Re:how Islam is treating anybody with enough educa
on
Cyber-Attacks?
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· Score: 2
That glorious Islamic civilisation was smashed by Genghis Khan and his successors. Baghdad was sacked in 1258. This catastrophe was seen as a divine judgment, and prompted the rise of extreme fundamentalism. They threw away their enormous cultural and intellectual dominance and left the world open to the rise of Europe.
http://www.fsmitha.com/h3/h11mon.htm is an interersting summary of the Khan's colourful career.
Incidentally, the Mongols didn't manage to conquer Israel. Presumably the local Muslims had been getting more than enough practice by killing Crusaders, and knew how to deal with a bunch of pony-mounted yurt-dwellers:-)
Yes, it is possible. The sources for all id Software engines up to and including Quake II have been released as GPL, but id still sell Quake and Doom - the levels aren't free, even if the engine is.
If LucasArts put scummvm.exe and sdl.dll on a CD, and have a source directory somewhere, they can fill the rest of that disk with whatever they like.
Actually manufacturing GBA carts might involve a royalty payment to Nintendo, but the GPL wouldn't be a problem.
The only people who can override the Legal department are... Marketing.
Someone ought to get in touch with some of these people and show them ScummVM. Show them Monkey Island 2 running under the DOS.exe, as supplied at present, and then show them the same game running under ScummVM, with anti-aliasing and superior MIDI. Then show them the same game running on about three million different platforms. Show them Dreamcast Monkey Island. Show them palmtop Monkey Island.
Then tell them that this marvellous technology is free, tell them they can use it in any future reissues of these old games, that they don't need to pay anyone for the privilege.
Tell them that they can market it as 'Monkey Island Classics Deluxe' and double the price.
What, 'Never pay more than $20 for a computer game'? LucasArts have had that as a running joke for a long time now. It resurfaced in Monkey 3: 'At least my bad fiction doesn't require over $1000 of hardware'...
Sorry, I'm talking bullshit, and so is the laywer. DMCA doesn't cover this AT ALL, as the software in question does not have access control mechanisms that are being circumvented.
Actually, it does. Monkey Island 2's copy protection is circumvented by ScummVM; you can type in whatever numbers you like and you get in.
Mind you, the.exe that comes with the CD version of Monkey 2 doesn't even show the copy protection screen, so that one might not stand up in court.
Has anyone actually _read_ the article?
on
Is Linux Dead?
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· Score: 1
Nowhere does it claim that Linux is dead. Basically what it says is that since all the big noise was made during the dot.com boom, Linux has been quietly growing in the server and geek markets, and is still improving rapidly, but hasn't yet broken into the home market. This, says the article, is largely because most PCs come with Windows preinstalled.
Where exactly is the problem here?
... I've bought the DotT / Sam & Max 2 in 1 pack; it doesn't work, because the.exe files are so old and can't cope with modern hardware. LucasArts provide patches, which work, sort of... I've also bought the Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3 pack, and the result with 1 and 2 is the same. Doesn't work out of the box, works, sort of, once you get the patch. The patch at least gets the game running, but the sound is decidedly dodgy. I don't even want to think about what happens to WinXP users...
But now there is ScummVM. All these games run better than they did in the first place, they run on machines and OSes that LucasArts never bothered with, and they run perfectly.
What LucasArts should do with ScummVM is write the authors a great big thank-you letter and start bundling it with all their old games. There's no reason why they shouldn't. Trying to shut down a project that's doing for free what you should have done a long time ago is just plain silly.
... First we build a nice space station the size of three Mirs, designed to carry a crew of seven with plenty of living space and room for scientific fun.
Then we cancel the project to build a seven-seater lifeboat for it, so we use a Russian Soyuz instead and limit the crew to three, the same as Mir always had.
Then we ground the Space Shuttle, meaning that the only spacecraft taking people to orbit in the first place is the good old three-seater Soyuz.
