> It would suck to have all your MP3 info in filesystem metadata and then lose it all when you
transferred to a system without fs metadata. Anyone have any insight?
Well, if your name is Bill Gates, and the filesystem in question is the one underpinning Longhorn, that's not a bug, it's a feature.
> If you think the current U.S. "middle class" is rich and educated, you better take a closer look. Two parents each working 50 hours a week to pay off the mortgage and cars is NOT rich. Most of what in the U.S. is considered middle class lives to barely break even when you take into account personal consumer debt.
At least the debt is self-inflicted. Taxes aren't.
The Party in 1984 used "War Without End" as the means by which GDP could be turned into scrap metal.
Our leaders have chosen "Bureaucracy Without End" instead. Half of GDP is now consumed by government, and the percentage rises, regardless of which party is in power. Yes, the Military gets a slice of it, but that slice is dwarfed by Medicare, AFDC, SS, SDI, transfers to state and local governments, midnight basketball, putting flowers on the median strips on the highways, picking up litter in the desert, and $80,000 grants to measure the size of squirrels' nuts. All of these things - from the largest to the smallest - require forms to be filled out, filed in duplicate, scanned, examined, re-filed, facts verified on separate forms, and buried in soft peat for six months.
You think that doesn't turn GDP into/dev/null just as effectively as permanent global war?
Given the alternatives for wealth destruction readily open to them, I'd say our leaders are the very model of grandmotherly kindness.
But all of this talk of "destroying wealth to keep the proles in line" is beside the point. It's one of many means our leaders are employing to achieve a (IMO desirable) end. The original poster wasn't interested in the means, he was interested in the ends. When you grok - in its fullness - the reason that "converting" Winston Smith was not an "option" (to be chosen over simply killing him), but a requirement - only then, will you understand the end - an end that doesn't merely justify the means, it requires them.
> I'm unsure of the use for TIA and I'm unsure of how bad it would be and unsure of what good they will get. > >Totally off topic, what would/. in the 1980s have been like? > What would the comments to stories about F-117 or B-2 or GPS have been like?
Probably "I'm unsure of the use for the F-117 and I'm unsure of how bad it'll be and unsure of what good they'll get."
Who needs a subsonic one-missile attack aircraft (F-117) and a multibillion dollar subsonic strategic bomber (B-2) when you can send out a bunch of B-1s, (supersonic, no less!), over the North Pole? Bomb the Russkies and be back for lunch! Canadians would be protesting "Stealth Cruise Missile Testing" too!
As for what good TIA will do, I don't know either. (Nor do I have a need to know).
Based on historical precedent, however - and I say this as a guy who's traditionally highly skeptical of most government initiatives - I'm willing to bet that within our lifetimes, (in much the same way that ane civilian on the planet can now read the VENONA transcripts and intercepts, and corroborate the evidence with data declassified from the KGB's archives) we'll eventually learn that our spy d00dz of the years 2003-2010 were more on the ball than we ever gave them credit for at the time.
> A system that would generate enough [H2O, or volumes of noble gas] FAST enough(well ok you can store some in a plastic, chemically inert tank) would be quite expensive, especially in any place where electricity costs are non-trivial(if you know a place where they are trivial, I'd consider moving there).
Why not a bunch of airbags from cars? Nitrogen's not as inert as a noble gas, but it's cheap and could still smother a fire. And just like a halon setup, it'd be real fun (albeit expensive) to test it:)
> A black budget in the sense of Have Blue (stealth aircraft development) has a line-item of a code name. Members of the Senate and House who are in on the important budgets know about the
programs, go see the aircraft. For example aviation magazines mentioned that Senate Select for Defense went to California and saw B-2 as early as 1983 and '85.
And yet - within 10 years, Have Blue was made public, and now you can even google for images of the prototype aircraft, released by the folks who built it. (Pretty farking neat design, I might add. Many of its elements can be seen in present-day UAVs whose existence has also been made public.)
