Now, I'm perfectly willing to believe that PAM is crap, provided good evidence (which you didn't). I've written a PAM module myself, and didn't see anything majorly wrong with it. So, please tell me what exactly is wrong with PAM and why, as I'm very interested.
However, I strongly disagree with the closed source part. Why exactly should the authentication system a closed thing, and what's the good in it? Unix has a well designed mechanism - it's perfectly well known, the password database can be left readable, and still (provided passwords are good) it's safe. That's good design.
What exactly are those closed source modules, and what's that great about them?
How can we conceive a perfect being? We don't. The christian god is an arrogant, angry being that makes his followers suffer. He's self contradictory in parts, and in the old testament just plain horrific. So, no, don't agree.
"Descarte also wrote, that God would never decieve us". Yes, of course, according to the opinion of some guy that died 355 years ago, God would never deceive us. Never mind that I wonder where he got the authority to say what God will do and won't do (surely that's blasphemy), after all those years who knows what he actually said. Don't agree.
"God is Truth" - completely nonsensical religious statement. Ignored.
"And that is where all human suffering origniates from.". So, how is that not faith when you make your conclusions from a book that provides no proof or evidence?
"As society gets more secular and starts making judgements without God, we will become more miserable". Very debatable. God is simply a human invention. And why your God, anyway, and not Zeus?
In any case, I disagree. I'd say that suffering noticeably decreased in our less religious times. Since we stopped believing that we'd be cured if we prayed hard enough we actually made some very nice advances in medicine - which were of course made at the cost of having to deal with opposition, and having to do research by digging out corpses from graves.
I still think that whatever term is picked it should be easily understandable and have positive connotations attached, so that it should be much harder to corrupt. Maybe one of the words in the Jargon File could be adapted for the purpose.
I'd say that whatever it is, it has to be an existent and well understood word, and which can be translated. "Hacker" is used as is in Spain, where nobody has the slightest clue it means anything but what the media says. On the other hand, words such as "wizard" can be translated easily, and others like "guru" and "samurai" are known already and are associated with many of the desired meanings.
Myself, I'd say that the one I like the most is "wizard" because it's easy to understand and the Jargon File meaning is close enough.
God is simply a placeholder for what we don't understand. Some time ago lightning was thought to come from some dude sitting on top of a mountain and throwing thunderbolts from it. And there were corresponding deities for everything else people didn't understand, such as natural disasters, seasons, life and death.
These days lots of these have unsurprisingly vanished, since we don't believe anymore that there is winter because Demeter misses Persephone during those months.
I'm pretty sure that as soon as the remaining mysteries are explained the rest of the belief in gods will vanish in a puff of logic. After all, what use is some guy sitting somewhere in the clouds when things have a more reasonable explanation?
Why use a new word when perfectly good ones are already available?
For example: wizard, guru, samurai, maybe tinkerer indeed.
Whatever it is, I think the pick should be some word that's hard to turn into something negative. "hacker" was far too obscure. Some of those words also have the advantage of still having a positive meaning in non-english speaking countries too.
I couldn't care less if tomorrow the RIAA goes completely bankrupt, and Britney (or whoever is popular these days, I don't know) is found on the street gathering food from garbage cans. It's not like music will suddenly disappear in that case. There will still be modarchive.com and the Unreal Tournament soundtrack.
On the other hand, I'm very much interested in seeing nice companies like Moonpod prosper and make more nice stuff:-)
You know, the fact people decide to infringe some law doesn't mean they can't be selective. And no, it's not theft, dammit.
Re:Wish they'd end it already
on
Planet Simpson
·
· Score: 1
This is my opinion, nothing else, and I don't see anything very wrong with stating it. It is simply my opinion that some things should be ended while they're still good, instead of trying to milk them until they become a shadow of their former self.
Now, I'm not saying they should cancel it right now, just that I wish for a proper end instead of a long and painful descent into mediocrity.
Although an atheist, I don't discount the possibility of a creator. I just don't think of it in a religious sense. For example, who knows, perhaps life on Earth was seeded by an alien race, or heck, the whole universe turns out to be in a giant testing tube.
Now, the idea of an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient creator just doesn't make much sense to me, and definitely quite unnecessary in my day to day life. I see all the varying gods as the fallback for what people don't understand.
