With your own firmware installed, you might even do something really novel and program the camera to do something that will get the intruder's attention before snapping a photo so that they are sure to be looking right at it, giving you an excellent shot of his or her identity.
I guess this technique is not uncommon in the surveillance industry. I was at a local U-Store a year or so ago, and they had red spinning light near the ceiling. I asked if there was some alarm going off or something. They said "no, that's just to get you to look nearly straight into the camera" [that happened to be next to the light].
I think that might be a bit obvious for home surveillance, though.
I am in the process of setting up something similar at my home, and I agree it is frustrating, pricewise. There are some nice outdoor cameras that work well in low/infrared light, but they are pricey. I've settled for a couple of good quality Logitech webcams pointing through the windows (to avoid weatherization issues). With proper yard lighting and motion-detecting lights, it works surprisingly well. Any movement is immediately uploaded to an offsite web server. It's comforting when I'm away from home, being able to check in and see everything's fine (and how many cats have visited that week).
That being said, don't assume the police will magically find your culprit, even with video. I know someone who worked for a water utility, who had some trucks broken into. They provided high quality video to the police, who didn't care, and didn't follow things up (perhaps out of habit, due to robberies being mostly hopeless to track, unless they find a stash of stolen goods by chance). Your mileage may vary by police department, but it isn't a magic bullet.
Here's hoping they don't ruin the remake like Battlestar Galactic did, by relying so heavily upon "shakeycam" to try and achieve a "you are there" effect. It's been done, it's not novel any more, it's just annoying and distracting. Let your writing, acting, and special effects carry themselves without making the viewers nauseous...
Why do I always have an insight into saying things more concisely, immediately after hitting submit. Sigh...
Another way to look at it: the number of operating systems and apps requiring C's efficiently is growing very slowly, one could even argue at a fairly low linear rate. Meanwhile, the number of apps overall is undoubtedly growing exponentially. So is there any surprise C/C++'s percentages are dropping? It doesn't reduce how essential they are to the infrastructures we use to run those non-C/C++ apps.
C (and C++) are great when speed, efficiency, and close mapping to the native processor are essential, such as for operating systems (scheduling, I/O, device drivers, need to be *Fast*), embedded systems, and a few other cases where CPU performance is the bottleneck. (Final Cut Pro won't be rewritten in Java, any time soon.)
For most other tasks, a higher level language with garbage collection allows far more rapid development, and with processor speeds such as they are, these other languages are more than fast enough, and becoming more so as CPU speeds and number-of-cores increase.
The odd time you do need some serious crunching, doing a "native method" (or equivalent, depending upon your higher level language of choice) is a great way to tweak up the 10% of your app that takes of 90% of the time, while spending most of your coding time in a higher level world.
More and more apps are becoming web-based; chewing up web requests and spitting back the resulting data, in relatively short-lived processes is a perfect place for garbage collecting higher languages with powerful string manipulating features.
C and C++ won't be going away soon, as long as we have operating systems in their current form. But the percentage of the apps requiring their specialties will indeed be decreasing.
This is a bit offtop, apologies, but it's not a terrible place to ask a mail security/signature related question.
I'm in a situation where I need to *prove* that someone has opened/read an email. I know there are paid "registered email" services, but they seem a bit overkill to me. And return receipts are jokes, since they aren't widely supported.
Is there *any* service out there that can post a letter to a person, send them the link (presumably) information (via email) to read that note, and log when they did indeed read it? It's not that complicated, but I'm not having much luck finding anything. (Even a bulletin-board that shows confirmation of specific users reading a note would suffice.)
I could implement it myself, without much difficulty, but where I'm one of the parties wanting a *third party* site/service to confirm the sending and reading of a message, unfortunately that won't do (I'll just be told "well, you could have faked the data.")
As much as an internet junkie as I am, I don't think the classroom (in general) is the place for it, any more than talking on a cell phone, or cooking a meal would be appropriate. It's a place where you're supposed to pay attention and take part in a discussion, not check your facebook constantly. If you don't want to go to the lecture, don't; get someone else's notes, read the text, or whatever. But if I'm a prof (and I was, part time, awhile back) I'm not going to waste my time interacting with a class that is doing something else at the time.
