Not a lot. Except to prove that your supercomputer is reliable when calculating numbers like that, and how fast it can do it. Usually, I think it's just used as a test of the computer's abilities rather than anything serious.
Even in the precision engineering world, more than about 10 digits of accuracy for pi is a bit silly. Pi will never really, practically, be required in more depth than what your processor's registers can hold.
Are you talking about making a vacuum? Do you have any idea of the pressures involved in that, and the forces required to push against that, and the fact that the whole "balloon" would have to be rigid because it would have 14 pounds per square inch forcing it to go back, and it would have to be air-tight ("balloons" like this are not air-tight, not are the ones made of rubber, they're just tight enough when the pressures on either side are about the same) and the sheer size of ship you'd need to make enough difference to get airborne (hint: almost as big as the balloon on a hot-air-balloon or other dirigible... HUGE). And then, yes, you'd get a device potentially dense that the air around it assuming all that skin and internal mechanics weighed less than a conventional airship.
Air is a fluid, so it's equivalent to putting an air-filled balloon in water - yes it would rise if you could overcome all the forces and engineering problems necessary, by exactly the same physical equations.
Or to answer realistically: Not worth the effort and way, way beyond what we can do at the moment. And quite possibly impossible for many many centuries to come and even then quite, quite pointless compared to other similar methods that don't involve vacuums the size of the Hindenburg - which may be an appropriate analogy if the outer skin punctures and lets in 14 pounds per square inch of air.
As has been discussed in the million other websites that jumped on this news earlier in the week:
It wasn't so much a win as a "no contest": - The company that's gone bankrupt, went bankrupt (in a real, non-SCO fashion) and couldn't have afforded to fight the case. - The people handling the bankruptcy don't want the lawyers who were working the case representing them any more (presumably they stopped paying them). - The lawyers handling the case stopped defending it because they were asked not to provide any further representation.
In many senses it was a "win by default" - it was unchallenged, they couldn't afford to challenge it, and they were bankrupt anyway. In terms of legal precedent, this is like saying "I *do* own an acre of the moon because I presented it in a case against NASA and NASA went bankrupt before they could file any defence whatsoever" and then using this as a legal precedent that everyone with the same paper as you owns an acre of the moon. It's not a "win", it's not even a "loss", it's just a "nothing" in legal terms.
I've *always* wanted to have the money to burn that I could create something I thought of even when I was a kid.
Combine "laser-tag / Quasar" with a 3D FPS. If anyone ever watched Knightmare as a child, they'll know what I mean. Basically, have a "blank set" in an arena somewhere - literally just plain green boxes and walls. Stick ten people inside the arena, each with VR-style headsets with similar tracking. Their heads up display provides the 3D/texture detail over the green-screen, so it just looks like you're "inside" a Quake / Counterstrike / Whatever level. Equip players with a "gun" of some kind and then track the 3D position / heading / trigger of the gun using whatever means.
With some simple green-screen tricks you can put the live image of your opponents into the virtual world quite easily (camera on the headset, green-screen overlay on the video game image - because the arena matches the virtual world, no need to worry about depth, wall-perception, etc.). When players shoot, they just trigger a message and then the video game decides the outcome. Dead players get their screen blanked, game over, and have to make their way out of the arena. You could even include grenades, etc. quite simply, and so long as the physical arena matches the virtual one, you can apply it to virtually any 3D game.
You can't "jump" onto ledges, or do crawling, jumping, camping etc. unless you're capable of it in real life, but yet there's no stupid-quasar-feel to it and you can have lives, damage, shields, etc. The game doesn't have to "draw" you at all, or try to interpret how you're standing, or what bits people can see of you (damage-taking should be as simple as finding a coloured blob on an all-green arena in the direction of the gun-facing and determining if they were shot or not and working out which player they are should be quite simple), the game "feels" like you're inside it, and you can only do things that you can actually do. Campers would end up with cramp, bunny-hoppers would be exhausted, etc.
Probably it's just me and nobody would play it but if I was a millionaire, I'd damn well build something like that in my mansion for my friends to play with.
I think MUCH worse than anything to do with current wars (propaganda will always be around), which we still have the ability to challenge, not participate in, or stop entirely, is rewriting history.
Watch U-571. That teaches American kids that America captured the Enigma machine. Alan Turing would be turning in his grave watching that and it does an horrendous dis-service to the other countries involved in that war. Trouble is that it's hard to challenge something that seeps into the social subconscious as "fact" even if it comes from a movie. Rewriting history dumbs down the contributions people made, makes the evil seem less evil and focuses on entirely the wrong things about war.
This is much of what irks me about France/ Germany's "no trading swastikas or other Nazi memorabilia" rules. It's pretending things didn't happen when they obviously did, pretending that a symbol has power rather than evil people who gather behind it (the swastika was previously used for other, slightly more wholesome, purposes). Or China's attitude to Tiananmen square.
War films, games, 3d-holographic simulations, whatever will always be around. But people should realise they are not real. Games don't claim to be "just like being there" - most of them include save/load and don't remove the game and not allow you to ever play it again once you've been killed. Movies do claim this, in some cases, to a certain extent and are much more dangerous in the social mind because they are often unchallenged, much more mass-market, and don't require the viewer to think. Everyone *knows* that when the Titanic sank the band kept on playing. But next generation will *know* that someone clung to a door, some old lady lost her pearls, etc.
Even The Dambusters has inaccuracies but they don't affect the history of the film as much as more modern "re-tellings". More dangerous than a game that upsets a veteran, is a movie that eventually rewrites history to be more "glorious", Chinese-whispers-style.
See what they've got on there. Basically pixel-for-pixel identical games from the arcade. They probably even used the original graphics/ROM's in order to get that "authentic". And they call them Pac-man or Donkey Kong. It's not the only one they've done and they call them all by their trademarked original names.
Welcome to real life, where if you directly steal other's work, distribute it, calling it by its original name, and get caught, you end up in trouble or at the very least with a cease-and-desist.
The kid can use it, they can make their own pet project, they can use the original graphics (hell, most programmers will substitute existing images in prototypes in order to get a feel for how it looks), but the second you start distributing it, it's no different to a school coursework which includes an MP3 of a chart hit (even historical), or a photographer's image without their permission, or huge excerpts verbatim from a still-in-print book. Yeah, a lot of people would just let it slide but NAMCO are well within their rights here, the kid didn't get sued or harsh punishment (just a "don't do that"), and if he'd had the brains to just call it a clone, not use only the words "Pac-man" in describing the game (even "Pac-man clone" would have been okay), and hadn't ripped-off graphics pixel-for-pixel, then nobody would care and it would be like the other 10 million Pac-man clones lining the web where people DID have the sense not to copy to this level of detail.
Nothing bad happened, nobody went to court, nobody demanded money (and NAMCO had to PAY to instruct their lawyer, don't forget), they just wanted the game taken off. It's happened a million times in the past, will continue to happen, and people KNOW it's not right.
I used to follow OpenTTD until they dismissed off-handly the fact that they were telling people to download a free, full copy of Transport Tycoon's graphics from an abandonware site in order to run their clone - and that was from one of the founding members. Disassembly of the original? No problem. Reliance on the original graphics? Great accuracy for me as a gamer, no problem. Pointing people to direct links to questionable abandonware sites for a file that can't be legally distributed, on the main wiki pages of the project and refusing to take them off while simultaneously chastising people for mentioning it on the forums? Just asking for trouble. Microprose does have a successor-in-interest somewhere and that attitude from some of the project leaders was just intolerable to me, so I stopped contributing. Who knows what else they've got inside their preciously-licensed and lovingly copyright-daubed code if they are just willing to infringe the author's copyright wholesale while pretending to maintain an air of respectability. I have original copies of TTD. Several years ago I made the code in TTD that verified the GRF file used was the original file because I had the DOS and Windows versions still sitting on a shelf. I used my CD to provide the original graphics and sound long before any "graphics replacement" projects existed. But I was disgusted by the attitude that you could just encourage users to download an absolutely, cast-iron, illegal copy that was required to run your clone project.
There's programming, there's cloning, there's even emulation (MAME is 100% legal don't forget), and then there's just outright copyright ignorance. This is the latter, and nobody got hurt, except NAMCO's legal budget.
