"a level of co-ordination and powers of concentration equivalent to those observed in top-level athletes"
...does not imply athletic prowess.
It does imply "the zone" in which the top athletes are at their best.
(Old-Sk00l gamer mode on) As one who played plenty of Defender, Robotron, and Tempest - not in MAME, but using the original controls, in dimly-lit arcades, surrounded by flashing lights and bleeps from 20 machines everywhere, and a 19" monitor filling most of my view - I experienced it daily. Once you got to the point where you could make $0.25 last for half an hour or more, you just melded into the machine and became one with it. (Sorry for the new-agey crap, I don't know any other way to describe the sensation.)
The expert who runs the mile and gets his "second wind" is like the kid who becomes one with the machine. The brain switches off, the body runs on autopilot, and you don't think about what to do, you just do.
I have no doubt that some of the "jocks" in my high school achieved the same level of concentration on the football field or on the track as I did in the arcade. (I just wish I'd known back then, as I'd have had more respect for their accomplishments.)
To mention a few more areas where folks enter "the zone", I'll offer motor sport, live performance of classical music, several martial arts disciplines, and Deep-Hack-Mode programming. I'm sure there are plenty of others.
Jocks achieved their godhood on the field, but remained assholes in the hallways and classrooms. My apotheoses were in the arcade and classroom, but I remained dateless in the hallways.
It has nothing to do with jockhood or geekhood, it has to do with the difference between someone who's merely competent or proficient, and someone who's truly a master or virtuoso.
One victim - $4000 lost - "Most of the charges were at Network Solutions".
Another victim "was called by his bank Monday and told a criminal had charged $1,000 on his card over the weekend at Network Solutions"
Now, I'm just speculating, but what kind of criminal do we Slashdotters know of that has a need to register lots and lots of domains, and has a use for lots and lots of credit card numbers, (that is, has a use for lots of CCs, a few of which would be used to register bogus domains, but the majority of which would be used to sign up for $20/month throwaway dialup accounts that get nuked within hours of signup...)
If my hypothesis is correct, all we need to do is follow the trail from the CCs to the domains to the dialups to the whackamole users.
Y'see, if the $KILOBUCK charges are going to domain registrars, it'd be pretty easy to figure out what domains were registered, and if they were appearing in spams.
And if we find the domains in spams, we can get the spammers' general geographical location by looking at reverse DNS from the throwaway dialups with which he spews. We can also learn from the "Send money to" snail-mail dropboxes (usually a Mail Boxes Etc. type of place) in the spams. Follow the money.
If there's only one or two spammers, I'll bet we also find that he and/or his associates have (in addition to the domain registry carding) been doing credit fraud on lots of cards the $TWENTYBUCK range to sign up throwaway dialup accounts. (Umm, and mailboxes at MBE;-)
Or maybe our Bad Guy is hiring others to spam on his behalf. In this case, we have 100 "work at home" suckers, most of whom lost money to the ringleader, and we only need one to turn state's evidence.
Of course, all of this is mere speculation. But it would account for much of what's appeared in our inboxes over the past year, wouldn't it? There are probably only a few spammers who would have the capacity to run such an operation, and their real-life identities are known. In my more paranoid fantasies, I imagine that this identity theft might have been done on behalf of one or more of them.
The wheels of justice grind slow. But they grind fine.
> The cops will just get snitty with you cuz you solved the crime.
If you walk in to your local PD and say "I 0wn h1m! j00 cl00less fux0rz list3n 2 m33!", yeah, they'll get snitty.
If you walk in, and behind closed doors (or cubicles:), outline how you solved it, in such a way that the officer you're talking to also has enough of an understanding on how to solve it, you've just taught a cop a new way to solve crime that none of his buddies know, and you've probably just made a friend.
Beat a man over the head with a fish, and he'll slap you across the face with one. Teach a man to fish and you're both fed for life.
> This probibly wont help you get right to your robber, he probibly sold all your stuff. And if he was smart he probibly sold it to a used
computer store that would resell it. Although most pilfers arent the smartest bunch, good luck;)
IANAL, but ISTR that in these cases, the used computer store (pawnshop) is guilty of "posession of stolen property". As is, for that matter, the innocent sucker who walks in off the street and buys it. As such, you can still get your computer back.
Option 1: (There's only one bad guy, the thief.) The guy who bought the computer will be pissed, he'll be pissed at the computer store. The guy who runs the computer store will be really pissed, and he'll be pissed at the guy who sold it to him. End result -- the thief loses his ability to sell stuff at that store.
Option 2: (There's another bad guy, in that there's a store or pawnshop operating as a "fence", that is, reselling goods they know are stolen). The guy who bought the computer will be pissed. The cops will have evidence to use in their (likely ongoing) case against the fencing operation. End result -- the thief may get away, but the fencing operation goes down.
Either way, by providing evidence to the cops, you increase the odds of getting your stuff back and cleaning up your town.
>...if they are willing to look at technical details.
Very true, the trick is to get someone at your local PD interested in the case. Routine burglaries are, well, routine. Just as the FBI laughs if the losses are less than $BIGNUM, your local cops generally don't give a damn about property theft, because the odds are slim and the cases are boring as hell.
1) So don't call - show up in meatspace at your local police department. (Or if you've filed a police report on the burglary, you probably have an officer's business card. In that case, call and try to set up a 15-minute appointment.)
