I've only tried it in the emulator, so I can't give you an indication of the speed. It runs 100% on my 300 mhz laptop in emulator, but that of course is no indication of what I'll see on the StrongARM. The main problem at this time is the shareware pak file is 48 MB.
Like he says, I'm not sure if an emulator would give you a true indication of how it may actually work. Although the screenshot looks impressive, it may not work or look the same once the PAK files are stripped.
Also, he may need to make some compromise for a sufficiently faster gameplay. In my experience so far, emulators always perform a lot more faster than the real things.
Very true. But the good news is that we are making some leeway into getting stuff ported our way, from companies that are pretty stubborn (if you do not know what I mean, go read the Sun Java (TM) License).
"...With an officially licensed binary Java distribution..."
Well, this does necessarily mean the end of a few license wars for running Java (TM) on FreeBSD, but atleast a native port has been done and something _is_ better than nothing. Not that ppl are going to begin using Java on FreeBSD tomorrow, but it definitely is a first step.
Since Microsoft is slowly trying to push third party development applications away from it's platform (apparently to make way for.NET), this is a good sign.
I'm not a big fan of Java, but if there are enough number of viable platforms for development, I'm sure attention could be shifted from the Win* platform to other unices.
FreeBSD is a very stable and robust platform, but to what extent has it managed to penetrate the existing MS market? Apparently Linux seems to be doing this, and the reason is not anything else, except support for existing applications.
I'd like to see where this takes the FreeBSD marketshare.
Actually, you do not even have to go that far. It is more than enough if you can direct a few hundred kgs of any isotope with a small half-life to the sun, when you have solar storms.
This would automatically cause wierd spectra. But the sad thing is that Chandra (the telescope) recently spotted real astronomical bodies which give out such spectra. So, even this maynot be a sure fire way of letting them ppl know our presence.
"...they look for Dyson spheres by looking for stars that have a lot of infrared. But you know, they've only looked a couple hundred stars."
"..So that was 1959 and by 1960 people were already looking for the signals."
"...So if you want to send a bit of information from here to Alpha Centauri it's cheaper, in terms of the energy, to do that with radio than to do it with light."
"So, you know, that's been the argument for many years. Now that argument isn't very solid anymore. "
That's a very insightful statement. Perhaps we are yet to discover yet another means of efficient mode of communication. Now suppose Earth were to try and make contact with another civilization, would we use smoke signals or radio?
Just imagine what would have happened if someone had transmitted a radio message just about 200 years ago? We do not even know if someone did.
Perhaps it is possible that some alien civilization has a much more efficient and better means of communication, and they are trying very hard to tell us something, but hey, would we know it even if we saw it?
Perhaps they should try blowing up stars next or something;-)
A poster above had commented on Logical v. Illogical Actions. I'd agree with him, but what actually sets us apart is emotions, or instinct, however you may choose to call it since the two are subtly connected.
Robot emotions play a much larger part than most people know. In fact, any serious researcher into AI would know that emotions are nothing but another decisive factor, except that they are not well understood.
I'd seriously advice looking at Arthur T Murray's research into this area available here. It has a lot more to it than mere `entertainment` value.
And if you really are worried about robots having souls or a conscience, you should read this!. It is a pretty insightful article into what robots may have to do to qualify as humans.
He recently witnessed a demonstration of a hydrogen-fueled automotive fuel cell that was so environmentally friendly its only byproduct was water safe enough to drink.
So they are talking about a H-O fuel cell. Agreed, but what about the risks of explosion? Seriously, I'd done some fuel cell research a couple of years back and one of the biggest problems the people doing it faced was regulating the flow of hydrogen & oxygen. More often than not, the flow would go awry. Ofcourse I'm not talking about small scale ones, I'm talking of large ones, developed for seeing how well fuel cells could be used in industrial areas. I'm sure these would be the kind of ones which would be used in such things as planes, too.
And given something like a plane, we cannot afford to have such uncertainities and risks.
Under the measure, retailers would have to provide identity theft victims with copies of all fraudulent records, and credit agencies would have to block bad credit information on their reports if they were the result of identity theft.
It all sounds very fair, but how easy would _that_ be? Given bureacratic middlemen and a lot of other things, I'm sure this would not be as easy as it sounds.
Plus what about the trouble with insurance. I'm certain that not many insurance companies would be ready to provide the victim with a proper profile, esp. after such an incident. In fact, I had a friend who had experienced something similar (not identity theft, but someone had interchanged her insurance profile) and even though it was _not_ her fault, most insurance companies are reluctant to give her anything that they feel would land them in trouble.
