Because the samba team havent taken their finger out of their ass to implement Win2K3 compatibility yet, genius. When they do, you'll have your access. I never said samba would be able to connect to Longhorn, I said Longhorn would be able to connect to Samba. Besides, if Windows NT 4 or Win98 can access your Win2K3 box, Samba should be able to as well, if it is properly configured which, since you couldn't even manage to properly configure a slashdot account, I expect it isnt.
Microsoft are allowed to file patents on their technology just like anyone else. Patents are a Good Thing -- they share knowledge in detail with anyone who wants to read them, but people cannot use that information to create a product for monetary gain. The patents Microsoft have filed seem legitimate. Why does the open source community hate patents so much? I think that if the open source community came up with something new, they would hopefully patent it just like Microsoft are doing. If they didn't patent it, then they're fools because someone else will. Just because you have a huge open source cabal doesn't mean you can decide that "patents are a bad thing, we're not going to play that game". The world doesn't work like that: you can't boycott the patents system by Not Filing A Patent. Patents inspire competition and are one of the primary reasons that America is where it is today. I am not an American, nor am I a lawyer.
Article quote: Now, after having their hands gently slapped by the Department of Justice, the boys from Redmond have another plan: Make it so that users of their next desktop system won't be able to use non-Microsoft-blessed servers or programs at all.
What utter FUD this is. This is nonsense of the highest degree, it suggests that Microsoft will not only shut out every independent developer on the planet (i.e. nobody who isn't "blessed by" Microsoft can write software for this thing) but also prevent users from accessing their network infrastructure. What gobshite. People will still be able to write software for Windows, people who use Windows will still be able to use the Internet, FTP to and from Linux boxes, and communicate with Samba servers. I am no authority on this, but if Microsoft prevented people from doing said things then:
1. Nobody would use Windows.
2. Windows Longhorn would not be able to access shares and resources on Windows 2000/NT/XP hosts.
Also, people like Mozilla and Open Source are frightened, according to this article. They're building up defenses! Hah. Many companies who are NOT open source use portable windowing toolkits for cross platform compatability. Look at Adobe -- all its products that run on Windows do NOT use the standard Windows widget set, or look at Macromedia -- same there.
So Microsoft's covering it's ass with patents. Plenty of people have done this in the past. Perhaps Linux and the Open Source community should be doing it first.
The BBC has to share its research with the public, because the public PAY for its research. It's not really free in the strictest sense, but it seems like it.
P2P internet radio/tv fascinates me. I'm in the process of planning some software to effectively bittorrent any stream. The biggest problem is sync and buffering, because as things propagate down the tree of peers they become more and more delayed, plus peers can instantly disconnect which, if you're using time multiplexing to deliver the content, causes a pause in the output. It's incredibly difficult to sync it all properly without receiving some of the same data twice, and I'm really trying to avoid that as bandwidth is very important and its such a waste to receive copies of the same bitstream. The most reliable way it can be done (as far as my tests go) is to have a very large (20 seconds or more) buffer, which you divide into a known-good portion and a volatile portion. The volatile portion is built from multiple peers and appended to the good portion, then another volatile portion is started and filled in segments from all the peers. The major problem with this is that when you retransmit the stream it is delayed by your buffer length (20 seconds) so people connecting to you need even bigger delays to acheive a known-good portion and the process repeats until someone somewhere has an hour-long buffer. The solution is to timecode packets at source and forward them immediately as received. Like I said though, when a peer goes down, finding another one in time requires a really large buffer stage.
Believe me, when it's figured out and working I'll let the/. crowd know.
Software patents don't, but patents on algorithms do. That's why we still can't legally use GIF files without paying Unisys a ton of cash for the use of the LZW compression algorithm. Since video codecs rely on algorithms, and most software relies on algorithms, I believe software patents DO exist in Europe. If "software" patents existed I could patent void main() { printf("Hello World\n"); }.