I would argue the same for TIA. TIA was renamed once ("Total" to "Terrorism" Information Awareness). It will be renamed again, only this time it will be made dark. Off-book funding for it will continue, and something equivalent to TIA will be implemented.
And 10+ years from now, TIA-thrice-renamed will be declassified, we'll all look back - just as we do at Have Blue today - and say "Hey, pretty neat. The idea actually worked. And once again, we were panicking over nothing."
> Let's propose some new names! >Totalitarian Information Awareness!
TIA: TIA: It Ain't Total Information Awareness!
(Under the Senate bill, would that make funding illegal, mandatory, or both?)
Re:...The real danger...
on
The Big Kerplop
·
· Score: 2, Funny
> I discovered if you pointed a 4 1/4" newtonian reflector at the sun you had a reasonable facsimile of a short range death-ray. [... ] "Mom, me and Sean are going out to the back porch and make a batch of formic acid. Don't
open the porch door until I tell you it's OK." [... ]
We drew designs on the ground and watched the ants follow them, then neutralized the whole batch. [... ] It's very easy to make [...]
My first parsing of your post went something like this:
So you drew designs on the ground with sugar water... and when you'd attracted enough ants, you broke out the 4.5" Newtonian and neutralized the ants. Viola! Plenty of formic acid!:)
Seriously - your parents sound like mine. Close enough supervision that if you get in over your head, they could bail you out -- but that up until that point, they could trust you, because they also taught you how to not get in over your head. Bravo. (And if you breed, do likewise with your offspring. We've got enough pop stars and lawyers. The world needs scientists, too.)
Re:The first books that made me think 'What if...'
on
The Big Kerplop
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
> Speaking as someone who tried to make their own napalm (and nearly set fire to my Dad's garage) I totally approved of their adventures!
> > How did it go?;-)
"Nearly set fire to his Dad's garage". I'd say he did pretty well!
(I grew up on these stories too. My folks gave 'em to me. My folks also supervized me - I now realize they were close enough to intervene if I screwed up, but from far enough away that, at the time, I didn't think they were watching. Good on them, I say. Techniques like that turned me on to science, which turned me on to computers, which turned into a fantastic career and hobby. But I do miss the homebrew fireworks. Dad, thanks for that 1950s-era book of chemistry experiments... and for bringing back some of the chemicals they stopped putting in chemistry sets.;-)
(Side note: Today's chemistry sets are even worse. I think "dissolve sugar" and "mix vinegar and baking soda, look at foam" are about all that's left. How the hell are you supposed to get an 8-year-old interested in science with that?!?! Fer chrissakes, you don't have to give 'em thermite, but at least let 'em detect the friggin' humidity with cobalt chloride!)
> They also had 12 ounce GLASS bottles of coke back then. That made it a tad harder to get fat by
sucking down 6 liters worth of cola in a day.
Yeah, and the extra mass made them fly like crap when you tried to fill 'em with vinegar and baking soda, or even just pressurized water.
They're safer, which is kinda boring compared to the glass ones I grew up with, but they fly better, which is what counts. Plastic 2L Coke bottles rule!
> Yahoo has loads more information about many users than google does, via the Yahoo personals,
my yahoo, and other personalized services. If they can integrate some of that information into the search process, they'll be the new search king.
Because when I want to find out the default voltage of this Athlon XP based on its stepping as printed on the chip, and which bridges I need to cut to unlock the multiplier, I also wanna be sure the author of my solution is a h0t ch1x0r, age 19-25, with b1g h00t3r5! Wow, look at the 120mm fans on her case!
> Do you really think that you could even get 5 people, let alone 5 million people, to turn themselves in?
Sure. What would be even more interesting would be - could you get your local cops to charge you?;-)
That would create an interesting paradox - show up at your local police station, confess to having downloaded 100 MP3z and having burned them to CD for long road trips.
What good is a law when nobody enforces it?
