It looks like they've got a 1280x960 image which will be completely revealed in about 14 days. I was going to download the image and do a comparison against previous images in order to remove the noise, but then I realized that they were giving you the image in jpg format -- the images are going to be compressed differently when a pixel changes, and thus you won't even necessarily be able to tell when there is a new pixel.
The video spread like wildfire throughout the WoW community about a month ago, and it's been leaking into online communities everywhere since then. Even if you don't play WoW, the video is worth seeing.
Quote: This means you can publish video that will play on your webpage and will work for anyone who has Google's player installed.
That part is highly misleading! The people who want to view video on your website each individually need to download the patch! It's not very useful to content providers with this restriction.
How about users? Who would download this patch? Well, people who want to watch videos tagged with application/x-google-vlc-plugin that aren't from google. Not too many of these...
So let's make a case study of eMule. If someone -- not an original eMule developer -- posts a message linking to the eMule source, saying "you can share files for free on this network, potentially including copyrighted material," are they now liable? It hardly seems that they should be, and yet Grokster's promotional campaign hardly extended past this level.
Hang on, read it again:
We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.
It seems to me that the ruling applies to the distributors. If the eMule developers are distributing their own software, then they can't do so with the intention to promote it that way. It seems that a third party promoting eMule can say whatever they want without harming the devs.
Guild Wars is a pretty sweet game. I had a preorder, so I was able to play for several weekends over the past 6 months or so.
It's a 3D RPG-style game similar in design to Diablo II. The PvP, the best part IMO, is really fast-paced and fun and team-oriented -- it's similar to a lot of FPSs in that regard, you play a brief round and if you die, you can be resurrected but you don't respawn automatically.
It's loads of fun; the drawback is that if you are playing alone, it gets boring quickly, because you are playing with random people who you don't know, and you usually get crushed if you don't have a decent amount of coordination.
To fully experience the game, I highly recommend joining a guild that uses a voice chat system to talk to each other during battles. It makes a huge difference in the quality of your organization, and you get to know your guildmates pretty well.
Another drawback of the game is that it runs only on Windows. Windows makes me extremely sad and I dearly hope they port it, because my Windows machine is several years old and it hates everything.
Okay, I'll try to configure them similarly without changing too much from the base option. It's not clear on Apple's site whether they used 2x1GB DIMMs for the RAM, or 4x512MB ones, so I'll do the 512's.
The BOXX dual AMD system from their website, with the 2GB RAM, will set you back $2,747. I don't know if the 1MB L2 cache costs extra, but they don't seem to provide the option or say what the existing cache amount is. It's probably 1MB though.
The Dell dual Xeon 3.6 GHz system, with 2GB RAM and a 2MB L2 cache, costs a whopping $3,918.
The Alienware machine, with an Athlon-64 4000+, costs only $2011. But it also performed the worst in nearly all the tests (which is understandable, as it is intended to be a gaming machine).
The Dell Dimension XPS Gen4, with 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 and 2GB RAM, costs $2479. The RAM is more expensive than it should be, though, because they didn't offer the option to do 4x512.
The Apple machines cost $2349, $2849, $3349 respectively. Note that all these prices are with first-party RAM, which is often more than you need to pay.
If you look at the results you will see that there was a 1-element Schwartz set. What this basically means is that there was a clear winner -- compared to each other candidate, Branden Robinson was preferred more than 50% of the time. This is very good because it means that there is a clear consensus within the voting population as to which candidate is the best.
No, Safari doesn't support Javascript's function objects (lambdas?), which the test seems to use. I don't know if rewriting the test in a different way would make it work, but I doubt it. It appears to be a flaw in the regular expression engine in Gecko.
I totally agree that Crytek deserves their prize. For the rest of the choices (besides community contribution), I feel like they didn't try very hard.:) Half-Life 2 was pretty good but I don't think it deserved all that it got, and I like hearing about lesser games rather than the ones pushed hard. Katamari Damacy is cool, too, and perhaps that deserved game design, but again it seems like an obvious choice (people talk about it all the time in how it's so quirky and unique).
