But of course, what a wonderful idea! Why attempted murder, that's not a crime at all! If somebody's about to kill somebody, then of course the police have no right to arrest him/her whatsoever.
Aside from the absurdity of not arresting somebody for trying to comit a crime, there's also the fact that they found kiddy porn on his laptop, the search for which he consented to.
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: 69. All midwives will be banned from the realm. All babies will be delivered at state-approved hospitals. Orphans will be placed in foster-homes, not abandoned in the woods to be raised by creatures of the wild. -- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
Isn't Jon Katz being a bit melodramatic? It's not usually his style, but this article is really bad. I found it so stupid and trite.
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: 80. If my weakest troops fail to eliminate a hero, I will send out my best troops instead of wasting time with progressively stronger ones as he gets closer and closer to my fortress. -- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
Aren't we already "apathetic, lassitudinous (is that a word?) beings incapable of anything."? People have been trained to think that because it's done on computers it's necessarily better even when this isn't the case at all.
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: 67. No matter how many shorts we have in the system, my guards will be instructed to treat every surveillance camera malfunction as a full-scale emergency. -- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
When you say that they're going to fix the problem, what do you mean they're going to do? Can you give us some details?
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: 28. My pet monster will be kept in a secure cage from which it cannot escape and into which I could not accidentally stumble. -- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
Loki just wants to get a little free slave labor. They're a closed source company that sells their software for money. In exchange for your thousands of hours of work, they want to give you the chance to win a computer. You've gotta be kidding! If they want people to help them work on their software, then they have to make it and its source freely available to all!
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: 7. When I've captured my adversary and he says, "Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?" I'll say, "No." and shoot him. No, on second thought I'll shoot him then say "No." -- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
If you started looking through the accounts of upper and middle management, I think that they'd quickly change that policy after the first few little embarrasing secrets were discovered.
Anybody know if GTK exists for W95? I'm about to develop some software for my High School (looks good on a transcript. Otherwise I'd burn the place down to the ground) and if I could give them W95 and Linux support, then I think that they'd like that. I'm trying to convert them to Linux and using it as my development platform while supporting a W95 version as well would probably be enough of an excuse to put it on at least a box or 2.
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: 91. I will not ignore the messenger that stumbles in exhausted and obviously agitated until my personal grooming or current entertainment is finished. It might actually be important. -- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: 78. I will not tell my Legions of Terror "And he must be taken alive!" The command will be "And try to take him alive if it is reasonably practical." -- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
If you were a daemon, what kind of daemon would you be and which do you think is cooler, the FreeBSD or OpenBSD Daemon?
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: 1. My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones. -- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
Do you think that Linux will ever become an enterprise class OS or will that position remain the domain of other Unices, and if so, how long do you think it will take?
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: 76. If the hero runs up to my roof, I will not run up after him and struggle with him in an attempt to push him over the edge. I will also not engage him at the edge of a cliff. (In the middle of a rope-bridge over a river of molten lava is not even worth considering.) -- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
What direction do you see RedHat going in now that they've IPO'd?
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: 26. No matter how attractive certain members of the rebellion are, there is probably someone just as attractive who is not desperate to kill me. Therefore, I will think twice before ordering a prisoner sent to my bedchamber. -- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
Well if they're using this same system, then all the passport sites will have the same URL form and you should be able to get into all of them. Just substitute an IP address.
What I'm thinking is that as M$ starts to offer more services like this, you could really fuck someboy over good by logging in to one of them and changing their password.
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: 45. I will make sure I have a clear understanding of who is responsible for what in my organization. For example, if my general screws up I will not draw my weapon, point it at him, say "And here is the price for failure," then suddenly turn and kill some random underling. -- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
I personally would love to see some more women get involved in computers and go into CS!!
1. Most important of course, it's a bit lonely as a heterosexual guy who's into computers. It'd be nice to have some more good quality potential gfs around.
