This should always be assumed, wherever you may be.
Visiting an authoritarian government doesn't change that.
Ah, so what they say is true, then? This must be some new definition of the term "FUD" of which I was previously unaware.
There's lots of the usual Slashdot bitching, kvetching, and sarcastic remarks, but I can't really see what's wrong with pointing out to tourists that their communications might be at risk when traveling in a foreign country. They advised me to get inoculated against hepatitis A and B before I traveled to Southeast Asia, yet people contract both diseases every day right here in the good ol' USA. So was it government propaganda?
From the sound of it, the scenario they're imagining is some random dumb guy going to the Olympics. He is a high-level guy at some company -- which is why he has the money to go -- and he's so important that he keeps having to call/email/IM home to advise on this or that aspect of some contract his team is working on. Which happens to be a contract with the U.S. government.
Hmm. Not impressed. The information about Hydrogenaudio and LAME on that page seems extremely out of date. Don't use anything after version 3.92? Please.
More to the point, how many "irreplaceable" discs do you have to want to repair before $250 sounds like a good deal? What did your last cell phone cost? Your last sushi dinner?
What would the submitter sell one of these "irreplaceable" CDs for? $25? $50?
The idea that there is this one, monolithic Microsoft that's single-mindedly driven to crush all competition (beginning with open source) is actually pretty much a myth. Within Microsoft there are a lot of different departments, teams, and initiatives. And believe it or not, nobody at the top is in charge of issuing brown shirts and armbands.
A couple of years ago I attended a presentation by some Microsoft folks at LinuxWorld Expo. It was actually by the Windows Embedded team, who wanted to talk about Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Windows XP Embedded. I guess the perception at the time was that there were a lot of interesting new devices coming to market, and that many of them were considering Linux for their OS. The Microsoft team wanted to get in the word about the Windows option.
Nothing strange there. That's just basic Microsoft competitive (or call it anti-Linux if you want) tactics. What was interesting, though, was that the talk was not held at the LinuxWorld convention center. I was tipped off about it by a girl who was wandering the show floor, handing out flyers. The actual talk was taking place at a pizza parlor across the street. So I went over, told them who I was, had a slice of pizza, and listed to how their new build tools for XP Embedded worked. Everybody was quite nice and cordial, and nobody even bothered to slam Linux.
My point is that, all in all, this was a pretty low-rent, low-impact move on Microsoft's part. If it was part of some evil Gates/Ballmer master plan then it was pretty ham-fisted. Rather, my guess is that the embedded team just felt strongly enough about marketing their product to the LinuxWorld audience that they got together some marketing budget from their own department, bought a few plane tickets for their guys, hired a local babe to distribute the flyers, and did what developers do almost every Friday -- bought pizza.
The iron fist of Ballmer crushing down? The face of evil? Hardly. The Microsoft reps were completely non-confrontational, and I, for one, was happy to hear what they had to say. I suppose I could have sat there and plugged my ear with one finger while singing "la la la la la" between bites of pizza, but then I'd kind of look like the closed-minded one, don't you think?
So if a few guys from the open source department at Microsoft come and give a talk at an open source conference, I hardly see where it's cause for all this alarm. If anything, it should be encouraging. Does it mean Microsoft has "turned over a new leaf," and is going to completely change its business practices to suit what the/. crowd thinks? Obviously not. But I am at least willing to assume that the guy is being honest about what he says. Or do you really believe that he didn't spend any time crafting the speech -- maybe he just sketched it out on a napkin the night before, while drinking absinthe from a harp seal skull with Steve Ballmer?
Basically, those journalists don't have many other choices, since their readers and viewers expect coverage of those events.
No other choices? They're forced to pay >$1,000/month for mediocre DSL? Wouldn't satellite Internet be cheaper than that? If we're talking about filing stories, couldn't they just use their cell phones as data modems?
People ride cars because they are convenient - they go from point to point as desired and they don't make the user bend to their schedule. They are private. They are comfortable, they don't have the smelly guy in the next seat.
