Try using a non-IE browser that identifies itself as non-IE (and doesn't include MSIE in it's useragent string) on the Hoyt's movie sites here in Australia. Or the old St George internet banking site.
Lots of sites use the useragent string to "identify" the browser. Then they serve up a, "your kind not welcome here" message if you're not MSIE-useragent-compliant or at least Mozilla-useragent-compliant. There's a reason that OmniWeb reports itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US) AppleWebKit/125.4 (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari) OmniWeb/v5 63.42" and Safari reports itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412"
It's not that the sites are coded explicitly for Internet Explorer - the sites work (mostly) on other browsers, but the people who wrote the site were only willing to test on the most common browser, and therefore reject other browsers. Now the sites are doing two-browser checking, but they're still checking based on UserAgent, not JavaScript capabilities, which means that when the next version of the browser comes out the site will again be inaccessible.
A whole bunch of zombie empire builders are going to realise that there is one platform that will allow them to expand their zombie base by 16%. Soon we'll have active trojans, worms and viruses looking to infest every Mac they can get their hands on.
I'm going to miss the good old days, when we could safely say, "Mac OS X is immune to all viruses"!
Windows users use their computers for entertainment (c'mon, honestly - how many games run on Macs? How many porn sites work for Macs?)
I would expect Windows users to use the web much more, as they're searching for the new Comet Cursors or KaZaa release, or trying to find the next big thing in joke movies, PowerPoint presentations, etc. People on Macs might use the web to find out about the latest plugins for Photoshop, or tutorials on Objective C.
Though this doesn't explain an 8-times differenential between Mac and PC users' behaviour. 16% is a huge number - far too big for me to believe.
Most Mac users will have learned long ago to configure their browser to pretend to be Internet Explorer. Otherwise the web sites that your colleagues write are inaccessible.
Don't issue addresses to DHCP clients that are identified as a Microsoft Windows PCs. No IP address, no ping flood!
The second step is enforcing a "zero tolerance i386 policy". No Intel i386 compatible chipsets allowed near your network. If they can't run Microsoft Windows, they can't run Microsoft Windows viruses.
Then you just have the problem of the smart punks assigning a static IP address.
Alternately, get friendly with the network administrator (the guy who "owns" the switch that these PCs are plugged into), and arrange to have virus-laden PCs cut off from the network (as in - turn off the port). Leave a copy of the latest virus definitions file on their doorstep with a note explaining that access to the network will be restored once they've cleaned up their machine.
And sprinkle the document with the usual "Think Different" propaganda. Linux and Mac OS X good! Microsoft Windows bad!
Apple has not consistently used "Mac OS 10.4" when the nickname, "Tiger" is used. Check their front page - it's all, "Tiger is available today" or "Tiger Unleashed".
However, everything I've seen about tiger has been announcing that it's a great new Operating System for your Apple computer. No confusion there, in my mind.
"Tiger, with Spotlight and Dashboard."
"Power Mac G5, with 2.7HGz, 16x SuperDrive and Tiger."
Obviously Tiger is a thing that you buy, not a brand that you buy from. Let's not get into reputation of the company itself, since that shouldn't be relevant to the judgement. Surely TigerDirect wouldn't be filing the charges if they didn't think there was some certainty that they actually had a case.
iChat only works on Mac OS X, but it does provide voice/video compatibility with AIM on Windows.
For other platforms, only Jabber support at this time. I expect that when Jabber gets a defined voice or video interface, things will look better for cross-platform support.
Statistically speaking, you're outside the 99% probability of natural disaster taking out your two sites if they are at least 10km apart. The hurricane will take out one site, but not be strong enough at the other site to do more than dump a lot of water everywhere. Tornadoes are pickier - your other site could be 50m away and not get scratched.
Ideally, make sure neither of your sites are labeled as being part of your company. Rusty falling-apart about-to-be-condemned warehouses are great for anonymity.
Even consider the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster of 2004 - the water washed away stuff as far as 800m inland in many places. The 10km limit still applies right up until the point where a bus-sized asteroid smacks into the Earth's surface half way between the two. But then there will be bigger problems than, "gee, I wonder if my stock portfolio is intact?"