Anyway, this list isn't very exciting because it doesn't make me go "ooh, I have to try that" -- I've played everything here.
Wireless controllers are generally banned in tournaments, or at least restricted. With Wavebirds, for example, you don't want to be using one in a tournament, because if someone else sets their Wavebird to the same channel, all of a sudden you can't control your character anymore! And this is an easy thing to do, especially in a crowd with a bunch of people.
Even if the Xbox controller doesn't have channels and instead has some bluetooth-esque pairing strategy, you can still screw with it by building a device that simply spams the air with RF on the same frequency as the controller, nullifying all wireless controllers in the area. It's just a bad idea.
As I've experienced it, having an accelerator render your windows is really very helpful for usability. Rather than having things pop into place, you animate them. You run your animations quickly, so it's not annoying -- but a bit of motion can do several things: - Draw your eye towards whatever is moving. Your peripheral vision can see something moving better than it can see a sudden pop. - Give you a better sense of what is happening. If I press Minimize and the window disappears, I sometimes have to go hunting around my screen for where it disappeared to. If it animatedly shrinks, it helps your spatial memory to find it again. Having a decent graphics card to render the shrinking effect makes the transition smooth and nice.
Having a graphics card for your windowing system also allows for reflection, transparency, and other effects like that. I haven't seen a good use for those effects in user interface yet, but I think they could turn out useful.
I enjoyed it. The advertising was painful, though. I could deal with either ridiculous product placement, OR the commercial breaks, but both?! How much money did they give these guys?
In any case, I had never seen Painkiller multiplayer before and it looks really fun. The description of the map was good of them to give, making me think about strategy on my own. I didn't think there was enough ingame footage -- but what they had was really interesting anyway.
I like comparing different games and how the pro players play them. Painkiller appears to be about the items and movement -- the gold and silver armors, the megahealth, the rocket launchers, etc. In contrast, I've been to pro Halo tournaments and seen that Halo is a totally different game -- it's much more one of stealth. In Painkiller the deal is that you can move really fast, get from one end of the map to the other in a couple seconds. In Halo, most of the weapons are insta-hit, the movement is slow, and so aiming is no longer a skill and is instead just something you do -- if you see the enemy, you have your cursor on him and you are firing. The skill there is stealth -- grabbing the camouflage powerup, sneaking up behind people, stuff like that.
The players seem also to have a good sense for when items are going to appear. I guess that is very important in a game where armor is probably the most important thing to swing the tide of a fight.
Let them port it. You can't fundamentally stop it anyway; that's why it's free software.
My other gripe with the article, and this is relatively common on Slashdot summaries, but quite annoying, is when you put several different links next to each other in a phrase, like "some more determined efforts underway currently".
This is really annoying and bad, for two reasons: 1. It's not obvious that there are three links -- it looks like one. 2. I have no idea where any of the links go, and no description giving me a clue.
Instead please do: "...some more determined efforts underway currently (link 1, link 2)."
It had a sweet tech tree too... incredibly deep; even after playing the game many times I still didn't remember how to get those sweet uber powerful laser cannons, whatever they were called.:)
As soon as this gets ported to Mac OS X I'm gonna try and dig out my old CD and see if I can play. I'm excited...
Quote from review: "Do you plan on participating in Player Vs. Player combat on a regular basis? If the answer is yes, you know where to go."
Yes, I know to go to a different game, like Guild Wars. Not World of Warcraft.
Before subscribing, know that WoW is NOT a PvP game, and the PvP is not fun at all. (At least, not yet -- but I don't expect them to make it fun, because their approach in developing WoW is to appeal to people who just want to advance in the game, and who don't tend to like PvP). WoW is good if you're one of the advancement-oriented RPGers.
However, if you're like me and are interested in strategic, skill-intensive PvP, pick a different game. I've been playing Guild Wars, and THAT is much more along the lines of what I'm looking for.
