By that train of thought, one person could buy the game then hand it along to every person he knows, letting each new person register a new account and bypassing the purchase price of the game itself.... no sense whatsoever.
You are aware that this is precisely how software has functioned since it was invented. Would it also surprise you that companies have made millions with that system? And that's without monthly fees. Your hypothetical scenario rarely occurs in the real world. Transferable licensing has always been the norm, not the exception. You may want to argue that transferable licensing is just INSANE.
BTW, your scheme wouldn't work anyway because Blizzard could simply disable the old account. It is an online game after all. They have complete control. One account per CD key. This really is not rocket science here.
Do they allow you to change said login and password so that the old user cannot just use your account while you pay the monthly fees? The submitter claims that Blizzard told him that he could not really prevent the old owner from still accessing the account.
No one is asking Blizzard to produce a new CD-key, just to allow the resetting of accounts so that it can be properly re-used by a new owner. That's just common sense. It's clear that Blizzard is after something here. Money. They have no intention of competing with used game sales. That's all.
WoW doesn't let you delete the account. I know because I played it for a month (okay 2 weeks) and got sick of it, but my account is still ready to be reactivated any time I want. There is no "delete" function. In fact I think they even explicitly mentioned that when I "suspended" my account with them. If there were a "delete your account" option this would be a non-issue.
I think it's clear what Blizzard is after. They don't want their new game sales competing with used game sales from people (like me) who didn't like the game. So they make the key itself (effectively) non-transferable. This is why I like piracy. If they are going to play hardball and take every advantage, then so should we.
Getting a restraining order is very easy for women. It was designed to be that way. But women are humans too (or so I've heard) and are just as tempted to abuse power when they have it.
A good friend of mine had a restraining order taken out on him for absolutely no reason other than the fact that his girlfriend at the time was angry with him for something. He was not a violent guy and had never hit a woman in his life.
She had been previously married to a cop and so knew how the system worked and how easy it was. The funny part is they ended up getting married. I would never marry a girl who did that to me. To his credit he did hesitate to get back together with her afterwards. I tried (unsuccesfully) to convince him not to. Eventually he accepted her apology and relented.
I would imagine that this could be easily abused by a wife who suspects her husband of cheating. She would have a record of everywhere he goes. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if guys tried to do it too. There are lots of circumstances where it would be really tempting. And it's not like there's any risk.
They didn't mention anything about market share. Perhaps that 3% of copying software happens to be just one application that almost everyone already uses anyway dvddecrypter. It may already have nearly 100% market share, which is why no one may even bother to defeat it this. Why defeat "copy protection" which doesn't work. Actually I am guessing that most of that 97% are applications that most people have never heard of let alone used.
Laser discs don't have any copy protection that I am aware of. I can copy any of mine to S-VHS tape or to my hard drive for that matter, any time I want. Maybe some discs had some macrovision but not many. That was actually far more common on VHS.
The most well-known case involved a monkey holding area of sorts, in Reston, Virginia.
That strain of Ebola is harmless to humans. So who cares? The only real case was in a USAMRIID lab with the Zaire strain of Ebola. Quite pathogenic to humans! That is kind of scary but it has never been reproduced to my knowledge. Although neither can it be easily explained away.
The other case involved a nurse in Zaire IIRC. The strain was named after her - Ebola Zaire Mayinga.
WRONG. That is totally wrong. That nurse was in direct contact (duh, she was an African nurse working with Ebola patients) with the virus. There was absolutely no evidence of airborne transmission.
Apparently this nurse ran around the city for a few hours while infected before they found her. Somehow she managed to fail to infect anyone
Yes, that is because the only Ebola strain that is aerosol transmissable is the Reston strain which so far has only proven dangerous to monkeys.
The fact that that nurse was able to walk around a major African city for as long as she did and share a soda and a sandwich with someone and not transmit it to anyone are actually evidence of exactly the opposite. An aerosol infective virus would have been transmitted to someone.
Also, I know for a fact, that your statement about the experiments is inaccurate. It's close, but not quite correct. What we have never seen is proof of airborne infection in humans in the wild.
That is completely untrue. Where are you getting this from anyway? If you are talking about the Reston strain then who cares? That is not dangerous to humans.
to the best of my knowledge, the experiments were reproduced.
Bullshit. Go ahead and cite them then. And I'm sorry but Google is not in fact a research tool. About this kind of subject you will find mostly incorrect 5th hand sensationalized information based on works of fiction and lots of speculation filtered through many different people. Those are not facts.
In any case, Ebola is a lot worse than you make it out to be, and even if it weren't airborne, the nature of crashing out is such that any lack of airborne ability would hardly slow the virus' spread much.
