked. There's something about almost single-handedly taking out >6 campers/defenders in one spawn to make one feel good about a game. :-)
Presumably they had to change about two lines in the program; where it had the mass of the vehicle and the thrust of the lunar lander engine, and recompile/reassemble. Then they ran the program. Can't have been much more to it than that, if they got the answer in 2-3 hours...
If we made stuff that never failed, how would we ever know we'd done it? We only learn that we haven't successfuly made things that never fail when things fail, and when things fail then we need the best evidence as to how they fail so we can stop it happening again.
Still, it could be worse, you could be older than Dr. Who the character. :-)
Get a sense of humour implant?
Seriously, your comics aren't funny.
In the same day. And they didn't rerun the generator, so it was a dupe.
Even more lucky that they didn't have a wardrobe malfunction at the same time; it would have doubled their fine.
It's going to be much, much harder for the spammers to get legitimate addresses, even if they buy/own domains; ISPs can be blocking new domains within minutes.
I would agree with this, to an extent. If I can finger anything that is obviously broken in SMTP it is that it lacks verification of the sender domain (sender).
That makes it way too easy to fake out who sent the email in the first place, hence phishing and faked email headers. It also makes it impossible to use reputation as a spam fighting tool- the spam currently appears to be coming from all over the place, whereas in reality only a tiny, tiny fraction of the internet is involved; and they need to be muzzled.
You can't fix a fundamentally economic problem with any number of technical tools. It's like adding more epicycles to the earth-centered "perfect spheres" models of the universe.
The 'nice' thing about computers is that they can handle thousands of epicycles. Merely throwing computers at something often works fine.
In other words, I don't agree, and hold up naive Bayesian filtering as a pretty good temporary fix until we can finally nail the b******s inflicting this on us. Spam has no chance really, if the techies, and the ISPs, can finally get their act together on this. I see the light at the end of the tunnel. The war can be won.
In other words, Bob can indeed patent it, provided he doesn't cover what she invented.
But you are right, patents don't have to be exclusive. For example the steam engine in general was patented, based on vacuum. But Watt came along with a much more powerful design double acting piston. His patent was novel, so was allowed as a patent, but was covered by the earlier patent; so he could not use it until the earlier patent expired.
And that's the problem, there's no hard and fast line between novel and not novel. Ultimately it's for the court to decide what is and isn't novel.
There's a potential route from suborbital all the way to space hotels to lunar trips; that is mostly funding driven (i.e. suborbital profit is likely to lead to increased orbital flights, the technology is not really directly applicable, although it's quite closely related.)
Yeah, I polled a few of your friends and they all agree, you are strange; what with using the royal 'we' all the time. :-)
Consider a Dyson vacuum cleaner- it's a cyclone dust extractor turned into a vacuum cleaner.
But, presumably cyclonic dust extraction is patented, and in this case it's an expired patent.
Now, that original patent presumably covers all uses of cyclonic dust extractors; which implicitly covers Dyson's specific use. But that patent, which is prior art, has expired; so if it does cover Dysons vacuum cleaner, then Dyson's patent isn't valid. You can't repatent what somebody else has patented, even if it has expired.
However, you can argue that using a cyclonic dust extractor in a portable use wasn't thought of by the applicant, so it is new.
But that's a judgement call. When does a general claim fail to cover a specific usage? "That's for the court to decide."
YMMV. IANAL.
None at all. That's the way it currently works. Only ICANN has the capability :-)
I rather expect so, in both cases.
Hmm. I don't agree with that. Being put in prison should be punishment enough, without the HIV risk.
Still, it's interesting and amusing to wonder whether they'll have to keep him in solitary to keep him away from the nonces on account of the violence they'd do to him... :-)
Yes, but consider it the other way around, because your company had to write it, it costs your company to write and maintain it. So what you are actually saying is that it is better for companies to spend more writing and maintaining multiple toolsets than to get together and write one between them.
Remember that since they are the competition, they will generally need the same tools.
Yeah, you wouldn't want to do this with your core competencies; I don't see companies open sourcing their cash cows. Peripheral stuff, timesheets and other things, maybe. Isn't Linux peripheral in most cases?
I don't agree with this. The senderId keys wouldn't be on most machines, only the email servers, which presumably would be better protected, and atleast in principle they can be repudiated in real time if a particular key owner starts spamming, or if a spammer makes it look like that. So spammers would soon run out of useable senderIds.
So, stealing serverIds doesn't help as much as you seem to think it does. serverIds aren't like from or Mail FROM addresses, there's a finite number, and they can be managed. That matters.
Also, serverId implementation implies that all the mail from a domain has to go through a mail server, hence prefiltering of the mail for spam can be performed at the same time (as in when a server gets dodgy looking email, the server goes- yep, sent it, but sticks it in a file for the admin to authorise/ditch). Prefiltering of email before it goes onto the internet has got to be a good idea (my ISP blocks email, unless it routes through their servers already, presumably for these kinds of reasons).
Mail with a particular serverId can be correlated against spam; and atleast nobody else has to accept mail from a serverId with a high spam ratio.
The IETF standard for crypto-signed email headers was substantially derailed by Microsoft not wanting to 'play nicely' with the extremely large proportion of the email servers out there that run on open source.
So, Microsoft imposed licensing requirements that the open source community couldn't meet. Yeah, to that extent, I blame Microsoft. That's not an Open Source failure, it's a deliberate licensing decision by Microsoft to write the license that way; even after it was clear what the effect would be- ultimately to help spammers.
That means that spammers have continued to be able to fake the headers out, and it makes it harder to filter off the spam (particularly on the send side of email- in other words, stopping spam enter the internet in the first place).
So, Microsoft have taken the decision to fund lawyers, rather than fund technology that is likely to massively reduce spam; Microsoft have sided with a bunch of lawyers.
I know you were probably joking, but:
http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/2475
"Polonsky reportedly is in negotiations to fly at a bargain price of $8 million, reportedly because the seat opened up on short notice last month when Russian officials rejected American businessman Gregory Olsen on medical grounds."
Incidentally, 'tourists' without a pulse are a perfectly legitimate business, there's been some launches for the space burial business.
How many work on Hurd? A dozen?
And they're doing something that nobody has done before, that nearly always takes longer.
And you can reasonably argue that that kind of debugging will get easier as more people do it; the tools to help will get improved and techniques will be developed to the point where it's not so bad. But I do agree that a fully multitasking system is harder, Linux tends to run non preemptible which is easier to write.