From This page: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation believes that personal and parental choice is the best filtering mechanism of content on the Internet. The development of technological filtering tools and children's services will go much further to promote the safety of children and free speech than any legislation."
The fact that there are closed source (so to speak) filtering solutions doesn't mean that all filters are bad. False alarms I can live with, him typing in "www.whitehouse.com" and staring at a picture of a woman sucking on a dick is not something I can live with. There's a reason why my wife and I lock the bedroom door when we're uh, 'doing it', there's a reason I don't let him have a subscription to Playboy, there's a reason he doesn't go to bars with me.
There's all kinds of injustices done to children every day. Overexuberant filtering software is pretty far down the list of things we need to address. As I said, when he gets close to being a teenager, we'll talk, but that's 10 years away and no one has the ability to forsee what the 'net experience will be like at that point, anyway. In the meanwhile, he'll get access to disney.com and nickjr.com and that's just about it. (And, of course, here I'll get the flames about how bad Disney-fication is to kids. Actually, my son is really into Scooby-Doo at the moment. I didn't get into it until I was in my early teens. Does that mean he's a child prodigy?)
Sorry, but there is no way that filtering software is evil when used by a 6 year old. No way. I have a 3 year old. He'll have filtering software on his machine until he's at least thirteen or until he figures out how to disable it. If he's savvy enough to outgeek his dad who's been geeking for over 20 years more than him, then he deserves his porn.
People who are rabidly anti-filtering forget that for some purposes it is useful. Alcohol, cigarettes, guns, porn - all things that an age-filter is useful for. I can't watch my son every moment he's online. This prevents inadvertent finger presses more than deliberate ones, at least until they get to a certain age. When my son gets to that age, he and I'll talk.
I'm also thinking that this isn't going to be a big sell in major metropolitan areas. In the DC area I have about a dozen stations that I can listen to at any time. Of course, that's largely because I like everything except C&W. If 98 Rock goes to commercial, I switch to DC 101 or HFS, then on to 94.7, 107.3, 102.7, 104.1, 103.1 and so on, and if I'm desperate I can get news on 107.7 or 1500 AM, then try some classical or put the radio on scan 'til I hit something interesting.
http://www.hackvan.com/pub/stig/life/i-am-become-d eath"
Oppenheimer ain't around to ask anymore, but I believe he said 'destroyer'. Since the Bhagavad Gita wasn't written in English, it is doubtful that anyone can definitively say that the correct word is shatterer. Shatterer is more poetic to me, but pretty much everything I can find on the subject says that Oppenheimer said the words I'm quoting.
If I had more than 120 characters to work with, I might have the quote followed by "J. R. Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, (possibly mis-)quoting Vishnu in the Baghavad Gita, upon successful first test of a nuclear device at Trinity test site, Alamogordo, New Mexico". If I had more room, I would likely also include Bainbridge's quote, which I really like.
Now we're way off topic and the only reason that I'm posting this is because I've had several questions about it. I don't mind the questions. I think it's a relevant quote even for Lord of the Rings. It's easy for me to think of the ring as a nuclear device. None of the good guys want to use it except Boromir. How many of us would be able to resist the temptation to put on the ring? Think of all the good you could do with it.:) Think of all the evil that you would unleash if you did use it. Tolkien was teaching us, as do all good storytellers. Power corrupts. Ultimate power corrupts absolutely.
Sharron and Tracey are the whiny, bitchy girlfriends of Sauron. See, they didn't know about each other, then Sharron saw Tracey leaving Minas Morgul one day and figured out that Sauron was two-timing her. So then, in order to quiet her down, Sauron had to give her a ring and promise to marry her. She didn't want just any ring, she wanted the One Ring. So Sauron had to send out his Riders to find the Ring. (They were all glad to get out, Sharron's whining was getting on their nerves.) Of course, I've given away about 90% of the movie now, but the ending where Tracey shows up and there's this big oil wrestling finale between her and Sharron is worth the price of admission alone.
