. There is the use of the arcane abbreviations used in texting. This is similar to the stupid use of the "10 codes" which was insane.
Those 10-codes were a carryover from standard police codes and anything but arcane. Early adopters of these radios were people who had training in enforcement or radio disciplines where this nomenclature was standard. SMS jargon is merely a bastardization of the English language that was not borne of efficiency, but most likely misspelling and novelty linguistic rebellion, and later adopted for efficiency. Modern phones could improve up on this by translating goofy l33t speak into actual english words, and some do.
The CB radio fad was expensive to get all of your equipment but once you had it, was cheap to operate. Texting is cheap upfront but very expensive to send messages. This having been said, both are expensive.
CB radios were never that expensive. They were necessary items for people who traveled a lot. They were in-effect a safety device and also early "radar detectors" (or should I say "smokey detectors" hehe). When the song "Convoy" became a hit, middle America decided they wanted to clog the airwaves with useless chatter, and THAT was a fad that screwed up the citizens band and forced them to open up a bunch of extra channels. Luckily the novelty use of CB radios did fade out and now once again, travelling/professionals use the system mostly, as it was always intended.
Many people just have to be on the bandwagon. Like CB radio, I think texting too is just a passing fascination.
People don't have to buy a special texting machine. SMS is built into almost all modern phones. Obviously if the telcos can't make a profit center out of it, they have no incentive to offer phones with this feature, but it's basically synonymous with mobile phones now. Your analogy might hold water if there was a CB radio sold with every new car, which there never was.
For these reasons, I believe texting will not last long.
The only thing that will kill texting is further evolution of the mobile web, and other cellular-based communications protocols, but there's no doubt "texting" in one form or another, is here to stay. If the telcos want to nickel and dime people to death then a tcp/ip phone-based skype or AIM-type messenging system will take over, but texting is here to stay. No doubt at all. It's way too efficient and desirable a feature. And it's most certainly not a fad. That's like saying "online chatting" is a fad when the first multi-user BBS offered such a feature. No. It was a revolutionary new way of communicating. It's better than voicemail and answering machines in that it can not only be passive, but also active. You can often send text messages when you can't get a normal voice call through -- this happened a lot during Hurricane Katrina... we were able to have text messages queued in our phones and when we hit service zones, the messages would be automatically sent - it was very useful.
I don't think they're replacing the standard batteries. I think they're adding a second, more substantive battery pack to provide more power. I suspect the current crop of hybrids doesn't have enough stored energy in their battery packs to be very useful. You could say they engineered the vehicles to not be effective without the gasoline engine even though the technology has been available for decades to make much more efficient electric vehicles. So by adding more batteries, they extend the range the car can travel on electric power alone.
You can use standard window units - but the key is insulation - you have to have a very well insulated and sealed room. I built my own server room by adding two additional layers of insulation on to the existing sheetrock (styrofoam with a plastic vinyl 4x8 sheet paneling and then putting silicon on all the seams, then using window units (with a backup unit). I can keep the room at a constant 61 degrees F with two full height racks running with a 8000-12000 btu 220 window unit.
If you're into Galaxian-style space shooters, you can't do better than Warblade and it's also available for the Mac. The graphics are stunning. The gameplay is really good, but if there's a complaint it's that you can build up a powerful arsenal of weapons at high levels but if you hit the wrong powerup, you become weak again and it doesn't matter how many lives you have, you'll die a quick painful death.
The solution to this problem isn't enabling SSL, it's not using Wireless networks and if you do, make sure you're using heavy encryption. The only way they can steal info is if they can packet sniff and you shouldn't be using any network where your traffic can be sniffed anyway.
The biggest scam artist I've seen is the Domain Registry of America - they send out snail mail letters with impressive looking American flag logos on them with a bogus invoice-looking form to renew domains, but it's really the Internet version of slamming the domain and switching registrars. DROA needs to be shut down.
I'm not into conspiracy stuff, but I do think Occham's Razer applies here. The timing and location of the cable cuts; the fact that the communications company that experienced two of the outages is calling them "cuts" despite the news media originally claiming otherwise, makes it seem reasonable that this was some sort of deliberate act. To what end, who knows, but there's no doubt that America's economists power players are deathly afraid of the oil trading system using another currency other than the dollar.
