Using a different server sure would be a hell of a lot simpler if you slashdot guys would get with that whole "web thing" and make all the links on the page RELATIVE instead of ABSOLUTE..
I mean, it's kinda annoying to use brak.slashdot.org only to have every link on every resulting page point to http://slashdot.org anyway.
I'd recommend doing that anyway. Not because of them trying to extort more cash from you (although that's a damn good reason), but because a lot of the cable modem setups out there have the cable installer guy get the MAC address of your PC's network card to phone into the office. Why? So that not every jackass can hook up an off the shelf cable modem, fire up DHCP, get a lease, and run with it. The DHCP server only gives out an IP to the list of verified MAC addresses. Mine does this.
So if the guy had used the MAC of the router, I'd be unable to connect without the router in the loop. As it stands now, I hid the router (avoiding any cable guy questions), he used the MAC of the PC, and then later I changed the router's WAN MAC to be the same as the PC's MAC. Thus, if the router kicks off one day, I can plug that PC in directly and still have some connectivity for getting technical help on fixing it. Most all SOHO NAT router devices let you change the MAC of the WAN side. Linksys calls it "MAC Cloning" I believe.
No, that's not SPI, that's just what NAT does (stateful packet inspection vs packet inspection).
SPI can be enabled or disabled for the little Linksys router. Enabling it effectively closes all inbound ports unless the packet passes the stateful packet inspection. But it disables port forwarding. Which is why disabling it, if you need to forward inbound ports, is required. But regardless of whether it's on or not, if you're not forwarding any ports, nothing gets inbound without a matching outbound connection to do the temporary port forwarding.
NAT uses packet inspection based simply on the destination and source IP addresses, along with port munging to get stuff to go to the right place.
SPI (stateful packet inspection) does a more thorough job of it, examining the entire packet up to the application layer. The important difference is that SPI is harder to fool. Whereas normally we only care about source and destinations, SPI builds a state table using info in the packet and uses that info from previous packets to determine if new packets are valid or not. It's more secure, but like I said, the little Linksys gateways can't arbitrarily forward ports with SPI turned on.
You are talking of a related, but different technology. Dynamic Access Filtering or Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) can be used to block all ports while opening up tiny holes to allow sessions you initiate to go through. This way, you can get out, but nobody can try and establish a session to you. If you're running a service like http, ftp, gnutella, IRC, AIM file transfer, etc., you have to create permanent holes in the service ports to allow incoming connections. Some devices allow you to specify the protocol, others do not.
Who the heck was talking about SPI?
BLOCK ALL PORTS. It's just that simple. If you want to open specific ports, like 80 or 443 for a web server, then you open those ports specifically.
But the default should be "deny". It's that simple.
Re:I don't
on
Wartrapping?
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· Score: 4, Informative
After that I found this game genie code to make it easier. GXNAGY. This will change the warp to world 2 at the end of 1-2 into a warp to the minus world.
I also read that completing the loop 8 times will send you to the final level. But in order to do that I think you'd need to put in the Game genie code to disable the clock as well.
Same as with signatures and so forth. I give out a timestamp or something encrypted with my private key. My public key can decrypt it. Therefore I'm me and you can open the door.
I never transmitted my key, I transmitted something that keeps changing (like the time) that was just encrypted with my key, and the decrypted version made sense. What the decrypted text actually turned out to be really wasn't the point.
Could be better ways.. Have the doorknob send me plain text which I then munge a bit and encrypt with my private key to send back. A challenge response mechanism using public key encryption, basically. Lots of other ways. Only thing that will really hurt me is theft of the implant.
We have to assume the implant is secure, though. If it has flaws then they could be exploitable, although it'd have to be damn fast to exploit if it's only got 1-2 seconds in which to do it.
If the one time pad is done correctly, yes, it's unbreakable. I think I said that.
If it's not done correctly, say, the guy used the same pad on two different messages, or the guy isn't using a good random generator, then a known plaintext attack will give you new parts of messages.
Especially if the guy used the same pad twice.
Like I said, if it's done *correctly* then it's unbreakable. But it often is not done correctly.
Assuming someone doesn't steal the key and you did it correctly, then yes.
But if you didn't do it correctly, or your pad choices aren't truly random, or someone knows some of the plaintext, or half a dozen other things, then a one time pad can be broken with a lot of guesswork.
[i]2) When schools try to educate students on how to secure their computers they tend not to listen. You might listen as a computer geek, but I can tell you right now that 99% of the people in my dorm building could care less about installing Windows 2000 SP3.[/i]
This is an already solved problem. You install a scanning server type of thing. Several different programs exist for this purpose. Basically it scans the local network for vulnerable systems. If it finds a computer on the network that is vulnerable to a known attack, it talks to the routers and flat out cuts that computer off from the network. With a little more effort, it can send email to the computer's owner explaining why they were cut off and how to get access reinstated (patch your f'ing system). I assume they'd need to get their email on campus after getting cut off as opposed to on their own PC's.;)
In any case, the biggest problem is keeping the scanner up to date. But solutions do exist to do this specific service.
If your packet stayed on the surface of the water, on the pad the whole time, then yeah, routing is a bitch. But the idea is that it routes on the surface only until it finds a pad with a "stem" (internet connection). Then it tunnels down that high speed connection to come up much closer to your friend. But not everyone has to share their internet connection, those that are not simply pass along traffic on wireless only.
The real trick to this setup is how do you know where your friend is? I mean, if you're on wireless and he's on wireless, then the route to either one of you via the pads is a minor PITA. But not nearly as hard as the scaling problem you're describing.
Fair enough, but I never said light exceeded c.. Here's the thing.. if point A and B are moving apart, then there's more space between them, right? So it must pass through that space. Simple, no?
It's like this.. motion of the sender is irrelevant, but motion of the receiver isn't. Nor is the intervening space. If it hasn't got there yet and "there" moves away, then it has farther to go, nyet?
Say you've got two points, 2ly apart. Also say that the universe is expanding at pretty close to the speed of light, but still less than light speed. Call it 99% of c.
Okay, now a beam of light travelling from point A to point B takes 1 year to travel 1 ly. But in that same amount of time, the universe has expanded 99% of 1 ly and stretched our two points apart by that much (the universe being our two points here). So the total distance from A to B is now just under 3 ly, and our light has only gone 1. It didn't really cover a lot of ground, did it?
