Be aware that the Tektronix ink is still very expensive. As I remember when I was considering printers, the cost per page was more than double that of an inkjet.
That said, the quality is extremely high. If you are printing for sale (Store window ads, for example), the Tektronix may be the way to go.
Quite simply, they put small Windows-like -[]X sets in the corner, and if you click on them, it takes you to their ad. They also put a "close" button there. Click unthinkingly (oh, yeah, another popup. Let me close it... whoops), and you get diverted to their adspace.
So yeah, I've been tricked.
But that said, I cannot see this lawsuit as a good thing. They're bad. They're evil, though not extremely so. But yeah, they're evil. But does that justify even more evil [which lawsuits, being an economic type of warfare really are]?
This is kindof how I view the US Government vs. Al Quaida. Should I really be rooting for one side or the other? Both have regularly demonstrated that they are evil. Heaven forbid! I'd rather root for both to survive another day, and learn to be good instead, even if there was only a slim chance of that happening.
In the same way, I can't root for DoubleClick or the ClassActionLawsuit. I'd rather that both sides just learned how to behave.
Last year, someone managed to patent the wheel as a joke.
Ford has just signed a licensing agreement, as has Goodyear [actually, a product-wide exclusive! How's that for thinking outside the box?].
Cannondale and Huffy, on the other hand, have decided to make things hard on themselves, and indeed it is going to be hard on them.
One might think the same about Piper Aircraft, but actually their legal adviser just laughed and commented that Piper gets sued out of existance every ten years anyhow, and they weren't going to pay it any more attention. After further investigation, we agreed that it was not worth pursuing that venue farther, and offered them a different licensing package which they accepted. Indeed, their lawyer, after looking at it, was quoted as saying "Huh, no kidding!".
So let me explain something about "humor", and "clue". Clues are kindof like the back end of a hammer: either it has one, or it doesn't. Humor is much the same, but if you don't have it, especially summertimes, you can go to a Good Humor Bar(TM), and get a sense of humor. But if you don't have a clue, please kindly refrain from moderating.
(1) Before too long *will* be less than $3500, if they aren't already (2) Will quite soon be able to run Linux [hop over to Debian, you'll see that Debian is quite into porting their systems] (3) If they're able to run Linux, will also be able to run AIX?
I wonder if this is what IBM is thinking as well, in general. But I'd bet that these low-end servers either will be a lot like a Mac, or else they'll actually be more expensive than a Mac before three years runs out. Mac, though they don't sell like M$, still has a ton of sales every year.
It's good to see people USING technology and developing it properly, rather than abusing it, and undermining the nation. I think IP in general is a bad thing, but I think breaking the law is worse, because it destroys trust, encourages looting, and thus destroys the economy.
What is wrong with the law is that intellectual property is not truly property. Property is that which can be defended against other people. But ideas (thought) cannot be defended. Therefore, if the government is going to try to claim that ideas are property, then it's going to have to try to control everybody's every thought and action.
That's going to eventually break the government, but it will make tons of people miserable meanwhile.
So yes, there's something wrong with the law.
Meanwhile, you have "great men" who view their subjects as sheep, sometimes to be sheared, and often to be eaten. They feel that the more people they can control, the greater they are. [Note that to me, saying "he's a great man" is not a complement.] So anyhow, they find that by passing these laws, they can chalk up more control in their own personal scoreboard. So yes, there's something wrong with them, too.
But now we get to the people breaking the law. First of all, if you are going to break with a government, you really ought to do it completely. To break just in part, is kindof like lying to other people around you. This is also damaging, because it destroys respect for the law, and since many are limited not by morality but by legality, destroys the line that many will not cross that keeps society whole. Yeah, that's right: the legal line is artificial, but it often approximates the moral line. When you wipe it out, you cease to give people a warning that they may be starting to hurt others.
