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User: Bonker

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  1. Re:Still illegal on Anti-Santy Worm Patches phpBB Flaw · · Score: 1

    This is like the vigilante cop who knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that a suspect is guilty of a heinous crime and also knows that he'll never get enough evidence to convite the suspect before he strikes again. So he goes and 'anonymously' drops a cap in the suspects head.

    Is it just? The cop thought so.
    Is it ethical or legal? Nope.
    Is it safe? Uh-uh.
    Did he save lives? Very possibly.

    The cop can sleep at night and the 'bad guy' doesn't committ any more crimes. Society is served... assuming the cop was right about the bad guy.

    In the real world, however, vigilante justice is often flawed and often destroys the lives of innocents. It's not hard to find examples from the lowest level-- the accidental killing of people living next door to a bail-jumper-- to the highest-- the unilateral invasion of a sovreign nation on false pretense.

  2. Re:This is great... on Plausible Deniability From Rockstar Cryptographers · · Score: 1

    Now assume you live in Red China and are trying to conduct what U.S.ians consider legitamite business with Taiwan.

    "I didn't say it. Someone else must have forged it," won't stop you from being dissapeared, but it'll go a lot further before a tribunal and get you more help from the U.S. embassy there than "Yup. It was me what done it."

  3. Tactile Feedback on Non-Invasive Computer Control Through Brainwaves · · Score: 2, Insightful

    While I think this is wonderful for people who lack mobility or the use of their limbs, I for one, can't see this kind of tech gaining much ground for everyday use.

    One of the primary reasons for this is the sensation of tactile feed-back you get from using controllers that require physical interaction. You can feel the mouse scraping against your desk as you move it back and forth. You can feel the microswitches 'catching' when pushing the buttons. You can feel the keyboard keys 'click' into place as the latex compression switches underneath connect.

    Remember all the 'touch sensitive' microwaves that came out in the 80's and early 90s? Notice how all the buttons now at least provide some semblance of movement when you touch them, even if it's a small amount?

    Even if this tech becomes cheap and wide-spread, there's just no replacing the touch-sensation inherent with using mechanical input devices.

  4. Design vs. Function? on Energia Reveals New Russian Spacecraft · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The nose of the craft looks suspiciously like the front-half of the NASA Space Shuttles, down to the white/black colorscheme.

    How much of that has to do with design and how much has to with the function of things like the reentry tiles and hull shielding?

  5. Re:Yay! on Mel Brooks Says 'Spaceballs' Sequel In The Works · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Brooks' stuff is uneven, but some of it is great.

    Remember that a great deal of his directoral work is influenced heavily by 30s and 40s movie direction techniques, with long, drawn out pauses, long establishing shots, and great care to extract maximum emotional impact from the viewer. It relies more on in-jokes, subtle ethnic humor, and wild-takes.

    Compare to today's comedies, which are influenced by the dramatically shorter attention span created by TV, Video games, and the intrnet. They rely more on extremely visual humor rather than situational humor and cut establishment to the bare minimum. Satires in particular rely on deadpan 'straight man' jokes, at a pace that seems rapid-fire in comparison to earlier works.

    I'm not saying one format is better. They're just different formats. Don't group Brooks with the Farelli Brothers or Mike Meyers any more than you'd group Peter Jackson with Alfred Hitchcock.

    I submit that 'Men in Tights' would have been an *incredible* film if only it had been edited differently.

  6. Cloudscape... yeah, it's solid. on Derby Source Code Released · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd normally balk at any indication that something in Java had been written intelligently or with any kind of care towards resource usage or execution speed.

    Cloudscape is solid, though. I got to play with a demo install a while back before it went OSS. It's small, quick, and fast.

  7. Chips? *Cough* VLC and MPC *Cough* on MPAA Sues DVD Chip Manufacturers · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are still people worrying with playback control on DVD players?

    Media Player Classic

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/

    VLC

    http://www.videolan.org/

    Pick yer platform

  8. Horrible Failure on Microsoft Offers A Peek At New Search Engine · · Score: 1

    I searched for "Horrible Failure" at MSN and got:

    Search ErrorMSN Search is temporarily unable to process your request.

