The other good protections that I have seen dealt with having to enter in words from the pages of the instruction manual (which could be defeated by copying the whole manual...) but most people didn't go and copy a 100 page manual.
No, those aren't so good. I hacked around one of those in an old D&D-style game on Macintosh II Cx owned by a guy down the hall back in college.
The "copy protection" was like this: Every time you wanted to cross a bridge, you had to answer a question, 'ere the other side you see. (No flying into the chasm if you got it wrong, though. You just couldn't cross) Well, it had a list of words, paired up with Page 37 word 5 and such. There were maybe 200 choices. What the program did was to look at what you typed in, and then look up the right answer based on page (x) word (y).
My simple hack was to populate the field where you type in the word with the answer the program looks up one line later to see if you got it right. It worked AND you got to see what the word was, which I think was useful somewhere else in the game.
I think I did this using (pirated) Norton DiskDoctor and MacsBug, but there might have been some other coding apps involved. It was *really* easy, a fun project for a few hours spread out over a few nights.
That mac (and his roommate's mac, and playing Oids, and Spectre over appletalk) is why my GPA plummeted from 3.3 to 1.6 in my second semester. I only wish I'd stayed with coding, now I can't code hello world unless it's in HTML. Such is the life of the Microsoft Certified Professional.
Trying to get rid of a few annoying ads, I added this line to my hosts file: 127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
Now, whenever mozilla tries to show those ads I get a error message popping up; "The connection was refused when attempting to contact ad.doubleclick.net" and I stupidly have to click OK.
Any ideas on how I can fix that? IE doesn't do it, it just puts its lame "The page cannot be displayed" box wherever the ad was. but at least there's no extra clicking.
I believe he's referring to Page Widening Posts, which can sometimes be found at the -1 level. They cause the page to get really wide in IE, as whatever it is that's supposed to make the text wrap doesn't do it anymore.
I just fired up IE and went looking for an example in recent stories and I can't find a widened page. So maybe they did fix it. If not fixing PWP was a tactic to get me to switch to mozilla, it worked.
Re:Days of denial are over.
on
Baked Alaska
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· Score: 1
The notion that we humans could actually "break" such a system is the most ludicrous form of arrogance
Well, I don't think we're going to render the planet incapable of life. Just human life, and whatever unfortunate species get consumed in the process.
And that won't last forever, surely. But you remember the Nulcear Winter scenario, right? It is definitely within our means to make the planet a pretty miserable place on the timescale of our lives, and our children's lives, and their children's lives. In 5,000 years things will be fine again, except under Yucca Mountain.
Additionally, you've argued that as we deplete forest in one area of the globe, it grows more readily in another. That might be true, except the, um, glocal trend is towards a removal of green space on the globe. Sure, if man existed in one tiny corner and he deforested that, it would have little effect outside that locality. But with the depletion of rainforest and the clearing of land for agricultural use occuring across the globe, where do you see these new CO2 sinks forming?
Re:Days of denial are over.
on
Baked Alaska
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Okay, the Hawaiian Volcano is producing more CO2 than even America can. So if the volcano erupts and kills 10,000 people than it's okay that we killed only 1,000 that year?
That was a joke, sort of...
The volcano has not deforested 50% of the original forests of the earth. Man did that. I mention this because plants turn CO2 into O2 and allow us to breathe. If we kill all the plants, who will produce oxygen for us?
Cows that produce methane gas are not a natural occurance, they are man-made. That you aruge cow CH4 emissions are a natural source of greenhouse gases is utterly ignorant.
Our planet's environment is akin to the buffered acid solutions we learned about in chemistry class. It maintains the status quo, even as it gets pushed towards one direction of the other, say by mass release of CO2 or O2 or something else. The question before us is: How far can we push the system? What are the effects of man-made gaseous emissions (CO2, CH4, etc.) and what are the effects of man-destroyed "sinks" for CO2 (rainforest, plankton, etc.) These aren't easy questions to answer.
In fact we will probably never have enough of an understanding of climatic change to "know" just how our production of CO2 and destruction of CO2 converters has affected the environment. The data is massive and the time scale could be on the order of 10,000+ years. We will never know if what we're seeing is "the beginning of the end" or just a 50-year hiccup.
