As well as the free SQL Server Express Edition, Microsoft have also just released the 'Visual Studio Express Editions'....
The SQL Server Express doesn't appear to come with any management GUI (or I installed it wrong).
However, the free version of Microsoft's management tool, MS SQL Server Management Studio Express. can be found here.
That said, I use Postgresql for my development job, but the Ohio Kerry 2004 campaign was using used MS SQL Server 2002 when I volunteered there, so I used it then. It reminded me quite a bit of Sybase's Transact SQL, especially when I checked out query showplans.
Yes, it was a bit clunky, and it had a terrible problem with values that it should have seen as constant in the context of a particular query, e.g.,
declare @name null select * from foo where ( @name is null or foo.name = @name )
would cause a table scan comparing foo.name to @name even though all rows would be returned.
But it was serviceable, and everybody else felt mire comfortable with a GUI (I mostly wrote sql in a text editor, because that's the easiest way for me to "see" what a table or view does).
It also let us export tables to MS Access format, and frankly putting together a distributable app was easier in Access than my idea of using wxWindows. Again, this was an election campaign, so the deadline couldn't be extended and reusability/maintainability didn't much matter after November 3rd.
Oh, speaking of MS Access.mdbs, how can I import them to MS SQL Server 2005? Or export mdbs from SQL Server? SQL Server 2002 had a pretty obvious import/export menu, but I don't see that in the 2005 Management Studio Express.
Most of them are so un-photogenic, your boss can't reasonably claim you had an prurient interest in them. And given the hairiness and man-boobs, you often can't even tell the women from the men.
It's as safe as looking at photos of some Stone Age tribe in National Geographic. Except, in this case it's a tribe of "Aging Stoners".
Now I wonder what's so dangerous about keeping a central database of persons. It somehow alert a bunch of people what the word "children" involved. But what is the real danger of this?
Here's an answer I gave over a year ago on Slashdot. Coincidentally, it used as an example Dutch history, and a particular Dutch girl who was anything but protected by the authorities.
I was writing in reply to a commenter like you who saw nothing to worry about. That commenter wrote:
Think of this utopia: The government is honest, never abuses info collected about the people,... Now would you really mind having a lot of data about yourself collected,... Collecting personal data by itself is harmless.
Anyway, here's how I replied last May, on what happened to be the 44th anniversary of the Dutch surrender to Nazi Germany:
Now, imagine that your utopia is The Netherlands. And imagine it's not May 15, 2004, but May 15, 1940 -- one day after The Netherlands surrendered to Nazi Germany. Note that in surrendering, The Netherlands legally turned over government control to the Nazis. Presumably that would included your database -- if the Nazis hadn't simply seized it outright.
Your utopian database contains the details of all residents, anyone who might join the Resistance, and all the Jews -- including Otto and Edith Frank and their daughters Margot and Anne. The Frank family managed to hide from the Nazis for two years; how long do you think they'd manage in your "utopia".
Now some will say that there's little chance of Nazi invasions these day, so we should feel safe with "utopian" databases. But it doesn't take a foreign invasion to radically change a government: sometimes it just takes an election, of an Anzar or a Berlusconi or a Blair & Blunkett team or a Bush or a Howard -- or a former war criminal like Waldheim.
Maybe the Dutch aren't reading their history any more, or maybe they just think history is over. It surely is over for Anne Frank and most of the others who got tattooed with generated id numbers and entered into the Nazi's great big people-exterminating database.
But, as always, there's a new generation ready to trust that the government and their oh-so-well-intentioned Leaders will never do wrong. I mean, it's not like FEMA was ever misused for political reasons, right? Right?,
If you do end up porting it, you'll instantly become a faggot zealot who likes to suck dick and take it up the ass. Eventually, the grand-pubah faggot zealot linus whorevalds himself will come around and make you his personal bitch. You'll take it in the ass all day long, swallowing load after load of his steaming pile of crappy codecum.
Wow, your game's simulation of the results of Red State education policies is spot on!
All that's missing from the lame gay-baiting is a rambling denunciation of about "Derwenean EVIL-lution"!
...I was making reference to.... the incompetence of the Mayor of NO and the governor of LA.
Here's the simple take-home point:
Do you think your city, your family and loved ones, will be safe when it is your city that needs to be evacuated?