"Crashing out" is not nearly as dramatic as you make it out to be. In fact not all Ebola victims die from blood loss. I can only hope that none of your "facts" are derived from The Hot Zone, because that was a work of complete fiction. There was almost nothing in that book that was not wildly exaggerated for dramatic effect. The descriptions of the way people died in particular were far more dramatic than in reality. Ebola just doesn't kill that way. That's not the reality.
It kills far too effectively to really pose a epidemic-scale threat.
Actually that's not true. Ebola victims can be infective and walking around for quite a long time. As long as a week or two. More than long enough to infect countless others if the virus were airborne infective. The main reason that Ebola is not a large threat even in Africa is that it can be stopped so easily with simple barrier nursing procedures as described by the CDC on their website. Every epidemic was simply a matter of primitive hospital conditions and lack of common sense.
However, the real threat would be someone modifying the virus to have a longer dormancy period.
Two weeks is more than long enough. If the Zaire strain could be modified to make it infective through the air, not just in one isolated lab experiment but in real world conditions, it could be an incredibly dangerous pathogen, and an excellent virus to use for terrorism purposes.
The problem with Ebola from a city wiping perspective is that it is just not infective enough. In fact it is actually surprisingly difficult to get.
In the current climate, only an idiot would actually buy a CD at a store.
I buy CDs, not due to my stupidity, but due to the fact that I can detect differences between the CD and even a carefully ripped 320kbps MP3. I have done blind tests and I can consistently tell the difference. I do have a hard time with.MPC -insane. That compression system is really, really good. I cannot consistently tell the difference in blind testing. But almost no music is available for download in that format. About the same amount as in APE or FLAC. The 128-192 kpbs MP3s available for download sounds like crap to me. I buy the CDs because the sound quality is better enough to make it worth it to me.
Maybe you should get your daughter's hearing checked (when was the last time she had a hearing test) or buy her some better equipment so she can hear the difference. Of course even when someone can hear the difference they may not care, or may not care enough to spend the money on a new CD, which can often cost $20 or more these days.
Besides, if you take care of your media you don't really need them
CD/DVD media is soft. Very soft. I have not actually found a way to take one out of its case, place it in my player, and remove it again without scratching it. And yes I am so careful doing so that it takes me a while to put it in and take it out. I do everything slowly and carefully.
and DVDs are more resistant than CDs
My experience does not agree. In my experience DVDs if anything are easier to damage. Not because they are easier to scratch. Both CDs and DVDs seem to be made of the same ultra-soft plastic. But because A DVD usually holds 9 GB (dual layer) of data in the same space that only holds 700 MB on a standard CD. So a small scratch can make a much larger amount of data unreadable to the laser.
DVDs are unbelievably fragile. If it weren't for advanced error correction that degrades video quality (by guessing) in order to keep the disc playing video rental stores might get like a week of use out of them.
If the MPAA ever does manage to find a truly effective system to thwart backup copies I will stop buying DVDs completely. Because I know that within a month my DVD will be scratched and will start to degrade in quality at about the same rate as a VHS tape. They will completely lose customers like me. I know that they will never be able to stop analog copies due to various laws of physics. So I will just download an S-VHS quality version from the internet instead of buying the "DVD".
If they could somehow make media that is truly scratchproof, like say by pressing the data into a heat treated beta alloy of titanium or something, then you might have a point.
For an extreme example of what can be asked for what is less than a couple of dollars worth of DVDs look at the cost of Japanese TV series. I am considering the purchase of a series that costs $220 +$25 shipping for only 6 DVDs. For that price I would expect to get gold masters. And just to make it more difficult they are region encoded so I cannot actually play them on my player. Japanese TV networks usually expect to sell their DVDs at around $40 per episode. Now that's begging for piracy. Which they get in abundance from Hong Kong and mainland China. Unfortunately the quality of the bootlegs is crap.
Music CDs are sold to the consumer for a price of approximately $10.
Where do you live? In China? Prices vary, but where I live (in the US) CDs range from $18-$23 + sales tax in local stores and $14-$19 + shipping online. Of course, used, scratched CDs are cheaper.
What the hell are you talking about? The only place Ebola has ever been demonstrated to transmit by the aerosol route is in a laboratory (in a group of monkeys) and that experiment has never been reproduced (AFAIK). Not one case has ever been demonstrated in the wild. Not one.
OTOH, isn't there a proven ebola vaccine now? Big news some years ago. And not of much use either. Ebola is one of the rarest diseases ever known to humanity. The odds of getting it even to a Central African is infinitesimal. Even if it were commercially available and you were planning to move to Kenya or Zaire for a few years, it wouldn't make much sense to get.
What's so hard about using 1337speak substitutions in your cracking software? It does add some extra characters that need to be searched but not that many. It's not exactly a new idea. I wouldn't be surprised if password cracking software already had the option to automatically include 1337speak in the search.