My reason for wanting to reduce CO2 emissions and to preserve natural habitat is because I like nature. I don't agree that the land is not being put to "good use" by remaining wild. I think an excellent example of our lack of human progress in dealing responsibly with our world is that we still mine for gold. Except now we do it by running entire mountains through a rock crusher and washing the chunks in cyanide to leech out the gold. How this possibly adds value to the world is beyond me (and no, that's not the queue for your libertairan/economic Darwinist explanation of free markets, I've read enough of that on this thread already.)
Tell me, why can't we live somewhat more in harmony with nature than we currently do? Why are we so attached to the "man vs. nature" paradigm going back to Genesis, man having dominion over the earth. What a load of hooey; ultimately the land has dominion over us as those folks in Melting Village, Alaska have discovered. The city I live in, Seattle, is beautiful not because of the buildings but because of the snow-capped mountains and deep blue waters surrounding her, and the greenways running through. Yet I look at Mt. Rainier in the distance and there's a big nasty layer of smog there. I would like to see that go away. I know that we could do it, too. Driving more fuel efficient cars would be a start, in particular Seattle could use a working mass transit system. What's wrong with legislating these things? As I see it, we could all be riding Segway HTs to work, except that the death of Ford and GM would be Bad For The Economy, and we can't have that! Fsck auto makers, all they've done is enabled suburban sprawl while they got rich because we all need cars to get anywhere now. I say open up the roads, or just one lane, to Segways and watch Detroit become Beirut. (Or is that too Free Market for you Libertarians?)
Is the globe warming? More than likely. Are we causing it? We might be, maybe not. Are our activities pushing the balance in favor of CO2 and away from O2? Yes.
My secretary sure doesn't...know what a browser is.
Why don't you find a different secretary? Or is it that she's right, and browsers (gasp) don't really matter that much???
I've never understood why they work so hard to get us to be loyal to Browser X. They're all free. They all work with whatever server you're running your web page on. Hell I'm using Mozilla now and the only difference is that my pages aren't as wide at -1. Big whoop.
People care about crash tests more than gas mileage.
That is just anohter example of how people look at benchmark X and decide it means everything. Like Processor Goodness is measured in MegaHertz.
SUV's do better in head-on collisions, but they roll over a *lot* more than your average family sedan. net result: the overall safety rate is about the same for SUVs or regular cars. But nobody cares, because most people can relate to the minor fender-bender but haven't been in a *serious* accident where their car rolls over; hence they feel that the SUV is safer in the type of accidents they are familiar with. Try to swerve around that deer, though, and you'll wish you were in a chevy lumina and not your ford excursion.
In the MIDI specification, it's a 7 bit number, which means 0-127 in decimal
I bet that a human has more tha 127 levels of how hard they hit the keys. If guys like Creskin can tell you how many cards from a deck of cards they're holding in their hands just by touch, then I would have to think that a concert pianist has better than 7-bit resolution. It might not be a linear response either, maybe there's enhanced detail towards the very soft or very loud.
I think what Huge Pi Removal is saying probably has to be correct. If you hooked up some sort of motion-detector arm-thingie to Picasso's arm and paintbrush, and got a robot arm to recreate the motions, would it paint a Picasso? No. It would paint something very much like a Picasso. (never mind that Picasso is dead.)
Why does it matter how close it is to the real thing? I want to see live musicians performing live, not some recording of The Best Musician Ever being played by a robot piano. Have you people ever heard of innovation?
Another thing...how different will this year's virtuoso performace be from one we get in 50 years? Myabe A will have gone up a few more cents by then, which will completely change the sound of the whole piano. What is up with this bizarre desire to capture perfection and store it in a bottle? It seems pretty much the antithesis of music to me.
ObviousGuy I think that was your best post yet. It was a +1 Post of Funny, in D&D terms. I'm trying to decide how you should sound in my head, and now you sound like Troy McClure. I'm sure you're appropriately honored.
pakistan car bomb, US consulate... It sounds like the Muslims killing you will kill themselves in the process, so you need not do anything, really.
problem is, islam has more adherents than any other religion in the world. so if they go one-for-one with us (we're close to parity after 9/11 and the subsequent airstrikes) then they will win.
Don't worry, though. God (TM) is on Our Side, the side of Democracy.*
Q: Is an on-topic response to an off-topic post considered off topic? A: Yes
*Democracy is a Registered Trademark of The America Corporation.
all of the planets found so far are gas-giants, and obviously the sort of life that we're looking for would not be living there.
"These aren't the life forms you're looking for. There's nothing to see here. Move along."
