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User: Jester99

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  1. Re:About Markoff on Kevin Mitnick Answers · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Desperation invites strange friends to dinner.

  2. Re:Temperature detectors... on Columbia Coverage · · Score: 1

    2 catastrophes out of just over 100 missions doesn't make for an exceptional record

    Well, that depends. Out of 1000 missions walking from my dorm room to the grocery store and back, I'd sure as hell hope that only one of them would end in a sprained ankle or something.

    Out of 100 missions where you take seven men and women, strap them to the back of a screaming fireball, and shoot them 10,000 miles straight up into the air, then spin 'em around and turn them into another flying fireball with the eventual goal of trying to turn that into a gentle 3-point landing, two failures is pretty damn impressive.

    Ever built one of those little model rockets with an attached glider airplanes that pops off at peak altitude and floats back down? I sure as hell haven't even gotten one of /those/ to last 100 flights... much less 10.

    In every human endeavor, there are missteps and tragedies. We send hundreds of thousands (millions?) of giant crates of cargo across the oceans on shipping liners... and nobody thinks twice about it. Two hundred years ago, it was a risky adventure to get a ship from England to the USA (not to mention coming back). Nowadays, it's commonplace. (How many shipwrecks were there in the early days of ocean travel? Probably at least 1 in 50...)

    Maybe in 2203, we'll be sending millions of crates of stuff to the moon and back like it's a routine task, but for now, it's an adventure and a half, with all the troubles associated with it.

  3. Re:FUD on FreeBSD Core Developer Thrown Out · · Score: 1

    Hrmmm, I wonder what would happen if Linus agreed with you there

    Troll, sure, but I'll bite. There's been lots of talk about this (Search online for "Linus Hit By Bus")...

    Basically, yea, it'd be a rough transition at the start. But Alan Cox, marcello and the other primary maintainers and contributors could probably fill in the gap.

  4. Re:Xmingwin? on Xmingwin For Cross Generation Applications · · Score: 1

    Anyone else read it as "X Wingman" on first glance?

    Now I can't get that pronunciation out of my head when I read the word. :P

  5. Re:Oh no.... on Strong Bad Creators Interviewed · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Actually, it's holding up remarkably well. I'm not noticing too much lag at all to get to the site.

    Not only do they write slick content, they know how to configure the site. Bravo!

  6. Re:the desire for telos on Infinite Games? · · Score: 1

    Tetris as the most interesting game? Hardly!! Tetris is a great waste of time. Friday afternoon, I've had a long week, and I want to entertain myself for a half hour, I'll play tetris or snood because they're mindless relaxing activities. But they're not interesting.

    Take a game like Half-Life or Resident Evil or whatever though -- a game with a defined story -- those are not only interesting, but downright thrilling. When in Half-Life, this giant tentacle broke through a glass window and grabbed a scientist, I was downright scared. And that's how I wanted it to be. Did I think of myself as Gordon Freeman? Not really. But think of movies. I never felt as though I was Luke Skywalker, but I wanted to know if he would survive the battle with Darth Vader and the Emperor. Likewise, in Half-Life, I rooted for Gordon Freeman and wanted to see if he'd succeed. The difference was, it was almost as though I were directing the movie, instead of just watching it, and that made it more exciting.

  7. Re:I can't see this being a go, any time soon. on Distributed Internet Backup System · · Score: 1

    Encryption will always be broken.

    That's not neccessarily true. Algorithms can be mathematically shown to be at best brute-force crackable. With a long enough key, that could be shown to take at least as long as you're alive.

    And even if all encryption can be broken.. So? My mother's a school teacher. She works for hours every night on lesson plans for her third grade class, making sure she has dittos and lessons and things. She backs up regularly, because if the harddrive went down, *months* or years of hard work would be lost.

    It'd be nice to encrypt it if such data were sent over the net. But you know what? Who really cares? If my mom's lesson plans are decrypted, sure, maybe some enterprising third grader somewhere will get an advance peak at the next arithmatic test, but really, it makes no difference. Still, having off-site backups would be a *good* thing for my mom.