So if you're going to break completely, there's two ways of doing it. If a whole bunch want to break together, they declare their independance, and then get slaughtered. The other option is that you or a whole bunch of people move somewhere else where the government is good, or (alternatively) where you can defend yourselves, and do. En masse. Maybe, you go and buy a good chunk of Zimbabwe at a low low price. Then it one week you move a whole merc army in, armed to the teeth, and declare independence. Then once the bullets settle down, you move your builders in.
I, though, listened to Ken Hamblin, the Black Avenger, and simply found a better country. That's really what I suggest doing.
It seems to me that in the book "Hope's Edge", the sequel to "Diet for a small planet", there was mention about how Gerber wanted to assure that there was no genetically modified corn in their product. In the end, becomes the genetically modified corn cross-polinated the real corn, they had to give up corn and corn products entirely.
Okay. That's their business decision, though actually, in my book, they should have been able to sue the firms that made and distributed the genetically modified corn, because they contaminated Gerber's food supply chain. But that's not the way it works.
In reality, the Gen-Eng companies sued the rest of the corn farmers for using their corn genes IP (remember, they contaminated the public domain stuff) and won.
I don't know what the proper response is: maybe the Amish way of doing things. Maybe, just leaving, and letting them find their own way, or not. But something is wrong.
It's not a case of George Bush. George Bush, the "gentler, kinder Republican", is no different than Al Gore, the "fiscally responsible Democrat". Nor is he different than any of the people we have in the Senate or Congress.
If this were just a case of George Bush, then no company would jump, because they have to deal with what comes four years later.
This is a case where the system is locked up, and the largest companies know it. This is a case of one party rule, and it ain't Democrats. It ain't Republicans. It's rule by the United DemPublicans.
Now, what you are seeing is that looting is becoming standard. Here's the process described to me: As looting overwhelms production, money and credit becomes pointless: you're likely to have it stolen anyways. Therefore, the economy shifts from a capital-based economy to one based on connections and trust.
But an economy based on connections and trust is a lot less efficient than one based on capital. If you will, in a capital economy, you can trust everybody. Therefore, you can do business with everybody. That allows competition (but does not mandate it), which increases the efficiency of the system. But if you're limited to doing business with just those whom you know, then all economic activity must be local, and specialization is very limited. Therefore the advantages of mass production are also limited, and the efficiency is less.
So then you get masse starvation, since the same amount of land cannot provide as much food as it used to. When that happens, being "on top" becomes a matter of survival for those who are on top. They *have* to trample those beneath them to maintain their position, but in so doing, if they lose their position, they are completely destroyed.
So what happens then is that you get every level of power battling every other similar level of power, and the most violent battles happen at the top. In such as situation, it is easy to get an emperor. Problem is, though, that as any emperor comes to the throne, he becomes a target for assassination by others near the top in a version of "king of the mountain". So the emperorship becomes more and more risky, until nobody will take it: to take it means to be shackled, then killed.
At that point, the old government disolves, and you end up with lower governments breaking up into regions.
Meanwhile, though, those "governments" that stay out of wars more rather than less end up being more prosperous. Thus the cycle starts over again, as you progress to peace and capitalism, then competition for the most peaceful capitalistic system of all, and then economic dominance followed by resentment of the dominated countries, followed by attacks against the economy of the top country, followed by war after war after war. All on the order of about a thousand years or so.
Oh? An intruder? Okay. I'll keep oper..a....tiing as no..r...m.a BSOD..
(reboot)
Okay, no intruuuud...BSOD
(reboot)
Good morning Dave! Where would you liiik.....e... t...o.... g....oooooo... [I can feel my brain going].... BSOD.
Actually, considering that this is DARPA, maybe this is a good thing. Maybe they will host the next war, and no one will come! Really!
[Please note: I have the right to say this. I have/had a dual boot system, and my VFAT partition has finally corrupted beyond repair. Linux can read it, but Windows can't get past square one. Tomorrow I will reformat the disk [isn't it lovely that I could save my data with Linux].]
