I'm a politician seeking re-election. I plan on taxing your children for all the make-believe stuff they "earn" in online games.
I ask for your vote this coming November. If this still isn't enough to convince you to cast your ballot for me, I also plan on taxing kids in Little League who catch the baseball. Each time they catch it, I will count it as income since some people sell home run balls from the World Series.
As you can see, this is a winning issue for an elected politician that no opponent will ever use against him.
I wish I could sue, but I looked into it, and that's the law. They can hold you for three days if you can't prove who you are, no questions, no calling your lawyer, they just hold you. They aren't arresting you, or charging you with anything, or even questioning you. Just waiting to ID you. For up to three days.
You gave them a valid ID card from another, valid US state. You've proven who you are, it's their fault they can't verify your valid ID.
You should contact the ACLU maybe, or some hotshot lawyer who wants to make, literally, a federal case out of it.
Game Keeper was pretty cool, but I started getting confused, I mean what's up with the Cromags, anyway? It's obviously jabberwoky for Cromagnon men, some kind of Neanderthal that didn't die out and in fact became the dominant civilization. But why are they Nazis? Believe it or not, that's the second sci-fi story that's used a Nazi-style civilization from Earth as an alternative history set of parallel universe explorers the heroes meet up with.
Although it's obvious the Cromags are not from an alternative history line, but rather from the future, as Archer later found out just after he saved the Earth from that Earth-destroying weapon. And why, when Enterprise got back to Earth, weren't there dozens of starships in orbit in construction? And that ship is a piss poor warship, at that, with one lame beam that, when set on overload, can destroy Mount Rushmore. Where are the nukes? 100 megaton? 1000 megaton? Any cobalt bombs? Come on, they had access to Klingon photon torpedo technology and still didn't use it? And if Spock helped invent the teleporter, how come it was invented 30 years before he was born, if he's 70 in TOS, which seems to be a bit of continuity also forgotten? And if Vulcans are 10x as strong as humans, how come B'ellana was able to fight one off easily? I'll admit it was that skinny guy from the academy, but sheesh, Spock was a twig, too.
Nah, it could have been much worse. It could have been dune buggies spray painted gray.
Because nothing says "Awesome, $100 million space action epic movie" quite like scenes leftover from a Saturday morning live-action kids' TV show.
At least having TOS wandering around San Francisco, as a cheapass way to save money, was done in a clever and humerous way. "Can you show me the vay to the nuclear wessels?"
I'm also sure 99% of the time, when people are required to use "at least three of each of cap, lower, number, or symbol", that people will capitalize the first letter, and only it, and add 1 as the number, and have it as the last digit.
In any event, one can simply remove the numbers from the prospectively decoded password, then run it through the word matcher anyway, since the number is basically irrelevant to determining if the bulk of a password is a real word or not, as is the capitalization.
All that this does is create a few multiples more of permutations for a brute force hack, which nobody uses anyway, and is useless anyway since machines have delays between multiple attempts, and temporarily 10 minute disabling between multiple failed attempts.
But given the first char is almost always a capital letter, and the last almost always a number, and the number 1, I'm sure that aids crackers.
Pre-IE, Microsoft was terrified of the potential (and declared goal) of Netscape turning their web browser into a virtual computer desktop, complete with the ability to generate applications and so on.
Of what need is Microsoft if suddenly all apps are written in this virtual computer browser, and one no longer needs any kind of OS beyond that needed to support the browser, which is to say, just a little HAL layer depending on IBM PC architecture, Mac, etc.
And their goal worked. While technically possible via Java and its clumsy built-in windowing abilities, nobody is out there promoting this heavily since there is no cohesive development environment and system being pushed -- unless you count Visual Java development environment from Microsoft, heavily integrated into IE.
So yes, there was a lot at stake. "Billions and billions" as a loss leader for Microsoft with Bill Gates at the helm, is a calculated risk. See also the money-losing X-Box series. This is why Bill Gates is worth more than many countries' GDP and Dvorak is a fat, bitchy commentator.
John Dvorak Thatcher: Charles! I happen to know this little e-enterprise of yours cost you a billion dollars last year.
Charles Foster Gates: Yes, Mr. Thatcher. This virtual paper lost a billion dollars last year. I expect it to lose a billion dollars this year. I expect it to lose a billion dollars next year. You know what, Mr. Thatcher? At a rate of a billion dollars a year, I'll have to close this place...in sixty years!
