There's a huge amount of slop in the brain needed to produce the perception of stable colors of objects under different lighting conditions
Boy, you can say that again. For anyone who *really* wants to experience this, I suggest you go caving some time. In a deep enough cave that no outside light penetrates. Last weekend myself and a group were out, and we all had different models of headlamps. Now, the cave we were in has 3 interesting things going for it here: very banded & multicoloured rock, lots of ice (again somewhat multicoloured due to how it forms over the centuries), and human artifacts (a fair bit of paint on the walls, general human refuse, etc).
Here's the trick: you're in an area where your eyes have never seen the surroundings in natural light. Effectively, you have no reference point to know what colour things are. Now, I personally have one of the newer LED/incandescent combo headlamps (an amazing combination by the way, and for those with any doubt, 3 white LEDs will provide more than enough light for at least 20' around you - no more trying to focus right in front of your feet:). Alternating between the LEDs (white light) and the bulb (yellow light) was... interesting. My eyes couldn't decide what colour things were. Relatively speaking, sure. But I'd go for a while with just the LEDs, my eyes got used to that, then switch to the bulb. Suddenly, switch to the bulb, and everything gets weird. Even subtle things like depth cues get messed up, because your brain is frantically trying to re-colour what you're looking at.
This really didn't happen with things like our clothing or other gear, because my brain "knew" what colour that stuff was, having seen it outside, and it adjusted easily. But the rocks, ice, and *especially* the tagging on the walls - very creepy effect. Things that looked green in one light could be red in another. The ice was fun, because it's actually somewhat brown/yellowish in some layers (dirt, I suspect). But the brain wants to colour it blue-white.
We also had a good game of "guess my eye colour" - many of these people didn't know each other very well. I think we scored less than 50% overall:)
A few weeks ago I saw an infomercial on TV for a new kind of dating service: one to help you have affairs of an adulterous nature. They had many disclaimers about their respect of the sanctity of marriage, and how they don't want to encourage cheating... then went on to say "hey, people are going to cheat, so we feel it's ok to help you hook up discretely". These two messages alternated throughout the whole thing. I couldn't stop watching; it was the most original thing I've seen on television in years.
I think this, and Craigslist, just go to show you the reality of human relations. I'm anxiously awaiting a slew of posts decrying Craigslist because "no strings attached sex" is still pretty taboo in most circles:)
The original olympics wasn't about all of this silly ethical garbage. It was about muscular naked men manhandling one another in front of a large audience.
"Tell me, Joey, do you like movies about Gladiators?"
And yes, I'm aware that I'm making Baby Jesus cry:)
I must not be as smart as the rest of ya (some AC already posted a solution hours ago), but it took me a couple of hours to actually work out a solution. I had it solved within a few minutes but for the life of me couldn't remember how I got there. It's funny, because the page source says
(Duda says he proved its solvable under 25 moves, but still cannot figure moves out)
Well, it's solvable (several ways) in 15 moves. The trick with a puzzle like this is that the ORDER of your clicks is irrelevant. The AC solution is also 15 long, here's mine (a bit more symmetrical and therefore asthetically pleasing IMHO:)
00011 11011 11100 01110 10110
1 means you click the square, 0 means you don't. Again, the order doesn't matter.
As another poster mentioned, MS themselves confirm this support being removed. I've been chuckling about this all week, because I've been waiting for this day for 3+ years now. Steve Gibson may be a blowhard, but he was 100% dead-on correct on this one.
As to why ping and tracert still work - well, they work for the same reason they worked in Windows pre-2000. Check out that link, it has nice pretty pictures, but here's the dirt (and everyone can correct me on the technical details I get wrong):
Raw sockets allow you to write data directly to the network layer. You can bypass the TCP and IP layers this way, and put whatever the heck you want into your packets. This gives you the ability to do fun things like forge your source address (good for UDP flooding or TCP SYN floods), and pretty much send anything you want. A lot of older attacks used to send malformed packets (bad TCP or IP headers) which would cause the receiving machine to choke on them (see: WinNuke).
Now, if you're forced to go through the appropriate layers (TCP and/or IP), the protocol stack handles the headers for you. Things like your source IP address, for instance, are assigned for you. You cannot change this, and therefore cannot spoof this. In the Win9x (and NT4) days, Windows only allowed you to write to the TCP layer. To accomodate "raw" sockets for use in ICMP, you could write to the IP layer (because ICMP doesn't use the concept of ports or sequencing or any of the TCP goodness).
