* Write a clever virus which tampers with Windows Defenders signatures and makes it remove legit files. This makes the virus code very fragile as it depends on a particular version of Defender and exploits which MS will quickly disable via Windows Update.
or:
* Simply make the virus delete the legit files it wants directly, and skip the middle-man.
In any country with > 60M people, it's sadly inevitable that murders will happen on almost a weekly basis. However in many countries you'll rarely see murder covered prominently on the national news. This isn't because they don't consider murder important. This isn't because murder never happens there, or happens so often that the public no longer cares....
Looking at the UK news you'll regularly see headlines about mothers mutillating their babies, creepy guys raping 6 year old kids, and grandmothers being stabbed to death. Looking at the news, you'd get the impression that the country is full of the worst kind of criminal scum imaginable.
The reality is different - crime rates aren't much different than elsewhere. People don't consider murder more or less 'noteworthy'. The media is simply more concerned with feeding us sensational stories than it's concerned with feeding us actual NEWS. I consider major international events, economic problems, and our continuing loss of civil liberties to be noteworthy - they affect the entire country, and the decisions we make now will affect generations to come.
The problem is the average citizen couldn't care less - they prefer to watch the "child forced to watch parents get mutillated after burglary" stories not for their informational value or noteworthiness - but because of their sensational value. The fact is most people are shallow. Real news is boring. Murder/crime is ENTERTAINMENT!
"Some kind of pictures on the sense o'clock news Miles of yellow tape --- silhouetted chalklines Tough-talking hood boys in pro-team logo knock-offs Conform to uniforms of some corporate entity Don't change that station It's Gangster Nation Now crime's in syndication on TV
What a show --- vertigo Video vertigo Test for echo"
You make some good points. I guess the agents can ask whatever they want. I am still unclear as to my obligations to answer, and the consequences of giving the 'wrong' answers.
Your good will is appreciated. I, however, have the power given to me by my government to decide what questions have relevance; I am a trained detective, you are not, how come you presume to know my job better than I do? So don't be difficult and answer my questions, all of them. If you are not guilty there would be no consequences anyhow.
To what extent do I have to continue giving speculative answers to questions such as "if you were both drunk, would you --- her?". What happens to me if I choose not to answer the question?
Questions such as "Do you think government is too big, too powerful?" are somewhat problematic. My honest answer would be "yes" - and that doesn't imply I'm a terrorist. However we both know that a "yes" answer in that situation would have opened up a nasty can of worms. So what's the best way out for an innocent guy? Lie and say "no"? Or say "yes" and have to deal with the further hostility which would inevitably result? If the answer has no effect, why ask the question?
Sir, you are in customs area, entering a foreign country. I am a customs agent, empowered to search anything and anyone who enters the country, and I have the right given to me by my government to make decisions what and who to search. I have decided to search your belongings; this is lawful and your complaints will have no effect. The very fact that you and I are in the Search Room that is equipped by the government specifically for searches - as it is quite apparent - should be a sufficient clue for you.
Point taken. However, does the authority of airport officials extend to the inspection of data stored on electronic media, or only to physical items? To what extent am I required to aid such searches? My laptop is password protected and contains encrypted files - am I required to reveal my password and encryption keys? What if I don't? Am I required to point out the location of my pr0n folder, give a tour of it, and discuss my tastes? What if I choose not to? Will I get deported, arrested, or just harrassed further?
Legalities aside, surely you can see the futility behind the idea of customs searching laptop contents? If I wanted to 'smuggle' data into a country, I can do so without physically transporting it - I can FTP/e-mail it, encrypted if neccessary, accross the intartubes any time I like. In some cases one can memorize it.
- I have no desire nor obligation to answer such a question. Assuming "yes" then...
Fine - assume whatever you like. How does that affect me? What are the implications of you assuming I have adult material on my laptop? Will you arrest me, or am I free to go?
Perhaps the following replies would have been more suitable. IANAL, Anyone see any flaws?