Kind of my point exactly. Today everybody should "know" that driving everywhere is not the best thing for the environment, and reducing your personal gas expenditures is sounding like a better idea every day. But once you put somebody behind the wheel of a car, it's darned hard to convince them to take "a step back" to start riding the bus again.
I see the OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Office argument the same way. "Compatible" is not the same thing as "equivalent." Sure, intellectually I might realize that OpenOffice.org is the better choice. But as far as functionality, I find OpenOffice.org to be a far step backward from Office 2007, and that's just not a sacrifice I'm willing to make. I'm sure I'm not alone.
Despite the fact that we give away a wonderful compatible office suite in OpenOffice 3 for free, most companies and individuals are still buying MS Office.
Um. Yeah. And despite the fact that it only costs $1.50 to ride the bus, most businesses and individuals still rely on cars. This is a poor example.
Many Linux-compatible TV tuners come with FM tuners built-in, I suspect it's only a matter of time until they start putting HD radio tuners on those too.
As a side note, Windows Vista Media Center supports FM tuners built-in to TV tuner cards. But it provides no means of time-shifting radio, even though it can do so for TV (and that is arguably its primary purpose). I have often wondered why this is so. What is the benefit of listening to radio on your computer if all the same rules apply as when you're listening to it on any other device? Doesn't it just become sort of a pain in the ass?
Wait a minute... there's still a market for sound cards? I am perplexed. Last I checked, there wasn't a motherboard made that didn't have onboard SPDIF, not to mention plugs for 5.1 speakers. Who are these people who buy sound cards?
Foundation's subject matter might be kind of dry, but remember that the original three books were compiled from a bunch of shorter pieces that appeared in science fiction magazines. As such, they spell it out to you in easily-digestible chunks. The overall writing style is accessible, also.
I was first introduced to Foundation by a Caedmon audiobook of the first part of the first book, ready by William Shatner. I was probably a young teenager at the time, but it left a definite impression on me.
Agreed with the other poster who recommended against anything after the first three, though. I really wanted to like the later stuff as a teenager, but as the years have rolled on I have to admit that it all just left a bad taste in my mouth. Everything from the characters, to the plots, to the overall themes were lacking compared to the originals.
Kids are reading those books, but I think you're exaggerating to say that the audience reading them "is kids." Many young kids have them read to them by parents. And industry scuttlebutt says the real reason for Harry Potter's resounding success is because adults bought them for adult consumption, though I can't find any demographics to support that at the moment. Certainly the only piece of printed matter that a great many adults of my acquaintance were likely to read in recent years was the latest Harry Potter book. My disgust at that fact is one reason why I put off reading them myself.
The children in Narnia are 20th century British schoolkids.
It's the closest comparison, I'll admit; with the little wrinkle that I don't remember the schoolchildren in the Narnia books ever actually having to go to school. And even Narnia wasn't completely original; the Peter Pan story predated it by almost 50 years, and Lewis Carroll's books are even older.
Were the Narnia books more "moving" than Harry Potter? It's hard for me to say. As I've said in one of the parents, Potter isn't really my cup of tea; but then again, as a 35-year-old, neither is Narnia. I remember that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe moved me quite a lot as a young child. I doubt that I'd be able to recapture that feeling if I re-read it, however.
Now that's interesting. I've been known to do some comic book lettering from time to time, but my actual handwriting is pretty damn horrible these days. Small, but horrible. The reason is application. I use handwriting to jot down notes, where the primary goal is speed. Studies have found that the slowest known way to write the English language is in block caps, so that's out the window straight away. The overall look of the letters goes downhill from there.
By comparison, writing letters for comic books is really more of a kind of drawing. You have to read the script to know what to write, but when you're making the marks on the paper you're not really thinking about the words at all, just the letterforms (in my experience, anyway -- and that's even when I wrote the script myself).