You could interpret it the other way. The two towers in question could be Barad-dur and Orthanc, or they could be Minas Tirith and Minas Ithil^WMorgul.
The events of the book centre largely on Orthanc, with Barad-dur and Minas Tirith playing supporting roles as places in the far background that matter occasionally. It would probably have to be Orthanc / Barad-dur, simply because of the heavy Saruman emphasis (and the fact that the other two don't really come into play much till RotK), but I think the contrast between Tirith and Morgul is not to be ignored; they were, after all, once twin cities.
Better would be to fly cameras on an f-18 or Concord or SR71 in the Moon's shadow during a total eclipse. You can get the best of both worlds.
The Blackbird and F-18 are pretty small, it'd be cramped in there... but Concorde's huge for a supersonic plane. You could get all sorts of kit aboard a suitably modified one of those.
Trouble is, the expense. There are only a dozen or so of them in the world and there's no prospect of any more being built. NASA could buy one and refit it, but that would come to, ooh, at least a quarter of the cost of a Shuttle launch.
The other thing is, if you're going to chase eclipses, how are you going to run the operation? There's a total eclipse every few years, that's fine, but they're rarely ideally placed. 1999 was great; a Concorde was indeed chartered and pursued the eclipse halfway across the Atlantic. The eclipse in December is from South Africa to Australia; also could be good. But too often you'll either strike the upper limit of Concorde's range, or have an eclipse which is largely overland. Most countries will take a dim view of a plane that size making the sonic boom over populated areas... there's a reason you can't get a Concorde from New York to Los Angeles, and it's not entirely that Boeing doesn't want BAe muscling in to the American market...
Why do we suddenly like Apple so much? Simple. MacOS used to be a brain-dead eye-candy OS for idiots. Now, it's the long dreamed-of user-friendly UNIX for the masses!
The highest bidder (that is, the bidder with the strongest desire to speak), is able to purchase spectrum at a reasonable cost from the American people. Thus, the maximum possible return is achieved for the taxpayers, and the highest bidder has paid a fair price for the scarce resource they need. Capitalism works - period.
Unfortunately, Canadia is not a capitalist society. Canadians favor socialist approaches to health care, government, and (yes) RF spectrum allocation. This means that the rights to an area of spectrum belong to the government, not to the people (as in America).
It's possible to strike a happy medium there. The health service in.uk, for instance, is more socialist than just about anywhere but Cuba... yet we somehow managed to extort twenty-two billion quid from the world's biggest and richest mobile phone companies in exchange for frequency ranges for a service they'll probably never actually provide because nobody really wants it... CH-CHING!
Who needs a jammer to keep mobiles from going off in the cinema? Just fill the walls with foil when you build the place, make the auditorium a total black hole for signal strength.
The reason that the internet has become so accessible to the common man is because of big business.
True, where 'big business' = some ISP. Not true, where 'big business' = crappy banner farm. The internet would be no less accessible if (for instance) doubleclick vanished tonight; maybe some sites dependent on ad revenue would die, but who cares? That's not accessibility, it's content, and there's plenty more.
What does big business want in return? They want you look at their popups and they want to track you and they want you (in the end) to buy their products or services.
The one and only big business that is in any way relevant to my access to the Internet is my ISP. What they want in return is nothing more than my money. If some third party wants to track me, or make me look at popups, too bad. Their cookies get binned, their Javascript popups automatically denied, and their banner ad farms/etc/hosts'd.
Only English speakers call it 'football'. Everyone else calls it fuetbol, or fußball, or something like that. I have bugger all idea what the Japanese call it, though... 'Soccer' is rather mysterious... apparently the name sprang from some English public school where most of the boys played rugger instead. Since Association Football is by far the most popular variation, 'football' by itself will of course be taken to mean this particular kind. If you mean some minority variant, try calling it 'rugby', 'Gaelic football', 'Australian football', 'five a side with coats for goalposts' or 'American football', depending on what particular variant you favour.
