I always eat like a starving wolf (always have, ever since I was a little kid -- that's how I best enjoy my food!), and at 52 I'm still as skinny as I was in college. People are always asking me how I stay so thin. Well, this is it:
Lack of balanced protein and/or lack of fat makes you FEEL HUNGRY, and sugars early in the day make the liver "lazy" ("gimme easy food, not food I have to work to process!") and gives you the munchies. -- My diet is based around red meat (chicken, fish, and vegetable proteins do NOT have the right balance of amino acids to control your appetite), with normal amounts of fat (no particular effort made to trim it down). I don't eat carbs before noon, unless liberally lathered with grease. (Incidentally my cholesterol is way *down* there.) This serves to keep my appetite under control over the long haul, and prevents having the munchies during the day. -- I don't limit sweets otherwise, since I hit a natural limit of how much "tastes good" fairly quick. I suspect as a side effect, I do not get "sugar highs" even if I eat a lot of sugar at once.
Just because your stomach is empty does NOT necessarily mean you need to ingest more calories. Learn to feel when you need energy, don't just assume your stomach knows anything about it. -- My stomach does NOT control when I eat. It can growl all it likes, but if the rest of my body doesn't say it needs food TOO, the stomach will be ignored (or at best placated with a couple crackers or a piece of jerky); it has learned to produce a couple token growls, then shuts up and stops bothering me. If you don't give in every time you feel the slightest hunger, your stomach too can learn this self-control.
Don't stuff yourself. I feel no need to "clean my plate". That's what the fridge is for -- storing leftovers. One extra bite at every meal adds up. And if you eat out a lot, remember that both fast-food joints and 5-star restaurants have doggie-bags. Take it home, get another meal out of it, instead of shoveling down food you don't really want.
Listen to your body when it is "bored" and wants to move around, or needs to sleep. The "twitchies" you get after a marathon coding session are a major symptom of this physical boredom and sleep deprivation (the two tend to go hand in hand). -- Find something physical to DO for an hour or so every day, even if it's just walking around the block. And try to sleep at *night* (preferably by 10pm) -- that helps keep the rest of the system in sync, so your appetite is easier to control.
Take note of the metabolic slowdown that happens around age 30. If you keep eating as much as you did when you were 20, you WILL get fat.
If your lifestyle *becomes more sedentary* thanks to computer games or ANY "sit in one place" behaviour, you WILL get fat. I know a lot of formerly-active, formerly-thin people (mostly middle-aged guys) who got addicted to some computer game, or to the internet, or who got a desk job after being a field rep, and promptly put on weight, simply because now they sit there and snack instead of moving around, and they eat just because their body is bored. -- I can tell when a certain friend's computer is broken, because he loses weight. -- TV never had quite as much of an effect, probably because what interests most people is limited to certain hours and certain days, so sitting in front of the TV tends to be self-limiting. Conversely, you can play WoW 24 hours a day if you wish. -- I still play a lot of DOOM, and muck about online a lot, but I DON'T snack while I'm on the computer. And I do stuff besides just sit here all day.
So... that's it. Nothing special about my lifestyle, no particular diets, no deprivation, no exercise regimen (tho I do a couple hours of physical work every day, it's nothing strenuous, mainly just a lot of walking). Do likewise, and chances are you'll return to your teenage weight, too. It worked for generations of your forefathers, who never heard of all this low-fat, low-protein "healthy eating" that's been packing weight on Americans for the past two decades.
I've seen TinyURL links longer than 5 characters, but that's a good thought regardless -- the key to the link could be hidden in an innocuous sentence (first letter of first word, 2nd letter of 2nd word, etc.) and even if someone figured THAT out, chances are slim to none that TinyURL would come to mind as what it belonged to. After all, what does "brlfq" mean to you?!:)
I've seen nonsense posts scattered about Usenet that one wonders if are steg'd data and not just the crapflooding they appear to be. Of course there's no real way to test that notion; as you say, Usenet is great for hiding stuff in plain sight, with at best a very tenuous backtrail to the poster, and none at all to the receiver. Good system if you need to get the same data to a large network of otherwise-unconnected cells.
