Not in a pinch, but regularly. You can't monitor a WSUS server without it.
Of course, IE on that particular network has a proxy server of 127.0.0.1 pushed out via group policy, with an exemption for the intranet. You could sneak around that by installing a proxy server on the machine you're using, but most of my users aren't that sharp. I've got Firefox 1.5.whatever running on everything now, so I can let my users off the leash a little.
The only thing I miss about IE is the ability to push settings to the browser via group policy. It's nice to be able to centrally manage an application like that. I haven't found a way to do that for firefox (HINT HINT).
If the flaw has been made public, there's an exploit for it. The 'sploit might not be available on www.l33t-d0wn0ad-sp10tz.ru right now, but you have to assume that it's floating around out there.
Wait, American Idol only exists so we can mock the idiots that don't know what they're doing. I already mock people who don't know what they're doing. It's called:
Sorry, but our legal system is ill equipped to back up any of these laws. Aside from kiddie porn, there's no easily enforcable, constitutional law on the books that define what is and isn't porn. Other than the infamous "I don't know what defines pornography, but I know porn when I see it" statute that we work under now.
I see nothing wrong with this so long as its not the "religious" right deciding the definition of porn.
True enough, but unfortunately there are only two groups that will side up on this. The "We're really a bunch of strict baptists, but we use the word 'family' in the name of our non-profit so we're not as obvious when we lobby" organizations will jump in and scream bloody murder until the laws have rediculous definitions of "porn" such as:
"any picture of two or more men post on the internet may not feature more than one man shirtless and all men must be at least 4.675 inches from the shoulder of the other men so as not to give the appearance of blah blah blah."
On the other side you'll have the ACLU, but you won't see a single elected rep arguing for reasonable restrictions, since their opponent in the next election will bombard the constituancy with "OMG SENATOR JOHN JOHNSON WANTS TO FUCK YOUR CHILDREN WITH A BROKEN GLASS DILDO AND MAKE YOU JERK OFF WHILE WATCHING THE FILM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111" Commercials.
This sort of thing came up a couple years ago when someone decided to go after the local township library because they didn't have filtering software installed. The library didn't recieve federal funds for internet access (so they don't have to comply with CIPA), allowed childred to access the internet only with a parent (a patron parent) present, and had specific computer areas where children weren't allowed (since they could not be easily watched by the front desk.) Oh well the church groups went nuts. Every freaking shyster baptist minister, every congregation showed up in force to the library board meetings. Reason went out the door and the township board (who could normally not give a flying fuck about the library since niether has any direct say on the others actions) start grandstanding and calling for the heads of the library board. Pure bullshit, with the church behind almost all of it. At the end of the day, a nice fat chunk of the library's technology budget goes towards software that they didn't want, didn't need, and shouldn't have had to pay for. All because someone wanted to feel better about themselves by calling for a law, and the elected reps erring on the side of votes, not reason.
Sorry, but our legal system is ill equipped to back up any of these laws. Aside from kiddie porn, there's easily enforcable, constitutional laws on the books that define what is and isn't porn. Other than the infamous "I don't know what defines pornography, but I know porn when I see it" statute that we work under now.
I'm not a moralist, but I just think people who try to equate violence and sex on TV are missing the point. Yes, they are different. Even a child can see that.
You're missing the point. If impressionable teens are going to engage in sex if we allow it to be shown on TV (because lord knows the raging hormones of a teenager are going to be solely directed by this weeks "law and order"), then why is it ok to show sex in the context of violence? Aren't we then enouraging violent sex instead of plain, old fashioned humping?
I agree with the rest of the world. I can't figure out our uptight attitude towards sex when compared to our relaxed attitude towards violence. (and on the same token, i can't figure out the UK's uptight attitude towards violence when compared with a relaxed attitude towards sex.) Repression doesn't solve anything.
The AC brings up a very good point, and that point leads to another point.
As far as primetime TV is concerned, Violence is ok, Sex is evil. We can thank the moral majority for that. Ward and June Cleaver sleeping in separate beds, Homosexuality not existing until the 1970's (soap), open homosexuality not being addressed until the 1990's (roseanne, ellen). No sir, we can't ever imply that people have sex, because that's evil and naughty. In fact, we need standards that keep filth like sex off of the tube.
