If the FBI wants to read our keystrokes to capture our passwords then I guess the next course of action is to move to hardware keys. There are a variety of biometric devices available, but the simpler (and more system-independant) solution would probably be to store private keys on one of those USB Flash-RAM dongles.
When Shaw took over the Rogers network in western Canada their very first move was to start moving customers off the super-saturated @Home network onto their own. They continued to use the @Home email and news services but provided their own connectivity. The Shaw system was advertised as 3X faster than Rogers and so far it appears to be true. They use much smaller subnets and a faster modem. There's only so much they can do about the rest of the internet but their corner is in top shape.
Shaw started sending out emails about 8 weeks ago suggesting, asking, begging, and then almost demanding that customers register for @shaw email addresses. Those who complied have nothing to worry about.
Everyone keeps bringing up the idea of a transparent "always on top" application like WinAmp running in front of the window with the focus. The problem with this idea is that no matter how transparent the front window becomes it still blocks you from using the mouse to select items/text on the obscured window. A more practical application would be to place the secondary application below a semi-transparent top level application. For example, I would far rather place a television tuner application in the background and watch it *through* my foreground task than have to move it around when I need to click on something under it. A hot key or widget to toggle the opacity between two set levels would be a real benefit.
I use the Mosfet translucent window theme for KDE and like it. Unfortunately it isn't true transparency as the background image is not updated while the menu is open. I would assume it's the difficulty of doing large-scale alpha blending on an ongoing basis that is preventing the type of windowing I desire.
I was about 30 seconds late tuning in and missed the first two introductions. As a result, I didn't find out about Wil's charity until I saw it here. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands more people might have found out about the EFF had Wil been on the other end of the stage... Too bad he didn't use his exit interview to plug the cause again.
This is yet again proof of why chat groups, bulletin boards and internet newsgroups are useless as a "breaking story" news source. It's been less than 45 minutes since the crash and already people are posting "facts" that were proven wrong minutes later or are providing mindless speculation. I'll grant you that CNN isn't much better in the first hour of any major story, but at least on TV the incorrect data doesn't stick around for days after the truth is known.
What you've said so far: It was a 767. It was inbound to NY. It crashed downtown. It might have been terrorists.
What CNN is saying as of a minute ago: It was an Airbus A300. It was leaving NY on an international flight. It crashed 10 miles from the airport, out in Rockaway (Long Island).
Let's leave the journalism to the journalists, shall we?
My first job out of high school was selling crap for Radio Shack. It gave me exposure to computers and got me hooked into hacking (in the original sense). A friend who graduated two years before me was writing code for a tiny software company. They were hired by a retail chain to convert an old POS system to a modern O/S. One day I got a call at home asking if I was interested in a week's worth of work converting the old inventory/accounting database over to ISAM. They needed a hacker who could reverse-engineer the database structure (the old company was out of business and there were no docs around), and their regular programmers were too busy putting together the application code.
To make a long story short, I converted the database, wrote a driver for their bar-code printer, did some wiring, etc. If I didn't know specifics I would either read the manual or just try things (or both). The boss thought I was pretty handy and took me on full-time. Although they were a Unix shop, they had never bothered to designate a specific person as the system administrator simply because there were so few people and the tasks (to that point) had been focused on software development and not deployment. As the new POS was nearing completion they brought me a box of parts and asked me to put together a server and install the O/S. I became the system administrator more or less by default, and soon thereafter was assigned to maintain the customer sites as well (as a value-added service).
For me, the path to becoming a system admin was just a matter of being unemployed at the right place at the right time.
That was all so long ago. Now I am part of an operational data management team (no, NOT "IM"-- those weenies install MS crap in the admin section) for a large company. I oversee about a dozen databases on systems ranging from 70's era mainframes to bleeding-edge distributed systems.
Many networks are forced to place logos on the screen simply to hide the logos of their upstream suppliers. I have seen some cases where even the third-tier cable company got involved, placing their logo over another logo that was *obviously* (ie: barely) covering a third....
I actually don't mind the ones that simply "watermark" the display in one corner, as they usually don't obscure much. There's nothing worse than watching a sports event on TV and having the scores blotted out by the network logo.
Man, I think alot of people posting here have no idea what Ion is really like. You *can* overlap windows in Ion. You just design the frameset for them. For example:
It's hard to believe we could have a misunderstanding about the meaning of the word "overlapping"....
