Wow, adobe has struck the Slashdot headlines *again*, and with news that's just as bad, if not worse, than anything else so far...
I noticed this:
"But Adobe doesn't currently plan to prevent VBScript or other files from running."
And the first thing that comes to mind is "gosh, what a totally stupid policy." All they have to do is NOT pass executable data to the script software...
Who even needs a way to execute scripts OF ANY KIND in a.pdf file?! The whole point of a pdf is that it is supposed to give you exactly what you get on the paper page, in a platform-independent fashion.. Your printed manual can't execute attachments, can it?! All the joys of excessive featuritis..
On another closely related hand, Isn't it great that we can get Outlook macroviruses with out even opening the attachent in outlook? Just think of the thousands of stupid office workers who are going to start spreading macroviruses without even realizing it... Teaching them not to use attachments in OUTLOOK has been hard enough.. to cope with Acrobat as well?! Damn near impossible....
Well, as it was said in a previous post, the 'effect' could be due to ferrous contamination...
So- what is more contaminated with iron than the earth itself?!
I'm sure we all know about the "Repulsorlift" which is a common piece of technology in the Star Wars Universe.. Well, now we have it..
Vehicles that can float about the ground and glide along? Screw maglev rails..
The galaxy far far away has become just that much nearer.. And, what with cloning on the horizon, we're almost there! (although, if we do ever reach the Star Wars Universe, I feel that a pre-emptive strike to wipe out the entire Gungan species could be a good idea, for the sanity of the entire galaxy)
you can't forget about the gratuitiously unneccessary closeups of women/men rubbing the bare asses of babies which seem to litter most soap/shampoo/fabric softener advertisements...
Why is it that between 0..1 year old, showing the kid totally bare-ass-naked with people rubbing the same bare ass is 'cute' and a 'good sales pitch', but for the next seventeen years it's illegal?
personally i think these bare-ass shots are totally unnecessary, and frankly quite nasty. I mean, why would i WANT to see some kids ass? how is this supposed to make me WANT to buy this product?
I think that disrupting a large portion of the internet would be completely counterproductive-
the media would simply label the perpetrators as anarchists and/or cyberterrorists, and the masses of J. Sheep Internet Users would be upset that they can't access their favorite sites. Would they care or even consider WHY we were doing this? No.
The action would be completely marginalized and any useful effect would be totally wiped out by the media, therefore enhancing the negatives and destroying our credibility to the public.
it sucks, but that's the way it is.....
Main Entry: nomad
Pronunciation: 'nO-"mad, British also 'nä-
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin nomad-, nomas member of a wandering pastoral people, from Greek, from nemein
Date: 1579
1 : a member of a people who have no fixed residence but move from place to place usually seasonally and within a well-defined territory
2 : an individual who roams about aimlessly
- nomad adjective
- nomadism/'nO-"ma-"di-z&m/ noun
just for your edification! thank you, and goodnight.
Why make it that difficult for yourself or the hapless developer? Just use this 384meg ramdrive as your swapdisk.. I don't know how useful it would be for Linux, but for someone running a windows based system, having 384 megabytes of rather fast, non-hdd swap space would be A Good Thing, especially for those doing desktop publishing or graphic manipulation where it is very likely that there will be things being paged in and out all the time..
The volatility of the ram wouldn't be a problem; a swapfile isn't really very useful after the system has shutdown. And, you wouldn't have to worry about having incriminating stuff or passwords left in the swapspace for some nosy Hacker, bent on destruction (as we well know they all are), to go peeking through:)
The only real possible problem is that the datarate could be somewhat slow. But, the benefit of the extremely fast seek time (plus having the swapfile be on a different drive than the actual application/data) i suppose would make up for the slower overall throughput.
Just an idea... (it's probably redundant by now, too... oh well)
boy, do i wish i was a moderator right now; this msg would get all my points as "insightful"
you have managed to sum up the entire hopeless media situation in three simple sentences... hyping up a completely nonexistant problem in order to freak out the population and increase ratings, while totally glossing over any REAL problems, like bad parenting and the destruction of free speech.
When you buy anything which comes with a rebate form, you're paying full price, **including sales tax** on the **full** price.
Herein lies the conspiracy: If the product was simply sold at a reduced price, the sales tax would be lower and hence the government would get less money!