But violence is a-ok. Cop shows can show murders and beatings because "that sort of thing happens all the time" or "that's the way it is." It's gritty, "life on the street" sorts of things. Drug abuse, murder, beatings, that's cool. That happens all the time, but God forbid we show a boobie. Because people don't have sex.
Which leads us down the path we're on now. TV shows cannot show sex, but they can show violence. So how to the writers skirt that little detail? SHOW VIOLENT SEX! Brutal Rape! Orgies! Kinky prostitutes being beaten do death by druggies!
I'm no expert on sex, but I think men and women (or two men. Or two women.) tend to have have normal (or comparitively normal) sex more often than people get raped, murdered, or skinned by a serial killer after freaky sex rituals. But we can't show that on tv. We've got to show violent sex.
As is the case with many things; Quality pot usually doesn't come from the U.S. and even if it does, it's not as cost effective as the dirt cheap equivilent that comes in from Mexico. It's just easier to grow the crop where law enforcement doesn't really look that hard for it, then sneak it across the border. It's economics at work. A large growing operations that produces enough pot to be super cheap has a harder time doing "business" in the U.S. due to "regulation" (re: DEA agents busting down the doors.) In Mexico, the government doesn't care, so you can make a lot of a cheap product for export.
There are a lot of different Marijuana traffic patterns. A lot from Mexico, a surprising amount from Canada. Most of the US grown pot comes from old moonshine territory such as the Kentucky hills.
The big Terrorist drug is Opium. Afghanistan exports two things: Opium and more opium. The drug money in that country faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar surpasses any GDP they've ever had. Ever. Hell, add a bunch of their yearly GDP's up and compare it to a years worth of estimated Opium exports. Adjust for inflation, have Enron do the book keeping, do what you want. Afghanistan is to Opium as Kuwait is to oil. That's the biggest terrorism financing tool. Good old fashioned Smack.
So remember kids, be a Patriot! Smoke homegrown pot! and When you're doing Herion, you're shooting up with Osama!
Think of the possibilities. MTV's got a hit show in "Pimp My Ride" with Rapper Xibit as the host. Take somebody's old beater, turn it over to West Coast Customs and spend probably up to a hundred grand (on the really really big custom jobs. Most are probably less than 50 grand.) film it all, some throw in some fancy editing and BAM! Hit show.
I say we hit up the Discovery Channel for the cash, find a bunch of struggling science labs and have Morgan Webb host the all new "Pimp My Mouse!"
"We know you guys were in to spinal cord research and the effects of degernative central nervous system diseases, So we hooked you up with a brand-new pair of Lou Gehrig's disease aflicted mice! They've got all the symptoms, a shortened life span, and the unchecked consequences of man playing God! Your lab has officially been pimped*!"
*and possibly relegated to being the epicenter for the coming geneticially engineered super-mouse holocaust......
Well technically I have 0 geek cred. I have a sony laptop and an AOL dial-up connection (for another couple weeks until the 90-day trial runs out.) DSL is not available in my area (two blocks south of me it is. fucking SBC/AT&T/Ma Bell) and I can't justify 50 bucks a month for cable at the moment.
But...
That AOL dial-up allows me to manage a couple active directory domain controllers, a couple linux servers, A BSD box, and a quad processor PPro200 File Server. All told about half a terrabyte in storage.
My network / datacenter may suck but the network I built and manage with it is nice.
(the nice things about AOL: it's never busy, and I've got access numbers everywhere I go. Too bad they're going to start asking me to pay for it soon.)
Removable devices shouldn't be able to use atuorun to do anything by themselves in XP. The autorun.inf is handled differently for removable devices. XP will read the autorun.inf if one is present in the root directory of a CD or a USB device, but won't actually execute commands on the removable device.
For example, you can make an autorun.inf on a USB device that points to an icon buried inside folders when the device is mounted. (XP will see the autorun and run the (apparently non-destructive) "icon=" line. it just won't do "open=", on removble drives.) You cannot use an Autorun.inf to execute a program on a USB device as soon as it's mounted. Microsoft made a point of neutering that feature on Read-write devices. I'm curious how the author got around that.
And just for the record Autorun can be easily disabled on CD drives, USB / Hotplug devices, or both via Group Policy.
"Brick and Mortar" casinos can come out ahead either way it goes.
