Does 84 people living instead of dying every year impress anyone, statistically speaking?
Not really. Especially when you consider the current population of the United States is over 310 million, 84/310000000 does turn out to be pretty statistically irrelevant number. We're well past "number of people killed every year by their toilet."
'When you get to those speeds, your accidents are going to be a lot worse. You're going to have a lot more fatalities.'"
That happens anytime you raise the speed limit. from 55 to 65. from 45 to 55. from 10 to 20. We've already had this argument brought up multiple times, and you lost. Take that argument and go away.
Statistically speaking anyway, once you're hurtling down the road at 65 mph or faster, you're already well over the curve for speed-to-lethality tradeoff. Dropping your odds of survival from 2% to 1.8% really doesn't impress me that much.
That brought a smile to my face. More than a few times I've put in comments like "yes it's doing it this way for a reason. don't try to optimize it by doing xyz, it doesn't correctly handle exceptional cases x and y. leave it alone."
I don't have a good memory, and my comments are for me as well as for others, even in projects that will never be seen by another living soul. Many times I've looked over some code and thought "that would work better / be so much cleaner if I changed that..." only to see one of my warnings that it had already been attempted and lead to unexpected complications.
But I would like to see more of an option to "collapse" comments. I usually place a comment block above every functional block of code. Most of the time I just need to see a quick one-liner reminding me what all that block does. Other times I need specifics like "this stuff is set on entry, and these things are set on exit" etc. But the detailed comments eat up a lot of screen space and make it take longer to scroll through code looking for things. I'd like to be able to have expandable/collapsable comment details. On a global basis.
Don't forget that there are exceptions to that rule, making it a crime to behave in a discriminatory manner against certain "protected groups". Kwik-mart can't tell you to get out because you are black. Corner cafe can't refuse you service because you're in a wheelchair. Grover Inc can't refuse to hire you because you're in the reserves. These aren't relevant exceptions in this discussion, but you're making a very overly-broad statement. Even private entities don't have a completely blank check.
(although in the end, if they're smart, they can still do it... but they'll get themselves in a jam if they're stupid and provide the reason for what they're doing - they're a lot safer if they just plain refuse to give a reason. That guy went from safe to unsafe when he said "and he looks foreign")
This sounds just like what the video game market occasionally pulls, with registration codes that come with the game that can only be used once, in an attempt to make resale of the product useless.
"First Sale Doctrine" says once you buy physical goods you can resell them without permission or interference from the manufacturer... but codes, they'll try to call them licenses or something like that to which FSD does not apply. So you have the textbook but can't access the quizzes that the instructor is going to be assigning, nor the references, nor the updates/corrections that they posted online, etc etc. Forcing you to buy a new book from them at the typically insane prices, just to get a code so you can do your homework.
Just another depressing bypass-consumer-protection-laws money-grab.
UDID "Unique Device ID", Apple's way of tagging their devices. UUID "Universally Unique ID", a standard which would have done the job for all intents and purposes.
I'd like someone with more specific expertise to follow up on this branch of the thread, but iirc one of those IDs is used to encrypt the data on the ipod/iphone, and is also used to encrypt the data backed up to the computer when synced, if you select to encrypt the backup. (itunes option)
So, having a big database of these IDs is also potentially useful for extracting the information from a protected device or backup.
If they have a database that contains names and product serial numbers with them, that probably makes their job much faster. Instead of having to try 12 million codes to see which one works on a phone they've just confiscated/borrowed, they may get lucky and find it in the db. If not, after spending the time (20 minutes? I have no clue) trying IDs until they find the right one, then your info gets added into the db for later faster retrieval. And identification I suppose too. But they don't need the IDs for that.
I've also read recently that some LEA have access to special software or hardware that can be plugged into an idevice and download data without syncing. I don't know how much truth there is to this, and I don't know if the information downloaded is also decrypted at the same time. I assume those are using unpublished exploits or possibly back doors that apple provided them with.
Could someone with more expertise in the use of those IDs please make additions/corrections to the above?