Listen, my internet provider offers 120Mbit internet for sale. Since it was only about $5 more expensive than 20Mbit internet, I got it... and found that its real rate was 8kBit. No joke: they'd overloaded their access lines.
Now, that is one problem that ISPs have, but there are lots others. The article said that this guy has yes-men everywhere. I could see where the yes-men were not telling him everything, and the whole thing starts to bog down before it ever gets profitable. Finally, you wind up with him in debt.
That said, this guy seems to know his history. With USD3.4 billion in debt, those banks are going to have to make him the governor of some small war-torn province so that he can pay them back. And he's then going to offer "pay double taxes during my term, and get an exemption: it will cover 3 terms!" Then he's going to use that money to raise an army, whip the opposition armies, and then come, see, conquer.
Well, maybe not. But if that isn't his backup plan, I think it's quite possible he's in a WorldCom load of trouble.
I loved your 3rd-to-last paragraph. It sounds positive, but unfortunately, look at this conversation I just had with my brother a few hours ago:
I wonder what history shows in such a time. Do you know? What is the next failure mode? Because that failure mode looks like it will occur on a worldwide scale.
The collapse of the Roman Empire or the Ming Empire are probably good examples. The increasing plunder drives people into feudal (same as communist) societies, which rely on loyalty and status rather than money as the basis for exchange of goods and services. Most of the population starves to death due to the great inefficiency of the system. Those at the top of the collapsing government involve themselves in intrigue, as they desperately try to stay on top, as a matter of survival. Increasing turnover at the top sucks up all the resources of the government, leaving anarchy, in which new powers arise.
Eventually the old government dissolves because no one wants a powerless position that guarantees death by intrigue of the person who holds it. In the meantime wars rage among the new powers, as they sort out their relationships. Eventually, those powers which stay at peace for longer periods of time grow larger capitalist economies than their neighbors, and thus gain more power than their neighbors.
I rather expect it will be good and bad, but meanwhile it will pay to be very alert. It actually will not pay to fight for power. Isn't there a Chinese martial art that involves going limp? Something like that might be useful to learn for our human interactions: let the waves wash over, and be as charitable and just as you can, meanwhile.
Tom Brokaw: "And we have 500 million votes for Candidate A, 300 million votes for Candidate B, and 700 million votes for Candidate C."
Dan Rather: "Well, considering that we have only 400 million American citizens, do you think that it's possible that there was some voter fraud?"
Tom Brokaw: "Actually, I do, Dan, especially since this was only the pilot program."
Dan Rather: "How do you think this could have happened?"... and thus the paperless electronic voting plans get scrapped. Or we get an all-new Congress and President, which is almost as good.
My brother predicted this, about 4 years back. Essentially, he said that America had been the vanguard (note the past-perfect tense) of justice; this made American business more profitable, and meant that if other countries wanted to keep up, they had to have some reasonable fraction of the same kind of justice.
But as our ignoring the constitution accelerated, it became clear that American justice was not functioning properly, and American business immediately began to hurt. So my brother saw that this was going to happen [remember, 4 years ago we were still in the boom], and predicted that we would see petty dictatorships rise everywhere. Indeed, it happens.
Oh, well. It is indeed a sad day. Europe had the chance to become the leader of justice, and indeed when Lithuania was considering entering, I considered it more of an advantage than a disadvantage, provided that there was good will.
After all, more free trade is better than less free trade. More natural rights is better than more granted rights. Better for the economy, better for the human condition, better, even, for morality.
It seemed there was more of all that. Now I begin to wonder.
I know Assembly, and 80x8n assembly, especially. So that was no problem. I could follow the basic plot; I didn't bother to try to read most of the code, but when I did, it wasn't hard to read. The article was pretty good that way.
But it looks to me like the article really didn't tell how the 007 Save Game was hacked. Rather, the article says "yeah it was hacked, and here's the neat part." But that's where it stops.
