what part of "non-obvious to me" was hard to get? I'm fully aware that I might be the problem here (and since it is my own personal problem...) and, through my posting, am looking for other with the same problems... But ponder this: When every other device I ever met apparently followed the same rough rules my mind is wired to "just know", why isn't the iPod? Why is it different than any other product I ever used, making it much harder for me to grasp?
...that doesn't consider the iPod interface "intuitive" (Nevermind the "nipple"-theory)? About half a year ago, I thought about getting an iPod, since my Trekstor iBeat organix only holds a single Gigabyte (Flash though, which I prefer over HD, which was the reason for getting this nice, big, Ogg-compatible player in the first place). So, I went to a store and began fiddling with the different players on display, including an iPod. I should mention that I'm both a capable tech-head (CS student actually writing software and enjoying poking inside the kernel of his Gentoo installs) and comfortable with end-user electronics (Never found a VCR, Mobile or Microwave I couldn't just handle without RTFM, though I usually do when they're my own devices). So, I tried to get the iPod to play a certain song. Just play it, no shuffle, playlist, repeat or whatever. You know what? It took me more than three minutes to figure out how to get that bat-shit-fucking-loco clickwheel to do that (I had ample opportunity to see the whole collection of music on the machine during that time though). IPods look nice, sure, but the interface is massively non-obvious to me...
You know how often really good people are accused of using aimbots? Just reporting someone as cheater should not trigger anything but an investigation, which should have to prove guilt. If cheating cannot be proven, then no penalties (like being forced to play with other "cheaters") should be applied. "In dubio pro reo".
Well, let's face it: Windows is a non-networked single-user OS (NT had a chance as server, but even that practically needed a GUI to administrate instead of properly running headless). Has it matured? In a way, yes, XP on a home machine is way more stable than 98 could ever hope to be, but it is step backward from NT 3.51 as well... On the other hand those home machines rarely have uptime requirements of more than 24 hours (Maybe a week for hardcore downloaders). The server editions, while trying their best (and I really mean that) to get more out of the code-base, just have no chance. A pure server system is designed to handle that better. *nix on the other hand translates poorly into homes, because home users don't seem to want the security requirements that come with it (That they may need them is another question). A desktop *nix regularly requires "power-user-niveau" (to borrow a Win-World term) to operate comfortably. *shrug* Different target audiences, only the latter can be adopted to other uses by users not bothered by the "inconveniences", while the former doesn't offer some necessary features.
I have read how it works, I've written small tools to do that myself, before I went cynic, and my usual partitions are encrypted (albeit not with TrueCrypt, but via loopback), currently I'm working on encrypting my drives completely, carrying the boot-sector in the aforementioned USB-stick. You trust "them" to be intelligent enough to get logic, I don't. From my perspective, in a worst case scenario, I picture a dumb torture-might-be-a-good-idea inquisitive who believes I'm hiding kiddie porn on the disk. Will that guy believe me and stop asking, for years on end probably, when I say "There's nothing more"? When he knows the system I use let's me hide an arbitrary number of further containers? Or is it better for me when I can claim not to divulge the keys at all, clearly sending me to prison for an exactly defined number of years? With the option of destroying my USB stick the second the cops come in, just to make sure? As I said, "Plausible deniability" only works with people who understand the technicalities in the first place, for everyone else it's "U-huh, but we know there could be more". Right? No. Just? No. Probably the case? In this fucked up world? I'd say yes, but that is my personal opinion, you're free to disagree.
Which means nothing as soon as you decrypted the first container. Probably the second is not listed then (and only available "if you know it exists"), but given the software is known (Using a software capable of, even advertising, doing this is likely enough, legally, to assume you may have used that feature) and the "random" bytes still have to be somewhere, it's absolutely possible to deduce the existance of further containers once the first is decrypted (total-container-size - encrypted(known-content-byte-size) = probable-secondary-containers). It may not be possible to proof that a secondary container exists (and is not random padding), but it can be said with about the same certainty as that the first one is an encrypted container (and not random bytes) in the first place.
"Plausible deniability" only works as long as all parties agree to strict adherence to logic, which cannot be assumed when police-men are involved. Otherwise saying that you keep files of random bytes on your disk would be enough, because anything else cannot be proven.