But no, instead, the vile suits decide to tempt people with the thought of getting money back, rather than the more sensible reduced price, and hence guarantee that the government gets sales tax on the $35!
anyone who is familiar with statistics should know the meaning of the word "outlier". basically, it's a point in a set of data which is quite obviously FAR away from the "normal" range of data.
all the fear about video games and movies and things causing violence are being spurred up because of the extreme nature of outliers.
to be more specific...
If the 1st paragraph of an article was something like this:
It is now the 1st anniversary of the release of the video game, featuring the most stunning, realistic, and gratuitous gore and violence ever seen in a video game. It has been played by people ranging from 6 to 110 years old. More than 100 million people have played this game [ok this may be a -little- excessive for a game, but it's possible; just go with it]. A month ago, a teenager killed 7 of his friends at school, and then shot himself.
The distraught parents have blamed the shootings on the video game the male played every night, as well as to the heavy metal music he listened to. As a result of this killing spree, the game has been banned in 6 countries and 48 states. Stringent regulations are to be enacted, and the developers are being sued...
------
now, while this is obviously fiction, you have to admit that it is slightly plausible.
Anyway, back to the point about the outliers. 100 million people played the game, one of which decided to go kill some people. No one who is emotionally stable and has had a decent moral education from family or even school (heh. like that'll ever happen) is going to go and kill people because he listened to Eminem or played a disgustingly violent game.
The only kids or adults who are going to kill people are individuals who have serious mental or social problems. However, no one ever wants to admit that their child had problems, or (heaven forbid) that they were ****ty-a$$ parents, so the blame has to be placed elsewhere.
And Now, this is REALLY where the outlier part comes in:
No one ever hears about the 99,999,999 people who played the game without problem. EVERYONE hears about the psycho kid who kills people. Obviously, the media never reports the fact that the parents never taught the kid anything, or that they were diagnosed sociopathic, or very visibly disturbed. The media, however, does report that the kid played this video game.
*BOOM*
So here are the problems:
1: The single outlying event is totally sensationalizd, completely ignoring the countless millions of people who were not affected at all.
2: No one ever hears anything other than the fact that the kid played the game and listened to metal. Because people need to explain things, the only data they have to go on is the game and the music; thus that is the cause.
3: people become enraged because the blame (as always) falls on the same industries; hence they become open to submitting to useless laws which will a: hurt the 99,999,999 normal people and b: will not help the 1 unfortunately disturbed person.
well gee, this is a really really long posting...
well, to summarize quickly:
The single freak person out of millions is reported, blame is placed on video games because no one is willing to blame the parents or the schools, hence millions of regular people are inconvenienced and the disturbed individuals are left with the same problems anyway.
Thus
Society is screwed up because (at least in the US):
-no one is ever willing to blame the parents or the schools, because that's not P.C.
-because the blame is never placed where it is due, people expend freakish amounts of energy to quash and destroy things which are not a problem at all, like games and movies, and totally ignore the REAL problems, like improper parenting and school systems that are afraid to teach real morals, with the consequence that nothing is solved and innocent people die because no one ever seriously tries to help the ones who truely need it.
ok well i'm sorry bout the length of this, but this is an issue which i feel very strongly about, and i can't cut it short. If you actually read it, thank you, and hopefully i won't get modded down.
if you disagree, plz reply via email because i'd be most willing to have a serious debate with someone about this.
final note: i'm 17, and i've been playing violent games, listening to extremely deathy music, and watching violence on tv and in the movies since a tender young age. However, my parents have taught me from an even younger age that violence is bad, and that there is a difference between fake and real violence. So, while i laugh when a monster goes up in a fountain of blood or the badguy gets hit by a train, when I see real people being killed on the news, I feel physically ill. What frightens me most, however, are people who are never told that there is a line between real and fake violence, and (worse still) that there are people who do not realize that it is possible for people to tell the difference.
isn't it possible that this whole Moore's law thing has been mutated into a method of chip companies extorting as much money as possible from us? I mean, the companies know about Moore's Law, and consequently, they feel that it's perfectly justifiable to release chips in minor increments, while hyping them up as "the next big thing", thus making it possible for people to keep buying and buying and buying...