And it's not just people doing other things. I did a couple of seminars on Java in its early days, at a progressive local university, that had internet (wired) at every seat. Only a couple of people were using it, but it's awfully hard to get across concepts when people are constantly googling what you say and trying to point out problems or sound smart before you finish getting a point across.
A lot of the time in teaching, you have to start with generalizations to get the general concept across, some of which aren't 100% correct, technically; then you delve into the details clarifying those points. (As a broad example in another field, teaching newtonian physics as a basis for relativistic stuff.) One smartass with Google/Wiki can ruin that process for the whole class.
(On the other hand, those who are genuinely curious about something that is said and want to take a quick detour, I could support; but like most liberties, where there's a tendency towards abuse, you sometimes have reduced those liberties in certain agreed upon circumstances. It's similar to the cell phones on planes arguments. There are those that would use it respectfully, moderately, and quietly; but there would typically be a more noticable inconsiderate contingent that would just drive everyone nuts.)
Ummm, "yank the elastoplast off in one go?" Wasn't the mandatory conversion supposed to take place close to a decade ago, but kept getting put off?
(I could be confusing this with the plan here in Canada; apologies for any incorrect facts; I'm on dialup this weekend, arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhhhhh [now, those bytes will cost me], and so doing much research into what I remember is impractical...)
The term "paranoia" gets thrown around way too much, inappropriately, IMHO... Wiktionary's definition:
1. A psychotic disorder characterized by delusions of persecution 2. Extreme, irrational distrust of others
The study mentions "exaggerated fears" of the threats from others. Sure, it pays to be a bit overly-cautious with strangers on public transportation. That doesn't translate into "extreme, irrational, psychotic, they're-all-out-to-get-me" paranoia... I think "mistrust" is a far more accurate term.
I'm about to lug a huge Wang hard drive out to the trash pickup on Monday - weighs over 100 pounds... still runs. Actually it uses removable platters but still...
Reminds me of when I was a student worker at a large corporation, years ago, and was helping their transition from dedicated Wang word processors to PC-based word processors for the typing pool. It met with a lot of resistance.
The first time I came across the president of the company, in the elevator after work one day, he started chatting about the transition, and how it was being resisted. Someone made the comment "yeah, those girls in the typing pool really love the Wangs." Never seen an elevator full of people try to stifle so many snickers in front of the prez...
Not to defend inequities in the financial class system in many countries (I'm near the bottom of it, these days) but...
One reason the rich get a lot of these tax breaks, is that they assume higher risks, and do more entrepreneurial things. Yes, if you got $100M in the bank, it's pretty easy to assume risk on new investments. Nonetheless, the risk is what is being rewarded. If you bought a condo in Mexico (not out of the question for many people who earn a reasonable salary), you too could justify a "business expense" to go visit it. If you are self-employed, and use your car ostensibly for work, you too can write it off. The tax breaks are there. If you take a 100% safe job earning a specific salary, it's true, there aren't many tax breaks; but you're not assuming much risk either (unless you rack up credit card bills and such; but that's more bad financial planning, than actual risk.)
I do agree there are some loopholes that need to be plugged; but overall, there are some good reasons for the way it is. If you have problems with specific tax-writeoffs, lobby your government representatives to change things.
I was pretty excited when I first tried Scribus the other day. But then it started crashing on me, repeatedly. Sigh. (And there were some basic things, like snapping to objects, not just grids, that were missing.) Sadly, InDesign still blows it away. Scribus will likely catch up someday, but it isn't quite there yet.
Hopefully they can save their pennies and get a dolly for their camera, and maybe a steadycam, and do away with that trendy, cheesy, nauseautingly fake shakey-cam effect they used in the last series. I couldn't watch it because of that. Producers/Directors: It does *not* add to the realism, it's just distracting from the art you're supposed to be producing. Ten years from now, shakey-cam produced content will look dated and will *not* be timeless. Create better compelling content, don't just shake and zoom in and out to simulate what a human might see if they were there.
