Knowledge is not power until it is used in a way that helps one to exert more influence in a way that could not have been done without the knowledge.
Furthermore, I have yet for anybody to show me, despite repeated inquiries, how Google could gain large amounts of power or control over... well... anything, using knowledge they gained from me, in a way that is detrimental to me.
I mean, so they know I search for porn. Shit, everybody knows that!;)
So what happens if you plug in two keyboards or two mice?
Well, I just tested, and on this particular PC (an older Dell), they both work.
The problem with PoE is that you can plug a PoE-enabled device into a non-PoE switch. While not very dangerous, this sort of "compatibility" would moot the point of PoE, as you'd need a separate power source. You'd have to upgrade some of your existing hardware to PoE-enabled versions, and then be careful to only use those (color coding?) when you need power.
I don't see why compatibility is such a sticking point here. PoE is fully backwards compatible. I've used it for years. Plugging a non-PoE device into a PoE plug just works. No damage to anything. Plugging a PoE into a non-PoE port does not work, as there's no power for the device to get, so yeah you use an inline power adapter. No better nor worse than using a power adapter on a non-PoE device, really.
Color coding is not required. Just make all the jacks have power. Plugging old gear into them won't hurt the gear.
If this is your position, it seems to me that you'll have a very difficult time reconciling the vast difference, that often exists between what people say, and what they actually do.
No. People are often hypocritical. No news there.
I can accept the notion that anyone can say that they believe something, but it's not quite the same when it comes to being Christian.
Why not? If you say you believe a thing then you clearly believe that thing or you are lying. Are you suggesting that the statistics are wrong and most people who say they are Christian are lying about it? For what purpose?
Merely calling myself a Christian, or implying that I'm Christian by virtue of what I say I believe, doesn't make me a Chrstian any more than calling myself the President makes me the President.
Whether or not you are the President does not depend on your belief system. Whether or not you are Christian does.
I'm not quite getting why this is such a hard thing to grasp here. Of course somebody can be a Christian and still act like they're not. But that just makes them a hypocrite, it doesn't change what they do, in fact, believe. Actions speak louder than words, but words reflect belief and belief is what determines a person's religion. Belief = Religion.
Yep. And this makes them Christian. Because your religious belief is what you say it is. Of all people, you should know just what it is that you believe.
Far fewer can put those words into action. Fewer still can do it with any degree of consistency.
Christianity is a religion. A religion is a belief. In other words, what you do doesn't mean shit, it's what you believe.
Maybe you want to discuss something other than semantics here, and if you want to say that somebody who claims to be christian can act unchristianlike, then fine, I agree with you. But that's irrelevant to the point. I'll still lump them in with the whole "christian" group, because that's what he claims and I cannot question that. After all, they're *his* beliefs. I'm in no position to question his belief system. His sanity, sure.;)
It may be worth your time to understand the finer points of how this all fits into the "big picture". Walking about thinking all Christians are nuts is easy, but it doesn't help much when going through life.
On the contrary, I've found that this simple adjustment in perspective has helped tremendously. It explains an extraordinary amount, and it is very helpful when you have to deal with such irrational people. You tend to speak slowly and not shout at them, for one thing. Wonderfully useful, I've always found.
By all means believe what you will, but grouping all Christians together into one big pot is going to make a mess of how you view politics, the world, human events, and all manner of big things.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I don't limit myself to Christians. All religious people, of any kind, are nuts. Since I admit this is the majority of the population, it actually makes things easier to explain. You stop looking for rational behavior for one thing, since rationality is clearly not a prerequisite. When people can believe in anything so clearly insane, then they can do anything for essentially no reason whatsoever. You don't have to wonder why anymore, and the background becomes irrelevant.
If you've ever actually dealt with a crazy person, you'd probably understand. Each and every one of these crazy people has their own particular worldview that nobody else shares, and while things they do make no sense to you, they always make perfect sense to them. So it becomes a matter of trying to see the particular type of sense that it makes to the other guy. Once you understand that, you understand them.
But the important thing here is that every crazy person is different. You cannot generalize them, like you were doing with various religious peoples.
The difference between, say, Catholics and Baptists is so huge that even though the "Christian" label fits both, treating them as following the same religion is bound to disappoint.
Again, you missed the point. The difference between, say, any person and any other person is so huge that even though you could come up with some label to fit us both, treating us in the same way will *never* work.
You can lump religious people together, unless you consider them all crazy. Then you have to actually deal with them as the individual crazy people they are. It's a matter of perspective, perhaps, but the point is that *what* they believe is irrelevant, as the belief is not the person. You never have dealt with a belief, but you have dealt with people.
Next, you assume I am a Christian. Which is interesting.
I was using the royal "you".;)
All I was pointing out is that many people say they are Christian, because of whatever reason, when in fact they have no idea for what they signed up for! If you were baptized at birth, and then never had any association with the faith for the rest of your life, I hardly think that qualifies you as a Christian!
Agreed, but that's not what you actually said. You were basically generally complaining about people who claim to be Christian and then don't know their own stories or only have a minimal knowledge of them, calling them, essentially, not "true" Christians.
I was only pointing out that from an outsider point of view, Christians are Christians. You don't get to pick and choose. I lump all Christians in the same category in exactly the same way that I lump all Islam in the same category. I'm aware that they have subdivisions, but not being a member of that faith, I really don't much care what it is that they believe. Not really. They call themselves Christian, then as far as I'm concerned, they're Christian. That's the way it works.
