Unfortunately, there's also nothing to compel an ISP not to hand it over anyway, just to play nice with law enforcement. If you really want privacy, you have to use proper encryption. Once you've sent it to someone else, you never know where it will end up. Anyone with access to it can CHOOSE to share it with anyone they want. It's a dark dismal world we live in.
Do you view the HTML source or DOM tree before clicking a link? Because where it looks like you're going is easy enough to fake if you control the HTML.
I used to. Until I disabled the javascript for spoofing HREFs. That was like the first javascript feature Firefox offered. Or maybe that was back in the Mozilla days. It's hard to remember that far back.
I refuse to click on any "shortened" link, because I want to know PRECISELY where I'm going to end up. Thank you Slashdot and goatse.cx. If it's important enough to go visit, it's important enough to spell out properly. And thank you, but I don't live my life via SMS, so the few extra characters is worth my piece of mind.
When I took undergraduate physics, there were no calculators allowed... there were no numbers on the exams. Problems were like "If you throw a rock horizontally off a bridge at (v) m/s and it hits the ground after (t) seconds, how far away from the base of the bridge did the rock hit the ground, and how tall is the bridge?" And then the student has to understand that this problem requires the use of the projectile motion equations, and they to know what the question is actually asking and solve for it:
w = v t
h = g t^2
One particularly sadistic (but awesome) professor asked a question like this "Suppose you're stuck in the middle of a frozen pond with a perfectly smooth (frictionless) surface. Propose a way to escape the pond." My (correctly marked) proposal was throw away a shoe. Of course, I could show equations for conservation of momentum, but the point was to see if students understood what it meant to be a frictionless surface and to simply be aware of conservation of momentum.
Building new may make you feel better about yourself, but it's definitely not the best option for the environment, by far.
I think you may be confused here. I'm going to build a new house, and that is a foregone conclusion. The two choices are build it conventionally, or built it using modern, less environmentally-abominable techniques. Obviously, the second choice is greener than the first choice. That is what green means.
Besides, if I can build my home entirely off the grid, and have enough land to raise my own food, I think I'm doing the world a much bigger favor than if I live in one of those "urban centers" that packs a population into an area that is incapable of supporting it. The biggest green thing you can do, is massively reduce population density.
You urban center requires electricity to be shipped in, since you don't have enough surface area to support wind or solar on site. It requires water to be treated remotely and shipped in, but then also to have waste shipped out, and expensive (and often futile) methods of controlling run-off when that system is overwhelmed. It requires food and all other goods to be trucked in, because urban centers have no means of food production, and no one wants to live in an area with heavy manufacturing. Your urban centers have to have an abundance of jobs to be useful, except that the big employers in food production and manufacturing have to be somewhere else. That means only the high paying information jobs and low paying service jobs are located in your urban center. That generally leads to the people with low paying service jobs (including teachers) not being able to afford to actually live there, and end up commuting in from the suburbs or less sophisticated un-renovated urban centers anyway.
While studying linguistics at the university level, I came across this quaint notion of "descriptive" vs "prescriptive" linguistics. The point was that the idea of "prescribing" a fixed set of rules for language is completely archaic, and that, like it or not, language is continuously evolving, and the best thing to do is to try to understand why and how it evolves. A useful dictionary should be updated to contain new forms and vocabulary, so that when you see something you don't understand, you can go look it up.
If you disagree, then perhaps you'd prefer to speak Middle English? Or Old English? Or Proto-Indo-European?
"Wall wart" refers to the plastic box containing a transformer that plugs into the wall a produces a low voltage DC output on a cord that plugs into a device. The usage here is as a form factor -- where the whole computer fits in a plastic box that plugs directly into the wall. I've been following plug computers for a long time, and the ones that are shaped like that often refer to the form factor as "computer in a wall wart".
1. Do you play windowed or full screen? If you do fullscreen, how do you get it to change resolutions? (It always whines for me that it can't change resolutions). If you do windowed, how do you get it to trap the mouse so the mouse scrolling is actually usable?