WTF?? Who is to say that you can't have intelligent life on a gas giant? Dude, we are looking for any kind of life out there, not just the kind about which Eddie Murphy can say "If the bitch is green, there's gotta be something wrong with the pu55y"
Props to all the Star Trek True Believers on this thread. We Are Not Alone, peeps.
His server crashes 3-4 times a day, and my workstation crashes even more often
It sounds like you don't have any admins at all. This is all too often the case, esp at a small company. You don't think your car can run forever without taking it to the shop, do you? Get a experienced professional to come in for four hours a week and whup things into shape.
Side note: By "server" do you mean the box everyone refers to as "the server" even though it's a Pentium 60 running Windows 95? That could be your problem...
Your fantasy about the deaths of thousands of innocent American civilians during our time of war demonstrates that you are a terrorist.
Your current status under U.S. law is "enemy combatant." Secret evidence, which you will never see nor be able to challenge, is being compiled even as you wet your pants in fear. Start packing for Camp X-Ray, you freedom-hating AC!
I bought the AMD knowing full well it could burst into flames at any moment! I see it this way: I know that I'm going to need to upgrade eventually, running the AMD chip ensures that my current CPU/MB comination will only last as long as the fan on my heatsink.
It's for that same reason that I used to revel in the toasty warmness of my PowerBook 5300. Could you imagine what would happen these days if your laptop caught flight on an airplane?
But seriously, heatsink/fan technology is pretty reliable these days, especially if you replace the retail box cooler with something a little heftier. As an experiment tonight I'm going to see how hot my cpu gets when I unplug the fan. I believe AMD rates their athlons up to 100C, and I'm at less than half that now. (In "silent" mode on my Zalman copper flower.)
Unfortunately for AMD their self-immolating CPUs do pose a problem when I think about servers. I wonder if AMD is even really trying to get into the server market, because if they are you'd think they would have the commom sense to include the anti-toast precautions we see on an Intel chip.
For me, the AMD vs. Intel choice is kinda like the whole "Dell on the desktop, Compaq in the server room" scenario all over again. (Though I must admit to running some Dell servers lately and so far so good.)
I thikn we should get Cyc's opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
When even one solider starts taking pleasure in killing innocent civilians, then something is wrong.
I wonder about that statement. Is it acceptable for a soldier to take pleasure in killing another soldier, but unacceptable to take pleasure in killing a civilian?
What kind of morals are those? Isn't any kind of killing a bad thing, even when you're forced to kill someone to defend yourself? Or are there people in this world who "need killin'" as our President might say?
If it's okay to kill combatants but not non-combatant civilians, what about forced conscripts, as seen in many parts of the world? Aren't all Israelis called on to serve in the IDF for two years, and can then be recalled if needed? Does that make the typical Israeli casualty a "potential soldier" and therefore less morally objectionable?
What about the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gives us the right to bear arms and form a civilian militia? Does this mean that gun owners killed in 9-11 were inactive combatants?
I also think the line between civilian and soldier is pretty much bullshit anyway. In Greek times, men (civilians who formed a milita during wartime) could reasonably expect to die on the battlefield, unless they survived long enough that they couldn't carry a spear any more.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that Palestinian suicide bombers are justified in their actions. The gradiations of national soldier to professional mercenary to conscript to forced conscript to civilian are a clever trick that makes war more palatable.
Changes have happened since Pope Gregory XIII adjusted the calendar in 1582 AD, who eliminated the accumulated error caused by a faulty calculation of the length of a year and avoided its recurrence by restricting century leap years to those divisible by 400. (Yes, 2000 is a leap year). This was introduced in Roman Catholic countries and other states only gradually changed from Old Style to New Style; Britain and its colonies didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar for almost two centuries in 1752 AD, when the error amounted to 11 days. The 3 September 1752 AD became 14 September 1752 AD. Up until then England had celebrated beginning of the year on 25 March; after 1752 it was moved to 1 January
Well said systemaster. Except, anything that isn't the keyboard, mouse, or monitor is the "hard drive."
I see the situation as pretty analogous to some leases I've signed over the years. They have clauses saying that if I don't pay the rent, the landlord can take posession of the property and all my belongings, and so on. Well, it may say that in the lease but the landlord-tenant laws will override the parts of our agreement that are illegal.