I, too, was very surprised. I went "Uh-oh" and thought for a moment that things were about to turn ugly. I was in the Navy for 10 years and this seemed like a perfect point for a 180 turn in the storyline. Perhaps I've read too much fiction in my life.
Let's assume that Congress passes a law making it illegal to use any encryption software without a 'back-door'. One of the solutions to the ordinary user is to hide his/her encrypted text using steganography. There's been a little bit published about detecting whether an image/music/video file has secret information hidden in it, I believe via the use of statistical analysis. Are you familiar with this? I haven't seen anything authoritative as to whether it's possible and I'm wondering whether you have some insights.
Specifically, if I were to take a picture with my digital camera, then bury my encrypted text in it using steganography, then send that picture to my friend via e-mail, is it possible for a third party who's intercepted that email to determine whether or not it has encrypted information in it? I'm not talking about the possibility of breaking it, just whether or not they can detect that I've done something ostensibly illegal.
OK, I broke it (with my secret decoding program). You know, the whole goatse thing is so last year. Everyone needs to get over it. Encrypting that link in order to fool people into clicking on it is just silly.
I went to lunch not too long after I posted that. Coming back, it's nice to see that other people feel the same way.
You know, Einstein was really troubled, right up to his death, about his role in developing The Bomb. Oppenheimer (in my sig), also was deeply despairing of his role. I guess it's not bad company to be in.
The thing about technology like this is that many other crypto researchers were working on similar things. If it hadn't been Phil's 'Pretty Good Privacy', it could just as easily have been Bruce's 'Applying Privacy', or Ron's 'Privacy the RSA Way' or perhaps IDG's 'Privacy for Dummies'. There are so many people on the cypherpunks list (which I haven't been on in a couple of years) who would have been eager to do the same thing. I just don't think it's necessary for Phil to beat himself up about it.
You're coming under attack for your decision to provide strong crypto to the general public. Please do not falter. There is a definite need for this sort of thing and the fact that it might be misused is no reason to ban it.
Cars can be used to run over people. Hammers can be used to hit people. I don't think I need to mention guns. There are lots of things out there that can be used counter to their original purpose. I think in the coming age strong crypto at a personal level will be very important.
There will always be people who blame the inventors for some of the uses their inventions are put. Some people blame Einstein for the devastation of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. Is Einstein really at fault? If someone dies in a car crash, who should be blamed - Ford? Benz? Should the Wright brothers be partly held to blame for the events of September 11th?
Just because your tool was possibly used in a bad way doesn't make you guilty. If it's any comfort, since there is so much talk about heroes lately, know that you are one of MY heroes. I remember the early USENET discussions and your original profile in Wired. I've always thought that if I had more ability in math, I would've liked to be like you.
Please know that for many of us, you are not a bad guy by any stretch of the imagination, and for a few of us, you are one of the really good guys.
Realistically, if you were going to buy a book from Amazon and you couldn't get to their web site, chances are you'd just try again in a few hours.
If I want to buy a book now and I can't get to Amazon, I'll go to a different bookseller. Borders, B&N, Fatbrain, whatever. No way I'd wait 'til Amazon came back up.
I think it would be easy to prove loss of income on Amazon's part. Take the period of time they were DOS'd, plot numbers/$ sold in that time period to same period in previous days/weeks/months. Easy as pie - or a pie chart (or some other kind of chart.) Statistically, it should be very straightforward.
Trouble is, Mafiaboy has no money for them to recoup. Aside from that, you tend not to get money from a criminal trial, only a civil one. They can still sue him in civil court.
A lot of people were upset about the fact that Kevin Mitnick sat in jail for 4 years without a trial. Due process and all that. If he'd gotten a speedy trial and all that, I think fewere people would have been upset. It showed the rest of us how easy it is for 'The Man' to do whatever he wants to us. That's the lesson most of us learned from Mitnick.
