An Anonymous Coward posted the following in regards to the rumored Apple office suite on January 3rd, 2004:
As with all rumors, there's no need to believe it until Apple starts taking legal action against the rumor sites. Until then, you can assume that they probably missed the mark.
The posted was modded +5, Funny (60% funny, 20% insightful, 20% underrated).
"Interplay Forced to Liquidate (France)" Don't freek out Germany tried to liquidate france twice, didn't really get close. Heck half the world has tried to liquidate france at one time or another.
(To be honest, that would be a French/Viking bastard liquidating the Anglo-Saxon English, which the mere Vikings couldn't do alone. Or something like that. European history being a mess of who went where when.)
When comparing a industrial strength drill (hole-hawg:unix/linux) to a normal drill (consumer-drill:windows/mac) the commenter writes:
What's more powerful, a hole-hawg, or a five-speed consumer drill with large grips, a safety shut-off, and a built-in level? The hole-hawg, obviously. But which would you rather use to drill, say, five hundred chandelier mounts in a ballroom?
I have to go with the tool that has a good chance of drilling 500 mounts. I don't trust fancy consumer drills to survive drilling many large deep holes.
Which, I think, also applies to unix/linux. I don't get all misty-eyed and sniffly at the thought of using a shell and good ol' CHUI tools. Nope. I use them because they consistantly get the job done quicker and easier than other tools.
The problem is that a lot of these nifty tools are scary, in meatspace and in cyberspace. They also require some training before use -- a steep learning curve. Take a bolt extractor (looks like a very corsely threaded thich screw with a square end for the wrench). Hand one to the average person and they won't know what the hell its for. But with a little knowledge and another simple tool (a good drill and a bit for metal) its rather useful to take out a broken bolt. What about a cutting torch? Screw up, and you'll be seeing grandma and Elvis. Learn to use it correctly and you'll be able to remove a drum from a vehicle with rusted out brake hardware, or to cut through thick chunks of iron.
Are these tools a little macho? Perhaps some of them (cutting metal with fire is damn fun). But is that why these tools are in use? No, these tools are used because they get the job done.
I have money in the bank, and I spend enough time in front of a monitor to be able to justify the purchase of software tools if they were able to fulfill a need that OS tools could not (and a certain proprietary OS is an excellent software tool for running proprietary games).
This commenter reminds me of someone who got into OSS because OSS was "cool".
Imagine someone who decides that he'll learn vim because hackers use vi (or emacs). He looks at a cheat sheet, figures out what i, a, hjkl, and:wq does, and is content at being a "hacker" for the next six months. Afterwords, he discovers some nice commercial IDE and, sick of the lack of features he finds in vim, decides to go with the commercial IDE. After all, he knows that vim can't lookup man pages for functions, jump to a function declaration, change its indentation style, edit multiple files, integrate with compiler errors, or a host of many other things that the commercial IDE can do. He sits back convinced that those OS lusers are fooling themselves, the same way he fooled himself.
I'm sure there was lots of infra-whats-a-ma-gig going on, but regardless of those factors, what it comes down to is that animals just aren't as stupid as humans.
When confronted with an unusual, confusing situation, they get the fuck out. Whether it was the vibrations, the noise, or the distant sea swell, doesn't matter, they got the fuck out.
That's loser speak.;)
What is better for Og: Avoiding the sharp rock that cut him? Or figuring out how to use that sharp rock to cut others?
Avoid fire like the rest of creation? Or use it to keep him warm and build better spears to kill others?
Og thinking that, like all other predators, a healthy, adult mammoth shouldn't be messed with? Or scream and taunt the mammoth to the point where, in order to escape this mad creature, the mammoth tries to flee, forgetting about the large cliff...
Sure, Og's actions lead to a high deathrate amoung Og's kin. But a few Ogs later, the rest of the clan is much better off.
An ipod costs upwards of $660, a decent entry level laptop costs $1200 and petrol (gas) costs about $1 per litre. Also cars are expensive.
Doesn't India have a high tarriff on all non-domestic vehicles? I believe they want to encourage their own domestic industry.
I don't know his exact requirements, but...
on
PDAs for a Disabled Man?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Has he considered a large binder full of tabbed pages with common phrases in it? At the front or back could be a notepad and a marker to write with.
If he was planning to use a keyboard and small PDA, he probably has the dexterity left to flip tabs, and enough control to write LARGE letters that are readable.
Its also pretty cheap and its unlikely that anyone would steal it.
I'll add my own wiki experience to the mix. I was doing a paper on the Japanese writer Higuchi Ichiyo last semester and, not knowing much about her, I ended up using wiki as a source. EVERYTHING I cited from wikipedia was factually wrong. Luckily I ran it by my professor before handing it in, but I will never use Wikipedia as a source on a paper again. They've completely turned me off to using it for any academic purpose. I do still visit wikipedia when I need general information but I even take that with a major grain of salt.
