In this film, several crew members of the Enterprise use "magnetic boots" to keep themselves firmly attached to the hull of the Enterprise as they hunt down Borg on the outside of the ship. These "magnetic boots" are strong enough to keep them fastened to the ship, which as we all know is hurtling through space at several thousand kilometers per hour, as it is orbiting Earth, but are weak enough to allow the crew members to safely step along the ship. This is quite inconceivable - not only could such an attractive force not exist, if the crew member did manage to lift his leg, it would be quite difficult to set it back on the ship again (the fast-moving ship thing again, what with inertia and all. To the story editors at Paramount: Inertia still has effect in a vacuum, boys and girls.)
At another point in this sequence, a crew member disengages the maglock, pushes off the craft, then re-engages the lock a few seconds later to send him careening back to the ship. Excuse me? I do believe this is the same maglock that allows the crew members to freely lift their legs off the ship and place them in different places! How could such a weak attractive force pull the boots back to the ship's surface, given the speeds of motion of the bodies involved? And let's not forget about the inertia stuff, which would make performing such a precise maneuver in zero gravity IN an unflexible spacesuit difficult for even expert acrobats.
-Evan
This can actually help us
on
Data Quality Act
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Never mind the fact that employees like to have file cabinets, desk toys, and other stuff to keep them happy during the day, and organized and productive. Essentially what Sun has said in implementing this concept is "everything important about your job is on the computer, or small enough to be carried with you everywhere you go."
-Evan
We've always had this sort of thing.
on
lowercase music
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I've always been into the whole techno thing. If anyone ever wanted downtempo, beatless music, there are a variety of options. This hasn't ever been called "lowercase", it's simply been referred to as "ambient" or "downtempo".
The internet radio station Cryosleep is a great example. It's "100% No Beat Guaranteed." Listen at www.bluemars.org.
A lot of Underworld music is very downtempo and quiet. Try listening to:
Underworld - Stagger
Underworld - Thing in a book
Underworld - Tounge
Underworld - Skym
Or you could always try the sounds of Autechre or Brothomstates. It may have somewhat of a beat but it's often extraordinarily quiet. Try:
Autechre - Bronchusevenmx24
Brothomstates - We kill da enemy
Finally, there's a lot of old-school pre-Everything Is Wrong Moby out there that's really "lowercase." Try:
Moby - House Of Blue Leaves
Moby - Slight Return
(Yes, I've been a Moby fan before he got popular.;P)
Hope this helps in your quest for fine music.
Maybe unfit for Terran life? But we've never made contact with ANY sort of alien life-form. But I'm guessing for life to thrive in a condition far different from Earth, it will turn up to be far different from life as we know it.
Essentially what AT&T has done is imposed an ownership tax that penalizes its users for owning their own equipment. The folks there probably just saw the latest reports and saw cable modem leasing was down. And of course AT&T prefers that the money is in their own hands, not the cable modem manufacturers'.
I'm surprised AT&T hasn't made their own cable modem yet and FORCED users to buy it. That wouldn't surprise me. This does.
This website pops up 64 popups every time you visit it. Which is likely to be once, after you realize your mistake, you won't come back.
This is considered criminal behavior. But what about companies like X10 or Casino-On-Net that you see about 30 ads an hour for, every time you try to use the web? In the end it is those companies that make you close more ad windows. I think that those are far more guilty. What about the pr0n ads that won't let you use the back button to leave, and if you try to close the window, they re-open themselves? I shudder to think how many thousands of popups from those companies I've closed in my lifetime.
Of course, it's the browsers themselves that are allowing these popups to happen. I would bet that companies like Doubleclick are paying M$ and Netscape not to develop protection from popups within their browsers. But I'm a conspiracy theorist.
In the corporate non-IT environment, you would be absolutely astonished at the stupidity of the passwords involved.
A great deal of passwords are simply PASSWORD. Try it, you'll be amazed
If you know the names of the target's immediate family (and possibly pets), you've just gained 1-5 more possible passwords.
Many people simply make their passwords 'qqqq' or some chain of identical letters. This is because they don't want to have to bother with remembering a password.