2. I think that we need some more quality people in CS. Most people in this field are idiots, both male and female. Why just 2 days ago I spent 15 mins explaing to a guy in my Computer Programming class why he couldn't place a function within another function in C++. Our final is next week and all we've done is C++. Oy Vey! At least some of the other stupid people had the decency to drop out!!
3. See number 1. It'd be nice to have a few more female nerds. Some of use geeks get horny too and could use gfs who share some common interests.
Incidentally, if you're a human female ~17 who lives in the Philadelphia area (preferably near ambler), my e-mail's listed.
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: 2.My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.
From Peter's Evil Overlord List http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
*cough*RACIST*cough* Excuse me, just clearing my throat.
First of all, the idea of giving black people computers is not aimed at older people, it's aimed at people much younger. As hard as this seems to be for people to believe, young black children were never slaves. They were never taken from their homeland, put into ships, and hauled off to pick cotton for a few hundred years. They weren't oppressed. If they were born to poverty, then they have a disadvantage there, but it's the same disadvantage that a poor white child has! Why then should they be given special treatment? Who cares if they're black? I sure as hell don't!! I just care who they are & who you are is not the color of your skin. Experiences aren't inhereted. They happen for each of us on our own. That's just plain crazy talk! What the fuck is wrong w/ you?! I didn't keep anybody from opportunities 30 years ago. I wasn't even born! And none of the people you're talking about helping were either!!!
Second, "Pure Darwinism worked in the middle ages..."? Um, I'm guessing you weren't much into attending history class back when you were younger. Social Darwinism (which is what you must mean, because Darwinism is a term that speaks of genetic evolution) wasn't applicable in the least in the middle ages. That's what was wrong. People were born into a caste system with no social mobility whatsoever. In our current class system social mobility is a lot greater, as is the application of Social Darwinism. In a completely libertarian society (that's libertarian with a lower case 'l') social mobility is far greater, because government beaurocracy doesn't attempt to keep people in their place. Under the system of hand-outs to the racially impaired (as you seem to think that being black is a disability), you're really just trying to keep people in place even more so, by making it a lot harder for their individual merits to allow them to change position. Poor whites sans computers would find it almost impossible to change positions, while poor black would be moved w/o them doing anything. Quite an unequal system IMHO.
Third, I just noticed that few if any people have used the PC term "African American". Good job! That term is absolutely rediculous and even less expressive than "black" is. I personally am African American in the most literal sense, but am anything but brown (as the term most logically should be). hehe, it helps me in putting down African American in this highly biased and racist society and provides unending amusement and joy over using the system, but it's still a grossly inaccurate term and it's nice that the far more expressive term "black" is being used, though judging by some of these posts, perhaps "brown crack head w/o a father living in poverty with no motivation whatsoever" should be used. That seems to be what many mean when they say "black" including Rabbins here.
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
1.My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.
From Peter's Evil Overlord List http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
You're wrong. Completely wrong. A caste system is a system in which you're locked into your position because of birth. There is no social mobility. What this guy's saying is that he likes the idea of a class system. That would be a system which allows for you to change professions and status in society based on your ability to work to improve (or not maintain) your status. While I don't like this idea, communism doesn't work, so we're not going to get a better one. In lieu of that, this is an acceptable trade-off in which a bright and/or hard working individual can rise to the highest rungs.
So basically, you're saying that black people in general: "were born in the middle of a housing project, with 4 siblings, no idea who your father was, a mother on drugs half the time and unable to give you attention, let alone raise you, with a boyfriend that beats her and sells drugs, where you don't play outside of the house, and you're lucky to get enough food to eat, let alone nutritional food"
And you were calling that other guy racist? Hmm, anybody else notice a slight discrepency. I think that poor people in general should be given more access to computers (not necessarily through the government though), but that this should be irrespective of the color of their skin. Why should a poor underprivelaged white kid get the shaft while a poor underprivelaged black kid is given a boost up and a chance to get a good, high-paying job? I try to live my life as color blind as possible (which isn't completely possible for anybody and if they say it is, then they're lying to you or themselves) and I refuse to be racist one way or the other.