BTW, tinyurl/brlfq actually goes somewhere legit. I wonder what else one could find by brute-force sequential TinyURLs?:)
True, but, I'm thinking that it's probably not a good idea to store incriminating files WITH an email account... obscure the trail by one step, by using an anonymous FTP that no one knows exists but you and your gang.
Also, this lets others access it (if you give them the link and login) without having to go through YOUR email account.
Or just unplug your hard drive and tell 'em the laptop is broken.
Obscurity may not be a good policy in the long haul, but as you note, most non-experts can't see past it.
But I agree, Komrade -- this is all getting WAY too invasive. Yeah, we have a right and duty to keep our borders secure FROM FOREIGN INVADERS. This should not translate to harrassing OUR OWN CITIZENS just because they chose to leave and re-enter their own country.
FDISK/MBR is all fine and good if your virus merely resides in the MBR sector, and didn't alter the MBR code itself, and if your virus didn't encrypt the drive (which some did, back in the day). If it did, bye-bye data.
I first saw BIOS-based MBR protection in BIOS code dated 1992 (on a 486 motherboard). It was common enough back then, but fell out of favour during the early Win32 era, probably because it would scream and halt the system when Win9x went to rewrite the MBR (which it does occasionally for no reason that I know of).
I've noticed it's made a comeback in the past few years, and this is a good thing -- it may drive some users crazy, but it's good to HAVE it there if you want to use it.
You don't need TC for this. All you need is a BIOS-level program *that the user can turn on and off as they please*, like the old ChipAway boot sector protection that was built into many 486-era BIOSs.
Remember Chip-Away, the old BIOS-based boot sector protection that was commonly seen on 486-era machines? It screamed bloody murder and halted the system any time ANYTHING tried to alter the boot code or MBR. I'm wondering if it's time to return to using such protection.
Since FProt is now dropping their DOS-based version, AFAIK there are no longer any AV products that can run with a minimal OS, such as a DOS floppy boot. All AVs that I know of require a fullblown OS, thus minimally either installed on the suspect system (not a good idea) or run from a Live CD, which you may not have the luxury of preparing on short notice (or may have a system that won't boot from CD -- I still see 'em once in a while).
So... I think we'll see a major upswing in BSV and suchlike, since our tools for detecting them are too limited.
"one thing that worries me the most - there is no way you can know if they MODIFIED your drives! added spyware. whatever."
Ugh. That's a very good point. If I were a paranoid country, I would sneak phonehome-ware onto each and every laptop that entered my borders. And with the sophisticated rootkits etc. now available, how would the average geek spot it, let alone the average non-geek??
If I wanted to get information across the border without being noticed, I'd put it on an FTP site and email the link and login info to myself, to a webmail account that I can access anywhere merely by memorizing the username and password. No need to even have the POP3 access info on the laptop, let alone the "incriminating data".
In fact if transporting data is your only reason for entering the country, just upload the nefarious data to one of the free FTP sites, and email the link to your partners-in-crime. Why risk being caught at the border??
As someone mentioned -- the Salt Flats. In other odd structures, if you scroll NW to Idaho, that big black blotch is the famous lava outcropping.
One day I was wandering thru some forested area not "far" north of there, and came across images of a forest fire in progress!
Dunno about now (being too lazy to look) but an oddity last year re Devil's Lake, North Dakota: If you were zoomed well out, you got summer images -- green fields and open water. But if you zoomed in, you got winter -- all snow covered, with the lake totally iced up. Does Google own a time machine we don't know about?:)
Contrary to myth, they didn't use stone tablets and chisels back then -- cuz if you look a bit to the left of that Sphinx, you'll see an LED-sign ad for Motorola's booth at NetWorld+Interop.