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense for the chip companies to just do something drastic and instead of moving up in 100 or 200mhz increments, and instead jumping up by gigahertz and nixing the entire 1-10 ghz range? If, all of a sudden, a company released a 10ghz chip, wouldn't they seal their hold on the market for an extremely long time? Even if the chip overheated and had to be underclocked to 50% speed, they'd still be wicked fast.... I'm sure the R&D costs to get from 1ghz to 10ghz in one fell swoop would be enormous, but I'm sure that as long as they could produce them at reasonable cost and sell them at a price that's affordable for anything under the level of Superpower Government, the demand would be so high that they could still turn a profit.
Not to mention the fact that having a 10x speed advantage over the nearest competitors would give them a fairly decent leeway until the rest of the industry caught up.
So, instead of sticking to Moore's law and using it as an excuse to just make more slightly faster chips, why doesn't some company just focus itself completely on developing an Extremely Fast CPU.
somehow i have a horrible feeling this message is somewhat redundant.. oh well... just my $.02k
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had the idea in Footfall.. the fithp had laser weapons in orbit and on ships such that they could destroy anything that resembled military equipment...
they also had big self-propelled metal bars hanging around in orbit which could be directed down upon an area, functioning as thin, heavy, guided meteors...
In the book "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson (I think...), a group of kids actually use an EMP to fry the computers at a company that was being raided by the police, in an attempt to "help". However, unfortunately, the kids fried the computers moments before the Hero was able to delete all the incriminating evidence off the hard drives. woops.:)
>Also note the 60s/70s views that we'd all be
>living on the moon by now. Clearly, optimism was
>high regarding the continuation of technological
>innovation, but what people forgot to take into
>account was that the research currently on the
>bleeding edge is so complex to maintain and
>manage...
I'm afraid that I disagree with your opinion as to why the space program did not continue on to colonization of the moon. You said that the technology was too complex for anybody to understand (at least that's how it read to me) and so consequently it collapsed and wasn't maintained and managed any more.
However, I think the reason why the space program fizzled out to the (still great, but not quite as earth-shattering) level it is today is simply because it did not fit into modern society properly.
NASA Right now could arrange a flight to the moon, by constructing some new launchers and capsules and the like; I mean, they must still have all the Apollo blueprints. However, they could probably do it far more safely, and more effectively from a research standpoint. However, this would cost a significant amount of Money, and would, barring some freak discovery, not result in any noticable "gain" for a long time. And this, unfortunately, is where the problem becomes evident.
In the 60's, because of the influence of certain Presidents, people were willing to see their tax money go into a space program, mainly because it allowed them to advance in the Space Race with the Russians and various others.
Now, however, Society has "developed" (I use that word with some trepidation) to the point where if it doesn't provide instant gratification it really isn't worth it, and consequently, no one is willing to pour billions of dollars into, say, the colonization of the Moon, because they won't see any appreciable "benefit" for many years.
Therfore, as I see it, the crux of the issue, the main reason why the Space Race fizzled out as it did, is not because the technology was too complex and therefore unattainable, (after all, if a human being invented it, surely another human being could improve on it, much less figure out how it works), but that Society as a whole is simply too cheap to obsessed with instant gratification to support it.
This is simply the opinion of one man, and I will be more than willing to listen to anyone's reaction, providing it contains even a modicum of intelligence beyond "you're wrong. period."
Isn't it really freaky how we're struggling to get things running at "Windows Performance"?
I mean, in some threads on/. we talk about how slow windows is in relation to anything, but here we are talking about the life-and-death quest to seek parity with Windows Performance..
Ok there is one thing which has always annoyed me about discussions about hacking:
WHY Does everybody keep making stupid analogies?
Breaking into a bank or looking into somebody's window is basically completely different than hacking into somebody's computer. And here is why, as I see it.
Nobody breaks into a bank just to 'prove that they can do it', and certainly after one has broken into a bank, one does not leave a little note saying how they did it. The sole reason for illegally breaking into a bank is to steal money.
Peeking into a window is somewhat closer to what hacking entails, but not really. When one peeks into a window, again the most likely reasons are to case the place to plan a robbery or to fulfill some voyeuristic inclination. There is also an immediate destruction of privacy. Again, there is no reason for the perpetrator to 'lave a note' to say what they had done. The entire point of peeking into a window is to do something WITHOUT BEING NOTICED.