(A real person's brain synchronizes interpreting their vision with their head/eye movements, so looking around isn't disconcerting; a video of a fakey shakeyzoomcam does *not* achieve that realism, and it's *way* overused.)
Two points: what's the harm in minutia? So you might have to go through the odd disambiguation page (and Wiki tends to show you the most popular one anyway, with a disambiguation link near the top). Most people (myself included) never use Wiki's horrible search, but just google " wiki" to find the good articles anyway; pretty easy to sift through irrelevant facts (especially if you toss in another keywork, like "film").
One thing I always thought would be a great use for Wiki, is for learning the details of a second language. Yes, something might be a meaningless detail to a native speaker, but for someone learning the language, reading the details on a given word or subject, with a "on the street" slant to it, is far more helpful than wading through a dictionary definition of it. It seems like that is an incredibly valuable use for Wiki, which is greatly boosted by including more, not by being overly selective.
I send/receive email to and from my mac with POP/SMTP, an open and accepted standard, not via the horribly ugly and MS-centric IMAP.
I do remote desktops via VNC, an open standard.
X-Windows is part of the operating system (well, an included Add-on) which opens up access to a lot of Unix apps. Their dev tools (also included) have gcc and all the other standard goodies.
A lot of Unix source code compiles up just fine on it. The code that doesn't, usually doesn't require extensive tweaks to do so.
Yeah, it's only certified on their hardware (which happens to be some of the best around).
Somehow I don't feel constrained... It's my choice to buy their gear, and I really don't feel locked in once I do. All the code I write, all the apps I use, can generally be done on other operating systems if I chose. I really don't ever seeing myself choosing to. It's just a better solution.
so why exactly should i pay for your kids again? in all that rambling you failed to show me a single reason.
Guess I'll dumb it down even more for ya. I made the point, but I guess ya missed it.
If someone has 17 children, they still pay the same taxes as someone who has 5 children, or who has zero children. So looking at it as paying-for-your-own-children is not gonna work. Look at it is as paying, after the fact, for when *YOU* were a child. You were a child at one time, no? Look at it as paying taxes, after the fact, for when *you* went to school. Everybody was a child once, so everyone pays taxes for schools; perfect 1-to-1 correspondence. The children you decide never to have (poor bugger) will pay zero taxes. It all works out, just delayed one generation. Hope that's not over your head.
I have a very simple proposal. start up an airline that bans children below age 10.
99% of the time when i travel the fuckheads that hold everything up are the soccer moms and their 2 kids and a pram bullshit. and then once your up in the air the little cunts scream and carry on. just to top it off they only take infants because it's free, only it's not free everyone else is paying for it.
the moment there is a no children airline, sign me up.
Are you a member of SSCCATAGAPP or something??? Sheeesh. Believe it or not, children ("the little cunts", as you call them) are humans, too, and clearly more civilized than you.
It's a similar argument to every childless person who bitches about having to pay taxes for schools. Think of it this way: don't keep track of who *has* kids (that varies). Keep track of who *was* a kid at one time. Wow, a 1-to-1, 100% correspondence. So pay you're freakin' taxes, put up with kids on public transit; you were a kid once, so tolerate kids now in return.
(Yes, parents^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hadults can be inconsiderate, including managing their kids; that's a separate issue. And 99.5% of the time when I see a kid acting like a jerk, it takes about 10 seconds of seeing their parents to see where they learned to act like a jerk.)
At one time, I never wanted kids; until I had one (one unplanned, then three more:). And it changed my life, and my whole perspective on what's important. I respect people's choice not to have kids; but I don't respect those who chose to be indignant to those who do. If you only knew the beauty of life you were missing.
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long as the name is changed.
There they go, forcing things on us in the guise of "Freedom." Forced name change != freedom, people. No better than the viral nature of the GPL.
If this is true, for a convicted monopolist to specifically disable compatibility with a competitor, when it would otherwise work (without the competitor check) is that not an actionable item by the FTC et al?
(I almost feel stupid asking; Microsoft seems to do things that should bring regulatory action on a weekly basis. But they seem to be so tight with the gov't that no action will ever occur, other than the slaps on the wrist. I'm ready to go live in a E.U. country:)
It is interesting research, and no doubt useful; millions of years of in-the-field generic trial and error can't be dismissed.