It's been a long time since I've seen Gasoline Alley (1960s, probably!) and it may have changed significantly since then. And yeah, sometimes it tried to be funny. So did lots of serials (better word for G.A., I agree) and soaps. I think whether it "succeeded" or not depends on whether you're of the mindset that likes G.A. and suchlike in the first place. I know people who thought Peyton Place was hilarious.
And maybe we're saying the same thing but using different terms, like the neverending debate over the line between SF and fantasy and speculative fiction and which ought to be called what... glah!
As it happens, Rex Morgan M.D. was the other one I was trying to think of!! Refused to come to mind when I was typing.
I read the patent abstracts. It appears that what is being patented isn't the game, but rather the method of delivering *advertising* to the game interface.
[blink] How is this fundamentally different from what websites with games AND ad banners have been doing since at least 1996??
I had similar thoughts. If Warner moves to all Blu-Ray, I won't be buying any more Warner movies (and I've already bought plenty), because I have no use for anything that's not a standard ordinary DVD that I can play on the computer. I'm not about to buy new equipment just to view their content (especially when both the equipment and the discs are still more expensive than I care to spend).
I *prefer* buying a reasonably-priced DVD to downloading it (even when the download is "free"). But if they're taking away my choice to purchase -- well, we all know what the next step is.
Since January 2006, behavior-detection officers have referred about 70,000 people for secondary
screening, Maccario said. Of those, about 600 to 700 were arrested on a variety of charges, including possession of drugs, weapons violations and outstanding warrants.
How is ONE PERCENT a big success??
I'd bet that if they screened 70,000 people *completely* at random, they'd have roughly the same results -- about 1% would prove arrestable for some violation or other.
Almost always, when I do need an update, I have to fetch it by way of some antiquated system and whatever browser will run from a CD. I don't always have WinXP and some necessary interface app available.
So what they're telling me, is that before I can download a necessary fix, I need to find a newish machine, install Win2K/XP/V on it, download Silverlight, install it, THEN come back and fetch the download that I need to fix some OTHER machine which presently refuses to access the net at all.
Sounds like same principle, different universe. Watching stuff change over the course of 25 years (it went on that long) was both fascinating and disturbing.
Forgot to mention, this isn't the only dream-alt-universe I've "been to". The other one (which was also semi-regular for a couple decades and has also faded out, tho in this case I don't know why) had vague parallels to Here-and-Now, and took place in western North America -- tho it bore little resemblence to any N.A. that I knew. Frex, Nevada was forested, SoCal was mainly a sand desert, and Los Angeles didn't exist except as a collection of a dozen dockside shacks right at the Mexican border (which was a bit further north than in Mundania). Oddly enough, construction and housing developments overtaking older rural areas began being a problem there about 10 years before it happened in Mundania.
Funny thing, these all started long before I began reading SF/F.
Necessity and poverty drive the most practical inventions:) The outcome actually struck me as very professionally done... and that it worked so well for so long vouches for that.
I imagine if a person wanted to design ducted cooling, the noise could be significantly reduced. But if you're not living next to it, I don't suppose it matters!
My DOOM dreams are the other way around: movement is just like Real Life, but the environment is usually 100% DOOM, including the not-quite-real-3D and the limited colour palatte!
"So in the dual party system (US), the systems leans towards statis (classical conservative). In multiparty systems (most of the rest of the world), the bias is towards radicalism."
I've observed this too (thanks for putting it in a nutshell). Coalitions of minor parties, all of them with radical agendas, can beat out a major party with moderate policies, simply because 10 nuts voting as a block can outvote 5 moderates voting as a block. I don't find tyrannies of minorities to be progress over tyranny of the majority.
