burried missile silos?
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 0
"Unfortunately, just about every plane taking off or landing at Washington's Reagan National Airport goes over the Pentagon. There wasn't enough time between them realizing they weren't trying to land and the plane crashing to do much of anything about it."
I may be wrong but dosn't the white house have some form of burried miniture missile silos on the front lawn? Some kind of SAM rockets or something? Why wouldn't the Pentagon one of the world's most secure facilities have something like that?
First time I got to post about the ideas. Some little comments and some clarifications:
1. I can possibly see how a bunch of idiots were able to take down the WTC but the Pentagon? How hard is it exactly to use radar and determine the flight path of a plane? What about missile intercepts?
2. A few guys with shitty little knives don't cut it when you have over 100+ people on a plane. There should have been no contest without firearms.
Anyway this whole thing smacks of a start of totalitarian ideals. This is precisely the kind of thing (ie the restoring of "order") that fascist governments (think Italy and Weimar Germany) thrived on to get more power to the state and do foolish things. Oh well I guess it's gpg time.
"Well, this surely sheds a little more light on the Battlebots situation. The NFL analogy is a good one. CBS and Fox have no rights to the NFL name. They only pay $100's of millions for the right to broadcast the games. So it's not Comedy Central that is not suing the kid, but the owner of the Battlebots properties."
I really don't know if anyone has actually tried this before but technically the national forensics league (NFL) had prior use on that trademark. In theory someone might be able to do something with that.
"You should. Alan Turing is considered by some to be the father of modern Artificial Intelligence. A troubled soul whose contributions to the world included The Turing Test (to measure whether a program is artificially intelligent or not) and cracking the German Enigma cypher code during the war.http://www.math.sfu.ca/histmath/Europe/20thCen turyAD/Turing.html [math.sfu.ca] for more info."
If I recally correctly didn't Alan specifically determine the German navy's particular settings of their enigma machine and furthermore determine that they were getting enigma rotor setting via a secret little book?
Ok whatever. For me they are the saving grace of email. I don't get much personal communications.
"They are trying to do something that is handled much better elsewhere: USENET."
*uncontrolled laughter*
really? You call potentially botched message sending, inequal distribution and possible loss of messages due to news queue rollover good? Ok whatever.
"It makes much more sense to use something designed for mass distribution and discussion."
*If* it's good at it and it hasn't already been demonostrated that it isn't necessarily free of problems. The only thing against email is if someone's address bounces.
"Granted, USENET has its share of problems. It's hard to create groups/run a server and the S/N ration can get very low. Perhaps a slightly tweaked version is needed. "
Yeah they have something like that it's called SMTP
"Moderation helps but places a large burden on the moderator. Mailing lists (at least the ones I subscribe to) don't seem to have a SPAM problem nearly as large as on USENET. Perhaps because it's easy to set up a mailing list that requires registration to post. Why doesn't USENET have anything like that? "
Design flaw
"It's a complete waste of resources to have everyone in a domain store separate copies of discussion messages when one USENET archive could be available to all. "
I mentioned rollover not to mention the current lack of archieving in usenet right now for all but the most important groups.
"What's the trick?"
A lot of redesigning.
"Why do most software projects (for example) use mailing lists rather than USENET?"
Because it's a safer assumption that it will work for almost everyone. Usenet access is less of a sure bet.
"How can we take back USENET?"
people have been debating this question. My opinion: make it more open. Make more open portals and free methods to access it (ie. mailandnews.com which unfortunately is having a problem with it's newsfeet: any light?). And make sure they carry almost all the groups you can think of. And maybe have a nice public archive service at least for the text groups.
"Huh? Can you give us one example of Email veering out of control and hitting someone?"
it's a metaphorical device
"Or even just veering out of control?"
Spending obcessive ammounts of time on it
"How, exactly, would that work? "
*fade in*
*bevis and butthead are sitting in front of their computer*
Bevis: He he cool! We to to email and stuff
Butthead: dude!
and the like
"A simple communications tool? Jon [isi.edu] wouldn't have taken offense, he wasn't like that, but he should have. "
it's all about the perseptions
"And spam and commercial harassment. Don't forget to list the most frequent uses first. "
frankly I don't think that in the age of procmail and other related products unix users and others who have similar products should keep complaining.