In 2000 and XP, Microsoft inexplicably allowed FULL raw socket access, something which had only been seen in the Unix world before - hence why most DoS attacks came from *nix boxes. This is one reason shell accounts used to be a BIG DEAL for script kiddies to get (the other reason of course is that anyone can install Linux or a BSD these days). Folks like Gibson warned them that Windows would now become zombie heaven, and hey! they were right.
Microsoft has finally admitted to the mistake, realized that almost nothing other than attack tools use full raw sockets, and has closed this up. I suspect they're allowing only IP layer access again (for TCP), and transport layer access (one above this) for UDP, to prevent IP spoofing. Notice that this still allows you to spoof your source IP address on a TCP connection - this is why outbound un-ACK'd TCP connections are being limited. We don't want SYN flooding:)
ICMP works because you still have IP layer access. It's sort of like a pseudo-raw socket. This makes me wonder: has anyone seen any limitation on ICMP traffic? Because a ping flood with spoofed source IP addresses should still be possible from what I can tell.
Re-read the post. On a box that's been hibernated at least once, the hibernation file and swap files are ALREADY ALLOCATED. The "free" space could technically be 1MB and the machine will hibernate and boot just fine. Windows won't LET you hibernate unless it has enough disk space.
Re-read a little further, and you'll note it was mentioned that this occured on different boxes, and with different ram.
Regardless, Windows is touted as "it just works". Here's a case where it doesn't. All someone did is add ram to a laptop, and BSOD.
As someone who worked as a broker for over 10 years, I can most assuredly tell you that this sort of thing is covered by most homeowner's insurance policies (at least here in Canada). In fact, most so-called "Acts of God" are also covered.
Any sudden, unavoidable weather event is generally covered, with some exceptions: flood damage in flood-prone areas, tornado damage in the plains, earthquakes on the west coast, things like that. Reason? Because when these things happen, they tend to be considered Natural Disasters, and the damage gets into the BILLIONS. Insurance companies and their re-insurers simply aren't up the task.
But a freak hailstorm, ice storm, tree falling on your house, meteor.. yup, pretty much all covered.
a CD might get scratched (as might a car or a DVD or a bike or most any other physical object)
I've never heard of a car or bike that stops working when it gets scratched. A good crunching, sure, but it's a hell of a lot easier to scratch a CD/DVD than it is to crash a car to the point where it doesn't work.
Besides, the ONLY reason wrecking a car puts it out of commission is the physical reality of it. We have the technology to prevent CD scratches from killing the product (the music), so why not employ it? If we could manufacture self-healing cars, should we have laws against that?
...but how feasible WOULD it be to make worms for Linux?
"Here's your new screensaver! You will be prompted for the admin password so we can install this and set it up
Wonderful, except that worms spread without user intervention. I'm pretty sure the one we're talking about here wouldn't spread at all between Linux machines.
2. The story you linked has no mention whatsoever of "entire generations of people" being "maimed". Other than a casual mention of personal injury and property damage lawsuits, there is not a single hint that anyone's actually been hurt.
Wow, if you're representative of people in the environmental movement, no wonder you're all viewed as being crackpots.
gamers have limits and can't break their banks for the 69.99 game and 200 $ worh of ram every new release
Call me crazy, but I can assure you that the price of keeping current with video cards outweighs RAM requirements by an order of magnitude or more. Unless there are games I've never heard of that still play just fine with my Geforce 2, but need 2 gigs of RAM. Hey, you never know...
what if your laptop has only a USB 1.0/1.1 interface and no firewire adapter? Have you ever tried moving 300 GB of files over a USB 1.x connection?
My laptop only has USB 1. Oddly enough, I've never tried transfering 300GB to or from it, because it only HAS 20GB in it. I find that 90% of the time, I'm moving over a few dozen/hundred MB at most. Takes a minute or 2 tops, maybe 5 if it's a big job. For everything else I do, I just run the files off the external. USB 1 is more than fast enough for pretty much anything (hint: DVD quality video is still less than 10mbps) short of running a 400MB executable or something weird.
Not to sound defeatist, but quite frankly I could beat your filter in a matter of seconds. I just start writing my spam to use subject lines like "Please review", "The file you asked for", etc. In fact, many spammers have started doing this very thing, to combat exactly what you're trying to do. Extend what you're doing to the body of the message, and I can still beat it trivially. I just move AWAY from normal spammer obfuscation, and write my spam as if it was english text.