I must confess though, I can't point my finger at the references that told me "10km"...
Your opinion also extends to the commercial on-paper encyclopaedias. Why should I trust an American encyclopaedia when they can't even spell "colour" properly?
Yes, they are researched, compiled, and edited by people who are paid money - but who's to say that the money didn't come from someone attempting to colour history in their favour?
I guess the time I really start taking Wikipedia seriously is when its hosting provider in the UK is raided by George W Bush's secret police on behalf of the Swiss and Italian Governments.
I just feel more comfortable using two orthogonal hash systems. Otherwise you're putting all your eggs in one basket (albeit a newer, denser weave basket, but one basket all the same).
I run Debian on my servers because Debian package management is the best I've seen. It works, it's simple. I need simple.
I run Mac OS X on my client machines because I need to look at it all day. Aqua is nice and smooth - it's a polished UI, literally and figuratively. Once you've used F9 (or bound F9-F11 to your extra mouse buttons), you'll quickly forget that there was a world before Exposé.
Mac OS X looks nice always. The same font will render the same way in every application. The interface is smooth and polished, so you won't suffer eyestrain from jaggies like you do with Keramic, and you can actually read the text. I find text rendered under X11 is hard to read - partly because of the poor selection of free fonts, and partly because of the lack of consistent rendering.
Besides, you can play StarCraft, WarCraft III, Diablo II and World of Warcraft on Mac OS X (and with 10.3.7, you can now play them in realtime;)
I use AbiWord for word processing - AppleWorks just doesn't cut it, even with the DavaVis converters. The people who send me Microsoft Word documents always seem to be using the features that aren't supported in any other MS-Word compatible editor. AbiWord is the closest to usable for me, without going and spending $AU800 just so I can fill in time sheets.
I've tried a couple of spreadsheet packages for the Mac, and the two best are Gnumeric (but it's X11 based and therefore ugly by nature, GTK based which means ugly by design, but presented to me via Apple's X11 server, which makes it actually look good) and Mariner Calc (it's a commercial non-Free licence).
The best browser I've ever used is OmniWeb. Again, it's a commercial licence, but worth it (especially since the tech support people actual respond to emails).
The biggest flaw/fault in the PB is that its aluminium shell significantly reduces its wireless range. I had to buy an extended range antenna for the AirPort Extreme base station just so I could get to the Internet from the other end of the house.
Mac OS X "just works", and the people at Apple tend (for the most part) to make the right choices, so I'm happy to trust them with future updates to my computer. When there's a new Software Update available, I am eager to install it. As opposed to when there's a new MS Service Pack available, at which time I wonder where I'm going to find the time to fix the machine after the SP is installed...
And did I mention that with the 10.3.7 update, I can now run Diablo II at 10 times the framerate I used to? It used to chug down to 4fps in combat scenes when running fullscreen in OpenGL mode, now it runs at a consistent 20fps in the heavy scenes (still not as fast as a gaming PC, but very usable). I can't wait to see what kind of improvement 10.3.7 brings to my 333MHz iMac.
Which brings me to my final point - my PowerBook G4 1.3GHz is no competition to my Athlon 750MHz w/Radeon 9600 video card when it comes to gaming - various sources give me the impression that most games for the Mac are ported from Direct X, which means lots of glue code, which means slower games. The PB excels as a general purpose computer - and it's a whole lot lighter than my desktop PC (3kg for PB vs 35kg + cables for desktop). And I don't have to reinstall the O/S every six months to keep my Macintosh computers stable.
If you don't want to spend the rest of your life twiddling and tweaking to make your O/S just right, get the PowerBook with Mac OS X. The guys at Apple have already tweaked it for you - all that's left to do is enjoy your work!
(but until Apple's package management improves a little, and Software Update supports third party applications, I'll stick with Debian for my servers)
From what I read, creating a hash-equivalent file for one hashing mechanism requires different and incompatible changes to those required for making a hash-equivalent file for a second hashing mechanism.