That infinite European desire to punch the crap out of froggies, krauts, dagos, eyeties, polacks, micks, sheepshaggers, scots, and all those Eastern European countries we haven't really got derogatory names for because in a thousand years we've somehow never found a reason to hate them... Yes, that.
And that infinite English inability to forget about the war...
Does this mean that when they finally split Microsoft up, we can then sue the component parts for antitrust violations, too? And then sue the bits of them? Whoopee!
Re:What needs to happen...
on
ICANN Updates
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· Score: 1
Actually a republic would be a much better idea. This is what the majority of the civilized word uses, including USA, GB, Mexico, Canada, Germany, France, etc.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that GB is not a republic, nor is the UK of which it is part... We are a monarchy, a dictatorship in which supreme executive power derives from a fluke of birthright rather than from a mandate from the masses!
In practice, admittedly, the monarch is a decent sort, and she allows herself to be told what to do by people who _do_ have a mandate from the masses, and several laws, charters, and at least one major war have institutionalised this arrangement... but the principle still stands!
... This judgment doesn't mean 'It is illegal to link to any page that links to illegal material'; nor does it imply the inductive consequence thereof, that it's illegal to be connected to illegal material by any finite series of links.
What it says is that people have previously been linking directly to illegal material, and got called on it, and made to stop. Now someone thinks they're getting round that by making it two-click. The ruling basically says 'Quit taking the piss'...
Now if someone links to another page, which has some innocent links and then one saying 'HEY EVERYONE! THIS WAY FOR THE ILLEGAL STUFF!' that goes to the Radikal page, which then says 'ILLEGAL STUFF HERE GUYS!' and points to the docs themselves, it's clear enough that they're taking the piss, too. This sort of behaviour is (a) silly and (b) probably contempt of court.
It's really just a matter of what material you define as illegal. I think a state has the right to keep secret the location of nuclear materials, and I think it's also reasonable to clamp down on the kind of incitement to commit crime described.
Once the Dutch start thinking that things like DVD players or e-book readers should be considered illegal, then I'll worry. But no reasonable jurisdiction would ever get that silly...
If the inbound was a Tunguska, we'd probably ignore it, unless it was on a direct course for a densely populated area. It's probably a lot cheaper to evacuate the locals rather than organise an effort to shoot at it.
Something bigger, though, maybe capable of taking out a country or two, would be worthy of our attention. We have robot equipment that could intercept an asteroid in deep space; a big Deep Space 1 with a hydrogen bomb on board would do nicely, and wouldn't require any new super-rockets. Trouble is, I don't think a single bomb would be enough.
Our best bet if we're dealing with a dino-buster is probably the Deep Impact scenario - build a big, crewed spaceship to go out there and do the engineering properly, on the spot. You could carry plenty of nukes and position them more accurately. Such an effort would require several years' warning, but could be done, given the funding. It needn't be a long flight; an asteroid coming to strike Earth will probably have a few near-misses first, as it intersects Earth's orbit while Earth isn't there. Intercepting the target at such a point would be a lot easier than (for instance) a Mars shot.
Remember, by the way, that the aim is to divert the object so that it misses the Earth - not to blast it to smithereens. Multiple small impacts aren't much better than a single big one. This means we need to carry out our operations in deep space; once the object is close, it's too late. All we could really do then is launch every nuke we can mount and hope... Whereas a small nudge, early on, can translate to a miss by millions of miles later.
In Arthur Clarke's 'Rendezvous with Rama', nobody paid very much attention to the asteroid threat until a super-Tunguska impact took out an awful lot of northern Italy.
Thing is, we can take a Tunguska; it's only a few H-bombs' worth. Millions might die, but they'll probably be millions of foreigners, so why should _we_ care? Sick, I know, but for any given country considering a spacewatch project, the chances of them in particular being the one hurt are minimal. Question is, could we spot a dinobuster in time to deal with it?