    Please try again in a few minutes.

    EID: f:618926422 - 1041:1041:10004:1059

    HC: 71d61b13


    I seached for "Horrible Failure" at google and got:

    Re: horrible failure to compile on Solaris 2.6
    Russell Kroll
    Wed, 18 Jul 2001 15:51:02 -0500

    Koos van den Hout wrote:

    > I am trying to build nut for our solaris 2.6 setup (so we can really start
    > using a bigass APC ups with max 50 amps output current). For some reason
    > apc does not deliver network-aware software with such a beast.
    [...]
    > "../include/common.h", line 89: warning: dubious tag declaration: struct termios
    > "common.c", line 441: warning: dubious tag declaration: struct termios
    > "common.c", line 442: identifier redeclared: cfmakeraw

    I'm guessing from the directory names that you're trying to build 0.45.0
    here. There's a patch that went into 0.45.1-pre2 that fixed a
    few termios.h problems. Try it and see what happens.

    All: when this sort of stuff happens, try the latest development
    version. Normal releases are sometimes 3-4 months apart, and sometimes
    the bug you are reporting has already been fixed in the -pre series.

  9. Re:New paradigm? on Mac Trojan Horse Disguised as Word 2004 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Surrrrreeee they thought it was a beta. Uh huh. That's why they went to Limewire rather than the MS website. Sure. Yeah.

    Open Office porters take note. At my last check, Mac users are still stuck with a sucky x11 version of OOO1.1 rather than the spiffy version available for Windows users.

  10. Re:angelfire? on Chernobyl...18 Years Later · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is a site worth mirroring. It's a history lesson. 50-100-500 years from now, people will be referring to archives of that sight to give people an impression of what Chernobyl did.

  11. Re:Orbital Debris: Plot of Planet-es Anime/Manga on Indian Robot Will Capture Space Debris · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I was going to bring up Planetes. One of the very few "hard" sci-fi stories I've ever thought was really excellent.

    Main characters are astronauts who collect space debris of various kind for a corporation who does space cargo and passenger flights.

    An entire episode of the anime is devoted to medical issues arising from extended periods in space. One of the minor characters describes herself as a 'Lunarian'. She's a 12-year old girl who's over five feet tall and has very brittle bones and other medical problems. Accordingly, she lives in a hospital and is in medical testing and treatement almost constantly.

    Good stuff. Check it out if you can.

  12. Re:WHAT!!! on SCO Fires back, Subpoenas Stallman, Torvalds et al · · Score: 1

    Uhm... everything the prosecution could possibly ask for is already public.

    Seriously, the defendant's 'exhibit A' is available for download from any given mirror site or bit torrent client world wide.

    "And where did you get this code, Mister Torvalds?!"

    "From this person here, as I stated in the Kernel comments. It's dated, too. If there's a problem with that particular procedure, I can always replaced it with *this* procedure."

    Linus pulls a CD from his pocket.

    A subpeona does nothing but add negative public opinion. SCO's 'counter' assault doesn't do anything but make a weak attempt to deceive people into beleiving that the lawsuit is not a buyout tactic.

  13. Re:nah on Longhorn's Flash Killer? · · Score: 1

    That's what we said about Netscape. Now, I'm like one of five people in an office of better than 200 that uses a Moz derivative.

  14. Re:Sitefinder on Verisign Gets Out of the Registrar Biz, Keeps .com Registry · · Score: 1

    You're accusing Verisign of having Ethics?

    Verisign execs realized some time ago that the business of selling domain names wasn't nearly the goldmine they thought it would be, especially when they were forced to relinquish their monopoly on the business and open it up to competitors.

    It's very simple. Verisign has no interest in providing services. They want money. If they can get more money by restricting those services to a select few, they can and will attempt to do so.

  15. Re:more please on Microsoft Patents Your Local Weather Report · · Score: 1

    I disagree. This weakens the patent system as a whole. Individuals and companies don't even bother to check for patents on their ideas anymore since they know they'll be sued anyway.