It's also a different country. Contrary to popular belief, Canada is not the 51st state.
I guess we're out here on the fringe of/., with nary a soul paying attention to us.
I just got Arcanum from a friend. OK, it needs 1.5GB to install, but how many games do you normally leave installed? I've probably bought more than 50 games in my lifetime, but I only have 3 installed at the moment. My mp3 collection takes up far more space.
My X-box comment was a cheap shot, since it's not ostensibly a PC, but I'm sticking by my guns. There are way more business PC's out there with a lot of RAM than home machines. Perhaps games influenced RAM development, but I'm going to say it was a peripheral effect due to advances in silicon, motherboards, CPU's, etc. The high end Crucial stuff goes into servers and the like. No gamer I know could afford it until recently. (And I think it's amazing how much RAM prices have dropped lately.)
The Turtle Beach stuff was great. I can't remember the last time I had one of their sound cards - 1992, maybe. Although I think that Creative and the like do do development, I think it's the high end cards that innovate and it trickles down to the other manufacturers. I don't have any specifics in mind, but that's the way it works in almost any industry. Gamers tend not be buyers of high-end audio. SoundBlaster is good enough.
But, in thinking about all this, I think we're both wrong and perhaps the whole thrust of this/. article is wrong. (Imagine that.) It's really not gamers or business or musicians or any one consumer group that drives development. It's money. There would be no reason for us to buy new stuff if they didn't come out with something newer/faster/better. It's the cycle of greed. Greed for money. Greed for better gaming. Greed for more immersive experiences. Greed for adulation from your friends. "Nice box, man." "That thing screams."
It's amazing how I've gotten away from that in so many areas of my life. My car is a '96 and I plan on driving it until it breaks. I buy about one new article of clothing a month, on average. I got my PIII about 2-1/2 years ago. Still runs everything I want. The only thing I'm thinking of upgrading is my RAM - 96MB.
What were we arguing about.:)
Pumpkin Chunkin'
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· Score: 3, Informative
The annual Pumpkin Chunkin' festival is in Delaware the weekend of November 2-4th. punkinchunkin.com My 3-year old son is gonna love it.
Who didn't figure this out the moment we learned Bush was gonna be prez. Duh... Pretty much everyone who voiced opinions on this said he was gonna do it. Republicans like big business. They prefer a hands-off attitude. It's nothing new.
If I have a week of vacation, I'm not going to spend 6 of those days traveling. And have you checked train prices? Just as expensive as flying, if not moreso. Can't see it.
Although I've always wanted to ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Or the Orient Express. And from what I understand, if you're sight-seeing in Europe, a Eurail pass is hard to beat.
We stopped answering our phone about 6 months ago. The only time we ever get it any more is when we know that there's someone we want to talk to about to call us. We've thought about getting caller ID. We can't see running over to the phone to see who's calling every time it rings. We've told our friends and relatives - they just talk to the answering machine until we pick up. Or they leave a message and we call back. Many people are in the habit of jumping to answer the phone. It can be a hard habit to break.
Email is only ever urgent at work. At home, I answer it when I get around to it. It's really just a way of thinking about things. If it's important to you, spend time on it. If it's not, don't. I'm nearing 40. I spend time with my son and wife. That's the important stuff for me.
Somebody recently wrote about the 10,000 hour rule - you have to do something for that long before you really become good at it. I think I've reached it for email. My filters take almost everything out of the inbox. If it's in the inbox, it's unusual. But I almost never deal with the same piece of email twice. If it has important stuff in it, it gets put in the 'Important Stuff' folder. If it's something for reference (password changing procedure or something) it gets put in the 'Reference' folder. Friends get their own folder. The 'Out of office' stuff gets looked at and immediately deleted. Then, if I need to find out if someone's in today, I can go to my deleted items folder and search for their name. I clear it out at the end of every week. You just have to figure out what you want out of your email and make it do that. 3 rules:
Get away from your computer for a weekend and what happens...