So they don't like our stuff, and I can understand that, the cultures are different. What I cannot understand is the western adoption of all their games like Pokémon, Zelda, etc. The voice actors (if they exist) are dreadful without fail, the character animation is ugly, the plots are simply missing or stupid or full of the sort of crackpot magic and legend nonsense that the japanese seem so keen on, and it's only in recent years that they've even managed to get the English translation sort-of right. Some arcade games like the latest incarnations of Tekken still have japanese text in-game. They clearly just don't care about the western market, but throw their products at it anyway, where geeks lap it up because it's all mystic and oriental and looks like anime which has pretty girls in, and kids lap it up because they don't know any better and it's the only stuff available for their N64/GameCube/GBA/Saturn/Dreamcast.
The reason the Playstation is seen as a little more "badass" or mature than Nintendo's or Segas consoles is because it does not try to sell itself explicitely on a flagship character. Lara Croft is a possible example, but Sony didn't adopt her as a mascot, they also don't seem to shut out developers as much as Nintendo or Sega did. It's pretty much impossible for a smaller company to ever get a game released on a Nintendo system because Nintendo are such control freaks when it comes to content and finance, and their media is stupidly expensive to produce.
In Japan, they don't like our games because they have games made for their tastes over there which they prefer, which is pretty damn obvious. The two examples of western games given ("Enter the Matrix" and "Lord of the Rings") were both movie tie-ins and thus are really crappy examples. Perhaps UT or Q3 would have been better. I don't care if Japan doesn't like the games the west produces, so what? I care that the balance in console gaming is Mostly Japanese vs. Western Shoddy Attempts By BAM! Entertainment. It's a real shame the market is swamped by all these different Pokemon and Bomberman games that are all the same game in different coloured boxes, and are about as inspirational as a paving stone.
we already have this on all highways. I'm sure everywhere else has it too. We have cameras that can recognise car license plates for all sorts of reasons: catching people exceeding speed limits, criminals, whatever. I see nothing wrong with that. You have a license plate on your car, so what? People can't read it? The police arent allowed to read it? Gimme a break.
It says it on the internet, so it must be true. also, the author of that page says "I believe", not "it is certain". The very fact that there needs to be a webpage explaining the camel and needle thing is evidence for my original point that it is open to interpretation and is certainly not meant to be considered fact.
I do, however, back down. I accept that it is unlikely that bad translation is an issue, but I do forward that reading the original text (provided that one can understand it) would be more exact than reading a translation where someone has had to phrase things appropriately for the target language.
Also, art usually retains it's price or gets more expensive with age. Video games do the exact opposite, in fact the original work (the source) often gets released openly and freely (see Doom) over a very short time. Open source people will say "yay", failing artists will say "price doesn't define art", but I just wanted to make that observation. "This is an original CliffyB work of source! Do I hear 1,000 dollars?" will never be something we hear.
This guy clearly doesn't know his Art from his Elbow. He claims that videogames combine design with interactivity and that that has never been done before. Of course it's been done before, in absolutely every user interface ever created. Plus the quality of the article is dreadful, the writing is haphazard and, while the guy has a point, he has executed it extremely badly. Video games are a collage of art; art is in every texture, every mesh, in the plot and writing, in the music and sound, in the concept art, even in the code, but it's how all the parts come together that define the piece.
I believe that some games are more art than entertainment; games like Myst and Syberia were both extremely artistic graphically and musically. Some games are too artistic; the original Unreal FPS didn't satisfy a lot of people because it was simply too art-driven, it was beautiful but slow with long periods of not enough stuff to shoot. Does that mean it's art in the videogame genre, or does entertainment factor into whether the game is art or not?
The point of the above is that there is a difference between interactive art and video games. It is intensely difficult to class video games artistically, most people see only as deep as the graphics. I don't think art necessarilly has anything to do with entertainment, which is what the interactivity provides. Art is possibly the antithesis of entertainment.
Basically my definition of art is anything that inspires one or ignites emotions. I've actually shed tears after finishing some video games (not because it was "so beautiful" but because it's often such a relief). So I guess that if a video game can be appreciated and provokes emotion in the observer (good or bad) then it can be classed as artistic.
However, I'm opposed to classifying video games as works of art, because if they do get to that distinction then they'll cost $3,000 a piece. Come to think of it, the source code probably costs more than that to license:) all we own as consumers is a copy.
<-- please learn to use this so that I am not overwhelmed by your crazy religious and oppressive block of text. Religious people always try to force it down my damn throat. "discover the truth for yourself" sod off. Try not reading crazy shit and thinking for your self. Jesus.
why else would a boat be up there?