  16. Re:Haste makes waste... on SunnComm Reconsiders Lawsuit Threat · · Score: 1

    Which may well have been one of the reasons why the CEO realized that he was screwing himself with broken glass and vaseline by threatening legal action.

    The DMCA has, on its face, very little credibilty. It's vague, overly broad, and ridiculous in the scope of the punishments it imposes for minor offenses. It has very little chance of standing up to intense court scrutiny, especially at the Supreme Court level.

    Right now, however, the DMCA stands. It's useful as an itimidation tool. It can be used to terrorize those who can't afford to fight it. It's a weapon of terror, if you will.

    If it becomes accepted through repeated court cases using it against those who are flagrantly in violation of other laws-- fraud, embezzlement, etc... then it will be a little more palatable. Its defenses will become tighter and it has more of a chance of becoming enforceable.

    I like to think of the DMCA like the Death Star. It's a huge white elephant. Sure, it can blow up a planet, but it's so big and makes such a huge target that it's nigh undefensable. It only has terror value and no real offense value for those who bought and paid for it. Just like the Death Star, the DMCA can and probably will succumb to an attack by a small force who know one its many weaknesses.

  17. Re:In related news... on Final Matrix Set for Synchronous Release · · Score: 1

    If you go to their 'products' page, they offer to allow you to download screensavers and desktop wallpapers that are both remeniscient of the 'Matrix' screen-savers and yet only contain 1s and 0s. I bet there's a cute message if you convert the binary to ascii.

  18. Re:It's a good idea... on Arcade ROMs for Download, Legally · · Score: 2

    I'll give you a good reason that at least some people will want to pay for them:

    The conditions of use for the site (http://www.starroms.com/about/condofuse.php) make no indication of any limits on how you use the games. The Roms themselves may contain licenses, but I haven't bought one to find out.

    If you buy the rom, chances are you can legally set it up for for-profit play... IE, set up a MAME console in your place of business and charge people 25cents per credit.

  19. Re:just use... on India Blocks Yahoo Groups Over Political Content · · Score: 3, Informative

    Java Anonymous Proxy was backdoored by the German government.

    http://theregister.co.uk/content/55/32450.html

    They posted an updated version which contained a backhole... they called it a 'crime tracking feature'... and then refused to indicate to users which site was being monitored and which wasn't.

  20. Degauss for Privacy on Smartcards to Track London Commuters · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.degaussers.net/degausserVS250.htm

    In some cases, the data is not kept on the card, but more and more I run into places that want to 'swipe' various cards to input data into their systems. This is starting to become very notable in Texas, where everyone and their brother wants to swipe your TXDL while you're paying.

    Degaussing my driver's license and ruining the track 1 and 2 data stored on it means that the various POS terminals that want to scan it go balls up. The manager comes over and almost invariably says 'Hmmm... Treat this like a cash payment.'

    It's not perfect, but it's a step in the right direction.

    Is inconvenience worth your privacy? It is for me.

  21. Re:Hmph... on New Anti-Swap CDs Hit Shelves · · Score: 1

    They are under obligation, however, not to market items that are copy protected as 'CDs'. They are laser-readable discs containing music, but 'CD' is a trademark. I beleive it belongs to Pioneer, IIRC.

    This is a legal grey area. Legislation's in U.S. congressional committee right now that requires CD makers to place a prominent 'This CD is copy protected' label on all CDs that contain anti-sharing mechanisms.

  22. Plaintext on Word Processors: One Writer's Retreat · · Score: 1

    I do some writing for fun and enjoyment. I've written a few thousand pages of anime fanfiction, original fiction, essays, rants, etc.

    I prefer TextPad on Windows and have used BBEdit on Macs. I used to use Super NoteTab on PC, but I moved to TextPad for a few of its features.

