Because once you get past what they advertise as their position and see what Libertarians really want (massive oligarchy in place of the government, with most stuff left up to mob rule). I totally agree with a lot of what they say they want, but it's hard to ignore the fact that you're getting in bed with a bunch of tax dodging fatcats who could care less about most of the stuff you want.
All I really want is a free online translator for web pages (ala Babelfish and Google) that aren't terrible at it. Seriously, the quality of Babelfish translations has stayed constant since it came on the scene in the late 90s, even though machine translation in general has made some rather significant advances. I don't really use them enough to justify plopping down $500 on the professional packages, but the current systems are just terrible.
How about making it effectively impossible for Worms to spread by IP scanning? Without botnets deployed by worms the spammers will have a much more difficult time getting up and running.
How about anything that requires two boxes to directly connect to each other over randomly chosen ports? Like, say, Netmeeting?
It's also a pain in the rear for FTP and a shed load of other protocols, especially games. In recent years people have designed their applications to work around NAT, but that's not to say they couldn't be more efficient and work better without having to deal with it.
On the other hand, a good firewall on that same router would work just as well and not cause massive headaches for networking types. The number one reason I've been excited about IPv6 is to finally get rid of those annoying NAT boxes everywhere.
I have not been so excited about the relative complexity of IPv6 (it's a lot more than just more bits in the address) and the real second system effect it has. The biggest killer for me is that most ISPs are really dragging their feet on IPv6, so it's exceedingly difficult to try to go "native".
It's all a conspiracy by the big Solar Power companies. They can't afford to let all of that energy fall into the hands of people who won't cowtow to them. That's why they've been lobbying so hard to get their executives into positions of power! It's all so clear now!
I second that thought. One thing I've never much liked about Nethack is that as you get better you can often make games last for hours before finding a situation you've never encountered before, but handling the situation wrong (and the proper solution isn't correct) basically just dumps you back at level 1 with nothing. That gets disheartening real fast because there are a lot of dangers on the lower levels that can kill or screw you over in a single action and basically stop your 12 hour run right on the spot. I also get kinda tired of fighting the same low level enemies over and over again just to get to the parts of the game I havn't seen yet.
The "death is final" aspect of Nethack (and in fact almost all roguelike games) is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it means the game has a ton of replay value, because you'll need thousands of hours to discover everything in it (because you have to grind the low levels so many times), but it's a curse that keeps the game on the fringe because most people will shut it down and not start it again if they get 5 hours into the game and then lose everything to what is basically an unavoidable situation.
I'm not sure if there is any real solution to this. You could have a set number of lives, but that will make the game too easy for people who have spent 20 years mastering it (and really, these are the people who do the most development). I have a sneaking suspicion that if this were the case then they would feel compelled to make some other aspect of the game even harder. That said, there are certainly no lack of extra-hard nethack clones available (I played on once on the Mac where spells would "burn out" if you used them too often (20 casts was enough to burn out the "fireball" spell, but even just 50 Magic Missiles would burn it out, and once it was burnt out you had no way (that I found) of ever casting that spell again), which make Wizards really hard to play.
Which is great if you're talking about the Pacific coast, but out in the Midwest you just don't have the moisture for it. That's why those areas were plains to start with, because grasses outcompeted trees. You can get trees to grow out there (Minnesota is notable in this regard, but it's a state that isn't exactly lacking in water), but making it sustainable is another story indeed, and in the more arid parts of the country like Nevada and New Mexico you really have no chance in heck of getting sustainable tree growth out of the waterfall in those regions.
Yeah, but one thing they do tend to have is a boatload of free time. A game that takes 80 hours to finish will take me several weeks to complete, but a kid that has to stay cooped up in a hospital room all day with not much to do or anyone to talk to for big streches of time will probably go through it a lot faster.
So you're plan for fixing climate change is to turn the US into a rainforest by changing the climate? I mean it's not like most of the US recieves enough rainfall each year to make it even close to a rain forest. It seems to me that once we have a gigantic weather control machine capable of causing rainfall over the entire US we won't need to go to all of that trouble to plant trees, we can just turn the thermostat down on the weather machine.