To most people, overlapping refers to the case where one window obscures part of another, implying a Z-order rendering. It says nothing about whether or not the windows are allowed to be different sizes. Your example describes a fairly trivial nesting of frames in which adjacent windows are not required to share common vertices. Not the same.
The desktop-as-series-of-nested-frames may make creating desktop software easier and (for some people) allow easier navigation, but it largely suffers from the fact that all windows are not created equal. If I want a small clock visible in one corner of the screen, why should I be forced to divide the desktop into multiple frames when "always on top" allows the underlying application to run full screen?
It looks to me like ion was written by someone whose spent far too much time creating framed web sites and wants to bring the rest of the desktop down to that level.
I have never experienced such "system freeze" swapping with Linux
My laptop (128Mb) did it all the time when I was running 2.4.4 through 2.4.7 or thereabouts. The problem invariably cropped up when I was closing an application under X. I solved the problem by disabling swap completely for a few kernel versions.
When an application comes up and asks for memory that is being consumed it should have its memory allocation fail. That is why malloc has the option to return NULL. If it returns NULL then the current application has to deal with it.
That assumes a certain amount of diligence on the part of the programmers (both application and kernel). Every program would have to check every return value (something that isn't done often enough, judging by the number of string buffer overflow exploits), and be able to exit to a recoverable state without requiring any extra memory from the malloc() onward. It's an ancient and ideal proposal that apparently doesn't happen with any regularity.
Perhaps a short-term solution is to allow an overcommit but hedge using a system-wide percentage reservation similar to the root reservation on ext2 partitions. Only when a pending OOM situation is recognized would the kernel dip into the reservation, and then only to bail itself out.
In the long term, maybe Linux should consider adopting one of the few intelligent Microsoft OS features-- a signal sent to user applications that indicates a pending OOM and which implicity requests the application to either give back some memory or exit completely. If and when the OOM killer is needed then it has some knowledge of which processes attempted to reduce their size and which did not. [Insert your Darwin witticism here.:-P]
Sometimes the only pages in RAM are critical to the operating system. Say for instance only kernel pages and pages for init are in memory. Now which do you kill?
Well, obviously you kill the system maintainer for compiling a kernel that won't fit in memory.:-P
Ever see W2k pop up a dialog that says "Running low on memory increasing page file size"? Thats not because the machine is 'low' on memory.
Linux has the ability to dynamically increase the swap memory using regular files if you install swapd. Of course that's yet another user process that requires its own memory....
And we've said that the real solution - the long-term solution - is a marketplace solution. That we have to get into the marketplace and offer not only a legitimate alternative, but a better alternative that will attract consumers because of the value we provide.
Then why not just do it? Most people would stop copying music if they had a chance to buy it at a competitive price and in a convenient format. There's no legitimate reason why a one-band-one-album CD should cost more than $10. I'd pay twice that much if I could walk into a store, select 10 tracks and have them placed onto RIAA-approved media, assuming I was able to play it on the device (and OS) of my choice. The days of buying an album to get one good song and 9 B-sides are over.
But we've also said that there were technical measures that could be used to address the problem. We didn't get very specific about what those technical measures were, but we always made clear that we would rely on technological solutions to address technological problems.
This sounds a lot like "we can neither confirm nor deny...."
I use Proxomitron on my Windows machine to block advertising, java window.open() calls, etc. when surfing the web. It replaces the browser identity header with one that says "SpaceBison". MSN.com blocks this as well. I'd guess there's more going on than simply blocking Opera and Mozilla.
But it's still just a snapshot....
on
Debian On DVD
·
· Score: 1
I love Debian and use it on all of my boxes (including laptop), but question the point of buying a DVD snapshot of a testing distribution. Woody is updated on a daily basis and any machine installed from DVD would be obsolete almost immediately. The DVD wouldn't save much time or effort because you'd end up replacing a majority of the packages via internet by the time Woody hits "stable". Better to wait for a stable DVD and then just download the security fixes.
If you can make DirectFB *identical* to XFree86 in functionality, then fine, I'll use it.
So why not have your cake and eat it, too? Compile the FB driver into your kernel and then use the FB device driver in X4....
The point here is to move the "what kind of hardware do I have" question and resulting driver complexity to a lower level so that conventional X can coexist with local high-video-bandwidth applications.