By the way... I mistyped 'Rama' as 'Ranma', _twice_, before I got it right. 'Rendezvous with Ranma'... I'd better bring a bucket of iced water;-)
Slashdot Mirror
That glorious Islamic civilisation was smashed by Genghis Khan and his successors. Baghdad was sacked in 1258. This catastrophe was seen as a divine judgment, and prompted the rise of extreme fundamentalism. They threw away their enormous cultural and intellectual dominance and left the world open to the rise of Europe.
http://www.fsmitha.com/h3/h11mon.htm is an interersting summary of the Khan's colourful career.
Incidentally, the Mongols didn't manage to conquer Israel. Presumably the local Muslims had been getting more than enough practice by killing Crusaders, and knew how to deal with a bunch of pony-mounted yurt-dwellers :-)
I'm searching for the legendary lost treasure of Buggy Whip!
If LucasArts put scummvm.exe and sdl.dll on a CD, and have a source directory somewhere, they can fill the rest of that disk with whatever they like.
Actually manufacturing GBA carts might involve a royalty payment to Nintendo, but the GPL wouldn't be a problem.
The only people who can override the Legal department are... Marketing.
Someone ought to get in touch with some of these people and show them ScummVM. Show them Monkey Island 2 running under the DOS .exe, as supplied at present, and then show them the same game running under ScummVM, with anti-aliasing and superior MIDI. Then show them the same game running on about three million different platforms. Show them Dreamcast Monkey Island. Show them palmtop Monkey Island.
Then tell them that this marvellous technology is free, tell them they can use it in any future reissues of these old games, that they don't need to pay anyone for the privilege.
Tell them that they can market it as 'Monkey Island Classics Deluxe' and double the price.
Then watch those lawyers disappear.
What, 'Never pay more than $20 for a computer game'? LucasArts have had that as a running joke for a long time now. It resurfaced in Monkey 3: 'At least my bad fiction doesn't require over $1000 of hardware'...
Actually, it does. Monkey Island 2's copy protection is circumvented by ScummVM; you can type in whatever numbers you like and you get in.
Mind you, the .exe that comes with the CD version of Monkey 2 doesn't even show the copy protection screen, so that one might not stand up in court.
Nowhere does it claim that Linux is dead. Basically what it says is that since all the big noise was made during the dot.com boom, Linux has been quietly growing in the server and geek markets, and is still improving rapidly, but hasn't yet broken into the home market. This, says the article, is largely because most PCs come with Windows preinstalled. Where exactly is the problem here?
... I've bought the DotT / Sam & Max 2 in 1 pack; it doesn't work, because the .exe files are so old and can't cope with modern hardware. LucasArts provide patches, which work, sort of...
I've also bought the Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3 pack, and the result with 1 and 2 is the same. Doesn't work out of the box, works, sort of, once you get the patch. The patch at least gets the game running, but the sound is decidedly dodgy. I don't even want to think about what happens to WinXP users...
But now there is ScummVM. All these games run better than they did in the first place, they run on machines and OSes that LucasArts never bothered with, and they run perfectly.
What LucasArts should do with ScummVM is write the authors a great big thank-you letter and start bundling it with all their old games. There's no reason why they shouldn't. Trying to shut down a project that's doing for free what you should have done a long time ago is just plain silly.
... First we build a nice space station the size of three Mirs, designed to carry a crew of seven with plenty of living space and room for scientific fun.
Then we cancel the project to build a seven-seater lifeboat for it, so we use a Russian Soyuz instead and limit the crew to three, the same as Mir always had.
Then we ground the Space Shuttle, meaning that the only spacecraft taking people to orbit in the first place is the good old three-seater Soyuz.
Nice one NASA.
You could interpret it the other way. The two towers in question could be Barad-dur and Orthanc, or they could be Minas Tirith and Minas Ithil^WMorgul.
The events of the book centre largely on Orthanc, with Barad-dur and Minas Tirith playing supporting roles as places in the far background that matter occasionally. It would probably have to be Orthanc / Barad-dur, simply because of the heavy Saruman emphasis (and the fact that the other two don't really come into play much till RotK), but I think the contrast between Tirith and Morgul is not to be ignored; they were, after all, once twin cities.