The thing is, we're sailing into uncharted waters with all this IP legislation stuff. We've already seen the corporate power grab embodied in the Sony Bono Copyrights Forever Act, which if I'm not mistaken will be before some high court any day now. We have laughable patents on ridiculous "business processes" and there's patent pending on the pop-under ad, which according to the story here on slashdot is all of two lines of javascript.
Hey, look, a soapbox called History... People, we are living through a revolution akin to Gutenberg's invention of movable type, and Martin Luther's reformation of the Catholic Church. What am I talking about? Prior to Gutenberg, it was prohibitively expensive to create printed matter; teams of monks dedicated their *lives* to copying important texts. Concomitant with the scarcity of literature was a vast illiterate population, who had to be told what the bible meant by their local clergy.
Gutenberg stood the status quo on its ear. Now, anyone with some molten lead and a few hard workers could turn out in days the same "content" that used to take YEARS to produce. People could now be taught to read the bible for themselves, and didn't have to rely on the interpretation spoon-fed to them by the Church. In short, people gained an incredible freedom, the freedom to THINK FOR THEMSELVES, and the all-powerful Catholic Church (you know, the guys who changed the calendar in October 1582) (look at your unix calendar, it's there) was dealt a blow from which it has never recovered.
How exactly does all this relate to IP law and the RIAA/MPAA DMCA Gabba Gabba Hey? I'm not quite sure, but you bet your pinhead they're related. The Church didn't need IP lawyers and patents, they would simply Darn You To Heck! if you got uppity. They had a copyright, if you will, on the freakin' alphabet! To us that sounds ridiculous, but a copyright and a horde of rapacious IP lawyers provides the same "Game Over" result today that Excommunication did five hundred years ago.
Revolutions of this sort play out over decades, and we are riding the first waves of this one. Meanwhile, I'm stepping down off the soapbox before JonKatz starts pelting me with AOL Platinum 7.0 CDs.
Both of these categories are in violation of MS EULA
We really need a court or two to weigh in on this issue of reinstalling the OEM OS on a new PC. I can see how Microsoft wants to protect their revenue stream by selling you a new OS when you buy a new PC, but I'm not sure if that's solid enough legal ground to stand on.
What, aside from Microsoft's assertion, makes the OS and the PC inseperable? If this is legally possible, why don't we see it all the time? For example, it's well-known that a car that costs $15,000 has got $30,000 worth of parts in it. Yet the auto manufacturers make no claim that you can't take the fuel filter from your old Honda and put it in your new Honda, or sell it on the street, or make a funny hat out of it.
Additionally, what is meant by the term "computer?" Is it the CPU, or the HD, or the RAM, or the MB, or what? If you upgrade all those items, one at a time, are you then required to buy a new OS because it's essentially a new computer now?
I (and many others) don't think Microsoft's assertion that an OEM OS is only valid on the computer it was sold with is legally viable. But until a court addresses the issue, we'll just have to take their word for it. Or not, like the people buying OS-less PCs at WalMart. I'd love to see their faces when the U.S. Marshalls break down the door.
Maybe a highly ethical Wal-Mart employee out there will feel compelled to provide the BSA with the names and addresses (via credit card receipts) of all those who've purchased OS-less PCs, thereby ensuring that our economy doesn't lose untold more millions due to software piracy.
You need to get one of these cool Zalman "flower" heatsinks, or track down one of their other models of quiet heatsinks if your CPU is faster than 1.4GHz
My CPU temp (Athlon XP 1600+ 1.4GHz no oc) is around 50c using the "copper flower" gizmo in Silent mode, so there's probably a little room for a faster CPU to still be cooled adequately and silently. My only other fan is the one in the power supply which of course now sounds incredibly loud since the CPU cooler is silent.
This is one I've had in mind ever since you know when...
Flight School tuition: $25,000 First Class tickets for you and your friends: $5,000 Box Cutters: $1.99 Striking back against the Great Satan: Priceless.
They were probably Belgian waffles, named for a country known for its inability to defend itself in World War II. Belgium also produces a type of beer which is dark and cloudy, possibly containing coded messages for terrorists, and brewed by religious zealots sometimes called "monks." By contrast, honest American beer is transparent and produced by huge corporations you can Trust, because they put the "Born On" date on the bottle and use Pure Rocky Mountain Spring Water and Rice, which definitely belongs in beer no matter what those Communists in Europe say.
Clearly, if you want to fight Terrorism, you must never travel, never use your credit card, and whatever you do DON'T ORDER THE WAFFLES!!!
"All I wanted was a Pepsi!"
