Re:"not designed with the American consumer in min
on
Hacking the XO Laptop
·
· Score: 1
Now, the XO peaks my interest as a backpacker/bicycle camping laptop. if you can rig a solar charger for these that would be perfect for the outdoorsperson that wants to have a pc with them (blogging from the backwoods W00t!) IIRC, part of the point of the XO is that it can be used where there is no power. There is a hand crank you use to generate power. A few minutes of cranking gives you a decent charge. There is also an optional solar panel that they sell.
Also, while they're not supposed to be immersed in water, they are rugged enough that supposedly a little rain won't kill them. YMMV.
(the above is based on my recollection of last years story, I'm pretty sure it's accurate but too lazy to go look)
A friend once put such a disk in his MacBook and then called me after he couldn't get it out. I tried several things, including opening the Mac, with no luck. After some searching I found a solution on the net: Reboot the MacBook holding it upside down... the disk properly ejected right on booting. I don't know why and I don't know if it's reproducable, as I didn't want to try to put it in again.
(btw, reading the disc while it was in worked fine.) You know, I like it. I'm sick of having to coach idiots over the phone to hold down F2 or Del or whatever (no, no, not the F key and the 8 key... there's one called F8 above that. No, not 8. F8. You know, Eff? As in Fun? You know what? Just box up your computer and send it back. You're too stupid to own one). A laptop with a simple positional sensor in it, so you can just say "Hold it upside down and hit the power button". It seems simple and stupid, but it'd work, and work well.
Hmm, "Simple, stupid, and it just works". Isn't that Apples new motto now?
Indeed. Remind me, what was the point of that? Because, if people don't need floppy drives any more, why the hell would they need Floppy V2.0 (aka CD)?
So, how are you going to reconcile your "here's your freedom, son" attitude when your network sniffing discovers him visiting localcrackdealers.com, goatse.cx, or younggayboys.net? Or if he posts on a members-only board how he's planning to steal test results for the upcoming midterm, or how he has nekkid pics of his teacher to use for blackmail? Or what if it's just something innocuous, that you still discover by sneaking around and analyzing his traffic? How are you going to break it to him that you've been secretly checking on his surfing, and further to that, how are you going to stop him from just doing his surfing at someone elses house after you tell him that his is no longer private?
I, for one, would just like to thank the poster and the article author for making TFA one nice, shiny page, instead of 10 separate pages filled with ads, crap, and only a few lines of real text. I hope this is a trend that continues.
Have you ever been late to a party and found everyone in the heights of drunken revelry? Yes. But it has never made me want to shove a bottle of Jager up my pooper.
Those people that panic and don't move promptly should have their licenses revoked.
This whole thread is pissing me off. "He was young and didn't know what he was doing..." BS. If the kid is smart enough to hack into a system, he's easily smart enough to know how much a train weighs and what damage a train derailment will cause. Send this kid to jail!
Secondly, I hate when people excuse bad driving as normal. It's not acceptable. If you don't clear the intersection when emergency vehicles are coming, you shouldn't be driving, period. If you consistently drive 5mph under the speed limit, your license should be revoked. If you can't PARK YOUR CAR without extreme effort, license REVOKED! If you took licenses away from all the people that shouldn't have them for safety reasons, there would be 50% fewer people on the road, AT LEAST.
I hate people. Those that panic == revoked license. Agreed. If you can't handle a simple thing like an oncoming emergency vehicle, piss off. Send the kid to jail? Ya, he's a smart kid, but smart =/= worldly. It's unlikely, even with a train set at home and a solid electrics knowledge, that he'd know certain minutia, such as "Trains have adjustable suspension so they can lean into their turns". Lean the train the wrong way in it's turn, and it can tip over. If you don't know that, then you're just working on a cool toy that will make the trains go where they're not supposed to, no harm done. Revoke licenses of people who drive 5mph under the limit? It's called a LIMIT and not a TARGET for a reason. It's the FASTEST you're supposed to go. Now, people who drive 20mph under the limit, I'll agree with that. When you're going unreasonably slow, you're a danger to everyone else. But otherwise, it's perfectly reasonable to drive at the speed you feel comfortable.
