I can remember back to when I was three. Can't remember MUCH at that age, just a few little events. The day my sister was brought home from the hospital, telling someone how old I was, waking up in bed one morning wondering what side of the bed my stuffed animal fell down on. I figure the reason I can't remember much before that is that before I was three I didn't have a firm grasp of the language yet. Not that I was a linguist marvel at three, but at least I could understand what was going on around me. I could look at something and associate it with a word. And later when I thought back on it, I remember looking at, or doing something that had a tangable name. Its hard to remember something as simple as "the picture on the wall" if you don't know what a picture is, a wall is, and that there's a significance to the relationship. Otherwise it's no more significant to you than an inkblot, and even that has no relevance if you don't know what an inkblot is.
You can't imprint those memories without some way of knowing what to recall. In fact, the memories might actually be there, but your brain wasn't able to "remember" them in a useful way you'd be able to recall. When the whole world is one big multicolored inkblot, there's not much worth remembering.
But not necessarily in the best interest of the company hosting them, so don't bet on it.
- Characters can die. Instead of building a character that will last for years, you build a character that, if you're lucky, you can keep alive for a couple weeks. Sure, you can have your friend ressurrect you, but if your corpse decays after so many minutes, you're gone forever. This will give a finality to the game at some point, providing a good point to start over anew, or a good excuse to quit if you've had enough.
- The game can end. Certainly not easy, but say you have an artifact split into 24 pieces, each giving special powers to the one possessing it. Of course, anyone holding one of the artifacts can't drop it, can't permanantly leave the game, and is overly visible to the rest of the world, making him/her a prime target. Anyone who can gain all the pieces will have a special capability of wiping the planet, or wiping all the evil from the planet (depending on your desire at the time). At least this gives people a goal beyond finding the next monster to kill.
- Unconditional banning of cheaters. Permanantly removed from the game, and all other games hosted by the company. No refunds, and to even make it better, have the players put forth a deposit that they lose. Granted, this should only be done with adaquate in-house witnesses to the cheating, but when I played UO, they had unrefutable proof of HUNDREDS of cheaters on each server that they offered a no-loss amnesty option. This had to do with duped gold & other resources. Just give us back the duped stuff, and we'll forget it ever happened... Then a few months later there was another "warning for cheaters" that had been cheating for quite a while. They were encouraged to "fix the problem" over the next few days or get banned. They already knew who were doing it. They didn't even need witnesses that time. Seriously, publically rid yourself of that 1% of your clientle that is cheating, and the other 99% won't even consider it.
- Balanced characters. In UO, everyone gravitated to swordsman and mage, with a few optional extras, since that was the only professions that you could really do anything with. Any of the other professions were only used by the mules. I actually played as a tamer early on, using tamed creatures as my weapons in battle, until OSI listened to a bunch of whiners about how hard it was to PK someone who had 6 tame dragons guarding him, that they decided to nix that as an option. Every character type in the game should have some useful benefit that gives them an advantage over one type, but vulnerable to another. In the old D&D rules for instance, a mage couldn't wear armor and had very low hitpoints compared to other characters. A useful ally, but you don't want to venture out alone.
Include the above elements, and make the game GOOD, and you'll have just as many hardcore gamers, addicts or otherwise. They'll all pay the same $10 a month, if they play for an hour a month or 12 hours a day. I finally quit playing UO and never looked back. All I could remember for the last few months was that I was miserable with the game, yet I couldn't wait to play it. There was just something wrong with that feeling....
Marty left 2015 thinking his life WAS roses. He didn't know that the upscale (1985) neighborhood his future self lived in had turned into a ghetto. He only thought his kids had problems, and after the encounter with Biff's grandson, he figured that problem was solved too. His only reason for ever picking up the sports almanac was an effort to have a fallback in case he needed one, although the likely reason was simply one of momentary greed, since his desire was spawned by the solicitor commenting on his wish that he gambled on the Cub's world series upset.
It was Jennifer that had a firsthand look at his bleak future. The Rolls Royce crash, the firing, the spoiled kids, etc. She probably would have mentioned something about it, but she fainted before she got a chance, and never woke up until the end of the third movie. Marty actually came to terms with his peer pressure problem when facing a much bigger threat (a gun battle) rather than a dangerous car race. As a result of that, he resisted the taunt to race at the end of the third movie, missed his opportunity to hit the Rolls Royce, and rewrote his future.