Work the rest out yourself. If the universe is expanding at.99*c, it takes light something like 102 years to make it to point B, at which time point A is 102 light years away from point B. When the light started it was only 2 ly away, but it got slowed down in it's journey because of the expansion of the universe, and yet it was travelling at c the whole time.
And this scales up or down in terms of time. Whether I used years or seconds or milliseconds makes no difference, the expansion of the universe means that things move apart at some speed, thus increasing the travel time of light without slowing it down.
You could rig existing hardware to do this. I've seen hardware that will take an IDE input and mirror it to two drives, basically implementing RAID1 without the knowledge of the computer involved. Also think it could speeds up reads by reading both drives simultaneously for different sections of the same block. Anyway, existing hardware can do that for a computer/tivo/anything at all.
Considering that standalone DVD burners are also at risk, I'd imagine there exists a way to put the firmware on a CD and have the drive read and update itself by inserting that CD.
Also, how does new firmware keep a drive from self destructing? Sounds like an engineering problem that firmware couldn't fix, unless said firmware simply lowers the drive speed
No, the unit tries to perform a test on blank media and it keeps retrying on the higher speed media for 5 minutes. The laser overheats and burns out. Foom, dead drive.
Okay, so are you sayign that you could get a 2.2k strip of data on the long axis of one edge of the card? And thus you can get 4.4K on one card?
If so, is this strip one sided? I mean, could they then print another 4.4K on the back? If so, you could cram 8.8K on a card. Using compression, most NES games could fit on one or two cards.
Sure you can. You can put a redirection up that says to any incoming vistors getting 401's, "hey, this page has moved" or you can just force the redirect upon them with a Location: header. What's so hard about that?
If your site changes structure so often that deep linking to it is inappropriate because of shifting pages, then you should disallow such deep linking in the first place by redirecting such direct links to the home page or by providing a means to redirect deep links to the moved page.
Or if it's database driven and pages are generated by an app based on the inputs in the URL, then what's the big deal? You're not shifting structure, are you changing all your page indexing schemes once a month? If old pages disappear, then where is the data that used to be on them? What exactly is disappearing? Is the info moving anywhere? Is there an appropriate place to link them to? Why not write your app such that if it has no data it redirects them to where the data is, likely is, or maybe even does a search for the user?
If your webmaster doesn't regularly look at your own site and knows those links are broken, then you need a new webmaster.
I block referrer entirely for a couple of reasons:
1. I don't care for sites to give me different content based on where that content is linked from. That's the most common use for referrer and it's a jerky thing for a website to do.
2. I see this all the time: Online forums, people linking images from outside websites, perhaps even their own, and then endless complaints about about the red X or broken image icon or a "tripod" icon or some such. I never see those problems, instead I see the actual image they meant to link to.
And so it's handy to do. And for all you onUnload() chaps, I disabled that too. If a web application *requires* onUnload(), then that web application is written poorly. If it just adds functionality, then fine. But 99.999% of the use of onUnload() is annoying ad popups and thus is always disabled.
The fact that u wasted your time on this just to whore some karma, is quite pathetic. The fact that it worked is even more pathetic. But then again this is Slashdot.
I wouldn't call it a waste of time, nor would I call it "karma whoring". I'd call it "being nice and helpful to the community".
For one thing, I didn't actually do it for posting on/., I did it because I wanted to read the article without having to translate manually.
So I did the obvious thing: cut, paste, search and replace 2=to, b=be, etc, etc. Took about 60 seconds total. Only after I had read the piece (which is quite good and does have some interesting points, albeit a naive outlook about some items, IMO) did I read the comments on/. and see a couple translation requests. Fast cut and paste later and there it is.
2nd point: Karma is worthless. You are limited to 50 anyway, and perhaps back when I started reading/. 5 years ago it might have mattered somewhat. Once my karma was at 280 something. Who frickin' cares about karma? You get an extra point on posts. So what?
The point of the post was to help some people read the material. It's called being nice. Just because you can't post anything useful or indeed worth reading to save your life (I know, I went through your posts and had a look see) doesn't make everyone else a karma whore.
Nobody but you and the other loser/trolls care about karma. It's worthless. All it does is give the rest us a reasonably good method to filter you out, and you can't deal with being ignored. Well, get something worth saying and then, perhaps, people might pay attention. Grow up already.
I may have missed a few here and there, or gotten some wrong. I just did a dozen search and replaces or so...
Yeesh. If you have something worthwhile to say, then say it in language everyone can understand. Moron.
-- Something happened on the way to the 21st century. Media and entertainment companies started "converging" and "shareholder value" became far more important than customer service and respect for company employees ever managed to b. Compensation packages for company executives hit the stratosphere - while holding them accountable for their company's results became nearly impossible.
These executives are indeed very naive if they think that people haven't noticed.
People are noticing that something isn't quite right - that something is indeed very wrong. After a decade during which the stock market gained apparent respectability as a legitimate, sensible form of investing, the recent slew of huge corporate scandals reveals that it is still what it has always been: a sick place where neurotic, puerile gamblers get their kicks off the backs of millions of "anonymous" workers and individuals, who have no control over what happens to their hard-earned retirement savings.
Yet this is the place that most company executives feel is much more important to watch than the actual people for whom they produce their goods and services. This is the place where the fate of thousands of employees is decided every day by people staring at computer monitors showing ever-changing, meaningless lists of numbers and charts. And if you happen to personally hold shares in a company that has just announced that it is "restructuring" in order to improve its bottom-line and thus increase its "shareholder value", don't kid urself: When the company is talking about "shareholders", it's not talking about you and your measly couple of thousands of shares. It's only talking about big shareholders - i.e. other companies that own a more significant share of its market value.
This is a world where "hostile takeovers" and government-approved "mergers" are feeding a never-ending cycle of fewer and fewer executives wielding more and more power on a multinational scale. Soon enough, the "World Company" and George Orwell's 1984 will no longer be the stuff of satire or fiction - but prophetic descriptions of a very real "New World Order" gradually unfolding before our eyes.