On a similar note, try QWERTY, ASDFGH, ZXCVBN, etc. Look for strings of letters on the keyboard that fit the minimum password length (typically either 4 or 6.
If you have access to the target's desk, you've hit pay dirt. The password is likely written down somewhere. It would be nice if most software didn't say write down your password, etc.
Good password creation tips...
Mother's maiden name is too obvious. But what about just any random name, or maybe a confirmation name (if you're Catholic)? For example, my confirmation name is Anthony. Here's what we do. We reverse the characters, and it becomes ynohtna. Let's remove the vowels. We get ynhtn. Screw around with case. Make it YnHtN. Then throw some easy to remember chain of numbers in there. For example, the last 4 digits of your phone number (0799 for me.) So it becomes Y0n7H9t9N - a password that would take weeks to bruteforce, and can be remembered fairly easily with a bit of practice.
Also consider biometrics. But the problem with biometric input devices is if your password is cracked, you can't really change it...
I've rigged up a:CueCat barcode scanner to just generate raw text input. This way, you can take another piece of paper that has a barcode on it and use that as a password. For instance, keep your library card in your wallet and use the barcode on that as your password by scanning it with a:CueCat. That's always a viable option.
But hey, if you have your password set to PASSWORD, let me tell you, you're asking for it.
Yeah, the performance was great, but a $1,000 system with games that cost $100 a piece was not going to be picked up by the gaming public in an era where the primary game players were under 18 at the time. Also the hardware was ahead of the time, but Neo-Geo emulates fine on my secondary PC (333 mhZ K6-2 with only 64 MB of RAM).
Bottom line? Stick with a PS2 or GameCube, you get more bang for your buck. (But less geek appeal...)
No one would ever choose to opt-in on such a thing. And chances are the companies who would share such information in the first place would not make it very obvious you could opt-out. My guess is that the choice to opt-out will be hidden in a 1,000 word legal disclaimer or an EULA that no one reads anyway.
Yet another law that helps corporations at our expense, because they apparantely have more rights than we do. At least certain congressmen (Mr. Boucher, Mr. Hollings, anyone?) think that's true.
Hmm, maybe Microsoft could just disable scripts in their email software? That sounds like a good option.
No one uses Outlook macros anyway, except worm writers. It's common sense that I don't want any software, not just viruses, automatically sending email without my consent or confirmation (or even knowledge!)
Our politicians are crooked because all of them are funded by corporations who do their bidding.
And our corporations are crooked because all of them are backed by politicians who do their bidding.
Sounds like we need some fundamental changes in our financial policy.
Finally, there's someone who thinks we should be able to do what we want to do with the music and movies that we buy!
I always assumed that those "CDs" we buy were kind of on indefinite loan from the media companies, so there would be no way that we would be able to decide how to use them! What a glorious future lies ahead of us!
Seriously: I would love to see someone write a '2084' that would show what the world would be like if all this copyright and consumer rights stuff got out of hand, and fell into the hands of the corporations...
You can't block SmarterChild or any of these other bots. You can't warn them either. Try it. It won't work. They've either a) found a way to get around AOL's systems or b) have been in league with AOL from the start.
Oh, and furthermore, if you want SmarterChild to shut up, tell it "I'm going to kill myself." It won't talk anymore after that point unless you say something again.
Cell phones are great for reading email on the go, and SMS is nice for incoming short messages, but it sometimes seems that morse code is more efficient than using your 12-digit keypad to send email. If I want to say "Hello Bob" I have to type
44#335555556660#22#66622
That's not very efficient - that's almost 250% the amount of keystrokes. Not to mention the fact that it's not always easy to remember where keys are on the phone. I'll keep my Palm VII for email on the go, thank you very much.
Man, they need to make this a surgical procedure that can be done to humans. Wouldn't it be trippy to have data from 5 computers flowing in and out of your brain?
And I thought I was old-school cause the first game I ever played was Combat for the Atari 2600...stuff like this really puts your position as a gamer in perspective. Wow.
Let me ask you this...
Has the RPG really evolved beyond Ultima? Has the shooter really evolved beyond Galaxian? Has the puzzle really evolved beyond Tetris, or the simulation beyond SimCity?