So how much gold do YOU have? If we moved over to the gold standard, would you be more or less rich? Oh wait, you think you'll be allowed to exchange your dollars for gold? Really? How many dollars per ounce of gold? Oh gold is at ~$800/oz so you think that's what you'd be trading at? Are you serious? Do you have any idea how much virtual "dollars" there are in circulation and what the price of gold would go to if there was ANY realistic talk of moving to a gold standard? You need to learn a little more about the monetary system before you start jumping on Ron Paul's goofy gold standard bandwagon. It makes about as much sense as any of his other fundy libertarian rantings. Seriously. Do your research. Ask yourself if we abolished half the government agencies Ron Paul proposes, what that would do to society? Ask yourself if you REALLY, HONESTLY believe that privatizing everything in creation would result in better, more efficient service? Seriously? Think about it.
I appreciate Ron Paul's attention and respect for the Constitution, but that doesn't mean I can forgive the fact that he's a raving nutty, fundamentalist, evangelical who believes the earth is 6000 years old. We already tried a fundy evangelical in the white house who slid into power by hoodwinking single-issue voters once. We don't need it again.
If you're going to look into Ron Paul, look into all of him. Not just the romantic idea that he thinks pot should be legal and nobody should pay taxes. Look at whether he could get anything done; whether his ideology can become dangerous (like it has with Bush) and whether or not his ideas make sense. Aside from a few abstract, conceptual notions such as Constitutionalism, most everything else he suggests is wildly unrealistic. The guy has no plan, only a few buttons that seem to give his supporters instant hardons.
The Zeitgeist Movie is valuable but far from perfect
Now that's quite an understatement. The movie suggests that there's some conspiratorial cabal behind everything from presidential assassinations throughout history, 9/11 and implanting RFID chips and tracking people. The next installment promises to show evidence that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster are actually CIA agents.
Now this academic hysteria is completely ridiculous, it sounds more like a science-as-religion bigotry to me.
Religious persecution of the secular arena is real. This is not "academic hysteria" any more than Martin Luther King, Jr. was engaging in "minority hysteria".
Religious ideology has been stifling politics for thousands of years and it's happening every day in front of us, from curtailing stem cell and AIDS research, to ignoring environmental issues and beyond.
It's a shame that the American academic community doesn't have the balls to stand up to religious power that the Italians do. We sure could use it.
Galileo had permission to publish, and it only became in issue when he presented his theory in a politically-inflammatory fashion) wrong of history.
When a scientist has to worry about political concerns in reporting his findings, he's being oppressed. Galileo was given a choice: death or STFU. Guess what he chose?
For some reason I had a vision of you as a GM appearing in front of em and using your godlike powers to kick their ass and send em running away.
That vision wouldn't be unheard of. We had a spell that would literally "kick" a person violently across the end of the zone. We'd also paralyze somebody so they couldn't move. All we really needed was the ability to play very bad MP3s on their client and the cycle would have been complete.
I knew GMs that engaged in all sorts of torture-like scenarios. Later on this stuff was outlawed. There were hidden dungeons in various zones that were only accessible to GMs. We'd teleport there, and then summon troublesome players. It looked like a prison; it felt like a prison. It was amusing how seriously upset some people would get.
Let me say though, the vast majority of cheaters were exploiting issues in the game's design. I was never hard on them, being a hacker, it just seemed like a natural thing. Part of playing the game, for example, was knowing how to exploit pathing to your advantage, whether you moved around natural objects or hid behind things to protect yourself. The game designers seemed to get upset if you exploited an aspect of the game they hadn't originally intended to be used in that manner, but it was all the same thing: playing & cheating in many cases. What got me were how many of these "holes" remained exploitable for so long.
Some of the best cheats nobody ever really knew about... mainly involving creative ways of using factions to perform surgical strikes on select NPCs.
I was a GM in Everquest for several years. I could chime in on my experience, which mostly related to scouting out in-game cheating. We were trained to look for signs of more elaborate types of cheats and report them higher up in the chain.
In most of these games, the main thing wasn't really "cheating" as much as it was "exploiting" flaws of characteristics of the game's design. On some maps it was possible to "fall through the world" and people could effectively position themselves so they could attack monsters but the monsters could not attack them. This was also accomplished by using creative means to get on top of structures in the game geometry that the designers had never intended to be accessible. There were places for example, where we'd often find PCs on roofs in hostile towns attacking high-level NPCs and due to the pathing, were able to not be counter-attacked. There was a constant cat-and-mouse game trying to find out how they were pulling these things off. It was more interesting than annoying usually. I was always impressed by some of the creative ways people would try to give themselves an advantage.
