Probably. You know, if you haven't watched Preaching to the Perverted, do so. It's a fun flick, and its theme is eerily similar. Of course, in that movie, the MP himself is a closet perv...:)
I've had mini LAN-parties over at my place, where five or six of us were playing WoW at the same time. MRTG's bandwidth graph remained astonishingly low for the duration.
Recently, I've also used dialup (~44-48K actual) to play WoW and it performs without a glitch, keeping the bar mostly in the green. Even Battlegrounds work, although a delay there is noticeable.
I'm very impressed with the way you've structured your protocol to make efficient use of network bandwidth and I'm curious to learn what the main difficulties were, what the most bandwidth-intensive parts of the system are, and what kind of protections have you built into the protocol to avoid tampering with the inbound/outbound data. I realize you can't go into great detail for a host of reasons, but any tips and tricks would be welcome.
I've built a simple system with a couple of cameras that are hooked up to a dedicated PC near the entrance. Each camera is running (simple) computer vision algorithms to detect movement while isolating possible false positives (cats, dogs, leaves, etc). I activate the system before heading to bed, and it works in parallel with my commercial (motion sensor-based) system.
Should the system be triggered, it remains silent until:
a) It has saved a few stills of the target b) It has saved a 20-sec video of the target c) It has uploaded the pics/video as an attachment to one of my email addresses d) It has faxed a still along with a pre-drafted cover letter to the local police department (who were kind enough to provide their fax#) e) It has sent an SMS to my mobile, in case I'm not around.
It then runs through a pre-recorded message on the home cinema's loudspeakers to the tune of: "You have been caught on camera. Your picture is in the hands of the police and on the Internet. Leave now, and you might escape."
The measures taken above ensure that even if the burglar finds and busts the computer, the information will not be lost.
Of course, any techie solution such as what I described above (which, actually, has been useful once - a burglar broke in, the alarms tripped, and he left without me ever seeing him. My patio door was broken into, though) will only work in conjunction with two things: A commercial alarm system with well-tuned motion detectors and GOOD LIGHTING.
The latter is so obvious, yet many people ignore it. Good lighting is not just to give the cameras a better mugshot, people. Burglars despise well-lit areas. Make sure your house and all accesses to it are well-lit.
Before this degenerates into another "The MPAA suxx0rz" argument (oops! too late!), I'm going to field a question here:
Is there be a way to defeat these goggles by emitting light in a wavelength invisible to the human eye? And if there is, since creating a blind spot where you're sitting would immediately call attention to your evildoing antics (bwahahaha), would it be possible to use a beam, directed at the little window and the dude with the night goggles, effectively blinding them?
This is merely for the sake of curiosity, of course, since (a) I'm not about to go set up a camcorder in my local cinema, (b) The attendants where I live wouldn't know night vision goggles from ViewMaster ones and (c) Creating such an effect would immediately draw attention to yourself anyway.
This happened about six months ago at my workplace. I finally got a new computer to replace my old one. The new machine was smoking. Brand-new top of the line Athlon, powerful graphics card, the works. So I put that baby on my desk next to the old machine and start transferring some video capture cards.
I'm prying loose the slot covers for two of the PCI slots on the new box, and my screwdriver slips. The lowest cover bends at an odd angle, and it takes me a while to pry it loose and fit the board.
I turn the PC on... Nothing. With horror, I remember the scraping noise the slot cover made when the screwdriver slipped. Surely enough, I notice a scrape on the motherboard that's sliced cleanly through one (yes, ONE) channel. Shit. It's very near the edge, and I'm pretty sure it's just cut one channel, unless there are other layers beneath.
After a lot of cursing, I take the box home and I carefully drop a dollop of solder with the ole iron exactly on the cut, hoping to bridge the severed connection. It worked. I'm still running that PC at work, and I've never had any problems with it.
Don't knock it. This works. A month or so ago, they brought one of these babies to the gym where I work out. As many here have said, games fitted to exercise machines aren't new.