For example, long time ago lightning was obviously produced by Thor or Zeus. I mean, it's prefectly clear, those scary things that happen on the sky must come from somewhere. So obviously there's got some origin to it, and some dude sitting on a mountain and throwing lighting bolts makes perfect sense.
These days we're a bit more advanced, so we no longer need Zeus. Now God seems to be still necessary to some people because they think Man couldn't just have sprung out of nowhere. Obviously we're so incredibly cool and perfect that we just had to be designed by a superior being.
I don't see what's so great and wonderful about us though. We're weak, slow, fragile creatures. For any possible characteristic except intelligence there's an animal that's better than us. The only thing we can claim is having more brains, the rest is vastly surpassed by other species. Our programming isn't perfect either, as you say. We fall prey to tiny lumps of chemicals that mess up our bodies quite badly, take AIDS for instance. I'm also quite sure that if we suddenly disappeared, our niche would eventually filled by some other species.
BTW, please explain what did you mean by "flawlessly" and "program without any bugs". Like all other species we've been debugged by evolution. The buggy versions died, and we were the ones that were left. Actually, I think we could say we're a lot buggier than most other animals, since we're noticeably changed the way natural selection works for us, and hence are a lot more plagued than any other species by problems like bad vision, alergies, etc.
Re:Wish they'd end it already
on
Planet Simpson
·
· Score: 1
Well, Ranma was mostly like that too, many episodes were quite independent, and some were even moved around a bit without problems. The problem was that you could at some point start guessing very well how would things go.
I'd say the problem is just that it's hard to come up with new stuff in the same setting when there lots of things that were done already. At this point, I find most episodes rather unsurprising. Bart behaves as Bart and Homer as Homer, and seeing Homer strangle Bart for the 128th time just loses its interest.
Wish they'd end it already
on
Planet Simpson
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Reminds me why I like anime. Lots of it (not all though) is a really long story. Take Fullmetal Alchemist for instance, great series, and ends in 51 episodes, unlike some others that drag and drag until they become a bleak shadow of what they were before.
The long stories with no continuity, even when they are good tend to turn to crap sooner or later. In anime that'd be Ranma, Inuyasha, Dragon Ball Z (eew). The Simpsons seem to be dying a slower death, but I already don't bother watching it and read slashdot instead.
Actually, I saw my brother playing UFO (X-COM) yesterday. Myself I played a few DOS games on my laptop, like One Must Fall and Descent.
A good game is a good game, even if it's old. I'd play it too, if it was possible to get drivers for my hardware. There don't seem to be DOS drivers for my Terratec card. Suppose I could try dosemu though.
Just don't have to be root for anything. I'm posting this from KDE 3.4, installed in my home directory. Root permissions weren't required during the building or installation
You can mount devices as an user, if you specify the 'user' option in/etc/fstab. Now, granted, root permissions are still needed, mount is just suid. I think you might be able to get around that with SELinux though.
Burning CDs is indeed still a bit problematic.
Now, it's not like only Linux has these problems. Under Windows almost nothing at all works unless working as a Power User. Good luck with installing anything as a normal user, unless the software comes in a.zip.
It's nearly impossible to do anything useful as a normal user on Windows. Pretty much everybody seems to have to be a Power User to get anything done.
Say, why is it that I need special privileges to debug my own programs, made in VS.NET? Isn't it a VM? What exactly is what requires extra privileges here? Under Linux gdb doesn't need any as far as I can see.
Disposable batteries have their uses. Mainly in TV remotes and such, where batteries easily last a year or more. A rechargeable battery would never pay for itself in that situation.
Now, I'm sure glad I have rechargeable ones for my MP3 player, wireless headphones and laptop.
I wonder why motherboards don't just use a large capacitor instead of a battery, though. While they don't die often, it's often quite annoying to have to get a replacement.
Sure, you can chain up stuff like that. But it still makes no sense with no context. Understanding "sky blue eyes" requires understanding "sky", "blue" and "eyes".
For instance, take "sky blue". I'd say this could be interpreted as "the same kind of blue as the sky". But that doesn't lead anywhere if you're dealing with this entity that never seen the sky, and doesn't have a concept of vision to begin with.
Attempting to ignore "sky" probably won't work much better. "blue" can be explained as a wavelength, but that's again useless to something that still won't understand what's the deal with all that strange stuff we keep talking about and that doesn't make any sense in its world.