Unless you get a really low rate of email that it needs to have constant levels of spam.
"E-mail is overwhelming Aol Instant Messenger? "
I would have to state that AIM is really anoying. I used AOL probably once in my entire life and never actually got around to turning the damn thing off. All sorts of interjections.
"..using letters, instead of the crude voice signals they had to use eighy years ago. "
80 years ago people didn't have the chance to talk to *anyone* *anywhere* it was just a function of who was on what grid. Try telegraph lines and that's maybe a llittle better. Think of human delivered email.
" take it back, this article just veered out of control. It ran me over. "
it's just a metaphor please reference the definition and then make another comment
"Writing a story about how email affects people to a bunch of nerds that have been using email since the old BBS's??"
I can admit that email really dosn't have that much effect on my life as yet.
"What kind of comment am I supposed to post here?
Email has affected me! "
And maybe why
"Its worse than preaching to a choir, its insane."
I wouldn't go that far
"I imagine that there are good stories being rejected so I can spend time reading this story."
That's the breaks. There are brobably thousands of stories that you would never see. Unless you want to spent say 5 seconds on each one to have thousands that you desire
"How do you get 4000 unread messages you ask? Well, you only have so much time, so you skim through your mail reading the most obvioulsy important and "saving the rest for later". Repeat for many months, and viola, you can't look at your email without feeling a sense of guilt and dread. Then, once a year or so I would hold my breath, select all and delete. Aaaah."
That just makes me wince I wonder how many people like this it takes until email will get a genuinely good rep as a communications medium.
You know what I mean. If you send an email to some places/persons you usually get almost nothing back. A letter is needed. It's more official and people tend unfortunately take you more seriously.
"Why do so many young people feel the need to stay glued to their screens playing mindless drivel games like 'Ultima online', 'Baldur's Gate', 'Tekken Tag' and 'Kamakazi F-zero US destroyer' ? "
Maybe doing work all the time stinks. Most of the really interesting stuff in CS is kept difficult to understand or code and never makes it's way out of technical journals.
" I would not mind if it were just stupid redneck Americans playing these games, but even educated nations such as Great Britain and Japan now seem to be obsessed with these semi-pornographic games."
Not every American is a red neck and quite frankly I find it hard to believe that people in Europe don't have people of that class.
"All this simulated violence day in, day out cannot help but influence children and young adults into becoming Columbine-style misfits. I don't want my country to be populated by moronic juvenile adults whose idea of fun is dismembering a computer-generated image of another human being."
Oh sure the European who thinks nothing of the most intellectual persuits? Come on Europe is usually at the forefront of controversial philosphical and intellectual forces that are usually not all that good for mankind (ie. Communism, Faciasm, Dadaism, etc).
"It would be nice if slashdot would for once post an article that was critical of violence in video games."
Maybe because not many people believe it really has any statistical correlation and that most of the violence is maybe statistaical outliers and not worthy of consideration in a scientific manner? Oh that kind of information.
"Anyway, don't think I am some religious nutball. I last went to church over 2 weeks ago, I just feel I have to add my voice to the growing millions who feel video games have gone too far."
As a European you have a greater propensity to know about your own ancient histroy. So you missed church one week to watch a cricket match and drink beer. Do I really care?
There has been much more problems with so called "Christian" values and the world. Take a look at the Byzantine empire. Basically they used all the tactics of Snidly Wiplash and angered a great many people to get what they want. Basically they bribed their way to survive. The end was also ghastly.
Point being religion is not a good basis for a rational person to base his life on.
"The graphic portrayal of gory slaughter of innocent men, women, children and animals in these so-called games is a sick indictment of America, and in my opinion only a culture as bankrupt as the USA's could have spawned such unspeakable filth."
Oh come on this isn't some game like "Home Invasion 3d" or some such. The people who get killed are usually very deserving of getting killed. Quake has a very easy to villify group called the Strogg who committed a massive group of hostile actions culminating in the invasion of earth and it's territories and killed millions. Then they killed the invasion force sent to eliminate them. They fight at every turn and then decide to torture/execute the downed pilots. What more of a rational justification do you need for killing them? Of course the European thing would be to have tea and crumpets with them and do a little psychoanalysis but that dosn't fly in most logical circles.