The point is, he never had to meet his future self to make that happen. He had an independent assessment of where his life was going if he didn't change his behavior, and changed it appropriately before it detrimentally afflicted his future.
All his assumptions are based pretty much on what we TODAY consider to be desired. The fact is, in 10 years, we'll have changed our perspective so that such things, once past the gee-wiz phase, have evolved into more mainstream appliances, that do what we want them to do, and more importantly ONLY what we want them to do.
Everyone doesn't have a cellphone..... yet, but it seems to be getting that way quickly. You can't walk down an asile in the supermarket without seeing someone talking on the phone, usually about some useless, pointless conversation that is only occupying what free brain cells they have left, and leaving very little, if any, available for any other purpose, like not blocking the asile, or applying the brakes in an orderly fashion. More and more places are banning active cellphone use, mostly to appeal to the customers that find others yelling into the cellphone during a movie to be somewhat disruptive. And those of us who value our privacy will venture away from the option to be located anywhere at any time. The feature might exist, but very few people will probably use it, unless its necessary.
RFID tags are great, and it makes sense to simply walk out the door and have your credit card deducted for the right amount as you do. And if you accidently walk out with something you're not supposed to, it will let you know. If it was a simple accident, you have the option to walk back in. If it wasn't, you can still run..:) But better than the embarrasing situation where you've accidently labeled yourself a criminal because you misplaced that package of bubblegum when you were shopping.
Cable already SHOULD be advertising free. You're paying a monthly fee for the shows, you should get them without advertising. And if not for the advertising, they shouldn't care when, or how many times you watch something. As long as you keep dishing out the monthly fee, and you will, it should make little, if any difference. Its the dependance on advertising that's biting the cable networks in the ass, hence their bitter complaints about Tivo and the like. Rid themselves of the advertising beast, embrace the PVR, restructure their budget, and life will be good.
As for voice recognition, we got that today. Of course, there's an AI element that's lacking, but if the driver is willing to stick to a standard convention for command structure, most of what the author is predicting in 10 years could be done today with little difficulty. The simple fact of the matter is, 99% of the time, I know where the nearest gas station is. Only travellers need this information, and most intellegent travellers will fill up at the most convienent opportunity (i.e., not when they have 10 miles worth of gas left) Better for the car to simply inform me as I'm passing a gas station, knowing my destination and most likely route, that the gas station I'm passing is the least expensive one I will pass before running out of gas and therefore I should stop now to fill up. Screw asking the car about it.:)
In a way it wasn't. U9 was started far prior to Ultima Online's release. When UO got close to completion, EA, in their infinite wisdom, moved most of their developers off U9 onto UO, leaving UO to stagnate. They eventually scrapped the original game and started over since the original would have been a few years behind technology wise. In the process, they sacrificed the story, removed the party from the game, and basically screwed it all to hell.
They never finished the original. Or so the legend goes.
If companies realize that the ticket to getting lower oem rates is to sell computers with lindows or any other linux distro preinstalled, there will be more retaillers doing exactly that, if only to take advantage of the price breaks. This means they'll be on the shelf and people might buy them.
I've noticed lately that Fry's has started to sell a system with some distro of linux pre-installed, complete with free versions of every office based application imaginable, for a grand total of $199. With that low of a price, there might be some people who buy it just to find out what this whole linux thing is all about. Microsoft might be giving other retailers an excuse to do so as well. So let them shoot themselves in the foot if they want to.
Those that will believe nothing. Those that will believe anything.
Skeptics and the suckers. Jaded and the gullible. Those who refuse to be fooled, and those who will buy anything, no matter how outrageous. I get them on my site all the time. A small group of people, despite the modern technology necessary to even access my website, refuse to believe its possible to control appliances via the computer. And then there are those who try to talk to a slideshow. You can't win.
