apparently, you want to buy AMD processors, or PPC when it comes to molecular dynamics. by and far PPC is way in the lead though, i'd have to imagine that a single PS3, without full SPU support runs gromacs about as good as a dual core AMD. if SPU support is added in, a PS3 is faster than a cluster of 4 quad core phenoms... i guess, gromacs is almost designed to run on a PS3.
I wouldn't bank on that, it gets almost Double the processing done on a g5 with a slower clock than a high end p-4. you might have wanted to look into that before you put your foot in your mouth. according to wikipedia the SPE in the ps3 is clocked to 3.2 ghz.
the exact wording of 3:1 is "significant willful infringements without motivation for financial gain to such extent as to prejudicially affect the copyright owner (eg: internet piracy)"
basically, if a copyright owner can claim you caused significant damage to them, you're now a criminal. wikileaks was already almost shut down because they 'leaked' confidential documents that were damaging to the people who sued them... with the kind of law needed to enforce 3:1 then yeah, wikileaks would be dead very shortly afterwards, unless they could get a court to overturn it.
Welcome, sneakernets... now if only there was a non-metallic flash memory device that can be sneaked through metal detectors for those who face metal detectors at the borders.
hey, i can imagine the boarder officials trying to access my linux laptop, with 2 logins, one that 'looks completely clean' and then the other one, that hides all the sneakernet data in files completely invisible to anyone except the user of that 'hidden' account...
making 'encryption' only for 'authorized' users will just mean every major 'pirate' will also have 'authorization' i remember when they busted this one warez dude using the university PCs he maintained to host several tb of warez files.. know i read it on slashdot but i can't find the article.
the whole point is just this, in terms of encryption, the cat is out of the bag, you can't stuff it back in if you can't catch up to it, and even if you catch up, people will find a work around. this is why computers in cuba, a complete dictatorship are still used to 'inform' the people living there, even though they can't get internet at home, they just get 'smuggled' flash memory cards or USB sticks, full of old news and they swap em around with friends etc. people found a way around the dictatorships rules, and as long as they don't strip search and full body cavity search Every Person who goes into cuba they can't 'stop' every source of 'sneaker net' data cards.
so no, they'll never get 'encrypted traffic' to be illegal, but they could easily make it so that all the torrent trackers have to be hosted in iran, and everyone using them had to use 'onion routing' or the like to connect to the trackers and then seed the p2p... oh and hey, while we're at it, our new police state that doesn't allow p2p, we can frame anybody we don't like, even the printer at work, of P2p infringement.
that's gonna go over real well, once somebody collects a list of IP addresses owned by billionaires(and fortune 500 companies), and frame them all of intense, p2p violation.
sure they got the money to pay the lawyers to get them off, that's not the point, the point is having a body of 'case law' where anyone can point to Gates vs Sony BMG where bill gates proved he was framed for 1,769 cases of 'copyright infringement' by a disgruntled hacker who's ip was never tracked down.
I went to wikileaks, read their summary, dled the PDF and read as much of it as i understood, and this document does nothing to 'criminalize' p2p activity. What it does criminalize is...
"For example page three, paragraph one is a "Pirate Bay killer" clause designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of unauthorized information exchange on the internet. This clause would also negatively affect transparency and primary source journalism sites such as Wikileaks. "
Basically, not just a pirate bay killer, but a wikileaks killer all rolled in one. Legitimate P2P is completely unaffected. except that there will never be 'open' trackers after this law goes through, in member nations. it's really easy to have a closed tracker, as WOW uses for distributing patches... now if WOW or say, SC2 uses P2P for 'user created content' (custom maps, sprites etc) then they might have to 'kill' those features in a patch, after all you can easily infringe on copyright (especially with custom sprites)
the '30 day' membership isn't a prize, it's 'free to anybody' normally gamefly only gives you a 10 day trial, so 'giving pizzahut customers' 30 day memberships, with any pizzahut online purchase is easy. all you get is an extra 20 days of free trial, they've done 30 day free promotions before, anyways.