I once worked at a school that provided PS2's to their "seclusion rooms". It was a disgusting bit of pandering to the "naughty" kids / special needs kids in order to stop them causing trouble. They were also allowed to use mobile phones and would often phone the children in other school's seclusion units, so we weren't alone in this.
You can imagine the student's thinking - if I smash the teacher I don't like in the face, I get to go to the seclusion room, play Playstation and phone my friends and not have to do any of this boring school work. Guess what they did again the next day? Or threatened to do if they didn't get their way?
But yes, it's unusual but not impossible, and in a school we always assume that every computer is compromised anyway. Plugging a Wii in would hardly be unusual, even if just for staffroom hijinks or public display or a million and one other reasons. The difference is - you don't let the damn thing on your administrative networks and don't plug it into the network unless it's 100% necessary, like everything else.
3. Often the MAC address of the internal interfaces and external ones are either a) identical (yes, I've seen it happen) or b) directly related (i.e. add two to the last byte).
So what they're saying is that it's an inherent failure in the current design of 3D technology - that there is no way to make a movie look good in 3D without explicitly having that in mind all the time. So it's like spam email - the inherent flaws in the current 3D technology mean that there's nothing can be done about filmmakers abusing it, or doing it poorly, or not doing it at all?
That's got me convinced then - I won't ever buy the current generation of 3D. Thanks, "Buzz" and Sony, you made an already-certain decision of mine even more concrete.
And again, where does this require long-term mass tracking of websites you've visited, recording of that information in cookies, or sale/use of that information (i.e. anything that a "privacy blocker" would erase from a website I visit after I close the window?). For Gmail, all they have to do is: scan the email that they received and store on my behalf, which I am NOW asking them to display on the screen in front of me, for keywords, then display ads based on those keywords. Nowhere do they need to keep cookies of me, or correlate that data with their other millions of users, or sell that data, or anything else. If Google don't need to, and Google is funded virtually entirely by its advertising, then no-one else needs to.
No. Crappy cards that overheat when left running displaying ANYTHING (static images, top-end 3D, what does it matter?) are killing those graphics cards. CPU's (and therefore GPU's) should detect overheat, then throttle back or switch off as necessary. If that still causes a problem in 2010, you have bigger problems on your hands than how often a game decides to blit surfaces about - such as a potential fire. If your case is that dirty, your card should still cope anyway, even if that means it just overheats a little, alerts you to the fact, then shuts down - or that you notice it starts running really slow and yet still ramping its fans up to maximum.
What it happens to be running when this happens is neither here nor there. This whole article just sounds like a way to scaremonger people into not buying StarCraft 2 (which I wouldn't be purchasing anyway, in case anyone wants to question why I debunk this crap). This is NOT a Starcraft-only problem. I could make a fifty-line bit of code with SDL and OpenGL that could tax a graphics card - it shouldn't make it stop working or die unless you've done something very stupid like : overclock, disable warnings, ignore alarms.
I don't really care about their motives or what they did. Hell, I avoid their software because of what they've done in the past, they have at least 10 years of spotless behaviour ahead of them before they ever even get back to the "Well, I'll consider them" phase.
More importantly, is the "targetted" advertising and tracking information that they can gather really that worthwhile? What's the stats on un-targetted versus targetted advertising in any medium - online, TV, radio? Obviously, it's not a good idea to target condom advertising in between Teletubbies episodes but does the reverse really have a much-worse response rate than normal? Where is the value in collecting that massive amount of data? Google has oodles and oodles and oodles of advert targeting data if it wants to use it - but almost all Google Adwords I see aren't related to me at all and when you want to show your ads, it's more common to let you choose keywords, target demographics or just let things happen pretty much randomly and in the cheapest spots than it is to target your football-related ads on football sites.
If I go to LWN.net NOW, I get these ads: Cloud Computing Linux, SysAdmin role in London, Linux VPS, Peer 1 UK Managed Hosting, Linux Unmanaged VPS, CHILImodule (A linux-based computer), "Server hosting from staff who care", HPC Linux Servers, TomCat support, Free Code Security Support
What targetted data could possibly have been used to show me those ads? The word Linux (in the sitename, I'm actually browsing from Windows in work and typed in the URL directly!), and my GeoIP (or, at least, my employer's GeoIP for their main proxy server). What's worth spending BILLIONS on infrastructure and data collection to put ads on a high-traffic Linux website that display to a London, UK user related to : London, UK and Linux.
Fluke? Let me try my brother's site - a Scouting site whose URL is www.scoutingresources.org.uk : Scout Uniforms for Sale, Ventures Abroad, Free Life Coach Training, Resellers Bookbuying tool, Scout & Guide Neckers, Names Badges and Lanyards, Cubs Laser Tag Fun, Scouting Activities, London Coupons, Scout Uniform.
So, actually, with Google's "Targetted Ad's", we end up with 3 ad's that aren't at all related to scouting (the other has various links to it) - only one of which is linked to the GeoIP, most of the Scouting links were actually for US Scouting which is vastly different, and the two remaining tenuous links are pretty-much random fillers. Considering that sites earns it's entire hosting budget + a couple of camps for the kids every year from just the Google Ad's alone, that's pretty damning of ad-targeting technology.
Seriously, what does collecting ad-targetting data in this manner get you that you couldn't from a quick keyword analysis and Geo IP lookup?
Maybe it's a geographical thing - here electricity costs 12-15p (that's GB pence) per KWh - about 18-20 US cents. Night rates are half that, if you're lucky. My old banger of a car isn't particularly efficient but costs me £3 (about $5) for 25 miles (so those "extreme" taxes aren't as much as you might think, because we have much more efficient cars apparently - this is a 1.8 litre, classed as quite a "big" car but nowhere near out of the ordinary for the UK - a 1997 Ford Mondeo). Petrol prices are basically identical throughout Europe, I found out last Christmas.
Your 8kw to do the equivalent journey would cost - 8*0.18 = $1.44, so you are actually saving quite a bit even over here - maybe not so much compared to one of those tiny European cars that was built after 2000 and is thus mandated to be more efficient. Against my car, yes, but a small Fiat or something, I don't know. I'm guessing my car would have more pulling power but I can't be sure given the size of the average American vehicle. I think loads on those cars will be another variable too. It's cheaper, for now, I'll give you that. And fuel prices in the UK/Europe have never been as ridiculously low as the US prices - I can barely remember when it was about less than a dollar per LITRE (3.78 litres in a US gallon). So in Europe we have a LOT more to save, even with higher electricity prices. Still, you hardly ever see them anywhere and I still haven't seen a petrol station that can refill them. You're not always going to be able to make it home. Have they standardised the electric charging points yet? Size, shape, voltage, amperage?
So I give you that it's cheap. I also give you several of the reasons you stated (no transmission, less drag etc.). Charging at night is also good when you can do that.
I'm not so sure about the cost of electricity going down, maybe that's just a European-market thing. It all relies on people voluntarily charging only at night - the hit on the grid, even if it's only for a few minutes, is HUGE - like this article where a car can charge up in five minutes - that amount of power in five minutes is a huge draw on the grid, probably the largest instantaneous single pull on the grid from a residential house. Whether it's for five minutes or five hours, it doesn't really matter. If it can't supply that power for the first few seconds it will just fuse the house/street/substation. People are suggesting in-house battery packs that trickle-charge and then pass it on to the car - more expense, more inefficiency, more things to replace after so-many charge cycles. Absolute peak power is what costs, the rest is "free" (which is why night rates are cheaper) and peak has a strange definition compared to other peaks. Plants see peak flows at 8pm because a popular soap opera finishes and everyone puts an electric kettle on - I kid you not, it's a visible spike in UK electricity graphs and the TV schedule is used in planning grid capacity.
So big devices being plugged in "at the wrong time", even only a few per street and only for a few seconds, can actually take the equivalent of several more entire houses in that street. That's a huge infrastructure investment. You can't ask people to "only charge at night" because they won't - no amount of timers, money savings, habit-breaking or common sense will make even the majority of people only charge at night. If you need the car at night, if you run a taxi service, if you use the car a lot during the day etc. you WILL have most electric car owners plugging them in at peak times. God knows, I want to know that my car will drive me to hospital at 1am if I need it to, no matter how far away that is.
