Perhaps the original author was afraid that the Slashdot effect would put a chink in the armor of the hosting company's intrusion detection system, and was just trying to help keep the log files spic and span of extraneous hits. In any case, thanks for not being niggardly with the links.
> > > > This ought to provide a good excuse for various network problems for a few weeks.... ^_^ > > Attention, troops stationed in New Orleans. Execute Order 66! >
> Who are the jedi?
> The looters?
"Yes, Lord! We need reinforcements, it's like a scene from Star Wars Galaxies down there!" - NL-421
Seriously, I hate to duck a BOFH reference, but you know someone's gonna try and work the communications disruptions into a Katrina conspiracy theory... or use the expected communications disruptions as cover for a real conspiracy... or perhaps Karl Rove has a machine that can cause a solar flare, which is what he's using to disrupt communications as part of the metaconspiracy. Or all three, because making up non-falsifiable hypotheses is fun!
And on that point, I can only say "Ha Ha, Only Serious". The reason conspiracy theories have "legs" is precisely because looking for conspiracies (real or imaginary) is fun. Our brains evolved in an environment where the ability to outguess our fellow primate band members was an extremely useful survival trait. So not only is inventing conspiracy theories fun, it's fun for a very good reason.
So trust the Computer. The Computer is your Friend. Because it's not paranoia when they really are out to get you. (Confused yet? Good!)
> So perhaps I'd drop rocks on you, or perhaps I'd buy in--that's an accounting evaluation. But my point remains--just getting their first doesn't give you a birthright to anything.
Yup. I'm not really trying to argue that point --
A "law" that says "first guy to mars owns it" is merely a more polite way of saying "anyone who drops rocks on the first guy gets rocks dropped his friends back home".
> Now to go offtopic: while China may not take oil by force, yet, [... ]
Not as off-topic as it looks. The Mars situation is merely the idealized case of frontier land/resources.
The colonization of North America was slightly less-than-ideal case, but was pretty close. (Unless you were a Native American, for whom it was highly less-than-ideal, as there was a 90% chance that you'd died of smallpox centuries before paleface even got clonse enough to throw a lead rock at you:)
The scramble for oil reserves, where everybody already has a claim to it, is gonna be... well, even further from the ideal situation.
As for CNOOC, the UN, Iran, and so on -- we agree. A few days after we said "no" to CNOOC buying our oil, CNPC decided to buy some oil next door in Canada.
By the time it's all sorted out, even some of the smaller players will probably have rocks to throw around. May we live in interesting times.
> > Think of it as the ultimate X-Prize. An entire planet for the taking.
> > Good point. I'll let you colonize Mars, build up some nice infrastructure--then I'll drop rocks on you from orbit. The first person can plant their flag--but unless you can defend it, too, that doesn't do you a whole lot of good. And the value of the Mars settlement is directly proportional to the interest a marauder would have on taking it away.
Which is why I added two caveats in my original post.
1) The country that makes the declaration has to pay "at least lip service" to property rights. That barely knocks China off the list. Japan's fine. Most European nations (EU or otherwise), as well as the current USA are also probably OK.
2) "...and that has sufficient weapons to back up said property rights on behalf of shareholders. " In other words, the Principality of Sealand doesn't count. Neither does Canada.
The weapons I spoke of are those currently operated by Earth-based governments, and currently employed to defend the interests of the Terran shareholders, not the Martian homesteaders.
> There's not a lot of legal protection, either, as naturally all of our treaties encompass only earth territories. Even a formal declaration, should there even be one, from the UN that the first person to the New World gets to lay claim to it is only as good as long as it's enforceable--the French planned to take the Louisiana territory back from us, even though we had legally bought it.
Correct.
Not to bring the French into it again -- but the French could have use force to defend their economic interests in their oil contracts with Iraq in early 2003. They chose not to - and probably for everyone's benefit. Had they chosen to defend those assets with force, the US would have been placed in an... interesting position, to say the least.
> So go ahead, lay claim all you want. But you better look over your shoulder, too.
Exactly.