I hardly equate Wahabbists with Shites.
I most certainly do. They're insane, like all religious people everywhere. Simple. Easy.:)
Next, you assume I am a Christian. Which is interesting.
Generally, those who claim that some Christian group aren't *really* Christians are those claiming to be the only *true* Christians themselves. It's semantically null, but still a pretty good indicator, all in all.
All I was pointing out is that many people say they are Christian, because of whatever reason, when in fact they have no idea for what they signed up for! If you were baptized at birth, and then never had any association with the faith for the rest of your life, I hardly think that qualifies you as a Christian!
As a non-Christian, the only qualifier that I care about is what that person says. If they say they're Christian, then I'm going to take that at face value. What you say is irrelevant. You see, you're claiming that they're not really Christians because of X. However, I don't believe in X or in what the other Christian believes in either. Both of them are equally ridiculous to me.
You stating that they somehow don't qualify carries no more weight than them claiming that they do. As far as I care, neither one of you is anywhere close to correct, so WTF does it matter? That's my point.
If you (assuming you're Christian) don't like being lumped in with them, well, tough. Change the name of your particular cult then. Make it distinctive. Because a Christian is a Christian is a Christian, and they're all nuts.
I think really what we disagree about is who is a Christian. A Christian in demographic terms is a person who says he believes in Jesus as more than historical figure. For me, that's not a Christian.
You don't get to pick and choose here. A person who says he is a Christian is a Christian. Simple as that. You may disagree with his beliefs, but lots of Christians disagree with each other. There's many, many factions there. For example, Catholics claim that they're the only ones, but then so do Southern Baptists.
Well, from a non-Christian point of view, you're all Christians. You all get lumped in the same category. And that's just how it is. You do the same to Islam, after all. I mean, there's just as much diversity there too you know, but you lump it all together under one broad category.
My point is that you don't get to say who is a true Christian when you're generalizing about them as a whole. That's like me saying that all black people like chicken and then defining "black people" as "that guy over there standing in line at the KFC (points)".
IMHO, PoE is at least as dumb an idea as using the same (mechanically speaking) PS/2 connector for mice and keyboards, with color coding to help people choose the right socket.
Most modern motherboards have them both wired to the same thing anyway, so it honestly makes no difference if you plug the mouse into the "keyboard" socket. This has been on mobo's for at least the last 10 years or so.
Now I grant you that some still existing boards might care which is plugged where, but the vast majority of boxes that I've used don't. I stopped noticing color coding or the little graphics on PS/2 ports years ago, and just plug it into first noticable port. It's not failed for me yet.
If I understood it properly, one increments and the other doubles.
While you're correct that the link he posted talks about x += x++, the given line of code in the post does not increment. x++ returns the value of x before x is incremented.
So y = x++ would do two things: It would set y = x, and it would increment x by 1. In the end, x would be greater than y by one.
In the case of x = x++, x would get incremented, and then it would get set back to its value before it was incremented. So x would actually remain unchanged, it would just go up one and then down one momentarily.:)
The quote is in some versions of Tanenbaum's Computer Networks, and it goes like this: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
However, the legend is of course not true. Australia has had a stable newsfeed since 1983 or thereabouts. The guy who set it up got his news from Melbourne by dialing into Berkeley, and he occassionally had tapes of his saved backup stuff mailed to him, which is likely where the legend originated.
Yeah, all streaming formats I encountered are shitty, seems to be inherent to their design although one should think they would be more robust to damage, all of them seem to have huge issues with some damaged bytes.
Really? Because MP3 is a streaming format. All MPEG formats are designed to be streaming from the get-go.
So your free music is DRMed to death? You're also gonna have to pay to put your "free" tunes on a DAP? Free as in beer locked in a safe I guess.
This is the exact same deal as the new Napster, actually. In any case, as least Rhapsody isn't crappy sounding songs. They're using AAC192 last time I checked. Napster uses WMA128's.
I can see it being a good service for somebody who doesn't have a big library of music already and buys a lot of CD's. This could save them money in the short run. But for those of us that do have a large library, it's a complete rip.
Before I get flamed, let me just say I have nothing against open source, I just don't understand how it works financially. Could someone explain how "Open Source" software makes any money? I know that corps use services to make there money, but what about smaller companies and independants? How would software development be profitable? I'm just a hobbiest coder and don't do this for a living, so I don't know all the ins and outs. Can someone explain this to me?
Well, there's several ways, but all ways of making money are essentially identical: Convince somebody to give you money for services or products rendered. Not really all that complex here.
Maybe some company will hire the guy and pay him to write code for them, and aren't too finicky about releasing that code. They use the code the guy writes, and that's really what they're concerned about.
Or, perhaps the guy writes some software which he gives away, and then sells support for it (ala Red Hat) or sells books on how to use it or something.
Or maybe he just writes Open Source when he's at home as a hobby and gets paid for writing closed source at work (probably the most common situation).
Point being that you can sell anything if you can find somebody to buy it.:)
Well, let's say you were moving at 5mph below c. Relatively speaking, wouldn't that mean that the radio signal would only be moving 5mph towards the other guy? If not, wouldn't that imply that the speed of light isn't the limit that RF can travel?