There isn't enough info here to reproduce it, unless you already are into hacking the XBox.
But that said, I wonder why [and maybe someone who does understand this hack can explain] the XBox-Linux people at sourceforge don't rewrite their install CDs, and give instructions, to allow a person to use this weakness to install Linux from a single CD.
Could it be that this hack really isn't "out there" yet? That the "Free the XBox" hackers are actually still in negotiations with Microsoft [or with their concrete boots at the bottom of the river]?
BTW... if anyone can answer this, I'd appreciate it. Over at Xbox-Linux, I see debian dists [nice], Mandrake, and some others. I see reference to the 007 hack. But I don't see any combination that allows a simple Linux user to pop 007 and one or two CDs, and install Linux.
Does anyone know if that will be coming out? Because if it does, then I seriously need to consider this solution.
Just looking at this, I can think of something I'd like to do, and it might work.
Suppose I wanted to set up a Virtual Linux server? What I might do is buy one DELL server, 4-5 XBoxes,2 ethernet boxes, and one copy of 007, allowing a modless Linux reboot. That would be a serious system, and expandable, too.
Although 65 MB of RAM isn't a lot, if you don't have a lot of processing to do, then it might be just fine.
Moreover, Microsoft said that they're more focused on mod chips. That being the case, it looks like the modless hack might not be such a bad idea.
My big question, though, would be whether XBOX Linux is up to the task. For example, is there an XBOX GCC? are all the ports well mapped? Ideally, is there an XBOX Debian?
The flight profile of the Black Armadillo starts out in a familiar fashion, but shortly after reaching the peak altitude of 107 km (67 miles), it operates in a manner which can only be described as "ground breaking."
I don't think I want to be a passenger in that particular entry. Breaking ground is a pretty severe way of landing, in my opinion.
I'd really also have to ask, "does this apply to people with assets"?
Because I don't have the assets to carry out a lot of my better ideas. I've had a lot of good ones, and a lot more bad ones, while I've been married; some of them have been very difficult, such as a reformulation of the Discrete Fourier Transform that allowed me to get a solution that seems marginally faster than the FFT. Honestly, it wasn't worth the effort, but in a way, it was, because my method also allowed me to better see what was happening with the DFT. Of course, that took me several weeks to get that far, and my wife was very patient.
But it's not just time, it's also money. Of course, it would help if I was paid decently.
So I kindof wonder: if our companies paid our workers decently across the board, would we suddenly see geniuses popping up out of married life? Would we suddenly see them popping up in the third and second world?
I rather suspect we would.
Perhaps it's a choice: would we rather have "great men" who can point to "great accomplishments"? Or would we rather have geniuses. Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, Prime ministers, some company directors, all probably would much prefer to have great men than to have any geniuses -- but I think I'd rather have the geniuses. I dunno, I just haven't gotten too thrilled lately to see More Great Men (TM) walking around in my lifetime than ever before.
If I remember correctly, Gorbachev was the one who quite correctly decided that it was better to let go of the reins than to switch to a hot war.
But the other major influences on the end of the Cold War were the Catholic Church [Pope JPII], the Polish unions, and the Baltic separatists.
Reagan simply accelerated things. At that, though, I'm not sure that Russia isn't burying the US, by having let go of the reins for what turns out to have been a very short time. [I consider Putin to be close to a communist dictator. Like, 10%, but on a political scale that's very close indeed.]
That said, I do love America, and I did enjoy living on the James while my wife worked at NNS.
Slashdot Mirror
Be aware that the Tektronix ink is still very expensive. As I remember when I was considering printers, the cost per page was more than double that of an inkjet.
That said, the quality is extremely high. If you are printing for sale (Store window ads, for example), the Tektronix may be the way to go.
But you have to put it *all* in French. He Pierre, m'curriellez ces chiffres de ventes.