But with all that in mind -- let's go back to your original rock-dropping proposal: Whether MarsCorp's Terran assets are protected by the nuclear weapons of the USA, China, Great Britian, Russia, India, or France, or whether they're simply defended the rock fortresses of Switzerland and Japan, wouldn't it be cheaper (in terms of not having to rebuild the devastated infrastructure from scratch) for the Mnemnonician government to simply tax its citizens and authorize itself to simply buy a 20% interest in MarsCorp?
The better parallel isn't so much the French taking back the Louisiana Purchase, but the Chinese government (through CNOOC) attempting to purchase oil and gas assets by proposing mergers with Western producers.
It's better to pay dollars (even if those dollars are immediately exchanged or gold or Euros) for Western oil and gas assets than to risk war by taking them by force. The rising price tag of our own adventures to secure Gulf oil assets is but one example -- considering the current price tag, we probably should have simply outbid the France/Germany axis and bought the goddamn country out from under Saddam, with all its oil assets intact.
Until we see a declaration like the following from a country that pays at least lip service to property rights (and that has sufficient weapons to back up said property rights on behalf of shareholders) any attempt to privately colonize Mars and sell its resources for profit, is doomed.
The first person to land on Mars, and to live there some specified minimum duration (such as a year), and to return alive owns the entire Red Planet.
Think of it as the ultimate X-Prize. An entire planet for the taking.
The day anyone comes up with a viable business plan (which the guys in the Wired article, unfortunately, haven't done yet - and probably can't do so long as there are no private property rights in space), put me on the first colony ship of homesteaders.
> You ever get the feeling that we are on the receiving end of someone that got tired of playing Sim City and is now just unleashing disasters and seeing what will happen.
Yeah, but can you really blame him? I just wish he'd touched asteroid 2004MN4 with his noodly appendage last year so as to guarantee an impact in 2029, or 2035/6/7.
Any shorter a timeframe, and we'd be doomed. Any longer a timeframe, and we'd ignore the problem, leaving it for future generations to solve.
25 years (or 35 years) is about the right timeframe to place a 50/50 bet on whether we'd be able to get off our duffs and build the spacecraft required to deflect it. I think it would have been fun to watch humanity scrambling to solve a problem (rather than just passing the bureaucratic buck) for a change.
Oh well. There's still hope that in 2029, He'll reach out and touch it for 2035, 2036, or 2037. Of course, if He does that, it'll probably be too late to do anything about it.
Maybe 2004MN4 is a test. If we're smart, we'll start building a flotilla of spacecraft for it today, in order to learn enough about it by 2029 to know what we'll have to do if it's on a collision course after the flyby, and be able to prevent disaster 7 years later.
Or, more likely, we'll do nothing until 2029, wake up in horror when we find out in 2030 that we have only 5 years to go before we'll all be eating fried roach shit... and that it'll take 6 years to build the spacecraft that could have prevented it.
> We need an Equalization of Opportunity in Video Games Act.
Naw, that's more like Atlas Swgged, not WoW.
At a time of dwindling production, shrinking markets and vanishing opportunities to make a living, it was unfair to let one player hoard several characters, while others had only one; it was destructive to let a few guilds corner all the resources, leaving others no chance; competition was essential to society, and it was society's duty to see that no competitor ever rose beyond the range of anybody who wanted to compete with him.
rear_hanky (ATLAS): FS, 100K bricks of Steel! HARVESTED BY HAND THIRD WEEK AFTER RELEASE, STILL THE UBEREST IN TEH GALAXY!1!! Bastard_Spawn_of_Raph_Koster (SOE): Because of our complete inability to write content worth playing, we're going to use the fig leaf of the excessive use of credit and item duping and farming on every server. All players are hereby be awarded a 30K resource deed that can be transmuted to 30000 units of any resource of their choice. 0rr3n_b0yl3 (WH1N3): HA HA! PWN3D! randy_ayn (ATLAS):: I'm unsubscribing!
Re:MOD REVIEW DOWN! TROLL!
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· Score: 1
> Holy FUCK! This is one of the funniest things I have ever read. Serisouly, I'm in physical pain right now.