I think the real problem is that democracy doesn't scale. Maybe we need smaller countries.:/
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I always eat like a starving wolf (always have, ever since I was a little kid -- that's how I best enjoy my food!), and at 52 I'm still as skinny as I was in college. People are always asking me how I stay so thin. Well, this is it:
Lack of balanced protein and/or lack of fat makes you FEEL HUNGRY, and sugars early in the day make the liver "lazy" ("gimme easy food, not food I have to work to process!") and gives you the munchies. -- My diet is based around red meat (chicken, fish, and vegetable proteins do NOT have the right balance of amino acids to control your appetite), with normal amounts of fat (no particular effort made to trim it down). I don't eat carbs before noon, unless liberally lathered with grease. (Incidentally my cholesterol is way *down* there.) This serves to keep my appetite under control over the long haul, and prevents having the munchies during the day. -- I don't limit sweets otherwise, since I hit a natural limit of how much "tastes good" fairly quick. I suspect as a side effect, I do not get "sugar highs" even if I eat a lot of sugar at once.
Just because your stomach is empty does NOT necessarily mean you need to ingest more calories. Learn to feel when you need energy, don't just assume your stomach knows anything about it. -- My stomach does NOT control when I eat. It can growl all it likes, but if the rest of my body doesn't say it needs food TOO, the stomach will be ignored (or at best placated with a couple crackers or a piece of jerky); it has learned to produce a couple token growls, then shuts up and stops bothering me. If you don't give in every time you feel the slightest hunger, your stomach too can learn this self-control.
Don't stuff yourself. I feel no need to "clean my plate". That's what the fridge is for -- storing leftovers. One extra bite at every meal adds up. And if you eat out a lot, remember that both fast-food joints and 5-star restaurants have doggie-bags. Take it home, get another meal out of it, instead of shoveling down food you don't really want.
Listen to your body when it is "bored" and wants to move around, or needs to sleep. The "twitchies" you get after a marathon coding session are a major symptom of this physical boredom and sleep deprivation (the two tend to go hand in hand). -- Find something physical to DO for an hour or so every day, even if it's just walking around the block. And try to sleep at *night* (preferably by 10pm) -- that helps keep the rest of the system in sync, so your appetite is easier to control.
Take note of the metabolic slowdown that happens around age 30. If you keep eating as much as you did when you were 20, you WILL get fat.
If your lifestyle *becomes more sedentary* thanks to computer games or ANY "sit in one place" behaviour, you WILL get fat. I know a lot of formerly-active, formerly-thin people (mostly middle-aged guys) who got addicted to some computer game, or to the internet, or who got a desk job after being a field rep, and promptly put on weight, simply because now they sit there and snack instead of moving around, and they eat just because their body is bored. -- I can tell when a certain friend's computer is broken, because he loses weight. -- TV never had quite as much of an effect, probably because what interests most people is limited to certain hours and certain days, so sitting in front of the TV tends to be self-limiting. Conversely, you can play WoW 24 hours a day if you wish. -- I still play a lot of DOOM, and muck about online a lot, but I DON'T snack while I'm on the computer. And I do stuff besides just sit here all day.
So... that's it. Nothing special about my lifestyle, no particular diets, no deprivation, no exercise regimen (tho I do a couple hours of physical work every day, it's nothing strenuous, mainly just a lot of walking). Do likewise, and chances are you'll return to your teenage weight, too. It worked for generations of your forefathers, who never heard of all this low-fat, low-protein "healthy eating" that's been packing weight on Americans for the past two decades.
I've seen TinyURL links longer than 5 characters, but that's a good thought regardless -- the key to the link could be hidden in an innocuous sentence (first letter of first word, 2nd letter of 2nd word, etc.) and even if someone figured THAT out, chances are slim to none that TinyURL would come to mind as what it belonged to. After all, what does "brlfq" mean to you?! :)
:)
I've seen nonsense posts scattered about Usenet that one wonders if are steg'd data and not just the crapflooding they appear to be. Of course there's no real way to test that notion; as you say, Usenet is great for hiding stuff in plain sight, with at best a very tenuous backtrail to the poster, and none at all to the receiver. Good system if you need to get the same data to a large network of otherwise-unconnected cells.