A Little History
Let's start with a simple list: America Online, Time, Life, Warner Bros., Fortune, Elektra, Sports Illustrated, HBO, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Cinemax, Entertainment Weekly, New Line Cinema, In Style, Warner/Chappell Music, Time Warner Cable, WBN, ICQ, Warner Music Group, Netscape, People, Reprise, Rhino, Atlantic, WEA, TNT, MapQuest, WinAmp, In Demand, Erato, Moviefone, Road Runner, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (AOL Time Warner).
And another one: Universal Music Group, Verve, Nathan, Canal+, Impulse!, Cegetel, USA Networks, Decca, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Barclay, Armand Colin, L'Express, Universal Studios, Larousse, Sierra, MP3.com, MCA Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cineplex, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Vivendi Universal).
And yet another one: Disney, ABC, ESPN, Hyperion, Miramax, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, A&E, The History Channel, E! Entertainment, RTL-2, Buena Vista, Mr. Showbiz, Wall of Sound, Mammoth Records, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Walt Disney).
Need we say more? See for yourself... There's already only 7 of these corporate giants in total - and how long will it be before there are even fewer?
It all began innocently enough. Young entrepreneurs in the early 20th century started up new companies with a mix of creative ambition and business acumen. Then these companies grew bigger and bigger, and whatever entrepreneurial vision was present at their birth became more and more diluted and less and less relevant. Then corporate accountants suggested merging with or taking over other companies - and it all became an all-too-real game of Monopoly.
Then the Internet and "new technologies" came about, and the accountants' next big idea was convergence - i.e. the merging of "content" providers and "access" providers in order to control everything from the inception of a "cultural product" to its ultimate consumption by the unsuspecting masses.
The Art of Manipulation
It is easy to guess what got lost along the way... Creativity. Artistry. Independence. Critical objectivity. Uncontrolled access. The ability to "break thru" cultural barriers. Cultural diversity. Innovation. Freedom. Real music. Real art. Juggling between art and commerce is a delicate balance at the best of times... and these are definitely NOT the best of times.
So now we have a so-called magazine "reporting" on the latest new blockbuster movie with a 10-page, full-color spread - as if the reporters weren't aware that the same company that produced the movie also owns their magazine... Yes, this is still called a "magazine". These are still called "reporters". And this is still called "journalism"... And yet millions of people are gleefully letting themselves be had.
Maybe we should stop calling this "art", or even "entertainment" for that matter - for what is so entertaining about being involved in a collective hallucination? Maybe we should start calling it what it really is, i.e. unfettered MANIPULATION. In 1995, Clear Channel Communications owned 43 radio stations. Now it owns more than 1,200 - and its army of so-called "independent promoters" are letting legalized payola dictate what you get (or rather don't get) to hear on the radio. Everywhere you look, the story is the same: more and more money, less and less choice, less and less freedom of access, fewer and fewer companies. How far will this have to go before a big shift in people's attitude causes this commercial hubris to collapse onto itself and implode?
Power Struggles
The first major cracks in this highly concentrated corporate world have, of course, already begun to appear, in what has been making the headlines in the past few months, i.e. shady accounting practices involving enormous amounts of money - enough to shake the economy of the most powerful nation of the world. And the hysterical stock markets have of course been swayed by this news, at the expense of tens of thousands of workers worldwide and millions of small investors who thought that their holdings had nowhere to go but up.
The value of AOL Time Warner's stock is now a quarter of what it was at the time of the merger between AOL and Time Warner, and this decline forced the company to take a $54 billion writedown earlier this year. And now it too is being investigated about its accounting practices. The story at Vivendi Universal is similar. Disney shares are near an 8-year low. And there is little doubt in people's mind that the problems are similar everywhere, in every big conglomerate that has become utterly out of touch with the reality of everyday work and the essence of human creativity.
In addition, people also realize all too well that governments have little - if any - power left when it comes to regulating these multinational monsters. Governments have much more power when it comes to regulating the lives of ordinary, law-abiding citizens - and they use and abuse this power as a way to distract people's attention from how much control the conglomerates have over what we get to hear, watch, read, eat, drink, buy, and generally experience as "free" citizens of the world.
One of the areas where this struggle is most acutely felt is, of course, the online world - a sprawling, anarchic community that is still in its infancy and whose exponential development in the last decade took everyone by surprise. And nothing exemplifies the struggle between government, big business, and individual rights better than the highly controversial issue of "peer-to-peer" file sharing and its many digital variations.
A Nation of Thieves?
Will the media/technology giants recover from the latest stock market slump? They probably will - but at what cost? In all likelihood, the cost will be more "restructuring", more layoffs, more executive shuffles and golden parachutes, causing even further alienation from their own employees and customers. And this, in turn, will further encourage the very behaviors that they claim are illegal and want punished by criminal law - all the while preserving their own impunity as they continue to carelessly flounder a capital that they do not own.
Napster may have gone bankrupt and become a closed chapter in the Internet's short history, but its death is by no means a reflection of a decline in peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, quite the contrary. If anything, P2P has grown even further - but since it's becoming totally decentralized, there is no easy way to measure its significance.
What is for sure, however, is that, in spite of its many claims to the contrary, the recording industry has yet to provide evidence that P2P is actually detrimental to music making as an artistic endeavor, and even as a commercial venture. It is worth remembering, for example, that sales of music CDs actually increased when Napster was at its peak, and declined after Napster was abruptly shut down. Even economists who thought that file sharing "should be" hurting the recording industry are now expressing their doubts, based on what they say is simply not happening.
More importantly, many well-respected artists have sided with Internet users against corporate greed and actually use the Internet to promote alternative ways to distribute their music and reach out to a non-captive, legitimate audience of authentic music lovers.
This does not mean, of course, that all forms of file sharing are equally innocuous. There is little doubt that, when people use the Internet as a substitute for radio, i.e. as a way to discover new music, it can help promote the work of artists. But when a young junior high school student downloads tracks off the Internet and makes CD-R copies of them that he then sells for $5 in the schoolyard, it hurts sales of the original CD and it's disrespectful of the artist - regardless of how small a cut of the actual CD price the artist actually gets after all the executives and the middlemen in the recording industry have taken their piece of the pie.
Still, can we really go as far as to say that digital technology is creating a "nation of thieves" who no longer recognize the just value of art?