Would it therefore be safe to calculate two hashes (MD5 and SHA-1) for the file, distribute the file and the two (or three, or four) separate hashes, and use the incompatible nature of the hashes as an extra "guarantee" of data integrity?
I know I've only ever managed to boycott Diablo II for days at a time - and then only because my computer desperately needs a reinstall.
As for the rest of the trash? Don't confuse fear with anger. Don't confuse anger with hate. Don't confuse hate with evil. Evil is what evil does - fear, anger, hate are the triumvirate motivators - the supporting elements that provide the incentive and drive for doing evil.
Don't worry too much though - humanity is built upon conflict. We can't survive without it. Humans will always find something to complain about, or fight about. Some will always crave power, and take advantage of those who crave security. It's a never ending story - a wheel or cycle that goes around and around. There's no escaping it, any attempt to do so just makes the wheel spin faster or slower.
Remember the wheel.
* I address David Brin directly, not the AC who cut-and-pasted his work.
Basic theory is, threshold of pain is about 120dB, so make your alarm louder.
There are certain limits you have to meet due to noise pollution laws, but by being creative with the number and position of audio transducers in and around your vehicle (the important ones being in the vehicle), you can make the sound painfully loud when someone sticks their head in your car, and still keep to legal limits on noise pollution outside the vehicle.
Hopefully the thief (because that's what they are by the time their head is inside your vehicle) will withdraw from the vehicle before they go deaf, otherwise you could be charged with malicious damage or assault.
Of course, if you don't have the money for a security system, you could just not leave valuables in the car, and trade the vehicle in for one that's not attractive to joyriders and spare parts dealers. I often leave the glove box and cigarette trays open just to show people that there's nothing in there worth taking. The tinted windows don't help though, and I've had a number of breakins because they thought there might be something worth taking.
A distributed denial of service attack against consumer profiling:
1. Buy huge basket of goods you don't really want 2. Wait an hour 3. Take them all back for refund 4. Wait for advertising material trying to sell you better versions (newer and more improved) of the stuff you bought in (1) 5. Pulp the paper and make paper bricks for the fireplace
For some people, WiFi is not now - and never will be - an option. Take for example people working in MRI labs, or farmers driving tractors.
GPS is computationally intensive, whereas a quartz oscillator draws minute amounts of current. A chip-size atomic clock will be an extra option in the size/weight/power/accuracy tradeoff game. An internal clock will be the only choice where the system is placed in a shielded environment such as in a radiation lab or deep underground.
Although the DARPA Grand Challenge showed that autonomous ground vehicles are a little way off just yet, I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility to imagine that the USA's Department of Homeland Security would be interested in robotic cockroach cameras that can synchronise their movements to millisecond accuracy when infiltrating terrorist cell headquarters over the period of a few days (the time it takes the cockroach cameras to run through the sewage system, for example) while maintaining total radio silence.
A number of things bother me about the M400 and all the hype around it:
It's never actually flown. Go to the site, watch the movies. It doesn't fly, it hovers on a cushion of air. You don't get the ground effect when you're flying, and I don't imagine that 10-20m above the ground will be enough to clear most bridges and power lines. Note that the ground effect only needs the body to be close to the ground with sufficient air being forced into the gap - you don't need skirts or wings unless you're trying to conserve energy. In the case of the M400, the aim is to doddle the investors with a hovercraft that looks like a flying car.
It's never carried any payload. It hovers at 8m above the ground with engines roaring, tethered to a crane, with noone actually in the vehicle. Add 60-100kg for a pilot, then another 60-100kg for a passenger: will the M400 even get 2m off the ground?
All the figures quoted for the skycar are speculative - how can they publish the cruise speed of a vehicle which has never actually flown at cruise altitude? What is he basing his figures on - the aerodynamics of the vehicle or the gullibility of his investors?
I'd love to see automated flying cars, but I don't think they are really feasible or environmentally sound. The energy that they're dissipating to help someone save 5 minutes in peak hour isn't being compensated for elsewhere. I'll stick to an ultralight to transport me from my city abode to my farm, thanks. Much quieter and much more efficient than an M400. I can't wait for a Skycar M400 Volantor to take off and prove 100 years of aeronautical design wrong.