Nope. It'd be moving at c with respect to you and the other guy. Where it gets really odd is that if you and the other guy happened to pass a guy who was standing still, then he'd see the RF travelling at c too. Now, he'd see some doppler effect (red-shifting/blue-shifting of the light as it moved away/towards him), but that would only change the frequency of the light, not its speed relative to him.
That's the trick. Light (any form of EM radiation) always moves along at speed c, for any observer, in any reference frame. In order for this to be true, people moving at speeds closer to c are experiencing time pass at a much slower rate. They don't notice it, obviously. But moving faster means that your personal time slows down.
This also explains why everything seems longer when you're sitting in rush hour traffic and not moving.;)
I'm a little worried about the hype surrounding them, though. I'm not so much worried about anything google has done, or said they plan to do, as about the hype. People keep speculating about how google will be a platform, and how great it will be when they keep all of your data on their servers, and anyone with a web browser can get at it.
The problem with that is that it's a big step backwards from microsoft, freedom wise. The google guys seem like nice guys, and they have their famous "don't be evil" motto and all of that. But the point of all of the whole open source thing is freedom -- it's having control over your own computer and your own data.
So what, exactly, has Google done or appeared to do or might be planning to do that takes said freedom away from you? I mean, if you don't want them to store your data, then don't put your data there. You don't *have* to use Google's services.
I guess I'm just not entirely sure what you're really complaining about here.
Google is a like a good and just king. They don't bully people, they don't make threats, they don't throw their weight around. But they are slowly and surely consolidating a lot of control over the flow of information, generally speaking, in the world. That's scary as hell. They've never done anything that makes me think that they have evil designs. But it's still scary.
So, Google is scary because they sat down, wrote software that let them get a whole bunch of information, and then wrote a bunch of software to provide that information to other people in various ways/means/formats.
I have only one word, and that word is: what-the-fuck? Okay, so yeah, they've got a lot of data. So what? Why is that scary *at all*?
Most of what they do is as an aggregation source. They get data from all sorts of places, sort it, collate it, apply various transformations and such to it, and then present it in useful formats. They are not a content producer, they are a content aggregator. They're probably the *best* content aggregator out there, and certainly they're the largest. But I still fail to understand why having a lot of information and the power to process that information is potentially "bad" in any way.
What's going to happen when the current management dies or retires? What if they get kicked out? Jobs got kicked out of Apple?
I don't mean to suggest that we should be terrified of google, or that we should think of them as a negative force in the world. But a more sophisticated inquiry into what's happening and what the long term consequences of it might be is certainly appropriate.
What, exactly, could Google do that is so god-awful scary? I'm asking for speculation here, because while it's one thing to be paranoid, it's another to be paranoid with a just reason. I don't see any just reason here, because I don't see that they have any world-dominating possibilities, myself. Yes, yes, information is power, but that's a bullshit throwaway line... *Control* of information is power, and Google doesn't really control shit in that respect. They aggregate information, they don't produce it.
In particular, whiz-bang "gee, google came out with a new free-beer gadget that I love!" articles don't help much. I don't know that they hurt that much, but they don't help.
They certainly help me find out about Google's new whiz-bang gadgetry. Because hey, they produce some cool stuff that I use a lot. So yeah, I'd say that these articles are quite helpful.
Nah, you just need to make each trojan behave more like a normal human-like pattern. The total effect is cumulative.
Maybe each one loads the ads and your page 10 times a day, and clicks on one of the ads maybe 1 out of those 10 times (chosen at random). Have it replicate to a thousand machines, and you've got something.
In order to make it more randomish and human, you use a random timer between each page load, a more randomised click counter (maybe once every 15-30 loads gets a ad-click, with the number between ad clicks being randomized as well), and so forth. Add enough randomization and it will look a lot like your site just gained popularity. Then make your site a blog, and post to it every day like any other blog, to make it a "real" site instead an obvious money maker via ad-forgery.
But how does this make sense? The root hash is the hash of the hash of the hash (etc.) of parts of the file. If one of those parts is corrupted but still has the same hash (hash collision), then how would that affect the tree of hashes built from those hashes? The hash of the block in question is the same, after all.
Umm.. no, because if they can create a block of data with the same hash as the original one, then they have acheived something far, far greater than just putzing around with tricking P2P apps. I'm working under the assumption that they have not done this, because if they have then they are demi-gods.;-)
What I was saying was that in a Tree hash system, every "server" sending you a piece of a file sends a block of data *and* the hash for that block. When you hash it, you'll get a match to what they sent you. But it won't match in the hash above it in the tree, because the hash is not the same as the original hash was, therefore it fucks up the tree of hashes.
It's possible to spoof the hash, but eventually the hash gets checked on the other end.
Possibilities: - They're only talking about the FastTrack network, which only hashes the first X bytes of the file anyway. Solution: Don't use FastTrack. Or fix FastTrack to hash the whole file. - They're talking about other networks that hash the whole file.
If they're simply sending garbage that doesn't match their hash, then it gets rejected immediately, and every P2P client in the world ignores them after a few spoofs.
If they're sending garbage that does match their hash, then either the hash won't agree with anybody else's copies on the network (since seeing corrupted files means those files get deleted and not shared anymore), or they're trying to exploit TigerTree hashing.
In a modern network like G2 or DC, TT hashes are used to verify file integrity. A Tree hash involves breaking the file into regular sized chunks, each of which you hash separately. Then you hash those hashes together to create a new hash, and hash those together, and so on until you have one root hash for the whole file.