"Funniest thing you've ever read." "In physical pain."
Well, a nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat, say no more, say no more!
> anyone else remember that when you d/l'd porn line by line at 9600 you could see that the top line in a trinitron monitor usually lined up with the nipples on a full body shot?
Anyone else remember that when b00bies were printed onto dead trees, and then scanned in for BBS distribution, the quality was better?
Maybe I'm dating myself (ahem, no pun intended:), but when Bob, Hugh, and Larry had to select the best 10 models out of 100 applicants for dead-tree publication (or even - gasp! - film transfer to VHS!), and the best 10 pictures out of 100 from a photo shoot, (or the best 10 minutes out of a 2-hour video shoot), pr0n was actually watchable and fun. For one thing, we actually got to see reasonably attractive women, and for another thing, a model who didn't make even the slightest pretense of feigning interest in her partners, tended not to make the cut.
Today, we've got quantity over quality. The barriers to entry have disappeared, so it's just Joe Schmoe taking 100 pictures of every Jane Schmoe that's willing to do a shoot with him. Of the 100 pictures he takes, 70 of them show Jane shown out of focus, a horrendous boob job with scars still visible, be poorly framed, or feature Jane with that classic "Beige. I think Joe should use a beige tarp for a background in the next shoot" look in her eyes.
Feh.
Re:High Resolution Computer Graphics and Broadband
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· Score: 2, Interesting
>
I know a guy that calls his T1 line the "porn pipe".
Calls em like he sees em I suppose.
As Billy the Bionic Badger so delicately put it to Space Moose: "You bet your fragrant ass."
> Is there anything wrong with a cell phone that's just a phone? All I want to do is make calls.
We're in the business of selling you stuff you don't need. If we actually sold you what you wanted, you'd have stopped buying stuff from us in 1990, and we... umm... well, that wouldn't be good for us, you see?
If you don't like your phone because the UI was designed by a crazy frog hopped up on ecstasy and crystal meth, give it back to us, along with a $200 termination fee. We'll send you our latest phone. (We fired the crazy frog earlier this year and replaced him with a three-toed sloth, who we doped up on valium. Better buy your new phone now, because we had a guy with five cocks in our UI focus group this quarter, and he wants to be sure that when the phone's in his pocket, his pants fit like a glove!)
> So you can grab the stream without using the MS program and netstat. > >
The utility is more like a utility like base64 decoders (this is not base64 though) than a circumventing tool.
Something like it would, however, make a damn nice Firefox plugin.
It's grown particularly galling during the Katrina disaster - if you're a TV station, and you're putting up a 2-minute clip of a news article or interview that you broadcast a few hours ago, why in God's name are you making us re-download it every time we want to view it?
Your servers are half melted down due to Slashdotting, your bandwidth costs are through the roof. If you must use a proprietary video format (seriously, if you're scared people won't be able to get the XVID codec, what's wrong with good old MPEG?), at least let us download the damn thing.
You stream live content. You download static content.
Is the difference that hard to understand? Or is it that news broa-buffering-dcasters hav-buffering-e a strange sexual fetish for buf-buffering-fering?
> Don't forget to mount the drive (physically) first.
And if you can't securely delete or deniably encrypt your pictures of that step, you deserve whatever punishment the geeks in the forensic lab can nail you with. Dude, sick!
> A file system that you get by an add-on? What good will that do, most desktops in Windows have partion set to ntfs under XP what do you do with it once you added it on. Is this really a file system or is it a indexer of files.
The bu^H^Hfeature is that you no longer get^H^H^Hneed to know where your files are.
Some idiot UI designer probably wrote a paper about how Windows users are confused as to where their files are located.
Rather than addressing the root of the problem -- the even bigger idiot UI designer for Windows 95 who decided to (a) by default, hide the full path to the file and (b) again by default, also hide the file extension, and (c) when users turn off "hide file extensions", still hide some file extensions like.SHS, etc -- and whose mistake was propagated to Windows 98, 98SE, ME, NT, 2K, XP, and 2K3, effectively making it impossible for nontechnical users to ever learn where their files were located...