"This has changed, and not recently. There is image retention, which means that if you leave your display on the same, high contrast image for a while, you'll see the bright bits on very dark screens for a couple of minutes. It's nothing even remotely permanent, and it never happens in motion video."
partially wrong, Plasma TVs have a nice built-in Image Retention detection chip, they cycle those pixels often enough for the display to avoid burn in, also, you can have screen savers set to prevent 'uneven phosphor wear'
CRTs are also prone to burn in, I've seen 'used' slot machines with a CRT with a permanent burn-in of the prize table, and even some ghosting in the other screen areas. plasma TV makers claim than they've got new phosphors that are 'as good as crts' this doesn't mean burn in proof, and phosphors can earn 'wear patterns' where some of the phosphors loose brightness over the 'wear cycle' of the phosphors. But again, modern Plasma TVs have modes, and computer technology to 'reverse' damage, caused by burn-in/uneven 'wear leveling' for instance, if you watch all yoru standard def, in a 3/4 box, the edges of the screen can become extremely 'bright' for playing HD/movie content. this problem is so bad, that modern plasmas default to stretching 3 by 4 content, unless it's 'digital' and set to display with black bars by the content producer
"Enhanced Screen Saver Functions A variety of screen saver functions help minimize the risk of uneven phosphor aging. You can also use the timer to set the screen saver operating cycles, operating time, and start and stop times. This lets you make settings that match your application.
* White Bar Scroll: White bars move across the screen from left to right at regular intervals. Good for ordinary still-image displays.
* Screen Reversal: Displays images with the black and white reversed. Good for text displays.
* Side Panel Adjustment: Brightens the black bands on the sides of the screen when displaying images in the 4:3 format.
* Wobbling: Shifts the image's position by several pixels at fixed time intervals.
* Peak Limit Mode: Lowers the peak brightness level (image contrast) by 30%"
"The only problem with the promotion is you have to be able to actually purchase something from Pizza Hut."
not true, you can enter once a day online, for free (but if you do ordering online doesn't add any extra 'chances' you're limited to 1 entry a day, order or not)
eprize com/net has a lot of contests going for a lot of companies... but their page is entirely broken to firefox... i wonder if they're a data mining company for 'targeted' ads or spam.
one year of gamefly, and one year of free pizza. the game fly is $275, and they give you $499 in free pizza. so your numbers are 'lower' than what pizza hut claims.
"Approximate Retail Value (âoeARVâ): $10,355. The ARV of electronic prizes is subject to price fluctuations in the consumer marketplace based on, among other things, any gap in time between the date the ARV is estimated for purposes of these Official Rules and the date the prize is awarded or redeemed."
not quite $10,000 but you can probably set a reserve of $1,200 for the wii, and if you roll your own setup $1,200 buys a nice HD capable PC to hook into that 60" plasma TV.
my folks bought a 50" plasma, it caps at 720P, so it was a lot cheaper than 1080P, but still, the only reason to get 1080p is if you're going to play HD video games*, and even then, it's a significant waste of money to get 50% more pixels.. (not to mention many 720p displays are actually 1366/768, so the same display hardware can be sold as a PC monitor)
I've played games at 800x600 for the past many years, even 1366/768 would be a big step up for me... 1920x1080 a huge leap.
the 3840Ã--2160 format they're going to start pushing in 2015 to try and get gamers/movie watchers to upgrade hardware even higher than 1080p is unimaginable to me.
I honestly don't think i will ever need better than 1080P I was running 800x600 or lower for pc gaming when that was all pc gaming could do, and i was still happy with 800x600 to this date (plus it allowed me to push back buying new hardware).
*= I think HD movies even if you have your own HD camcorder are a huge waste of space at 1080p, even with BD-50 only 300 minutes of mpeg-4? besides sales of 'blu-ray' players (other than ps3 units) are lagging even with the death of HD-DVD.
"There are a few pros and cons to releasing Duke Nukem Forever."
i think 'the end of the world' is a pretty big con.
We all know that DNF has been delayed time and time again, but never canceled, because in truth it couldn't be released until the world was ripe to end.