The root hash tells you if the file as a whole is correct, and it's how you identify files over the network. But each level of the tree hash lets you verify parts of the file independently. Each sender tells you his own hashes for whatever sections he's sending you, up to the root hash.
Once you have enough hashes and the pieces of the files, you can hash each one and actually find which piece is the bad piece via an iterative sequence. Even though each piece matches the hash given for it, the hashes won't combine to make the tree of hashes work out correctly.
Google for Merkle Trees to see what I mean. They might be thinking that they can exploit a P2P network using this form of hashing, but while they can probably make clients accept the data they send, they can't actually corrupt the final file, as the tree walk will eliminate the bad data they've sent to the peers.
Until you wouldn't mind having your own personal information and home address posted to a blog, it wouldn't seem appropriate to do it to someone else, would it?
But this information is not particularly hard to find, you know?
(I have no idea if that's you or not, I'm just illustrating the point.)
It doesn't matter if the information is available "publicly" somewhere. When you post it in the spirit of "let's harass the fuck out of this person" or "let's scare this group of people so we can feel big and powerful by having this information" it's a little different from the fact it happens to be in someone's local phone book.
Fair enough, but at the same time, doesn't that sort of behavior already fall under existing laws? I mean, posting somebody's information for informational purposes (like the phonebook google example) is fine. But posting it and saying "go picket on this man's front lawn" or "call this fucker at 3 am" is harrassment, no?
Maybe I just find it hard to understand why we need extra protections for online publication as opposed to some group organizing in the offline world for essentially the same purpose. The law shouldn't make things illegal based on the means, but on the result and the motive behind that result. The means by which you harrass a person doesn't change that it is still harrassment.
Those flaws have long been fixed. Whoever volunteers to be an organizer can reschedule the meetup places AND dates/times, and even set up polls to determine what arrangement works best for the majority of people.
No, those flaws have not been fixed. There have been features added to the system to allow you to kinda/sorta modify the existing meetups that it generates, but the underlying "meetup of everybody local every so often" is still built in. It never should have been there, and they should have removed it. Essentially it's spamming all the members once every month or so, which is more than enough to cause most people to remove their name from the service entirely.
Meetup.com eliminated spammers and the need to approve of new subscribers and posts in order to arrange a convenient way to get a bunch of people together who didn't know each other and meet somewhere locally.
The thing is that if I want to meet a bunch of people I don't know, I can go outside and go to a bar. Most scheduled meetings in the online world are desired by people who do "know" each other, via forums or whatever, but want to get together to meet each other in meatspace. Meetup.com had the potential to cater to that, and they threw it away.
I've gone to many online-people-I-know-meetings, but I dumped meetup.com after the first 3 monthly spams. The idea of meeting people with similar interests is great, but there's no need for meetup.com to bring those people together, and there never was. Those people are already brought together elsewhere, meetup.com should have made it easier for them to arrange to meet one another. It tried to do too much, and ended up not doing anything well.
And the "be an organizer" functionality is still inherently flawed itself. The whole point of having an automated service like this is for the service itself to be the organizer. Nobody likes doing this sort of thing, and it's really unnecessary for anybody to do it at all. The machine can do it well enough to suit most people's needs. It needs to take dates from everybody as to when they're available, decide on a date, let the people pick places, maybe handle voting on places, and essentially finalize the whole shebang. As for money making, the opportunities for marketing within these confines are endless. Having a national meeting? Suggest hotels. Having a local or regional meeting? Suggest local restaurants/bars. And so forth.
Meetup.com was/is fundamentally flawed and I thought so from the very beginning.
The real problem is that the way that meetup's work are too restrictive. So I was registered in a group that had like a thousand members or so, scattered around the US. All these members had some kind of common interest or were members of a forum or what have you, so it was a reasonably good group of people who wanted to meet each other.
The idea of meetup.com was to, once a month, send a meetup invite to everybody in some geographic area. Unfortunately, we were scattered, as most random selections of people are, and unless you could get 3 or more people to confirm, the meetup got cancelled. And you couldn't get information on other cities meetups. And you couldn't schedule your own meetup time/place.
In other words, meetup.com took all the work that you didn't need it to take. People are quite capable of scheduling meetings. People are quite capable of picking places. What people need help with is: -Notifying other interested people. -Getting RSVPs and such. -Resolving schedule conflicts.
If meetup had allowed people to select areas that they wanted to monitor for meetups, and have it email/notify them whenever somebody has a meetup in that area (perhaps for the given group only), and then an easy way to send an reply saying they'll be there... that would be perfect. That's all that's needed. Also add the ability to see all meetups regardless of area or in a given area.
When people in my group wanted to have a national meeting, they resorted to forums and email. Why? Because meetup.com was fucking useless for real world meetings. It only created artificial once a month meetings that usually never actually occurred.
Another time at the same supermarket, my friend got carded. The cashier didn't recognize the out-of-state driver's license and got the manager, who examined it for a while before deciding: "MARY-land? No way." He'd never heard of the state of Maryland.
I'm certain that a number of people have stories along similar lines. One of my college roommates had the same problem at a Wal-Mart because both the cashier and the manager did not think Idaho was a state.
The part that made the experience so surreal was that they didn't card him for the 2 cases of beer he was buying at the time (age 21 required), but they did card him for the carton of cigarettes (age 18 required). The result: they would only sell him the beer. He had to go to the smoke shop next door to buy the cigarettes.