Ahem. Rather than addressing the real problem of why nontechnical users had trouble finding where their files were, the idiot UI designer for WinFS decided to take idiocy to its most proper level: at no time should a user ever be able to find a file. At no time should a user ever be able to choose a file's location. Teh desktop is like teh Intarweb, the user should have to goo^H^H^Huse some sort of MSN Desktop Search tool in order to find "content".
Microsoft UI: Dumber than advertised, and making sure our users stay that way.
> I entered Pluto Nium as my name, but when I check the site to make sure they've got me on the list it isn't there. > >
For some reason they don't want us to know Pluto Nium is on-board.
All hail the second coming of Archimedes! Fifty thousand years hence, all shall see the wisdom of the PLUTONIUM ATOM TOTALITY!
> Let us assume for the sake of argument, that we have implemented a form of nuclear energy production that leaves something relatively harmless behind, such as helium. When this process is put into practice the world over, the effect on our environment could be Very Bad.
Helium is chemically inert. Doesn't react with anything. (And I mean anything, not "mostly anything, but it can be catalyze other reactions like we found out the hard way with Freon and other CFCs". Helium is not merely "inert under most circumstances", it really is inert.)
Furthermore, helium is so light that most of it ends up escaping from the atmosphere in a relatively short timeframe. Most of the helium in our baloons was (and is still being) produced in the form of alpha particles from the decay of radioactive elements from the Earth's creation ~4.5 billion years ago.
By "Very Bad", do you mean "dogs and cats sounding like clowns (and not even living together)", because all I'm seeing so far is the mass hysteria.
> Intel is developing a new technology that could prevent unauthorized access to wireless networks using the time it takes for packets to arrive from the access point to the Wi-Fi user.
Crackers are developing new technologies to enable unauthorized access to wireless networks using the time it takes them to intercept and retransmit packets between the access point and the Wi-Fi user.
As for the "solution" of detecting worms by autokilling connections when bandwidth usage changes in a way that the software didn't predict, (in a way that's more likely to cripple your favorite P2P client software more than it's likely to disable a worm that decides to start slowly and ramp up), how about Intel gets off its sorry ass (if you felt a rant coming on, you were right) and comes up with a real solution to connection hijacking -- namely by implementing cryptographically strong authentication between client and access point at Layer 2 of the OSI model, not Layer 7.
Oh, right. Securing Layer 2 instead of Layer 7 would harm the interest of those in charge of writing Layers 8 (financial) and Layer 9 (political) of the 7-layer model.
Old-school remote exploit:
Co-worker: "Run. Cee emm dee dot ee ex ee!"
Me: "FORMAT! See Colon! Yes! Yes!"
> Ten years ago, the first Web sites were like company brochures, says Jeff Pulver, the VoIP pioneer. 'No one ever expected to have the ability to engage a community virtually...
Jeff: "But now a lot of services are becoming a part of the Internet experience, including video, email and voice."
Me: "Aitch-tee-tee-pee colon slash slash. Goat dot cee ex. And be thankful it's only the pumpkin version these days."
>
You must be unfamiliar with legal systems in third world countries. Execution is a very real possibility. Severe beatings and years in a miserable prison are likely.
Worm/virus authors are one notch above spammers. (They're only one notch above spammers because, unlike spam, I've never been hit with one.)
In other words - you're making the original poster's point. Spending their time locked into a cell with nothing but a bucket of their own feces for dinner, beaten regularly, and after a few months to a few years, finally having their limbs or heads hacked off with a rusty blade (or having their lungs blasted out through their back by means of a hail of automatic weapon fire), they'll get only a fraction of the punishment they deserve.
> The downside is that home schooling isn't for everyone. I was home schooled, but my wife doesn't feel up to the challenge. So we send our kids to a private school. Even then, it was VERY difficult finding a school that was both affordable and met the needs of our child.
Kudos to you and your family for analyzing the time commitment required and deciding that, since you didn't have the time to commit to the project, to outsource the job to people who would do a good job of it.