2) You may want to talk to a detective, rather than the beat cop. Dunno how lucky you'll be at finding one. Might be worth a shot. Go through channels.
3) (Here's the kicker). YOU know how to solve the crime. The cops don't. So YOU explain it to the cop or detective - in detail. Bring printouts. Use highlighters. Emphasize the point that even though you did the legwork, you don't want credit - you want the cop to get credit for solving the "high-tech" case. This means career advancement to the cop/dick, and ought to interest him, even if the dollar value of the case is peanuts.
"My house was broken into and bad guys stole my stuff" - a boring case, like dozens of others, involving all the paperwork with no chance of recovering the goods.
"Here's an open-and-shut case on how to track a thief through cyberspace" - something new, possibly a promotion for finding a new way to solve cases, and a reputation within the department as "the guy who knows how to track criminals through cyberspace, he's even smarter than that moron the Feds send us every few months".
If you're helpful your local cops, they just might be able to help you.
> "The Tree of Liberty must, from time to time, be watered with the blood of patriots" > > - Thomas Jefferson > And ill probably be arrested for quoting him.
Naah, you only get arrested if you quote him like this:
"Gur Gerr bs Yvoregl zhfg, sebz gvzr gb gvzr, or jngrerq jvgu gur oybbq bs cngevbgf." - Gubznf Wrssrefba
Which reminds me, it's time to update my.sig file.
"Now that crypto is outlawed, only outlaws quote Wrssrefba."
> The reason [the guy who threatened to knife a contestant] was expelled was because he's a danger to everyone on the show, and a possible PR nightmare for CBS. I mean, a
murder/assault on a reality show?
Yeah, God forbid we show 'em reality on a reality show.
(Personally, I disagree. I'd be willing to bet the CBS execs collectively creamed their Armani suits when the near-knifing happened, until the CBS legal department showed them that they'd be sued into the stone age if they knowingly allowed a contestant to be murdered/assaulted. Whereupon, the execs then shat their pants, turfed the contestant, and gave some New York dry cleaner a Very Bad Day.)
> You can kinda-sorta opt out of X10 ads by going here. Although I believe the net effect is that it loads the ad, reads your optout
preference from a cookie, then immediately closes the ad window. Plus, you have to re-opt after 30 days. Better than nothing, I guess.
No, firewalling them, HOSTS-blocking them, or using Junkbuster to filter them out is "better than nothing".
Opting-out is not a solution, because it relies on the good behavior of your adversary.
But you can't trust your adversary -- because the reason you want to opt out is because they've demonstrated themselves incapable of abiding by the rules of polite society.
Which makes more sense:
1) Get down on your knees and beg "please, known-privacy-invader or annoying-ad-maker, track my movements for 30 days but promise that if you can continue to track me, you won't show me the ad until a month from now, when I'll have to jump through the opt-out hoop again?"
or
2) Blackhole them, so that (because you can't send packets to them, and they can't send packets to you) you're immune, no matter what the marketroids decide to do next, you remain unaffected.
By way of analogy: You leave your door unlocked, and someone walks in, shits on your living room rug, and leaves, with a note saying "Cool shit, huh? I'll leave some more samples next week!"
Do you lock your door? Or do you leave it unlocked, but tack up a note on the door saying "Thank you for not shitting on my rug today. Please continue to not shit on the rug for 30 days, because I just had it cleaned."
> The latest thing on the seamy side are banner ads with.WAV files attached.
Favorite quote:
"If I want your website to make sound, I'll lick my finger and rub it against my screen. Now fuck off while I delete the damn MIDI.DLL from my Nutscrape install."
> Impossible! We need a new word, annoying isn't good enough even now...
May I submit the word "Shoshkele" as the word for "transcendentally annoying, transcending even transcendent annoyance, the kind of annoying that makes you want to hunt down every marketing executive and sodomize them with 20 feet of razor wire wrapped around an aluminum baseball bat":
(Amusingly enough, I point out that the most amazing thing about marketroid-speak is that I couldn't figure out what the fuck a shoshkele was, even after reading the "What's a Shoshkele" link on the aforementioned marketroid site.)
This is all going to end up like the Marketing Department of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, who defined a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With".
And the HHGTTG defined the marketing department of SCC as "A load of useless gits who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes".
> > Next will be shootings, accidents and executions.
> >
<BILL_AND_TED> Excellent! </BILL_AND_TED>
Damn, you stole my one-line-thunder.
But for those who think "The Running Man" (movie, TV, or the already-mentioned, and totally awesome, "Smash TV" video game) is fiction, have you turned on FOX recently?
"America's [Wildest|Most-Dangerous] Police [Videos|Chases]" and COPS are real shows.
I admit it - I watch. I like to call it "The Senseless Violence Hour -- on FOX!" I know exactly what I'm there for, namely to munch on popcorn and watch dumbfucks roll their cars after a high-speed pursuit and then try desperately to convince the cop that the six empty beers on the roadway (and the half-empty one still leaking) weren't theirs.
The only difference between these and "Running Man" is that in the current crop of "cop shows", the studios aren't allowed to show the dumbfucks that get themselves killed. So most of the time, even the ones who get ejected from the vehicle get up and walk away with a few scratches. (Presumably it's very expensive to get the releases from the family for the dumbfucks who get themselves killed, whereas the dumbfucks who live don't have much say in the matter...)
Old joke:
Q: Did you hear that it's now legal to broadcast live executions on TV? I wonder if FOX is gonna do it!