Posting such a list would be counter-productive, since so many of the Slashdot zombies would just click away... we'd be sending them more traffic, not less.
Replace the soldiers' bones with titanium molecularly bonded structures. Replace or enhance their ligaments with carbon nanotubes. Just have to figure out what to do with the bone marrow.
Then should the computer crash, the soldier will be ripping the exoskeleton apart. And they'll be kicking arse when it comes to hand-to-hand combat. Quite literally.
Why have easily-breaking "Aliens" style soldiers when you can have toughened "Wolverine" style soldiers? Just have to figure out how to protect the skin from the impact of metal bones on enemy armour.
I thought one of the conditions for a patent was that the invention had to be novel and non-obvious?
Where's the novelty and originality in sending a list of available updates (let's call it a catalogue) to a client, and having the client order the stuff they want from the catalogue that they don't already have?
Most of the articles referenced in the patent provide all the prior art required to dismiss the patent - the only thing different with this "invention" is that it is cheaper because it doesn't involve "special" equipment (in the days when modems were not all compatible with each other) or an expensive subscription (such as to a case law product).
If this patent had been presented in 1990, it might have been original. But between 1990 and 1998 there was a lot of work in the distribution of software using the Internet - many products started to have "home pages" where you could open up the web page (in an HTML viewer, for example) which would list the available packages, and the user would select the new packages to download. The obvious extension to this is to provide the user with a catalogue of already-installed software. The obvious extension to that is to get the computer to check the catalogue of available versus the catalogue of installed packages and present the user with the differences. The obvious extension to this is to allow the computer to automatically download the differences, and perhaps even install them.
Don't suppose anyone has scripts left over from the University days where they'd get a listing of a BBS or FTP archive, and start downloading the stuff they didn't already have?
I guess TT decided that applying for a patent was easier than writing software. There's a.sig going around along the lines of: "Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. Patents are about having the inspiration, letting someone else do the perspiration, then suing them for it."
Public outage reports include details of what went wrong and how the carrier fixed it
Public outage reports come out long after the event.
DHS is not concerned about "the network is currently down" notifications being "blueprints for terrorists". DHS is concerned about the ones like this:
"the CDMA cell at 33N 37W went down due to a fault in the non-redundant power feed - an overhead powerline that runs 1km from the nearest substation. We plan to install a second feed from another nearby substation within 6 months. Overhead lines to be installed as per attached plans."
That's what the DHS means by "blueprints for terrorists" - they're concerned that the level of detail in the fault analysis would be enough for someone to cause an outage on purpose, thus preventing people calling in or out of that mobile coverage area.
So please just read the damned article before harping on about "how could a network outage possibly benefit a terrorist"?
As it stands, a network outage could be of great benefit to terrorists, if they can cause the outage at will.
The phrase "which begs the question" has always - in my Australian vocabulary - meant, "makes obvious and unsupported assumptions," or "leaves obvious questions to be asked."
For example, if someone is demonstrating a new space-alien repellant, the demonstration itself would beg the question, "which space aliens?"
Or someone proclaiming that a particular person is an "unlawful combatant" begs the question of what exactly defines a "lawful combatant"?
Ultimately, to "beg the question" means that you leave obvious questions unanswered. Sometimes this is the aim - make people ask a question that your political opponents don't want asked.
Is there anything like Ether Ape that's text based? I'm going to have to install 40MB worth of gnome libraries and sound card drivers on my router in order to run Ether Ape - the sound stuff is useless since my workstation isn't within hearing distance of my desk...
The police are not allowed to ask for a name, if there is already an existing case against the victim.
The police are allowed to ask for a name, if the victim is not known to under prosecution, and if the police suspect that a crime may have been committed.
Providing a false name is a crime, providing no name is a crime - try telling Frederick Goldberg or Caleb Rubenstein that revealing his name will cost him nothing, especially when it's the highly professional (and ethical!) German SS soldier asking, and he's living in Berlin, circa 1938.