The big Vegas casinos will be the first to tell you, they *want* internet gambling in the United States. They can trade on the "trust" they've built with people face to face to build their on-line business. Any major customer service business has one major cost: labor. You don't pay dealers on-line, you don't comp drinks, you don't pay waitresses. Just a few admins and bandwidth costs.
If the US outlaws internet gambling, The casinos lose slightly, but come away with a push overall. They can't move into the on-line realm like they want to, but will at least keep the face to face business.
Personally, I would like to see on-line gambling through the major casinos. I'm hesitant to put up money with off shore organizations (why yes, I fully trust you and your Costa Rican LLC! Here's my Visa card!) You'd probably see a slight drop off in gambling related crime. For instance, I wouldn't mind dropping 20-40 bucks a week on the NFL and NHL. But since I don't live in Vegas, I'd have to deal with the local bookie. I'd be a criminal.
The easiest way to get rid of the small time crime (loan sharking, bookmaking, etc) is to make it a large scale crime e.g. a profitable capitalist enterprise:)
Show me the mission in any of the GTA series that requires you to beat, kill, or otherwise be violent towards a prostitute. I've finished the storylines in all three of the PS2 versions, I wasted many an hour playing the PC version of the original, but never got a shot at GTA2.
So where's the "Kill rape and murder all the hookers" mission?
Lawyers don't just file lawsuits. Lawyers file lawsuits *on behalf* of people.
It's not the lawyers. It is the maddening lawyer lust that exists in some people. "Something didn't go my way. LAWSUIT!!!!!!!!!FREE MONEY FOR TEH WIN!!!!!!!111LOLORZ!!!!!"
But it doesn't help the situation that there are thousands of laywers that treat the law like fresh cooked pasta (eh, throw it at the wall and see what sticks.)
Do some reading about "Harry Bennett", who was Ford's union buster.
Ford was definatly a genius, but with genius comes serious eccentricities. He held very firm beliefs about the "working class" and how they should be treated (and in return how they should act.) An extension of that feeling was his belief that the "international jew" was conspiring against the working man.
He was also quite shrewd. Read the fine print about the "five dollar day." You didn't just get a job, work a day, and walk out the door with a five dollar bill. You had to be a clean living family man (by Ford's standards) and even then, you still made the standard factory wages (two-ish dollars a day). the "Five dollar day" came from the bonus you received after a set period of employment. A bonus that usually spent on....the purchase of a Ford vehicle.
It didn't help that Ford was effectivly senile for the last ten or so years of his life. Fascinating man, but also bat-shit insane.
To me, he just seems like a rich guy who is doing what he wants to do in life... which I have no problem with. But, it seems like he has a PR staff who is constantly trumpeting: "Look at this guy! He is sooooo great" To me, that is a turn off.
If you want to really get down to it, the whole X-prize was nothing more than a giant PR stunt. "Hey! look at us! we can get a bunch of rich guys to spend money! We're boldy going where man has been going for about 40 years now!"
But before you break out the flamebait mods: It was a PR stunt with a purpose. Without the X-prize, private space flights would've remained a "neat idea." Now, in a few years, maybe (if you're rich enough. Or if you win a contest) you could take a quick flight into space. Ya blatant PR and shameless rich guy whoring!
Yeah, we've already flown around the world and Fossett isn't exactly treading new ground. But maybe stunts like this spur on new advances in aviation. Maybe a company decides they want to be the next scaled composites and starts kicking money to R & D. Maybe somebody is inspired to look at the way things are being done and decides they can do better. Maybe.
Re:What about efficient use of our resources?
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Drop a few bills on an LCD monitor. New LCD's draw far less power than CRT monitors. This is especially true if you're using an old 14" clunker that doesn't do any sort of real power saving. Combine this with a VGA switch (or a KVM switch) to cut down on what you'll need to have plugged in.
Find and eliminate "wall warts", those little black inverters / chargers that are constantly drawing anywhere from 4 to 15 watts. I'd suggest getting a cheap power strip (one that has a switch) and putting it on top of your desk, then taking plugging as many of the warts into that as possible. Phone charger, laptop brick, iPod Charger, PC speaker inverter, and anything you can plug in that has a remote control.