But I was impressed with the new models. Instead of crappy-ass little LCDs or blinkenlights, they've got good-quality 15" TFTs, and the games are pretty neat. From puzzles (pedal faster to slow the bricks coming down) to shoot'em ups (pedal faster for speed and/or ammo), the graphics are good, and the combination of exercise with an IMMEDIATE goal is immersive.
The first time I started playing, at some point I felt really tired. I checked my watch, and I'd been pedalling away for thirty(!) minutes. I usually can't interest myself to stay on a bike more than fifteen minutes.
So yeah. Bring it on. Now all we need is a Quake mod where all the bikes in the gym are networked, and the faster you pedal, the more ammo and respawns you get.;)
It's a book geared towards science students, but to me at least, it's best damned Math book I've ever read. Why? Because it bridges the gap between disciplines. Mathematicians are often very theoretical-minded people. They have a hard time understanding that some people do not relate very well to theory, especially when all they need to know is how to apply that obscure theorem to get a practical result.
Lyons' book puts everything into context. His writing style is pretty laid back and comfortable (especially considering that this is a book about...well. Math.)
The two volumes together should give you a good, solid base to use math. Having that, I suggest following the other posters' advice and buying more specialized, more in-depth books that really get into the whys and hows. But I'm betting this kind of book will really help to get you started.
I have to agree with this and add that it has to be a developer that's...compatible with you. You know how you sometimes work with somebody else and you can't get along no matter what? Not just on a personal level, but code-wise. And then you work with someone else, and you think/so/ much alike, that when you take your separate pieces of developed code at the end of the day and try to integrate them, they just fit like a jigsaw, on their own.
I find that when paired with a person like that, we can whip out code like nobody's business. We also inevitably end up drinking Guinness while coding, but I think that's a fringe benefit. (Mental note: Conduct tests concerning the zone with and without guinness. Report on/.)
Well, 3D isn't overrated as such, but yes, I think a lot of new technologies will show up that will add value and flash to our games. Academic conferences on computer graphics, visualization and computer vision are ripe with ideas and technologies that are slowly being introduced into gaming as well.
Take volume graphics and voxels, for example. At a conference (I think it was early 2001), I watched a presentation showing how a team had put together a video with the most accurately rendered nebula I'd ever seen using volume graphics and voxels (run a Google search). Amazing detail. The only drawback? Computational cost. But PCs being what they are, and GPUs having come a long way... That's just one of the techs I see being included in games soon.
What about computer vision, which is more my kind of field? Interactive games, anyone? We know when you smile, we know when you growl, we know when you frown in thought. Not that the latter will have too much application in UT-style games, but...
My point is basically to agree with the original poster: Many new technologies will grace our games without causing a huge paradigm shift (i.e. a change from the mouse/keyboard/screen/joystick setup).
Microsoft has successfully used this approach already.
(No, guys, this is not an MS-bashing post. Okay? Good.)
Think about it. Could everybody and their grandmother copy MS CDs, including Windows, Office etc? Yes. Did they try to stomp out piracy? No. Did they froth over installation issues that allowed people to use ridiculously simple series of digits (2s, 0s with a 1 at the end...anybody remember those?) to install their products? Nope.
Now you can all claim that was MS being useless. I won't. I'll claim they knew that their products were piratable (is that even a word?) and didn't care. Because there was a good chance it would give them market penetration.
I'm not saying this is the sole reason for MS's dominance of the home market, but I do firmly believe it is _a_ reason.
So what about 'activation' schemes and the like, you'll ask. Isn't that making it harder for Joe Blow to pirate their software now? Well, yeah. But now they're the market leaders, aren't they? So piracy is hurting them without helping them anymore.
This tactic can easily be applied to music, methinks.
Assuming a worst-case scenario (EULAs are all upheld, consumers are forced to pay damages for breaking them), I'm wondering if the punishment for breaking an EULA might be greater than the punishment for piracy.
I can't help but chuckle at the following court defence:
'Your honor, the defendant has violated the EULA!' 'Er. No I haven't. I never signed anything. There's no EULA on the software I'm using.' 'WHAT? Then it's a pirated copy! Someone's removed the license!' '...Yup.'