Wikipedia keeps the history of all articles, including all edits, so lets figure out what was wrong. As anther poster has commented, the information appears to be correct.
This is the history page, would you care to point out the incorrect information from the version you used? I'm not seeing it.
Re:Not only Google looks for big brains
on
Defining Google
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· Score: 1
If pirates 1 and 3 can convince pirates 2 and 4 not to go with 5, or vice-versa, they can leverage to get more money out of pirate 5. My first instinct was that since the threat of death was upon them, that each of the other 4 pirates would hold out for 20 gold coins.
The problem implies that the pirates are untrustworthy, since they are extremely greedy (and because, well, they are pirates).
But lets humor you, and say pirates do bargain:
Lets assume that the pirates are 100% trustworthy (honor amoung thieves), and start bargaining among themselves. They understand probability. They know that dead pirates have no gold. If two possible solutions result in thhe same amount of money for a certain pirate, he'll vote for the solution that keeps the most pirates alive (strength in numbers, y'know).
Now, the solution is not as well defined, so we will add another caveat: The highest ranking pirate makes his offer first, then the next highest ranking pirate, and so on down the line. There is no counter-offers, and thus no bluffing. Then they vote.
Assume we have 3 pirates:
Scenerio:
#3: #1, I'll give you 1 if you vote yes and I win.
[99, 0, 1]
#2: #1, I'll give you 2 if you no. [d, 98, 2]
Dead pirate! Oopsie.
#3: #1, I'll give you 50 if you vote yes and I win. [50, 0, 50]
#2: #1, I'll give you 51 if you vote no. [d, 49, 51]
#3 is still dead. Shit.
#3: #1, I'll give you 99 if you vote yes and I win. [1, 0, 99]
#2: #1, I'll give you 99 if you vote no. [d, 1, 99]
#2 can't give an effective counter offer. #1 will vote with #3 in order to preserve the strength of the group.
So, with three pirates, it goes 1/0/99 or 1/99/0.
Didn't do what you expected, huh?
Running the above with 5 pirates is left as an exercise for the reader. Running the above with 3 pirates and the parameters that (1) pirates can counteroffer and (2) that they don't care about strength in numbers is also fun little exercise, but on that may end up running in circles (didn't have the time to test it out).
If I were the interview (and I have been in the past...), the type of person I'd be looking for is someone who was not too lazy to learn the difference between the words "well" and "good".
I may be wrong (having suffered through a few nutty grammar teachers in my lifetime), but a thing is "good", a process is "well". Since I'm referring to the process of faking a task, the correct word is "well". (And if this is wrong, a thundering horde of slashdotters will correct me).
Re:Quick Question
on
Defining Google
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Do all the jobs require an appitutude test? Or just the high ranking ones?
Almost every job does. Most of the time the aptitude test is how well you are at faking the type of person the interviewer wants.
Yes, I'm bitter and cynical. That does not make me wrong.
However, at the same time, said people are admitting in court that they downloaded (or attempted to download) media for which they didn't hold the copyright.
I don't think it should matter (but IANAL).
Consider -- if you shoplifted a CD in the store, the owner of the store couldn't legally slash all four tires on your automobile, even if it was the vehicle that took you to the store during your illegal act.
Speaking of which -- is attempting to download a copyrighted song illegal? Or do you have to do it?
You can easily find computer operated 60w lasers. And yes its beam is 5 inches wide.
I don't believe that will work. First, in the picture you shown, the beam is already diffusing over the distance shown. The plane was 8500 feet above ground. Even assuming the laser was pointed straight up, I would assume that the beam had diffused by that time.
Speaking of 8500 feet, if the laser was pointed straight up at the plane (lets assume a glass bottomed cockpit), that laser would have to accurate to within +/-.15 degrees to hit a 50' wide cockpit. That's the shortest distance to the plane.
Just to add to the complexity of this feat, the plane was moving. Googling, I find that the approach speed for a landing 747 is (at the low end) 120mph. If my math is right, that's about 170 feet a second!
Now you need a high-powered laser (one that can travel several miles without diffusing) that can be calibrated within a small fraction of a degree and can track an object that moves 170 feet a second, or a little over 1 degree a second.
If you aren't shooting light into a glass-bottomed cockpit, but from, say, 5 miles away, then the plane's angle, relative to you, changes less. Your laser has to be more accurate though: About +/-.05 degrees if MS calc is to be believed. That doesn't stop the plane from being a moving target though, you'll still need tracking software and damn accurate motors to reposition the laser.
This story is very odd, especially with its lack of details. Something isn't right here.
Re:Bayesian is good for almost everything
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Bayesian Tail
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Bayesian filtering could be used for lots of things outside of spam. One example could possibly be Wikis, determining spam from ham modifications (well, yes, it is spam here). I've had some other ideas that involve Bayesian, but they've escaped me for the moment.