When you're not using those items, turn off the strip. You can cut out anywhere from 20 to 80 watts of useless power. Multiply that by the hours you save (because hey, your PC speakers need to be sucking power when you're fast asleep...) and you can make a decent dent in your bill. (it's also a bit healthier for battery charged items to not be sucking power all the time.)
Aside from that? Compact flourescent bulbs help, and not being a dumbass helps more. Don't heat anything with electricity if you can avoid it, don't leave lights on all the time, enable powersave features on the PC's when you can.
As you said, every computer scientist knows to do the mundane tasks of computers (how to run an anti-virus program, how to set up an email program, etc.)
You obviously have never gone near tech support.
I can't tell you how many times I've had to hear "Don't tell me 'blah', I have a Masters / PhD / Certified piece of paper that instantly makes me smarter and better than you!" from Computer Science folks that don't have a fucking clue, or who don't want to be 'bothered' to learn how to do something.
Why don't we throw the modifier of "every *compotent* computer scientist knows how to do the mundane tasks" into your original statement.
That's why tech support people simply aren't that nerdy.
See, Now why do you have to go and be a cock like that? Support staff, from the lowest level of the help desk to the highest level of systems administration, have the same love of computers that that coders have. There are some that like the paycheck, and others that would do it for free if they could. Yeah, there are paper MCSE's that don't belong anywhere near a server room. But there are just as many Coders or CS prof's that don't belong in their field.
There's no need to look down your nose at people just because you're in a different discipline.
It seems like somewhere around the Challenger disaster, the pioneering attitude of NASA that had been its hallmark up until then took something of a backseat.
You don't really have the point of reference based on your age (technically, neither do I, since I'm only a couple years older than you), but that "pioneering attitude" had taken a backseat long before the shuttle program had even started.
The "Failure is not an Option" program that ran on the History Channel this evening (in the US, just so I don't piss off those reading overseas) Glossed over it, but at least made mention. There were grand plans for NASA that reached beyond Apollo and the Moon. Lunar Bases, Manned Missions to Mars, Space Stations, Reuseable Shuttles, the whole shebang. Unfortunatly at the same time, we were stuck at a horrible point in our history. Nixon was taking a savage (and deserved) beating over Vietnam. The country had little faith in its government, and just a few years later we were hit with an Oil Embargo that did a nice job of slamming our economy.
Congress started looking for places to cut the budget and, just like in Civ 3, Science took the hit. NASA's budget took a massive beating over the next few Fiscal years. They were thrown a bone and allowed to put together Skylab on a shoestring budget, then (late 70's early 80's) were saddled with the proverbial "good idea at the time" of the Shuttle program. The momentum NASA had during the late 60's was long gone by the time the shuttles starting futzing around in the upper atmosphere in the early 80's. Sad really. In the late 60's, NASA was a point of national pride. In fifteen years they had fallen to fodder for Johnny Carson & David Letterman's B-material.
Someone upstream made a joke comparing NASA to Amtrak, and it's a really close analogy. Could the private sector do a better job running either field? Probably. But there are a lot of good things going on that if fed a little bit of money and support, and not killed by the 1200 pound gorilla that is government management, could go a long way towards reforming both the organization and the public's perception of both groups do business.
A "Low-Level format" refers to that actual creation of sectors on a drive, literally creating order from the chaos of a bare metal platter. Many years ago, like in the years of "megabyte" sized drives, companies offered tools that would allow you to go through the and "reformat" the drive, rewriting the sectors and tracks as had been done at the factory, usually in an effort to try and cure bad sectors. The formats seldom did much good, and since there was a good chance you'd fubar the drive, companies just quit offering the tools.
A zero-write pass writes 0's to all sectors on the drive, and is a nice way for the paranoid to make sure that there's very little chance of data surviving. For the ultra paranoid there's Autoclave which has sadly been EOL'd by it's creator. This and similar utilities allow you to do numerous passes writing all sorts of random and non-random data
A normal, quick format just marks all sectors (normal sectors anyway) on the drive as being available for use.
I've never seen spyware or viruses survive even a quick format (or an fdisk/mbr in the case of boot sector viruses.) I guess in theory it's still there, but if nothing knows to look at that point for that data, why worry?
Slashdot Mirror
Not in a pinch, but regularly. You can't monitor a WSUS server without it.