Seriously. What possible use would a transparent video player have? While ditching X is a great idea, I think a more useful demonstration of their technology is necessary rather than just a screenshot were everyone says "Ohhh Ahhh Isn't that pretty"
I do most of my work in maximized windows. XTerm and/or MP3 players may work fine in small windows, but serious text editing simply works better when you can see lots at once. The biggest limitation with the conventional TV-on-PC "solutions" is that you have to choose between a postage stamp "always on top" image that gets in the way of your work or turn your display into an expensive TV substitute.
Having a translucent desktop would allow a person to work full-screen on an application while monitoring a full-screen TV image in the background. When something comes onto the TV that can't be missed then you just minimize or roll up your foreground app.
I would expect the window managers to eventually support a "translucence" widget for each window's title bar so that some can be made more transparent than others.
What I would prefer to see in more new games is automatic scaling of the rendering. Rather than increasing my FPS from 30 to 50 with a CPU upgrade, how about keeping the FPS constant at ~30 (that's all you really need to see fluid motion) and *automatically* increasing the resolution, "collateral object" count or depth of field based on horsepower? MS FS2000 does it, as did IndyCar-II back around 1996, but nobody else seems interested in automatic scaling. Why should we be forced to manually tweak our games to set the resolution, complexity, etc. when the game is in the the best position to detect idle CPU periods?
Is the bottleneck in FPS the time it takes to render a scene or the time it takes to send it to the display? Most Quake-like games require changes in screen resolution or use framing to keep a 1:1 relationship between the image data and the pixels. Why not render at whatever resolution the CPU speed allows and then map the pixels on the way to the display so that the user can stick with a 1024x768 or higher resolution and still play the game full-screen?
I have to say that your Attorney General looked pretty stupid on television last week chastising the other nations who have poor border security. Canada is not (and has never been) a firewall for the USofA. Yes, our government is stupid sometimes and there are bad people who take advantage of our loopholes to get into Canada, but the terrorists who got into the USofA did it by passing through US Customs and US INS checkpoints. People leaving Canada don't pass through Canadian customs. Point fingers if you must, but let's be reasonable in our expectations of who is responsible for your security.
Even if you missed the September 15th posting deadline you can have some input into the process. The Canadian government will be posting the received opinions and comments to a web page for public viewing, and are encouraging the public to comment on the submissions no later than October 5th. The web site doesn't yet contain the comments-- keep your eyes peeled. Finally, a place where "me too" posts are not only appropriate but encouraged!
Preface: I am agnostic. I hope the following is not too offensive to those who have strong religious beliefs...
The experts (parent linked article's authors) research assumed a paradigm in which the suicide bomber is a short-term member of a fanatical fringe group who is essentially brainwashed into performing the act while in an altered mental state. They have difficulty integrating the Tuesday group because they don't match the profile. They have made the mistake of equating tactics with motives at the individual level, and assume that since the motive (from a personal preservation POV) is irrational the act must also be so. I think it is safe to say that the participants on Tuesday were not brainwashed. Nor were they given a last-minute pep-talk and shoved out the door. They clearly *believed* in what they were doing, to the point that they were able to carry out their duties without any apparent direct supervision. That implies that they acted with what they feel to be a motive of blissful martyrdom instead of fanatical hatred. What the Pat Robertsons of the world fail to grasp is that the "terrorists" might feel exactly the same way about their religion as Pat Robertson does about his. You can't argue religion with someone who has "seen the light". Convincing a would-be terrorist that his suicide is irrational is as pointless as trying to convince Pat Robertson that all of the Christian martyrs throughout history were really just hopeless lunatics. It's arrogant to assume your religious tenets are any more valid than those of Islam or any other faith. Think about the word "faith"-- it's essential meaning is "to accept a fact that cannot be proven". All religions hold certain truths to be self-evident. I'm glad the USA government is leading a coalition to make war against those governments that condone or support terrorists, but sadly think it's a lost cause. You could well imagine our indignation if the other side was to recruit nations to help kill off all the Jesuits and punish the nations that allow such a radical fringe to prosper and send their missionaries out into the world. If the citizens support the actions of the fringe then no act short of occupation and indoctrination will cure the situation. If you just kill off the Taliban government then another will surely replace it, in much the same way the USA would elect a new slate of representatives if the 4th aircraft had made it back to it's target.