However, unless we're talking unmanned vehicles, I'd think a serious limitation in any design is the not-designed-for-flight blob of human goo sitting in the cockpit. You can strap pressure pants on to stop them from blacking out in higher G's than normal, but in general, our physiology is not tailored to the stresses of flight that birds can achieve daily. We're a ground-based entity rattling around inside a rigid hole inside the flying machine; it hardly could ever compete to with an entity whose every organ and tissue has evolved with millions of tweaks towards better flying (and thus better survival through preying, mating, escape, etc.)
Another factor is that almost all of our successful (but relatively brief) engineering history has been based upon solid, fixed objects (with the odd hinge, wheel, sliding groove, where motion is required). Okay, we need the plane to change course, we'll add a couple of hinges between rigid parts on the wings and tail (a pale imitation of the flexibility of a bird's wing). We have very little in the dynamic, flexible materials that are as strong, lightweight, and controllable as birds possess. It's amazing we do as well as we already do, considering the inflexibility and weight of our materials. (On the other hand, it always amazes me how efficient birds are; with what little they seem to eat, they can fuel incredible amounts of flight time; I guess they only have to keep a few ounces aloft, although it still impresses me.)
I had a similar thing happen when I returned a webcam but forgot to remove my email address from it. It took a national news story to shame the ISP into notifying their customer (they ignored my requests to look up the IP address and notify their customer; however, the day the news story aired, the problem was immediately resolved).
There was no mention in the article how these pirates handled keys and activation and such.
An exact copy of the pretty box and manuals and holograms and stuff is fine, but if it's an exact copy of the CD contents itself, it won't activate properly. Do they use hacked versions of the binaries? You'd think that would stand out (failed updates and such). Anyone know?
Seriously. A lot of big sites seem to disable ping presumably for security/DOS resasons. Yahoo was kind of an "old reliable" for always accepting pings. Microsoft, not so much. Cnn, and the other news sites, no. I remember av.com working (sigh, I used to love AltaVista, and Babelfish is still kinda cool).
I don't remember google answering pings, but it seems to now, so I guess that's a good alternative that will probably be around for awhile.:)
It's sad that IP stacks of the world were of such lame quality, that there could be PING related attacks on them. A ping should be the lightest weight IP transaction possible, putting no noticable load on any network; how could it have become a security/DOS risk?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess this technique is not uncommon in the surveillance industry. I was at a local U-Store a year or so ago, and they had red spinning light near the ceiling. I asked if there was some alarm going off or something. They said "no, that's just to get you to look nearly straight into the camera" [that happened to be next to the light].
I think that might be a bit obvious for home surveillance, though.
I am in the process of setting up something similar at my home, and I agree it is frustrating, pricewise. There are some nice outdoor cameras that work well in low/infrared light, but they are pricey. I've settled for a couple of good quality Logitech webcams pointing through the windows (to avoid weatherization issues). With proper yard lighting and motion-detecting lights, it works surprisingly well. Any movement is immediately uploaded to an offsite web server. It's comforting when I'm away from home, being able to check in and see everything's fine (and how many cats have visited that week).
That being said, don't assume the police will magically find your culprit, even with video. I know someone who worked for a water utility, who had some trucks broken into. They provided high quality video to the police, who didn't care, and didn't follow things up (perhaps out of habit, due to robberies being mostly hopeless to track, unless they find a stash of stolen goods by chance). Your mileage may vary by police department, but it isn't a magic bullet.
Here's hoping they don't ruin the remake like Battlestar Galactic did, by relying so heavily upon "shakeycam" to try and achieve a "you are there" effect. It's been done, it's not novel any more, it's just annoying and distracting. Let your writing, acting, and special effects carry themselves without making the viewers nauseous...
Thanks...
For those of you young 'uns missing it, the Herb Alpert reference is to the cover of the album Whipped Cream and Other Delights.
I personally prefer Clam Dip.
Why do I always have an insight into saying things more concisely, immediately after hitting submit. Sigh...