Even more interesting, my dad was also pretty good at block caps. I used to see his block writing around the house, on moving boxes etc. It was even more precise than mine (I assume because in comics you're trying to convey a little bit of emotion with the letters). His handwriting for notes was legible, but totally different. And my dad was also a doctor. I've seen him write prescriptions. They are illegible, totally illegible. I swear to you it's a code! I bet they write them that way to prevent hypochondriacs and junkies from writing believable fake scrips.
by the end she is not telling a story she is recording the lives of the main characters.
Actually, I think that's her major innovation. So much fantasy fiction relies on generic stereotypes and faux-operatic melodrama. By contrast, Rowling's old, white-haired, bearded wizard is not Gandalf. Her protagonists aren't hobbits and they aren't the long-lost kings of an ancient race and they aren't kids at their magical old uncle's house; they're 21st century British schoolkids. The people they meet are ordinary folks in an extraordinary setting. They have feelings -- not all of which are worthy of fantasy heroes -- and family, and jobs. (Goblins! Actual goblins! And what do they do? They're clerks at a bank.) The lives of her characters are pointedly not the stuff of legend; rather, most aspects are quite ordinary.
Rowling is sly about it, so that you don't realize it at first, but the main thrust of her narrative is that these ordinary kids manage to enter a world of magic and mystery -- and in many aspects it's no different from our world. At first it seems like they're the luckiest kids in the world, but in reality, things are still hard for them. They still have problems to overcome, the respect of their elders to earn, friends to win, their first loves to deal with.
In other words, the whole point of the books is chronicling the lives of the main characters. You, who have probably read too much stock fantasy fiction, just didn't get it. I bet young kids all get it, though.
JK lies though... she didn't plan it all from start to finish, otherwise every book wouldn't introduce something completely new and unheard of before.
Sure it would! That was one of the things that kept the series interesting for me. After the first two I began to detect a pattern: sorting hat, first day of class, Christmas, birthdays... every year was starting to seem the same. Only then she started throwing us curve balls.
Besides, she never said she had the whole thing plotted out on paper, the way George Lucas claimed to. I think she said she had the last chapter of "Deathly Hallows" completed somewhere during the writing of "Order of the Phoenix." But that's just the absolute end of the story, though -- I've read interviews where she claims to have purposely left lots of interesting details to "reveal themselves" as she went along. Otherwise, she said, it would just be too dull to write the damn things if she knew absolutely everything in advance. She was often pretty distraught to have to kill off certain characters, too, but said that's just the way the story seemed to be heading.
I was once chatting with a guy while visiting Detroit, and I made the comment that the lifestyle there seemed a lot different than that in my hometown (San Francisco). For me this was sort of an off-the-cuff comment, mostly intuitive, so when he asked me what I meant I had to struggle for a minute to come up with a concrete example. Finally, I said, "Well... just for example, where I live, I don't own a car." There was about thirty seconds of silence before he replied, in a quiet voice, "I can't even imagine what that's like."
No doubt Slashdot is full of Harry Potter haters. I was one, too, until I actually read the entire series last month. It's still not exactly my cuppa, but it's an incredibly well-crafted work of fantasy fiction for young adults. The first couple of books are pure wish-fulfillment, which will appeal to any pre-teen. The books are too long for young readers to make it through all of them back to back, though, so by the time they get around to the later volumes, they will be just the right age to appreciate the darker aspects and more complex themes of the series's conclusion.
Unfortunately, most kids will probably just watch the movies.
Machines do need to have more than one size screw and nut. But suppose you have a big machine designed by a bunch of different engineers, each of which has their own fanatical view about what size screw is "best". Or similar opinions about metric versus SAE versus BA versus Whitworth threading. And about Phillips head versus Frearson, BNAE, hex or TORX. Let's not even get into the issue of screws versus other kinds of fastners....
Fortunately, hardware engineers don't suffer from that kind of fanaticism. When some piece of hardware gets designed, somebody says, "we're only going to use metric Phillips screws" and everybody goes along.
Hey man, don't tell it to us. We're software people. Tell it to NASA.