See, filters used to just pick up obvious "indicative" words, so spammers started to use caps. Filters got those, so spammers started to obfuscate with spaces. Filters got those, so spammers started with real text munging (v1@gr@, etc). Filters got those, so spammers started inserting huge volumes of real words in their spam.
Notice the pattern?
The reason Baysian filters (which are anything but nonsense, trust me) work is because they adapt to the spammers' techniques. As time goes on, spammers figure out how we're filtering. They adapt. Your filtering system will be obsolete within a year, guaranteed. A Baysian filter won't, because it adapts along with the spam. In as much as any algorithm can be considered "learning", a Baysian spam filter learns pretty damn well. 90-95% accuracy with enough training data, and who doesn't have enough spam to train a filter with?:)
More power to ya though, because each and every person working towards a solution helps. Just don't discount the more esoteric methods outright, because combining what you're doing with an adaptive filter is pretty much the optimal technological solution (for now).
Try to show off Linux to a friend and just to read a file of a floppy disk is a CS101 class; and you've lost the battle before it even gets started.
I don't know which distros you play with, but with Knoppix at least, there's a nice floppy icon on the desktop. Double click it with a disk inserted, and you see the floppy's contents. Try it with no disk, a nice "no disk" error pops up. Need to eject the disk? It's the best of both worlds - you need to tell the computer to "eject" the disk, and then manually do it yourself. It's Mac and Windows rolled up into one! Ok, that part kinda sucks rocks:) But it's a far cry from a CS101 class.
Remember, in the PC world there simply is no way to know if a floppy disk has been inserted, you still have to somehow tell the computer. Apple had this right a long time ago. Having said that, CDs work flawlessly in Knoppix. Insert, desktop icon appears. Eject, icon goes away. Magic.
One really nice feature WOULD be auto-mounting USB drives, without any setup involved - but where would they mount to? We'd need to standardize on that first./mnt/usb1...10 would be a start, although then people would complain that the directory names were "obtuse". Or someone would want/mnt/ipod. Or/mnt/key. Or/mnt/my_3rd_harddrive.
As the other poster said, history, mostly. To retain the maximum compatibility with both users and applications. These main directories have been there seemingly forever, and this is a *good* thing, for the most part. I agree they're a little terse, but hey, we survived with 8.3 filenames in the DOS world for years, and people survived:)
You haven't been using Windows too long if you think Unix directory structure is confusing. Consider the various things we've seen in the past from Windows:
Windows/WINNT. Real brilliant move. Some computers have both. Where is my OS installed again?
Temp/Tmp. Same deal, I believe most machines now use both of these, often in different locations.
System/System32. The former is finally starting to wane, but for years it was a real treat trying to remember if a dll went in the first or the second of these. Or both, or neither.
Documents and Settings. As Windows moves to a multi-user-account system, this entire tree is getting silly. All Users/Default User/Administrator/Me. Hmm, really fun to piece together my Start menu when it's often scattered across 4 different branches. Go back a few years, and most of this was under Windows/*.
About the only thing that's stayed constant has been "Program Files". Can't say as I mind that part. Oh, and about 500 3 character directory names, with illuminating titles such as inf, mui, csc, pif, pss. I won't even begin to explore the wonderful world of "Temporary Internet Files", where you often can't even see all of what's inside.
My point? All heirarchical filesystems are confusing at first. And months later. And years later. So are filenames, and extensions. So is the seemingly arbitrary hidden/shown attribute (or . prefix, for the *nixes). I've never met a filesystem that makes much sense for the average user, unless most of it is hidden from them - which was Microsoft's goal with "Program Files" and "My Documents". You can do the same thing in a Unix setup, namely home directories (because really, users shouldn't need to play in application directories once they're installed).
Filesystems are designed by geeks, FOR geeks. We should as much as possible try to abstract the details from the user, yet still allow a geek user the power to easily play. I haven't found the right stuff yet myself, but I'd would never go so far as to say any of them are "easy". They're all pretty damn hard to get into unless you either have a ton of experience, or can ignore what you don't understand and hope it's all working correctly.
Weird. Guess I'm not up on the actual ratings numbers, but here's what I as a Canadian have been watching for news for the past decade or more:
CNN & CNN Headline News. The first (and I thought biggest) US news network. Shows zero Canadian content, and has never been "banned" by anyone.
