Indeed. It would be a quiet source of entertainment (perhaps some irony?) to see another alien race converted by human preachers.
There is also the not so mirthful possibility that they will be a first contact for another race, declare them to be demons, fire on them, and doom the rest of the human race (as this race seeks revenge by removing the human scum).
Fear of the unknown. Some people will argue that when it came time to colonize the Americas, we knew they had fresh water / food / etc., but reality speaks otherwise -> most of the people involved did not comprehend what they were getting into, and entire colonies died out.
With Mars, an argument could be made of the same. There will be people scared to death of life on another planet (let alone a trip through space), and there will be people who will die on Mars during colonization. Sometimes through the hostile environment, more likely through human artifice. But if you want a new beginning, or are just a rugged survivalist who wants to put their skills to the test, you will be a part of something great. Death can get a human being on Earth as easily as on Mars. And yes, space colonization does solve the human population problem, at least temporarily. I believe it to be of a much better design than some of the human population control schemes various parties are cooking up.
Perhaps. But in a few centuries, the parties which sniffed their noses at the chance of advance colonization of this or that planet will hate themselves.
A few words here and there, and someone else could have ended up with Australia. That's an entire continent. Mind you, an entire continent filled with some of the most deadly animals on earth, but it's still a continent that people thrive on.
'Tis easier to just de-elect any Congress member who supports such terrible actions.
Seeing as IT people are in the information trade, and a few photos / video of an incumbent congress member in an indefensible position showing up at an inopportune time might ruin his / her election...you know as well as I do that Congressman what's his name is deeply afraid of someone posting a copy of a furtive meeting.
On one hand, we have the FBI, who play politics the way dolphins can play Water Polo, carry guns, come from an Authoritarian mindset, and think their jurisdiction is the internet. They also think they can dominate anyone, and are unaware that their actions, even their gentle probings of Anonymous, are escalating things.
On the other hand, we have Anonymous, whose constituents change so rapidly and lack any amount of central structure, than they are more like a cell operation. They believe the internet is anyone's but the would-be usurpers. They also come from a mentality in which they believe they can dominate anyone.
It's like having two Kings trying to rule the same country. Someone is going to die if the FBI keeps escalating things, and over the long run, it won't be the members of Anonymous. The FBI throws a rock, Anonymous throws a boulder; the FBI takes the life of one Anonymous member, three undercover FBI agents are unmasked in the field. And the people will be in the middle of this exchange. The FBI has the backing of the US government, and access to their financial resources. Anonymous has the backing of an unknown number of people from all over the world, and access to those financial resources.
Anonymous => 4channers (typically), pranks, occasional crimes of minor significance. Russian mob => Botnets, stealing people's financial information, giving IT people the blood eye.
They're two completely different, and unrelated groups.
I worry less about Anon & friends (a slight annoyance, were I to come under their gaze), than I do about what heavy-handed things the boys in DC might do to 'fix' things.
Watching them chase after cyber-terrorists is a bit like watching Kung Pow (nuts to fist style): [Chosen One kicks Wimp-Lo in the face. Wimp-Lo does a pose] Wimp Lo: Ha! Face to foot style, how do you like it? Chosen One: I'm sure on some planet your style is impressive, but your weak link is: this is Earth. Wimp Lo: Oh yeah? Then try my nuts to your fist style!
They go about this whole thing the wrong way. But then, it's politics -> Divide & Rule.
Why fix what isn't broken? The WIMP interface has almost all the bugs worked out of it, seeing as it's been the primary interface for, I don't know, every major OS for the past several generations?
And while I like the idea of updating / replacing it, that idea is only valid if it's replaced with something better. The Metro interface is anything but that. It's like switching out your DNS servers for WINS servers (and I used to like WINS, so there).
As the Metro interface, based off of my continually painful experience with the Developer Preview, appears to show, it's a giant step backwards, and it destroys one of MS's more powerful fail-safes (moving from one version of Windows to the next requires minimal retraining). Me thinks Ballmer's desire to distance himself from his predecessor is getting in the way (sometimes it's about being different, sometimes it's keeping the company afloat). More CEOs have gone down in flames throughout history because they were so focused on being different that they didn't realize the company was dying.