Am I right in guessing that the Web page containing the payload would have to be coded with the default password AND the default IP address of your router's admin interface? I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I generally set my subnet to a 10.x.x.x address block when I first configure my home router.
I dunno about you, but I'd be a lot more sympathetic to that than, "Alright, your honor, you got me. I killed her. This is where her body is. So, hey, cut me some slack, huh? I'm workin wit ya here..."
Seriously, if Hans's sentence gets reduced because of this, absent the full consent of the victim's family, it would be a travesty. I don't think there's any law anywhere that says it's illegal to trick a guy into revealing where he buried the body of your missing daughter while he stands convicted of the murder. He's led them to the body. Now let him rot. (My opinion.)
Well, psychopaths aren't the only ones. I once had a girlfriend who had exactly the same skill. No joke, I'm not trying to be funny -- I eventually found out she'd been lying to me constantly, about the most seemingly trivial things. Even a simple question like "How come you didn't finish the laundry like you said you were going to do?" would elicit a story about how some strange guys were hanging around the house and were banging on the door and she was afraid of what they might do.
She would tell me stories about what she did one summer, who her friends were, where they went on vacation, how they had a falling out and why she doesn't talk to them anymore. Only later I found out that she'd been lying about her age by a year or two (again, nothing that would make any difference) and so the math didn't add up -- in the year of the road trip she described to me, she wouldn't have been old enough in real life to have a driver's license.
I don't think she was a psychopath. Bipolar? Quite probably, yes. But people develop this lying behavior for all kinds of reasons. In the case of my ex-, I think she just had terrible self-esteem and a history of making bad choices that she didn't want to get lectured about, and she just wanted to sound more interesting so that people would like her. I don't hold it against her anymore. I feel kind of sorry for her, actually, because in the long run this habit has messed up her life way more than she's ever benefited from it.
Slashdot Mirror
This should always be assumed, wherever you may be. Visiting an authoritarian government doesn't change that.
Ah, so what they say is true, then? This must be some new definition of the term "FUD" of which I was previously unaware.
There's lots of the usual Slashdot bitching, kvetching, and sarcastic remarks, but I can't really see what's wrong with pointing out to tourists that their communications might be at risk when traveling in a foreign country. They advised me to get inoculated against hepatitis A and B before I traveled to Southeast Asia, yet people contract both diseases every day right here in the good ol' USA. So was it government propaganda?
From the sound of it, the scenario they're imagining is some random dumb guy going to the Olympics. He is a high-level guy at some company -- which is why he has the money to go -- and he's so important that he keeps having to call/email/IM home to advise on this or that aspect of some contract his team is working on. Which happens to be a contract with the U.S. government.
You pick a number that would never come up to mark the end of data input. like 99 for a year.
Wow, kinda crazy ... considering you could have just as easily picked 0x64 instead of 0x63 (it's a computer, duh).
Hmm. Not impressed. The information about Hydrogenaudio and LAME on that page seems extremely out of date. Don't use anything after version 3.92? Please.
More to the point, how many "irreplaceable" discs do you have to want to repair before $250 sounds like a good deal? What did your last cell phone cost? Your last sushi dinner?
What would the submitter sell one of these "irreplaceable" CDs for? $25? $50?
The idea that there is this one, monolithic Microsoft that's single-mindedly driven to crush all competition (beginning with open source) is actually pretty much a myth. Within Microsoft there are a lot of different departments, teams, and initiatives. And believe it or not, nobody at the top is in charge of issuing brown shirts and armbands.
A couple of years ago I attended a presentation by some Microsoft folks at LinuxWorld Expo. It was actually by the Windows Embedded team, who wanted to talk about Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Windows XP Embedded. I guess the perception at the time was that there were a lot of interesting new devices coming to market, and that many of them were considering Linux for their OS. The Microsoft team wanted to get in the word about the Windows option.