If they wanna fix something, fix allowing sites to hard-code their fonts so I can't set it to large to read it. I'm sick and tired of squinting at the screen because some "graphic designed" is sitting there all full of himself, looking at his Sally Struthers School of Internet "Programming" certificate on their cube wall. (Strange, the certificate actually has quotes around "Programming".)
Selling oil in Euros is a red herring. When push comes to shove, a bunch of countries with 15% unemployment in average times are not as stable a store of value as a country whose population gets mad if the unemployment rate is 7%.
Oh, I certainly make no claim that this would be an easy step for the US. The point would be to make it a serious enough threat China would agree not to force US companies to give up the names of bloggers and whatnot. China does not gain all that much from it, for that it's worth to them. They know pulling trade status is not particularly credible (which is, of course, why they are trying to get away with it) but they also know that enough public pressure would force western countries to act to do something (economic) and that something would hurt China somewhat, in some way.
That's where Congress and the President have to step in. They have the authority to set foreign policy. Currently, the policy is to encourage trade with China. They can shut down China quickly by threatening to remove the favored trading status. "Do not force foreign companies to aid you in your opression, or the status will be pulled."
Not that hard to do. It just takes balls on the part of the President.
> Asking for assistance *anywhere* by walking up and saying > "Why isn't there fucking mayo on my sandwich?"
Post after post here is missing the point. A Microsoft or Apple tech employee, who, asked "why doesnot my f***ing XYZ work", who responded with "RTFM, jackass!", would be fired on the spot.
Along comes Linux, with no real corporation, just more or less volunteers for 99% of it, who do respond this way, then wonder why people flee in droves. If you want mass acceptance, you have to use the techniques corporations use, which means responding as if the customer was always right. Remember, they're mad because your product is hard to use and not intuitive to figure out. Apple and MS have literally spent billions of dollars researching methods to make things intuitive. If self-appointed (literally) Linux help gurus truly want mass acceptance, they have to start responding as if it's an engineering problem to solve -- one with social engineering as well. How do I help this guy, calm him down, and make sure his problem is fixed so he feels good about himself, rather than that he feels like an idiot for buying it? "I bought it, it didn't work, they couldn't help me, they made me feel stupid and bad", then you wonder why nobody is buying it? How long did the movies Glitter or Ultraviolet survive on word of mouth? Now imagine someone standing at the exit of the theater shouting, "Jackass, you didn't understand it. Ass!" at each person as they left, on top of it.
"Here's a silly real world example: say I wanted to send a letter to a friend in another city. Why should I learn how the post office operates in order to send the letter?"
Because if you didn't your friend would never receive his letter.
You left out the postmaster telling the guy, "Read the poster on the wall of how to apply a stamp, jackass!", as well as the part about the postmaster wondering why he just got fired and the guy went back to Windows.
Apparently you weren't paying attention to the original article. "RTFM, jackass!" is not a good response to people having problems if you're looking for massive adoption of your product.
> This approach, which relies on visual and auditory illusions, > could lead to commercial low-cost VR simulators in the near future."
Thank god. Now my wife and I can go sit our combined, 500lb.+ asses in the personal, two-person VR simulators in malls without sitting there for a few minutes of nothingness, followed by the door opening, the guy announcing the ride was not working, us walking away, then him starting it up again after we are out of visual range.
There used to be an expert system (rule-based) engine that would "compile" the text-based file of rules for distribution with their runtime engine. The file was, suspiciously, the exact same size as the source text file. A quick test by myself demonstrated the "compilation" just added 1 to every ascii value in the file.
It allowed me to develop a quick little program to update rules dynamically after distribution.
This was well before the DCMA, so a little reverse engineering of encryption was no problem. Heck, I could argue I was actually reverse-engineering a "compiler", since that's what they called it.
I forget what it was called, but the head of the company called his own op-ed piece in the monthly newsletter "From the Fountainhead".
Slashdot Mirror
Hi,
I'm a politician seeking re-election. I plan on taxing your children for all the make-believe stuff they "earn" in online games.
I ask for your vote this coming November. If this still isn't enough to convince you to cast your ballot for me, I also plan on taxing kids in Little League who catch the baseball. Each time they catch it, I will count it as income since some people sell home run balls from the World Series.
As you can see, this is a winning issue for an elected politician that no opponent will ever use against him.