"5 Rev. 6:9-11 'SOULS UNDER THE ALTAR' "Souls were heard crying for Duke Nukem Forever. They were told to wait for a while till a further engine rewrite took place." This seal reveals a further persecution of God's people, a persecution as intense as any which occurred in the past. Matt. 24:9-10 Luke 21:12-19
The game OS only has limited video/audio codec/container support. The way you might be able to "fix" this is by using mediatomb and its transcoding support: http://mediatomb.cc/pages/transcoding
But the last time I tried I couldn't get h264/ac3 in mkv transcoded to mpeg2/ac3 at full resolution. Down scaling to PAL and 2 audiochannels worked, the problem was ffmpeg audio sync IIRC. you might want to follow a better guide http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/PS3_H.264_Conversion_Guide_page9.html
ahh i linked to page 9, but there are 3 methods, that produce 3 different containers the ps3 will support.
Can you find a better $400 computer for calculating molecular dynamics?
I'm just asking, I know you can get a dual core for under 400, but even the cheapest quad core and the rest of the system is going to be garbage grade..
"Do you have any evidence to suggest that viewing child porn (or, more specifically, cg child porn) increases crimes against children? "
that's a difficult question to answer, and I have no real access to any 'real' numbers, but 'CG porn' that 'is too hard to distinguish' from real child porn has 1 real advantage... Police can (theoretically) create a website designed to attract sex offenders, collect personal information, while providing them with CG porn, all without harming any children.
the question is if people are comfortable with the cops selling the child porn to criminals in order to someday bust them...
i know the that the 'law' that made even 'cartoon' porn illegal was struck down for being too broad (what if an artist from another country where 13 is the AoC drew cell art of a 13 year old, riding a pokemon? hrm? the law that got struck down would have made putting that art on the net) but if you can't tell CG from 'real' anymore it's still a tough question... the very popular game 'the sims' had 'nude' models in it's art data, the game engine, could even be altered to 'remove' blurring, and even to make characters be 'nude' the whole time, if 'the sims 4' or something has CG too realistic, it might be called child porn... (they have children too in the sims)
true the developers of the game engine can always have the 'nude' art be lower res, but then some website will come along with 'art packs' that are nude but full resolution... btw, by default the sims used blurring whenever the 'nude' art was used, but again to disable that was a quick hack of a single text file...
i think the main problem is the database of 'old' articles and posts, can you imagine having to converting years and years of posts/articles etc to UTF8 ?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/04/1412229 this is the first article i posted into from an account... and it's still up on slashdot, and the reason i can get to it, is i forgot the password on that acct, and it's set to my college e-mail from 1995.
"First, if money gets transferred to you then you are susceptible to being caught."
Runners, Mules, and Hostile governments (against 'developed nations') all can add a 'layer' of security Vs being caught. If you live in DC, go to a nice crack neighborhood find some 'hungry looking' kids tell them for $100 a month if they run 'notes' to the bank, and bring back the 'envelopes' while either wearing a disguise, so they can't identify you or whatever, you got yourself a nice bunch of runners who even if they get caught, couldn't identify you, and will only go to juvenile hall, where they'll get fed better than by mommy crack addict, they got no down side man no down side.
"since they're unknown there is no "reputational" factor that would make people more likely to pay based on the experience of others."
aliases, aliases, and fronts. what if they have a website, in iran, what if, other people have 'reported' getting their data back? on a highly page ranked forum? there is no reason why a (false) reputation can't be 'generated' to make people believe they'll get their data back. if you Do give them their data back, there is a possibility of 'repeat' sales... some people are retarded when it comes to security, they think mcaffe will protect them, then 3 months later, you hit them again, same scam... then again 3 months later, you just keep hitting that money tree til someone tells them to get ubuntu. If you're smart you give them 1 time fixes for the extortion. that's what they call a 'Protection racket.'
"the fact is that the professionals in the field are smarter than the criminals."
Seriously you believe this? have you any idea of how hard a polymorphic rootkit is to detect and remove from a windows system? I'll give you a hint, there are 0 programs for windows that can detect a polymorphic root kit by signatures or heuristics. you need a protected boot environment (removable media, linux, etc) to even detect the file changes of a polymorphic rootkit.
and then, only a system that can verify the integrity of system files can even come close to trying to remove or repair a system hit by a polymorphic rootkit. the easiest way is to reformat, from removable media. today's polymorphic rootkits infect the 'special partition' that oh so many OEMS create for reformatting windows using 'slipstreaming' technology. sad but true, but at least most OEMs let you create dvd-r 'media' from that partition, while it's still 'new'
criminals don't have to be 'smarter' than security professionals as long as Microsoft is the 'gatekeeper' putting in the locks.