Sad that things like this ought to happen, only shows that we may not be ready, after all, for full automation.
Despite all the arguments favouring IP rights et al, I'd say that most of the research has to be open-sourced, so to speak.
There is no point in re-inventing the wheel. It becomes ridiculous when 10 different companies engage in enormous investments independently on 10 different projects, when they could have all done 10 different projects to begin with.
IP has it's own say, no doubt, but over doing it leads to commercialization of science, and defeats it's very purpose. Engaged in silly patent and copyright wars, we have no doubt postponed many a useful invention by at least a few decades, IMHO.
"...what science-fiction novels have had a particularly noticeable effect on the development of technology..." I know that Asimov had not coined the word, nor do I mention so anywhere! What I meant was that we are increasingly becoming like the _Spacer_ worlds, more so Solaria-ish, in the sense that millions of people would rather watch TV and chat on the net, than go out with friends.
We are increasingly dependent on our technology, and our nifty little gadgets. You may not have robots staring in your face right tomorrow, but when they really arrive, you'd not even have noticed. Unless of course when some depressed robot comes along complaining about those diodes of his;-)
Although some things stated by Asimov are quite out of this world, we _are_ having a lot of robotics going on around us, in some form of automation or the other.
Sony's Aibo, cars & washing machines with computers built into them, automated support systems, expert systems (before someone yells that these things are not widely used in the industry, I'd like to let them know that I'm in the support industry working on automated-support query solving agents). And what about bots which crawl the web and gather data.
We could go on and on, the basic fact is that although things like Daneel (or for that matter Marvin;-) are not yet here, robotics and AI is a fast advancing field. Sure, no fancy AI taking over the world tomorrow, but the technology is so subtle that we do not notice it, or even if we do, not pay much attention to it.
And this slide sums up the whole paper basically - it gives an overview of how the backscatter idea works.
If I remember correctly, there was also a follow up to this paper on ACM regarding some statistical survey of existing DoS attacks and the ones mentioned in this paper.
There was this really interesting paper on intrusion that I had once read.
The paper basically had this idea that for every spoofed TCP packet, the receiptent will return a message, upon which the original sender would essentially say that it did not send the packet.
This paper made a statistical analysis of logging such packets over a fixed range of IP addresses, and then extrapolated from that result.
That way, one could get an idea of spoofed attacks being carried out. But the downside was that a lot of security programs themselves at times spoof IPs to mask their identity, so that could kind of alter the result by a reasonably high margin.
But I remember that it had a probability of a really high number of attacks being carried out under spoofed addresses. Pretty interesting read, although I do not seem to be able to locate where I had read it.
Review: Some of the media gives Microsoft a bad rap, that might be because most of the media is AOL/Time/Warner. I've been pretty lucky to meet lots of folks from Microsoft in the last year and they're a great passionate crew and the result is a profitable company with cool products, so I'm pretty excited about this particular annual meeting to say the least!
Huh? What the hell? What has this guy been smoking?
I had posted this in an earlier discussion [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23740&cid=256 1817] about DDOS networks being built.
Now one poster had suggested something about exchanging possibly "blacklisted" IPs. Perhaps we could build up a DB of such IPs and possibly compare these with those murkier IPs.
I'm almost certain that atleast some of the banned IPs would fall under the murkier regions. In fact, still worse is the fact that some of these come through wingates (as I found out), making it all the more troublesome:-/
``In terms of costs and attraction, Asimo would rank among the celebrities called on to host events,'' said Toshiji Asai, manager of Asimo's business office.
Great, what next? Inaugarations by Aibo - hey there nice doggie doggie. Jump over that ribbon?
(no pun intended)...
Even I've had logs of apparent DNS DDOS, but mine go back as far as April 20th and odd. Yes, after the increasing number of random IPs on ports 53 and 129, 79 I decided to stop the DNS.
I know this is slightly offtopic, but this was there on the bugtraq mailing list, thought ppl here may find it interesting:
To: bugtraq@securityfocus.com
Subject: Fwd: Possible DDOS network being built through ssh1 crc compromised hosts
I am making this notification to assist in determining whether other
folks have been affected by this attack.
An associate's home NAT gateway linux box was hacked by what I am
guessing was the ssh1 crc bug (ssh1 was the only exposed service).