Under the current thinking, a child can be charged as an adult if a crime is considered heinous enough, but denied its rights up until its 18th birthday. In short, if you're a kid, the State isn't really sure you have any rights. One might argue that it would have been particularly noble of an adult to have stepped in, and prevented this abuse, but nobility / honour is kind of out of fashion. Bowing to your leaders and their demands (thinking is hard), dogmatically agreeing with everything they say (spine of a jelly-fish), and fighting over their scraps is the current in-thing (if we are good, we might be able to ask for a small favor later on).
For the record, we also send off kids to die before they're old enough to drink, have a permanent caste system, and we attack / infiltrate groups of people who have never spoken an ill word nor lifted a finger against us. We put the vile in evil.
Ambassador Londo Mollari: My shoes are too tight and I have forgotten how to dance.
I believe that quotes sums it up. The people involved have committed a great evil to someone less powerful than themselves, preying on the very being they were charged to protect; but it doesn't matter to them, because they've already forgotten what it was like to be a child.
No doubt the kid will continue to be ridiculed and besmirched for some time, and the wounds will heal, leaving only scars. A few decade's time, she will want to become a teacher / administrator, so she can right the wrongs of her predecessors; and after many years of being pushed around by a system that frankly doesn't care about her now anymore than it did when she was a child, the light will go out in her soul at an inopportune time, during which she will commit a similar act to some young thing, and the cycle will begin anew. She will realize her mistake all too late to correct it, and spend the rest of her life trying to come to terms with an opportunity come and gone.
I wish I had advice to dispense here, but I haven't found any that works in circumstances like these. I'd like to say that something will come from this, that there will be no scars, that good will triumph over evil, that everyone will learn some sort of valuable lesson, and that it will be the right one, but experience has taught me that good only triumphs over evil in fairy tales.
1.) No one said it was trivial, but for a capable researcher who has spent a fair portion of their life dealing with decompilers (and writing a few of their own), they probably have an idea how to do it fairly quickly.
2.) While it's possible to walk-through reams of Assembly code, it's painful. Extremely painful. A 100-line 'function' in Assembly code will cause most programmers to pause, and a 100,000 lines of Assembly code ('functions' and all) will break even the most vigilant of programmers. The human mind just does not like holding 100,000 variables actively in working memory (whether it can actually do that is open to some debate). 100,000 lines in Assembly is 2,000 lines in a higher-level languages, segmented properly so the human brain doesn't crash.
Think about it. We use high-level languages because it expresses an idea in fewer words. If I call a TextBox control in C#, that's simpler than the equivalent in Assembly. These people, of course, are annoyed, because without knowing what the higher language was (assuming there was one used), it will take their minds years to analyze what exactly the code is dong; whereas if they knew what the higher language was, they could create a decompiler, and have something approaching the original source code in a few weeks / months.
My personal favorite is when you're trying to RMA the hard drive, and the person on the other end has you run a bunch of diagnostics that say the drive is fine.
It's like, come on guys, I am a tech, my case has its side off more often than on, I've spent a fair amount of my life tending to the needs and wants to a number of machines that have found their way to me...I know what the usual sounds those hard drives are supposed to make, having been running them for over a year, and one of them has suddenly started making scratching noises. Your diagnostics will be giving me a green light right while the drive drops / corrupts data and disappears randomly from the OS's view, right up until the day it's suddenly no longer detected. Even Windows will think something is wrong with the drive before your diagnostic program will.
I had to run the m*therf*cking acoustic test on one of Seagate's (or was it Maxtor's) drive before it would give me a code to send the thing in. Show of hands from the people who know how long it takes to run that test, with the machine unusable while you're running it.
Let's see here. Rather than takes Valve's approach to things (they are actually successfully competing against 'free,' which is the technological equivalent of making a river flow upstream), they instead take the most ass-way possible to providing 'backups' to customers.