Re:out of the technical journal DUH.
on
Kazaa Usability Study
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
If you drive off with the car but leave the cigarette lighther behind, then yes, you didn't steal the cigarette lighter. I should think that would be obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
The other good protections that I have seen dealt with having to enter in words from the pages of the instruction manual (which could be defeated by copying the whole manual...) but most people didn't go and copy a 100 page manual.
No, those aren't so good. I hacked around one of those in an old D&D-style game on Macintosh II Cx owned by a guy down the hall back in college.
The "copy protection" was like this: Every time you wanted to cross a bridge, you had to answer a question, 'ere the other side you see. (No flying into the chasm if you got it wrong, though. You just couldn't cross) Well, it had a list of words, paired up with Page 37 word 5 and such. There were maybe 200 choices. What the program did was to look at what you typed in, and then look up the right answer based on page (x) word (y).
My simple hack was to populate the field where you type in the word with the answer the program looks up one line later to see if you got it right. It worked AND you got to see what the word was, which I think was useful somewhere else in the game.
I think I did this using (pirated) Norton DiskDoctor and MacsBug, but there might have been some other coding apps involved. It was *really* easy, a fun project for a few hours spread out over a few nights.
That mac (and his roommate's mac, and playing Oids, and Spectre over appletalk) is why my GPA plummeted from 3.3 to 1.6 in my second semester. I only wish I'd stayed with coding, now I can't code hello world unless it's in HTML. Such is the life of the Microsoft Certified Professional.
I wish terrorism would hurry up and surrender.
Trying to get rid of a few annoying ads, I added this line to my hosts file:
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
Now, whenever mozilla tries to show those ads I get a error message popping up; "The connection was refused when attempting to contact ad.doubleclick.net" and I stupidly have to click OK.
Any ideas on how I can fix that? IE doesn't do it, it just puts its lame "The page cannot be displayed" box wherever the ad was. but at least there's no extra clicking.
I believe he's referring to Page Widening Posts, which can sometimes be found at the -1 level. They cause the page to get really wide in IE, as whatever it is that's supposed to make the text wrap doesn't do it anymore.
I just fired up IE and went looking for an example in recent stories and I can't find a widened page. So maybe they did fix it. If not fixing PWP was a tactic to get me to switch to mozilla, it worked.
The notion that we humans could actually "break" such a system is the most ludicrous form of arrogance
Well, I don't think we're going to render the planet incapable of life. Just human life, and whatever unfortunate species get consumed in the process.
And that won't last forever, surely. But you remember the Nulcear Winter scenario, right? It is definitely within our means to make the planet a pretty miserable place on the timescale of our lives, and our children's lives, and their children's lives. In 5,000 years things will be fine again, except under Yucca Mountain.
Additionally, you've argued that as we deplete forest in one area of the globe, it grows more readily in another. That might be true, except the, um, glocal trend is towards a removal of green space on the globe. Sure, if man existed in one tiny corner and he deforested that, it would have little effect outside that locality. But with the depletion of rainforest and the clearing of land for agricultural use occuring across the globe, where do you see these new CO2 sinks forming?
Okay, the Hawaiian Volcano is producing more CO2 than even America can. So if the volcano erupts and kills 10,000 people than it's okay that we killed only 1,000 that year?
That was a joke, sort of...
The volcano has not deforested 50% of the original forests of the earth. Man did that. I mention this because plants turn CO2 into O2 and allow us to breathe. If we kill all the plants, who will produce oxygen for us?
Cows that produce methane gas are not a natural occurance, they are man-made. That you aruge cow CH4 emissions are a natural source of greenhouse gases is utterly ignorant.
Our planet's environment is akin to the buffered acid solutions we learned about in chemistry class. It maintains the status quo, even as it gets pushed towards one direction of the other, say by mass release of CO2 or O2 or something else. The question before us is: How far can we push the system? What are the effects of man-made gaseous emissions (CO2, CH4, etc.) and what are the effects of man-destroyed "sinks" for CO2 (rainforest, plankton, etc.) These aren't easy questions to answer.
In fact we will probably never have enough of an understanding of climatic change to "know" just how our production of CO2 and destruction of CO2 converters has affected the environment. The data is massive and the time scale could be on the order of 10,000+ years. We will never know if what we're seeing is "the beginning of the end" or just a 50-year hiccup.
