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  1. Re:Well considering... on U.S. Forces In Iraq Ban GPS Phones · · Score: 1

    It seems to me that a general who bombs Iraqi citizens would be more likely to be promoted than fired, as long as he did it without getting caught.

    Perhaps. However, he wasn't bombing Iraqi civilians. His anti-air fire was missing or otherwise malfunctioning and falling back on Baghdad, which is certainly bad for Iraqi air defence. Possibly his fault, possibly not. ... if that had been a US munition, it would have made a much, much bigger crater and killed a hell of a lot more people, that much is for certain.

    Not necessarily. A US bomb or missile would have made a much bigger crater, but a US cluster bomblet (probably not being dropped on Baghdad, but possible) or an artillery shell (much more likely) could have caused it.

    It could have been the Iraqis, it could have been the US. We'll probably never know.

  2. Re:Don't have to intercept the signal on U.S. Forces In Iraq Ban GPS Phones · · Score: 1

    Maybe they don't have to intercept the signal. Maybe they only have to hack into the telephone company and read their locations from their computers.

    Maybe they just have to ask the telephone company. I think that the US would be a bit suspicious of giving out their coordinates to any phone company, but particularly one in Abu Dhabi.

  3. Re:Also with effect 31 March... on Michigan First With A Law That Could Outlaw VPNs · · Score: 2, Funny

    ... they have just one more tool to fuck you over with impunity.

    I don't know about that. Fucking someone over with a tool ought to qualify as lewd and lascivious, don't you think?

  4. System prefs is Cocoa on Apple Responds to Adobe · · Score: 1

    (no text)

  5. Re:Various rumors and speculations on Apple to Announce new Mac OS X version in June · · Score: 1

    iWorks Application (standard office suite)

    They could get pretty far here by improving LyX...

  6. I can just see the ads! on Dvorak Thinks Apple Will Switch to Intel · · Score: 1

    [queue stupid music] So I was writing my report, on the PowerPC, and it was really slow ... and then my alarm was like BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP .... 'cause it was almost time for class ... so I finished it ... but I had to write it fast, so it wasn't as good... it was kind of ... a bummer ...

  7. Re:Other way around? on Web Site Hacks Rise as War Rages in Iraq · · Score: 1
    Reminds me of the joke about
    bush@whitehouse: /afghanistan$ rm -f /bin/laden
    rm: /bin/laden not found.
  8. Re:"Bush's War" at ends with "The War On Terror" on Strike on Iraq · · Score: 1

    It's not an either-or position, it's a comparison of two hypotheticals. And I don't mean a lightning France-style surrender, I mean a shooting war. You know, where we bomb each other and launch cruise missiles at each other's stuff and invade with tanks. The damage from such a war would probably be much greater than a nuke to New York, both in the US and in whoever we were fighting against.

    Furthermore, the overall effect on world stability would be dreadful, and such a war would either escalate or be followed by more, increasingly destructive wars. A war between industrialized, democratic countries would be a disaster, and I would bet that there would be nukes going off within 5 years.

  9. Re:Hmmm... on Texas Rep Wants To Jail File Traders · · Score: 1

    Using that logic, you might as well say that taking a photo of someone is stealing.

    SOUL THIEVES!!!!

  10. Re:"Bush's War" at ends with "The War On Terror" on Strike on Iraq · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Since WWII, we have consistantly [sic] not only allowed, but encouraged home rule after war. We have helped rebuild every country we went to war against, once the peace treaties were signed. (Vietnam and Korea do not count, since there has never been an end to the war, just a perpetual "cease-fire." Same thing for Iraq after Gulf War I)

    In other words, after WWII we encouraged home rule. There haven't been any "official" wars since then. And the parent said "in the last 50 years" which WWII wasn't. Not exactly "consistant."

    True, it takes a lot of planning to do these sorts of things. That makes it better? The "provocation" you seem to cite would be something similar to this: [...]

    I can add to that.

    What about the military supplies and technology we sold / are continuing to sell to Israel?

    What about our intermittent cruise-missile attacks into Afghanistan and Iraq, even during "peace time"? (I don't care whether they were shot at "terrorists," most of them didn't hit terrorists).

    If you want to look back a bit further, what about arming Muslim fundamentalists (including bin Laden) to kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan? They thought we would help rebuild the country, but we left them in ruins. Iran / Iraq war? Basically the same thing. Afghanistan, part 2? Same thing again. And what are we going to do this time around? The very same, unless Bush has a sudden change of heart. History repeats itself.

    The US, with a VOLUNTEER Armed Force, can beat any 12 other nations, even if they have help from France and Germany.

    A war between two industrialized, democratic countries would be just about the worst thing that could happen short of a nuclear war. Even if the terrorists blew up New York, it would be better than fighting France.

    If it removes onc conduit for explosives, chemicals, biologicals, or nukes, then it is a huge step forward. An ounce of prevention is worth pounds of cure.