I play full screen. I have a Dell Latitude D830 with a widescreen display and nvidia Quadro NVS 140M graphics card, running Ubuntu 8.10 with the restricted drivers. There's a program called nvidia-settings, which allows you to configure your X server. If you go down through the options, there's a setting for "Flat Panel Scaling", and I set it to "Aspect Ratio Scaled" — the default is "Stretched". If you set it to scaled, you'll get full screen apps running with the correct aspect ratio, and in the case of StarCraft, you get vertical black bars on the left and right, and the game looks perfect. The only trick is you have to remember to load up the settings each time you log in by running "nvidia-settings -l". I used to have a system with ATI graphics, and it had a similar configuration option.
2. What version of wine are you using? The recent ones I've tried make Starcraft run really slowly, but I've heard that certain older versions work Ok.
I'm using the vanilla wine that comes from the Ubuntu repository, wine-1.0.1 (though a more recent version of Ubuntu might have a more up-to-date version of wine). My system is wicked fast, but it ran fine under wine even on my old laptop from 2001 (which I retired because the case wore out, not because the system specs were in any way inadequate). The only real difficulty was getting the sound to work properly. In winecfg, I selected "Emulation" for the hardware acceleration, checked "Driver Emulation", and chose the OSS Driver from the choices at the top. I have no idea how or why it works — I spent many, many hours trying various combinations and that's the configuration that ended up working.
3. Do you play on battle.net?
This one was tricky — I'd basically given up on it, until at a LAN party a couple months ago, one of my friends pointed out that the real problem was that I didn't have the latest patches. And the patch installer simply doesn't work under wine. In the end, I copied the important files from my friend's fully updated installation. These are the files I copied:
BNUpdate.exe
BroodWar.mpq
SEditPTG.loc
Readme.cnt
License.txt
License.html
InstCC.exe
StarCraft.exe
StarDat.mpq
patch_rt.mpq
battle.snp
standard.snp
storm.dll
After that, I had no trouble connecting to BattleNet.
I haven't actually tried StarCraft II... I'm perpetually about five years behind, so it's likely to be a while before I actually get to it. Anyway, I hope this info helps you out!
The only thing I use wine for is to play StarCraft, which it does really well. I don't know how good Wine 1.2 is, but call me when it supports StarCraft II.
this is a case of Verizon forgetting who they work for. They work for the Customers
I'm sure you're being sarcastic, but I'd like to point out that big companies work for their shareholders and NO ONE else. If they can maximize the profit for their shareholders by biting the heads of kittens, they will, and they don't care one bit what anyone else thinks, especially not customers.
Do notice all the tire tracks that don't lead into the parking spot? Like all of the robotics projects I've been involved in, this took a LOT of tries.
Wow, those are all of the things that keep me on Firefox/Linux and away from IE/Windows. I don't WANT anyone else screwing with my computer. I don't care how smart you think you are. If I have to work on my computer, I want it to do what *I* want it to do.
Oh joy, another visually stunning film with a disjointed script, mixing Tolkien's brilliant timeless dialog with flat modern drivel penned by Fran Walsh. And the sequel... that's just going to be visually stunning with drivel for plot and dialog.
It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't screw up the plot and dialog so badly. Ugh.
How is that sad? When someone says Final Fantasy, I can only assume they mean the original NES version from 1987, which I bought then, and still play now. I'm afraid I never upgraded to any of these newer fancy-pants systems. I miss the class NES games, and I wish they'd make new games with new stories with the original engine and style of game play. Newer games are too busy and their graphics just give me a headache.
Actually, most libraries refuse to even KEEP those kinds of records, so that they are simply UNABLE to comply with that sort of subpoena. The library knows what you have on hold, and what you currently have checked out, but they do not keep your histories.
