Crossroads of Twilight was about 800 pages of women being bitchy at each other, and men bitching about women. I found it incredibly realistic!
Has anyone tried applying simple population dynamics to the plot twists in Wheel of Time? Will the number of plot twists eventually decline to zero, allowing the series to be concluded, or will it reach an equilibrium value, allowing RJ to write books forever? Right now the number seems to be growing exponentially...
The impending DDoS attack on Microsoft scheduled in the MSBlast worm was drastically mitigated by Microsoft's DNS shuffing, the diligent patching by systems administrators around the world, and the lack of electricity in several population centers. However, it was replaced by a much more potent DDoS attack by people checking to see if Microsoft's site was dead yet...
I'm surprised there are over 250 comments at +2 and nobody seems to have posted this. The Wired article includes the spammers' toll-free customer service number and email addresses at the very end. I tried the toll-free number and it really works; you'll get the voice mail of Amazing Internet Products.
Through 2012, more than 95 percent (by volume in gigabytes)...
But wait, what percentage would it be if they measured the volume in kilobytes? Or nybbles? I think the use of gigabytes as the completely irrelevant unit of measurement casts suspicion on the results of this study =)
On the topic of CGI, does anyone know if there exists a poster-sized rendering of the scene with Gandalf facing the balrog in FotR? Am I the only one that thinks this would be the coolest poster ever?
The state is the first in the nation to set rules regulating the gravitational pull, or G-force, of rides.
Sorry, but does anyone else think that it isn't unreasonable for the state to require roller coaster rides to be less than 5.6 times the mass of the Earth!?
It's almost common practice to buy components separately and build the computer yourself if you want a desktop. Has anyone had any success with building a laptop? I know that the proprietary designs laptop vendors use in order to cram the most things in the smallest space severely limit your choices, but it seems like there should still be standard interfaces and specifications for some components.
For example, I want an AMD system with a NVIDIA Geforce2Go video card. I don't know of any vendor that sells a laptop with both of these components. The NVIDIA card still conforms to AGP 4x, which AMD chipsets support, so it should be possible to buy or scavenge the components separately and Frankenstein something together.
I did find this site, which has some useful information on building your own laptop; maybe it is a good place to start.
By the way, is it possible to call Dell sales and get them to send you a laptop with no memory? Their 2 DIMM 128 MB costs twice as much as a 1 DIMM 256 MB module (yes, even ones designed for laptops) from just about any store. As an added bonus, maybe having no memory would prevent them from preinstalling Windows, Office, various idiotic AOL software, etc.?
There have now been several studies asserting that a concentrated attack on just the top 3% (or some other low percentage), in terms of connectivity, of the major hubs / backbones of the internet would result in some critical failure scenario such as fragmentation into small isolated clusters. But isn't this type of condition valid for a lot of systems besides the internet?
Consider this example, though it isn't meant to be analogous to the internet in any way. What if the President of the USA, the Vice President, the entire Cabinet, the entire Senate, the entire House of Representatives, etc. etc. were simultaneously assassinated? Can you even imagine ensuing chaos? You can even throw in all the state Governers, whatever, but that still wouldn't come out to more than the top 0.0004% of the country's population, in terms of "political importance" or some other metric. Is this scenario plausible or worth worrying about? You decide.
I'm wondering how many people here are in or recently graduated from high school and thus know just how Advanced the AP courses in general are. Take a look at the information on Exam Scores at the Collegeboard website. According to them, a score of 5 (the highest score) indicates that the student is Extremely well qualified in the subject.
Now, guess how well students have to do to earn a coveted 5? The cutoff varies between subjects and changes from year to year, but it is quite common for the cutoff to be around 65%. From the Collegeboard site:
You may be very surprised to see that your composite score can be two-thirds of the total possible score and you could still earn a grade of 5! Earning that score on other exams might translate to an "F" at worst and a "D" at best.
The cutoff for Computer Science AB is always one of the lowest. I don't have citations for these numbers, but the year I took the test (1998, my sophomore year) the cutoff was about 55%. So any student that can show he/she has mastered just more than half of the material is considered Extremely Well Qualified. The funny thing is only about 10% of the people who took it got a 5 (indeed, that is how they determine the cutoff - something like "top 10%").