I don't really like people retelling Simpsons/Family Guy/Chapelle Show quotes ad nauseum.
Chappelle Show quotes do indeed grow old quickly, but with something like the Simpsons, where the list of quotes is so large that you can literally hold entire conversations using nothing but memorable quotes, it's not quite as bad as all that. There's pretty much a Simpsons quote for every occasion, which reduces the "grow old" factor as none of them get overused.
Assuming your quoter is a true fan, of course, and can dreg 'em up from the entire 15 seasons.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Knowledge is Power.
;)
No, electricity is power.
Knowledge is not power until it is used in a way that helps one to exert more influence in a way that could not have been done without the knowledge.
Furthermore, I have yet for anybody to show me, despite repeated inquiries, how Google could gain large amounts of power or control over... well... anything, using knowledge they gained from me, in a way that is detrimental to me.
I mean, so they know I search for porn. Shit, everybody knows that!
So what happens if you plug in two keyboards or two mice?
Well, I just tested, and on this particular PC (an older Dell), they both work.
The problem with PoE is that you can plug a PoE-enabled device into a non-PoE switch. While not very dangerous, this sort of "compatibility" would moot the point of PoE, as you'd need a separate power source. You'd have to upgrade some of your existing hardware to PoE-enabled versions, and then be careful to only use those (color coding?) when you need power.
I don't see why compatibility is such a sticking point here. PoE is fully backwards compatible. I've used it for years. Plugging a non-PoE device into a PoE plug just works. No damage to anything. Plugging a PoE into a non-PoE port does not work, as there's no power for the device to get, so yeah you use an inline power adapter. No better nor worse than using a power adapter on a non-PoE device, really.
Color coding is not required. Just make all the jacks have power. Plugging old gear into them won't hurt the gear.
No, it covers just the first book and a bit of the end of the third (kinda.. not really).
If this is your position, it seems to me that you'll have a very difficult time reconciling the vast difference, that often exists between what people say, and what they actually do.
No. People are often hypocritical. No news there.
I can accept the notion that anyone can say that they believe something, but it's not quite the same when it comes to being Christian.
Why not? If you say you believe a thing then you clearly believe that thing or you are lying. Are you suggesting that the statistics are wrong and most people who say they are Christian are lying about it? For what purpose?
Merely calling myself a Christian, or implying that I'm Christian by virtue of what I say I believe, doesn't make me a Chrstian any more than calling myself the President makes me the President.
Whether or not you are the President does not depend on your belief system. Whether or not you are Christian does.
I'm not quite getting why this is such a hard thing to grasp here. Of course somebody can be a Christian and still act like they're not. But that just makes them a hypocrite, it doesn't change what they do, in fact, believe. Actions speak louder than words, but words reflect belief and belief is what determines a person's religion. Belief = Religion.
Anyone can say they're Christian.
;)
Yep. And this makes them Christian. Because your religious belief is what you say it is. Of all people, you should know just what it is that you believe.
Far fewer can put those words into action. Fewer still can do it with any degree of consistency.
Christianity is a religion. A religion is a belief. In other words, what you do doesn't mean shit, it's what you believe.
Maybe you want to discuss something other than semantics here, and if you want to say that somebody who claims to be christian can act unchristianlike, then fine, I agree with you. But that's irrelevant to the point. I'll still lump them in with the whole "christian" group, because that's what he claims and I cannot question that. After all, they're *his* beliefs. I'm in no position to question his belief system. His sanity, sure.
It may be worth your time to understand the finer points of how this all fits into the "big picture". Walking about thinking all Christians are nuts is easy, but it doesn't help much when going through life.
On the contrary, I've found that this simple adjustment in perspective has helped tremendously. It explains an extraordinary amount, and it is very helpful when you have to deal with such irrational people. You tend to speak slowly and not shout at them, for one thing. Wonderfully useful, I've always found.
By all means believe what you will, but grouping all Christians together into one big pot is going to make a mess of how you view politics, the world, human events, and all manner of big things.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I don't limit myself to Christians. All religious people, of any kind, are nuts. Since I admit this is the majority of the population, it actually makes things easier to explain. You stop looking for rational behavior for one thing, since rationality is clearly not a prerequisite. When people can believe in anything so clearly insane, then they can do anything for essentially no reason whatsoever. You don't have to wonder why anymore, and the background becomes irrelevant.
If you've ever actually dealt with a crazy person, you'd probably understand. Each and every one of these crazy people has their own particular worldview that nobody else shares, and while things they do make no sense to you, they always make perfect sense to them. So it becomes a matter of trying to see the particular type of sense that it makes to the other guy. Once you understand that, you understand them.
But the important thing here is that every crazy person is different. You cannot generalize them, like you were doing with various religious peoples.
The difference between, say, Catholics and Baptists is so huge that even though the "Christian" label fits both, treating them as following the same religion is bound to disappoint.
Again, you missed the point. The difference between, say, any person and any other person is so huge that even though you could come up with some label to fit us both, treating us in the same way will *never* work.
You can lump religious people together, unless you consider them all crazy. Then you have to actually deal with them as the individual crazy people they are. It's a matter of perspective, perhaps, but the point is that *what* they believe is irrelevant, as the belief is not the person. You never have dealt with a belief, but you have dealt with people.
Next, you assume I am a Christian. Which is interesting.
;)
:)
I was using the royal "you".
