These guys smuggled KNIVES on board. The problem is not that guns are easy to get on board, they arent. The problem is that people arent trained to resist as if their life depends on it, since usually it doesnt.
A hijacking usually means that the plane is redirected to another location and the hostages are traded for some demands, etc etc.
Now I think that people will fight back a lot harder the next time someone tries to hijack a plane with a knife.
It depends totally on the culture. This varies even within the US. For example, when stoplight cameras were put up everywhere in NYC, the people immediately responded with vandalism and destruction of the cameras (which were heavily armored, but not heavily enough, alas). Go down the east cost to Washington DC and Maryland and no one touches the cameras or complains. In the UK, cameras are everywhere and give out millions of tickets every year, yet people do not seem to protest it at all.
You should also check out korea. In korea, every car has a little light on its roof that shows when it goes over 65mph. The cops just keep an eye out and pull you over. The koreans just seem to accept it.
What might be seen as totalitarian in NYC is seen as normal in the UK, whereas other countries generally regard NYC as a lawless wasteland. For my part, I will be the first to dynamite cameras if they go up in the bay area. Oh yes, and I will write my representative, just in case that doesnt work.
Its called california. I live in the bay area and every day on the way to work i hit 90-110, even with moderately heavy traffic (I commute at 10am).
There are all sorts of cool laws on the books here to protect truckers from speeding tickets. Its basically illegal for cops to do anything that measures speed for the purpose of giving tickets (a vast oversimplification). There are lots of exceptions to this, but its rarely worth the trouble to give someone a speeding ticket instead of a reckless or a contest of speed (which are the two big things they hate).
Unlike other states, you rarely see CHP standing along the side of the roads gunning people. Usually (and even this is relatively rare) they will have cars just floating along at the same speed as traffic. As long as you dont zip by them you will usually avoid a ticket.
Um, that passage was talking about how saruman's orcs differed from regular orcs. If you read the Silmarilion, or carefully read the Hobbit and the trilogy, you would find that orcs and goblins are the same beast.
In the Hobbit and especially in the first book of the trilogy, you find a few times that Orc is derived from the elvish word (i dont remember which dialect) yrch, which has a little umlaut over the y. Goblin is the Common word for the same naughty creatures.
In the Silmarillion, we learn of the creation of the orcs by Melkor/Morgoth (im guessing- it could have been Sauron for all I know), and that they were once elves that had been twisted and made evil.
I know I will get flamethrowered for my post because I probably got a lot of details wrong. I havent read the trilogy or the Sil in at least a year.
A chevette with a 300 hp engine is faster than a corvette with the same. This is true of any car with more power/weight than another car. But I digress.
On the issue of mac vs pc architecture, what does compiler efficiency serve for but an excuse? We see that macs fall behind on SETI@home, on linux compiles and on everything else shared between the two platforms except Photoshop filters. O course, this could be easily explained by the mhz differences, which brings up another point.
Its interesting to note that regardless of clock speed, the motorola, intel and AMD chips all do roughly the same amount of work per clock cycle (with progressively smaller returns per increase in clock -due to latency, cache misses, etc). This seems to suggest to me that given the relatively static architecture of these three brands, that they are probably all roughly equivalent, assuming identical clock speeds. Unfortunately, its been about 4 years since intel or amd was producing 400 mhz pieces.
Even more unfortunately, everyone I know who is an avid mac user in the past year has switched over to athlon or pentium based systems due to cost and features. The only people that are carrying on the fight are trolls and morons or both (my unproven personal observation).
We just got into a heated argument at the office about this. We are a little disbeleiving that Microsoft could attempt anything this completely diabolical and obvious. Yet it seems that is what they are doing. After some discussion, we came to the conclusion that this will not work to microsoft's benefit in the long run, and that this is most likely an attempt to test the laws in this area. I cant find this out, but is the contract to use passport/hotmail formed under the jurisdiction of Washington (Redmond) or Maryland (UCITA state) courts?
Another thought- if microsoft starts using the tactic of "if you use any of our services, you surrender all intellectual property rights to us" eventually people will start to behave towards microsoft in the same way. If microsoft thinks it has a problem with piracy now, just wait till goverments and business stop cooperating altogether after microsoft starts to lift people's code. What if my company's proprietary network protocols suddenly show up in the next version of a.net product? If we succeed in suing them, they are out of pocket a LOT of money. If we fail, you can bet that every business in our sector will stop doing business with MSFT out of fear/spite. I don't think it will take a lot of effort to completely destroy microsoft once word gets out. Microsoft has to realize that its entire business is founded upon respect for copyrights, not theft or misappropriation of copyrights.
I personally suspect that this is a quasi-legal attempt to get around the GPL and start including linux code in windows. As you can already tell, I think this is stupid. There are plenty of wealthy GPL programmers who like to sue violators (remember Carmack and the quake code?). I admit that the FSF isnt exactly MSFT in terms of market cap, but they can probably afford lawyers. Do you think that ESR or RMS will back down if MSFT tries to pirate code from Linux, er i mean GNU/Linux? Not bloodly likely.
A lot of people got rounded up for just this sort of naughtiness in the late 80s and early 90s and it changed a lot of things in the underground. The warez d00dz and the carderz and the coderz (phone code guys) all used to be part of the same clique. It was good fun for bored high schoolers everywhere- like I said, this changed.
The FBI made some very prominent credit card fraud arrests due to guys using this exact scheme. The carders were buying computer equipment and hanging out on BBSes with warez doodz. They were also posting CCs to a number of warez BBSes for trading purposes. Unfortunately for the warez dudes who weren't involved with the carders, the FBI found out about the use of the BBSes and infiltrated and raided a huge number of them. When the busts started going down, there was a huge media shitstorm.
Anyway, word got around that carding was a quick ticket into jail, so almost everyone avoided it from then on. Warez is a fun hobby for some (I dont "get it" personally), but these guys arent looking for jail time. I strongly disagree with the 6 figure salary. Once the CC companies notice a pattern, the feds will be invited in almost immediately. Once they compromise a single carder, they will eavesdrop on his dealings for a while to pick up all his friends. Then they raid. Like Oztun said, this has happened before.