it's like comparing the security of a 'padlock' you got in a carton of cereal here that microsoft gives us, to the bank vault that linux gives us here
if a 12 year old runs up to the bank where the money was wired, has all the paperwork to get the money, and then runs through a series of streets faster than any cop could dream of running (even in a 3rd world country) to hand off the envelope to someone they never even saw, who manages the kids makes sure they're too dumb to check the envelopes they get at the bank etc, or perhaps the kids themselves are too afraid of being shot to not do exactly as told, etc...
seriously, they use kids for a lot of criminal activity, there is nothing illegal about a kid handing over a signed piece of paper and getting their money from the bank... there are 2 big advantages, even those countries where the US has forced laws on the books, kids generally are immune, after all they basically are in the US anyways, and the lawmakers of these countries know this, so they can play both sides by making laws only apply to adults..
so yeah, getting back bank wires, even trying to trace them to anyone 'but a child' is unlikely...
Fortunately, brute force attacks aren't necessary. If one can read the memory space used by the 'decryptor' one can find the key in seconds.
this is why movie content will 'never' be immune to cracking. in the case of this virus, the decryptor is sent to you over the internet, if you pay the money, but having a good backup scheme also defeats the need to brute force. having a good security setup, should negate even the need for backups to prevent infection in the first place.
so always have a competent hardened firewall device like smoothwall express, never download attachments (webmail helps a lot in this arena, along with a secure browser, and a phishing aware user/browser add-on) avoid windows like the plague, but if you must run windows make sure it can only get access to the actual ports of the programs you actually use on it. and never run as administrator, unless you really genuinely need to do something that can't be done as a normal user.
trusting a 'commercial' 'hardware' router to protect a windows machine is insane, even if you've replaced the firmware with some variant of linux, it's Still Not hardened like smoothwall...
fine if you have all linux/bsd machines, but windows has as much security as the emperor had new clothes, even with a $$$ security suite. sad but true, only 0% of tested windows security software could stop 50/50 2006/2007 known rootkit/malware post install... the best was i think being able to remove 7/50 and 13/50, if it had actually gotten installed. specialized tools were also tested, not just suites.
the point being, if you must run windows remember that a piece of paper stands more chance of surviving a nuclear blast at point blank than windows has of being de-rooted without a format.
"And how often do you roll through your backups? "
try 'never i use 1 time recordable optical media'
i realize some people use 'rewritable' media for backups, and have this 'roll over' issue, but the only part of my backup that does rollover is the redundant external HDD for 'critical' data that i don't trust entirely to a DVD media, even is i only buy grade 1 media...
I don't have a small data set either, I have over 1 TB of stuff on optical discs, but surprisingly only about 30 gigs that is important enough to go to a redundant hdd.
I've played with all kinda of image editors, and i do find the gimp easier than some interfaces.
but, Paint Shop Pro still, although i haven't used it since 1995, was cool and had tons of nifty features i liked back then. never enough to pay for it.
photoshop has tons of plug-ins though, many 'pros' live and die by their PS plug-ins... gimp windows can use some PS plugins, and there have been efforts to make FOSS gimp plugins that emulate PS plugins... but die hards will always find a reason not to use linux. but the types of laptops acer is pushing linux on aren't powerful graphic editors (no laptop nowadays can even do true 24-bit color, anyways) or gaming machines, they're portable word processors, maybe with dvd movie playback, possibly with wireless internet a portable web-browser.
all things linux can do, although the DVD playback tools I've tried are subpar, xvid/divx playback is great. and yeah. i was using dvds with no copy protection at all, video/audio sync issues grr.
Slashdot Mirror
ISP immunity is also a clause of this bad boy, so... suing routers is a bit hard
i forget to include a AMD number.
"Linux Athlon 64 1 Intel 8 2200 512 9446 2592 1641 190 4092 408 1.48"
apparently, you want to buy AMD processors, or PPC when it comes to molecular dynamics. by and far PPC is way in the lead though, i'd have to imagine that a single PS3, without full SPU support runs gromacs about as good as a dual core AMD. if SPU support is added in, a PS3 is faster than a cluster of 4 quad core phenoms... i guess, gromacs is almost designed to run on a PS3.