If even 5% or 10% more peak electricity demand results from that, that's a HUGE infrastructure cost to manage and prices will rise disproportionally. There are also certain "types" of electric load that cause more problems - electricity companies are finding that the fluorescent bulbs that are now basically compulsory (you "can't" buy the old incan
God, I know I'm pedantic but how hard is it to get *simple* things like this right? At least most of the time. It severely hinders my reading speed if some text has simple mistakes like that. My mind jars as it hits them and slows me down.
Yes, but then people "weigh" themselves in kg's by standing on a scale that is affected by gravity.
There are certain things that, although "visible" by ordinary people and named, don't actually exist or exist only because we *perceive* them to exist, like that optical illusion with the white triangle that isn't ACTUALLY there.
Centrifugal force may be misnamed (i.e. not a force), it may be incorrect, but it's generally accepted that "a force" exists that has an effect on your when you're spun in a circle. Just because the direction / origin / name of that force is incorrect is no reason to tell people that they're stupid for having felt it and knowing what it is before you explain its origins.
Back in the 60's there was an advertising campaign by scientists working on the behalf of government to target heat loss in elderly people's properties. It encouraged old people to "keep the heat in". It didn't go down well and it took them years to discover why. Eventually it was changed to "keep the cold out" and more elderly people understood that. "Cold" doesn't actually exist, it's just the absence of heat, but old people didn't think that way as easily (and who can blame them? "Shut the door, you're letting the cold in" is a common cry in my family - despite the fact that you're neither letting cold in nor arranging for some mystical "cold" entity to enter your property rather than, say, air with slightly less heat).
There's 100% pedantic accuracy. There's complete bollocks. And somewhere in the middle is how *everybody* thinks, even if they know both extremes in detail.
What on Earth makes you think that if you disagree with his statements and his representation of yourself that you should wait at all? Write, complain, protest, leave the organisation. Nobody is forcing you to affiliate yourself with an organisation whose stance / management you disagree with, and thus tarring yourself with the same brush as they are.
Judging by the Wiki article on ASCAP, they are also giving you a bad name in other ways too. Do something about it if you don't like it, starting with complaining loudly in their faces, rather than wishy-washy "Oh, I might possibly vote against him if/when he next decides to have some kind of vote, whenever that might be".
1) You should challenge it, and ask for evidence, dates, times.
2) You could easily have had your password sniffed, possibly even from an uninstalled version of Steam, if you got a virus/spyware in the meantime - many of them lift your details right out of the registry/filesystem because a Steam account is a very valuable commodity. They don't need to "crack" anything - if they have read-access on your computer, they can lift your username/password if you got Steam to memorise it. Once they got banned on your account, they probably wouldn't bother to use it again, either. This sounds even more likely if you claim never to have played HL2 multiplayer yourself beforehand.
3) The terms and conditions say that once you're banned, you're banned, unless you can provide proof your account was hacked. That may be "unfair", but you agreed to it when you signed up.
4) You can't really expect Valve to distinguish between "someone else used my account and got me banned" and "I'm a cheater and claim the same". Thus, if any cheating is detected, your account is banned. Otherwise every cheater would say that and VAC would be useless.
5) Losing your online nickname? That's quite pathetic. If you'd been playing lots of multiplayer and built up lots of admin access, stats, etc. on your STEAM_ID, then I could understand that but what would you have done if the original Steam account hadn't been able to use your nickname because someone else was? It's not a big deal at all. At least you could move any Steam friends you had over to your new account, if that's what you wanted to do.
6) The multiplayer Steam games have been dirt-cheap for ages. The Source Multiplayer pack is currently $29.99 which is a drop in the ocean for a serious gamer. That's half the price of a modern console game, or for the same price you could get the Counterstrike pack which contains the original CS, CS:CZ and CS:Source. Or CS Classic on its own is only $9.99. If you were that worried about it, you could have just re-purchased the games.
Your banning was not Valve's mistake, unless you can prove otherwise. Did you ask for logs, did you ask for the exact cheat used, when and from what IP? Valve have that sort of info to hand and could have helped you but the chances are you had your credentials lifted, either by a friend or some malware, and your account was banned. For a game that you could rebuy for $9.99 if you really wanted it.
It sounds more like you hardly ever used Steam, hardly ever played any Steam games. If I were you, I'd have asked for logs, I'd have searched the online cheater-list websites for my STEAM_ID and if it was really that big a deal, start writing letters, demanding proof and/or just rebuying the games.
You don't need to renew your gas tank every 6000 charges (admittedly, that's probably a lot of years in an absolutely ideal charging scenario, but the chances that it works like that with ordinary car-use are near-zero). When you do, it doesn't cost you as much as a *new* car (not even a replacement of the car you're driving, a BRAND NEW car). Refuelling your car does not require an enormous infrastructure and 100's or 1000's of amps flowing down a cable (sorry, but I'd rather have a petroleum fire on the end of my fuelling nozzle than have the equivalent happen with an electric charging cable - slight fire that you can extinguish versus KABOOM - plus the price of copper is so high at the moment that people are ripping up telephone lines and melting them down). Fuel stops don't need to have the equivalent of a small power station to run them. You can walk to the station if you run out of fuel and come back with enough to get you to the next fuelling stop. You don't need something like 75% of the weight of the car being fuel (and that weight never lessens no matter how "empty" you're running).
When everyone parks their car at home at 6pm, it doesn't cause a massive power surge larger than our entire towns take at the moment. If you want to go long-distance, you pack some extra fuel, or note the locations of various fuel stops across Europe - because even the tiniest town up in the hills where they barely have electric will have petroleum - I got from the UK through France, Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and back on about £300-400 of fuel - that's the same as a quarter's worth of electricity for my house without an electric car, God knows what it would have cost in an electric car. You don't have to manage and dispose of nearly a ton of Lithium battery every time a car is scrapped (or, similarly, find nearly a ton of it when you build one) - there's more than enough nasty stuff in brake linings and exhausts but it doesn't make anywhere near as much waste.
Seriously, I'm a realist and have been saying for years that oil needs to STOP being used. But at the moment, the tech for electric is nowhere near good enough, hence the rise of "hybrid" (read: two cars wastage for the price of one) and slow-moving, short-range electric vehicles. We've had electric vehicles for decades - my milkman still delivers on a lead-acid-based vehicle that was introduced before I was even born (the 70's) - they charge overnight, do 30mph, and are slowly being replaced by the lithium battery variety. They are on the edge of plausibility but there are still a million, much more difficult, problems to overcome than just inventing a slightly more suitable battery. And in the end, grid-surge means higher peak-demand which means we have to use the only *practical* methods of generating that sort of electricity en-masse: Nuclear, coal, gas and other oil-based burning. All we've done is move the oil-burning into a power station and lost at least 10% of the electricity in storage/transmission.
Electric cars will stay the SSD's of the vehicle market for a while yet - expensive, with their own downsides, but provide clear benefits, and therefore used mainly by enthusiasts. I'm driving a 1997 car that's in perfect working order with no major mechanical changes made to it. It's the third or fourth car like that that I've owned. That sort of second-hand market will not exist for DECADES in the electric car market, because of the price of spares and batteries - that means most people who are driving second-hand cars (i.e. most drivers everywhere) will not be able to afford to change. Electric cars will cost a lot more for a long while and that means they risk being shunned entirely, or seen as a "luxury". It will take electric cars at least another 10 years after they are "solved" to take over our roads and for everyone "normal" to be driving them. Home maintenance of them is probably also out of the window - good for big dealerships, bad for local garages.
Link to anything, ANYTHING that actually backs up any of these wild assertions, please. I'm British, £10bn is a lot of money, and I think you're talking bullshit.
There are upgrades to the BT network. About f***ing time. We're only about 40 years behind the rest of the world in terms of telephone infrastructure.
These upgrades have led to a rise in cost (but only for BT at the moment - other places aren't passing them on, e.g. completely independent phone companies that you are utterly free to use, or set up yourself, oh, and my old ISP is part of BT and actually just LOWERED all my prices for the same package - strange that given that BT infrastructure is used to connect *most* ADSL/phone line customers). Everything BT does leads to a rise in cost. Stupidity costs money, BT is full of that (ex-government monopolies tend to suffer from that), and telephone networks are getting more and more expensive to build and run (ADSL, ADSL2, fibre to the home, fibre to the cabinet, loss of virtually all payphone income, an unpopular mobile arm used only by traffic-heavy users due to exclusive iPhone deals, 12% of houses having NO LANDLINES AT ALL any more etc.etc.etc.).