Inevitably, most of this thread ended up discussing AI and the same arguments for and against machine intelligence I've seen bandied about in universities were used here as well.
Obviously, none of us (including those who actually do work on AI) can predict the state of affairs several years from now. However, my personal opinion is that humanity will be unable to create true 'AI', unless it changes its computing and programming models. Which it will, eventually. So you could say I'm maintaining a level of healthy optimism.
As for a an excellent book on the subject of how the brain works, check out Paul Churchland's 'The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A philosophical journey into the brain'. I heartily recommend it as a good read. It's not 'cutting edge', in that it was published a few years ago (my printing was published in 1996), and the systems described are not the SOTA. But it's till a great book.
Actually, to my experience, a lot of people go for Oracle over something like PostgreSQL because they're caught up in the hype.
I'm not saying that some people don't have legitimate reasons for choosing a highly expensive DB solution, like you said. I'm just saying that a lot of people that could do their job just as well with a 'free' solution choose Oracle because they don't know any better.
This is a good and rational post, and I hate to be a doomsayer. But unfortunately, history and experience have taught us that in a war there are no 'right' or 'wrong' sides.
Now before everyone jumps down my throat, let me clarify: I believe that Truth and Purity are myths. There exist no such ideals in the world we live in. They may exist in Tennyson's romantic poems, but here, as the NMA say, 'purity is for mad men to make fools of us all'.
No wars are fought just for 'right' or 'wrong' (and I put quotes around these notions because they are both human inventions -- nature has no use for them). They are fought for profit, in a multitude of guises -- money, oil, a base on foreign soil, a destabilizing hand in overseas politics.
Of course, it is expedient for governments to couch their intentions in moral crusades. They have learned all too well that public opinion/does/ count... if only for the next election.
In a war, there is no 'good' side. Nothing, I repeat, nothing in our world is black and white -- if you only see in these two colors, consider yourself either (a) blind, or (b) blessed.
War is simply the continuation of politics through other means. Since time immemorial, people have never been happy with who they are, where they are, and what they have. It's human nature. Borders, politics and, indeed, morals have been in a state of constant flux ever since the first caveman took a club to the head of the guy living next cave to take his food.
Am I a cynic? You bet. Is there hope? Beats me. Do I have any other suggestions? No, I don't - I'm expressing my opinion, not acting superior.
As an aside, I don't think humanity will be breaking this vicious cycle of dominator/dominated any time soon. My personal vision is that technology will one day contribute to the extinction of war and conflict, not by fighting our wars for us, but simply by providing everything one might wish for -- when Man has conquered Matter and Energy (which, apparently, are the same thing), one hopes there will be nothing left to fight for. Then again, human nature being what it is, this might simply remain a hope. For the distant future, no less. But we must have something to believe in, right?
Thanks for reminding me. While I cannot confirm whether this is a rumor/horror story/urban myth or the truth, I've heard that in the days when East Germany was a totalitarian state, several 'political suspects' were tagged using radioactive material by the secret police.
With the unfortunate side-effect that many of them died of cancer and other pleasant things.
"But no, really. These implants are safe! Scout's honor."...Bugger off.
Nobody would mind indeed, if governments around the world were ideal. If there was no corruption, no greater interests, etc etc ad nauseum.
Are they? Uh. No. Hell no. When you think about a technology, and when you are weighing its benefits, you shouldn't think of how it can be used. You should think of how it would be ABused. Because it will be.
I don't disagree that what is being described by many is overkill, and I won't even attempt arguments like: "But, I'm sharing a house with seven others and we want..."
One good reason why I would like to eventually migrate to such a setup is that you learn a lot while putting it together. You also learn a lot by having a 'real' network to play with. Don't assume that everyone reading slashdot is employed as a network admin
I do know how I feel about this. When an author is a hit, any book with his name on it is bound to sell well.