My reason for wanting to reduce CO2 emissions and to preserve natural habitat is because I like nature. I don't agree that the land is not being put to "good use" by remaining wild. I think an excellent example of our lack of human progress in dealing responsibly with our world is that we still mine for gold. Except now we do it by running entire mountains through a rock crusher and washing the chunks in cyanide to leech out the gold. How this possibly adds value to the world is beyond me (and no, that's not the queue for your libertairan/economic Darwinist explanation of free markets, I've read enough of that on this thread already.)
Tell me, why can't we live somewhat more in harmony with nature than we currently do? Why are we so attached to the "man vs. nature" paradigm going back to Genesis, man having dominion over the earth. What a load of hooey; ultimately the land has dominion over us as those folks in Melting Village, Alaska have discovered. The city I live in, Seattle, is beautiful not because of the buildings but because of the snow-capped mountains and deep blue waters surrounding her, and the greenways running through. Yet I look at Mt. Rainier in the distance and there's a big nasty layer of smog there. I would like to see that go away. I know that we could do it, too. Driving more fuel efficient cars would be a start, in particular Seattle could use a working mass transit system. What's wrong with legislating these things? As I see it, we could all be riding Segway HTs to work, except that the death of Ford and GM would be Bad For The Economy, and we can't have that! Fsck auto makers, all they've done is enabled suburban sprawl while they got rich because we all need cars to get anywhere now. I say open up the roads, or just one lane, to Segways and watch Detroit become Beirut. (Or is that too Free Market for you Libertarians?)
Is the globe warming? More than likely. Are we causing it? We might be, maybe not. Are our activities pushing the balance in favor of CO2 and away from O2? Yes.
Your move.
You just restated my point, naasking.
My secretary sure doesn't...know what a browser is.
Why don't you find a different secretary? Or is it that she's right, and browsers (gasp) don't really matter that much???
I've never understood why they work so hard to get us to be loyal to Browser X. They're all free. They all work with whatever server you're running your web page on. Hell I'm using Mozilla now and the only difference is that my pages aren't as wide at -1. Big whoop.
People care about crash tests more than gas mileage.
That is just anohter example of how people look at benchmark X and decide it means everything. Like Processor Goodness is measured in MegaHertz.
SUV's do better in head-on collisions, but they roll over a *lot* more than your average family sedan. net result: the overall safety rate is about the same for SUVs or regular cars. But nobody cares, because most people can relate to the minor fender-bender but haven't been in a *serious* accident where their car rolls over; hence they feel that the SUV is safer in the type of accidents they are familiar with. Try to swerve around that deer, though, and you'll wish you were in a chevy lumina and not your ford excursion.
In the MIDI specification, it's a 7 bit number, which means 0-127 in decimal
I bet that a human has more tha 127 levels of how hard they hit the keys. If guys like Creskin can tell you how many cards from a deck of cards they're holding in their hands just by touch, then I would have to think that a concert pianist has better than 7-bit resolution. It might not be a linear response either, maybe there's enhanced detail towards the very soft or very loud.
I think what Huge Pi Removal is saying probably has to be correct. If you hooked up some sort of motion-detector arm-thingie to Picasso's arm and paintbrush, and got a robot arm to recreate the motions, would it paint a Picasso? No. It would paint something very much like a Picasso. (never mind that Picasso is dead.)
Why does it matter how close it is to the real thing? I want to see live musicians performing live, not some recording of The Best Musician Ever being played by a robot piano. Have you people ever heard of innovation?
Another thing...how different will this year's virtuoso performace be from one we get in 50 years? Myabe A will have gone up a few more cents by then, which will completely change the sound of the whole piano. What is up with this bizarre desire to capture perfection and store it in a bottle? It seems pretty much the antithesis of music to me.
ObviousGuy I think that was your best post yet. It was a +1 Post of Funny, in D&D terms. I'm trying to decide how you should sound in my head, and now you sound like Troy McClure. I'm sure you're appropriately honored.
pakistan car bomb, US consulate...
It sounds like the Muslims killing you will kill themselves in the process, so you need not do anything, really.
problem is, islam has more adherents than any other religion in the world. so if they go one-for-one with us (we're close to parity after 9/11 and the subsequent airstrikes) then they will win.
Don't worry, though. God (TM) is on Our Side, the side of Democracy.*
Q: Is an on-topic response to an off-topic post considered off topic?
A: Yes
*Democracy is a Registered Trademark of The America Corporation.
all of the planets found so far are gas-giants, and obviously the sort of life that we're looking for would not be living there.