It's like they have some form of a powerful character disorder, where they can see others profiting (legally) through content distribution systems, but can't quite grasp the concept that they need to deliver the content, with minimal fuss, at acceptable pricing, to their customers in order to get some green. Their attempts to create 'new' systems compares favorably with the "Supervisor" sketch from AQHF -> they aren't really new, but for some reason the people creating them think they are. "That's it boys, the problem with the previous system isn't that the customers hated being treated like dogs, it's that the interface wasn't shiny / restrictive enough!"
Allow me to help you with the right DRM system design, since you seem to be suffering from an inability to figure it out yourselves. 1.) The customer should be able to access said content in an off-line mode, without having to provide a fingerprint / urine analysis, 2.) the content should be downloaded to the customer's machine (f*ck streaming), 3.) (and this is key) ensure that you actually keep said content updated (studio releases a change to a scene, because they left a mic visible somewhere? automatically send that out), 4.) ensure pricing (monthly, seasonal) deals (actual deals, not the pathetic jokes that you wish were deals); why? because it undercuts the people who might be setting up factories to stamp out that stuff on DVDs (because you know from finance & accounting, that you can erect a barrier to entry to a market by ensuring that any new players will never be able to recoup their investments; and you can even do that without having to pay off DC), 5.) do not piss off the customer, do not piss off the customer, do not piss on the customer, 6.) while I am sure that you have many other wonderful products you think that customer might be interested in, do not make them mandatory to watch before the customer can watch said purchased content (if you haven't heard the amount of b*tching that goes on whenever you sit through 30 minutes of previews at the theater, or 15 minutes on a DVD, you need only open your window...).
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Entertaining, but owing to the maxim outlined in Good Omens -> the more impressive the title, the less power they have. ;-)
Indeed. It would be a quiet source of entertainment (perhaps some irony?) to see another alien race converted by human preachers.
There is also the not so mirthful possibility that they will be a first contact for another race, declare them to be demons, fire on them, and doom the rest of the human race (as this race seeks revenge by removing the human scum).
Launch near the equator, you won't suffer from this problem.
Fear of the unknown. Some people will argue that when it came time to colonize the Americas, we knew they had fresh water / food / etc., but reality speaks otherwise -> most of the people involved did not comprehend what they were getting into, and entire colonies died out.
With Mars, an argument could be made of the same. There will be people scared to death of life on another planet (let alone a trip through space), and there will be people who will die on Mars during colonization. Sometimes through the hostile environment, more likely through human artifice. But if you want a new beginning, or are just a rugged survivalist who wants to put their skills to the test, you will be a part of something great. Death can get a human being on Earth as easily as on Mars. And yes, space colonization does solve the human population problem, at least temporarily. I believe it to be of a much better design than some of the human population control schemes various parties are cooking up.
Perhaps. But in a few centuries, the parties which sniffed their noses at the chance of advance colonization of this or that planet will hate themselves.
A few words here and there, and someone else could have ended up with Australia. That's an entire continent. Mind you, an entire continent filled with some of the most deadly animals on earth, but it's still a continent that people thrive on.
We're working on that.
'Tis easier to just de-elect any Congress member who supports such terrible actions.
Seeing as IT people are in the information trade, and a few photos / video of an incumbent congress member in an indefensible position showing up at an inopportune time might ruin his / her election...you know as well as I do that Congressman what's his name is deeply afraid of someone posting a copy of a furtive meeting.
Indeed.
On one hand, we have the FBI, who play politics the way dolphins can play Water Polo, carry guns, come from an Authoritarian mindset, and think their jurisdiction is the internet. They also think they can dominate anyone, and are unaware that their actions, even their gentle probings of Anonymous, are escalating things.
On the other hand, we have Anonymous, whose constituents change so rapidly and lack any amount of central structure, than they are more like a cell operation. They believe the internet is anyone's but the would-be usurpers. They also come from a mentality in which they believe they can dominate anyone.