Add in the fact that the vast majority of sitcoms, dramas, documentaries, movies, sports, and commercials are from the US. And when I say vast, I mean VAST. I think the average Canadian might see one episode of a Canadian sitcom a month, if that. I haven't seen one personally for years, because I rarely watch the CBC or CTV.
One of the biggest Canadian broadcasters, Global, broadcasts the Superbowl every year. A 100% US sport, league, etc. Almost every movie I've ever seen on television comes from the US. We get each and every one of your insipid "reality" TV shows. We have nightly NBA/NFL games in-season. The Canadian versions of Discovery/TLC/etc mostly show US-produced content. Even Space (our sci-fi channel) shows only US content. Well, unless Canada had a burgeoning 50's monster movie industry that everyone forgot about.
If there are bans going on, they sure as hell aren't very successful. Even if there are, it's trivial to set up a DirectTV dish, and contrary to what tinfoil hatters would say, the government DOES NOT CARE. There are at least a dozen of these dishes on my street, and no government official or police officer has once said word one about it. In fact, we have a cop on my street, I'm pretty sure if there was some sort of "ban" going on, he'd have busted them by now.
Don't even TRY to compare CanCon rules to what goes on in places like China or the middle east. You don't go to jail here for watching "unapproved" content.
Male your flavour? Try 8=====) (or 8==========) if you're looking for a more "exciting" experience).
Pattern match, and boom! Instant porn results.
And no, I cannot believe that I actually posted some ascii pr0n on Slashdot:) Just imagine what the poor search engine would have to do to match that horrible goatse ascii *shudder*. Maybe it'd return some astronomy websites dealing with singularities.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't figured out your title tough.
:)
Just wait till the end of the conference. I hear there's a rumor MD5 is broken
There's a huge amount of slop in the brain needed to produce the perception of stable colors of objects under different lighting conditions
:). Alternating between the LEDs (white light) and the bulb (yellow light) was... interesting. My eyes couldn't decide what colour things were. Relatively speaking, sure. But I'd go for a while with just the LEDs, my eyes got used to that, then switch to the bulb. Suddenly, switch to the bulb, and everything gets weird. Even subtle things like depth cues get messed up, because your brain is frantically trying to re-colour what you're looking at.
:)
Boy, you can say that again. For anyone who *really* wants to experience this, I suggest you go caving some time. In a deep enough cave that no outside light penetrates. Last weekend myself and a group were out, and we all had different models of headlamps. Now, the cave we were in has 3 interesting things going for it here: very banded & multicoloured rock, lots of ice (again somewhat multicoloured due to how it forms over the centuries), and human artifacts (a fair bit of paint on the walls, general human refuse, etc).
Here's the trick: you're in an area where your eyes have never seen the surroundings in natural light. Effectively, you have no reference point to know what colour things are. Now, I personally have one of the newer LED/incandescent combo headlamps (an amazing combination by the way, and for those with any doubt, 3 white LEDs will provide more than enough light for at least 20' around you - no more trying to focus right in front of your feet
This really didn't happen with things like our clothing or other gear, because my brain "knew" what colour that stuff was, having seen it outside, and it adjusted easily. But the rocks, ice, and *especially* the tagging on the walls - very creepy effect. Things that looked green in one light could be red in another. The ice was fun, because it's actually somewhat brown/yellowish in some layers (dirt, I suspect). But the brain wants to colour it blue-white.
We also had a good game of "guess my eye colour" - many of these people didn't know each other very well. I think we scored less than 50% overall
I'd believe it.
:)
A few weeks ago I saw an infomercial on TV for a new kind of dating service: one to help you have affairs of an adulterous nature. They had many disclaimers about their respect of the sanctity of marriage, and how they don't want to encourage cheating... then went on to say "hey, people are going to cheat, so we feel it's ok to help you hook up discretely". These two messages alternated throughout the whole thing. I couldn't stop watching; it was the most original thing I've seen on television in years.
I think this, and Craigslist, just go to show you the reality of human relations. I'm anxiously awaiting a slew of posts decrying Craigslist because "no strings attached sex" is still pretty taboo in most circles
The original olympics wasn't about all of this silly ethical garbage. It was about muscular naked men manhandling one another in front of a large audience.
:)
"Tell me, Joey, do you like movies about Gladiators?"