As to the suggestion that suicide bombers are a fanatical and irrational gang: The western military organizations regularly send men into battle with the knowledge that many *will* get killed. These men go into battle knowing that the penalty for failure could be a fate worse than death and therefore accept their poor odds. We call them heroes. When the Allies landed on the beaches on D-Day the name of the game was attrition. The generals and politicians had no illusions about the casualty rate, but simply hoped they could put enough "resources" into action to overcome the enemy. The idea of winning a war without massive casualties on both sides wasn't invented until Desert Storm. I'm sure that this Bin Laden monster would be quite happy to send in stealth bombers and laser-guided bombs but the army he leads isn't so equipped.
In any event, I find it interesting that the hijackers are so obviously labelled as "evil crazy people" while the passengers of the EWR-SFO flight are held up as heroes. I'm sure there are people in the world who think that agents of the devil rose up to spite their blessed martyrs. It's all a matter of perspective.
The numbers are even less random than that site would indicate. For example, it lists the VISA prefix number as "4". Well, yes, all VISA cards start with the number 4. But anyone who has ever seen more than a few numbers will know that the second through 4th digits are also predictable as they indicate the issuing bank, type of card (regular, gold, platinum, airmiles, points, business vs. personal), etc. There are actually only 11 digits in the "random" part of the card. The trick for a criminal is to pick the 4-digit prefix having the largest number of issued cards to maximize the probability of a match. Alternatively, the high-stakes forger would go for the prestige prefixes since a successful match will have a credit limit that is an order of magnitude greater than the entry-level card. As a general rule, however, I believe most fraud artists simply copy numbers from receipts.
The article complains that today's games are too complicated to allow casual players to have any fun. That much is true. One of the big things that got me away from the arcade was the rising prices. When arcades were at their peak in the early 80's it was common for my classmates and I to buy a roll of quarters ($10) and make it last at least a day or two. Then as the technology improved the prices started rising. It wasn't enough for them to charge $.50 or $.75 per game, but they also started with the "renewable" game where you had to keep feeding quarters if you wanted to keep playing. Next thing you know, that $10 roll doesn't last 'till dinner. Teenagers have always been the demographic that played games, and at the time we just couldn't afford to start bringing $20 bills every day. I think the trend toward home game systems has a lot more to do with economics than people realize. Sure, the technology is great and the convenience of playing at 3am in your skivvies is enticing, but the big issue for a lot of parents is the fact that they don't have to give the kid a $20 and send him/her out to play.
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If the FBI wants to read our keystrokes to capture our passwords then I guess the next course of action is to move to hardware keys. There are a variety of biometric devices available, but the simpler (and more system-independant) solution would probably be to store private keys on one of those USB Flash-RAM dongles.
When Shaw took over the Rogers network in western Canada their very first move was to start moving customers off the super-saturated @Home network onto their own. They continued to use the @Home email and news services but provided their own connectivity. The Shaw system was advertised as 3X faster than Rogers and so far it appears to be true. They use much smaller subnets and a faster modem. There's only so much they can do about the rest of the internet but their corner is in top shape.
Shaw started sending out emails about 8 weeks ago suggesting, asking, begging, and then almost demanding that customers register for @shaw email addresses. Those who complied have nothing to worry about.
Everyone keeps bringing up the idea of a transparent "always on top" application like WinAmp running in front of the window with the focus. The problem with this idea is that no matter how transparent the front window becomes it still blocks you from using the mouse to select items/text on the obscured window. A more practical application would be to place the secondary application below a semi-transparent top level application. For example, I would far rather place a television tuner application in the background and watch it *through* my foreground task than have to move it around when I need to click on something under it. A hot key or widget to toggle the opacity between two set levels would be a real benefit.
I use the Mosfet translucent window theme for KDE and like it. Unfortunately it isn't true transparency as the background image is not updated while the menu is open. I would assume it's the difficulty of doing large-scale alpha blending on an ongoing basis that is preventing the type of windowing I desire.
I was about 30 seconds late tuning in and missed the first two introductions. As a result, I didn't find out about Wil's charity until I saw it here. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands more people might have found out about the EFF had Wil been on the other end of the stage... Too bad he didn't use his exit interview to plug the cause again.
I didn't think ReiserFS had any inodes to get dirty. Aren't inodes a feature of ext2/ext3?