(And for that matter, what's the statute of limitations on the DMCA? Will we eventually have an annual DMCA-hack-liberation-day when the coolest hacks of the $STATUTEOFLIMITATION years ago can be publicly acknowledged?:)
> I'm not sure where you are getting "unelected" from, but the idea that you are pretty much stuck with what the majority wants even if you don't like it, is basically central to the entire concept of democracy.
Thankfully, it is not central to the concept of a representative republic.
The two systems have much in common, but there are fundamental philosophical differences between them.
> "We are currently pursuing a spammer from the West Palm Beach, Florida area."
My initial reaction to that sentence was:
We are currently pursuing sand in the Sahara.
We are currently pursuing ice on the North Pole.
We are currently pursuing water at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
> Will [w]e see this on Fox?
I don't care if it's a peaceful takedown on COPS with nothin' more than a few whacks of the billy club and a shot of pepper spray, or a full-blown high-speed pursuit ending in a fireball of burning gasoline and roasted spammer gibs splattered all over World's Wildest Police Videos, but oh dear God, yes, I hope so.
> One would have to subscribe quite fully to her views not fitting in with the current society/gubment in order to really claim she was subversive, instead of merely brazenly outspoken...
True - though I'd actually intended it to be taken, in a ha-ha-only-serious sort of way, that there's another interpretation of "subversive" that could be used here:
Namely, that one would have to subscribe only moderately to the views of the current society/gubment to claim that being outpsoken and critical of our "mixed" economy as also subversive. After all, was John Galt a traitor to his nation, or not?:)
> Promised bugfixes, balance adjustments and playability enhancements in Real Life 1.01: > >Anything I missed? I'm also looking forward to the new Spaceflight/Posthumanist expansion. Should be out around the same time as Duke Nukem Forever and the Diablo II 1.10.
Damn. I got the wrong version. The admins in my game put the Spaceflight/Posthumanist expansion pack permanently on hold.
In my version, there was a bug in the steel/asbestos lining of a couple of towers in New York. No big deal until a bunch of barbarians (probably a memory leak from Civilization I) got mixed up with another memory leak from Flight Simulator, somehow they managed to trigger the bug in the Towers, the whole damn game script got corrupted and went to hell from there. (Goddamn C programmers.)
And while there's no save/restore feature, there may be a causality/time loop bug, which would imply someone's found a way to do a save/restore cheat? The week before the bug brought down the game, some players bought assloads of put options on certain stocks, almost as if they had read the stock page of the New York Times from two weeks ahead of time (the ultimate cheat sheet!), and then restored from an earlier version.
Even if they can't fix the bugs, or release the spaceflight/expansion pack, could the admins kindly ban those players?
> Do you like real life? > Yes 1194 (64%) > No 666 (35%) >
Apparently those who don't like Real Life prefer Eternal Damnation.
The site is targeted at gamers, not the general audience. We grew up on DOOM. If Hell is anything like that, then Hell sounds like a pretty cool place!:)
Gamer: "Hey! Fuckin' fire everywhere! Ouch! It's just one big lava pit! And there's this asshole with a big sword who just gets in my way all the time! This isn't like DOOM at all! This SUX!1!!"
Satan: "Back in Real Life, you were only playing the demo. This is the released version. Sorry kid, you get to play Daiakatana for all eternity!"
> Well, from personal experience I can say that unsubscribing is a bitch. The customer service people have been instructed to hassle anyone who comes in saying they want to unsubscribe until they agree to stay; I know people who say they unsubscribed previously, only to find later that they were still being billed; and all the user interfaces through which you can have your account deleted are just plain user unfriendly. (I am beginning to suspect the "slit wrists" module, which is the one most of the help files direct you toward, is designed just plain not have any way to make it work at all. "Down not across" indeed, what
rubbish.)
RL is teh sux0r. I wouldn't even warez it.
I mean, what else can you do other than unsubscribe once you get bored? It's like the Sims, but worse! No speed-up, not even for the 8 hours a day you spend at work!