A: Naah, FOX would never show a live execution. Live naked executions, on the other hand...
> The thing that strikes me in the article is the fact that they are so certain that this protection will prevent (or
diminish) the copying. If on thing can be learnt from the past is that every protection can and will be cracked.
Yep. Worst-case scenario, we rip at 1x instead of 10x, and we do it before we go to bed, or when we get up in the middle of the night to take a piss.
(Hilary Rosen, what are you doing on the floor of my washroom? No, I don't care if your stomach's on fire...)
> +5, Funny? You guys are all mormons. And morons.
...and when the Hindu chick sent me back to the hospital, there was this Mormon chick... and she didn't mind that I was still dating the Hindu chick. Gotta love them Mormons!
> Run over you to learn about dangerous
driving laws? The children are living in our society. Our society has rules/laws to stop people ruining the society for
everyone else. If you don't tell the children what's not acceptable in their society, then there's going to be a lot of children
getting into trouble.
I sense I'm being trolled, but what the heck, I'll bite the juicy worm on the end of the string...
> Our society has rules/laws to stop people...
No, our society has rules because people didn't behave themselves.
The way you teach the kid about armed robbery laws is to teach him that theft is wrong. If I steal your cookie, you can't eat the cookie. How would you like it if someone stole your cookie?
The way you teach the kid about dangerous driving laws is you teach him upfront that killing - even accidental killing - is wrong and to be avoided (how'd you like it if someone killed you?), and that when he gets behind the wheel (or the trigger, if you take him/her hunting), he's being entrusted with the lives of the people on the road or on the range.
I don't obey all intellectual property laws because I don't see all such breaches as immoral.
("See, if I copy your CD, you can still hear the music! We can both hear the music now! Do you feel like I've stolen anything from you?")
Other things that happen in intellectual property law, I do see as immoral.
("See? You made the pretty painting. You can make copies and sell them to the 20 people in your class for $0.05 each. I'm gonna go to my office, make 100 photocopies, and sell them to my co-workers for $1.00 each by telling them it's a school fund-raiser. I can make $100, you'll only make $1.00, but if you beg nicely, I'll even give you $0.05 for every copy I sell. How would that make you feel if I made $99.00 and you made $1.00 for that painting you worked on all day?")
> Would you want your children to learn about narcotics by smoking crack, or reading a book at school?
I'd want them to read books on critical thinking so they could yell "false dichotomy" when presented with one.
> It's much easier to get close to a
moving target than it is to hit it, and using nuclear-tipped interceptors is the easiest and most reliable way to do
that. Remember that, in a nuclear missile attack, it's better to have a very small nuke explode 300 miles above
your continent than a big one explode in your cities. I imagine the nuclear-tipped interceptor idea was killed
because it was politically unpopular or not "green" enough or something like that.
Yeah, which reminds me - we've had the ability to do that (nuclear-tipped interceptors) for well over 30 years, using all-analog/mechanical computers, but with an accuracy measurable in feet at ranges of 50+ miles and speeds over Mach 3.
The target at the time was enemy bombers, either alone or in formation. Nike Hercules was also capable of taking out short-range ballistic missiles. The successor programme (Nike Zeus / Spartan) was designed to take out long-range ballistic missile re-entry vehicles at high-altitude. (OK, that still doesn't solve the decoy problem, but hell, it was 1959, give the engineers a break, willya?;-)
Geeks in the SF Bay Area with an eye for military history could do with a trip to the Nike Missile Base - Site SF-88 in the Marin headlands. SF-88 is our last such base - it's the one we were allowed to keep as a historical site when we signed SALT I, and has recently been restored by an army of dedicated volunteers.
Not only is the surrounding scenery beautiful, but the people conducting the tours of the facility are often the ones doing the restoration -- and therefore, they know the technology inside-out. It's amazing what you can do with some gears, potentiometers, and vacuum tubes when you put a few thousand IQ points behind it. (These guys are "hackers", even if their computers happen to use all the values between the "1" and "0" we're used to;-)
Anyways - given the ABM technology we already had in the 50s and 60s, I also find it hard to believe that, after an additional 40 years of R&D on both rocket motor technology and computers/guidance, we can't come up with a "close enough" solution today.
Kinetic kill is a damn cool idea (read: geek appeal), but if I were really worried about a ballistic missile threat, I'd settle for "close". If close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nukes, then fine - put a nuke in the tip of the interceptor and be done with it.
(Though, I suppose in defence of the kinetic kill folks, there'd be a horrible political price to pay for shooting down a decoy missile with a nuke at high altitude, so our adversaries would only have to lob decoys, one at a time, while we shot them down and had to clean up the mess from the EMP (possibly) and the mobs of greens rioting in the streets (definitely!). Hell, maybe that prospect is enough of a justification mandate kinetic kill all by itself;-)
> I've seen 'natural language' tech support problem solver thingies before. LucasArts has had an 'Ask Yoda' for
support on their games. Toshiba has 'Ask Iris." HP has a one too - ("How do I clear a paper jam?") > >But really, does anyone use these things? [...because they suck!]
Amen.
Natural language is a good tool for humans - "How do I clear a paper jam" from one human to another, when you're standing in front of the office printer, is a very clear query.
I get angry at companies that try to hide their tech support databases behind natural-language crap online.
Lemme type "paper jam $MODEL_FOO" at hp.com, and gimme the answer.
