> "Ever wonder which hollywood stars and starlets share common sequences?" Oprah's grandmother's dirty little secret!" "THE RICH AND POWERFUL: Genetically Inclined?" > >no thanks
OK, I wouldn't pay $600K for it, but I'd pay $60 to get a few gigs of data and type:
$ cp/home/Tackhead/genemap/home/h0tbabe/genemap
As a geek and heavy Slashdot reader, I'm reasonably confident that this is the only way my genes will ever propagate.
(Hell, this is the only kind of gene propagation I'm interested in. Who the fsck wants to deal with a squalling brat with p00py diapers when there's fragging to be done, dammit? Think lifestyle issues, man, lifestyle!:-)
> It's extra email. That's all. Nobody raped your mother. Nobody shot your sister.
Hmph. That's not what my latest spam claimed to be selling pictures of.
> It's email. I find really hard to believe that the extra second it takes you daily to nuke your spam is really *that* critical. Get over yourself.
Tell you what. Your mailbox, your rules. You just hit delete.
My mailbox, my rules. SPEWS rocks, and I blocks. Fuck ELI.NET for harboring Freeyankee/qves.com.
> I could say that you should be publically tortured and executed because you wasted a minute of my time by posting such drivel.
And I'd defend your right to say it -- but say it with your dime. Not mine.
And as long as I'm exercising my First Amendment rights, fuck ELI.NET sideways with a wire brush. Fuck 'em crosswise with a wire brush. And don't even get me started on what I'd like to see done with Chinanet.
> I am less concerned at this point with anti-Jewish foolishness than I am that a Sikh got shot on September 12, 2001 by some idiot who thought he was shooting a Muslim (as if all Muslims were responsible for the crimes of a few).
And I am less concerned at this point with anti-Muslim foolishness than I am that 3000+ civilians were incinerated or ground into pulp on September 11, 2001 by 19 idiots who thought that Allah ordered the murder of all Americans (as if all Americans were responsible for the crimes of a few).
> As H.G. Wells wrote almost a century ago, "the future will be a race between education and disaster". We need a free flow of information and ideas to prevent the "Big Lie" Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels relied upon to permit the Holocaust to occur.
In this, we're in agreement.
The future is a race between education and disaster. But every time we try to replace a backward-looking theocracy with one promoting freedom, capitalism, and high technology, someone (not you - you didn't raise this point, but many who oppose the War on Terror have) comes back with the "Big Lie" propaganda technique that smears this effort as cultural imperialism.
If spreading the Western value of individual rights - from which come the twin values of religious freedom and economic freedom, and from the latter of which comes an advanced industrialized economy that generates a higher standard of living for all who live in it - is cultural imperialism, I'm guilty as charged.
I know whose side I'm on in the race between education and catastrophe. (And I suspect that despite our initial disagreement on which particular sort of bigoted religious foolishness is more worrisome, you and I are, for the most part, on the same side.) But do technology/freedom/capitalism's detractors know?
> Yes, but it was only a piece of fantasy movie making at best. Remember, Brad Pitt's character said "Hey hey hey, how is this Legal!?!!"
Well, now it is!
Truth be told, I kinda like the PATRIOT Act. It brought a lot of stuff that was probably going on anyways into the open.
Now that it's officially legal and above-board, it's up to the courts to decide whether it'll remain legal, and the last the I checked the Constitution, that's where the decision's supposed to be being made.
Or would you prefer the old system, wherein the cops couldn't tell the court how they'd gotten the evidence, and the court had to pretend they didn't know, and as a result, the hard questions were never asked?
> Use of letters M W N H etc are replaced sometimes with a combination of slash characters, changing them to |\/| |/\| |\| |-| respectively. I'll leave those out, in this font at least they are a terrific blow to reading comprehension.
Oh great.
You mean to tell me that the Holy Unpronounceable Name of God (aka, the Tetragrammatron, "YHVH") is changed to "the wholly incomprehensible in this font", t3tr4gr4mm@ron "MWNH"?:-)
I can s/YHVH/MWNH/g pretty easily, but after escaping all those into pipes and slashes, well...
s/MWNH/|\\\/||\/\\||\\||-|/g
Well whaddya know. Larry Wall was right. God is a Perl h4x0r!