Of course, IE on that particular network has a proxy server of 127.0.0.1 pushed out via group policy, with an exemption for the intranet. You could sneak around that by installing a proxy server on the machine you're using, but most of my users aren't that sharp. I've got Firefox 1.5.whatever running on everything now, so I can let my users off the leash a little.
The only thing I miss about IE is the ability to push settings to the browser via group policy. It's nice to be able to centrally manage an application like that. I haven't found a way to do that for firefox (HINT HINT).
If the flaw has been made public, there's an exploit for it. The 'sploit might not be available on www.l33t-d0wn0ad-sp10tz.ru right now, but you have to assume that it's floating around out there.
Oh please. I'm very good at computer security. I know better than to do something dumb like that.
Besides, the Password Inspector on IRC said my root password was one of the best he'd ever seen.
Wait, American Idol only exists so we can mock the idiots that don't know what they're doing. I already mock people who don't know what they're doing. It's called:
root@notmine>rm -rf *
Sorry, but our legal system is ill equipped to back up any of these laws. Aside from kiddie porn, there's no easily enforcable, constitutional law on the books that define what is and isn't porn. Other than the infamous "I don't know what defines pornography, but I know porn when I see it" statute that we work under now.
I see nothing wrong with this so long as its not the "religious" right deciding the definition of porn.
True enough, but unfortunately there are only two groups that will side up on this. The "We're really a bunch of strict baptists, but we use the word 'family' in the name of our non-profit so we're not as obvious when we lobby" organizations will jump in and scream bloody murder until the laws have rediculous definitions of "porn" such as:
"any picture of two or more men post on the internet may not feature more than one man shirtless and all men must be at least 4.675 inches from the shoulder of the other men so as not to give the appearance of blah blah blah."
On the other side you'll have the ACLU, but you won't see a single elected rep arguing for reasonable restrictions, since their opponent in the next election will bombard the constituancy with "OMG SENATOR JOHN JOHNSON WANTS TO FUCK YOUR CHILDREN WITH A BROKEN GLASS DILDO AND MAKE YOU JERK OFF WHILE WATCHING THE FILM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111" Commercials.
This sort of thing came up a couple years ago when someone decided to go after the local township library because they didn't have filtering software installed. The library didn't recieve federal funds for internet access (so they don't have to comply with CIPA), allowed childred to access the internet only with a parent (a patron parent) present, and had specific computer areas where children weren't allowed (since they could not be easily watched by the front desk.) Oh well the church groups went nuts. Every freaking shyster baptist minister, every congregation showed up in force to the library board meetings. Reason went out the door and the township board (who could normally not give a flying fuck about the library since niether has any direct say on the others actions) start grandstanding and calling for the heads of the library board. Pure bullshit, with the church behind almost all of it. At the end of the day, a nice fat chunk of the library's technology budget goes towards software that they didn't want, didn't need, and shouldn't have had to pay for. All because someone wanted to feel better about themselves by calling for a law, and the elected reps erring on the side of votes, not reason.
Sorry, but our legal system is ill equipped to back up any of these laws. Aside from kiddie porn, there's easily enforcable, constitutional laws on the books that define what is and isn't porn. Other than the infamous "I don't know what defines pornography, but I know porn when I see it" statute that we work under now.
I'm not a moralist, but I just think people who try to equate violence and sex on TV are missing the point. Yes, they are different. Even a child can see that.
You're missing the point. If impressionable teens are going to engage in sex if we allow it to be shown on TV (because lord knows the raging hormones of a teenager are going to be solely directed by this weeks "law and order"), then why is it ok to show sex in the context of violence? Aren't we then enouraging violent sex instead of plain, old fashioned humping?
I agree with the rest of the world. I can't figure out our uptight attitude towards sex when compared to our relaxed attitude towards violence. (and on the same token, i can't figure out the UK's uptight attitude towards violence when compared with a relaxed attitude towards sex.) Repression doesn't solve anything.
The AC brings up a very good point, and that point leads to another point.
As far as primetime TV is concerned, Violence is ok, Sex is evil. We can thank the moral majority for that. Ward and June Cleaver sleeping in separate beds, Homosexuality not existing until the 1970's (soap), open homosexuality not being addressed until the 1990's (roseanne, ellen). No sir, we can't ever imply that people have sex, because that's evil and naughty. In fact, we need standards that keep filth like sex off of the tube.
