I don't see how he could do that and still give humans free will?
That is an oxymoron, actually. The bible claims god is omnipotent; he knows the past, the now, and the future, forever, every single small detail. Now, that means that when he created humans he already knew what was going to happen to them, including eating the forbidden fruit and all that, yet he still created them. The thing is, if every single little thing we as a mankind do from the beginning of time to the end of it is already known then "free will" is simply an illusion and we are in fact just all following a pre-defined path. So, basically, either there is no "free will", or god is in fact not omnipotent; those two things can't coexist.
But what if god was omnipotent and free will didn't exist, merely an illusion of such? Well, it would mean god knew from the beginning all the sins and atrocities we will commit and created us anyway, we can't change the fact that we will commit those things and as such when we were created god knew already whether we are going to hell or heaven, and basically whatever the FUCK you do to yourself, your neighbours, your neighbour's dog, your children or anyone else you're just doing as god had already planned for you to do and you're just doing his will. A scary thought, eh.
I also thought this to be true. Resetting the phone (which doesn't reset the hardware id numbers) should restore from the cloud, no?
It's actually quite counter-intuitive to restore all settings from the cloud after doing a factory reset: in most cases people do factory reset exactly because there is something wrong with the settings and no other way of resetting them. If it just restored those settings after the reset it would all have been for nothing.
Though, I agree that it should be stated more clearly what actually gets stored in the cloud and what doesn't.
I should also point out that most high profile games don't meet my criteria for the higher price tag either. Of the games I've bought this year, I can only think of two that were worth paying sixty at launch. For everything else, I've waited until the price dropped, or it went on sale. I don't think that the average gamer decides what a fair price ought to be based on what the average price is; we balance how many hours of entertainment we're going to get out of a game, and then decide what we think of as a good price for those hours. I've certainly felt ripped off in the past, buying a game at launch only to find it's only good for a few hours of play, hence my current purchasing habits.
I quite have to agree with you. I personally wait for games to be on sale in Steam, then I check Gamespot for reviews of them before I decide whether it looks like it's worth the money or not. If it's short, really buggy, or really shallow I just simply won't buy it, no matter how cheap it is. On the other hand I don't buy games at launch anyways, I always wait for the price to come down to a spot where I feel it's worth it. Like for example I got Batman: Arkham Asylum for 17 euros on Steam when it was on sale; it was a damn good game and one of my favorites now, but even then I still wouldn't have paid much more for it. For me around 20 euros is the max I am willing to pay for a game, no matter what the average is.
You quite obviously don't run remote desktops over *DSL link; if you did you'd know it's really laggy if you just try to go with standard X11 port forwarding over SSH.
Besides, you're overlooking a LOT things, like for example mobile networks are quite popular nowadays. If you're on a mobile network any speed increases you can get are a plus. Oh, and what about mobile devices themselves? There's plenty of reasonable things one might want to/need to do on their real desktop computer while on the road, and then a remote desktop is the only solution.
maybe revising the X windows protocol so it doesn't suck so hard it has its own event horizon?
That would be a start. The X protocol is really chatty and there's lots of unneeded roundtrips. NX does filter away what isn't needed and compresses the rest into larger packets that then get sent all at once instead of small bits all the time. So, perhaps X.org should start doing the same.
But even that simply isn't enough. X11 forwarding would still be immensely slow compared to what NX does as NX for example keeps a cache of pixmaps on both server and client side, thus rendering the need for those pixmaps to be transmitted over the network all the time obsolete. Not to mention all the other small tricks it does that all add up.
I don't know, but I feel that simply revising X11 forwarding will not cut it. Besides, NX client works on other platforms too, not just Linux/Unix. I am atleast not aware of any good way of doing X11 forwarding to a Windows client.
Ssh with compression simply doesn't even nearly compare to NX and its speed. NX does in fact run over ssh and uses compression, but the NX server also does lots of other tricks on its end, like caching of tiles, selectively updating only certain regions of the screen and so on. It all adds up and once you've tried NX you'll notice the difference. I've been using NX for several years now and I have not found anything remotely as capable or as fast as it.
Oh, and then there's the fact that NX client is useable on Windows whereas X11 forwarding to a Windows client would require quite a lot of hacking around.