(Half the time, I tend to do just that - except I do it at google.com instead, and get either a direct link to the "right" company-internal page, or better yet, on groups.google.com, where there's a decent chance I'll find that $MODEL_FOO was recalled due to a design flaw, and that the company's keeping it quiet, but free replacement parts are available if you badger your salesdrone loudly enough:-)
> Is IBM just trying to occupy its customers on some online help session so that they're not
sucking up money by being on hold on the 1-800 number? Or do they actually think that they can make this
work?
"Yes", and "who-cares?", respectively.
Yes - because some percentage of the users are dumb enough to ask a common enough question and it's better to pay a CGI script nothing to waste the time of all users in order to make a 5-10% reduction in the number of calls to meat-based CGI scripts that cost real money.
Who-cares - because it's IBM. A big company with a big research budget. Read "The Dilbert Principle" and be enlightened. (Redux: It's a project with a sexy name, and real AI is so far away that the project can be milked for years of secure employment and decent budgets. Anyone involved has a good shot at spending 2-3 years of getting paid to goof around with problems they find interesting. Woo-hoo! Where do I transfer?)
> If everything fails, the expert system should contain questions about wether the user has modified the
system in relevant ways.
And when the user says "no, I didn't change anything", it'll say "of course you did."
A real AI would be able to tell the difference between someone with a clue ("No, I really didn't change anything, asshole, I can connect, the modem trains, and then I can ping an IP address but I can't do DNS resolutions, SO IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MY PHONE LINE, it has to do with either the router between my end and your DNS server, or if you're getting a million morons calling who can articulate nothing more than "my start page is broken!", then it probably is your friggin' DNS server")...
...(whew, not that that's ever happened to me)...
...and someone who has no idea that running PrivacyInvader2.03.vbs that a complete stranger mailed them last night really does constitute a system change.
Of course, since neither this AI nor most front-line technical support are able to make this distinction, I suppose the AI passes the Turing test.
Come to think of it, the Turing Test is getting a lot simpler to pass these days, isn't it? (And it sure ain't because the AIs are getting smarter.)
"The uncleans consist of eleven things; urine, stool, semen, corpse,
blood, dogs, pigs, infidel, wine beer and the sweat of a camel that eats the unclean"
So, if I were to say that the Taliban leaders wallow in their own piss, shit, jizz, blood, wine, beer, and the sweat of a camel that had eaten a soup made up of the same gunk, and that they ate dog-and-pork sausage in the morgue with infidels, it might be regarded as un-Islamic?;-)
(Unclean? Sounds like a great weekend! I cut my finger pretty bad during the wee hours of the morning, and was worried about the bleeding, so I got a stich put in by this cute Jewish med student interning at the hospital... we hit it off and met at the zoo later that morning after she got off her shift, on which one of her patients died, which was a bummer... we went to the zoo, walked around a bit, grabbed a sausage from the sidewalk vendor, saw the camels (he was looking hungry, so I fed him some sausage, even though the sign said not to, while petting him on the nose, poor thing was burning up, it was so hot outside that day), then went out for Chinese food, then went bar-hopping... then I got really drunk... Never mix beer and wine. Anyways, I remember getting laid, but I'd had waaaaaay too much to drink and I really embarassed myself. But I was too drunk to really give a damn. In fact, I was so damn drunk, she got worried, and she had to go to work anyways, so she took me to the hospital at 3:00am and left me to get my stomach pumped, which I think was a subtle signal that the relationship was over... but that's OK, 'cuz while I was getting my guts pumped out, I met this cute Hindu med student...)
> What the article fails to mention, or I'm too blind to find, is what bit rates these tests were run at and a quick
discussion of what bit rates the various formats are considered best at.
Exactly.
My suspicion - given the preference for MP3Pro over MP3 - is that it was MP3 at 64kbps vs. MP3Pro at 64kbps.
Even makes sense, after all. Including WMA in the study at all is weird -- and if they encoded the WMA and the MP3 using MSFT's built-in MP3 encoder, they'd have gotten the shittiest-sounding 64k MP3 on the planet.
MP3Pro is designed for streaming audio, and outperforms MP3 at extremely low bitrates (i.e. 64K).
The part in the article where the guitarist said he could hear the valves closing on the clarinet and bassoon... is utter bullshit. He probably heard some flanging artifact and thought it was a valve closure.
Finally - and this is another biggie - for the MP3 section, did they use Blade, LAME, Fraun, or Xing? Some rock on some forms of music, but utterly sux0r on others. And some encoders sound like dog shit on all forms of music.
Sounds to me like a puff piece designed to get people out of (ubiquitous) MP3 and into (proprietary, Windoze-only) MP3Pro and (DRM-encumbered and proprietary) WMA, with Ogg Vorbis thrown in for a "What's that?" appeal.
(Credit to them grokking that lossy compression in music often throws away stereo separation / spatial components, though.)
> 5 months in cramped quarters hurtling through the vacuum of space seems sucky on the
face of it.
Depends on where you're going and what you do when you get there.
If, after the five months in cramped quarters hurtling through the vaccuum of space were over, I were to look out the window and find myself in orbit around Mars in preparation for a landing, it wouldn't be sucky at all.
If, however, after five months, I discovered that I'd done 2400 laps around the same blue planet where I started from -- five months flying in circles and going nowhere -- yeah, that might start to qualify as suckitude.