Other than those points, good angry rant. You get +1 to your Blood Pressure score.
However, the mediating particles themselves are not affected by the force they mediate. Otherwise the universe would disappear up its own arse. Hence, gravity is not affected by gravity. Actually, most mediating particles are affected by the force they mediate, including gluons, the hypothetical gravitons, and IIRC the W bosons.
In gauge theory, a non-Abelian gauge group will in general lead to a nonlinear Yang-Mills theory with self-interacting fields, in contrast to the linear Abelian theory of electrodynamics.
Because gluons, the mediator of the strong nuclear force, themselves carry strong ("color") charge, it's possible for them to bind to each other. (See glueballs in quantum chromodynamics.)
Similarly, gravity gravitates: gravitons interact with each other, because they have energy and anything with energy gravitates. This idea holds even in classical general relativity: gravitational fields themselves gravitate. Analogously to QCD glueballs, general relativity can have gravitational geons, which are regions of gravitational field which hold themselves together under their own gravity. (You might think that a vacuum black hole has that property too, but I'm talking about purely non-singular field configurations.) Pffft. I can put together a bunch of big made-up words to sound smart too.
'Because, as everyone knows, the gluons gravitate towards gravitons, due to Abelian gauge theory and how it acts upon Bosun-W quark neutrons, regardless of the non-self-interactivity of Yang-Mills theory in relation to the Gass-Black theory of rock.'
See? It's a perfectly cromulent way to sound smart, but I'm on to you!
I was kinda hoping it would go through. Nothing says "fun conversation around the water cooler" like flimsy moral justification for continued song downloading.
It's a violation of human freedom to be forced to participate in the democracy you live in? I think the two words in conflict are "freedom" and "forced". Since when does "freedom" mean "free to fuck off and do whatever I want and fuck the consequences"? Freedom has responsibility with it.
You want to live in a democratic state, you participate in the democracy. It doesn't really seem that hard, or that much of a burden. Once every few years, you're required to go take a small bit of time to cast a vote, even if that vote is a write in for I.P. Freely. If you don't, there's a small fine.
Seems pretty straightforward to me, and a really decent way to make sure that the population participates in a vote, and not just the people who think they have something to gain.
You forgot CleverNickName. That karma-whoring bastard. As soon as I get home I'm starting up a group against him. He's always spitting out +5 posts. I don't even know why everyone loves him or drools over everything he writes.
I think I'll give it some cool, original name, too. I'm leaning towards alt.CleverNickName.die.die.die
I've yet to understand why people feel cheated by this.
So the corporation is trading credits. So what? That still means that somewhere, someone is doing something green in an amount equal to what you paid for. Whether your green payments go towards buying more hydro power from right next door, or get traded to someone replanting the Amazon, something green is still happening, it's offsetting your carbon emissions,
Yes, it would be ideal if it went to something cleaner in your own country, especially since carbon credits don't address all the other crap we spew into our air. But even putting something good in another country is still better than nothing, by a long shot.
What bugs me is they calculate the carbon credit based on the tree living 100 years. Like that is somehow going to happen. Most of them will be dead long before then, and that's assuming someone doesn't just come harvest them for lumber when they turn 30.
The problem is that building and fueling an atomic power station takes a considerable amount of energy. The argument seems to hinge on how much fuel can be created by breeder reactors and how much must be mined and refined.
Building anything takes power and fuel. The only way to not use up fuel and energy is to sit on a rock someplace until you starve to death.