This
machine looks to have been compromised on Nov 2nd at 1:15pm PST, I
won't know for certain until I obtain his hard disk later today, and
provided that/var logging is recoverable. This machine was running
redhat 6.2, reasonably patched except for the fact that he was still
running ssh1.
It appears that someone may be building up a network of (potentially)
DDOS hosts. I have done some quick research and found no matches for
the signatures I have been able to identify so far.
Using the Chkrootkit (www.chkrootkit.org) utilities did not identify
a known trojan pack, so if this isn't identified in the wild, I'm
already referring to it as the LIMPninja.
It also appears that this particular host was used as a central host
for other LIMPninja zombies. Also, haven't been able to determine
what the command structure it is that the remote bots act upon.
The following is by no means complete, even after a full examination
of the drive has been completed, as there was never any file
integrity base line completed(a shame).
The attack appears to be scripted as all changes happened within a
minute, except for the IRC server which was not installed until 2
days later (and manually). When I found this particular irc net
there were over 120 hosts all communicating via IRC. This host was
found to be running an unrealircd daemon from/usr/bin/bin/u/src/ircd
listening at port 6669.
All other compromised hosts were joining this irc network
(ircd.hola.mx holad) on channel #kujikiri with a channel key of
'ninehandscutting'. All bots joined as the nick ninjaXXXX where XXXX
is some RANDOM? selection of 4 upper case letters.
Several ports were listening
3879 term (this port had an ipchains rule blocking all external
traffic - placed by the attacker's script)
6669 ircd
9706 term
42121 inetd spawned in.telnetd
Logs were wiped, and couldn't find a wiping utility so I'm thinking a
simple rm or unlink was used, so I'm hoping to find more details when
the disk is in hand. File modifications that were made follow:(not
necessarily a complete analysis yet)
clearly Trojaned binaries (probably others)
/bin/ps
/bin/netstat
/bin/ls (this ls binary was hiding several things, directory
structures named/u/, mysqld klogd...)
/usr/local/bin/sshd1 (the file was just several hundred bytes larger
than previously)
Binary file/directory additions
/usr/bin/bin/u/ An entire directory structure containing the ircd
server source
/usr/bin/share/mysqld (looks like some type of irc spoofing proxy)
/bin/klogd (almost looks like an ftp proxy)
/bin/term (A bindshell of some sort)
/usr/sbin/init.d was added and is exactly the same file size as term
System configuration files that were modified/added
/etc/hosts.allow made specific allowances for the.dk domain, as well
as.cais.net.cais.com
/etc/passwd two new accounts were added with the same password (des
hashes -NOT MD5)
/etc/shadow The added accounts were lpd 1212:1212, and admin 0:0
/etc/inetd.conf 200+ lines of whitespace added, and then the single
telnet entry
/etc/services was modified for telnet to start on port 42121
/etc/resolv.conf a new nameserver was added...
/etc/psdevtab haven't examined closely yet
/etc/rc.sysinit a line was added to start the/usr/sbin/init.d
trojan/backdoor
/etc/rc.local after much whitespace was added.... following lines at
the bottom of the rc.local file
User : Hi, I'd like you to take me to the ice cream shop.
Marvin : Oh, I'm so depressed. All my 2000cc engines which can drive an Enterprise captain to warp power against the klingons, and what am I made to do? Drive to ice cream shop.
Well, maybe I'll count 1 zillion sheeps and cows before I feel more depressed.
Already a lot of public places forbid you from using cell phones. With all due apologies to the road warriors, I have a feeling that the convergence of music games et al into a cell will only add more to the problem.
Waiter: Sir, you cannot talk on a cell inside the hotel sir.
Me: Oh no, I was just excited about Commander Keen.
Waiter: Huh? I doubt you are allowed to talk to Mr.Keen either, sir.
Me: aaaaaaaaarggggggggghhhhh
Slashdot Mirror
I've only tried it in the emulator, so I can't give you an indication of the speed. It runs 100% on my 300 mhz laptop in emulator, but that of course is no indication of what I'll see on the StrongARM. The main problem at this time is the shareware pak file is 48 MB.
Like he says, I'm not sure if an emulator would give you a true indication of how it may actually work. Although the screenshot looks impressive, it may not work or look the same once the PAK files are stripped.
Also, he may need to make some compromise for a sufficiently faster gameplay. In my experience so far, emulators always perform a lot more faster than the real things.
Still, a great start. Way to go...
Very true. But the good news is that we are making some leeway into getting stuff ported our way, from companies that are pretty stubborn (if you do not know what I mean, go read the Sun Java (TM) License).