You make some good points, but I'm going to disagree with most of them. I don't know anyone who copies their games to their hard drives. I would guess that's a small fraction of players, except perhaps for some specific games that I'm not aware of. So as long as you only have a couple of games you're playing, hard drive size is not being pushed by games.
The X-box is coming out with 64MB of RAM. Tell me that games require a lot of memory. I haven't played MechWarrior, but every game I've played on my 96MB P-III has run fine. Perhaps the very latest and greatest games that are coming out now push RAM higher, but I doubt seriously that they will exceed things like AutoCAD and Photoshop. The next time you're working on a 50MB image file or designing the next power plant, you'll be glad to have 512MB. Perhaps MechWarrior is at the bleeding edge. I haven't seen any other games that require that much RAM.
I forgot about sound cards. You're right about that, although I imagine music outside of games has had a good bit of effect on development in that arena also.
Development in the Bus architecture has been driven by the speed of processors and RAM, which have never been able to talk to each other at speeds necessary. Games affect development in processor speeds so by extension, the rest of the motherboard is affected, but it's not a direct correlation.
You misconstrued my comment about musicians. They produce a product that makes consumers want more/better CD capabilities. Without musicians, there would be no CD development in the early 80's. The home data storage requirement is only a recent development and I would argue, without other developments in the optical field, we would still be using tape for home backup. Musicians are the reason everyone has CD players in their homes. I haven't checked in on the warez scene in a while, but I doubt they're pushing CD development due to lack of numbers. It's the millions of teens/post-teens making MP3's.
Games only push speed of the processor and the video card. That's it. Most games play off the CD, so they don't push the size of the hard drive. They could care less about your printer, scanner, or anything else like that. Most big software packages require more RAM than any game. I have 512MB at work not because I run games.
So Intel and AMD love games. I imagine RAM manufacturers like bloated office app developers, and bloated OS developers - MS springs to mind. CD player/recorder makers like musicians. Printer makers like business and old people who want a hard copy of everything. Scanner makers love the internet for wanting everyone to share their pictures.
So companies like HP could conceivably help their bottom line by supporting musicians, longevity drugs, and getting more people on the internet. How about that. Someone should tell Bruce Perens.
It's not quite that simple. He is guilty in some sense - he sold a program (for $99) to Americans that allowed Americans to break the law. If he'd only sold it to Russians, it's unlikely that he'd have been arrested.
The problem here is coming up with the proper analogy - I don't think there is one. Here's some bad ones:
Imagine there's a country where pornography depicting 16 year olds is legal. In the US, the legal age is 18. Would it be legal for him to sell it here? (Obviously not.)
Imagine he's from a country where Marijuana is legal. Is he guilty of a crime if he sells it to an American in the US. (Obviously.)
You sell a gun to a convicted felon. He's not allowed to own it and you know it. He then kills someone with that gun. Are you guilty of anything? (I believe so.)
Imagine all our guns had gunlocks. Imagine Dmitry sold a device (legal in Russia) that circumvented the gunlocks. Someone uses his device and subsequently commits a crime with that gun. Is Dmitry liable? (Probably.)
And that last analogy might be closest - he (his company) knowingly sold something to someone who is not allowed to own it. Like selling alcohol to a minor. You get in trouble for that.
If he'd just given his crack away, I'm not sure he'd have been prosecutable. But he sold it. Profiting from a crime. However we might feel about the constitutional validity of the DMCA, right now it's a law. Breaking it is a crime.
I can't wait for the justice department to start arresting all the Dutch tourists on drug charges.