So now they want to teach it in Java. I hope this causes Apple or someone else to develop some resemblance of a decent Java VM for the Macintosh because so many schools use Macs exclusively. Right now the Netscape and the Metrowerks VMs are abysmal...
I met a person in college who said his high school's AP Computer Science course consisted of nothing but playing Need for Speed III the whole semester. He took the AP test and got a 1, but got an A for the course, which boosted his GPA enough to make him valedictorian of his class...
Your suggestion would be effective initially, but within a matter of weeks some script kiddie (or more likely, several dozen) would just create a lookalike "trojan", even including a helpful or educational disclaimer, but with a malicious payload. The original benign "trojan" would not only be disregarded and avoided, its creator might even be blamed for the script kiddie's version.
You have to remember the whole principle trojans operate on: masquerade as something helpful and then do something harmful. This principle will work even on another trojan.
I just finished watching the debate, if you could call it that. It seemed as though Jack Valenti responded to every question with:
Well I'm surprised that people are finding it so difficult to accept one simple fact: If an artist creates a work, be it poetry, a movie, a book, etc., he or she should be able to protect that work...
I don't know what you're talking about!
Well I need a lawyer with me to answer that. (At one point Lessig responded "Ok, I'll be your lawyer then" which was pretty amusing)
You should obey the law, and since the DMCA says that is illegal...
He still managed to get a lot of applause and laughs out of the audience. I was a bit disappointed with that since the audience consisted mostly of *Harvard Law School* students...
I have a question that I've been wanting to ask supporters of the DMCA. I submitted the question during the debate, but they didn't have nearly enough time to address it (They barely answered any of the questions submitted online at all). How do you think they would respond to this:
Many technological devices that are employed to protect copyrighted works are based on mathematical theorems. If a mathematician makes a purely mathematical discovery that inadvertantly facilitates circumvention of a technological protection mechanism, should this mathematician be vulnerable to legal retribution and should it be legal to disseminate his discovery?
Take a look at the file containing the source for almost all of the entries in the competition, including the almighty Iocaine Powder. Can anyone think of an effective counter-strategy against Iocaine? It appears to be impossible since even a successful strategy solely dedicated to hosing Iocaine would just cause it to go into Random (Optimal) mode.
Anyway, I'll paste the source to Psychic Friends Network hear so you don't have to dig through the file to find it. It's freaking hilarious:
/* Entrant: Psychic Friends Network Michael Schatz et al (USA) (Unofficial Super-Modified Class, i.e. it cheats)
note: may cause a Segmentation Fault vs MegaHAL (error: "OUCH")
> The Psychic Friends Network is a truly hilarious piece of obfuscated C, > written by Michael Schatz and company at RST Corporation. Among other > things, it uses an auxiliary function to find good karma, consults > horoscopes, cooks spaghetti and (mystic) pizza to go with various kinds > of fruit, #defines democrats as communists, and undefines god. We're > still trying to figure out exactly what it is doing with the stack > frame, but we do know that it never scores less than +998 in a match, > unless it is playing against a meta-meta-cheater.