Midway into EQ's popularity a number of software programs started to appear. These really blew the lid off the game's integrity. I forget the name of this one utility, but it was a utility that managed to decrypt the game stream, and due to the way the game was designed, when you entered a zone, this program could identify the coordinates of and nature of every NPC and PC in a certain range. SOE's game design, which often sent more info to the client than the client needed to make available to the user, created a situation where once someone decrypted the data, they had access to what was going on. Suddenly rare NPCs were being killed within minutes of appearing, and when a GM appeared in a zone to investigate, the perps knew instantly we were there and would logoff. Again, a cat-and-mouse game erupted where the developers started routinely changing the game's encryption and eventually they curtailed much of this behavior and made it too difficult to use the software. But at its heyday, the cheats were quite impressed. You'd have your main game client, and then you'd have a second computer sniffing the traffic, decoding it and displaying a real-time map of all PCs and NPCs in the zone. Very high-tech. Also very difficult to catch. Since the cheat program wasn't even on the same PC, programs like WoW's "Warden" wouldn't help. The only way you could identify someone cheating was to watch their in-game behavior. When you'd see PCs make a beeline for a rare NPC within seconds of it spawning, you knew something was up.
Last but not least, in these games, the servers log just about everything. If they want to catch a cheater, the behavior is quite easy to spot. I think the biggest issue with security in MMORPGS isn't being able to catch people cheating, it's trying to figure out how to keep the proper balance between game integrity and profitability. Probably 90% of people playing MMORPGs have broke rules and most of this behavior is on file. The companies cannot afford to take too hard a stance unless the transgressions are creating big problems.
Slashdot Mirror
. There is the use of the arcane abbreviations used in texting. This is similar to the stupid use of the "10 codes" which was insane.
Those 10-codes were a carryover from standard police codes and anything but arcane. Early adopters of these radios were people who had training in enforcement or radio disciplines where this nomenclature was standard. SMS jargon is merely a bastardization of the English language that was not borne of efficiency, but most likely misspelling and novelty linguistic rebellion, and later adopted for efficiency. Modern phones could improve up on this by translating goofy l33t speak into actual english words, and some do.
The CB radio fad was expensive to get all of your equipment but once you had it, was cheap to operate. Texting is cheap upfront but very expensive to send messages. This having been said, both are expensive.
CB radios were never that expensive. They were necessary items for people who traveled a lot. They were in-effect a safety device and also early "radar detectors" (or should I say "smokey detectors" hehe). When the song "Convoy" became a hit, middle America decided they wanted to clog the airwaves with useless chatter, and THAT was a fad that screwed up the citizens band and forced them to open up a bunch of extra channels. Luckily the novelty use of CB radios did fade out and now once again, travelling/professionals use the system mostly, as it was always intended.
Many people just have to be on the bandwagon. Like CB radio, I think texting too is just a passing fascination.
People don't have to buy a special texting machine. SMS is built into almost all modern phones. Obviously if the telcos can't make a profit center out of it, they have no incentive to offer phones with this feature, but it's basically synonymous with mobile phones now. Your analogy might hold water if there was a CB radio sold with every new car, which there never was.
For these reasons, I believe texting will not last long.
The only thing that will kill texting is further evolution of the mobile web, and other cellular-based communications protocols, but there's no doubt "texting" in one form or another, is here to stay. If the telcos want to nickel and dime people to death then a tcp/ip phone-based skype or AIM-type messenging system will take over, but texting is here to stay. No doubt at all. It's way too efficient and desirable a feature. And it's most certainly not a fad. That's like saying "online chatting" is a fad when the first multi-user BBS offered such a feature. No. It was a revolutionary new way of communicating. It's better than voicemail and answering machines in that it can not only be passive, but also active. You can often send text messages when you can't get a normal voice call through -- this happened a lot during Hurricane Katrina... we were able to have text messages queued in our phones and when we hit service zones, the messages would be automatically sent - it was very useful.
I'm serious. I've had three papers rejected by IEEE, and they except one that came out of a hidden markov model? That seriously pisses me off.
I think we know why your paper was rejected.
Administration says one thing... reality is likely the other.
Haven't we learned yet?
I'm not believing a damn thing those people say. Chances are the attack is coming from within their own network.
It's not all about money you moron.
I don't think they're replacing the standard batteries. I think they're adding a second, more substantive battery pack to provide more power. I suspect the current crop of hybrids doesn't have enough stored energy in their battery packs to be very useful. You could say they engineered the vehicles to not be effective without the gasoline engine even though the technology has been available for decades to make much more efficient electric vehicles. So by adding more batteries, they extend the range the car can travel on electric power alone.