Another way to look at it: the number of operating systems and apps requiring C's efficiently is growing very slowly, one could even argue at a fairly low linear rate. Meanwhile, the number of apps overall is undoubtedly growing exponentially. So is there any surprise C/C++'s percentages are dropping? It doesn't reduce how essential they are to the infrastructures we use to run those non-C/C++ apps.
These results seem pretty obvious to me.
C (and C++) are great when speed, efficiency, and close mapping to the native processor are essential, such as for operating systems (scheduling, I/O, device drivers, need to be *Fast*), embedded systems, and a few other cases where CPU performance is the bottleneck. (Final Cut Pro won't be rewritten in Java, any time soon.)
For most other tasks, a higher level language with garbage collection allows far more rapid development, and with processor speeds such as they are, these other languages are more than fast enough, and becoming more so as CPU speeds and number-of-cores increase.
The odd time you do need some serious crunching, doing a "native method" (or equivalent, depending upon your higher level language of choice) is a great way to tweak up the 10% of your app that takes of 90% of the time, while spending most of your coding time in a higher level world.
More and more apps are becoming web-based; chewing up web requests and spitting back the resulting data, in relatively short-lived processes is a perfect place for garbage collecting higher languages with powerful string manipulating features.
C and C++ won't be going away soon, as long as we have operating systems in their current form. But the percentage of the apps requiring their specialties will indeed be decreasing.
This is a bit offtop, apologies, but it's not a terrible place to ask a mail security/signature related question.
I'm in a situation where I need to *prove* that someone has opened/read an email. I know there are paid "registered email" services, but they seem a bit overkill to me. And return receipts are jokes, since they aren't widely supported.
Is there *any* service out there that can post a letter to a person, send them the link (presumably) information (via email) to read that note, and log when they did indeed read it? It's not that complicated, but I'm not having much luck finding anything. (Even a bulletin-board that shows confirmation of specific users reading a note would suffice.)
I could implement it myself, without much difficulty, but where I'm one of the parties wanting a *third party* site/service to confirm the sending and reading of a message, unfortunately that won't do (I'll just be told "well, you could have faked the data.")
Thanks for any insights.
As much as an internet junkie as I am, I don't think the classroom (in general) is the place for it, any more than talking on a cell phone, or cooking a meal would be appropriate. It's a place where you're supposed to pay attention and take part in a discussion, not check your facebook constantly. If you don't want to go to the lecture, don't; get someone else's notes, read the text, or whatever. But if I'm a prof (and I was, part time, awhile back) I'm not going to waste my time interacting with a class that is doing something else at the time.
And it's not just people doing other things. I did a couple of seminars on Java in its early days, at a progressive local university, that had internet (wired) at every seat. Only a couple of people were using it, but it's awfully hard to get across concepts when people are constantly googling what you say and trying to point out problems or sound smart before you finish getting a point across.
A lot of the time in teaching, you have to start with generalizations to get the general concept across, some of which aren't 100% correct, technically; then you delve into the details clarifying those points. (As a broad example in another field, teaching newtonian physics as a basis for relativistic stuff.) One smartass with Google/Wiki can ruin that process for the whole class.
(On the other hand, those who are genuinely curious about something that is said and want to take a quick detour, I could support; but like most liberties, where there's a tendency towards abuse, you sometimes have reduced those liberties in certain agreed upon circumstances. It's similar to the cell phones on planes arguments. There are those that would use it respectfully, moderately, and quietly; but there would typically be a more noticable inconsiderate contingent that would just drive everyone nuts.)
Ummm, "yank the elastoplast off in one go?" Wasn't the mandatory conversion supposed to take place close to a decade ago, but kept getting put off?
(I could be confusing this with the plan here in Canada; apologies for any incorrect facts; I'm on dialup this weekend, arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhhhhh [now, those bytes will cost me], and so doing much research into what I remember is impractical...)
The study mentions "exaggerated fears" of the threats from others. Sure, it pays to be a bit overly-cautious with strangers on public transportation. That doesn't translate into "extreme, irrational, psychotic, they're-all-out-to-get-me" paranoia... I think "mistrust" is a far more accurate term.