    If your data is mission-critical and MUST be kept secret, well, then you do what you have to do -- send tapes to Iron Mountain, or whatever, but for the other 90% of us, the photos of our friends, etc, are nice to have automatically backed up to some offsite node, but it really doesn't matter if somebody sneaks a peak supposing the encryption's broken.

  8. Re:It's a monster on World's Most Annoying IE Toolbar · · Score: 1

    My applications come from one of either two sources:

    a) CD distributions (Visual Studio, MS Office, CodeWarrior, etc)
    b) The internet (WinAMP, MikTeX, AIM, etc).

    For all of the latter, I made a catalogue of all the downloaded software, saved the installers, and burned them to a CD. Everything I downloaded fit into a single CD-ROM. I just made a "restore" CD which I keep in a safe place. Now if my system ever gets really good and hosed, I can just reformat, reinstall the software from CDs, and reinstall my latest monthly backup CD of my data.

    Takes an hour or two but it's rather painless on the whole, and I'm not dependant on fast net speed to get my programs again.

    My CD also has an 'instructions.txt' file on it reminding me how to set up everything else I liked (what usernames I want, what settings I have to disable in where, etc), so there's very little left to guess-work.

    If you just run down your start menu's programs list, or look thru c:\program files, you can probably easily list everything you would have to redownload, and instead, just back up those installers.

    (If you don't have the installers, grab 'em at work during your lunch break or something when you have access to a fast box.)

  9. Re:What we really need now on SBC Patents Links, Dynamic Pages · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd be more interested in hearing how you plan to implement it.

    Alright, here goes.

    1. Hire patent investigators who are qualified to appraise the value of patents. The original patent clerks were supposed to be "skilled in their profession." Require a Master's Degree in the field they work (ECE, CS, etc) or equivalent experience. Pay patent clerks enough that people with Master's Degrees will apply. Make it so that patent clerks have no incentive to actually grant a patent. The default case should be "think about it more" and after that "deny until it's further clarified."

    2. If you file a patent and while it's under investigation (as this takes a while), you discover other people using technology which might infringe, you should be required to send them notification formally stating what you feel might infringe on your IP, and exactly what remedies you desire should your patent be granted.

    3. Patents should work like Trademarks: if they are unenforced, they lose their enforcability. You should be required to file for redress IMMEDIATELY upon hearing that somebody uses technology which may violate your IP. No submarining patents. No going after 100 small fish instead of actually filing a lawsuit against IBM or somebody who might have the power to take you out. You want your IP, you must defend it vigilently.

    4. Patent terms for technical innovations last 20 years. In today's fast-changing society, this is far too long. Software patents should last no more than 4 years, hardware for no more than 10. A 20-year patent on the WWW filed in 1990 would set it back until 2010 for public use!

    5. Patenting business practices is just fucking stupid. Disallow this.

  10. Re:With some live footage on Six Giant Music Retailers Will Try Online Sales Together · · Score: 1

    Comparing concerts and movies is a very apples-to-oranges case.

    Concerts are only half about the band. The other half is audience participation. Standing with 20,000 people who are all excited to be there is exhillarating. Sitting in a theatre with 500 people whose cell phones keep ringing and their popcorn keeps getting thrown everywhere doesn't even come close.

    A good live concert has an energy to it that is not seen in movies. Otherwise, why would you pay $50 for a concert ticket? You'd just pay $20 to buy the recorded version of the concert on DVD and watch it as many times as you'd like at home. The concert itself is nearly impossible to captivate on a movie screen, no matter if it's 42" or 42 feet.

  11. Re:It's all spam on Using gzip As A Spam Filter · · Score: 1

    I've received thousands of spam messages (20-30 per day...) and perhaps with a couple exceptions that I'm forgetting, they've *all* been in English.

    Of course, an insane number of those spam messages seem to be duplicates of themselves sent day after day, but still. Everything's in English in my account. :\

  12. Re:Where is the US economy going? Follow the money on Robin Gross and IP Justice · · Score: 1

    Food is actually one of the things that is not embargoed; we don't send them technology, but we send millions of dollars worth of relief aid in the form of food, clothes, etc.