Games may have changed in their outward appearance, but at their heart, they're all essentially the same.
Keep it open. Don't have everything crammed into as small a space as possible. Entire pages of nothing but textlinks are highly confusing...put stuff in logical places. Don't "nest" links in menus-keep functionality simple, and make it easy to find that which the user wants to find. In the case of a corporate information website, this may involve redundancy. Don't be afraid to be redundant...better to be redundant than to have a frustrated user (potential customer) leave the site.
Don't adhere to a traditional color scheme...make your own.
It's too late, Blizzard: too many servers are all running different variations of Bnetd, some even custom-tuned. I, myself, was among one of the first people to log onto a bnetd server, which happened Thursday.
My personal curiosity was why Blizz waited so long before they started this whole legal battle against the Bnetd folks. #warcraft3 on DALnet was the channel where everyone was congregating to talk about Bnetd emulation, as well as distributing the ISO to various users so that, when some solution was created, everyone could just hop in and play. The channel's users topped 400+, and there was no doubt in our minds that someone from Blizzard was in there just gathering a log...
So Bnetd was originally released for Starcraft and Diablo2. Then the Warforge folks come along and they create a version of Bnetd (since Bnetd is GPL'd) that works with War3Beta. The Fluffnet project also worked on this. I believe that Fluffnet got finished first, and Warforge got a crack out that let everyone play. Soon people were playing everywhere...if Blizz was smar they would have stopped this whole charade long before it was near completion. But it took them too long, and they screwed themselves, legal-wise.
Slashdot Mirror
In this film, several crew members of the Enterprise use "magnetic boots" to keep themselves firmly attached to the hull of the Enterprise as they hunt down Borg on the outside of the ship. These "magnetic boots" are strong enough to keep them fastened to the ship, which as we all know is hurtling through space at several thousand kilometers per hour, as it is orbiting Earth, but are weak enough to allow the crew members to safely step along the ship. This is quite inconceivable - not only could such an attractive force not exist, if the crew member did manage to lift his leg, it would be quite difficult to set it back on the ship again (the fast-moving ship thing again, what with inertia and all. To the story editors at Paramount: Inertia still has effect in a vacuum, boys and girls.)
At another point in this sequence, a crew member disengages the maglock, pushes off the craft, then re-engages the lock a few seconds later to send him careening back to the ship. Excuse me? I do believe this is the same maglock that allows the crew members to freely lift their legs off the ship and place them in different places! How could such a weak attractive force pull the boots back to the ship's surface, given the speeds of motion of the bodies involved? And let's not forget about the inertia stuff, which would make performing such a precise maneuver in zero gravity IN an unflexible spacesuit difficult for even expert acrobats.
-Evan
Who wants to be the first to challenge the extraordinarily limited government data that video games are incapable of expressing ideas?
-Evan
Never mind the fact that employees like to have file cabinets, desk toys, and other stuff to keep them happy during the day, and organized and productive. Essentially what Sun has said in implementing this concept is "everything important about your job is on the computer, or small enough to be carried with you everywhere you go."
-Evan
I've always been into the whole techno thing. If anyone ever wanted downtempo, beatless music, there are a variety of options. This hasn't ever been called "lowercase", it's simply been referred to as "ambient" or "downtempo".
;P)
The internet radio station Cryosleep is a great example. It's "100% No Beat Guaranteed." Listen at www.bluemars.org.
A lot of Underworld music is very downtempo and quiet. Try listening to:
Underworld - Stagger
Underworld - Thing in a book
Underworld - Tounge
Underworld - Skym
Or you could always try the sounds of Autechre or Brothomstates. It may have somewhat of a beat but it's often extraordinarily quiet. Try:
Autechre - Bronchusevenmx24
Brothomstates - We kill da enemy
Finally, there's a lot of old-school pre-Everything Is Wrong Moby out there that's really "lowercase." Try:
Moby - House Of Blue Leaves
Moby - Slight Return
(Yes, I've been a Moby fan before he got popular.
Hope this helps in your quest for fine music.