"(especially since gromacs probably has tons of x86 optimizations in it) than a PS3 would."
http://www.gromacs.org/content/view/25/
I wouldn't bank on that, it gets almost Double the processing done on a g5 with a slower clock than a high end p-4. you might have wanted to look into that before you put your foot in your mouth. according to wikipedia the SPE in the ps3 is clocked to 3.2 ghz.
"Linux Pentium 4 1 Intel 8 3000 1024 10176 2280 1353 164 3045 357 0.95"
"Apple G5 PPC 970 1 IBM 2500 512 15309 4177 2213 175 5069 544 1.74"
the exact wording of 3:1 is "significant willful infringements without motivation for financial gain to such extent as to prejudicially affect the copyright owner (eg: internet piracy)"
basically, if a copyright owner can claim you caused significant damage to them, you're now a criminal. wikileaks was already almost shut down because they 'leaked' confidential documents that were damaging to the people who sued them... with the kind of law needed to enforce 3:1 then yeah, wikileaks would be dead very shortly afterwards, unless they could get a court to overturn it.
A 'closed' tracker requires a user/pass that is private to 'create new torrent downloads'
blizz's tracker is closed as far as i can tell, in that nobody but blizzard can make new torrents on the tracker.
Welcome, sneakernets... now if only there was a non-metallic flash memory device that can be sneaked through metal detectors for those who face metal detectors at the borders.
hey, i can imagine the boarder officials trying to access my linux laptop, with 2 logins, one that 'looks completely clean' and then the other one, that hides all the sneakernet data in files completely invisible to anyone except the user of that 'hidden' account...
making 'encryption' only for 'authorized' users will just mean every major 'pirate' will also have 'authorization' i remember when they busted this one warez dude using the university PCs he maintained to host several tb of warez files.. know i read it on slashdot but i can't find the article.
the whole point is just this, in terms of encryption, the cat is out of the bag, you can't stuff it back in if you can't catch up to it, and even if you catch up, people will find a work around. this is why computers in cuba, a complete dictatorship are still used to 'inform' the people living there, even though they can't get internet at home, they just get 'smuggled' flash memory cards or USB sticks, full of old news and they swap em around with friends etc. people found a way around the dictatorships rules, and as long as they don't strip search and full body cavity search Every Person who goes into cuba they can't 'stop' every source of 'sneaker net' data cards.
so no, they'll never get 'encrypted traffic' to be illegal, but they could easily make it so that all the torrent trackers have to be hosted in iran, and everyone using them had to use 'onion routing' or the like to connect to the trackers and then seed the p2p... oh and hey, while we're at it, our new police state that doesn't allow p2p, we can frame anybody we don't like, even the printer at work, of P2p infringement.
that's gonna go over real well, once somebody collects a list of IP addresses owned by billionaires(and fortune 500 companies), and frame them all of intense, p2p violation.
sure they got the money to pay the lawyers to get them off, that's not the point, the point is having a body of 'case law' where anyone can point to Gates vs Sony BMG where bill gates proved he was framed for 1,769 cases of 'copyright infringement' by a disgruntled hacker who's ip was never tracked down.
I went to wikileaks, read their summary, dled the PDF and read as much of it as i understood, and this document does nothing to 'criminalize' p2p activity. What it does criminalize is...
"For example page three, paragraph one is a "Pirate Bay killer" clause designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of unauthorized information exchange on the internet. This clause would also negatively affect transparency and primary source journalism sites such as Wikileaks. "
Basically, not just a pirate bay killer, but a wikileaks killer all rolled in one. Legitimate P2P is completely unaffected. except that there will never be 'open' trackers after this law goes through, in member nations. it's really easy to have a closed tracker, as WOW uses for distributing patches... now if WOW or say, SC2 uses P2P for 'user created content' (custom maps, sprites etc) then they might have to 'kill' those features in a patch, after all you can easily infringe on copyright (especially with custom sprites)
the '30 day' membership isn't a prize, it's 'free to anybody' normally gamefly only gives you a 10 day trial, so 'giving pizzahut customers' 30 day memberships, with any pizzahut online purchase is easy. all you get is an extra 20 days of free trial, they've done 30 day free promotions before, anyways.