Protecting the Product
It is worth noting, to begin with, that the recording industry itself is far from having distinguished itself by recognizing the true value of art. Instead, it has consistently fought to be allowed to deprive many artists of their most fundamental rights. It has allowed popular artists to go bankrupt even though their albums were selling by the millions. It has reduced the artists' cut of the album sales pie to a ridiculously small portion of the actual income generated by these sales. It has consistently pushed commercial musical products at the expense of real musical artistry.
This hardly entitles the recording industry to lecture anyone about recognizing the just value of art.
It is also interesting to note that the cultural products that seem to be the primary concern of the industry giants are those that are already the most popular ones, and that things such as CD copy protection are being experimentally used mostly with items that will sell millions regardless of whether they are copy-protected or not.
So are most citizens really being completely disrespectful of the value of art and the need to provide appropriate compensation to the artists for their works? We've said it before and we'll say it again: the rise of digital technology and peer-to-peer file sharing has little to do with people's intrinsic respect for art and artists, and everything to do with the cynical attitude of big industry conglomerates, which have consistently pushed for more and more commercial, highly profitable products at the expense of authentic art and respect for artists.
If people do not feel enough guilt to prevent them from making digital copies of the latest episode of a popular TV show or hit pop song, it is precisely because the industry giants have succeeded in making these works purely commercial products, with little or no consideration for their actual artistic value. It is precisely because these companies have been consistently promoting commercial products at the expense of artistic works.
The fact that actual works of art still manage to seep thru the cracks of this huge profit-driven industry does not change anything about the fundamental equations that have been driving and still drive the industry, today more than ever - i.e. that art = money, artists = money-makers, and art lovers = consumers.
As a simple example of how little music is valued as an art form by the industry, it is estimated that only about 20 percent of music ever recorded is currently available - and, of this 20 percent, what proportion is actually readily available to music lovers? What proportion is not the current 100 top albums on the SoundScan charts?
It simply appears that the instinctive reaction of the lover of art (be it music, TV shows, movies, or other forms of art) is such that, if the industry has no respect for his or her identity as an appreciator of art, then he or she has no reason to have any respect for the industry as a purveyor of art. By making digital copies of so-called cultural products, many people are not demonstrating their lack of respect for art and for artists, but are expressing - consciously or not - their frustration with the way the entertainment industry profits from art at the expense of both art makers and art lovers.
The consumers of the commercial products of the entertainment industry are only as cynical as the industry has deliberately made them, by dumbing down their products, by exploiting artists, by making profit-driven choices and decisions, and by providing their own kind with obscene compensations and legal impunity that are completely out of touch with the real world of ordinary people.
Don't Get It Twisted
That being said, the whole debate about file sharing and digital piracy is, most of all, a convenient way for industry conglomerates to deflect attention from their own shady business practices and dubious alliances.
for example, it is worth noting that the Warner Music Group is heavily involved in the recording industry's fight against piracy, but that its own parent company, AOL Time Warner, is directly benefiting from file sharing, as a provider of Internet access to millions of Internet users worldwide. When AOL Time Warner repeatedly flaunts its ever-increasing number of members (34 million and counting) and the billions of hours that they spend online, is there any doubt that a good part of this growth involves the "unlawful" exchange of computer files at the detriment of recording artists?
In other words, the real "thieves" are not necessarily those that are currently getting the blame... Rather than a "nation of thieves", the current situation looks, to us, much more like an "elite of thieves".
And the real victims of this thievery are very much, as usual, the recording artists themselves, who will never get their share of AOL's profits as an Internet access provider, even though these profits are partly based on the content that they originally provided. And the real victims also include authentic music lovers, who already suffer from restricted access to the full range of music that they would like to explore, and who are also likely to suffer from technological restrictions that will soon prevent them from making legitimate copies of the works that they have lawfully purchased for their own enjoyment.
Make no mistake: the entertainment industry (including TV, movies and music) might be big, but the technology industry is even bigger. Remember that it is AOL that bought Time Warner, and not the other way around. Remember that Sony makes much more money in electronics and computer equipment than it does in record sales...
If the technology industry ends up implementing technological limitations that prevent users from lawfully enjoying their purchases - as it is threatening to do - the beneficiaries will not be the artists whose works are thus being allegedly "protected". And it will certainly not be the art lovers whose enjoyment of art will thus be restricted. No, it will simply b, once again... the industry conglomerates, who will have yet another generation of incompatible media and devices to sell to us under the guise of "technological improvement".
Conclusion
The technology and entertainment industries are simply to big for us to expect any overnight changes. The industry giants will continue to do their best to deflect people's attention away from their own wrongdoings and to blame falling profits and commercial failures on piracy at the same time that they are encouraging their customers to adopt the very technologies that make piracy possible. Artists will continue to be lured by unrealistic promises and contracts with big numbers and lots of small print.
How long, however, before a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, to leave the system for good? How long before a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and are careful not to get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long before a critical mass of art lovers get together to provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the existing system artistically irrelevant?
It all depends on us - and it all depends on you. --
The DVD sets of Bebop have both the English and the Japanese dubs (it's a cartoon, it's always "dubbed").
Personally, I prefer the English version. The voices fit the characters, settings, and tone of the series much better. The Japanese dubs seem flat and out of character.
Yes, Spike is a super cool badass, Faye is hot and tough, Jet is a disgruntled ex-cop, and Ed is insane. But to the English speaking ear, the English voices convey those same senses of character much better in the English dub.
Put it like this: If you watch lots of Japanese dubbed animation, then you'll get the feel for Japanese voices and will be able to tell flavor and character of the voices. But, to the average non super-anime-fan, it's a bunch of gibberish with no variation in tone or pitch. Flat. Uninteresting.
To me, who can ear the variation in both, I'd say that while they both convey the same feeling of character and flavor, you're more likely to hear it better in the language you understand (unless you watch so much anime that your eyes bleed:-P).
Slashdot Mirror
Using a different server sure would be a hell of a lot simpler if you slashdot guys would get with that whole "web thing" and make all the links on the page RELATIVE instead of ABSOLUTE..
I mean, it's kinda annoying to use brak.slashdot.org only to have every link on every resulting page point to http://slashdot.org anyway.
All numbers are in g/cm^3.