Most reasonable people will see suspending internet access to machines that are highly probable to be infected to be a good idea.
Every time this thread comes up, a few trolls file in and insist it's a privacy violation to notice your dorm pc is sending out 500,000 emails a day, or that it's somehow not the user's responsibility to keep their machine from being an aggressive problem/danger to the internet if they're not computer-savy.
We all know it's a good idea, for the same reason that requiring passing a driving test to get a license (and taking it away if you can't stop running into people) is a good idea. Support it, do it, end.
I had to do that with an itunes library recently. Nowhere near the number of items you're working with, but same principle - watch your O's. (that's the first time I've had to deal with a 58mb XML file!) After the initial run forecasting 48 hrs and not being highly reliable, I dug in and optimized. A few hours later I had a program that would run in 48 seconds. When you're dealing with data sets of that size, process optimizing really can matter that much. (if it's taking too long, you're almost certainly doing it wrong)
The library I had to work with had an issue with songs being in the library multiple times, under different names, and that ended up meaning there was NOTHING unique about the songs short of the checksums. To make matters WORSE, I was doing this offline. (I did not have access to the music files which were on the customer's hard drives, all seven of them)
It sounds like you are also dealing with differing filenames. I was able to figure out a unique hashing system based on the metadata I had in the library file. If you can't do that, and I suspect you don't have any similar information to work with, you will need to do some thinking. Checksumming all the files is probably unnecessarily wasteful. Files that aren't the same size don't need to be checksummed. You may decide to consider files with the same size AND same creation and/or modification dates to be identical. That will reduce the number of files you need to checksum by several orders. A file key may be "filesize:checksum", where unique filesizes just have a 0 for the checksum.
Write your program in two separate phases. First phase is to gather checksums where needed. Make sure the program is resumable. It may take awhile. It should store a table somehow that can be read by the 2nd program. The table should include full pathname and checksum. For files that did not require checksumming, simply leave it zero.
Phase 2 should load the table, and create a collection from it. Use a language that supports it natively. (realbasic does, and is very fast and mac/win/lin targetable) For each item, do a collection lookup. Collections store a single arbitrary object (pathname) via a key. (checksum) If the collection (key) doesn't exist, it will create a new collection entry with that as its only object. if it already exists, the object is appended to the array for that collection. That's the actual deduping process, and will be done in a few seconds. Dictionaries and collections kick ass for deduping.
From here you'll have to decide what you want to do.... delete, move, whatever. Duplicate songs required consolidation of playlists when removing dups for example. Simply walk the collection, looking for items with more than one object in the collection. Decide what to keep and what to do elsewise with (delete?) I recommend dry-running it and looking at what it's going to do before letting it start blowing things away.
It will take 30-60 min to code probably. The checksum part may take awhile to run. Assuming you don't have a ton of files that are the same size (database chunks, etc) the checksumming shouldn't be too bad. The actual processing afterward will be relatively instantaneous. Use whatever checksumming method you can find that works fastest.
The checksumming part can be further optimized by doing it in two phases, depending on file sizes. If you have a lot of files that are large-ish (>20mb) that will be the same size, try checksumming in two steps. Checksum the first 1mb of the file. If they differ, ok, they're different. If they're the same, ok then checksum the entire file. I don't know what your data set is like so this may or may not speed things up for you.
I like to go on long rides on summer weekends here in Iowa. I keep my lunch/dinner in a jando pack on the back rack. The box is black, so it heats up pretty fast on the outside.
The walls of the box have a 1/2" foam stiffener in them, which works a bit like insulation. Inside the box I place my food and drink, and I use a 1 liter bottle for cooling. Just take an empty 1L bottle and fill it mostly with water and freeze it. You can keep several of them in the freezer so you always have one or two froze solid. They're free, and can absorb more thermal energy than any ice pack you can buy.