With Katrina we had several days' notice of a disaster -- and you use that to blame Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco.
But the next terrorist attack will give no warning. The attacked city will be relying entirely on FEMA -- there'll be no Nagin, no Blanco for apologists to blame.
Some four years after September 11th, both FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security have demonstrated that they can't protect Americans -- indeed, their leaders in abject and total failure can only blithely deny news footage we're seeing with our own eyes.
The fundamental purpose of any government -- as any conservative will tell you -- is the protection of its citizens.
In the last four years, our "leaders" have ignored crucial evidence preceding the September 11th attacks, have failed to get those responsible, have been willingly fooled by colossally bad intelligence about WMDs in Iraq, have fired those who correctly predicted we'd need far more troops to avoid a quagmire in Iraq, and have now let thousands of your fellow Americans die from their incompetence and lack of preparedness.
Our so-called "leaders" have repeatedly failed to uphold their end of the social contract. One "understandable" mistake after another -- and no one's been fired except whistle-blowers and those who were in retrospect proven right in their predictions.
How many more mistakes rewarded by Presidential Medals of Freedom will you tolerate? How many more Americans must die from sheer incompetent failure at the highest level of government before you find your anger?
How much longer will you trust your life, your children's lives, and your country's future, to the "protection" of these miserable failures?
Isn't the icecap frozen fresh water? Maybe someone who really knows can tell us if it makes a difference that it is frozen fresh water floating on salt water.
Well, those stupid scientists (what have they ever given us?) think that
The Gulf Stream relies on a sensitive "conveyer belt" action, which could be "switched off" - quite suddenly - if it becomes diluted by fresh water from the melting ice-sheets, they claim.
Dr Terry Joyce, an oceanographer from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, US, believes there is a 50% chance of a sudden climate change happening in the next 100 years.
"It will be quick," he says. "Suddenly one decade we're warm, and the next decade we're in the coldest winter we've experienced in the last 100 years, but we're in it for a 100 years."
A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.
A senior White House official accused of doctoring government reports on climate change to play down the link between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming has taken a job with ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company.
Philip Cooney, who resigned as chief of staff of the White House council on environment quality at the weekend, will begin work at the oil giant in the autumn.
Nothing to see here folks! What do scientists know? They can't even make real money like a good lobbyist. If they're so smart, why aren't they rich?
Carnegie-Mellon these are the guys who love to quantify the unquantifiable.
Didn't they also give us the "Capability Maturity Model"? I've seen organizations race to get to CMM-3 or CMM-4, and it's all been a joke.
A bunch of highly paid consultants tell everyone a new way to count beans ("under CMM, we group the beans starting from the right, not the left....").
Promises are made about code auditing, but once the CMM level has been awarded (usually by highly paid consultants who just happen to work with the highly paid consults who "mentored" the company's CMM training), all tat's actually done is that the people doing the real work of writing software are regularly distracted by a clown with a check-list and a clipboard.
Carnegie-Mellon continues to have a fetish for quantifying and for creating check-lists, and middle management continues to have a fetish for anything that allows them to quantify (even spuriously), because it takes the risk and bother out of their jobs.
Middle Manager: "The WordPerfect Project only got a 3 on the Carnegie Mellon software score, but the Clippy Project got a 5! So, it's perfectly safe for me to decide that to disband the WordPerfect Project and devote its resources to the Clippy Project. (And if it turns out later that was a bad decision, they can't fire me, because I relied on hard numbers generated by a known process!"
"As the highest classification available [PDF link] for computer games is MA15+ (as opposed to R18+ for films that can be sold in all states and territories), the sex scenes in 'Hot Coffee' pushed the game outside the permitted content for that rating, effectively banning the game."
But but, but Bill Gates said "MA15+ ought to be high enough a rating for anybody"!
Re:Water implies Life
on
Ice Lake on Mars
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Why not?"
A couple of very good reasons:
We want to compare Mars life to Earth life. If Mars life has been contaminated with Earth life that'll be much harder to do. In particular, we'd like to know if, and to what extent, Mars life is similar to Earth life: does it use DNA, does its DNA use the same codons, are we descended from it. All of this will tremendously inform us about our own earth life, and will have strong implications for what life may be like elsewhere in the universe.
And, if Mars life does exist, it's probably less complex than Earth life, and possibly easily overwhelmed by Earth life. Just for ethical reasons, we'd prefer not to destroy anything that is uniquely different.