No matter what you do, no matter how much proof is available, there will always be idiots that believe the moon landings were faked. I call them idiots because their "proof" is based on scientific evidence that is actually proof against them, false implications, or outright lies. And for the most part, they fail to listen to any reason. They're not looking for a debate, they're looking to impose their view on the world, and refuse to accept that others would actually believe that the obvious happened. There are actually people in this world that still believe the Earth is flat. You can try to convince these people, but you're wasting your breath. Just let them enjoy their ignorance. It IS bliss afterall.
I fondly recall the days of spending an hour tweaking the computer to get that extra 2k of ram available for programs. Hey, because when programs had to fit in conventional ram, and we're talking the 640k that should be enough for anyone, it was a challenge getting the programs you wanted, plus the 15 or so TSR's all to fit in ram. Don't forget about himem. You can stash stuff up there, make more room. And if you really got desparate, video memory was available too.:)
Buy from http://smarthome.com instead though. They sell X10 compatible modules from other companies, usually cheaper than the equivalent X10 product, and you're not sending your money to X10.
Its a shame actually, as its the only thing that X10 does well. Those cams they advertise everywhere are crap.
On another note it always amazes me that a significant segment of a human population will believe the unbelievable and doubt the obvious.
I get that all the time with the website I run. Its simply a demonstration of very simple home automation control, consumer grade technology that has been available for 20 years. Yet some people simply can't for the life of them believe its real, or even possible.
And yet on the other end of the spectrum, I get people trying to talk to a prerecorded slideshow that is clearly identified as such. I give up trying to convince them.:)
If they want to monitor, lets give them something to monitor. Find out what books would trigger the watchful eyes, and go check out ALL of them, frequently. Have everyone else do the same. Overwhelm them with useless information. When everyone is on the list, there's no point in having a list.
The only difference between this and a conventional worm is that it doesn't come with a payload package that will cause damage to the system, although spyware isn't much better. From what I can tell, this software serves no legitimate purpose. You have to install it to read the greeting card, which is sent by someone else installing the software. Does anyone ever actually send a legitimate "greeting card?" If not, there would be no reason to install this software. The only functional aspect of this application is to provide the user with advertisements, which even the most clueless user probably wouldn't install intentionally for only that purpose.
Because the user has no legitimate reason to WANT to install this software, he/she has to be coerced into doing so with false pretenses. If this is legal to do, it would be no less legal to install a dangerous payload, so long as the EULA explains it and gives the user an option to cancel.
Perhaps this would be a good time to try to challenge the validity of the EULA. Can't have it both ways. Either it's a binding contract and therefore if you agree to spam your contacts and have your harddrive formmated, you can't hold the author liable. Or EULA's will have to NOT be considered contracts and therefore this will apply to ALL EULA's. Or we can hope.:)
Pretty losely defined as it is, it would mean to say that anyone who so much as wanders on a piece of land is "using" it. And they're probably right. Even "undeveloped" area is typically used for farming. The farms are the first to go when the cities move in, but the land is there, someone owns it, and it rarely sits idle.
The the 17% of unused land can be easily taken up by Antarctica and the major deserts. There isn't much farmland or fishing going on in Antarctica.
I'm using linux to control the X10 devices in my house as well. While its not a perfect technology, it works remarkably well as cheap consumer products that in some cases cost very little more than the conventional physical interfaces.
I just wish X10 would spend their efforts on expanding and perfecting their home automation devices instead of spending all their marketing funds pimping those crappy wireless cameras. I've talked to many people that think simple cheap home automation is still a futuristic dream, yet when I mention X10, they've heard of it but equate it only to the cameras.
Since you chose to bring it up, an embedded device such as this is one of the applications that has need for the most minimal user interface possible. The "User Interface" consists of two buttons and a 2x16 LCD display. Drag&Drop, antialiased fonts, guesture based mouse commands and happy paperclips are the very things you DON'T need, don't want and have no room for anyway.
GNU/Linux only applies in those situations where you refer to the entire operating system. The kernel itself is pure Linux, and even RMS doesn't debate that issue.
Since BK is purely a kernel development issue, his failure to prefix GNU isn't proof of his lack of sincerity.:)
Not only that, if you get a TON of traffic, and some people only look at 10% of the article before going on to something else, do you really want them downloading the other 90% of the article's pictures?