It's like having two Kings trying to rule the same country. Someone is going to die if the FBI keeps escalating things, and over the long run, it won't be the members of Anonymous. The FBI throws a rock, Anonymous throws a boulder; the FBI takes the life of one Anonymous member, three undercover FBI agents are unmasked in the field. And the people will be in the middle of this exchange. The FBI has the backing of the US government, and access to their financial resources. Anonymous has the backing of an unknown number of people from all over the world, and access to those financial resources.
That would be the Russian mob, not Anonymous.
Anonymous => 4channers (typically), pranks, occasional crimes of minor significance.
Russian mob => Botnets, stealing people's financial information, giving IT people the blood eye.
They're two completely different, and unrelated groups.
I worry less about Anon & friends (a slight annoyance, were I to come under their gaze), than I do about what heavy-handed things the boys in DC might do to 'fix' things.
Watching them chase after cyber-terrorists is a bit like watching Kung Pow (nuts to fist style):
[Chosen One kicks Wimp-Lo in the face. Wimp-Lo does a pose]
Wimp Lo: Ha! Face to foot style, how do you like it?
Chosen One: I'm sure on some planet your style is impressive, but your weak link is: this is Earth.
Wimp Lo: Oh yeah? Then try my nuts to your fist style!
They go about this whole thing the wrong way. But then, it's politics -> Divide & Rule.
Why fix what isn't broken? The WIMP interface has almost all the bugs worked out of it, seeing as it's been the primary interface for, I don't know, every major OS for the past several generations?
And while I like the idea of updating / replacing it, that idea is only valid if it's replaced with something better. The Metro interface is anything but that. It's like switching out your DNS servers for WINS servers (and I used to like WINS, so there).
As the Metro interface, based off of my continually painful experience with the Developer Preview, appears to show, it's a giant step backwards, and it destroys one of MS's more powerful fail-safes (moving from one version of Windows to the next requires minimal retraining). Me thinks Ballmer's desire to distance himself from his predecessor is getting in the way (sometimes it's about being different, sometimes it's keeping the company afloat). More CEOs have gone down in flames throughout history because they were so focused on being different that they didn't realize the company was dying.
*shrugs*
Under the current thinking, a child can be charged as an adult if a crime is considered heinous enough, but denied its rights up until its 18th birthday. In short, if you're a kid, the State isn't really sure you have any rights. One might argue that it would have been particularly noble of an adult to have stepped in, and prevented this abuse, but nobility / honour is kind of out of fashion. Bowing to your leaders and their demands (thinking is hard), dogmatically agreeing with everything they say (spine of a jelly-fish), and fighting over their scraps is the current in-thing (if we are good, we might be able to ask for a small favor later on).
For the record, we also send off kids to die before they're old enough to drink, have a permanent caste system, and we attack / infiltrate groups of people who have never spoken an ill word nor lifted a finger against us. We put the vile in evil.
Ambassador Londo Mollari: My shoes are too tight and I have forgotten how to dance.
I believe that quotes sums it up. The people involved have committed a great evil to someone less powerful than themselves, preying on the very being they were charged to protect; but it doesn't matter to them, because they've already forgotten what it was like to be a child.
No doubt the kid will continue to be ridiculed and besmirched for some time, and the wounds will heal, leaving only scars. A few decade's time, she will want to become a teacher / administrator, so she can right the wrongs of her predecessors; and after many years of being pushed around by a system that frankly doesn't care about her now anymore than it did when she was a child, the light will go out in her soul at an inopportune time, during which she will commit a similar act to some young thing, and the cycle will begin anew. She will realize her mistake all too late to correct it, and spend the rest of her life trying to come to terms with an opportunity come and gone.
I wish I had advice to dispense here, but I haven't found any that works in circumstances like these. I'd like to say that something will come from this, that there will be no scars, that good will triumph over evil, that everyone will learn some sort of valuable lesson, and that it will be the right one, but experience has taught me that good only triumphs over evil in fairy tales.
Seconded.
Interesting. I've checked out what he said, and it does appear Steam needs you to do some prep work (one time per game) + login into your account before switching to Offline mode.
Does anyone feel like contacting Gabe, and asking him to fix this? Locally cached user info might be a good fix.