An additional problem is that we have a concept of blue because we have receptors for it, not because that part of the spectrum is any more special than the surrounding ones. For example, AFAIK, there's no reason why a creature that would perceive the range from 440 to 655 nm as shades of one unique color couldn't exist. For us that range includes blue, cyan and green, but that doesn't really mean there's something other than our eyes and brain that makes it be that way.
Probably there's no need to go to such a low level, though.
There's an interesting theory of that we're made from levels, and that it could be possible to make life from middle level blocks if they're made well enough.
For instance. We could simulate a human by simulating atoms. But if we could come up with a good enough simulation of cells, even if they weren't made of virtual atoms, the end result would be just as good.
I think of it a bit like microprocessors. AMD and VIA don't need to completely emulate Intel, they only need to make it externally similar enough. Whatever happens inside doesn't really matter.
Not trolling, I'd simply like an explanation. Say "Tokyo is the capital of Japan". That's a nice piece of data, but is it really of any use? I don't think you can bootstrap much from stuff like that.
To begin with, "foo is the capital of bar" is essentially an empty statement to something that doesn't know what's a capital. Can you really get very far starting from say, "Cogito ergo sum", and chaining up stuff from there?
For example, let's take this CYC thing. You feed it an enormous database of knowledge. Great, now what would it do with it? I don't see how it could do anything useful.
For example, let's try with "the sky is blue". To a human, that's obvious. Try to explain it to something that has no concept of space or color. In fact, I don't think you can even explain such a thing as color to somebody who doesn't perceive at least part of it.
I'm fairly sure of that to be able to understand something like this you need a starting point to extrapolate from. For instance, I can't imagine very well what a tetrachromat sees, but I can kind of understand the idea. The same way people with a defective vision should be able to understand that normal vision is kind of like their, except that there is a difference between this gray color people sometimes call "red" and sometimes "green" even if they can't see any.
Now, I haven't the faintest idea of how to explain the idea of color to somebody who has been blind since birth.
Perhaps something intelligent can indeed come out of something that only gets data through a text interface. But how would you relate to it? I mean, I have a great difficulty with understanding my cat a lot of the time, and we share the same world. Such a disembodied intelligence couldn't relate to me at all.
How could you make sense from a completely alien intelligence? One that doesn't even begin to understand the world you live in, the whole concept of need and emotion?
I'm pretty sure that anything that looks even remotely like intelligence will never be achieved by a mechanism that isn't useful for itself. Intelligence has one reason to exist, survival, and at least our concept of it has to be linked to the environment.
Imagine you were born a brain in a vat: blind, deaf, mute, lacking all ways of sensing the environment except a text interface somehow connected to your brain. Does somebody really believe that given such terrible limitations it's possible to make an entity that can somehow relate to a human and make sense? The whole concept of a surronding 3D environment would make absolutely no sense to it.
I think it doesn't matter how much stuff you feed to CYC, it will never be able to understand it. How could it even understand such things as the different colors, the whole concepts of sound, space, movement, pain if it's not able to feel them? These things are impossible to explain to somebody who doesn't have at least some way of perceiving at least part of them.
Here I think that Steve Grand (the guy who made the Creatures games) has a good point here. To make an artificial being you'd need to start from the low level, so that complex behavior can emerge, and provide a proper environment.
Eew. It's annoying. I only tried it for a few minutes, and I already have a long list of things I don't like about it:
It always scrolls when you move the mouse, and not just when you get close to an edge. That makes it rather hard to move to a specific point.
It's extremely non-standard. It took me a few seconds to figure out how to go back.
It noticeably raises my laptop's CPU use high which makes it turn on the fan.
The load delay is noticeable on a 512K ADSL, it'd be really annoying on a modem.
I tried the demo reel and clicked the play button. Nothing happens for a second or two, then a jumpy video starts. Also not that impressive.
I think I can resume my complaint as the following: When I'm searching for info online, I don't like to waste time, increase my laptop's battery usage and the produced noise, and have figure out whatever unique navigation system you made up just so that you can demonstrate to me how clever you are at using Flash.
Now, by all means, link tons of flash demo from the site, but I hate having all of it done that way.
Slashdot Mirror
huh?
Now, I'm perfectly willing to believe that PAM is crap, provided good evidence (which you didn't). I've written a PAM module myself, and didn't see anything majorly wrong with it. So, please tell me what exactly is wrong with PAM and why, as I'm very interested.