    Conduit, nothing. If Saddam has any clue how to play his hand, he's already given plenty of VX and C4 to al Qaeda. Until the war started, they couldn't use them for fear of retaliation. But now, it's free-for-all...

  11. Ho Hum... on Microsoft Bug May Attract Big Worm · · Score: 1

    Yet another buffer overflow. In Windows. Yet another opportunity to send email viruses in Outlook. Yet another opportunity for Linux geeks to make fun of "M$."

    While this is important news for Windows users, I expect MS has already told them. Move along, nothing to see here.

  12. Re:This raises two important questions: on Bug Reporting Etiquette · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Dude. Chill. Remember that while reading TFM is an excellent map from {Linux commands} to {what they do}, there is not a simple inverse map from {what you want to do} to {Linux command}. apropos and Google are decent steps, but they don't always give you the answer even if you know how to search.

    It is much easier just to ask someone who knows what they're doing and can answer in 5 minutes than to spend hours googling and crawling the man pages. I have several friends who have been using Linux for a year or so, and when we can't figure something out, we IM / write each other and ask, and it's better that way. If you have a fish that you're not going to eat, why not give it to a man?

  13. And the moral of the story is... on Slashback: Texasocial, Networking, Attacks · · Score: 2, Funny
    The moral of the story is, when you hack into someone's school and steal their SSNs, you should probably
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    jZbnNopsNK8Rfyk2yhK/hOnV5k Z6ZRMJ6FzV/0VqTLxolyLTik6UgGRwy8aB+f7i
    nr9n3/vrQr SE8TT9L+eoBc+lT2NeuAW4Lom6CLUBEABub6uZOEnT5gP4A88V DGi0
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    paAiP91CckT1 gwuMBPwpZJDhaic5u6lfvH3NksxShQ28lNfKEEWYdDzDgkCkrv Hz
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    =d/AE
  14. D'oh! preview first!!! on Building Your Own Glowing Cyber-Balls? · · Score: 1
    I'm spaced out today. The BTFSS PORTA command should be a BTFSC or your colors will be backward. The BTFSC command listed as after MOVF $red, W should be two lines down, after XORLW -1, and should read:
    BTFSC STATUS, Z
    GOTO do_green
    Sorry about that.
  15. Corrections to the above code... on Building Your Own Glowing Cyber-Balls? · · Score: 1
    I looked at PIC codes and the above stuff looks approximately correct. However, the synch is wrong between colors and pulsating, due to my hack of complementing RED value registers subtracting from 255 not 256, as well as timings between updating and stuff. You can hack it so that it works right as long as you initialize things very carefully, but a better methed would be to replace:
    MOVF $red, W //0x51
    MOVWF $redtemp
    XORLW -1
    MOVWF $red
    with
    MOVF $red, W
    BTFSS PORTA, $redbit
    XORLW -1
    MOVWF $redtemp
    The colors will then be in 255ths, but be careful to set it between 1 and 254; in fact, you might want to enforce this in your connection code. Alternatively, you could add the following:
    after MOVF $red, W:
    BTFSC STATUS, Z

    after ADDWF $blue, F (and ditto for other colors):
    BTFSC STATUS, Z
    BCF PORTA, $blue_bit
    Otherwise either 0 or 255 will give you about half duty ratio. Again, this list is not necessarily all the bugs.
  16. Re:parallel vs. serial on Building Your Own Glowing Cyber-Balls? · · Score: 1

    While parallel is easier, it's also not available on a Mac. Dang... so you really do have to use USB there.

    Mike

  17. Re:You're asking P=NP. on Ask Security/Cryptography Expert Paul Kocher · · Score: 1

    I know that. I know that RSA = NP doesn't mean RSA = easy. You were just saying that it was doubted that RSA is NP, which it's not.

    Furthermore, you don't really need P != NP to stay secure. If P=NP but the fastest polynomial algo has degree 5 trillion, you're still safe (unless the coefficients are epsilon). But a proof of security would be about as hard to come up with as P=NP.

  18. Re:Got Root? on Local Root Hole in Linux Kernels · · Score: 5, Funny

    I do now >:)

    I believe you mean "#:)"

  19. Re:You're asking P=NP. on Ask Security/Cryptography Expert Paul Kocher · · Score: 1

    NP doesn't mean hard. NP means that a proposed answer can be checked in polynomial time. Which it can, you just multiply.

    Integer factorization is NP, but probably not NP-complete. An NP-complete problem is one that you can encode any NP problem into in a polynomial amount of time, so if you can solve it in polynomial time, you can solve any NP problem in polynomial time.

    In general, P = probably doable, if the problem isn't huge and the exponents aren't too large.

    NP = can check it fast at least, so if you have a good guess you can get it. Nobody knows whether such problems are necessarily also P, but most mathematicians think not.

    NP-complete = probably not doable except for a small problem size, and if you can do it fast for all problem sizes you get a million dollars from Clay.