Heck, try telling Mohammed Abdulla Ben-Sharif that no harm will come to him by telling the good policeman his name, when he's wandering through New York on a chilly September night.
And how long until some good policeman is forced to detain a suspect for providing an obviously false name? Only to find out that his name is really Winston Smith?
You will love Big Brother. And remember, Big Brother is watching!
Slashdot Mirror
Try using a non-IE browser that identifies itself as non-IE (and doesn't include MSIE in it's useragent string) on the Hoyt's movie sites here in Australia. Or the old St George internet banking site.
Lots of sites use the useragent string to "identify" the browser. Then they serve up a, "your kind not welcome here" message if you're not MSIE-useragent-compliant or at least Mozilla-useragent-compliant. There's a reason that OmniWeb reports itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh;
U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US) AppleWebKit/125.4 (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari) OmniWeb/v5
63.42" and Safari reports itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412"
It's not that the sites are coded explicitly for Internet Explorer - the sites work (mostly) on other browsers, but the people who wrote the site were only willing to test on the most common browser, and therefore reject other browsers. Now the sites are doing two-browser checking, but they're still checking based on UserAgent, not JavaScript capabilities, which means that when the next version of the browser comes out the site will again be inaccessible.
You know what's going to happen now?
A whole bunch of zombie empire builders are going to realise that there is one platform that will allow them to expand their zombie base by 16%. Soon we'll have active trojans, worms and viruses looking to infest every Mac they can get their hands on.
I'm going to miss the good old days, when we could safely say, "Mac OS X is immune to all viruses"!
Mac users use their computers to work.
Windows users use their computers for entertainment (c'mon, honestly - how many games run on Macs? How many porn sites work for Macs?)
I would expect Windows users to use the web much more, as they're searching for the new Comet Cursors or KaZaa release, or trying to find the next big thing in joke movies, PowerPoint presentations, etc. People on Macs might use the web to find out about the latest plugins for Photoshop, or tutorials on Objective C.
Though this doesn't explain an 8-times differenential between Mac and PC users' behaviour. 16% is a huge number - far too big for me to believe.
Most Mac users will have learned long ago to configure their browser to pretend to be Internet Explorer. Otherwise the web sites that your colleagues write are inaccessible.
Don't issue addresses to DHCP clients that are identified as a Microsoft Windows PCs. No IP address, no ping flood!
The second step is enforcing a "zero tolerance i386 policy". No Intel i386 compatible chipsets allowed near your network. If they can't run Microsoft Windows, they can't run Microsoft Windows viruses.
Then you just have the problem of the smart punks assigning a static IP address.
Alternately, get friendly with the network administrator (the guy who "owns" the switch that these PCs are plugged into), and arrange to have virus-laden PCs cut off from the network (as in - turn off the port). Leave a copy of the latest virus definitions file on their doorstep with a note explaining that access to the network will be restored once they've cleaned up their machine.
And sprinkle the document with the usual "Think Different" propaganda. Linux and Mac OS X good! Microsoft Windows bad!
Apple has not consistently used "Mac OS 10.4" when the nickname, "Tiger" is used. Check their front page - it's all, "Tiger is available today" or "Tiger Unleashed". However, everything I've seen about tiger has been announcing that it's a great new Operating System for your Apple computer. No confusion there, in my mind. "Tiger, with Spotlight and Dashboard." "Power Mac G5, with 2.7HGz, 16x SuperDrive and Tiger." Obviously Tiger is a thing that you buy, not a brand that you buy from. Let's not get into reputation of the company itself, since that shouldn't be relevant to the judgement. Surely TigerDirect wouldn't be filing the charges if they didn't think there was some certainty that they actually had a case.
iChat only works on Mac OS X, but it does provide voice/video compatibility with AIM on Windows. For other platforms, only Jabber support at this time. I expect that when Jabber gets a defined voice or video interface, things will look better for cross-platform support.