This is one of the times where reality bites and enough information can always be gained to convince an not overly formal inquisitive... I'd rather go to jail for not divulging my keys in the first place than living through the nightmare of being questioned for possible secondary, tertiary, etc. keys for years...
But they can "force" (if you don't want to go to prison or pay some fine, probably torture in the future?) you to hand over the key to the first container. Opening it (Usually they'll have the legal "right" to do so by the time they come asking for the first key, because otherwise they probably would'nt even know about that one in the first place) and finding the second container, thus getting to know it's existance... ad infinitum. Plausible deniablity only works as long as "they" can't get their hands on your raw drive and "known" container keys legally. I prefer not to even deny I'm encrypting, but keeping the key on an encrypted USB stick, which can easily be destroyed, effectively destroying all my data at the same time (Until the original encryption is broken, which is, in all likelyhood, long after my death). I may end up "destroying probable evidence" and even being "unwilling to disclose my keys" (thouh that would be a stretch), but they can't, under any circumstances, gain those keys anymore (Neither can I, but that's worth it).
But then, I live in Germany, where at this time, encryption is still legal and even recommended by the courts to protect private data.
Then why does your server send it as "Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" instead of "application/xhtml+xml", like the standard requires and my browser accepts ("Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,tex t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5" )? Because "in Mozilla it is rendering slower"? That is my decision, not yours. Because "IE would fail to display"? Configuring Apache (via.htaccess, if you don't have w on the main config) to distinguish (sending everything not accepting xhtml then default text/html header) by Accept is trivial:
"2st was added as an afterthought" should've been "1st was added as an afterthought"... That's what I get for typing about my favourite game series early in the morning:-P
Myst (and Riven, Myst 3 Exile, Myst 4 Revelation and Myst 5 End of Ages) only had 1st person (which at the time of flat-from-the-side adventures was very unique), but was also pre-rendered (Myst 5 is the exception here), so texturing wasn't a problem:-) You may be referring to Uru, often nicknamed "Myst-online", which is a real-time 3D environment and offers both 1st and 3rd (there is no "2nd", BTW) perspectives, but 3rd is usually preferred (and was in the mind of the designers, 2st was added as an afterthought by popular demand), because of some rather hideous jumping "puzzles".
I bought the original PS when I could get it, completely modded, for 150DM, I've skipped the second generation completely so far, but I'm tempted (especially since I'm moving to an all-free-software PC) to try the third. So, Wii, XBoX360 and PS3 are my options:
Wii
It has a crappy name, but looks halfway decent. The price seems to be ok (I'm not that much of a video gamer, as you might have concluded by now), but I'll probably not be happy with the game choices (I never had a thing for Nintendo titles, which is why I didn't even own a GameBoy back then). Also: Why have a wireless controller and attach a second doohickey to it by cable? The Nunchuk is pretty dumb, I'd say, give me two wireless controllers instead, so I can move my arms apart...
XBoX360
Aside from my near-universal contempt for Microsoft (They have only made two products I didn't find utterly crappy, QB4.5 (which still had some stupid memory-limits) and the original Intellimouse Explorer (three of which died in a two-year period), which was finally a mouse big enough for my paws) and the well known problems (noise, overheating)? Maybe I'm not that interested in a PC-in-disguise and don't want a miserable online-shop?
PS3
Damn, that thing is expensive and ugly as hell. Did those designers watch too many 50s space operas? Ugh. In addition to that, I don't trust anything Sony after the Rootkit-shit and have not bought a single Sony product since then. But on the other hand, it'll probably feature the most interesting games (mainly japanese rpgs, though Nintendo also had a few gems there...)
Hm, not in the Comp.Sci dep. here in Aachen. The quotient isn't 50:50, but there's tons of female students (and many of them better than the males, because they informed themselves about comp.sci beforehand, while many males still made the mistake of trying to study "something with computers":-P)
The Author claims he cared more for the Barneys and dozens of cloned Scientists from HL than for the citizens in HL2. From my point of view that warrants a "WTF?". The woman waiting for her husband right at the beginning of HL2 is freaking hot, for crying out loud (Alyx no so much, too much Action-heroine/Booty-babe crossover for my taste), "There is only one way to console a widow. But remember the risk." (From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long). Yeesh, I smell a big case of "In the good ol' days" here (even though the author admits this), HL was great, but I doubt it'd get more than 30 or 40 in a test today, because, let's face it, it looks as old as it is!