To give credit, where credit was due: Frank Hill and T.J. Walls (also of Reliable Software Technologies) were the other minds behind Psychic Friends Network. To see some of their other exploits check out: http://www.rstcorp.com/news/gambling.html */
#define RST_ULTIMATE_ANALYZER_FUNCTION rst_ultimate_analyzer_function #define GOD % #define democrats communists /* The open brace was always overrated anyway. */ #define recycle return
char *find_goodkarma(int *arr) THEFUNCTIONSTARTS int turn = arr[0], * karma[50], eleven = 0; int magic_bacon;
*karma = while (!eleven) THELOOPSTARTS
/* We need to determine the karma rating of the magic bacon. */ /* This depends highly on the number eleven. */ for (magic_bacon = 0; magic_bacon < turn; magic_bacon++) THELOOPSTARTS eleven = 1; if ( (*(*karma + magic_bacon)) != arr[magic_bacon] ) THEIFSTARTS eleven = 0; break; } }
/* why does everyone put their comments at the end of the line? */ /* is it eleven yet? */ if (eleven) break; /* determine karma ratio */ (0[karma]) += (fresh bananas * karma / fresh grapes * karma ); }
/* return the . . . whatever the heck this is. */ recycle (char *)*karma; }
int RST_ULTIMATE_ANALYZER_FUNCTION() THEFUNCTIONSTARTS int turn [1]; int *good_hand, *bad_hand, *pizza; int cancer, scorpio, libra; /* x is actually my all time favorite variable */ int x; int i, democrats; int (*callback) () = spaghetti;
if (*turn < trials - 2) return libra ? callback() : be_good_for GOD sake;
/* Consult appropriate astrological signs in order to determine exactly */ /* which hand to throw. */ good_hand = (int *)find_goodkarma(my_history); bad_hand = (int *)find_goodkarma(opp_history);
/* Process Good Karma Values */ for (i = 1; i<=*turn; i++) THELOOPSTARTS if (good_hand[i] == bad_hand[i]) libra++; else if ( ((good_hand[i] - bad_hand[i] +3) GOD sake) == 1) cancer++; else scorpio++;
good_hand[i] = (bad_hand[i] + 1) GOD sake; }
if (bad_hand > good_hand) THEIFSTARTS i = cancer; cancer = scorpio; scorpio = i; democrats = 2; } else democrats = 1;
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever, I saw a digital photo of the Sharp LCD and the contrast wasn't any better than that of my current monitor.
"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was surrounded by midgets."
- Murray Gell-Mann
From the Launch Event FAQ:
Q: Can we fly a commercial flight to Mojave?
A: No, Mojave has no commercial airline service.
Doh.
Crossroads of Twilight was about 800 pages of women being bitchy at each other, and men bitching about women. I found it incredibly realistic!
Has anyone tried applying simple population dynamics to the plot twists in Wheel of Time? Will the number of plot twists eventually decline to zero, allowing the series to be concluded, or will it reach an equilibrium value, allowing RJ to write books forever? Right now the number seems to be growing exponentially...
- Smiley =)
The impending DDoS attack on Microsoft scheduled in the MSBlast worm was drastically mitigated by Microsoft's DNS shuffing, the diligent patching by systems administrators around the world, and the lack of electricity in several population centers. However, it was replaced by a much more potent DDoS attack by people checking to see if Microsoft's site was dead yet...
Heart!
"When your powers combine..."
Toll-free number (should cost the spammer by the minute): 1-800-576-4044
Email addresses: vze3c9sk@verizon.net and frappe_boy@yahoo.com
I'm surprised there are over 250 comments at +2 and nobody seems to have posted this. The Wired article includes the spammers' toll-free customer service number and email addresses at the very end. I tried the toll-free number and it really works; you'll get the voice mail of Amazing Internet Products.
- Smiley =)
But wait, what percentage would it be if they measured the volume in kilobytes? Or nybbles? I think the use of gigabytes as the completely irrelevant unit of measurement casts suspicion on the results of this study =)
- Smiley =)
On the topic of CGI, does anyone know if there exists a poster-sized rendering of the scene with Gandalf facing the balrog in FotR? Am I the only one that thinks this would be the coolest poster ever?
- Smiley =)
The state is the first in the nation to set rules regulating the gravitational pull, or G-force, of rides.
Sorry, but does anyone else think that it isn't unreasonable for the state to require roller coaster rides to be less than 5.6 times the mass of the Earth!?
- Smiley =)
Before bidding, know that the Ford Escort already had 102K miles on it before it was "upgraded."
- Smiley =)
After seeing these pictures pictures...
Technician: Hello, this is Gyration technical support. How may I help you?
Caller: This cordless phone you sold me doesn't work! And when I hold it near my head it just shines annoying lights in my eye!
For some absolutely gorgeous photographs of past Leonid showers, see the Leonid Multi-instrument Aircraft Campaign.
-The One God of Smilies =)
It's almost common practice to buy components separately and build the computer yourself if you want a desktop. Has anyone had any success with building a laptop? I know that the proprietary designs laptop vendors use in order to cram the most things in the smallest space severely limit your choices, but it seems like there should still be standard interfaces and specifications for some components.
For example, I want an AMD system with a NVIDIA Geforce2Go video card. I don't know of any vendor that sells a laptop with both of these components. The NVIDIA card still conforms to AGP 4x, which AMD chipsets support, so it should be possible to buy or scavenge the components separately and Frankenstein something together.