"I think its about time Britain banned all American video games, until the producers demonstrate a little social responsibility. Only then will their hands be free of the blood of the children."
Again no statistical correlation to anything at all. People will be more likely to shoot others if they have been mercissely bullied than if they play a round of Quake.
Why can't the X people be bothered to actually include support for the older cards that they said they would put back into the original source? My S3 Trio64 chip isn't supported and therefore prevents the newly hyped release.
"Can somebody please tell me how anonymous tracking data can possibly be considered a privacy violation to anyone other than black-helicopter conspiracy nuts? "
getting to it
"Does it really hurt anybody if advertisers know that 35% of Simpsons viewers also watch ER (or whatever)?"
it psychologically profiles people to determine how to create majority oriented programming which decreases the value of television.
"How does this hurt me? Nobody got my name. Nobody got my phone number. I lost nothing. My privacy wasn't even invaded, because all they know is that some people like watching certain shows in certain proportions. "
*shudders* I seriously doubt you want the viewing habits of the majority making moves on the minority. I will seriously stop watching almost anything on fox if they decide to put one of these stupid little voyeuristic "reality" shows on again or "World's Scarriest Enemas" or whatever
"I really don't see the problem. I want them to know what shows I watch. That way they might make more of them."
Dumbing down television and it's associated programming is a war crime.
Not everyone can write (or has enough hours in the day) to write everything that they need to have on a particular OS. That's the one reason I switched from dos/win3.11 for linux was the application support and support for legacy hardware and minimal sys requirements.
"Like they're any better under Linux. Terminal windows mysteriously die. Navigator crashes constantly. GNOME crashes while it's crashing, and then crashes again. "
Man you really must have some flaky hardware. Or a crappy distro. try debian for some up to date linux apps. And if the software dies on you submit a bug report and make sure it gets fixed. The community needs all the help it can get.
"I'd say Windows users are getting a pretty true-to-life introduction."
more like a biased picture through rose coloured glasses
"Well bitch, don't be so fucking lazy and code it up yourself. Isn't that the beauty of Open Source? "
Well bitch here's the rundown.
1. learning all the ins and outs of the kernel is a full time job in itself. I don't have the time to spend 6 months learning exactly what goes where.
2. C coding is not taught in any standard form in current university settings. I have learned Pascal, C++, bash, ksh, and csh but I never touched C because it wasn't formally taught.
3. Writing kernel code is approximately 200% harder and more precise than writing an application program.
4. I don't have expertise levels of OS design.
Those things being stated I feel that at least on the surface once those things have been removed it wouldn't take say Linux or Alan Cox much more than 5 minutes of their time to get it working once and for all. Basically you just have something sitting above the call to storing or writing data and have your favorite compression algorithm there to act as an intermediary.
"I miss the old BBS's... I had such good times playing games as a kid, leaving messages for people, trading files... I found about about the Internet because of the BBS's we had connected to things like FIDOnet and other mail-forwarding services. I had a shell account as a result of the BBS's in my town. In fact, one of the comic shops on the West side of town who ran a great board called the Jester's Court (name of the store too) just closed a few months ago I guess. "
Having dealt with BBSes and their kin I can safely say that having to pay possible long distance charges and having forced periods of connectivity and file transfer quotas are not good things in the least. The internet and unmetered access is the best thing that ever happened to network computing. The network is meant to be a public resource not a collection of fiefdoms.
I really wish the freenet project would get up a little more steam and start creating say a nice Freenet to web interface and start having a community. Uncrackable and undestructable and totally anonymous!
Well I guess I must be the first to actually post something serious about the korn shell. Having been forced to program in pdksh because of a lack of actually having access to ksh93 in debian I wonder where one can actually get it?
"There are two ways to answer this; one is by paraphrasing the man himself. Games programming is one of the last bastions of 'pure' code; you can write from scratch, and optimisation counts. I stopped being interested in programming when Windows was becoming ubiquitous; I don't like using other people's libraries. So as Obi-wan would say, games programming does transcend; from a certain point of view."