-Evan
Maybe unfit for Terran life? But we've never made contact with ANY sort of alien life-form. But I'm guessing for life to thrive in a condition far different from Earth, it will turn up to be far different from life as we know it.
-Evan
Essentially what AT&T has done is imposed an ownership tax that penalizes its users for owning their own equipment. The folks there probably just saw the latest reports and saw cable modem leasing was down. And of course AT&T prefers that the money is in their own hands, not the cable modem manufacturers'.
I'm surprised AT&T hasn't made their own cable modem yet and FORCED users to buy it. That wouldn't surprise me. This does.
-Evan
This website pops up 64 popups every time you visit it. Which is likely to be once, after you realize your mistake, you won't come back.
This is considered criminal behavior. But what about companies like X10 or Casino-On-Net that you see about 30 ads an hour for, every time you try to use the web? In the end it is those companies that make you close more ad windows. I think that those are far more guilty. What about the pr0n ads that won't let you use the back button to leave, and if you try to close the window, they re-open themselves? I shudder to think how many thousands of popups from those companies I've closed in my lifetime.
Of course, it's the browsers themselves that are allowing these popups to happen. I would bet that companies like Doubleclick are paying M$ and Netscape not to develop protection from popups within their browsers. But I'm a conspiracy theorist.
-Evan
- A great deal of passwords are simply PASSWORD. Try it, you'll be amazed
- If you know the names of the target's immediate family (and possibly pets), you've just gained 1-5 more possible passwords.
- Many people simply make their passwords 'qqqq' or some chain of identical letters. This is because they don't want to have to bother with remembering a password.
- On a similar note, try QWERTY, ASDFGH, ZXCVBN, etc. Look for strings of letters on the keyboard that fit the minimum password length (typically either 4 or 6.
- If you have access to the target's desk, you've hit pay dirt. The password is likely written down somewhere. It would be nice if most software didn't say write down your password, etc.
Good password creation tips...Mother's maiden name is too obvious. But what about just any random name, or maybe a confirmation name (if you're Catholic)? For example, my confirmation name is Anthony. Here's what we do. We reverse the characters, and it becomes ynohtna. Let's remove the vowels. We get ynhtn. Screw around with case. Make it YnHtN. Then throw some easy to remember chain of numbers in there. For example, the last 4 digits of your phone number (0799 for me.) So it becomes Y0n7H9t9N - a password that would take weeks to bruteforce, and can be remembered fairly easily with a bit of practice.
Also consider biometrics. But the problem with biometric input devices is if your password is cracked, you can't really change it...
I've rigged up a
But hey, if you have your password set to PASSWORD, let me tell you, you're asking for it.
-Evan
The Atari 2600 - plays great retro games, and allows you to dial long distance phone calls for free on old hardware!
;)
-Evan
Next will come the Atari PBX Rewiring Utility
Yeah, the performance was great, but a $1,000 system with games that cost $100 a piece was not going to be picked up by the gaming public in an era where the primary game players were under 18 at the time. Also the hardware was ahead of the time, but Neo-Geo emulates fine on my secondary PC (333 mhZ K6-2 with only 64 MB of RAM).
Bottom line? Stick with a PS2 or GameCube, you get more bang for your buck. (But less geek appeal...)
-Evan
For the same plot information even quicker, simply read the Children's Movie Storybook. :)
Thanks Lucas for making spoilers readily available before the film is even released.
-Evan
No one would ever choose to opt-in on such a thing. And chances are the companies who would share such information in the first place would not make it very obvious you could opt-out. My guess is that the choice to opt-out will be hidden in a 1,000 word legal disclaimer or an EULA that no one reads anyway.
Yet another law that helps corporations at our expense, because they apparantely have more rights than we do. At least certain congressmen (Mr. Boucher, Mr. Hollings, anyone?) think that's true.
-Evan
Hmm, maybe Microsoft could just disable scripts in their email software? That sounds like a good option.
No one uses Outlook macros anyway, except worm writers. It's common sense that I don't want any software, not just viruses, automatically sending email without my consent or confirmation (or even knowledge!)
Our politicians are crooked because all of them are funded by corporations who do their bidding.
