I think your comparison isn't quite valid. Sending and receiving data costs about the same, there's no real benefit to having incoming and outgoing data in some kind of balance.
Actually there is a benefit. Suppose I have ~100Mbps coming in, and ~100Mbps going out. I can fit all of that on one 100Mbps Ethernet connection. On the other hand, if I have ~200Mbps coming in, and nothing going out, I'll need to purchase two 100Mbps links - costing me twice as much - and one half of each of these links will sit idle for most of the time...
You could call it SQL injection, replay-attack, man in the middle, etc.
Equally, you could call it money laundering, you could call it drug dealing and you could call it first-degree murder—but that doesn't make it true!
It isn't SQL injection, because it isn't injecting SQL into web queries (or anywhere else)
It isn't a replay attack, because it isn't replaying messages it has intercepted between two other parties
It isn't man-in-the-middle, because it's not modifying the communications between two unknowing parties
Whether or not you believe that what this program does should be allowed or not, it works by pretending to be the user of the game, sending keypresses etc to the program—a bit like asking a friend to play for you while you visit the bathroom. I can see why Blizzard don't like it, though I'm not sure that justifies the sweeping legal decision they're seeking—but calling the program something it's not doesn't help either side of the debate!
My my, how hard is it to 'right click' then select Sort by Name. Yep that is pretty tough.
It's not very hard—but it's also not very useful, as it doesn't solve the problem that the programs are still sorted by folders almost always named after the vendor.
It looks like a fork bomb - i.e. it spawns lots and lots of processes very fast. Unless the machine running it has (for example) per-user process limits, this usually brings a machine to its knees very rapidly. Fortunately slashdot seems to have truncated the command, so it won't actually work if pasted directly - nor if the assembler 'nasm' is not installed on your machine.
Resend missing/failed/corrupted packets does have value and is required for TCP applications to work properly. If there is a reply-request to confirm successful delivery of all related packets, then an ACK/reply will be sent to the sending TCP application, by the receiving TCP application, confirming complete clean (no errors) reception of all packets associated with the email including all the attachments. No, the receiving end will always ACK all packets that it gets—otherwise the other end will assume the packets didn't get through and keep resending them. That's why it's not worthless to send ACKs!
Poor understanding/implementation of TCP/IP appears to be the problem for folks, This part of your post, however, is correct.
The TCP origin of an email/file does not need any ACK-confirmation that a packet was received at the intended destination, but the TCP origin does require a NACK-notice (to initiate a resend specific packet) when a specific packet was not received or corrupt (no need to resend the whole email/file); That's not true: if the receiving end doesn't send an ACK for the packets that the sender sends, the sender will both (a) resend the packets that weren't ACKed, and (b) refrain from sending further packets (beyond a certain limit). There is no such think as a NACK in TCP—the nearest that you get is a resend of an ACK for a previous packet, which is usually treated as an indication of packet loss.
This is a war that is over 2000 years old. Are you seriously suggesting that there's a "large and mobile population that has decided to make war on the US" that has been around for centuries longer than either the US or (considering you refer to the Crusades in your other post) Islam, for that matter? I've got to say, that's pretty far fetched, even for slashdot;-)
And don't forget that both the sender *and* the recipient pay for a text message for every one sent. Only in the US. In the UK (and the rest of Europe, AFAIK) the telcos don't charge you for receiving texts—and even the idea of them doing so is considered absurd.
Taking them away means you cut the volume of your support requests by at least half. Not if you suddenly start getting a lot of requests about how to turn on the feature you've just deleted!
right next to the post Anonymously check box there is a No Karma Bonus Check box. I can assure you there isn't—and you don't! I suspect you're not using the new AJAX posting method. The No-karma-bonus button has gone—though I suspect it comes back if you follow the link to use the old form.
i'm sick of people trying to shoot down idea's claiming it creates an arms race. so fucking what, EVERYTHING is an arms race if you try and look at 2 opposing agenda.
You have a good point—but the claim isn't that it creates an arms race, it's that it just creates an arms race: the important question being whether the benefit you gain by starting the race is outweighed by the cost to you of having to upgrade your 'arms' every time your adversary does.