The problem is -- if you were to flip a legislative switch and say "Everybody gets homeschooled, and the government will cover the cost of your broadband pipe", you'd discover that 90% of the population did feel up to the challenge. You know -- the 90% of the parents of the students in your public school, who already don't give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut if Johnny can read, as long as he's out of their hair for 8 hours a day.
Implement something like that, and what little literacy and numeracy remains in our population would go out like a light, eclipsed by an avalanche of stupidity that would make the Kansas Board of Education look like a beacon of pedagogical integrity.
Might be a great competitive advantage to be part of the 1% that had parents who cared whether you could read or not -- but 20 years down the road, that 1% will have to either support the remaining 99% of the population using some form of nanotech magic they've invented (which isn't very likely) , or the other 99% will be classified as redudnant and... well... removed, because they outnumber you 100:1 and outbreed you by 10:1. Anyone for Soylent Green tonight?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the original author was afraid that the Slashdot effect would put a chink in the armor of the hosting company's intrusion detection system, and was just trying to help keep the log files spic and span of extraneous hits. In any case, thanks for not being niggardly with the links.
So, fellow [male] Slashdotters, is that Windows XP in our pockets, or do we all just have a case of blue balls?
> > Attention, troops stationed in New Orleans. Execute Order 66!
>
> Who are the jedi?
> The looters?
"Yes, Lord! We need reinforcements, it's like a scene from Star Wars Galaxies down there!"
- NL-421
Seriously, I hate to duck a BOFH reference, but you know someone's gonna try and work the communications disruptions into a Katrina conspiracy theory... or use the expected communications disruptions as cover for a real conspiracy... or perhaps Karl Rove has a machine that can cause a solar flare, which is what he's using to disrupt communications as part of the metaconspiracy. Or all three, because making up non-falsifiable hypotheses is fun!
And on that point, I can only say "Ha Ha, Only Serious". The reason conspiracy theories have "legs" is precisely because looking for conspiracies (real or imaginary) is fun. Our brains evolved in an environment where the ability to outguess our fellow primate band members was an extremely useful survival trait. So not only is inventing conspiracy theories fun, it's fun for a very good reason.
So trust the Computer. The Computer is your Friend. Because it's not paranoia when they really are out to get you. (Confused yet? Good!)
Attention, troops stationed in New Orleans. Execute Order 66!
Yup. I'm not really trying to argue that point -- A "law" that says "first guy to mars owns it" is merely a more polite way of saying "anyone who drops rocks on the first guy gets rocks dropped his friends back home".
> Now to go offtopic: while China may not take oil by force, yet, [ ... ]
Not as off-topic as it looks. The Mars situation is merely the idealized case of frontier land/resources.
The colonization of North America was slightly less-than-ideal case, but was pretty close. (Unless you were a Native American, for whom it was highly less-than-ideal, as there was a 90% chance that you'd died of smallpox centuries before paleface even got clonse enough to throw a lead rock at you :)
The scramble for oil reserves, where everybody already has a claim to it, is gonna be... well, even further from the ideal situation.
As for CNOOC, the UN, Iran, and so on -- we agree. A few days after we said "no" to CNOOC buying our oil, CNPC decided to buy some oil next door in Canada.
By the time it's all sorted out, even some of the smaller players will probably have rocks to throw around. May we live in interesting times.
About 3.6 million floppies, if I haven't slipped a digit.
As for slipping digits and four-banging the calculator... well, now that we've got the diskspace, let's see the .torrent.
>
> Good point. I'll let you colonize Mars, build up some nice infrastructure--then I'll drop rocks on you from orbit. The first person can plant their flag--but unless you can defend it, too, that doesn't do you a whole lot of good. And the value of the Mars settlement is directly proportional to the interest a marauder would have on taking it away.
Which is why I added two caveats in my original post.
1) The country that makes the declaration has to pay "at least lip service" to property rights. That barely knocks China off the list. Japan's fine. Most European nations (EU or otherwise), as well as the current USA are also probably OK.
