Yes, it's exciting, but something about this guy's expression on the diary page makes me think he's got more than a coaster blueprint hiding behind that paper.
Yes but was it against SearchKing specifically or any site that did what SearchKing did?
Well, pointed out in a previous article, Google has kept the exact method of its page rank for this as well as all other cases on the lowdown. However, if link farms were getting downgraded, I would wager that such things as Scientology would start to drop as well. Then again, I just did do a search for Scientology and noticed quite a few highly ranked sites critical of Scientology. You'll note that scientology.org ranks very highly, but I believe that a domain that nearly exactly matches a search ranks very high for non-common terms. For instance, try searching for "searchking recipes". They're #1. Now, try searching for "recipes". They're still there, but they're in the 80s.
Though, my ultimately answer is: I don't know. But judging by the catastrophic drop of their pages, I would wager they just manually set the PageRank for any SearchKing site to a low value, or capped it similarly. Further, depending on how you read the wording in their reply, you could assume they are implying that:
And Search King admitted that Google had the right to take action in response, including changing Google's opinion of the importance of the Search King site by changing the PageRank assigned to that site.
Granted, I'm sure any strict logicican (and certainly Google's lawyers), would suggest that this simply means Google has a right to lower anyone's Page Rank either directly or indirectly through modification of their ranking algorithms, and it doesn't even state that Google changed its algorithms at all, let alone specifically to affect SearchKing.
Google didn't reduce SearchKing's page rank, Google changed the page rank formula.
If I recall correctly, Google changed its page rank formula in one simple way: It severely downrated any site that linked to SearchKing. Therefore, the link farms developed to pump up SearchKing's results were considered unimportant and did not boost its pages as they had previously. This was very much a move taken directly against SearchKing and only SearchKing.
>> [Kernel tweaking] is also little more productive than a fragfest.
>> I couldn't even get the encoder (lame) to run reliably until I began >> the tedious process of benchmarking and recompiling each of the major >> components--
And, remind me, what does tweaking lame for a specific purpose have to do with teaking the kernel?
Nothing against tweaking a specific application for a specific purpose. Even tweaking the kernel with purpose is a very understandable activity. But, in general, little time is spent in kernel functions. I thought that was, in fact, part of the point of a microkernel.
Since the last pinewood derby I had the pleasure to attend was over a decade ago, my memory is a little hazy. However, I do clearly recall all of the fastest cars having one common feature: They were almost planes. And I don't mean the flying vehicle kind. Plenty of people made very carefully crafted, glossy cars with carefully painted details, but they never won. All of the cars I saw do well were basically shells whose purpose was to hold the weights (which were always measured out to be barely below the upper limit) and the wheels together. Further, I recall many taking great trouble to rub some lubricant on their axels prior to every run. I can't speculate on the usefulness of such a thing.
Overall, I think the process is more fun if a lot of effort is taken in designing the car to look nice more so than making it fast, due to the blandness of competition stated above. That's not to say I didn't see a couple of nicely decorated planes, but when you got right down to it, it was still 2-dimensional.
Actually, I think -O, -O2, -O3, and -Os are mostly abbreviation for long lists of various -f commands.
Gah, ignorance redux. The same page clearly reads Not all of the optimizations performed by GCC have -f options to control them. Too much skimming, not enough scanning.
From what I've observed, there is no legal C++ code that doesn't self-modify which gcc can't intelligently optimize without problems.
Legal C++...well, that's the trick, isn't it? I've seen at least one major failure in a complex project I work on that was exposed by -O2 optimization level using g++-3.2.
Could you clarify on this matter please? I have seen some things break between version of g++ due to changes in how the STL was implemented. In one case, for instance, I was transparently using pointers as if they were iterators. This caused problems that required a rather large rewrite. But that was entirely my fault. Anyhow, my question is really what specifically caused your problem?
Whether it's a bug in the code or a bug in the compiler I do not know. Unfortunately, g++ doesn't seem to have the command-line interface to systematically test things.