So get a few of those 1L chilling, and get a regular food cooler, one of those 7x9x15" insulated lunch bag coolers. Place your gadgets in the bottom of the cooler. Lay in a little hand towel over the top of them to catch any condensation from the bottles, then add one or two frozen 1L on top. Be sure to get a bag that zips shut (not fold and velcro) and if it doesn't have insulation on the top or bottom, add something there so it's got some form of insulation all the way around. (my jando pack has no foam on the top so I added some filler to the pouch that is in the lid)
Even if you don't roll down the windows a bit or shade your windows (both recommended, especially the windshield, get one of those silver reflective things to put in it when you park) you won't have melted both of those 1L by the time you get back to the car. You may even be able to use just one.
You can further optimize the cooler by placing it on the floor in the back seat area, with a white towel laid over the top. Or add other simple insulation like throwing your jacket over the top, to stop direct sunlight from hitting the cooler.
really? And you're worried primarily about the state of his computer?
He should be spending some time on the phone with his credit card companies making sure any security features they offer are fully activated, such as enhanced (not easily guessed based on what was on his computer) security questions, subscribing to a few years of identity theft watch, schedule regular pulls of his credit report watching for new plastic, checking accounts, and loans in his name, etc. The ssn by itself has some limits on abuse, but combined with the information on the hard drive (mother's maiden name, address, workplace, etc) it greatly magnifies the risk because it's going to allow additional verification of identity that a lot of places require.
After that, get him a book or something on how to be less of a sucker on the internet and in the world in general, or he'll just do it to himself again.
This could hound him for years to come. Make sure he understands that. If someone DOES manage to take out say, a loan or a card on his ssn, he needs to deal with it swiftly and decisively. Banks and similar organizations are notorious for not wanting to be the fall guy in cases like this, and will often try very hard to stick your dad with some or all of the bill. Don't be terribly surprised if something requires a lawyer to fix or clear off his record.
4k block size will still take quite awhile due to all the overhead. bump it up to 1024000 for a wipe that will move at much closer to the speed of the interface.
needs more 'correlationisnotcausation" tagging methinks.
if A and B appear together (correlation) it doesn't mean A causes B, or even that B causes A. It just means that the two tend to occur together for some possibly very indirect reason.
I think in this case pot doesn't cause stupidity, but that generally speaking, stupider people tend to do more drugs. Nothing surprising nor valuable to hear about that.
So in this evolved society who takes care of the children and family?
I'll admit that here anyway, too many (irresponsible?) parents seem to think I'M (/society is) responsible for looking out for their kids... but that's a whole 'nother can of worms I don't want to stagger off topic into.
I won't deny that different people have different priorities. For some, being able to play all the very latest computer games is their primary consideration when getting a new computer. (and frequently their motivation for upgrading to a new computer) But I think too much emphasis is placed on games by too many computer users. I consider my computer a multipurpose tool - productivity, entertainment, communication, research, organization, etc. And for me at least, I'm not willing to sacrifice all the rest to optimize any one of these. (that's why I suggested he get a console and a computer) For me, games are just a part of the "entertainment" category above, a small fraction of how I use my computer, and certainly not the all-important one.
Well it looks like we have all these women that are willing to attend school and get an education but we have a cultural problem with hiring women in general. So instead of pounding some sense into our backward citizens that would rather hire a retarded goat than an educated woman, we're just going to stop educating them, because that will totally fix the problem.
And as a bonus, we can further justify hiding them at home to do nothing but raise our children, (aka "keep them barefoot and pregnant") because they're too dumb to do anything us men do. This'll be a great way to maintain the status quo.
A similar line of thinking was used to make education of slaves illegal in the USA some time ago. "They're stupid, so we're not going to educate them." What?? (they also later tried to pull that argument with women iirc)
Society advances and becomes more socially modern over time. It doesn't happen overnight. I get that. Every group can look back at its own personal history and muse "What was wrong with those people??" What I don't understand is why certain groups just take an abnormally long time to move forward, especially when exposed on all sides with the next logical steps. They don't even have to wait for someone among them to come up with a good idea, fight the initial resistance, and manage to get it off the ground and prove it works. The seeds are planted right on their doorstep, and yet they seem hellbent on stomping on them. And in these cases I don't have to look back 200 years to say "what's wrong with those people??" I can just do it over and over, right here, today.