Best Regards, Your Incumbant Congressman,
Power Q. Hungry
THe desirability of networking for personal computers was already very evident by the late 1980's.
You gave them a valid ID card from another, valid US state. You've proven who you are, it's their fault they can't verify your valid ID.
You should contact the ACLU maybe, or some hotshot lawyer who wants to make, literally, a federal case out of it.
Saying detention is not arrest is like saying downloading copyrighted music without permission is not stealing. It's a difference only a lawyer loves.
What about the overlapping oe glyph "oe"? Is that the same as ö and oe?
Game Keeper was pretty cool, but I started getting confused, I mean what's up with the Cromags, anyway? It's obviously jabberwoky for Cromagnon men, some kind of Neanderthal that didn't die out and in fact became the dominant civilization. But why are they Nazis? Believe it or not, that's the second sci-fi story that's used a Nazi-style civilization from Earth as an alternative history set of parallel universe explorers the heroes meet up with.
Although it's obvious the Cromags are not from an alternative history line, but rather from the future, as Archer later found out just after he saved the Earth from that Earth-destroying weapon. And why, when Enterprise got back to Earth, weren't there dozens of starships in orbit in construction? And that ship is a piss poor warship, at that, with one lame beam that, when set on overload, can destroy Mount Rushmore. Where are the nukes? 100 megaton? 1000 megaton? Any cobalt bombs? Come on, they had access to Klingon photon torpedo technology and still didn't use it? And if Spock helped invent the teleporter, how come it was invented 30 years before he was born, if he's 70 in TOS, which seems to be a bit of continuity also forgotten? And if Vulcans are 10x as strong as humans, how come B'ellana was able to fight one off easily? I'll admit it was that skinny guy from the academy, but sheesh, Spock was a twig, too.
Yeah, exactly what was God doing for an infinity of time before He made everything else?
An angel knocks on the bathroom door: God? What are you doing in there?
God: Nothing! Do [b]not[/b] open the door, please!
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/ is a more interesting one.
Nah, it could have been much worse. It could have been dune buggies spray painted gray.
Because nothing says "Awesome, $100 million space action epic movie" quite like scenes leftover from a Saturday morning live-action kids' TV show.
At least having TOS wandering around San Francisco, as a cheapass way to save money, was done in a clever and humerous way. "Can you show me the vay to the nuclear wessels?"
> I keep forgetting Starbuck's a female, now.
Shouldn't she be named "Stardoe", then?
"Hey, let's go check out what Stardoe's doin'!"
I'm sorry for that joke. I feel truly dirty, like I write for an easy listening rock station's morning show.
Boy, I'm glad we in America, Land of the Free, don't have mandatory ID cards.
Except for the Social Security one.
And the driver's license one.
I'm also sure 99% of the time, when people are required to use "at least three of each of cap, lower, number, or symbol", that people will capitalize the first letter, and only it, and add 1 as the number, and have it as the last digit.
In any event, one can simply remove the numbers from the prospectively decoded password, then run it through the word matcher anyway, since the number is basically irrelevant to determining if the bulk of a password is a real word or not, as is the capitalization.
All that this does is create a few multiples more of permutations for a brute force hack, which nobody uses anyway, and is useless anyway since machines have delays between multiple attempts, and temporarily 10 minute disabling between multiple failed attempts.
But given the first char is almost always a capital letter, and the last almost always a number, and the number 1, I'm sure that aids crackers.
Billions in loss?
Pre-IE, Microsoft was terrified of the potential (and declared goal) of Netscape turning their web browser into a virtual computer desktop, complete with the ability to generate applications and so on.
Of what need is Microsoft if suddenly all apps are written in this virtual computer browser, and one no longer needs any kind of OS beyond that needed to support the browser, which is to say, just a little HAL layer depending on IBM PC architecture, Mac, etc.
And their goal worked. While technically possible via Java and its clumsy built-in windowing abilities, nobody is out there promoting this heavily since there is no cohesive development environment and system being pushed -- unless you count Visual Java development environment from Microsoft, heavily integrated into IE.
So yes, there was a lot at stake. "Billions and billions" as a loss leader for Microsoft with Bill Gates at the helm, is a calculated risk. See also the money-losing X-Box series. This is why Bill Gates is worth more than many countries' GDP and Dvorak is a fat, bitchy commentator.
John Dvorak Thatcher: Charles! I happen to know this little e-enterprise of yours cost you a billion dollars last year.