And yes, I'm aware that I'm making Baby Jesus cry
I must not be as smart as the rest of ya (some AC already posted a solution hours ago), but it took me a couple of hours to actually work out a solution. I had it solved within a few minutes but for the life of me couldn't remember how I got there. It's funny, because the page source says
:)
(Duda says he proved its solvable under 25 moves, but still cannot figure moves out)
Well, it's solvable (several ways) in 15 moves. The trick with a puzzle like this is that the ORDER of your clicks is irrelevant. The AC solution is also 15 long, here's mine (a bit more symmetrical and therefore asthetically pleasing IMHO
00011
11011
11100
01110
10110
1 means you click the square, 0 means you don't. Again, the order doesn't matter.
As another poster mentioned, MS themselves confirm this support being removed. I've been chuckling about this all week, because I've been waiting for this day for 3+ years now. Steve Gibson may be a blowhard, but he was 100% dead-on correct on this one.
:)
As to why ping and tracert still work - well, they work for the same reason they worked in Windows pre-2000. Check out that link, it has nice pretty pictures, but here's the dirt (and everyone can correct me on the technical details I get wrong):
Raw sockets allow you to write data directly to the network layer. You can bypass the TCP and IP layers this way, and put whatever the heck you want into your packets. This gives you the ability to do fun things like forge your source address (good for UDP flooding or TCP SYN floods), and pretty much send anything you want. A lot of older attacks used to send malformed packets (bad TCP or IP headers) which would cause the receiving machine to choke on them (see: WinNuke).
Now, if you're forced to go through the appropriate layers (TCP and/or IP), the protocol stack handles the headers for you. Things like your source IP address, for instance, are assigned for you. You cannot change this, and therefore cannot spoof this. In the Win9x (and NT4) days, Windows only allowed you to write to the TCP layer. To accomodate "raw" sockets for use in ICMP, you could write to the IP layer (because ICMP doesn't use the concept of ports or sequencing or any of the TCP goodness).
In 2000 and XP, Microsoft inexplicably allowed FULL raw socket access, something which had only been seen in the Unix world before - hence why most DoS attacks came from *nix boxes. This is one reason shell accounts used to be a BIG DEAL for script kiddies to get (the other reason of course is that anyone can install Linux or a BSD these days). Folks like Gibson warned them that Windows would now become zombie heaven, and hey! they were right.
Microsoft has finally admitted to the mistake, realized that almost nothing other than attack tools use full raw sockets, and has closed this up. I suspect they're allowing only IP layer access again (for TCP), and transport layer access (one above this) for UDP, to prevent IP spoofing. Notice that this still allows you to spoof your source IP address on a TCP connection - this is why outbound un-ACK'd TCP connections are being limited. We don't want SYN flooding
ICMP works because you still have IP layer access. It's sort of like a pseudo-raw socket. This makes me wonder: has anyone seen any limitation on ICMP traffic? Because a ping flood with spoofed source IP addresses should still be possible from what I can tell.
Re-read the post. On a box that's been hibernated at least once, the hibernation file and swap files are ALREADY ALLOCATED. The "free" space could technically be 1MB and the machine will hibernate and boot just fine. Windows won't LET you hibernate unless it has enough disk space.
Re-read a little further, and you'll note it was mentioned that this occured on different boxes, and with different ram.
Regardless, Windows is touted as "it just works". Here's a case where it doesn't. All someone did is add ram to a laptop, and BSOD.
Quite frankly, you had me sold at step 2.
Where does this myth come from?
This year's flash ads on Slashdot?
*rimshot*
As someone who worked as a broker for over 10 years, I can most assuredly tell you that this sort of thing is covered by most homeowner's insurance policies (at least here in Canada). In fact, most so-called "Acts of God" are also covered.
Any sudden, unavoidable weather event is generally covered, with some exceptions: flood damage in flood-prone areas, tornado damage in the plains, earthquakes on the west coast, things like that. Reason? Because when these things happen, they tend to be considered Natural Disasters, and the damage gets into the BILLIONS. Insurance companies and their re-insurers simply aren't up the task.
But a freak hailstorm, ice storm, tree falling on your house, meteor.. yup, pretty much all covered.
a CD might get scratched (as might a car or a DVD or a bike or most any other physical object)
I've never heard of a car or bike that stops working when it gets scratched. A good crunching, sure, but it's a hell of a lot easier to scratch a CD/DVD than it is to crash a car to the point where it doesn't work.
Besides, the ONLY reason wrecking a car puts it out of commission is the physical reality of it. We have the technology to prevent CD scratches from killing the product (the music), so why not employ it? If we could manufacture self-healing cars, should we have laws against that?