Maybe not as well as a 'real' book by him, but well enough that publishers will lick their lips over this one. Hell. Even books vaguely connected to a series/world/idea sell. Think of the gazillion Guide To The World Of Foo books that are out there.
Some might argue that this is done so that the world will not be left without a particularly talented author's final contribution or some such. Some people may even mean that.
Personally, I don't like it. It's another man's work. Another man's dream. No matter how much respect you afford it, it's not yours. Leave it be. And, as my sig says,...
This isn't 100% relevant to making a photo frame, but I also don't think it warrants an entire thread of its own. So here's a supplementary question from me: Has anyone successfully hacked a laptop's TFT screen for use with other devices?
Id est, have you successfully 'ripped' the screen from the laptop and interfaced it with stuff like an ordinary VGA, something that outputs video, pictures, whatever?
I'm trying to find more information on that. I have a couple of old laptops that can barely run X, and since I'm integrating a PC into my car, I thought it'd be nice to rip the TFT off of one and use it for in-car output. In the past, I've replaced some cabling connecting the laptop's on-board VGA card to the TFT screen and the entire system looked very weird to me. But I'm assuming it can be done, if the pinouts can be tracked down. Or I could be way off track:)
If anybody with more experience on this could point me to the right direction, I'd appreciate it.
I really don't see how this could be an accident. The rule is that any airplane accident is a combination of at least three different errors/factors.
However. Any urban area, especially one with such a dense traffic, is at all times under radar surveillance and Air Traffic Control. Unless a number of people simultaneously had their braincells commit mass suicide, this could (or should) not have happened.
I fear that this is the result of terrorism. And if the news say different, I'll be very skeptical. After all, if it were terrorism, what does this show to the US public? That they're vulnerable at any time. Not exactly a sentiment the Powers That Be would like to instill to their voters...
And one last thing. Whatever this turns out to be, and as much as people all over the world are glued to their PCs or TV sets for news, there's one thing to remember here. It's not 'exciting', it's not 'fun'. It's tragic. These were real, live people...and the news channels are having a field day.
Hidden scripts. Web bugs. Pop-ups. Cookies. Ad trackers. SmartTags (a contradiction
in terms if I've ever seen one). We've entered an era where companies and unscrupulous
marketeers (yes, this is a purposeful allusion to the term buccaneer) hijack
our bandwidth and piss us off on a daily basis.
So what do we do? We try to protect ourselves with counter-measures, we spend
time and effort getting rid of things that shouldn't be there in the first
place. There's got to be a better way. If the corporations can hide behind the law, why
can't we, the users, the techies, the people, make legitimate use of it, in order to
adequately protect ourselves from the vultures?
Currently, this is difficult. The companies that annoy the hell out of us hide behind a
single fact: 'You came to my site. Suck it up, and watch what I'm
serving you.' Or, take another infuriating fact: Click-through licenses, which are written in
such a convoluted manner so as to make them absolutely useless. But what if users and
content providers (for, after all, they get hit by the various gator/smartTag technologies
too) worked together to create some kind of structure which would indeed make it
illegal to serve such ads to the user without their express consent?
How can technology and common sense be used so that each user can expressly
define what he or she consents to viewing? If such 'preferences' were the first thing a
remote server processed, for example, would it not help people avoid unwanted content?
Would it not become illegal for companies to disregard your wishes and hijack your
bandwidth serving you up with a load of crap? It should.
Or what if 'click through' licenses were required to stick to a common format in simple,
plain English, Q&A format that even the least advanced user would be able to
understand? Eg: 'Does this software install anything that might at any time perform an
action without my express consent, such as serve me ads, or communicate information to
a server? Yes/No:...'
So what would it take? Adaptations to the internet protocol? Browser/OS support for
this scheme? How would people pushing for such a structure make it a de facto
standard, or even make companies/sites disregarding this content liable under law? And is
more litigation the answer to it all? Or is it a double-edged knife? Step back for a minute
from what you know -- you are fighting a war on someone else's terms. What would it
take to redefine the battlefield and take over?