I thought most people no adays who work as programmers usually had to use the libraries of others. I sure see that when I look at several hundered such libraries needed by various programs.
"As for the fulfilment: the big software that keeps hospitals running is first and foremost accountancy software. I've written this sort of thing, and it's soul-destroying work. Knowing that it was used in a hospital and was helping keep people alive would have made the pill a little less bitter, but not by much."
The tool is neutral. I see little way in which writing a program could destroy my soul unless I kept failing to be able to actually solve the problem and the compiler kept bitching at me and this continued over a very long time then yes it would destroy my soul. To be perfectly honest I am in CS not for the fun but for the possibility of a job. I have other interests which are more fun and interesting but I just don't have the nerve to approach them.
"Are games trivial? Of course they are. How many people do you know who wouldn't benefit from reading a book or visiting a museum rather than fragging ass?"
Not all games are FPS games. Many RPGs have a deep and meaningful plot which is very enjoyable and are usually my first choice for a game genre to look at when buying. Games are only made for a while and will eventually be no more. That old museum or book will be around in some form for probably longer than I am alive.
"But much as I like reading and museuming, I still like crushing the weak underfoot, and consider that aspect of my character - and social life - to be one of the many traits that make me the wonderful human being that I am today."
Was that a faceous remark? How are barbarism, savagery, violence, and acting like some hard ass navy seal officer good traits to propragate?
"Is the absolute aim of each human to live longer, or to live better? If I wrote a game that brought enjoyment to millions, and pushed the envelope slightly so that future generations of games - and/or hostpital software - benefited from my insights into coding, then I'd feel pretty fulfilled."
Well long life is a plus but having a crappy long life is nothing that I would welcome. The idea is to make sure you have the same quality of life that you have now and keep that quality as you extend age.
PS. The lameness filter is really bad for quoted text and dosn't like anything that it thinks is a "troll". It must be fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
"Unfortunately, just about every plane taking off or landing at Washington's Reagan National Airport goes over the Pentagon. There wasn't enough time between them realizing they weren't trying to land and the plane crashing to do much of anything about it."
I may be wrong but dosn't the white house have some form of burried miniture missile silos on the front lawn? Some kind of SAM rockets or something? Why wouldn't the Pentagon one of the world's most secure facilities have something like that?
First time I got to post about the ideas. Some little comments and some clarifications:
1. I can possibly see how a bunch of idiots were able to take down the WTC but the Pentagon? How hard is it exactly to use radar and determine the flight path of a plane? What about missile intercepts?
2. A few guys with shitty little knives don't cut it when you have over 100+ people on a plane. There should have been no contest without firearms.
Anyway this whole thing smacks of a start of totalitarian ideals. This is precisely the kind of thing (ie the restoring of "order") that fascist governments (think Italy and Weimar Germany) thrived on to get more power to the state and do foolish things. Oh well I guess it's gpg time.
"Well, this surely sheds a little more light on the Battlebots situation. The NFL analogy is a good one. CBS and Fox have no rights to the NFL name. They only pay $100's of millions for the right to broadcast the games. So it's not Comedy Central that is not suing the kid, but the owner of the Battlebots properties."
I really don't know if anyone has actually tried this before but technically the national forensics league (NFL) had prior use on that trademark. In theory someone might be able to do something with that.
"You should. Alan Turing is considered by some to be the father of modern Artificial Intelligence. A troubled soul whose contributions to the world included The Turing Test (to measure whether a program is artificially intelligent or not) and cracking the German Enigma cypher code during the war.http://www.math.sfu.ca/histmath/Europe/20thCen turyAD/Turing.html [math.sfu.ca] for more info."
If I recally correctly didn't Alan specifically determine the German navy's particular settings of their enigma machine and furthermore determine that they were getting enigma rotor setting via a secret little book?
"As I see it, mailing lists are a big problem."
Ok whatever. For me they are the saving grace of email. I don't get much personal communications.
"They are trying to do something that is handled much better elsewhere: USENET."
*uncontrolled laughter*
really? You call potentially botched message sending, inequal distribution and possible loss of messages due to news queue rollover good? Ok whatever.
"It makes much more sense to use something designed for mass distribution and discussion."