"...With an officially licensed binary Java distribution..."
Well, this does necessarily mean the end of a few license wars for running Java (TM) on FreeBSD, but atleast a native port has been done and something _is_ better than nothing. Not that ppl are going to begin using Java on FreeBSD tomorrow, but it definitely is a first step.
Since Microsoft is slowly trying to push third party development applications away from it's platform (apparently to make way for .NET), this is a good sign.
I'm not a big fan of Java, but if there are enough number of viable platforms for development, I'm sure attention could be shifted from the Win* platform to other unices.
FreeBSD is a very stable and robust platform, but to what extent has it managed to penetrate the existing MS market? Apparently Linux seems to be doing this, and the reason is not anything else, except support for existing applications.
I'd like to see where this takes the FreeBSD marketshare.
Actually, you do not even have to go that far. It is more than enough if you can direct a few hundred kgs of any isotope with a small half-life to the sun, when you have solar storms.
This would automatically cause wierd spectra. But the sad thing is that Chandra (the telescope) recently spotted real astronomical bodies which give out such spectra. So, even this maynot be a sure fire way of letting them ppl know our presence.
Seth has a very important point.
;-)
"...they look for Dyson spheres by looking for stars that have a lot of infrared. But you know, they've only looked a couple hundred stars."
"..So that was 1959 and by 1960 people were already looking for the signals."
"...So if you want to send a bit of information from here to Alpha Centauri it's cheaper, in terms of the energy, to do that with radio than to do it with light."
"So, you know, that's been the argument for many years. Now that argument isn't very solid anymore. "
That's a very insightful statement. Perhaps we are yet to discover yet another means of efficient mode of communication. Now suppose Earth were to try and make contact with another civilization, would we use smoke signals or radio?
Just imagine what would have happened if someone had transmitted a radio message just about 200 years ago? We do not even know if someone did.
Perhaps it is possible that some alien civilization has a much more efficient and better means of communication, and they are trying very hard to tell us something, but hey, would we know it even if we saw it?
Perhaps they should try blowing up stars next or something
The following year they released simple games such as Ozama Wars
;-)
Umm! The "Ozama Wars - The saga continues..."
Now I know where Dubya's inspiration came from
Rappsrv is an interesting framework for web applications written entirely in Ruby.
You can check out the site, the code and the thing at work.
Pretty neat! There are also some nice Ruby resources at the same site.
A poster above had commented on Logical v. Illogical Actions. I'd agree with him, but what actually sets us apart is emotions, or instinct, however you may choose to call it since the two are subtly connected.
Robot emotions play a much larger part than most people know. In fact, any serious researcher into AI would know that emotions are nothing but another decisive factor, except that they are not well understood.
I'd seriously advice looking at Arthur T Murray's research into this area available here. It has a lot more to it than mere `entertainment` value.
And if you really are worried about robots having souls or a conscience, you should read this!. It is a pretty insightful article into what robots may have to do to qualify as humans.
He recently witnessed a demonstration of a hydrogen-fueled automotive fuel cell that was so environmentally friendly its only byproduct was water safe enough to drink.
So they are talking about a H-O fuel cell. Agreed, but what about the risks of explosion? Seriously, I'd done some fuel cell research a couple of years back and one of the biggest problems the people doing it faced was regulating the flow of hydrogen & oxygen. More often than not, the flow would go awry. Ofcourse I'm not talking about small scale ones, I'm talking of large ones, developed for seeing how well fuel cells could be used in industrial areas. I'm sure these would be the kind of ones which would be used in such things as planes, too.
And given something like a plane, we cannot afford to have such uncertainities and risks.
Under the measure, retailers would have to provide identity theft victims with copies of all fraudulent records, and credit agencies would have to block bad credit information on their reports if they were the result of identity theft.
It all sounds very fair, but how easy would _that_ be? Given bureacratic middlemen and a lot of other things, I'm sure this would not be as easy as it sounds.
Plus what about the trouble with insurance. I'm certain that not many insurance companies would be ready to provide the victim with a proper profile, esp. after such an incident. In fact, I had a friend who had experienced something similar (not identity theft, but someone had interchanged her insurance profile) and even though it was _not_ her fault, most insurance companies are reluctant to give her anything that they feel would land them in trouble.
Sad that things like this ought to happen, only shows that we may not be ready, after all, for full automation.
Despite all the arguments favouring IP rights et al, I'd say that most of the research has to be open-sourced, so to speak.