Just don't talk to this thing for too long. It might not be quite the same as it was before.
Better would be to fly cameras on an f-18 or Concord or SR71 in the Moon's shadow during a total eclipse. You can get the best of both worlds.
The Blackbird and F-18 are pretty small, it'd be cramped in there... but Concorde's huge for a supersonic plane. You could get all sorts of kit aboard a suitably modified one of those.
Trouble is, the expense. There are only a dozen or so of them in the world and there's no prospect of any more being built. NASA could buy one and refit it, but that would come to, ooh, at least a quarter of the cost of a Shuttle launch.
The other thing is, if you're going to chase eclipses, how are you going to run the operation? There's a total eclipse every few years, that's fine, but they're rarely ideally placed. 1999 was great; a Concorde was indeed chartered and pursued the eclipse halfway across the Atlantic. The eclipse in December is from South Africa to Australia; also could be good. But too often you'll either strike the upper limit of Concorde's range, or have an eclipse which is largely overland. Most countries will take a dim view of a plane that size making the sonic boom over populated areas... there's a reason you can't get a Concorde from New York to Los Angeles, and it's not entirely that Boeing doesn't want BAe muscling in to the American market...
Why do we suddenly like Apple so much? Simple. MacOS used to be a brain-dead eye-candy OS for idiots. Now, it's the long dreamed-of user-friendly UNIX for the masses!
;-)
Yes, all it took was that command line prompt
Mehmet Ali Agca, perhaps?
The highest bidder (that is, the bidder with the strongest desire to speak), is able to purchase spectrum at a reasonable cost from the American people. Thus, the maximum possible return is achieved for the taxpayers, and the highest bidder has paid a fair price for the scarce resource they need. Capitalism works - period.
.uk, for instance, is more socialist than just about anywhere but Cuba... yet we somehow managed to extort twenty-two billion quid from the world's biggest and richest mobile phone companies in exchange for frequency ranges for a service they'll probably never actually provide because nobody really wants it... CH-CHING!
Unfortunately, Canadia is not a capitalist society. Canadians favor socialist approaches to health care, government, and (yes) RF spectrum allocation. This means that the rights to an area of spectrum belong to the government, not to the people (as in America).
It's possible to strike a happy medium there. The health service in
Who needs a jammer to keep mobiles from going off in the cinema? Just fill the walls with foil when you build the place, make the auditorium a total black hole for signal strength.
The reason that the internet has become so accessible to the common man is because of big business.
True, where 'big business' = some ISP. Not true, where 'big business' = crappy banner farm. The internet would be no less accessible if (for instance) doubleclick vanished tonight; maybe some sites dependent on ad revenue would die, but who cares? That's not accessibility, it's content, and there's plenty more.
What does big business want in return? They want you look at their popups and they want to track you and they want you (in the end) to buy their products or services.
The one and only big business that is in any way relevant to my access to the Internet is my ISP. What they want in return is nothing more than my money. If some third party wants to track me, or make me look at popups, too bad. Their cookies get binned, their Javascript popups automatically denied, and their banner ad farms /etc/hosts'd.
Only English speakers call it 'football'. Everyone else calls it fuetbol, or fußball, or something like that. I have bugger all idea what the Japanese call it, though...
'Soccer' is rather mysterious... apparently the name sprang from some English public school where most of the boys played rugger instead.
Since Association Football is by far the most popular variation, 'football' by itself will of course be taken to mean this particular kind. If you mean some minority variant, try calling it 'rugby', 'Gaelic football', 'Australian football', 'five a side with coats for goalposts' or 'American football', depending on what particular variant you favour.
That infinite European desire to punch the crap out of froggies, krauts, dagos, eyeties, polacks, micks, sheepshaggers, scots, and all those Eastern European countries we haven't really got derogatory names for because in a thousand years we've somehow never found a reason to hate them... Yes, that. And that infinite English inability to forget about the war...