WoW's PvP servers simply allow random ganking by the opposing faction (alliance or horde) in certain areas. Your faction is determined upon character creation (based on race), and you cannot even TALK to the other faction. This to me is boring and meaningless. Especially since there's no penalty to dying in PvP -- if you are being attacked, simply die; you lose nothing. In Shadowbane I had fond memories of frantically calling for a summon when three people from an enemy guild showed up while I was carrying a valuable rune or something. There's no such rush of adrenaline here.
Honestly I prefer the LCD on my Powerbook to any CRT I have ever used in terms of picture quality. It's bright, crisp, and I can game on it without any problem (haven't felt like it was refreshing too slow), but maybe other people are more sensitive than me to that.
Yay for Mac OS X! The spec tells you where to put Preferences in any application -- under the application-name menu. So I get to do File > Preferences. It's great and a fantastic solution to this annoying issue.
For non-users of Mac OS X, there's always an 'Apple' menu with the same items no matter what application you have focused. Next to it is the name of the app, in bold, which is also a menu. Items include About, Preferences, Services (which are like GUI pipe commands, so you can select some text and go Services > Open URL), Hide, Hide Others, Show All, and Quit.
They're not, though. They're pushing themselves to release it in November. Recently they posted a rather large list of features that weren't gonna make release (things like hero classes, plus it looks like they are dropping any decent organized PvP) - a bunch of gamebreakers for me. I'm in the beta, but I'm not going to purchase WoW until they make the game massively better, which will probably be several months into 2005.
Have you played it? It's vaguely fun, but there's nothing really compelling about it. (Or EQ2 for that matter.)
Now, I think Guild Wars will be totally sweet, and I'm going to massively play it this weekend. Check it out. (Windows only right now, I hope they port it!)
Hey. Don't dis the Stokes equation; it is real and it is very cool.
To explain it a bit, a manifold is a 'thing with a border', and it can be manydimensional, but let's look at it in 2D. If I have a circle in the plane, this says that I can find the area in two ways -- either I can use the integral to form the area itself using a regular area integral, or I can do a line integral along the curve of the circle.
Now, you can extend this in many different ways. Instead of simply finding the area, I could integrate some more complicated function (Ampere's Law maybe.) Or you could extend it into the third dimension -- instead of integrating inside the sphere, do a surface integral across the surface.
Basically, it says that you can always do either the 'inside integral' or the 'boundary integral'.
(Someone correct me if I've oversimplified somewhere)
You can build an RFID tag that will DOS the system, but you first need to know how RFID works.
The RFID tag is simply a sequence of bits. You can ask about portions of its tag -- "do you start with sequence X". There is no way to communicate with only one tag; if you send a request, all tags in range hear it and send an affirmative signal if they do start with that sequence (and nothing otherwise).
When a reader needs to scan many RFID tags at once, it sends a signal saying 'Whose next bit is a 1?' and 'Whose next bit is a 0?' and counts the chirps for each response. When it gets zero chirps, it knows to stop (there are no tags with that ID). If it gets only one chirp, it has found a unique tag and records it. Otherwise, it recurs down both trees.
If you build a device that always says 'yes' to both questions, the reader will have to recur down both trees 'forever' or give up until you leave range.
This seems to have the desired effect of preventing RFID scans without your knowledge, and it would certainly be handy to be able to turn it off at will.
This is not a good article. It focuses on one argument, national defense, and no other issues which may or may not be important. (Certainly it seems that most people agree that you shouldn't decide your vote based on only one issue -- you should look at all that someone has to offer.)
Anyway, the writing is almost entirely an appeal to emotion.
Look at this crap. "Since the devastating terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, one American leader has maintained an unbending resolve to protect our homeland and interest against Islamic savages and those foreign governments appeasing them."