  20. Re:You're asking P=NP. on Ask Security/Cryptography Expert Paul Kocher · · Score: 1

    Not quite: all that would prove is that RSA is an NP problem.

    Actually, RSA is an NP problem, ie a proposed solution can be checked in polynomial time. The really important questions are then:

    Is it an NP-complete problem? (i.e., can we prove that to break it in polynomial time, you have to be able to break everything in polynomial time?) The answer to this is almost certainly "no" because RSA is too "simple" a problem to encode, say, satisfiability. It (probably) just doesn't have enough inputs to do that sort of thing. Most known NP-complete problems take a long list of arguments (such as a graph or a circuit) and require a long list of solutions (such as a k-coloring of that graph or a value that produces 1 in that circuit).

    If it's not NP-complete (and P!=NP), then we can still ask "can it be solved in (a reasonable amount of time || polynomial time)? That is, after all, what you care about.

  21. Cheaper at DigiKey.com on Building Your Own Glowing Cyber-Balls? · · Score: 1

    You can get equivalent LEDs cheaper at digikey. They're order of 30 cents there for very bright LEDs, except the blue ones which are not quite a dollar.

  22. Re:Microcontrollers on Building Your Own Glowing Cyber-Balls? · · Score: 1

    I have nightmares about PIC code (though it's still better than CISC).

    LOL. see my earlier post on the subject.

  23. Amen to the PIC chip! Here's some code... on Building Your Own Glowing Cyber-Balls? · · Score: 5, Informative
    Just to get you started. It's mostly left over from my wireless buzzer project. Since PICs don't come with 3 PWM units, you can just:
    do_red: // software PWM for red color
    DECFSZ $redtemp, F //0x41, for instance
    GOTO do_green
    MOVF $red, W //0x51
    MOVWF $redtemp
    XORLW -1
    MOVWF $red
    MOVLW $redbit //bit number of red LEDs on the port, say 0x1
    XORWF PORTA, F

    do_green: s/green/blue/; s/red/green/;
    do_blue: s/blue/red/; s/green/blue/;
    If you want it to pulsate, substitute GOTO do_counter for the last GOTO do_red:
    do_counter:
    DECFSZ $counter_divide_1
    GOTO do_red

    // Check if the interrupt code wants our attention
    BTFSC $interrupt_attn, $attn_bit
    GOTO get_new_params // get new pulsation parameters, you can write this

    DECFSZ $counter_divide_2
    GOTO do_red
    MOVLW 0xF // approximate delay loop for 30 HZ update
    MOVWF $counter_divide_2

    // if you're running at 4MHz, this code will be called about 30 times per second.

    BTFSS $pulsate_control, $pulsate_bit // Are we pulsating?
    GOTO do_red
    MOVLW $redbit || $greenbit || $bluebit
    MOVWF PORTA // reset the LEDS
    DECFSZ $step_counter // check if we should go opposite
    GOTO calccolors

    BTFSS $pulsate_control, $fixed_num // Do we have a fixed number of cycles?
    GOTO invert_deltas

    DECFSZ $num_pulses
    GOTO invert_deltas

    CLRF $pulsate_control // not pulsating anymore
    GOTO do_red

    invert_deltas:
    MOVF $num_steps, W
    MOVWF $step_counter // reload the step counter
    COMF $red_delta, F
    INCF $red_delta, F // invert the delta registers
    COMF $green_delta, F
    INCF $green_delta, F
    COMF $blue_delta, F
    INCF $blue_delta, F

    calccolors: // actual color adjustment
    MOVF $red_delta, W
    ADDWF $red, F
    MOVF $blue_delta, W
    ADDWF $blue, F
    MOVF $green_delta, W
    ADDWF $green, F
    GOTO do_red
    I'm a bit rusty on my PIC, so check the mnemonics and look for typos. Initialize $steps to be the number of "frames" to take to wax or wane in color, $red / $green / $blue to the initial color (in 256ths), and $red_delta, $green_delta, $blue_delta to be the change per step. You can control these from a USB or serial interface without too much pain. Just have your interrupt code set $interrupt_attn bit number $attn_bit. To do only a fixed number of pulses, set the bit $pulsate_control -> $fixed_num, and set $num_pulses to the number of half-pulses you want to do. IE, set it to 1 for a fade, 2 for a pulse, 3 for a pulse then a fade...

    In terms of hardware, you'd need the jack for the port, the power cord, a PIC chip, a transistor for each color, and a bunch of LEDs/resistors of each color. Easy stuff really. Let me know what you come up with. If you use USB, I'd be especially interested, as I have a Mac (no serial port). Good luck!
  24. Spam has historical roots... on Forty Percent of All Email is Spam · · Score: 1, Funny

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  25. Re:Perl is turning into a completely new language on Perl 6: Apocalypse 6 Released · · Score: 1

    There is something like this in perl 6, although I don't remember what it is. Probably something like require Perl5;