And £10bn is £357 for every phone line that BT manages in the UK - again, I call crap. BT already has the capability to intercept any phone line at will, on demand, with due legal process, and it costs NOTHING more than they already pay, whether they are analog, VoIP or anything else. IP phones are no easier or harder to intercept than traditional ones. Not since the days of gold-plated contacts, rotary pulse diallers and line-powered telephones has there NOT been an ADC or several dozen of them along the way, or the phone calls not passing straight through BT-owned hardware capable of sniffing anything it likes - BT's infrastructure from the cabinet to the exchange and to the receiving cabinet is virtually all digital and tappable and has been for decades - how do you think they know what number you dialled - all you did was put a DTMF tone down a copper line and it read it, interpreted it, formed paths, connected both ends, etc.
Then you have the question of the sheer amount of traffic such capabilities would generate, whether it's possible to analyse the traffic for any purpose whatsoever, useful or not, (given that 3 out of 10 times the best voice recognition algorithms, straight out of PhD's papers, on the planet can't work out what I'm saying from a very limited vocabulary and I don't even have a strong accent and/or am trying to obscure my communications), whether it's possible to analyse THAT amount of traffic, etc.
Stop spouting hyperbole. If you've spotted something on a budget, if you work at an ISP and have seen what the alleged "blackboxes" can do, if you work for BT and have had to install lines that you're completely under the Official Secrets Act for and therefore can't tell anyone about, etc. THEN you might have something worth listening to. And then I'd probably say "Oh?" and ignore you. So what? I'm a privacy nut but I already assume that anything the government wants to listen to, it can do so completely legally anyway. Telephone conversations, especially international ones, have absolutely no guarantee that you will NEVER be listened to. I don't expect them to monitor it routinely but then if they did, they have to have a damn good reason or you just go to the press (or Wikileaks if you believe the local press are compromised) and instantly everyone knows about it - you're going down because of an illegal act anyway, so might as well broadcast it to get attention off your "crimes" and onto those people who are monitoring phonecalls illegally. I mean, Wikileaks is just FULL of people who have done that, isn't it?
It's crap. Conspiracy hyperbole of the highest order. Absence of evidence is not proof of the negative. And when 90,000 classified US army logs can slip out the door, someone, somewhere would leak this stuff too. And the biggest question: to what purpose? Liste
Having "classified" information being completely unable to be reported makes for a more dangerous society. This isn't an "open source" vs "closed source" thing - of course we don't want people to know exactly where our troops are, what they are armed with, what they are targeting and how they are doing. But there's a difference between "classified for operational reasons" and "classified because it would make us look bad / stupid / illegal".
The press has a single purpose - to get the truth onto paper in front of your eyes. 99% of what the papers print is complete bollocks. 99% of the stuff that is true is completely uninteresting. But they exist because, at some point, someone has to publish something that other people won't like. Classified or not, freedom of the press ensures that if they are acting in the interests of the populous, they won't get into (too much) trouble in any civilised country. I'd rather live in a country where the press can break the rules occasionally on the big stuff, than one where they get shot/imprisoned for revealing something critical to my knowledge of what my country's up to.
Otherwise you WOULD NOT KNOW what went on in Guantanamo Bay. You WOULD NOT KNOW what happened in Vietnam - you would live in blinkered ignorance about the whole thing and think it was actually worthwhile. You WOULD NOT KNOW that Clinton slept with Lewinsky. You WOULD NOT KNOW about any of the big policital scandals of the last hundreds years. This is why the majority of the young population of China DO NOT KNOW what happened in Tiananmen Square, can't talk about it, are in fear of their lives if they mention it. Because the government doesn't want them to know and refuses to let it be published at all, ever, anywhere and the press has zero legal protection if they do it.
If the US did something stupid, illegal, immoral or downright disgusting, you WANT to know about that. If you don't, it's hard to call yourself a patriot. I'm British and I *WANT* to know when my country is doing something downright stupid (like blindly following another country into a war they can't win), so I can know about it, help stop it, and even apologise for it. Historically my country has a god-damn terrible record of invading countries for not-much-reason and trying to take over the world. We did some horrible things (we basically abandoned Singapore in WW2 to be taken over by the Japanese, for instance, knowing it would get overrun in seconds and knowing that a small British presence would save it... I didn't even know that myself until I heard a whisper of it and went to look it up). And I know about that because people were able to tell the stories.
There should be, in any civilised country, a law and process to deal with people who classify things that the public should know about. If your military has broken its own laws, you should damn well know about it - FFS your country is claiming to be "righting" another country and showing them the way and you can't even keep your highly-trained, supposedly disciplined professional soldiers on the right side of your OWN laws. But just because they put a little classified stamp on the documents, that means they stay secret forever, or at least until nobody can do anything about it? Don't be silly. That's just a way to rubber-stamp approval of any war-crime ever committed.
This is what happens when you deny things are going wrong. Someone, somewhere, has the moral balls to say "it isn't right and people should know" despite every rule and every colleague stopping them doing so. That's about the most powerful thought a person can ever have - much more dangerous, effective and damaging than anything else they can do. The question is: What's in the Wikileaks material that you DIDN'T know about but SHOULD have?
Because in practice, making sure that there is absolutely no hint of a secure piece of information is incredibly tricky. Most programmers traditionally have little concept of actual *secure* programming. Most implementations of perfectly secure algorithms are subject to flaws because people didn't treat side-cases, or properly analyse how the traffic use would affect the algorithm, etc. e.g. not renegotiating keys often enough, so that people can see enough traffic to decrypt a key in a relatively short space of time.
Additionally, this isn't an attack on the crypto. The crypto secures the conversation, it does not necessarily prove identity and if it does prove identity most places don't care about the identity (how many company distinguish individual users/computers over the wireless network by anything other than MAC/IP/username given? AES is still 100% perfectly intact. If you'd been using, say, OpenVPN or OpenSSH with the same algorithm over an unsecured wireless network, the internal encrypted conversation would still be virtually as secure today as it was when AES was invented. The problem is that the *implementation* of AES wasn't designed to cover the usage scenario here, and probably never could be because of the way the access to this particular tiny piece of this part of the broadcast specification is granted. Basically, the flaw has always been sitting there in WPA, not in AES which is still chugging along nicely doing its job. Shocking that a wireless "encryption" fails to properly implement a security scheme because of a bad implementation that side-steps the actual encryption itself... that's never ever happened before ever anywhere:-P
Moral of the story: only trust crypto from those well-established in the crypto-field that's been attacked and attacked and still is approved for government/military use in lots of sensible countries. And then make sure you have a damn good implementation that's not overly complex, or cast in stone, such that most people can't examine it / play with it / fix it.
If you'd been running OpenVPN over the same wireless network, but using OpenVPN's key infrastructure and encryption instead of WPA or WEP or anything at all (i.e. completely "open" wireless) you would still be secure. A bad implementation of a particular encryption in WPA allows people to bypass steps of the actual encryption process that were never designed to be bypassed. It's almost an "out of band" security vulnerability - i.e. nothing to do with whether you use AES or Blowfish or 3DES or whatever you choose... they basically find a way around the (still theoretically secure) encryption that has no effect on the efficacy of the encryption itself.
Basic rule: Just because your "Ethernet-over-the-mains" devices says it uses AES, don't think that means it's "secure". Chances are that it's not.
Then most professionals would laugh in your face at such a concept and walk away. Those who want to pay peanuts, end up hiring monkeys. If the business arrangement doesn't suit you, don't enter it. That person would *never* have been your customer anyway because the way they want to scrimp and save and "only pay one person" means they were always looking for a cheap way out - and any *decent* designer wouldn't be satisfied with what they were offering. The designers haven't *lost* any business, they just aren't getting any from a new "auction-style" job market that's cropped up. That's up to them, but it's hardly a jobs nightmare. At any point in history, in any profession, the same thing could have (and has) happened.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a lot. Except to prove that your supercomputer is reliable when calculating numbers like that, and how fast it can do it. Usually, I think it's just used as a test of the computer's abilities rather than anything serious.
Even in the precision engineering world, more than about 10 digits of accuracy for pi is a bit silly. Pi will never really, practically, be required in more depth than what your processor's registers can hold.
