> No, this has NEVER worked right. I have so many shortcuts assigned hotkeys, like Ctrl+Alt+P > for a command prompt, Ctrl+Alt+T for a terminal, Ctrl+Alt+N for notepad, etc. Only like 20% > of the time does the key work, even in XP and Vista.
Back when I had Windows on my PC, this worked just fine (Provided the keyboard shortcuts were assigned via a shortcut (lnk) file somewhere in the Start menu). Granted, that wasn't XP or Vista, as they weren't out yet. (For most of the time it was Windows 95 OSR2, and then for a few months it was Windows Me, which was not nearly as awful as everyone says; it ain't Debian, but it's actually better than Windows '95, IMO.) Still, I never had any significant trouble with it. It consistently worked as it was supposed to do.
I had *other* problems with Windows, but that's neither here nor there.
> I just have a really hard time believing that two people could both behave > so unbelievably cluelessly in the same place over such a short period of time.
Apparently you have never worked with the public (help desk, tech support, whatever).
> Doesn't that normally cause some kind of tear in spacetime or something?
If it did, there'd be nothing left of spacetime by now.
> Now the question is, is it reasonable for the court to compel the > defendant himself to open the safe (or suffer the consequences...)?
With a physical safe containing evidence, the main consequence if you don't cooperate and open it is that they'll confiscate and probably destroy the safe in order to get at the evidence. (Though, they would have to get a warrant first, if they haven't got one already. In this case, the dude is under arrest, so presumably they've got enough for a warrant.)
Encryption is different from a physical safe in that it can be prohibitively difficult to break into without the owner's cooperation. I'm not really sure exactly what legal implications that has, but I'm certain it's relevant.
> And as a matter of fact, so can any witness. Suppose you are called to testify on a crime you saw being > committed. You can refuse to answer any question that would show you were an accessory to that crime.
Yeah, but in that case the trial you're in is for someone else, so *you* can still be tried later, and that wouldn't be double jeopardy. And meanwhile the police are allowed to investigate and look for evidence against you.
So if you were involved (even lightly involved) in a particular crime, it would probably be to your advantage to *avoid* being a witness in the case, if possible.
That's counting computers that were sold with a license for Vista but are actually running something else (typically, XP, but some smaller and totally-unmeasurable percentage of them are Win2K, Linux, and various other minor players).
There's no way to get accurate statistics on how many *actual* running copies of any given OS there are out there. Everything you see is an estimate, usually based on sales data, which don't tell the whole story.
> In my experience it is rare to actually get a Windows CD when you buy a laptop or desktop. > I don't think I've ever had that happen (not saying it doesn't happen, just haven't seen it myself). > I always ended up with a 'System Restore' of some sort, branded by the particular manufacture.
It depends on the manufacturer and, specifically, how large they are. If you buy from large manufacturers, it is almost universally as you say. I *suspect* that the terms of their volume license with Microsoft (which allows them to pay less per copy than a smaller OEM or, in Microsoft parlance, "system builder") dictate this.
Small white-box vendors usually give you a plain vanilla Windows install CD. It's almost always the OEM kind, which is only licensed for use on the specific hardware it came with (and Microsoft officially requires them to attach the COA sticker to the case), but it will actually still work if you've made significant changes to said hardware (even something big, like replacing the motherboard), and it only installs Windows itself, not a bunch of other junk. Unfortunately, it also doesn't magically install hardware drivers; these normally come separate for each piece of hardware on a different disc; I generally only concern myself with the network card driver disc (if necessary; *occasionally* Windows will actually recognize the network card OOTB and have its own driver, almost as if it were a modern operating system or something), and then I get the rest of the drivers from manufacturer websites. IMO, the disadvantage of needing to track down hardware drivers is outweighed by the advantage of not having to spend umpteen hours finding and purging every last bit of the trainload of bundled drossware that the big OEMs like to include on their restore CDs, but I suppose that's a matter of preference.