An analogy: European settlement destroyed much of the indigenous human heritage of South America. Catholic missionaries deliberately burned indigenous religious books, and pulled down indigenous temples. European explorers and settlers killed thousands of indigenous peoples with guns, and millions with European germs. We still have only a tenuous understanding of what human life was like before Europeans discovered South America, and that knowledge is slowly and painfully wrung from mall and inaccessible archaeological digs. (The same can be said of Australia and parts of Africa, where Europeans hunted natives for sport and received bounties for native scalps.) How much more would we know if we had an unbroken cultural history to learn from?
The worst setback to our knowledge of Martian life -- and by extension, life anywhere other than Earth -- would be to heedlessly rush in and destroy the uniqueness of what we hope to study.
Water implies Life
on
Ice Lake on Mars
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Water => Life.
I'll be damned surprised if we don't find life on Mars now that we know there's free-standing water (ice) on the planet.
Our next responsibility is to try very very hard not to contaminate Mars with Earth-life, if we haven't already with our probes.
"The only way to improve the design drastically would be to build NEW shuttles. There is a limit to how much you can improve a design without building a new design."
And it's about damn time we did.
We got to the Moon, proved we'd "beaten" the Soviets, and since then we've done diddly.
Had we really invested in space, we could have had whole colonies in orbit by now -- and our economy would be reaping the fantastic benefits that colonizing the frontier has always brought.We'd have zero-G medicines and all sorts of technology that could only be produced cheaply in micro-gravity environments. And we'd have the pride of once again being pioneers.
But instead, we squandered our chances, made Space not "the final frontier" but instead a supposedly "safe" government monopoly. Instead, we sit on our asses and watch "Pimp My Ride" and "Batchelor Island" and wonder where or self-respect has gone.
When I was a kid, we expected to be taking vacations on the Moon by 2005. Anyone who wants that vacation is advised to start learning Chinese.
America has become the land of the security-conscious, home of the frightened.
We spend billions -- in money our grandchildren will have to pay off -- to invade a country so that a few oligarchs can get contracts on oil that will be depleted in a generation. We rely on our military might and forget the ingenuity and the pioneering spirit that made that might possible.
Unable anymore to out-perform the Chinese, we pass "Intellectual Property" laws that the Chinese merely wink at, and pretend that the dictates of legislatures can turn back progress and protect the investments of carriage makers and buggy whip manufacturers in a world of automobiles and interstate highways.
And we literally can't even get a Space Shuttle -- twenty-five year old technology, folks! -- off the ground.
Are we really the heirs of Patrick Henry? Would Davy Crockett see himself in the cowering hair-splitters we've become?
Learn Chinese, or at least make sure your kids learn it. Because the sun is rapidly setting on the American Empire.
"It's likely done at a hardware level, or more specifically firmware."
Sure, the serial number is printed at the hardware level as a partially-filled array of yellow dots:
X_XXX__XX_X_X_X <-- printer "A"'s a binary bit pattern of Xs that gives a serial number of 23765 decimal
X_XXX_X__XXXX_X <-- printer "B"'s a binary bit pattern of Xs gives a serial number of 23869 decimal
I'm suggesting at the software level (in a driver) we direct the printer to fill the whole array. This will make the serial number unreadable, by giving all printers using the driver a completely filled and indistinguishable array:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX <-- Printer "A"'s pattern with the driver filling in all the dots now gives a fake serial number of 32767
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX <-- Printer "B"'s pattern with the driver filling in all the dots also gives the same fake serial number of 32767
According the EFF, for Xerox( but not Canon) printers, it looks like this:
For Xerox documents, within the 0.5" by 1" rectangular space, 8 x 15 = 120 locations exist for printers to print yellow tracking dots. Consider the following pattern found on test00-template, printed on a Xerox DocuColor 12 located at FedEx Kinko's, 201 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, CA.
(The Slashdot "lameness" filter prevents me from posting the entire diagram.)
Now it seems to me that Open Source has an answer for this. Can we patch Xerox printer drivers so that they automatically print the yellow dot at all 120 locations, making each page bear a fake serial number of "FF FF FF..."?
Or if the drivers aren't open source, can we write proxy printer drivers that add the dots and then forward to the real Xerox print driver?