Sounds like you're just discovering that there's more to computers than playing the very latest games. You should consider replacing it with a console and a computer that does all the other things you want your computer to do?
Tried that on an emulator in several different modes. Nothing but "?SYNTAX ERROR"s all around. Do you have any evidence that this command is real?
Minor brainfart on my part. It wasn't in the ROM, this was the DOS (3.2) that did it. It was a DOS intercepted command, "VERIFY", to read all blocks from a file to verify it. (mostly useless) If typed without any filename supplied, it would display the above message. It was a copyright message from the DOS, not the BASIC ROM. my bad there. It's been awhile;)
They had their DOS copied by several companies. (FastDisk One was my personal favorite, and it WAS fast) At one point I managed to decompile it and got the source code into merlin pro assembler and was able to mod and recompile it. Beagle Bros also provided some function similar to that, I think in their DoubleTake and DBug software, patching the keyboard intercept vector to add functionality. Amazing what they managed to pull off with DBug. (I owned 23 of their titles, most of them! good stuff!) Ahhh the good ol days. Sometimes I wish I knew a fifth as much about my current computer as I knew about my//c back then... and if you're seriously questioning if any of this is real, you can just 3D0G outa here;)
I recall on my//c I could type "VERIFY" (with no filename, or with no DOS booted) and it would return
COPYRIGHT (C) 1984 APPLE COMPUTER (beep!)
I heard a rumor, I'm not sure if it was urban legend or real, that some company pirated apple's rom into their apple 2 clone and it went to court. And in court, they had brought in a clone computer that was "not infringing" and the prosecution asked them to type "VERIFY" and hit return. The message that displayed on their machine closed the case.
I was thinking about what I would do if I were him. I'd arrange for ~15 people with very similar physical descriptions to come to the embassy and all get hollywooded up to look just like him, then put on very basic disguises like glasses, beards, hats, etc. Then arrange to have them all step out of the embassy at the same time and rapidly split in separate directions. Have several taxis, private cars, bicycles, everything standing by to rapidly scatter the decoys in every direction.
That would be entertaining to watch as hotdog vendors and bums on the street suddenly jumped up waving badges trying to chase down all the decoys. Then during the chaos, have Assanage saunter out of the embassy in a good disguise of a person that regularly leaves the embassy at that time every day, and simply walk away. Then he could just go to some random safehouse in the city and decide what to do from there, without having any pressure.
OR he could just stay in the embassy and they could simply say "he left recently" and send the stakeout team combing over the "decoy explosion" footage trying to figure out which one was him and how they missed him. That would also diffuse the pressure on assanage. But espionage being what it is, they likely have at least an informant in the embassy and will "of the record" know he's still in there.
But I think his going to the embassy was a bad move personally. He's semi-safe, but cornered there. What he should have done is have shook his tail and gotten to a safehouse to begin with.
that would certainly be nice. The rights granted by any "consumer protection laws" in general should not be waivable. Not just class action suit. Because companies are known to be coercive about trying to force their customers to waive those rights.
Are you serious? Voice wreckignition is bad enough when trying to dictate a letter, where at least you have auto spell and grammar correction to help. Trying that with programming would be horrid. You'd get your work done faster hunting and pecking with a pool cue.
The TSA wasn't the problem, it was the privately owned airliner that offed him.
A private company can refuse service to anyone for any reason except where legally protected. (race, religion, physical disability, vetran, etc)
Shirt or no shirt. They could have done the same thing without citing any reason. Maybe their official line should have been "we won't let you fly 'cuz your momma dresses you funny". They're a private company, they're allowed to do that.
I don't personally like any of the above exceptions. I don't think the govt should be able to force you to provide services to any person or group. But too many people were being dicks to the same groups so we had to make laws to protect those groups from "stupid people in large numbers". *shrug* I suppose a small dent in my rights to prevent a significant number of others from getting a large dent in their rights is a sensible tradeoff.