Oh, and as a naturalized American citizen (ex-German), I'm deeply ashamed. This is not why I came to this country for. I would like to tell all non-American/.ers that we're working to rectify this, but it will take some time. Meanwhile, it would be most helpful if you could convince everyone in your country to go somewhere else for holiday. Some less repressive country. A big drop in the tourist industry would be felt and would help us achieve our goal of returning to a democracy. Thanks for your support. We now return you to your regularly scheduled trolling.
if you've got a small device that you want to conserve power on, and only communicate small distances, Bluetooth's ideal. If you've got a lot of power, a la a notebook computer, and want to communicate 150 ft., then 802.11 is what you want. Imagine that: Different uses! Different standards! Amazing!
Which one do I use if I have a medium sized device with a middlin' amount of power and want to communicate a moderate distance. Do I need both?
If anyone from Loki is reading this, are you planning on porting Heroes of Might and Magic IV? It's scheduled to be released next month (although that's not official) and I'm wondering if I should wait to buy the Linux version.
I want to buy the Linux version. I would prefer to buy the Linux version. However, I mostly just want to play the game. I've been playing III since it came out, and am eagerly awaiting IV. The reason I didn't buy III for Linux is that I had already bought it for Windows when it first came out.
What does everyone else here do? Say that the answer is "We're porting it. It will be a few months." What do you do? Buy both? Wait? I can't see waiting more than a couple of weeks. If it's a simultaneous release, I'll buy the Linux version. But if it's not?
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that there are closed source (so to speak) filtering solutions doesn't mean that all filters are bad. False alarms I can live with, him typing in "www.whitehouse.com" and staring at a picture of a woman sucking on a dick is not something I can live with. There's a reason why my wife and I lock the bedroom door when we're uh, 'doing it', there's a reason I don't let him have a subscription to Playboy, there's a reason he doesn't go to bars with me.
There's all kinds of injustices done to children every day. Overexuberant filtering software is pretty far down the list of things we need to address. As I said, when he gets close to being a teenager, we'll talk, but that's 10 years away and no one has the ability to forsee what the 'net experience will be like at that point, anyway. In the meanwhile, he'll get access to disney.com and nickjr.com and that's just about it. (And, of course, here I'll get the flames about how bad Disney-fication is to kids. Actually, my son is really into Scooby-Doo at the moment. I didn't get into it until I was in my early teens. Does that mean he's a child prodigy?)
People who are rabidly anti-filtering forget that for some purposes it is useful. Alcohol, cigarettes, guns, porn - all things that an age-filter is useful for. I can't watch my son every moment he's online. This prevents inadvertent finger presses more than deliberate ones, at least until they get to a certain age. When my son gets to that age, he and I'll talk.
I'm also thinking that this isn't going to be a big sell in major metropolitan areas. In the DC area I have about a dozen stations that I can listen to at any time. Of course, that's largely because I like everything except C&W. If 98 Rock goes to commercial, I switch to DC 101 or HFS, then on to 94.7, 107.3, 102.7, 104.1, 103.1 and so on, and if I'm desperate I can get news on 107.7 or 1500 AM, then try some classical or put the radio on scan 'til I hit something interesting.
Oppenheimer ain't around to ask anymore, but I believe he said 'destroyer'. Since the Bhagavad Gita wasn't written in English, it is doubtful that anyone can definitively say that the correct word is shatterer. Shatterer is more poetic to me, but pretty much everything I can find on the subject says that Oppenheimer said the words I'm quoting.
If I had more than 120 characters to work with, I might have the quote followed by "J. R. Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, (possibly mis-)quoting Vishnu in the Baghavad Gita, upon successful first test of a nuclear device at Trinity test site, Alamogordo, New Mexico". If I had more room, I would likely also include Bainbridge's quote, which I really like.
Now we're way off topic and the only reason that I'm posting this is because I've had several questions about it. I don't mind the questions. I think it's a relevant quote even for Lord of the Rings. It's easy for me to think of the ring as a nuclear device. None of the good guys want to use it except Boromir. How many of us would be able to resist the temptation to put on the ring? Think of all the good you could do with it. :) Think of all the evil that you would unleash if you did use it. Tolkien was teaching us, as do all good storytellers. Power corrupts. Ultimate power corrupts absolutely.