Who'll take on this challenge? (Preferably a good linux coder who isn't a US citizen or resident.)
From the article: "Lorelei Pagano, a counterfeiting specialist with the U.S. Secret Service, stresses that the government uses the embedded serial numbers only when alerted to a forgery. "The only time any information is gained from these documents is purely in [the case of] a criminal act," she says."
Somebody ask
Alexander Hamilton (later the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, the same Treasury that Lorelei Pagano now works for),
James Madison (later fourth President of The United States), or
John Jay (later first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court)
why they published the Federalist Papers anonymously under the name "Publius".
Ask them if they'd have been able to write the these brilliant arguments that shaped the Constitution of the United States of America if the very paper they'd printed it on could have been used to strip then of their anonymity?
Could they have made their arguments as forcefully, would they have allowed their ideas to have been so revolutionary, if they had known any political opponent could trace those papers back to them, perhaps deny them jobs or political offices because of disagreement with their ideas?
Would we even have the Constitution that we have today if these great men had not been able to use the pen-name "Publius"?
Hamilton and Madison and Jay forged (ahem) our Constitution in anonymity, but counterfeiting specialist Lorelei Pagano tells us that those three silly boys didn't need their anonymity? That in order to be safe from counterfeiters, we have to give up our right to anonymous politically agitation?
How much more security can this country -- this nation conceived in anonymity -- survive?
"And a programmer... have you never tried to lay your thoughts out quickly and typed the wrong word?"
Yes, but it was in PERL, so of course nobody could tell.
And that's how the HTML-producing CGI script I was trying to write accidently became a self-modifying ASCII-text Pac Man game that did DeCSS decoding if you ate all four ghosts.
"Looking around the world for more representative forms of government like parlimentary systems I'm beginning to despair...."
You and me both. As HL Mencken observed, there's a strong strain of "booboisie" in America. Mencken, being of German extraction, experienced it himself in the anti-German hysteria that attended our entrance into World War One.
Why can't we write a second American constitution and bill of rights that forever enshrines certain liberties above the muck of anyone's political ambitions?"
Because it would be written by those currently in power, to include a "right" to have God and Creationism in the schools, a "right" to keep gays from marrying, a "right" to security that would be nothing like the restrictions on government enshrined in the 4th, 5th, and 8th Amendments.
And the rest of it would be written by lawyers for Wal-Mart and the music industry; they'd "grant" us "rights" to unbreakable DRM and to work for less than minimum wage.
And as the highest law, there'd be no undoing those "rights" without writing a third Constitution -- and probably a second America Revolution.
In principle, a new start is what's needed. In practice it would be an invitation to the worst tyranny of the majority (and whipped up majorities led by the nose by PR men for big corporations) that the world had ever seen.
"It's funny how the most leftist of politicians do exactly the sorts of things that they accuse the right of."
Of course, Hillary Clinton isn't left-wing. She's a politicians who does whatever it takes to win elections.
She and Bill have long stood with the Democratic Leadership council, a group that for over a decade has told Democrats to support Corporate America, and to act just like Republicans. (And then the DLC wonders why people just vote for real Republicans rather than Democrats-In-Name-Only.)
This is just Hillary pandering to the "soccer mom" vote, another attempt at "triangulation" in preparation for running for President in 2008.
I don't agree with you, by the way, that the kid who downloads the mod should be blamed. We should blame the parents who have abdicated their parenting duties. We should blame the parents who have so failed to educate their children that a few minutes of simulated sex in a video game would somehow "damage" their children.
But the real tragedy is that their are far more pressing problems in America: declining educational standards, health care inequity, an ever-more stratified economy where CEOs make thousands of times what workers make, and a costly and apparently never-ending occupation of a desert country where everyone hates us.
I'd have a lot more respect for Hillary if ferreting out secret sex mods in GTA wasn't her top priority. But of course, I'm being unfair: GTA isn't her priority at all -- getting elected in 2008 is her top priority.
'Now that his head has been bashed into 50% its original size, do those penis enlargements work on the "big head?"'
I thought we all assumed his head was bashed with an enlarged penis. (You can get low low rates on enlarged penises! Refinance at only 1.5% Click here!)
Well, put Cygwin on his MS-Windows box. Write bash scripts. Done right, your cuustomer will never even notice Cygwin, and you'll have access to everything you need to automate his workflow.