If the past is any indication, the ATI product will be faster than the competing nVidia product, but will be held back by driver issues. Once the drivers are sorted out (mostly) they'll be faster at most everything until the next big nVidia release.
I wouldn't be so keen on hoping for failure. That's what happened to SVHS and look what it got us: Stuck with inferior VHS tapes for years longer than we should have while the industry cooked up something that they thought was even more restrictive (we got lucky with DVDs having lousy encryption).
You're acting like they're going to post all information they have on the Wiki. Clearly you only post information for threats that aren't likely to have a shot at looking at it. I don't think you'll be seeing Chinese information on it for instance.
As someone who isn't a big fan of Bluegrass, Sunday is pretty much dead to me with WAMU. I do like the Big Broadcast when I remember to tune it in though. Saturday is pretty good until the afternoon though. This American Life is just too sappy for me. The weekdays are where it's at with WAMU though, they pride themselves on their talk radio and news. Diane and Kojo both put on good shows, it's just a shame that I only catch them in the evening repeats when I can't call in and tell one of the guests why he's an idiot.
Frankly, their interest here seems to be "let our listeners actually hear our content", which is pretty hard to argue against, especially when the other guy is flagrantly breaking the law.
I'm surprised at how rediculously powerful those repeaters apparently are. We had one set up along my commute and it totally blew away my NPR station for a good 5 minutes (at 35MPH admittedly) with some Latino Hip-Hop something or the other. It was also blasting across the station above and below it on the dial. That only lasted about 6 months before it just suddenly stopped though. I'm not sure if they dropped their Satellite radio service, or if the FCC got them. Actaully, I thought it was pirate radio for a long time, but an XM repeater seems to make more sense (Why would a Pirate station blast over an existing one? That's a surefire way to get caught.)
I think the lack of advertising was the major contributer to the terrible numbers they got in the end. Unless you read Slashdot/Digg/Etc or know someone connected to the project, then chances are you never heard of this. I could walk around my office and ask but I'll guarentee that no more than 2 or 3 of the 40 people who work here would have a clue what I'm talking about, and we're technology oriented!
More importantly, with the change in our threats has come a change in where the threats come from. When the "big bad guy" was the Soviets, we had to assume that they had paid off at least some strategic people in every agency, or possibly even had plants, that allowed them some access to data that should otherwise be protected by our security clearance and secure data handing procedures. Because of this, it was very necessary to keep everyone as compartmentalized as possible, even though this is far from optimal when trying to organize the efforts of thousands of analysts and field operatives.
Modern day threats are different. Al-Quieda probably doesn't have a vast network of spies gaining access to our intelligence serivices, so it makes sense to open up the internal communication a bit to allow our own intelligence workers to be more efficient. While it does make a compromise that much more painful, the advantages gained through the information sharing probably outweigh the risks.
The fear is because not only is it a relatively minor mutation to make the virus compatable with humans, but we have historical evidence that a very similar thing has happened in the past. The 1918 flu that killed between 20 to 40 million people worldwide is considered to be a reasonable preview to what would happen if H5N1 mutated into a human transmissable form. While it's true that virtually any virus could mutate into something deadly to humans and rapidly transmissable, the amount of mutation required for that to happen in most cases is far larger than what is required for H5N1 to do the same thing. Thus, we're protecting against the most likely threat, which is really all we can do.
To be honest, I'm not that worried about the Wine infection vector. It's my experiance that even well behaved programs are a crapshoot in Wine, trying to get something underhanded working in Wine would be a nightmare, especially with all of the different versions out there.
But I want a phone that has 8000 features including getting my ESPN newsclips in 5 second video segments, playing badly made games, and having a look like it was designed by 12 year old boys with crayons! And so help me god if the battery lasts 8 hours or I ever get more than 2 bars worth of signal!
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, I think that's right around the projected minimum specs for Neverwinter Nights 3.
Hmm, for $2000 I could buy 3 PS3s (maybe just 2 off of eBay) and make two crappy laser pointers myself. The term that leaps to mind is "rip off".