*If* it's good at it and it hasn't already been demonostrated that it isn't necessarily free of problems. The only thing against email is if someone's address bounces.
"Granted, USENET has its share of problems. It's hard to create groups/run a server and the S/N ration can get very low. Perhaps a slightly tweaked version is needed. "
Yeah they have something like that it's called SMTP
"Moderation helps but places a large burden on the moderator. Mailing lists (at least the ones I subscribe to) don't seem to have a SPAM problem nearly as large as on USENET. Perhaps because it's easy to set up a mailing list that requires registration to post. Why doesn't USENET have anything like that? "
Design flaw
"It's a complete waste of resources to have everyone in a domain store separate copies of discussion messages when one USENET archive could be available to all. "
I mentioned rollover not to mention the current lack of archieving in usenet right now for all but the most important groups.
"What's the trick?"
A lot of redesigning.
"Why do most software projects (for example) use mailing lists rather than USENET?"
Because it's a safer assumption that it will work for almost everyone. Usenet access is less of a sure bet.
"How can we take back USENET?"
people have been debating this question. My opinion: make it more open. Make more open portals and free methods to access it (ie. mailandnews.com which unfortunately is having a problem with it's newsfeet: any light?). And make sure they carry almost all the groups you can think of. And maybe have a nice public archive service at least for the text groups.
"Huh? Can you give us one example of Email veering out of control and hitting someone?"
it's a metaphorical device
"Or even just veering out of control?"
Spending obcessive ammounts of time on it
"How, exactly, would that work? "
*fade in*
*bevis and butthead are sitting in front of their computer*
Bevis: He he cool! We to to email and stuff
Butthead: dude!
and the like
"A simple communications tool? Jon [isi.edu] wouldn't have taken offense, he wasn't like that, but he should have. "
it's all about the perseptions
"And spam and commercial harassment. Don't forget to list the most frequent uses first. "
frankly I don't think that in the age of procmail and other related products unix users and others who have similar products should keep complaining.
Unless you get a really low rate of email that it needs to have constant levels of spam.
"E-mail is overwhelming Aol Instant Messenger? "
I would have to state that AIM is really anoying. I used AOL probably once in my entire life and never actually got around to turning the damn thing off. All sorts of interjections.
"..using letters, instead of the crude voice signals they had to use eighy years ago. "
80 years ago people didn't have the chance to talk to *anyone* *anywhere* it was just a function of who was on what grid. Try telegraph lines and that's maybe a llittle better. Think of human delivered email.
" take it back, this article just veered out of control. It ran me over. "
it's just a metaphor please reference the definition and then make another comment
metaphor
"Writing a story about how email affects people to a bunch of nerds that have been using email since the old BBS's??"
I can admit that email really dosn't have that much effect on my life as yet.
"What kind of comment am I supposed to post here?
Email has affected me! "
And maybe why
"Its worse than preaching to a choir, its insane."
I wouldn't go that far
"I imagine that there are good stories being rejected so I can spend time reading this story."
That's the breaks. There are brobably thousands of stories that you would never see. Unless you want to spent say 5 seconds on each one to have thousands that you desire
it helps out
"How do you get 4000 unread messages you ask? Well, you only have so much time, so you skim through your mail reading the most obvioulsy important and "saving the rest for later". Repeat for many months, and viola, you can't look at your email without feeling a sense of guilt and dread. Then, once a year or so I would hold my breath, select all and delete. Aaaah."
That just makes me wince I wonder how many people like this it takes until email will get a genuinely good rep as a communications medium.
You know what I mean. If you send an email to some places/persons you usually get almost nothing back. A letter is needed. It's more official and people tend unfortunately take you more seriously.
It seems to me that this whole idea seems rather like the legal doctrine of entrapment and also by non lawenforcement types. Scary.
"Why do so many young people feel the need to stay glued to their screens playing mindless drivel games like 'Ultima online', 'Baldur's Gate', 'Tekken Tag' and 'Kamakazi F-zero US destroyer' ? "
Maybe doing work all the time stinks. Most of the really interesting stuff in CS is kept difficult to understand or code and never makes it's way out of technical journals.
" I would not mind if it were just stupid redneck Americans playing these games, but even educated nations such as Great Britain and Japan now seem to be obsessed with these semi-pornographic games."