"The whole point of my tracking was to better serve our visitors and eventual customers"
Ok, so tell your customers that: if a cookie isn't accepted, take them to a page that tells them,
You may have noticed that our site sets a "cookie" on browser.
Of course, you can use our site without the cookie being set. Click here to continue without cookies.
We only use the cookie to allow us to better serve you as a customer. Below, you can read, in clear and unambiguous sentences, the data protection and retention polices that we follow. You can also click a button to set a cookie that tells us not to track you (that cookie is shared by all who accept it, and only aggregate information about what pages on our site they visit is collected). Or, if you agree that accepting a cookie serves you as much as it serves us, you can quickly and easily register a login name at our site. As a thank-you, customers with registered logins get a 10% discount on all our merchandise.
Again, if you prefer not to be individually tracked, you can accept our "anonymous" cookie or simply refuse all cookies; all of our site will continue to be accessible to you. We want to thank you again for visiting our site, and we hope to earn the privilege of having you as a customer. Thank you, [Business or Site Name].
"We all know he had a fun, fake Scottish accent and was unparalleled in delivering technobabble in just the right doses for a good episode of Trek, but I'd love to hear the stories of this man that aren't penned by Rodenberry or copyrighted by Viacom."
I was a bit surprised to hear on NPR that Doohan had served as a captain in the Canadian Army during World War Two, was wounded the arm and leg during the D-Day invasion, and lost a finger as well.
In any case, I'd be remiss if I didn't send James Doohan off with the traditional Slashdot salute:
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Star Trek actor James "Scotty" Doohan was found dead in his Washington State home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly a Canadian icon.
"Apparently they have chosen to make it more difficult to develop for the unit by encrypting their firmware updates. Even worse, until they were asked to, they neglected to make the GPL and LGPL licensed software they used in their device available."
So let's reward them for using GPL'd software and not making their mods available it, by buying lots and lots of these Zipits!
To hell with them. If I buy a device, I want to be able to use it as I want to use it. For them to use GPL'd linux and then encrypt their proprietary add-ons is just offensive.
Slashdot Mirror
The SQL Server Express doesn't appear to come with any management GUI (or I installed it wrong).
However, the free version of Microsoft's management tool, MS SQL Server Management Studio Express.
can be found here.
That said, I use Postgresql for my development job, but the Ohio Kerry 2004 campaign was using used MS SQL Server 2002 when I volunteered there, so I used it then. It reminded me quite a bit of Sybase's Transact SQL, especially when I checked out query showplans.
Yes, it was a bit clunky, and it had a terrible problem with values that it should have seen as constant in the context of a particular query, e.g.,
would cause a table scan comparing foo.name to @name even though all rows would be returned.
But it was serviceable, and everybody else felt mire comfortable with a GUI (I mostly wrote sql in a text editor, because that's the easiest way for me to "see" what a table or view does).
It also let us export tables to MS Access format, and frankly putting together a distributable app was easier in Access than my idea of using wxWindows. Again, this was an election campaign, so the deadline couldn't be extended and reusability/maintainability didn't much matter after November 3rd.
Oh, speaking of MS Access
Mr. Samba, that's the name, that name again is Mr. Samba.
Are naked hippies work safe?
Most of them are so un-photogenic, your boss can't reasonably claim you had an prurient interest in them. And given the hairiness and man-boobs, you often can't even tell the women from the men.
It's as safe as looking at photos of some Stone Age tribe in National Geographic. Except, in this case it's a tribe of "Aging Stoners".
Here's an answer I gave over a year ago on Slashdot. Coincidentally, it used as an example Dutch history, and a particular Dutch girl who was anything but protected by the authorities.
I was writing in reply to a commenter like you who saw nothing to worry about. That commenter wrote:
Anyway, here's how I replied last May, on what happened to be the 44th anniversary of the Dutch surrender to Nazi Germany:
Here's the original comment.
Maybe the Dutch aren't reading their history any more, or maybe they just think history is over. It surely is over for Anne Frank and most of the others who got tattooed with generated id numbers and entered into the Nazi's great big people-exterminating database.