"These aren't the life forms you're looking for. There's nothing to see here. Move along."
WTF?? Who is to say that you can't have intelligent life on a gas giant? Dude, we are looking for any kind of life out there, not just the kind about which Eddie Murphy can say "If the bitch is green, there's gotta be something wrong with the pu55y"
Props to all the Star Trek True Believers on this thread. We Are Not Alone, peeps.
His server crashes 3-4 times a day, and my workstation crashes even more often
It sounds like you don't have any admins at all. This is all too often the case, esp at a small company. You don't think your car can run forever without taking it to the shop, do you? Get a experienced professional to come in for four hours a week and whup things into shape.
Side note: By "server" do you mean the box everyone refers to as "the server" even though it's a Pentium 60 running Windows 95? That could be your problem...
Your fantasy about the deaths of thousands of innocent American civilians during our time of war demonstrates that you are a terrorist.
Your current status under U.S. law is "enemy combatant." Secret evidence, which you will never see nor be able to challenge, is being compiled even as you wet your pants in fear. Start packing for Camp X-Ray, you freedom-hating AC!
+r0llZ r00lax0r 2N1+3!! F1R5+ 3l3v3n p05+z m0ddax0r3d d0\/\/n t0 n3g81v 0n3!!!!!
If you're gonna mod me down to minus one, you should at least read at minus one once in a while you playa hating pussies!!!
I bought the AMD knowing full well it could burst into flames at any moment! I see it this way: I know that I'm going to need to upgrade eventually, running the AMD chip ensures that my current CPU/MB comination will only last as long as the fan on my heatsink.
It's for that same reason that I used to revel in the toasty warmness of my PowerBook 5300. Could you imagine what would happen these days if your laptop caught flight on an airplane?
But seriously, heatsink/fan technology is pretty reliable these days, especially if you replace the retail box cooler with something a little heftier. As an experiment tonight I'm going to see how hot my cpu gets when I unplug the fan. I believe AMD rates their athlons up to 100C, and I'm at less than half that now. (In "silent" mode on my Zalman copper flower.)
Unfortunately for AMD their self-immolating CPUs do pose a problem when I think about servers. I wonder if AMD is even really trying to get into the server market, because if they are you'd think they would have the commom sense to include the anti-toast precautions we see on an Intel chip.
For me, the AMD vs. Intel choice is kinda like the whole "Dell on the desktop, Compaq in the server room" scenario all over again. (Though I must admit to running some Dell servers lately and so far so good.)
I thikn we should get Cyc's opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
When even one solider starts taking pleasure in killing innocent civilians, then something is wrong.
I wonder about that statement. Is it acceptable for a soldier to take pleasure in killing another soldier, but unacceptable to take pleasure in killing a civilian?
What kind of morals are those? Isn't any kind of killing a bad thing, even when you're forced to kill someone to defend yourself? Or are there people in this world who "need killin'" as our President might say?
If it's okay to kill combatants but not non-combatant civilians, what about forced conscripts, as seen in many parts of the world? Aren't all Israelis called on to serve in the IDF for two years, and can then be recalled if needed? Does that make the typical Israeli casualty a "potential soldier" and therefore less morally objectionable?
What about the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gives us the right to bear arms and form a civilian militia? Does this mean that gun owners killed in 9-11 were inactive combatants?
I also think the line between civilian and soldier is pretty much bullshit anyway. In Greek times, men (civilians who formed a milita during wartime) could reasonably expect to die on the battlefield, unless they survived long enough that they couldn't carry a spear any more.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that Palestinian suicide bombers are justified in their actions. The gradiations of national soldier to professional mercenary to conscript to forced conscript to civilian are a clever trick that makes war more palatable.
So, you need to cal 9 1752 and you will see it!
Well said systemaster. Except, anything that isn't the keyboard, mouse, or monitor is the "hard drive."
I see the situation as pretty analogous to some leases I've signed over the years. They have clauses saying that if I don't pay the rent, the landlord can take posession of the property and all my belongings, and so on. Well, it may say that in the lease but the landlord-tenant laws will override the parts of our agreement that are illegal.
The thing is, we're sailing into uncharted waters with all this IP legislation stuff. We've already seen the corporate power grab embodied in the Sony Bono Copyrights Forever Act, which if I'm not mistaken will be before some high court any day now. We have laughable patents on ridiculous "business processes" and there's patent pending on the pop-under ad, which according to the story here on slashdot is all of two lines of javascript.