That's not really something you "know". The information is not stored in your brain. The advantage of brain storage is that an armed attacker cannot (literally) force you to divulge the information. And if they kill you they will never get it.
One of the biggest problems with most biometrics like fingerprints or eye scans is that you can be physically coerced to use the reader. All it would take is 3 or 4 strong guys to physically move your hand or your head where they want it. All embedding a token into your finger would do is convert something you have into something that you are. Either way it cannot be relied on. It's nice but does not eliminate the need for secure passwords.
I end up with a completely random set of characters.
That I doubt. All lowercase letters occuring with the same frequency pattern as naturally occuring English would be susceptible to frequency analysis. Of course it avoids dictionary words (in any language) and doesn't follow the consonant-vowel pattern that many languages have. It is also shorter/faster to type than a passphrase.
I thought the whole point of brute force was that you don't need a dictionary. I wonder if you might need the proper character sets though. If a cyrillic only letter appears it could make things difficult even for brute forcing. Or maybe not since it is just stored as a binary code based on the character table for that alphabet. Using a language for which dictionaries are not commonly avaialable would certainly stop dictionary attacks though. It is not likely that an attacker is willing to go through the trouble of writing his own dictionaries for languages that don't have them.
[Slovakian]+[Japanese with alternating Hiragana/Katakana characters]+[Chinese]+[Russian/Ukranian]+[Hangul(K orean)]+[Georgian]+[Gaelic]+[Kmer(Cambodia)]+[Hua( Papua New Guinea)]+[Gujarati]+[one additional language for which no dictionary has ever been written] = pretty good passphrase. The only problem is that not all of these character sets may be available on the operating system. Languages which often break the consonant-vowel-consonant pattern like Czech are good too. All you have to do is memorize a very limited vocabulary from these languages. Just enough to create simple passphrases from.
I was actually impressed with the character balancing in World of Warcraft. Usually mages are overpowered and everyone likes them, but in WoW there are not many mages because they are so underpowered that they are very tough to play. Now if Blizzard could have just thrown in some kind of a story to keep me playing it may have held my interest for more than a couple of weeks. There is only so much level grinding and hacking and slashing I can do before I get very bored. But then, being over 30, I am not exactly in the target demographic. I like your magic system idea. Combine that with a good story and you could certainly have an interesting game. Of course, games are going in exactly the opposite direction: towards simpler console friendly twitch-fests and away from hardcore, have to read the 200 page manual and spend some time learning the stat system, kind of game.
Well, sort of. My point is that it is neither true nor false. No fact either way.
Well then I misinterpreted your post. A supernatural, by definition invisible, undetectable entity is impossible to show any evidence for. It is not just unproven but unprovable. To assert the existence of such a thing (and I use that term loosely) is completely pointless. Even if it is not self-contradictory (and not all deities are), there would be no way for anyone to know about it. Understanding something by "non-rational" means is just another way of not understanding something.
If you really wanted to use scientific vocabulary to pigeonhole it, you would have to call it a theory, not proven, yet not disproven.
An unprovable theory is a contridiction in terms. A hypothesis for which, not only is there not a shred of evidence, but for which there could be no way of gathering evidence would probably be a more accurate description.
Science is not perfect, but it happens to be the only way we have of actually understanding the world around us. Religion is not like some kind of alternative to it. Rather it is an extremely primitive attempt at the same thing. In this sense they are competing. The only difference is that one is sometimes succesful at increasing our knowledge of the world around us, but the other never is and could never be. I can see your point about science having its place and religion having another, but religion is just a primitive attempt at science: science without the benefit of the scientific method.
I wonder if you would have the same sort of comments about my belief in magical flying gnomes living in the trees in my backyard. Would you say that scientific terms should not be used to characterize such beliefs? Both are unprovable assertions (magical invisible undetectable entities). Religion is given far more respect than it deserves. Even with its waning popularity in the modern world, especially as a philosophy, these silly ideas are taken way too seriously. Its only importance is in the numbers of people who believe it (mostly because other people do) and the sociological implications of that. If only a few people believed them they would never be taken seriously.
See this humorous review from an unbeliever. Kinda summarizes why I didn't like You Can't Go Home Again (ep05).
Just so you know, Act of Contrition (ep4), You Can't Go Home Again (ep5), Litmus (ep6)[blatant ripoff of ST:TNG "The Drumhead"],and Secrets and Lies (ep9) all blow chunks. They are episodic "planet of the week" kind of episodes written by amateurs whose previous writing experience consists of courtroom TV or none at all (story editors).
If you want to be able to guess which episodes are going to suck in this season or the next, just look for ones written by Jeff Flaming, Carla Robinson, and the David Weddle/Bradley Thompson team of story editors (not writers).