In this particular case, it seems unlikely to be a net win: as has been pointed out elsewhere, this will only block certain types of steganography, so when you've created, tested and deployed your noise-adding filter to every node in the phone system, at great cost, your adversary can very easily move to another method, which they can test out very easily, and you won't know a thing about it.
It seems to me that, if you are sufficiently paranoid to worry about this sort of thing, and ethically OK with messing with people's private phone calls, you're far better off trying to detect such stealth communication techniques, by looking for statistical anomalies—that way, you can find out who has something to hide (and must therefore incontrovertibly be a terrorist), and you don't even have to let on how you found out...
Really. The effect in older phones came from the shape of the hollow handset. I'm sorry but that's just not true. In older telephones there was much more sidetone—basically all of the signal transmitted by this end was also heard in the local speaker. For this reason the sidetone coil was added, to reduce the effect. (There's plenty of information about this available on the internets.) What's more, the fact that the sidetone can't be heard when the phone is disconnected from the line shows that the effect is electrical rather than purely physical.
A proper ellipse contains only three dots, with a space between each one. .. I can't believe I'm replying to this, but: an ellipse is the locus of the point (a sin(t), b cos(t)) as t varies. The punctuation with the dots is an ellipsis. (And the correct way to write an ellipsis in HTML is, I believe, "…", but slashdot doesn't seem to like rendering that.
The ball screw converts the "fall" distance to a lot farther than 4 feet. In the time it takes for that weight to make it to the bottom the gear has traveled a much further distance in revolutions.
That's an interesting idea, but doesn't the conservation of energy mean that, in increasing the effective distance travelled, the force will be reduced—just as, with a lever, you can halve the force you need to lift something, but you end up moving double the distance?
Basically, the total amount of potential energy that's in the system in the first place is m*g*h (m=mass, g=gravitational field, h=height), and no amount of levers, ballscrews or other ingenious devices can increase that...
TFA doesn't claim that the Gravity Lamp runs for 4 hours, just says it produces as much light as a 40 watt bulb running for four hours.
Nice try but no. Lumens measure brightness, not total light output. A 40W bulb produces... about 600-800 lumens of brightness. Running for four hours, a 40W bulb will produce... as much light as this lamp would produce if left running for four hours. So whichever way you interpret that sentence, it means the same thing—and (sadly) my logic above still applies.
Indeed, even if you ignore that sentence, doesn't the calculation imply that the lamp will necessarily either (a) run substantially dimmer than a 40W bulb, or (b) only run for a matter of minutes?
OK, can someone tell me where my calculation is wrong:
The designer's diagram shows 50lbs of weight falling 58 inches. Google tells me in metric that's about 23kg falling 1.5m; under the force of gravity (9.8N/kg), that gives a total potential energy of 23*1.5*9.8 Joules—call it 350J to be generous.
Now, the claim is that this thing outputs 600-800 lumens of light. Let's assume that LEDs can put out 200 lumens per watt of electricity delivered—this is apparently quitegenerous. That means the LEDs will need at least 3 watts of electricity to give out that amount of light.
As everyone here knows, 3 watts is 3 joules/second—meaning our total of 350J will last slightly less than two minutes; this is substantially less than the claimed four hours!
Either my number-crunching is wrong (in which case I'd be delighted to be enlightened—excuse the puns), or this device ain't ever going to do what it claims...
I'm sure that the vast majority of moderate, peace-loving Muslims appreciate being tarred with the same brush as the extremists about as much as the vast majority of moderate, peace-loving Christians enjoy being compared to supporters of the IRA...
Slashdot Mirror
I think your comparison isn't quite valid. Sending and receiving data costs about the same, there's no real benefit to having incoming and outgoing data in some kind of balance.
Actually there is a benefit. Suppose I have ~100Mbps coming in, and ~100Mbps going out. I can fit all of that on one 100Mbps Ethernet connection. On the other hand, if I have ~200Mbps coming in, and nothing going out, I'll need to purchase two 100Mbps links - costing me twice as much - and one half of each of these links will sit idle for most of the time...
And it entirely fails to mention the 4.4 series...
(you need to use HTML character entities: "comme ça". Slashdot only supports some—a fairly arbitrary subset—of these.)