This worm attacks ports that myself, and 99.99999% of the Windows using population out there, have no need to have open.
Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, leaves these open by default, and provides no practical way to close them.
Ergo, a firewall.
...but how feasible WOULD it be to make worms for Linux?
"Here's your new screensaver!
You will be prompted for the admin password so we can install this and set it up
Wonderful, except that worms spread without user intervention. I'm pretty sure the one we're talking about here wouldn't spread at all between Linux machines.
Viruses, on the other hand...
I can transfer 4 gigs in under an hour. Most DVDs don't actually use 9.7 gigs for the movie alone. Do the math.
I'm on my neighbors AP right now.
:)
WEP is actually a lot more effective than people on slashdot will tell you.
Um....
1. PCBs do not contain lead.
2. The story you linked has no mention whatsoever of "entire generations of people" being "maimed". Other than a casual mention of personal injury and property damage lawsuits, there is not a single hint that anyone's actually been hurt.
Wow, if you're representative of people in the environmental movement, no wonder you're all viewed as being crackpots.
gamers have limits and can't break their banks for the 69.99 game and 200 $ worh of ram every new release
Call me crazy, but I can assure you that the price of keeping current with video cards outweighs RAM requirements by an order of magnitude or more. Unless there are games I've never heard of that still play just fine with my Geforce 2, but need 2 gigs of RAM. Hey, you never know...
what if your laptop has only a USB 1.0/1.1 interface and no firewire adapter? Have you ever tried moving 300 GB of files over a USB 1.x connection?
My laptop only has USB 1. Oddly enough, I've never tried transfering 300GB to or from it, because it only HAS 20GB in it. I find that 90% of the time, I'm moving over a few dozen/hundred MB at most. Takes a minute or 2 tops, maybe 5 if it's a big job. For everything else I do, I just run the files off the external. USB 1 is more than fast enough for pretty much anything (hint: DVD quality video is still less than 10mbps) short of running a 400MB executable or something weird.
Is it necessarily the DVD drive sucking the power though?
:)
Surely CPU usage goes up somewhat to decode & handle the video, which (I would have thought) would be the more significant drain.
I woulda thought it was the screen, personally.
(yes, it's a joke, laugh
Not to sound defeatist, but quite frankly I could beat your filter in a matter of seconds. I just start writing my spam to use subject lines like "Please review", "The file you asked for", etc. In fact, many spammers have started doing this very thing, to combat exactly what you're trying to do. Extend what you're doing to the body of the message, and I can still beat it trivially. I just move AWAY from normal spammer obfuscation, and write my spam as if it was english text.
:)
See, filters used to just pick up obvious "indicative" words, so spammers started to use caps. Filters got those, so spammers started to obfuscate with spaces. Filters got those, so spammers started with real text munging (v1@gr@, etc). Filters got those, so spammers started inserting huge volumes of real words in their spam.
Notice the pattern?
The reason Baysian filters (which are anything but nonsense, trust me) work is because they adapt to the spammers' techniques. As time goes on, spammers figure out how we're filtering. They adapt. Your filtering system will be obsolete within a year, guaranteed. A Baysian filter won't, because it adapts along with the spam. In as much as any algorithm can be considered "learning", a Baysian spam filter learns pretty damn well. 90-95% accuracy with enough training data, and who doesn't have enough spam to train a filter with?
More power to ya though, because each and every person working towards a solution helps. Just don't discount the more esoteric methods outright, because combining what you're doing with an adaptive filter is pretty much the optimal technological solution (for now).
Try to show off Linux to a friend and just to read a file of a floppy disk is a CS101 class; and you've lost the battle before it even gets started.
:) But it's a far cry from a CS101 class.
/mnt/usb1...10 would be a start, although then people would complain that the directory names were "obtuse". Or someone would want /mnt/ipod. Or /mnt/key. Or /mnt/my_3rd_harddrive.
I don't know which distros you play with, but with Knoppix at least, there's a nice floppy icon on the desktop. Double click it with a disk inserted, and you see the floppy's contents. Try it with no disk, a nice "no disk" error pops up. Need to eject the disk? It's the best of both worlds - you need to tell the computer to "eject" the disk, and then manually do it yourself. It's Mac and Windows rolled up into one! Ok, that part kinda sucks rocks
Remember, in the PC world there simply is no way to know if a floppy disk has been inserted, you still have to somehow tell the computer. Apple had this right a long time ago. Having said that, CDs work flawlessly in Knoppix. Insert, desktop icon appears. Eject, icon goes away. Magic.