Clarification time:
you can't precalculate because there are too damn many permutations. AIM could ask for a single byte, or it could ask for all the bytes or it could ask for half the bytes. Although the message digest is fixed length, the message itself can be of ANY length. The number of possible combinations in a byte array (aim.exe here) of length n is (n^2)/2. Which consumes 8*n^2 bytes if you write all the hashes to disk. For the 24kb aim executable, this will require approximately 4.6Gb of storage. An average computer can calculate about 15 thousand MD5 hashes a second (my personal experience, actual studies may vary), which makes for at least a few days (3.54938 days, thank you Commander Data) work in calculating them. Actually this isnt so bad, except that AOL can update their client at will, which will render your previous work pretty much useless.
How about...
The problem with including the AIM.exe executable in the GAIM as a byte array is the obvious issue that aim.exe is a software product, as opposed to garbage data. If one were to ROT13 the file so that it was no longer an executable, would its inclusion be allowable under "reverse engineering for compatibility?" Of course, under linux, it isnt an executable anyway. Why would it be legal to include the data of aim.exe as "compatibility data" but not as a "peice of AIM?" What if you rename it? What if you split it in half? What if you tell AOL to fuck itself? So many unexplored possibilities. Or you could just use TOC, haha, silly idea.
Am I in a position to know about AIM? Read and judge for yourself.
AOL updates its protocol from time to time- this is something that all the IM services do. They occaisionally do this *gasp* without telling people- even companies that they have business agreements with for the use of AIM. Its just how they do business, and it isnt intended to genuinely disrupt other clients, approved or not by the corporate powers that be.
What can be done? What does any programmer do when his favorite protocol changes? He breaks out the old packet sniffer, changes a few lines of code and recompiles.
I dont think aol has declared war on the open source messengers because they are more concerned with world domination, microsoft, their stock, and countless other things that don't involve the open source community for the most part.
AOL doesnt really gain anything from forcing people to use its free client, except maybe theoretical marketing eyes. But the truth is, all their numbers are based off of IM accounts, which exist regardless of the client used. AOL makes most of its money from AIM (what little money it makes right now) from deals with businesses who use it for business purposes. And this doesnt even refer to the "business" of spamming people, or targeting people with ads, just the simple business of communicating on work related topics, or using the AIM network (yeah, the network exists for reasons other than chat) for customer support, etc etc.
Why cant we have both? And why does only the goverment get to use the cameras? If they are broadcasting anyway, why not publish everything on the web in realtime? Let the citizens use them to search the city- Find your missing child, report a crime in progress, see that cop getting a blow from that hooker. Hey you werent supposed to see that... hehehe give the camera back.
On the other hand, whats wrong with everyone having a gun? NYC has no guns, there are muggers everywhere AND the cops are fascists that routinely brutalize or kill non-criminals. Outside of NYC, EVERYONE in new york state has a gun, most have multiple guns. Guess how many muggers there are? Guess how much police brutality there is? Sure, there are a few burglars and car thieves, but they dont last long. An armed citizenry keeps down crime. Armed citizens keep the boot of goverment and corporations from stomping on the face of humanity too harshly. If Winston Smith can shoot you, you dont spy on him or oppress him too harshly because its not worth the trouble.
As a further disclaimer, most of the harm that I have seen from guns comes from drunken retards who go hunting completely sloshed and end up shooting one another. There are some minor accidents with gun cleaning and stupidity (fill in the blanks here), but these are not really tradgedies in any sense of the word. The "child playing with daddy's guns" stories are pretty rare because most parents know that guns are dangerous and its practically the first thing they teach their kids. Every kid I ever met that grew up around guns was well adjusted and normal except that they could handle guns. Not a bad skill to have, I might add.
One thing that disturbs me a little is the underlying assumption of all these "big brother in the UK" articles. There seems to be a general impression that UK and the USA are very much the same, and that what happens in one country is sure to follow quickly in the other. This could not be further from the truth. Despite our shared language and our shared hatred of the french and germans (joking of course, haha), we are very different people. I will draw upon my experiences as a person of English descent with many english relatives.
The english have a long history as a strictly hierarchical society with very little vertical movement permitted to its citizenry. This is mostly due to the fact that they were once a monarchy (the queen is mostly window dressing these days). As anyone who has watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail will tell you, the Brits are very different from us. Without touching on the miserably boring history of the English, lets see how we are different today.
-Freedom of speech is curtailed by very restrictive libel and slander laws. The burden of proof is on the producer of the speech. If you say GM makes shitty cars over here, they have to prove you wrong. If you say "British Telecom is ripping off consumers... again" they can sue you and easily win. ISPs and newspapers routinely bend over for big business in the UK, its 10 times worse than over here. Moral: dont step out of line -Guns. The citizenry dont defend themselves. The crown watches over its subjects. Guns are for the hunting of waterfowl on one's estate and the military. End of story.
-Privacy. The crown is watching over you and will decide what is good for you. Give us your passwords and don't talk back peasant! Witness the RIP act and numerous other things more recently passed or in the process of passing. Forced handing over of private keys, etc etc etc.
-Cars. The brits have an insane traffic and speed system that is designed to a)inconvenience car owners and b) generate revenue with speed cameras. This is part "Green" legislation, part greed, part stupidity.
I could go on for years about all the things that are differnet about the UK, but I havent been there in a while and I think ive made my point anyway. The british arent moving closer to 1984, they are just making well-intentioned mistakes that place freedom last (what would they do with it if they had it?). I think that eventually they will wise up. A good portion of the populace doesnt think any higher of these things than you and I, they are just outnumbered right now.
Maybe Im a dummy, but these seems like a bad idea.
on
Fiddler on the RUF
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This whole idea seems poorly thought out, perhaps a subtle troll on the popular mechanics readers amongst us. The idea doesnt address the basic causes of traffic congestion, nor does it offer increased speed or fuel efficiency. It is a highway, but with rails on it to guide the cars. This actually has more drawbacks than benefits....