Or Mac OS X Mach? The system I use is GNU ("Windows", "Mac OS X"), it's kernel is called Linux ("ntoskrnl.exe", "Mach"), the distribution is Gentoo ("XP Professional", "Tiger"). Calling the thing Linux may be convenient when talking to people still believing they can't be bothered to even seriously try OpenOffice.org, because they just can't do what they can in Word (It's amazing to see Grade-A students in theoretical physics fail at finding a function under a different name or shortcut), but that's a case of mismarketing. When talking to tech-heads, refering to GNU/Linux, GNU, "a NIX" or "a POSIX compliant system" is both correct and conveys much more information about the context.
Flash works just fine... As a Java dev I'm a bit disappointed by the trouble of getting Applets to run (not that it's impossible, just difficult) though.
Nope, a volcano is a region where Magma is released onto the surface, which is not the case here (Though there are some very active volcanoes on Iceland, of course). There is Magma (I incorrectly termed it Lava before, which is the name once it is on the surface) involved, but not directly as well (Water in contact with Magma will heat to a lot more than 500 and cool the Magma back into stone at the same time).
The summary is bullshit, even by/. standards. They were drilling for conventional geothermal energy, that is water heated by a lava flow nearby (extremely common in Iceland). Given the high pressure they were expecting high temperatures (the quoted 380) and still liquid water (due to the pressure). What was surprising is the fact that the water was probably more than 500 and actually melted the thermometer. Given this discovery (aka The water in this depth is much hotter than previously calculated) it makes perfect sense to a) explore the reasons for the higher temperature and b) use that for a more efficient power plant. There's no volcanoes involved at all.
Slashdot Mirror
what part of "non-obvious to me" was hard to get? I'm fully aware that I might be the problem here (and since it is my own personal problem...) and, through my posting, am looking for other with the same problems... But ponder this: When every other device I ever met apparently followed the same rough rules my mind is wired to "just know", why isn't the iPod? Why is it different than any other product I ever used, making it much harder for me to grasp?
...that doesn't consider the iPod interface "intuitive" (Nevermind the "nipple"-theory)? About half a year ago, I thought about getting an iPod, since my Trekstor iBeat organix only holds a single Gigabyte (Flash though, which I prefer over HD, which was the reason for getting this nice, big, Ogg-compatible player in the first place). So, I went to a store and began fiddling with the different players on display, including an iPod. I should mention that I'm both a capable tech-head (CS student actually writing software and enjoying poking inside the kernel of his Gentoo installs) and comfortable with end-user electronics (Never found a VCR, Mobile or Microwave I couldn't just handle without RTFM, though I usually do when they're my own devices). So, I tried to get the iPod to play a certain song. Just play it, no shuffle, playlist, repeat or whatever. You know what? It took me more than three minutes to figure out how to get that bat-shit-fucking-loco clickwheel to do that (I had ample opportunity to see the whole collection of music on the machine during that time though). IPods look nice, sure, but the interface is massively non-obvious to me...
You know how often really good people are accused of using aimbots? Just reporting someone as cheater should not trigger anything but an investigation, which should have to prove guilt. If cheating cannot be proven, then no penalties (like being forced to play with other "cheaters") should be applied. "In dubio pro reo".
Now someone go milk the beetles and give me a kortee'nea, I need to write some Ages badly :-) Oh, well, back to Povray it is then... :-P
Well, let's face it: Windows is a non-networked single-user OS (NT had a chance as server, but even that practically needed a GUI to administrate instead of properly running headless). Has it matured? In a way, yes, XP on a home machine is way more stable than 98 could ever hope to be, but it is step backward from NT 3.51 as well... On the other hand those home machines rarely have uptime requirements of more than 24 hours (Maybe a week for hardcore downloaders). The server editions, while trying their best (and I really mean that) to get more out of the code-base, just have no chance. A pure server system is designed to handle that better. *nix on the other hand translates poorly into homes, because home users don't seem to want the security requirements that come with it (That they may need them is another question). A desktop *nix regularly requires "power-user-niveau" (to borrow a Win-World term) to operate comfortably. *shrug* Different target audiences, only the latter can be adopted to other uses by users not bothered by the "inconveniences", while the former doesn't offer some necessary features.