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Not really. Especially when you consider the current population of the United States is over 310 million, 84/310000000 does turn out to be pretty statistically irrelevant number. We're well past "number of people killed every year by their toilet."
That happens anytime you raise the speed limit. from 55 to 65. from 45 to 55. from 10 to 20. We've already had this argument brought up multiple times, and you lost. Take that argument and go away.
Statistically speaking anyway, once you're hurtling down the road at 65 mph or faster, you're already well over the curve for speed-to-lethality tradeoff. Dropping your odds of survival from 2% to 1.8% really doesn't impress me that much.
That brought a smile to my face. More than a few times I've put in comments like "yes it's doing it this way for a reason. don't try to optimize it by doing xyz, it doesn't correctly handle exceptional cases x and y. leave it alone."
I don't have a good memory, and my comments are for me as well as for others, even in projects that will never be seen by another living soul. Many times I've looked over some code and thought "that would work better / be so much cleaner if I changed that..." only to see one of my warnings that it had already been attempted and lead to unexpected complications.
But I would like to see more of an option to "collapse" comments. I usually place a comment block above every functional block of code. Most of the time I just need to see a quick one-liner reminding me what all that block does. Other times I need specifics like "this stuff is set on entry, and these things are set on exit" etc. But the detailed comments eat up a lot of screen space and make it take longer to scroll through code looking for things. I'd like to be able to have expandable/collapsable comment details. On a global basis.
Don't forget that there are exceptions to that rule, making it a crime to behave in a discriminatory manner against certain "protected groups". Kwik-mart can't tell you to get out because you are black. Corner cafe can't refuse you service because you're in a wheelchair. Grover Inc can't refuse to hire you because you're in the reserves. These aren't relevant exceptions in this discussion, but you're making a very overly-broad statement. Even private entities don't have a completely blank check.
(although in the end, if they're smart, they can still do it... but they'll get themselves in a jam if they're stupid and provide the reason for what they're doing - they're a lot safer if they just plain refuse to give a reason. That guy went from safe to unsafe when he said "and he looks foreign")
This sounds just like what the video game market occasionally pulls, with registration codes that come with the game that can only be used once, in an attempt to make resale of the product useless.
"First Sale Doctrine" says once you buy physical goods you can resell them without permission or interference from the manufacturer... but codes, they'll try to call them licenses or something like that to which FSD does not apply. So you have the textbook but can't access the quizzes that the instructor is going to be assigning, nor the references, nor the updates/corrections that they posted online, etc etc. Forcing you to buy a new book from them at the typically insane prices, just to get a code so you can do your homework.
Just another depressing bypass-consumer-protection-laws money-grab.
I'd like someone with more specific expertise to follow up on this branch of the thread, but iirc one of those IDs is used to encrypt the data on the ipod/iphone, and is also used to encrypt the data backed up to the computer when synced, if you select to encrypt the backup. (itunes option)
So, having a big database of these IDs is also potentially useful for extracting the information from a protected device or backup.
If they have a database that contains names and product serial numbers with them, that probably makes their job much faster. Instead of having to try 12 million codes to see which one works on a phone they've just confiscated/borrowed, they may get lucky and find it in the db. If not, after spending the time (20 minutes? I have no clue) trying IDs until they find the right one, then your info gets added into the db for later faster retrieval. And identification I suppose too. But they don't need the IDs for that.
I've also read recently that some LEA have access to special software or hardware that can be plugged into an idevice and download data without syncing. I don't know how much truth there is to this, and I don't know if the information downloaded is also decrypted at the same time. I assume those are using unpublished exploits or possibly back doors that apple provided them with.
Could someone with more expertise in the use of those IDs please make additions/corrections to the above?
Most reasonable people will see suspending internet access to machines that are highly probable to be infected to be a good idea.