You can use standard window units - but the key is insulation - you have to have a very well insulated and sealed room. I built my own server room by adding two additional layers of insulation on to the existing sheetrock (styrofoam with a plastic vinyl 4x8 sheet paneling and then putting silicon on all the seams, then using window units (with a backup unit). I can keep the room at a constant 61 degrees F with two full height racks running with a 8000-12000 btu 220 window unit.
If you're into Galaxian-style space shooters, you can't do better than Warblade and it's also available for the Mac. The graphics are stunning. The gameplay is really good, but if there's a complaint it's that you can build up a powerful arsenal of weapons at high levels but if you hit the wrong powerup, you become weak again and it doesn't matter how many lives you have, you'll die a quick painful death.
The solution to this problem isn't enabling SSL, it's not using Wireless networks and if you do, make sure you're using heavy encryption. The only way they can steal info is if they can packet sniff and you shouldn't be using any network where your traffic can be sniffed anyway.
I agree. But at the same time I understand why they're asking. The current administration seems to have depleted its supply of natural intelligence.
The fact that the site was developed using Cold Fusion should have signaled the first sign of its impending demise.
The biggest scam artist I've seen is the Domain Registry of America - they send out snail mail letters with impressive looking American flag logos on them with a bogus invoice-looking form to renew domains, but it's really the Internet version of slamming the domain and switching registrars. DROA needs to be shut down.
You have an alternative. You can stop watching their crappy shows in the first place.
"radical muzzy group"
Slashdot sure has changed.... I miss the old Slashdot.
I'm not into conspiracy stuff, but I do think Occham's Razer applies here. The timing and location of the cable cuts; the fact that the communications company that experienced two of the outages is calling them "cuts" despite the news media originally claiming otherwise, makes it seem reasonable that this was some sort of deliberate act. To what end, who knows, but there's no doubt that America's economists power players are deathly afraid of the oil trading system using another currency other than the dollar.
So how much gold do YOU have? If we moved over to the gold standard, would you be more or less rich? Oh wait, you think you'll be allowed to exchange your dollars for gold? Really? How many dollars per ounce of gold? Oh gold is at ~$800/oz so you think that's what you'd be trading at? Are you serious? Do you have any idea how much virtual "dollars" there are in circulation and what the price of gold would go to if there was ANY realistic talk of moving to a gold standard? You need to learn a little more about the monetary system before you start jumping on Ron Paul's goofy gold standard bandwagon. It makes about as much sense as any of his other fundy libertarian rantings. Seriously. Do your research. Ask yourself if we abolished half the government agencies Ron Paul proposes, what that would do to society? Ask yourself if you REALLY, HONESTLY believe that privatizing everything in creation would result in better, more efficient service? Seriously? Think about it.
I appreciate Ron Paul's attention and respect for the Constitution, but that doesn't mean I can forgive the fact that he's a raving nutty, fundamentalist, evangelical who believes the earth is 6000 years old. We already tried a fundy evangelical in the white house who slid into power by hoodwinking single-issue voters once. We don't need it again.
If you're going to look into Ron Paul, look into all of him. Not just the romantic idea that he thinks pot should be legal and nobody should pay taxes. Look at whether he could get anything done; whether his ideology can become dangerous (like it has with Bush) and whether or not his ideas make sense. Aside from a few abstract, conceptual notions such as Constitutionalism, most everything else he suggests is wildly unrealistic. The guy has no plan, only a few buttons that seem to give his supporters instant hardons.
The problem with Ron Paul is that he's clearly admitted he is a creationist and rejects the theory of evolution, and aside from that there's no substantive evidence in the history of human civilization that his brand of anarcho capitalist libertarianism would work in our society.
Other than that, what's there not to like about Ron Paul?
B..B..B..But Clinton!
*yawn*
Are you sure you should be typing this stuff in a public forum? Remember, they're watching everything you do! : /
The Zeitgeist Movie is valuable but far from perfect
Now that's quite an understatement. The movie suggests that there's some conspiratorial cabal behind everything from presidential assassinations throughout history, 9/11 and implanting RFID chips and tracking people. The next installment promises to show evidence that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster are actually CIA agents.
I meant to say "science" instead of "politics". This is obviously Satan's fault.
Now this academic hysteria is completely ridiculous, it sounds more like a science-as-religion bigotry to me.
Religious persecution of the secular arena is real. This is not "academic hysteria" any more than Martin Luther King, Jr. was engaging in "minority hysteria".
Religious ideology has been stifling politics for thousands of years and it's happening every day in front of us, from curtailing stem cell and AIDS research, to ignoring environmental issues and beyond.