But, as always, there's a new generation ready to trust that the government and their oh-so-well-intentioned Leaders will never do wrong. I mean, it's not like FEMA was ever misused for political reasons, right? Right?,
If you do end up porting it, you'll instantly become a faggot zealot who likes to suck dick and take it up the ass. Eventually, the grand-pubah faggot zealot linus whorevalds himself will come around and make you his personal bitch. You'll take it in the ass all day long, swallowing load after load of his steaming pile of crappy codecum.
Wow, your game's simulation of the results of Red State education policies is spot on!
All that's missing from the lame gay-baiting is a rambling denunciation of about "Derwenean EVIL-lution"!
...I was making reference to.... the incompetence of the Mayor of NO and the governor of LA.
Here's the simple take-home point:
Do you think your city, your family and loved ones, will be safe when it is your city that needs to be evacuated?
With Katrina we had several days' notice of a disaster -- and you use that to blame Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco.
But the next terrorist attack will give no warning. The attacked city will be relying entirely on FEMA -- there'll be no Nagin, no Blanco for apologists to blame.
Some four years after September 11th, both FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security have demonstrated that they can't protect Americans -- indeed, their leaders in abject and total failure can only blithely deny news footage we're seeing with our own eyes.
The fundamental purpose of any government -- as any conservative will tell you -- is the protection of its citizens.
In the last four years, our "leaders" have ignored crucial evidence preceding the September 11th attacks, have failed to get those responsible, have been willingly fooled by colossally bad intelligence about WMDs in Iraq, have fired those who correctly predicted we'd need far more troops to avoid a quagmire in Iraq, and have now let thousands of your fellow Americans die from their incompetence and lack of preparedness.
Our so-called "leaders" have repeatedly failed to uphold their end of the social contract. One "understandable" mistake after another -- and no one's been fired except whistle-blowers and those who were in retrospect proven right in their predictions.
How many more mistakes rewarded by Presidential Medals of Freedom will you tolerate? How many more Americans must die from sheer incompetent failure at the highest level of government before you find your anger?
How much longer will you trust your life, your children's lives, and your country's future, to the "protection" of these miserable failures?
How much longer?
Well, those stupid scientists (what have they ever given us?) think that
But of course that's all hogwash! We should listen to Big Oil lobbyist Phil Cooney:
After a stint doing "editing" for the Bush Administration, Phil's making the real cash now:
Nothing to see here folks! What do scientists know? They can't even make real money like a good lobbyist. If they're so smart, why aren't they rich?
Trust your President: he knows that global warming is just liberal whining and that we should teach real science, like Intelligent Design, in our public schools.
Carnegie-Mellon these are the guys who love to quantify the unquantifiable.
Didn't they also give us the "Capability Maturity Model"? I've seen organizations race to get to CMM-3 or CMM-4, and it's all been a joke.
A bunch of highly paid consultants tell everyone a new way to count beans ("under CMM, we group the beans starting from the right, not the left....").
Promises are made about code auditing, but once the CMM level has been awarded (usually by highly paid consultants who just happen to work with the highly paid consults who "mentored" the company's CMM training), all tat's actually done is that the people doing the real work of writing software are regularly distracted by a clown with a check-list and a clipboard.
Carnegie-Mellon continues to have a fetish for quantifying and for creating check-lists, and middle management continues to have a fetish for anything that allows them to quantify (even spuriously), because it takes the risk and bother out of their jobs.
Middle Manager: "The WordPerfect Project only got a 3 on the Carnegie Mellon software score, but the Clippy Project got a 5! So, it's perfectly safe for me to decide that to disband the WordPerfect Project and devote its resources to the Clippy Project. (And if it turns out later that was a bad decision, they can't fire me, because I relied on hard numbers generated by a known process!"
"As the highest classification available [PDF link] for computer games is MA15+ (as opposed to R18+ for films that can be sold in all states and territories), the sex scenes in 'Hot Coffee' pushed the game outside the permitted content for that rating, effectively banning the game."
But but, but Bill Gates said "MA15+ ought to be high enough a rating for anybody"!
A couple of very good reasons:
An analogy: European settlement destroyed much of the indigenous human heritage of South America. Catholic missionaries deliberately burned indigenous religious books, and pulled down indigenous temples. European explorers and settlers killed thousands of indigenous peoples with guns, and millions with European germs. We still have only a tenuous understanding of what human life was like before Europeans discovered South America, and that knowledge is slowly and painfully wrung from mall and inaccessible archaeological digs. (The same can be said of Australia and parts of Africa, where Europeans hunted natives for sport and received bounties for native scalps.) How much more would we know if we had an unbroken cultural history to learn from?