I had once a motherboard that was sold in pro and cheap versions. There was physically no difference as both had all the same chips and connectors, the cheap one just had only stereo sound and Serial-ATA disabled. Just smudge a disconnected bridge with a pencil and you got the pro version. I never understood how it was cost-efficient for them to do it that way, but I didn't complain.
Don't you see man! It's like slavery! thinking you can "own" an animal. We can't "own" our animal equals! keeping a pet is so like exactly the same as slavery!
That's what they seem to claim, indeed. However, in slavery the slaver puts the slaves to work for him or her to produce something of value, but pets do not need to work, they do not produce anything, they just exist. Even when some people take their dogs out to hunting or something the pet actually most often enjoys it, it's not forced to it, it's good for it, and again is not slavery in the least bit.
Of course there are some really horrible owners, but I atleast am not aware of any single one. A regular person usually takes good care of their pet or pets and provide for them in all the ways they might need. That is VERY different from what real slavery is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery
The problem is that PETA don't think *any* animals should be domesticated, so mostly they don't even bother to try to rehome animals.
That's one thing I've never understood. What exactly is wrong with an animal having a caring owner, someone to trust to, a warm home, no need to be afraid of predators, and not having to get cold and sometimes go days without food? I myself have two cats and I would say they are MUCH better off here with me than out there in the Finnish winter. Hell, you don't need to be an expert or anything to see that they actually like their life here. Even if I open the door and let them out they come back after 3 minutes, they just simply don't want to go there.
So, I just simply do not understand PETA and their ideals.
If they couldn't enforce their patents, someone could start selling (or giving away) copies of Microsoft products, only having to rebrand them to avoid trademark issues.
Not possible. Microsoft still owns copyright to their products and code even if patents were done with so a person selling or giving away copies would still be in breach of copyright law and equally liable for damages. Rebranding Microsoft's copyrighted products would not change a thing.
Knock offs could be exact replicas of Microsoft software.
Yes, and your point is? The thing is, that's how it should be. You should be allowed to create exact replicas if you so desired. You'd still have to do all the code yourself so someone making a replica of e.g. MS Office would mean they'd have to write millions and millions of lines of code and documentation. If they used existing code they'd possibly again be in breach of copyright laws and be liable for damages.
People could steal everything Microsoft (or any other company) develops.
Incorrect again. You are completely mixing copyright laws and patent laws.
Look, copyright law is about distribution of copyrighted works: if you try to distribute code, application, book, ie. "work" you do so under copyright laws and if you are not the owner of copyright to the "work" in question you either have to obtain permission from the owner or else you'll be distributing it illegally.
Patents are an entirely different beast: someone can for example patent a way of identifying objects in a digital image. Even if you write all the code yourself and own all the copyrights in your software you'll still be in breach of patent laws if you also code a way of identifying objects in a digital image.
Thus patents really only serve to hinder software development and not actually have anything to do with sales -- ie. distribution -- of the software.
So it could make sense to hold Microsoft responsible for an OS with a horrible security record
I don't know whether to agree or disagree with you o_O Yeah, this is off-topic, but one day I decided to install Live Messenger. Installation went fine, then I logged in.. and POOF, almost instantly I got "Security Tool" ( http://www.2-spyware.com/remove-security-tool.html ) on my PC. Needless to say Messenger didn't live long on my PC.
The thing is, if it was a Microsoft-made car even a small thing like adding a speaker could render the car a danger both to its operator and anyone else on the road. Sure, you could tune it up and pimp it like crazy, but sooner or later it'd go on a rampage while you're sleeping..
It would be more like the government requiring car manufacturers to do something about car theft, since an 'infected computer' is essentially out of the user's control.
No, it's not. It's out of control only when the user doesn't know about the virus, but once they know about it they have multiple ways of fixing the situation and then they are indeed fully in control. In a car theft being aware of your car being stolen doesn't change the situation, you're still not in control of it.
IMHO the original car analogy is close enough. Of course there's holes in it, but that's why it's an analogy. Its only purpose is to lay out the situation to laymen in a really basic way so that they mostly understand it. There is no such thing as a perfect analogy.