But the main reason I prefer to buy from small whitebox vendors is that the hardware components you get are usually standard off-the-shelf components and, if any of them later fail, can be easily replaced. When you buy from the big OEMs, you are much more likely to get components specificially designed for the system in question: special cables, CD-ROM drives with a slightly abnormal front bezel made to fit the goofy case, CD-ROM drives that are a slightly different height to fit a special this-drive-only drive bay, screws you can only turn with a special custom screwdriver that you have to get shipped in from Ganymede (or, almost as bad, tamper-proof torx, more commonly known as "Compaq screws"), oddball daughter cards (especially common in small-form-factor systems), power supplies with non-standard connectors, power supplies with the fan and venting in a non-standard location because they mount differently in the case,... all these hassles and more can be yours if you buy from a big-name PC manufacturer. They don't *always* pull these stunts, but they can and do often enough to have annoyed me countless times over the years. Of course, if you're the kind of person who just throws the computer away and replaces it if one component dies three months after the warranty expires, then you likely don't care about this. I know that category probably includes a lot of people, but it does not include me. So when I have a choice I generally buy a small-OEM white-box system. They're more easily repairable/upgradeable on average.
IIRC, the British also had better ships. Not larger or sturdier, but better designed for combat in other ways: faster, and more maneuverable. The Spanish had a larger *number* of ships... well, *before* the battle they did, anyway. Afterward, not so much.
> > yes airstrikes work very well, plus the Yamato was taken out simply because we overwhelmed the Japanese navy. > Which has only become easier to do with the proliferation of relatively cheap antiship missiles.
Air-launched torpedoes are even cheaper, and quite effective when used in quantity. You can sink any ship, no matter *what* kind of armor it has, if you can dominate the airspace around it. This was conclusively proven in World War II and has been reconfirmed repeatedly. No navy since then has been taken seriously unless it is built around carriers.
> The water belt-line of the Iowa class Battleships are 12.2 inches of SOLID steel.
Yeah, and they have good firepower too. If you sail your ship right up to an enemy battleship and try to shoot at it with ship-to-ship missiles, it's probably going to sink you.
But the thing is, you *don't* sail your capital ships right up to the enemy battleship and try to shoot at it with ship-to-ship missiles. That would be tactically moronic.
So in practice the battleship never gets to really show off its awesomeness in ship-to-ship combat, because the enemy sends supersonic jets, or maybe launches torpedoes from subs or torpedo boats (if you don't have enough destroyers around to prevent that), and chases your battleship off before it gets close enough to do anything.
> Now, if you want to decry a weaponized space, how do you think we are going to deal with extra-terrestial enemies?
Simple: we make them come down into the atmosphere to fight us. Humans have a natural immunity to Earth's caustic oxidizing atmosphere and are accustomed to planetside gravity, so fighting down here gives us significant tactical advantages. The aliens will have to wear cumbersome armored environment suits, so they'll scarcely be able to move at all in the heavy gravity, and on top of that even a small leak will kill them. So even if their weapons are a hundred times better, we'll still sterilize their chronometers.
> Granted no navy has the brains to build battleships anymore
They aren't necessary. The relative worth of battleships versus carriers was pretty well explored in WWII, and the verdict was fairly clear.
> Battleships can take Exocet missiles into the hull all day long and not sink
Typically you don't attack a battleship with ship-to-ship missiles, unless it's the only weapon you've got. (Well, I suppose it's better than a sidearm...) You also don't try to shell a battleship, even though shells are cheap, because if the battleship is in range for that, so are you.
You typically attack a battleship with torpedoes (launched from small fast boats or subs if the battleship isn't protected by destroyers, but if it is, then you launch the torpedoes from planes). You might also hit strategic subtargets (like the radio tower, for instance) with air-to-surface missiles, and you can strafe the deck with standard machine-gun fire if there are significant exposed personnel, but the torpedoes are the main thing.
Cruisers and destroyers don't do the heavy damage, but they are strategically important for protecting the carriers and the battleships from certain kinds of threats (notably, submarines and torpedo boats). Battleships have a number of uses (e.g., they can shell land targets that are very close to the coast, and they can usefully engage enemy cruisers if necessary), but on the open ocean they cannot get close enough to a carrier group to do anything meaningful against it, because the carriers (or rather the aircraft launched from the carriers) have a significantly greater effective range.
It comes down to this: battleships don't effectively control airspace, and if you don't control the airspace in modern warfare, you lose, full stop. So no matter how many battleships you've got, your fleet has GOT to have carriers in it, or you lose. A carrier group, on the other hand, doesn't really need a battleship. If you've got one around, there are useful things you can do with it, but it's not *necessary*. The other major classes of ships (carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and subs) *are* all necessary, for various reasons.