BTW, tinyurl/brlfq actually goes somewhere legit. I wonder what else one could find by brute-force sequential TinyURLs?
True, but, I'm thinking that it's probably not a good idea to store incriminating files WITH an email account... obscure the trail by one step, by using an anonymous FTP that no one knows exists but you and your gang.
Also, this lets others access it (if you give them the link and login) without having to go through YOUR email account.
Or just unplug your hard drive and tell 'em the laptop is broken.
Obscurity may not be a good policy in the long haul, but as you note, most non-experts can't see past it.
But I agree, Komrade -- this is all getting WAY too invasive. Yeah, we have a right and duty to keep our borders secure FROM FOREIGN INVADERS. This should not translate to harrassing OUR OWN CITIZENS just because they chose to leave and re-enter their own country.
FDISK /MBR is all fine and good if your virus merely resides in the MBR sector, and didn't alter the MBR code itself, and if your virus didn't encrypt the drive (which some did, back in the day). If it did, bye-bye data.
I first saw BIOS-based MBR protection in BIOS code dated 1992 (on a 486 motherboard). It was common enough back then, but fell out of favour during the early Win32 era, probably because it would scream and halt the system when Win9x went to rewrite the MBR (which it does occasionally for no reason that I know of).
I've noticed it's made a comeback in the past few years, and this is a good thing -- it may drive some users crazy, but it's good to HAVE it there if you want to use it.
You don't need TC for this. All you need is a BIOS-level program *that the user can turn on and off as they please*, like the old ChipAway boot sector protection that was built into many 486-era BIOSs.
Remember Chip-Away, the old BIOS-based boot sector protection that was commonly seen on 486-era machines? It screamed bloody murder and halted the system any time ANYTHING tried to alter the boot code or MBR. I'm wondering if it's time to return to using such protection.
Since FProt is now dropping their DOS-based version, AFAIK there are no longer any AV products that can run with a minimal OS, such as a DOS floppy boot. All AVs that I know of require a fullblown OS, thus minimally either installed on the suspect system (not a good idea) or run from a Live CD, which you may not have the luxury of preparing on short notice (or may have a system that won't boot from CD -- I still see 'em once in a while).
So... I think we'll see a major upswing in BSV and suchlike, since our tools for detecting them are too limited.
"one thing that worries me the most - there is no way you can know if they MODIFIED your drives! added spyware. whatever."
Ugh. That's a very good point. If I were a paranoid country, I would sneak phonehome-ware onto each and every laptop that entered my borders. And with the sophisticated rootkits etc. now available, how would the average geek spot it, let alone the average non-geek??
If I wanted to get information across the border without being noticed, I'd put it on an FTP site and email the link and login info to myself, to a webmail account that I can access anywhere merely by memorizing the username and password. No need to even have the POP3 access info on the laptop, let alone the "incriminating data".
In fact if transporting data is your only reason for entering the country, just upload the nefarious data to one of the free FTP sites, and email the link to your partners-in-crime. Why risk being caught at the border??
As someone mentioned -- the Salt Flats. In other odd structures, if you scroll NW to Idaho, that big black blotch is the famous lava outcropping.
:)
One day I was wandering thru some forested area not "far" north of there, and came across images of a forest fire in progress!
Dunno about now (being too lazy to look) but an oddity last year re Devil's Lake, North Dakota: If you were zoomed well out, you got summer images -- green fields and open water. But if you zoomed in, you got winter -- all snow covered, with the lake totally iced up. Does Google own a time machine we don't know about?
Contrary to myth, they didn't use stone tablets and chisels back then -- cuz if you look a bit to the left of that Sphinx, you'll see an LED-sign ad for Motorola's booth at NetWorld+Interop.
It's been a long time since I've seen Gasoline Alley (1960s, probably!) and it may have changed significantly since then. And yeah, sometimes it tried to be funny. So did lots of serials (better word for G.A., I agree) and soaps. I think whether it "succeeded" or not depends on whether you're of the mindset that likes G.A. and suchlike in the first place. I know people who thought Peyton Place was hilarious.