All I was pointing out is that many people say they are Christian, because of whatever reason, when in fact they have no idea for what they signed up for! If you were baptized at birth, and then never had any association with the faith for the rest of your life, I hardly think that qualifies you as a Christian!
Agreed, but that's not what you actually said. You were basically generally complaining about people who claim to be Christian and then don't know their own stories or only have a minimal knowledge of them, calling them, essentially, not "true" Christians.
I was only pointing out that from an outsider point of view, Christians are Christians. You don't get to pick and choose. I lump all Christians in the same category in exactly the same way that I lump all Islam in the same category. I'm aware that they have subdivisions, but not being a member of that faith, I really don't much care what it is that they believe. Not really. They call themselves Christian, then as far as I'm concerned, they're Christian. That's the way it works.
I hardly equate Wahabbists with Shites.
I most certainly do. They're insane, like all religious people everywhere. Simple. Easy.
Next, you assume I am a Christian. Which is interesting.
Generally, those who claim that some Christian group aren't *really* Christians are those claiming to be the only *true* Christians themselves. It's semantically null, but still a pretty good indicator, all in all.
All I was pointing out is that many people say they are Christian, because of whatever reason, when in fact they have no idea for what they signed up for! If you were baptized at birth, and then never had any association with the faith for the rest of your life, I hardly think that qualifies you as a Christian!
As a non-Christian, the only qualifier that I care about is what that person says. If they say they're Christian, then I'm going to take that at face value. What you say is irrelevant. You see, you're claiming that they're not really Christians because of X. However, I don't believe in X or in what the other Christian believes in either. Both of them are equally ridiculous to me.
You stating that they somehow don't qualify carries no more weight than them claiming that they do. As far as I care, neither one of you is anywhere close to correct, so WTF does it matter? That's my point.
If you (assuming you're Christian) don't like being lumped in with them, well, tough. Change the name of your particular cult then. Make it distinctive. Because a Christian is a Christian is a Christian, and they're all nuts.
I think really what we disagree about is who is a Christian. A Christian in demographic terms is a person who says he believes in Jesus as more than historical figure. For me, that's not a Christian.
You don't get to pick and choose here. A person who says he is a Christian is a Christian. Simple as that. You may disagree with his beliefs, but lots of Christians disagree with each other. There's many, many factions there. For example, Catholics claim that they're the only ones, but then so do Southern Baptists.
Well, from a non-Christian point of view, you're all Christians. You all get lumped in the same category. And that's just how it is. You do the same to Islam, after all. I mean, there's just as much diversity there too you know, but you lump it all together under one broad category.
My point is that you don't get to say who is a true Christian when you're generalizing about them as a whole. That's like me saying that all black people like chicken and then defining "black people" as "that guy over there standing in line at the KFC (points)".
IMHO, PoE is at least as dumb an idea as using the same (mechanically speaking) PS/2 connector for mice and keyboards, with color coding to help people choose the right socket.
Most modern motherboards have them both wired to the same thing anyway, so it honestly makes no difference if you plug the mouse into the "keyboard" socket. This has been on mobo's for at least the last 10 years or so.
Now I grant you that some still existing boards might care which is plugged where, but the vast majority of boxes that I've used don't. I stopped noticing color coding or the little graphics on PS/2 ports years ago, and just plug it into first noticable port. It's not failed for me yet.
If I understood it properly, one increments and the other doubles.
:)
While you're correct that the link he posted talks about x += x++, the given line of code in the post does not increment. x++ returns the value of x before x is incremented.
So y = x++ would do two things: It would set y = x, and it would increment x by 1. In the end, x would be greater than y by one.
In the case of x = x++, x would get incremented, and then it would get set back to its value before it was incremented. So x would actually remain unchanged, it would just go up one and then down one momentarily.
The quote is in some versions of Tanenbaum's Computer Networks, and it goes like this:
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
However, the legend is of course not true. Australia has had a stable newsfeed since 1983 or thereabouts. The guy who set it up got his news from Melbourne by dialing into Berkeley, and he occassionally had tapes of his saved backup stuff mailed to him, which is likely where the legend originated.
Yeah, all streaming formats I encountered are shitty, seems to be inherent to their design although one should think they would be more robust to damage, all of them seem to have huge issues with some damaged bytes.
Really? Because MP3 is a streaming format. All MPEG formats are designed to be streaming from the get-go.
So your free music is DRMed to death? You're also gonna have to pay to put your "free" tunes on a DAP? Free as in beer locked in a safe I guess.
This is the exact same deal as the new Napster, actually. In any case, as least Rhapsody isn't crappy sounding songs. They're using AAC192 last time I checked. Napster uses WMA128's.
I can see it being a good service for somebody who doesn't have a big library of music already and buys a lot of CD's. This could save them money in the short run. But for those of us that do have a large library, it's a complete rip.
Before I get flamed, let me just say I have nothing against open source, I just don't understand how it works financially. Could someone explain how "Open Source" software makes any money? I know that corps use services to make there money, but what about smaller companies and independants? How would software development be profitable? I'm just a hobbiest coder and don't do this for a living, so I don't know all the ins and outs. Can someone explain this to me?
:)
Well, there's several ways, but all ways of making money are essentially identical: Convince somebody to give you money for services or products rendered. Not really all that complex here.
Maybe some company will hire the guy and pay him to write code for them, and aren't too finicky about releasing that code. They use the code the guy writes, and that's really what they're concerned about.