Actually, I think -O, -O2, -O3, and -Os are mostly abbreviation for long lists of various -f commands. See the manual for a complete reference. It goes on for pages, however, and isn't exactly clear on which -f's the specific optimization levels, but it sheds some light. There is the occasional mention of "this is automatically enabled after -O2". And there's a sentence that reads On most machines, the -O option turns on the -fthread-jumps and -fdelayed-branch options, but specific machines may
handle it differently.
to find out what instabilities happen due to specific optimizations, and either fix GCC so it can more intelligently tell when to optimize and when not to
Having only but read the man page for gcc a couple of times, and not even that of gcc 3.0, I can say I'm woefully underqualified to comment on the subject, but I will anyhow. From what I've observed, there is no legal C++ code that doesn't self-modify which gcc can't intelligently optimize without problems. The only time that I have ever seen optimization issues was when inline assmebler was involved, which I would hope was already optimized, considering the nature of the beast. Further, many of the optimizations that gcc performs are rather simple things such as loop unrolling, function inlining, delaying popping of the stack until after several function calls, etc.
Perhaps one of the most notable optimizations, for the beginner at least, is that one needs to provide -O or gcc will not allocate any variables in a register. It'll be memory, register, operation, and back to memory over and over again. (Or perhaps just a direct memory operation if you're on x86.) Despite my early teachers' insistance that compilers were simply too smart and didn't need such hints, I tested and found that a trivial heavily looped programs often ran 3 times faster when I declared the loop counters as 'register'. The problem was that we were simply using "gcc source.c" to compile our programs. gcc produces very poor code if -O isn't used at least.
But, anyhow, I think the largest issues would be concerned with -m and -f flags which may change default or even standard behavior. For instance, -felide-constructors breaks ANSI C++ compliance, but isn't a bad idea if you create and destroy a large number of expernsive objects. (Then again, you shouldn't do that.)
Someone already commented on this somewhere, it could have been FidoNET or Slashdot, so I'll paraphrase. Anyhow, the upshot is that there are two things about Linux.
It's an OS that can be used to run programs which occupy your full time.
Two, it's an OS that can be tweaked endlessly to occupy one's full time.
The lady or gentleman who finds it more entertaining to tweak the kernel than play Quake is that much geekier and worthy of respect in my book. It's just important that such a person realizes, aside from gaining some small amount of technical knowledge and problem-solving skills, such an act is also little more productive than a fragfest.
but these calls are providing real employment for people who would otherwise be living marginal or supported lives.
Let them give you the spiel, say no POLITELY, and know you helped someone feed their family.
Just like the guy in the black mask robbing the liquor store? Just be happy to give him your wallet! You're helping to support his heroin habit! You wouldn't want him to die from withdrawl, would you?
Fast food is always hiring, and I'd argue it is much more moral. I'd also wager it provides for greater experience -- You can honestly deal with people like you might in any other real customer service activity; and updward mobility -- being a Burger King GM isn't that bad of a deal.
why does it look like these state do-not-call lists all require residents to pay a fee to be listed?
Haven't done any research on other calling lists, but in my state, Colorado, the Colorado No Call List [2] is completely free. Further, the cost to run it, apparently came out pretty low. It was bid at about $42,000 per year by one company. Considering some 750,000 people signed up for it, in the past year alone, if each even paid a quarter, the cost to maintain the list would be easily covered.
I believe any higher cost would have to be justified in a sort of "total cost to the state" for lost revenues from workers for the telemarketers, resulting sales to both the telemarketers and telemarketed, and resulting tax revenue. Even then, I can't see a reasonable cost exceeding $1.
this is inpertitent to the matter at hand
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
My slight misspelling of the word not withstanding, I don't suppose you could point me at where else I have recently used (or supposedly misused) this word? I briefly checked my recent comments, the few of them that there are, and did not see it.
Sure would be nice if I could just check a box to mod myself down to 0 without having to post anonymously.
Re:"or more often during heavy traffic"
on
Cryptome Log Subpoenaed
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
If the log files were deleted all along that is okay, but if they deleted the logs after the subpoena they were destroying evidence.
As already noted by another poster, this is inpertitent to the matter at hand, but raises an interesting question:
If you have a cron job that just happens to delete your logs, say, every 7 days, and you don't do any backups of said logs, and you receive a subpoena, oh, 20 minutes or so before that cron job is scheduled to run...exactly how fast are you obligated to walk over to the machine room to turn that thing off? How liable are you legally for taking your coffee break around then? What is the burden of proof on the prosecutor in such a case?