Call me crazy, but waiting to merge onto the railway so that I can get to work at the zippy speed of 62 mph just doesnt add up. Most likely, entering and exiting the car-rail system will create immense blockages on either end of the system as cars take time to merge on and off of it. This negates the speed benefit from smooth railway traffic (if this is even demonstrable).
The high traffic volume at the entrances and exits to this system will cause far more accidents than the rail system will prvent by obseleting the highways. This negates the safety benefits.
The supportive guiding rails will cause an increase in friction which will in turn cause decreased fuel economy. Perhaps this could be offset by the use of electricity, but I have doubts that real increases in efficiency will result.
The use of rails will cause an increase in maintenance complexity (rails more difficult to maintain than flat asphalt) which will make the system more expensive in the long run. This in addition to the increased cost of the building the sysytem in the first place.
Where will we put this system? There isnt much room for rails where I live. Considering that it is less than an ideal system, is there any place we would want to put it if we could?
Anoynmous Coward wrote: How do you figure? "The Little Mermaid" is a copyrighted work, while the bible is in the public domain. *Specific* printings of bibles, especially those with new concordances or indices are new works and protected by copyright.
My poor, quasi-educated friend, back when Gutenberg printed the bible, it WASNT public domain. To get a bible back then you had to pay the catholic church an exorbitant amount of money, build a church (which would house the bible), and agree to have the church send along people that would handle the reading and interpretaion of the bible. Oh my god, doesnt
this sound like a familiar train of thought?
Im sure the more devout amongst you are saying to yourself, as I once did, "but how can that be, the bible being free (as in speech) greatly helped the spread of christianity!" (for better or worse) Ah yes, but this freedom also created the protestant reformation and weakened the overall power of the Catholic Church. Eventually the freedom that was created by the printing press ushered in a new age of literacy and intellecualism known as The Enlightenment. The Catholic Church saw, just as RIAA et MPAA see now, that their influence and control are weakening because the internet is the movable type of our century. This is your much hyped bridge to the new millenium- isnt it fucking great? I am certainly begining to think so.
I only alluded to all of this in a semi-serious fashion because I assumed everyone here was smart enough to get my allusions. Im not implying that anyone is actually dumb here, only that people are taking too short sighted and narrow-minded a view of the whole issue. This is still happening everywhere you look, so dont feel bad if you dont get it yet, or you think im talking out of my ass. I just hope that we dont end up having a RIAA led inquisition to prevent the spread of change (oh crap too late, damn). Well, you were all warned, dont say I didnt try. Just be glad they cant torture you, and if they ever get the right to torture you, be glad they cant find you.
Is to avoid being served with the subpoena, and to avoid depending on someone who is easy to serve. If your ISP is a wanker, you should change ISPs. Dont depend on any one person to protect you.
I admit this is not advice a lawyer would give, mostly because it avoids court entirely, but there is really no better alternative to avoiding lawyers and thus not being sued.
If you want to do something that a very powerful corporation or evil dictatorship will sue you for, the first thing you should do is establish a fake identity for yourself and have that fake identity do all the naughty stuff. If that sounds too naughty, there is always multiple layers of anonymity, ala "Citizen 513" whom Harlan Ellison is still unsuccessfully trying to serve. Citizen 513 continues to post copyrighted material to usenet, in his own quasi-legal attempt to promote literacy (my own personal interpretation).
I am personally 10000000% for book and music and movie piracy. We should promote social literacy at every possible chance. Printing your own copy of "The little mermaid" is no worse than printing a copy of the bible in the year 1500. If gutenberg was right then, gutenberg is right now.
Fuck the man, be he the catholic church or the MPAA or RIAA.
The real problem with P2P these days isn't that P2P services or programs are breaking the law, its that the record companies have the ability to force rewriting and reinterpretation of the law in their favor, regardless of what steps programmers and p2p providers take. Even the strongest good-faith legal defence is powerless against a system that is completely biased and corrupt.
RIAA and MPAA pushed through DMCA once and they could push through more stuff in the future. The courts have pushed through bogus definitions of contributory infringement, bogus definitions of "financial gain" and completely ignored the betamax and rio cases. They also completely ignored AHRA and fair use. Why? Because the law doesnt pay you to interpret it correctly. The RIAA pays you to interpret it correctly. Well, as correctly as serves their interests.
The solution is not "obey the law." We have seen that is not possible to obey the law if you are a potential threat to the record companies. The law is twisted to make you guilty and remove you as a threat. The solution is either to
-ignore the law: use all the technological measures available to you to hide from the RIAA and from any enforcement agencies (goverment or otherwise) that they employ. Deal only with trusted pirate entities and be careful about what you do.
-change the law: this will be difficult. One way to change the law is to give congress more money than RIAA and MPAA do. This is not likely to be a trivial matter to accomplish. Another way is to start voting congressmen out of office who voted for things like DMCA. However, most of the voting public is completely ignorant of technical issues.
-have a bloody revolution: record company tyranny isnt really a good enough reason to break out the guns. Give it time. Just hope that you still have the right to own guns by that time.
There are aftermarket computers available for every engine configuration and every type and make of car. However, there are few reasons to use one, as the factory engine configuration is usually matched to the factory ECU.
It is often not necessary to modify the ecu for minor engine mods either. Almost any engine computer from the past 10 years can adjust for varying amounts of air (be it from a small turbo or a decrease in altitude or temperature) and keep the car running normally and cleanly.
It only becomes necessary to upgrade the computer when the car is running cams and the stock ecu can't lean out the mixture enough at idle, or your car is running so much boost that the stock injectors cant keep up with it at high RPMs.