This series while certainly some of the best SciFi I have ever seen on television has its own share of poorly written episodes just like most.
The "real" episodes are 1-3,7,8,10-13 (although 10 is questionable). The rest are filler. Just download the bad episodes so that you can follow what little story arc they toss in (sometimes as little as a few minutes worth).
It's amazing how people are willing to twist their minds into pretzels to get around the fact that patching a hole in a spaceship by stuffing it with a jacket (whether accompanied by a scrap of metal or not) and "steering" an organism that was never fitted with any "controls" (for obvious reasons) is not even remotely plausible. It is clear to me that the writer, Carla Robinson (who has previously written for The West Wing, Law and Order, and Six Feet Under) had lost her way and didn't know how to get back herself.
Six Degrees of Seperation (ep07) and Kobols Last Gleaming (ep12/13) were by far the best episodes in the season. The only thing that could compete would be the pilot.
1) 33 Pretty good. Written by RDM, directed by Rymer.
2) Water Pretty good, perhaps a bit better than 33. Written by RDM, directed by Marita Grabiak.
3) Bastille Day Blatant attempt at appeasing TOS fans with Dick Hatch. Not as good as the first two, but not terrible either. Written by Toni Graphia, directed by Allan Kroeker.
4) Act of Contrition Stupid, poorly written. Horrible. Top Gun. Not real SciFi. Written by Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, directed by Ron Hardy
5) You Can't Go Home Again Bad, bad, bad... A blatant attempt to copy TOS ep. Written by Carla Robinson, Directed by Sergio Mimica-gezzan
6) Litmus The courtroom episode. Dumb. Not even scifi. Already been done much better in ST:TNG The Drumhead, which no doubt Flaming has probably seen. Written by Jeff Flaming, directed by Ron Hardy.
7) Six Degrees of Seperation Unfrackingbelievable! Incredible! Why can't they all be like this one? Written by Michael Angeli, directed by Robert Young. Hope we see more of these guys in season 2.
8) Flesh and Bone Not bad. Kind of interesting. Some good parts. Written by Toni Graphia, directed by Brad Turner.
9) Secrets and Lies Lame attempt at comedy. Horrible. Barely watchable. Written by Jeff Flaming, Directed by EJO.
10) The Hand of God Attempt to appeal to TOS fans through space battles. Predictable, but not completely horrible. Written by David Weddle and Bradley Thompson, directed by Jeff Woolnough.
11) Colonial Day The political episode. Not SciFI. Mildly interesting, but mostly a filler episode. Hatch again for TOS folks. Written by Carla Robinson, directed by Jonas Pate.
12/13) Kobol's Last Gleaming The best episode. Why couldn't they have produced all of the episodes at this level of quality?
Written by David Eick (story) and RDM (teleplay), directed by the great Michael Rymer. These guys should have written and directed every episode! Why all the filler?!
Conclusion: Jeff Flaming, Carla Robinson, Bradley Thompson, and David Weddle should not be allowed to write any episodes in season 2. All writing should be done by David Eick, RDM, and Michael Angeli. Directing should be done by Michael Rymer, Robert Young, or maybe Marita Grabiak. Ideally Michael Rymer would just direct all future episodes.
Many western religions have ideas (for lack of a better term) which are self-contradictory. It is not actually possible to "believe" in these per se. There is nothing to believe in. Square circles cannot exist by definition. I have to admire the creators of such "ideas". It is so ballsy to expect your followers to believe in something which you have explicitly defined as not being possible to exist. A true test of the faithful I guess.
For the most part I believe you are correct. This is why religious beliefs cannot be true per se. Anything that is not just unproven but unprovable cannot be regarded as a fact. Such beliefs can also justifiably be regarded as irrational. Just like the belief in elves or talking trees or invisible aliens living in your backyard.
I think the confusion stems from the fact that religion is just a very primitive form of science. It is a pre-scientific way of trying to understand the world around you. If you can't understand something just invent a supernatural entitity who created whatever it is and controls whatever process you don't understand. It is really just a substitute for actual understanding.
The primitive hope is that if some creature is responsible for the life and death and fertility and crops and every other aspect of human animal life, that it can be controlled without understanding it just be asking the appropriate entity for mercy or help or kindness or whatever. There was a ST:TNG episode based on this very idea.
The difference between polytheism and monotheism is just that the polytheists believe (sensibly enough)in the division of labor whereas the monotheists believe that one entity controls everything. I guess the advantage of that is that you only have one person to ask favors of and the mythologies may be simpler.
Nope. You must be thinking of the Pentium M there buddy. Triple those numbers and you'll be a lot closer to reality, at least at full load. CnQ is another matter of course.
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By that train of thought, one person could buy the game then hand it along to every person he knows, letting each new person register a new account and bypassing the purchase price of the game itself.... no sense whatsoever.