Email sorting filters: imagine a baynesian setup that can decide if a new mail should be sorted into "work", "friends", "ebay", "amazon", "project", etc.
Interest filters: Run slashdot stories and comments through your own trained baynesian sorting system and filter out the stories you probably don't want to see. Do the same for news.google.com, cnn, or usenet.
Music sorter: Can Baynesian filters be taught to understand music (pitch, amplitude, etc?) If so, can they sort on it? If I see a song playing in xmms, can I use my nifty baynesian_sort plugin to play more songs that sound like that for the rest of the day? Consider tying it in to the 'next' button -- if I don't play a song completely, I probably don't want to hear songs like that for the next few days.
IM secretary: Add a 'secretary' feature to your IM client. When you enable it, it will show you only messages that it thinks you want to see.
I say, as soon as the alert warning goes off, we set off tactical nukes across the entire coastline and kill ourselves because, hey, f' you mother nature.
There might be an interesting idea buried in your jest.
Is it possible to set up detonations of such magnitude that a tsunami's force is weakened?
A tsunami takes a decent amount of time to head across an ocean (hours). An ICBM travels quicker. The problem that I see is calculating where to apply the nukes and how much force -- that would seem to require locating the wave itself -- deep sea bouys, perhaps?
It depends on the lawyer, the tactics, and the case itself.
Considering that their trackers seem to be trading in copyrighted material, the only valid defense seems to be attacking section 103 of the DMCA, and that would seem to require a first amendment defense (IANAL).
A previous court has already ruled that the DMCA is not trumped by the first amendment (the 2600 case), which makes me think that they must plan a defense on some other factor.
Perhaps they will attack the selective application of the DMCA - google has never been sued, while it looks like Loki will be. Is the DMCA only going after those who can't afford to defend themselves? If so, is this illegal? (Question: has google been approached with DMCA takedown notices before and complied? RIAA: "Remove link to $X" Google: "Done." ???)
I'm almost tempted to tip Loki $25 bucks or so, just to see their defense.
Thanks, this is a good example of how little guys get crushed by well meaning laws with onerous enforcement. He did write a take down notice, but the host did not follow through.
RTFA! It has no mention of a DMCA takedown notice.
A DMCA takedown notice requires (from wikipedia):
contact information
the name of the information that was copied
the address of the copied information
a statement that he has a good faith belief that the material is not legal
a statement that, under penalty of perjury, he is authorized to act for the copyright holder
his signature
You can't complain about a law being broken for the "little guy" if the little guy does not comply with the terms of the law.
Legal rights are a lot less effective if you don't know what they are or how to use them. While obviously everyone can't be an expert, a little research can do wonders.
Imagine what a well-written letter to the ISP with the appropriate information would do.
Identify the law you are acting under, tell them that your provided information (name, address, etc) that you believe fulfills your requirements of the law, and while you aren't interpretting what the law says they should do, this informed person has written that the law says they should do this to avoid that consequence.
I would add MD5sums for each file I identified on the server, just in case the infringer tries to get creative with naming. Under the DMCA, this does nothing, but it helps avoid a "he said, she said" argument later with the ISP ("but I removed file stolen.gif and now you are complaining about stolen_a.gif!" "As you can see by my earlier letter, the md5sum for those two files are the same.")
As for the DMCA, it is section 103 (copying restrictiosn) which is a big pile of steaming shit. That doesn't make unrelated sections bad by association.
http://www.e-buyonline.com/purchase.php and http://www.e-buyonline.com/mk.php still allows you to enter in credit card info to purchase the stolen program.
That's okay, the resulting slashdotting will kill it.:)
In all seriousness, this guy doesn't seem to be beyond the reach of US law. His hosting appears to be from Pakhost, who *tada* keeps their servers in Michigan and Texas.
Remember that DMCA thing we bitch about? Time to write a takedown notice to the hosting company citing the infringing material in question. In addition, once you have collected that information, take a few extra minutes tracking down the legitimate owners of the other software on the site, explain what you did, and share that information.
[ If I'm wrong and his hosting company isn't in the US, a careful inspection of the online store reveals no validation of ording information other than a valid email address. A bitter, wronged coder could write a script to string together valid-looking names, locations, emails, and credit card numbers, then flood their ordering page. It appears that the order information is checked manually, so the above action would end up DOSing their ordering channel. Depending on your location, and the location of the server, this may be very, very illegal, and thus I don't advise it.]
The sad thing is that the E911 document was originally valued
at $79,449 but had roughly the same information as the
"BellSouth E911 Service Interfaces", available for $13 from
a Bellcore catalog (_Hacker_Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling).
As much as I like id software, remember when the occasional new game was different and unique, instead of the same old game with graphics updates?