>
I also wonder if "our father" shouldn't be replaced with something else... Linus perhaps, or a reference to root... don't know really, nothing I think of seems to fit but I have this nagging suspicion that "our father" ought to go.
Yeah, I thought about it but couldn't come up with anything until your post. So how about "Yo, MWNH-1"? We might as well bring the SubGenius contingent onboard.
> And what if, following a long philosophical tradition, the perception is in fact the actual reality? What if there is no actual world and all we have is our pont of view on them? There is something like this in Dostoievski's Karamazov, when he says that it doesn't matter if God exists or not, provided you can feel him. Nietszche also said that we build our reality in the same way when we are sleeping and when we are awake. I could quote many other writers and post-structuralists that deal with this problem in the same way, but [...]
...in the meantime, what if there was an actual reality? What if there was an actual world, and all we silly hairless apes had to go on is the evidence of our senses, and the ability of our intelligence to interpret the data passed back to us by our senses?
There's something like this in Schrodinger's and Einstein's and Pauli's theories, where you can't tell if the cat's alive or not, provided you don't observe it, and that matter and energy are interchangeable, and that electrons can't occupy any energy state they bloody feel like, but that they exist only in one of a finite number of discrete states at one time, and that you can make 'em jump from one state to another, but you can never shove 'em halfway in between these states.
> I know it is not a popular scientific tradition among americans and, specially, among computer scientists, but it is a pretty interesting line of thought.
I know it is not a popular poststructuralist tradition among academics, and, specifically, among philosophers, but the notion that there exists an objective reality, whose nature can be determined through the scientific method, is also a pretty interesting line of thought.
> It will sure be difficult to show he who had an out-of-body experience that what he saw is an illusion.
A lot of people tried the "objective reality" idea, built devices like transistors, cathode ray tubes, radio and X-ray telescopes, nuclear weapons, and laser keychain pointers based on those principles.
In the meantime, what have postmodernist and poststructuralist theorists brought us, other than graduate papers on postmodernism?
I think the scientist denying the OBE-believer's claim as mere illusion has a much easier time of it than a poststructuralist philosophy student's attempted denial of everything from the 15-kiloton explosion over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the 0.5 milliwatt HeNe laser reflecting annoyingly off his computer's display after having been aimed there by a couple of wise-ass geeks in the engineering lab across campus.
I can't speak for Dostoevsky, but I think Nietzsche would have been embarassed at you. Who, since Nietzsche's day, has done more to completely redefine our understanding of reality than the scientist? Will to Power, indeed.
Now it's my turn to ROFLMAO. (J00 r0x0r, d00d! Wish I'd thought of that!)
Actually, that and your verbing "to lame" and your nouning of "teach", as in ""wh3n th3y l4m3 2 us" and "give n00bz 4 learnin'" are both cool.
Verbing/nouning stuff weirds language, often in a good (or at least fun) way. Reminds me of another quote I saw on USENET:
"First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.
Well, that's just a character-substitution. To really translate the language, you'd need to update the older idioms.
(For instance, see how 1384's language "And foryeue to us oure dettis at is oure synnys as we foryeuen to oure dettouris at is to men at han synned in us" - which my layman's re-reading works like this: "And forgive (to) us our debt that is our sins, as we forgive (to) our debtors that is to men that have sinned in (against) us" - states explicitly the theological notion that sin is debt, whereas this notion had become implicit by 1611's wording.)
So - The Lord's Prayer, theology mostly intact, but rendered in 2002 'leetspeak:
Our Father, who 0wnz heaven, j00 r0ck! May all 0ur base someday be belong to you! May j00 0wn earth just like j00 0wn heaven. Give us this day our warez, mp3z, and pr0n through a phat pipe. And cut us some slack when we act like n00b lamerz, just as we teach n00bz when they act lame on us. Please don't give us root access on some poor d00d'z box when we're too pissed off to think about what's right and wrong, and if you could keep the f3i off our backs, we'd appreciate it. For j00 0wn r00t on all our b0x3n 4ever and ever, 4m3n.
> Ancient Chinese proverb: Beware man who says he wishes to become rich so that he can help the poor.
Amen to that.
Frankly, I think anyone who sets up a business and turns $1B into $2B will do a lot more good through the additional economic activity he or she creates (workers hired, software developed, new gadget invented and mass-produced), that the extra $1B in donations is a drop in the bucket.