I'd rather see bash on HP/UX, etc. Why should we take a giant leap backward for their sake?
This is yet again proof of why chat groups, bulletin boards and internet newsgroups are useless as a "breaking story" news source. It's been less than 45 minutes since the crash and already people are posting "facts" that were proven wrong minutes later or are providing mindless speculation. I'll grant you that CNN isn't much better in the first hour of any major story, but at least on TV the incorrect data doesn't stick around for days after the truth is known.
What you've said so far: It was a 767. It was inbound to NY. It crashed downtown. It might have been terrorists.
What CNN is saying as of a minute ago: It was an Airbus A300. It was leaving NY on an international flight. It crashed 10 miles from the airport, out in Rockaway (Long Island).
Let's leave the journalism to the journalists, shall we?
My first job out of high school was selling crap for Radio Shack. It gave me exposure to computers and got me hooked into hacking (in the original sense). A friend who graduated two years before me was writing code for a tiny software company. They were hired by a retail chain to convert an old POS system to a modern O/S. One day I got a call at home asking if I was interested in a week's worth of work converting the old inventory/accounting database over to ISAM. They needed a hacker who could reverse-engineer the database structure (the old company was out of business and there were no docs around), and their regular programmers were too busy putting together the application code.
To make a long story short, I converted the database, wrote a driver for their bar-code printer, did some wiring, etc. If I didn't know specifics I would either read the manual or just try things (or both). The boss thought I was pretty handy and took me on full-time. Although they were a Unix shop, they had never bothered to designate a specific person as the system administrator simply because there were so few people and the tasks (to that point) had been focused on software development and not deployment. As the new POS was nearing completion they brought me a box of parts and asked me to put together a server and install the O/S. I became the system administrator more or less by default, and soon thereafter was assigned to maintain the customer sites as well (as a value-added service).
For me, the path to becoming a system admin was just a matter of being unemployed at the right place at the right time.
That was all so long ago. Now I am part of an operational data management team (no, NOT "IM"-- those weenies install MS crap in the admin section) for a large company. I oversee about a dozen databases on systems ranging from 70's era mainframes to bleeding-edge distributed systems.
Many networks are forced to place logos on the screen simply to hide the logos of their upstream suppliers. I have seen some cases where even the third-tier cable company got involved, placing their logo over another logo that was *obviously* (ie: barely) covering a third....
I actually don't mind the ones that simply "watermark" the display in one corner, as they usually don't obscure much. There's nothing worse than watching a sports event on TV and having the scores blotted out by the network logo.
It's hard to believe we could have a misunderstanding about the meaning of the word "overlapping"....
To most people, overlapping refers to the case where one window obscures part of another, implying a Z-order rendering. It says nothing about whether or not the windows are allowed to be different sizes. Your example describes a fairly trivial nesting of frames in which adjacent windows are not required to share common vertices. Not the same.
The desktop-as-series-of-nested-frames may make creating desktop software easier and (for some people) allow easier navigation, but it largely suffers from the fact that all windows are not created equal. If I want a small clock visible in one corner of the screen, why should I be forced to divide the desktop into multiple frames when "always on top" allows the underlying application to run full screen?
It looks to me like ion was written by someone whose spent far too much time creating framed web sites and wants to bring the rest of the desktop down to that level.
My laptop (128Mb) did it all the time when I was running 2.4.4 through 2.4.7 or thereabouts. The problem invariably cropped up when I was closing an application under X. I solved the problem by disabling swap completely for a few kernel versions.
That assumes a certain amount of diligence on the part of the programmers (both application and kernel). Every program would have to check every return value (something that isn't done often enough, judging by the number of string buffer overflow exploits), and be able to exit to a recoverable state without requiring any extra memory from the malloc() onward. It's an ancient and ideal proposal that apparently doesn't happen with any regularity.
Perhaps a short-term solution is to allow an overcommit but hedge using a system-wide percentage reservation similar to the root reservation on ext2 partitions. Only when a pending OOM situation is recognized would the kernel dip into the reservation, and then only to bail itself out.
In the long term, maybe Linux should consider adopting one of the few intelligent Microsoft OS features-- a signal sent to user applications that indicates a pending OOM and which implicity requests the application to either give back some memory or exit completely. If and when the OOM killer is needed then it has some knowledge of which processes attempted to reduce their size and which did not. [Insert your Darwin witticism here.:-P]
Sometimes the only pages in RAM are critical to the operating system. Say for instance only kernel pages and pages for init are in memory. Now which do you kill?