Maybe if there used to be a lake up the mountain?
No matter what evidence I show you that God exists
HAR HAR, "Evidence", Ha ha ha... lollerskates. Come on guy, the Bible is a good guidebook for living morally and relatively sensibly (based on your interpretation of it), but I've noticed most Christians have a huge difficulty when trying to grasp the lashings of metaphore and poetic expression used in Genesis.
You also have to remember that the Bible was translated into English and translated haphazardly, probably re-interpreted several times along the way. As with any translation, some meaning is lost in the process: In Matthew 19:24, Jesus proclaims "is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God", The "Needle's Eye" was a narrow gate in jerusalem. The mistranslation caused dumb ideas about the surrealist stuffing of camels through needle eyes.
vital parts to modern Linux systems, such as important documentation, firmware needed for proper hardware support will have to be removed
I thought one of the biggest problems Linux suffered was the inaccuracy of documentation (nobody really wants to document the project -- that's the dull part) and lack of wide-ranging and proper (non-beta) hardware support.
Several provide automatic tools. Perhaps all do, but I am not positive for some. Even if they don't, it would be possible to script your own easily with cron and expect.
Yeah, bingo. Does it not occur to you that the kind of person who could write a shellscript to run the updater software is the kind of person that does not need their updates to be automatic? "Several provide automatic tools" doesn't quite hit it for me, in other words what you mean is "I've no idea if they're automatic or not, but i sure can use Aptitude to download and install my debian packages!".
If you're new to linux, you want the updates to happen, but you don't know how, so you don't do it. Can find nothing on google except "up2date" - a tool for redhat that is not scheduled by default or even installed for you.
Except it doesn't. Not a standard system, and none of the distro's i've ever used ever had it. And if they did, it wouldn't properly update the stuff i'd compiled myself - so realistically, Linux can't have auto-updates unless they were entirely binary-only patches.
How does Microsoft do the same thing, you might ask. Obviously, they don't.
Windows update keeps my Windows (R) Operating System up-to-date by automatically downloading and installing critical security patches at a time that suits me! So fuck off!
Microsoft releases patches for it's stable branches, just like everyone else. There is no use of an unstable branch outside Microsoft's own beta runs, and even then auto-update still functions.
Also, why not visit windowsupdate.com to scan for and download the critical updates at a time that suits you and your crap-ass modem connection. In MS software, you can turn automatic updates off and do it manually, plus they're not on by default, but at least the app shows up so you can turn them on if you want.
If linux tried to do this, then it'd work for 3 months and then shut down due to lack of interest because it's maintained by one guy who just can't be bothered anymore; it'd never work quite properly and kernel patches would be impossible to install because linux kernels are archaic non-microkernel structures desperately trying to turn into an NT-style modular microkernel before anybody notices how outdated it is. Plus, so much stuff is compiled from source under linux that it would be impossible to correctly update without recompiling.
So I guess all Linux could do in this area is have something that pops up to say "New version of this available, here's what's fixed:..., of you go and download it/compile it/install it."
You retard. You can't use power plant fuel to make a nuclear bomb. The U-235 content of any fuel used in nuclear reactors is hopeless for creating any kind of bang. It needs to be enriched in an extremely expensive and difficult process before it'd be any use. What you want is Plutonium-239 if you're serious. To get your plutonium you have to already own a nuclear reactor, and have a supply of U-238 obtained from the original enrichment process that also yielded the U-235. There's plenty of U-238 yield from uranium enrichment, but like i said, the enrichment process is extremely difficult and costs an insane amount of money.
U-238 is depleted uranium -- it's pretty much useless because it's non fissile. However, you can jack it up to military Pu-239 using a nuclear reactor. When exposed to loose neutrons inside the reactor, U-238 atoms gain extra neutrons to become Pu-239 atoms. The process is known as "breeding". This takes ages, and once complete, you still have to seperate the Pu-239 from the remaining U-238, which costs (you guessed) an insane amount of money and a huge chemical plant.