I had to literally go to Wikipedia and find out what Black Friday is. Apparently it's a "go and buy and buy and buy all kinds of things, whether you need it or not" - day. No wonder the average US citizen weighs more than a truck. And yes, they indeed do seem to behave like cattle: you tell them something and they believe it, without anyone bothering to even think about it.
(There is no Black Friday or anything similar here so I obviously had never even heard of it before)
It sure looks great, I especially loved how the shadows worked realistically when interacting with water.
As for performance: I ran the demo in benchmark mode in Windows 7 using both DX10 and OpenGL, and in Ubuntu 10.10 using OpenGL, and I got the same numbers. Of course since the demo is rather limited it doesn't reflect the full picture of how a game would run, but what it does do is show that Linux is perfectly capable of running a good-looking, modern graphics demo just as well as Win7 at the same speed. That should already be enough to debunk OP's claim: if it was nothing more than a simple framebuffer under Linux it wouldn't achieve equal performance as compared to Win7.
I see plenty of free 3D engines around, yes, but most of them are rather inadequate for modern games. And like it or not, there's still quite plenty of gaming companies who prefer closed-source engines.
I'm just saying that I personally do not care if the game is closed or not, or if parts of it are, as long as it looks good, has great gameplay, and is available for Linux. God knows we lack good games.
When did bricklayer become something you are and something you do?
You don't do "bricklayer", you lay bricks, or perhaps you do a layer of bricks. His point was that you aren't "reverse engineer"; "reverse engineer" is a process someone does, but the person doing it isn't even necessarily an engineer at all.
Then why hasn't someone gotten to it and embedded a firmware rootkit like this before?
How do you know someone hasn't done it already? The whole point of rootkits is that they're undetected for as long as possible. And firmware rootkits are most likely employed by people who really know what they're doing and thus it's not likely the rootkits are found.
Firmware based rootkits aren't anything new, there has been lots of them already before. Like for example, last year there was several demonstrations of someone writing firmware rootkit for certain Apple-branded keyboards; there simply was enough space in the ROM for a complete keylogger and a bit of heuristics there and several kilobytes of space where to store the log. And network card base rootkits? I remember having read about them and seeing a demonstration already 5-6 years ago.
The thing is, as long as the user has actual physical access to the computer in question he or she can do lots of different kinds of small modifications, and for example the keyboard rootkit is easiest to do, doesn't require admin rights, and is undetectable unless you verify the actual firmware.
Indeed, Homeworld is one of the most epic RTS games I've ever played. It looked great, and it's still not all that ugly, but the atmosphere.. oh damn, it really did have that! Too bad that HomeworldSDL hasn't been active for 3 years now :
I really miss Little Big Adventure. It wasn't about killing everything as fast as possible, it was about a journey through a great story, great atmosphere, and logic. With updated graphics but everything else kept intact exactly as it was, including the gameplay, it could still stand to gather quite a few players. LBA2 wasn't as good, but it too was still worth playing and could do with updated graphics, but it'd probably also benefit from slightly improving the gameplay.
Anyone else who misses LBA? Or is there some other game you enjoyed back then and which wasn't about killing everything in sight?
Yes, the reason people don't have old PCs is because they break down, not because newer and better technology comes out.
If the PC was in daily use for 20 years.. yes, it would most likely break. I mean, sure, a PC from 20 years ago might still be working fine, but it hasn't been in use for the last 20 years. It's most likely been in heavy use the first 5 years and then 15 years in the closet. From what I've seen so far when repairing computers and tasked with this or that, it's almost always storage media that goes first if it has any moving parts in it, then goes the motherboard or PSU.
Well, I can't see Valve in as negative light as you try to portray them in. No, I haven't played any Valve games in ages, but Steam itself is damn near perfect: I don't need to find installation media, I don't need to find patches, I don't need to worry about keeping my games functional.. And I personally love how they have the midweek and weekend sales. I just recently bought Batman: Arkham Asylum for 17 euro and I really have to say it was worth every penny! But try and buy that game somewhere else and you'll not get it for only 17€. Or maybe a used copy.
I am just saying that I have no idea about Valve games, but they _are_ doing atleast something really well and actually providing an excellent service to gamers.
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I don't see how he could do that and still give humans free will?