Or, perhaps the guy writes some software which he gives away, and then sells support for it (ala Red Hat) or sells books on how to use it or something.
Or maybe he just writes Open Source when he's at home as a hobby and gets paid for writing closed source at work (probably the most common situation).
Point being that you can sell anything if you can find somebody to buy it.
Well, let's say you were moving at 5mph below c. Relatively speaking, wouldn't that mean that the radio signal would only be moving 5mph towards the other guy? If not, wouldn't that imply that the speed of light isn't the limit that RF can travel?
;)
Nope. It'd be moving at c with respect to you and the other guy. Where it gets really odd is that if you and the other guy happened to pass a guy who was standing still, then he'd see the RF travelling at c too. Now, he'd see some doppler effect (red-shifting/blue-shifting of the light as it moved away/towards him), but that would only change the frequency of the light, not its speed relative to him.
That's the trick. Light (any form of EM radiation) always moves along at speed c, for any observer, in any reference frame. In order for this to be true, people moving at speeds closer to c are experiencing time pass at a much slower rate. They don't notice it, obviously. But moving faster means that your personal time slows down.
This also explains why everything seems longer when you're sitting in rush hour traffic and not moving.
So what, exactly, has Google done or appeared to do or might be planning to do that takes said freedom away from you? I mean, if you don't want them to store your data, then don't put your data there. You don't *have* to use Google's services.
I guess I'm just not entirely sure what you're really complaining about here.
So, Google is scary because they sat down, wrote software that let them get a whole bunch of information, and then wrote a bunch of software to provide that information to other people in various ways/means/formats.
I have only one word, and that word is: what-the-fuck? Okay, so yeah, they've got a lot of data. So what? Why is that scary *at all*?
Most of what they do is as an aggregation source. They get data from all sorts of places, sort it, collate it, apply various transformations and such to it, and then present it in useful formats. They are not a content producer, they are a content aggregator. They're probably the *best* content aggregator out there, and certainly they're the largest. But I still fail to understand why having a lot of information and the power to process that information is potentially "bad" in any way.
What, exactly, could Google do that is so god-awful scary? I'm asking for speculation here, because while it's one thing to be paranoid, it's another to be paranoid with a just reason. I don't see any just reason here, because I don't see that they have any world-dominating possibilities, myself. Yes, yes, information is power, but that's a bullshit throwaway line... *Control* of information is power, and Google doesn't really control shit in that respect. They aggregate information, they don't produce it.
They certainly help me find out about Google's new whiz-bang gadgetry. Because hey, they produce some cool stuff that I use a lot. So yeah, I'd say that these articles are quite helpful.
Nah, you just need to make each trojan behave more like a normal human-like pattern. The total effect is cumulative.
:)
Maybe each one loads the ads and your page 10 times a day, and clicks on one of the ads maybe 1 out of those 10 times (chosen at random). Have it replicate to a thousand machines, and you've got something.
In order to make it more randomish and human, you use a random timer between each page load, a more randomised click counter (maybe once every 15-30 loads gets a ad-click, with the number between ad clicks being randomized as well), and so forth. Add enough randomization and it will look a lot like your site just gained popularity. Then make your site a blog, and post to it every day like any other blog, to make it a "real" site instead an obvious money maker via ad-forgery.
The real secret is to not get too greedy.
But how does this make sense? The root hash is the hash of the hash of the hash (etc.) of parts of the file. If one of those parts is corrupted but still has the same hash (hash collision), then how would that affect the tree of hashes built from those hashes? The hash of the block in question is the same, after all.
;-)
Umm.. no, because if they can create a block of data with the same hash as the original one, then they have acheived something far, far greater than just putzing around with tricking P2P apps. I'm working under the assumption that they have not done this, because if they have then they are demi-gods.
What I was saying was that in a Tree hash system, every "server" sending you a piece of a file sends a block of data *and* the hash for that block. When you hash it, you'll get a match to what they sent you. But it won't match in the hash above it in the tree, because the hash is not the same as the original hash was, therefore it fucks up the tree of hashes.
It's possible to spoof the hash, but eventually the hash gets checked on the other end.
Possibilities:
- They're only talking about the FastTrack network, which only hashes the first X bytes of the file anyway. Solution: Don't use FastTrack. Or fix FastTrack to hash the whole file.
- They're talking about other networks that hash the whole file.
If they're simply sending garbage that doesn't match their hash, then it gets rejected immediately, and every P2P client in the world ignores them after a few spoofs.
If they're sending garbage that does match their hash, then either the hash won't agree with anybody else's copies on the network (since seeing corrupted files means those files get deleted and not shared anymore), or they're trying to exploit TigerTree hashing.
In a modern network like G2 or DC, TT hashes are used to verify file integrity. A Tree hash involves breaking the file into regular sized chunks, each of which you hash separately. Then you hash those hashes together to create a new hash, and hash those together, and so on until you have one root hash for the whole file.
The root hash tells you if the file as a whole is correct, and it's how you identify files over the network. But each level of the tree hash lets you verify parts of the file independently. Each sender tells you his own hashes for whatever sections he's sending you, up to the root hash.
Once you have enough hashes and the pieces of the files, you can hash each one and actually find which piece is the bad piece via an iterative sequence. Even though each piece matches the hash given for it, the hashes won't combine to make the tree of hashes work out correctly.