I did find this site, which has some useful information on building your own laptop; maybe it is a good place to start.
By the way, is it possible to call Dell sales and get them to send you a laptop with no memory? Their 2 DIMM 128 MB costs twice as much as a 1 DIMM 256 MB module (yes, even ones designed for laptops) from just about any store. As an added bonus, maybe having no memory would prevent them from preinstalling Windows, Office, various idiotic AOL software, etc.?
- The One God of Smilies =)
There have now been several studies asserting that a concentrated attack on just the top 3% (or some other low percentage), in terms of connectivity, of the major hubs / backbones of the internet would result in some critical failure scenario such as fragmentation into small isolated clusters. But isn't this type of condition valid for a lot of systems besides the internet?
Consider this example, though it isn't meant to be analogous to the internet in any way. What if the President of the USA, the Vice President, the entire Cabinet, the entire Senate, the entire House of Representatives, etc. etc. were simultaneously assassinated? Can you even imagine ensuing chaos? You can even throw in all the state Governers, whatever, but that still wouldn't come out to more than the top 0.0004% of the country's population, in terms of "political importance" or some other metric. Is this scenario plausible or worth worrying about? You decide.
- The One God of Smilies =)
I'm wondering how many people here are in or recently graduated from high school and thus know just how Advanced the AP courses in general are. Take a look at the information on Exam Scores at the Collegeboard website. According to them, a score of 5 (the highest score) indicates that the student is Extremely well qualified in the subject.
Now, guess how well students have to do to earn a coveted 5? The cutoff varies between subjects and changes from year to year, but it is quite common for the cutoff to be around 65%. From the Collegeboard site:
The cutoff for Computer Science AB is always one of the lowest. I don't have citations for these numbers, but the year I took the test (1998, my sophomore year) the cutoff was about 55%. So any student that can show he/she has mastered just more than half of the material is considered Extremely Well Qualified. The funny thing is only about 10% of the people who took it got a 5 (indeed, that is how they determine the cutoff - something like "top 10%").
So now they want to teach it in Java. I hope this causes Apple or someone else to develop some resemblance of a decent Java VM for the Macintosh because so many schools use Macs exclusively. Right now the Netscape and the Metrowerks VMs are abysmal...
I met a person in college who said his high school's AP Computer Science course consisted of nothing but playing Need for Speed III the whole semester. He took the AP test and got a 1, but got an A for the course, which boosted his GPA enough to make him valedictorian of his class...
-Albert Mao
Your suggestion would be effective initially, but within a matter of weeks some script kiddie (or more likely, several dozen) would just create a lookalike "trojan", even including a helpful or educational disclaimer, but with a malicious payload. The original benign "trojan" would not only be disregarded and avoided, its creator might even be blamed for the script kiddie's version.
You have to remember the whole principle trojans operate on: masquerade as something helpful and then do something harmful. This principle will work even on another trojan.
-The One God of Smilies =)
I just finished watching the debate, if you could call it that. It seemed as though Jack Valenti responded to every question with:
He still managed to get a lot of applause and laughs out of the audience. I was a bit disappointed with that since the audience consisted mostly of *Harvard Law School* students...
I have a question that I've been wanting to ask supporters of the DMCA. I submitted the question during the debate, but they didn't have nearly enough time to address it (They barely answered any of the questions submitted online at all). How do you think they would respond to this:
Many technological devices that are employed to protect copyrighted works are based on mathematical theorems. If a mathematician makes a purely mathematical discovery that inadvertantly facilitates circumvention of a technological protection mechanism, should this mathematician be vulnerable to legal retribution and should it be legal to disseminate his discovery?
-The One God of Smilies =)
Take a look at the file containing the source for almost all of the entries in the competition, including the almighty Iocaine Powder. Can anyone think of an effective counter-strategy against Iocaine? It appears to be impossible since even a successful strategy solely dedicated to hosing Iocaine would just cause it to go into Random (Optimal) mode.