"Let me make things clear. I ask questions. You answer them. Do we have an understanding?"
I have acted in good will and explained the situation to yourself. I am happy to clarify anything relevant to the iPod - my personal relationships are of no relevance.
"I've got 5 good men going into that airplane right now. Five of my best bomb squad guys. If there is any reason that I should be concerned for their life, then I need to know now. So just answer the questions, and do as I say."
I assure you that your best bomb squad guys should be more than capable at removing my iPod from the toilet without incurring any injury. You have no reason to be concerned for their life.
What do you think about 9/11?
It was a terrible tradgedy - not just because of the direct loss of life, but the resulting change of government politics, eroding civil liberties, and hysteric overreaction to ipods dropped in toilets.
What are your views on the Iran issue? Do you think government is too big, too powerful? Would you ever "make a point?"
I have commited no wrongdoing, and do not presently wish to comment on my political ideologies.
He then asked me to turn on my laptop. I did, and he began using it. I saw him open Spotlight and begin searching.
Sir, I have commited no wrongdoing and do not consent to any searches. Without probable cause such searches are unlawful, and I assure you that I will file a formal complaint should you decide to ignore my request.
"Do you have any pornography?"
I have no desire nor obligation to answer such a question.
"I honestly don't know. But that doesn't matter. I get to decide what goes in this country. Do you have a problem with that?"
I have no problem with you deciding what goes on in your country by means of voting. Surely you aren't implying that you feel empowered to violate your countrys laws at will?
Yes - except this feedback can't be relied on. Advertisers would be quite happy to only include the code snippet on every other sale in order to persuade Google that their clicks were fraudulent/low quality, hence should be cheaper.
I'm not sure. 'Wheee!' works because its simplistic, playfull and silly. 'This is hot' works because it's beautifully rendered with breathtaking scenes.
A combination would result in dissonance. It's difficult to simulatneously acheive the "wow effect" of spectacular cinematography while keeping the playful siliness.
"But few in the porn world know much about Steve Jones, the 39-year-old married father of two behind the Lightspeed persona -- and that's the way he wants to keep it".
Some relatives don't know about his work and likely wouldn't approve.
Except shortly everyone Googling for his name will know who he is and what industry he works in. Nice responsible journalism. Why not ruin someone's life so you can write an interesting article.
"A few years ago, Mr. Jones relocated his family after some neighbors learned of his profession, and forbade their children from playing with his. "It was kind of heartbreaking," Mr. Jones said. He added: "My kids have no clue what we do."
The media stooped lower than usual this time. The least they could have done was shown some slight respect for the guy and his kids, and obscured the names.
If the current beta versions of Vista are anything to go by, the signed driver requirment will not be strictly enforced. In the present builds there is an option in the bootloader (F8 during startup), where you can select "Enable Unsigned Drivers" or something like that.
The implementation makes sense - it stops lusers from getting rootkitted by running a bad attachments, yet allows those who know what they are doing to bypass the checks.
[snip insults]...Writing a small program take a lot more time in assembly than in a high-level language. But for a complex programs, where you spend more time thinking about algorithms and data structures than typing, the difference is not that significant. For someone who knows what he's doing, it's not more difficult to write in assembly. It takes more time to type the code, but it's not more difficult.
Wrong. For simple projects, there isn't much difference. For complex projects, you *need* to write modular code. This usually means defining objects and their behavour, and then putting the building blocks together by defining how the objects interract.
Object programming has nothing to do with physical objects that need to be modelled....[snip insults]
If your OO code doesn't model real objects, perhaps you shouldn't use object-oriented programming for the application. However OO programming has a LOT do do with modelling physical objects, and that's what it's ideally suited to do.