Actually, Dirty Jobs and Mythbusters are two of my favorite shows. I *like* watching people blow stuff up, I just don't want anyone confusing it with "educational" - Discovery is a for-profit entertainment network. It drives me batty when the Mythbusters spend weeks working on a build that obviously won't work, because they don't have a physicist on staff. Dirty Jobs actually IS educational, probably the best "reality" show on television... but there's a lot of stuff on Discovery that is just really gimmicky and awful, like using high end computer graphics to animate theoretical fights between dinosaurs (where the science is really cool, but the program spends three seconds on science, and the rest on dino death match), or those horrifyingly bad supernatural shows (which have less science than Ghostbusters).
I don't WANT NASA TV to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The Discovery Channel used to be educational... now it's "how can we use science to blow shit up?" MTV used to be music videos... now it's the Shiny Things Network(c). I tune to NASA TV when I actually want to see what's ACTUALLY going on, narrated by someone who actually has some idea of what they're talking about, without going through an "audience is retarded" filter. If you don't find it interesting, fine, wait a few days, and read the brain-dead version in one of the mass media outlets. CNN will be happy to distill six hours of interesting live coverage down to a 30 second clip that you can digest will drinking your Starbucks. NASA TV is what it is for a good reason. The cameras are always on, and when something interesting, but unexpected happens, you get to watch it unfold. Keep your Hollywood ideas off my Nerdovision.
SPF is great. It's one of the technical means of making sure that the IP address that is trying to send you a message is authorized to use the sender that it claims to be from. That means you can automatically reject spam that claims to be from any of the big mailers.
One common problem right now, is misconfigured mail servers. An e-mail admin configures the SPF entry in DNS, and then forgets about it. Then they change their IP address, or they outsource their e-mail to a third party, and suddenly, SPF is saying that all of their legit mail is not legit. The other problem is when a company has (for example) an order fulfillment system that generates its own e-mails, instead of routing them through the proper mail server. If that system isn't identified in the SPF entry, those messages can be rejected.
Another "problem" is when organizations send messages on behalf of other individuals or organizations (like the legit message that avon.com tried to send me this morning that was being generated by filltek.com, but without the permission of avon.com's SPF entry). I put "problem" in quotes, because really, third party messaging services should not forge the From line of the message.
On the other hand, it's great, in that it blocks all those stupid e-cards, because they claim to be from your.friend@gmail.com, when really they're being sent by stupid-e-card.com.
The biggest problem is dealing with "forwarding" services, like your @acm.org e-mail address. On my server, I have to keep a list of domains that "bypass" SPF checks, because any message sent to a forwarded address is going to arrive at your mail server from the forwarded (i.e. mail.acm.org), but it's going to have the header information associated with the original message. OpenSPF.org talks about some ways to deal with this, but I haven't look at it in a while.
Since SPF is still not universally accepted, it has a "soft fail" option that you can use for testing, until you're sure that it works the way you want it to. It's not the be-all-and-end-all, but it is a useful piece of the puzzle.
I'll always take 90 minutes of vertigo and manhandling my "duck" reflex over 3 hours of robots arguing about matrices and sparks
It took me a second, but I think you're referring to a Transformers movie... and I can only imagine you don't realize that there was an epic animated version released back in the 80s that didn't suck. Go find a copy, and revel in Orson Welles last great role. In stunning Two Dimensions!
The Hackers Diet is awesome. I've never been fat, but I did put on a bit of weight in the years approaching my 30th birthday. In the past four months, I've painlessly lost 15 pounds on the Hackers Diet, and I expect to lose most of the last ten by the end of the year. But building muscle mass definitely helps, as it raises your base metabolic rate, meaning you will burn calories faster in general (or in my case, eat a bit more, while still losing weight).
I avoid 3D movies, and I'll avoid 3D video. Generally the 3D technology is only used for "gag" effects in children's and horror movies anyway. And regardless of how good the effect is, I am not wearing any moldy 3D glasses out of the 1980s for any reason.
I'm a liberal because the First Amendment is dear to me. I vote Democrat for that reason. But the Second Amendment is equally important to me, and you are correct on every point.