Personally, I wish the anti-nuclear activists would take this advice...
he rationale for having me boot my computer apparently was that it may be a bomb, not that my contents might be suspicious. The logic of having me sit in front of them and power on a bomb just to find out if it is, in fact, a bomb still escapes me to this day. This is rather simple. If the bomb went off in customs it would kill less than on a plane. Have you seen some of the lineups at airports lately??
Exactly, who the hell thought that it would be a good idea to allow the passenger network and pilot network system to even communicate with each other.
Oh wait I got it, what if terrorist took over the cabin, but then a passenger(Justin Long) who is a master hacker controls the plane from his seat using his cell phone, and safely lands the plane but after he flipped it a few times so the terrorist would be knocked unconscious. Who has Bruckheimer's phone number I have an idea. All I have to say is, thank $deity there is a writers strike on now, and no-one is allowed to write new scripts...
I am tracking each day(every 10 minutes) the status of xbox live, and creating statisical images, this shows the biig picture on how "live" xbox-live actually is:)
While I do agree with you about light pollution being a PITA, a Bad Thing (tm), and something we really should cut down on...
I'm just not buying that you can see the Calgary light dome from 200km away. Even excluding the fact that I don't think there's anywhere in Alberta you could sit 200km away from Calgary and not have another town in between, seeing the light dome from that far away would require a 3136M cloud ceiling just to clear the horizon, which I'd expect would be hard to get while maintaining 200km of clear sky for the light to travel. Also, having just driven Vancouver -> Edmonton just last week and enjoyed the sky along the way, I can state from personal experience that any notable light dome is a heck of a lot closer. I'd guesstimate it was about 50km away when it first became noticeable (which isn't to say it's not measurable from farther away, but it'd be damn hard to see.) Of course, the increase in urban centers heading towards major cities makes it hard to tell what's glow from the city, and what's glow from the little berg just over the hill.
That said, for all the geeks who haven't been out of the city in a while to stare at the stars, do yourself a favour, head an hour out of town and look up. It's fan-freaking-tastic, breathtaking, and will make you feel very, very tiny.
And then, when you're driving back into town, you'll see that ugly brown-orange smudge on the horizon, and realize just how much energy we pump needlessly into the atmosphere just to make night seem like day.
I'm sorry, I just want to clarify. You bought the unit. It was software locked. This made you mad and you wanted to return it. Then someone hacked it, unauthorized by the manufacturer. Now you're happy, and going to buy a second unit.
And then you say to the manufacturer, if you want more people like me to support you, open it up.
But people like you just bought 2 units. So why should the manufacturer bother opening it up?
Now, if people like you bought 0 units, but would buy 2 units if they were unlocked, that might give them reason to unlock it. But people like you bought 2 units, which is twice as many as they'd expect the normal consumer to buy.
Here's how the conversation at the publisher must have gone:
"Hey, Jim, did you see this funny Chuck Norris shit on the internet?" "Yeah Bob, I did, it's funny shit. Let's turn it into a book and sell it!" "Awesome, it will be the best Chuck Norris book ever! Hey, do you think we should ask Chuck Norris if we can publish a Chuck Norris book?" "Nah, fuck him, what's he gonna do?"
(sadly, these were the last words Jim and Bob ever spoke. Bob blinks that he's very, very sorry. The doctors think Jim is blinking too, but no-one wants to look into his arse to find out.)
compilation CDs that could only exist in the dreams of a music fan
Well, consider this: the "dreams of music fans" up north of the border include the "compilation/best hits" album from Trooper, a quintessential Canadian band, that they (the band) put together, rerecorded as necessary, and put some new stuff together for.
The label (Universal) has been holding it up for
years
. Possibly more than a decade. Now, it would be one thing if the label just didn't want to spend the money themselves to release the album. But, they're holding on to the rights to the songs, and refusing to let the band release the album itself or via a different label. Basically saying "We own your music, and it's not going anywhere, ever".