(Plus, as you point out, I'd trust a guy who says he wants to turn $1B into $2B so he can buy a yacht full of supermodels, rather than just so he can give away an extra $1B at retirement. The yacht fetisist can't be hiding anything:-)
> IIRC domestic turkeys can't mate - their breasts are too large for them to get their genitalia in contact with each other. > > Yay for artificial insemination and big turkey dinners!
/me adds another entry to "Jobs I Don't Want, No Matter How Bad The Economy Gets", just below "goatse.cx guy".
> [...] This product has been show to burn labratory rat animals in tests on 2x and 4x recordable mediums.
ROFLMAO.
So, how much data can they fit on a rat these days? If I have a male and female rat, and I leave too much food in their cage, do RIAA lawyers come after me for copyright infringement a few weeks later?
> After having his brain advanced 1,000,000 dog years, Porthos will become an ensign and have to grapple with an Earth that does not grant individual freedoms to dogs. Look for episode "Man's Best Friend" where Porthos is deemed the propery of Starfleet and Archer must argue that Porthos deserves to makes his own choices.
After 1,000,000 years, Porthos will be dressed like a flamboyant 70s pimp, and worried about his appearance more than anything, and, oh, no, wait, that was the Cat from Red Dwarf... Wrong series. My bad.
> You simply can't keep moving all the wealth in the world to a select few and expect everything
to work out all right.
You may be assuming that the amount of wealth in the world is constant. A comparison of planetary population, hunger, literacy and mortality rates, and material standard of living from the year 1200, 1800, and 2000 should cause you to seriously question this assumption.
> Honestly, once you have a nice place to live, food to last you the rest of your life, a car (not even mandatory depending on where you live or what your lifestyle is), and a few luxuries (I'm not talking about billion dollar boats here either), what good is another billion dollars going to do you?
Notice how - even in the Forbes article - some of the more expensive things are items where another billion would make a difference? (Like, you could do twice as much work with 1000 clones instead of 500, or give Sally Struthers twice as much food to eat in the hopes that more of it might get to the poor when she's done filling up on cheesy poofs:)
> Personally if I had that much dough, I'd give most of it, like maybe $950 million, away. The rest would take care of me and my entire extended family for the rest of our lives.
(Nothing wrong with that approach - as long as you're giving your $950M away. Hell, I could live comfortably on $10M. Try to take someone else's $950M, and you're little more than a thug, however:)
But why do you give $950M away in the first place? If your goal is to make the world a better place through philanthropy (feed the world) or through strategic investments (building space-based power stations and orbiting colonies), wouldn't the world be twice as good a place if you kept the $950M used it to earn another billion, thereby giving you and your heirs $1950M to build yet more Good Things?
This scales down, too. If you've got a business plan that'll get you $1B in 10 years, but you only need $50M, and you start giving it all away when you hit $51M in your first year, you'll never make it to $1B, and the big projects - like developing a gene-h4x0r3d rice that grows in the Sahara, or fusion power, or cheap orbital launch capability - will remain forever out of your grasp.
> While Bin Laden is a nutter and his followers are too you must accept that America _is_ the reason that many people in the Middle East are suffering.
Pray tell, what would a bunch of former nomadic tribesmen in a desert be doing without western Capitalism's need for oil?
Oh, right. Still wandering around in the desert. An 11th century lifestyle might be fine for Osama, but it's not good enough for me.
Nor, I suspect, is it good enough for even the poorest of us. How come Japan (every city bombed to ash) and Hong Kong (a pathetic trading outpost) have become economic powerhouses, and Israel (probably the only goddamn place in the middle east without oil!) have managed to increase their citizens' standard of living while that of the Middle East continues to stagnate?
A hint might lie in the economic systems of the countries in question. One of these economic systems is not like the others.
> I was as horrified by September the 11th as anyone but come on! These things do happen for a reason. Do something about it.
You mean, something like "sieze the oil fields for our own use, since it's Capitalism that knew what the oil was good for, Capitalism that turned ugly pools of hydrocarbons into skyscrapers and airplanes and automobiles and color TVs and $0.99 cheeseburgers and $99 bottles of wine, and Capitalism that's raised the standard of living in every country it's ever been tried, and to hell with any two-bit tinpot prince and religious crackpot who stands in our way?"