(Given the chance, I'd still go, even if just to fly in circles. But I'd much rather go somewhere new.)
> With this idea of sealed boxes the scariest thing for me is that maybe they'll sell one box for video editing
and one for gaming but not one that does both well. So instead of paying for one card I have to buy a whole
system to get the same functionality. The beauty of PCs is how customizable they are, it would be a great
loss to lose that.
Look, ma, Extremetech! That corporate-owned site that's trying to astroturf over the overclocking/geek/performance community!
And surprise, surprise, the guys who take in advertising dollars in their print publications form the likes of D3LL, Compaq, Gateway, and the other "prefab boxes with proprietary motherboard form factors" are saying that the screwdriver shop is dead.
I'll grant the proprietary shops one thing - proprietary mobo designs allow for great control of airflow and quiet cases in comparison to the DIY market.
But that's all. A fellow tech here saw a D3LL P4 box for $800 and thought it was a bargain. Yeah, right, a 1.3G P4, PC600 - yes, SIX-hundred - RDRAM (shit, I didn't know they even made that stuff anymore). I calmly pointed out that any Athlon 1G could whup its ass six ways to Sunday on any benchmark he cared to point out, took him to a few sites that proved it, and the rest was history.
Michael Dell, if you're listening, you make a good proprietary system for an office setting, but you lost ten desktops that day. You'll lose more tomorrow.
Slashdot Mirror
It does imply "the zone" in which the top athletes are at their best.
(Old-Sk00l gamer mode on) As one who played plenty of Defender, Robotron, and Tempest - not in MAME, but using the original controls, in dimly-lit arcades, surrounded by flashing lights and bleeps from 20 machines everywhere, and a 19" monitor filling most of my view - I experienced it daily. Once you got to the point where you could make $0.25 last for half an hour or more, you just melded into the machine and became one with it. (Sorry for the new-agey crap, I don't know any other way to describe the sensation.)
The expert who runs the mile and gets his "second wind" is like the kid who becomes one with the machine. The brain switches off, the body runs on autopilot, and you don't think about what to do, you just do.
I have no doubt that some of the "jocks" in my high school achieved the same level of concentration on the football field or on the track as I did in the arcade. (I just wish I'd known back then, as I'd have had more respect for their accomplishments.)
To mention a few more areas where folks enter "the zone", I'll offer motor sport, live performance of classical music, several martial arts disciplines, and Deep-Hack-Mode programming. I'm sure there are plenty of others.
Jocks achieved their godhood on the field, but remained assholes in the hallways and classrooms. My apotheoses were in the arcade and classroom, but I remained dateless in the hallways.
It has nothing to do with jockhood or geekhood, it has to do with the difference between someone who's merely competent or proficient, and someone who's truly a master or virtuoso.
One victim - $4000 lost - "Most of the charges were at Network Solutions".
Another victim "was called by his bank Monday and told a criminal had charged $1,000 on his card over the weekend at Network Solutions"
Now, I'm just speculating, but what kind of criminal do we Slashdotters know of that has a need to register lots and lots of domains, and has a use for lots and lots of credit card numbers, (that is, has a use for lots of CCs, a few of which would be used to register bogus domains, but the majority of which would be used to sign up for $20/month throwaway dialup accounts that get nuked within hours of signup...)
If my hypothesis is correct, all we need to do is follow the trail from the CCs to the domains to the dialups to the whackamole users.
Y'see, if the $KILOBUCK charges are going to domain registrars, it'd be pretty easy to figure out what domains were registered, and if they were appearing in spams.
And if we find the domains in spams, we can get the spammers' general geographical location by looking at reverse DNS from the throwaway dialups with which he spews. We can also learn from the "Send money to" snail-mail dropboxes (usually a Mail Boxes Etc. type of place) in the spams. Follow the money.
If there's only one or two spammers, I'll bet we also find that he and/or his associates have (in addition to the domain registry carding) been doing credit fraud on lots of cards the $TWENTYBUCK range to sign up throwaway dialup accounts. (Umm, and mailboxes at MBE ;-)
Or maybe our Bad Guy is hiring others to spam on his behalf. In this case, we have 100 "work at home" suckers, most of whom lost money to the ringleader, and we only need one to turn state's evidence.
Of course, all of this is mere speculation. But it would account for much of what's appeared in our inboxes over the past year, wouldn't it? There are probably only a few spammers who would have the capacity to run such an operation, and their real-life identities are known. In my more paranoid fantasies, I imagine that this identity theft might have been done on behalf of one or more of them.
The wheels of justice grind slow. But they grind fine.
If you walk in to your local PD and say "I 0wn h1m! j00 cl00less fux0rz list3n 2 m33!", yeah, they'll get snitty.
If you walk in, and behind closed doors (or cubicles :), outline how you solved it, in such a way that the officer you're talking to also has enough of an understanding on how to solve it, you've just taught a cop a new way to solve crime that none of his buddies know, and you've probably just made a friend.
Beat a man over the head with a fish, and he'll slap you across the face with one. Teach a man to fish and you're both fed for life.
IANAL, but ISTR that in these cases, the used computer store (pawnshop) is guilty of "posession of stolen property". As is, for that matter, the innocent sucker who walks in off the street and buys it. As such, you can still get your computer back.
Option 1: (There's only one bad guy, the thief.) The guy who bought the computer will be pissed, he'll be pissed at the computer store. The guy who runs the computer store will be really pissed, and he'll be pissed at the guy who sold it to him. End result -- the thief loses his ability to sell stuff at that store.