"Oh, that? That's an old workbook file I created as an undergrad. It's got all my data in it from all the labs we did in five or six classes, plus my big research paper. I rescued it from the old university mainframe when they were getting ready to shut it down for good. I keep hoping I'll find a program that runs on a modern computer and can read it, because I'd really like to be able to convert that to a more accessible format. I don't actually need it, but sentimentally it would be nice to be able to look back at that stuff."
"Oh, hey, I notice you're trying to get information from me by hitting me with a wrench. Would you like some pointers on which parts of my anatomy to hit next, or should I tell you where I keep the really big pipe wrench in the basement?"
> Your ISP knows EVERYTHING! Your darknet lights the ISP up like a christmas tree!
That's assuming you straightforwardly pass your darknet traffic through your ISP in the traditional way that you would pass any other traffic. As opposed to, say, embedding it in what appears to be normal HTTPS traffic between you and a bank, whose IT guy just happens to be a member of the darknet council and exploits his position at the bank to run an HTTPS-based darknet node; the firewall sees that the traffic is coming from a darknet member, rather than a normal bank customer, and surreptitiously routes the traffic to a different daemon that handles it specially; from there your traffic goes over the bank's WAN embedded in the VOIP stream and comes out in the Houston office, which is across the street from a television station office that has another darknet node, and the traffic crosses the street on a microwave beam through the windows on the eighth floor. The TV station's IT guy is also a member of the darknet and the traffic is now embedded, encrypted of course, in the apparently random scrambling/snow that masks out certain Pay-per-view channels. The recipient system has a TV receiver and picks up and decrypts the snow, then sends a reply, steganographically embedded in VPN traffic. The VPN server is behind a NAT gateway, which handles a HUGE amount of traffic because there's a whole data center behind it, and which is controlled by the darknet council and re-encodes the reply into minor variations in outgoing TCP sequence numbers...
Granted, I don't think any of the networks discussed in this thread are true darknets in that sense, *certainly* not the network discussed in the article. A true darknet, in order to remain undetected, has to use MUCH less bandwidth than the normal traffic it's embedded in (like, 1% or less, after encryption), so it's not really suitable for BitTorrent-like large file transfers.
Also, a true darknet works best if there are fewer than six people in the world who know about it.
Would it be an interesting artistic statement to use Tor to scp/dev/random from your home system to/dev/null on your workstation at work? What about forty-two copies of it in parallel? Just asking.
> I would be willing to go to jail for a year or two just to provide proof that we won't put up with this crap
I'd be willing to go to jail for a year or two just because it would be an interesting experience.
But that may be partly because our prison system around here is so benign. The only really bad things about it are that you can't choose to leave at any time (well, duh, that's the whole point) and that most of the people around you are criminals (again, duh). Oh, and it looks bad on your resume. Boo hoo.
On the plus side, all of your expenses are covered, and you have plenty of free time to do more or less whatever you want. You want to be a couch potato for a living? Sure, and the taxpayers will cover your room and board. You'd prefer to spend most of your time studying, but you can't afford college tuition? Well, have we got a deal for you. You've got medical problems and can't afford good care? No problem, good old Uncle Sam will pay for it!
Compare this with prisons in the third world, where you don't get enough to eat unless your friends and family bring you food, half of which the guards probably confiscate if it's any good. If I lived in, say, Nigeria, I'd be somewhat less willing to be jailed than here in nice comfy Ohio where prisoners have almost as many rights as the general population at large.
> 1) If the warrant was obtained improperly on the basis of the "apple" theft, there > is a good probability that the whole case could be thrown out. Miranda anyone?
If the warrant was not properly obtained, then the evidence gained by the search is inadmissible. But if the warrant was obtained by following the normal and proper procedures for obtaining a warrant, then the evidence *is* admissible, *even* if it ultimately shows you guilty of different crimes than the one they originally had enough evidence for to get the warrant. (And it should be noted that enough evidence to get a warrant is NOT the same thing as enough evidence to convict. There can be all kinds of reasonable doubt, and the warrant can still be properly obtained.)
> Which is largely how the web was, before (non-porn) people realised they could make money on that network.
I don't remember it that way. I remember the web being dominated by two things: academic information (e.g., history, science, mathematics,...) and silly goofing around (e.g., the Church of Spam). Occasionally these two categories combined on a single website (e.g., look at all these cool Mandelbrot-set images we generated).
Then sometime around 1995, people started getting on the internet who were *not* in college, and the rest is history.