So, simply put your claims are retarded. It takes an intense amount of effort to make a nuclear reactor go critical, theft is not a problem, about the only way to reasonably use the waste spat out by nuclear reactors is to make dirty bombs, which just blow highly radioactive material around. The only real threat from a dirty bomb is a small increase in the risk of cancer, due to the fast dispersion of the nuclear particles into the air, the concentration decreases very rapidly. However, those close to the blast site (and the site itself) would have to be decontaminated. Of course, you could spend millions on refining the waste into Pu-239 in your huge chemical plant that costs millions of dollars, but you're a tiny scummbag terrorist organisation, not a government of an extremely rich nuclear-capable country, so you probably wouldn't choose to do that. Go nuclear.
Except our country is too fucking stupid (and paranoid) to recycle spent fuel
I think it's more to do with the fact that recycling spent fuel costs a freakin' bomb and takes ages. Recycling it provides absolutely no cost saving advantages, so may as well just dump it.
I can't say this wasn't in my mind when I posted. But unfortunately, to beat these tests you simply have to be straight. Use real words, construct a real sentence, dont fill your e-mail with crap. Plus, this tool is really designed to be teamed up with your ISP's spam checker (which might be SpamAssassin). Once you check for crazy obfuscation AND do a bayesian scan for marketting rubbish, you're well on your way to defeating a lot of this junk.
However, I do get the feeling the spammers are winning. I'm about to add a test to this thing to pick up domain names from the mail for possible HTTP examination and/or WHOIS lookup, as I think this is one of the only ways to properly blacklist spammers.
That's the end of my posting on this subject, really.
1. I dont use Bayesian filters for the precise reason that spammers are wise to that too now and that's what all those "acceptance insipid derelict butane armour monkey relentless concerned capital" things are in the plaintext message of multipart SPAMs.
2. I may add an adaptive filter to this. We'll see how it goes.
3. Your subjects are nice examples of what this thing currently wont detect, but luckilly such simple subjects are rare. Normally it's "The file you asked for xihcm" or "RE:FW: The file you asked for". It'll soon check the body and sender too. I was having it attempt to check for open SMTP relays, but I gave up on that as it hardly caught anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the samba team havent taken their finger out of their ass to implement Win2K3 compatibility yet, genius. When they do, you'll have your access. I never said samba would be able to connect to Longhorn, I said Longhorn would be able to connect to Samba. Besides, if Windows NT 4 or Win98 can access your Win2K3 box, Samba should be able to as well, if it is properly configured which, since you couldn't even manage to properly configure a slashdot account, I expect it isnt.
Simply patent the act of filing a patent.
Microsoft are allowed to file patents on their technology just like anyone else. Patents are a Good Thing -- they share knowledge in detail with anyone who wants to read them, but people cannot use that information to create a product for monetary gain. The patents Microsoft have filed seem legitimate. Why does the open source community hate patents so much? I think that if the open source community came up with something new, they would hopefully patent it just like Microsoft are doing. If they didn't patent it, then they're fools because someone else will. Just because you have a huge open source cabal doesn't mean you can decide that "patents are a bad thing, we're not going to play that game". The world doesn't work like that: you can't boycott the patents system by Not Filing A Patent. Patents inspire competition and are one of the primary reasons that America is where it is today. I am not an American, nor am I a lawyer.
Article quote: Now, after having their hands gently slapped by the Department of Justice, the boys from Redmond have another plan: Make it so that users of their next desktop system won't be able to use non-Microsoft-blessed servers or programs at all.
What utter FUD this is. This is nonsense of the highest degree, it suggests that Microsoft will not only shut out every independent developer on the planet (i.e. nobody who isn't "blessed by" Microsoft can write software for this thing) but also prevent users from accessing their network infrastructure. What gobshite. People will still be able to write software for Windows, people who use Windows will still be able to use the Internet, FTP to and from Linux boxes, and communicate with Samba servers. I am no authority on this, but if Microsoft prevented people from doing said things then:
1. Nobody would use Windows.
2. Windows Longhorn would not be able to access shares and resources on Windows 2000/NT/XP hosts.
Also, people like Mozilla and Open Source are frightened, according to this article. They're building up defenses! Hah. Many companies who are NOT open source use portable windowing toolkits for cross platform compatability. Look at Adobe -- all its products that run on Windows do NOT use the standard Windows widget set, or look at Macromedia -- same there.