You are aware that this is precisely how software has functioned since it was invented. Would it also surprise you that companies have made millions with that system? And that's without monthly fees. Your hypothetical scenario rarely occurs in the real world. Transferable licensing has always been the norm, not the exception. You may want to argue that transferable licensing is just INSANE.
BTW, your scheme wouldn't work anyway because Blizzard could simply disable the old account. It is an online game after all. They have complete control. One account per CD key. This really is not rocket science here.
Do they allow you to change said login and password so that the old user cannot just use your account while you pay the monthly fees? The submitter claims that Blizzard told him that he could not really prevent the old owner from still accessing the account.
No one is asking Blizzard to produce a new CD-key, just to allow the resetting of accounts so that it can be properly re-used by a new owner. That's just common sense. It's clear that Blizzard is after something here. Money. They have no intention of competing with used game sales. That's all.
WoW doesn't let you delete the account. I know because I played it for a month (okay 2 weeks) and got sick of it, but my account is still ready to be reactivated any time I want. There is no "delete" function. In fact I think they even explicitly mentioned that when I "suspended" my account with them. If there were a "delete your account" option this would be a non-issue.
I think it's clear what Blizzard is after. They don't want their new game sales competing with used game sales from people (like me) who didn't like the game. So they make the key itself (effectively) non-transferable. This is why I like piracy. If they are going to play hardball and take every advantage, then so should we.
Getting a restraining order is very easy for women. It was designed to be that way. But women are humans too (or so I've heard) and are just as tempted to abuse power when they have it.
A good friend of mine had a restraining order taken out on him for absolutely no reason other than the fact that his girlfriend at the time was angry with him for something. He was not a violent guy and had never hit a woman in his life.
She had been previously married to a cop and so knew how the system worked and how easy it was. The funny part is they ended up getting married. I would never marry a girl who did that to me. To his credit he did hesitate to get back together with her afterwards. I tried (unsuccesfully) to convince him not to. Eventually he accepted her apology and relented.
I would imagine that this could be easily abused by a wife who suspects her husband of cheating. She would have a record of everywhere he goes. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if guys tried to do it too. There are lots of circumstances where it would be really tempting. And it's not like there's any risk.
They didn't mention anything about market share. Perhaps that 3% of copying software happens to be just one application that almost everyone already uses anyway dvddecrypter. It may already have nearly 100% market share, which is why no one may even bother to defeat it this. Why defeat "copy protection" which doesn't work. Actually I am guessing that most of that 97% are applications that most people have never heard of let alone used.
Laser discs don't have any copy protection that I am aware of. I can copy any of mine to S-VHS tape or to my hard drive for that matter, any time I want. Maybe some discs had some macrovision but not many. That was actually far more common on VHS.
The most well-known case involved a monkey holding area of sorts, in Reston, Virginia.
That strain of Ebola is harmless to humans. So who cares? The only real case was in a USAMRIID lab with the Zaire strain of Ebola. Quite pathogenic to humans! That is kind of scary but it has never been reproduced to my knowledge. Although neither can it be easily explained away.
The other case involved a nurse in Zaire IIRC. The strain was named after her - Ebola Zaire Mayinga.
WRONG. That is totally wrong. That nurse was in direct contact (duh, she was an African nurse working with Ebola patients) with the virus. There was absolutely no evidence of airborne transmission.
Apparently this nurse ran around the city for a few hours while infected before they found her. Somehow she managed to fail to infect anyone
Yes, that is because the only Ebola strain that is aerosol transmissable is the Reston strain which so far has only proven dangerous to monkeys.
The fact that that nurse was able to walk around a major African city for as long as she did and share a soda and a sandwich with someone and not transmit it to anyone are actually evidence of exactly the opposite. An aerosol infective virus would have been transmitted to someone.
Also, I know for a fact, that your statement about the experiments is inaccurate. It's close, but not quite correct. What we have never seen is proof of airborne infection in humans in the wild.
That is completely untrue. Where are you getting this from anyway? If you are talking about the Reston strain then who cares? That is not dangerous to humans.
to the best of my knowledge, the experiments were reproduced.
Bullshit. Go ahead and cite them then. And I'm sorry but Google is not in fact a research tool. About this kind of subject you will find mostly incorrect 5th hand sensationalized information based on works of fiction and lots of speculation filtered through many different people. Those are not facts.
In any case, Ebola is a lot worse than you make it out to be, and even if it weren't airborne, the nature of crashing out is such that any lack of airborne ability would hardly slow the virus' spread much.