Are you talking about making a vacuum? Do you have any idea of the pressures involved in that, and the forces required to push against that, and the fact that the whole "balloon" would have to be rigid because it would have 14 pounds per square inch forcing it to go back, and it would have to be air-tight ("balloons" like this are not air-tight, not are the ones made of rubber, they're just tight enough when the pressures on either side are about the same) and the sheer size of ship you'd need to make enough difference to get airborne (hint: almost as big as the balloon on a hot-air-balloon or other dirigible... HUGE). And then, yes, you'd get a device potentially dense that the air around it assuming all that skin and internal mechanics weighed less than a conventional airship.
Air is a fluid, so it's equivalent to putting an air-filled balloon in water - yes it would rise if you could overcome all the forces and engineering problems necessary, by exactly the same physical equations.
Or to answer realistically: Not worth the effort and way, way beyond what we can do at the moment. And quite possibly impossible for many many centuries to come and even then quite, quite pointless compared to other similar methods that don't involve vacuums the size of the Hindenburg - which may be an appropriate analogy if the outer skin punctures and lets in 14 pounds per square inch of air.
As has been discussed in the million other websites that jumped on this news earlier in the week:
It wasn't so much a win as a "no contest":
- The company that's gone bankrupt, went bankrupt (in a real, non-SCO fashion) and couldn't have afforded to fight the case.
- The people handling the bankruptcy don't want the lawyers who were working the case representing them any more (presumably they stopped paying them).
- The lawyers handling the case stopped defending it because they were asked not to provide any further representation.
In many senses it was a "win by default" - it was unchallenged, they couldn't afford to challenge it, and they were bankrupt anyway. In terms of legal precedent, this is like saying "I *do* own an acre of the moon because I presented it in a case against NASA and NASA went bankrupt before they could file any defence whatsoever" and then using this as a legal precedent that everyone with the same paper as you owns an acre of the moon. It's not a "win", it's not even a "loss", it's just a "nothing" in legal terms.
I've *always* wanted to have the money to burn that I could create something I thought of even when I was a kid.
Combine "laser-tag / Quasar" with a 3D FPS. If anyone ever watched Knightmare as a child, they'll know what I mean. Basically, have a "blank set" in an arena somewhere - literally just plain green boxes and walls. Stick ten people inside the arena, each with VR-style headsets with similar tracking. Their heads up display provides the 3D/texture detail over the green-screen, so it just looks like you're "inside" a Quake / Counterstrike / Whatever level. Equip players with a "gun" of some kind and then track the 3D position / heading / trigger of the gun using whatever means.
With some simple green-screen tricks you can put the live image of your opponents into the virtual world quite easily (camera on the headset, green-screen overlay on the video game image - because the arena matches the virtual world, no need to worry about depth, wall-perception, etc.). When players shoot, they just trigger a message and then the video game decides the outcome. Dead players get their screen blanked, game over, and have to make their way out of the arena. You could even include grenades, etc. quite simply, and so long as the physical arena matches the virtual one, you can apply it to virtually any 3D game.
You can't "jump" onto ledges, or do crawling, jumping, camping etc. unless you're capable of it in real life, but yet there's no stupid-quasar-feel to it and you can have lives, damage, shields, etc. The game doesn't have to "draw" you at all, or try to interpret how you're standing, or what bits people can see of you (damage-taking should be as simple as finding a coloured blob on an all-green arena in the direction of the gun-facing and determining if they were shot or not and working out which player they are should be quite simple), the game "feels" like you're inside it, and you can only do things that you can actually do. Campers would end up with cramp, bunny-hoppers would be exhausted, etc.
Probably it's just me and nobody would play it but if I was a millionaire, I'd damn well build something like that in my mansion for my friends to play with.
I think MUCH worse than anything to do with current wars (propaganda will always be around), which we still have the ability to challenge, not participate in, or stop entirely, is rewriting history.
Watch U-571. That teaches American kids that America captured the Enigma machine. Alan Turing would be turning in his grave watching that and it does an horrendous dis-service to the other countries involved in that war. Trouble is that it's hard to challenge something that seeps into the social subconscious as "fact" even if it comes from a movie. Rewriting history dumbs down the contributions people made, makes the evil seem less evil and focuses on entirely the wrong things about war.
This is much of what irks me about France/ Germany's "no trading swastikas or other Nazi memorabilia" rules. It's pretending things didn't happen when they obviously did, pretending that a symbol has power rather than evil people who gather behind it (the swastika was previously used for other, slightly more wholesome, purposes). Or China's attitude to Tiananmen square.
War films, games, 3d-holographic simulations, whatever will always be around. But people should realise they are not real. Games don't claim to be "just like being there" - most of them include save/load and don't remove the game and not allow you to ever play it again once you've been killed. Movies do claim this, in some cases, to a certain extent and are much more dangerous in the social mind because they are often unchallenged, much more mass-market, and don't require the viewer to think. Everyone *knows* that when the Titanic sank the band kept on playing. But next generation will *know* that someone clung to a door, some old lady lost her pearls, etc.
Even The Dambusters has inaccuracies but they don't affect the history of the film as much as more modern "re-tellings". More dangerous than a game that upsets a veteran, is a movie that eventually rewrites history to be more "glorious", Chinese-whispers-style.
Check your facts:
http://scratch.mit.edu/users/124scratch
See what they've got on there. Basically pixel-for-pixel identical games from the arcade. They probably even used the original graphics/ROM's in order to get that "authentic". And they call them Pac-man or Donkey Kong. It's not the only one they've done and they call them all by their trademarked original names.
Welcome to real life, where if you directly steal other's work, distribute it, calling it by its original name, and get caught, you end up in trouble or at the very least with a cease-and-desist.
The kid can use it, they can make their own pet project, they can use the original graphics (hell, most programmers will substitute existing images in prototypes in order to get a feel for how it looks), but the second you start distributing it, it's no different to a school coursework which includes an MP3 of a chart hit (even historical), or a photographer's image without their permission, or huge excerpts verbatim from a still-in-print book. Yeah, a lot of people would just let it slide but NAMCO are well within their rights here, the kid didn't get sued or harsh punishment (just a "don't do that"), and if he'd had the brains to just call it a clone, not use only the words "Pac-man" in describing the game (even "Pac-man clone" would have been okay), and hadn't ripped-off graphics pixel-for-pixel, then nobody would care and it would be like the other 10 million Pac-man clones lining the web where people DID have the sense not to copy to this level of detail.
Nothing bad happened, nobody went to court, nobody demanded money (and NAMCO had to PAY to instruct their lawyer, don't forget), they just wanted the game taken off. It's happened a million times in the past, will continue to happen, and people KNOW it's not right.
I used to follow OpenTTD until they dismissed off-handly the fact that they were telling people to download a free, full copy of Transport Tycoon's graphics from an abandonware site in order to run their clone - and that was from one of the founding members. Disassembly of the original? No problem. Reliance on the original graphics? Great accuracy for me as a gamer, no problem. Pointing people to direct links to questionable abandonware sites for a file that can't be legally distributed, on the main wiki pages of the project and refusing to take them off while simultaneously chastising people for mentioning it on the forums? Just asking for trouble. Microprose does have a successor-in-interest somewhere and that attitude from some of the project leaders was just intolerable to me, so I stopped contributing. Who knows what else they've got inside their preciously-licensed and lovingly copyright-daubed code if they are just willing to infringe the author's copyright wholesale while pretending to maintain an air of respectability. I have original copies of TTD. Several years ago I made the code in TTD that verified the GRF file used was the original file because I had the DOS and Windows versions still sitting on a shelf. I used my CD to provide the original graphics and sound long before any "graphics replacement" projects existed. But I was disgusted by the attitude that you could just encourage users to download an absolutely, cast-iron, illegal copy that was required to run your clone project.
There's programming, there's cloning, there's even emulation (MAME is 100% legal don't forget), and then there's just outright copyright ignorance. This is the latter, and nobody got hurt, except NAMCO's legal budget.
I once worked at a school that provided PS2's to their "seclusion rooms". It was a disgusting bit of pandering to the "naughty" kids / special needs kids in order to stop them causing trouble. They were also allowed to use mobile phones and would often phone the children in other school's seclusion units, so we weren't alone in this.