When one hacks into a system, it is usually immediately obvious to the owner of the system if they're actually paying attention. Also, there are a variety of motivations for hacking (As compared to breaking into a bank or peeking into windows). Hackers could be hacking to actually destroy the target system, for the sheer hell of it, a lack of anything better to do, or with a genuine intent to help the owner of the system out. I don't really want to go into the merits of hacking for the powers of good, because that's a whole different topic. Anyway...
When the media or ppl on the internet start making analogies between hacking and anything in 'real life', they're instantly causing confusion. Cyberspace and Realspace are almost completely different. There are some rules which are the same, like not stealing and destroying things which are the same as in the real world, but that's where any similarity ends. When someone breaks into anything in the real world, it's essentially always for a bad purpose. As soon as an analogy links a physical crime with a virtual one, the situation is instantly clouded by lots of garbage that really doesn't apply.
To solve the radiation problem, couldn't you put a conductive screen around the outsides of the case, which is then connected to the ground? (next to the plexiglass in the PVC Case)
Microwave ovens do that sort of thing to prevent the user from being nuked when they're looking in the window, and i'm sure that technique could be adapted to mostly transparent radiation protection..
just an idea..
AFAIK most companies pay for bandwidth for their service, as in a certain amount of money per certain amount of data coming across the line. Surely this episode must be costing M$ a fairly large sum of money, as 250 packets/second would add up pretty darn quick. I also hate to think of how much the average net lag has gone up because of this. One second? two?
ahh, but brand new roads can be a bad thing. My mother's street was cambered incorrectly around a corner (instead of going Up on the outside of the turn it went down) so lots of people had fun going around too fast and flying off the road into people's gardens, etc.
Hey, they (the little green men) struck first. Remember that mars probe that 'disappeared'?
Don't forget about those rockets that are 'exploding' for 'no apparent reason' or 'software bugs'; it's actually part of the conspiracy: As the rockets are blowing up they're actually firing shells of a sort at various planets, masked by the explosion. Pretty sneaky, eh?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, adobe has struck the Slashdot headlines *again*, and with news that's just as bad, if not worse, than anything else so far...
.pdf file?! The whole point of a pdf is that it is supposed to give you exactly what you get on the paper page, in a platform-independent fashion.. Your printed manual can't execute attachments, can it?! All the joys of excessive featuritis..
I noticed this:
"But Adobe doesn't currently plan to prevent VBScript or other files from running."
And the first thing that comes to mind is "gosh, what a totally stupid policy." All they have to do is NOT pass executable data to the script software...
Who even needs a way to execute scripts OF ANY KIND in a
On another closely related hand, Isn't it great that we can get Outlook macroviruses with out even opening the attachent in outlook? Just think of the thousands of stupid office workers who are going to start spreading macroviruses without even realizing it... Teaching them not to use attachments in OUTLOOK has been hard enough.. to cope with Acrobat as well?! Damn near impossible....
*sigh*
Well, as it was said in a previous post, the 'effect' could be due to ferrous contamination...
So- what is more contaminated with iron than the earth itself?!
I'm sure we all know about the "Repulsorlift" which is a common piece of technology in the Star Wars Universe.. Well, now we have it..
Vehicles that can float about the ground and glide along? Screw maglev rails..
The galaxy far far away has become just that much nearer.. And, what with cloning on the horizon, we're almost there! (although, if we do ever reach the Star Wars Universe, I feel that a pre-emptive strike to wipe out the entire Gungan species could be a good idea, for the sanity of the entire galaxy)
you can't forget about the gratuitiously unneccessary closeups of women/men rubbing the bare asses of babies which seem to litter most soap/shampoo/fabric softener advertisements...
Why is it that between 0..1 year old, showing the kid totally bare-ass-naked with people rubbing the same bare ass is 'cute' and a 'good sales pitch', but for the next seventeen years it's illegal?
personally i think these bare-ass shots are totally unnecessary, and frankly quite nasty. I mean, why would i WANT to see some kids ass? how is this supposed to make me WANT to buy this product?