    The problem is that the distribution of said provisions has been largely fucked up, mostly because of Saddam's internal government managing to not bother to distribute it properly. As a result, the people starve.

    I think there's actually some UN resolution or something such that you can't starve a country into submission with embargoes.. you gotta at least trade for food.

  13. Re:Won't Work on Mission: Infiltrate the P2P Network · · Score: 1

    Unless Overseer or whatever found a reverse algorithm for MD5, I doubt very much that they could degrade the qualify of a music file in such a way that the MD5 doesn't change.

    They don't need to.

    All Overseer has to do to "win" is to make it "hard" for you to download your music, to the point where it is easier to pay $18 for a CD. You cannot yourself compute or verify the MD5 hash until you've got the file. The whole file.

    Therefore, when you search for "Britney Spears - I can't perform!!", you get 300 responses from various people who say "I've got a file named 'britney spears - I can't perform!! and it's got MD5 hash 12341234".

    You trust them to all have the real file that computes to that, because the legit KaZaA client computes the MD5 on the fly.

    Overseer, however, could simply say "we're going to poison that song." They perform the search, and see that 300 people (A very high confidence factor) match MD5 hash "12341234". They make a crap file with low-fi recording in it, and then they use a hacked client that lets them manually set the MD5 hash. The next time you search for the song, you'll see 301 people who have the file "Britney Spears - I can't perform" with MD5 hash "12341234". And until you actually download the whole song, you don't know that you've gotta throw it away because you downloaded a segment of it from Overseer.

    If they make it so that you have to download every song six or eight times before you get it right, chances are, a decent number of people (especially those who aren't on broadband, and therefore really want it to work the first time) might go back to buying music on CD instead of downloading.

  14. Re:Won't Work on Mission: Infiltrate the P2P Network · · Score: 1

    Even worse, supposing your client verifies using a majority vote of 2 out of 3 duplicate chunks, nothing prevents the spammer from setting up several dozen/hundred/$large_n different hosts serving the bogus file. So then you download a "good" chunk and a "bad" chunk, and go back for a third one, and you happen to get another chunk that matches the bad one -- your client accepts it as the "real" data and moves on..

    Your probability of owning the "best" chunk increases with the number of times you redownload the question... but without an external verification agent, nothing ensures that you've got the good data - the number of rounds you use yourself merely make it "more likely", but not certain.

    The question really is -- based on a) your bandwidth and b) the number of spamming hosts, how many downloads are really needed to make a system like that work "good enough"?

  15. Re:Businesses don't feel the way you do on Sony to Stop Producing Smaller CRTs · · Score: 1

    Damn man, I wanna move to your campus then :)

  16. Re:Businesses don't feel the way you do on Sony to Stop Producing Smaller CRTs · · Score: 1

    Another large market for computers is college students. There are thousands (millions?) of them, and they almost all have at least one computer. College kids also have very tiny desks. LCD flatpanels are very attractive from that point of view.

  17. Re:It's only 10 fonts. on Bitstream To Donate 10 Fonts To Free Software World · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How many fonts do you really use in your daily life? I probably use five for 95% of my time on a computer.

    Furthermore, no license today really addresses fonts; open source licenses tend to make provisions for source code and computer programs, or else "open content", e.g., printed words. It would kind of seem natural to craft a new license that addresses font issues.

  18. Re:War is clean these days (hah!) on U.S. Air Force Developing Microwave Weapon · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually, have you read Time magazine lately? Every article reporting back on the Israel situation (another suicide bombing, another army incursion, etc) is peppered with images of destroyed homes, dead bodies, body parts, etc. Not pretty stuff.

  19. Re:The two major questions about EMPs. Anyone? on U.S. Air Force Developing Microwave Weapon · · Score: 1

    This strikes me as a far more useful weapon of Terror than those messy chemicals and biological agents that Frys or Radio Shack wouldn't sell you.