Option 2: (There's another bad guy, in that there's a store or pawnshop operating as a "fence", that is, reselling goods they know are stolen). The guy who bought the computer will be pissed. The cops will have evidence to use in their (likely ongoing) case against the fencing operation. End result -- the thief may get away, but the fencing operation goes down.
Either way, by providing evidence to the cops, you increase the odds of getting your stuff back and cleaning up your town.
Very true, the trick is to get someone at your local PD interested in the case. Routine burglaries are, well, routine. Just as the FBI laughs if the losses are less than $BIGNUM, your local cops generally don't give a damn about property theft, because the odds are slim and the cases are boring as hell.
1) So don't call - show up in meatspace at your local police department. (Or if you've filed a police report on the burglary, you probably have an officer's business card. In that case, call and try to set up a 15-minute appointment.)
2) You may want to talk to a detective, rather than the beat cop. Dunno how lucky you'll be at finding one. Might be worth a shot. Go through channels.
3) (Here's the kicker). YOU know how to solve the crime. The cops don't. So YOU explain it to the cop or detective - in detail. Bring printouts. Use highlighters. Emphasize the point that even though you did the legwork, you don't want credit - you want the cop to get credit for solving the "high-tech" case. This means career advancement to the cop/dick, and ought to interest him, even if the dollar value of the case is peanuts.
"My house was broken into and bad guys stole my stuff" - a boring case, like dozens of others, involving all the paperwork with no chance of recovering the goods.
"Here's an open-and-shut case on how to track a thief through cyberspace" - something new, possibly a promotion for finding a new way to solve cases, and a reputation within the department as "the guy who knows how to track criminals through cyberspace, he's even smarter than that moron the Feds send us every few months".
If you're helpful your local cops, they just might be able to help you.
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> And ill probably be arrested for quoting him.
Naah, you only get arrested if you quote him like this:
"Gur Gerr bs Yvoregl zhfg, sebz gvzr gb gvzr, or jngrerq jvgu gur oybbq bs cngevbgf."
- Gubznf Wrssrefba
Which reminds me, it's time to update my .sig file.
"Now that crypto is outlawed, only outlaws quote Wrssrefba."
> Have you ever driven I-17?
Or for that matter, set up a chair 20 feet back from any busy railroad crossing, and watched motorist behavior when the flashing lights come on?
Yeah, God forbid we show 'em reality on a reality show.
(Personally, I disagree. I'd be willing to bet the CBS execs collectively creamed their Armani suits when the near-knifing happened, until the CBS legal department showed them that they'd be sued into the stone age if they knowingly allowed a contestant to be murdered/assaulted. Whereupon, the execs then shat their pants, turfed the contestant, and gave some New York dry cleaner a Very Bad Day.)
No, firewalling them, HOSTS-blocking them, or using Junkbuster to filter them out is "better than nothing".
Opting-out is not a solution, because it relies on the good behavior of your adversary.
But you can't trust your adversary -- because the reason you want to opt out is because they've demonstrated themselves incapable of abiding by the rules of polite society.
Which makes more sense:
1) Get down on your knees and beg "please, known-privacy-invader or annoying-ad-maker, track my movements for 30 days but promise that if you can continue to track me, you won't show me the ad until a month from now, when I'll have to jump through the opt-out hoop again?"
or
2) Blackhole them, so that (because you can't send packets to them, and they can't send packets to you) you're immune, no matter what the marketroids decide to do next, you remain unaffected.
By way of analogy: You leave your door unlocked, and someone walks in, shits on your living room rug, and leaves, with a note saying "Cool shit, huh? I'll leave some more samples next week!"
Do you lock your door? Or do you leave it unlocked, but tack up a note on the door saying "Thank you for not shitting on my rug today. Please continue to not shit on the rug for 30 days, because I just had it cleaned."
Favorite quote:
"If I want your website to make sound, I'll lick my finger and rub it against my screen. Now fuck off while I delete the damn MIDI .DLL from my Nutscrape install."
May I submit the word "Shoshkele" as the word for "transcendentally annoying, transcending even transcendent annoyance, the kind of annoying that makes you want to hunt down every marketing executive and sodomize them with 20 feet of razor wire wrapped around an aluminum baseball bat":
Or as the advertisers define it:
Sample Shoshkeles.
(Amusingly enough, I point out that the most amazing thing about marketroid-speak is that I couldn't figure out what the fuck a shoshkele was, even after reading the "What's a Shoshkele" link on the aforementioned marketroid site.)
This is all going to end up like the Marketing Department of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, who defined a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With".
And the HHGTTG defined the marketing department of SCC as "A load of useless gits who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes".
>
> <BILL_AND_TED> Excellent! </BILL_AND_TED>
Damn, you stole my one-line-thunder.
But for those who think "The Running Man" (movie, TV, or the already-mentioned, and totally awesome, "Smash TV" video game) is fiction, have you turned on FOX recently?
"America's [Wildest|Most-Dangerous] Police [Videos|Chases]" and COPS are real shows.
I admit it - I watch. I like to call it "The Senseless Violence Hour -- on FOX!" I know exactly what I'm there for, namely to munch on popcorn and watch dumbfucks roll their cars after a high-speed pursuit and then try desperately to convince the cop that the six empty beers on the roadway (and the half-empty one still leaking) weren't theirs.