Slashdot Mirror
Probably. You know, if you haven't watched Preaching to the Perverted, do so. It's a fun flick, and its theme is eerily similar. Of course, in that movie, the MP himself is a closet perv... :)
I've had mini LAN-parties over at my place, where five or six of us were playing WoW at the same time. MRTG's bandwidth graph remained astonishingly low for the duration.
Recently, I've also used dialup (~44-48K actual) to play WoW and it performs without a glitch, keeping the bar mostly in the green. Even Battlegrounds work, although a delay there is noticeable.
I'm very impressed with the way you've structured your protocol to make efficient use of network bandwidth and I'm curious to learn what the main difficulties were, what the most bandwidth-intensive parts of the system are, and what kind of protections have you built into the protocol to avoid tampering with the inbound/outbound data. I realize you can't go into great detail for a host of reasons, but any tips and tricks would be welcome.
I've built a simple system with a couple of cameras that are hooked up to a dedicated PC near the entrance. Each camera is running (simple) computer vision algorithms to detect movement while isolating possible false positives (cats, dogs, leaves, etc). I activate the system before heading to bed, and it works in parallel with my commercial (motion sensor-based) system.
Should the system be triggered, it remains silent until:
a) It has saved a few stills of the target
b) It has saved a 20-sec video of the target
c) It has uploaded the pics/video as an attachment to one of my email addresses
d) It has faxed a still along with a pre-drafted cover letter to the local police department (who were kind enough to provide their fax#)
e) It has sent an SMS to my mobile, in case I'm not around.
It then runs through a pre-recorded message on the home cinema's loudspeakers to the tune of: "You have been caught on camera. Your picture is in the hands of the police and on the Internet. Leave now, and you might escape."
The measures taken above ensure that even if the burglar finds and busts the computer, the information will not be lost.
Of course, any techie solution such as what I described above (which, actually, has been useful once - a burglar broke in, the alarms tripped, and he left without me ever seeing him. My patio door was broken into, though) will only work in conjunction with two things: A commercial alarm system with well-tuned motion detectors and GOOD LIGHTING.
The latter is so obvious, yet many people ignore it. Good lighting is not just to give the cameras a better mugshot, people. Burglars despise well-lit areas. Make sure your house and all accesses to it are well-lit.
P.
Before this degenerates into another "The MPAA suxx0rz" argument (oops! too late!), I'm going to field a question here:
Is there be a way to defeat these goggles by emitting light in a wavelength invisible to the human eye? And if there is, since creating a blind spot where you're sitting would immediately call attention to your evildoing antics (bwahahaha), would it be possible to use a beam, directed at the little window and the dude with the night goggles, effectively blinding them?
This is merely for the sake of curiosity, of course, since (a) I'm not about to go set up a camcorder in my local cinema, (b) The attendants where I live wouldn't know night vision goggles from ViewMaster ones and (c) Creating such an effect would immediately draw attention to yourself anyway.
Eh. Implode. Now. k, thx.
This happened about six months ago at my workplace. I finally got a new computer to replace my old one. The new machine was smoking. Brand-new top of the line Athlon, powerful graphics card, the works. So I put that baby on my desk next to the old machine and start transferring some video capture cards.
I'm prying loose the slot covers for two of the PCI slots on the new box, and my screwdriver slips. The lowest cover bends at an odd angle, and it takes me a while to pry it loose and fit the board.
I turn the PC on... Nothing. With horror, I remember the scraping noise the slot cover made when the screwdriver slipped. Surely enough, I notice a scrape on the motherboard that's sliced cleanly through one (yes, ONE) channel. Shit. It's very near the edge, and I'm pretty sure it's just cut one channel, unless there are other layers beneath.
After a lot of cursing, I take the box home and I carefully drop a dollop of solder with the ole iron exactly on the cut, hoping to bridge the severed connection. It worked. I'm still running that PC at work, and I've never had any problems with it.
Don't knock it. This works. A month or so ago, they brought one of these babies to the gym where I work out. As many here have said, games fitted to exercise machines aren't new.