Every time this thread comes up, a few trolls file in and insist it's a privacy violation to notice your dorm pc is sending out 500,000 emails a day, or that it's somehow not the user's responsibility to keep their machine from being an aggressive problem/danger to the internet if they're not computer-savy.
We all know it's a good idea, for the same reason that requiring passing a driving test to get a license (and taking it away if you can't stop running into people) is a good idea. Support it, do it, end.
I had to do that with an itunes library recently. Nowhere near the number of items you're working with, but same principle - watch your O's. (that's the first time I've had to deal with a 58mb XML file!) After the initial run forecasting 48 hrs and not being highly reliable, I dug in and optimized. A few hours later I had a program that would run in 48 seconds. When you're dealing with data sets of that size, process optimizing really can matter that much. (if it's taking too long, you're almost certainly doing it wrong)
The library I had to work with had an issue with songs being in the library multiple times, under different names, and that ended up meaning there was NOTHING unique about the songs short of the checksums. To make matters WORSE, I was doing this offline. (I did not have access to the music files which were on the customer's hard drives, all seven of them)
It sounds like you are also dealing with differing filenames. I was able to figure out a unique hashing system based on the metadata I had in the library file. If you can't do that, and I suspect you don't have any similar information to work with, you will need to do some thinking. Checksumming all the files is probably unnecessarily wasteful. Files that aren't the same size don't need to be checksummed. You may decide to consider files with the same size AND same creation and/or modification dates to be identical. That will reduce the number of files you need to checksum by several orders. A file key may be "filesize:checksum", where unique filesizes just have a 0 for the checksum.
Write your program in two separate phases. First phase is to gather checksums where needed. Make sure the program is resumable. It may take awhile. It should store a table somehow that can be read by the 2nd program. The table should include full pathname and checksum. For files that did not require checksumming, simply leave it zero.
Phase 2 should load the table, and create a collection from it. Use a language that supports it natively. (realbasic does, and is very fast and mac/win/lin targetable) For each item, do a collection lookup. Collections store a single arbitrary object (pathname) via a key. (checksum) If the collection (key) doesn't exist, it will create a new collection entry with that as its only object. if it already exists, the object is appended to the array for that collection. That's the actual deduping process, and will be done in a few seconds. Dictionaries and collections kick ass for deduping.
From here you'll have to decide what you want to do.... delete, move, whatever. Duplicate songs required consolidation of playlists when removing dups for example. Simply walk the collection, looking for items with more than one object in the collection. Decide what to keep and what to do elsewise with (delete?) I recommend dry-running it and looking at what it's going to do before letting it start blowing things away.
It will take 30-60 min to code probably. The checksum part may take awhile to run. Assuming you don't have a ton of files that are the same size (database chunks, etc) the checksumming shouldn't be too bad. The actual processing afterward will be relatively instantaneous. Use whatever checksumming method you can find that works fastest.
The checksumming part can be further optimized by doing it in two phases, depending on file sizes. If you have a lot of files that are large-ish (>20mb) that will be the same size, try checksumming in two steps. Checksum the first 1mb of the file. If they differ, ok, they're different. If they're the same, ok then checksum the entire file. I don't know what your data set is like so this may or may not speed things up for you.
I like to go on long rides on summer weekends here in Iowa. I keep my lunch/dinner in a jando pack on the back rack. The box is black, so it heats up pretty fast on the outside.
The walls of the box have a 1/2" foam stiffener in them, which works a bit like insulation. Inside the box I place my food and drink, and I use a 1 liter bottle for cooling. Just take an empty 1L bottle and fill it mostly with water and freeze it. You can keep several of them in the freezer so you always have one or two froze solid. They're free, and can absorb more thermal energy than any ice pack you can buy.