Take for example a simple game. You define some code for Vectors, Complex Numbers. Then you build on top of this - you define a class for handling Quaternions and Matrix Operations. You also define operators for simple operations (Vector Multiplication, Transforms etc). Once the initial work is done, you implement the behaviour in what becomes simple and elegant code:
A simple glance at a fragment of the code is enough for someone to tell what it does. Maintaining it is easy. You don't repeat code for things which need to be done frequently - you define them as inline routines to produce efficient executables.
With high-level languages you are freed to spend your time and effort thinking about high-level problems. Not messing around with typing out 2 pages of code every time you want to do floating point multiplication of a vector by a matrix.
While I agree that good knowledge of low-level programming is essential for anyone who wants to write decent code, good coders should also be able to select the right tools for the job - and assembler is not always a good choice.
ASM is great for those fragments of code which are performance critical, need direct access to hardware, or those few cases where the ASM code is simpler and neater than the equivelant code in high-level languages. It's great when used inline to optimize fragments of code. However it is not a good language for writing a entire complex application in.
In all but the most trivial projects, it is often beneficial to trade a little bit of run-time execution speed for more maintainable/readable (hence less bug-prone) code. For example, modern compilers are pretty damn good at producing efficient ASM code from C++ code. You can have unbundled loops, inline functions, etc without making your source files look horribly nasty (with pages of 'cut+paste code reuse').
For things like computer games, where physical objects need to be modelled, object-oriented programming is something that's difficult to live without. The compiler translates things like inherited object traits, virtual functions, calling object destructors at the right times, etc, into relatively efficient assembly code which would have been very difficult to write by hand without producing code which is impossible to understand at a glance, and requires thourough studying to maintain or debug.
An average coder will know how to write in both low-level code and high-level code. An good coder will have a good familiarity with their compiler, will have studied the assembly code listings generated from their high-level source files, and will have a good feel for the strenghts and weaknesses of their compiler. An excellent coder will know how to apply this knowledge. As they type code in a high-level language, they will instinctively know how this will be translated into ASM code, and will be able to use this knowledge to identify potentially inefficient statments and re-write them in inline ASM.
Lastly, don't forget portability. If you choose to write your entire project in ASM, you might be proud of that 8% performance gain, but when the time comes to port the code to a new platform, you are thoroughly screwed - while your competitors will simply recompile their code with a different compiler, you need to re-write it all from scratch!
And for God's sake, don't let them log on as Administrator.
I disagree - if you're going to give them their own PC, give them full access to it - and make them learn how to reinstall the OS when they screw up. You can't teach them the inner workings of a computer system by hiding all the low-level stuff and giving them an idiot-proof GUI and security settings which make accidental damage impossible.
10 years ago, FairPlay/PlayForSure wouldn't have been much of a deciding factor. Microsoft would have reverse-engineered FairPlay and made their players fully compatible with the iPod.
Now, thanks to wonderful laws like the DMCA, we've reached a world where every track you buy is licensed to a specific device type and/or hardware manufacturer.
If today's laws were around 10 years ago, Compaq would not have been able to legally reverse-engineer the IBM BIOS, and the PC revolution would have been set back several years - something which is happening now with digital music players.
You could do that... or you could use something like the Siemens TC65 GSM/GPRS module. It also costs around $70, but has an integrated processor which runs Java code, so you could easily program it to relay the GPS coordinates via SMS or upload it to a web server.
That way you don't need a receiver - just a PC or a cellphone to check the location and show it on a map. It cuts the cost in half, and will have a much higher range than walkie-talkies.
Of course not all areas have good GSM coverage, but 99% do (at least here in the UK; I'm not sure where you live). If you lose signal temporarily just wait till your dog walks out of the coverage blackspot. Walkie-talkie range tends to be crap, especially in built-up areas.
The cellphone part is overboard, but I'd argue that the GPS tracking feature could help dog owners be even more responsible.
Without the cellphone part, how is it supposed to send the GPS coordinates back to you?
I won't be buying one of these, however, unless they take out the cellphone portion and make it into a GPS transmitter and receiver.