;)
But I was impressed with the new models. Instead of crappy-ass little LCDs or blinkenlights, they've got good-quality 15" TFTs, and the games are pretty neat. From puzzles (pedal faster to slow the bricks coming down) to shoot'em ups (pedal faster for speed and/or ammo), the graphics are good, and the combination of exercise with an IMMEDIATE goal is immersive.
The first time I started playing, at some point I felt really tired. I checked my watch, and I'd been pedalling away for thirty(!) minutes. I usually can't interest myself to stay on a bike more than fifteen minutes.
So yeah. Bring it on. Now all we need is a Quake mod where all the bikes in the gym are networked, and the faster you pedal, the more ammo and respawns you get.
Try the two-book series by Louis Lyons called 'All you wanted to know about Mathematics (but were afraid to ask)'.
It's a book geared towards science students, but to me at least, it's best damned Math book I've ever read. Why? Because it bridges the gap between disciplines. Mathematicians are often very theoretical-minded people. They have a hard time understanding that some people do not relate very well to theory, especially when all they need to know is how to apply that obscure theorem to get a practical result.
Lyons' book puts everything into context. His writing style is pretty laid back and comfortable (especially considering that this is a book about...well. Math.)
The two volumes together should give you a good, solid base to use math. Having that, I suggest following the other posters' advice and buying more specialized, more in-depth books that really get into the whys and hows. But I'm betting this kind of book will really help to get you started.
I have to agree with this and add that it has to be a developer that's ...compatible with you. You know how you sometimes work with somebody else and you can't get along no matter what? Not just on a personal level, but code-wise. And then you work with someone else, and you think /so/ much alike, that when you take your separate pieces of developed code at the end of the day and try to integrate them, they just fit like a jigsaw, on their own.
/.)
I find that when paired with a person like that, we can whip out code like nobody's business. We also inevitably end up drinking Guinness while coding, but I think that's a fringe benefit. (Mental note: Conduct tests concerning the zone with and without guinness. Report on
Well, 3D isn't overrated as such, but yes, I think a lot of new technologies will show up that will add value and flash to our games. Academic conferences on computer graphics, visualization and computer vision are ripe with ideas and technologies that are slowly being introduced into gaming as well.
Take volume graphics and voxels, for example. At a conference (I think it was early 2001), I watched a presentation showing how a team had put together a video with the most accurately rendered nebula I'd ever seen using volume graphics and voxels (run a Google search). Amazing detail. The only drawback? Computational cost. But PCs being what they are, and GPUs having come a long way... That's just one of the techs I see being included in games soon.
What about computer vision, which is more my kind of field? Interactive games, anyone? We know when you smile, we know when you growl, we know when you frown in thought. Not that the latter will have too much application in UT-style games, but...
My point is basically to agree with the original poster: Many new technologies will grace our games without causing a huge paradigm shift (i.e. a change from the mouse/keyboard/screen/joystick setup).
Microsoft has successfully used this approach already.
...anybody remember those?) to install their products? Nope.
(No, guys, this is not an MS-bashing post. Okay? Good.)
Think about it. Could everybody and their grandmother copy MS CDs, including Windows, Office etc? Yes. Did they try to stomp out piracy? No. Did they froth over installation issues that allowed people to use ridiculously simple series of digits (2s, 0s with a 1 at the end
Now you can all claim that was MS being useless. I won't. I'll claim they knew that their products were piratable (is that even a word?) and didn't care. Because there was a good chance it would give them market penetration.
I'm not saying this is the sole reason for MS's dominance of the home market, but I do firmly believe it is _a_ reason.
So what about 'activation' schemes and the like, you'll ask. Isn't that making it harder for Joe Blow to pirate their software now? Well, yeah. But now they're the market leaders, aren't they? So piracy is hurting them without helping them anymore.
This tactic can easily be applied to music, methinks.
Assuming a worst-case scenario (EULAs are all upheld, consumers are forced to pay damages for breaking them), I'm wondering if the punishment for breaking an EULA might be greater than the punishment for piracy.
I can't help but chuckle at the following court defence:
'Your honor, the defendant has violated the EULA!'