For fuck's sake, once you got bored of the Sims, you could at least save, have your fun, and restore. But nooooooo, the dumbass designers of Real Life didn't even bother to build in a save-restore feature.
So every little mistake you make follows you around for the rest of the game. I mean, what's the fucking point of that? You spend three weeks setting up a menage a trois with you, your boss's wife, and one lousy goat...
> I mean, what is the use of switching users as fast as it can be done?
Ask any BOFH about the "rule of thumb" for whip, cane, tawse, or switch. I find that 7200 users per minute is about the practical limit.
Personally, I prefer to counterbalance two riding crops to the hub of an old full-height 3600 RPM 5.25" hard drive.
For particularly annoying users, I also have an RM-80 disk pack (14-inch platters!) salvaged from an old PDP-11/70. The platters spin at 1800 RPM, but the huge motor required to accelerate them allows me to spin up four bullwhips.
> A fair enough point, but (as I'm sure kc8kgu knew), once things are compiled, it becomes much less simple to identify a hacker's signature. A decent compiler will compile all the above examples to the same code. I don't buy "enough flair gets through to the machine language" for short code fragments, I'm afraid.
You're assuming the code in question was compiled. Glancing at it, I'd lay good odds that it was handcrafted.
Besides, with the risk of being DMCA'd into his or her component atoms (regardless of where our mystery hacker lives), this isn't the kind of hack you can do in 15 minutes, slap your name on it, and get your ego gratification by having worldwide bragging rights.
That leaves only one other route to ego gratification - spend a few hours, make it perfect, and get your ego gratification by presenting a beautiful gift to geeks and hackers around the world... and by leaving the world's DMCA types puzzle they'll never figure out.
Win-win, as I see it. And artful as all fuck. Call it the Faberge' egg of hackerdom.
"Who was that masked man?"
"Nobody knows, ma'am. Folks 'round here call 'im the Lone Ranger."
"Artful fucker, ain't he?"
"Yes ma'am. Maddest props to him."
> That said, while my first conclusion from the article was that marriage causes a decrease in creativity, it's more likely a mutually-reinforcing situation: A guy who lives for his work won't have the time or inclination to meet people and 'settle down'. Only after he has already reached the end of his youthful enthusiasm for work does he perk his head up and realize that there are other things in life.
Gaming! Beer! Slashdot! (OK, it's not quite Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy, but it'll do:)
> Since when did making scientific contributions or other great feats of intellect ever help attract women?
Since the first genius figured out how to bang two rocks together to make fire. Or that by following those regularly-spaced holes in the dirt next to those broken reeds, he'd find meat. Or that a stick could be sharpened by rubbing against a rock, and that pointy sticks were better than fingernails when hunting or fighting competitors. Or when rhythmic tapping on stuff was fun. And that making funny growly sounds with the mouth hole while tapping rhythmically on stuff was even more fun. And that funny growly sounds could also represent the regularly shaped holes in the dirt that the meat made.
Brains aren't as useful for attracting mates now, but look back a million years or so, and you'll see that brains were pretty cool.
> I gotta hide out from
my girlfriend for an hour after work just so I can get a couple rounds of CS in. Or read a chapter or two
out of a book that normally woulda taken me a day to read, but ends up taking 2 months.
Old JPL humor:
Every engineer should have both a wife and a mistress.
You tell your wife you're spending the night with your mistress, and your mistress you're spending the night with your wife...
...so you can finally spend enough time in the lab to do some useful work!
> Ayn Rand isn't really all that subversive. A better word would be extremist or perhaps insane. But she isn't really all that subversive. Plus she thinks that 65 page monolouges are a good idea. They aren't.
Muhahahhaha.... it's all a part of the Statist conspiracy! How could even the most hotheaded Libertarian muster the will to resist after slogging through all 100 pages of Galt's speech?:)
> So put down the aluminum foil, take a deep breath, and relax. And maybe look out the window. We can go outside tomorrow, after the weather clears up a bit.