Two points:
1.) No one said it was trivial, but for a capable researcher who has spent a fair portion of their life dealing with decompilers (and writing a few of their own), they probably have an idea how to do it fairly quickly.
2.) While it's possible to walk-through reams of Assembly code, it's painful. Extremely painful. A 100-line 'function' in Assembly code will cause most programmers to pause, and a 100,000 lines of Assembly code ('functions' and all) will break even the most vigilant of programmers. The human mind just does not like holding 100,000 variables actively in working memory (whether it can actually do that is open to some debate). 100,000 lines in Assembly is 2,000 lines in a higher-level languages, segmented properly so the human brain doesn't crash.
Or just a regular code obfuscator.
Because it annoys the PhDs, that's why they care.
Think about it. We use high-level languages because it expresses an idea in fewer words. If I call a TextBox control in C#, that's simpler than the equivalent in Assembly. These people, of course, are annoyed, because without knowing what the higher language was (assuming there was one used), it will take their minds years to analyze what exactly the code is dong; whereas if they knew what the higher language was, they could create a decompiler, and have something approaching the original source code in a few weeks / months.
Pity. If they had offered more, they probably would have had the industry at their command.
Right, going back to dotless TCP/IP address.
Hmm. I thought the replacement retained the warranty from the original drive.
So the model I'd potentially want is going for half a kidney. Got it.
My personal favorite is when you're trying to RMA the hard drive, and the person on the other end has you run a bunch of diagnostics that say the drive is fine.
It's like, come on guys, I am a tech, my case has its side off more often than on, I've spent a fair amount of my life tending to the needs and wants to a number of machines that have found their way to me...I know what the usual sounds those hard drives are supposed to make, having been running them for over a year, and one of them has suddenly started making scratching noises. Your diagnostics will be giving me a green light right while the drive drops / corrupts data and disappears randomly from the OS's view, right up until the day it's suddenly no longer detected. Even Windows will think something is wrong with the drive before your diagnostic program will.
I had to run the m*therf*cking acoustic test on one of Seagate's (or was it Maxtor's) drive before it would give me a code to send the thing in. Show of hands from the people who know how long it takes to run that test, with the machine unusable while you're running it.
Let's see here. Rather than takes Valve's approach to things (they are actually successfully competing against 'free,' which is the technological equivalent of making a river flow upstream), they instead take the most ass-way possible to providing 'backups' to customers.
It's like they have some form of a powerful character disorder, where they can see others profiting (legally) through content distribution systems, but can't quite grasp the concept that they need to deliver the content, with minimal fuss, at acceptable pricing, to their customers in order to get some green. Their attempts to create 'new' systems compares favorably with the "Supervisor" sketch from AQHF -> they aren't really new, but for some reason the people creating them think they are. "That's it boys, the problem with the previous system isn't that the customers hated being treated like dogs, it's that the interface wasn't shiny / restrictive enough!"
Allow me to help you with the right DRM system design, since you seem to be suffering from an inability to figure it out yourselves. 1.) The customer should be able to access said content in an off-line mode, without having to provide a fingerprint / urine analysis, 2.) the content should be downloaded to the customer's machine (f*ck streaming), 3.) (and this is key) ensure that you actually keep said content updated (studio releases a change to a scene, because they left a mic visible somewhere? automatically send that out), 4.) ensure pricing (monthly, seasonal) deals (actual deals, not the pathetic jokes that you wish were deals); why? because it undercuts the people who might be setting up factories to stamp out that stuff on DVDs (because you know from finance & accounting, that you can erect a barrier to entry to a market by ensuring that any new players will never be able to recoup their investments; and you can even do that without having to pay off DC), 5.) do not piss off the customer, do not piss off the customer, do not piss on the customer, 6.) while I am sure that you have many other wonderful products you think that customer might be interested in, do not make them mandatory to watch before the customer can watch said purchased content (if you haven't heard the amount of b*tching that goes on whenever you sit through 30 minutes of previews at the theater, or 15 minutes on a DVD, you need only open your window...).