I think that disrupting a large portion of the internet would be completely counterproductive- the media would simply label the perpetrators as anarchists and/or cyberterrorists, and the masses of J. Sheep Internet Users would be upset that they can't access their favorite sites. Would they care or even consider WHY we were doing this? No. The action would be completely marginalized and any useful effect would be totally wiped out by the media, therefore enhancing the negatives and destroying our credibility to the public. it sucks, but that's the way it is... ..
uhh... IIRC, 'nomad' is a real word
/'nO-"ma-"di-z&m/ noun
m-w.com says this:
Main Entry: nomad
Pronunciation: 'nO-"mad, British also 'nä-
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin nomad-, nomas member of a wandering pastoral people, from Greek, from nemein
Date: 1579
1 : a member of a people who have no fixed residence but move from place to place usually seasonally and within a well-defined territory
2 : an individual who roams about aimlessly
- nomad adjective
- nomadism
just for your edification! thank you, and goodnight.
Why make it that difficult for yourself or the hapless developer? Just use this 384meg ramdrive as your swapdisk.. I don't know how useful it would be for Linux, but for someone running a windows based system, having 384 megabytes of rather fast, non-hdd swap space would be A Good Thing, especially for those doing desktop publishing or graphic manipulation where it is very likely that there will be things being paged in and out all the time..
:)
The volatility of the ram wouldn't be a problem; a swapfile isn't really very useful after the system has shutdown. And, you wouldn't have to worry about having incriminating stuff or passwords left in the swapspace for some nosy Hacker, bent on destruction (as we well know they all are), to go peeking through
The only real possible problem is that the datarate could be somewhat slow. But, the benefit of the extremely fast seek time (plus having the swapfile be on a different drive than the actual application/data) i suppose would make up for the slower overall throughput.
Just an idea... (it's probably redundant by now, too... oh well)
boy, do i wish i was a moderator right now; this msg would get all my points as "insightful"
you have managed to sum up the entire hopeless media situation in three simple sentences... hyping up a completely nonexistant problem in order to freak out the population and increase ratings, while totally glossing over any REAL problems, like bad parenting and the destruction of free speech.
and we wonder why everyone is so paranoid.
oh well...
Isn't it obvious?
When you buy anything which comes with a rebate form, you're paying full price, **including sales tax** on the **full** price.
Herein lies the conspiracy: If the product was simply sold at a reduced price, the sales tax would be lower and hence the government would get less money!
But no, instead, the vile suits decide to tempt people with the thought of getting money back, rather than the more sensible reduced price, and hence guarantee that the government gets sales tax on the $35!
it's so obvious!
hehe
anyone who is familiar with statistics should know the meaning of the word "outlier". basically, it's a point in a set of data which is quite obviously FAR away from the "normal" range of data.
all the fear about video games and movies and things causing violence are being spurred up because of the extreme nature of outliers.
to be more specific...
If the 1st paragraph of an article was something like this:
It is now the 1st anniversary of the release of the video game, featuring the most stunning, realistic, and gratuitous gore and violence ever seen in a video game. It has been played by people ranging from 6 to 110 years old. More than 100 million people have played this game [ok this may be a -little- excessive for a game, but it's possible; just go with it]. A month ago, a teenager killed 7 of his friends at school, and then shot himself.
The distraught parents have blamed the shootings on the video game the male played every night, as well as to the heavy metal music he listened to. As a result of this killing spree, the game has been banned in 6 countries and 48 states. Stringent regulations are to be enacted, and the developers are being sued...
------
now, while this is obviously fiction, you have to admit that it is slightly plausible.
Anyway, back to the point about the outliers. 100 million people played the game, one of which decided to go kill some people. No one who is emotionally stable and has had a decent moral education from family or even school (heh. like that'll ever happen) is going to go and kill people because he listened to Eminem or played a disgustingly violent game.
The only kids or adults who are going to kill people are individuals who have serious mental or social problems. However, no one ever wants to admit that their child had problems, or (heaven forbid) that they were ****ty-a$$ parents, so the blame has to be placed elsewhere.
And Now, this is REALLY where the outlier part comes in:
No one ever hears about the 99,999,999 people who played the game without problem. EVERYONE hears about the psycho kid who kills people. Obviously, the media never reports the fact that the parents never taught the kid anything, or that they were diagnosed sociopathic, or very visibly disturbed. The media, however, does report that the kid played this video game.
*BOOM*
So here are the problems:
1: The single outlying event is totally sensationalizd, completely ignoring the countless millions of people who were not affected at all.
2: No one ever hears anything other than the fact that the kid played the game and listened to metal. Because people need to explain things, the only data they have to go on is the game and the music; thus that is the cause.