Not every American is a red neck and quite frankly I find it hard to believe that people in Europe don't have people of that class.
"All this simulated violence day in, day out cannot help but influence children and young adults into becoming Columbine-style misfits. I don't want my country to be populated by moronic juvenile adults whose idea of fun is dismembering a computer-generated image of another human being."
Oh sure the European who thinks nothing of the most intellectual persuits? Come on Europe is usually at the forefront of controversial philosphical and intellectual forces that are usually not all that good for mankind (ie. Communism, Faciasm, Dadaism, etc).
"It would be nice if slashdot would for once post an article that was critical of violence in video games."
Maybe because not many people believe it really has any statistical correlation and that most of the violence is maybe statistaical outliers and not worthy of consideration in a scientific manner? Oh that kind of information.
"Anyway, don't think I am some religious nutball. I last went to church over 2 weeks ago, I just feel I have to add my voice to the growing millions who feel video games have gone too far."
As a European you have a greater propensity to know about your own ancient histroy. So you missed church one week to watch a cricket match and drink beer. Do I really care?
There has been much more problems with so called "Christian" values and the world. Take a look at the Byzantine empire. Basically they used all the tactics of Snidly Wiplash and angered a great many people to get what they want. Basically they bribed their way to survive. The end was also ghastly.
Point being religion is not a good basis for a rational person to base his life on.
"The graphic portrayal of gory slaughter of innocent men, women, children and animals in these so-called games is a sick indictment of America, and in my opinion only a culture as bankrupt as the USA's could have spawned such unspeakable filth."
Oh come on this isn't some game like "Home Invasion 3d" or some such. The people who get killed are usually very deserving of getting killed. Quake has a very easy to villify group called the Strogg who committed a massive group of hostile actions culminating in the invasion of earth and it's territories and killed millions. Then they killed the invasion force sent to eliminate them. They fight at every turn and then decide to torture/execute the downed pilots. What more of a rational justification do you need for killing them? Of course the European thing would be to have tea and crumpets with them and do a little psychoanalysis but that dosn't fly in most logical circles.
"I think its about time Britain banned all American video games, until the producers demonstrate a little social responsibility. Only then will their hands be free of the blood of the children."
Again no statistical correlation to anything at all. People will be more likely to shoot others if they have been mercissely bullied than if they play a round of Quake.
Why can't the X people be bothered to actually include support for the older cards that they said they would put back into the original source? My S3 Trio64 chip isn't supported and therefore prevents the newly hyped release.
"Can somebody please tell me how anonymous tracking data can possibly be considered a privacy violation to anyone other than black-helicopter conspiracy nuts? "
getting to it
"Does it really hurt anybody if advertisers know that 35% of Simpsons viewers also watch ER (or whatever)?"
it psychologically profiles people to determine how to create majority oriented programming which decreases the value of television.
"How does this hurt me? Nobody got my name. Nobody got my phone number. I lost nothing. My privacy wasn't even invaded, because all they know is that some people like watching certain shows in certain proportions. "
*shudders* I seriously doubt you want the viewing habits of the majority making moves on the minority. I will seriously stop watching almost anything on fox if they decide to put one of these stupid little voyeuristic "reality" shows on again or "World's Scarriest Enemas" or whatever
"I really don't see the problem. I want them to know what shows I watch. That way they might make more of them."
Dumbing down television and it's associated programming is a war crime.
Not everyone can write (or has enough hours in the day) to write everything that they need to have on a particular OS. That's the one reason I switched from dos/win3.11 for linux was the application support and support for legacy hardware and minimal sys requirements.
"Thanks, you just made my day."
I would direct your attention to debian's unstable branch and then post again please.
"Like they're any better under Linux. Terminal windows mysteriously die. Navigator crashes constantly. GNOME crashes while it's crashing, and then crashes again. "
Man you really must have some flaky hardware. Or a crappy distro. try debian for some up to date linux apps. And if the software dies on you submit a bug report and make sure it gets fixed. The community needs all the help it can get.
"I'd say Windows users are getting a pretty true-to-life introduction."
more like a biased picture through rose coloured glasses
Most of these problems are solves with a little thinking.