You can imagine the student's thinking - if I smash the teacher I don't like in the face, I get to go to the seclusion room, play Playstation and phone my friends and not have to do any of this boring school work. Guess what they did again the next day? Or threatened to do if they didn't get their way?
But yes, it's unusual but not impossible, and in a school we always assume that every computer is compromised anyway. Plugging a Wii in would hardly be unusual, even if just for staffroom hijinks or public display or a million and one other reasons. The difference is - you don't let the damn thing on your administrative networks and don't plug it into the network unless it's 100% necessary, like everything else.
3. Often the MAC address of the internal interfaces and external ones are either a) identical (yes, I've seen it happen) or b) directly related (i.e. add two to the last byte).
"and that the US has the authority to arrest its spokesman, Julian Assange, even if it has to contravene international law to do so"
Interesting interpretation of "international law" and America's opinion of it. No wonder the world hates the US.
So what they're saying is that it's an inherent failure in the current design of 3D technology - that there is no way to make a movie look good in 3D without explicitly having that in mind all the time. So it's like spam email - the inherent flaws in the current 3D technology mean that there's nothing can be done about filmmakers abusing it, or doing it poorly, or not doing it at all?
That's got me convinced then - I won't ever buy the current generation of 3D. Thanks, "Buzz" and Sony, you made an already-certain decision of mine even more concrete.
And again, where does this require long-term mass tracking of websites you've visited, recording of that information in cookies, or sale/use of that information (i.e. anything that a "privacy blocker" would erase from a website I visit after I close the window?). For Gmail, all they have to do is: scan the email that they received and store on my behalf, which I am NOW asking them to display on the screen in front of me, for keywords, then display ads based on those keywords. Nowhere do they need to keep cookies of me, or correlate that data with their other millions of users, or sell that data, or anything else. If Google don't need to, and Google is funded virtually entirely by its advertising, then no-one else needs to.
No. Crappy cards that overheat when left running displaying ANYTHING (static images, top-end 3D, what does it matter?) are killing those graphics cards. CPU's (and therefore GPU's) should detect overheat, then throttle back or switch off as necessary. If that still causes a problem in 2010, you have bigger problems on your hands than how often a game decides to blit surfaces about - such as a potential fire. If your case is that dirty, your card should still cope anyway, even if that means it just overheats a little, alerts you to the fact, then shuts down - or that you notice it starts running really slow and yet still ramping its fans up to maximum.
What it happens to be running when this happens is neither here nor there. This whole article just sounds like a way to scaremonger people into not buying StarCraft 2 (which I wouldn't be purchasing anyway, in case anyone wants to question why I debunk this crap). This is NOT a Starcraft-only problem. I could make a fifty-line bit of code with SDL and OpenGL that could tax a graphics card - it shouldn't make it stop working or die unless you've done something very stupid like : overclock, disable warnings, ignore alarms.
I don't really care about their motives or what they did. Hell, I avoid their software because of what they've done in the past, they have at least 10 years of spotless behaviour ahead of them before they ever even get back to the "Well, I'll consider them" phase.
More importantly, is the "targetted" advertising and tracking information that they can gather really that worthwhile? What's the stats on un-targetted versus targetted advertising in any medium - online, TV, radio? Obviously, it's not a good idea to target condom advertising in between Teletubbies episodes but does the reverse really have a much-worse response rate than normal? Where is the value in collecting that massive amount of data? Google has oodles and oodles and oodles of advert targeting data if it wants to use it - but almost all Google Adwords I see aren't related to me at all and when you want to show your ads, it's more common to let you choose keywords, target demographics or just let things happen pretty much randomly and in the cheapest spots than it is to target your football-related ads on football sites.
If I go to LWN.net NOW, I get these ads: Cloud Computing Linux, SysAdmin role in London, Linux VPS, Peer 1 UK Managed Hosting, Linux Unmanaged VPS, CHILImodule (A linux-based computer), "Server hosting from staff who care", HPC Linux Servers, TomCat support, Free Code Security Support
What targetted data could possibly have been used to show me those ads? The word Linux (in the sitename, I'm actually browsing from Windows in work and typed in the URL directly!), and my GeoIP (or, at least, my employer's GeoIP for their main proxy server). What's worth spending BILLIONS on infrastructure and data collection to put ads on a high-traffic Linux website that display to a London, UK user related to : London, UK and Linux.
Fluke? Let me try my brother's site - a Scouting site whose URL is www.scoutingresources.org.uk : Scout Uniforms for Sale, Ventures Abroad, Free Life Coach Training, Resellers Bookbuying tool, Scout & Guide Neckers, Names Badges and Lanyards, Cubs Laser Tag Fun, Scouting Activities, London Coupons, Scout Uniform.
So, actually, with Google's "Targetted Ad's", we end up with 3 ad's that aren't at all related to scouting (the other has various links to it) - only one of which is linked to the GeoIP, most of the Scouting links were actually for US Scouting which is vastly different, and the two remaining tenuous links are pretty-much random fillers. Considering that sites earns it's entire hosting budget + a couple of camps for the kids every year from just the Google Ad's alone, that's pretty damning of ad-targeting technology.
Seriously, what does collecting ad-targetting data in this manner get you that you couldn't from a quick keyword analysis and Geo IP lookup?
Maybe it's a geographical thing - here electricity costs 12-15p (that's GB pence) per KWh - about 18-20 US cents. Night rates are half that, if you're lucky. My old banger of a car isn't particularly efficient but costs me £3 (about $5) for 25 miles (so those "extreme" taxes aren't as much as you might think, because we have much more efficient cars apparently - this is a 1.8 litre, classed as quite a "big" car but nowhere near out of the ordinary for the UK - a 1997 Ford Mondeo). Petrol prices are basically identical throughout Europe, I found out last Christmas.
Your 8kw to do the equivalent journey would cost - 8*0.18 = $1.44, so you are actually saving quite a bit even over here - maybe not so much compared to one of those tiny European cars that was built after 2000 and is thus mandated to be more efficient. Against my car, yes, but a small Fiat or something, I don't know. I'm guessing my car would have more pulling power but I can't be sure given the size of the average American vehicle. I think loads on those cars will be another variable too. It's cheaper, for now, I'll give you that. And fuel prices in the UK/Europe have never been as ridiculously low as the US prices - I can barely remember when it was about less than a dollar per LITRE (3.78 litres in a US gallon). So in Europe we have a LOT more to save, even with higher electricity prices. Still, you hardly ever see them anywhere and I still haven't seen a petrol station that can refill them. You're not always going to be able to make it home. Have they standardised the electric charging points yet? Size, shape, voltage, amperage?
So I give you that it's cheap. I also give you several of the reasons you stated (no transmission, less drag etc.). Charging at night is also good when you can do that.
I'm not so sure about the cost of electricity going down, maybe that's just a European-market thing. It all relies on people voluntarily charging only at night - the hit on the grid, even if it's only for a few minutes, is HUGE - like this article where a car can charge up in five minutes - that amount of power in five minutes is a huge draw on the grid, probably the largest instantaneous single pull on the grid from a residential house. Whether it's for five minutes or five hours, it doesn't really matter. If it can't supply that power for the first few seconds it will just fuse the house/street/substation. People are suggesting in-house battery packs that trickle-charge and then pass it on to the car - more expense, more inefficiency, more things to replace after so-many charge cycles. Absolute peak power is what costs, the rest is "free" (which is why night rates are cheaper) and peak has a strange definition compared to other peaks. Plants see peak flows at 8pm because a popular soap opera finishes and everyone puts an electric kettle on - I kid you not, it's a visible spike in UK electricity graphs and the TV schedule is used in planning grid capacity.
So big devices being plugged in "at the wrong time", even only a few per street and only for a few seconds, can actually take the equivalent of several more entire houses in that street. That's a huge infrastructure investment. You can't ask people to "only charge at night" because they won't - no amount of timers, money savings, habit-breaking or common sense will make even the majority of people only charge at night. If you need the car at night, if you run a taxi service, if you use the car a lot during the day etc. you WILL have most electric car owners plugging them in at peak times. God knows, I want to know that my car will drive me to hospital at 1am if I need it to, no matter how far away that is.