And yes I do value human life more than an animals.
An understandable judgement call which one must make for himself, but unnecessary suffering of any living thing is cruel, and I would hold unethical. How common are horse allergies an impediment to the use of antivenin? How many chicks suffer through this process now? Has anything been done to address their pain? These I would consider serious questions to which I do not have answers, nor does the article.
Hate to think how many shots I've had and I did used to donate blood.
Unless you're some kind of typing superchicken, I don't see how your voluntary exposure to pain to benefit other humans is in any way comparable to injecting poison into a child of any species.
It doesn't seem unduly cruel to the animals either.
Rhetorical: At what point does cruelty become due and proper?
So our solution to the great deal of pain caused by continually blood-letting a horse is to simply inject a light dose of venom into still-maturing chickens? As noted in the comment at the end of the story, this may lower the overall amount of pain (How quantifiable is pain?), but it soundslike we're still benefitting from a rather cruel process to animals. Is it possible to safely anesthesize the birds and still reap the benefits of anti-venom, or are we just injecting them with pain inducing venom and letting them flap it off?
Actually, it's spot on. And that's actually damned high for a technical institution. In fact, the percentage of our faculty which is female is remarkably high for an engineering institution. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
If you go to CU Boulder, where our dropouts mostly wind up, you'll find a much higher female population, but most of them are in liberal arts areas. That's not to say anything against women or Boulder in general. Women are great, and it's still a bit of a mystery why women have poured into most previously male-dominated industries such as medical, construction, and so on, but engineers are still predominately male. Further, Boulder offers a wider variety of courses and degrees than Mines possibly could, and has an entirely different atmosphere. But the course work is decidedly less rigorous.
and the town absolutely reeks from that plant.
Can't tell you I've ever smelled anything from the plant. On overcast days, the inversion takes over, and the whole town (all of Denver, not just Golden/Denver West) gets a rather horrid smell from all sorts of emissions in the greater Denver area. Just the same, even the people who attend UIUC don't notice the smell after a week or two.
Surprising that one of the largest plants in the state might just have some environmental problems. Even 3M's 3E program fails at times, and they wind up in their own scandals.
Personally, I found the large accidental dump of sour mash into Clear Creek a year ago to be a bit more noticable example of the company's irresponsibility, not the drafting of legislation which held back what was already completely lax enforcement. Luckily, the dump caused little death of wildlife. Clear Creek is a great waterway, in most parts, but the upstream mines manage to kill off most of the fish long before they reach the shores of Golden.
You might try visiting the Coors Brewery in Golden, CO. You'll get to see the world's largest single-site brewery as well as the nation's largest aluminum can manufacturing plant. Naturally, they give several free samples at the end of the tour. For those of you who scoff at Coors, they also produce Killian's Ale (originally an Irish recipe, but produced in the U.S.) and Keystone ('the never bitter,' cheapest possible beer) if one of those floats your boat.
Be warned, students of the nearby college frequently take 'the short tour', which skips the bottles and chemicals, going straight to the beer. At a college that's around 75% guys, this could be a hazardous experience for females.
TetriFast is a slightly updated version of Tetrinet but without the piece delay which makes it a bit more fun. They both, however, are tiny installs and, as requested, they leave no footprint on the machine. Just eliminate the directory they install into and you're fine.
However, it's worth noting that the game is insanely easy to cheat at with a custom client, so it's wise to stick to using a local server that only you and your work mates play on. Luckily, the client comes with a (slightly flaky) builtin server which you can use for that purpose.
Can God make a rock so big that he can't carry it himself?
That question illustrates the problem many have with understanding this problem. The question is more abstract than some people, including our fair parent, think. We're not asking whether we can teach the computer everything know, but whether we can teach it everything we know, including ways to learn more (and ways to learn ways to learn). The question is one removed from the real issue.
If there is a God, no It can't make a rock so big that It can't carry It because a rock is physical and It is metaphysical. Anything physical is wholly within Its domain. That's like asking whether I can make a bugger so big that I can't pick it out of my nose. The bugger's limited by the size of my nose.
As for medical purposes, you have to think beyond just doing what we do now on a smaller scale. You'll never HAVE organ failure.