There is no point in re-inventing the wheel. It becomes ridiculous when 10 different companies engage in enormous investments independently on 10 different projects, when they could have all done 10 different projects to begin with.
IP has it's own say, no doubt, but over doing it leads to commercialization of science, and defeats it's very purpose. Engaged in silly patent and copyright wars, we have no doubt postponed many a useful invention by at least a few decades, IMHO.
Please read the article -
;-)
"...what science-fiction novels have had a particularly noticeable effect on the development of technology..."
I know that Asimov had not coined the word, nor do I mention so anywhere! What I meant was that we are increasingly becoming like the _Spacer_ worlds, more so Solaria-ish, in the sense that millions of people would rather watch TV and chat on the net, than go out with friends.
We are increasingly dependent on our technology, and our nifty little gadgets. You may not have robots staring in your face right tomorrow, but when they really arrive, you'd not even have noticed. Unless of course when some depressed robot comes along complaining about those diodes of his
Although some things stated by Asimov are quite out of this world, we _are_ having a lot of robotics going on around us, in some form of automation or the other.
;-) are not yet here, robotics and AI is a fast advancing field. Sure, no fancy AI taking over the world tomorrow, but the technology is so subtle that we do not notice it, or even if we do, not pay much attention to it.
Sony's Aibo, cars & washing machines with computers built into them, automated support systems, expert systems (before someone yells that these things are not widely used in the industry, I'd like to let them know that I'm in the support industry working on automated-support query solving agents). And what about bots which crawl the web and gather data.
We could go on and on, the basic fact is that although things like Daneel (or for that matter Marvin
Yup! That was the one. Thanks a lot...
i ndex.xml)
And this slide sums up the whole paper basically - it gives an overview of how the backscatter idea works.
If I remember correctly, there was also a follow up to this paper on ACM regarding some statistical survey of existing DoS attacks and the ones mentioned in this paper.
And moderators - pls mod up the parent to this post, that is a useful link (just in case - http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/backscatter/
There was this really interesting paper on intrusion that I had once read.
The paper basically had this idea that for every spoofed TCP packet, the receiptent will return a message, upon which the original sender would essentially say that it did not send the packet.
This paper made a statistical analysis of logging such packets over a fixed range of IP addresses, and then extrapolated from that result.
That way, one could get an idea of spoofed attacks being carried out. But the downside was that a lot of security programs themselves at times spoof IPs to mask their identity, so that could kind of alter the result by a reasonably high margin.
But I remember that it had a probability of a really high number of attacks being carried out under spoofed addresses. Pretty interesting read, although I do not seem to be able to locate where I had read it.
This is a little offtopic, but then...
From the site -
Review: Some of the media gives Microsoft a bad rap, that might be because most of the media is AOL/Time/Warner. I've been pretty lucky to meet lots of folks from Microsoft in the last year and they're a great passionate crew and the result is a profitable company with cool products, so I'm pretty excited about this particular annual meeting to say the least!
Huh? What the hell? What has this guy been smoking?
I had posted this in an earlier discussion [http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23740&cid=256 1817] about DDOS networks being built.
:-/
Now one poster had suggested something about exchanging possibly "blacklisted" IPs. Perhaps we could build up a DB of such IPs and possibly compare these with those murkier IPs.
I'm almost certain that atleast some of the banned IPs would fall under the murkier regions. In fact, still worse is the fact that some of these come through wingates (as I found out), making it all the more troublesome
Scary though...
Moderators! Some mod up that AC parent post.
That's useful info since a lot of people seem to be facing similar attacks.
``In terms of costs and attraction, Asimo would rank among the celebrities called on to host events,'' said Toshiji Asai, manager of Asimo's business office.
Great, what next? Inaugarations by Aibo - hey there nice doggie doggie. Jump over that ribbon?
(no pun intended)...
Even I've had logs of apparent DNS DDOS, but mine go back as far as April 20th and odd. Yes, after the increasing number of random IPs on ports 53 and 129, 79 I decided to stop the DNS.
Weird heh?
I know this is slightly offtopic, but this was there on the bugtraq mailing list, thought ppl here may find it interesting:
/var logging is recoverable. This machine was running
/usr/bin/bin/u/src/ircd
/u/, mysqld klogd ...)
.dk domain, as well
.cais.net .cais.com
/usr/sbin/init.d
/sbin/ipchains -I input -p tcp -d 0/0 3879 -j DENY
To: bugtraq@securityfocus.com
Subject: Fwd: Possible DDOS network being built through ssh1 crc compromised hosts
I am making this notification to assist in determining whether other
folks have been affected by this attack.