Islamic savages?! Why not just "savages"? Why did the author put the word Islamic in there? Muslims are not inherently bad people. The intent of that phrase is to alienate them, make them seem "different" (and thus, it is implied, they aren't really people, they're evil, they should be destroyed, whatever... yeah, I know, slippery slope, but read on.)
"While out-of-touch U.S. politicians and world leaders have attacked President Bush's tactics, they can't question his steely commitment to keep America safe." Out-of-touch is a red herring, so let's remove it:
"While other U.S. politicians and world leaders have attacked President Bush's tactics, they can't question his steely commitment to keep America safe."
They can't question his commitment to keep America safe? Well, they CAN, and it has been done. The way it is often questioned is by comparing it to other priorities -- would Bush rather keep America safe, for example, than gain control of some oil fields in Iraq (so his family and friends can make more money?) I don't have an answer for this -- but it has certainly been reasonably questioned, by people like Michael Moore. (Even if you think this is a stupid question, at least take a moment to consider the response -- what evidence do you have for your argument in either direction?)
Let's continue.
He said he will do all that is humanly possible and necessary to make certain that terrorists never strike again on U.S. soil.
Can anyone deny that President Bush has not delivered? America the terrorists' No. 1 target has recovered from its tragic wounds and rebounded. It remains safe to this day.
Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil are rare. Take a look at this timeline, which seems relatively complete. Find the ones on U.S. soil. It turns out that there's only 5: 1920 1975 1993 1995 2001. So there may or may not be any statistical change in the past four years -- we wouldn't know; the sample size is too small. This is a totally unfounded assertion.
I was going to stop, but this article is too hilarious.
What might a lesser leader have done, faced with the daunting task of deciding America's course against withering, partisan attacks from Democrats, media propagandists, disingenuous U.N. officials and disloyal White House operatives selling their souls for profit during a time of war?
A lesser leader might have caved in. President Bush has stood his ground.
SELLING THEIR SOULS FOR PROFIT! YES! IT'S LIKE A VIDEO GAME!
Seriously, what the shit is this shit? Most people in America would not profit from being attacked, and would therefore do what they could to prevent attacks. This much is true. Or is the author referring to making the decisions themselves?
A lesser leader might have caved in. Or he might not have. What about a greater leader? Would HE have definitely NOT caved in? Is Bush right on the edge of caving and not caving? My point is that this is an entirely meaningless statement, intended again to make the reader think, "who's the lesser leader?"
Argh! Can't stop!
In his 20 years in the U.S. Senate, Kerry, a Navy war hero, hasn't risen above the rank of seaman for his uninspiring legislative record. He's been inconsistent on ma
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like they've got a 1280x960 image which will be completely revealed in about 14 days. I was going to download the image and do a comparison against previous images in order to remove the noise, but then I realized that they were giving you the image in jpg format -- the images are going to be compressed differently when a pixel changes, and thus you won't even necessarily be able to tell when there is a new pixel.
For those who don't know, Leeroy Jenkins refers to this video:6 6
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=16
The video spread like wildfire throughout the WoW community about a month ago, and it's been leaking into online communities everywhere since then. Even if you don't play WoW, the video is worth seeing.
Quote:
This means you can publish video that will play on your webpage and will work for anyone who has Google's player installed.
That part is highly misleading! The people who want to view video on your website each individually need to download the patch! It's not very useful to content providers with this restriction.
How about users? Who would download this patch? Well, people who want to watch videos tagged with application/x-google-vlc-plugin that aren't from google. Not too many of these...
Hang on, read it again:
It seems to me that the ruling applies to the distributors. If the eMule developers are distributing their own software, then they can't do so with the intention to promote it that way. It seems that a third party promoting eMule can say whatever they want without harming the devs.
That's my interpretation, anyway...
Guild Wars is a pretty sweet game. I had a preorder, so I was able to play for several weekends over the past 6 months or so.
It's a 3D RPG-style game similar in design to Diablo II. The PvP, the best part IMO, is really fast-paced and fun and team-oriented -- it's similar to a lot of FPSs in that regard, you play a brief round and if you die, you can be resurrected but you don't respawn automatically.