Reminds me of when I was a student worker at a large corporation, years ago, and was helping their transition from dedicated Wang word processors to PC-based word processors for the typing pool. It met with a lot of resistance.
The first time I came across the president of the company, in the elevator after work one day, he started chatting about the transition, and how it was being resisted. Someone made the comment "yeah, those girls in the typing pool really love the Wangs." Never seen an elevator full of people try to stifle so many snickers in front of the prez...
Not to defend inequities in the financial class system in many countries (I'm near the bottom of it, these days) but...
One reason the rich get a lot of these tax breaks, is that they assume higher risks, and do more entrepreneurial things. Yes, if you got $100M in the bank, it's pretty easy to assume risk on new investments. Nonetheless, the risk is what is being rewarded. If you bought a condo in Mexico (not out of the question for many people who earn a reasonable salary), you too could justify a "business expense" to go visit it. If you are self-employed, and use your car ostensibly for work, you too can write it off. The tax breaks are there. If you take a 100% safe job earning a specific salary, it's true, there aren't many tax breaks; but you're not assuming much risk either (unless you rack up credit card bills and such; but that's more bad financial planning, than actual risk.)
I do agree there are some loopholes that need to be plugged; but overall, there are some good reasons for the way it is. If you have problems with specific tax-writeoffs, lobby your government representatives to change things.
I was pretty excited when I first tried Scribus the other day. But then it started crashing on me, repeatedly. Sigh. (And there were some basic things, like snapping to objects, not just grids, that were missing.) Sadly, InDesign still blows it away. Scribus will likely catch up someday, but it isn't quite there yet.
Hopefully they can save their pennies and get a dolly for their camera, and maybe a steadycam, and do away with that trendy, cheesy, nauseautingly fake shakey-cam effect they used in the last series. I couldn't watch it because of that. Producers/Directors: It does *not* add to the realism, it's just distracting from the art you're supposed to be producing. Ten years from now, shakey-cam produced content will look dated and will *not* be timeless. Create better compelling content, don't just shake and zoom in and out to simulate what a human might see if they were there.
(A real person's brain synchronizes interpreting their vision with their head/eye movements, so looking around isn't disconcerting; a video of a fakey shakeyzoomcam does *not* achieve that realism, and it's *way* overused.)
Why can't they just put validation stickers on underpowered Intel hardware, saying it's -Capable? It's what MS does for Vista :)
Two points: what's the harm in minutia? So you might have to go through the odd disambiguation page (and Wiki tends to show you the most popular one anyway, with a disambiguation link near the top). Most people (myself included) never use Wiki's horrible search, but just google " wiki" to find the good articles anyway; pretty easy to sift through irrelevant facts (especially if you toss in another keywork, like "film").
One thing I always thought would be a great use for Wiki, is for learning the details of a second language. Yes, something might be a meaningless detail to a native speaker, but for someone learning the language, reading the details on a given word or subject, with a "on the street" slant to it, is far more helpful than wading through a dictionary definition of it. It seems like that is an incredibly valuable use for Wiki, which is greatly boosted by including more, not by being overly selective.
I send/receive email to and from my mac with POP/SMTP, an open and accepted standard, not via the horribly ugly and MS-centric IMAP.
I do remote desktops via VNC, an open standard.
X-Windows is part of the operating system (well, an included Add-on) which opens up access to a lot of Unix apps. Their dev tools (also included) have gcc and all the other standard goodies.
A lot of Unix source code compiles up just fine on it. The code that doesn't, usually doesn't require extensive tweaks to do so.
Yeah, it's only certified on their hardware (which happens to be some of the best around).
Somehow I don't feel constrained... It's my choice to buy their gear, and I really don't feel locked in once I do. All the code I write, all the apps I use, can generally be done on other operating systems if I chose. I really don't ever seeing myself choosing to. It's just a better solution.
Guess I'll dumb it down even more for ya. I made the point, but I guess ya missed it.