Statistically speaking, you're outside the 99% probability of natural disaster taking out your two sites if they are at least 10km apart. The hurricane will take out one site, but not be strong enough at the other site to do more than dump a lot of water everywhere. Tornadoes are pickier - your other site could be 50m away and not get scratched.
Ideally, make sure neither of your sites are labeled as being part of your company. Rusty falling-apart about-to-be-condemned warehouses are great for anonymity.
Even consider the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster of 2004 - the water washed away stuff as far as 800m inland in many places. The 10km limit still applies right up until the point where a bus-sized asteroid smacks into the Earth's surface half way between the two. But then there will be bigger problems than, "gee, I wonder if my stock portfolio is intact?"
I must confess though, I can't point my finger at the references that told me "10km"...
Your opinion also extends to the commercial on-paper encyclopaedias. Why should I trust an American encyclopaedia when they can't even spell "colour" properly?
Yes, they are researched, compiled, and edited by people who are paid money - but who's to say that the money didn't come from someone attempting to colour history in their favour?
I guess the time I really start taking Wikipedia seriously is when its hosting provider in the UK is raided by George W Bush's secret police on behalf of the Swiss and Italian Governments.
I just feel more comfortable using two orthogonal hash systems. Otherwise you're putting all your eggs in one basket (albeit a newer, denser weave basket, but one basket all the same).
I run Debian on my servers because Debian package management is the best I've seen. It works, it's simple. I need simple.
;)
I run Mac OS X on my client machines because I need to look at it all day. Aqua is nice and smooth - it's a polished UI, literally and figuratively. Once you've used F9 (or bound F9-F11 to your extra mouse buttons), you'll quickly forget that there was a world before Exposé.
Mac OS X looks nice always. The same font will render the same way in every application. The interface is smooth and polished, so you won't suffer eyestrain from jaggies like you do with Keramic, and you can actually read the text. I find text rendered under X11 is hard to read - partly because of the poor selection of free fonts, and partly because of the lack of consistent rendering.
Besides, you can play StarCraft, WarCraft III, Diablo II and World of Warcraft on Mac OS X (and with 10.3.7, you can now play them in realtime
I use AbiWord for word processing - AppleWorks just doesn't cut it, even with the DavaVis converters. The people who send me Microsoft Word documents always seem to be using the features that aren't supported in any other MS-Word compatible editor. AbiWord is the closest to usable for me, without going and spending $AU800 just so I can fill in time sheets.
I've tried a couple of spreadsheet packages for the Mac, and the two best are Gnumeric (but it's X11 based and therefore ugly by nature, GTK based which means ugly by design, but presented to me via Apple's X11 server, which makes it actually look good) and Mariner Calc (it's a commercial non-Free licence).
The best browser I've ever used is OmniWeb. Again, it's a commercial licence, but worth it (especially since the tech support people actual respond to emails).
The biggest flaw/fault in the PB is that its aluminium shell significantly reduces its wireless range. I had to buy an extended range antenna for the AirPort Extreme base station just so I could get to the Internet from the other end of the house.
Mac OS X "just works", and the people at Apple tend (for the most part) to make the right choices, so I'm happy to trust them with future updates to my computer. When there's a new Software Update available, I am eager to install it. As opposed to when there's a new MS Service Pack available, at which time I wonder where I'm going to find the time to fix the machine after the SP is installed...
And did I mention that with the 10.3.7 update, I can now run Diablo II at 10 times the framerate I used to? It used to chug down to 4fps in combat scenes when running fullscreen in OpenGL mode, now it runs at a consistent 20fps in the heavy scenes (still not as fast as a gaming PC, but very usable). I can't wait to see what kind of improvement 10.3.7 brings to my 333MHz iMac.
Which brings me to my final point - my PowerBook G4 1.3GHz is no competition to my Athlon 750MHz w/Radeon 9600 video card when it comes to gaming - various sources give me the impression that most games for the Mac are ported from Direct X, which means lots of glue code, which means slower games. The PB excels as a general purpose computer - and it's a whole lot lighter than my desktop PC (3kg for PB vs 35kg + cables for desktop). And I don't have to reinstall the O/S every six months to keep my Macintosh computers stable.
