But by applying the laws related to the sale of alchohol to minors they could ask you for ID before they sell you a bottle of vodka. This use of ID has completely stopped incidents of underage drinking in, well, nowhere really.
Yup, like surface to air missiles. I hear that not all black-marketeers ask for ID when they swap you three 'stingers' and a launcher for a suitcase full of Afghan heroin.
Tightening security at one weak point just forces the terrorists to find another.
Security can only go so far; there will always be viable and vulnerable targets for terrorists.
Policing can only go so far; for every terrorist you imprison or kill another fills his plastique-soled shoes.
By addressing the causes of terrorism such as the actual and perceived injustices and abuses perpetrated by certain groups of people by other groups of people we could reduce terrorism but as long as one person on the planet is pissed off with their lot in life and feels that their only option is to use violence and terror to affect change terrorism will always be with us.
The unpleasent reality is that we cannot hope to win this 'war' on terrorism, we can only hope to survive it.
Unless you are driving in a car registered to yourself or hired by yourself (requiring ID) in which case the hundreds of CCTV cameras along the way have recorded your licence plate; making your movements (at least theoretically) traceable.
In western countries anonymity and privacy are pretty much pipedreams.
It does mean you have to get your wife/kisd/gf/butler/nurse to change your disks, type your slashdot posts, feed you, scratch any itchy bits and wipe your bottom for you but damned if I will ever drop a controller again halfway through a frag-fest. Just so long as my midi-interface game-pad does not become obsolete.. oh, sh..
I have been a chronic insomniac for most of my life and have tried practically everything. The only thing that consistantly worked* for me was a big joint at bedtime.
I know it wasn't legal but I was desperate and unlike the pharmacutical crap they kept prescribing me it was 100% effective, had no major side effects and did not screw up my head.
I'm not recommending this as a solution for anyone else, just saying it worked for me.
Mobile phone cameras suck compared to real digital cameras.
Mobile phone MP3 players suck compared to real mp3 players.
Mobile phone games suck compared to real handheld games consoles.
Mobile phone applications suck compared to real applications.
Web-browsing sucks compared to real web browsers.
Mobile phone ringtones suck compared to real music.
Mobile phone vibrating alarms suck compared to a real vibr..
Well, anyway, you get the point.
But, and it's a J-Lo sized but, it does mean people who would not normally use these technologies may well like them and then go out and buy the 'real' thing.
Unfortunately I am a geek and therefore already have a digital camera, MP3 player, games console, palmtop, web browser and battery powered marital toys. All I want from a phone is a phone dammit.
The phone manufacturers have been so busy jumping on the bandwagon that they didn't bother to look where it was going. When it goes over the cliff I just hope it takes their hideous polyphonic ringtones with them.
"He's talking about the UK, where the legal drinking age is 18 everywhere"
UK drinking laws are not quite that clear cut; It's legal to buy and drink beer or cider in a pub or restaurant at 16 so long as you have it with a meal. Also, as far as I can tell, kids over 5 can get as pissed as they like in the comfort of their own home.
http://www.talktofrank.com/azofdrugs/A/Alcohol.a sp x
I have always wondered why 2D games are not called 3D games and 3D games are not called 4D games. Without the passage of time (the extra D) 2D and 3D games are what we commonly call 'screenshots'.
Oh, and while I am moaning; as the 3rd dimension (depth) in 3D games is faked (meaning you can 'see' Lara Croft's curves but not 'feel' them) 3D games should be called 2.5D games (or 3.5D if you include the aforementioned dimension of time, possibly even 48DD if you count the Lara Croft dimensions).
Seriously though, comparing 2D and 3D games on visuals alone is missing the point.
It's like the difference between watching a rock concert on DVD with 'perfect' camera angles set by a director versus actually being there in the sweaty moshpit with a non-perfect view. It's a personal opinion as to which is better.