If they have a high speed connection and load the entire article before they're done reading the 10% of it they planned to, they still use up all the bandwidth, but they didn't need to.
Of course, I'm sure the ads have more to do with it than the bandwidth minimising, but you never know.
You have a funny definition of "free". If you're a student there, you can damn well bet that you have paid for it, probably several times over. Each semester. Check those "technology fees" that they charge so you can get "free" copies of Windows products.
And even if they don't charge you fees there, if the university "picks up" the tab for those licenses, where exactly does the university get the money from anyway? (hint: the students). You pay for it, one way or another. Unless you're on a full scholorship, you're buying it. And if you don't use it, you're still buying it.
Now, I'm sure the school gets a nice bulk discount. But so does any large organization, educational or otherwise, that buys large quantities of licenses. But its a far cry from free.
Piracy is typically referred to as theft, but only when it deprives a software company of a sale it otherwise would have gotten. In your example, no, the kid who farts around with photoshop is not costing adobe any money.
It gets tricky where you actually NEED that software. If your job or hobbies require the use of photoshop and you pirate it, then you ARE depriving Adobe of a sale. The argument could always be stated that there are less expensive and/or free alternatives (like The Gimp), and this may very well be true. But if this is the case, someone using the software in a professional environment should be using the less expensive/free alternative anyway, otherwise the deprivation argument actually has teeth.
In a business environment, there is no excuse. The entire company could be built around free software solutions from the beginning if it wants to remain neutral in the piracy war. But when corporations utilize commercial software to make money and don't purchase the licenses that enable them to do so, that is strictly a lost sale, and there's not really anything that can be argued about it.
One sidenote though, the highschool kid with photoshop is learning to use softwere he would otherwise not be able to legally obtain. Should he use alternative software, along with many others, that alternative solution would inevitably become more popular, to the detriment of Adobe. While you can debate the ethical piracy issues regarding that one illicit copy, in the long run, it probably helps Adobe that the kid uses it instead of Gimp on a regular basis.
Not is the teenage/pre-teen world forming bad habits, but there are a lot of people in the world that pretty much learn english in chatrooms, and you better believe they consider this to be perfectly acceptable conversation language.
I suppose, what bothers me the most is that it just looks and feels retarded. I remember thinking back to first grade, when we were all still learning how to spell. Sometimes it took a while for it to kick in that YOU is not spelled U just because they sound the same. Or SUN/SON, etc etc. With first graders, its an acceptable faux pas. To do so intentionally when you clearly know better is at the height of moronic. I understand the need/desire to abbreviate long words sometimes, but u for you, r for our/are and the extra retarded ur for your, just makes NO credible sense.
And while sometimes I'm willing to write off this stuff as the juvenile swill from those "Damn teenagers", when I see people in their 20's+ doing it, it just makes me sick.
Well, sick is perhaps too strong a word. It just makes me feel artifically intellectually superior to them, and I no longer want to spend my time conversing. Of course, there's always the chance that my assumptions are correct... and perhaps that explains it.
It might not be legal in the sense that you "attack back" the infected server. However, If you set up a webpage that people go to in order to "fix" their infected computers, and that page just so happens to be named one of the files that the worms are attempting to access.
In the past, I've seen pages that would allow you to test your system to see if you were vulnerable to the various nuke programs (winnuke, teardrop, etc), of the sort "if you get this message, that means you're still operational, and you're not vulnerable"
So set up a page, explain exactly what it will do, and include on there a link to the script that will "fix" the client computer. If people come along, access my server, and my server does exactly what they requested it to do.... how grey is the legal area?
Of course, its probably still illegal, since nobody "authorized" the activity, but it might be less shaky legal ground. If you don't want my webserver fixing your computer, then don't access it. Dunno.
That's true. The best he can do is get 15% of his time shaved off for "good behaviour"... unless someone's changed something recently and I missed it. Its not like I spend a great deal of time researching federal prisons.