Hey, look, a soapbox called History... People, we are living through a revolution akin to Gutenberg's invention of movable type, and Martin Luther's reformation of the Catholic Church. What am I talking about? Prior to Gutenberg, it was prohibitively expensive to create printed matter; teams of monks dedicated their *lives* to copying important texts. Concomitant with the scarcity of literature was a vast illiterate population, who had to be told what the bible meant by their local clergy.
Gutenberg stood the status quo on its ear. Now, anyone with some molten lead and a few hard workers could turn out in days the same "content" that used to take YEARS to produce. People could now be taught to read the bible for themselves, and didn't have to rely on the interpretation spoon-fed to them by the Church. In short, people gained an incredible freedom, the freedom to THINK FOR THEMSELVES, and the all-powerful Catholic Church (you know, the guys who changed the calendar in October 1582) (look at your unix calendar, it's there) was dealt a blow from which it has never recovered.
How exactly does all this relate to IP law and the RIAA/MPAA DMCA Gabba Gabba Hey? I'm not quite sure, but you bet your pinhead they're related. The Church didn't need IP lawyers and patents, they would simply Darn You To Heck! if you got uppity. They had a copyright, if you will, on the freakin' alphabet! To us that sounds ridiculous, but a copyright and a horde of rapacious IP lawyers provides the same "Game Over" result today that Excommunication did five hundred years ago.
Revolutions of this sort play out over decades, and we are riding the first waves of this one. Meanwhile, I'm stepping down off the soapbox before JonKatz starts pelting me with AOL Platinum 7.0 CDs.
Both of these categories are in violation of MS EULA
We really need a court or two to weigh in on this issue of reinstalling the OEM OS on a new PC. I can see how Microsoft wants to protect their revenue stream by selling you a new OS when you buy a new PC, but I'm not sure if that's solid enough legal ground to stand on.
What, aside from Microsoft's assertion, makes the OS and the PC inseperable? If this is legally possible, why don't we see it all the time? For example, it's well-known that a car that costs $15,000 has got $30,000 worth of parts in it. Yet the auto manufacturers make no claim that you can't take the fuel filter from your old Honda and put it in your new Honda, or sell it on the street, or make a funny hat out of it.
Additionally, what is meant by the term "computer?" Is it the CPU, or the HD, or the RAM, or the MB, or what? If you upgrade all those items, one at a time, are you then required to buy a new OS because it's essentially a new computer now?
I (and many others) don't think Microsoft's assertion that an OEM OS is only valid on the computer it was sold with is legally viable. But until a court addresses the issue, we'll just have to take their word for it. Or not, like the people buying OS-less PCs at WalMart. I'd love to see their faces when the U.S. Marshalls break down the door.
Maybe a highly ethical Wal-Mart employee out there will feel compelled to provide the BSA with the names and addresses (via credit card receipts) of all those who've purchased OS-less PCs, thereby ensuring that our economy doesn't lose untold more millions due to software piracy.
You need to get one of these cool Zalman "flower" heatsinks, or track down one of their other models of quiet heatsinks if your CPU is faster than 1.4GHz
My CPU temp (Athlon XP 1600+ 1.4GHz no oc) is around 50c using the "copper flower" gizmo in Silent mode, so there's probably a little room for a faster CPU to still be cooled adequately and silently. My only other fan is the one in the power supply which of course now sounds incredibly loud since the CPU cooler is silent.
This is one I've had in mind ever since you know when...
Flight School tuition: $25,000
First Class tickets for you and your friends: $5,000
Box Cutters: $1.99
Striking back against the Great Satan: Priceless.
They were probably Belgian waffles, named for a country known for its inability to defend itself in World War II. Belgium also produces a type of beer which is dark and cloudy, possibly containing coded messages for terrorists, and brewed by religious zealots sometimes called "monks." By contrast, honest American beer is transparent and produced by huge corporations you can Trust, because they put the "Born On" date on the bottle and use Pure Rocky Mountain Spring Water and Rice, which definitely belongs in beer no matter what those Communists in Europe say.
Clearly, if you want to fight Terrorism, you must never travel, never use your credit card, and whatever you do DON'T ORDER THE WAFFLES!!!
"All I wanted was a Pepsi!"
If you drive off with the car but leave the cigarette lighther behind, then yes, you didn't steal the cigarette lighter. I should think that would be obvious.