I'm out. Peace.
The general consensus seems to be that they will get them at the council of Elrond.
Sharron and Tracey are the whiny, bitchy girlfriends of Sauron. See, they didn't know about each other, then Sharron saw Tracey leaving Minas Morgul one day and figured out that Sauron was two-timing her. So then, in order to quiet her down, Sauron had to give her a ring and promise to marry her. She didn't want just any ring, she wanted the One Ring. So Sauron had to send out his Riders to find the Ring. (They were all glad to get out, Sharron's whining was getting on their nerves.) Of course, I've given away about 90% of the movie now, but the ending where Tracey shows up and there's this big oil wrestling finale between her and Sharron is worth the price of admission alone.
I, too, was very surprised. I went "Uh-oh" and thought for a moment that things were about to turn ugly. I was in the Navy for 10 years and this seemed like a perfect point for a 180 turn in the storyline. Perhaps I've read too much fiction in my life.
Specifically, if I were to take a picture with my digital camera, then bury my encrypted text in it using steganography, then send that picture to my friend via e-mail, is it possible for a third party who's intercepted that email to determine whether or not it has encrypted information in it? I'm not talking about the possibility of breaking it, just whether or not they can detect that I've done something ostensibly illegal.
Thanks.
(That's a joke. Laugh. Ha-ha. Tee-Hee.)
You know, Einstein was really troubled, right up to his death, about his role in developing The Bomb. Oppenheimer (in my sig), also was deeply despairing of his role. I guess it's not bad company to be in.
The thing about technology like this is that many other crypto researchers were working on similar things. If it hadn't been Phil's 'Pretty Good Privacy', it could just as easily have been Bruce's 'Applying Privacy', or Ron's 'Privacy the RSA Way' or perhaps IDG's 'Privacy for Dummies'. There are so many people on the cypherpunks list (which I haven't been on in a couple of years) who would have been eager to do the same thing. I just don't think it's necessary for Phil to beat himself up about it.
Just my opinion.
You're coming under attack for your decision to provide strong crypto to the general public. Please do not falter. There is a definite need for this sort of thing and the fact that it might be misused is no reason to ban it.
Cars can be used to run over people. Hammers can be used to hit people. I don't think I need to mention guns. There are lots of things out there that can be used counter to their original purpose. I think in the coming age strong crypto at a personal level will be very important.
There will always be people who blame the inventors for some of the uses their inventions are put. Some people blame Einstein for the devastation of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. Is Einstein really at fault? If someone dies in a car crash, who should be blamed - Ford? Benz? Should the Wright brothers be partly held to blame for the events of September 11th?
Just because your tool was possibly used in a bad way doesn't make you guilty. If it's any comfort, since there is so much talk about heroes lately, know that you are one of MY heroes. I remember the early USENET discussions and your original profile in Wired. I've always thought that if I had more ability in math, I would've liked to be like you.
Please know that for many of us, you are not a bad guy by any stretch of the imagination, and for a few of us, you are one of the really good guys.
Thanks for listening.
SLASHDOT in elvish. It's been about 20 years so I can't do it anymore. Anyone got a book handy?
I think it would be easy to prove loss of income on Amazon's part. Take the period of time they were DOS'd, plot numbers/$ sold in that time period to same period in previous days/weeks/months. Easy as pie - or a pie chart (or some other kind of chart.) Statistically, it should be very straightforward.
Trouble is, Mafiaboy has no money for them to recoup. Aside from that, you tend not to get money from a criminal trial, only a civil one. They can still sue him in civil court.
It's also a different country. Contrary to popular belief, Canada is not the 51st state.
Hey, look down here. It's a meeting of the old-timers club. Anybody need a battery for their hearing aid? Still typing on those stone tablets, I see.