Slashdot Mirror
I can remember back to when I was three. Can't remember MUCH at that age, just a few little events. The day my sister was brought home from the hospital, telling someone how old I was, waking up in bed one morning wondering what side of the bed my stuffed animal fell down on. I figure the reason I can't remember much before that is that before I was three I didn't have a firm grasp of the language yet. Not that I was a linguist marvel at three, but at least I could understand what was going on around me. I could look at something and associate it with a word. And later when I thought back on it, I remember looking at, or doing something that had a tangable name. Its hard to remember something as simple as "the picture on the wall" if you don't know what a picture is, a wall is, and that there's a significance to the relationship. Otherwise it's no more significant to you than an inkblot, and even that has no relevance if you don't know what an inkblot is.
You can't imprint those memories without some way of knowing what to recall. In fact, the memories might actually be there, but your brain wasn't able to "remember" them in a useful way you'd be able to recall. When the whole world is one big multicolored inkblot, there's not much worth remembering.
-Restil
But not necessarily in the best interest of the company hosting them, so don't bet on it.
- Characters can die. Instead of building a character that will last for years, you build a character that, if you're lucky, you can keep alive for a couple weeks. Sure, you can have your friend ressurrect you, but if your corpse decays after so many minutes, you're gone forever. This will give a finality to the game at some point, providing a good point to start over anew, or a good excuse to quit if you've had enough.
- The game can end. Certainly not easy, but say you have an artifact split into 24 pieces, each giving special powers to the one possessing it. Of course, anyone holding one of the artifacts can't drop it, can't permanantly leave the game, and is overly visible to the rest of the world, making him/her a prime target. Anyone who can gain all the pieces will have a special capability of wiping the planet, or wiping all the evil from the planet (depending on your desire at the time). At least this gives people a goal beyond finding the next monster to kill.
- Unconditional banning of cheaters. Permanantly removed from the game, and all other games hosted by the company. No refunds, and to even make it better, have the players put forth a deposit that they lose. Granted, this should only be done with adaquate in-house witnesses to the cheating, but when I played UO, they had unrefutable proof of HUNDREDS of cheaters on each server that they offered a no-loss amnesty option. This had to do with duped gold & other resources. Just give us back the duped stuff, and we'll forget it ever happened... Then a few months later there was another "warning for cheaters" that had been cheating for quite a while. They were encouraged to "fix the problem" over the next few days or get banned. They already knew who were doing it. They didn't even need witnesses that time.
Seriously, publically rid yourself of that 1% of your clientle that is cheating, and the other 99% won't even consider it.
- Balanced characters. In UO, everyone gravitated to swordsman and mage, with a few optional extras, since that was the only professions that you could really do anything with. Any of the other professions were only used by the mules. I actually played as a tamer early on, using tamed creatures as my weapons in battle, until OSI listened to a bunch of whiners about how hard it was to PK someone who had 6 tame dragons guarding him, that they decided to nix that as an option. Every character type in the game should have some useful benefit that gives them an advantage over one type, but vulnerable to another. In the old D&D rules for instance, a mage couldn't wear armor and had very low hitpoints compared to other characters. A useful ally, but you don't want to venture out alone.
Include the above elements, and make the game GOOD, and you'll have just as many hardcore gamers, addicts or otherwise. They'll all pay the same $10 a month, if they play for an hour a month or 12 hours a day. I finally quit playing UO and never looked back. All I could remember for the last few months was that I was miserable with the game, yet I couldn't wait to play it. There was just something wrong with that feeling....
-Restil
Marty left 2015 thinking his life WAS roses. He didn't know that the upscale (1985) neighborhood his future self lived in had turned into a ghetto. He only thought his kids had problems, and after the encounter with Biff's grandson, he figured that problem was solved too. His only reason for ever picking up the sports almanac was an effort to have a fallback in case he needed one, although the likely reason was simply one of momentary greed, since his desire was spawned by the solicitor commenting on his wish that he gambled on the Cub's world series upset.
It was Jennifer that had a firsthand look at his bleak future. The Rolls Royce crash, the firing, the spoiled kids, etc. She probably would have mentioned something about it, but she fainted before she got a chance, and never woke up until the end of the third movie. Marty actually came to terms with his peer pressure problem when facing a much bigger threat (a gun battle) rather than a dangerous car race. As a result of that, he resisted the taunt to race at the end of the third movie, missed his opportunity to hit the Rolls Royce, and rewrote his future.