> but the trouble with firefox is it's hard to run multiple instances of > firefox on windows at the same time - even with the "run as" stuff.
You know, I've never tried that on Windows. I've had different *versions* installed, which is much easier with Firefox than with IE, but I've never tried to run multiple instances at once (on Windows, that is; I've done it on other OSes, usually in a separate GUI session, e.g., via gdmflexiserver).
Out of curiousity, what problems do you run into when you try it with Run As?
I tend to think making the domain name a different color from the rest of the URL would be a useful visual clue.
But, really, most IDNs should just be disabled by default, with only ones in the writing system used for the l10n language (if applicable) enabled out of the box, and a UI in the prefs for enabling IDNs in additional specific writing systems that the user knows how to read. Unless the user is a very accomplished linguist, there's NO good reason for all of Unicode to be supported. The overwhelming majority of users are literate in at most two writing systems, one of which is probably the Latin alphabet (which only even needs IDNs at all if you simply must have diacritical marks).
I mean, even setting aside pretty much the entire Western hemisphere (where if you ask random people on the street to name two alphabets they're probably going to say the English alphabet and the Spanish alphabet), a user in Ukraine probably only needs IDNs in Cyrillic. A user in India probably only needs IDNs in Devanagari and maybe Tamil. A user in Iran probably only needs IDNs in Arabic. And so on.
> Nice delusion, but totally false-to-fact. Maybe back in the day of the Altar or Apple II > you could control the entire machine, but today you didn't write the OS, the BIOS, the > device firmware, the drivers, the utilities, or the programs. You have no say in the matter.
I don't need to write the whole OS from scratch line by line to have a reasonable level of control. I just need to be able to replace the parts I don't like (because they don't behave the way I want) with ones that I do like (because they *do* behave the way I want). I use Gnome for the panel, but I don't use Metacity or Nautilus. (/usr/bin/metacity is a symlink to/usr/bin/sawfish, and nautilus is just chmod -x so it doesn't consume any system resources; I don't have any use for a graphical file manager since I discovered tab completion back in the nineties).
And when the available software doesn't meet my needs, then I *do* write my own. I wrote my own system for organizing my music collection and generating playlists (with an algorithm that shuffles in such a way that you never get the same genre twice in a row). I wrote my own spaced repetition system for vocabulary as well, because the existing ones (e.g., Anki) didn't really meet my needs. I made a significant number of customizations to my text editor, including a couple of custom major modes for editing special types of files that are unique to my situation. At work, I made a small (less than twenty lines of code) change to xscreensaver for a special kiosk-type situation, so that it accepts as a valid password any fourteen-digit number that passes a simple checksum and prefix check, and logs it to a file. (Another process then does stuff based on that. Like I said, it's a special situation.)
I don't need to personally write every line of code that runs my computer. It's enough to be *able* to rewrite thee stuff that I *want* to change, or even just replace it with different code that somebody else has written that happens to do what I want.
> My dad... (despite not being technical) seems to have picked up a foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of vista
Windows Vista is unpopular with at least some segments of the general public, beyond the IT industry. My dentist, in telling me how terrible he thinks it is, compared it unfavorably to Windows Me. He's a bit of a power-user and a gamer, but he's *not* an IT professional.
I suspect this is mostly because in early versions of Vista the annoying UAC prompts were too frequent, and people don't like to be bothered with stuff like that. Of course, UAC was absolutely necessary, and once application developers get their stuff together and stop doing things that require admin privileges, when it clearly isn't necessary, from processes running out of the logged-in user's account, the amount of annoyance associated with UAC will fade.
I'm pretty sure this is why Microsoft is promoting what is essentially the next service pack (everything we know about Seven is totally inconsistent with the next major release, formerly called Blackcomb, and totally consistent with being essentially SP2 for Vista) as if it were a whole new version of Windows, with new branding, an new name, and marketing hype. They're hoping that the most extreme UAC annoyances will be so greatly reduced that if the users will only give it another chance, they'll find it's not so bad. But as long as it's branded "Vista", nobody's giving it another chance, hence the new name and branding and stuff.
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> No, this has NEVER worked right. I have so many shortcuts assigned hotkeys, like Ctrl+Alt+P
> for a command prompt, Ctrl+Alt+T for a terminal, Ctrl+Alt+N for notepad, etc. Only like 20%
> of the time does the key work, even in XP and Vista.