But violence is a-ok. Cop shows can show murders and beatings because "that sort of thing happens all the time" or "that's the way it is." It's gritty, "life on the street" sorts of things. Drug abuse, murder, beatings, that's cool. That happens all the time, but God forbid we show a boobie. Because people don't have sex.
Which leads us down the path we're on now. TV shows cannot show sex, but they can show violence. So how to the writers skirt that little detail? SHOW VIOLENT SEX! Brutal Rape! Orgies! Kinky prostitutes being beaten do death by druggies!
I'm no expert on sex, but I think men and women (or two men. Or two women.) tend to have have normal (or comparitively normal) sex more often than people get raped, murdered, or skinned by a serial killer after freaky sex rituals. But we can't show that on tv. We've got to show violent sex.
Like there's ever been a decent US built aircraft powered by a Rolls-Royce engine.....
(unless you wanna count this)
As is the case with many things; Quality pot usually doesn't come from the U.S. and even if it does, it's not as cost effective as the dirt cheap equivilent that comes in from Mexico. It's just easier to grow the crop where law enforcement doesn't really look that hard for it, then sneak it across the border. It's economics at work. A large growing operations that produces enough pot to be super cheap has a harder time doing "business" in the U.S. due to "regulation" (re: DEA agents busting down the doors.) In Mexico, the government doesn't care, so you can make a lot of a cheap product for export.
There are a lot of different Marijuana traffic patterns. A lot from Mexico, a surprising amount from Canada. Most of the US grown pot comes from old moonshine territory such as the Kentucky hills.
The big Terrorist drug is Opium. Afghanistan exports two things: Opium and more opium. The drug money in that country faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar surpasses any GDP they've ever had. Ever. Hell, add a bunch of their yearly GDP's up and compare it to a years worth of estimated Opium exports. Adjust for inflation, have Enron do the book keeping, do what you want. Afghanistan is to Opium as Kuwait is to oil. That's the biggest terrorism financing tool. Good old fashioned Smack.
So remember kids, be a Patriot! Smoke homegrown pot! and When you're doing Herion, you're shooting up with Osama!
Think of the possibilities. MTV's got a hit show in "Pimp My Ride" with Rapper Xibit as the host. Take somebody's old beater, turn it over to West Coast Customs and spend probably up to a hundred grand (on the really really big custom jobs. Most are probably less than 50 grand.) film it all, some throw in some fancy editing and BAM! Hit show.
I say we hit up the Discovery Channel for the cash, find a bunch of struggling science labs and have Morgan Webb host the all new "Pimp My Mouse!"
"We know you guys were in to spinal cord research and the effects of degernative central nervous system diseases, So we hooked you up with a brand-new pair of Lou Gehrig's disease aflicted mice! They've got all the symptoms, a shortened life span, and the unchecked consequences of man playing God! Your lab has officially been pimped*!"
*and possibly relegated to being the epicenter for the coming geneticially engineered super-mouse holocaust......
Well technically I have 0 geek cred. I have a sony laptop and an AOL dial-up connection (for another couple weeks until the 90-day trial runs out.) DSL is not available in my area (two blocks south of me it is. fucking SBC/AT&T/Ma Bell) and I can't justify 50 bucks a month for cable at the moment.
But...
That AOL dial-up allows me to manage a couple active directory domain controllers, a couple linux servers, A BSD box, and a quad processor PPro200 File Server. All told about half a terrabyte in storage.
My network / datacenter may suck but the network I built and manage with it is nice.
(the nice things about AOL: it's never busy, and I've got access numbers everywhere I go. Too bad they're going to start asking me to pay for it soon.)
Removable devices shouldn't be able to use atuorun to do anything by themselves in XP. The autorun.inf is handled differently for removable devices. XP will read the autorun.inf if one is present in the root directory of a CD or a USB device, but won't actually execute commands on the removable device.
For example, you can make an autorun.inf on a USB device that points to an icon buried inside folders when the device is mounted. (XP will see the autorun and run the (apparently non-destructive) "icon=" line. it just won't do "open=", on removble drives.) You cannot use an Autorun.inf to execute a program on a USB device as soon as it's mounted. Microsoft made a point of neutering that feature on Read-write devices. I'm curious how the author got around that.
And just for the record Autorun can be easily disabled on CD drives, USB / Hotplug devices, or both via Group Policy.