Sure. I'm willing to do something. Where do I sign up, and when do we start?
Actually, scratch that. I "sign up" for that war every day, and I "start" when I go to work in the morning and guzzle down a cup of adrenaline. I do it with [the $0.60 I have left after Uncle Sam's looters steal "their" part from] every dollar I earn, and every dollar of profit my employer earns.
> Questions about the morality of duplicating non-physical goods in the first place aside for now, if you duplicate and distribute warez that's your own damn fault. If you crack/RE and tell others how to crack/RE a "protected" piece of software, there is no copyright or duplication involved. This natural right needs to be preserved.
Here's an interesting ethical continuum for you:
1) Download FOO.ZIP for the cracked version.
2) Download FOOCRAK.ZIP to get the crack. Unzip this file and/or patch the following bytes of foo.exe to remove the check for the serial.
3) To crack Foosoft's protection, you need to make sure that the code at $addressFOO always returns the correct answer. The serial validation routine starts at $addressBAR. Crack is left as an exercise for someone willing to learn some basic assembly language.
4) To crack Foosoft's protection, you need to know that the serial validation routine sums the first 12 digits of the serial number, and compares them against the last four digits of the serial number. Crack is left as an exercise for someone who's learned some basic assembly language and also wants to learn how to use a debugger.
DMCA bans all four.
Based solely on my personal whim (a luxury that our judicial system doesn't really allow judges), I'd argue that distributing cracks of the form of #3 is questionable but should probably be legal, and that distributing cracks of the form of #4 should be protected.
> If you want to "improve your skills as a SysAdmin", then feel free to setup your own box and break into it all day long. Hell get a friend to set it up and you can go back and forth trying to break into each others setups.
You raise an important point - perhaps more important than you yourself appreciate.
The original poster was talking about "serious UNIX guys". If we're to assume this implies 5-10 years of experience with UNIX, it's highly likely that when these "serious UNIX guys" first got into computers, the only way to learn about UNIX was to crax0r someone else's b0x, because the alternative was a VIC-20 or C-64.
My first VMS experience was a box with a default password. (Wups, hope the statute of limitations has expired, or at least I hope it was legal when I did it, or I just h0z3d myself:-) I read an *assload* of help files, did some really basic stuff for a few days, and emailed the likely meatspace admins that they oughta (a) change default passwords as a matter of policy, and (b) hide the lists of non-privileged users and their expired passwords, because (c) I probably wasn't the first person to find this system, and probably wouldn't be the last, and because (d) if user FOO had password PASS8 expire in August, it wasn't gonna be too hard for anyone to guess what FOO's password was for September.
Now - was what I did wrong? Illegal, yeah, probably (and certainly illegal today!). But morally, at the time, I'm not convinced it was any great sin. I did no harm to the system, read no user's email or company files, and deleted no data that I didn't create (a "hello, world" executable! w00t! 1 \/\/4$ $0 7337!:) "Take only memories, leave only footprints."
At the time (early-to-mid '80s), there was simply no other way for a geeky kid to learn what a real OS was like. (Leaving aside the fact that when I found a UNIX box, I also concluded that VMS was just plain evil:-)
(Aside: had I harmed the system, either by accident or by malice aforethought, it would have been a whole different moral kettle of fish. With root access comes great responsibility, especially when it's not your box!)
But as you correctly point out - that argument doesn't hold water today, because a wide range of operating systems and software are F/freely available, and hardware is as damn close to free beer as it'll ever get - $25 at a surplus store if you need nodes for a home network.
There's no longer any ethical justification for the curious geeky kid to 0wn someone else's b0x, nor is there any practical justification for it, as if curiosity is the motivation, he/she can learn far more quickly, and with far less risk to him/herself and to others, by simply acquiring and using their own gear.
I just hope the graphics are better than that tombstone the Napster guys did.
If you'd known about this during trading hours on the 12th (and sold your stock on the 13th!) it would have been a nice trade, but IMHO a look at PRVT's one-year stock chart still says "Fucked Company".
There's plenty of ways to blow a wad of cash in this market. I'd think hard before going long here.
> "Squish DRM" equals "Compromise" -- something Jack "Maddog... Grrr!..." Valenti and Hilary Rosen are incapable of understanding in their current, frothy states.