Nothing strange there. That's just basic Microsoft competitive (or call it anti-Linux if you want) tactics. What was interesting, though, was that the talk was not held at the LinuxWorld convention center. I was tipped off about it by a girl who was wandering the show floor, handing out flyers. The actual talk was taking place at a pizza parlor across the street. So I went over, told them who I was, had a slice of pizza, and listed to how their new build tools for XP Embedded worked. Everybody was quite nice and cordial, and nobody even bothered to slam Linux.
My point is that, all in all, this was a pretty low-rent, low-impact move on Microsoft's part. If it was part of some evil Gates/Ballmer master plan then it was pretty ham-fisted. Rather, my guess is that the embedded team just felt strongly enough about marketing their product to the LinuxWorld audience that they got together some marketing budget from their own department, bought a few plane tickets for their guys, hired a local babe to distribute the flyers, and did what developers do almost every Friday -- bought pizza.
The iron fist of Ballmer crushing down? The face of evil? Hardly. The Microsoft reps were completely non-confrontational, and I, for one, was happy to hear what they had to say. I suppose I could have sat there and plugged my ear with one finger while singing "la la la la la" between bites of pizza, but then I'd kind of look like the closed-minded one, don't you think?
So if a few guys from the open source department at Microsoft come and give a talk at an open source conference, I hardly see where it's cause for all this alarm. If anything, it should be encouraging. Does it mean Microsoft has "turned over a new leaf," and is going to completely change its business practices to suit what the /. crowd thinks? Obviously not. But I am at least willing to assume that the guy is being honest about what he says. Or do you really believe that he didn't spend any time crafting the speech -- maybe he just sketched it out on a napkin the night before, while drinking absinthe from a harp seal skull with Steve Ballmer?
Basically, those journalists don't have many other choices, since their readers and viewers expect coverage of those events.
No other choices? They're forced to pay >$1,000/month for mediocre DSL? Wouldn't satellite Internet be cheaper than that? If we're talking about filing stories, couldn't they just use their cell phones as data modems?
These proprietary technologies be damned! If Linux only had a proper reality distortion field, it would be perfect for everything.
People ride cars because they are convenient - they go from point to point as desired and they don't make the user bend to their schedule. They are private. They are comfortable, they don't have the smelly guy in the next seat.
Kind of my point exactly. Today everybody should "know" that driving everywhere is not the best thing for the environment, and reducing your personal gas expenditures is sounding like a better idea every day. But once you put somebody behind the wheel of a car, it's darned hard to convince them to take "a step back" to start riding the bus again.
I see the OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Office argument the same way. "Compatible" is not the same thing as "equivalent." Sure, intellectually I might realize that OpenOffice.org is the better choice. But as far as functionality, I find OpenOffice.org to be a far step backward from Office 2007, and that's just not a sacrifice I'm willing to make. I'm sure I'm not alone.
The driver itself is open source but depends on the proprietary Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that is available in binary form only.
Despite the fact that we give away a wonderful compatible office suite in OpenOffice 3 for free, most companies and individuals are still buying MS Office.
Um. Yeah. And despite the fact that it only costs $1.50 to ride the bus, most businesses and individuals still rely on cars. This is a poor example.
Many Linux-compatible TV tuners come with FM tuners built-in, I suspect it's only a matter of time until they start putting HD radio tuners on those too.
As a side note, Windows Vista Media Center supports FM tuners built-in to TV tuner cards. But it provides no means of time-shifting radio, even though it can do so for TV (and that is arguably its primary purpose). I have often wondered why this is so. What is the benefit of listening to radio on your computer if all the same rules apply as when you're listening to it on any other device? Doesn't it just become sort of a pain in the ass?
It disgusts me because they're childrens' books. If that's the only thing that can entice grown adults to read, it's a sad thing for our society.
Wait a minute ... there's still a market for sound cards? I am perplexed. Last I checked, there wasn't a motherboard made that didn't have onboard SPDIF, not to mention plugs for 5.1 speakers. Who are these people who buy sound cards?
Foundation's subject matter might be kind of dry, but remember that the original three books were compiled from a bunch of shorter pieces that appeared in science fiction magazines. As such, they spell it out to you in easily-digestible chunks. The overall writing style is accessible, also.