"Crashing out" is not nearly as dramatic as you make it out to be. In fact not all Ebola victims die from blood loss. I can only hope that none of your "facts" are derived from The Hot Zone, because that was a work of complete fiction. There was almost nothing in that book that was not wildly exaggerated for dramatic effect. The descriptions of the way people died in particular were far more dramatic than in reality. Ebola just doesn't kill that way. That's not the reality.
It kills far too effectively to really pose a epidemic-scale threat.
Actually that's not true. Ebola victims can be infective and walking around for quite a long time. As long as a week or two. More than long enough to infect countless others if the virus were airborne infective. The main reason that Ebola is not a large threat even in Africa is that it can be stopped so easily with simple barrier nursing procedures as described by the CDC on their website. Every epidemic was simply a matter of primitive hospital conditions and lack of common sense.
However, the real threat would be someone modifying the virus to have a longer dormancy period.
Two weeks is more than long enough. If the Zaire strain could be modified to make it infective through the air, not just in one isolated lab experiment but in real world conditions, it could be an incredibly dangerous pathogen, and an excellent virus to use for terrorism purposes.
The problem with Ebola from a city wiping perspective is that it is just not infective enough. In fact it is actually surprisingly difficult to get.
In the current climate, only an idiot would actually buy a CD at a store.
.MPC -insane. That compression system is really, really good. I cannot consistently tell the difference in blind testing. But almost no music is available for download in that format. About the same amount as in APE or FLAC. The 128-192 kpbs MP3s available for download sounds like crap to me. I buy the CDs because the sound quality is better enough to make it worth it to me.
I buy CDs, not due to my stupidity, but due to the fact that I can detect differences between the CD and even a carefully ripped 320kbps MP3. I have done blind tests and I can consistently tell the difference. I do have a hard time with
Maybe you should get your daughter's hearing checked (when was the last time she had a hearing test) or buy her some better equipment so she can hear the difference. Of course even when someone can hear the difference they may not care, or may not care enough to spend the money on a new CD, which can often cost $20 or more these days.
Besides, if you take care of your media you don't really need them
CD/DVD media is soft. Very soft. I have not actually found a way to take one out of its case, place it in my player, and remove it again without scratching it. And yes I am so careful doing so that it takes me a while to put it in and take it out. I do everything slowly and carefully.
and DVDs are more resistant than CDs
My experience does not agree. In my experience DVDs if anything are easier to damage. Not because they are easier to scratch. Both CDs and DVDs seem to be made of the same ultra-soft plastic. But because A DVD usually holds 9 GB (dual layer) of data in the same space that only holds 700 MB on a standard CD. So a small scratch can make a much larger amount of data unreadable to the laser.
DVDs are unbelievably fragile. If it weren't for advanced error correction that degrades video quality (by guessing) in order to keep the disc playing video rental stores might get like a week of use out of them.
If the MPAA ever does manage to find a truly effective system to thwart backup copies I will stop buying DVDs completely. Because I know that within a month my DVD will be scratched and will start to degrade in quality at about the same rate as a VHS tape. They will completely lose customers like me. I know that they will never be able to stop analog copies due to various laws of physics. So I will just download an S-VHS quality version from the internet instead of buying the "DVD".
If they could somehow make media that is truly scratchproof, like say by pressing the data into a heat treated beta alloy of titanium or something, then you might have a point.
For an extreme example of what can be asked for what is less than a couple of dollars worth of DVDs look at the cost of Japanese TV series. I am considering the purchase of a series that costs $220 +$25 shipping for only 6 DVDs. For that price I would expect to get gold masters. And just to make it more difficult they are region encoded so I cannot actually play them on my player. Japanese TV networks usually expect to sell their DVDs at around $40 per episode. Now that's begging for piracy. Which they get in abundance from Hong Kong and mainland China. Unfortunately the quality of the bootlegs is crap.
Music CDs are sold to the consumer for a price of approximately $10.
Where do you live? In China? Prices vary, but where I live (in the US) CDs range from $18-$23 + sales tax in local stores and $14-$19 + shipping online. Of course, used, scratched CDs are cheaper.
What the hell are you talking about? The only place Ebola has ever been demonstrated to transmit by the aerosol route is in a laboratory (in a group of monkeys) and that experiment has never been reproduced (AFAIK). Not one case has ever been demonstrated in the wild. Not one.
OTOH, isn't there a proven ebola vaccine now? Big news some years ago. And not of much use either. Ebola is one of the rarest diseases ever known to humanity. The odds of getting it even to a Central African is infinitesimal. Even if it were commercially available and you were planning to move to Kenya or Zaire for a few years, it wouldn't make much sense to get.
People that don't buy from them are not their customers.
Which is precisely the point they seem to be missing. They are not even potential customers. So there is no economic loss.
What's so hard about using 1337speak substitutions in your cracking software? It does add some extra characters that need to be searched but not that many. It's not exactly a new idea. I wouldn't be surprised if password cracking software already had the option to automatically include 1337speak in the search.