Naw, I still need to recover from having my brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped 'round a large gold monologue. *g*
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if your name is Bill Gates, and the filesystem in question is the one underpinning Longhorn, that's not a bug, it's a feature.
A TRAP! It's
> How can you fake your IP address?
"And honey, I faked every IP address!"
-- Anonymous Coward, as written on a note left on Hilary Rosen's bedstand.
At least the debt is self-inflicted. Taxes aren't.
The Party in 1984 used "War Without End" as the means by which GDP could be turned into scrap metal.
Our leaders have chosen "Bureaucracy Without End" instead. Half of GDP is now consumed by government, and the percentage rises, regardless of which party is in power. Yes, the Military gets a slice of it, but that slice is dwarfed by Medicare, AFDC, SS, SDI, transfers to state and local governments, midnight basketball, putting flowers on the median strips on the highways, picking up litter in the desert, and $80,000 grants to measure the size of squirrels' nuts. All of these things - from the largest to the smallest - require forms to be filled out, filed in duplicate, scanned, examined, re-filed, facts verified on separate forms, and buried in soft peat for six months.
You think that doesn't turn GDP into /dev/null just as effectively as permanent global war?
Given the alternatives for wealth destruction readily open to them, I'd say our leaders are the very model of grandmotherly kindness.
But all of this talk of "destroying wealth to keep the proles in line" is beside the point. It's one of many means our leaders are employing to achieve a (IMO desirable) end. The original poster wasn't interested in the means, he was interested in the ends. When you grok - in its fullness - the reason that "converting" Winston Smith was not an "option" (to be chosen over simply killing him), but a requirement - only then, will you understand the end - an end that doesn't merely justify the means, it requires them.
>
>Totally off topic, what would
> What would the comments to stories about F-117 or B-2 or GPS have been like?
Probably "I'm unsure of the use for the F-117 and I'm unsure of how bad it'll be and unsure of what good they'll get."
Who needs a subsonic one-missile attack aircraft (F-117) and a multibillion dollar subsonic strategic bomber (B-2) when you can send out a bunch of B-1s, (supersonic, no less!), over the North Pole? Bomb the Russkies and be back for lunch! Canadians would be protesting "Stealth Cruise Missile Testing" too!
As for what good TIA will do, I don't know either. (Nor do I have a need to know).
Based on historical precedent, however - and I say this as a guy who's traditionally highly skeptical of most government initiatives - I'm willing to bet that within our lifetimes, (in much the same way that ane civilian on the planet can now read the VENONA transcripts and intercepts, and corroborate the evidence with data declassified from the KGB's archives) we'll eventually learn that our spy d00dz of the years 2003-2010 were more on the ball than we ever gave them credit for at the time.
Why not a bunch of airbags from cars? Nitrogen's not as inert as a noble gas, but it's cheap and could still smother a fire. And just like a halon setup, it'd be real fun (albeit expensive) to test it :)
And yet - within 10 years, Have Blue was made public, and now you can even google for images of the prototype aircraft, released by the folks who built it. (Pretty farking neat design, I might add. Many of its elements can be seen in present-day UAVs whose existence has also been made public.)
I would argue the same for TIA. TIA was renamed once ("Total" to "Terrorism" Information Awareness). It will be renamed again, only this time it will be made dark. Off-book funding for it will continue, and something equivalent to TIA will be implemented.
And 10+ years from now, TIA-thrice-renamed will be declassified, we'll all look back - just as we do at Have Blue today - and say "Hey, pretty neat. The idea actually worked. And once again, we were panicking over nothing."
>Totalitarian Information Awareness!
TIA: TIA: It Ain't Total Information Awareness!
(Under the Senate bill, would that make funding illegal, mandatory, or both?)
My first parsing of your post went something like this:
So you drew designs on the ground with sugar water... and when you'd attracted enough ants, you broke out the 4.5" Newtonian and neutralized the ants. Viola! Plenty of formic acid! :)
Seriously - your parents sound like mine. Close enough supervision that if you get in over your head, they could bail you out -- but that up until that point, they could trust you, because they also taught you how to not get in over your head. Bravo. (And if you breed, do likewise with your offspring. We've got enough pop stars and lawyers. The world needs scientists, too.)