I know there are new games out there that are different, but they never seem to reach our side of the pond.
I want more than FPS 17: This Sequal Requires DirectX 12. I want more than MMORPG: The Quest To Pay Us Money. And I want more than Super Mario Branded Piss Poor Game Remake and Zelda: We Are Whoring This Franchise Out For the Money.
Processing power has increased to insane levels, the gaming industry has more money than Hollywood, and yet we get the same bland crap?
The Slashdot summary is a word-for-word copy of the technocrat summary.
Now, I understand that slashdot editors are not overly concerned with spelling and grammar, and that is their choice. But even if plagiarism is the result of laziness, the net effect is that someone else's work is passed off as your own, and that is morally wrong.
But hey, we Americans don't care. Since only 8 Americans died (thus far) in the trajedy, the news isn't covering it the way you might think they would for a single event that has caused (so far) over 20,000 dead.
USA Today, December 28, 2004. Front page, above the fold and half of the page below the fold (ignoring the USA Today sidebar): "Disaster takes historic toll." Continues to half of page 2 (other half of page is an ad), with all of pages 10 and 11 devoted to the event. While the subheadline on the front page is US-centric ("Over 22,000 die; hundred of Americans are not located") and parts of the body are also US-centric ("The United States is sending $15 million in cash and resources to the region...") its obvious that the US media is reporting the disaster and its effects on non-Americans.
Now, some, including myself, may criticize the quality of the USA Today's reporting, but it does have a circulation of over 2 million, making it one of the major papers in the US.
Checking the newspaper vending machine, I see that the local paper (Fargo Forum) is also reporting the event as a front page headline. Again, except for the sidebar most newspapers seem to have, its the only story above the fold.
Turning on CNN, I watch through the last minute of "Headlines", wade through a few commercials, and then see their report on the tsunami.
We may not be preempting every other story out there, but the US news organizations seem to be giving this story a lot of weight, by US news standards.
I'm not sure what country you are living in, but yes, Americans do care.
Sure if warning systems were in placed it could have helped lower the death toll, but there is no way to prevent deaths altogether in this situation...
As for preventable, USA Today reports that NOAA did attempt notification of at least two countries: "The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, operated by the National Oceaic and Atmospheric Administration, sent e-mails warning of possible tsunamis within 20 minutes of the quake, said NOAA spokesman Jeff LaDouce. The warnings reached some Australian and Indonesian officials, but the center does not know what became of the information after that." (Cover story, USA Today, December 28th, 2004.) The impression that I'm getting is that South and Southeast Asia had no formal regional notification system, which had disasterous results.
You are right in saying that not all deaths are preventable, but it appears that a good fraction of those deaths were, if the nations involved had an effective regional warning system in place.
PS: USA Today also quotes Arthur C. Clarke. Seems that his story has been picked up by the national newsfeed.
If I format a HD, and fill it with random 1s and 0s , you cannot recover what has been deleted, if you could, then you can store 400gig on my 200gig HD.
This may be tinfoil hat-ish, but I've been told that it is possible to recover some data after a hard drive has been zeroed.
Basically, the recovery procedure would involve reading the strength of each bit, and trying to guess what that bit was before. Due to the width of the drive data ring and the size of the write head, I believe that this mechanism is possible. You can't position the write head exactly on the data stripe, so if you overwrite a 0 with a 1, at the edge of the 0 bit will be some of the left over 1's. Ne'ermind that overwriting the 0 bit with the 1 bit will leave a weaker 1 bit than overwriting a 1 with a 1. Its an analog storage mechanism. To the hard drive hardware, any value over x% is a 1, and any value under x% is a 0. Plus there should be a skew in the write position along the data ring -- everytime a drive writes, the bits may start at a slightly different position. The net effect of this is that the drive keeps a hint of the previous data on the drive, and, theoretically, that data can be recovered. This would be easier to do on a drive that was formatted once, without being defragged, and without many files being deleted and rewritten.
That being said, this would be an expensive recovery, and the recovered data would probably have some gaps in it. If you piss off the local police department, and do a quick zeroing of the drive, you are probably safe. If you piss off the NSA, you might want to consider turning the hard drive into slag.
For normal destruction of data, I prefer some variant of 'badblocks -c 64 -w -p 10 -t random/dev/hdx'.
If the above 'badblocks' tries to write to a badblock and fails, some data in the badblock may still be recoverable. Depending on a variety of factors, a good deal of text data may survive. But this is a problem with any software-based hard drive format: the hardware in modern drives tries to swap out failing blocks with spare blocks by design, and without the OS's help or knowledge. Even if you get all the bad blocks the OS sees, the hard drive may have hidden some from the OS. So no matter which software command you wipe a drive with, some data may still survive. Hence the "slag" option when you piss off the NSA.