Every time a label whines about anything, I remember Trooper, and how they're pretty much stuck unable to put out an album (if I recall Ra ranting about it during one of the shows, it's something along the lines of 'they signed a multi-album deal and now the studio won't release their last album, basically leaving them unable to legally release a new CD'). That, more than any ranting about the whole "hey new band, here's your shiny contract with a million $$ advance" sucker-you-in deal, makes me realize that labels are not in it for the music, it's just the money and power.
On the bright side, Trooper does at least 100 shows a year, all sellouts. I'm sure they make more money from that than any CD could give them.
Seriously... Macs have fewer attacks and viruses than PCs because they only have a 5-10% userbase. Most malevolent virus writers are aiming for damage, or botnets, so of course they're written for the dominant platform. Lets wait until Macs become the dominant hardware, and then we can all complain about how all the viruses are for them and PCs are pretty secure.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, while they're not supposed to be immersed in water, they are rugged enough that supposedly a little rain won't kill them. YMMV.
(the above is based on my recollection of last years story, I'm pretty sure it's accurate but too lazy to go look)
(btw, reading the disc while it was in worked fine.) You know, I like it. I'm sick of having to coach idiots over the phone to hold down F2 or Del or whatever (no, no, not the F key and the 8 key... there's one called F8 above that. No, not 8. F8. You know, Eff? As in Fun? You know what? Just box up your computer and send it back. You're too stupid to own one). A laptop with a simple positional sensor in it, so you can just say "Hold it upside down and hit the power button". It seems simple and stupid, but it'd work, and work well.
Hmm, "Simple, stupid, and it just works". Isn't that Apples new motto now?
So, how are you going to reconcile your "here's your freedom, son" attitude when your network sniffing discovers him visiting localcrackdealers.com, goatse.cx, or younggayboys.net? Or if he posts on a members-only board how he's planning to steal test results for the upcoming midterm, or how he has nekkid pics of his teacher to use for blackmail? Or what if it's just something innocuous, that you still discover by sneaking around and analyzing his traffic? How are you going to break it to him that you've been secretly checking on his surfing, and further to that, how are you going to stop him from just doing his surfing at someone elses house after you tell him that his is no longer private?
I, for one, would just like to thank the poster and the article author for making TFA one nice, shiny page, instead of 10 separate pages filled with ads, crap, and only a few lines of real text. I hope this is a trend that continues.
This whole thread is pissing me off. "He was young and didn't know what he was doing..." BS. If the kid is smart enough to hack into a system, he's easily smart enough to know how much a train weighs and what damage a train derailment will cause. Send this kid to jail!
Secondly, I hate when people excuse bad driving as normal. It's not acceptable. If you don't clear the intersection when emergency vehicles are coming, you shouldn't be driving, period. If you consistently drive 5mph under the speed limit, your license should be revoked. If you can't PARK YOUR CAR without extreme effort, license REVOKED! If you took licenses away from all the people that shouldn't have them for safety reasons, there would be 50% fewer people on the road, AT LEAST.
I hate people. Those that panic == revoked license. Agreed. If you can't handle a simple thing like an oncoming emergency vehicle, piss off.
Send the kid to jail? Ya, he's a smart kid, but smart =/= worldly. It's unlikely, even with a train set at home and a solid electrics knowledge, that he'd know certain minutia, such as "Trains have adjustable suspension so they can lean into their turns". Lean the train the wrong way in it's turn, and it can tip over. If you don't know that, then you're just working on a cool toy that will make the trains go where they're not supposed to, no harm done.
Revoke licenses of people who drive 5mph under the limit? It's called a LIMIT and not a TARGET for a reason. It's the FASTEST you're supposed to go.
Now, people who drive 20mph under the limit, I'll agree with that. When you're going unreasonably slow, you're a danger to everyone else. But otherwise, it's perfectly reasonable to drive at the speed you feel comfortable.
Other than those points, good angry rant. You get +1 to your Blood Pressure score.