Does this mean that when they finally split Microsoft up, we can then sue the component parts for antitrust violations, too? And then sue the bits of them? Whoopee!
Anyone fancy a game of Microsoft Pang?
Actually a republic would be a much better idea. This is what the majority of the civilized word uses, including USA, GB, Mexico, Canada, Germany, France, etc.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that GB is not a republic, nor is the UK of which it is part... We are a monarchy, a dictatorship in which supreme executive power derives from a fluke of birthright rather than from a mandate from the masses!
In practice, admittedly, the monarch is a decent sort, and she allows herself to be told what to do by people who _do_ have a mandate from the masses, and several laws, charters, and at least one major war have institutionalised this arrangement... but the principle still stands!
What, do the Americans not kick the thing at all? Weird. They do in rugby occasionally, and also IIRC in Aussie and Gaelic football...
... This judgment doesn't mean 'It is illegal to link to any page that links to illegal material'; nor does it imply the inductive consequence thereof, that it's illegal to be connected to illegal material by any finite series of links.
What it says is that people have previously been linking directly to illegal material, and got called on it, and made to stop. Now someone thinks they're getting round that by making it two-click. The ruling basically says 'Quit taking the piss'...
Now if someone links to another page, which has some innocent links and then one saying 'HEY EVERYONE! THIS WAY FOR THE ILLEGAL STUFF!' that goes to the Radikal page, which then says 'ILLEGAL STUFF HERE GUYS!' and points to the docs themselves, it's clear enough that they're taking the piss, too. This sort of behaviour is (a) silly and (b) probably contempt of court.
It's really just a matter of what material you define as illegal. I think a state has the right to keep secret the location of nuclear materials, and I think it's also reasonable to clamp down on the kind of incitement to commit crime described.
Once the Dutch start thinking that things like DVD players or e-book readers should be considered illegal, then I'll worry. But no reasonable jurisdiction would ever get that silly...
If the inbound was a Tunguska, we'd probably ignore it, unless it was on a direct course for a densely populated area. It's probably a lot cheaper to evacuate the locals rather than organise an effort to shoot at it.
Something bigger, though, maybe capable of taking out a country or two, would be worthy of our attention. We have robot equipment that could intercept an asteroid in deep space; a big Deep Space 1 with a hydrogen bomb on board would do nicely, and wouldn't require any new super-rockets. Trouble is, I don't think a single bomb would be enough.
Our best bet if we're dealing with a dino-buster is probably the Deep Impact scenario - build a big, crewed spaceship to go out there and do the engineering properly, on the spot. You could carry plenty of nukes and position them more accurately. Such an effort would require several years' warning, but could be done, given the funding. It needn't be a long flight; an asteroid coming to strike Earth will probably have a few near-misses first, as it intersects Earth's orbit while Earth isn't there. Intercepting the target at such a point would be a lot easier than (for instance) a Mars shot.
Remember, by the way, that the aim is to divert the object so that it misses the Earth - not to blast it to smithereens. Multiple small impacts aren't much better than a single big one. This means we need to carry out our operations in deep space; once the object is close, it's too late. All we could really do then is launch every nuke we can mount and hope... Whereas a small nudge, early on, can translate to a miss by millions of miles later.
In Arthur Clarke's 'Rendezvous with Rama', nobody paid very much attention to the asteroid threat until a super-Tunguska impact took out an awful lot of northern Italy.
Thing is, we can take a Tunguska; it's only a few H-bombs' worth. Millions might die, but they'll probably be millions of foreigners, so why should _we_ care? Sick, I know, but for any given country considering a spacewatch project, the chances of them in particular being the one hurt are minimal. Question is, could we spot a dinobuster in time to deal with it?
By the way... I mistyped 'Rama' as 'Ranma', _twice_, before I got it right. 'Rendezvous with Ranma'... I'd better bring a bucket of iced water ;-)