I'd love some nice old boxen! If anybody lives w/in easy driving distance of Ambler or Philly, then I'll pick up your old boxen & if you want to send them to me, then I'll take them from anywhere! laktar@hotmail.com
It sounds to me like the guy who wrote this article hasn't worked in the section of the computer games industry that makes good products. I don't know if it's that he's not a good programmer, if he's one of those people who accepts his lot in life w/o trying for any better, whether he's just unlucky, or whether it's the whole age thing, but there are a lot of really excellent games out there and many cool companies making them, including a lot of pretty big companies who/can/ afford to keep their programmers employed. Of course your outlook is going to be that computer gaming as an industry sucks to work in if you've worked on no-name projects that failed, but even if you accept his 10% success rate, then that means that he should've at least worked on a few good games.
This comment is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
I think what changes it is that there are a lot of options out there in computer games, even w/in a genre. Compare this to other software. There are very few word processors comparitively, or full operating systems. And it's pretty much impossible to form a monopoly type thing in games. They become so outdated and there's just so much in variety to worry about.
Is it just me, or is this a bit counterintuitive for everybody else out there? If you're a cracker who's bored on a Saturday night and trawling for boxes to get into and you find one that you could only get into by using some kind of brute force cracker to get in are you going to want to do that? Or, are you going to want to crack into some box you find that's mysterious & that you don't know the inner operations of? I personally would prefer to try and find the cock-ups of the designers of the STO'd system and get in that way. I have a feeling that most crackers would prefer this as well, with the exception of Script Kiddies who don't have much of a chance of getting in unless you use a poor STO based system anyway.
The example of the Navajo code talkers in WWII is a very poor one. Today that code would be cracked in no time flat. The mass of computing power and knowledge of techniques in cracking such schemes available today as well as the number of people world wide who would be working on such an interesting project would render the code broken very rapidly. How long could that code possibly last today before somebody would suggest that it was similar to some Navajo that she had heard (here I'm using she just to be contrary to the author of the article) somewhere? The code would last a few days before it was found out and maybe a few weeks before a translation program that could do a reasonable word for word translation was available. Even if it was a newly invented language, it would still follow patterns and thus be easily suceptable to automated cracking attempts. Using current schemes is completely different. Passwords must be cracked on a trial and error method. Sure it's possible that somebody comes up w/ a fast implementation for factoring, but if such a thing were to happen, then encryption schemes would change. If you notice, we don't use the same method to encrypt passwords as we did back a few years ago. Think how fast a system could be cracked if that were the truth?
I wonder if this year's contest will be on another 4 processor machine. I think something like that makes it a bit unfair to those of us running little budget Linux boxes. I've never programmed for such a beautiful set of hardware and even if I learned something like Cilk (which looks rather nice and simple), I'd have to find somebody w/ a bigassed powerful machine to test any of the code on. I suppose it's time to recruit from PLUG (Philadelphia Linux User's Group).
hmmm, I wonder if a team of 50 would be too big to effectively manage...
I've got an idea. How about a fair real world test? An independent group comes up w/ some real world type need. They then give (or allow) each group to use some reasonable set amount of funds. That set amount will go to cover hardware, software, and personnel (they will have to pay themselves on set hourly figures that the independent group finds reasonable). That way you bring it down to the bottom line. The servers would be tested on how fast they could be and how reliable as well and of course price would also be tested since the cheaper system setup would allow more expenditure for greater overdesign.
Slashdot Mirror
But of course, what a wonderful idea! Why attempted murder, that's not a crime at all! If somebody's about to kill somebody, then of course the police have no right to arrest him/her whatsoever.