This is exactly the kind of stary-eyed, far-fetched sort of thing that is too many decades off to be realistic and is exactly why I was saying I saw few medical uses in the near future. Nano-machines complicated enough to do anything without outside assistance, especially on that scale are at least 20 if not 50 years away. Aside from other issues, there is the matter of the sheer amount of power one of those would require. That's a lot of energy density with something so small. Wait, you want it powered by the energy of muscle contractions? More likely such a machine would be fried by those very potential differences.
And the same issues applies to the assumption of some kind of bootstrapping process. Creating nano-machines using nano-machines is a pipe dream. A very appealing imagery, true, but it comes across the same problems as above. You're looking to pack an incredible amount of sophistication into something very small. The energy it would need to control in order to make smaller items may well be enough to break the very bonds holding it together! To speak nothing of the liklihood of its breaking apart due to the heat of the energy necessary to drive such a complicated process. Think your Athlon gets a fair amount of heat density?
In response to all of the smart asses wondering how this could be very useful: Ask someone at Micron or Intel perhaps. Thin layer deposition is cool, but difficult, expensive, and error prone. Transistors and capacitors are relatively simple devices when you get right down to it.
Of course, there's a lot of work necessary before this sort of thing could be done. It sounds like it's only working right now on some semiconducting materials. The article states: "[it] can be used to direct and manipulate almost any particle...whether the particle has a net charge or not...", but then "Alexandridis is developing models to predict how various particles, and combination of particles, will behave under the influence of different electrical fields". Further, the article notes that the structures only stay together while the electric field is maintained. When it is removed, the structures fall apart. They're, uh, working on that small problem. Once both of those problems are solved, there's the issue of doing the nano-construction repeatedly and on a massive scale. Lots of science and engineering left to that.
Now, medical purposes I don't buy quite so much myself. Non-invasive surgeries, including threading a thin wire into your brain to eliminate a potential aneurism and breaking up galstones with a laser, already make scary things into outpatient procedures without the need for this insane level of miniaturization. Protein construction for drug synthesis might be viable, if it could be done more reliably through nano-construction than the "splice genes into random simple bacteria until one works" method.
fact that the earth is elliptical and not circular isn't important; it's that it appears circular to us (no it doesn't appear flat unless you've never seen pictures from space)
Please note that despite the rather amazing sites such photographs might be, they are far and removed from everyday life. Perhaps an easier method of observing the Earth's roundness (as pointed out some centuries ago) is to observe a ship coming or leaving over the horizon. On a flat ocean, the ship should simply shrink into the distance till it is too small to observe. But since the ocean surface is curved, the body of the ship disappears long before the mast. Of course, we take it for granted that the ocean surface is flat relative to the Earth beneath it.
Actually, as someone else already pointed out, gestures can be turned off. Once more, the first time you activate a gesture, Opera asks you whether you intended to do so and if you wish to continue with them activated. A simple check and a "No", and mouse gestures will never bother you again.
So, I'm clueless. But there's a lot of smart people on Slashdot.
No, really, how often does one actually unmount a volume at home? In a production environment? When you shut down, is an unmount performed? If so, is the cached metadata and data flushed manually beforehand? Does this mean it's safer to simply reboot one's computer rather than carefully shut it down?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's exciting, but something about this guy's expression on the diary page makes me think he's got more than a coaster blueprint hiding behind that paper.
Well, pointed out in a previous article, Google has kept the exact method of its page rank for this as well as all other cases on the lowdown. However, if link farms were getting downgraded, I would wager that such things as Scientology would start to drop as well. Then again, I just did do a search for Scientology and noticed quite a few highly ranked sites critical of Scientology. You'll note that scientology.org ranks very highly, but I believe that a domain that nearly exactly matches a search ranks very high for non-common terms. For instance, try searching for "searchking recipes". They're #1. Now, try searching for "recipes". They're still there, but they're in the 80s.
Though, my ultimately answer is: I don't know. But judging by the catastrophic drop of their pages, I would wager they just manually set the PageRank for any SearchKing site to a low value, or capped it similarly. Further, depending on how you read the wording in their reply, you could assume they are implying that:
Granted, I'm sure any strict logicican (and certainly Google's lawyers), would suggest that this simply means Google has a right to lower anyone's Page Rank either directly or indirectly through modification of their ranking algorithms, and it doesn't even state that Google changed its algorithms at all, let alone specifically to affect SearchKing.