I took it the other way around. Squishy DRM is indeed a "compromise". It's a compromise in the same sense that the DMCA was a "compromise" between ISPs and Hollywood and the CBDTPA was (presented as) a "compromise" between hardware makers and Hollywood.
Jack and Hilly are very capable of understanding what "compromise" means. To MPAA and RIAA, "compromise" means "You give us some of what you used to have, and we keep it until we decide it's time for another compromise."
(The content cartel's notion of compromise from one of their more popular movie characters, namely Darth Vader, of "I am altering the terms of our bargain. Pray that I do not alter it further" fame)
> Is this Iron Chef (the Japanese show), or Iron Chef USA that we're talking about? The latter is pretty damn funny, if for no other reason than to see William Shatner pretend like he knows what he's talking about, and the comments on food that he delivers in his classic melodramatic style.
IMHO, Iron Chef is funny, and it's great entertainment, but it's not really a cooking show, as the pace of the cooking (multiple chefs, multiple dishes per chef, dozens of sous-chefs doing the prep work simultaneously) makes it impossible to really understand what's going on and learn anything. You've got these great chefs out there, doing great things, but you end up with no idea how they did it or how to apply it to your own cooking.
Perhaps that's what the original poster was referring to when he said he didn't enjoy Iron Chef.
It's rather like watching a grandmaster-level chess match, but replayed at one move per second.
Slashdot Mirror
>
>no thanks
OK, I wouldn't pay $600K for it, but I'd pay $60 to get a few gigs of data and type:
$ cp /home/Tackhead/genemap /home/h0tbabe/genemap
As a geek and heavy Slashdot reader, I'm reasonably confident that this is the only way my genes will ever propagate.
(Hell, this is the only kind of gene propagation I'm interested in. Who the fsck wants to deal with a squalling brat with p00py diapers when there's fragging to be done, dammit? Think lifestyle issues, man, lifestyle! :-)
Hmph. That's not what my latest spam claimed to be selling pictures of.
> It's email. I find really hard to believe that the extra second it takes you daily to nuke your spam is really *that* critical. Get over yourself.
Tell you what. Your mailbox, your rules. You just hit delete.
My mailbox, my rules. SPEWS rocks, and I blocks. Fuck ELI.NET for harboring Freeyankee/qves.com.
> I could say that you should be publically tortured and executed because you wasted a minute of my time by posting such drivel.
And I'd defend your right to say it -- but say it with your dime. Not mine.
And as long as I'm exercising my First Amendment rights, fuck ELI.NET sideways with a wire brush. Fuck 'em crosswise with a wire brush. And don't even get me started on what I'd like to see done with Chinanet.
And I am less concerned at this point with anti-Muslim foolishness than I am that 3000+ civilians were incinerated or ground into pulp on September 11, 2001 by 19 idiots who thought that Allah ordered the murder of all Americans (as if all Americans were responsible for the crimes of a few).
> As H.G. Wells wrote almost a century ago, "the future will be a race between education and disaster". We need a free flow of information and ideas to prevent the "Big Lie" Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels relied upon to permit the Holocaust to occur.
In this, we're in agreement.
The future is a race between education and disaster. But every time we try to replace a backward-looking theocracy with one promoting freedom, capitalism, and high technology, someone (not you - you didn't raise this point, but many who oppose the War on Terror have) comes back with the "Big Lie" propaganda technique that smears this effort as cultural imperialism.
If spreading the Western value of individual rights - from which come the twin values of religious freedom and economic freedom, and from the latter of which comes an advanced industrialized economy that generates a higher standard of living for all who live in it - is cultural imperialism, I'm guilty as charged.
I know whose side I'm on in the race between education and catastrophe. (And I suspect that despite our initial disagreement on which particular sort of bigoted religious foolishness is more worrisome, you and I are, for the most part, on the same side.) But do technology/freedom/capitalism's detractors know?
Well, now it is!
Truth be told, I kinda like the PATRIOT Act. It brought a lot of stuff that was probably going on anyways into the open.
Now that it's officially legal and above-board, it's up to the courts to decide whether it'll remain legal, and the last the I checked the Constitution, that's where the decision's supposed to be being made.
Or would you prefer the old system, wherein the cops couldn't tell the court how they'd gotten the evidence, and the court had to pretend they didn't know, and as a result, the hard questions were never asked?
Oh great.