I use Spamvampire almost constantly. It works great. It sucks up their bandwidth, and while it doesn't DOS them, it does make the business of spam a hell of a lot less financially viable.
J. Random Skriptkiddie thanks you. If everyone did what you are doing, DDOS attacks would be as simple as running a few fake spam emails through the nearest open relay. Right now, DDOS attacks are limited to mainly zombie networks, which takes more care and feeding.
Slashdot Mirror
An Anonymous Coward posted the following in regards to the rumored Apple office suite on January 3rd, 2004:
As with all rumors, there's no need to believe it until Apple starts taking legal action against the rumor sites. Until then, you can assume that they probably missed the mark.
The posted was modded +5, Funny (60% funny, 20% insightful, 20% underrated).
"Interplay Forced to Liquidate (France)" Don't freek out Germany tried to liquidate france twice, didn't really get close. Heck half the world has tried to liquidate france at one time or another.
Although history does record a French bastard liquidating England.
(To be honest, that would be a French/Viking bastard liquidating the Anglo-Saxon English, which the mere Vikings couldn't do alone. Or something like that. European history being a mess of who went where when.)
When comparing a industrial strength drill (hole-hawg:unix/linux) to a normal drill (consumer-drill:windows/mac) the commenter writes:
What's more powerful, a hole-hawg, or a five-speed consumer drill with large grips, a safety shut-off, and a built-in level? The hole-hawg, obviously. But which would you rather use to drill, say, five hundred chandelier mounts in a ballroom?
I have to go with the tool that has a good chance of drilling 500 mounts. I don't trust fancy consumer drills to survive drilling many large deep holes.
Which, I think, also applies to unix/linux. I don't get all misty-eyed and sniffly at the thought of using a shell and good ol' CHUI tools. Nope. I use them because they consistantly get the job done quicker and easier than other tools.
The problem is that a lot of these nifty tools are scary, in meatspace and in cyberspace. They also require some training before use -- a steep learning curve. Take a bolt extractor (looks like a very corsely threaded thich screw with a square end for the wrench). Hand one to the average person and they won't know what the hell its for. But with a little knowledge and another simple tool (a good drill and a bit for metal) its rather useful to take out a broken bolt. What about a cutting torch? Screw up, and you'll be seeing grandma and Elvis. Learn to use it correctly and you'll be able to remove a drum from a vehicle with rusted out brake hardware, or to cut through thick chunks of iron.
Are these tools a little macho? Perhaps some of them (cutting metal with fire is damn fun). But is that why these tools are in use? No, these tools are used because they get the job done.
I have money in the bank, and I spend enough time in front of a monitor to be able to justify the purchase of software tools if they were able to fulfill a need that OS tools could not (and a certain proprietary OS is an excellent software tool for running proprietary games).
This commenter reminds me of someone who got into OSS because OSS was "cool".
Imagine someone who decides that he'll learn vim because hackers use vi (or emacs). He looks at a cheat sheet, figures out what i, a, hjkl, and :wq does, and is content at being a "hacker" for the next six months. Afterwords, he discovers some nice commercial IDE and, sick of the lack of features he finds in vim, decides to go with the commercial IDE. After all, he knows that vim can't lookup man pages for functions, jump to a function declaration, change its indentation style, edit multiple files, integrate with compiler errors, or a host of many other things that the commercial IDE can do. He sits back convinced that those OS lusers are fooling themselves, the same way he fooled himself.
I'm sure there was lots of infra-whats-a-ma-gig going on, but regardless of those factors, what it comes down to is that animals just aren't as stupid as humans.
When confronted with an unusual, confusing situation, they get the fuck out. Whether it was the vibrations, the noise, or the distant sea swell, doesn't matter, they got the fuck out.
That's loser speak. ;)
What is better for Og: Avoiding the sharp rock that cut him? Or figuring out how to use that sharp rock to cut others?
Avoid fire like the rest of creation? Or use it to keep him warm and build better spears to kill others?
Og thinking that, like all other predators, a healthy, adult mammoth shouldn't be messed with? Or scream and taunt the mammoth to the point where, in order to escape this mad creature, the mammoth tries to flee, forgetting about the large cliff...
Sure, Og's actions lead to a high deathrate amoung Og's kin. But a few Ogs later, the rest of the clan is much better off.
An ipod costs upwards of $660, a decent entry level laptop costs $1200 and petrol (gas) costs about $1 per litre. Also cars are expensive.
Doesn't India have a high tarriff on all non-domestic vehicles? I believe they want to encourage their own domestic industry.
Has he considered a large binder full of tabbed pages with common phrases in it? At the front or back could be a notepad and a marker to write with.
If he was planning to use a keyboard and small PDA, he probably has the dexterity left to flip tabs, and enough control to write LARGE letters that are readable.
Its also pretty cheap and its unlikely that anyone would steal it.