The only difference between these and "Running Man" is that in the current crop of "cop shows", the studios aren't allowed to show the dumbfucks that get themselves killed. So most of the time, even the ones who get ejected from the vehicle get up and walk away with a few scratches. (Presumably it's very expensive to get the releases from the family for the dumbfucks who get themselves killed, whereas the dumbfucks who live don't have much say in the matter...)
Old joke:
Q: Did you hear that it's now legal to broadcast live executions on TV? I wonder if FOX is gonna do it!
A: Naah, FOX would never show a live execution. Live naked executions, on the other hand...
Yep. Worst-case scenario, we rip at 1x instead of 10x, and we do it before we go to bed, or when we get up in the middle of the night to take a piss.
(Hilary Rosen, what are you doing on the floor of my washroom? No, I don't care if your stomach's on fire...)
*rimshot*
I sense I'm being trolled, but what the heck, I'll bite the juicy worm on the end of the string...
> Our society has rules/laws to stop people...
No, our society has rules because people didn't behave themselves.
The way you teach the kid about armed robbery laws is to teach him that theft is wrong. If I steal your cookie, you can't eat the cookie. How would you like it if someone stole your cookie?
The way you teach the kid about dangerous driving laws is you teach him upfront that killing - even accidental killing - is wrong and to be avoided (how'd you like it if someone killed you?), and that when he gets behind the wheel (or the trigger, if you take him/her hunting), he's being entrusted with the lives of the people on the road or on the range.
I don't obey all intellectual property laws because I don't see all such breaches as immoral.
("See, if I copy your CD, you can still hear the music! We can both hear the music now! Do you feel like I've stolen anything from you?")
Other things that happen in intellectual property law, I do see as immoral.
("See? You made the pretty painting. You can make copies and sell them to the 20 people in your class for $0.05 each. I'm gonna go to my office, make 100 photocopies, and sell them to my co-workers for $1.00 each by telling them it's a school fund-raiser. I can make $100, you'll only make $1.00, but if you beg nicely, I'll even give you $0.05 for every copy I sell. How would that make you feel if I made $99.00 and you made $1.00 for that painting you worked on all day?")
> Would you want your children to learn about narcotics by smoking crack, or reading a book at school?
I'd want them to read books on critical thinking so they could yell "false dichotomy" when presented with one.
Yeah, which reminds me - we've had the ability to do that (nuclear-tipped interceptors) for well over 30 years, using all-analog/mechanical computers, but with an accuracy measurable in feet at ranges of 50+ miles and speeds over Mach 3.
The target at the time was enemy bombers, either alone or in formation. Nike Hercules was also capable of taking out short-range ballistic missiles. The successor programme (Nike Zeus / Spartan) was designed to take out long-range ballistic missile re-entry vehicles at high-altitude. (OK, that still doesn't solve the decoy problem, but hell, it was 1959, give the engineers a break, willya? ;-)
Geeks in the SF Bay Area with an eye for military history could do with a trip to the Nike Missile Base - Site SF-88 in the Marin headlands. SF-88 is our last such base - it's the one we were allowed to keep as a historical site when we signed SALT I, and has recently been restored by an army of dedicated volunteers. Not only is the surrounding scenery beautiful, but the people conducting the tours of the facility are often the ones doing the restoration -- and therefore, they know the technology inside-out. It's amazing what you can do with some gears, potentiometers, and vacuum tubes when you put a few thousand IQ points behind it. (These guys are "hackers", even if their computers happen to use all the values between the "1" and "0" we're used to ;-)
Anyways - given the ABM technology we already had in the 50s and 60s, I also find it hard to believe that, after an additional 40 years of R&D on both rocket motor technology and computers/guidance, we can't come up with a "close enough" solution today.
Kinetic kill is a damn cool idea (read: geek appeal), but if I were really worried about a ballistic missile threat, I'd settle for "close". If close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nukes, then fine - put a nuke in the tip of the interceptor and be done with it.
(Though, I suppose in defence of the kinetic kill folks, there'd be a horrible political price to pay for shooting down a decoy missile with a nuke at high altitude, so our adversaries would only have to lob decoys, one at a time, while we shot them down and had to clean up the mess from the EMP (possibly) and the mobs of greens rioting in the streets (definitely!). Hell, maybe that prospect is enough of a justification mandate kinetic kill all by itself ;-)
>
>But really, does anyone use these things? [...because they suck!]
Amen.
Natural language is a good tool for humans - "How do I clear a paper jam" from one human to another, when you're standing in front of the office printer, is a very clear query.
I get angry at companies that try to hide their tech support databases behind natural-language crap online.
Lemme type "paper jam $MODEL_FOO" at hp.com, and gimme the answer.
(Half the time, I tend to do just that - except I do it at google.com instead, and get either a direct link to the "right" company-internal page, or better yet, on groups.google.com, where there's a decent chance I'll find that $MODEL_FOO was recalled due to a design flaw, and that the company's keeping it quiet, but free replacement parts are available if you badger your salesdrone loudly enough :-)
> Is IBM just trying to occupy its customers on some online help session so that they're not sucking up money by being on hold on the 1-800 number? Or do they actually think that they can make this work?
"Yes", and "who-cares?", respectively.
Yes - because some percentage of the users are dumb enough to ask a common enough question and it's better to pay a CGI script nothing to waste the time of all users in order to make a 5-10% reduction in the number of calls to meat-based CGI scripts that cost real money.