>
> How did it go?
"Nearly set fire to his Dad's garage". I'd say he did pretty well!
(I grew up on these stories too. My folks gave 'em to me. My folks also supervized me - I now realize they were close enough to intervene if I screwed up, but from far enough away that, at the time, I didn't think they were watching. Good on them, I say. Techniques like that turned me on to science, which turned me on to computers, which turned into a fantastic career and hobby. But I do miss the homebrew fireworks. Dad, thanks for that 1950s-era book of chemistry experiments... and for bringing back some of the chemicals they stopped putting in chemistry sets. ;-)
(Side note: Today's chemistry sets are even worse. I think "dissolve sugar" and "mix vinegar and baking soda, look at foam" are about all that's left. How the hell are you supposed to get an 8-year-old interested in science with that?!?! Fer chrissakes, you don't have to give 'em thermite, but at least let 'em detect the friggin' humidity with cobalt chloride!)
Yeah, and the extra mass made them fly like crap when you tried to fill 'em with vinegar and baking soda, or even just pressurized water.
They're safer, which is kinda boring compared to the glass ones I grew up with, but they fly better, which is what counts. Plastic 2L Coke bottles rule!
Because when I want to find out the default voltage of this Athlon XP based on its stepping as printed on the chip, and which bridges I need to cut to unlock the multiplier, I also wanna be sure the author of my solution is a h0t ch1x0r, age 19-25, with b1g h00t3r5! Wow, look at the 120mm fans on her case!
Sure. What would be even more interesting would be - could you get your local cops to charge you? ;-)
That would create an interesting paradox - show up at your local police station, confess to having downloaded 100 MP3z and having burned them to CD for long road trips.
What good is a law when nobody enforces it?
(And for that matter, what's the statute of limitations on the DMCA? Will we eventually have an annual DMCA-hack-liberation-day when the coolest hacks of the $STATUTEOFLIMITATION years ago can be publicly acknowledged? :)
Thankfully, it is not central to the concept of a representative republic.
The two systems have much in common, but there are fundamental philosophical differences between them.
My initial reaction to that sentence was:
We are currently pursuing sand in the Sahara.
We are currently pursuing ice on the North Pole.
We are currently pursuing water at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.
> Will [w]e see this on Fox?
I don't care if it's a peaceful takedown on COPS with nothin' more than a few whacks of the billy club and a shot of pepper spray, or a full-blown high-speed pursuit ending in a fireball of burning gasoline and roasted spammer gibs splattered all over World's Wildest Police Videos, but oh dear God, yes, I hope so.
True - though I'd actually intended it to be taken, in a ha-ha-only-serious sort of way, that there's another interpretation of "subversive" that could be used here:
Namely, that one would have to subscribe only moderately to the views of the current society/gubment to claim that being outpsoken and critical of our "mixed" economy as also subversive. After all, was John Galt a traitor to his nation, or not? :)
>
>Anything I missed? I'm also looking forward to the new Spaceflight/Posthumanist expansion. Should be out around the same time as Duke Nukem Forever and the Diablo II 1.10.
Damn. I got the wrong version. The admins in my game put the Spaceflight/Posthumanist expansion pack permanently on hold.
In my version, there was a bug in the steel/asbestos lining of a couple of towers in New York. No big deal until a bunch of barbarians (probably a memory leak from Civilization I) got mixed up with another memory leak from Flight Simulator, somehow they managed to trigger the bug in the Towers, the whole damn game script got corrupted and went to hell from there. (Goddamn C programmers.)
And while there's no save/restore feature, there may be a causality/time loop bug, which would imply someone's found a way to do a save/restore cheat? The week before the bug brought down the game, some players bought assloads of put options on certain stocks, almost as if they had read the stock page of the New York Times from two weeks ahead of time (the ultimate cheat sheet!), and then restored from an earlier version.