Also 2D games have a 20-year headstart on 3D games. Just imagine what 3D games will look like in 20 years when the technology tops-out as it has for 2D games. Having said that even photo-realistic 3D will not be as beautiful as 2D games. Without the designer-imposed restrictions possible in 2D games the player will always have the ability to find an ugly camera angle or composition.
Some 3D Games like 'X2-The Threat' manage to be gorgeous anyway (if you ignore the dodgy cut-scene characters).
When I got my Sony-Ericsson 610 I thought it was great apart from the unneccessary camera (I'm a unix boy - one tool for one job - and have a perfectly good digital camera already) and the annoying menus and phonebook and lack of basic usability compared with my old Nokia 7110 but nice all the same. Then I realised I could hardly read the display in sunlight. Then the display packed in. After I had been through 3 different handsets, all of which developed faults within a week I gave up and went back to Nokia with a (non bluetooth) 6110.
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_97/journal/vo l1/ncp/ if you happen to have $14,000 to spare - actually, make that $28,000 - you will want two.
Re:Well then Webster owns the world already then
on
Who Owns The Facts?
·
· Score: 1
Why Webster? The first large monolingual English dictionary was published in 1656 by Thomas Blount a century before Noah Webster was born and a century-and-a-half before he published 'A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language'.
Obviously it depends on what you are testing but if the criteria are intelligence and adaptability I'd take a black-box approach (where 'two systems can be considered equal when they produce the same output from the same input').
As humans are chaotic, ie. the same human given a set of stimuli may not react in exactly the same way to identical stimuli a few seconds later and two different humans will almost certainly react differently, this has to be redefined as 'two systems that, when given the same input, produce output that cannot be used to determine which of the systems produced the output'. Or something like that anyway.
Anyhow - forget the semantics - here's my Turing++ test..
1) Give the machine a slashdot account.
2) Let all users vote whether they think each other user is a human or a machine.
3) When the machines get as many 'is human' votes as the humans they are equal.
It's not even that hard to implement the testing facility - just add a '-0 : not human' to the mod drop-down and collect the votes.
Writing an AI agent that can emulate your average slashdot user would, I suspect, be trickier.
I quite like the uber-geek approach to puctuation ( some ( but not all ) programmers ( people who write computer code ( especially the 'c' like languages ( PHP, Java, Javascript, Perl (and many more ( including c++ of course ) ) ) ) ) end up using parenthesis ( also known as 'rounded brackets' ( or 'braces' ) ) in the wrong ( according to the rules of ( traditional ) English ) places when writing prose ( ie. 'language not cast in poetical measure or rhythm' ( from Webster's revised, unabridged dictionary ( 1913 ) ) ) ( they also tend to 'nest' ( use multiple levels of ) parentheses ) ) as it is easier for me to read ( but impossible ( or at least very hard ) ) for non-programmers..
This is what I do too. TV is so banal, populist and trivial now it's a waste of time even switching it on.
Unfortunately the mass-media industry seems to be heading for a pay-to-play model. I suspect that soon they will be pushing for disposable one-use DVDs and broadband pay-per-view so they can wring the last drop of blood from their customers.
I used to build Linux based NAT/Firewall machines for small businesses. One of my clients complained that their network had been (badly) compromised over the course of a week and blamed my product for this. The language he used was unacceptable even by my broad standards.
After a hurried flight to his office (in another country) I noticed that nearly every PC on his network had a shiny new modem plugged into the wall. A quick check and - yes - no firewalling on any of these NT4 machines.
It turned out he had been having complaints that the offices' 56kbps modem connection serviced by our NAT/Firewall box was too slow for the forty or so machines on his network to use concurrently so in an effort to save some money he had paid his daughter's boyfriend to install modems in all the office machines (rather than upgrade to DSL as I had suggested at installation time).
This ham-fisted luser had set the modems up for dial-on demand then misconfigured some services that kept the lines up 24/7 allowing some script-kiddie to wreak havok on his network.