Because once you get past what they advertise as their position and see what Libertarians really want (massive oligarchy in place of the government, with most stuff left up to mob rule). I totally agree with a lot of what they say they want, but it's hard to ignore the fact that you're getting in bed with a bunch of tax dodging fatcats who could care less about most of the stuff you want.
All I really want is a free online translator for web pages (ala Babelfish and Google) that aren't terrible at it. Seriously, the quality of Babelfish translations has stayed constant since it came on the scene in the late 90s, even though machine translation in general has made some rather significant advances. I don't really use them enough to justify plopping down $500 on the professional packages, but the current systems are just terrible.
How about making it effectively impossible for Worms to spread by IP scanning? Without botnets deployed by worms the spammers will have a much more difficult time getting up and running.
How about anything that requires two boxes to directly connect to each other over randomly chosen ports? Like, say, Netmeeting?
It's also a pain in the rear for FTP and a shed load of other protocols, especially games. In recent years people have designed their applications to work around NAT, but that's not to say they couldn't be more efficient and work better without having to deal with it.
On the other hand, a good firewall on that same router would work just as well and not cause massive headaches for networking types. The number one reason I've been excited about IPv6 is to finally get rid of those annoying NAT boxes everywhere.
I have not been so excited about the relative complexity of IPv6 (it's a lot more than just more bits in the address) and the real second system effect it has. The biggest killer for me is that most ISPs are really dragging their feet on IPv6, so it's exceedingly difficult to try to go "native".
It's all a conspiracy by the big Solar Power companies. They can't afford to let all of that energy fall into the hands of people who won't cowtow to them. That's why they've been lobbying so hard to get their executives into positions of power! It's all so clear now!
I second that thought. One thing I've never much liked about Nethack is that as you get better you can often make games last for hours before finding a situation you've never encountered before, but handling the situation wrong (and the proper solution isn't correct) basically just dumps you back at level 1 with nothing. That gets disheartening real fast because there are a lot of dangers on the lower levels that can kill or screw you over in a single action and basically stop your 12 hour run right on the spot. I also get kinda tired of fighting the same low level enemies over and over again just to get to the parts of the game I havn't seen yet.
The "death is final" aspect of Nethack (and in fact almost all roguelike games) is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it means the game has a ton of replay value, because you'll need thousands of hours to discover everything in it (because you have to grind the low levels so many times), but it's a curse that keeps the game on the fringe because most people will shut it down and not start it again if they get 5 hours into the game and then lose everything to what is basically an unavoidable situation.
I'm not sure if there is any real solution to this. You could have a set number of lives, but that will make the game too easy for people who have spent 20 years mastering it (and really, these are the people who do the most development). I have a sneaking suspicion that if this were the case then they would feel compelled to make some other aspect of the game even harder. That said, there are certainly no lack of extra-hard nethack clones available (I played on once on the Mac where spells would "burn out" if you used them too often (20 casts was enough to burn out the "fireball" spell, but even just 50 Magic Missiles would burn it out, and once it was burnt out you had no way (that I found) of ever casting that spell again), which make Wizards really hard to play.
It's easy to take tough stands and be completely clean and truthful when nobody listens to what you say anyway.
Which is great if you're talking about the Pacific coast, but out in the Midwest you just don't have the moisture for it. That's why those areas were plains to start with, because grasses outcompeted trees. You can get trees to grow out there (Minnesota is notable in this regard, but it's a state that isn't exactly lacking in water), but making it sustainable is another story indeed, and in the more arid parts of the country like Nevada and New Mexico you really have no chance in heck of getting sustainable tree growth out of the waterfall in those regions.
Yeah, but one thing they do tend to have is a boatload of free time. A game that takes 80 hours to finish will take me several weeks to complete, but a kid that has to stay cooped up in a hospital room all day with not much to do or anyone to talk to for big streches of time will probably go through it a lot faster.