It's also hard for me to bitch out Microsoft while I am forced to tell people who actually want to use websites with flash (such as full screen youtube) that they can't use Linux.
I dunno, I haven't used Microsoft in ages... but my Linux (Ubuntu) boxes never seem to have a problem with full screen youtube videos. Not for years.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, there's also nothing to compel an ISP not to hand it over anyway, just to play nice with law enforcement. If you really want privacy, you have to use proper encryption. Once you've sent it to someone else, you never know where it will end up. Anyone with access to it can CHOOSE to share it with anyone they want. It's a dark dismal world we live in.
I used to. Until I disabled the javascript for spoofing HREFs. That was like the first javascript feature Firefox offered. Or maybe that was back in the Mozilla days. It's hard to remember that far back.
I refuse to click on any "shortened" link, because I want to know PRECISELY where I'm going to end up. Thank you Slashdot and goatse.cx. If it's important enough to go visit, it's important enough to spell out properly. And thank you, but I don't live my life via SMS, so the few extra characters is worth my piece of mind.
When I took undergraduate physics, there were no calculators allowed... there were no numbers on the exams. Problems were like "If you throw a rock horizontally off a bridge at (v) m/s and it hits the ground after (t) seconds, how far away from the base of the bridge did the rock hit the ground, and how tall is the bridge?" And then the student has to understand that this problem requires the use of the projectile motion equations, and they to know what the question is actually asking and solve for it:
w = v t
h = g t^2
One particularly sadistic (but awesome) professor asked a question like this "Suppose you're stuck in the middle of a frozen pond with a perfectly smooth (frictionless) surface. Propose a way to escape the pond." My (correctly marked) proposal was throw away a shoe. Of course, I could show equations for conservation of momentum, but the point was to see if students understood what it meant to be a frictionless surface and to simply be aware of conservation of momentum.
I don't have any mod points, so I just wanted to say thank you.
I think you may be confused here. I'm going to build a new house, and that is a foregone conclusion. The two choices are build it conventionally, or built it using modern, less environmentally-abominable techniques. Obviously, the second choice is greener than the first choice. That is what green means.
Besides, if I can build my home entirely off the grid, and have enough land to raise my own food, I think I'm doing the world a much bigger favor than if I live in one of those "urban centers" that packs a population into an area that is incapable of supporting it. The biggest green thing you can do, is massively reduce population density.
You urban center requires electricity to be shipped in, since you don't have enough surface area to support wind or solar on site. It requires water to be treated remotely and shipped in, but then also to have waste shipped out, and expensive (and often futile) methods of controlling run-off when that system is overwhelmed. It requires food and all other goods to be trucked in, because urban centers have no means of food production, and no one wants to live in an area with heavy manufacturing. Your urban centers have to have an abundance of jobs to be useful, except that the big employers in food production and manufacturing have to be somewhere else. That means only the high paying information jobs and low paying service jobs are located in your urban center. That generally leads to the people with low paying service jobs (including teachers) not being able to afford to actually live there, and end up commuting in from the suburbs or less sophisticated un-renovated urban centers anyway.
Yeah, I'll pass on the urban centers.
While studying linguistics at the university level, I came across this quaint notion of "descriptive" vs "prescriptive" linguistics. The point was that the idea of "prescribing" a fixed set of rules for language is completely archaic, and that, like it or not, language is continuously evolving, and the best thing to do is to try to understand why and how it evolves. A useful dictionary should be updated to contain new forms and vocabulary, so that when you see something you don't understand, you can go look it up.
If you disagree, then perhaps you'd prefer to speak Middle English? Or Old English? Or Proto-Indo-European?
"Wall wart" refers to the plastic box containing a transformer that plugs into the wall a produces a low voltage DC output on a cord that plugs into a device. The usage here is as a form factor -- where the whole computer fits in a plastic box that plugs directly into the wall. I've been following plug computers for a long time, and the ones that are shaped like that often refer to the form factor as "computer in a wall wart".