Hence, gravity is not affected by gravity. Actually, most mediating particles are affected by the force they mediate, including gluons, the hypothetical gravitons, and IIRC the W bosons.
In gauge theory, a non-Abelian gauge group will in general lead to a nonlinear Yang-Mills theory with self-interacting fields, in contrast to the linear Abelian theory of electrodynamics.
Because gluons, the mediator of the strong nuclear force, themselves carry strong ("color") charge, it's possible for them to bind to each other. (See glueballs in quantum chromodynamics.)
Similarly, gravity gravitates: gravitons interact with each other, because they have energy and anything with energy gravitates. This idea holds even in classical general relativity: gravitational fields themselves gravitate. Analogously to QCD glueballs, general relativity can have gravitational geons, which are regions of gravitational field which hold themselves together under their own gravity. (You might think that a vacuum black hole has that property too, but I'm talking about purely non-singular field configurations.) Pffft. I can put together a bunch of big made-up words to sound smart too.
'Because, as everyone knows, the gluons gravitate towards gravitons, due to Abelian gauge theory and how it acts upon Bosun-W quark neutrons, regardless of the non-self-interactivity of Yang-Mills theory in relation to the Gass-Black theory of rock.'
See? It's a perfectly cromulent way to sound smart, but I'm on to you!
I was kinda hoping it would go through.
Nothing says "fun conversation around the water cooler" like flimsy moral justification for continued song downloading.
You want to live in a democratic state, you participate in the democracy. It doesn't really seem that hard, or that much of a burden. Once every few years, you're required to go take a small bit of time to cast a vote, even if that vote is a write in for I.P. Freely. If you don't, there's a small fine.
Seems pretty straightforward to me, and a really decent way to make sure that the population participates in a vote, and not just the people who think they have something to gain.
You forgot CleverNickName.
That karma-whoring bastard.
As soon as I get home I'm starting up a group against him. He's always spitting out +5 posts. I don't even know why everyone loves him or drools over everything he writes.
I think I'll give it some cool, original name, too. I'm leaning towards alt.CleverNickName.die.die.die
I've yet to understand why people feel cheated by this.
So the corporation is trading credits. So what? That still means that somewhere, someone is doing something green in an amount equal to what you paid for. Whether your green payments go towards buying more hydro power from right next door, or get traded to someone replanting the Amazon, something green is still happening, it's offsetting your carbon emissions,
Yes, it would be ideal if it went to something cleaner in your own country, especially since carbon credits don't address all the other crap we spew into our air. But even putting something good in another country is still better than nothing, by a long shot.
What bugs me is they calculate the carbon credit based on the tree living 100 years. Like that is somehow going to happen. Most of them will be dead long before then, and that's assuming someone doesn't just come harvest them for lumber when they turn 30.
Personally, I wish the anti-nuclear activists would take this advice...Building anything takes power and fuel. The only way to not use up fuel and energy is to sit on a rock someplace until you starve to death.
This is possibly the most informative and completely off-topic post I have read in recent memory.
Oh wait I got it, what if terrorist took over the cabin, but then a passenger(Justin Long) who is a master hacker controls the plane from his seat using his cell phone, and safely lands the plane but after he flipped it a few times so the terrorist would be knocked unconscious. Who has Bruckheimer's phone number I have an idea. All I have to say is, thank $deity there is a writers strike on now, and no-one is allowed to write new scripts...
statisical images, this shows the biig picture on how "live" xbox-live actually is
http://www.acddv.com/
Also these statistics are available for the public as-well
Cem Aykan Hm, maybe XBLA is actually going down because it's getting DDOS'd by people constantly accessing it to graph uptime.
Is there a -1 (Asshat) mod?
It's a violation of human freedom to be forced to participate in the democracy you live in?
I seriously hope this is a joke that I have just completely missed.
He's the guy that sang the line "I don't have a gun," and then showed us he was being ironic. Wait... he was shot by Alanis Morrisette?