Back when I had Windows on my PC, this worked just fine (Provided the keyboard shortcuts were assigned via a shortcut (lnk) file somewhere in the Start menu). Granted, that wasn't XP or Vista, as they weren't out yet. (For most of the time it was Windows 95 OSR2, and then for a few months it was Windows Me, which was not nearly as awful as everyone says; it ain't Debian, but it's actually better than Windows '95, IMO.) Still, I never had any significant trouble with it. It consistently worked as it was supposed to do.
I had *other* problems with Windows, but that's neither here nor there.
> I just have a really hard time believing that two people could both behave
> so unbelievably cluelessly in the same place over such a short period of time.
Apparently you have never worked with the public (help desk, tech support, whatever).
> Doesn't that normally cause some kind of tear in spacetime or something?
If it did, there'd be nothing left of spacetime by now.
> Now the question is, is it reasonable for the court to compel the ...)?
> defendant himself to open the safe (or suffer the consequences
With a physical safe containing evidence, the main consequence if you don't cooperate and open it is that they'll confiscate and probably destroy the safe in order to get at the evidence. (Though, they would have to get a warrant first, if they haven't got one already. In this case, the dude is under arrest, so presumably they've got enough for a warrant.)
Encryption is different from a physical safe in that it can be prohibitively difficult to break into without the owner's cooperation. I'm not really sure exactly what legal implications that has, but I'm certain it's relevant.
> If the law is meant to be followed by the people, then it should be written to be understood by the people.
You know, I think I agree with that. I'd like to live in a place where that's true.
What universe do you live in? Do they accept immigrants?
> And as a matter of fact, so can any witness. Suppose you are called to testify on a crime you saw being
> committed. You can refuse to answer any question that would show you were an accessory to that crime.
Yeah, but in that case the trial you're in is for someone else, so *you* can still be tried later, and that wouldn't be double jeopardy. And meanwhile the police are allowed to investigate and look for evidence against you.
So if you were involved (even lightly involved) in a particular crime, it would probably be to your advantage to *avoid* being a witness in the case, if possible.
> I wonder, which part of "nor shall be compelled" did the honorable judge not understand?
I think it's the "to be a witness about himself" part where his interpretation differs from yours. HTH.HAND.
> 23% of which now Vista
That's counting computers that were sold with a license for Vista but are actually running something else (typically, XP, but some smaller and totally-unmeasurable percentage of them are Win2K, Linux, and various other minor players).
There's no way to get accurate statistics on how many *actual* running copies of any given OS there are out there. Everything you see is an estimate, usually based on sales data, which don't tell the whole story.
> In my experience it is rare to actually get a Windows CD when you buy a laptop or desktop.
... all these hassles and more can be yours if you buy from a big-name PC manufacturer. They don't *always* pull these stunts, but they can and do often enough to have annoyed me countless times over the years. Of course, if you're the kind of person who just throws the computer away and replaces it if one component dies three months after the warranty expires, then you likely don't care about this. I know that category probably includes a lot of people, but it does not include me. So when I have a choice I generally buy a small-OEM white-box system. They're more easily repairable/upgradeable on average.
> I don't think I've ever had that happen (not saying it doesn't happen, just haven't seen it myself).
> I always ended up with a 'System Restore' of some sort, branded by the particular manufacture.
It depends on the manufacturer and, specifically, how large they are. If you buy from large manufacturers, it is almost universally as you say. I *suspect* that the terms of their volume license with Microsoft (which allows them to pay less per copy than a smaller OEM or, in Microsoft parlance, "system builder") dictate this.
Small white-box vendors usually give you a plain vanilla Windows install CD. It's almost always the OEM kind, which is only licensed for use on the specific hardware it came with (and Microsoft officially requires them to attach the COA sticker to the case), but it will actually still work if you've made significant changes to said hardware (even something big, like replacing the motherboard), and it only installs Windows itself, not a bunch of other junk. Unfortunately, it also doesn't magically install hardware drivers; these normally come separate for each piece of hardware on a different disc; I generally only concern myself with the network card driver disc (if necessary; *occasionally* Windows will actually recognize the network card OOTB and have its own driver, almost as if it were a modern operating system or something), and then I get the rest of the drivers from manufacturer websites. IMO, the disadvantage of needing to track down hardware drivers is outweighed by the advantage of not having to spend umpteen hours finding and purging every last bit of the trainload of bundled drossware that the big OEMs like to include on their restore CDs, but I suppose that's a matter of preference.