The point is, he never had to meet his future self to make that happen. He had an independent assessment of where his life was going if he didn't change his behavior, and changed it appropriately before it detrimentally afflicted his future.
-Restil
All his assumptions are based pretty much on what we TODAY consider to be desired. The fact is, in 10 years, we'll have changed our perspective so that such things, once past the gee-wiz phase, have evolved into more mainstream appliances, that do what we want them to do, and more importantly ONLY what we want them to do.
:) But better than the embarrasing situation where you've accidently labeled yourself a criminal because you misplaced that package of bubblegum when you were shopping.
:)
Everyone doesn't have a cellphone..... yet, but it seems to be getting that way quickly. You can't walk down an asile in the supermarket without seeing someone talking on the phone, usually about some useless, pointless conversation that is only occupying what free brain cells they have left, and leaving very little, if any, available for any other purpose, like not blocking the asile, or applying the brakes in an orderly fashion. More and more places are banning active cellphone use, mostly to appeal to the customers that find others yelling into the cellphone during a movie to be somewhat disruptive. And those of us who value our privacy will venture away from the option to be located anywhere at any time. The feature might exist, but very few people will probably use it, unless its necessary.
RFID tags are great, and it makes sense to simply walk out the door and have your credit card deducted for the right amount as you do. And if you accidently walk out with something you're not supposed to, it will let you know. If it was a simple accident, you have the option to walk back in. If it wasn't, you can still run..
Cable already SHOULD be advertising free. You're paying a monthly fee for the shows, you should get them without advertising. And if not for the advertising, they shouldn't care when, or how many times you watch something. As long as you keep dishing out the monthly fee, and you will, it should make little, if any difference. Its the dependance on advertising that's biting the cable networks in the ass, hence their bitter complaints about Tivo and the like. Rid themselves of the advertising beast, embrace the PVR, restructure their budget, and life will be good.
As for voice recognition, we got that today. Of course, there's an AI element that's lacking, but if the driver is willing to stick to a standard convention for command structure, most of what the author is predicting in 10 years could be done today with little difficulty. The simple fact of the matter is, 99% of the time, I know where the nearest gas station is. Only travellers need this information, and most intellegent travellers will fill up at the most convienent opportunity (i.e., not when they have 10 miles worth of gas left) Better for the car to simply inform me as I'm passing a gas station, knowing my destination and most likely route, that the gas station I'm passing is the least expensive one I will pass before running out of gas and therefore I should stop now to fill up. Screw asking the car about it.
-Restil
In a way it wasn't. U9 was started far prior to Ultima Online's release. When UO got close to completion, EA, in their infinite wisdom, moved most of their developers off U9 onto UO, leaving UO to stagnate. They eventually scrapped the original game and started over since the original would have been a few years behind technology wise. In the process, they sacrificed the story, removed the party from the game, and basically screwed it all to hell.
They never finished the original. Or so the legend goes.
-Restil
If companies realize that the ticket to getting lower oem rates is to sell computers with lindows or any other linux distro preinstalled, there will be more retaillers doing exactly that, if only to take advantage of the price breaks. This means they'll be on the shelf and people might buy them.
I've noticed lately that Fry's has started to sell a system with some distro of linux pre-installed, complete with free versions of every office based application imaginable, for a grand total of $199. With that low of a price, there might be some people who buy it just to find out what this whole linux thing is all about. Microsoft might be giving other retailers an excuse to do so as well. So let them shoot themselves in the foot if they want to.
-Restil
Those that will believe nothing.
Those that will believe anything.
Skeptics and the suckers. Jaded and the gullible. Those who refuse to be fooled, and those who will buy anything, no matter how outrageous. I get them on my site all the time. A small group of people, despite the modern technology necessary to even access my website, refuse to believe its possible to control appliances via the computer. And then there are those who try to talk to a slideshow. You can't win.
No matter what you do, no matter how much proof is available, there will always be idiots that believe the moon landings were faked. I call them idiots because their "proof" is based on scientific evidence that is actually proof against them, false implications, or outright lies. And for the most part, they fail to listen to any reason. They're not looking for a debate, they're looking to impose their view on the world, and refuse to accept that others would actually believe that the obvious happened. There are actually people in this world that still believe the Earth is flat. You can try to convince these people, but you're wasting your breath. Just let them enjoy their ignorance. It IS bliss afterall.