I just got Arcanum from a friend. OK, it needs 1.5GB to install, but how many games do you normally leave installed? I've probably bought more than 50 games in my lifetime, but I only have 3 installed at the moment. My mp3 collection takes up far more space.
My X-box comment was a cheap shot, since it's not ostensibly a PC, but I'm sticking by my guns. There are way more business PC's out there with a lot of RAM than home machines. Perhaps games influenced RAM development, but I'm going to say it was a peripheral effect due to advances in silicon, motherboards, CPU's, etc. The high end Crucial stuff goes into servers and the like. No gamer I know could afford it until recently. (And I think it's amazing how much RAM prices have dropped lately.)
The Turtle Beach stuff was great. I can't remember the last time I had one of their sound cards - 1992, maybe. Although I think that Creative and the like do do development, I think it's the high end cards that innovate and it trickles down to the other manufacturers. I don't have any specifics in mind, but that's the way it works in almost any industry. Gamers tend not be buyers of high-end audio. SoundBlaster is good enough.
But, in thinking about all this, I think we're both wrong and perhaps the whole thrust of this /. article is wrong. (Imagine that.) It's really not gamers or business or musicians or any one consumer group that drives development. It's money. There would be no reason for us to buy new stuff if they didn't come out with something newer/faster/better. It's the cycle of greed. Greed for money. Greed for better gaming. Greed for more immersive experiences. Greed for adulation from your friends. "Nice box, man." "That thing screams."
It's amazing how I've gotten away from that in so many areas of my life. My car is a '96 and I plan on driving it until it breaks. I buy about one new article of clothing a month, on average. I got my PIII about 2-1/2 years ago. Still runs everything I want. The only thing I'm thinking of upgrading is my RAM - 96MB.
What were we arguing about. :)
The annual Pumpkin Chunkin' festival is in Delaware the weekend of November 2-4th. punkinchunkin.com My 3-year old son is gonna love it.
This isn't the company you want. Move along.
Although I've always wanted to ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Or the Orient Express. And from what I understand, if you're sight-seeing in Europe, a Eurail pass is hard to beat.
Email is only ever urgent at work. At home, I answer it when I get around to it. It's really just a way of thinking about things. If it's important to you, spend time on it. If it's not, don't. I'm nearing 40. I spend time with my son and wife. That's the important stuff for me.
Somebody recently wrote about the 10,000 hour rule - you have to do something for that long before you really become good at it. I think I've reached it for email. My filters take almost everything out of the inbox. If it's in the inbox, it's unusual. But I almost never deal with the same piece of email twice. If it has important stuff in it, it gets put in the 'Important Stuff' folder. If it's something for reference (password changing procedure or something) it gets put in the 'Reference' folder. Friends get their own folder. The 'Out of office' stuff gets looked at and immediately deleted. Then, if I need to find out if someone's in today, I can go to my deleted items folder and search for their name. I clear it out at the end of every week. You just have to figure out what you want out of your email and make it do that. 3 rules:
Use your filters
Make and use folders
Read each email only once
That's it.
You make some good points, but I'm going to disagree with most of them. I don't know anyone who copies their games to their hard drives. I would guess that's a small fraction of players, except perhaps for some specific games that I'm not aware of. So as long as you only have a couple of games you're playing, hard drive size is not being pushed by games.
The X-box is coming out with 64MB of RAM. Tell me that games require a lot of memory. I haven't played MechWarrior, but every game I've played on my 96MB P-III has run fine. Perhaps the very latest and greatest games that are coming out now push RAM higher, but I doubt seriously that they will exceed things like AutoCAD and Photoshop. The next time you're working on a 50MB image file or designing the next power plant, you'll be glad to have 512MB. Perhaps MechWarrior is at the bleeding edge. I haven't seen any other games that require that much RAM.