So get a few of those 1L chilling, and get a regular food cooler, one of those 7x9x15" insulated lunch bag coolers. Place your gadgets in the bottom of the cooler. Lay in a little hand towel over the top of them to catch any condensation from the bottles, then add one or two frozen 1L on top. Be sure to get a bag that zips shut (not fold and velcro) and if it doesn't have insulation on the top or bottom, add something there so it's got some form of insulation all the way around. (my jando pack has no foam on the top so I added some filler to the pouch that is in the lid)
Even if you don't roll down the windows a bit or shade your windows (both recommended, especially the windshield, get one of those silver reflective things to put in it when you park) you won't have melted both of those 1L by the time you get back to the car. You may even be able to use just one.
You can further optimize the cooler by placing it on the floor in the back seat area, with a white towel laid over the top. Or add other simple insulation like throwing your jacket over the top, to stop direct sunlight from hitting the cooler.
really? And you're worried primarily about the state of his computer?
He should be spending some time on the phone with his credit card companies making sure any security features they offer are fully activated, such as enhanced (not easily guessed based on what was on his computer) security questions, subscribing to a few years of identity theft watch, schedule regular pulls of his credit report watching for new plastic, checking accounts, and loans in his name, etc. The ssn by itself has some limits on abuse, but combined with the information on the hard drive (mother's maiden name, address, workplace, etc) it greatly magnifies the risk because it's going to allow additional verification of identity that a lot of places require.
After that, get him a book or something on how to be less of a sucker on the internet and in the world in general, or he'll just do it to himself again.
This could hound him for years to come. Make sure he understands that. If someone DOES manage to take out say, a loan or a card on his ssn, he needs to deal with it swiftly and decisively. Banks and similar organizations are notorious for not wanting to be the fall guy in cases like this, and will often try very hard to stick your dad with some or all of the bill. Don't be terribly surprised if something requires a lawyer to fix or clear off his record.
4k block size will still take quite awhile due to all the overhead. bump it up to 1024000 for a wipe that will move at much closer to the speed of the interface.
needs more 'correlationisnotcausation" tagging methinks.
if A and B appear together (correlation) it doesn't mean A causes B, or even that B causes A. It just means that the two tend to occur together for some possibly very indirect reason.
I think in this case pot doesn't cause stupidity, but that generally speaking, stupider people tend to do more drugs. Nothing surprising nor valuable to hear about that.
hey I found a picture of a neat fish! put it on slashdot, yah!
I'll admit that here anyway, too many (irresponsible?) parents seem to think I'M (/society is) responsible for looking out for their kids... but that's a whole 'nother can of worms I don't want to stagger off topic into.
I won't deny that different people have different priorities. For some, being able to play all the very latest computer games is their primary consideration when getting a new computer. (and frequently their motivation for upgrading to a new computer) But I think too much emphasis is placed on games by too many computer users. I consider my computer a multipurpose tool - productivity, entertainment, communication, research, organization, etc. And for me at least, I'm not willing to sacrifice all the rest to optimize any one of these. (that's why I suggested he get a console and a computer) For me, games are just a part of the "entertainment" category above, a small fraction of how I use my computer, and certainly not the all-important one.
Well it looks like we have all these women that are willing to attend school and get an education but we have a cultural problem with hiring women in general. So instead of pounding some sense into our backward citizens that would rather hire a retarded goat than an educated woman, we're just going to stop educating them, because that will totally fix the problem.
And as a bonus, we can further justify hiding them at home to do nothing but raise our children, (aka "keep them barefoot and pregnant") because they're too dumb to do anything us men do. This'll be a great way to maintain the status quo.
A similar line of thinking was used to make education of slaves illegal in the USA some time ago. "They're stupid, so we're not going to educate them." What?? (they also later tried to pull that argument with women iirc)
Society advances and becomes more socially modern over time. It doesn't happen overnight. I get that. Every group can look back at its own personal history and muse "What was wrong with those people??" What I don't understand is why certain groups just take an abnormally long time to move forward, especially when exposed on all sides with the next logical steps. They don't even have to wait for someone among them to come up with a good idea, fight the initial resistance, and manage to get it off the ground and prove it works. The seeds are planted right on their doorstep, and yet they seem hellbent on stomping on them. And in these cases I don't have to look back 200 years to say "what's wrong with those people??" I can just do it over and over, right here, today.