That is an oxymoron, actually. The bible claims god is omnipotent; he knows the past, the now, and the future, forever, every single small detail. Now, that means that when he created humans he already knew what was going to happen to them, including eating the forbidden fruit and all that, yet he still created them. The thing is, if every single little thing we as a mankind do from the beginning of time to the end of it is already known then "free will" is simply an illusion and we are in fact just all following a pre-defined path. So, basically, either there is no "free will", or god is in fact not omnipotent; those two things can't coexist.
But what if god was omnipotent and free will didn't exist, merely an illusion of such? Well, it would mean god knew from the beginning all the sins and atrocities we will commit and created us anyway, we can't change the fact that we will commit those things and as such when we were created god knew already whether we are going to hell or heaven, and basically whatever the FUCK you do to yourself, your neighbours, your neighbour's dog, your children or anyone else you're just doing as god had already planned for you to do and you're just doing his will. A scary thought, eh.
I also thought this to be true. Resetting the phone (which doesn't reset the hardware id numbers) should restore from the cloud, no?
It's actually quite counter-intuitive to restore all settings from the cloud after doing a factory reset: in most cases people do factory reset exactly because there is something wrong with the settings and no other way of resetting them. If it just restored those settings after the reset it would all have been for nothing.
Though, I agree that it should be stated more clearly what actually gets stored in the cloud and what doesn't.
I should also point out that most high profile games don't meet my criteria for the higher price tag either. Of the games I've bought this year, I can only think of two that were worth paying sixty at launch. For everything else, I've waited until the price dropped, or it went on sale. I don't think that the average gamer decides what a fair price ought to be based on what the average price is; we balance how many hours of entertainment we're going to get out of a game, and then decide what we think of as a good price for those hours. I've certainly felt ripped off in the past, buying a game at launch only to find it's only good for a few hours of play, hence my current purchasing habits.
I quite have to agree with you. I personally wait for games to be on sale in Steam, then I check Gamespot for reviews of them before I decide whether it looks like it's worth the money or not. If it's short, really buggy, or really shallow I just simply won't buy it, no matter how cheap it is. On the other hand I don't buy games at launch anyways, I always wait for the price to come down to a spot where I feel it's worth it. Like for example I got Batman: Arkham Asylum for 17 euros on Steam when it was on sale; it was a damn good game and one of my favorites now, but even then I still wouldn't have paid much more for it. For me around 20 euros is the max I am willing to pay for a game, no matter what the average is.
You quite obviously don't run remote desktops over *DSL link; if you did you'd know it's really laggy if you just try to go with standard X11 port forwarding over SSH.
Besides, you're overlooking a LOT things, like for example mobile networks are quite popular nowadays. If you're on a mobile network any speed increases you can get are a plus. Oh, and what about mobile devices themselves? There's plenty of reasonable things one might want to/need to do on their real desktop computer while on the road, and then a remote desktop is the only solution.
maybe revising the X windows protocol so it doesn't suck so hard it has its own event horizon?
That would be a start. The X protocol is really chatty and there's lots of unneeded roundtrips. NX does filter away what isn't needed and compresses the rest into larger packets that then get sent all at once instead of small bits all the time. So, perhaps X.org should start doing the same.
But even that simply isn't enough. X11 forwarding would still be immensely slow compared to what NX does as NX for example keeps a cache of pixmaps on both server and client side, thus rendering the need for those pixmaps to be transmitted over the network all the time obsolete. Not to mention all the other small tricks it does that all add up.
I don't know, but I feel that simply revising X11 forwarding will not cut it. Besides, NX client works on other platforms too, not just Linux/Unix. I am atleast not aware of any good way of doing X11 forwarding to a Windows client.
Ssh with compression simply doesn't even nearly compare to NX and its speed. NX does in fact run over ssh and uses compression, but the NX server also does lots of other tricks on its end, like caching of tiles, selectively updating only certain regions of the screen and so on. It all adds up and once you've tried NX you'll notice the difference. I've been using NX for several years now and I have not found anything remotely as capable or as fast as it.
Oh, and then there's the fact that NX client is useable on Windows whereas X11 forwarding to a Windows client would require quite a lot of hacking around.
I had once a motherboard that was sold in pro and cheap versions. There was physically no difference as both had all the same chips and connectors, the cheap one just had only stereo sound and Serial-ATA disabled. Just smudge a disconnected bridge with a pencil and you got the pro version. I never understood how it was cost-efficient for them to do it that way, but I didn't complain.