The worst setback to our knowledge of Martian life -- and by extension, life anywhere other than Earth -- would be to heedlessly rush in and destroy the uniqueness of what we hope to study.
Water => Life.
I'll be damned surprised if we don't find life on Mars now that we know there's free-standing water (ice) on the planet.
Our next responsibility is to try very very hard not to contaminate Mars with Earth-life, if we haven't already with our probes.
And it's about damn time we did.
We got to the Moon, proved we'd "beaten" the Soviets, and since then we've done diddly.
Had we really invested in space, we could have had whole colonies in orbit by now -- and our economy would be reaping the fantastic benefits that colonizing the frontier has always brought.We'd have zero-G medicines and all sorts of technology that could only be produced cheaply in micro-gravity environments. And we'd have the pride of once again being pioneers.
But instead, we squandered our chances, made Space not "the final frontier" but instead a supposedly "safe" government monopoly. Instead, we sit on our asses and watch "Pimp My Ride" and "Batchelor Island" and wonder where or self-respect has gone.
When I was a kid, we expected to be taking vacations on the Moon by 2005. Anyone who wants that vacation is advised to start learning Chinese.
America has become the land of the security-conscious, home of the frightened.
We spend billions -- in money our grandchildren will have to pay off -- to invade a country so that a few oligarchs can get contracts on oil that will be depleted in a generation. We rely on our military might and forget the ingenuity and the pioneering spirit that made that might possible.
Unable anymore to out-perform the Chinese, we pass "Intellectual Property" laws that the Chinese merely wink at, and pretend that the dictates of legislatures can turn back progress and protect the investments of carriage makers and buggy whip manufacturers in a world of automobiles and interstate highways.
And we literally can't even get a Space Shuttle -- twenty-five year old technology, folks! -- off the ground.
Are we really the heirs of Patrick Henry? Would Davy Crockett see himself in the cowering hair-splitters we've become?
Learn Chinese, or at least make sure your kids learn it. Because the sun is rapidly setting on the American Empire.
"Do NSA printers exhibit the same behaviour?"
I dunno about NSA printers, but I hear that White House printers add a footer:
"Psst: Valerie Plame, er, that is, Ambassador Wilson's wife is a CIA agent -- but you didn't hear it from us!
Sure, the serial number is printed at the hardware level as a partially-filled array of yellow dots:
X_XXX__XX_X_X_X <-- printer "A"'s a binary bit pattern of Xs that gives a serial number of 23765 decimal
X_XXX_X__XXXX_X <-- printer "B"'s a binary bit pattern of Xs gives a serial number of 23869 decimal
I'm suggesting at the software level (in a driver) we direct the printer to fill the whole array. This will make the serial number unreadable, by giving all printers using the driver a completely filled and indistinguishable array:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX <-- Printer "A"'s pattern with the driver filling in all the dots now gives a fake serial number of 32767
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX <-- Printer "B"'s pattern with the driver filling in all the dots also gives the same fake serial number of 32767
(The Slashdot "lameness" filter prevents me from posting the entire diagram.)
Now it seems to me that Open Source has an answer for this. Can we patch Xerox printer drivers so that they automatically print the yellow dot at all 120 locations, making each page bear a fake serial number of "FF FF FF
Or if the drivers aren't open source, can we write proxy printer drivers that add the dots and then forward to the real Xerox print driver?
Who'll take on this challenge? (Preferably a good linux coder who isn't a US citizen or resident.)
Somebody ask
- Alexander Hamilton (later the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, the same Treasury that Lorelei Pagano now works for),
- James Madison (later fourth President of The United States), or
- John Jay (later first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court)
why they published the Federalist Papers anonymously under the name "Publius".Ask them if they'd have been able to write the these brilliant arguments that shaped the Constitution of the United States of America if the very paper they'd printed it on could have been used to strip then of their anonymity?
Could they have made their arguments as forcefully, would they have allowed their ideas to have been so revolutionary, if they had known any political opponent could trace those papers back to them, perhaps deny them jobs or political offices because of disagreement with their ideas?
Would we even have the Constitution that we have today if these great men had not been able to use the pen-name "Publius"?