Quite simply, they put small Windows-like -[]X sets in the corner, and if you click on them, it takes you to their ad. They also put a "close" button there. Click unthinkingly (oh, yeah, another popup. Let me close it... whoops), and you get diverted to their adspace.
So yeah, I've been tricked.
But that said, I cannot see this lawsuit as a good thing. They're bad. They're evil, though not extremely so. But yeah, they're evil. But does that justify even more evil [which lawsuits, being an economic type of warfare really are]?
This is kindof how I view the US Government vs. Al Quaida. Should I really be rooting for one side or the other? Both have regularly demonstrated that they are evil. Heaven forbid! I'd rather root for both to survive another day, and learn to be good instead, even if there was only a slim chance of that happening.
In the same way, I can't root for DoubleClick or the ClassActionLawsuit. I'd rather that both sides just learned how to behave.
Ford has just signed a licensing agreement, as has Goodyear [actually, a product-wide exclusive! How's that for thinking outside the box?].
Cannondale and Huffy, on the other hand, have decided to make things hard on themselves, and indeed it is going to be hard on them.
One might think the same about Piper Aircraft, but actually their legal adviser just laughed and commented that Piper gets sued out of existance every ten years anyhow, and they weren't going to pay it any more attention. After further investigation, we agreed that it was not worth pursuing that venue farther, and offered them a different licensing package which they accepted. Indeed, their lawyer, after looking at it, was quoted as saying "Huh, no kidding!".
Okay, enough pulling your leg. Joke's over.
But you guys, last time I posted a joke like this, one really stupid person rated it "informative", after which lots of others rated it troll. I honestly *never* expected it to get an "informative", or even get a bad reaction. I expected people to laugh and go on.
So let me explain something about "humor", and "clue". Clues are kindof like the back end of a hammer: either it has one, or it doesn't. Humor is much the same, but if you don't have it, especially summertimes, you can go to a Good Humor Bar(TM), and get a sense of humor. But if you don't have a clue, please kindly refrain from moderating.
You mean it? We'll be free?
No overlords? You're serious?!?!??!!!
No kidding!
... Wouldn't it be valid to say that G5's
(1) Before too long *will* be less than $3500, if they aren't already
(2) Will quite soon be able to run Linux [hop over to Debian, you'll see that Debian is quite into porting their systems]
(3) If they're able to run Linux, will also be able to run AIX?
I wonder if this is what IBM is thinking as well, in general. But I'd bet that these low-end servers either will be a lot like a Mac, or else they'll actually be more expensive than a Mac before three years runs out. Mac, though they don't sell like M$, still has a ton of sales every year.
It's good to see people USING technology and developing it properly, rather than abusing it, and undermining the nation. I think IP in general is a bad thing, but I think breaking the law is worse, because it destroys trust, encourages looting, and thus destroys the economy.
What is wrong with the law is that intellectual property is not truly property. Property is that which can be defended against other people. But ideas (thought) cannot be defended. Therefore, if the government is going to try to claim that ideas are property, then it's going to have to try to control everybody's every thought and action.
That's going to eventually break the government, but it will make tons of people miserable meanwhile.
So yes, there's something wrong with the law.
Meanwhile, you have "great men" who view their subjects as sheep, sometimes to be sheared, and often to be eaten. They feel that the more people they can control, the greater they are. [Note that to me, saying "he's a great man" is not a complement.] So anyhow, they find that by passing these laws, they can chalk up more control in their own personal scoreboard. So yes, there's something wrong with them, too.
But now we get to the people breaking the law. First of all, if you are going to break with a government, you really ought to do it completely. To break just in part, is kindof like lying to other people around you. This is also damaging, because it destroys respect for the law, and since many are limited not by morality but by legality, destroys the line that many will not cross that keeps society whole. Yeah, that's right: the legal line is artificial, but it often approximates the moral line. When you wipe it out, you cease to give people a warning that they may be starting to hurt others.