"This has changed, and not recently. There is image retention, which means that if you leave your display on the same, high contrast image for a while, you'll see the bright bits on very dark screens for a couple of minutes. It's nothing even remotely permanent, and it never happens in motion video."
partially wrong, Plasma TVs have a nice built-in Image Retention detection chip, they cycle those pixels often enough for the display to avoid burn in, also, you can have screen savers set to prevent 'uneven phosphor wear'
CRTs are also prone to burn in, I've seen 'used' slot machines with a CRT with a permanent burn-in of the prize table, and even some ghosting in the other screen areas. plasma TV makers claim than they've got new phosphors that are 'as good as crts' this doesn't mean burn in proof, and phosphors can earn 'wear patterns' where some of the phosphors loose brightness over the 'wear cycle' of the phosphors. But again, modern Plasma TVs have modes, and computer technology to 'reverse' damage, caused by burn-in/uneven 'wear leveling' for instance, if you watch all yoru standard def, in a 3/4 box, the edges of the screen can become extremely 'bright' for playing HD/movie content. this problem is so bad, that modern plasmas default to stretching 3 by 4 content, unless it's 'digital' and set to display with black bars by the content producer
"Enhanced Screen Saver Functions
A variety of screen saver functions help minimize the risk of uneven phosphor aging. You can also use the timer to set the screen saver operating cycles, operating time, and start and stop times. This lets you make settings that match your application.
* White Bar Scroll: White bars move across the screen from left to right at regular intervals. Good for ordinary still-image displays.
* Screen Reversal: Displays images with the black and white reversed. Good for text displays.
* Side Panel Adjustment: Brightens the black bands on the sides of the screen when displaying images in the 4:3 format.
* Wobbling: Shifts the image's position by several pixels at fixed time intervals.
* Peak Limit Mode: Lowers the peak brightness level (image contrast) by 30%"
nice, their site is so broken, you can't even read their privacy policy in firefox.
"The only problem with the promotion is you have to be able to actually purchase something from Pizza Hut."
not true, you can enter once a day online, for free (but if you do ordering online doesn't add any extra 'chances' you're limited to 1 entry a day, order or not)
someone else posted the website, but i assumed you might not read that so here goes http://pizzahut.eprize.net/gamefly/
eprize com/net has a lot of contests going for a lot of companies... but their page is entirely broken to firefox... i wonder if they're a data mining company for 'targeted' ads or spam.
"Did they throw in any games?"
one year of gamefly, and one year of free pizza.
the game fly is $275, and they give you $499 in free pizza. so your numbers are 'lower' than what pizza hut claims.
"Approximate Retail Value (âoeARVâ): $10,355. The ARV of electronic prizes is subject to price fluctuations in the consumer marketplace based on, among other things, any gap in time between the date the ARV is estimated for purposes of these Official Rules and the date the prize is awarded or redeemed."
not quite $10,000 but you can probably set a reserve of $1,200 for the wii, and if you roll your own setup $1,200 buys a nice HD capable PC to hook into that 60" plasma TV.
my folks bought a 50" plasma, it caps at 720P, so it was a lot cheaper than 1080P, but still, the only reason to get 1080p is if you're going to play HD video games*, and even then, it's a significant waste of money to get 50% more pixels.. (not to mention many 720p displays are actually 1366/768, so the same display hardware can be sold as a PC monitor)
I've played games at 800x600 for the past many years, even 1366/768 would be a big step up for me... 1920x1080 a huge leap.
the 3840Ã--2160 format they're going to start pushing in 2015 to try and get gamers/movie watchers to upgrade hardware even higher than 1080p is unimaginable to me.
I honestly don't think i will ever need better than 1080P I was running 800x600 or lower for pc gaming when that was all pc gaming could do, and i was still happy with 800x600 to this date (plus it allowed me to push back buying new hardware).
*= I think HD movies even if you have your own HD camcorder are a huge waste of space at 1080p, even with BD-50 only 300 minutes of mpeg-4? besides sales of 'blu-ray' players (other than ps3 units) are lagging even with the death of HD-DVD.
"There are a few pros and cons to releasing Duke Nukem Forever."
i think 'the end of the world' is a pretty big con.
We all know that DNF has been delayed time and time again, but never canceled, because in truth it couldn't be released until the world was ripe to end.