One really nice feature WOULD be auto-mounting USB drives, without any setup involved - but where would they mount to? We'd need to standardize on that first.
As the other poster said, history, mostly. To retain the maximum compatibility with both users and applications. These main directories have been there seemingly forever, and this is a *good* thing, for the most part. I agree they're a little terse, but hey, we survived with 8.3 filenames in the DOS world for years, and people survived :)
You haven't been using Windows too long if you think Unix directory structure is confusing. Consider the various things we've seen in the past from Windows:
Windows/WINNT. Real brilliant move. Some computers have both. Where is my OS installed again?
Temp/Tmp. Same deal, I believe most machines now use both of these, often in different locations.
System/System32. The former is finally starting to wane, but for years it was a real treat trying to remember if a dll went in the first or the second of these. Or both, or neither.
Documents and Settings. As Windows moves to a multi-user-account system, this entire tree is getting silly. All Users/Default User/Administrator/Me. Hmm, really fun to piece together my Start menu when it's often scattered across 4 different branches. Go back a few years, and most of this was under Windows/*.
About the only thing that's stayed constant has been "Program Files". Can't say as I mind that part. Oh, and about 500 3 character directory names, with illuminating titles such as inf, mui, csc, pif, pss. I won't even begin to explore the wonderful world of "Temporary Internet Files", where you often can't even see all of what's inside.
My point? All heirarchical filesystems are confusing at first. And months later. And years later. So are filenames, and extensions. So is the seemingly arbitrary hidden/shown attribute (or . prefix, for the *nixes). I've never met a filesystem that makes much sense for the average user, unless most of it is hidden from them - which was Microsoft's goal with "Program Files" and "My Documents". You can do the same thing in a Unix setup, namely home directories (because really, users shouldn't need to play in application directories once they're installed).
Filesystems are designed by geeks, FOR geeks. We should as much as possible try to abstract the details from the user, yet still allow a geek user the power to easily play. I haven't found the right stuff yet myself, but I'd would never go so far as to say any of them are "easy". They're all pretty damn hard to get into unless you either have a ton of experience, or can ignore what you don't understand and hope it's all working correctly.
Weird. Guess I'm not up on the actual ratings numbers, but here's what I as a Canadian have been watching for news for the past decade or more:
CNN & CNN Headline News. The first (and I thought biggest) US news network. Shows zero Canadian content, and has never been "banned" by anyone.
Add in the fact that the vast majority of sitcoms, dramas, documentaries, movies, sports, and commercials are from the US. And when I say vast, I mean VAST. I think the average Canadian might see one episode of a Canadian sitcom a month, if that. I haven't seen one personally for years, because I rarely watch the CBC or CTV.
One of the biggest Canadian broadcasters, Global, broadcasts the Superbowl every year. A 100% US sport, league, etc. Almost every movie I've ever seen on television comes from the US. We get each and every one of your insipid "reality" TV shows. We have nightly NBA/NFL games in-season. The Canadian versions of Discovery/TLC/etc mostly show US-produced content. Even Space (our sci-fi channel) shows only US content. Well, unless Canada had a burgeoning 50's monster movie industry that everyone forgot about.
If there are bans going on, they sure as hell aren't very successful. Even if there are, it's trivial to set up a DirectTV dish, and contrary to what tinfoil hatters would say, the government DOES NOT CARE. There are at least a dozen of these dishes on my street, and no government official or police officer has once said word one about it. In fact, we have a cop on my street, I'm pretty sure if there was some sort of "ban" going on, he'd have busted them by now.
Don't even TRY to compare CanCon rules to what goes on in places like China or the middle east. You don't go to jail here for watching "unapproved" content.
I'm still wondering if glaciers run MacOS, for convenient virus uploadability. Overclock their CPUs, melt the ice, happy ending!
I can even do it with a textbox interface:
:) Just imagine what the poor search engine would have to do to match that horrible goatse ascii *shudder*. Maybe it'd return some astronomy websites dealing with singularities.
Looking for female porn? Enter (*)(*).
Male your flavour? Try 8=====) (or 8==========) if you're looking for a more "exciting" experience).
Pattern match, and boom! Instant porn results.
And no, I cannot believe that I actually posted some ascii pr0n on Slashdot