Plus, the battery life of paper rocks. :)
I'll add my own wiki experience to the mix. I was doing a paper on the Japanese writer Higuchi Ichiyo last semester and, not knowing much about her, I ended up using wiki as a source. EVERYTHING I cited from wikipedia was factually wrong. Luckily I ran it by my professor before handing it in, but I will never use Wikipedia as a source on a paper again. They've completely turned me off to using it for any academic purpose. I do still visit wikipedia when I need general information but I even take that with a major grain of salt.
Wikipedia keeps the history of all articles, including all edits, so lets figure out what was wrong. As anther poster has commented, the information appears to be correct.
This is the history page, would you care to point out the incorrect information from the version you used? I'm not seeing it.
If pirates 1 and 3 can convince pirates 2 and 4 not to go with 5, or vice-versa, they can leverage to get more money out of pirate 5. My first instinct was that since the threat of death was upon them, that each of the other 4 pirates would hold out for 20 gold coins.
The problem implies that the pirates are untrustworthy, since they are extremely greedy (and because, well, they are pirates).
But lets humor you, and say pirates do bargain:
Lets assume that the pirates are 100% trustworthy (honor amoung thieves), and start bargaining among themselves. They understand probability. They know that dead pirates have no gold. If two possible solutions result in thhe same amount of money for a certain pirate, he'll vote for the solution that keeps the most pirates alive (strength in numbers, y'know).
Now, the solution is not as well defined, so we will add another caveat: The highest ranking pirate makes his offer first, then the next highest ranking pirate, and so on down the line. There is no counter-offers, and thus no bluffing. Then they vote.
Assume we have 3 pirates:
Scenerio:
#3: #1, I'll give you 1 if you vote yes and I win. [99, 0, 1]
#2: #1, I'll give you 2 if you no. [d, 98, 2]
Dead pirate! Oopsie.
#3: #1, I'll give you 50 if you vote yes and I win. [50, 0, 50]
#2: #1, I'll give you 51 if you vote no. [d, 49, 51]
#3 is still dead. Shit.
#3: #1, I'll give you 99 if you vote yes and I win. [1, 0, 99]
#2: #1, I'll give you 99 if you vote no. [d, 1, 99]
#2 can't give an effective counter offer. #1 will vote with #3 in order to preserve the strength of the group.
So, with three pirates, it goes 1/0/99 or 1/99/0.
Didn't do what you expected, huh?
Running the above with 5 pirates is left as an exercise for the reader. Running the above with 3 pirates and the parameters that (1) pirates can counteroffer and (2) that they don't care about strength in numbers is also fun little exercise, but on that may end up running in circles (didn't have the time to test it out).
If I were the interview (and I have been in the past...), the type of person I'd be looking for is someone who was not too lazy to learn the difference between the words "well" and "good".
I may be wrong (having suffered through a few nutty grammar teachers in my lifetime), but a thing is "good", a process is "well". Since I'm referring to the process of faking a task, the correct word is "well". (And if this is wrong, a thundering horde of slashdotters will correct me).
Do all the jobs require an appitutude test? Or just the high ranking ones?
Almost every job does. Most of the time the aptitude test is how well you are at faking the type of person the interviewer wants.
Yes, I'm bitter and cynical. That does not make me wrong.
However, at the same time, said people are admitting in court that they downloaded (or attempted to download) media for which they didn't hold the copyright.
I don't think it should matter (but IANAL).
Consider -- if you shoplifted a CD in the store, the owner of the store couldn't legally slash all four tires on your automobile, even if it was the vehicle that took you to the store during your illegal act.
Speaking of which -- is attempting to download a copyrighted song illegal? Or do you have to do it?
You can easily find computer operated 60w lasers. And yes its beam is 5 inches wide.
I don't believe that will work. First, in the picture you shown, the beam is already diffusing over the distance shown. The plane was 8500 feet above ground. Even assuming the laser was pointed straight up, I would assume that the beam had diffused by that time.
Speaking of 8500 feet, if the laser was pointed straight up at the plane (lets assume a glass bottomed cockpit), that laser would have to accurate to within +/-.15 degrees to hit a 50' wide cockpit. That's the shortest distance to the plane.
Just to add to the complexity of this feat, the plane was moving. Googling, I find that the approach speed for a landing 747 is (at the low end) 120mph. If my math is right, that's about 170 feet a second!
Now you need a high-powered laser (one that can travel several miles without diffusing) that can be calibrated within a small fraction of a degree and can track an object that moves 170 feet a second, or a little over 1 degree a second.
If you aren't shooting light into a glass-bottomed cockpit, but from, say, 5 miles away, then the plane's angle, relative to you, changes less. Your laser has to be more accurate though: About +/-.05 degrees if MS calc is to be believed. That doesn't stop the plane from being a moving target though, you'll still need tracking software and damn accurate motors to reposition the laser.