"DNF cannot be completed Never. Because it will bomb."
No it can never be completed because it is one of the Seven Seals of the Apocalypse! http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/sbs777/prophecy/revbook/seals.html
"5 Rev. 6:9-11 'SOULS UNDER THE ALTAR' "Souls were heard crying for Duke Nukem Forever. They were told to wait for a while till a further engine rewrite took place." This seal reveals a further persecution of God's people, a persecution as intense as any which occurred in the past. Matt. 24:9-10
Luke 21:12-19
http://mediatomb.cc/pages/transcoding
But the last time I tried I couldn't get h264/ac3 in mkv transcoded to mpeg2/ac3 at full resolution. Down scaling to PAL and 2 audiochannels worked, the problem was ffmpeg audio sync IIRC. you might want to follow a better guide http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/PS3_H.264_Conversion_Guide_page9.html
ahh i linked to page 9, but there are 3 methods, that produce 3 different containers the ps3 will support.
Can you find a better $400 computer for calculating molecular dynamics?
I'm just asking, I know you can get a dual core for under 400, but even the cheapest quad core and the rest of the system is going to be garbage grade..
"Do you have any evidence to suggest that viewing child porn (or, more specifically, cg child porn) increases crimes against children? "
that's a difficult question to answer, and I have no real access to any 'real' numbers, but 'CG porn' that 'is too hard to distinguish' from real child porn has 1 real advantage... Police can (theoretically) create a website designed to attract sex offenders, collect personal information, while providing them with CG porn, all without harming any children.
the question is if people are comfortable with the cops selling the child porn to criminals in order to someday bust them...
i know the that the 'law' that made even 'cartoon' porn illegal was struck down for being too broad (what if an artist from another country where 13 is the AoC drew cell art of a 13 year old, riding a pokemon? hrm? the law that got struck down would have made putting that art on the net) but if you can't tell CG from 'real' anymore it's still a tough question... the very popular game 'the sims' had 'nude' models in it's art data, the game engine, could even be altered to 'remove' blurring, and even to make characters be 'nude' the whole time, if 'the sims 4' or something has CG too realistic, it might be called child porn... (they have children too in the sims)
true the developers of the game engine can always have the 'nude' art be lower res, but then some website will come along with 'art packs' that are nude but full resolution... btw, by default the sims used blurring whenever the 'nude' art was used, but again to disable that was a quick hack of a single text file...
slashdot already supports UTF8 http://slashdot.jp/
i think the main problem is the database of 'old' articles and posts, can you imagine having to converting years and years of posts/articles etc to UTF8 ?
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/04/1412229 this is the first article i posted into from an account... and it's still up on slashdot, and the reason i can get to it, is i forgot the password on that acct, and it's set to my college e-mail from 1995.
"First, if money gets transferred to you then you are susceptible to being caught."
Runners, Mules, and Hostile governments (against 'developed nations') all can add a 'layer' of security Vs being caught. If you live in DC, go to a nice crack neighborhood find some 'hungry looking' kids tell them for $100 a month if they run 'notes' to the bank, and bring back the 'envelopes' while either wearing a disguise, so they can't identify you or whatever, you got yourself a nice bunch of runners who even if they get caught, couldn't identify you, and will only go to juvenile hall, where they'll get fed better than by mommy crack addict, they got no down side man no down side.
"since they're unknown there is no "reputational" factor that would make people more likely to pay based on the experience of others."
aliases, aliases, and fronts. what if they have a website, in iran, what if, other people have 'reported' getting their data back? on a highly page ranked forum? there is no reason why a (false) reputation can't be 'generated' to make people believe they'll get their data back. if you Do give them their data back, there is a possibility of 'repeat' sales... some people are retarded when it comes to security, they think mcaffe will protect them, then 3 months later, you hit them again, same scam... then again 3 months later, you just keep hitting that money tree til someone tells them to get ubuntu. If you're smart you give them 1 time fixes for the extortion. that's what they call a 'Protection racket.'
"the fact is that the professionals in the field are smarter than the criminals."