I was first introduced to Foundation by a Caedmon audiobook of the first part of the first book, ready by William Shatner. I was probably a young teenager at the time, but it left a definite impression on me.
Agreed with the other poster who recommended against anything after the first three, though. I really wanted to like the later stuff as a teenager, but as the years have rolled on I have to admit that it all just left a bad taste in my mouth. Everything from the characters, to the plots, to the overall themes were lacking compared to the originals.
Kids are reading those books, but I think you're exaggerating to say that the audience reading them "is kids." Many young kids have them read to them by parents. And industry scuttlebutt says the real reason for Harry Potter's resounding success is because adults bought them for adult consumption, though I can't find any demographics to support that at the moment. Certainly the only piece of printed matter that a great many adults of my acquaintance were likely to read in recent years was the latest Harry Potter book. My disgust at that fact is one reason why I put off reading them myself.
The children in Narnia are 20th century British schoolkids.
It's the closest comparison, I'll admit; with the little wrinkle that I don't remember the schoolchildren in the Narnia books ever actually having to go to school. And even Narnia wasn't completely original; the Peter Pan story predated it by almost 50 years, and Lewis Carroll's books are even older.
Were the Narnia books more "moving" than Harry Potter? It's hard for me to say. As I've said in one of the parents, Potter isn't really my cup of tea; but then again, as a 35-year-old, neither is Narnia. I remember that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe moved me quite a lot as a young child. I doubt that I'd be able to recapture that feeling if I re-read it, however.
Now that's interesting. I've been known to do some comic book lettering from time to time, but my actual handwriting is pretty damn horrible these days. Small, but horrible. The reason is application. I use handwriting to jot down notes, where the primary goal is speed. Studies have found that the slowest known way to write the English language is in block caps, so that's out the window straight away. The overall look of the letters goes downhill from there.
By comparison, writing letters for comic books is really more of a kind of drawing. You have to read the script to know what to write, but when you're making the marks on the paper you're not really thinking about the words at all, just the letterforms (in my experience, anyway -- and that's even when I wrote the script myself).
Even more interesting, my dad was also pretty good at block caps. I used to see his block writing around the house, on moving boxes etc. It was even more precise than mine (I assume because in comics you're trying to convey a little bit of emotion with the letters). His handwriting for notes was legible, but totally different. And my dad was also a doctor. I've seen him write prescriptions. They are illegible, totally illegible. I swear to you it's a code! I bet they write them that way to prevent hypochondriacs and junkies from writing believable fake scrips.
by the end she is not telling a story she is recording the lives of the main characters.
Actually, I think that's her major innovation. So much fantasy fiction relies on generic stereotypes and faux-operatic melodrama. By contrast, Rowling's old, white-haired, bearded wizard is not Gandalf. Her protagonists aren't hobbits and they aren't the long-lost kings of an ancient race and they aren't kids at their magical old uncle's house; they're 21st century British schoolkids. The people they meet are ordinary folks in an extraordinary setting. They have feelings -- not all of which are worthy of fantasy heroes -- and family, and jobs. (Goblins! Actual goblins! And what do they do? They're clerks at a bank.) The lives of her characters are pointedly not the stuff of legend; rather, most aspects are quite ordinary.
Rowling is sly about it, so that you don't realize it at first, but the main thrust of her narrative is that these ordinary kids manage to enter a world of magic and mystery -- and in many aspects it's no different from our world. At first it seems like they're the luckiest kids in the world, but in reality, things are still hard for them. They still have problems to overcome, the respect of their elders to earn, friends to win, their first loves to deal with.
In other words, the whole point of the books is chronicling the lives of the main characters. You, who have probably read too much stock fantasy fiction, just didn't get it. I bet young kids all get it, though.
JK lies though... she didn't plan it all from start to finish, otherwise every book wouldn't introduce something completely new and unheard of before.
Sure it would! That was one of the things that kept the series interesting for me. After the first two I began to detect a pattern: sorting hat, first day of class, Christmas, birthdays ... every year was starting to seem the same. Only then she started throwing us curve balls.