It's a shame that the American academic community doesn't have the balls to stand up to religious power that the Italians do. We sure could use it.
Galileo had permission to publish, and it only became in issue when he presented his theory in a politically-inflammatory fashion) wrong of history.
When a scientist has to worry about political concerns in reporting his findings, he's being oppressed. Galileo was given a choice: death or STFU. Guess what he chose?
Normally, I'd say faith is faith and science is science, but theology and science seems to be constantly banging heads. As a result, it's unfortunate that we need these kinds of resources to help educate people on the importance of this ideological conflict. I've found FreeThoughtPedia to be a good place to direct people to who need info to engage in the debate. Whether you're trying to show that the theory of evolution is a fact, showcase how theology constantly invades society or offer hard-hitting questions about the legitimacy of scripture, FTP is a good resource to make superstitious ideologues tuck their tails between their cloven hoofs.
For some reason I had a vision of you as a GM appearing in front of em and using your godlike powers to kick their ass and send em running away.
That vision wouldn't be unheard of. We had a spell that would literally "kick" a person violently across the end of the zone. We'd also paralyze somebody so they couldn't move. All we really needed was the ability to play very bad MP3s on their client and the cycle would have been complete.
I knew GMs that engaged in all sorts of torture-like scenarios. Later on this stuff was outlawed. There were hidden dungeons in various zones that were only accessible to GMs. We'd teleport there, and then summon troublesome players. It looked like a prison; it felt like a prison. It was amusing how seriously upset some people would get.
Let me say though, the vast majority of cheaters were exploiting issues in the game's design. I was never hard on them, being a hacker, it just seemed like a natural thing. Part of playing the game, for example, was knowing how to exploit pathing to your advantage, whether you moved around natural objects or hid behind things to protect yourself. The game designers seemed to get upset if you exploited an aspect of the game they hadn't originally intended to be used in that manner, but it was all the same thing: playing & cheating in many cases. What got me were how many of these "holes" remained exploitable for so long.
Some of the best cheats nobody ever really knew about... mainly involving creative ways of using factions to perform surgical strikes on select NPCs.
I was a GM in Everquest for several years. I could chime in on my experience, which mostly related to scouting out in-game cheating. We were trained to look for signs of more elaborate types of cheats and report them higher up in the chain.
In most of these games, the main thing wasn't really "cheating" as much as it was "exploiting" flaws of characteristics of the game's design. On some maps it was possible to "fall through the world" and people could effectively position themselves so they could attack monsters but the monsters could not attack them. This was also accomplished by using creative means to get on top of structures in the game geometry that the designers had never intended to be accessible. There were places for example, where we'd often find PCs on roofs in hostile towns attacking high-level NPCs and due to the pathing, were able to not be counter-attacked. There was a constant cat-and-mouse game trying to find out how they were pulling these things off. It was more interesting than annoying usually. I was always impressed by some of the creative ways people would try to give themselves an advantage.
Midway into EQ's popularity a number of software programs started to appear. These really blew the lid off the game's integrity. I forget the name of this one utility, but it was a utility that managed to decrypt the game stream, and due to the way the game was designed, when you entered a zone, this program could identify the coordinates of and nature of every NPC and PC in a certain range. SOE's game design, which often sent more info to the client than the client needed to make available to the user, created a situation where once someone decrypted the data, they had access to what was going on. Suddenly rare NPCs were being killed within minutes of appearing, and when a GM appeared in a zone to investigate, the perps knew instantly we were there and would logoff. Again, a cat-and-mouse game erupted where the developers started routinely changing the game's encryption and eventually they curtailed much of this behavior and made it too difficult to use the software. But at its heyday, the cheats were quite impressed. You'd have your main game client, and then you'd have a second computer sniffing the traffic, decoding it and displaying a real-time map of all PCs and NPCs in the zone. Very high-tech. Also very difficult to catch. Since the cheat program wasn't even on the same PC, programs like WoW's "Warden" wouldn't help. The only way you could identify someone cheating was to watch their in-game behavior. When you'd see PCs make a beeline for a rare NPC within seconds of it spawning, you knew something was up.
Last but not least, in these games, the servers log just about everything. If they want to catch a cheater, the behavior is quite easy to spot. I think the biggest issue with security in MMORPGS isn't being able to catch people cheating, it's trying to figure out how to keep the proper balance between game integrity and profitability. Probably 90% of people playing MMORPGs have broke rules and most of this behavior is on file. The companies cannot afford to take too hard a stance unless the transgressions are creating big problems.