Hydrogen 0.0008
Air 0.0013
Oxygen 0.0014
Carbon dioxide 0.0018
Gasoline 0.7
Alcohol 0.7
Wood 0.85
Water(ice) 0.9
Oil 0.9
Water 1.0
Glycerin 1.26
Sugar 1.58
Salt 2.16
Aluminum 2.7
Steel wool 7.8
Copper 8.94
Silver 10.5
Lead 11.3
Mercury 13.5
gold 19.3
I'd recommend doing that anyway. Not because of them trying to extort more cash from you (although that's a damn good reason), but because a lot of the cable modem setups out there have the cable installer guy get the MAC address of your PC's network card to phone into the office. Why? So that not every jackass can hook up an off the shelf cable modem, fire up DHCP, get a lease, and run with it. The DHCP server only gives out an IP to the list of verified MAC addresses. Mine does this.
So if the guy had used the MAC of the router, I'd be unable to connect without the router in the loop. As it stands now, I hid the router (avoiding any cable guy questions), he used the MAC of the PC, and then later I changed the router's WAN MAC to be the same as the PC's MAC. Thus, if the router kicks off one day, I can plug that PC in directly and still have some connectivity for getting technical help on fixing it. Most all SOHO NAT router devices let you change the MAC of the WAN side. Linksys calls it "MAC Cloning" I believe.
No, that's not SPI, that's just what NAT does (stateful packet inspection vs packet inspection).
SPI can be enabled or disabled for the little Linksys router. Enabling it effectively closes all inbound ports unless the packet passes the stateful packet inspection. But it disables port forwarding. Which is why disabling it, if you need to forward inbound ports, is required. But regardless of whether it's on or not, if you're not forwarding any ports, nothing gets inbound without a matching outbound connection to do the temporary port forwarding.
NAT uses packet inspection based simply on the destination and source IP addresses, along with port munging to get stuff to go to the right place.
SPI (stateful packet inspection) does a more thorough job of it, examining the entire packet up to the application layer. The important difference is that SPI is harder to fool. Whereas normally we only care about source and destinations, SPI builds a state table using info in the packet and uses that info from previous packets to determine if new packets are valid or not. It's more secure, but like I said, the little Linksys gateways can't arbitrarily forward ports with SPI turned on.
You are talking of a related, but different technology. Dynamic Access Filtering or Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) can be used to block all ports while opening up tiny holes to allow sessions you initiate to go through. This way, you can get out, but nobody can try and establish a session to you. If you're running a service like http, ftp, gnutella, IRC, AIM file transfer, etc., you have to create permanent holes in the service ports to allow incoming connections. Some devices allow you to specify the protocol, others do not.
Who the heck was talking about SPI?
BLOCK ALL PORTS. It's just that simple. If you want to open specific ports, like 80 or 443 for a web server, then you open those ports specifically.
But the default should be "deny". It's that simple.
http://www.worldvillage.com/wv/school/images/scrns hot/pooh2.gif
Best I could find.
And in that case, wouldn't it be a "Hunnypot"?
I was able to do it once. *Once*.
After that I found this game genie code to make it easier. GXNAGY. This will change the warp to world 2 at the end of 1-2 into a warp to the minus world.
I also read that completing the loop 8 times will send you to the final level. But in order to do that I think you'd need to put in the Game genie code to disable the clock as well.
Same as with signatures and so forth. I give out a timestamp or something encrypted with my private key. My public key can decrypt it. Therefore I'm me and you can open the door.
I never transmitted my key, I transmitted something that keeps changing (like the time) that was just encrypted with my key, and the decrypted version made sense. What the decrypted text actually turned out to be really wasn't the point.
Could be better ways.. Have the doorknob send me plain text which I then munge a bit and encrypt with my private key to send back. A challenge response mechanism using public key encryption, basically. Lots of other ways. Only thing that will really hurt me is theft of the implant.
We have to assume the implant is secure, though. If it has flaws then they could be exploitable, although it'd have to be damn fast to exploit if it's only got 1-2 seconds in which to do it.
The software he used to do this was Hypersnap DX, and it can see through video overlays as well.
If the one time pad is done correctly, yes, it's unbreakable. I think I said that.
If it's not done correctly, say, the guy used the same pad on two different messages, or the guy isn't using a good random generator, then a known plaintext attack will give you new parts of messages.
Especially if the guy used the same pad twice.
Like I said, if it's done *correctly* then it's unbreakable. But it often is not done correctly.
Assuming someone doesn't steal the key and you did it correctly, then yes.
But if you didn't do it correctly, or your pad choices aren't truly random, or someone knows some of the plaintext, or half a dozen other things, then a one time pad can be broken with a lot of guesswork.
[i]2) When schools try to educate students on how to secure their computers they tend not to listen. You might listen as a computer geek, but I can tell you right now that 99% of the people in my dorm building could care less about installing Windows 2000 SP3.[/i]
;)
This is an already solved problem. You install a scanning server type of thing. Several different programs exist for this purpose. Basically it scans the local network for vulnerable systems. If it finds a computer on the network that is vulnerable to a known attack, it talks to the routers and flat out cuts that computer off from the network. With a little more effort, it can send email to the computer's owner explaining why they were cut off and how to get access reinstated (patch your f'ing system). I assume they'd need to get their email on campus after getting cut off as opposed to on their own PC's.
In any case, the biggest problem is keeping the scanner up to date. But solutions do exist to do this specific service.
If your packet stayed on the surface of the water, on the pad the whole time, then yeah, routing is a bitch. But the idea is that it routes on the surface only until it finds a pad with a "stem" (internet connection). Then it tunnels down that high speed connection to come up much closer to your friend. But not everyone has to share their internet connection, those that are not simply pass along traffic on wireless only.
The real trick to this setup is how do you know where your friend is? I mean, if you're on wireless and he's on wireless, then the route to either one of you via the pads is a minor PITA. But not nearly as hard as the scaling problem you're describing.
Fair enough, but I never said light exceeded c.. Here's the thing.. if point A and B are moving apart, then there's more space between them, right? So it must pass through that space. Simple, no?
It's like this.. motion of the sender is irrelevant, but motion of the receiver isn't. Nor is the intervening space. If it hasn't got there yet and "there" moves away, then it has farther to go, nyet?
My bad, in that example it takes light something like 200 years to traverse the distance, not 102. Sorry.