Sounds like you're just discovering that there's more to computers than playing the very latest games. You should consider replacing it with a console and a computer that does all the other things you want your computer to do?
Minor brainfart on my part. It wasn't in the ROM, this was the DOS (3.2) that did it. It was a DOS intercepted command, "VERIFY", to read all blocks from a file to verify it. (mostly useless) If typed without any filename supplied, it would display the above message. It was a copyright message from the DOS, not the BASIC ROM. my bad there. It's been awhile ;)
They had their DOS copied by several companies. (FastDisk One was my personal favorite, and it WAS fast) At one point I managed to decompile it and got the source code into merlin pro assembler and was able to mod and recompile it. Beagle Bros also provided some function similar to that, I think in their DoubleTake and DBug software, patching the keyboard intercept vector to add functionality. Amazing what they managed to pull off with DBug. (I owned 23 of their titles, most of them! good stuff!) Ahhh the good ol days. Sometimes I wish I knew a fifth as much about my current computer as I knew about my //c back then... and if you're seriously questioning if any of this is real, you can just 3D0G outa here ;)
I recall on my //c I could type "VERIFY" (with no filename, or with no DOS booted) and it would return
COPYRIGHT (C) 1984 APPLE COMPUTER (beep!)
I heard a rumor, I'm not sure if it was urban legend or real, that some company pirated apple's rom into their apple 2 clone and it went to court. And in court, they had brought in a clone computer that was "not infringing" and the prosecution asked them to type "VERIFY" and hit return. The message that displayed on their machine closed the case.
Anyone know if that really happened?
I was thinking about what I would do if I were him. I'd arrange for ~15 people with very similar physical descriptions to come to the embassy and all get hollywooded up to look just like him, then put on very basic disguises like glasses, beards, hats, etc. Then arrange to have them all step out of the embassy at the same time and rapidly split in separate directions. Have several taxis, private cars, bicycles, everything standing by to rapidly scatter the decoys in every direction.
That would be entertaining to watch as hotdog vendors and bums on the street suddenly jumped up waving badges trying to chase down all the decoys. Then during the chaos, have Assanage saunter out of the embassy in a good disguise of a person that regularly leaves the embassy at that time every day, and simply walk away. Then he could just go to some random safehouse in the city and decide what to do from there, without having any pressure.
OR he could just stay in the embassy and they could simply say "he left recently" and send the stakeout team combing over the "decoy explosion" footage trying to figure out which one was him and how they missed him. That would also diffuse the pressure on assanage. But espionage being what it is, they likely have at least an informant in the embassy and will "of the record" know he's still in there.
But I think his going to the embassy was a bad move personally. He's semi-safe, but cornered there. What he should have done is have shook his tail and gotten to a safehouse to begin with.
Well, I tried to train mine, but it crashed, with a bus error.
no, I was serious. They're already doing this.
http://imgur.com/gallery/jTtev
that would certainly be nice. The rights granted by any "consumer protection laws" in general should not be waivable. Not just class action suit. Because companies are known to be coercive about trying to force their customers to waive those rights.
Are you serious? Voice wreckignition is bad enough when trying to dictate a letter, where at least you have auto spell and grammar correction to help. Trying that with programming would be horrid. You'd get your work done faster hunting and pecking with a pool cue.
The TSA wasn't the problem, it was the privately owned airliner that offed him.
A private company can refuse service to anyone for any reason except where legally protected. (race, religion, physical disability, vetran, etc)
Shirt or no shirt. They could have done the same thing without citing any reason. Maybe their official line should have been "we won't let you fly 'cuz your momma dresses you funny". They're a private company, they're allowed to do that.
I don't personally like any of the above exceptions. I don't think the govt should be able to force you to provide services to any person or group. But too many people were being dicks to the same groups so we had to make laws to protect those groups from "stupid people in large numbers". *shrug* I suppose a small dent in my rights to prevent a significant number of others from getting a large dent in their rights is a sensible tradeoff.