That's not really something you "know". The information is not stored in your brain. The advantage of brain storage is that an armed attacker cannot (literally) force you to divulge the information. And if they kill you they will never get it.
One of the biggest problems with most biometrics like fingerprints or eye scans is that you can be physically coerced to use the reader. All it would take is 3 or 4 strong guys to physically move your hand or your head where they want it. All embedding a token into your finger would do is convert something you have into something that you are. Either way it cannot be relied on. It's nice but does not eliminate the need for secure passwords.
I end up with a completely random set of characters.
That I doubt. All lowercase letters occuring with the same frequency pattern as naturally occuring English would be susceptible to frequency analysis. Of course it avoids dictionary words (in any language) and doesn't follow the consonant-vowel pattern that many languages have. It is also shorter/faster to type than a passphrase.
I thought the whole point of brute force was that you don't need a dictionary. I wonder if you might need the proper character sets though. If a cyrillic only letter appears it could make things difficult even for brute forcing. Or maybe not since it is just stored as a binary code based on the character table for that alphabet. Using a language for which dictionaries are not commonly avaialable would certainly stop dictionary attacks though. It is not likely that an attacker is willing to go through the trouble of writing his own dictionaries for languages that don't have them.
[Slovakian]+[Japanese with alternating Hiragana/Katakana characters]+[Chinese]+[Russian/Ukranian]+[Hangul(K orean)]+[Georgian]+[Gaelic]+[Kmer(Cambodia)]+[Hua( Papua New Guinea)]+[Gujarati]+[one additional language for which no dictionary has ever been written] = pretty good passphrase. The only problem is that not all of these character sets may be available on the operating system. Languages which often break the consonant-vowel-consonant pattern like Czech are good too. All you have to do is memorize a very limited vocabulary from these languages. Just enough to create simple passphrases from.
I was actually impressed with the character balancing in World of Warcraft. Usually mages are overpowered and everyone likes them, but in WoW there are not many mages because they are so underpowered that they are very tough to play. Now if Blizzard could have just thrown in some kind of a story to keep me playing it may have held my interest for more than a couple of weeks. There is only so much level grinding and hacking and slashing I can do before I get very bored. But then, being over 30, I am not exactly in the target demographic. I like your magic system idea. Combine that with a good story and you could certainly have an interesting game. Of course, games are going in exactly the opposite direction: towards simpler console friendly twitch-fests and away from hardcore, have to read the 200 page manual and spend some time learning the stat system, kind of game.
Well, sort of. My point is that it is neither true nor false. No fact either way.
Well then I misinterpreted your post. A supernatural, by definition invisible, undetectable entity is impossible to show any evidence for. It is not just unproven but unprovable. To assert the existence of such a thing (and I use that term loosely) is completely pointless. Even if it is not self-contradictory (and not all deities are), there would be no way for anyone to know about it. Understanding something by "non-rational" means is just another way of not understanding something.
If you really wanted to use scientific vocabulary to pigeonhole it, you would have to call it a theory, not proven, yet not disproven.
An unprovable theory is a contridiction in terms. A hypothesis for which, not only is there not a shred of evidence, but for which there could be no way of gathering evidence would probably be a more accurate description.
Science is not perfect, but it happens to be the only way we have of actually understanding the world around us. Religion is not like some kind of alternative to it. Rather it is an extremely primitive attempt at the same thing. In this sense they are competing. The only difference is that one is sometimes succesful at increasing our knowledge of the world around us, but the other never is and could never be. I can see your point about science having its place and religion having another, but religion is just a primitive attempt at science: science without the benefit of the scientific method.
I wonder if you would have the same sort of comments about my belief in magical flying gnomes living in the trees in my backyard. Would you say that scientific terms should not be used to characterize such beliefs? Both are unprovable assertions (magical invisible undetectable entities). Religion is given far more respect than it deserves. Even with its waning popularity in the modern world, especially as a philosophy, these silly ideas are taken way too seriously. Its only importance is in the numbers of people who believe it (mostly because other people do) and the sociological implications of that. If only a few people believed them they would never be taken seriously.
See this humorous review from an unbeliever. Kinda summarizes why I didn't like You Can't Go Home Again (ep05).
Just so you know, Act of Contrition (ep4), You Can't Go Home Again (ep5), Litmus (ep6)[blatant ripoff of ST:TNG "The Drumhead"],and Secrets and Lies (ep9) all blow chunks. They are episodic "planet of the week" kind of episodes written by amateurs whose previous writing experience consists of courtroom TV or none at all (story editors).
If you want to be able to guess which episodes are going to suck in this season or the next, just look for ones written by Jeff Flaming, Carla Robinson, and the David Weddle/Bradley Thompson team of story editors (not writers).