That being said, I have to disagree with you. There is a much greater amount of tuning possible due to computer controlled ignition and injector timing. It allows your car to continue to function with a much wider range of mods than would otherwise be possible. Now, ODBII is another story altogether. Most of the problems with that relate to the fact that it goes off for lots of stupid reasons, and the extra sensors for the exhaust get in the way of a lot of mods. Of course, there are no shortage of cool ways to work around odbII, since it was only built into 1996+ cars, and it can be disabled without police detection on most cars. I think ODB-II was a stupid idea in the first place. Thanks clinton.
as a programmer who has worked with mssql, I have to second that- MSSQL does not scale that well, and even worse, it has all sorts of nasty problems with memory leaks and very awkward allocation schemes. MSSQL will blindly cache 10GB result sets in 1GB of memory while waiting for the socket to catch up and send it all to the client- it will then refuse to give that memory back to the system, or even for other queries. For trivial implementations, MSSQL is a pleasure to work with, but it is a total bagbiter when you need it to do heavy duty stuff. I havent had any problems doing transactional stuff on mssql.
I think my company might have switched entirely to linux/oracle if it werent for oracle. Why do we use MSSQL instead of Oracle?
-cost: oracle costs a ton more. If anything, oracle is a worse leech that microsoft ever was.
-administration: oracle admins cost a lot more than mssql admins. The idiot console (enterprise manager) is easy for anyone to learn really quickly.
-administration: its a lot easier to hose an Oracle installation if you are a moron and dont think carefully before you do something. Did i mention that proper Oracle admins cost more? Hehehe.
I know that this is going to be flamed and marked down as a pro-microsoft troll, but it isnt. I hate microsoft as much as anyone else here. However, is Oracle really that different from microsoft? Hardly the lesser of too evils. I wish that postGreSQL or mySQL would get its shit together so that I could have a COMPLETE open enterprise setup. This would save on licensing and peace of mind.
I thought that DVD writing on the new MACs was crippled anyway, at least to the point that it didnt have access to certain CSS related regions of the disk. I heard, from elsewhere on slashdot, no less, that Apple had bent over backwards to get DVD Consortium support for dvd writing and authoring. I personally dont trust Apple's claims about the functionality of the new DVD features. All the important details are misssing, and it smells to me mostly of marketing hype.
Even if I completely trusted Apple not to mess up OS/X and the new macs, I would still be very leery of being an early adopter of a rushed product. Would you run out and buy a new computer from Compaq or Gateway with the latest beta build of Windows ME on it, in addition to never-before-seen hardware features?
Who wants to explore space anyway, its like so empty and stuff.
We need to focus on the things that improve quality of life for all of humanity, like a tax cut for the pharmaceuticals and bogus missle defense contracts for our friends in aerospace. If we dont cut every last penny from NASA's budget, we wont have trillions to spend on the important stuff. Right guys?
On a serious note, if someone could figure out a way to tie space exploration to moneyed interests, a lot more progress could be made. Im sure the oil companies would love to mine helium-3 from the moon, or mine asteroids for rare metals. If only we could trick them into staying there. And taking all their laywers with them when they leave.
I agree with you. CNet probably has about as much overclocking experience as it took to write that article. There are countless sites out there that slashdot could have chosen a better article from, sites that have been featuring overclocking prominently for nearly 4 years now.
Ive been overclocking since the adjustable asus t2p4 board came out in late 96 and I have to say Im just dissapointed by the shallow approach of the CNet article. How come no one ever addresses the issue of fraud regarding chips? Intel has a long and proud history of gouging for its processors and then remarking them as low-speed chips to fill demand. Overclocking as it originally started wasnt even overclocking- it was just people changing the speed back to what it was when it left the factory. The old celeron 266s were just p2-400s with no cache and a single pin disabled off-chip so the motherboard would run it at a slower speed. They cost about the same to manufacture, but the p2 cost nearly 8 time more to buy.
Since the 1950's when the first long range microwave radars went up (to detect soviet bombers at long ranges), we have been aware of the harmful effects of microwaves on the human body. Long term exposure at low intensities causes cancer and damage to the eyes. Your eyes are full of liquid which is mostly water. Having your eyeballs boiled from the inside out is bad for them. Exposure to higher intensities is probably worse for you rather than better.
What is the real purpose of this proposed weapon? We already have the ability to non-lethally incapacitate people with guns. Have you ever seen how fast people run after you shoot them in the ass or the leg? Not very fast. We already have teargas and firehoses for crowds. Fire hoses work great- Im not a proponent of breaking up protests, but the tools are all already there.
The difference between this gun and all the other tools is that this gun sanitizes the use of force. No obvious permanant damage from zapping the crowd, no blood or bodies. You can go zap whole crowds of people into agony and it will have minimal PR and legal ramifications. Sure, some losers will get cancer or eye damage, but they were being noisy and disruptive! Serves them right!
Havent we seen enough abuse of pepper spray yet? Why do we need more painful weapons? I predict that not only will this be used against crowds, but even more likely as a torture tool, much like electroshock is used today.
This is another brilliant example of corrupt law-makers not understanding how the world works combined with some old-fashioned short-sightedness.
Good laws should spring up to enforce social conventions and give them legitimacy. For example, if a society can agree that it entering people's houses and taking stuff is wrong, then the laws should reflect that. If we lived in a society which stressed the unimportance of having personal space or possessions, the law would probably reflect that. I admit Im probably being a little philosophical here, but consider the alternatives.
Laws should not (in my obviously not consulted opinion) be created to shape society, especially in ways that are non-intuitive to the average person, and benefit only a small minority. By this, I mean that the vast majority of people out there dont really consider it stealing to trade files and music with one another. That such copying is immoral has been propagandized by the software (remember MSFT circa early 1980s?) and entertainment industries for many many years. When this propaganda failed to sway the behaviour and sentiment of the public, they resorted to pushing through unfair laws to force us to obey.
I, for one, think that people, even in government, are mostly fair and intelligent. Companies will change or companies will fade. Once pocketbooks are hit, eyes will open.
Slashdot Mirror
These guys smuggled KNIVES on board. The problem is not that guns are easy to get on board, they arent. The problem is that people arent trained to resist as if their life depends on it, since usually it doesnt.