Say you've got two points, 2ly apart. Also say that the universe is expanding at pretty close to the speed of light, but still less than light speed. Call it 99% of c.
.99*c, it takes light something like 102 years to make it to point B, at which time point A is 102 light years away from point B. When the light started it was only 2 ly away, but it got slowed down in it's journey because of the expansion of the universe, and yet it was travelling at c the whole time.
Okay, now a beam of light travelling from point A to point B takes 1 year to travel 1 ly. But in that same amount of time, the universe has expanded 99% of 1 ly and stretched our two points apart by that much (the universe being our two points here). So the total distance from A to B is now just under 3 ly, and our light has only gone 1. It didn't really cover a lot of ground, did it?
Work the rest out yourself. If the universe is expanding at
And this scales up or down in terms of time. Whether I used years or seconds or milliseconds makes no difference, the expansion of the universe means that things move apart at some speed, thus increasing the travel time of light without slowing it down.
You could rig existing hardware to do this. I've seen hardware that will take an IDE input and mirror it to two drives, basically implementing RAID1 without the knowledge of the computer involved. Also think it could speeds up reads by reading both drives simultaneously for different sections of the same block. Anyway, existing hardware can do that for a computer/tivo/anything at all.
Considering that standalone DVD burners are also at risk, I'd imagine there exists a way to put the firmware on a CD and have the drive read and update itself by inserting that CD.
Might be worth looking into.
Also, how does new firmware keep a drive from self destructing? Sounds like an engineering problem that firmware couldn't fix, unless said firmware simply lowers the drive speed
No, the unit tries to perform a test on blank media and it keeps retrying on the higher speed media for 5 minutes. The laser overheats and burns out. Foom, dead drive.
The New Scientist article says this.
Okay, so are you sayign that you could get a 2.2k strip of data on the long axis of one edge of the card? And thus you can get 4.4K on one card?
If so, is this strip one sided? I mean, could they then print another 4.4K on the back? If so, you could cram 8.8K on a card. Using compression, most NES games could fit on one or two cards.
Sure you can. You can put a redirection up that says to any incoming vistors getting 401's, "hey, this page has moved" or you can just force the redirect upon them with a Location: header. What's so hard about that?
If your site changes structure so often that deep linking to it is inappropriate because of shifting pages, then you should disallow such deep linking in the first place by redirecting such direct links to the home page or by providing a means to redirect deep links to the moved page.
Or if it's database driven and pages are generated by an app based on the inputs in the URL, then what's the big deal? You're not shifting structure, are you changing all your page indexing schemes once a month? If old pages disappear, then where is the data that used to be on them? What exactly is disappearing? Is the info moving anywhere? Is there an appropriate place to link them to? Why not write your app such that if it has no data it redirects them to where the data is, likely is, or maybe even does a search for the user?
If your webmaster doesn't regularly look at your own site and knows those links are broken, then you need a new webmaster.
I block referrer entirely for a couple of reasons:
1. I don't care for sites to give me different content based on where that content is linked from. That's the most common use for referrer and it's a jerky thing for a website to do.
2. I see this all the time: Online forums, people linking images from outside websites, perhaps even their own, and then endless complaints about about the red X or broken image icon or a "tripod" icon or some such. I never see those problems, instead I see the actual image they meant to link to.
And so it's handy to do. And for all you onUnload() chaps, I disabled that too. If a web application *requires* onUnload(), then that web application is written poorly. If it just adds functionality, then fine. But 99.999% of the use of onUnload() is annoying ad popups and thus is always disabled.
The fact that u wasted your time on this just to whore some karma, is quite pathetic. The fact that it worked is even more pathetic. But then again this is Slashdot.
/., I did it because I wanted to read the article without having to translate manually.
/. and see a couple translation requests. Fast cut and paste later and there it is.
/. 5 years ago it might have mattered somewhat. Once my karma was at 280 something. Who frickin' cares about karma? You get an extra point on posts. So what?
I wouldn't call it a waste of time, nor would I call it "karma whoring". I'd call it "being nice and helpful to the community".
For one thing, I didn't actually do it for posting on
So I did the obvious thing: cut, paste, search and replace 2=to, b=be, etc, etc. Took about 60 seconds total. Only after I had read the piece (which is quite good and does have some interesting points, albeit a naive outlook about some items, IMO) did I read the comments on
2nd point: Karma is worthless. You are limited to 50 anyway, and perhaps back when I started reading
The point of the post was to help some people read the material. It's called being nice. Just because you can't post anything useful or indeed worth reading to save your life (I know, I went through your posts and had a look see) doesn't make everyone else a karma whore.
Nobody but you and the other loser/trolls care about karma. It's worthless. All it does is give the rest us a reasonably good method to filter you out, and you can't deal with being ignored. Well, get something worth saying and then, perhaps, people might pay attention. Grow up already.
I may have missed a few here and there, or gotten some wrong. I just did a dozen search and replaces or so...
Yeesh. If you have something worthwhile to say, then say it in language everyone can understand. Moron.
--
Something happened on the way to the 21st century. Media and entertainment companies started "converging" and "shareholder value" became far more important than customer service and respect for company employees ever managed to b. Compensation packages for company executives hit the stratosphere - while holding them accountable for their company's results became nearly impossible.
These executives are indeed very naive if they think that people haven't noticed.
People are noticing that something isn't quite right - that something is indeed very wrong. After a decade during which the stock market gained apparent respectability as a legitimate, sensible form of investing, the recent slew of huge corporate scandals reveals that it is still what it has always been: a sick place where neurotic, puerile gamblers get their kicks off the backs of millions of "anonymous" workers and individuals, who have no control over what happens to their hard-earned retirement savings.
Yet this is the place that most company executives feel is much more important to watch than the actual people for whom they produce their goods and services. This is the place where the fate of thousands of employees is decided every day by people staring at computer monitors showing ever-changing, meaningless lists of numbers and charts. And if you happen to personally hold shares in a company that has just announced that it is "restructuring" in order to improve its bottom-line and thus increase its "shareholder value", don't kid urself: When the company is talking about "shareholders", it's not talking about you and your measly couple of thousands of shares. It's only talking about big shareholders - i.e. other companies that own a more significant share of its market value.