However, I strongly disagree with the closed source part. Why exactly should the authentication system a closed thing, and what's the good in it? Unix has a well designed mechanism - it's perfectly well known, the password database can be left readable, and still (provided passwords are good) it's safe. That's good design.
What exactly are those closed source modules, and what's that great about them?
PAM has been available on Linux for ages. And it doesn't look as a very complicated thing either.
Just curious, have there been problems with the adoption of PAM, or it just wasn't a priority?
Doesn't follow. Still lots of faith in that post. Let's take a look at it:
Rene Descartes says we're imperfect. Completely agreed.
How can we conceive a perfect being? We don't. The christian god is an arrogant, angry being that makes his followers suffer. He's self contradictory in parts, and in the old testament just plain horrific. So, no, don't agree.
"Descarte also wrote, that God would never decieve us". Yes, of course, according to the opinion of some guy that died 355 years ago, God would never deceive us. Never mind that I wonder where he got the authority to say what God will do and won't do (surely that's blasphemy), after all those years who knows what he actually said. Don't agree.
"God is Truth" - completely nonsensical religious statement. Ignored.
"And that is where all human suffering origniates from.". So, how is that not faith when you make your conclusions from a book that provides no proof or evidence?
"As society gets more secular and starts making judgements without God, we will become more miserable". Very debatable. God is simply a human invention. And why your God, anyway, and not Zeus?
In any case, I disagree. I'd say that suffering noticeably decreased in our less religious times. Since we stopped believing that we'd be cured if we prayed hard enough we actually made some very nice advances in medicine - which were of course made at the cost of having to deal with opposition, and having to do research by digging out corpses from graves.
Yup, I'm quite aware of it.
I still think that whatever term is picked it should be easily understandable and have positive connotations attached, so that it should be much harder to corrupt. Maybe one of the words in the Jargon File could be adapted for the purpose.
I'd say that whatever it is, it has to be an existent and well understood word, and which can be translated. "Hacker" is used as is in Spain, where nobody has the slightest clue it means anything but what the media says. On the other hand, words such as "wizard" can be translated easily, and others like "guru" and "samurai" are known already and are associated with many of the desired meanings.
Myself, I'd say that the one I like the most is "wizard" because it's easy to understand and the Jargon File meaning is close enough.
Nonsense.
God is simply a placeholder for what we don't understand. Some time ago lightning was thought to come from some dude sitting on top of a mountain and throwing thunderbolts from it. And there were corresponding deities for everything else people didn't understand, such as natural disasters, seasons, life and death.
These days lots of these have unsurprisingly vanished, since we don't believe anymore that there is winter because Demeter misses Persephone during those months.
I'm pretty sure that as soon as the remaining mysteries are explained the rest of the belief in gods will vanish in a puff of logic. After all, what use is some guy sitting somewhere in the clouds when things have a more reasonable explanation?
Why use a new word when perfectly good ones are already available?
For example: wizard, guru, samurai, maybe tinkerer indeed.
Whatever it is, I think the pick should be some word that's hard to turn into something negative. "hacker" was far too obscure. Some of those words also have the advantage of still having a positive meaning in non-english speaking countries too.
Eh, don't overgeneralize, please.
:-)
I couldn't care less if tomorrow the RIAA goes completely bankrupt, and Britney (or whoever is popular these days, I don't know) is found on the street gathering food from garbage cans. It's not like music will suddenly disappear in that case. There will still be modarchive.com and the Unreal Tournament soundtrack.
On the other hand, I'm very much interested in seeing nice companies like Moonpod prosper and make more nice stuff
You know, the fact people decide to infringe some law doesn't mean they can't be selective. And no, it's not theft, dammit.
This is my opinion, nothing else, and I don't see anything very wrong with stating it. It is simply my opinion that some things should be ended while they're still good, instead of trying to milk them until they become a shadow of their former self.
Now, I'm not saying they should cancel it right now, just that I wish for a proper end instead of a long and painful descent into mediocrity.
Although an atheist, I don't discount the possibility of a creator. I just don't think of it in a religious sense. For example, who knows, perhaps life on Earth was seeded by an alien race, or heck, the whole universe turns out to be in a giant testing tube.