1. Do you play windowed or full screen? If you do fullscreen, how do you get it to change resolutions? (It always whines for me that it can't change resolutions). If you do windowed, how do you get it to trap the mouse so the mouse scrolling is actually usable?
I play full screen. I have a Dell Latitude D830 with a widescreen display and nvidia Quadro NVS 140M graphics card, running Ubuntu 8.10 with the restricted drivers. There's a program called nvidia-settings, which allows you to configure your X server. If you go down through the options, there's a setting for "Flat Panel Scaling", and I set it to "Aspect Ratio Scaled" — the default is "Stretched". If you set it to scaled, you'll get full screen apps running with the correct aspect ratio, and in the case of StarCraft, you get vertical black bars on the left and right, and the game looks perfect. The only trick is you have to remember to load up the settings each time you log in by running "nvidia-settings -l". I used to have a system with ATI graphics, and it had a similar configuration option.
2. What version of wine are you using? The recent ones I've tried make Starcraft run really slowly, but I've heard that certain older versions work Ok.
I'm using the vanilla wine that comes from the Ubuntu repository, wine-1.0.1 (though a more recent version of Ubuntu might have a more up-to-date version of wine). My system is wicked fast, but it ran fine under wine even on my old laptop from 2001 (which I retired because the case wore out, not because the system specs were in any way inadequate). The only real difficulty was getting the sound to work properly. In winecfg, I selected "Emulation" for the hardware acceleration, checked "Driver Emulation", and chose the OSS Driver from the choices at the top. I have no idea how or why it works — I spent many, many hours trying various combinations and that's the configuration that ended up working.
3. Do you play on battle.net?
This one was tricky — I'd basically given up on it, until at a LAN party a couple months ago, one of my friends pointed out that the real problem was that I didn't have the latest patches. And the patch installer simply doesn't work under wine. In the end, I copied the important files from my friend's fully updated installation. These are the files I copied:
After that, I had no trouble connecting to BattleNet.
I haven't actually tried StarCraft II... I'm perpetually about five years behind, so it's likely to be a while before I actually get to it. Anyway, I hope this info helps you out!
-brian
The only thing I use wine for is to play StarCraft, which it does really well. I don't know how good Wine 1.2 is, but call me when it supports StarCraft II.
I'm sure you're being sarcastic, but I'd like to point out that big companies work for their shareholders and NO ONE else. If they can maximize the profit for their shareholders by biting the heads of kittens, they will, and they don't care one bit what anyone else thinks, especially not customers.
Do notice all the tire tracks that don't lead into the parking spot? Like all of the robotics projects I've been involved in, this took a LOT of tries.
Wow, those are all of the things that keep me on Firefox/Linux and away from IE/Windows. I don't WANT anyone else screwing with my computer. I don't care how smart you think you are. If I have to work on my computer, I want it to do what *I* want it to do.
Oh joy, another visually stunning film with a disjointed script, mixing Tolkien's brilliant timeless dialog with flat modern drivel penned by Fran Walsh. And the sequel... that's just going to be visually stunning with drivel for plot and dialog.
It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't screw up the plot and dialog so badly. Ugh.
How is that sad? When someone says Final Fantasy, I can only assume they mean the original NES version from 1987, which I bought then, and still play now. I'm afraid I never upgraded to any of these newer fancy-pants systems. I miss the class NES games, and I wish they'd make new games with new stories with the original engine and style of game play. Newer games are too busy and their graphics just give me a headache.
Actually, most libraries refuse to even KEEP those kinds of records, so that they are simply UNABLE to comply with that sort of subpoena. The library knows what you have on hold, and what you currently have checked out, but they do not keep your histories.
Um, I'm American, and I agree with you.