3: people become enraged because the blame (as always) falls on the same industries; hence they become open to submitting to useless laws which will a: hurt the 99,999,999 normal people and b: will not help the 1 unfortunately disturbed person.
well gee, this is a really really long posting...
well, to summarize quickly:
The single freak person out of millions is reported, blame is placed on video games because no one is willing to blame the parents or the schools, hence millions of regular people are inconvenienced and the disturbed individuals are left with the same problems anyway.
Thus
Society is screwed up because (at least in the US):
-no one is ever willing to blame the parents or the schools, because that's not P.C.
-because the blame is never placed where it is due, people expend freakish amounts of energy to quash and destroy things which are not a problem at all, like games and movies, and totally ignore the REAL problems, like improper parenting and school systems that are afraid to teach real morals, with the consequence that nothing is solved and innocent people die because no one ever seriously tries to help the ones who truely need it.
ok well i'm sorry bout the length of this, but this is an issue which i feel very strongly about, and i can't cut it short. If you actually read it, thank you, and hopefully i won't get modded down.
if you disagree, plz reply via email because i'd be most willing to have a serious debate with someone about this.
final note: i'm 17, and i've been playing violent games, listening to extremely deathy music, and watching violence on tv and in the movies since a tender young age. However, my parents have taught me from an even younger age that violence is bad, and that there is a difference between fake and real violence. So, while i laugh when a monster goes up in a fountain of blood or the badguy gets hit by a train, when I see real people being killed on the news, I feel physically ill. What frightens me most, however, are people who are never told that there is a line between real and fake violence, and (worse still) that there are people who do not realize that it is possible for people to tell the difference.
sigh.
conspiracy time..
isn't it possible that this whole Moore's law thing has been mutated into a method of chip companies extorting as much money as possible from us? I mean, the companies know about Moore's Law, and consequently, they feel that it's perfectly justifiable to release chips in minor increments, while hyping them up as "the next big thing", thus making it possible for people to keep buying and buying and buying...
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense for the chip companies to just do something drastic and instead of moving up in 100 or 200mhz increments, and instead jumping up by gigahertz and nixing the entire 1-10 ghz range? If, all of a sudden, a company released a 10ghz chip, wouldn't they seal their hold on the market for an extremely long time? Even if the chip overheated and had to be underclocked to 50% speed, they'd still be wicked fast.... I'm sure the R&D costs to get from 1ghz to 10ghz in one fell swoop would be enormous, but I'm sure that as long as they could produce them at reasonable cost and sell them at a price that's affordable for anything under the level of Superpower Government, the demand would be so high that they could still turn a profit.
Not to mention the fact that having a 10x speed advantage over the nearest competitors would give them a fairly decent leeway until the rest of the industry caught up.
So, instead of sticking to Moore's law and using it as an excuse to just make more slightly faster chips, why doesn't some company just focus itself completely on developing an Extremely Fast CPU.
somehow i have a horrible feeling this message is somewhat redundant.. oh well... just my $.02k
-ws/dtl
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had the idea in Footfall.. the fithp had laser weapons in orbit and on ships such that they could destroy anything that resembled military equipment...
they also had big self-propelled metal bars hanging around in orbit which could be directed down upon an area, functioning as thin, heavy, guided meteors...
In the book "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson (I think...), a group of kids actually use an EMP to fry the computers at a company that was being raided by the police, in an attempt to "help". However, unfortunately, the kids fried the computers moments before the Hero was able to delete all the incriminating evidence off the hard drives. woops. :)
>Also note the 60s/70s views that we'd all be
>living on the moon by now. Clearly, optimism was
>high regarding the continuation of technological
>innovation, but what people forgot to take into
>account was that the research currently on the
>bleeding edge is so complex to maintain and
>manage...
I'm afraid that I disagree with your opinion as to why the space program did not continue on to colonization of the moon. You said that the technology was too complex for anybody to understand (at least that's how it read to me) and so consequently it collapsed and wasn't maintained and managed any more.
However, I think the reason why the space program fizzled out to the (still great, but not quite as earth-shattering) level it is today is simply because it did not fit into modern society properly.