But the main reason I prefer to buy from small whitebox vendors is that the hardware components you get are usually standard off-the-shelf components and, if any of them later fail, can be easily replaced. When you buy from the big OEMs, you are much more likely to get components specificially designed for the system in question: special cables, CD-ROM drives with a slightly abnormal front bezel made to fit the goofy case, CD-ROM drives that are a slightly different height to fit a special this-drive-only drive bay, screws you can only turn with a special custom screwdriver that you have to get shipped in from Ganymede (or, almost as bad, tamper-proof torx, more commonly known as "Compaq screws"), oddball daughter cards (especially common in small-form-factor systems), power supplies with non-standard connectors, power supplies with the fan and venting in a non-standard location because they mount differently in the case,
Etymologically, yes, but in modern English the word "decimate" generally means something closer to "completely destroy".
IIRC, the British also had better ships. Not larger or sturdier, but better designed for combat in other ways: faster, and more maneuverable. The Spanish had a larger *number* of ships... well, *before* the battle they did, anyway. Afterward, not so much.
> > yes airstrikes work very well, plus the Yamato was taken out simply because we overwhelmed the Japanese navy.
> Which has only become easier to do with the proliferation of relatively cheap antiship missiles.
Air-launched torpedoes are even cheaper, and quite effective when used in quantity. You can sink any ship, no matter *what* kind of armor it has, if you can dominate the airspace around it. This was conclusively proven in World War II and has been reconfirmed repeatedly. No navy since then has been taken seriously unless it is built around carriers.
> The water belt-line of the Iowa class Battleships are 12.2 inches of SOLID steel.
Yeah, and they have good firepower too. If you sail your ship right up to an enemy battleship and try to shoot at it with ship-to-ship missiles, it's probably going to sink you.
But the thing is, you *don't* sail your capital ships right up to the enemy battleship and try to shoot at it with ship-to-ship missiles. That would be tactically moronic.
So in practice the battleship never gets to really show off its awesomeness in ship-to-ship combat, because the enemy sends supersonic jets, or maybe launches torpedoes from subs or torpedo boats (if you don't have enough destroyers around to prevent that), and chases your battleship off before it gets close enough to do anything.
> Now, if you want to decry a weaponized space, how do you think we are going to deal with extra-terrestial enemies?
Simple: we make them come down into the atmosphere to fight us. Humans have a natural immunity to Earth's caustic oxidizing atmosphere and are accustomed to planetside gravity, so fighting down here gives us significant tactical advantages. The aliens will have to wear cumbersome armored environment suits, so they'll scarcely be able to move at all in the heavy gravity, and on top of that even a small leak will kill them. So even if their weapons are a hundred times better, we'll still sterilize their chronometers.
> Granted no navy has the brains to build battleships anymore
They aren't necessary. The relative worth of battleships versus carriers was pretty well explored in WWII, and the verdict was fairly clear.
> Battleships can take Exocet missiles into the hull all day long and not sink
Typically you don't attack a battleship with ship-to-ship missiles, unless it's the only weapon you've got. (Well, I suppose it's better than a sidearm...) You also don't try to shell a battleship, even though shells are cheap, because if the battleship is in range for that, so are you.
You typically attack a battleship with torpedoes (launched from small fast boats or subs if the battleship isn't protected by destroyers, but if it is, then you launch the torpedoes from planes). You might also hit strategic subtargets (like the radio tower, for instance) with air-to-surface missiles, and you can strafe the deck with standard machine-gun fire if there are significant exposed personnel, but the torpedoes are the main thing.
Cruisers and destroyers don't do the heavy damage, but they are strategically important for protecting the carriers and the battleships from certain kinds of threats (notably, submarines and torpedo boats). Battleships have a number of uses (e.g., they can shell land targets that are very close to the coast, and they can usefully engage enemy cruisers if necessary), but on the open ocean they cannot get close enough to a carrier group to do anything meaningful against it, because the carriers (or rather the aircraft launched from the carriers) have a significantly greater effective range.
It comes down to this: battleships don't effectively control airspace, and if you don't control the airspace in modern warfare, you lose, full stop. So no matter how many battleships you've got, your fleet has GOT to have carriers in it, or you lose. A carrier group, on the other hand, doesn't really need a battleship. If you've got one around, there are useful things you can do with it, but it's not *necessary*. The other major classes of ships (carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and subs) *are* all necessary, for various reasons.