If you don't want to spend the rest of your life twiddling and tweaking to make your O/S just right, get the PowerBook with Mac OS X. The guys at Apple have already tweaked it for you - all that's left to do is enjoy your work!
(but until Apple's package management improves a little, and Software Update supports third party applications, I'll stick with Debian for my servers)
From what I read, creating a hash-equivalent file for one hashing mechanism requires different and incompatible changes to those required for making a hash-equivalent file for a second hashing mechanism.
Would it therefore be safe to calculate two hashes (MD5 and SHA-1) for the file, distribute the file and the two (or three, or four) separate hashes, and use the incompatible nature of the hashes as an extra "guarantee" of data integrity?
Just tell your browser to not load images from sites other than the one that the web page came from. Lots of empty image placeholders, no naked women.
Boycotted for a whole week?
I admire your* staying power.
I know I've only ever managed to boycott Diablo II for days at a time - and then only because my computer desperately needs a reinstall.
As for the rest of the trash? Don't confuse fear with anger. Don't confuse anger with hate. Don't confuse hate with evil. Evil is what evil does - fear, anger, hate are the triumvirate motivators - the supporting elements that provide the incentive and drive for doing evil.
Don't worry too much though - humanity is built upon conflict. We can't survive without it. Humans will always find something to complain about, or fight about. Some will always crave power, and take advantage of those who crave security. It's a never ending story - a wheel or cycle that goes around and around. There's no escaping it, any attempt to do so just makes the wheel spin faster or slower.
Remember the wheel.
* I address David Brin directly, not the AC who cut-and-pasted his work.
I'm a big fan of the sonic barrage.
Basic theory is, threshold of pain is about 120dB, so make your alarm louder.
There are certain limits you have to meet due to noise pollution laws, but by being creative with the number and position of audio transducers in and around your vehicle (the important ones being in the vehicle), you can make the sound painfully loud when someone sticks their head in your car, and still keep to legal limits on noise pollution outside the vehicle.
Hopefully the thief (because that's what they are by the time their head is inside your vehicle) will withdraw from the vehicle before they go deaf, otherwise you could be charged with malicious damage or assault.
Of course, if you don't have the money for a security system, you could just not leave valuables in the car, and trade the vehicle in for one that's not attractive to joyriders and spare parts dealers. I often leave the glove box and cigarette trays open just to show people that there's nothing in there worth taking. The tinted windows don't help though, and I've had a number of breakins because they thought there might be something worth taking.
A distributed denial of service attack against consumer profiling:
1. Buy huge basket of goods you don't really want
2. Wait an hour
3. Take them all back for refund
4. Wait for advertising material trying to sell you better versions (newer and more improved) of the stuff you bought in (1)
5. Pulp the paper and make paper bricks for the fireplace
Yes, advertising pays my heating costs.
For some people, WiFi is not now - and never will be - an option. Take for example people working in MRI labs, or farmers driving tractors.
GPS is computationally intensive, whereas a quartz oscillator draws minute amounts of current. A chip-size atomic clock will be an extra option in the size/weight/power/accuracy tradeoff game. An internal clock will be the only choice where the system is placed in a shielded environment such as in a radiation lab or deep underground.
Although the DARPA Grand Challenge showed that autonomous ground vehicles are a little way off just yet, I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility to imagine that the USA's Department of Homeland Security would be interested in robotic cockroach cameras that can synchronise their movements to millisecond accuracy when infiltrating terrorist cell headquarters over the period of a few days (the time it takes the cockroach cameras to run through the sewage system, for example) while maintaining total radio silence.
A number of things bother me about the M400 and all the hype around it:
I'd love to see automated flying cars, but I don't think they are really feasible or environmentally sound. The energy that they're dissipating to help someone save 5 minutes in peak hour isn't being compensated for elsewhere. I'll stick to an ultralight to transport me from my city abode to my farm, thanks. Much quieter and much more efficient than an M400. I can't wait for a Skycar M400 Volantor to take off and prove 100 years of aeronautical design wrong.