NASA Right now could arrange a flight to the moon, by constructing some new launchers and capsules and the like; I mean, they must still have all the Apollo blueprints. However, they could probably do it far more safely, and more effectively from a research standpoint. However, this would cost a significant amount of Money, and would, barring some freak discovery, not result in any noticable "gain" for a long time. And this, unfortunately, is where the problem becomes evident.
In the 60's, because of the influence of certain Presidents, people were willing to see their tax money go into a space program, mainly because it allowed them to advance in the Space Race with the Russians and various others.
Now, however, Society has "developed" (I use that word with some trepidation) to the point where if it doesn't provide instant gratification it really isn't worth it, and consequently, no one is willing to pour billions of dollars into, say, the colonization of the Moon, because they won't see any appreciable "benefit" for many years.
Therfore, as I see it, the crux of the issue, the main reason why the Space Race fizzled out as it did, is not because the technology was too complex and therefore unattainable, (after all, if a human being invented it, surely another human being could improve on it, much less figure out how it works), but that Society as a whole is simply too cheap to obsessed with instant gratification to support it.
This is simply the opinion of one man, and I will be more than willing to listen to anyone's reaction, providing it contains even a modicum of intelligence beyond "you're wrong. period."
-ws/dtl
Isn't it really freaky how we're struggling to get things running at "Windows Performance"? /. we talk about how slow windows is in relation to anything, but here we are talking about the life-and-death quest to seek parity with Windows Performance..
I mean, in some threads on
just a random thought that occured to me..
it is kinda scary though, isn't it?
-ws
Ok there is one thing which has always annoyed me about discussions about hacking:
WHY Does everybody keep making stupid analogies?
Breaking into a bank or looking into somebody's window is basically completely different than hacking into somebody's computer. And here is why, as I see it.
Nobody breaks into a bank just to 'prove that they can do it', and certainly after one has broken into a bank, one does not leave a little note saying how they did it. The sole reason for illegally breaking into a bank is to steal money.
Peeking into a window is somewhat closer to what hacking entails, but not really. When one peeks into a window, again the most likely reasons are to case the place to plan a robbery or to fulfill some voyeuristic inclination. There is also an immediate destruction of privacy. Again, there is no reason for the perpetrator to 'lave a note' to say what they had done. The entire point of peeking into a window is to do something WITHOUT BEING NOTICED.
When one hacks into a system, it is usually immediately obvious to the owner of the system if they're actually paying attention. Also, there are a variety of motivations for hacking (As compared to breaking into a bank or peeking into windows). Hackers could be hacking to actually destroy the target system, for the sheer hell of it, a lack of anything better to do, or with a genuine intent to help the owner of the system out. I don't really want to go into the merits of hacking for the powers of good, because that's a whole different topic. Anyway...
When the media or ppl on the internet start making analogies between hacking and anything in 'real life', they're instantly causing confusion. Cyberspace and Realspace are almost completely different. There are some rules which are the same, like not stealing and destroying things which are the same as in the real world, but that's where any similarity ends. When someone breaks into anything in the real world, it's essentially always for a bad purpose. As soon as an analogy links a physical crime with a virtual one, the situation is instantly clouded by lots of garbage that really doesn't apply.
Sigh... analogies are here to stay. Just an idea.
-ws
To solve the radiation problem, couldn't you put a conductive screen around the outsides of the case, which is then connected to the ground? (next to the plexiglass in the PVC Case) Microwave ovens do that sort of thing to prevent the user from being nuked when they're looking in the window, and i'm sure that technique could be adapted to mostly transparent radiation protection.. just an idea..
AFAIK most companies pay for bandwidth for their service, as in a certain amount of money per certain amount of data coming across the line. Surely this episode must be costing M$ a fairly large sum of money, as 250 packets/second would add up pretty darn quick. I also hate to think of how much the average net lag has gone up because of this. One second? two?
ahh, but brand new roads can be a bad thing. My mother's street was cambered incorrectly around a corner (instead of going Up on the outside of the turn it went down) so lots of people had fun going around too fast and flying off the road into people's gardens, etc.
Hey, they (the little green men) struck first. Remember that mars probe that 'disappeared'?
:)
Don't forget about those rockets that are 'exploding' for 'no apparent reason' or 'software bugs'; it's actually part of the conspiracy: As the rockets are blowing up they're actually firing shells of a sort at various planets, masked by the explosion. Pretty sneaky, eh?