If someone has 17 children, they still pay the same taxes as someone who has 5 children, or who has zero children. So looking at it as paying-for-your-own-children is not gonna work. Look at it is as paying, after the fact, for when *YOU* were a child. You were a child at one time, no? Look at it as paying taxes, after the fact, for when *you* went to school. Everybody was a child once, so everyone pays taxes for schools; perfect 1-to-1 correspondence. The children you decide never to have (poor bugger) will pay zero taxes. It all works out, just delayed one generation. Hope that's not over your head.
Are you a member of SSCCATAGAPP or something??? Sheeesh. Believe it or not, children ("the little cunts", as you call them) are humans, too, and clearly more civilized than you.
It's a similar argument to every childless person who bitches about having to pay taxes for schools. Think of it this way: don't keep track of who *has* kids (that varies). Keep track of who *was* a kid at one time. Wow, a 1-to-1, 100% correspondence. So pay you're freakin' taxes, put up with kids on public transit; you were a kid once, so tolerate kids now in return.
(Yes, parents^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hadults can be inconsiderate, including managing their kids; that's a separate issue. And 99.5% of the time when I see a kid acting like a jerk, it takes about 10 seconds of seeing their parents to see where they learned to act like a jerk.)
At one time, I never wanted kids; until I had one (one unplanned, then three more
There they go, forcing things on us in the guise of "Freedom." Forced name change != freedom, people. No better than the viral nature of the GPL.
If this is true, for a convicted monopolist to specifically disable compatibility with a competitor, when it would otherwise work (without the competitor check) is that not an actionable item by the FTC et al?
:)
(I almost feel stupid asking; Microsoft seems to do things that should bring regulatory action on a weekly basis. But they seem to be so tight with the gov't that no action will ever occur, other than the slaps on the wrist. I'm ready to go live in a E.U. country
It is interesting research, and no doubt useful; millions of years of in-the-field generic trial and error can't be dismissed.
However, unless we're talking unmanned vehicles, I'd think a serious limitation in any design is the not-designed-for-flight blob of human goo sitting in the cockpit. You can strap pressure pants on to stop them from blacking out in higher G's than normal, but in general, our physiology is not tailored to the stresses of flight that birds can achieve daily. We're a ground-based entity rattling around inside a rigid hole inside the flying machine; it hardly could ever compete to with an entity whose every organ and tissue has evolved with millions of tweaks towards better flying (and thus better survival through preying, mating, escape, etc.)
Another factor is that almost all of our successful (but relatively brief) engineering history has been based upon solid, fixed objects (with the odd hinge, wheel, sliding groove, where motion is required). Okay, we need the plane to change course, we'll add a couple of hinges between rigid parts on the wings and tail (a pale imitation of the flexibility of a bird's wing). We have very little in the dynamic, flexible materials that are as strong, lightweight, and controllable as birds possess. It's amazing we do as well as we already do, considering the inflexibility and weight of our materials. (On the other hand, it always amazes me how efficient birds are; with what little they seem to eat, they can fuel incredible amounts of flight time; I guess they only have to keep a few ounces aloft, although it still impresses me.)
I had a similar thing happen when I returned a webcam but forgot to remove my email address from it. It took a national news story to shame the ISP into notifying their customer (they ignored my requests to look up the IP address and notify their customer; however, the day the news story aired, the problem was immediately resolved).
There was no mention in the article how these pirates handled keys and activation and such.
An exact copy of the pretty box and manuals and holograms and stuff is fine, but if it's an exact copy of the CD contents itself, it won't activate properly. Do they use hacked versions of the binaries? You'd think that would stand out (failed updates and such). Anyone know?
Really? I thought law was considered a profession...
Seriously. A lot of big sites seem to disable ping presumably for security/DOS resasons. Yahoo was kind of an "old reliable" for always accepting pings. Microsoft, not so much. Cnn, and the other news sites, no. I remember av.com working (sigh, I used to love AltaVista, and Babelfish is still kinda cool).
:)
I don't remember google answering pings, but it seems to now, so I guess that's a good alternative that will probably be around for awhile.
It's sad that IP stacks of the world were of such lame quality, that there could be PING related attacks on them. A ping should be the lightest weight IP transaction possible, putting no noticable load on any network; how could it have become a security/DOS risk?