Actually, Dirty Jobs and Mythbusters are two of my favorite shows. I *like* watching people blow stuff up, I just don't want anyone confusing it with "educational" - Discovery is a for-profit entertainment network. It drives me batty when the Mythbusters spend weeks working on a build that obviously won't work, because they don't have a physicist on staff. Dirty Jobs actually IS educational, probably the best "reality" show on television... but there's a lot of stuff on Discovery that is just really gimmicky and awful, like using high end computer graphics to animate theoretical fights between dinosaurs (where the science is really cool, but the program spends three seconds on science, and the rest on dino death match), or those horrifyingly bad supernatural shows (which have less science than Ghostbusters).
I don't WANT NASA TV to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The Discovery Channel used to be educational... now it's "how can we use science to blow shit up?" MTV used to be music videos... now it's the Shiny Things Network(c). I tune to NASA TV when I actually want to see what's ACTUALLY going on, narrated by someone who actually has some idea of what they're talking about, without going through an "audience is retarded" filter. If you don't find it interesting, fine, wait a few days, and read the brain-dead version in one of the mass media outlets. CNN will be happy to distill six hours of interesting live coverage down to a 30 second clip that you can digest will drinking your Starbucks. NASA TV is what it is for a good reason. The cameras are always on, and when something interesting, but unexpected happens, you get to watch it unfold. Keep your Hollywood ideas off my Nerdovision.
SPF is great. It's one of the technical means of making sure that the IP address that is trying to send you a message is authorized to use the sender that it claims to be from. That means you can automatically reject spam that claims to be from any of the big mailers.
One common problem right now, is misconfigured mail servers. An e-mail admin configures the SPF entry in DNS, and then forgets about it. Then they change their IP address, or they outsource their e-mail to a third party, and suddenly, SPF is saying that all of their legit mail is not legit. The other problem is when a company has (for example) an order fulfillment system that generates its own e-mails, instead of routing them through the proper mail server. If that system isn't identified in the SPF entry, those messages can be rejected.
Another "problem" is when organizations send messages on behalf of other individuals or organizations (like the legit message that avon.com tried to send me this morning that was being generated by filltek.com, but without the permission of avon.com's SPF entry). I put "problem" in quotes, because really, third party messaging services should not forge the From line of the message.
On the other hand, it's great, in that it blocks all those stupid e-cards, because they claim to be from your.friend@gmail.com, when really they're being sent by stupid-e-card.com.
The biggest problem is dealing with "forwarding" services, like your @acm.org e-mail address. On my server, I have to keep a list of domains that "bypass" SPF checks, because any message sent to a forwarded address is going to arrive at your mail server from the forwarded (i.e. mail.acm.org), but it's going to have the header information associated with the original message. OpenSPF.org talks about some ways to deal with this, but I haven't look at it in a while.
Since SPF is still not universally accepted, it has a "soft fail" option that you can use for testing, until you're sure that it works the way you want it to. It's not the be-all-and-end-all, but it is a useful piece of the puzzle.
It took me a second, but I think you're referring to a Transformers movie... and I can only imagine you don't realize that there was an epic animated version released back in the 80s that didn't suck. Go find a copy, and revel in Orson Welles last great role. In stunning Two Dimensions!
The Hackers Diet is awesome. I've never been fat, but I did put on a bit of weight in the years approaching my 30th birthday. In the past four months, I've painlessly lost 15 pounds on the Hackers Diet, and I expect to lose most of the last ten by the end of the year. But building muscle mass definitely helps, as it raises your base metabolic rate, meaning you will burn calories faster in general (or in my case, eat a bit more, while still losing weight).
I avoid 3D movies, and I'll avoid 3D video. Generally the 3D technology is only used for "gag" effects in children's and horror movies anyway. And regardless of how good the effect is, I am not wearing any moldy 3D glasses out of the 1980s for any reason.
I'm a liberal because the First Amendment is dear to me. I vote Democrat for that reason. But the Second Amendment is equally important to me, and you are correct on every point.
I dunno, I haven't used Microsoft in ages... but my Linux (Ubuntu) boxes never seem to have a problem with full screen youtube videos. Not for years.