Okay...so after reading the article, I see that they're trying to make it so that users can get back to the main page easily so they can get to the information they want.
Why not make it *really* easy and develop a "forward" button that would actually take you to the piece of the Mega-pagecount-poorly-indexed-searchbuttonless web portal of doom that you're really interested in? They could call it the Psychic Fast Forward or some such.
Base it off of all of the Total Information Awareness data that the government wants to gather about us, so it predicts what you want.
And then place locks on your browser so that you really only want to go to the major sites.
Then eugenically engineer society so that you don't even know that you ever wanted to go somewhere else.
Why would a rational atheist act in anyone's interest but his or her own?
They wouldn't, necessarily...but, what's your definition of "his own interest"?
I consider myself a rational atheist, yet I support the government (although not all of it's actions), give money and time to charities of my choosing (the Kidney Foundation for the most part, others as well), and generally don't go walking down the street randomly shooting AK-47s into other people's houses, even if I want their stuff.
Why? Why would I do any of these things without "God's Word" telling me to/not to?
Let's see...collective security and a social contract ensures a higher level of safety and a better standard of living for everyone, so government is a good thing.
The money and time I give to a charity today could result in the cure for a disease that afflicts friends and family members of mine. Maybe not today, but eventually hopefully.
Again, it's the social contract...if I don't shoot into my neighbor's house, he won't shoot into mine. So my security is enhanced.
I don't see how I need ten commandments, or a Torah, or whatever, to engage in rational conduct. If anything religion has always struck me as irrational..."You must believe and Worship God...yes, I know, you can't see or hear or touch him...but if you don't, then he will punish you for all eternity". Sounds kinda like my parents telling me I had to stay in bed after dark because otherwise the bogeyman would eat me to me...
So, after all those Maytag commercials advertising that their product is the quietest ever...now they'll be advertising "The TURBOBLAST 9000!!! Generates 186 decibels of ear-splitting cooling power!!!!!".
If this is so cool...how come my constantly loud neighbors haven't turned into icicles yet?
And in other news, Ken-L-Ration and Pedigree petitioned the Justice Department to begin an anti-trust investigation into predatory marketing practices related to microsoft.DOGFOOD
"We just can't compete...we know that we use high quality beef and poultry, and our customers know that, but that means we have to charge, whereas.DOGFOOD is just lowgrade horsemeat, but they can give it away."
Microdog spokesmen were overheard saying that by 2015, they intend to have upgraded their product to include.MEAT, and expected 95% of canine digestive tracts to only be compatible with.DOGFOOD extensions.
The startup is a bitch...but, if you're willing to pony up $99.99 a month for a year, they'll give you the dish, and after the year it reverts to the $59.99.
So the $450 for the dish is spread out over 12 months, at a not too too obnoxious interest rate.
And actually...latency isn't nearly the bitch some gamers make it out to be when compared to the nothing-but-packet-lag you get over the 26.4 connection the dialup provides (on a good day).
I can play Diablo II on battlenet barely...but I couldn't over Dialup. Yeah, you're right...it's 2 years out of date and lame, but it's still an improvement.
Because some of us live in *such* a rural area that the cableopolies can't make a profit running their wires to us, so it's satellite or slow dial-up (where "slow" = 24,4 on a GOOD day)
Denying Federal funding has been the U.S. Government's preferred method of enacting local change for many years now.
See Mandatory Seatbelt laws or the 21 Year old drinking age, or the 55 MPH speed limit (later changed to 65, later junked).
And it's not about browsing porn (I'll bet dollars to donuts anybody who was browsing hardcore porn on a library computer would quickly find his access to said computer cut off), it's about being forced to install software that arbitrarily removes the access for *ADULTS* to web pages based on metrics which are completely out of control of the local librarian, and for that matter generally inaccurate.
The problem isn't with "You shouldn't access Jugs Magazine on this computer." It's with "You must install software that will filter the internet on a series of arbitrarily described terms.
Add in the fact that most filtering programs these days would not only filter out "Jugs the Magazine", but also "Jugs the water carrying vessels", and it gets worse.
Filter on the word "Breast" and you filter out Breast Cancer, or the Bible for that matter (it's in there, frequently).
Trusting businesses to maintain "Black hole" lists doesn't work either, because it either becomes government supported censorship (who's paying for the filters...right...your taxes), or it becomes an easy way for political adgendas to be advanced (See the ACLU site blocked because they defend the Free Speech rights of the unpopular).