Well, obviously you kill the system maintainer for compiling a kernel that won't fit in memory. :-P
Ever see W2k pop up a dialog that says "Running low on memory increasing page file size"? Thats not because the machine is 'low' on memory.
Linux has the ability to dynamically increase the swap memory using regular files if you install swapd. Of course that's yet another user process that requires its own memory....
Then why not just do it? Most people would stop copying music if they had a chance to buy it at a competitive price and in a convenient format. There's no legitimate reason why a one-band-one-album CD should cost more than $10. I'd pay twice that much if I could walk into a store, select 10 tracks and have them placed onto RIAA-approved media, assuming I was able to play it on the device (and OS) of my choice. The days of buying an album to get one good song and 9 B-sides are over.
But we've also said that there were technical measures that could be used to address the problem. We didn't get very specific about what those technical measures were, but we always made clear that we would rely on technological solutions to address technological problems.
This sounds a lot like "we can neither confirm nor deny...."
I use Proxomitron on my Windows machine to block advertising, java window.open() calls, etc. when surfing the web. It replaces the browser identity header with one that says "SpaceBison". MSN.com blocks this as well. I'd guess there's more going on than simply blocking Opera and Mozilla.
I love Debian and use it on all of my boxes (including laptop), but question the point of buying a DVD snapshot of a testing distribution. Woody is updated on a daily basis and any machine installed from DVD would be obsolete almost immediately. The DVD wouldn't save much time or effort because you'd end up replacing a majority of the packages via internet by the time Woody hits "stable". Better to wait for a stable DVD and then just download the security fixes.
So why not have your cake and eat it, too? Compile the FB driver into your kernel and then use the FB device driver in X4....
The point here is to move the "what kind of hardware do I have" question and resulting driver complexity to a lower level so that conventional X can coexist with local high-video-bandwidth applications.
I do most of my work in maximized windows. XTerm and/or MP3 players may work fine in small windows, but serious text editing simply works better when you can see lots at once. The biggest limitation with the conventional TV-on-PC "solutions" is that you have to choose between a postage stamp "always on top" image that gets in the way of your work or turn your display into an expensive TV substitute.
Having a translucent desktop would allow a person to work full-screen on an application while monitoring a full-screen TV image in the background. When something comes onto the TV that can't be missed then you just minimize or roll up your foreground app.
I would expect the window managers to eventually support a "translucence" widget for each window's title bar so that some can be made more transparent than others.
What I would prefer to see in more new games is automatic scaling of the rendering. Rather than increasing my FPS from 30 to 50 with a CPU upgrade, how about keeping the FPS constant at ~30 (that's all you really need to see fluid motion) and *automatically* increasing the resolution, "collateral object" count or depth of field based on horsepower? MS FS2000 does it, as did IndyCar-II back around 1996, but nobody else seems interested in automatic scaling. Why should we be forced to manually tweak our games to set the resolution, complexity, etc. when the game is in the the best position to detect idle CPU periods?
Is the bottleneck in FPS the time it takes to render a scene or the time it takes to send it to the display? Most Quake-like games require changes in screen resolution or use framing to keep a 1:1 relationship between the image data and the pixels. Why not render at whatever resolution the CPU speed allows and then map the pixels on the way to the display so that the user can stick with a 1024x768 or higher resolution and still play the game full-screen?
Quick! Somebody set up us the Athlon! All your magic smoke are belong to us!
I have to say that your Attorney General looked pretty stupid on television last week chastising the other nations who have poor border security. Canada is not (and has never been) a firewall for the USofA. Yes, our government is stupid sometimes and there are bad people who take advantage of our loopholes to get into Canada, but the terrorists who got into the USofA did it by passing through US Customs and US INS checkpoints. People leaving Canada don't pass through Canadian customs. Point fingers if you must, but let's be reasonable in our expectations of who is responsible for your security.
Even if you missed the September 15th posting deadline you can have some input into the process. The Canadian government will be posting the received opinions and comments to a web page for public viewing, and are encouraging the public to comment on the submissions no later than October 5th. The web site doesn't yet contain the comments-- keep your eyes peeled. Finally, a place where "me too" posts are not only appropriate but encouraged!