'Er. No I haven't. I never signed anything. There's no EULA on the software I'm using.'
'WHAT? Then it's a pirated copy! Someone's removed the license!'
'...Yup.'
Inevitably, most of this thread ended up discussing AI and the same arguments for and against machine intelligence I've seen bandied about in universities were used here as well.
Obviously, none of us (including those who actually do work on AI) can predict the state of affairs several years from now. However, my personal opinion is that humanity will be unable to create true 'AI', unless it changes its computing and programming models. Which it will, eventually. So you could say I'm maintaining a level of healthy optimism.
As for a an excellent book on the subject of how the brain works, check out Paul Churchland's 'The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A philosophical journey into the brain'. I heartily recommend it as a good read. It's not 'cutting edge', in that it was published a few years ago (my printing was published in 1996), and the systems described are not the SOTA. But it's till a great book.
Actually, to my experience, a lot of people go for Oracle over something like PostgreSQL because they're caught up in the hype.
I'm not saying that some people don't have legitimate reasons for choosing a highly expensive DB solution, like you said. I'm just saying that a lot of people that could do their job just as well with a 'free' solution choose Oracle because they don't know any better.
This is a good and rational post, and I hate to be a doomsayer. But unfortunately, history and experience have taught us that in a war there are no 'right' or 'wrong' sides.
/does/ count... if only for the next election.
Now before everyone jumps down my throat, let me clarify: I believe that Truth and Purity are myths. There exist no such ideals in the world we live in. They may exist in Tennyson's romantic poems, but here, as the NMA say, 'purity is for mad men to make fools of us all'.
No wars are fought just for 'right' or 'wrong' (and I put quotes around these notions because they are both human inventions -- nature has no use for them). They are fought for profit, in a multitude of guises -- money, oil, a base on foreign soil, a destabilizing hand in overseas politics.
Of course, it is expedient for governments to couch their intentions in moral crusades. They have learned all too well that public opinion
In a war, there is no 'good' side. Nothing, I repeat, nothing in our world is black and white -- if you only see in these two colors, consider yourself either (a) blind, or (b) blessed.
War is simply the continuation of politics through other means. Since time immemorial, people have never been happy with who they are, where they are, and what they have. It's human nature. Borders, politics and, indeed, morals have been in a state of constant flux ever since the first caveman took a club to the head of the guy living next cave to take his food.
Am I a cynic? You bet. Is there hope? Beats me. Do I have any other suggestions? No, I don't - I'm expressing my opinion, not acting superior.
As an aside, I don't think humanity will be breaking this vicious cycle of dominator/dominated any time soon. My personal vision is that technology will one day contribute to the extinction of war and conflict, not by fighting our wars for us, but simply by providing everything one might wish for -- when Man has conquered Matter and Energy (which, apparently, are the same thing), one hopes there will be nothing left to fight for. Then again, human nature being what it is, this might simply remain a hope. For the distant future, no less. But we must have something to believe in, right?
P.
Thanks for reminding me. While I cannot confirm whether this is a rumor/horror story/urban myth or the truth, I've heard that in the days when East Germany was a totalitarian state, several 'political suspects' were tagged using radioactive material by the secret police.
...Bugger off.
With the unfortunate side-effect that many of them died of cancer and other pleasant things.
"But no, really. These implants are safe! Scout's honor."
Nobody would mind indeed, if governments around the world were ideal. If there was no corruption, no greater interests, etc etc ad nauseum.
Are they? Uh. No. Hell no. When you think about a technology, and when you are weighing its benefits, you shouldn't think of how it can be used. You should think of how it would be ABused. Because it will be.
I don't disagree that what is being described by many is overkill, and I won't even attempt arguments like: "But, I'm sharing a house with seven others and we want..."
One good reason why I would like to eventually migrate to such a setup is that you learn a lot while putting it together. You also learn a lot by having a 'real' network to play with. Don't assume that everyone reading slashdot is employed as a network admin
I do know how I feel about this. When an author is a hit, any book with his name on it is bound to sell well.