You must have watched too many bad movies. There's no such thing as a GPS transmitter. GPS modules are passive devices - they listen for satellite signals and work out their location by accurate timing measurments and comparisons. GPS does not send any data to the satellites, nor does it provide any mechanism for remote tracking - that's what the cellphone part is for.
Re:Bash build a program now in 10 easy seconds
on
Build a Program Now
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· Score: 1
Why would you use alert() in plain HTML without surrounding it in tags?
Not only that, but for a fake-domain-system like this to be viable, it would need recognition from not only the majority of browsers, but also search engines.
If google returned new.net sites in it's SERPS, a lot of people would switch to the new.net servers. If search engines won't find your $1000 domain, and even a small percentage of users will complain about it being unreachable, it's completely usless.
Slashdot Mirror
No - it isn't. You can launch the memory tester from the F8 bootloader menu.
I'm pretty sure a few ms would be absorbed by the jitter buffer. Heck, 20ms jitter is often a normal occurance on long-distance WAN links.
So virus writers can either:
* Write a clever virus which tampers with Windows Defenders signatures and makes it remove legit files. This makes the virus code very fragile as it depends on a particular version of Defender and exploits which MS will quickly disable via Windows Update.
or:
* Simply make the virus delete the legit files it wants directly, and skip the middle-man.
In any country with > 60M people, it's sadly inevitable that murders will happen on almost a weekly basis. However in many countries you'll rarely see murder covered prominently on the national news. This isn't because they don't consider murder important. This isn't because murder never happens there, or happens so often that the public no longer cares....
Looking at the UK news you'll regularly see headlines about mothers mutillating their babies, creepy guys raping 6 year old kids, and grandmothers being stabbed to death. Looking at the news, you'd get the impression that the country is full of the worst kind of criminal scum imaginable.
The reality is different - crime rates aren't much different than elsewhere. People don't consider murder more or less 'noteworthy'. The media is simply more concerned with feeding us sensational stories than it's concerned with feeding us actual NEWS. I consider major international events, economic problems, and our continuing loss of civil liberties to be noteworthy - they affect the entire country, and the decisions we make now will affect generations to come.
The problem is the average citizen couldn't care less - they prefer to watch the "child forced to watch parents get mutillated after burglary" stories not for their informational value or noteworthiness - but because of their sensational value. The fact is most people are shallow. Real news is boring. Murder/crime is ENTERTAINMENT!
To what extent do I have to continue giving speculative answers to questions such as "if you were both drunk, would you --- her?". What happens to me if I choose not to answer the question?
Questions such as "Do you think government is too big, too powerful?" are somewhat problematic. My honest answer would be "yes" - and that doesn't imply I'm a terrorist. However we both know that a "yes" answer in that situation would have opened up a nasty can of worms. So what's the best way out for an innocent guy? Lie and say "no"? Or say "yes" and have to deal with the further hostility which would inevitably result? If the answer has no effect, why ask the question?
Point taken. However, does the authority of airport officials extend to the inspection of data stored on electronic media, or only to physical items? To what extent am I required to aid such searches? My laptop is password protected and contains encrypted files - am I required to reveal my password and encryption keys? What if I don't? Am I required to point out the location of my pr0n folder, give a tour of it, and discuss my tastes? What if I choose not to? Will I get deported, arrested, or just harrassed further?
Legalities aside, surely you can see the futility behind the idea of customs searching laptop contents? If I wanted to 'smuggle' data into a country, I can do so without physically transporting it - I can FTP/e-mail it, encrypted if neccessary, accross the intartubes any time I like. In some cases one can memorize it.
Fine - assume whatever you like. How does that affect me? What are the implications of you assuming I have adult material on my laptop? Will you arrest me, or am I free to go?
I have acted in good will and explained the situation to yourself. I am happy to clarify anything relevant to the iPod - my personal relationships are of no relevance.
I assure you that your best bomb squad guys should be more than capable at removing my iPod from the toilet without incurring any injury. You have no reason to be concerned for their life.