If even 5% or 10% more peak electricity demand results from that, that's a HUGE infrastructure cost to manage and prices will rise disproportionally. There are also certain "types" of electric load that cause more problems - electricity companies are finding that the fluorescent bulbs that are now basically compulsory (you "can't" buy the old incan
Bandwidth? Storage? Backup? Downloads from a particular site? What the hell are we talking about here?
While we're at it, can someone please bring up the following:
to/too/two
there/they're/their
your/you're
whose/who's
God, I know I'm pedantic but how hard is it to get *simple* things like this right? At least most of the time.
It severely hinders my reading speed if some text has simple mistakes like that. My mind jars as it hits them and slows me down.
Yes, but then people "weigh" themselves in kg's by standing on a scale that is affected by gravity.
There are certain things that, although "visible" by ordinary people and named, don't actually exist or exist only because we *perceive* them to exist, like that optical illusion with the white triangle that isn't ACTUALLY there.
Centrifugal force may be misnamed (i.e. not a force), it may be incorrect, but it's generally accepted that "a force" exists that has an effect on your when you're spun in a circle. Just because the direction / origin / name of that force is incorrect is no reason to tell people that they're stupid for having felt it and knowing what it is before you explain its origins.
Back in the 60's there was an advertising campaign by scientists working on the behalf of government to target heat loss in elderly people's properties. It encouraged old people to "keep the heat in". It didn't go down well and it took them years to discover why. Eventually it was changed to "keep the cold out" and more elderly people understood that. "Cold" doesn't actually exist, it's just the absence of heat, but old people didn't think that way as easily (and who can blame them? "Shut the door, you're letting the cold in" is a common cry in my family - despite the fact that you're neither letting cold in nor arranging for some mystical "cold" entity to enter your property rather than, say, air with slightly less heat).
There's 100% pedantic accuracy. There's complete bollocks. And somewhere in the middle is how *everybody* thinks, even if they know both extremes in detail.
As does pidgin - because Facebook now supports open standards:
http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php
What on Earth makes you think that if you disagree with his statements and his representation of yourself that you should wait at all? Write, complain, protest, leave the organisation. Nobody is forcing you to affiliate yourself with an organisation whose stance / management you disagree with, and thus tarring yourself with the same brush as they are.
Judging by the Wiki article on ASCAP, they are also giving you a bad name in other ways too. Do something about it if you don't like it, starting with complaining loudly in their faces, rather than wishy-washy "Oh, I might possibly vote against him if/when he next decides to have some kind of vote, whenever that might be".
1) You should challenge it, and ask for evidence, dates, times.
2) You could easily have had your password sniffed, possibly even from an uninstalled version of Steam, if you got a virus/spyware in the meantime - many of them lift your details right out of the registry/filesystem because a Steam account is a very valuable commodity. They don't need to "crack" anything - if they have read-access on your computer, they can lift your username/password if you got Steam to memorise it. Once they got banned on your account, they probably wouldn't bother to use it again, either. This sounds even more likely if you claim never to have played HL2 multiplayer yourself beforehand.
3) The terms and conditions say that once you're banned, you're banned, unless you can provide proof your account was hacked. That may be "unfair", but you agreed to it when you signed up.
4) You can't really expect Valve to distinguish between "someone else used my account and got me banned" and "I'm a cheater and claim the same". Thus, if any cheating is detected, your account is banned. Otherwise every cheater would say that and VAC would be useless.
5) Losing your online nickname? That's quite pathetic. If you'd been playing lots of multiplayer and built up lots of admin access, stats, etc. on your STEAM_ID, then I could understand that but what would you have done if the original Steam account hadn't been able to use your nickname because someone else was? It's not a big deal at all. At least you could move any Steam friends you had over to your new account, if that's what you wanted to do.
6) The multiplayer Steam games have been dirt-cheap for ages. The Source Multiplayer pack is currently $29.99 which is a drop in the ocean for a serious gamer. That's half the price of a modern console game, or for the same price you could get the Counterstrike pack which contains the original CS, CS:CZ and CS:Source. Or CS Classic on its own is only $9.99. If you were that worried about it, you could have just re-purchased the games.
Your banning was not Valve's mistake, unless you can prove otherwise. Did you ask for logs, did you ask for the exact cheat used, when and from what IP? Valve have that sort of info to hand and could have helped you but the chances are you had your credentials lifted, either by a friend or some malware, and your account was banned. For a game that you could rebuy for $9.99 if you really wanted it.
It sounds more like you hardly ever used Steam, hardly ever played any Steam games. If I were you, I'd have asked for logs, I'd have searched the online cheater-list websites for my STEAM_ID and if it was really that big a deal, start writing letters, demanding proof and/or just rebuying the games.
You don't need to renew your gas tank every 6000 charges (admittedly, that's probably a lot of years in an absolutely ideal charging scenario, but the chances that it works like that with ordinary car-use are near-zero). When you do, it doesn't cost you as much as a *new* car (not even a replacement of the car you're driving, a BRAND NEW car). Refuelling your car does not require an enormous infrastructure and 100's or 1000's of amps flowing down a cable (sorry, but I'd rather have a petroleum fire on the end of my fuelling nozzle than have the equivalent happen with an electric charging cable - slight fire that you can extinguish versus KABOOM - plus the price of copper is so high at the moment that people are ripping up telephone lines and melting them down). Fuel stops don't need to have the equivalent of a small power station to run them. You can walk to the station if you run out of fuel and come back with enough to get you to the next fuelling stop. You don't need something like 75% of the weight of the car being fuel (and that weight never lessens no matter how "empty" you're running).
When everyone parks their car at home at 6pm, it doesn't cause a massive power surge larger than our entire towns take at the moment. If you want to go long-distance, you pack some extra fuel, or note the locations of various fuel stops across Europe - because even the tiniest town up in the hills where they barely have electric will have petroleum - I got from the UK through France, Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and back on about £300-400 of fuel - that's the same as a quarter's worth of electricity for my house without an electric car, God knows what it would have cost in an electric car. You don't have to manage and dispose of nearly a ton of Lithium battery every time a car is scrapped (or, similarly, find nearly a ton of it when you build one) - there's more than enough nasty stuff in brake linings and exhausts but it doesn't make anywhere near as much waste.
Seriously, I'm a realist and have been saying for years that oil needs to STOP being used. But at the moment, the tech for electric is nowhere near good enough, hence the rise of "hybrid" (read: two cars wastage for the price of one) and slow-moving, short-range electric vehicles. We've had electric vehicles for decades - my milkman still delivers on a lead-acid-based vehicle that was introduced before I was even born (the 70's) - they charge overnight, do 30mph, and are slowly being replaced by the lithium battery variety. They are on the edge of plausibility but there are still a million, much more difficult, problems to overcome than just inventing a slightly more suitable battery. And in the end, grid-surge means higher peak-demand which means we have to use the only *practical* methods of generating that sort of electricity en-masse: Nuclear, coal, gas and other oil-based burning. All we've done is move the oil-burning into a power station and lost at least 10% of the electricity in storage/transmission.
Electric cars will stay the SSD's of the vehicle market for a while yet - expensive, with their own downsides, but provide clear benefits, and therefore used mainly by enthusiasts. I'm driving a 1997 car that's in perfect working order with no major mechanical changes made to it. It's the third or fourth car like that that I've owned. That sort of second-hand market will not exist for DECADES in the electric car market, because of the price of spares and batteries - that means most people who are driving second-hand cars (i.e. most drivers everywhere) will not be able to afford to change. Electric cars will cost a lot more for a long while and that means they risk being shunned entirely, or seen as a "luxury". It will take electric cars at least another 10 years after they are "solved" to take over our roads and for everyone "normal" to be driving them. Home maintenance of them is probably also out of the window - good for big dealerships, bad for local garages.
It will happen, eventually, with some te
Link to anything, ANYTHING that actually backs up any of these wild assertions, please. I'm British, £10bn is a lot of money, and I think you're talking bullshit.
There are upgrades to the BT network. About f***ing time. We're only about 40 years behind the rest of the world in terms of telephone infrastructure.