Now, the idea of an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient creator just doesn't make much sense to me, and definitely quite unnecessary in my day to day life. I see all the varying gods as the fallback for what people don't understand.
For example, long time ago lightning was obviously produced by Thor or Zeus. I mean, it's prefectly clear, those scary things that happen on the sky must come from somewhere. So obviously there's got some origin to it, and some dude sitting on a mountain and throwing lighting bolts makes perfect sense.
These days we're a bit more advanced, so we no longer need Zeus. Now God seems to be still necessary to some people because they think Man couldn't just have sprung out of nowhere. Obviously we're so incredibly cool and perfect that we just had to be designed by a superior being.
I don't see what's so great and wonderful about us though. We're weak, slow, fragile creatures. For any possible characteristic except intelligence there's an animal that's better than us. The only thing we can claim is having more brains, the rest is vastly surpassed by other species. Our programming isn't perfect either, as you say. We fall prey to tiny lumps of chemicals that mess up our bodies quite badly, take AIDS for instance. I'm also quite sure that if we suddenly disappeared, our niche would eventually filled by some other species.
BTW, please explain what did you mean by "flawlessly" and "program without any bugs". Like all other species we've been debugged by evolution. The buggy versions died, and we were the ones that were left. Actually, I think we could say we're a lot buggier than most other animals, since we're noticeably changed the way natural selection works for us, and hence are a lot more plagued than any other species by problems like bad vision, alergies, etc.
Well, Ranma was mostly like that too, many episodes were quite independent, and some were even moved around a bit without problems. The problem was that you could at some point start guessing very well how would things go.
I'd say the problem is just that it's hard to come up with new stuff in the same setting when there lots of things that were done already. At this point, I find most episodes rather unsurprising. Bart behaves as Bart and Homer as Homer, and seeing Homer strangle Bart for the 128th time just loses its interest.
Reminds me why I like anime. Lots of it (not all though) is a really long story. Take Fullmetal Alchemist for instance, great series, and ends in 51 episodes, unlike some others that drag and drag until they become a bleak shadow of what they were before.
The long stories with no continuity, even when they are good tend to turn to crap sooner or later. In anime that'd be Ranma, Inuyasha, Dragon Ball Z (eew). The Simpsons seem to be dying a slower death, but I already don't bother watching it and read slashdot instead.
Hah, much harder.
What, haven't you heard? There are cracks to disable Steam already. The only people bothered by it are those who are honest and play it as delivered.
Sad times we live in, when pirated copies often are a lot more convenient to play than the retail ones.
Actually, I saw my brother playing UFO (X-COM) yesterday. Myself I played a few DOS games on my laptop, like One Must Fall and Descent.
A good game is a good game, even if it's old. I'd play it too, if it was possible to get drivers for my hardware. There don't seem to be DOS drivers for my Terratec card. Suppose I could try dosemu though.
This is correct in part, but not completely.
/etc/fstab. Now, granted, root permissions are still needed, mount is just suid. I think you might be able to get around that with SELinux though.
.zip.
Just don't have to be root for anything. I'm posting this from KDE 3.4, installed in my home directory. Root permissions weren't required during the building or installation
You can mount devices as an user, if you specify the 'user' option in
Burning CDs is indeed still a bit problematic.
Now, it's not like only Linux has these problems. Under Windows almost nothing at all works unless working as a Power User. Good luck with installing anything as a normal user, unless the software comes in a
It's nearly impossible to do anything useful as a normal user on Windows. Pretty much everybody seems to have to be a Power User to get anything done.
.NET? Isn't it a VM? What exactly is what requires extra privileges here? Under Linux gdb doesn't need any as far as I can see.
Say, why is it that I need special privileges to debug my own programs, made in VS
Hmm, good point there. I stand corrected.
Um, in the latest AMD CPUs, it's the CPU that has the memory controller. So, no, there won't be contention there.
Disposable batteries have their uses. Mainly in TV remotes and such, where batteries easily last a year or more. A rechargeable battery would never pay for itself in that situation.
Now, I'm sure glad I have rechargeable ones for my MP3 player, wireless headphones and laptop.
I wonder why motherboards don't just use a large capacitor instead of a battery, though. While they don't die often, it's often quite annoying to have to get a replacement.
Or Draconix/Dragonix, I think it sounds a bit better.
But indeed, "Mandriva" just sounds weird.