This is a world where "hostile takeovers" and government-approved "mergers" are feeding a never-ending cycle of fewer and fewer executives wielding more and more power on a multinational scale. Soon enough, the "World Company" and George Orwell's 1984 will no longer be the stuff of satire or fiction - but prophetic descriptions of a very real "New World Order" gradually unfolding before our eyes.
A Little History
Let's start with a simple list: America Online, Time, Life, Warner Bros., Fortune, Elektra, Sports Illustrated, HBO, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Cinemax, Entertainment Weekly, New Line Cinema, In Style, Warner/Chappell Music, Time Warner Cable, WBN, ICQ, Warner Music Group, Netscape, People, Reprise, Rhino, Atlantic, WEA, TNT, MapQuest, WinAmp, In Demand, Erato, Moviefone, Road Runner, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (AOL Time Warner).
And another one: Universal Music Group, Verve, Nathan, Canal+, Impulse!, Cegetel, USA Networks, Decca, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Barclay, Armand Colin, L'Express, Universal Studios, Larousse, Sierra, MP3.com, MCA Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cineplex, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Vivendi Universal).
And yet another one: Disney, ABC, ESPN, Hyperion, Miramax, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, A&E, The History Channel, E! Entertainment, RTL-2, Buena Vista, Mr. Showbiz, Wall of Sound, Mammoth Records, etc. All owned by the same corporate giant (Walt Disney).
Need we say more? See for yourself... There's already only 7 of these corporate giants in total - and how long will it be before there are even fewer?
It all began innocently enough. Young entrepreneurs in the early 20th century started up new companies with a mix of creative ambition and business acumen. Then these companies grew bigger and bigger, and whatever entrepreneurial vision was present at their birth became more and more diluted and less and less relevant. Then corporate accountants suggested merging with or taking over other companies - and it all became an all-too-real game of Monopoly.
Then the Internet and "new technologies" came about, and the accountants' next big idea was convergence - i.e. the merging of "content" providers and "access" providers in order to control everything from the inception of a "cultural product" to its ultimate consumption by the unsuspecting masses.
The Art of Manipulation
It is easy to guess what got lost along the way... Creativity. Artistry. Independence. Critical objectivity. Uncontrolled access. The ability to "break thru" cultural barriers. Cultural diversity. Innovation. Freedom. Real music. Real art.
Juggling between art and commerce is a delicate balance at the best of times... and these are definitely NOT the best of times.
So now we have a so-called magazine "reporting" on the latest new blockbuster movie with a 10-page, full-color spread - as if the reporters weren't aware that the same company that produced the movie also owns their magazine... Yes, this is still called a "magazine". These are still called "reporters". And this is still called "journalism"... And yet millions of people are gleefully letting themselves be had.
Maybe we should stop calling this "art", or even "entertainment" for that matter - for what is so entertaining about being involved in a collective hallucination? Maybe we should start calling it what it really is, i.e. unfettered MANIPULATION.
In 1995, Clear Channel Communications owned 43 radio stations. Now it owns more than 1,200 - and its army of so-called "independent promoters" are letting legalized payola dictate what you get (or rather don't get) to hear on the radio.
Everywhere you look, the story is the same: more and more money, less and less choice, less and less freedom of access, fewer and fewer companies. How far will this have to go before a big shift in people's attitude causes this commercial hubris to collapse onto itself and implode?
Power Struggles
The first major cracks in this highly concentrated corporate world have, of course, already begun to appear, in what has been making the headlines in the past few months, i.e. shady accounting practices involving enormous amounts of money - enough to shake the economy of the most powerful nation of the world. And the hysterical stock markets have of course been swayed by this news, at the expense of tens of thousands of workers worldwide and millions of small investors who thought that their holdings had nowhere to go but up.
The value of AOL Time Warner's stock is now a quarter of what it was at the time of the merger between AOL and Time Warner, and this decline forced the company to take a $54 billion writedown earlier this year. And now it too is being investigated about its accounting practices. The story at Vivendi Universal is similar. Disney shares are near an 8-year low. And there is little doubt in people's mind that the problems are similar everywhere, in every big conglomerate that has become utterly out of touch with the reality of everyday work and the essence of human creativity.
In addition, people also realize all too well that governments have little - if any - power left when it comes to regulating these multinational monsters. Governments have much more power when it comes to regulating the lives of ordinary, law-abiding citizens - and they use and abuse this power as a way to distract people's attention from how much control the conglomerates have over what we get to hear, watch, read, eat, drink, buy, and generally experience as "free" citizens of the world.
One of the areas where this struggle is most acutely felt is, of course, the online world - a sprawling, anarchic community that is still in its infancy and whose exponential development in the last decade took everyone by surprise. And nothing exemplifies the struggle between government, big business, and individual rights better than the highly controversial issue of "peer-to-peer" file sharing and its many digital variations.
A Nation of Thieves?
Will the media/technology giants recover from the latest stock market slump? They probably will - but at what cost? In all likelihood, the cost will be more "restructuring", more layoffs, more executive shuffles and golden parachutes, causing even further alienation from their own employees and customers. And this, in turn, will further encourage the very behaviors that they claim are illegal and want punished by criminal law - all the while preserving their own impunity as they continue to carelessly flounder a capital that they do not own.
Napster may have gone bankrupt and become a closed chapter in the Internet's short history, but its death is by no means a reflection of a decline in peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, quite the contrary. If anything, P2P has grown even further - but since it's becoming totally decentralized, there is no easy way to measure its significance.
What is for sure, however, is that, in spite of its many claims to the contrary, the recording industry has yet to provide evidence that P2P is actually detrimental to music making as an artistic endeavor, and even as a commercial venture. It is worth remembering, for example, that sales of music CDs actually increased when Napster was at its peak, and declined after Napster was abruptly shut down. Even economists who thought that file sharing "should be" hurting the recording industry are now expressing their doubts, based on what they say is simply not happening.
More importantly, many well-respected artists have sided with Internet users against corporate greed and actually use the Internet to promote alternative ways to distribute their music and reach out to a non-captive, legitimate audience of authentic music lovers.