"Well bitch, don't be so fucking lazy and code it up yourself. Isn't that the beauty of Open Source? "
Well bitch here's the rundown.
1. learning all the ins and outs of the kernel is a full time job in itself. I don't have the time to spend 6 months learning exactly what goes where.
2. C coding is not taught in any standard form in current university settings. I have learned Pascal, C++, bash, ksh, and csh but I never touched C because it wasn't formally taught.
3. Writing kernel code is approximately 200% harder and more precise than writing an application program.
4. I don't have expertise levels of OS design.
Those things being stated I feel that at least on the surface once those things have been removed it wouldn't take say Linux or Alan Cox much more than 5 minutes of their time to get it working once and for all. Basically you just have something sitting above the call to storing or writing data and have your favorite compression algorithm there to act as an intermediary.
I hope this is more lucid than your reply.
I speak for people with small drives everywhere when I say:
When will the kernel support default compression of filesystems.
"I miss the old BBS's ... I had such good times playing games as a kid, leaving messages for people, trading files ... I found about about the Internet because of the BBS's we had connected to things like FIDOnet and other mail-forwarding services. I had a shell account as a result of the BBS's in my town. In fact, one of the comic shops on the West side of town who ran a great board called the Jester's Court (name of the store too) just closed a few months ago I guess. "
Having dealt with BBSes and their kin I can safely say that having to pay possible long distance charges and having forced periods of connectivity and file transfer quotas are not good things in the least. The internet and unmetered access is the best thing that ever happened to network computing. The network is meant to be a public resource not a collection of fiefdoms.
Now this looks promising something that works but dosn't try to make people slaves to environmentalists.
I really wish the freenet project would get up a little more steam and start creating say a nice Freenet to web interface and start having a community. Uncrackable and undestructable and totally anonymous!
Well I guess I must be the first to actually post something serious about the korn shell. Having been forced to program in pdksh because of a lack of actually having access to ksh93 in debian I wonder where one can actually get it?
"There are two ways to answer this; one is by paraphrasing the man himself. Games programming is one of the last bastions of 'pure' code; you can write from scratch, and optimisation counts. I stopped being interested in programming when Windows was becoming ubiquitous; I don't like using other people's libraries. So as Obi-wan would say, games programming does transcend; from a certain point of view."
I thought most people no adays who work as programmers usually had to use the libraries of others. I sure see that when I look at several hundered such libraries needed by various programs.
"As for the fulfilment: the big software that keeps hospitals running is first and foremost accountancy software. I've written this sort of thing, and it's soul-destroying work. Knowing that it was used in a hospital and was helping keep people alive would have made the pill a little less bitter, but not by much."
The tool is neutral. I see little way in which writing a program could destroy my soul unless I kept failing to be able to actually solve the problem and the compiler kept bitching at me and this continued over a very long time then yes it would destroy my soul. To be perfectly honest I am in CS not for the fun but for the possibility of a job. I have other interests which are more fun and interesting but I just don't have the nerve to approach them.
"Are games trivial? Of course they are. How many people do you know who wouldn't benefit from reading a book or visiting a museum rather than fragging ass?"
Not all games are FPS games. Many RPGs have a deep and meaningful plot which is very enjoyable and are usually my first choice for a game genre to look at when buying. Games are only made for a while and will eventually be no more. That old museum or book will be around in some form for probably longer than I am alive.
"But much as I like reading and museuming, I still like crushing the weak underfoot, and consider that aspect of my character - and social life - to be one of the many traits that make me the wonderful human being that I am today."
Was that a faceous remark? How are barbarism, savagery, violence, and acting like some hard ass navy seal officer good traits to propragate?
"Is the absolute aim of each human to live longer, or to live better? If I wrote a game that brought enjoyment to millions, and pushed the envelope slightly so that future generations of games - and/or hostpital software - benefited from my insights into coding, then I'd feel pretty fulfilled."
Well long life is a plus but having a crappy long life is nothing that I would welcome. The idea is to make sure you have the same quality of life that you have now and keep that quality as you extend age.
PS. The lameness filter is really bad for quoted text and dosn't like anything that it thinks is a "troll". It must be fixed.