Charles Foster Gates: Yes, Mr. Thatcher. This virtual paper lost a billion dollars last year. I expect it to lose a billion dollars this year. I expect it to lose a billion dollars next year. You know what, Mr. Thatcher? At a rate of a billion dollars a year, I'll have to close this place...in sixty years!
Cue horns: Wah wah wah wha waaaaaaaaaaaaah...
If they wanna fix something, fix allowing sites to hard-code their fonts so I can't set it to large to read it. I'm sick and tired of squinting at the screen because some "graphic designed" is sitting there all full of himself, looking at his Sally Struthers School of Internet "Programming" certificate on their cube wall. (Strange, the certificate actually has quotes around "Programming".)
Selling oil in Euros is a red herring. When push comes to shove, a bunch of countries with 15% unemployment in average times are not as stable a store of value as a country whose population gets mad if the unemployment rate is 7%.
Oh, I certainly make no claim that this would be an easy step for the US. The point would be to make it a serious enough threat China would agree not to force US companies to give up the names of bloggers and whatnot. China does not gain all that much from it, for that it's worth to them. They know pulling trade status is not particularly credible (which is, of course, why they are trying to get away with it) but they also know that enough public pressure would force western countries to act to do something (economic) and that something would hurt China somewhat, in some way.
That's where Congress and the President have to step in. They have the authority to set foreign policy. Currently, the policy is to encourage trade with China. They can shut down China quickly by threatening to remove the favored trading status. "Do not force foreign companies to aid you in your opression, or the status will be pulled."
Not that hard to do. It just takes balls on the part of the President.
> Asking for assistance *anywhere* by walking up and saying
> "Why isn't there fucking mayo on my sandwich?"
Post after post here is missing the point. A Microsoft or Apple tech employee, who, asked "why doesnot my f***ing XYZ work", who responded with "RTFM, jackass!", would be fired on the spot.
Along comes Linux, with no real corporation, just more or less volunteers for 99% of it, who do respond this way, then wonder why people flee in droves. If you want mass acceptance, you have to use the techniques corporations use, which means responding as if the customer was always right. Remember, they're mad because your product is hard to use and not intuitive to figure out. Apple and MS have literally spent billions of dollars researching methods to make things intuitive. If self-appointed (literally) Linux help gurus truly want mass acceptance, they have to start responding as if it's an engineering problem to solve -- one with social engineering as well. How do I help this guy, calm him down, and make sure his problem is fixed so he feels good about himself, rather than that he feels like an idiot for buying it? "I bought it, it didn't work, they couldn't help me, they made me feel stupid and bad", then you wonder why nobody is buying it? How long did the movies Glitter or Ultraviolet survive on word of mouth? Now imagine someone standing at the exit of the theater shouting, "Jackass, you didn't understand it. Ass!" at each person as they left, on top of it.
You left out the postmaster telling the guy, "Read the poster on the wall of how to apply a stamp, jackass!", as well as the part about the postmaster wondering why he just got fired and the guy went back to Windows.
Apparently you weren't paying attention to the original article. "RTFM, jackass!" is not a good response to people having problems if you're looking for massive adoption of your product.
> This approach, which relies on visual and auditory illusions,
> could lead to commercial low-cost VR simulators in the near future."
Thank god. Now my wife and I can go sit our combined, 500lb.+ asses in the personal, two-person VR simulators in malls without sitting there for a few minutes of nothingness, followed by the door opening, the guy announcing the ride was not working, us walking away, then him starting it up again after we are out of visual range.
> He's right, it was the Greeks not the Chinese who used the pole.
Ehh, hehe. Ya know,
Nah.
It's way too easy.
Oh for god's sake, just add 1 or 49 to it, it's already in extended ASCII anyway, most web sites parsing cedillas (cedillae?), etc., just fine.
There used to be an expert system (rule-based) engine that would "compile" the text-based file of rules for distribution with their runtime engine. The file was, suspiciously, the exact same size as the source text file. A quick test by myself demonstrated the "compilation" just added 1 to every ascii value in the file.
It allowed me to develop a quick little program to update rules dynamically after distribution.
This was well before the DCMA, so a little reverse engineering of encryption was no problem. Heck, I could argue I was actually reverse-engineering a "compiler", since that's what they called it.
I forget what it was called, but the head of the company called his own op-ed piece in the monthly newsletter "From the Fountainhead".