You could call it SQL injection, replay-attack, man in the middle, etc.
Equally, you could call it money laundering, you could call it drug dealing and you could call it first-degree murder—but that doesn't make it true!
Whether or not you believe that what this program does should be allowed or not, it works by pretending to be the user of the game, sending keypresses etc to the program—a bit like asking a friend to play for you while you visit the bathroom. I can see why Blizzard don't like it, though I'm not sure that justifies the sweeping legal decision they're seeking—but calling the program something it's not doesn't help either side of the debate!
My my, how hard is it to 'right click' then select Sort by Name. Yep that is pretty tough.
It's not very hard—but it's also not very useful, as it doesn't solve the problem that the programs are still sorted by folders almost always named after the vendor.
...any Web site filled with an endless stream of mostly forgettable comments trolling for reactions from the rival fans
I can't think of any site to fit that description...
It looks like a fork bomb - i.e. it spawns lots and lots of processes very fast. Unless the machine running it has (for example) per-user process limits, this usually brings a machine to its knees very rapidly. Fortunately slashdot seems to have truncated the command, so it won't actually work if pasted directly - nor if the assembler 'nasm' is not installed on your machine.
Hear hear. Not to mention that the word is just downright ugly :-)
so fucking what, EVERYTHING is an arms race if you try and look at 2 opposing agenda.
You have a good point—but the claim isn't that it creates an arms race, it's that it just creates an arms race: the important question being whether the benefit you gain by starting the race is outweighed by the cost to you of having to upgrade your 'arms' every time your adversary does.
In this particular case, it seems unlikely to be a net win: as has been pointed out elsewhere, this will only block certain types of steganography, so when you've created, tested and deployed your noise-adding filter to every node in the phone system, at great cost, your adversary can very easily move to another method, which they can test out very easily, and you won't know a thing about it.
It seems to me that, if you are sufficiently paranoid to worry about this sort of thing, and ethically OK with messing with people's private phone calls, you're far better off trying to detect such stealth communication techniques, by looking for statistical anomalies—that way, you can find out who has something to hide (and must therefore incontrovertibly be a terrorist), and you don't even have to let on how you found out...
That's an interesting idea, but doesn't the conservation of energy mean that, in increasing the effective distance travelled, the force will be reduced—just as, with a lever, you can halve the force you need to lift something, but you end up moving double the distance?
Basically, the total amount of potential energy that's in the system in the first place is m*g*h (m=mass, g=gravitational field, h=height), and no amount of levers, ballscrews or other ingenious devices can increase that...
Nice try but no. Lumens measure brightness, not total light output. A 40W bulb produces... about 600-800 lumens of brightness. Running for four hours, a 40W bulb will produce... as much light as this lamp would produce if left running for four hours. So whichever way you interpret that sentence, it means the same thing—and (sadly) my logic above still applies.
Indeed, even if you ignore that sentence, doesn't the calculation imply that the lamp will necessarily either (a) run substantially dimmer than a 40W bulb, or (b) only run for a matter of minutes?
OK, can someone tell me where my calculation is wrong:
The designer's diagram shows 50lbs of weight falling 58 inches. Google tells me in metric that's about 23kg falling 1.5m; under the force of gravity (9.8N/kg), that gives a total potential energy of 23*1.5*9.8 Joules—call it 350J to be generous.
Now, the claim is that this thing outputs 600-800 lumens of light. Let's assume that LEDs can put out 200 lumens per watt of electricity delivered—this is apparently quite generous. That means the LEDs will need at least 3 watts of electricity to give out that amount of light.
As everyone here knows, 3 watts is 3 joules/second—meaning our total of 350J will last slightly less than two minutes; this is substantially less than the claimed four hours!
Either my number-crunching is wrong (in which case I'd be delighted to be enlightened—excuse the puns), or this device ain't ever going to do what it claims...
Because it could never happen that American Christians support terrorism abroad?
I'm sure that the vast majority of moderate, peace-loving Muslims appreciate being tarred with the same brush as the extremists about as much as the vast majority of moderate, peace-loving Christians enjoy being compared to supporters of the IRA...