2) "...and that has sufficient weapons to back up said property rights on behalf of shareholders. " In other words, the Principality of Sealand doesn't count. Neither does Canada.
The weapons I spoke of are those currently operated by Earth-based governments, and currently employed to defend the interests of the Terran shareholders, not the Martian homesteaders.
> There's not a lot of legal protection, either, as naturally all of our treaties encompass only earth territories. Even a formal declaration, should there even be one, from the UN that the first person to the New World gets to lay claim to it is only as good as long as it's enforceable--the French planned to take the Louisiana territory back from us, even though we had legally bought it.
Correct.
Not to bring the French into it again -- but the French could have use force to defend their economic interests in their oil contracts with Iraq in early 2003. They chose not to - and probably for everyone's benefit. Had they chosen to defend those assets with force, the US would have been placed in an... interesting position, to say the least.
> So go ahead, lay claim all you want. But you better look over your shoulder, too.
Exactly.
But with all that in mind -- let's go back to your original rock-dropping proposal: Whether MarsCorp's Terran assets are protected by the nuclear weapons of the USA, China, Great Britian, Russia, India, or France, or whether they're simply defended the rock fortresses of Switzerland and Japan, wouldn't it be cheaper (in terms of not having to rebuild the devastated infrastructure from scratch) for the Mnemnonician government to simply tax its citizens and authorize itself to simply buy a 20% interest in MarsCorp?
The better parallel isn't so much the French taking back the Louisiana Purchase, but the Chinese government (through CNOOC) attempting to purchase oil and gas assets by proposing mergers with Western producers.
It's better to pay dollars (even if those dollars are immediately exchanged or gold or Euros) for Western oil and gas assets than to risk war by taking them by force. The rising price tag of our own adventures to secure Gulf oil assets is but one example -- considering the current price tag, we probably should have simply outbid the France/Germany axis and bought the goddamn country out from under Saddam, with all its oil assets intact.
Who Should Own Mars?
Think of it as the ultimate X-Prize. An entire planet for the taking.
The day anyone comes up with a viable business plan (which the guys in the Wired article, unfortunately, haven't done yet - and probably can't do so long as there are no private property rights in space), put me on the first colony ship of homesteaders.
Yeah, but can you really blame him? I just wish he'd touched asteroid 2004MN4 with his noodly appendage last year so as to guarantee an impact in 2029, or 2035/6/7.
Any shorter a timeframe, and we'd be doomed. Any longer a timeframe, and we'd ignore the problem, leaving it for future generations to solve.
25 years (or 35 years) is about the right timeframe to place a 50/50 bet on whether we'd be able to get off our duffs and build the spacecraft required to deflect it. I think it would have been fun to watch humanity scrambling to solve a problem (rather than just passing the bureaucratic buck) for a change.
Oh well. There's still hope that in 2029, He'll reach out and touch it for 2035, 2036, or 2037. Of course, if He does that, it'll probably be too late to do anything about it.
Maybe 2004MN4 is a test. If we're smart, we'll start building a flotilla of spacecraft for it today, in order to learn enough about it by 2029 to know what we'll have to do if it's on a collision course after the flyby, and be able to prevent disaster 7 years later.
Or, more likely, we'll do nothing until 2029, wake up in horror when we find out in 2030 that we have only 5 years to go before we'll all be eating fried roach shit... and that it'll take 6 years to build the spacecraft that could have prevented it.
RAmen.
Naw, that's more like Atlas Swgged, not WoW.
At a time of dwindling production, shrinking markets and vanishing opportunities to make a living, it was unfair to let one player hoard several characters, while others had only one; it was destructive to let a few guilds corner all the resources, leaving others no chance; competition was essential to society, and it was society's duty to see that no competitor ever rose beyond the range of anybody who wanted to compete with him.
rear_hanky (ATLAS): FS, 100K bricks of Steel! HARVESTED BY HAND THIRD WEEK AFTER RELEASE, STILL THE UBEREST IN TEH GALAXY!1!!
Bastard_Spawn_of_Raph_Koster (SOE): Because of our complete inability to write content worth playing, we're going to use the fig leaf of the excessive use of credit and item duping and farming on every server. All players are hereby be awarded a 30K resource deed that can be transmuted to 30000 units of any resource of their choice.