Don't you see man! It's like slavery! thinking you can "own" an animal.
We can't "own" our animal equals!
keeping a pet is so like exactly the same as slavery!
That's what they seem to claim, indeed. However, in slavery the slaver puts the slaves to work for him or her to produce something of value, but pets do not need to work, they do not produce anything, they just exist. Even when some people take their dogs out to hunting or something the pet actually most often enjoys it, it's not forced to it, it's good for it, and again is not slavery in the least bit.
Of course there are some really horrible owners, but I atleast am not aware of any single one. A regular person usually takes good care of their pet or pets and provide for them in all the ways they might need. That is VERY different from what real slavery is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery
Until they take over and make us their pets no...no sympathy from me.
In essence, you're saying that if aliens come here and make us their pets then we don't need rights either and they can do with us as they please.
That's a really limited way of seeing things.
The problem is that PETA don't think *any* animals should be domesticated, so mostly they don't even bother to try to rehome animals.
That's one thing I've never understood. What exactly is wrong with an animal having a caring owner, someone to trust to, a warm home, no need to be afraid of predators, and not having to get cold and sometimes go days without food? I myself have two cats and I would say they are MUCH better off here with me than out there in the Finnish winter. Hell, you don't need to be an expert or anything to see that they actually like their life here. Even if I open the door and let them out they come back after 3 minutes, they just simply don't want to go there.
So, I just simply do not understand PETA and their ideals.
If they couldn't enforce their patents, someone could start selling (or giving away) copies of Microsoft products, only having to rebrand them to avoid trademark issues.
Not possible. Microsoft still owns copyright to their products and code even if patents were done with so a person selling or giving away copies would still be in breach of copyright law and equally liable for damages. Rebranding Microsoft's copyrighted products would not change a thing.
Knock offs could be exact replicas of Microsoft software.
Yes, and your point is? The thing is, that's how it should be. You should be allowed to create exact replicas if you so desired. You'd still have to do all the code yourself so someone making a replica of e.g. MS Office would mean they'd have to write millions and millions of lines of code and documentation. If they used existing code they'd possibly again be in breach of copyright laws and be liable for damages.
People could steal everything Microsoft (or any other company) develops.
Incorrect again. You are completely mixing copyright laws and patent laws.
Look, copyright law is about distribution of copyrighted works: if you try to distribute code, application, book, ie. "work" you do so under copyright laws and if you are not the owner of copyright to the "work" in question you either have to obtain permission from the owner or else you'll be distributing it illegally.
Patents are an entirely different beast: someone can for example patent a way of identifying objects in a digital image. Even if you write all the code yourself and own all the copyrights in your software you'll still be in breach of patent laws if you also code a way of identifying objects in a digital image.
Thus patents really only serve to hinder software development and not actually have anything to do with sales -- ie. distribution -- of the software.
So it could make sense to hold Microsoft responsible for an OS with a horrible security record
I don't know whether to agree or disagree with you o_O Yeah, this is off-topic, but one day I decided to install Live Messenger. Installation went fine, then I logged in.. and POOF, almost instantly I got "Security Tool" ( http://www.2-spyware.com/remove-security-tool.html ) on my PC. Needless to say Messenger didn't live long on my PC.
The thing is, if it was a Microsoft-made car even a small thing like adding a speaker could render the car a danger both to its operator and anyone else on the road. Sure, you could tune it up and pimp it like crazy, but sooner or later it'd go on a rampage while you're sleeping..
It would be more like the government requiring car manufacturers to do something about car theft, since an 'infected computer' is essentially out of the user's control.
No, it's not. It's out of control only when the user doesn't know about the virus, but once they know about it they have multiple ways of fixing the situation and then they are indeed fully in control. In a car theft being aware of your car being stolen doesn't change the situation, you're still not in control of it.
IMHO the original car analogy is close enough. Of course there's holes in it, but that's why it's an analogy. Its only purpose is to lay out the situation to laymen in a really basic way so that they mostly understand it. There is no such thing as a perfect analogy.
(like Black Friday).