This series while certainly some of the best SciFi I have ever seen on television has its own share of poorly written episodes just like most.
The "real" episodes are 1-3,7,8,10-13 (although 10 is questionable). The rest are filler. Just download the bad episodes so that you can follow what little story arc they toss in (sometimes as little as a few minutes worth).
It's amazing how people are willing to twist their minds into pretzels to get around the fact that patching a hole in a spaceship by stuffing it with a jacket (whether accompanied by a scrap of metal or not) and "steering" an organism that was never fitted with any "controls" (for obvious reasons) is not even remotely plausible. It is clear to me that the writer, Carla Robinson (who has previously written for The West Wing, Law and Order, and Six Feet Under) had lost her way and didn't know how to get back herself.
Six Degrees of Seperation (ep07) and Kobols Last Gleaming (ep12/13) were by far the best episodes in the season. The only thing that could compete would be the pilot.
1) 33
Pretty good.
Written by RDM, directed by Rymer.
2) Water
Pretty good, perhaps a bit better than 33.
Written by RDM, directed by Marita Grabiak.
3) Bastille Day
Blatant attempt at appeasing TOS fans with Dick Hatch. Not as good as the first two, but not terrible either.
Written by Toni Graphia, directed by Allan Kroeker.
4) Act of Contrition
Stupid, poorly written. Horrible. Top Gun. Not real SciFi.
Written by Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, directed by Ron Hardy
5) You Can't Go Home Again
Bad, bad, bad... A blatant attempt to copy TOS ep.
Written by Carla Robinson, Directed by Sergio Mimica-gezzan
6) Litmus
The courtroom episode. Dumb. Not even scifi. Already been done much better in ST:TNG The Drumhead, which no doubt Flaming has probably seen.
Written by Jeff Flaming, directed by Ron Hardy.
7) Six Degrees of Seperation
Unfrackingbelievable! Incredible! Why can't they all be like this one?
Written by Michael Angeli, directed by Robert Young. Hope we see more of these guys in season 2.
8) Flesh and Bone
Not bad. Kind of interesting. Some good parts.
Written by Toni Graphia, directed by Brad Turner.
9) Secrets and Lies
Lame attempt at comedy. Horrible. Barely watchable.
Written by Jeff Flaming, Directed by EJO.
10) The Hand of God
Attempt to appeal to TOS fans through space battles. Predictable, but not completely horrible.
Written by David Weddle and Bradley Thompson, directed by Jeff Woolnough.
11) Colonial Day
The political episode. Not SciFI. Mildly interesting, but mostly a filler episode. Hatch again for TOS folks.
Written by Carla Robinson, directed by Jonas Pate.
12/13) Kobol's Last Gleaming
The best episode. Why couldn't they have produced all of the episodes at this level of quality?
Written by David Eick (story) and RDM (teleplay), directed by the great Michael Rymer. These guys should have written and directed every episode! Why all the filler?!
Conclusion: Jeff Flaming, Carla Robinson, Bradley Thompson, and David Weddle should not be allowed to write any episodes in season 2. All writing should be done by David Eick, RDM, and Michael Angeli. Directing should be done by Michael Rymer, Robert Young, or maybe Marita Grabiak. Ideally Michael Rymer would just direct all future episodes.
Many western religions have ideas (for lack of a better term) which are self-contradictory. It is not actually possible to "believe" in these per se. There is nothing to believe in. Square circles cannot exist by definition. I have to admire the creators of such "ideas". It is so ballsy to expect your followers to believe in something which you have explicitly defined as not being possible to exist. A true test of the faithful I guess.
For the most part I believe you are correct. This is why religious beliefs cannot be true per se. Anything that is not just unproven but unprovable cannot be regarded as a fact. Such beliefs can also justifiably be regarded as irrational. Just like the belief in elves or talking trees or invisible aliens living in your backyard.
I think the confusion stems from the fact that religion is just a very primitive form of science. It is a pre-scientific way of trying to understand the world around you. If you can't understand something just invent a supernatural entitity who created whatever it is and controls whatever process you don't understand. It is really just a substitute for actual understanding.
The primitive hope is that if some creature is responsible for the life and death and fertility and crops and every other aspect of human animal life, that it can be controlled without understanding it just be asking the appropriate entity for mercy or help or kindness or whatever. There was a ST:TNG episode based on this very idea.
The difference between polytheism and monotheism is just that the polytheists believe (sensibly enough)in the division of labor whereas the monotheists believe that one entity controls everything. I guess the advantage of that is that you only have one person to ask favors of and the mythologies may be simpler.
Nope. You must be thinking of the Pentium M there buddy. Triple those numbers and you'll be a lot closer to reality, at least at full load. CnQ is another matter of course.