0rr3n_b0yl3 (WH1N3): HA HA! PWN3D!
randy_ayn (ATLAS):: I'm unsubscribing!
"Funniest thing you've ever read." "In physical pain."
Well, a nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat, say no more, say no more!
(Umm... what's it like? :-)
Anyone else remember that when b00bies were printed onto dead trees, and then scanned in for BBS distribution, the quality was better?
Maybe I'm dating myself (ahem, no pun intended :), but when Bob, Hugh, and Larry had to select the best 10 models out of 100 applicants for dead-tree publication (or even - gasp! - film transfer to VHS!), and the best 10 pictures out of 100 from a photo shoot, (or the best 10 minutes out of a 2-hour video shoot), pr0n was actually watchable and fun. For one thing, we actually got to see reasonably attractive women, and for another thing, a model who didn't make even the slightest pretense of feigning interest in her partners, tended not to make the cut.
Today, we've got quantity over quality. The barriers to entry have disappeared, so it's just Joe Schmoe taking 100 pictures of every Jane Schmoe that's willing to do a shoot with him. Of the 100 pictures he takes, 70 of them show Jane shown out of focus, a horrendous boob job with scars still visible, be poorly framed, or feature Jane with that classic "Beige. I think Joe should use a beige tarp for a background in the next shoot" look in her eyes.
Feh.
As Billy the Bionic Badger so delicately put it to Space Moose: "You bet your fragrant ass."
Cyberspace Moose.
Anyone else remember those old Maxell commercials?
We're in the business of selling you stuff you don't need. If we actually sold you what you wanted, you'd have stopped buying stuff from us in 1990, and we... umm... well, that wouldn't be good for us, you see?
If you don't like your phone because the UI was designed by a crazy frog hopped up on ecstasy and crystal meth, give it back to us, along with a $200 termination fee. We'll send you our latest phone. (We fired the crazy frog earlier this year and replaced him with a three-toed sloth, who we doped up on valium. Better buy your new phone now, because we had a guy with five cocks in our UI focus group this quarter, and he wants to be sure that when the phone's in his pocket, his pants fit like a glove!)
>
> The utility is more like a utility like base64 decoders (this is not base64 though) than a circumventing tool.
Something like it would, however, make a damn nice Firefox plugin.
It's grown particularly galling during the Katrina disaster - if you're a TV station, and you're putting up a 2-minute clip of a news article or interview that you broadcast a few hours ago, why in God's name are you making us re-download it every time we want to view it?
Your servers are half melted down due to Slashdotting, your bandwidth costs are through the roof. If you must use a proprietary video format (seriously, if you're scared people won't be able to get the XVID codec, what's wrong with good old MPEG?), at least let us download the damn thing.
You stream live content. You download static content. Is the difference that hard to understand? Or is it that news broa-buffering-dcasters hav-buffering-e a strange sexual fetish for buf-buffering-fering?
"That can be arranged."
- RIAA
"*shrug*, *BLAM*"
- Your government
As opposed to a penguin that had just stuffed itself with herring, you would prefer a penguin that had just gotten laid?
(Well, maybe you do, but it's not politic, so maybe you shouldn't.)
And if you can't securely delete or deniably encrypt your pictures of that step, you deserve whatever punishment the geeks in the forensic lab can nail you with. Dude, sick!
The bu^H^Hfeature is that you no longer get^H^H^Hneed to know where your files are.
Some idiot UI designer probably wrote a paper about how Windows users are confused as to where their files are located.
Rather than addressing the root of the problem -- the even bigger idiot UI designer for Windows 95 who decided to (a) by default, hide the full path to the file and (b) again by default, also hide the file extension, and (c) when users turn off "hide file extensions", still hide some file extensions like .SHS, etc -- and whose mistake was propagated to Windows 98, 98SE, ME, NT, 2K, XP, and 2K3, effectively making it impossible for nontechnical users to ever learn where their files were located...