"Oh, that? That's an old workbook file I created as an undergrad. It's got all my data in it from all the labs we did in five or six classes, plus my big research paper. I rescued it from the old university mainframe when they were getting ready to shut it down for good. I keep hoping I'll find a program that runs on a modern computer and can read it, because I'd really like to be able to convert that to a more accessible format. I don't actually need it, but sentimentally it would be nice to be able to look back at that stuff."
So then you go all Clippit on 'em:
"Oh, hey, I notice you're trying to get information from me by hitting me with a wrench. Would you like some pointers on which parts of my anatomy to hit next, or should I tell you where I keep the really big pipe wrench in the basement?"
(See also: Too Kinky To Torture.)
> Your ISP knows EVERYTHING! Your darknet lights the ISP up like a christmas tree!
That's assuming you straightforwardly pass your darknet traffic through your ISP in the traditional way that you would pass any other traffic. As opposed to, say, embedding it in what appears to be normal HTTPS traffic between you and a bank, whose IT guy just happens to be a member of the darknet council and exploits his position at the bank to run an HTTPS-based darknet node; the firewall sees that the traffic is coming from a darknet member, rather than a normal bank customer, and surreptitiously routes the traffic to a different daemon that handles it specially; from there your traffic goes over the bank's WAN embedded in the VOIP stream and comes out in the Houston office, which is across the street from a television station office that has another darknet node, and the traffic crosses the street on a microwave beam through the windows on the eighth floor. The TV station's IT guy is also a member of the darknet and the traffic is now embedded, encrypted of course, in the apparently random scrambling/snow that masks out certain Pay-per-view channels. The recipient system has a TV receiver and picks up and decrypts the snow, then sends a reply, steganographically embedded in VPN traffic. The VPN server is behind a NAT gateway, which handles a HUGE amount of traffic because there's a whole data center behind it, and which is controlled by the darknet council and re-encodes the reply into minor variations in outgoing TCP sequence numbers...
Granted, I don't think any of the networks discussed in this thread are true darknets in that sense, *certainly* not the network discussed in the article. A true darknet, in order to remain undetected, has to use MUCH less bandwidth than the normal traffic it's embedded in (like, 1% or less, after encryption), so it's not really suitable for BitTorrent-like large file transfers.
Also, a true darknet works best if there are fewer than six people in the world who know about it.
Would it be an interesting artistic statement to use Tor to scp /dev/random from your home system to /dev/null on your workstation at work? What about forty-two copies of it in parallel? Just asking.
> I would be willing to go to jail for a year or two just to provide proof that we won't put up with this crap
I'd be willing to go to jail for a year or two just because it would be an interesting experience.
But that may be partly because our prison system around here is so benign. The only really bad things about it are that you can't choose to leave at any time (well, duh, that's the whole point) and that most of the people around you are criminals (again, duh). Oh, and it looks bad on your resume. Boo hoo.
On the plus side, all of your expenses are covered, and you have plenty of free time to do more or less whatever you want. You want to be a couch potato for a living? Sure, and the taxpayers will cover your room and board. You'd prefer to spend most of your time studying, but you can't afford college tuition? Well, have we got a deal for you. You've got medical problems and can't afford good care? No problem, good old Uncle Sam will pay for it!
Compare this with prisons in the third world, where you don't get enough to eat unless your friends and family bring you food, half of which the guards probably confiscate if it's any good. If I lived in, say, Nigeria, I'd be somewhat less willing to be jailed than here in nice comfy Ohio where prisoners have almost as many rights as the general population at large.
> 1) If the warrant was obtained improperly on the basis of the "apple" theft, there
> is a good probability that the whole case could be thrown out. Miranda anyone?
If the warrant was not properly obtained, then the evidence gained by the search is inadmissible. But if the warrant was obtained by following the normal and proper procedures for obtaining a warrant, then the evidence *is* admissible, *even* if it ultimately shows you guilty of different crimes than the one they originally had enough evidence for to get the warrant. (And it should be noted that enough evidence to get a warrant is NOT the same thing as enough evidence to convict. There can be all kinds of reasonable doubt, and the warrant can still be properly obtained.)
> Which is largely how the web was, before (non-porn) people realised they could make money on that network.