So Microsoft's covering it's ass with patents. Plenty of people have done this in the past. Perhaps Linux and the Open Source community should be doing it first.
The BBC has to share its research with the public, because the public PAY for its research. It's not really free in the strictest sense, but it seems like it.
P2P internet radio/tv fascinates me. I'm in the process of planning some software to effectively bittorrent any stream. The biggest problem is sync and buffering, because as things propagate down the tree of peers they become more and more delayed, plus peers can instantly disconnect which, if you're using time multiplexing to deliver the content, causes a pause in the output. It's incredibly difficult to sync it all properly without receiving some of the same data twice, and I'm really trying to avoid that as bandwidth is very important and its such a waste to receive copies of the same bitstream. The most reliable way it can be done (as far as my tests go) is to have a very large (20 seconds or more) buffer, which you divide into a known-good portion and a volatile portion. The volatile portion is built from multiple peers and appended to the good portion, then another volatile portion is started and filled in segments from all the peers. The major problem with this is that when you retransmit the stream it is delayed by your buffer length (20 seconds) so people connecting to you need even bigger delays to acheive a known-good portion and the process repeats until someone somewhere has an hour-long buffer. The solution is to timecode packets at source and forward them immediately as received. Like I said though, when a peer goes down, finding another one in time requires a really large buffer stage.
/. crowd know.
Believe me, when it's figured out and working I'll let the
half the lines each FIELD. They send all the lines each FRAME, which is made up of two FIELDS, which are interlaced.
Software patents don't, but patents on algorithms do. That's why we still can't legally use GIF files without paying Unisys a ton of cash for the use of the LZW compression algorithm. Since video codecs rely on algorithms, and most software relies on algorithms, I believe software patents DO exist in Europe. If "software" patents existed I could patent void main() { printf("Hello World\n"); }.
So they don't like our stuff, and I can understand that, the cultures are different. What I cannot understand is the western adoption of all their games like Pokémon, Zelda, etc. The voice actors (if they exist) are dreadful without fail, the character animation is ugly, the plots are simply missing or stupid or full of the sort of crackpot magic and legend nonsense that the japanese seem so keen on, and it's only in recent years that they've even managed to get the English translation sort-of right. Some arcade games like the latest incarnations of Tekken still have japanese text in-game. They clearly just don't care about the western market, but throw their products at it anyway, where geeks lap it up because it's all mystic and oriental and looks like anime which has pretty girls in, and kids lap it up because they don't know any better and it's the only stuff available for their N64/GameCube/GBA/Saturn/Dreamcast.
The reason the Playstation is seen as a little more "badass" or mature than Nintendo's or Segas consoles is because it does not try to sell itself explicitely on a flagship character. Lara Croft is a possible example, but Sony didn't adopt her as a mascot, they also don't seem to shut out developers as much as Nintendo or Sega did. It's pretty much impossible for a smaller company to ever get a game released on a Nintendo system because Nintendo are such control freaks when it comes to content and finance, and their media is stupidly expensive to produce.
In Japan, they don't like our games because they have games made for their tastes over there which they prefer, which is pretty damn obvious. The two examples of western games given ("Enter the Matrix" and "Lord of the Rings") were both movie tie-ins and thus are really crappy examples. Perhaps UT or Q3 would have been better. I don't care if Japan doesn't like the games the west produces, so what? I care that the balance in console gaming is Mostly Japanese vs. Western Shoddy Attempts By BAM! Entertainment. It's a real shame the market is swamped by all these different Pokemon and Bomberman games that are all the same game in different coloured boxes, and are about as inspirational as a paving stone.
we already have this on all highways. I'm sure everywhere else has it too. We have cameras that can recognise car license plates for all sorts of reasons: catching people exceeding speed limits, criminals, whatever. I see nothing wrong with that. You have a license plate on your car, so what? People can't read it? The police arent allowed to read it? Gimme a break.
It says it on the internet, so it must be true. also, the author of that page says "I believe", not "it is certain". The very fact that there needs to be a webpage explaining the camel and needle thing is evidence for my original point that it is open to interpretation and is certainly not meant to be considered fact.