This story is very odd, especially with its lack of details. Something isn't right here.
Bayesian filtering could be used for lots of things outside of spam. One example could possibly be Wikis, determining spam from ham modifications (well, yes, it is spam here). I've had some other ideas that involve Bayesian, but they've escaped me for the moment.
There are a ton of possibilities available.
I say, as soon as the alert warning goes off, we set off tactical nukes across the entire coastline and kill ourselves because, hey, f' you mother nature.
There might be an interesting idea buried in your jest.
Is it possible to set up detonations of such magnitude that a tsunami's force is weakened?
A tsunami takes a decent amount of time to head across an ocean (hours). An ICBM travels quicker. The problem that I see is calculating where to apply the nukes and how much force -- that would seem to require locating the wave itself -- deep sea bouys, perhaps?
It depends on the lawyer, the tactics, and the case itself.
Considering that their trackers seem to be trading in copyrighted material, the only valid defense seems to be attacking section 103 of the DMCA, and that would seem to require a first amendment defense (IANAL).
A previous court has already ruled that the DMCA is not trumped by the first amendment (the 2600 case), which makes me think that they must plan a defense on some other factor.
Perhaps they will attack the selective application of the DMCA - google has never been sued, while it looks like Loki will be. Is the DMCA only going after those who can't afford to defend themselves? If so, is this illegal? (Question: has google been approached with DMCA takedown notices before and complied? RIAA: "Remove link to $X" Google: "Done." ???)
I'm almost tempted to tip Loki $25 bucks or so, just to see their defense.
Thanks, this is a good example of how little guys get crushed by well meaning laws with onerous enforcement. He did write a take down notice, but the host did not follow through.
RTFA! It has no mention of a DMCA takedown notice.A DMCA takedown notice requires (from wikipedia):
You can't complain about a law being broken for the "little guy" if the little guy does not comply with the terms of the law.
Legal rights are a lot less effective if you don't know what they are or how to use them. While obviously everyone can't be an expert, a little research can do wonders.
Imagine what a well-written letter to the ISP with the appropriate information would do.
Identify the law you are acting under, tell them that your provided information (name, address, etc) that you believe fulfills your requirements of the law, and while you aren't interpretting what the law says they should do, this informed person has written that the law says they should do this to avoid that consequence.
I would add MD5sums for each file I identified on the server, just in case the infringer tries to get creative with naming. Under the DMCA, this does nothing, but it helps avoid a "he said, she said" argument later with the ISP ("but I removed file stolen.gif and now you are complaining about stolen_a.gif!" "As you can see by my earlier letter, the md5sum for those two files are the same.")
As for the DMCA, it is section 103 (copying restrictiosn) which is a big pile of steaming shit. That doesn't make unrelated sections bad by association.
http://www.e-buyonline.com/purchase.php and http://www.e-buyonline.com/mk.php still allows you to enter in credit card info to purchase the stolen program.
That's okay, the resulting slashdotting will kill it. :)
In all seriousness, this guy doesn't seem to be beyond the reach of US law. His hosting appears to be from Pakhost, who *tada* keeps their servers in Michigan and Texas.
Remember that DMCA thing we bitch about? Time to write a takedown notice to the hosting company citing the infringing material in question. In addition, once you have collected that information, take a few extra minutes tracking down the legitimate owners of the other software on the site, explain what you did, and share that information.
[ If I'm wrong and his hosting company isn't in the US, a careful inspection of the online store reveals no validation of ording information other than a valid email address. A bitter, wronged coder could write a script to string together valid-looking names, locations, emails, and credit card numbers, then flood their ordering page. It appears that the order information is checked manually, so the above action would end up DOSing their ordering channel. Depending on your location, and the location of the server, this may be very, very illegal, and thus I don't advise it.]
"Surströmming" == "Pickled Herring"???
The raw fish and horrible smell sounds about right.
Back before I gave up eating meat, I used to love the stuff.
The sad thing is that the E911 document was originally valued at $79,449 but had roughly the same information as the "BellSouth E911 Service Interfaces", available for $13 from a Bellcore catalog (_Hacker_Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling).
As much as I like id software, remember when the occasional new game was different and unique, instead of the same old game with graphics updates?
I know there are new games out there that are different, but they never seem to reach our side of the pond.
I want more than FPS 17: This Sequal Requires DirectX 12. I want more than MMORPG: The Quest To Pay Us Money. And I want more than Super Mario Branded Piss Poor Game Remake and Zelda: We Are Whoring This Franchise Out For the Money.
Processing power has increased to insane levels, the gaming industry has more money than Hollywood, and yet we get the same bland crap?
*Waves cane!*
Actually, it was submitted by Bruce Perens, who .. uh, well, runs technocrat.net. It's *his* content, and he can post it anywhere he likes.