My client's argument was that as our NAT/Firewall box was a security product it should have protected his network whatever other changes he made to the network and that we were liable for damages.
Rather than risk talking at this juncture I simply pointed out a section in our four-page, large print, plain-english manual that was sitting, unread, on his desk -
'Under no circumstances allow computers or devices on your network a direct connection to the Internet. Using other methods of Internet access such as a modem will completely bypass the security features of our product.'
I aslo helpfully drew his attention to the bit in our support contract that said
'On-site support visits related to issues arising from an inability on the part of the purchaser to read the included documentation will be billed at our consultancy rates of 150 per hour (or part thereof) including travelling time and expenses. These costs are not covered by the purchaser's support contract.'
He'd started going purple by this point so I thought I'd do him a favour and warned him his next phone bill may be a wee bit high.
"Oh, no problem there" he said, relaxing a little,
"Dave used a free Internet Service Provider".
"Ah", said I, "is that free access or free calls?"
"Er" he said then called British Telecom Billing.
"What's our next bill currently standing at?" he enquired politely.
The next sentence was complex and largely unintelligable save from the phrases "bastard bloody bastard idiot bastard boyfriend", "so far up", "chew my toes", "bloody girl too" and the concluding "Gnnnaarrgh!"
In a rare moment of BOFH compassion I made him a cup of tea at this point, coincidentally taking me across another 150-an-hour-or-part-thereof boundary.
The moral of this slightly rambling story is..
'a network is only as secure as it's dumbest user whatever NAT/Firewall you install'.
Slashdot Mirror
But by applying the laws related to the sale of alchohol to minors they could ask you for ID before they sell you a bottle of vodka. This use of ID has completely stopped incidents of underage drinking in, well, nowhere really.
Yup, like surface to air missiles. I hear that not all black-marketeers ask for ID when they swap you three 'stingers' and a launcher for a suitcase full of Afghan heroin.
Tightening security at one weak point just forces the terrorists to find another.
Security can only go so far; there will always be viable and vulnerable targets for terrorists.
Policing can only go so far; for every terrorist you imprison or kill another fills his plastique-soled shoes.
By addressing the causes of terrorism such as the actual and perceived injustices and abuses perpetrated by certain groups of people by other groups of people we could reduce terrorism but as long as one person on the planet is pissed off with their lot in life and feels that their only option is to use violence and terror to affect change terrorism will always be with us.
The unpleasent reality is that we cannot hope to win this 'war' on terrorism, we can only hope to survive it.
Your baggage were made less safe by LAX security?
How apt.
Unless you are driving in a car registered to yourself or hired by yourself (requiring ID) in which case the hundreds of CCTV cameras along the way have recorded your licence plate; making your movements (at least theoretically) traceable. In western countries anonymity and privacy are pretty much pipedreams.
Nah, you're OK, it's puke yellow in Konqueror too.
True but you can get RF opaque glass that blocks WIFI signals. And you will have to wallpaper your doors too.
I do think that the paranoid tinfoil-hat afficionados will look much more attractive with a layer of flock wallpaper over their shiny headgear though.
Windows creates a security hole?
No surprise there then.
Chemical Rubber? Pah!! Real men use superglue.
It does mean you have to get your wife/kisd/gf/butler/nurse to change your disks, type your slashdot posts, feed you, scratch any itchy bits and wipe your bottom for you but damned if I will ever drop a controller again halfway through a frag-fest. Just so long as my midi-interface game-pad does not become obsolete.. oh, sh..
I didn't get that far as the page did not display properly in Konqueror. Funny that.
I have been a chronic insomniac for most of my life and have tried practically everything. The only thing that consistantly worked* for me was a big joint at bedtime.
I know it wasn't legal but I was desperate and unlike the pharmacutical crap they kept prescribing me it was 100% effective, had no major side effects and did not screw up my head.
I'm not recommending this as a solution for anyone else, just saying it worked for me.