If I recall correctly, Google changed its page rank formula in one simple way: It severely downrated any site that linked to SearchKing. Therefore, the link farms developed to pump up SearchKing's results were considered unimportant and did not boost its pages as they had previously. This was very much a move taken directly against SearchKing and only SearchKing.
Not that that's a bad thing.
>> [Kernel tweaking] is also little more productive than a fragfest.
>> I couldn't even get the encoder (lame) to run reliably until I began
>> the tedious process of benchmarking and recompiling each of the major
>> components--
And, remind me, what does tweaking lame for a specific purpose have to do with teaking the kernel?
Nothing against tweaking a specific application for a specific purpose. Even tweaking the kernel with purpose is a very understandable activity. But, in general, little time is spent in kernel functions. I thought that was, in fact, part of the point of a microkernel.
Since the last pinewood derby I had the pleasure to attend was over a decade ago, my memory is a little hazy. However, I do clearly recall all of the fastest cars having one common feature: They were almost planes. And I don't mean the flying vehicle kind. Plenty of people made very carefully crafted, glossy cars with carefully painted details, but they never won. All of the cars I saw do well were basically shells whose purpose was to hold the weights (which were always measured out to be barely below the upper limit) and the wheels together. Further, I recall many taking great trouble to rub some lubricant on their axels prior to every run. I can't speculate on the usefulness of such a thing.
Overall, I think the process is more fun if a lot of effort is taken in designing the car to look nice more so than making it fast, due to the blandness of competition stated above. That's not to say I didn't see a couple of nicely decorated planes, but when you got right down to it, it was still 2-dimensional.
Gah, ignorance redux. The same page clearly reads Not all of the optimizations performed by GCC have -f options to control them. Too much skimming, not enough scanning.
Could you clarify on this matter please? I have seen some things break between version of g++ due to changes in how the STL was implemented. In one case, for instance, I was transparently using pointers as if they were iterators. This caused problems that required a rather large rewrite. But that was entirely my fault. Anyhow, my question is really what specifically caused your problem?
Actually, I think -O, -O2, -O3, and -Os are mostly abbreviation for long lists of various -f commands. See the manual for a complete reference. It goes on for pages, however, and isn't exactly clear on which -f's the specific optimization levels, but it sheds some light. There is the occasional mention of "this is automatically enabled after -O2". And there's a sentence that reads On most machines, the -O option turns on the -fthread-jumps and -fdelayed-branch options, but specific machines may handle it differently.
Having only but read the man page for gcc a couple of times, and not even that of gcc 3.0, I can say I'm woefully underqualified to comment on the subject, but I will anyhow. From what I've observed, there is no legal C++ code that doesn't self-modify which gcc can't intelligently optimize without problems. The only time that I have ever seen optimization issues was when inline assmebler was involved, which I would hope was already optimized, considering the nature of the beast. Further, many of the optimizations that gcc performs are rather simple things such as loop unrolling, function inlining, delaying popping of the stack until after several function calls, etc.
Perhaps one of the most notable optimizations, for the beginner at least, is that one needs to provide -O or gcc will not allocate any variables in a register. It'll be memory, register, operation, and back to memory over and over again. (Or perhaps just a direct memory operation if you're on x86.) Despite my early teachers' insistance that compilers were simply too smart and didn't need such hints, I tested and found that a trivial heavily looped programs often ran 3 times faster when I declared the loop counters as 'register'. The problem was that we were simply using "gcc source.c" to compile our programs. gcc produces very poor code if -O isn't used at least.
But, anyhow, I think the largest issues would be concerned with -m and -f flags which may change default or even standard behavior. For instance, -felide-constructors breaks ANSI C++ compliance, but isn't a bad idea if you create and destroy a large number of expernsive objects. (Then again, you shouldn't do that.)
Someone already commented on this somewhere, it could have been FidoNET or Slashdot, so I'll paraphrase. Anyhow, the upshot is that there are two things about Linux.