...
Maybe not as well as a 'real' book by him, but well enough that publishers will lick their lips over this one. Hell. Even books vaguely connected to a series/world/idea sell. Think of the gazillion Guide To The World Of Foo books that are out there.
Some might argue that this is done so that the world will not be left without a particularly talented author's final contribution or some such. Some people may even mean that.
Personally, I don't like it. It's another man's work. Another man's dream. No matter how much respect you afford it, it's not yours. Leave it be. And, as my sig says,
This isn't 100% relevant to making a photo frame, but I also don't think it warrants an entire thread of its own. So here's a supplementary question from me: Has anyone successfully hacked a laptop's TFT screen for use with other devices?
:)
Id est, have you successfully 'ripped' the screen from the laptop and interfaced it with stuff like an ordinary VGA, something that outputs video, pictures, whatever?
I'm trying to find more information on that. I have a couple of old laptops that can barely run X, and since I'm integrating a PC into my car, I thought it'd be nice to rip the TFT off of one and use it for in-car output. In the past, I've replaced some cabling connecting the laptop's on-board VGA card to the TFT screen and the entire system looked very weird to me. But I'm assuming it can be done, if the pinouts can be tracked down. Or I could be way off track
If anybody with more experience on this could point me to the right direction, I'd appreciate it.
I really don't see how this could be an accident. The rule is that any airplane accident is a combination of at least three different errors/factors.
However. Any urban area, especially one with such a dense traffic, is at all times under radar surveillance and Air Traffic Control. Unless a number of people simultaneously had their braincells commit mass suicide, this could (or should) not have happened.
I fear that this is the result of terrorism. And if the news say different, I'll be very skeptical. After all, if it were terrorism, what does this show to the US public? That they're vulnerable at any time. Not exactly a sentiment the Powers That Be would like to instill to their voters...
And one last thing. Whatever this turns out to be, and as much as people all over the world are glued to their PCs or TV sets for news, there's one thing to remember here. It's not 'exciting', it's not 'fun'. It's tragic. These were real, live people...and the news channels are having a field day.
Hidden scripts. Web bugs. Pop-ups. Cookies. Ad trackers. SmartTags (a contradiction in terms if I've ever seen one). We've entered an era where companies and unscrupulous marketeers (yes, this is a purposeful allusion to the term buccaneer) hijack our bandwidth and piss us off on a daily basis.
So what do we do? We try to protect ourselves with counter-measures, we spend time and effort getting rid of things that shouldn't be there in the first place. There's got to be a better way. If the corporations can hide behind the law, why can't we, the users, the techies, the people, make legitimate use of it, in order to adequately protect ourselves from the vultures?
Currently, this is difficult. The companies that annoy the hell out of us hide behind a single fact: 'You came to my site. Suck it up, and watch what I'm serving you.' Or, take another infuriating fact: Click-through licenses, which are written in such a convoluted manner so as to make them absolutely useless. But what if users and content providers (for, after all, they get hit by the various gator/smartTag technologies too) worked together to create some kind of structure which would indeed make it illegal to serve such ads to the user without their express consent?
How can technology and common sense be used so that each user can expressly define what he or she consents to viewing? If such 'preferences' were the first thing a remote server processed, for example, would it not help people avoid unwanted content? Would it not become illegal for companies to disregard your wishes and hijack your bandwidth serving you up with a load of crap? It should.
Or what if 'click through' licenses were required to stick to a common format in simple, plain English, Q&A format that even the least advanced user would be able to understand? Eg: 'Does this software install anything that might at any time perform an action without my express consent, such as serve me ads, or communicate information to a server? Yes/No: ...'
So what would it take? Adaptations to the internet protocol? Browser/OS support for this scheme? How would people pushing for such a structure make it a de facto standard, or even make companies/sites disregarding this content liable under law? And is more litigation the answer to it all? Or is it a double-edged knife? Step back for a minute from what you know -- you are fighting a war on someone else's terms. What would it take to redefine the battlefield and take over?
Pathway