    Right on! After some terrorist strike (may have been 9/11), I read an article in Popular Mechanics expressing that exact fear. Basically, an EMP device with a radius of several hundred meters could be built for well under $1,000. Furthermore, it'd easily fit inside a truck.

    Scary things often come in small packages. One guy whipping out an AK-47 and spraying in a mall would certainly cause a *great* deal of terror. The use of planes are very terroristic because it's fantastic -- the psychological effect of an entire jumbo jet ramming into something's pretty devestating. But if you want to kill a lot of people, or disable a lot of things, or generally cause mayhem, it's alarming how little equipment you need, and how powerless we really are to stop every possible threat.

  20. Re:So how has it all changed? on Ask Kevin Mitnick · · Score: 1

    I think you just answered at least the first part of your own question there. :)

  21. Re:Happened before... on Programming Languages Will Become OSes · · Score: 1

    Who wants to code on a machine that can only use one language?

    Ever hear of a Forth Machine? Some computers were specifically geared to run Forth, and only Forth. As a primitive operating system and progamming language all rolled into one.

  22. The main problem I see... on Killing Others' Malicious Processes · · Score: 3, Interesting

    with Mr. Mullen's proposal, is this.

    He sees the world this way: 1. People are negligent, and allow machines to become compromised, which allows harm to come your way. 2. Therefore, if people will not defend their own machines, you should be able to defend yours by disabling theirs.

    This is a little like the following: 1. People are negligent, and allow their cars to get stolen, which allows hit-and-run drivers to take you out with them. 2. Therefore, if people will not defend their own cars, you should be able to defend yours by being given a rocket launcher to disable theirs.

    The second example sounds kinda weird, doesn't it?

    I've watched "World's Scariest Police Chases" and suchwhat. If a driver's acting like a maniac, the police bust out these cars with large ramming devices on them, and beat the crap out of the offending vehicle. If someone is driving recklessly on the highway, I can't just take my SUV and ram them off the road myself.

    While I may have justification for doing so -- after all, that driver is endangering me and those around me -- I do not have authority. There is a reason that only police are given the power of arrest and other various things they have. (Just try walking around with a pistol in broad daylight in Philadelphia, for example.)

    Mullen would have us all issued shotguns, to defend ourselves from any would-be vandals and thieves who enter our homes. While it is justifiable for us to use these weapons against those who would cause us harm, is it really wise to give everyone a shotgun? There are most certainly those who would use them improperly. The obvious solution, of course, is to give everyone some sort of shield, that prevents them from being hit by a shotgun shell, to protect us from bad users of shotguns. But, uhm, then shotguns don't work against the vandals, because they have shields too. So a perpetual arms race against ourselves would develop.

    There's a reason weapons aren't issued to us for our own defense -- collectively, we are not responsible enough to operate that way. Only special agencies are given the Authority to administer Justice; justice itself does not belong to the rest of us. Unfortunately, we don't have an "internet police force", nor would one even be desirable.

    But ISPs can still pull the plug on users who aren't operating "correctly," and University and other networks can block down a MAC address if it's causing trouble. And that's about as close as we really should want.

  23. Re:Open? on Microsoft Opens Code Just Slightly More · · Score: 2
    I don't remember signing anything before being able to look at RedHat source...

    Try some source material.

    I refer you specifically to paragraph five:

    You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License.


    You didn't sign the GPL, beacuse you probably never saw it actually printed out on paper. But it's basically as though you have.
  24. Re:it is sad on Alpha Lives! But Who Will Market It? · · Score: 1

    Somewhat OT, but anywho:

    A minor correction to the above list. While DEC's been a great innovator, ethernet was actually the responsibility of Xerox PARC in the late '70s. (They had just invented the laser printer, and needed a cable that could deliver the data to it fast enough from more than one machine.)

  25. Re:Seat of Trust is infinite regression on AMI Introduces 'Trusted Computing' BIOS · · Score: 2

    Ever tried to replace a BIOS that is soldered directly to the board? if so, please let me know how it went

    Yup. First I yanked out the old board, then I popped in the new one. :)

    Tada, new BIOS.