An associate's home NAT gateway linux box was hacked by what I am
guessing was the ssh1 crc bug (ssh1 was the only exposed service).
This
machine looks to have been compromised on Nov 2nd at 1:15pm PST, I
won't know for certain until I obtain his hard disk later today, and
provided that
redhat 6.2, reasonably patched except for the fact that he was still
running ssh1.
It appears that someone may be building up a network of (potentially)
DDOS hosts. I have done some quick research and found no matches for
the signatures I have been able to identify so far.
Using the Chkrootkit (www.chkrootkit.org) utilities did not identify
a known trojan pack, so if this isn't identified in the wild, I'm
already referring to it as the LIMPninja.
It also appears that this particular host was used as a central host
for other LIMPninja zombies. Also, haven't been able to determine
what the command structure it is that the remote bots act upon.
The following is by no means complete, even after a full examination
of the drive has been completed, as there was never any file
integrity base line completed(a shame).
The attack appears to be scripted as all changes happened within a
minute, except for the IRC server which was not installed until 2
days later (and manually). When I found this particular irc net
there were over 120 hosts all communicating via IRC. This host was
found to be running an unrealircd daemon from
listening at port 6669.
All other compromised hosts were joining this irc network
(ircd.hola.mx holad) on channel #kujikiri with a channel key of
'ninehandscutting'. All bots joined as the nick ninjaXXXX where XXXX
is some RANDOM? selection of 4 upper case letters.
Several ports were listening
3879 term (this port had an ipchains rule blocking all external
traffic - placed by the attacker's script)
6669 ircd
9706 term
42121 inetd spawned in.telnetd
Logs were wiped, and couldn't find a wiping utility so I'm thinking a
simple rm or unlink was used, so I'm hoping to find more details when
the disk is in hand. File modifications that were made follow:(not
necessarily a complete analysis yet)
clearly Trojaned binaries (probably others)
/bin/ps
/bin/netstat
/bin/ls (this ls binary was hiding several things, directory
structures named
/usr/local/bin/sshd1 (the file was just several hundred bytes larger
than previously)
Binary file/directory additions
/usr/bin/bin/u/ An entire directory structure containing the ircd
server source
/usr/bin/share/mysqld (looks like some type of irc spoofing proxy)
/bin/klogd (almost looks like an ftp proxy)
/bin/term (A bindshell of some sort)
/usr/sbin/init.d was added and is exactly the same file size as term
System configuration files that were modified/added
/etc/hosts.allow made specific allowances for the
as
/etc/passwd two new accounts were added with the same password (des
hashes -NOT MD5)
/etc/shadow The added accounts were lpd 1212:1212, and admin 0:0
/etc/inetd.conf 200+ lines of whitespace added, and then the single
telnet entry
/etc/services was modified for telnet to start on port 42121
/etc/resolv.conf a new nameserver was added...
/etc/psdevtab haven't examined closely yet
/etc/rc.sysinit a line was added to start the
trojan/backdoor
/etc/rc.local after much whitespace was added.... following lines at
the bottom of the rc.local file
killall -9 rpc.statd
killall -9 gdm
killall -9 gpm
killall -9 lpd
term
klogd
"/usr/bin/share/mysqld"
-----
This should assist other ppl who have had similar attacks...
That's a pretty famous archive, the Hitchhikers guide to GA's. There were other mirrors too, but I just have this one that works :^)
Check out the GA Archive. Great collection of the more famous GA's and proceedings.
For those wishing to get an intro to GA, try The Hitchhiker's Guide to Evolutionary Computation.
I can almost imagine this -
User : Hi, I'd like you to take me to the ice cream shop.
Marvin : Oh, I'm so depressed. All my 2000cc engines which can drive an Enterprise captain to warp power against the klingons, and what am I made to do? Drive to ice cream shop.
Well, maybe I'll count 1 zillion sheeps and cows before I feel more depressed.
;-)
Already a lot of public places forbid you from using cell phones. With all due apologies to the road warriors, I have a feeling that the convergence of music games et al into a cell will only add more to the problem.
Waiter: Sir, you cannot talk on a cell inside the hotel sir.
Me: Oh no, I was just excited about Commander Keen.
Waiter: Huh? I doubt you are allowed to talk to Mr.Keen either, sir.
Me: aaaaaaaaarggggggggghhhhh