The Government shouldn't be in the business of telling me what I can see. Libraries are a function of the Government. Therefore Libraries shouldn't be in the business of telling me what I can see...Q.E.D.
Re:Security on Progressive games
on
Net Vegas
·
· Score: 2
Dude...watch the Discovery channel every now and then. It's called "a silicon chip".
I hear they've got big possibilities...
Seriously, the way it works is that when the developers of the new multi-billion slot game determine the desired odds of payout (say, one in 100 million pulls hits the big accumulating jackpot), they program the chips that go into each machine to have that 1 in 100 million shot at it.
From there, randomness handles the rest. Yes, you're right, it's only pseudo-random (since silicon doesn't do completly random), but as a previous poster said, there are a large enough number of differing seeds to make it random enough.
All the network is for is communicating what happened.
I agree that it sucks, but if the alternative out in "27500 feet from the CO, and a signal splitter in the wire, so DSL is right out" world that is so rural that the cable companies won't even touch it for tv service, never mind cable modems, is a 28.8 dialup that never gets above 16,6 (courtesy of the before mentioned signal splitters)...whatcha gonna do?
Thusfar the service isn't hideous...a little slow to start getting the file, but once it gets going...ZOOM! (Latest full version of netscape in a hair under a minute). I'm just curious if I could get rid of that annoying blue box on the taskbar...apparently not.
Good thing this is the Army and not the Navy, or else the old "If it moves, salute it, if it doesn't move, paint it gray" motto would be right out the window!
Of course...I believe the Army has the same motto...save for the global search and replace of Green for Gray
What about Satellite modems? Direcway's two way system has this "Direcway client" software that appears to be necessary for the two way connection to work at all (ie if it's disabled or turned off, the net connection goes down).
And since the connections from the satellite modem is a USB, there doesn't seem to be any way to use the Linksys router (that we bought before the installation intending to use as a firewall and to network the two PC's) as anything more than a glorified hub.
Am I wrong? Is there a way to do this? Anybody got any thoughts>?
In theory, it's because any portable electronic device is capable of acting as a low power transmitter of radio signals in the course of normal operation (that's why there's that FCC "Part A" sticker on the back of them all that talks about not being able to cause interference and must accept any interferance that comes in, yadda, yadda, yadda").
So it's theoretically possible that your gameboy's signal could jam the frequency that the pilots need for communication with the ground, or with vital control operation (which is largely done via radio waves these days).
At 30,000 feet it's not a huge deal, since in the exceptionally unlikely event something went wrong, there's enough time to straighten it out before plane hit ground and go boom. At 30 feet during takeoff, however, there is no such recovery time, hence the ban.
However, the odds of it happening are darned near astronomical in any case, since the sideband radiation caused by the gameboy would have to be right on the right frequency and strong enough to override the "correct" signal...not terribly likely.
Cell phones, though, in that they are designed to transmit signals, have much more powerful transmissions (duh...) so it's more likely they could interfere.
Okay...ummm...if they're blocking the frequencies normally used...how does my cell phone know to switch to a new frequency? Does my phone have the right transmitter to use a new frequency?
Keep in mind, my cell phone is one of those dumb "Buy the minutes as you use em" kinda things, which is a good deal seeing as how I only have to spend $15 every 90 days, as opposed to $30/month for the 10 minutes I generally use the phone.
No, I don't consider it wrong that people were against slavery, or the Holocaust, or even that they are against abortion now. Freedom of thought and political opinion and all that is absolute.
However, a site that said "Here's 35 slave owners, go get a gun and shoot them" in 1855 would have been advocating a clearly illegal act against people who were participating in a legal activity, and therefore should have been treated as "incitement to violence".
Likewise, I have no objections to a site that says "Abortion is wrong, for these 37 reasons", nor do I have any objections to a site that says "We should work to change the laws of the country to ban abortions"
However, the line is very clearly drawn at "Here's 40 Doctors who are engaging in illegal acts, you as a Christian should get a gun and KILL them!!!" (oddly enough...I've never seen a website run by a Jewish person, or a Hindu, or a NeoPagan advocating violence against abortion doctors, it's always fundamentalist Christians...)
Acting within the law to enact political change is allowable, encourageable, and even worthy. Acting OUTSIDE the law to kill those who are engaging in legal activities is not. Encouraging others to act outside the law to kill those who are engaging in legal activities is not either.