This does not mean, of course, that all forms of file sharing are equally innocuous. There is little doubt that, when people use the Internet as a substitute for radio, i.e. as a way to discover new music, it can help promote the work of artists. But when a young junior high school student downloads tracks off the Internet and makes CD-R copies of them that he then sells for $5 in the schoolyard, it hurts sales of the original CD and it's disrespectful of the artist - regardless of how small a cut of the actual CD price the artist actually gets after all the executives and the middlemen in the recording industry have taken their piece of the pie.
Still, can we really go as far as to say that digital technology is creating a "nation of thieves" who no longer recognize the just value of art?
Protecting the Product
It is worth noting, to begin with, that the recording industry itself is far from having distinguished itself by recognizing the true value of art. Instead, it has consistently fought to be allowed to deprive many artists of their most fundamental rights. It has allowed popular artists to go bankrupt even though their albums were selling by the millions. It has reduced the artists' cut of the album sales pie to a ridiculously small portion of the actual income generated by these sales. It has consistently pushed commercial musical products at the expense of real musical artistry.
This hardly entitles the recording industry to lecture anyone about recognizing the just value of art.
It is also interesting to note that the cultural products that seem to be the primary concern of the industry giants are those that are already the most popular ones, and that things such as CD copy protection are being experimentally used mostly with items that will sell millions regardless of whether they are copy-protected or not.
So are most citizens really being completely disrespectful of the value of art and the need to provide appropriate compensation to the artists for their works? We've said it before and we'll say it again: the rise of digital technology and peer-to-peer file sharing has little to do with people's intrinsic respect for art and artists, and everything to do with the cynical attitude of big industry conglomerates, which have consistently pushed for more and more commercial, highly profitable products at the expense of authentic art and respect for artists.
If people do not feel enough guilt to prevent them from making digital copies of the latest episode of a popular TV show or hit pop song, it is precisely because the industry giants have succeeded in making these works purely commercial products, with little or no consideration for their actual artistic value. It is precisely because these companies have been consistently promoting commercial products at the expense of artistic works.
The fact that actual works of art still manage to seep thru the cracks of this huge profit-driven industry does not change anything about the fundamental equations that have been driving and still drive the industry, today more than ever - i.e. that art = money, artists = money-makers, and art lovers = consumers.
As a simple example of how little music is valued as an art form by the industry, it is estimated that only about 20 percent of music ever recorded is currently available - and, of this 20 percent, what proportion is actually readily available to music lovers? What proportion is not the current 100 top albums on the SoundScan charts?
It simply appears that the instinctive reaction of the lover of art (be it music, TV shows, movies, or other forms of art) is such that, if the industry has no respect for his or her identity as an appreciator of art, then he or she has no reason to have any respect for the industry as a purveyor of art. By making digital copies of so-called cultural products, many people are not demonstrating their lack of respect for art and for artists, but are expressing - consciously or not - their frustration with the way the entertainment industry profits from art at the expense of both art makers and art lovers.
The consumers of the commercial products of the entertainment industry are only as cynical as the industry has deliberately made them, by dumbing down their products, by exploiting artists, by making profit-driven choices and decisions, and by providing their own kind with obscene compensations and legal impunity that are completely out of touch with the real world of ordinary people.
Don't Get It Twisted
That being said, the whole debate about file sharing and digital piracy is, most of all, a convenient way for industry conglomerates to deflect attention from their own shady business practices and dubious alliances.
for example, it is worth noting that the Warner Music Group is heavily involved in the recording industry's fight against piracy, but that its own parent company, AOL Time Warner, is directly benefiting from file sharing, as a provider of Internet access to millions of Internet users worldwide. When AOL Time Warner repeatedly flaunts its ever-increasing number of members (34 million and counting) and the billions of hours that they spend online, is there any doubt that a good part of this growth involves the "unlawful" exchange of computer files at the detriment of recording artists?
In other words, the real "thieves" are not necessarily those that are currently getting the blame... Rather than a "nation of thieves", the current situation looks, to us, much more like an "elite of thieves".
And the real victims of this thievery are very much, as usual, the recording artists themselves, who will never get their share of AOL's profits as an Internet access provider, even though these profits are partly based on the content that they originally provided. And the real victims also include authentic music lovers, who already suffer from restricted access to the full range of music that they would like to explore, and who are also likely to suffer from technological restrictions that will soon prevent them from making legitimate copies of the works that they have lawfully purchased for their own enjoyment.
Make no mistake: the entertainment industry (including TV, movies and music) might be big, but the technology industry is even bigger. Remember that it is AOL that bought Time Warner, and not the other way around. Remember that Sony makes much more money in electronics and computer equipment than it does in record sales...
If the technology industry ends up implementing technological limitations that prevent users from lawfully enjoying their purchases - as it is threatening to do - the beneficiaries will not be the artists whose works are thus being allegedly "protected". And it will certainly not be the art lovers whose enjoyment of art will thus be restricted. No, it will simply b, once again... the industry conglomerates, who will have yet another generation of incompatible media and devices to sell to us under the guise of "technological improvement".
Conclusion
The technology and entertainment industries are simply to big for us to expect any overnight changes. The industry giants will continue to do their best to deflect people's attention away from their own wrongdoings and to blame falling profits and commercial failures on piracy at the same time that they are encouraging their customers to adopt the very technologies that make piracy possible. Artists will continue to be lured by unrealistic promises and contracts with big numbers and lots of small print.
How long, however, before a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, to leave the system for good? How long before a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and are careful not to get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long before a critical mass of art lovers get together to provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the existing system artistically irrelevant?
It all depends on us - and it all depends on you.
--
The DVD sets of Bebop have both the English and the Japanese dubs (it's a cartoon, it's always "dubbed").
:-P).
Personally, I prefer the English version. The voices fit the characters, settings, and tone of the series much better. The Japanese dubs seem flat and out of character.
Yes, Spike is a super cool badass, Faye is hot and tough, Jet is a disgruntled ex-cop, and Ed is insane. But to the English speaking ear, the English voices convey those same senses of character much better in the English dub.
Put it like this: If you watch lots of Japanese dubbed animation, then you'll get the feel for Japanese voices and will be able to tell flavor and character of the voices. But, to the average non super-anime-fan, it's a bunch of gibberish with no variation in tone or pitch. Flat. Uninteresting.
To me, who can ear the variation in both, I'd say that while they both convey the same feeling of character and flavor, you're more likely to hear it better in the language you understand (unless you watch so much anime that your eyes bleed