Besides, she never said she had the whole thing plotted out on paper, the way George Lucas claimed to. I think she said she had the last chapter of "Deathly Hallows" completed somewhere during the writing of "Order of the Phoenix." But that's just the absolute end of the story, though -- I've read interviews where she claims to have purposely left lots of interesting details to "reveal themselves" as she went along. Otherwise, she said, it would just be too dull to write the damn things if she knew absolutely everything in advance. She was often pretty distraught to have to kill off certain characters, too, but said that's just the way the story seemed to be heading.
I was once chatting with a guy while visiting Detroit, and I made the comment that the lifestyle there seemed a lot different than that in my hometown (San Francisco). For me this was sort of an off-the-cuff comment, mostly intuitive, so when he asked me what I meant I had to struggle for a minute to come up with a concrete example. Finally, I said, "Well... just for example, where I live, I don't own a car." There was about thirty seconds of silence before he replied, in a quiet voice, "I can't even imagine what that's like."
No doubt Slashdot is full of Harry Potter haters. I was one, too, until I actually read the entire series last month. It's still not exactly my cuppa, but it's an incredibly well-crafted work of fantasy fiction for young adults. The first couple of books are pure wish-fulfillment, which will appeal to any pre-teen. The books are too long for young readers to make it through all of them back to back, though, so by the time they get around to the later volumes, they will be just the right age to appreciate the darker aspects and more complex themes of the series's conclusion.
Unfortunately, most kids will probably just watch the movies.
Machines do need to have more than one size screw and nut. But suppose you have a big machine designed by a bunch of different engineers, each of which has their own fanatical view about what size screw is "best". Or similar opinions about metric versus SAE versus BA versus Whitworth threading. And about Phillips head versus Frearson, BNAE, hex or TORX. Let's not even get into the issue of screws versus other kinds of fastners.... Fortunately, hardware engineers don't suffer from that kind of fanaticism. When some piece of hardware gets designed, somebody says, "we're only going to use metric Phillips screws" and everybody goes along.
Hey man, don't tell it to us. We're software people. Tell it to NASA.
Am I right in guessing that the Web page containing the payload would have to be coded with the default password AND the default IP address of your router's admin interface? I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I generally set my subnet to a 10.x.x.x address block when I first configure my home router.
I dunno about you, but I'd be a lot more sympathetic to that than, "Alright, your honor, you got me. I killed her. This is where her body is. So, hey, cut me some slack, huh? I'm workin wit ya here..."
Seriously, if Hans's sentence gets reduced because of this, absent the full consent of the victim's family, it would be a travesty. I don't think there's any law anywhere that says it's illegal to trick a guy into revealing where he buried the body of your missing daughter while he stands convicted of the murder. He's led them to the body. Now let him rot. (My opinion.)
Well, psychopaths aren't the only ones. I once had a girlfriend who had exactly the same skill. No joke, I'm not trying to be funny -- I eventually found out she'd been lying to me constantly, about the most seemingly trivial things. Even a simple question like "How come you didn't finish the laundry like you said you were going to do?" would elicit a story about how some strange guys were hanging around the house and were banging on the door and she was afraid of what they might do.
She would tell me stories about what she did one summer, who her friends were, where they went on vacation, how they had a falling out and why she doesn't talk to them anymore. Only later I found out that she'd been lying about her age by a year or two (again, nothing that would make any difference) and so the math didn't add up -- in the year of the road trip she described to me, she wouldn't have been old enough in real life to have a driver's license.
I don't think she was a psychopath. Bipolar? Quite probably, yes. But people develop this lying behavior for all kinds of reasons. In the case of my ex-, I think she just had terrible self-esteem and a history of making bad choices that she didn't want to get lectured about, and she just wanted to sound more interesting so that people would like her. I don't hold it against her anymore. I feel kind of sorry for her, actually, because in the long run this habit has messed up her life way more than she's ever benefited from it.