It was a terrible tradgedy - not just because of the direct loss of life, but the resulting change of government politics, eroding civil liberties, and hysteric overreaction to ipods dropped in toilets.
I have commited no wrongdoing, and do not presently wish to comment on my political ideologies.
Sir, I have commited no wrongdoing and do not consent to any searches. Without probable cause such searches are unlawful, and I assure you that I will file a formal complaint should you decide to ignore my request.
I have no desire nor obligation to answer such a question.
I have no problem with you deciding what goes on in your country by means of voting. Surely you aren't implying that you feel empowered to violate your countrys laws at will?
Poundcake, Van Halen
Tease Me, Please Me - Scorpions
Crazy Cool - Paula Abdul
Remind me what you need to wait for?
Yes - except this feedback can't be relied on. Advertisers would be quite happy to only include the code snippet on every other sale in order to persuade Google that their clicks were fraudulent/low quality, hence should be cheaper.
102.12a of course :)
I'm not sure. 'Wheee!' works because its simplistic, playfull and silly. 'This is hot' works because it's beautifully rendered with breathtaking scenes.
A combination would result in dissonance. It's difficult to simulatneously acheive the "wow effect" of spectacular cinematography while keeping the playful siliness.
Except shortly everyone Googling for his name will know who he is and what industry he works in. Nice responsible journalism. Why not ruin someone's life so you can write an interesting article.
The media stooped lower than usual this time. The least they could have done was shown some slight respect for the guy and his kids, and obscured the names.
If the current beta versions of Vista are anything to go by, the signed driver requirment will not be strictly enforced. In the present builds there is an option in the bootloader (F8 during startup), where you can select "Enable Unsigned Drivers" or something like that.
The implementation makes sense - it stops lusers from getting rootkitted by running a bad attachments, yet allows those who know what they are doing to bypass the checks.
[snip insults]...Writing a small program take a lot more time in assembly than in a high-level language. But for a complex programs, where you spend more time thinking about algorithms and data structures than typing, the difference is not that significant. For someone who knows what he's doing, it's not more difficult to write in assembly. It takes more time to type the code, but it's not more difficult.
...[snip insults]
//while (blah) ...
Wrong. For simple projects, there isn't much difference. For complex projects, you *need* to write modular code. This usually means defining objects and their behavour, and then putting the building blocks together by defining how the objects interract.
Object programming has nothing to do with physical objects that need to be modelled.
If your OO code doesn't model real objects, perhaps you shouldn't use object-oriented programming for the application. However OO programming has a LOT do do with modelling physical objects, and that's what it's ideally suited to do.
Take for example a simple game. You define some code for Vectors, Complex Numbers. Then you build on top of this - you define a class for handling Quaternions and Matrix Operations. You also define operators for simple operations (Vector Multiplication, Transforms etc). Once the initial work is done, you implement the behaviour in what becomes simple and elegant code:
Vector objVelocity;
Vector objPosition;
objPosition = objPosition + objVelocity;
etc...
A simple glance at a fragment of the code is enough for someone to tell what it does. Maintaining it is easy. You don't repeat code for things which need to be done frequently - you define them as inline routines to produce efficient executables.
With high-level languages you are freed to spend your time and effort thinking about high-level problems. Not messing around with typing out 2 pages of code every time you want to do floating point multiplication of a vector by a matrix.
While I agree that good knowledge of low-level programming is essential for anyone who wants to write decent code, good coders should also be able to select the right tools for the job - and assembler is not always a good choice.
ASM is great for those fragments of code which are performance critical, need direct access to hardware, or those few cases where the ASM code is simpler and neater than the equivelant code in high-level languages. It's great when used inline to optimize fragments of code. However it is not a good language for writing a entire complex application in.
In all but the most trivial projects, it is often beneficial to trade a little bit of run-time execution speed for more maintainable/readable (hence less bug-prone) code. For example, modern compilers are pretty damn good at producing efficient ASM code from C++ code. You can have unbundled loops, inline functions, etc without making your source files look horribly nasty (with pages of 'cut+paste code reuse').