So if you're going to break completely, there's two ways of doing it. If a whole bunch want to break together, they declare their independance, and then get slaughtered. The other option is that you or a whole bunch of people move somewhere else where the government is good, or (alternatively) where you can defend yourselves, and do. En masse. Maybe, you go and buy a good chunk of Zimbabwe at a low low price. Then it one week you move a whole merc army in, armed to the teeth, and declare independence. Then once the bullets settle down, you move your builders in.
I, though, listened to Ken Hamblin, the Black Avenger, and simply found a better country. That's really what I suggest doing.
Okay. That's their business decision, though actually, in my book, they should have been able to sue the firms that made and distributed the genetically modified corn, because they contaminated Gerber's food supply chain. But that's not the way it works.
In reality, the Gen-Eng companies sued the rest of the corn farmers for using their corn genes IP (remember, they contaminated the public domain stuff) and won.
I don't know what the proper response is: maybe the Amish way of doing things. Maybe, just leaving, and letting them find their own way, or not. But something is wrong.
It's not a case of George Bush. George Bush, the "gentler, kinder Republican", is no different than Al Gore, the "fiscally responsible Democrat". Nor is he different than any of the people we have in the Senate or Congress.
If this were just a case of George Bush, then no company would jump, because they have to deal with what comes four years later.
This is a case where the system is locked up, and the largest companies know it. This is a case of one party rule, and it ain't Democrats. It ain't Republicans. It's rule by the United DemPublicans.
Now, what you are seeing is that looting is becoming standard. Here's the process described to me: As looting overwhelms production, money and credit becomes pointless: you're likely to have it stolen anyways. Therefore, the economy shifts from a capital-based economy to one based on connections and trust.
But an economy based on connections and trust is a lot less efficient than one based on capital. If you will, in a capital economy, you can trust everybody. Therefore, you can do business with everybody. That allows competition (but does not mandate it), which increases the efficiency of the system. But if you're limited to doing business with just those whom you know, then all economic activity must be local, and specialization is very limited. Therefore the advantages of mass production are also limited, and the efficiency is less.
So then you get masse starvation, since the same amount of land cannot provide as much food as it used to. When that happens, being "on top" becomes a matter of survival for those who are on top. They *have* to trample those beneath them to maintain their position, but in so doing, if they lose their position, they are completely destroyed.
So what happens then is that you get every level of power battling every other similar level of power, and the most violent battles happen at the top. In such as situation, it is easy to get an emperor. Problem is, though, that as any emperor comes to the throne, he becomes a target for assassination by others near the top in a version of "king of the mountain". So the emperorship becomes more and more risky, until nobody will take it: to take it means to be shackled, then killed.
At that point, the old government disolves, and you end up with lower governments breaking up into regions.
Meanwhile, though, those "governments" that stay out of wars more rather than less end up being more prosperous. Thus the cycle starts over again, as you progress to peace and capitalism, then competition for the most peaceful capitalistic system of all, and then economic dominance followed by resentment of the dominated countries, followed by attacks against the economy of the top country, followed by war after war after war. All on the order of about a thousand years or so.
Oh? An intruder? Okay. I'll keep oper..a....tiing as no..r...m.a BSOD..
... t...o.... g....oooooo ... [I can feel my brain going].... BSOD.
(reboot)
Okay, no intruuuud...BSOD
(reboot)
Good morning Dave! Where would you liiik.....e
Actually, considering that this is DARPA, maybe this is a good thing. Maybe they will host the next war, and no one will come! Really!
[Please note: I have the right to say this. I have/had a dual boot system, and my VFAT partition has finally corrupted beyond repair. Linux can read it, but Windows can't get past square one. Tomorrow I will reformat the disk [isn't it lovely that I could save my data with Linux].]
Listen, my internet provider offers 120Mbit internet for sale. Since it was only about $5 more expensive than 20Mbit internet, I got it... and found that its real rate was 8kBit. No joke: they'd overloaded their access lines.