Posting such a list would be counter-productive, since so many of the Slashdot zombies would just click away... we'd be sending them more traffic, not less.
The obvious solution:
Replace the soldiers' bones with titanium molecularly bonded structures. Replace or enhance their ligaments with carbon nanotubes. Just have to figure out what to do with the bone marrow.
Then should the computer crash, the soldier will be ripping the exoskeleton apart. And they'll be kicking arse when it comes to hand-to-hand combat. Quite literally.
Why have easily-breaking "Aliens" style soldiers when you can have toughened "Wolverine" style soldiers? Just have to figure out how to protect the skin from the impact of metal bones on enemy armour.
I thought one of the conditions for a patent was that the invention had to be novel and non-obvious?
.sig going around along the lines of: "Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. Patents are about having the inspiration, letting someone else do the perspiration, then suing them for it."
Where's the novelty and originality in sending a list of available updates (let's call it a catalogue) to a client, and having the client order the stuff they want from the catalogue that they don't already have?
Most of the articles referenced in the patent provide all the prior art required to dismiss the patent - the only thing different with this "invention" is that it is cheaper because it doesn't involve "special" equipment (in the days when modems were not all compatible with each other) or an expensive subscription (such as to a case law product).
If this patent had been presented in 1990, it might have been original. But between 1990 and 1998 there was a lot of work in the distribution of software using the Internet - many products started to have "home pages" where you could open up the web page (in an HTML viewer, for example) which would list the available packages, and the user would select the new packages to download. The obvious extension to this is to provide the user with a catalogue of already-installed software. The obvious extension to that is to get the computer to check the catalogue of available versus the catalogue of installed packages and present the user with the differences. The obvious extension to this is to allow the computer to automatically download the differences, and perhaps even install them.
Don't suppose anyone has scripts left over from the University days where they'd get a listing of a BBS or FTP archive, and start downloading the stuff they didn't already have?
I guess TT decided that applying for a patent was easier than writing software. There's a
The brunt of the argument is that
DHS is not concerned about "the network is currently down" notifications being "blueprints for terrorists". DHS is concerned about the ones like this:
That's what the DHS means by "blueprints for terrorists" - they're concerned that the level of detail in the fault analysis would be enough for someone to cause an outage on purpose, thus preventing people calling in or out of that mobile coverage area.
So please just read the damned article before harping on about "how could a network outage possibly benefit a terrorist"?
As it stands, a network outage could be of great benefit to terrorists, if they can cause the outage at will.
TRANSMISSION ENDS
The phrase "which begs the question" has always - in my Australian vocabulary - meant, "makes obvious and unsupported assumptions," or "leaves obvious questions to be asked."
For example, if someone is demonstrating a new space-alien repellant, the demonstration itself would beg the question, "which space aliens?"
Or someone proclaiming that a particular person is an "unlawful combatant" begs the question of what exactly defines a "lawful combatant"?
Ultimately, to "beg the question" means that you leave obvious questions unanswered. Sometimes this is the aim - make people ask a question that your political opponents don't want asked.
Is there anything like Ether Ape that's text based? I'm going to have to install 40MB worth of gnome libraries and sound card drivers on my router in order to run Ether Ape - the sound stuff is useless since my workstation isn't within hearing distance of my desk...
You read wrong.
The police are not allowed to ask for a name, if there is already an existing case against the victim.
The police are allowed to ask for a name, if the victim is not known to under prosecution, and if the police suspect that a crime may have been committed.
Providing a false name is a crime, providing no name is a crime - try telling Frederick Goldberg or Caleb Rubenstein that revealing his name will cost him nothing, especially when it's the highly professional (and ethical!) German SS soldier asking, and he's living in Berlin, circa 1938.
Heck, try telling Mohammed Abdulla Ben-Sharif that no harm will come to him by telling the good policeman his name, when he's wandering through New York on a chilly September night.
And how long until some good policeman is forced to detain a suspect for providing an obviously false name? Only to find out that his name is really Winston Smith?
You will love Big Brother. And remember, Big Brother is watching!