You mean to tell me that the Holy Unpronounceable Name of God (aka, the Tetragrammatron, "YHVH") is changed to "the wholly incomprehensible in this font", t3tr4gr4mm@ron "MWNH"? :-)
I can s/YHVH/MWNH/g pretty easily, but after escaping all those into pipes and slashes, well...
s/MWNH/|\\\/||\/\\||\\||-|/g
Well whaddya know. Larry Wall was right. God is a Perl h4x0r! > I also wonder if "our father" shouldn't be replaced with something else... Linus perhaps, or a reference to root... don't know really, nothing I think of seems to fit but I have this nagging suspicion that "our father" ought to go.
Yeah, I thought about it but couldn't come up with anything until your post. So how about "Yo, MWNH-1"? We might as well bring the SubGenius contingent onboard.
> http://www.layhands.com/HowToCastOutSpirits.htm
1) Gentoo. Build from source.
2) FDISK and install Linux instead.
There's something like this in Schrodinger's and Einstein's and Pauli's theories, where you can't tell if the cat's alive or not, provided you don't observe it, and that matter and energy are interchangeable, and that electrons can't occupy any energy state they bloody feel like, but that they exist only in one of a finite number of discrete states at one time, and that you can make 'em jump from one state to another, but you can never shove 'em halfway in between these states.
> I know it is not a popular scientific tradition among americans and, specially, among computer scientists, but it is a pretty interesting line of thought.
I know it is not a popular poststructuralist tradition among academics, and, specifically, among philosophers, but the notion that there exists an objective reality, whose nature can be determined through the scientific method, is also a pretty interesting line of thought.
> It will sure be difficult to show he who had an out-of-body experience that what he saw is an illusion.
A lot of people tried the "objective reality" idea, built devices like transistors, cathode ray tubes, radio and X-ray telescopes, nuclear weapons, and laser keychain pointers based on those principles.
In the meantime, what have postmodernist and poststructuralist theorists brought us, other than graduate papers on postmodernism?
I think the scientist denying the OBE-believer's claim as mere illusion has a much easier time of it than a poststructuralist philosophy student's attempted denial of everything from the 15-kiloton explosion over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the 0.5 milliwatt HeNe laser reflecting annoyingly off his computer's display after having been aimed there by a couple of wise-ass geeks in the engineering lab across campus.
I can't speak for Dostoevsky, but I think Nietzsche would have been embarassed at you. Who, since Nietzsche's day, has done more to completely redefine our understanding of reality than the scientist? Will to Power, indeed.
Now it's my turn to ROFLMAO. (J00 r0x0r, d00d! Wish I'd thought of that!)
Actually, that and your verbing "to lame" and your nouning of "teach", as in ""wh3n th3y l4m3 2 us" and "give n00bz 4 learnin'" are both cool.
Verbing/nouning stuff weirds language, often in a good (or at least fun) way. Reminds me of another quote I saw on USENET:
Well, that's just a character-substitution. To really translate the language, you'd need to update the older idioms.
(For instance, see how 1384's language "And foryeue to us oure dettis at is oure synnys as we foryeuen to oure dettouris at is to men at han synned in us" - which my layman's re-reading works like this: "And forgive (to) us our debt that is our sins, as we forgive (to) our debtors that is to men that have sinned in (against) us" - states explicitly the theological notion that sin is debt, whereas this notion had become implicit by 1611's wording.)
So - The Lord's Prayer, theology mostly intact, but rendered in 2002 'leetspeak:
So the only difference between antiwater and any other soft drink is that the TV advertisements for it would be accurate descriptions of reality?
Hey, that would be a revolutionary breakthrough!
Amen to that.
Frankly, I think anyone who sets up a business and turns $1B into $2B will do a lot more good through the additional economic activity he or she creates (workers hired, software developed, new gadget invented and mass-produced), that the extra $1B in donations is a drop in the bucket.
(Plus, as you point out, I'd trust a guy who says he wants to turn $1B into $2B so he can buy a yacht full of supermodels, rather than just so he can give away an extra $1B at retirement. The yacht fetisist can't be hiding anything :-)
>
> Yay for artificial insemination and big turkey dinners!
ROFLMAO.
So, how much data can they fit on a rat these days? If I have a male and female rat, and I leave too much food in their cage, do RIAA lawyers come after me for copyright infringement a few weeks later?