While I do agree with you about light pollution being a PITA, a Bad Thing (tm), and something we really should cut down on...
I'm just not buying that you can see the Calgary light dome from 200km away. Even excluding the fact that I don't think there's anywhere in Alberta you could sit 200km away from Calgary and not have another town in between, seeing the light dome from that far away would require a 3136M cloud ceiling just to clear the horizon, which I'd expect would be hard to get while maintaining 200km of clear sky for the light to travel.
Also, having just driven Vancouver -> Edmonton just last week and enjoyed the sky along the way, I can state from personal experience that any notable light dome is a heck of a lot closer. I'd guesstimate it was about 50km away when it first became noticeable (which isn't to say it's not measurable from farther away, but it'd be damn hard to see.) Of course, the increase in urban centers heading towards major cities makes it hard to tell what's glow from the city, and what's glow from the little berg just over the hill.
That said, for all the geeks who haven't been out of the city in a while to stare at the stars, do yourself a favour, head an hour out of town and look up. It's fan-freaking-tastic, breathtaking, and will make you feel very, very tiny.
And then, when you're driving back into town, you'll see that ugly brown-orange smudge on the horizon, and realize just how much energy we pump needlessly into the atmosphere just to make night seem like day.
I'm sorry, I just want to clarify. You bought the unit. It was software locked. This made you mad and you wanted to return it. Then someone hacked it, unauthorized by the manufacturer. Now you're happy, and going to buy a second unit.
And then you say to the manufacturer, if you want more people like me to support you, open it up.
But people like you just bought 2 units. So why should the manufacturer bother opening it up?
Now, if people like you bought 0 units, but would buy 2 units if they were unlocked, that might give them reason to unlock it. But people like you bought 2 units, which is twice as many as they'd expect the normal consumer to buy.
So where's the incentive?
Here's how the conversation at the publisher must have gone:
"Hey, Jim, did you see this funny Chuck Norris shit on the internet?"
"Yeah Bob, I did, it's funny shit. Let's turn it into a book and sell it!"
"Awesome, it will be the best Chuck Norris book ever! Hey, do you think we should ask Chuck Norris if we can publish a Chuck Norris book?"
"Nah, fuck him, what's he gonna do?"
(sadly, these were the last words Jim and Bob ever spoke. Bob blinks that he's very, very sorry. The doctors think Jim is blinking too, but no-one wants to look into his arse to find out.)
Well, consider this: the "dreams of music fans" up north of the border include the "compilation/best hits" album from Trooper, a quintessential Canadian band, that they (the band) put together, rerecorded as necessary, and put some new stuff together for.
The label (Universal) has been holding it up for
- years
. Possibly more than a decade.Now, it would be one thing if the label just didn't want to spend the money themselves to release the album. But, they're holding on to the rights to the songs, and refusing to let the band release the album itself or via a different label. Basically saying "We own your music, and it's not going anywhere, ever".
Every time a label whines about anything, I remember Trooper, and how they're pretty much stuck unable to put out an album (if I recall Ra ranting about it during one of the shows, it's something along the lines of 'they signed a multi-album deal and now the studio won't release their last album, basically leaving them unable to legally release a new CD'). That, more than any ranting about the whole "hey new band, here's your shiny contract with a million $$ advance" sucker-you-in deal, makes me realize that labels are not in it for the music, it's just the money and power.
On the bright side, Trooper does at least 100 shows a year, all sellouts. I'm sure they make more money from that than any CD could give them.
Joke: ->
/|\
You: O
/ \
Ah, the new US Army motto:
"Security through obscurity."
Seriously... Macs have fewer attacks and viruses than PCs because they only have a 5-10% userbase. Most malevolent virus writers are aiming for damage, or botnets, so of course they're written for the dominant platform. Lets wait until Macs become the dominant hardware, and then we can all complain about how all the viruses are for them and PCs are pretty secure.