For things like computer games, where physical objects need to be modelled, object-oriented programming is something that's difficult to live without. The compiler translates things like inherited object traits, virtual functions, calling object destructors at the right times, etc, into relatively efficient assembly code which would have been very difficult to write by hand without producing code which is impossible to understand at a glance, and requires thourough studying to maintain or debug.
An average coder will know how to write in both low-level code and high-level code. An good coder will have a good familiarity with their compiler, will have studied the assembly code listings generated from their high-level source files, and will have a good feel for the strenghts and weaknesses of their compiler. An excellent coder will know how to apply this knowledge. As they type code in a high-level language, they will instinctively know how this will be translated into ASM code, and will be able to use this knowledge to identify potentially inefficient statments and re-write them in inline ASM.
Lastly, don't forget portability. If you choose to write your entire project in ASM, you might be proud of that 8% performance gain, but when the time comes to port the code to a new platform, you are thoroughly screwed - while your competitors will simply recompile their code with a different compiler, you need to re-write it all from scratch!
And for God's sake, don't let them log on as Administrator.
I disagree - if you're going to give them their own PC, give them full access to it - and make them learn how to reinstall the OS when they screw up. You can't teach them the inner workings of a computer system by hiding all the low-level stuff and giving them an idiot-proof GUI and security settings which make accidental damage impossible.
And you forgot the sense of humour :p
Not always. People often share stuff for no profit or purpose - just look at all the music available on P2P networks.
Sorry. It was a typo. My main point still stands.
10 years ago, FairPlay/PlayForSure wouldn't have been much of a deciding factor. Microsoft would have reverse-engineered FairPlay and made their players fully compatible with the iPod.
Now, thanks to wonderful laws like the DMCA, we've reached a world where every track you buy is licensed to a specific device type and/or hardware manufacturer.
If today's laws were around 10 years ago, Compaq would not have been able to legally reverse-engineer the IBM BIOS, and the PC revolution would have been set back several years - something which is happening now with digital music players.
You could do that... or you could use something like the Siemens TC65 GSM/GPRS module. It also costs around $70, but has an integrated processor which runs Java code, so you could easily program it to relay the GPS coordinates via SMS or upload it to a web server.
That way you don't need a receiver - just a PC or a cellphone to check the location and show it on a map. It cuts the cost in half, and will have a much higher range than walkie-talkies.
Of course not all areas have good GSM coverage, but 99% do (at least here in the UK; I'm not sure where you live). If you lose signal temporarily just wait till your dog walks out of the coverage blackspot. Walkie-talkie range tends to be crap, especially in built-up areas.
The cellphone part is overboard, but I'd argue that the GPS tracking feature could help dog owners be even more responsible.
Without the cellphone part, how is it supposed to send the GPS coordinates back to you?
I won't be buying one of these, however, unless they take out the cellphone portion and make it into a GPS transmitter and receiver.
You must have watched too many bad movies. There's no such thing as a GPS transmitter. GPS modules are passive devices - they listen for satellite signals and work out their location by accurate timing measurments and comparisons. GPS does not send any data to the satellites, nor does it provide any mechanism for remote tracking - that's what the cellphone part is for.
Why would you use alert() in plain HTML without surrounding it in tags?
Not only that, but for a fake-domain-system like this to be viable, it would need recognition from not only the majority of browsers, but also search engines.
If google returned new.net sites in it's SERPS, a lot of people would switch to the new.net servers. If search engines won't find your $1000 domain, and even a small percentage of users will complain about it being unreachable, it's completely usless.
Is that figure for wiped or unwiped ass surfaces?
which I'm guessing is more than the static friction coefficient of ass cheek on glass. Anyone know the exact value?
Not off the top of my head, but it should be easy to find in any decent engineer's handbook.