-Restil
I fondly recall the days of spending an hour tweaking the computer to get that extra 2k of ram available for programs. Hey, because when programs had to fit in conventional ram, and we're talking the 640k that should be enough for anyone, it was a challenge getting the programs you wanted, plus the 15 or so TSR's all to fit in ram. Don't forget about himem. You can stash stuff up there, make more room. And if you really got desparate, video memory was available too. :)
-Restil
Buy from http://smarthome.com instead though. They sell X10 compatible modules from other companies, usually cheaper than the equivalent X10 product, and you're not sending your money to X10.
Its a shame actually, as its the only thing that X10 does well. Those cams they advertise everywhere are crap.
-Restil
The Strangelet Article from last May on the same issue.
-Restil
On another note it always amazes me that a significant segment of a human population will believe the unbelievable and doubt the obvious.
:)
I get that all the time with the website I run. Its simply a demonstration of very simple home automation control, consumer grade technology that has been available for 20 years. Yet some people simply can't for the life of them believe its real, or even possible.
And yet on the other end of the spectrum, I get people trying to talk to a prerecorded slideshow that is clearly identified as such. I give up trying to convince them.
-Restil
If they want to monitor, lets give them something to monitor. Find out what books would trigger the watchful eyes, and go check out ALL of them, frequently. Have everyone else do the same. Overwhelm them with useless information. When everyone is on the list, there's no point in having a list.
-Restil
The only difference between this and a conventional worm is that it doesn't come with a payload package that will cause damage to the system, although spyware isn't much better. From what I can tell, this software serves no legitimate purpose. You have to install it to read the greeting card, which is sent by someone else installing the software. Does anyone ever actually send a legitimate "greeting card?" If not, there would be no reason to install this software. The only functional aspect of this application is to provide the user with advertisements, which even the most clueless user probably wouldn't install intentionally for only that purpose.
:)
Because the user has no legitimate reason to WANT to install this software, he/she has to be coerced into doing so with false pretenses. If this is legal to do, it would be no less legal to install a dangerous payload, so long as the EULA explains it and gives the user an option to cancel.
Perhaps this would be a good time to try to challenge the validity of the EULA. Can't have it both ways. Either it's a binding contract and therefore if you agree to spam your contacts and have your harddrive formmated, you can't hold the author liable. Or EULA's will have to NOT be considered contracts and therefore this will apply to ALL EULA's. Or we can hope.
-Restil
Pretty losely defined as it is, it would mean to say that anyone who so much as wanders on a piece of land is "using" it. And they're probably right. Even "undeveloped" area is typically used for farming. The farms are the first to go when the cities move in, but the land is there, someone owns it, and it rarely sits idle.
The the 17% of unused land can be easily taken up by Antarctica and the major deserts. There isn't much farmland or fishing going on in Antarctica.
-Restil
I'll get on that right away. :)
-Restil
The only thing that's common is the company that sells them.
-Restil
I'm using linux to control the X10 devices in my house as well. While its not a perfect technology, it works remarkably well as cheap consumer products that in some cases cost very little more than the conventional physical interfaces.
I just wish X10 would spend their efforts on expanding and perfecting their home automation devices instead of spending all their marketing funds pimping those crappy wireless cameras.
I've talked to many people that think simple cheap home automation is still a futuristic dream, yet when I mention X10, they've heard of it but equate it only to the cameras.
-Restil
Since you chose to bring it up, an embedded device such as this is one of the applications that has need for the most minimal user interface possible. The "User Interface" consists of two buttons and a 2x16 LCD display. Drag&Drop, antialiased fonts, guesture based mouse commands and happy paperclips are the very things you DON'T need, don't want and have no room for anyway.
-Restil
GNU/Linux only applies in those situations where you refer to the entire operating system. The kernel itself is pure Linux, and even RMS doesn't debate that issue.
:)
Since BK is purely a kernel development issue, his failure to prefix GNU isn't proof of his lack of sincerity.