I do, however, back down. I accept that it is unlikely that bad translation is an issue, but I do forward that reading the original text (provided that one can understand it) would be more exact than reading a translation where someone has had to phrase things appropriately for the target language.
Also, art usually retains it's price or gets more expensive with age. Video games do the exact opposite, in fact the original work (the source) often gets released openly and freely (see Doom) over a very short time. Open source people will say "yay", failing artists will say "price doesn't define art", but I just wanted to make that observation. "This is an original CliffyB work of source! Do I hear 1,000 dollars?" will never be something we hear.
This guy clearly doesn't know his Art from his Elbow. He claims that videogames combine design with interactivity and that that has never been done before. Of course it's been done before, in absolutely every user interface ever created. Plus the quality of the article is dreadful, the writing is haphazard and, while the guy has a point, he has executed it extremely badly. Video games are a collage of art; art is in every texture, every mesh, in the plot and writing, in the music and sound, in the concept art, even in the code, but it's how all the parts come together that define the piece.
:) all we own as consumers is a copy.
I believe that some games are more art than entertainment; games like Myst and Syberia were both extremely artistic graphically and musically. Some games are too artistic; the original Unreal FPS didn't satisfy a lot of people because it was simply too art-driven, it was beautiful but slow with long periods of not enough stuff to shoot. Does that mean it's art in the videogame genre, or does entertainment factor into whether the game is art or not?
The point of the above is that there is a difference between interactive art and video games. It is intensely difficult to class video games artistically, most people see only as deep as the graphics. I don't think art necessarilly has anything to do with entertainment, which is what the interactivity provides. Art is possibly the antithesis of entertainment.
Basically my definition of art is anything that inspires one or ignites emotions. I've actually shed tears after finishing some video games (not because it was "so beautiful" but because it's often such a relief). So I guess that if a video game can be appreciated and provokes emotion in the observer (good or bad) then it can be classed as artistic.
However, I'm opposed to classifying video games as works of art, because if they do get to that distinction then they'll cost $3,000 a piece. Come to think of it, the source code probably costs more than that to license
<-- please learn to use this so that I am not overwhelmed by your crazy religious and oppressive block of text. Religious people always try to force it down my damn throat. "discover the truth for yourself" sod off. Try not reading crazy shit and thinking for your self. Jesus.
why else would a boat be up there?
Maybe if there used to be a lake up the mountain?
No matter what evidence I show you that God exists
HAR HAR, "Evidence", Ha ha ha... lollerskates. Come on guy, the Bible is a good guidebook for living morally and relatively sensibly (based on your interpretation of it), but I've noticed most Christians have a huge difficulty when trying to grasp the lashings of metaphore and poetic expression used in Genesis.
You also have to remember that the Bible was translated into English and translated haphazardly, probably re-interpreted several times along the way. As with any translation, some meaning is lost in the process: In Matthew 19:24, Jesus proclaims "is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God", The "Needle's Eye" was a narrow gate in jerusalem. The mistranslation caused dumb ideas about the surrealist stuffing of camels through needle eyes.
please mod him down. he's a twat.
vital parts to modern Linux systems, such as important documentation, firmware needed for proper hardware support will have to be removed
I thought one of the biggest problems Linux suffered was the inaccuracy of documentation (nobody really wants to document the project -- that's the dull part) and lack of wide-ranging and proper (non-beta) hardware support.
I love spewing FUD.
Several provide automatic tools. Perhaps all do, but I am not positive for some. Even if they don't, it would be possible to script your own easily with cron and expect.
Yeah, bingo. Does it not occur to you that the kind of person who could write a shellscript to run the updater software is the kind of person that does not need their updates to be automatic? "Several provide automatic tools" doesn't quite hit it for me, in other words what you mean is "I've no idea if they're automatic or not, but i sure can use Aptitude to download and install my debian packages!".
If you're new to linux, you want the updates to happen, but you don't know how, so you don't do it. Can find nothing on google except "up2date" - a tool for redhat that is not scheduled by default or even installed for you.
Except it doesn't. Not a standard system, and none of the distro's i've ever used ever had it. And if they did, it wouldn't properly update the stuff i'd compiled myself - so realistically, Linux can't have auto-updates unless they were entirely binary-only patches.
How does Microsoft do the same thing, you might ask. Obviously, they don't.