And as for the "Well, then we shouldn't have fought the Nazi's" argument...you'll notice that we didn't enter the war to save the Jews, we entered it to stop expansion...and when the Holocaust was discovered and proved, the legal system acted quite nicely in punishing most of those responsible.
Important difference, dude...
Killing of Doctors = illegal by current laws
Removing a mass of fetal matter from it's unwilling host = legal by current laws (in many places)
Abortion may or may not be morally corrupt, depending on your particular moral code, but there is an unambiguous fact, it's legal.
Not all that close, when you consider that DNA knows nothing about what's happened to you since birth in terms of did you lose an eye in a tragic carrot eating accident, or do you have a scar on your left forearm from that attack by the killer monkeys, or anything else that is nurture over nature.
OKay...if the article answers this I'm going to feel stupid, but I can't get to it right now (it's an internal network thing here)...
Would it be possible for someone to come in and buy the name "Seti@home", along with the list of signed up computers, and then use that processing time for completely other purposes that might not be nearly as desireable as scanning for intelligent life?
I know that getting out of any such trojan use would be as simple as uninstalling/turning it off, but if there's a significant group of people who aren't smart enough to find out that the hands have changed and ditch it, what keeps the person who purchases SETI@home's assets from turning all those CPU cycles into something nefarious...like cracking the encryption on bank accounts or something (you're right, that was a lame idea, but I'm sure someone would come up with a better one).
And it would seem that given the universe of AOL/Windows users, there would be a significant number of folks who would fall into that category.
Or perhaps the End User Agreement or other documents prevent this? I've never run SETI@Home, so I've never seen their agreement.
A new and cool feature would be a file system that maintained a Weblog...
Today I stored my user's tax return...what a piece of crap...he actually expects the IRS to believe that he donated 40,000 to the MDA?...I think I'll just switch a few numbers around and drop a hint to the audit hotline
Yeah, that could be good...where's the SourceForge project for this?
Given the materials necessary to create a watch, as listed in an instruction manual for watch creation, and the manual dexterity necessary to follow the instructions, a watch can be created.
According to the Bible, the materials necessary to create the Universe are...nothing.
The process isn't documented or reproducible...sorry, but God doesn't even qualify for SEI level 1...which explains rather a lot.
IANAL, but I work in a law office. Ashcroft is sued because, as the chief Prosecutor for the United States (Attorney General), he would be the person ultimately responsible for any prosecutions under the act.
Fundamentally, what's really being asked for is the Court to enjoin Ashcroft and his underlings from enforcing the law, since there is a higher law (Constitution) which overrides it.
The law would remain on the books until officially repealed, but would be unenforceable (most compilations of the U.S. Code would either mark it as ruled unconsitutional or delete it, but technically the words would still be there).
Regretfully, unless the party in question is the President, that'll never happen.
Only the President can nominate Supreme Court Justices. The Senate confirms the nomination (or rejects it).
Most Presidents don't even publish their "short lists", instead the Media has to dig it out ferretlike from who he's talking to, Appellate Justices who appear promising, etc, etc, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not make it *really* easy and develop a "forward" button that would actually take you to the piece of the Mega-pagecount-poorly-indexed-searchbuttonless web portal of doom that you're really interested in? They could call it the Psychic Fast Forward or some such.
Base it off of all of the Total Information Awareness data that the government wants to gather about us, so it predicts what you want.
And then place locks on your browser so that you really only want to go to the major sites.
Then eugenically engineer society so that you don't even know that you ever wanted to go somewhere else.
NOW we're making the web useful!!!!!!!!!!!
They wouldn't, necessarily...but, what's your definition of "his own interest"?
I consider myself a rational atheist, yet I support the government (although not all of it's actions), give money and time to charities of my choosing (the Kidney Foundation for the most part, others as well), and generally don't go walking down the street randomly shooting AK-47s into other people's houses, even if I want their stuff.
Why? Why would I do any of these things without "God's Word" telling me to/not to?
Let's see...collective security and a social contract ensures a higher level of safety and a better standard of living for everyone, so government is a good thing.
The money and time I give to a charity today could result in the cure for a disease that afflicts friends and family members of mine. Maybe not today, but eventually hopefully.
Again, it's the social contract...if I don't shoot into my neighbor's house, he won't shoot into mine. So my security is enhanced.