Preface: I am agnostic. I hope the following is not too offensive to those who have strong religious beliefs...
The experts (parent linked article's authors) research assumed a paradigm in which the suicide bomber is a short-term member of a fanatical fringe group who is essentially brainwashed into performing the act while in an altered mental state. They have difficulty integrating the Tuesday group because they don't match the profile. They have made the mistake of equating tactics with motives at the individual level, and assume that since the motive (from a personal preservation POV) is irrational the act must also be so. I think it is safe to say that the participants on Tuesday were not brainwashed. Nor were they given a last-minute pep-talk and shoved out the door. They clearly *believed* in what they were doing, to the point that they were able to carry out their duties without any apparent direct supervision. That implies that they acted with what they feel to be a motive of blissful martyrdom instead of fanatical hatred. What the Pat Robertsons of the world fail to grasp is that the "terrorists" might feel exactly the same way about their religion as Pat Robertson does about his. You can't argue religion with someone who has "seen the light". Convincing a would-be terrorist that his suicide is irrational is as pointless as trying to convince Pat Robertson that all of the Christian martyrs throughout history were really just hopeless lunatics. It's arrogant to assume your religious tenets are any more valid than those of Islam or any other faith. Think about the word "faith"-- it's essential meaning is "to accept a fact that cannot be proven". All religions hold certain truths to be self-evident. I'm glad the USA government is leading a coalition to make war against those governments that condone or support terrorists, but sadly think it's a lost cause. You could well imagine our indignation if the other side was to recruit nations to help kill off all the Jesuits and punish the nations that allow such a radical fringe to prosper and send their missionaries out into the world. If the citizens support the actions of the fringe then no act short of occupation and indoctrination will cure the situation. If you just kill off the Taliban government then another will surely replace it, in much the same way the USA would elect a new slate of representatives if the 4th aircraft had made it back to it's target.
As to the suggestion that suicide bombers are a fanatical and irrational gang: The western military organizations regularly send men into battle with the knowledge that many *will* get killed. These men go into battle knowing that the penalty for failure could be a fate worse than death and therefore accept their poor odds. We call them heroes. When the Allies landed on the beaches on D-Day the name of the game was attrition. The generals and politicians had no illusions about the casualty rate, but simply hoped they could put enough "resources" into action to overcome the enemy. The idea of winning a war without massive casualties on both sides wasn't invented until Desert Storm. I'm sure that this Bin Laden monster would be quite happy to send in stealth bombers and laser-guided bombs but the army he leads isn't so equipped.
In any event, I find it interesting that the hijackers are so obviously labelled as "evil crazy people" while the passengers of the EWR-SFO flight are held up as heroes. I'm sure there are people in the world who think that agents of the devil rose up to spite their blessed martyrs. It's all a matter of perspective.
The numbers are even less random than that site would indicate. For example, it lists the VISA prefix number as "4". Well, yes, all VISA cards start with the number 4. But anyone who has ever seen more than a few numbers will know that the second through 4th digits are also predictable as they indicate the issuing bank, type of card (regular, gold, platinum, airmiles, points, business vs. personal), etc. There are actually only 11 digits in the "random" part of the card. The trick for a criminal is to pick the 4-digit prefix having the largest number of issued cards to maximize the probability of a match. Alternatively, the high-stakes forger would go for the prestige prefixes since a successful match will have a credit limit that is an order of magnitude greater than the entry-level card. As a general rule, however, I believe most fraud artists simply copy numbers from receipts.
The article complains that today's games are too complicated to allow casual players to have any fun. That much is true. One of the big things that got me away from the arcade was the rising prices. When arcades were at their peak in the early 80's it was common for my classmates and I to buy a roll of quarters ($10) and make it last at least a day or two. Then as the technology improved the prices started rising. It wasn't enough for them to charge $.50 or $.75 per game, but they also started with the "renewable" game where you had to keep feeding quarters if you wanted to keep playing. Next thing you know, that $10 roll doesn't last 'till dinner. Teenagers have always been the demographic that played games, and at the time we just couldn't afford to start bringing $20 bills every day. I think the trend toward home game systems has a lot more to do with economics than people realize. Sure, the technology is great and the convenience of playing at 3am in your skivvies is enticing, but the big issue for a lot of parents is the fact that they don't have to give the kid a $20 and send him/her out to play.