Seriously you believe this? have you any idea of how hard a polymorphic rootkit is to detect and remove from a windows system? I'll give you a hint, there are 0 programs for windows that can detect a polymorphic root kit by signatures or heuristics. you need a protected boot environment (removable media, linux, etc) to even detect the file changes of a polymorphic rootkit.
and then, only a system that can verify the integrity of system files can even come close to trying to remove or repair a system hit by a polymorphic rootkit. the easiest way is to reformat, from removable media. today's polymorphic rootkits infect the 'special partition' that oh so many OEMS create for reformatting windows using 'slipstreaming' technology. sad but true, but at least most OEMs let you create dvd-r 'media' from that partition, while it's still 'new'
criminals don't have to be 'smarter' than security professionals as long as Microsoft is the 'gatekeeper' putting in the locks.
it's like comparing the security of a 'padlock' you got in a carton of cereal here that microsoft gives us, to the bank vault that linux gives us here
no, they hire 12 year old kids to act as runners.
if a 12 year old runs up to the bank where the money was wired, has all the paperwork to get the money, and then runs through a series of streets faster than any cop could dream of running (even in a 3rd world country) to hand off the envelope to someone they never even saw, who manages the kids makes sure they're too dumb to check the envelopes they get at the bank etc, or perhaps the kids themselves are too afraid of being shot to not do exactly as told, etc...
seriously, they use kids for a lot of criminal activity, there is nothing illegal about a kid handing over a signed piece of paper and getting their money from the bank... there are 2 big advantages, even those countries where the US has forced laws on the books, kids generally are immune, after all they basically are in the US anyways, and the lawmakers of these countries know this, so they can play both sides by making laws only apply to adults..
so yeah, getting back bank wires, even trying to trace them to anyone 'but a child' is unlikely...
Fortunately, brute force attacks aren't necessary. If one can read the memory space used by the 'decryptor' one can find the key in seconds.
this is why movie content will 'never' be immune to cracking. in the case of this virus, the decryptor is sent to you over the internet, if you pay the money, but having a good backup scheme also defeats the need to brute force. having a good security setup, should negate even the need for backups to prevent infection in the first place.
so always have a competent hardened firewall device like smoothwall express, never download attachments (webmail helps a lot in this arena, along with a secure browser, and a phishing aware user/browser add-on) avoid windows like the plague, but if you must run windows make sure it can only get access to the actual ports of the programs you actually use on it. and never run as administrator, unless you really genuinely need to do something that can't be done as a normal user.
trusting a 'commercial' 'hardware' router to protect a windows machine is insane, even if you've replaced the firmware with some variant of linux, it's Still Not hardened like smoothwall...
fine if you have all linux/bsd machines, but windows has as much security as the emperor had new clothes, even with a $$$ security suite. sad but true, only 0% of tested windows security software could stop 50/50 2006/2007 known rootkit/malware post install... the best was i think being able to remove 7/50 and 13/50, if it had actually gotten installed. specialized tools were also tested, not just suites.
the point being, if you must run windows remember that a piece of paper stands more chance of surviving a nuclear blast at point blank than windows has of being de-rooted without a format.
"And how often do you roll through your backups? "
try 'never i use 1 time recordable optical media'
i realize some people use 'rewritable' media for backups, and have this 'roll over' issue, but the only part of my backup that does rollover is the redundant external HDD for 'critical' data that i don't trust entirely to a DVD media, even is i only buy grade 1 media...
I don't have a small data set either, I have over 1 TB of stuff on optical discs, but surprisingly only about 30 gigs that is important enough to go to a redundant hdd.
I've played with all kinda of image editors, and i do find the gimp easier than some interfaces.
but, Paint Shop Pro still, although i haven't used it since 1995, was cool and had tons of nifty features i liked back then. never enough to pay for it.
photoshop has tons of plug-ins though, many 'pros' live and die by their PS plug-ins... gimp windows can use some PS plugins, and there have been efforts to make FOSS gimp plugins that emulate PS plugins... but die hards will always find a reason not to use linux. but the types of laptops acer is pushing linux on aren't powerful graphic editors (no laptop nowadays can even do true 24-bit color, anyways) or gaming machines, they're portable word processors, maybe with dvd movie playback, possibly with wireless internet a portable web-browser.
all things linux can do, although the DVD playback tools I've tried are subpar, xvid/divx playback is great. and yeah. i was using dvds with no copy protection at all, video/audio sync issues grr.