I have read how it works, I've written small tools to do that myself, before I went cynic, and my usual partitions are encrypted (albeit not with TrueCrypt, but via loopback), currently I'm working on encrypting my drives completely, carrying the boot-sector in the aforementioned USB-stick. You trust "them" to be intelligent enough to get logic, I don't. From my perspective, in a worst case scenario, I picture a dumb torture-might-be-a-good-idea inquisitive who believes I'm hiding kiddie porn on the disk. Will that guy believe me and stop asking, for years on end probably, when I say "There's nothing more"? When he knows the system I use let's me hide an arbitrary number of further containers? Or is it better for me when I can claim not to divulge the keys at all, clearly sending me to prison for an exactly defined number of years? With the option of destroying my USB stick the second the cops come in, just to make sure? As I said, "Plausible deniability" only works with people who understand the technicalities in the first place, for everyone else it's "U-huh, but we know there could be more". Right? No. Just? No. Probably the case? In this fucked up world? I'd say yes, but that is my personal opinion, you're free to disagree.
Which means nothing as soon as you decrypted the first container. Probably the second is not listed then (and only available "if you know it exists"), but given the software is known (Using a software capable of, even advertising, doing this is likely enough, legally, to assume you may have used that feature) and the "random" bytes still have to be somewhere, it's absolutely possible to deduce the existance of further containers once the first is decrypted (total-container-size - encrypted(known-content-byte-size) = probable-secondary-containers). It may not be possible to proof that a secondary container exists (and is not random padding), but it can be said with about the same certainty as that the first one is an encrypted container (and not random bytes) in the first place.
"Plausible deniability" only works as long as all parties agree to strict adherence to logic, which cannot be assumed when police-men are involved. Otherwise saying that you keep files of random bytes on your disk would be enough, because anything else cannot be proven.
This is one of the times where reality bites and enough information can always be gained to convince an not overly formal inquisitive... I'd rather go to jail for not divulging my keys in the first place than living through the nightmare of being questioned for possible secondary, tertiary, etc. keys for years...
But they can "force" (if you don't want to go to prison or pay some fine, probably torture in the future?) you to hand over the key to the first container. Opening it (Usually they'll have the legal "right" to do so by the time they come asking for the first key, because otherwise they probably would'nt even know about that one in the first place) and finding the second container, thus getting to know it's existance... ad infinitum. Plausible deniablity only works as long as "they" can't get their hands on your raw drive and "known" container keys legally. I prefer not to even deny I'm encrypting, but keeping the key on an encrypted USB stick, which can easily be destroyed, effectively destroying all my data at the same time (Until the original encryption is broken, which is, in all likelyhood, long after my death). I may end up "destroying probable evidence" and even being "unwilling to disclose my keys" (thouh that would be a stretch), but they can't, under any circumstances, gain those keys anymore (Neither can I, but that's worth it). But then, I live in Germany, where at this time, encryption is still legal and even recommended by the courts to protect private data.
Then why does your server send it as "Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" instead of "application/xhtml+xml", like the standard requires and my browser accepts ("Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,tex t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5" )? Because "in Mozilla it is rendering slower"? That is my decision, not yours. Because "IE would fail to display"? Configuring Apache (via .htaccess, if you don't have w on the main config) to distinguish (sending everything not accepting xhtml then default text/html header) by Accept is trivial:
.* - [T=application/xhtml+xml]
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} application/xhtml\+xml
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} !application/xhtml\+xml\s*;\s*q=0
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} \.html$
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} HTTP/1\.1
RewriteRule
"2st was added as an afterthought" should've been "1st was added as an afterthought"... That's what I get for typing about my favourite game series early in the morning :-P
Myst (and Riven, Myst 3 Exile, Myst 4 Revelation and Myst 5 End of Ages) only had 1st person (which at the time of flat-from-the-side adventures was very unique), but was also pre-rendered (Myst 5 is the exception here), so texturing wasn't a problem :-) You may be referring to Uru, often nicknamed "Myst-online", which is a real-time 3D environment and offers both 1st and 3rd (there is no "2nd", BTW) perspectives, but 3rd is usually preferred (and was in the mind of the designers, 2st was added as an afterthought by popular demand), because of some rather hideous jumping "puzzles".