    I will not use a word processor for my writing. Period. I will not choose a font. I will not use 'styles' until I'm finished and want to convert my work to stylized text for a web page. I do not want tables. I do not want headers and footers. I do not want 'assistants'. I loathe, I loathe, I loathe autoreplace features! If I wanted a fucking long dash rather than two hyphens, I wouldn't have typed in the two hyphens, would I?

    I really loathe vi's 'modal' text entry and prefer the ability to drag text around with a mouse. I like soft-wrapping, but it's not essential. I like spell-checking, but hate the underlining features of Word that check spelling and grammar. Yeah, I know that sentance isn't formed correctly. I took high-school English. Quit bothering me, dammit!

  23. Re:Oh great on IT Career Horoscopes · · Score: 1

    I was expecting something like this and didn't see one.

    "Your current position will be exported to a country where 'overtime compensation' is a fairytale story about a foreign land with streets paved with gold where good children go when they die."

  24. Re:Mo Money! Mo Money! Mo Money! on Windows ATMs by 2005 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Fortunately for the banking industry and unfortunately for you, most ATMs have built-in failsafes to keep that from happening.

    If you completely disregard that most ATMs don't have built-in TCP/IP stacks-- even the ones that communicate via CDPD, or cellular to internet use a transmitter that works through a serial port and sends an encrypted stream of data to the processor-- Most ATMs are designed to go balls-up at the first sign of trouble and shut themselves down after sending detailed error messages to their owners via leased lines. Out of paper? Error message, shut down. Out of money? Error message, shut down. OS Crash? Error message, shut down. Damage to the ATM Case? Error message, shut down.

  25. Cache the Suckage on New Breed Of Web Accelerators Actually Work · · Score: 2, Informative

    I worked at a local ISP who managed to get a demo for a cache server a while back. (I don't anymore.) The machine arrived. We plugged it in, and started to take tech calls.

    Basically, it proxied all requests through that ISP on port 80. If it found a request to an IP or sitename it had visited before, it tried to serve it out of cache. If it didn't, it proxied the result through and returned the results from the requested IP or sitename.

    The problems:

    The server had a difficult time with virtual hosting of any kind. About 4 out of 5 requests to a virtual host would go through. About 20% of the time, there was some critical piece of information that the cache server would mangle so that the vhost mechanism would be unable to serve the right data. This was a couple years ago, so bugfixes might have happened. Maybe.

    The server definitely had a hard time with dynamic content that wasn't built with a GET url (thus triggering the pass-thru proxy). If the request was posted, encrypted, hashed, or referenced a server side directive of some kind (server-side redirects were a nasty) the cache would fail. A server side link equating something like "http://www.server.net/redirect/" to a generated URL or dynamic content of some kind was the most frequent case we rean into with this. The server simply couldn't parse each and every http request or every variety and try to decide if it should pass-thru or not. I can't think of a logical way around this that wouldn't break any given implimentation. Can you?

    We used dynamically assigned IPs at the time, so proxy requests made from one PC were often returned erroneously to another assuming the IP changed between usage. Say a modem hangup, etc. This was a rare event, but I listened to at least one person complaining that he was getting someone else's Hotmail. The fix to this is either to blacklist sites from being cached-- infeasible for every site that could possibly be requested-- or assign static IPs. DHCP broadband users may have similar problems, especially for those who have new IPs every so often.

    Finally, if something got corrpted on the cache server due to disk error, stalled transfer, or some other reason, the sever had little or no way to throw out the bad data. It would throw out data that it *knew* was corrupt due to unfinished downloads, etc... , but often times this check failed or data was assumed to be correct even when it wasn't. Everyone who requested the same piece of corrupt data got it. I had to answer this statement a few times. "I downloaded it on one computer connected to your ISP and got a bad download. I downloaded it on my other computer from the same ISP and got the same bad download. Then I connected to another ISP from the first computer and got a complete download. What's up wit' dat, yo?"

    Cache servers are a bad idea. The very idea is to try to be an end-all be-all to everyone who uses them. There are bug-fixes to some of the problem, but no way to solve the essential problem of the fact that MOST data on the web is dynamic now. Using cache servers with dynamic data is inviting difficulty and problem.