Even if they can't fix the bugs, or release the spaceflight/expansion pack, could the admins kindly ban those players?
> Yes 1194 (64%)
> No 666 (35%)
> Apparently those who don't like Real Life prefer Eternal Damnation.
The site is targeted at gamers, not the general audience. We grew up on DOOM. If Hell is anything like that, then Hell sounds like a pretty cool place! :)
Gamer: "Hey! Fuckin' fire everywhere! Ouch! It's just one big lava pit! And there's this asshole with a big sword who just gets in my way all the time! This isn't like DOOM at all! This SUX!1!!"
Satan: "Back in Real Life, you were only playing the demo. This is the released version. Sorry kid, you get to play Daiakatana for all eternity!"
RL is teh sux0r. I wouldn't even warez it.
I mean, what else can you do other than unsubscribe once you get bored? It's like the Sims, but worse! No speed-up, not even for the 8 hours a day you spend at work!
For fuck's sake, once you got bored of the Sims, you could at least save, have your fun, and restore. But nooooooo, the dumbass designers of Real Life didn't even bother to build in a save-restore feature.
So every little mistake you make follows you around for the rest of the game. I mean, what's the fucking point of that? You spend three weeks setting up a menage a trois with you, your boss's wife, and one lousy goat...
Ask any BOFH about the "rule of thumb" for whip, cane, tawse, or switch. I find that 7200 users per minute is about the practical limit.
Personally, I prefer to counterbalance two riding crops to the hub of an old full-height 3600 RPM 5.25" hard drive.
For particularly annoying users, I also have an RM-80 disk pack (14-inch platters!) salvaged from an old PDP-11/70. The platters spin at 1800 RPM, but the huge motor required to accelerate them allows me to spin up four bullwhips.
Moral of the story: Don't fsck with the BOFH.
You're assuming the code in question was compiled. Glancing at it, I'd lay good odds that it was handcrafted.
Besides, with the risk of being DMCA'd into his or her component atoms (regardless of where our mystery hacker lives), this isn't the kind of hack you can do in 15 minutes, slap your name on it, and get your ego gratification by having worldwide bragging rights.
That leaves only one other route to ego gratification - spend a few hours, make it perfect, and get your ego gratification by presenting a beautiful gift to geeks and hackers around the world... and by leaving the world's DMCA types puzzle they'll never figure out.
Win-win, as I see it. And artful as all fuck. Call it the Faberge' egg of hackerdom.
"Who was that masked man?"
"Nobody knows, ma'am. Folks 'round here call 'im the Lone Ranger."
"Artful fucker, ain't he?"
"Yes ma'am. Maddest props to him."
Gaming! Beer! Slashdot! (OK, it's not quite Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy, but it'll do :)
Since the first genius figured out how to bang two rocks together to make fire. Or that by following those regularly-spaced holes in the dirt next to those broken reeds, he'd find meat. Or that a stick could be sharpened by rubbing against a rock, and that pointy sticks were better than fingernails when hunting or fighting competitors. Or when rhythmic tapping on stuff was fun. And that making funny growly sounds with the mouth hole while tapping rhythmically on stuff was even more fun. And that funny growly sounds could also represent the regularly shaped holes in the dirt that the meat made.
Brains aren't as useful for attracting mates now, but look back a million years or so, and you'll see that brains were pretty cool.
Old JPL humor:
Every engineer should have both a wife and a mistress.
You tell your wife you're spending the night with your mistress, and your mistress you're spending the night with your wife...
Muhahahhaha.... it's all a part of the Statist conspiracy! How could even the most hotheaded Libertarian muster the will to resist after slogging through all 100 pages of Galt's speech? :)
> So put down the aluminum foil, take a deep breath, and relax. And maybe look out the window. We can go outside tomorrow, after the weather clears up a bit.
Naw, I still need to recover from having my brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped 'round a large gold monologue. *g*