Google for Merkle Trees to see what I mean. They might be thinking that they can exploit a P2P network using this form of hashing, but while they can probably make clients accept the data they send, they can't actually corrupt the final file, as the tree walk will eliminate the bad data they've sent to the peers.
Is this the place?
Good album to get a copy of, BTW, if you don't have one.
Until you wouldn't mind having your own personal information and home address posted to a blog, it wouldn't seem appropriate to do it to someone else, would it?
& q= D+Schroeder+Madison%2C+WI
But this information is not particularly hard to find, you know?
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient
(I have no idea if that's you or not, I'm just illustrating the point.)
It doesn't matter if the information is available "publicly" somewhere. When you post it in the spirit of "let's harass the fuck out of this person" or "let's scare this group of people so we can feel big and powerful by having this information" it's a little different from the fact it happens to be in someone's local phone book.
Fair enough, but at the same time, doesn't that sort of behavior already fall under existing laws? I mean, posting somebody's information for informational purposes (like the phonebook google example) is fine. But posting it and saying "go picket on this man's front lawn" or "call this fucker at 3 am" is harrassment, no?
Maybe I just find it hard to understand why we need extra protections for online publication as opposed to some group organizing in the offline world for essentially the same purpose. The law shouldn't make things illegal based on the means, but on the result and the motive behind that result. The means by which you harrass a person doesn't change that it is still harrassment.
Those flaws have long been fixed. Whoever volunteers to be an organizer can reschedule the meetup places AND dates/times, and even set up polls to determine what arrangement works best for the majority of people.
No, those flaws have not been fixed. There have been features added to the system to allow you to kinda/sorta modify the existing meetups that it generates, but the underlying "meetup of everybody local every so often" is still built in. It never should have been there, and they should have removed it. Essentially it's spamming all the members once every month or so, which is more than enough to cause most people to remove their name from the service entirely.
Meetup.com eliminated spammers and the need to approve of new subscribers and posts in order to arrange a convenient way to get a bunch of people together who didn't know each other and meet somewhere locally.
The thing is that if I want to meet a bunch of people I don't know, I can go outside and go to a bar. Most scheduled meetings in the online world are desired by people who do "know" each other, via forums or whatever, but want to get together to meet each other in meatspace. Meetup.com had the potential to cater to that, and they threw it away.
I've gone to many online-people-I-know-meetings, but I dumped meetup.com after the first 3 monthly spams. The idea of meeting people with similar interests is great, but there's no need for meetup.com to bring those people together, and there never was. Those people are already brought together elsewhere, meetup.com should have made it easier for them to arrange to meet one another. It tried to do too much, and ended up not doing anything well.
And the "be an organizer" functionality is still inherently flawed itself. The whole point of having an automated service like this is for the service itself to be the organizer. Nobody likes doing this sort of thing, and it's really unnecessary for anybody to do it at all. The machine can do it well enough to suit most people's needs. It needs to take dates from everybody as to when they're available, decide on a date, let the people pick places, maybe handle voting on places, and essentially finalize the whole shebang. As for money making, the opportunities for marketing within these confines are endless. Having a national meeting? Suggest hotels. Having a local or regional meeting? Suggest local restaurants/bars. And so forth.
Meetup.com was/is fundamentally flawed and I thought so from the very beginning.
The real problem is that the way that meetup's work are too restrictive. So I was registered in a group that had like a thousand members or so, scattered around the US. All these members had some kind of common interest or were members of a forum or what have you, so it was a reasonably good group of people who wanted to meet each other.
The idea of meetup.com was to, once a month, send a meetup invite to everybody in some geographic area. Unfortunately, we were scattered, as most random selections of people are, and unless you could get 3 or more people to confirm, the meetup got cancelled. And you couldn't get information on other cities meetups. And you couldn't schedule your own meetup time/place.
In other words, meetup.com took all the work that you didn't need it to take. People are quite capable of scheduling meetings. People are quite capable of picking places. What people need help with is:
-Notifying other interested people.
-Getting RSVPs and such.
-Resolving schedule conflicts.
If meetup had allowed people to select areas that they wanted to monitor for meetups, and have it email/notify them whenever somebody has a meetup in that area (perhaps for the given group only), and then an easy way to send an reply saying they'll be there... that would be perfect. That's all that's needed. Also add the ability to see all meetups regardless of area or in a given area.
When people in my group wanted to have a national meeting, they resorted to forums and email. Why? Because meetup.com was fucking useless for real world meetings. It only created artificial once a month meetings that usually never actually occurred.
I'm certain that a number of people have stories along similar lines. One of my college roommates had the same problem at a Wal-Mart because both the cashier and the manager did not think Idaho was a state.
The part that made the experience so surreal was that they didn't card him for the 2 cases of beer he was buying at the time (age 21 required), but they did card him for the carton of cigarettes (age 18 required). The result: they would only sell him the beer. He had to go to the smoke shop next door to buy the cigarettes.
I don't really like people retelling Simpsons/Family Guy/Chapelle Show quotes ad nauseum.
:)
Chappelle Show quotes do indeed grow old quickly, but with something like the Simpsons, where the list of quotes is so large that you can literally hold entire conversations using nothing but memorable quotes, it's not quite as bad as all that. There's pretty much a Simpsons quote for every occasion, which reduces the "grow old" factor as none of them get overused.
Assuming your quoter is a true fan, of course, and can dreg 'em up from the entire 15 seasons.