A hijacking usually means that the plane is redirected to another location and the hostages are traded for some demands, etc etc.
Now I think that people will fight back a lot harder the next time someone tries to hijack a plane with a knife.
Half-life is a hack of the Quake2 engine. It uses all of john carmacks old Q2 graphics code.
Carmack is an OpenGL programmer. It is his area of special expertise. DirectX support was added on later. That is why half life runs better in openGL.
It depends totally on the culture. This varies even within the US. For example, when stoplight cameras were put up everywhere in NYC, the people immediately responded with vandalism and destruction of the cameras (which were heavily armored, but not heavily enough, alas). Go down the east cost to Washington DC and Maryland and no one touches the cameras or complains. In the UK, cameras are everywhere and give out millions of tickets every year, yet people do not seem to protest it at all.
You should also check out korea. In korea, every car has a little light on its roof that shows when it goes over 65mph. The cops just keep an eye out and pull you over. The koreans just seem to accept it.
What might be seen as totalitarian in NYC is seen as normal in the UK, whereas other countries generally regard NYC as a lawless wasteland. For my part, I will be the first to dynamite cameras if they go up in the bay area. Oh yes, and I will write my representative, just in case that doesnt work.
Its called california. I live in the bay area and every day on the way to work i hit 90-110, even with moderately heavy traffic (I commute at 10am).
There are all sorts of cool laws on the books here to protect truckers from speeding tickets. Its basically illegal for cops to do anything that measures speed for the purpose of giving tickets (a vast oversimplification). There are lots of exceptions to this, but its rarely worth the trouble to give someone a speeding ticket instead of a reckless or a contest of speed (which are the two big things they hate).
Unlike other states, you rarely see CHP standing along the side of the roads gunning people. Usually (and even this is relatively rare) they will have cars just floating along at the same speed as traffic. As long as you dont zip by them you will usually avoid a ticket.
Um, that passage was talking about how saruman's orcs differed from regular orcs. If you read the Silmarilion, or carefully read the Hobbit and the trilogy, you would find that orcs and goblins are the same beast.
In the Hobbit and especially in the first book of the trilogy, you find a few times that Orc is derived from the elvish word (i dont remember which dialect) yrch, which has a little umlaut over the y. Goblin is the Common word for the same naughty creatures.
In the Silmarillion, we learn of the creation of the orcs by Melkor/Morgoth (im guessing- it could have been Sauron for all I know), and that they were once elves that had been twisted and made evil.
I know I will get flamethrowered for my post because I probably got a lot of details wrong. I havent read the trilogy or the Sil in at least a year.
A chevette with a 300 hp engine is faster than a corvette with the same. This is true of any car with more power/weight than another car. But I digress.
On the issue of mac vs pc architecture, what does compiler efficiency serve for but an excuse? We see that macs fall behind on SETI@home, on linux compiles and on everything else shared between the two platforms except Photoshop filters. O course, this could be easily explained by the mhz differences, which brings up another point.
Its interesting to note that regardless of clock speed, the motorola, intel and AMD chips all do roughly the same amount of work per clock cycle (with progressively smaller returns per increase in clock -due to latency, cache misses, etc). This seems to suggest to me that given the relatively static architecture of these three brands, that they are probably all roughly equivalent, assuming identical clock speeds. Unfortunately, its been about 4 years since intel or amd was producing 400 mhz pieces.
Even more unfortunately, everyone I know who is an avid mac user in the past year has switched over to athlon or pentium based systems due to cost and features. The only people that are carrying on the fight are trolls and morons or both (my unproven personal observation).
We just got into a heated argument at the office about this. We are a little disbeleiving that Microsoft could attempt anything this completely diabolical and obvious. Yet it seems that is what they are doing. After some discussion, we came to the conclusion that this will not work to microsoft's benefit in the long run, and that this is most likely an attempt to test the laws in this area. I cant find this out, but is the contract to use passport/hotmail formed under the jurisdiction of Washington (Redmond) or Maryland (UCITA state) courts?
.net product? If we succeed in suing them, they are out of pocket a LOT of money. If we fail, you can bet that every business in our sector will stop doing business with MSFT out of fear/spite. I don't think it will take a lot of effort to completely destroy microsoft once word gets out. Microsoft has to realize that its entire business is founded upon respect for copyrights, not theft or misappropriation of copyrights.
Another thought- if microsoft starts using the tactic of "if you use any of our services, you surrender all intellectual property rights to us" eventually people will start to behave towards microsoft in the same way. If microsoft thinks it has a problem with piracy now, just wait till goverments and business stop cooperating altogether after microsoft starts to lift people's code. What if my company's proprietary network protocols suddenly show up in the next version of a
I personally suspect that this is a quasi-legal attempt to get around the GPL and start including linux code in windows. As you can already tell, I think this is stupid. There are plenty of wealthy GPL programmers who like to sue violators (remember Carmack and the quake code?). I admit that the FSF isnt exactly MSFT in terms of market cap, but they can probably afford lawyers. Do you think that ESR or RMS will back down if MSFT tries to pirate code from Linux, er i mean GNU/Linux? Not bloodly likely.
Oztun couldnt be more right.
A lot of people got rounded up for just this sort of naughtiness in the late 80s and early 90s and it changed a lot of things in the underground. The warez d00dz and the carderz and the coderz (phone code guys) all used to be part of the same clique. It was good fun for bored high schoolers everywhere- like I said, this changed.
The FBI made some very prominent credit card fraud arrests due to guys using this exact scheme. The carders were buying computer equipment and hanging out on BBSes with warez doodz. They were also posting CCs to a number of warez BBSes for trading purposes. Unfortunately for the warez dudes who weren't involved with the carders, the FBI found out about the use of the BBSes and infiltrated and raided a huge number of them. When the busts started going down, there was a huge media shitstorm.