So you're plan for fixing climate change is to turn the US into a rainforest by changing the climate? I mean it's not like most of the US recieves enough rainfall each year to make it even close to a rain forest. It seems to me that once we have a gigantic weather control machine capable of causing rainfall over the entire US we won't need to go to all of that trouble to plant trees, we can just turn the thermostat down on the weather machine.
That's not always true. There are always some evolutionary dead ends that end up just dying out.
If the past is any indication, the ATI product will be faster than the competing nVidia product, but will be held back by driver issues. Once the drivers are sorted out (mostly) they'll be faster at most everything until the next big nVidia release.
I wouldn't be so keen on hoping for failure. That's what happened to SVHS and look what it got us: Stuck with inferior VHS tapes for years longer than we should have while the industry cooked up something that they thought was even more restrictive (we got lucky with DVDs having lousy encryption).
You're acting like they're going to post all information they have on the Wiki. Clearly you only post information for threats that aren't likely to have a shot at looking at it. I don't think you'll be seeing Chinese information on it for instance.
As someone who isn't a big fan of Bluegrass, Sunday is pretty much dead to me with WAMU. I do like the Big Broadcast when I remember to tune it in though. Saturday is pretty good until the afternoon though. This American Life is just too sappy for me. The weekdays are where it's at with WAMU though, they pride themselves on their talk radio and news. Diane and Kojo both put on good shows, it's just a shame that I only catch them in the evening repeats when I can't call in and tell one of the guests why he's an idiot.
Frankly, their interest here seems to be "let our listeners actually hear our content", which is pretty hard to argue against, especially when the other guy is flagrantly breaking the law.
I'm surprised at how rediculously powerful those repeaters apparently are. We had one set up along my commute and it totally blew away my NPR station for a good 5 minutes (at 35MPH admittedly) with some Latino Hip-Hop something or the other. It was also blasting across the station above and below it on the dial. That only lasted about 6 months before it just suddenly stopped though. I'm not sure if they dropped their Satellite radio service, or if the FCC got them. Actaully, I thought it was pirate radio for a long time, but an XM repeater seems to make more sense (Why would a Pirate station blast over an existing one? That's a surefire way to get caught.)
I think the lack of advertising was the major contributer to the terrible numbers they got in the end. Unless you read Slashdot/Digg/Etc or know someone connected to the project, then chances are you never heard of this. I could walk around my office and ask but I'll guarentee that no more than 2 or 3 of the 40 people who work here would have a clue what I'm talking about, and we're technology oriented!
More importantly, with the change in our threats has come a change in where the threats come from. When the "big bad guy" was the Soviets, we had to assume that they had paid off at least some strategic people in every agency, or possibly even had plants, that allowed them some access to data that should otherwise be protected by our security clearance and secure data handing procedures. Because of this, it was very necessary to keep everyone as compartmentalized as possible, even though this is far from optimal when trying to organize the efforts of thousands of analysts and field operatives.
Modern day threats are different. Al-Quieda probably doesn't have a vast network of spies gaining access to our intelligence serivices, so it makes sense to open up the internal communication a bit to allow our own intelligence workers to be more efficient. While it does make a compromise that much more painful, the advantages gained through the information sharing probably outweigh the risks.
The fear is because not only is it a relatively minor mutation to make the virus compatable with humans, but we have historical evidence that a very similar thing has happened in the past. The 1918 flu that killed between 20 to 40 million people worldwide is considered to be a reasonable preview to what would happen if H5N1 mutated into a human transmissable form. While it's true that virtually any virus could mutate into something deadly to humans and rapidly transmissable, the amount of mutation required for that to happen in most cases is far larger than what is required for H5N1 to do the same thing. Thus, we're protecting against the most likely threat, which is really all we can do.
To be honest, I'm not that worried about the Wine infection vector. It's my experiance that even well behaved programs are a crapshoot in Wine, trying to get something underhanded working in Wine would be a nightmare, especially with all of the different versions out there.
But I want a phone that has 8000 features including getting my ESPN newsclips in 5 second video segments, playing badly made games, and having a look like it was designed by 12 year old boys with crayons! And so help me god if the battery lasts 8 hours or I ever get more than 2 bars worth of signal!