"Brick and Mortar" casinos can come out ahead either way it goes.
:)
The big Vegas casinos will be the first to tell you, they *want* internet gambling in the United States. They can trade on the "trust" they've built with people face to face to build their on-line business. Any major customer service business has one major cost: labor. You don't pay dealers on-line, you don't comp drinks, you don't pay waitresses. Just a few admins and bandwidth costs.
If the US outlaws internet gambling, The casinos lose slightly, but come away with a push overall. They can't move into the on-line realm like they want to, but will at least keep the face to face business.
Personally, I would like to see on-line gambling through the major casinos. I'm hesitant to put up money with off shore organizations (why yes, I fully trust you and your Costa Rican LLC! Here's my Visa card!) You'd probably see a slight drop off in gambling related crime. For instance, I wouldn't mind dropping 20-40 bucks a week on the NFL and NHL. But since I don't live in Vegas, I'd have to deal with the local bookie. I'd be a criminal.
The easiest way to get rid of the small time crime (loan sharking, bookmaking, etc) is to make it a large scale crime e.g. a profitable capitalist enterprise
Show me the mission in any of the GTA series that requires you to beat, kill, or otherwise be violent towards a prostitute. I've finished the storylines in all three of the PS2 versions, I wasted many an hour playing the PC version of the original, but never got a shot at GTA2.
So where's the "Kill rape and murder all the hookers" mission?
Lawyers don't just file lawsuits. Lawyers file lawsuits *on behalf* of people.
It's not the lawyers. It is the maddening lawyer lust that exists in some people. "Something didn't go my way. LAWSUIT!!!!!!!!!FREE MONEY FOR TEH WIN!!!!!!!111LOLORZ!!!!!"
But it doesn't help the situation that there are thousands of laywers that treat the law like fresh cooked pasta (eh, throw it at the wall and see what sticks.)
Do some reading about "Harry Bennett", who was Ford's union buster.
Ford was definatly a genius, but with genius comes serious eccentricities. He held very firm beliefs about the "working class" and how they should be treated (and in return how they should act.) An extension of that feeling was his belief that the "international jew" was conspiring against the working man.
He was also quite shrewd. Read the fine print about the "five dollar day." You didn't just get a job, work a day, and walk out the door with a five dollar bill. You had to be a clean living family man (by Ford's standards) and even then, you still made the standard factory wages (two-ish dollars a day). the "Five dollar day" came from the bonus you received after a set period of employment. A bonus that usually spent on....the purchase of a Ford vehicle.
It didn't help that Ford was effectivly senile for the last ten or so years of his life. Fascinating man, but also bat-shit insane.
To me, he just seems like a rich guy who is doing what he wants to do in life... which I have no problem with. But, it seems like he has a PR staff who is constantly trumpeting: "Look at this guy! He is sooooo great" To me, that is a turn off.
If you want to really get down to it, the whole X-prize was nothing more than a giant PR stunt. "Hey! look at us! we can get a bunch of rich guys to spend money! We're boldy going where man has been going for about 40 years now!"
But before you break out the flamebait mods: It was a PR stunt with a purpose. Without the X-prize, private space flights would've remained a "neat idea." Now, in a few years, maybe (if you're rich enough. Or if you win a contest) you could take a quick flight into space. Ya blatant PR and shameless rich guy whoring!
Yeah, we've already flown around the world and Fossett isn't exactly treading new ground. But maybe stunts like this spur on new advances in aviation. Maybe a company decides they want to be the next scaled composites and starts kicking money to R & D. Maybe somebody is inspired to look at the way things are being done and decides they can do better. Maybe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_A
Drop a few bills on an LCD monitor. New LCD's draw far less power than CRT monitors. This is especially true if you're using an old 14" clunker that doesn't do any sort of real power saving. Combine this with a VGA switch (or a KVM switch) to cut down on what you'll need to have plugged in.
Find and eliminate "wall warts", those little black inverters / chargers that are constantly drawing anywhere from 4 to 15 watts. I'd suggest getting a cheap power strip (one that has a switch) and putting it on top of your desk, then taking plugging as many of the warts into that as possible. Phone charger, laptop brick, iPod Charger, PC speaker inverter, and anything you can plug in that has a remote control.