The lady or gentleman who finds it more entertaining to tweak the kernel than play Quake is that much geekier and worthy of respect in my book. It's just important that such a person realizes, aside from gaining some small amount of technical knowledge and problem-solving skills, such an act is also little more productive than a fragfest.
Haven't done any research on other calling lists, but in my state, Colorado, the Colorado No Call List [2] is completely free. Further, the cost to run it, apparently came out pretty low. It was bid at about $42,000 per year by one company. Considering some 750,000 people signed up for it, in the past year alone, if each even paid a quarter, the cost to maintain the list would be easily covered.
I believe any higher cost would have to be justified in a sort of "total cost to the state" for lost revenues from workers for the telemarketers, resulting sales to both the telemarketers and telemarketed, and resulting tax revenue. Even then, I can't see a reasonable cost exceeding $1.
My slight misspelling of the word not withstanding, I don't suppose you could point me at where else I have recently used (or supposedly misused) this word? I briefly checked my recent comments, the few of them that there are, and did not see it.
Sure would be nice if I could just check a box to mod myself down to 0 without having to post anonymously.
As already noted by another poster, this is inpertitent to the matter at hand, but raises an interesting question:
If you have a cron job that just happens to delete your logs, say, every 7 days, and you don't do any backups of said logs, and you receive a subpoena, oh, 20 minutes or so before that cron job is scheduled to run...exactly how fast are you obligated to walk over to the machine room to turn that thing off? How liable are you legally for taking your coffee break around then? What is the burden of proof on the prosecutor in such a case?
In backwards order:
An understandable judgement call which one must make for himself, but unnecessary suffering of any living thing is cruel, and I would hold unethical. How common are horse allergies an impediment to the use of antivenin? How many chicks suffer through this process now? Has anything been done to address their pain? These I would consider serious questions to which I do not have answers, nor does the article.
Unless you're some kind of typing superchicken, I don't see how your voluntary exposure to pain to benefit other humans is in any way comparable to injecting poison into a child of any species.
Rhetorical: At what point does cruelty become due and proper?
So our solution to the great deal of pain caused by continually blood-letting a horse is to simply inject a light dose of venom into still-maturing chickens? As noted in the comment at the end of the story, this may lower the overall amount of pain (How quantifiable is pain?), but it soundslike we're still benefitting from a rather cruel process to animals. Is it possible to safely anesthesize the birds and still reap the benefits of anti-venom, or are we just injecting them with pain inducing venom and letting them flap it off?
Actually, it's spot on. And that's actually damned high for a technical institution. In fact, the percentage of our faculty which is female is remarkably high for an engineering institution. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
If you go to CU Boulder, where our dropouts mostly wind up, you'll find a much higher female population, but most of them are in liberal arts areas. That's not to say anything against women or Boulder in general. Women are great, and it's still a bit of a mystery why women have poured into most previously male-dominated industries such as medical, construction, and so on, but engineers are still predominately male. Further, Boulder offers a wider variety of courses and degrees than Mines possibly could, and has an entirely different atmosphere. But the course work is decidedly less rigorous.
Can't tell you I've ever smelled anything from the plant. On overcast days, the inversion takes over, and the whole town (all of Denver, not just Golden/Denver West) gets a rather horrid smell from all sorts of emissions in the greater Denver area. Just the same, even the people who attend UIUC don't notice the smell after a week or two.
Surprising that one of the largest plants in the state might just have some environmental problems. Even 3M's 3E program fails at times, and they wind up in their own scandals.
Personally, I found the large accidental dump of sour mash into Clear Creek a year ago to be a bit more noticable example of the company's irresponsibility, not the drafting of legislation which held back what was already completely lax enforcement. Luckily, the dump caused little death of wildlife. Clear Creek is a great waterway, in most parts, but the upstream mines manage to kill off most of the fish long before they reach the shores of Golden.
You might try visiting the Coors Brewery in Golden, CO. You'll get to see the world's largest single-site brewery as well as the nation's largest aluminum can manufacturing plant. Naturally, they give several free samples at the end of the tour. For those of you who scoff at Coors, they also produce Killian's Ale (originally an Irish recipe, but produced in the U.S.) and Keystone ('the never bitter,' cheapest possible beer) if one of those floats your boat.