Now, that is one problem that ISPs have, but there are lots others. The article said that this guy has yes-men everywhere. I could see where the yes-men were not telling him everything, and the whole thing starts to bog down before it ever gets profitable. Finally, you wind up with him in debt.
That said, this guy seems to know his history. With USD3.4 billion in debt, those banks are going to have to make him the governor of some small war-torn province so that he can pay them back. And he's then going to offer "pay double taxes during my term, and get an exemption: it will cover 3 terms!" Then he's going to use that money to raise an army, whip the opposition armies, and then come, see, conquer.
Well, maybe not. But if that isn't his backup plan, I think it's quite possible he's in a WorldCom load of trouble.
I wonder what history shows in such a time. Do you know? What
is the next failure mode? Because that failure mode looks like it
will occur on a worldwide scale.
The collapse of the Roman Empire or the Ming Empire are probably good examples. The increasing plunder drives people into feudal (same as communist) societies, which rely on loyalty and status rather than money as the basis for exchange of goods and services. Most of the population starves to death due to the great inefficiency of the system. Those at the top of the collapsing government involve themselves in intrigue, as they desperately try to stay on top, as a matter of survival. Increasing turnover at the top sucks up all the resources of the government, leaving anarchy, in which new powers arise.
Eventually the old government dissolves because no one wants a powerless position that guarantees death by intrigue of the person who holds it. In the meantime wars rage among the new powers, as they sort out their relationships. Eventually, those powers which stay at peace for longer periods of time grow larger capitalist economies than their neighbors, and thus gain more power than their neighbors.
I rather expect it will be good and bad, but meanwhile it will pay to be very alert. It actually will not pay to fight for power. Isn't there a Chinese martial art that involves going limp? Something like that might be useful to learn for our human interactions: let the waves wash over, and be as charitable and just as you can, meanwhile.
Unfortunately or fortunately [I have a lot of work], my bandwidth won't handle this too easily.
Do you have a link to a spoiler [storyline]? Or can you tell what it is, approximately?
... especially if it is written in Active-X:
... and thus the paperless electronic voting plans get scrapped. Or we get an all-new Congress and President, which is almost as good.
Tom Brokaw: "And we have 500 million votes for Candidate A, 300 million votes for Candidate B, and 700 million votes for Candidate C."
Dan Rather: "Well, considering that we have only 400 million American citizens, do you think that it's possible that there was some voter fraud?"
Tom Brokaw: "Actually, I do, Dan, especially since this was only the pilot program."
Dan Rather: "How do you think this could have happened?"
My brother predicted this, about 4 years back. Essentially, he said that America had been the vanguard (note the past-perfect tense) of justice; this made American business more profitable, and meant that if other countries wanted to keep up, they had to have some reasonable fraction of the same kind of justice.
But as our ignoring the constitution accelerated, it became clear that American justice was not functioning properly, and American business immediately began to hurt. So my brother saw that this was going to happen [remember, 4 years ago we were still in the boom], and predicted that we would see petty dictatorships rise everywhere. Indeed, it happens.
Oh, well. It is indeed a sad day. Europe had the chance to become the leader of justice, and indeed when Lithuania was considering entering, I considered it more of an advantage than a disadvantage, provided that there was good will.
After all, more free trade is better than less free trade. More natural rights is better than more granted rights. Better for the economy, better for the human condition, better, even, for morality.
It seemed there was more of all that. Now I begin to wonder.
James Gold, Older brother of Thomas, says "Will not!"
Secretary of Planetary Society claims "Liar, Liar, pants on fire"
Louis Freedman picks nose while he thinks, says wife
FLASH! LOUIS FREEDMAN PICKS NOSE!
The Case of Exploding Journalists [Dave Barry]
I Do not! claims Louis Freedman on Letterman show"
I'll update this list when I see more information. This looks really interesting -- it's hitting all the major media!.