And our corporations are crooked because all of them are backed by politicians who do their bidding.
Sounds like we need some fundamental changes in our financial policy.
-Evan
Darned good thing that judge didn't see Grand Theft Auto 3. :)
-Evan
Finally, there's someone who thinks we should be able to do what we want to do with the music and movies that we buy!
I always assumed that those "CDs" we buy were kind of on indefinite loan from the media companies, so there would be no way that we would be able to decide how to use them! What a glorious future lies ahead of us!
Seriously: I would love to see someone write a '2084' that would show what the world would be like if all this copyright and consumer rights stuff got out of hand, and fell into the hands of the corporations...
-Evan
Well there are still plenty more letters left in the alphabet. Personally, I look forward to jMac, wMac, fMac, and 21 other fine computers.
Then, perhaps they will have to use characters from other alphabets. Wonder how you would pronounce ßMac? "Smack?"
-Evan
You can't block SmarterChild or any of these other bots. You can't warn them either. Try it. It won't work. They've either a) found a way to get around AOL's systems or b) have been in league with AOL from the start.
Oh, and furthermore, if you want SmarterChild to shut up, tell it "I'm going to kill myself." It won't talk anymore after that point unless you say something again.
-Evan
Cell phones are great for reading email on the go, and SMS is nice for incoming short messages, but it sometimes seems that morse code is more efficient than using your 12-digit keypad to send email. If I want to say "Hello Bob" I have to type
44#335555556660#22#66622
That's not very efficient - that's almost 250% the amount of keystrokes. Not to mention the fact that it's not always easy to remember where keys are on the phone. I'll keep my Palm VII for email on the go, thank you very much.
-Evan
Man, they need to make this a surgical procedure that can be done to humans. Wouldn't it be trippy to have data from 5 computers flowing in and out of your brain?
-Evan
And I thought I was old-school cause the first game I ever played was Combat for the Atari 2600...stuff like this really puts your position as a gamer in perspective. Wow.
Let me ask you this...
Has the RPG really evolved beyond Ultima? Has the shooter really evolved beyond Galaxian? Has the puzzle really evolved beyond Tetris, or the simulation beyond SimCity?
Games may have changed in their outward appearance, but at their heart, they're all essentially the same.
-Evan
- Most people who use P2P networks have high speed connections.
- Most people with high-speed connections have firewalls.
- P2P is a major security risk, and the only way to get a P2P connection going is to let your firewall drop its guard for a second.
Therefore, P2P is a major security risk. What's wrong with client-server? I think it's great.-Evan
Keep it open. Don't have everything crammed into as small a space as possible. Entire pages of nothing but textlinks are highly confusing...put stuff in logical places. Don't "nest" links in menus-keep functionality simple, and make it easy to find that which the user wants to find. In the case of a corporate information website, this may involve redundancy. Don't be afraid to be redundant...better to be redundant than to have a frustrated user (potential customer) leave the site.
Don't adhere to a traditional color scheme...make your own.
Check out my website - it's my own personal "optimal design..." - http://lemonwood.aexx.net/
It's too late, Blizzard: too many servers are all running different variations of Bnetd, some even custom-tuned. I, myself, was among one of the first people to log onto a bnetd server, which happened Thursday.
My personal curiosity was why Blizz waited so long before they started this whole legal battle against the Bnetd folks. #warcraft3 on DALnet was the channel where everyone was congregating to talk about Bnetd emulation, as well as distributing the ISO to various users so that, when some solution was created, everyone could just hop in and play. The channel's users topped 400+, and there was no doubt in our minds that someone from Blizzard was in there just gathering a log...
So Bnetd was originally released for Starcraft and Diablo2. Then the Warforge folks come along and they create a version of Bnetd (since Bnetd is GPL'd) that works with War3Beta. The Fluffnet project also worked on this. I believe that Fluffnet got finished first, and Warforge got a crack out that let everyone play. Soon people were playing everywhere...if Blizz was smar they would have stopped this whole charade long before it was near completion. But it took them too long, and they screwed themselves, legal-wise.
Long live the Warcraft 3 Beta
-Evan
But will our laptops still start on cold mornings?
:)
-Evan