Anyway, word got around that carding was a quick ticket into jail, so almost everyone avoided it from then on. Warez is a fun hobby for some (I dont "get it" personally), but these guys arent looking for jail time. I strongly disagree with the 6 figure salary. Once the CC companies notice a pattern, the feds will be invited in almost immediately. Once they compromise a single carder, they will eavesdrop on his dealings for a while to pick up all his friends. Then they raid. Like Oztun said, this has happened before.
Clarification time:
you can't precalculate because there are too damn many permutations. AIM could ask for a single byte, or it could ask for all the bytes or it could ask for half the bytes. Although the message digest is fixed length, the message itself can be of ANY length. The number of possible combinations in a byte array (aim.exe here) of length n is (n^2)/2. Which consumes 8*n^2 bytes if you write all the hashes to disk. For the 24kb aim executable, this will require approximately 4.6Gb of storage. An average computer can calculate about 15 thousand MD5 hashes a second (my personal experience, actual studies may vary), which makes for at least a few days (3.54938 days, thank you Commander Data) work in calculating them. Actually this isnt so bad, except that AOL can update their client at will, which will render your previous work pretty much useless.
How about...
The problem with including the AIM.exe executable in the GAIM as a byte array is the obvious issue that aim.exe is a software product, as opposed to garbage data. If one were to ROT13 the file so that it was no longer an executable, would its inclusion be allowable under "reverse engineering for compatibility?" Of course, under linux, it isnt an executable anyway. Why would it be legal to include the data of aim.exe as "compatibility data" but not as a "peice of AIM?" What if you rename it? What if you split it in half? What if you tell AOL to fuck itself? So many unexplored possibilities. Or you could just use TOC, haha, silly idea.
Am I in a position to know about AIM? Read and judge for yourself.
AOL updates its protocol from time to time- this is something that all the IM services do. They occaisionally do this *gasp* without telling people- even companies that they have business agreements with for the use of AIM. Its just how they do business, and it isnt intended to genuinely disrupt other clients, approved or not by the corporate powers that be.
What can be done? What does any programmer do when his favorite protocol changes? He breaks out the old packet sniffer, changes a few lines of code and recompiles.
I dont think aol has declared war on the open source messengers because they are more concerned with world domination, microsoft, their stock, and countless other things that don't involve the open source community for the most part.
AOL doesnt really gain anything from forcing people to use its free client, except maybe theoretical marketing eyes. But the truth is, all their numbers are based off of IM accounts, which exist regardless of the client used. AOL makes most of its money from AIM (what little money it makes right now) from deals with businesses who use it for business purposes. And this doesnt even refer to the "business" of spamming people, or targeting people with ads, just the simple business of communicating on work related topics, or using the AIM network (yeah, the network exists for reasons other than chat) for customer support, etc etc.
Why cant we have both? And why does only the goverment get to use the cameras? If they are broadcasting anyway, why not publish everything on the web in realtime? Let the citizens use them to search the city- Find your missing child, report a crime in progress, see that cop getting a blow from that hooker. Hey you werent supposed to see that... hehehe give the camera back.
On the other hand, whats wrong with everyone having a gun? NYC has no guns, there are muggers everywhere AND the cops are fascists that routinely brutalize or kill non-criminals. Outside of NYC, EVERYONE in new york state has a gun, most have multiple guns. Guess how many muggers there are? Guess how much police brutality there is? Sure, there are a few burglars and car thieves, but they dont last long. An armed citizenry keeps down crime. Armed citizens keep the boot of goverment and corporations from stomping on the face of humanity too harshly. If Winston Smith can shoot you, you dont spy on him or oppress him too harshly because its not worth the trouble.
As a further disclaimer, most of the harm that I have seen from guns comes from drunken retards who go hunting completely sloshed and end up shooting one another. There are some minor accidents with gun cleaning and stupidity (fill in the blanks here), but these are not really tradgedies in any sense of the word. The "child playing with daddy's guns" stories are pretty rare because most parents know that guns are dangerous and its practically the first thing they teach their kids. Every kid I ever met that grew up around guns was well adjusted and normal except that they could handle guns. Not a bad skill to have, I might add.
One thing that disturbs me a little is the underlying assumption of all these "big brother in the UK" articles. There seems to be a general impression that UK and the USA are very much the same, and that what happens in one country is sure to follow quickly in the other. This could not be further from the truth. Despite our shared language and our shared hatred of the french and germans (joking of course, haha), we are very different people. I will draw upon my experiences as a person of English descent with many english relatives.
The english have a long history as a strictly hierarchical society with very little vertical movement permitted to its citizenry. This is mostly due to the fact that they were once a monarchy (the queen is mostly window dressing these days). As anyone who has watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail will tell you, the Brits are very different from us. Without touching on the miserably boring history of the English, lets see how we are different today.
-Freedom of speech is curtailed by very restrictive libel and slander laws. The burden of proof is on the producer of the speech. If you say GM makes shitty cars over here, they have to prove you wrong. If you say "British Telecom is ripping off consumers... again" they can sue you and easily win. ISPs and newspapers routinely bend over for big business in the UK, its 10 times worse than over here. Moral: dont step out of line
-Guns. The citizenry dont defend themselves. The crown watches over its subjects. Guns are for the hunting of waterfowl on one's estate and the military. End of story.
-Privacy. The crown is watching over you and will decide what is good for you. Give us your passwords and don't talk back peasant! Witness the RIP act and numerous other things more recently passed or in the process of passing. Forced handing over of private keys, etc etc etc.
-Cars. The brits have an insane traffic and speed system that is designed to a)inconvenience car owners and b) generate revenue with speed cameras. This is part "Green" legislation, part greed, part stupidity.
I could go on for years about all the things that are differnet about the UK, but I havent been there in a while and I think ive made my point anyway. The british arent moving closer to 1984, they are just making well-intentioned mistakes that place freedom last (what would they do with it if they had it?). I think that eventually they will wise up. A good portion of the populace doesnt think any higher of these things than you and I, they are just outnumbered right now.
This whole idea seems poorly thought out, perhaps a subtle troll on the popular mechanics readers amongst us. The idea doesnt address the basic causes of traffic congestion, nor does it offer increased speed or fuel efficiency. It is a highway, but with rails on it to guide the cars. This actually has more drawbacks than benefits....