And maybe we're saying the same thing but using different terms, like the neverending debate over the line between SF and fantasy and speculative fiction and which ought to be called what... glah!
As it happens, Rex Morgan M.D. was the other one I was trying to think of!! Refused to come to mind when I was typing.
Gasoline Alley, Mary Worth, Rick O'Shay, etc. aren't =supposed= to be *funny*. They're essentially soap operas in graphics format.
Automated online game rankings go way back to the first textmode games offered by BBSs, ca. 1980ish.
But if someone wants to sue popup advertisers... hey, I'm all for it!!
I read the patent abstracts. It appears that what is being patented isn't the game, but rather the method of delivering *advertising* to the game interface.
[blink] How is this fundamentally different from what websites with games AND ad banners have been doing since at least 1996??
I had similar thoughts. If Warner moves to all Blu-Ray, I won't be buying any more Warner movies (and I've already bought plenty), because I have no use for anything that's not a standard ordinary DVD that I can play on the computer. I'm not about to buy new equipment just to view their content (especially when both the equipment and the discs are still more expensive than I care to spend).
I *prefer* buying a reasonably-priced DVD to downloading it (even when the download is "free"). But if they're taking away my choice to purchase -- well, we all know what the next step is.
The extra security personnel (now with job security!) and the manufacturers of various screening tools are surely crying all the way to the bank.
How is ONE PERCENT a big success??
I'd bet that if they screened 70,000 people *completely* at random, they'd have roughly the same results -- about 1% would prove arrestable for some violation or other.
Forced updates, is what it smells like to me.
Almost always, when I do need an update, I have to fetch it by way of some antiquated system and whatever browser will run from a CD. I don't always have WinXP and some necessary interface app available.
So what they're telling me, is that before I can download a necessary fix, I need to find a newish machine, install Win2K/XP/V on it, download Silverlight, install it, THEN come back and fetch the download that I need to fix some OTHER machine which presently refuses to access the net at all.
Right.
Sounds like same principle, different universe. Watching stuff change over the course of 25 years (it went on that long) was both fascinating and disturbing.
Forgot to mention, this isn't the only dream-alt-universe I've "been to". The other one (which was also semi-regular for a couple decades and has also faded out, tho in this case I don't know why) had vague parallels to Here-and-Now, and took place in western North America -- tho it bore little resemblence to any N.A. that I knew. Frex, Nevada was forested, SoCal was mainly a sand desert, and Los Angeles didn't exist except as a collection of a dozen dockside shacks right at the Mexican border (which was a bit further north than in Mundania). Oddly enough, construction and housing developments overtaking older rural areas began being a problem there about 10 years before it happened in Mundania.
Funny thing, these all started long before I began reading SF/F.
Necessity and poverty drive the most practical inventions :) The outcome actually struck me as very professionally done... and that it worked so well for so long vouches for that.
I imagine if a person wanted to design ducted cooling, the noise could be significantly reduced. But if you're not living next to it, I don't suppose it matters!
Well, DOOM was an upgrade. Back in the olden daze, we had to make do with dreaming Space Invaders. It sucked when you ran out of quarters!
So did you ever get the cash? :)
My DOOM dreams are the other way around: movement is just like Real Life, but the environment is usually 100% DOOM, including the not-quite-real-3D and the limited colour palatte!
"So in the dual party system (US), the systems leans towards statis (classical conservative). In multiparty systems (most of the rest of the world), the bias is towards radicalism."
:/
I've observed this too (thanks for putting it in a nutshell). Coalitions of minor parties, all of them with radical agendas, can beat out a major party with moderate policies, simply because 10 nuts voting as a block can outvote 5 moderates voting as a block. I don't find tyrannies of minorities to be progress over tyranny of the majority.
I think the real problem is that democracy doesn't scale. Maybe we need smaller countries.