..., of you go and download it/compile it/install it."
Windows update keeps my Windows (R) Operating System up-to-date by automatically downloading and installing critical security patches at a time that suits me! So fuck off!
Microsoft releases patches for it's stable branches, just like everyone else. There is no use of an unstable branch outside Microsoft's own beta runs, and even then auto-update still functions.
Also, why not visit windowsupdate.com to scan for and download the critical updates at a time that suits you and your crap-ass modem connection. In MS software, you can turn automatic updates off and do it manually, plus they're not on by default, but at least the app shows up so you can turn them on if you want.
If linux tried to do this, then it'd work for 3 months and then shut down due to lack of interest because it's maintained by one guy who just can't be bothered anymore; it'd never work quite properly and kernel patches would be impossible to install because linux kernels are archaic non-microkernel structures desperately trying to turn into an NT-style modular microkernel before anybody notices how outdated it is. Plus, so much stuff is compiled from source under linux that it would be impossible to correctly update without recompiling.
So I guess all Linux could do in this area is have something that pops up to say "New version of this available, here's what's fixed:
You retard. You can't use power plant fuel to make a nuclear bomb. The U-235 content of any fuel used in nuclear reactors is hopeless for creating any kind of bang. It needs to be enriched in an extremely expensive and difficult process before it'd be any use. What you want is Plutonium-239 if you're serious. To get your plutonium you have to already own a nuclear reactor, and have a supply of U-238 obtained from the original enrichment process that also yielded the U-235. There's plenty of U-238 yield from uranium enrichment, but like i said, the enrichment process is extremely difficult and costs an insane amount of money.
U-238 is depleted uranium -- it's pretty much useless because it's non fissile. However, you can jack it up to military Pu-239 using a nuclear reactor. When exposed to loose neutrons inside the reactor, U-238 atoms gain extra neutrons to become Pu-239 atoms. The process is known as "breeding". This takes ages, and once complete, you still have to seperate the Pu-239 from the remaining U-238, which costs (you guessed) an insane amount of money and a huge chemical plant.
So, simply put your claims are retarded. It takes an intense amount of effort to make a nuclear reactor go critical, theft is not a problem, about the only way to reasonably use the waste spat out by nuclear reactors is to make dirty bombs, which just blow highly radioactive material around. The only real threat from a dirty bomb is a small increase in the risk of cancer, due to the fast dispersion of the nuclear particles into the air, the concentration decreases very rapidly. However, those close to the blast site (and the site itself) would have to be decontaminated. Of course, you could spend millions on refining the waste into Pu-239 in your huge chemical plant that costs millions of dollars, but you're a tiny scummbag terrorist organisation, not a government of an extremely rich nuclear-capable country, so you probably wouldn't choose to do that. Go nuclear.
That would be Hi-La-Ri-Ous if they had actually gone up in the Shuttle. They actually went up in a Soyuz capsule.
I can't say this wasn't in my mind when I posted. But unfortunately, to beat these tests you simply have to be straight. Use real words, construct a real sentence, dont fill your e-mail with crap. Plus, this tool is really designed to be teamed up with your ISP's spam checker (which might be SpamAssassin). Once you check for crazy obfuscation AND do a bayesian scan for marketting rubbish, you're well on your way to defeating a lot of this junk.
However, I do get the feeling the spammers are winning. I'm about to add a test to this thing to pick up domain names from the mail for possible HTTP examination and/or WHOIS lookup, as I think this is one of the only ways to properly blacklist spammers.
That's the end of my posting on this subject, really.
It already does both of those things.
And no, it wouldn't get those subjects. But I only hacked it together a couple of days ago. Come on...
1. I dont use Bayesian filters for the precise reason that spammers are wise to that too now and that's what all those "acceptance insipid derelict butane armour monkey relentless concerned capital" things are in the plaintext message of multipart SPAMs.
2. I may add an adaptive filter to this. We'll see how it goes.
3. Your subjects are nice examples of what this thing currently wont detect, but luckilly such simple subjects are rare. Normally it's "The file you asked for xihcm" or "RE:FW: The file you asked for". It'll soon check the body and sender too. I was having it attempt to check for open SMTP relays, but I gave up on that as it hardly caught anything.