* past tense used for legal reasons.
Oh, that's where it went. Can I have it back now please.
Mobile phone cameras suck compared to real digital cameras. Mobile phone MP3 players suck compared to real mp3 players. Mobile phone games suck compared to real handheld games consoles. Mobile phone applications suck compared to real applications. Web-browsing sucks compared to real web browsers. Mobile phone ringtones suck compared to real music. Mobile phone vibrating alarms suck compared to a real vibr.. Well, anyway, you get the point. But, and it's a J-Lo sized but, it does mean people who would not normally use these technologies may well like them and then go out and buy the 'real' thing. Unfortunately I am a geek and therefore already have a digital camera, MP3 player, games console, palmtop, web browser and battery powered marital toys. All I want from a phone is a phone dammit. The phone manufacturers have been so busy jumping on the bandwagon that they didn't bother to look where it was going. When it goes over the cliff I just hope it takes their hideous polyphonic ringtones with them.
"He's talking about the UK, where the legal drinking age is 18 everywhere"
a sp x
UK drinking laws are not quite that clear cut;
It's legal to buy and drink beer or cider in a pub or restaurant at 16 so long as you have it with a meal. Also, as far as I can tell, kids over 5 can get as pissed as they like in the comfort of their own home.
http://www.talktofrank.com/azofdrugs/A/Alcohol.
Does Michael Jackson have one of his overdrafts there?
I have always wondered why 2D games are not called 3D games and 3D games are not called 4D games.
Without the passage of time (the extra D) 2D and 3D games are what we commonly call 'screenshots'.
Oh, and while I am moaning; as the 3rd dimension (depth) in 3D games is faked (meaning you can 'see' Lara Croft's curves but not 'feel' them) 3D games should be called 2.5D games (or 3.5D if you include the aforementioned dimension of time, possibly even 48DD if you count the Lara Croft dimensions).
Seriously though, comparing 2D and 3D games on visuals alone is missing the point.
It's like the difference between watching a rock concert on DVD with 'perfect' camera angles set by a director versus actually being there in the sweaty moshpit with a non-perfect view. It's a personal opinion as to which is better.
Also 2D games have a 20-year headstart on 3D games. Just imagine what 3D games will look like in 20 years when the technology tops-out as it has for 2D games. Having said that even photo-realistic 3D will not be as beautiful as 2D games. Without the designer-imposed restrictions possible in 2D games the player will always have the ability to find an ugly camera angle or composition.
Some 3D Games like 'X2-The Threat' manage to be gorgeous anyway (if you ignore the dodgy cut-scene characters).
When I got my Sony-Ericsson 610 I thought it was great apart from the unneccessary camera (I'm a unix boy - one tool for one job - and have a perfectly good digital camera already) and the annoying menus and phonebook and lack of basic usability compared with my old Nokia 7110 but nice all the same. Then I realised I could hardly read the display in sunlight. Then the display packed in. After I had been through 3 different handsets, all of which developed faults within a week I gave up and went back to Nokia with a (non bluetooth) 6110.
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_97/journal/vo l1/ncp/ if you happen to have $14,000 to spare - actually, make that $28,000 - you will want two.
Why Webster? The first large monolingual English dictionary was published in 1656 by Thomas Blount a century before Noah Webster was born and a century-and-a-half before he published 'A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language'.
Obviously it depends on what you are testing but if the criteria are intelligence and adaptability I'd take a black-box approach (where 'two systems can be considered equal when they produce the same output from the same input').
As humans are chaotic, ie. the same human given a set of stimuli may not react in exactly the same way to identical stimuli a few seconds later and two different humans will almost certainly react differently, this has to be redefined as 'two systems that, when given the same input, produce output that cannot be used to determine which of the systems produced the output'. Or something like that anyway.
Anyhow - forget the semantics - here's my Turing++ test..
1) Give the machine a slashdot account.