Be warned, students of the nearby college frequently take 'the short tour', which skips the bottles and chemicals, going straight to the beer. At a college that's around 75% guys, this could be a hazardous experience for females.
TetriFast is a slightly updated version of Tetrinet but without the piece delay which makes it a bit more fun. They both, however, are tiny installs and, as requested, they leave no footprint on the machine. Just eliminate the directory they install into and you're fine.
However, it's worth noting that the game is insanely easy to cheat at with a custom client, so it's wise to stick to using a local server that only you and your work mates play on. Luckily, the client comes with a (slightly flaky) builtin server which you can use for that purpose.
That question illustrates the problem many have with understanding this problem. The question is more abstract than some people, including our fair parent, think. We're not asking whether we can teach the computer everything know, but whether we can teach it everything we know, including ways to learn more (and ways to learn ways to learn). The question is one removed from the real issue.
If there is a God, no It can't make a rock so big that It can't carry It because a rock is physical and It is metaphysical. Anything physical is wholly within Its domain. That's like asking whether I can make a bugger so big that I can't pick it out of my nose. The bugger's limited by the size of my nose.
This is exactly the kind of stary-eyed, far-fetched sort of thing that is too many decades off to be realistic and is exactly why I was saying I saw few medical uses in the near future. Nano-machines complicated enough to do anything without outside assistance, especially on that scale are at least 20 if not 50 years away. Aside from other issues, there is the matter of the sheer amount of power one of those would require. That's a lot of energy density with something so small. Wait, you want it powered by the energy of muscle contractions? More likely such a machine would be fried by those very potential differences.
And the same issues applies to the assumption of some kind of bootstrapping process. Creating nano-machines using nano-machines is a pipe dream. A very appealing imagery, true, but it comes across the same problems as above. You're looking to pack an incredible amount of sophistication into something very small. The energy it would need to control in order to make smaller items may well be enough to break the very bonds holding it together! To speak nothing of the liklihood of its breaking apart due to the heat of the energy necessary to drive such a complicated process. Think your Athlon gets a fair amount of heat density?
Nice dreams, but not practical.
In response to all of the smart asses wondering how this could be very useful: Ask someone at Micron or Intel perhaps. Thin layer deposition is cool, but difficult, expensive, and error prone. Transistors and capacitors are relatively simple devices when you get right down to it.
Of course, there's a lot of work necessary before this sort of thing could be done. It sounds like it's only working right now on some semiconducting materials. The article states: "[it] can be used to direct and manipulate almost any particle...whether the particle has a net charge or not...", but then "Alexandridis is developing models to predict how various particles, and combination of particles, will behave under the influence of different electrical fields". Further, the article notes that the structures only stay together while the electric field is maintained. When it is removed, the structures fall apart. They're, uh, working on that small problem. Once both of those problems are solved, there's the issue of doing the nano-construction repeatedly and on a massive scale. Lots of science and engineering left to that.
Now, medical purposes I don't buy quite so much myself. Non-invasive surgeries, including threading a thin wire into your brain to eliminate a potential aneurism and breaking up galstones with a laser, already make scary things into outpatient procedures without the need for this insane level of miniaturization. Protein construction for drug synthesis might be viable, if it could be done more reliably through nano-construction than the "splice genes into random simple bacteria until one works" method.
Please note that despite the rather amazing sites such photographs might be, they are far and removed from everyday life. Perhaps an easier method of observing the Earth's roundness (as pointed out some centuries ago) is to observe a ship coming or leaving over the horizon. On a flat ocean, the ship should simply shrink into the distance till it is too small to observe. But since the ocean surface is curved, the body of the ship disappears long before the mast. Of course, we take it for granted that the ocean surface is flat relative to the Earth beneath it.
Actually, as someone else already pointed out, gestures can be turned off. Once more, the first time you activate a gesture, Opera asks you whether you intended to do so and if you wish to continue with them activated. A simple check and a "No", and mouse gestures will never bother you again.
So, I'm clueless. But there's a lot of smart people on Slashdot. No, really, how often does one actually unmount a volume at home? In a production environment? When you shut down, is an unmount performed? If so, is the cached metadata and data flushed manually beforehand? Does this mean it's safer to simply reboot one's computer rather than carefully shut it down?