I don't see how I need ten commandments, or a Torah, or whatever, to engage in rational conduct. If anything religion has always struck me as irrational..."You must believe and Worship God...yes, I know, you can't see or hear or touch him...but if you don't, then he will punish you for all eternity". Sounds kinda like my parents telling me I had to stay in bed after dark because otherwise the bogeyman would eat me to me...
Elves do not exist.
-1 "Can't distinguish fantasy from reality"
You mean chickenshit, don't you?
If this is so cool...how come my constantly loud neighbors haven't turned into icicles yet?
"We just can't compete...we know that we use high quality beef and poultry, and our customers know that, but that means we have to charge, whereas .DOGFOOD is just lowgrade horsemeat, but they can give it away."
Microdog spokesmen were overheard saying that by 2015, they intend to have upgraded their product to include .MEAT, and expected 95% of canine digestive tracts to only be compatible with .DOGFOOD extensions.
Currently my Direcway service is $59.99/month.
The startup is a bitch...but, if you're willing to pony up $99.99 a month for a year, they'll give you the dish, and after the year it reverts to the $59.99.
So the $450 for the dish is spread out over 12 months, at a not too too obnoxious interest rate.
And actually...latency isn't nearly the bitch some gamers make it out to be when compared to the nothing-but-packet-lag you get over the 26.4 connection the dialup provides (on a good day).
I can play Diablo II on battlenet barely...but I couldn't over Dialup. Yeah, you're right...it's 2 years out of date and lame, but it's still an improvement.
Because some of us live in *such* a rural area that the cableopolies can't make a profit running their wires to us, so it's satellite or slow dial-up (where "slow" = 24,4 on a GOOD day)
See Mandatory Seatbelt laws or the 21 Year old drinking age, or the 55 MPH speed limit (later changed to 65, later junked).
And it's not about browsing porn (I'll bet dollars to donuts anybody who was browsing hardcore porn on a library computer would quickly find his access to said computer cut off), it's about being forced to install software that arbitrarily removes the access for *ADULTS* to web pages based on metrics which are completely out of control of the local librarian, and for that matter generally inaccurate.
Add in the fact that most filtering programs these days would not only filter out "Jugs the Magazine", but also "Jugs the water carrying vessels", and it gets worse.
Filter on the word "Breast" and you filter out Breast Cancer, or the Bible for that matter (it's in there, frequently).
Trusting businesses to maintain "Black hole" lists doesn't work either, because it either becomes government supported censorship (who's paying for the filters...right...your taxes), or it becomes an easy way for political adgendas to be advanced (See the ACLU site blocked because they defend the Free Speech rights of the unpopular).
The Government shouldn't be in the business of telling me what I can see. Libraries are a function of the Government. Therefore Libraries shouldn't be in the business of telling me what I can see...Q.E.D.
I hear they've got big possibilities...
Seriously, the way it works is that when the developers of the new multi-billion slot game determine the desired odds of payout (say, one in 100 million pulls hits the big accumulating jackpot), they program the chips that go into each machine to have that 1 in 100 million shot at it.
From there, randomness handles the rest. Yes, you're right, it's only pseudo-random (since silicon doesn't do completly random), but as a previous poster said, there are a large enough number of differing seeds to make it random enough.
All the network is for is communicating what happened.
That's gonna make shutting off the monitor real fast to hide the porn from your (wife/boss/Priest/Teacher) a lot more difficult.
Therefore, this tech will never fly.
Thusfar the service isn't hideous...a little slow to start getting the file, but once it gets going...ZOOM! (Latest full version of netscape in a hair under a minute). I'm just curious if I could get rid of that annoying blue box on the taskbar...apparently not.
Of course...I believe the Army has the same motto...save for the global search and replace of Green for Gray
What about Satellite modems? Direcway's two way system has this "Direcway client" software that appears to be necessary for the two way connection to work at all (ie if it's disabled or turned off, the net connection goes down). And since the connections from the satellite modem is a USB, there doesn't seem to be any way to use the Linksys router (that we bought before the installation intending to use as a firewall and to network the two PC's) as anything more than a glorified hub.
Am I wrong? Is there a way to do this? Anybody got any thoughts>?
So it's theoretically possible that your gameboy's signal could jam the frequency that the pilots need for communication with the ground, or with vital control operation (which is largely done via radio waves these days).