-Restil
Not only that, if you get a TON of traffic, and some people only look at 10% of the article before going on to something else, do you really want them downloading the other 90% of the article's pictures?
If they have a high speed connection and load the entire article before they're done reading the 10% of it they planned to, they still use up all the bandwidth, but they didn't need to.
Of course, I'm sure the ads have more to do with it than the bandwidth minimising, but you never know.
-Restil
You have a funny definition of "free". If you're a student there, you can damn well bet that you have paid for it, probably several times over. Each semester. Check those "technology fees" that they charge so you can get "free" copies of Windows products.
And even if they don't charge you fees there, if the university "picks up" the tab for those licenses, where exactly does the university get the money from anyway? (hint: the students). You pay for it, one way or another. Unless you're on a full scholorship, you're buying it. And if you don't use it, you're still buying it.
Now, I'm sure the school gets a nice bulk discount. But so does any large organization, educational or otherwise, that buys large quantities of licenses. But its a far cry from free.
-Restil
Piracy is typically referred to as theft, but only when it deprives a software company of a sale it otherwise would have gotten. In your example, no, the kid who farts around with photoshop is not costing adobe any money.
It gets tricky where you actually NEED that software. If your job or hobbies require the use of photoshop and you pirate it, then you ARE depriving Adobe of a sale. The argument could always be stated that there are less expensive and/or free alternatives (like The Gimp), and this may very well be true. But if this is the case, someone using the software in a professional environment should be using the less expensive/free alternative anyway, otherwise the deprivation argument actually has teeth.
In a business environment, there is no excuse. The entire company could be built around free software solutions from the beginning if it wants to remain neutral in the piracy war. But when corporations utilize commercial software to make money and don't purchase the licenses that enable them to do so, that is strictly a lost sale, and there's not really anything that can be argued about it.
One sidenote though, the highschool kid with photoshop is learning to use softwere he would otherwise not be able to legally obtain. Should he use alternative software, along with many others, that alternative solution would inevitably become more popular, to the detriment of Adobe. While you can debate the ethical piracy issues regarding that one illicit copy, in the long run, it probably helps Adobe that the kid uses it instead of Gimp on a regular basis.
-Restil
Not is the teenage/pre-teen world forming bad habits, but there are a lot of people in the world that pretty much learn english in chatrooms, and you better believe they consider this to be perfectly acceptable conversation language.
I suppose, what bothers me the most is that it just looks and feels retarded. I remember thinking back to first grade, when we were all still learning how to spell. Sometimes it took a while for it to kick in that YOU is not spelled U just because they sound the same. Or SUN/SON, etc etc. With first graders, its an acceptable faux pas. To do so intentionally when you clearly know better is at the height of moronic. I understand the need/desire to abbreviate long words sometimes, but u for you, r for our/are and the extra retarded ur for your, just makes NO credible sense.
And while sometimes I'm willing to write off this stuff as the juvenile swill from those "Damn teenagers", when I see people in their 20's+ doing it, it just makes me sick.
Well, sick is perhaps too strong a word. It just makes me feel artifically intellectually superior to them, and I no longer want to spend my time conversing. Of course, there's always the chance that my assumptions are correct... and perhaps that explains it.
Ok, rant done. Moderate as you will.
-Restil
It might not be legal in the sense that you "attack back" the infected server. However, If you set up a webpage that people go to in order to "fix" their infected computers, and that page just so happens to be named one of the files that the worms are attempting to access.
In the past, I've seen pages that would allow you to test your system to see if you were vulnerable to the various nuke programs (winnuke, teardrop, etc), of the sort "if you get this message, that means you're still operational, and you're not vulnerable"
So set up a page, explain exactly what it will do, and include on there a link to the script that will "fix" the client computer. If people come along, access my server, and my server does exactly what they requested it to do.... how grey is the legal area?
Of course, its probably still illegal, since nobody "authorized" the activity, but it might be less shaky legal ground. If you don't want my webserver fixing your computer, then don't access it. Dunno.
-Restil
That's true. The best he can do is get 15% of his time shaved off for "good behaviour"... unless someone's changed something recently and I missed it. Its not like I spend a great deal of time researching federal prisons.
-Restil