When you're not using those items, turn off the strip. You can cut out anywhere from 20 to 80 watts of useless power. Multiply that by the hours you save (because hey, your PC speakers need to be sucking power when you're fast asleep...) and you can make a decent dent in your bill. (it's also a bit healthier for battery charged items to not be sucking power all the time.)
Aside from that? Compact flourescent bulbs help, and not being a dumbass helps more. Don't heat anything with electricity if you can avoid it, don't leave lights on all the time, enable powersave features on the PC's when you can.
As you said, every computer scientist knows to do the mundane tasks of computers (how to run an anti-virus program, how to set up an email program, etc.)
You obviously have never gone near tech support.
I can't tell you how many times I've had to hear "Don't tell me 'blah', I have a Masters / PhD / Certified piece of paper that instantly makes me smarter and better than you!" from Computer Science folks that don't have a fucking clue, or who don't want to be 'bothered' to learn how to do something.
Why don't we throw the modifier of "every *compotent* computer scientist knows how to do the mundane tasks" into your original statement.
That's why tech support people simply aren't that nerdy.
See, Now why do you have to go and be a cock like that? Support staff, from the lowest level of the help desk to the highest level of systems administration, have the same love of computers that that coders have. There are some that like the paycheck, and others that would do it for free if they could. Yeah, there are paper MCSE's that don't belong anywhere near a server room. But there are just as many Coders or CS prof's that don't belong in their field.
There's no need to look down your nose at people just because you're in a different discipline.
Remember; If you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made prolonging the problem.
Antz wasn't a pixar flick. "A Bug's Life" was the Pixar ant-related film.
It seems like somewhere around the Challenger disaster, the pioneering attitude of NASA that had been its hallmark up until then took something of a backseat.
You don't really have the point of reference based on your age (technically, neither do I, since I'm only a couple years older than you), but that "pioneering attitude" had taken a backseat long before the shuttle program had even started.
The "Failure is not an Option" program that ran on the History Channel this evening (in the US, just so I don't piss off those reading overseas) Glossed over it, but at least made mention. There were grand plans for NASA that reached beyond Apollo and the Moon. Lunar Bases, Manned Missions to Mars, Space Stations, Reuseable Shuttles, the whole shebang. Unfortunatly at the same time, we were stuck at a horrible point in our history. Nixon was taking a savage (and deserved) beating over Vietnam. The country had little faith in its government, and just a few years later we were hit with an Oil Embargo that did a nice job of slamming our economy.
Congress started looking for places to cut the budget and, just like in Civ 3, Science took the hit. NASA's budget took a massive beating over the next few Fiscal years. They were thrown a bone and allowed to put together Skylab on a shoestring budget, then (late 70's early 80's) were saddled with the proverbial "good idea at the time" of the Shuttle program. The momentum NASA had during the late 60's was long gone by the time the shuttles starting futzing around in the upper atmosphere in the early 80's. Sad really. In the late 60's, NASA was a point of national pride. In fifteen years they had fallen to fodder for Johnny Carson & David Letterman's B-material.
Someone upstream made a joke comparing NASA to Amtrak, and it's a really close analogy. Could the private sector do a better job running either field? Probably. But there are a lot of good things going on that if fed a little bit of money and support, and not killed by the 1200 pound gorilla that is government management, could go a long way towards reforming both the organization and the public's perception of both groups do business.
Ahhh, no.
/mbr in the case of boot sector viruses.) I guess in theory it's still there, but if nothing knows to look at that point for that data, why worry?
A "Low-Level format" refers to that actual creation of sectors on a drive, literally creating order from the chaos of a bare metal platter. Many years ago, like in the years of "megabyte" sized drives, companies offered tools that would allow you to go through the and "reformat" the drive, rewriting the sectors and tracks as had been done at the factory, usually in an effort to try and cure bad sectors. The formats seldom did much good, and since there was a good chance you'd fubar the drive, companies just quit offering the tools.
A zero-write pass writes 0's to all sectors on the drive, and is a nice way for the paranoid to make sure that there's very little chance of data surviving. For the ultra paranoid there's Autoclave which has sadly been EOL'd by it's creator. This and similar utilities allow you to do numerous passes writing all sorts of random and non-random data
A normal, quick format just marks all sectors (normal sectors anyway) on the drive as being available for use.
I've never seen spyware or viruses survive even a quick format (or an fdisk