At 30,000 feet it's not a huge deal, since in the exceptionally unlikely event something went wrong, there's enough time to straighten it out before plane hit ground and go boom. At 30 feet during takeoff, however, there is no such recovery time, hence the ban.
However, the odds of it happening are darned near astronomical in any case, since the sideband radiation caused by the gameboy would have to be right on the right frequency and strong enough to override the "correct" signal...not terribly likely.
Cell phones, though, in that they are designed to transmit signals, have much more powerful transmissions (duh...) so it's more likely they could interfere.
Keep in mind, my cell phone is one of those dumb "Buy the minutes as you use em" kinda things, which is a good deal seeing as how I only have to spend $15 every 90 days, as opposed to $30/month for the 10 minutes I generally use the phone.
No, I don't consider it wrong that people were against slavery, or the Holocaust, or even that they are against abortion now. Freedom of thought and political opinion and all that is absolute.
However, a site that said "Here's 35 slave owners, go get a gun and shoot them" in 1855 would have been advocating a clearly illegal act against people who were participating in a legal activity, and therefore should have been treated as "incitement to violence".
Likewise, I have no objections to a site that says "Abortion is wrong, for these 37 reasons", nor do I have any objections to a site that says "We should work to change the laws of the country to ban abortions"
However, the line is very clearly drawn at "Here's 40 Doctors who are engaging in illegal acts, you as a Christian should get a gun and KILL them!!!" (oddly enough...I've never seen a website run by a Jewish person, or a Hindu, or a NeoPagan advocating violence against abortion doctors, it's always fundamentalist Christians...)
Acting within the law to enact political change is allowable, encourageable, and even worthy. Acting OUTSIDE the law to kill those who are engaging in legal activities is not. Encouraging others to act outside the law to kill those who are engaging in legal activities is not either.
And as for the "Well, then we shouldn't have fought the Nazi's" argument...you'll notice that we didn't enter the war to save the Jews, we entered it to stop expansion...and when the Holocaust was discovered and proved, the legal system acted quite nicely in punishing most of those responsible.
Important difference, dude... Killing of Doctors = illegal by current laws Removing a mass of fetal matter from it's unwilling host = legal by current laws (in many places) Abortion may or may not be morally corrupt, depending on your particular moral code, but there is an unambiguous fact, it's legal.
Would it be possible for someone to come in and buy the name "Seti@home", along with the list of signed up computers, and then use that processing time for completely other purposes that might not be nearly as desireable as scanning for intelligent life?
I know that getting out of any such trojan use would be as simple as uninstalling/turning it off, but if there's a significant group of people who aren't smart enough to find out that the hands have changed and ditch it, what keeps the person who purchases SETI@home's assets from turning all those CPU cycles into something nefarious...like cracking the encryption on bank accounts or something (you're right, that was a lame idea, but I'm sure someone would come up with a better one).
And it would seem that given the universe of AOL/Windows users, there would be a significant number of folks who would fall into that category.
Or perhaps the End User Agreement or other documents prevent this? I've never run SETI@Home, so I've never seen their agreement.
In Short, just how exposed are people?
A new and cool feature would be a file system that maintained a Weblog...
Today I stored my user's tax return...what a piece of crap...he actually expects the IRS to believe that he donated 40,000 to the MDA?...I think I'll just switch a few numbers around and drop a hint to the audit hotline
Yeah, that could be good...where's the SourceForge project for this?
Given the materials necessary to create a watch, as listed in an instruction manual for watch creation, and the manual dexterity necessary to follow the instructions, a watch can be created.
According to the Bible, the materials necessary to create the Universe are...nothing.
The process isn't documented or reproducible...sorry, but God doesn't even qualify for SEI level 1...which explains rather a lot.
IANAL, but I work in a law office. Ashcroft is sued because, as the chief Prosecutor for the United States (Attorney General), he would be the person ultimately responsible for any prosecutions under the act.
Fundamentally, what's really being asked for is the Court to enjoin Ashcroft and his underlings from enforcing the law, since there is a higher law (Constitution) which overrides it.
The law would remain on the books until officially repealed, but would be unenforceable (most compilations of the U.S. Code would either mark it as ruled unconsitutional or delete it, but technically the words would still be there).
Only the President can nominate Supreme Court Justices. The Senate confirms the nomination (or rejects it).
Most Presidents don't even publish their "short lists", instead the Media has to dig it out ferretlike from who he's talking to, Appellate Justices who appear promising, etc, etc, etc.