These upgrades have led to a rise in cost (but only for BT at the moment - other places aren't passing them on, e.g. completely independent phone companies that you are utterly free to use, or set up yourself, oh, and my old ISP is part of BT and actually just LOWERED all my prices for the same package - strange that given that BT infrastructure is used to connect *most* ADSL/phone line customers). Everything BT does leads to a rise in cost. Stupidity costs money, BT is full of that (ex-government monopolies tend to suffer from that), and telephone networks are getting more and more expensive to build and run (ADSL, ADSL2, fibre to the home, fibre to the cabinet, loss of virtually all payphone income, an unpopular mobile arm used only by traffic-heavy users due to exclusive iPhone deals, 12% of houses having NO LANDLINES AT ALL any more etc.etc.etc.).
And £10bn is £357 for every phone line that BT manages in the UK - again, I call crap. BT already has the capability to intercept any phone line at will, on demand, with due legal process, and it costs NOTHING more than they already pay, whether they are analog, VoIP or anything else. IP phones are no easier or harder to intercept than traditional ones. Not since the days of gold-plated contacts, rotary pulse diallers and line-powered telephones has there NOT been an ADC or several dozen of them along the way, or the phone calls not passing straight through BT-owned hardware capable of sniffing anything it likes - BT's infrastructure from the cabinet to the exchange and to the receiving cabinet is virtually all digital and tappable and has been for decades - how do you think they know what number you dialled - all you did was put a DTMF tone down a copper line and it read it, interpreted it, formed paths, connected both ends, etc.
Then you have the question of the sheer amount of traffic such capabilities would generate, whether it's possible to analyse the traffic for any purpose whatsoever, useful or not, (given that 3 out of 10 times the best voice recognition algorithms, straight out of PhD's papers, on the planet can't work out what I'm saying from a very limited vocabulary and I don't even have a strong accent and/or am trying to obscure my communications), whether it's possible to analyse THAT amount of traffic, etc.
Stop spouting hyperbole. If you've spotted something on a budget, if you work at an ISP and have seen what the alleged "blackboxes" can do, if you work for BT and have had to install lines that you're completely under the Official Secrets Act for and therefore can't tell anyone about, etc. THEN you might have something worth listening to. And then I'd probably say "Oh?" and ignore you. So what? I'm a privacy nut but I already assume that anything the government wants to listen to, it can do so completely legally anyway. Telephone conversations, especially international ones, have absolutely no guarantee that you will NEVER be listened to. I don't expect them to monitor it routinely but then if they did, they have to have a damn good reason or you just go to the press (or Wikileaks if you believe the local press are compromised) and instantly everyone knows about it - you're going down because of an illegal act anyway, so might as well broadcast it to get attention off your "crimes" and onto those people who are monitoring phonecalls illegally. I mean, Wikileaks is just FULL of people who have done that, isn't it?
It's crap. Conspiracy hyperbole of the highest order. Absence of evidence is not proof of the negative. And when 90,000 classified US army logs can slip out the door, someone, somewhere would leak this stuff too. And the biggest question: to what purpose? Liste
Having "classified" information being completely unable to be reported makes for a more dangerous society. This isn't an "open source" vs "closed source" thing - of course we don't want people to know exactly where our troops are, what they are armed with, what they are targeting and how they are doing. But there's a difference between "classified for operational reasons" and "classified because it would make us look bad / stupid / illegal".
The press has a single purpose - to get the truth onto paper in front of your eyes. 99% of what the papers print is complete bollocks. 99% of the stuff that is true is completely uninteresting. But they exist because, at some point, someone has to publish something that other people won't like. Classified or not, freedom of the press ensures that if they are acting in the interests of the populous, they won't get into (too much) trouble in any civilised country. I'd rather live in a country where the press can break the rules occasionally on the big stuff, than one where they get shot/imprisoned for revealing something critical to my knowledge of what my country's up to.
Otherwise you WOULD NOT KNOW what went on in Guantanamo Bay. You WOULD NOT KNOW what happened in Vietnam - you would live in blinkered ignorance about the whole thing and think it was actually worthwhile. You WOULD NOT KNOW that Clinton slept with Lewinsky. You WOULD NOT KNOW about any of the big policital scandals of the last hundreds years. This is why the majority of the young population of China DO NOT KNOW what happened in Tiananmen Square, can't talk about it, are in fear of their lives if they mention it. Because the government doesn't want them to know and refuses to let it be published at all, ever, anywhere and the press has zero legal protection if they do it.
If the US did something stupid, illegal, immoral or downright disgusting, you WANT to know about that. If you don't, it's hard to call yourself a patriot. I'm British and I *WANT* to know when my country is doing something downright stupid (like blindly following another country into a war they can't win), so I can know about it, help stop it, and even apologise for it. Historically my country has a god-damn terrible record of invading countries for not-much-reason and trying to take over the world. We did some horrible things (we basically abandoned Singapore in WW2 to be taken over by the Japanese, for instance, knowing it would get overrun in seconds and knowing that a small British presence would save it... I didn't even know that myself until I heard a whisper of it and went to look it up). And I know about that because people were able to tell the stories.
There should be, in any civilised country, a law and process to deal with people who classify things that the public should know about. If your military has broken its own laws, you should damn well know about it - FFS your country is claiming to be "righting" another country and showing them the way and you can't even keep your highly-trained, supposedly disciplined professional soldiers on the right side of your OWN laws. But just because they put a little classified stamp on the documents, that means they stay secret forever, or at least until nobody can do anything about it? Don't be silly. That's just a way to rubber-stamp approval of any war-crime ever committed.
This is what happens when you deny things are going wrong. Someone, somewhere, has the moral balls to say "it isn't right and people should know" despite every rule and every colleague stopping them doing so. That's about the most powerful thought a person can ever have - much more dangerous, effective and damaging than anything else they can do. The question is: What's in the Wikileaks material that you DIDN'T know about but SHOULD have?
Because in practice, making sure that there is absolutely no hint of a secure piece of information is incredibly tricky. Most programmers traditionally have little concept of actual *secure* programming. Most implementations of perfectly secure algorithms are subject to flaws because people didn't treat side-cases, or properly analyse how the traffic use would affect the algorithm, etc. e.g. not renegotiating keys often enough, so that people can see enough traffic to decrypt a key in a relatively short space of time.
Additionally, this isn't an attack on the crypto. The crypto secures the conversation, it does not necessarily prove identity and if it does prove identity most places don't care about the identity (how many company distinguish individual users/computers over the wireless network by anything other than MAC/IP/username given? AES is still 100% perfectly intact. If you'd been using, say, OpenVPN or OpenSSH with the same algorithm over an unsecured wireless network, the internal encrypted conversation would still be virtually as secure today as it was when AES was invented. The problem is that the *implementation* of AES wasn't designed to cover the usage scenario here, and probably never could be because of the way the access to this particular tiny piece of this part of the broadcast specification is granted. Basically, the flaw has always been sitting there in WPA, not in AES which is still chugging along nicely doing its job. Shocking that a wireless "encryption" fails to properly implement a security scheme because of a bad implementation that side-steps the actual encryption itself... that's never ever happened before ever anywhere :-P
Moral of the story: only trust crypto from those well-established in the crypto-field that's been attacked and attacked and still is approved for government/military use in lots of sensible countries. And then make sure you have a damn good implementation that's not overly complex, or cast in stone, such that most people can't examine it / play with it / fix it.
If you'd been running OpenVPN over the same wireless network, but using OpenVPN's key infrastructure and encryption instead of WPA or WEP or anything at all (i.e. completely "open" wireless) you would still be secure. A bad implementation of a particular encryption in WPA allows people to bypass steps of the actual encryption process that were never designed to be bypassed. It's almost an "out of band" security vulnerability - i.e. nothing to do with whether you use AES or Blowfish or 3DES or whatever you choose... they basically find a way around the (still theoretically secure) encryption that has no effect on the efficacy of the encryption itself.
Basic rule: Just because your "Ethernet-over-the-mains" devices says it uses AES, don't think that means it's "secure". Chances are that it's not.
Then most professionals would laugh in your face at such a concept and walk away. Those who want to pay peanuts, end up hiring monkeys. If the business arrangement doesn't suit you, don't enter it. That person would *never* have been your customer anyway because the way they want to scrimp and save and "only pay one person" means they were always looking for a cheap way out - and any *decent* designer wouldn't be satisfied with what they were offering. The designers haven't *lost* any business, they just aren't getting any from a new "auction-style" job market that's cropped up. That's up to them, but it's hardly a jobs nightmare. At any point in history, in any profession, the same thing could have (and has) happened.