Call me crazy, but waiting to merge onto the railway so that I can get to work at the zippy speed of 62 mph just doesnt add up. Most likely, entering and exiting the car-rail system will create immense blockages on either end of the system as cars take time to merge on and off of it. This negates the speed benefit from smooth railway traffic (if this is even demonstrable).
The high traffic volume at the entrances and exits to this system will cause far more accidents than the rail system will prvent by obseleting the highways. This negates the safety benefits.
The supportive guiding rails will cause an increase in friction which will in turn cause decreased fuel economy. Perhaps this could be offset by the use of electricity, but I have doubts that real increases in efficiency will result.
The use of rails will cause an increase in maintenance complexity (rails more difficult to maintain than flat asphalt) which will make the system more expensive in the long run. This in addition to the increased cost of the building the sysytem in the first place.
Where will we put this system? There isnt much room for rails where I live. Considering that it is less than an ideal system, is there any place we would want to put it if we could?
Anoynmous Coward wrote: How do you figure? "The Little Mermaid" is a copyrighted work, while the bible is in the public domain. *Specific* printings of bibles, especially those with new concordances or indices are new works and protected by copyright.
My poor, quasi-educated friend, back when Gutenberg printed the bible, it WASNT public domain. To get a bible back then you had to pay the catholic church an exorbitant amount of money, build a church (which would house the bible), and agree to have the church send along people that would handle the reading and interpretaion of the bible. Oh my god, doesnt this sound like a familiar train of thought?
Im sure the more devout amongst you are saying to yourself, as I once did, "but how can that be, the bible being free (as in speech) greatly helped the spread of christianity!" (for better or worse) Ah yes, but this freedom also created the protestant reformation and weakened the overall power of the Catholic Church. Eventually the freedom that was created by the printing press ushered in a new age of literacy and intellecualism known as The Enlightenment. The Catholic Church saw, just as RIAA et MPAA see now, that their influence and control are weakening because the internet is the movable type of our century. This is your much hyped bridge to the new millenium- isnt it fucking great? I am certainly begining to think so.
I only alluded to all of this in a semi-serious fashion because I assumed everyone here was smart enough to get my allusions. Im not implying that anyone is actually dumb here, only that people are taking too short sighted and narrow-minded a view of the whole issue. This is still happening everywhere you look, so dont feel bad if you dont get it yet, or you think im talking out of my ass. I just hope that we dont end up having a RIAA led inquisition to prevent the spread of change (oh crap too late, damn). Well, you were all warned, dont say I didnt try. Just be glad they cant torture you, and if they ever get the right to torture you, be glad they cant find you.
Is to avoid being served with the subpoena, and to avoid depending on someone who is easy to serve. If your ISP is a wanker, you should change ISPs. Dont depend on any one person to protect you.
I admit this is not advice a lawyer would give, mostly because it avoids court entirely, but there is really no better alternative to avoiding lawyers and thus not being sued.
If you want to do something that a very powerful corporation or evil dictatorship will sue you for, the first thing you should do is establish a fake identity for yourself and have that fake identity do all the naughty stuff. If that sounds too naughty, there is always multiple layers of anonymity, ala "Citizen 513" whom Harlan Ellison is still unsuccessfully trying to serve. Citizen 513 continues to post copyrighted material to usenet, in his own quasi-legal attempt to promote literacy (my own personal interpretation).
I am personally 10000000% for book and music and movie piracy. We should promote social literacy at every possible chance. Printing your own copy of "The little mermaid" is no worse than printing a copy of the bible in the year 1500. If gutenberg was right then, gutenberg is right now.
Fuck the man, be he the catholic church or the MPAA or RIAA.
The real problem with P2P these days isn't that P2P services or programs are breaking the law, its that the record companies have the ability to force rewriting and reinterpretation of the law in their favor, regardless of what steps programmers and p2p providers take. Even the strongest good-faith legal defence is powerless against a system that is completely biased and corrupt.
RIAA and MPAA pushed through DMCA once and they could push through more stuff in the future. The courts have pushed through bogus definitions of contributory infringement, bogus definitions of "financial gain" and completely ignored the betamax and rio cases. They also completely ignored AHRA and fair use. Why? Because the law doesnt pay you to interpret it correctly. The RIAA pays you to interpret it correctly. Well, as correctly as serves their interests.
The solution is not "obey the law." We have seen that is not possible to obey the law if you are a potential threat to the record companies. The law is twisted to make you guilty and remove you as a threat. The solution is either to
-ignore the law: use all the technological measures available to you to hide from the RIAA and from any enforcement agencies (goverment or otherwise) that they employ. Deal only with trusted pirate entities and be careful about what you do.
-change the law: this will be difficult. One way to change the law is to give congress more money than RIAA and MPAA do. This is not likely to be a trivial matter to accomplish. Another way is to start voting congressmen out of office who voted for things like DMCA. However, most of the voting public is completely ignorant of technical issues.
-have a bloody revolution: record company tyranny isnt really a good enough reason to break out the guns. Give it time. Just hope that you still have the right to own guns by that time.
There are aftermarket computers available for every engine configuration and every type and make of car. However, there are few reasons to use one, as the factory engine configuration is usually matched to the factory ECU.
It is often not necessary to modify the ecu for minor engine mods either. Almost any engine computer from the past 10 years can adjust for varying amounts of air (be it from a small turbo or a decrease in altitude or temperature) and keep the car running normally and cleanly.
It only becomes necessary to upgrade the computer when the car is running cams and the stock ecu can't lean out the mixture enough at idle, or your car is running so much boost that the stock injectors cant keep up with it at high RPMs.