Aside from the absurdity of not arresting somebody for trying to comit a crime, there's also the fact that they found kiddy porn on his laptop, the search for which he consented to.
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
69. All midwives will be banned from the realm. All babies will be delivered
at state-approved hospitals. Orphans will be placed in foster-homes, not
abandoned in the woods to be raised by creatures of the wild.
-- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
Isn't Jon Katz being a bit melodramatic? It's not usually his style, but this article is really bad. I found it so stupid and trite.
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
80. If my weakest troops fail to eliminate a hero, I will send out my best
troops instead of wasting time with progressively stronger ones as he gets
closer and closer to my fortress.
-- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
Aren't we already "apathetic, lassitudinous (is that a word?) beings incapable of anything."? People have been trained to think that because it's done on computers it's necessarily better even when this isn't the case at all.
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
67. No matter how many shorts we have in the system, my guards will be
instructed to treat every surveillance camera malfunction as a full-scale
emergency.
-- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
When you say that they're going to fix the problem, what do you mean they're going to do? Can you give us some details?
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
28. My pet monster will be kept in a secure cage from which it cannot escape
and into which I could not accidentally stumble.
-- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
Loki just wants to get a little free slave labor. They're a closed source company that sells their software for money. In exchange for your thousands of hours of work, they want to give you the chance to win a computer. You've gotta be kidding! If they want people to help them work on their software, then they have to make it and its source freely available to all!
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
7. When I've captured my adversary and he says, "Look, before you kill me,
will you at least tell me what this is all about?" I'll say, "No." and shoot
him. No, on second thought I'll shoot him then say "No."
-- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
If you started looking through the accounts of upper and middle management, I think that they'd quickly change that policy after the first few little embarrasing secrets were discovered.
Anybody know if GTK exists for W95? I'm about to develop some software for my High School (looks good on a transcript. Otherwise I'd burn the place down to the ground) and if I could give them W95 and Linux support, then I think that they'd like that. I'm trying to convert them to Linux and using it as my development platform while supporting a W95 version as well would probably be enough of an excuse to put it on at least a box or 2.
Who do you look up to?
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
91. I will not ignore the messenger that stumbles in exhausted and obviously
agitated until my personal grooming or current entertainment is finished. It
might actually be important.
-- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
Who's your favorite hacker and why?
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
78. I will not tell my Legions of Terror "And he must be taken alive!" The
command will be "And try to take him alive if it is reasonably practical."
-- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
If you were a daemon, what kind of daemon would you be and which do you think is cooler, the FreeBSD or OpenBSD Daemon?
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
1. My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not
face-concealing ones.
-- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
Do you think that Linux will ever become an enterprise class OS or will that position remain the domain of other Unices, and if so, how long do you think it will take?
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
76. If the hero runs up to my roof, I will not run up after him and struggle
with him in an attempt to push him over the edge. I will also not engage him
at the edge of a cliff. (In the middle of a rope-bridge over a river of molten
lava is not even worth considering.)
-- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
What direction do you see RedHat going in now that they've IPO'd?
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
26. No matter how attractive certain members of the rebellion are, there is
probably someone just as attractive who is not desperate to kill me.
Therefore, I will think twice before ordering a prisoner sent to my
bedchamber.
-- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
Well if they're using this same system, then all the passport sites will have the same URL form and you should be able to get into all of them. Just substitute an IP address.
What I'm thinking is that as M$ starts to offer more services like this, you could really fuck someboy over good by logging in to one of them and changing their password.
-Laktar, a.k.a. Nick Rosen, laktar.dyndns.org
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
45. I will make sure I have a clear understanding of who is responsible for
what in my organization. For example, if my general screws up I will not draw
my weapon, point it at him, say "And here is the price for failure," then
suddenly turn and kill some random underling.
-- Peter's Evil Overlord List, http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
I personally would love to see some more women get involved in computers and go into CS!!