... that I didn't understand.
I didn't have to look anything up, though...
I know Assembly, and 80x8n assembly, especially. So that was no problem. I could follow the basic plot; I didn't bother to try to read most of the code, but when I did, it wasn't hard to read. The article was pretty good that way.
But it looks to me like the article really didn't tell how the 007 Save Game was hacked. Rather, the article says "yeah it was hacked, and here's the neat part." But that's where it stops.
There isn't enough info here to reproduce it, unless you already are into hacking the XBox.
But that said, I wonder why [and maybe someone who does understand this hack can explain] the XBox-Linux people at sourceforge don't rewrite their install CDs, and give instructions, to allow a person to use this weakness to install Linux from a single CD.
Could it be that this hack really isn't "out there" yet? That the "Free the XBox" hackers are actually still in negotiations with Microsoft [or with their concrete boots at the bottom of the river]?
BTW... if anyone can answer this, I'd appreciate it. Over at Xbox-Linux, I see debian dists [nice], Mandrake, and some others. I see reference to the 007 hack. But I don't see any combination that allows a simple Linux user to pop 007 and one or two CDs, and install Linux.
Does anyone know if that will be coming out? Because if it does, then I seriously need to consider this solution.
Just looking at this, I can think of something I'd like to do, and it might work.
Suppose I wanted to set up a Virtual Linux server? What I might do is buy one DELL server, 4-5 XBoxes,2 ethernet boxes, and one copy of 007, allowing a modless Linux reboot. That would be a serious system, and expandable, too.
Although 65 MB of RAM isn't a lot, if you don't have a lot of processing to do, then it might be just fine.
Moreover, Microsoft said that they're more focused on mod chips. That being the case, it looks like the modless hack might not be such a bad idea.
My big question, though, would be whether XBOX Linux is up to the task. For example, is there an XBOX GCC? are all the ports well mapped? Ideally, is there an XBOX Debian?
Thanks for the info. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that.
I don't think I want to be a passenger in that particular entry. Breaking ground is a pretty severe way of landing, in my opinion.
I'd really also have to ask, "does this apply to people with assets"?
Because I don't have the assets to carry out a lot of my better ideas. I've had a lot of good ones, and a lot more bad ones, while I've been married; some of them have been very difficult, such as a reformulation of the Discrete Fourier Transform that allowed me to get a solution that seems marginally faster than the FFT. Honestly, it wasn't worth the effort, but in a way, it was, because my method also allowed me to better see what was happening with the DFT. Of course, that took me several weeks to get that far, and my wife was very patient.
But it's not just time, it's also money. Of course, it would help if I was paid decently.
So I kindof wonder: if our companies paid our workers decently across the board, would we suddenly see geniuses popping up out of married life? Would we suddenly see them popping up in the third and second world?
I rather suspect we would.
Perhaps it's a choice: would we rather have "great men" who can point to "great accomplishments"? Or would we rather have geniuses. Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, Prime ministers, some company directors, all probably would much prefer to have great men than to have any geniuses -- but I think I'd rather have the geniuses. I dunno, I just haven't gotten too thrilled lately to see More Great Men (TM) walking around in my lifetime than ever before.
*sigh*
You mean, of course, that the US never starts anything, and has never started anything. I agree fully; our country does us proud.
If I remember correctly, Gorbachev was the one who quite correctly decided that it was better to let go of the reins than to switch to a hot war.
But the other major influences on the end of the Cold War were the Catholic Church [Pope JPII], the Polish unions, and the Baltic separatists.
Reagan simply accelerated things. At that, though, I'm not sure that Russia isn't burying the US, by having let go of the reins for what turns out to have been a very short time. [I consider Putin to be close to a communist dictator. Like, 10%, but on a political scale that's very close indeed.]
That said, I do love America, and I did enjoy living on the James while my wife worked at NNS.