Ahem. Rather than addressing the real problem of why nontechnical users had trouble finding where their files were, the idiot UI designer for WinFS decided to take idiocy to its most proper level: at no time should a user ever be able to find a file. At no time should a user ever be able to choose a file's location. Teh desktop is like teh Intarweb, the user should have to goo^H^H^Huse some sort of MSN Desktop Search tool in order to find "content".
Microsoft UI: Dumber than advertised, and making sure our users stay that way.
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> For some reason they don't want us to know Pluto Nium is on-board.
All hail the second coming of Archimedes! Fifty thousand years hence, all shall see the wisdom of the PLUTONIUM ATOM TOTALITY!
Helium is chemically inert. Doesn't react with anything. (And I mean anything, not "mostly anything, but it can be catalyze other reactions like we found out the hard way with Freon and other CFCs". Helium is not merely "inert under most circumstances", it really is inert.)
Furthermore, helium is so light that most of it ends up escaping from the atmosphere in a relatively short timeframe. Most of the helium in our baloons was (and is still being) produced in the form of alpha particles from the decay of radioactive elements from the Earth's creation ~4.5 billion years ago.
By "Very Bad", do you mean "dogs and cats sounding like clowns (and not even living together)", because all I'm seeing so far is the mass hysteria.
Crackers are developing new technologies to enable unauthorized access to wireless networks using the time it takes them to intercept and retransmit packets between the access point and the Wi-Fi user.
As for the "solution" of detecting worms by autokilling connections when bandwidth usage changes in a way that the software didn't predict, (in a way that's more likely to cripple your favorite P2P client software more than it's likely to disable a worm that decides to start slowly and ramp up), how about Intel gets off its sorry ass (if you felt a rant coming on, you were right) and comes up with a real solution to connection hijacking -- namely by implementing cryptographically strong authentication between client and access point at Layer 2 of the OSI model, not Layer 7.
Oh, right. Securing Layer 2 instead of Layer 7 would harm the interest of those in charge of writing Layers 8 (financial) and Layer 9 (political) of the 7-layer model.
Co-worker: "Run. Cee emm dee dot ee ex ee!"
Me: "FORMAT! See Colon! Yes! Yes!"
> Ten years ago, the first Web sites were like company brochures, says Jeff Pulver, the VoIP pioneer. 'No one ever expected to have the ability to engage a community virtually...
Jeff: "But now a lot of services are becoming a part of the Internet experience, including video, email and voice."
Me: "Aitch-tee-tee-pee colon slash slash. Goat dot cee ex. And be thankful it's only the pumpkin version these days."
Worm/virus authors are one notch above spammers. (They're only one notch above spammers because, unlike spam, I've never been hit with one.)
In other words - you're making the original poster's point. Spending their time locked into a cell with nothing but a bucket of their own feces for dinner, beaten regularly, and after a few months to a few years, finally having their limbs or heads hacked off with a rusty blade (or having their lungs blasted out through their back by means of a hail of automatic weapon fire), they'll get only a fraction of the punishment they deserve.
Kudos to you and your family for analyzing the time commitment required and deciding that, since you didn't have the time to commit to the project, to outsource the job to people who would do a good job of it.
The problem is -- if you were to flip a legislative switch and say "Everybody gets homeschooled, and the government will cover the cost of your broadband pipe", you'd discover that 90% of the population did feel up to the challenge. You know -- the 90% of the parents of the students in your public school, who already don't give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut if Johnny can read, as long as he's out of their hair for 8 hours a day.
Implement something like that, and what little literacy and numeracy remains in our population would go out like a light, eclipsed by an avalanche of stupidity that would make the Kansas Board of Education look like a beacon of pedagogical integrity.
Might be a great competitive advantage to be part of the 1% that had parents who cared whether you could read or not -- but 20 years down the road, that 1% will have to either support the remaining 99% of the population using some form of nanotech magic they've invented (which isn't very likely) , or the other 99% will be classified as redudnant and... well... removed, because they outnumber you 100:1 and outbreed you by 10:1. Anyone for Soylent Green tonight?