I'm not sure that will result in anything useful.
Sure, you can chain up stuff like that. But it still makes no sense with no context. Understanding "sky blue eyes" requires understanding "sky", "blue" and "eyes".
For instance, take "sky blue". I'd say this could be interpreted as "the same kind of blue as the sky". But that doesn't lead anywhere if you're dealing with this entity that never seen the sky, and doesn't have a concept of vision to begin with.
Attempting to ignore "sky" probably won't work much better. "blue" can be explained as a wavelength, but that's again useless to something that still won't understand what's the deal with all that strange stuff we keep talking about and that doesn't make any sense in its world.
An additional problem is that we have a concept of blue because we have receptors for it, not because that part of the spectrum is any more special than the surrounding ones. For example, AFAIK, there's no reason why a creature that would perceive the range from 440 to 655 nm as shades of one unique color couldn't exist. For us that range includes blue, cyan and green, but that doesn't really mean there's something other than our eyes and brain that makes it be that way.
Probably there's no need to go to such a low level, though.
There's an interesting theory of that we're made from levels, and that it could be possible to make life from middle level blocks if they're made well enough.
For instance. We could simulate a human by simulating atoms. But if we could come up with a good enough simulation of cells, even if they weren't made of virtual atoms, the end result would be just as good.
I think of it a bit like microprocessors. AMD and VIA don't need to completely emulate Intel, they only need to make it externally similar enough. Whatever happens inside doesn't really matter.
Great, and the point of all that is?
Not trolling, I'd simply like an explanation. Say "Tokyo is the capital of Japan". That's a nice piece of data, but is it really of any use? I don't think you can bootstrap much from stuff like that.
To begin with, "foo is the capital of bar" is essentially an empty statement to something that doesn't know what's a capital. Can you really get very far starting from say, "Cogito ergo sum", and chaining up stuff from there?
I think you're missing my point here a bit.
For example, let's take this CYC thing. You feed it an enormous database of knowledge. Great, now what would it do with it? I don't see how it could do anything useful.
For example, let's try with "the sky is blue". To a human, that's obvious. Try to explain it to something that has no concept of space or color. In fact, I don't think you can even explain such a thing as color to somebody who doesn't perceive at least part of it.
I'm fairly sure of that to be able to understand something like this you need a starting point to extrapolate from. For instance, I can't imagine very well what a tetrachromat sees, but I can kind of understand the idea. The same way people with a defective vision should be able to understand that normal vision is kind of like their, except that there is a difference between this gray color people sometimes call "red" and sometimes "green" even if they can't see any.
Now, I haven't the faintest idea of how to explain the idea of color to somebody who has been blind since birth.
Perhaps something intelligent can indeed come out of something that only gets data through a text interface. But how would you relate to it? I mean, I have a great difficulty with understanding my cat a lot of the time, and we share the same world. Such a disembodied intelligence couldn't relate to me at all.
How could you make sense from a completely alien intelligence? One that doesn't even begin to understand the world you live in, the whole concept of need and emotion?
IMNSHO, such things lead absolutely nowhere.
I'm pretty sure that anything that looks even remotely like intelligence will never be achieved by a mechanism that isn't useful for itself. Intelligence has one reason to exist, survival, and at least our concept of it has to be linked to the environment.
Imagine you were born a brain in a vat: blind, deaf, mute, lacking all ways of sensing the environment except a text interface somehow connected to your brain. Does somebody really believe that given such terrible limitations it's possible to make an entity that can somehow relate to a human and make sense? The whole concept of a surronding 3D environment would make absolutely no sense to it.
I think it doesn't matter how much stuff you feed to CYC, it will never be able to understand it. How could it even understand such things as the different colors, the whole concepts of sound, space, movement, pain if it's not able to feel them? These things are impossible to explain to somebody who doesn't have at least some way of perceiving at least part of them.
Here I think that Steve Grand (the guy who made the Creatures games) has a good point here. To make an artificial being you'd need to start from the low level, so that complex behavior can emerge, and provide a proper environment.
I think I can resume my complaint as the following: When I'm searching for info online, I don't like to waste time, increase my laptop's battery usage and the produced noise, and have figure out whatever unique navigation system you made up just so that you can demonstrate to me how clever you are at using Flash.
Now, by all means, link tons of flash demo from the site, but I hate having all of it done that way.