...) and silly goofing around (e.g., the Church of Spam). Occasionally these two categories combined on a single website (e.g., look at all these cool Mandelbrot-set images we generated).
I don't remember it that way. I remember the web being dominated by two things: academic information (e.g., history, science, mathematics,
Then sometime around 1995, people started getting on the internet who were *not* in college, and the rest is history.
> but the trouble with firefox is it's hard to run multiple instances of
> firefox on windows at the same time - even with the "run as" stuff.
You know, I've never tried that on Windows. I've had different *versions* installed, which is much easier with Firefox than with IE, but I've never tried to run multiple instances at once (on Windows, that is; I've done it on other OSes, usually in a separate GUI session, e.g., via gdmflexiserver).
Out of curiousity, what problems do you run into when you try it with Run As?
I tend to think making the domain name a different color from the rest of the URL would be a useful visual clue.
But, really, most IDNs should just be disabled by default, with only ones in the writing system used for the l10n language (if applicable) enabled out of the box, and a UI in the prefs for enabling IDNs in additional specific writing systems that the user knows how to read. Unless the user is a very accomplished linguist, there's NO good reason for all of Unicode to be supported. The overwhelming majority of users are literate in at most two writing systems, one of which is probably the Latin alphabet (which only even needs IDNs at all if you simply must have diacritical marks).
I mean, even setting aside pretty much the entire Western hemisphere (where if you ask random people on the street to name two alphabets they're probably going to say the English alphabet and the Spanish alphabet), a user in Ukraine probably only needs IDNs in Cyrillic. A user in India probably only needs IDNs in Devanagari and maybe Tamil. A user in Iran probably only needs IDNs in Arabic. And so on.
> Nice delusion, but totally false-to-fact. Maybe back in the day of the Altar or Apple II
/usr/bin/sawfish, and nautilus is just chmod -x so it doesn't consume any system resources; I don't have any use for a graphical file manager since I discovered tab completion back in the nineties).
> you could control the entire machine, but today you didn't write the OS, the BIOS, the
> device firmware, the drivers, the utilities, or the programs. You have no say in the matter.
I don't need to write the whole OS from scratch line by line to have a reasonable level of control. I just need to be able to replace the parts I don't like (because they don't behave the way I want) with ones that I do like (because they *do* behave the way I want). I use Gnome for the panel, but I don't use Metacity or Nautilus. (/usr/bin/metacity is a symlink to
And when the available software doesn't meet my needs, then I *do* write my own. I wrote my own system for organizing my music collection and generating playlists (with an algorithm that shuffles in such a way that you never get the same genre twice in a row). I wrote my own spaced repetition system for vocabulary as well, because the existing ones (e.g., Anki) didn't really meet my needs. I made a significant number of customizations to my text editor, including a couple of custom major modes for editing special types of files that are unique to my situation. At work, I made a small (less than twenty lines of code) change to xscreensaver for a special kiosk-type situation, so that it accepts as a valid password any fourteen-digit number that passes a simple checksum and prefix check, and logs it to a file. (Another process then does stuff based on that. Like I said, it's a special situation.)
I don't need to personally write every line of code that runs my computer. It's enough to be *able* to rewrite thee stuff that I *want* to change, or even just replace it with different code that somebody else has written that happens to do what I want.
> My dad... (despite not being technical) seems to have picked up a foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of vista
Windows Vista is unpopular with at least some segments of the general public, beyond the IT industry. My dentist, in telling me how terrible he thinks it is, compared it unfavorably to Windows Me. He's a bit of a power-user and a gamer, but he's *not* an IT professional.
I suspect this is mostly because in early versions of Vista the annoying UAC prompts were too frequent, and people don't like to be bothered with stuff like that. Of course, UAC was absolutely necessary, and once application developers get their stuff together and stop doing things that require admin privileges, when it clearly isn't necessary, from processes running out of the logged-in user's account, the amount of annoyance associated with UAC will fade.
I'm pretty sure this is why Microsoft is promoting what is essentially the next service pack (everything we know about Seven is totally inconsistent with the next major release, formerly called Blackcomb, and totally consistent with being essentially SP2 for Vista) as if it were a whole new version of Windows, with new branding, an new name, and marketing hype. They're hoping that the most extreme UAC annoyances will be so greatly reduced that if the users will only give it another chance, they'll find it's not so bad. But as long as it's branded "Vista", nobody's giving it another chance, hence the new name and branding and stuff.