*Blushes* Oopsie.
The Slashdot summary is a word-for-word copy of the technocrat summary.
Now, I understand that slashdot editors are not overly concerned with spelling and grammar, and that is their choice. But even if plagiarism is the result of laziness, the net effect is that someone else's work is passed off as your own, and that is morally wrong.
But hey, we Americans don't care. Since only 8 Americans died (thus far) in the trajedy, the news isn't covering it the way you might think they would for a single event that has caused (so far) over 20,000 dead.
USA Today, December 28, 2004. Front page, above the fold and half of the page below the fold (ignoring the USA Today sidebar): "Disaster takes historic toll." Continues to half of page 2 (other half of page is an ad), with all of pages 10 and 11 devoted to the event. While the subheadline on the front page is US-centric ("Over 22,000 die; hundred of Americans are not located") and parts of the body are also US-centric ("The United States is sending $15 million in cash and resources to the region...") its obvious that the US media is reporting the disaster and its effects on non-Americans.
Now, some, including myself, may criticize the quality of the USA Today's reporting, but it does have a circulation of over 2 million, making it one of the major papers in the US.
Checking the newspaper vending machine, I see that the local paper (Fargo Forum) is also reporting the event as a front page headline. Again, except for the sidebar most newspapers seem to have, its the only story above the fold.
Turning on CNN, I watch through the last minute of "Headlines", wade through a few commercials, and then see their report on the tsunami.
We may not be preempting every other story out there, but the US news organizations seem to be giving this story a lot of weight, by US news standards.
I'm not sure what country you are living in, but yes, Americans do care.
Sure if warning systems were in placed it could have helped lower the death toll, but there is no way to prevent deaths altogether in this situation...
As for preventable, USA Today reports that NOAA did attempt notification of at least two countries: "The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, operated by the National Oceaic and Atmospheric Administration, sent e-mails warning of possible tsunamis within 20 minutes of the quake, said NOAA spokesman Jeff LaDouce. The warnings reached some Australian and Indonesian officials, but the center does not know what became of the information after that." (Cover story, USA Today, December 28th, 2004.) The impression that I'm getting is that South and Southeast Asia had no formal regional notification system, which had disasterous results.
You are right in saying that not all deaths are preventable, but it appears that a good fraction of those deaths were, if the nations involved had an effective regional warning system in place.
PS: USA Today also quotes Arthur C. Clarke. Seems that his story has been picked up by the national newsfeed.
If I format a HD, and fill it with random 1s and 0s , you cannot recover what has been deleted, if you could, then you can store 400gig on my 200gig HD.
This may be tinfoil hat-ish, but I've been told that it is possible to recover some data after a hard drive has been zeroed.
Basically, the recovery procedure would involve reading the strength of each bit, and trying to guess what that bit was before. Due to the width of the drive data ring and the size of the write head, I believe that this mechanism is possible. You can't position the write head exactly on the data stripe, so if you overwrite a 0 with a 1, at the edge of the 0 bit will be some of the left over 1's. Ne'ermind that overwriting the 0 bit with the 1 bit will leave a weaker 1 bit than overwriting a 1 with a 1. Its an analog storage mechanism. To the hard drive hardware, any value over x% is a 1, and any value under x% is a 0. Plus there should be a skew in the write position along the data ring -- everytime a drive writes, the bits may start at a slightly different position. The net effect of this is that the drive keeps a hint of the previous data on the drive, and, theoretically, that data can be recovered. This would be easier to do on a drive that was formatted once, without being defragged, and without many files being deleted and rewritten.
That being said, this would be an expensive recovery, and the recovered data would probably have some gaps in it. If you piss off the local police department, and do a quick zeroing of the drive, you are probably safe. If you piss off the NSA, you might want to consider turning the hard drive into slag.
For normal destruction of data, I prefer some variant of 'badblocks -c 64 -w -p 10 -t random /dev/hdx'.
If the above 'badblocks' tries to write to a badblock and fails, some data in the badblock may still be recoverable. Depending on a variety of factors, a good deal of text data may survive. But this is a problem with any software-based hard drive format: the hardware in modern drives tries to swap out failing blocks with spare blocks by design, and without the OS's help or knowledge. Even if you get all the bad blocks the OS sees, the hard drive may have hidden some from the OS. So no matter which software command you wipe a drive with, some data may still survive. Hence the "slag" option when you piss off the NSA.
DogDude writes:
I use Spamvampire almost constantly. It works great. It sucks up their bandwidth, and while it doesn't DOS them, it does make the business of spam a hell of a lot less financially viable.
J. Random Skriptkiddie thanks you. If everyone did what you are doing, DDOS attacks would be as simple as running a few fake spam emails through the nearest open relay. Right now, DDOS attacks are limited to mainly zombie networks, which takes more care and feeding.