2) Let all users vote whether they think each other user is a human or a machine.
3) When the machines get as many 'is human' votes as the humans they are equal.
It's not even that hard to implement the testing facility - just add a '-0 : not human' to the mod drop-down and collect the votes.
Writing an AI agent that can emulate your average slashdot user would, I suspect, be trickier.
..is a sms-to-web client so you can send your trolls to slashdot from the car.
I quite like the uber-geek approach to puctuation ( some ( but not all ) programmers ( people who write computer code ( especially the 'c' like languages ( PHP, Java, Javascript, Perl (and many more ( including c++ of course ) ) ) ) ) end up using parenthesis ( also known as 'rounded brackets' ( or 'braces' ) ) in the wrong ( according to the rules of ( traditional ) English ) places when writing prose ( ie. 'language not cast in poetical measure or rhythm' ( from Webster's revised, unabridged dictionary ( 1913 ) ) ) ( they also tend to 'nest' ( use multiple levels of ) parentheses ) ) as it is easier for me to read ( but impossible ( or at least very hard ) ) for non-programmers..
IANAL but I don't think that's as much of a problem as it appears..
1) Your company's software is insecure (neglegence)
2) They tell their clients it *is* secure (fraudulent advertising)
3) You know about it (blackmail)
This is what I do too. TV is so banal, populist and trivial now it's a waste of time even switching it on. Unfortunately the mass-media industry seems to be heading for a pay-to-play model. I suspect that soon they will be pushing for disposable one-use DVDs and broadband pay-per-view so they can wring the last drop of blood from their customers.
I hate intolerant people.
I used to build Linux based NAT/Firewall machines for small businesses. One of my clients complained that their network had been (badly) compromised over the course of a week and blamed my product for this. The language he used was unacceptable even by my broad standards. After a hurried flight to his office (in another country) I noticed that nearly every PC on his network had a shiny new modem plugged into the wall. A quick check and - yes - no firewalling on any of these NT4 machines. It turned out he had been having complaints that the offices' 56kbps modem connection serviced by our NAT/Firewall box was too slow for the forty or so machines on his network to use concurrently so in an effort to save some money he had paid his daughter's boyfriend to install modems in all the office machines (rather than upgrade to DSL as I had suggested at installation time). This ham-fisted luser had set the modems up for dial-on demand then misconfigured some services that kept the lines up 24/7 allowing some script-kiddie to wreak havok on his network. My client's argument was that as our NAT/Firewall box was a security product it should have protected his network whatever other changes he made to the network and that we were liable for damages. Rather than risk talking at this juncture I simply pointed out a section in our four-page, large print, plain-english manual that was sitting, unread, on his desk - 'Under no circumstances allow computers or devices on your network a direct connection to the Internet. Using other methods of Internet access such as a modem will completely bypass the security features of our product.' I aslo helpfully drew his attention to the bit in our support contract that said 'On-site support visits related to issues arising from an inability on the part of the purchaser to read the included documentation will be billed at our consultancy rates of 150 per hour (or part thereof) including travelling time and expenses. These costs are not covered by the purchaser's support contract.' He'd started going purple by this point so I thought I'd do him a favour and warned him his next phone bill may be a wee bit high. "Oh, no problem there" he said, relaxing a little, "Dave used a free Internet Service Provider". "Ah", said I, "is that free access or free calls?" "Er" he said then called British Telecom Billing. "What's our next bill currently standing at?" he enquired politely. The next sentence was complex and largely unintelligable save from the phrases "bastard bloody bastard idiot bastard boyfriend", "so far up", "chew my toes", "bloody girl too" and the concluding "Gnnnaarrgh!" In a rare moment of BOFH compassion I made him a cup of tea at this point, coincidentally taking me across another 150-an-hour-or-part-thereof boundary. The moral of this slightly rambling story is.. 'a network is only as secure as it's dumbest user whatever NAT/Firewall you install'.