I bought the original PS when I could get it, completely modded, for 150DM, I've skipped the second generation completely so far, but I'm tempted (especially since I'm moving to an all-free-software PC) to try the third. So, Wii, XBoX360 and PS3 are my options:
Wii It has a crappy name, but looks halfway decent. The price seems to be ok (I'm not that much of a video gamer, as you might have concluded by now), but I'll probably not be happy with the game choices (I never had a thing for Nintendo titles, which is why I didn't even own a GameBoy back then). Also: Why have a wireless controller and attach a second doohickey to it by cable? The Nunchuk is pretty dumb, I'd say, give me two wireless controllers instead, so I can move my arms apart... XBoX360 Aside from my near-universal contempt for Microsoft (They have only made two products I didn't find utterly crappy, QB4.5 (which still had some stupid memory-limits) and the original Intellimouse Explorer (three of which died in a two-year period), which was finally a mouse big enough for my paws) and the well known problems (noise, overheating)? Maybe I'm not that interested in a PC-in-disguise and don't want a miserable online-shop? PS3 Damn, that thing is expensive and ugly as hell. Did those designers watch too many 50s space operas? Ugh. In addition to that, I don't trust anything Sony after the Rootkit-shit and have not bought a single Sony product since then. But on the other hand, it'll probably feature the most interesting games (mainly japanese rpgs, though Nintendo also had a few gems there...)So, what am I to do? Enlighten me! :-P
Some, I'd say that quota is about average. But I may be biased here, I have a thing for nerd-girls, glasses and all :-D
Hm, not in the Comp.Sci dep. here in Aachen. The quotient isn't 50:50, but there's tons of female students (and many of them better than the males, because they informed themselves about comp.sci beforehand, while many males still made the mistake of trying to study "something with computers" :-P)
I tend to think Roberta Williams is more of a pioneer here. "King's Quest"? The founding of "Sierra"?
The Author claims he cared more for the Barneys and dozens of cloned Scientists from HL than for the citizens in HL2. From my point of view that warrants a "WTF?". The woman waiting for her husband right at the beginning of HL2 is freaking hot, for crying out loud (Alyx no so much, too much Action-heroine/Booty-babe crossover for my taste), "There is only one way to console a widow. But remember the risk." (From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long). Yeesh, I smell a big case of "In the good ol' days" here (even though the author admits this), HL was great, but I doubt it'd get more than 30 or 40 in a test today, because, let's face it, it looks as old as it is!
Or Mac OS X Mach? The system I use is GNU ("Windows", "Mac OS X"), it's kernel is called Linux ("ntoskrnl.exe", "Mach"), the distribution is Gentoo ("XP Professional", "Tiger"). Calling the thing Linux may be convenient when talking to people still believing they can't be bothered to even seriously try OpenOffice.org, because they just can't do what they can in Word (It's amazing to see Grade-A students in theoretical physics fail at finding a function under a different name or shortcut), but that's a case of mismarketing. When talking to tech-heads, refering to GNU/Linux, GNU, "a NIX" or "a POSIX compliant system" is both correct and conveys much more information about the context.
Flash works just fine... As a Java dev I'm a bit disappointed by the trouble of getting Applets to run (not that it's impossible, just difficult) though.
Nope, a volcano is a region where Magma is released onto the surface, which is not the case here (Though there are some very active volcanoes on Iceland, of course). There is Magma (I incorrectly termed it Lava before, which is the name once it is on the surface) involved, but not directly as well (Water in contact with Magma will heat to a lot more than 500 and cool the Magma back into stone at the same time).
No, I just love Iceland :-D
That first sentence is obviously a teaser written by journalists. It has nothing to do with the actual article.
The summary is bullshit, even by /. standards. They were drilling for conventional geothermal energy, that is water heated by a lava flow nearby (extremely common in Iceland). Given the high pressure they were expecting high temperatures (the quoted 380) and still liquid water (due to the pressure). What was surprising is the fact that the water was probably more than 500 and actually melted the thermometer. Given this discovery (aka The water in this depth is much hotter than previously calculated) it makes perfect sense to a) explore the reasons for the higher temperature and b) use that for a more efficient power plant. There's no volcanoes involved at all.
Iceland is green, Greenland is ice...
It has been here for years, but there's rarely a story posted in it :-)
Zubrin's Explanations are valid.