Who-cares - because it's IBM. A big company with a big research budget. Read "The Dilbert Principle" and be enlightened. (Redux: It's a project with a sexy name, and real AI is so far away that the project can be milked for years of secure employment and decent budgets. Anyone involved has a good shot at spending 2-3 years of getting paid to goof around with problems they find interesting. Woo-hoo! Where do I transfer?)
And when the user says "no, I didn't change anything", it'll say "of course you did."
A real AI would be able to tell the difference between someone with a clue ("No, I really didn't change anything, asshole, I can connect, the modem trains, and then I can ping an IP address but I can't do DNS resolutions, SO IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MY PHONE LINE, it has to do with either the router between my end and your DNS server, or if you're getting a million morons calling who can articulate nothing more than "my start page is broken!", then it probably is your friggin' DNS server") ...
Of course, since neither this AI nor most front-line technical support are able to make this distinction, I suppose the AI passes the Turing test.
Come to think of it, the Turing Test is getting a lot simpler to pass these days, isn't it? (And it sure ain't because the AIs are getting smarter.)
"Elvis needs boats!"
- Mojo Nixon, "Elvis is Everywhere".
So, if I were to say that the Taliban leaders wallow in their own piss, shit, jizz, blood, wine, beer, and the sweat of a camel that had eaten a soup made up of the same gunk, and that they ate dog-and-pork sausage in the morgue with infidels, it might be regarded as un-Islamic? ;-)
(Unclean? Sounds like a great weekend! I cut my finger pretty bad during the wee hours of the morning, and was worried about the bleeding, so I got a stich put in by this cute Jewish med student interning at the hospital... we hit it off and met at the zoo later that morning after she got off her shift, on which one of her patients died, which was a bummer... we went to the zoo, walked around a bit, grabbed a sausage from the sidewalk vendor, saw the camels (he was looking hungry, so I fed him some sausage, even though the sign said not to, while petting him on the nose, poor thing was burning up, it was so hot outside that day), then went out for Chinese food, then went bar-hopping... then I got really drunk... Never mix beer and wine. Anyways, I remember getting laid, but I'd had waaaaaay too much to drink and I really embarassed myself. But I was too drunk to really give a damn. In fact, I was so damn drunk, she got worried, and she had to go to work anyways, so she took me to the hospital at 3:00am and left me to get my stomach pumped, which I think was a subtle signal that the relationship was over... but that's OK, 'cuz while I was getting my guts pumped out, I met this cute Hindu med student...)
Until now, I didn't know computers could orgasm.
Exactly.
My suspicion - given the preference for MP3Pro over MP3 - is that it was MP3 at 64kbps vs. MP3Pro at 64kbps.
Even makes sense, after all. Including WMA in the study at all is weird -- and if they encoded the WMA and the MP3 using MSFT's built-in MP3 encoder, they'd have gotten the shittiest-sounding 64k MP3 on the planet.
MP3Pro is designed for streaming audio, and outperforms MP3 at extremely low bitrates (i.e. 64K).
The part in the article where the guitarist said he could hear the valves closing on the clarinet and bassoon... is utter bullshit. He probably heard some flanging artifact and thought it was a valve closure.
Finally - and this is another biggie - for the MP3 section, did they use Blade, LAME, Fraun, or Xing? Some rock on some forms of music, but utterly sux0r on others. And some encoders sound like dog shit on all forms of music.
Sounds to me like a puff piece designed to get people out of (ubiquitous) MP3 and into (proprietary, Windoze-only) MP3Pro and (DRM-encumbered and proprietary) WMA, with Ogg Vorbis thrown in for a "What's that?" appeal.
(Credit to them grokking that lossy compression in music often throws away stereo separation / spatial components, though.)
Depends on where you're going and what you do when you get there.
If, after the five months in cramped quarters hurtling through the vaccuum of space were over, I were to look out the window and find myself in orbit around Mars in preparation for a landing, it wouldn't be sucky at all.
If, however, after five months, I discovered that I'd done 2400 laps around the same blue planet where I started from -- five months flying in circles and going nowhere -- yeah, that might start to qualify as suckitude.
(Given the chance, I'd still go, even if just to fly in circles. But I'd much rather go somewhere new.)
Look, ma, Extremetech! That corporate-owned site that's trying to astroturf over the overclocking/geek/performance community!
And surprise, surprise, the guys who take in advertising dollars in their print publications form the likes of D3LL, Compaq, Gateway, and the other "prefab boxes with proprietary motherboard form factors" are saying that the screwdriver shop is dead.
I'll grant the proprietary shops one thing - proprietary mobo designs allow for great control of airflow and quiet cases in comparison to the DIY market.
But that's all. A fellow tech here saw a D3LL P4 box for $800 and thought it was a bargain. Yeah, right, a 1.3G P4, PC600 - yes, SIX-hundred - RDRAM (shit, I didn't know they even made that stuff anymore). I calmly pointed out that any Athlon 1G could whup its ass six ways to Sunday on any benchmark he cared to point out, took him to a few sites that proved it, and the rest was history.
Michael Dell, if you're listening, you make a good proprietary system for an office setting, but you lost ten desktops that day. You'll lose more tomorrow.
Dude, you rock.
Out of curiosity, when (note, I didn't say "if" :-) does it try to access our old friend msid.msn.com?