That being said, I have to disagree with you. There is a much greater amount of tuning possible due to computer controlled ignition and injector timing. It allows your car to continue to function with a much wider range of mods than would otherwise be possible. Now, ODBII is another story altogether. Most of the problems with that relate to the fact that it goes off for lots of stupid reasons, and the extra sensors for the exhaust get in the way of a lot of mods. Of course, there are no shortage of cool ways to work around odbII, since it was only built into 1996+ cars, and it can be disabled without police detection on most cars. I think ODB-II was a stupid idea in the first place. Thanks clinton.
as a programmer who has worked with mssql, I have to second that- MSSQL does not scale that well, and even worse, it has all sorts of nasty problems with memory leaks and very awkward allocation schemes. MSSQL will blindly cache 10GB result sets in 1GB of memory while waiting for the socket to catch up and send it all to the client- it will then refuse to give that memory back to the system, or even for other queries. For trivial implementations, MSSQL is a pleasure to work with, but it is a total bagbiter when you need it to do heavy duty stuff. I havent had any problems doing transactional stuff on mssql.
I think my company might have switched entirely to linux/oracle if it werent for oracle. Why do we use MSSQL instead of Oracle?
-cost: oracle costs a ton more. If anything, oracle is a worse leech that microsoft ever was.
-administration: oracle admins cost a lot more than mssql admins. The idiot console (enterprise manager) is easy for anyone to learn really quickly.
-administration: its a lot easier to hose an Oracle installation if you are a moron and dont think carefully before you do something. Did i mention that proper Oracle admins cost more? Hehehe.
I know that this is going to be flamed and marked down as a pro-microsoft troll, but it isnt. I hate microsoft as much as anyone else here. However, is Oracle really that different from microsoft? Hardly the lesser of too evils. I wish that postGreSQL or mySQL would get its shit together so that I could have a COMPLETE open enterprise setup. This would save on licensing and peace of mind.
The Australian goverment is obviously trolling us with this law. There can be no other explanation.
FBI reveals Carnivore to be hoax, announces "YHBT"
Mod this gentleman up. This post is "Insightful."
I thought that DVD writing on the new MACs was crippled anyway, at least to the point that it didnt have access to certain CSS related regions of the disk. I heard, from elsewhere on slashdot, no less, that Apple had bent over backwards to get DVD Consortium support for dvd writing and authoring. I personally dont trust Apple's claims about the functionality of the new DVD features. All the important details are misssing, and it smells to me mostly of marketing hype.
Even if I completely trusted Apple not to mess up OS/X and the new macs, I would still be very leery of being an early adopter of a rushed product. Would you run out and buy a new computer from Compaq or Gateway with the latest beta build of Windows ME on it, in addition to never-before-seen hardware features?
Exactly.
Who wants to explore space anyway, its like so empty and stuff.
We need to focus on the things that improve quality of life for all of humanity, like a tax cut for the pharmaceuticals and bogus missle defense contracts for our friends in aerospace. If we dont cut every last penny from NASA's budget, we wont have trillions to spend on the important stuff. Right guys?
On a serious note, if someone could figure out a way to tie space exploration to moneyed interests, a lot more progress could be made. Im sure the oil companies would love to mine helium-3 from the moon, or mine asteroids for rare metals. If only we could trick them into staying there. And taking all their laywers with them when they leave.
I agree with you. CNet probably has about as much overclocking experience as it took to write that article. There are countless sites out there that slashdot could have chosen a better article from, sites that have been featuring overclocking prominently for nearly 4 years now.
Ive been overclocking since the adjustable asus t2p4 board came out in late 96 and I have to say Im just dissapointed by the shallow approach of the CNet article. How come no one ever addresses the issue of fraud regarding chips? Intel has a long and proud history of gouging for its processors and then remarking them as low-speed chips to fill demand. Overclocking as it originally started wasnt even overclocking- it was just people changing the speed back to what it was when it left the factory. The old celeron 266s were just p2-400s with no cache and a single pin disabled off-chip so the motherboard would run it at a slower speed. They cost about the same to manufacture, but the p2 cost nearly 8 time more to buy.
Since the 1950's when the first long range microwave radars went up (to detect soviet bombers at long ranges), we have been aware of the harmful effects of microwaves on the human body. Long term exposure at low intensities causes cancer and damage to the eyes. Your eyes are full of liquid which is mostly water. Having your eyeballs boiled from the inside out is bad for them. Exposure to higher intensities is probably worse for you rather than better.
What is the real purpose of this proposed weapon? We already have the ability to non-lethally incapacitate people with guns. Have you ever seen how fast people run after you shoot them in the ass or the leg? Not very fast. We already have teargas and firehoses for crowds. Fire hoses work great- Im not a proponent of breaking up protests, but the tools are all already there.
The difference between this gun and all the other tools is that this gun sanitizes the use of force. No obvious permanant damage from zapping the crowd, no blood or bodies. You can go zap whole crowds of people into agony and it will have minimal PR and legal ramifications. Sure, some losers will get cancer or eye damage, but they were being noisy and disruptive! Serves them right!
Havent we seen enough abuse of pepper spray yet? Why do we need more painful weapons? I predict that not only will this be used against crowds, but even more likely as a torture tool, much like electroshock is used today.
This is another brilliant example of corrupt law-makers not understanding how the world works combined with some old-fashioned short-sightedness.
Good laws should spring up to enforce social conventions and give them legitimacy. For example, if a society can agree that it entering people's houses and taking stuff is wrong, then the laws should reflect that. If we lived in a society which stressed the unimportance of having personal space or possessions, the law would probably reflect that. I admit Im probably being a little philosophical here, but consider the alternatives.
Laws should not (in my obviously not consulted opinion) be created to shape society, especially in ways that are non-intuitive to the average person, and benefit only a small minority. By this, I mean that the vast majority of people out there dont really consider it stealing to trade files and music with one another. That such copying is immoral has been propagandized by the software (remember MSFT circa early 1980s?) and entertainment industries for many many years. When this propaganda failed to sway the behaviour and sentiment of the public, they resorted to pushing through unfair laws to force us to obey.
I, for one, think that people, even in government, are mostly fair and intelligent. Companies will change or companies will fade. Once pocketbooks are hit, eyes will open.