1. Most important of course, it's a bit lonely as a heterosexual guy who's into computers. It'd be nice to have some more good quality potential gfs around.
2. I think that we need some more quality people in CS. Most people in this field are idiots, both male and female. Why just 2 days ago I spent 15 mins explaing to a guy in my Computer Programming class why he couldn't place a function within another function in C++. Our final is next week and all we've done is C++. Oy Vey! At least some of the other stupid people had the decency to drop out!!
3. See number 1. It'd be nice to have a few more female nerds. Some of use geeks get horny too and could use gfs who share some common interests.
Incidentally, if you're a human female ~17 who lives in the Philadelphia area (preferably near ambler), my e-mail's listed.
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
2.My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.
From Peter's Evil Overlord List http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
*cough*RACIST*cough*
Excuse me, just clearing my throat.
First of all, the idea of giving black people computers is not aimed at older people, it's aimed at people much younger. As hard as this seems to be for people to believe, young black children were never slaves. They were never taken from their homeland, put into ships, and hauled off to pick cotton for a few hundred years. They weren't oppressed. If they were born to poverty, then they have a disadvantage there, but it's the same disadvantage that a poor white child has! Why then should they be given special treatment? Who cares if they're black? I sure as hell don't!! I just care who they are & who you are is not the color of your skin. Experiences aren't inhereted. They happen for each of us on our own. That's just plain crazy talk! What the fuck is wrong w/ you?! I didn't keep anybody from opportunities 30 years ago. I wasn't even born! And none of the people you're talking about helping were either!!!
Second, "Pure Darwinism worked in the middle ages..."? Um, I'm guessing you weren't much into attending history class back when you were younger. Social Darwinism (which is what you must mean, because Darwinism is a term that speaks of genetic evolution) wasn't applicable in the least in the middle ages. That's what was wrong. People were born into a caste system with no social mobility whatsoever. In our current class system social mobility is a lot greater, as is the application of Social Darwinism. In a completely libertarian society (that's libertarian with a lower case 'l') social mobility is far greater, because government beaurocracy doesn't attempt to keep people in their place. Under the system of hand-outs to the racially impaired (as you seem to think that being black is a disability), you're really just trying to keep people in place even more so, by making it a lot harder for their individual merits to allow them to change position. Poor whites sans computers would find it almost impossible to change positions, while poor black would be moved w/o them doing anything. Quite an unequal system IMHO.
Third, I just noticed that few if any people have used the PC term "African American". Good job! That term is absolutely rediculous and even less expressive than "black" is. I personally am African American in the most literal sense, but am anything but brown (as the term most logically should be). hehe, it helps me in putting down African American in this highly biased and racist society and provides unending amusement and joy over using the system, but it's still a grossly inaccurate term and it's nice that the far more expressive term "black" is being used, though judging by some of these posts, perhaps "brown crack head w/o a father living in poverty with no motivation whatsoever" should be used. That seems to be what many mean when they say "black" including Rabbins here.
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord:
1.My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.
From Peter's Evil Overlord List http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
You're wrong. Completely wrong. A caste system is a system in which you're locked into your position because of birth. There is no social mobility.
What this guy's saying is that he likes the idea of a class system. That would be a system which allows for you to change professions and status in society based on your ability to work to improve (or not maintain) your status. While I don't like this idea, communism doesn't work, so we're not going to get a better one. In lieu of that, this is an acceptable trade-off in which a bright and/or hard working individual can rise to the highest rungs.
So basically, you're saying that black people in general:
"were born in the middle of a housing project, with 4 siblings, no idea who your father was, a mother on drugs half the time and unable to give you attention, let alone raise you, with a boyfriend that beats her and sells drugs, where you don't play outside of the house, and you're lucky to get enough food to eat, let alone nutritional food"
And you were calling that other guy racist? Hmm, anybody else notice a slight discrepency. I think that poor people in general should be given more access to computers (not necessarily through the government though), but that this should be irrespective of the color of their skin. Why should a poor underprivelaged white kid get the shaft while a poor underprivelaged black kid is given a boost up and a chance to get a good, high-paying job? I try to live my life as color blind as possible (which isn't completely possible for anybody and if they say it is, then they're lying to you or themselves) and I refuse to be racist one way or the other.