I forgot about sound cards. You're right about that, although I imagine music outside of games has had a good bit of effect on development in that arena also.
Development in the Bus architecture has been driven by the speed of processors and RAM, which have never been able to talk to each other at speeds necessary. Games affect development in processor speeds so by extension, the rest of the motherboard is affected, but it's not a direct correlation.
You misconstrued my comment about musicians. They produce a product that makes consumers want more/better CD capabilities. Without musicians, there would be no CD development in the early 80's. The home data storage requirement is only a recent development and I would argue, without other developments in the optical field, we would still be using tape for home backup. Musicians are the reason everyone has CD players in their homes. I haven't checked in on the warez scene in a while, but I doubt they're pushing CD development due to lack of numbers. It's the millions of teens/post-teens making MP3's.
Games only push speed of the processor and the video card. That's it. Most games play off the CD, so they don't push the size of the hard drive. They could care less about your printer, scanner, or anything else like that. Most big software packages require more RAM than any game. I have 512MB at work not because I run games.
So Intel and AMD love games. I imagine RAM manufacturers like bloated office app developers, and bloated OS developers - MS springs to mind. CD player/recorder makers like musicians. Printer makers like business and old people who want a hard copy of everything. Scanner makers love the internet for wanting everyone to share their pictures.
So companies like HP could conceivably help their bottom line by supporting musicians, longevity drugs, and getting more people on the internet. How about that. Someone should tell Bruce Perens.
It's not quite that simple. He is guilty in some sense - he sold a program (for $99) to Americans that allowed Americans to break the law. If he'd only sold it to Russians, it's unlikely that he'd have been arrested.
/.ers that we're working to rectify this, but it will take some time. Meanwhile, it would be most helpful if you could convince everyone in your country to go somewhere else for holiday. Some less repressive country. A big drop in the tourist industry would be felt and would help us achieve our goal of returning to a democracy. Thanks for your support. We now return you to your regularly scheduled trolling.
The problem here is coming up with the proper analogy - I don't think there is one. Here's some bad ones:
Imagine there's a country where pornography depicting 16 year olds is legal. In the US, the legal age is 18. Would it be legal for him to sell it here? (Obviously not.)
Imagine he's from a country where Marijuana is legal. Is he guilty of a crime if he sells it to an American in the US. (Obviously.)
You sell a gun to a convicted felon. He's not allowed to own it and you know it. He then kills someone with that gun. Are you guilty of anything? (I believe so.)
Imagine all our guns had gunlocks. Imagine Dmitry sold a device (legal in Russia) that circumvented the gunlocks. Someone uses his device and subsequently commits a crime with that gun. Is Dmitry liable? (Probably.)
And that last analogy might be closest - he (his company) knowingly sold something to someone who is not allowed to own it. Like selling alcohol to a minor. You get in trouble for that.
If he'd just given his crack away, I'm not sure he'd have been prosecutable. But he sold it. Profiting from a crime. However we might feel about the constitutional validity of the DMCA, right now it's a law. Breaking it is a crime.
I can't wait for the justice department to start arresting all the Dutch tourists on drug charges.
Oh, and as a naturalized American citizen (ex-German), I'm deeply ashamed. This is not why I came to this country for. I would like to tell all non-American
If anyone from Loki is reading this, are you planning on porting Heroes of Might and Magic IV? It's scheduled to be released next month (although that's not official) and I'm wondering if I should wait to buy the Linux version.
I want to buy the Linux version. I would prefer to buy the Linux version. However, I mostly just want to play the game. I've been playing III since it came out, and am eagerly awaiting IV. The reason I didn't buy III for Linux is that I had already bought it for Windows when it first came out.
What does everyone else here do? Say that the answer is "We're porting it. It will be a few months." What do you do? Buy both? Wait? I can't see waiting more than a couple of weeks. If it's a simultaneous release, I'll buy the Linux version. But if it's not?
Seems like there's no easy answer.