Hamilton and Madison and Jay forged (ahem) our Constitution in anonymity, but counterfeiting specialist Lorelei Pagano tells us that those three silly boys didn't need their anonymity? That in order to be safe from counterfeiters, we have to give up our right to anonymous politically agitation?
How much more security can this country -- this nation conceived in anonymity -- survive?
"And a programmer... have you never tried to lay your thoughts out quickly and typed the wrong word?"
Yes, but it was in PERL, so of course nobody could tell.
And that's how the HTML-producing CGI script I was trying to write accidently became a self-modifying ASCII-text Pac Man game that did DeCSS decoding if you ate all four ghosts.
"Looking around the world for more representative forms of government like parlimentary systems I'm beginning to despair...."
You and me both. As HL Mencken observed, there's a strong strain of "booboisie" in America. Mencken, being of German extraction, experienced it himself in the anti-German hysteria that attended our entrance into World War One.
Why can't we write a second American constitution and bill of rights that forever enshrines certain liberties above the muck of anyone's political ambitions?"
Because it would be written by those currently in power, to include a "right" to have God and Creationism in the schools, a "right" to keep gays from marrying, a "right" to security that would be nothing like the restrictions on government enshrined in the 4th, 5th, and 8th Amendments.
And the rest of it would be written by lawyers for Wal-Mart and the music industry; they'd "grant" us "rights" to unbreakable DRM and to work for less than minimum wage.
And as the highest law, there'd be no undoing those "rights" without writing a third Constitution -- and probably a second America Revolution.
In principle, a new start is what's needed. In practice it would be an invitation to the worst tyranny of the majority (and whipped up majorities led by the nose by PR men for big corporations) that the world had ever seen.
"It's funny how the most leftist of politicians do exactly the sorts of things that they accuse the right of."
Of course, Hillary Clinton isn't left-wing. She's a politicians who does whatever it takes to win elections.
She and Bill have long stood with the Democratic Leadership council, a group that for over a decade has told Democrats to support Corporate America, and to act just like Republicans. (And then the DLC wonders why people just vote for real Republicans rather than Democrats-In-Name-Only.)
This is just Hillary pandering to the "soccer mom" vote, another attempt at "triangulation" in preparation for running for President in 2008.
I don't agree with you, by the way, that the kid who downloads the mod should be blamed. We should blame the parents who have abdicated their parenting duties. We should blame the parents who have so failed to educate their children that a few minutes of simulated sex in a video game would somehow "damage" their children.
But the real tragedy is that their are far more pressing problems in America: declining educational standards, health care inequity, an ever-more stratified economy where CEOs make thousands of times what workers make, and a costly and apparently never-ending occupation of a desert country where everyone hates us.
I'd have a lot more respect for Hillary if ferreting out secret sex mods in GTA wasn't her top priority. But of course, I'm being unfair: GTA isn't her priority at all -- getting elected in 2008 is her top priority.
'Now that his head has been bashed into 50% its original size, do those penis enlargements work on the "big head?"'
I thought we all assumed his head was bashed with an enlarged penis. (You can get low low rates on enlarged penises! Refinance at only 1.5% Click here!)
Maybe Alan Kay'll be lucky, and Carly Fiorini will hire him for wherever she's going to be CEO next!
I hear she's a wiz at turning companies around!
Oh wait....
"put linux on it."
Well, put Cygwin on his MS-Windows box. Write bash scripts. Done right, your cuustomer will never even notice Cygwin, and you'll have access to everything you need to automate his workflow.
Ok, so tell your customers that: if a cookie isn't accepted, take them to a page that tells them,
I was a bit surprised to hear on NPR that Doohan had served as a captain in the Canadian Army during World War Two, was wounded the arm and leg during the D-Day invasion, and lost a finger as well.
In any case, I'd be remiss if I didn't send James Doohan off with the traditional Slashdot salute:
"Apparently they have chosen to make it more difficult to develop for the unit by encrypting their firmware updates. Even worse, until they were asked to, they neglected to make the GPL and LGPL licensed software they used in their device available."
So let's reward them for using GPL'd software and not making their mods available it, by buying lots and lots of these Zipits!
To hell with them. If I buy a device, I want to be able to use it as I want to use it. For them to use GPL'd linux and then encrypt their proprietary add-ons is just offensive.