I had to literally go to Wikipedia and find out what Black Friday is. Apparently it's a "go and buy and buy and buy all kinds of things, whether you need it or not" - day. No wonder the average US citizen weighs more than a truck. And yes, they indeed do seem to behave like cattle: you tell them something and they believe it, without anyone bothering to even think about it.
(There is no Black Friday or anything similar here so I obviously had never even heard of it before)
It sure looks great, I especially loved how the shadows worked realistically when interacting with water.
As for performance: I ran the demo in benchmark mode in Windows 7 using both DX10 and OpenGL, and in Ubuntu 10.10 using OpenGL, and I got the same numbers. Of course since the demo is rather limited it doesn't reflect the full picture of how a game would run, but what it does do is show that Linux is perfectly capable of running a good-looking, modern graphics demo just as well as Win7 at the same speed. That should already be enough to debunk OP's claim: if it was nothing more than a simple framebuffer under Linux it wouldn't achieve equal performance as compared to Win7.
I see plenty of free 3D engines around, yes, but most of them are rather inadequate for modern games. And like it or not, there's still quite plenty of gaming companies who prefer closed-source engines.
I'm just saying that I personally do not care if the game is closed or not, or if parts of it are, as long as it looks good, has great gameplay, and is available for Linux. God knows we lack good games.
When did bricklayer become something you are and something you do?
You don't do "bricklayer", you lay bricks, or perhaps you do a layer of bricks. His point was that you aren't "reverse engineer"; "reverse engineer" is a process someone does, but the person doing it isn't even necessarily an engineer at all.
Then why hasn't someone gotten to it and embedded a firmware rootkit like this before?
How do you know someone hasn't done it already? The whole point of rootkits is that they're undetected for as long as possible. And firmware rootkits are most likely employed by people who really know what they're doing and thus it's not likely the rootkits are found.
Firmware based rootkits aren't anything new, there has been lots of them already before. Like for example, last year there was several demonstrations of someone writing firmware rootkit for certain Apple-branded keyboards; there simply was enough space in the ROM for a complete keylogger and a bit of heuristics there and several kilobytes of space where to store the log. And network card base rootkits? I remember having read about them and seeing a demonstration already 5-6 years ago.
The thing is, as long as the user has actual physical access to the computer in question he or she can do lots of different kinds of small modifications, and for example the keyboard rootkit is easiest to do, doesn't require admin rights, and is undetectable unless you verify the actual firmware.
Well, to be precise, this topic is about solid silicone layers whereas the type of silicone you have in mind is gel, not solid.
Indeed, Homeworld is one of the most epic RTS games I've ever played. It looked great, and it's still not all that ugly, but the atmosphere.. oh damn, it really did have that! Too bad that HomeworldSDL hasn't been active for 3 years now :
I really miss Little Big Adventure. It wasn't about killing everything as fast as possible, it was about a journey through a great story, great atmosphere, and logic. With updated graphics but everything else kept intact exactly as it was, including the gameplay, it could still stand to gather quite a few players. LBA2 wasn't as good, but it too was still worth playing and could do with updated graphics, but it'd probably also benefit from slightly improving the gameplay.
Anyone else who misses LBA? Or is there some other game you enjoyed back then and which wasn't about killing everything in sight?
Yes, the reason people don't have old PCs is because they break down, not because newer and better technology comes out.
If the PC was in daily use for 20 years.. yes, it would most likely break. I mean, sure, a PC from 20 years ago might still be working fine, but it hasn't been in use for the last 20 years. It's most likely been in heavy use the first 5 years and then 15 years in the closet. From what I've seen so far when repairing computers and tasked with this or that, it's almost always storage media that goes first if it has any moving parts in it, then goes the motherboard or PSU.
Ouch, touché!! :D
Well, I can't see Valve in as negative light as you try to portray them in. No, I haven't played any Valve games in ages, but Steam itself is damn near perfect: I don't need to find installation media, I don't need to find patches, I don't need to worry about keeping my games functional.. And I personally love how they have the midweek and weekend sales. I just recently bought Batman: Arkham Asylum for 17 euro and I really have to say it was worth every penny! But try and buy that game somewhere else and you'll not get it for only 17€. Or maybe a used copy.
I am just saying that I have no idea about Valve games, but they _are_ doing atleast something really well and actually providing an excellent service to gamers.