Dude, you need to get out more.
I mean, Earth Girls Are Easy, but everyone from the Fifth Invader Force knows that $cientologist chicks are, like, the worst lays on the planet.
*rimshot*
After 1,000,000 years, Porthos will be dressed like a flamboyant 70s pimp, and worried about his appearance more than anything, and, oh, no, wait, that was the Cat from Red Dwarf... Wrong series. My bad.
You may be assuming that the amount of wealth in the world is constant. A comparison of planetary population, hunger, literacy and mortality rates, and material standard of living from the year 1200, 1800, and 2000 should cause you to seriously question this assumption.
> Honestly, once you have a nice place to live, food to last you the rest of your life, a car (not even mandatory depending on where you live or what your lifestyle is), and a few luxuries (I'm not talking about billion dollar boats here either), what good is another billion dollars going to do you?
Notice how - even in the Forbes article - some of the more expensive things are items where another billion would make a difference? (Like, you could do twice as much work with 1000 clones instead of 500, or give Sally Struthers twice as much food to eat in the hopes that more of it might get to the poor when she's done filling up on cheesy poofs :)
> Personally if I had that much dough, I'd give most of it, like maybe $950 million, away. The rest would take care of me and my entire extended family for the rest of our lives.
(Nothing wrong with that approach - as long as you're giving your $950M away. Hell, I could live comfortably on $10M. Try to take someone else's $950M, and you're little more than a thug, however :)
But why do you give $950M away in the first place? If your goal is to make the world a better place through philanthropy (feed the world) or through strategic investments (building space-based power stations and orbiting colonies), wouldn't the world be twice as good a place if you kept the $950M used it to earn another billion, thereby giving you and your heirs $1950M to build yet more Good Things?
This scales down, too. If you've got a business plan that'll get you $1B in 10 years, but you only need $50M, and you start giving it all away when you hit $51M in your first year, you'll never make it to $1B, and the big projects - like developing a gene-h4x0r3d rice that grows in the Sahara, or fusion power, or cheap orbital launch capability - will remain forever out of your grasp.
Pray tell, what would a bunch of former nomadic tribesmen in a desert be doing without western Capitalism's need for oil?
Oh, right. Still wandering around in the desert. An 11th century lifestyle might be fine for Osama, but it's not good enough for me.
Nor, I suspect, is it good enough for even the poorest of us. How come Japan (every city bombed to ash) and Hong Kong (a pathetic trading outpost) have become economic powerhouses, and Israel (probably the only goddamn place in the middle east without oil!) have managed to increase their citizens' standard of living while that of the Middle East continues to stagnate?
A hint might lie in the economic systems of the countries in question. One of these economic systems is not like the others.
> I was as horrified by September the 11th as anyone but come on! These things do happen for a reason. Do something about it.
You mean, something like "sieze the oil fields for our own use, since it's Capitalism that knew what the oil was good for, Capitalism that turned ugly pools of hydrocarbons into skyscrapers and airplanes and automobiles and color TVs and $0.99 cheeseburgers and $99 bottles of wine, and Capitalism that's raised the standard of living in every country it's ever been tried, and to hell with any two-bit tinpot prince and religious crackpot who stands in our way?"
Sure. I'm willing to do something. Where do I sign up, and when do we start?
Actually, scratch that. I "sign up" for that war every day, and I "start" when I go to work in the morning and guzzle down a cup of adrenaline. I do it with [the $0.60 I have left after Uncle Sam's looters steal "their" part from] every dollar I earn, and every dollar of profit my employer earns.
>
> One _being_ a heatsink? (-:
Go beyond a heatsink. How 'bout a hot chick with a pair of peltier coolers?
>
>[...]he "?" in "...?, profit"
Yeah, but that doesn't matter, I mean, the article's got it in the wrong order:
1) ???
2) Profit!
3) Umm, someone at Forbes screwed up the joke.
Here's an interesting ethical continuum for you:
1) Download FOO.ZIP for the cracked version.
2) Download FOOCRAK.ZIP to get the crack. Unzip this file and/or patch the following bytes of foo.exe to remove the check for the serial.
3) To crack Foosoft's protection, you need to make sure that the code at $addressFOO always returns the correct answer. The serial validation routine starts at $addressBAR. Crack is left as an exercise for someone willing to learn some basic assembly language.