I'd love some nice old boxen! If anybody lives w/in easy driving distance of Ambler or Philly, then I'll pick up your old boxen & if you want to send them to me, then I'll take them from anywhere!
laktar@hotmail.com
It sounds to me like the guy who wrote this article hasn't worked in the section of the computer games industry that makes good products. I don't know if it's that he's not a good programmer, if he's one of those people who accepts his lot in life w/o trying for any better, whether he's just unlucky, or whether it's the whole age thing, but there are a lot of really excellent games out there and many cool companies making them, including a lot of pretty big companies who /can/ afford to keep their programmers employed. Of course your outlook is going to be that computer gaming as an industry sucks to work in if you've worked on no-name projects that failed, but even if you accept his 10% success rate, then that means that he should've at least worked on a few good games.
This comment is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
I think what changes it is that there are a lot of options out there in computer games, even w/in a genre. Compare this to other software. There are very few word processors comparitively, or full operating systems. And it's pretty much impossible to form a monopoly type thing in games. They become so outdated and there's just so much in variety to worry about.
"STO can be a powerful disincentive"
Is it just me, or is this a bit counterintuitive for everybody else out there? If you're a cracker who's bored on a Saturday night and trawling for boxes to get into and you find one that you could only get into by using some kind of brute force cracker to get in are you going to want to do that? Or, are you going to want to crack into some box you find that's mysterious & that you don't know the inner operations of? I personally would prefer to try and find the cock-ups of the designers of the STO'd system and get in that way. I have a feeling that most crackers would prefer this as well, with the exception of Script Kiddies who don't have much of a chance of getting in unless you use a poor STO based system anyway.
The example of the Navajo code talkers in WWII is a very poor one. Today that code would be cracked in no time flat. The mass of computing power and knowledge of techniques in cracking such schemes available today as well as the number of people world wide who would be working on such an interesting project would render the code broken very rapidly. How long could that code possibly last today before somebody would suggest that it was similar to some Navajo that she had heard (here I'm using she just to be contrary to the author of the article) somewhere? The code would last a few days before it was found out and maybe a few weeks before a translation program that could do a reasonable word for word translation was available. Even if it was a newly invented language, it would still follow patterns and thus be easily suceptable to automated cracking attempts. Using current schemes is completely different. Passwords must be cracked on a trial and error method. Sure it's possible that somebody comes up w/ a fast implementation for factoring, but if such a thing were to happen, then encryption schemes would change. If you notice, we don't use the same method to encrypt passwords as we did back a few years ago. Think how fast a system could be cracked if that were the truth?
By now somebody must have scanned in a copy of this report and posted it or something. Does anybody know where it can be found online?
I wonder if this year's contest will be on another 4 processor machine. I think something like that makes it a bit unfair to those of us running little budget Linux boxes. I've never programmed for such a beautiful set of hardware and even if I learned something like Cilk (which looks rather nice and simple), I'd have to find somebody w/ a bigassed powerful machine to test any of the code on. I suppose it's time to recruit from PLUG (Philadelphia Linux User's Group).
hmmm, I wonder if a team of 50 would be too big to effectively manage...
I've got an idea. How about a fair real world test? An independent group comes up w/ some real world type need. They then give (or allow) each group to use some reasonable set amount of funds. That set amount will go to cover hardware, software, and personnel (they will have to pay themselves on set hourly figures that the independent group finds reasonable). That way you bring it down to the bottom line. The servers would be tested on how fast they could be and how reliable as well and of course price would also be tested since the cheaper system setup would allow more expenditure for greater overdesign.