Anyway, I'll paste the source to Psychic Friends Network hear so you don't have to dig through the file to find it. It's freaking hilarious:
/**********************************************
/* Entrant: Psychic Friends Network Michael Schatz et al (USA)
(Unofficial Super-Modified Class, i.e. it cheats)
note: may cause a Segmentation Fault vs MegaHAL (error: "OUCH")
> The Psychic Friends Network is a truly hilarious piece of obfuscated C,
> written by Michael Schatz and company at RST Corporation. Among other
> things, it uses an auxiliary function to find good karma, consults
> horoscopes, cooks spaghetti and (mystic) pizza to go with various kinds
> of fruit, #defines democrats as communists, and undefines god. We're
> still trying to figure out exactly what it is doing with the stack
> frame, but we do know that it never scores less than +998 in a match,
> unless it is playing against a meta-meta-cheater.
To give credit, where credit was due: Frank Hill and T.J. Walls
(also of Reliable Software Technologies) were the other minds behind
Psychic Friends Network. To see some of their other exploits check out:
http://www.rstcorp.com/news/gambling.html
*/
#define RST_ULTIMATE_ANALYZER_FUNCTION rst_ultimate_analyzer_function
#define GOD %
#define democrats communists
/* The open brace was always overrated anyway. */
#define recycle return
/* more readable */
#define THEFUNCTIONSTARTS {
#define THEIFSTARTS {
#define THELOOPSTARTS {
#define spaghetti RST_ULTIMATE_ANALYZER_FUNCTION
#define fresh (
#define rotten (unsigned
#define bananas int)
#define grapes bananas
#define sake 3
#define be_good_for random()
char *find_goodkarma(int *arr) THEFUNCTIONSTARTS
int turn = arr[0], * karma[50], eleven = 0;
int magic_bacon;
*karma =
while (!eleven) THELOOPSTARTS
for (magic_bacon = 0; magic_bacon < turn; magic_bacon++) THELOOPSTARTS
eleven = 1;
if ( (*(*karma + magic_bacon)) != arr[magic_bacon] ) THEIFSTARTS
eleven = 0;
break;
}
}
}
}
int RST_ULTIMATE_ANALYZER_FUNCTION() THEFUNCTIONSTARTS
int turn [1];
int *good_hand, *bad_hand, *pizza;
int cancer, scorpio, libra;
int i, democrats;
int (*callback) () = spaghetti;
(*&cancer) = (scorpio = (libra = (int)NULL));
*turn = opp_history[0];
if (*turn < trials - 2) return libra ? callback() : be_good_for GOD sake;
good_hand = (int *)find_goodkarma(my_history);
bad_hand = (int *)find_goodkarma(opp_history);
if( cancer == 1 ) return *(int *)"ROCK";
if( scorpio == 1 ) return *(int *)"SCISSORS";
if( !(( scorpio != 0 ) || (cancer != 1)) || !((cancer != 0) ||
(scorpio!=1)) ) return *(int *)"PAPER";
if( (( scorpio == 0 ) && (cancer == 1)) || ((cancer == 0) &&
(scorpio==1)) ) return *(int *)"FONZ";
for (i = 1; i<=*turn; i++) THELOOPSTARTS
if (good_hand[i] == bad_hand[i]) libra++;
else if ( ((good_hand[i] - bad_hand[i] +3) GOD sake) == 1) cancer++;
else scorpio++;
good_hand[i] = (bad_hand[i] + 1) GOD sake;
}
if (bad_hand > good_hand) THEIFSTARTS
i = cancer;
cancer = scorpio;
scorpio = i;
democrats = 2;
}
else democrats = 1;
pizza = turn;
for ( x = 0; !( (pizza[0] == libra) &&
(pizza[1] == scorpio) &&
(pizza[2] == cancer) ); x++ ) pizza++;
pizza[0] = 0;
pizza[1] = 0;
pizza[2] = 0;
pizza[3-democrats] = cancer + scorpio + libra;
democrats = 0;
recycle (pizza[democrats] + rotten bananas good_hand) GOD sake;
}
# undef GOD
/* Is that possible? */
#undef democrats
#undef recycle
#undef THEFUNCTIONSTARTS
#undef THEIFSTARTS
#undef THELOOPSTARTS
#undef spaghetti
#undef fresh
#undef rotten
#undef bananas
#undef grapes
/**********************************************
BTW Sorry if I mangled something this is my first post to /.