4) To crack Foosoft's protection, you need to know that the serial validation routine sums the first 12 digits of the serial number, and compares them against the last four digits of the serial number. Crack is left as an exercise for someone who's learned some basic assembly language and also wants to learn how to use a debugger.
DMCA bans all four.
Based solely on my personal whim (a luxury that our judicial system doesn't really allow judges), I'd argue that distributing cracks of the form of #3 is questionable but should probably be legal, and that distributing cracks of the form of #4 should be protected.
You raise an important point - perhaps more important than you yourself appreciate.
The original poster was talking about "serious UNIX guys". If we're to assume this implies 5-10 years of experience with UNIX, it's highly likely that when these "serious UNIX guys" first got into computers, the only way to learn about UNIX was to crax0r someone else's b0x, because the alternative was a VIC-20 or C-64.
My first VMS experience was a box with a default password. (Wups, hope the statute of limitations has expired, or at least I hope it was legal when I did it, or I just h0z3d myself :-) I read an *assload* of help files, did some really basic stuff for a few days, and emailed the likely meatspace admins that they oughta (a) change default passwords as a matter of policy, and (b) hide the lists of non-privileged users and their expired passwords, because (c) I probably wasn't the first person to find this system, and probably wouldn't be the last, and because (d) if user FOO had password PASS8 expire in August, it wasn't gonna be too hard for anyone to guess what FOO's password was for September.
Now - was what I did wrong? Illegal, yeah, probably (and certainly illegal today!). But morally, at the time, I'm not convinced it was any great sin. I did no harm to the system, read no user's email or company files, and deleted no data that I didn't create (a "hello, world" executable! w00t! 1 \/\/4$ $0 7337! :) "Take only memories, leave only footprints."
At the time (early-to-mid '80s), there was simply no other way for a geeky kid to learn what a real OS was like. (Leaving aside the fact that when I found a UNIX box, I also concluded that VMS was just plain evil :-)
(Aside: had I harmed the system, either by accident or by malice aforethought, it would have been a whole different moral kettle of fish. With root access comes great responsibility, especially when it's not your box!)
But as you correctly point out - that argument doesn't hold water today, because a wide range of operating systems and software are F/freely available, and hardware is as damn close to free beer as it'll ever get - $25 at a surplus store if you need nodes for a home network.
There's no longer any ethical justification for the curious geeky kid to 0wn someone else's b0x, nor is there any practical justification for it, as if curiosity is the motivation, he/she can learn far more quickly, and with far less risk to him/herself and to others, by simply acquiring and using their own gear.
#include<thekidsdontknowhowgoodtheygotitthesedays. h> /* grumble grumble */
"Ded pussy?" (eeeewwww!)
"Wet kitty?" (much nicer!)
I just hope the graphics are better than that tombstone the Napster guys did.
If you'd known about this during trading hours on the 12th (and sold your stock on the 13th!) it would have been a nice trade, but IMHO a look at PRVT's one-year stock chart still says "Fucked Company".
There's plenty of ways to blow a wad of cash in this market. I'd think hard before going long here.
Guilty as charged. Thanks for the (deserved!) LARTing.
I took it the other way around. Squishy DRM is indeed a "compromise". It's a compromise in the same sense that the DMCA was a "compromise" between ISPs and Hollywood and the CBDTPA was (presented as) a "compromise" between hardware makers and Hollywood.
Jack and Hilly are very capable of understanding what "compromise" means. To MPAA and RIAA, "compromise" means "You give us some of what you used to have, and we keep it until we decide it's time for another compromise."
(The content cartel's notion of compromise from one of their more popular movie characters, namely Darth Vader, of "I am altering the terms of our bargain. Pray that I do not alter it further" fame)
IMHO, Iron Chef is funny, and it's great entertainment, but it's not really a cooking show, as the pace of the cooking (multiple chefs, multiple dishes per chef, dozens of sous-chefs doing the prep work simultaneously) makes it impossible to really understand what's going on and learn anything. You've got these great chefs out there, doing great things, but you end up with no idea how they did it or how to apply it to your own cooking.
Perhaps that's what the original poster was referring to when he said he didn't enjoy Iron Chef.
It's rather like watching a grandmaster-level chess match, but replayed at one move per second.