It's loads of fun; the drawback is that if you are playing alone, it gets boring quickly, because you are playing with random people who you don't know, and you usually get crushed if you don't have a decent amount of coordination.
To fully experience the game, I highly recommend joining a guild that uses a voice chat system to talk to each other during battles. It makes a huge difference in the quality of your organization, and you get to know your guildmates pretty well.
Another drawback of the game is that it runs only on Windows. Windows makes me extremely sad and I dearly hope they port it, because my Windows machine is several years old and it hates everything.
Okay, I'll try to configure them similarly without changing too much from the base option. It's not clear on Apple's site whether they used 2x1GB DIMMs for the RAM, or 4x512MB ones, so I'll do the 512's.
The BOXX dual AMD system from their website, with the 2GB RAM, will set you back $2,747. I don't know if the 1MB L2 cache costs extra, but they don't seem to provide the option or say what the existing cache amount is. It's probably 1MB though.
The Dell dual Xeon 3.6 GHz system, with 2GB RAM and a 2MB L2 cache, costs a whopping $3,918.
The Alienware machine, with an Athlon-64 4000+, costs only $2011. But it also performed the worst in nearly all the tests (which is understandable, as it is intended to be a gaming machine).
The Dell Dimension XPS Gen4, with 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 and 2GB RAM, costs $2479. The RAM is more expensive than it should be, though, because they didn't offer the option to do 4x512.
The Apple machines cost $2349, $2849, $3349 respectively. Note that all these prices are with first-party RAM, which is often more than you need to pay.
In bast.c, change #include to #include and compile and run.
Loads of fun! I didn't get a single line before I died!
(fixed the angle brackets)
In bast.c, change #include to #include and compile and run.
Loads of fun! I didn't get a single line before I died!
If you look at the results you will see that there was a 1-element Schwartz set. What this basically means is that there was a clear winner -- compared to each other candidate, Branden Robinson was preferred more than 50% of the time. This is very good because it means that there is a clear consensus within the voting population as to which candidate is the best.
No, Safari doesn't support Javascript's function objects (lambdas?), which the test seems to use. I don't know if rewriting the test in a different way would make it work, but I doubt it. It appears to be a flaw in the regular expression engine in Gecko.
I totally agree that Crytek deserves their prize. For the rest of the choices (besides community contribution), I feel like they didn't try very hard. :) Half-Life 2 was pretty good but I don't think it deserved all that it got, and I like hearing about lesser games rather than the ones pushed hard. Katamari Damacy is cool, too, and perhaps that deserved game design, but again it seems like an obvious choice (people talk about it all the time in how it's so quirky and unique).
Anyway, this list isn't very exciting because it doesn't make me go "ooh, I have to try that" -- I've played everything here.
Wireless controllers are generally banned in tournaments, or at least restricted. With Wavebirds, for example, you don't want to be using one in a tournament, because if someone else sets their Wavebird to the same channel, all of a sudden you can't control your character anymore! And this is an easy thing to do, especially in a crowd with a bunch of people.
Even if the Xbox controller doesn't have channels and instead has some bluetooth-esque pairing strategy, you can still screw with it by building a device that simply spams the air with RF on the same frequency as the controller, nullifying all wireless controllers in the area. It's just a bad idea.
FYI, you can un-DRM your iTMS songs with Hymn. This is exactly what Hymn is intended for. Very convenient.
As I've experienced it, having an accelerator render your windows is really very helpful for usability. Rather than having things pop into place, you animate them. You run your animations quickly, so it's not annoying -- but a bit of motion can do several things:
- Draw your eye towards whatever is moving. Your peripheral vision can see something moving better than it can see a sudden pop.
- Give you a better sense of what is happening. If I press Minimize and the window disappears, I sometimes have to go hunting around my screen for where it disappeared to. If it animatedly shrinks, it helps your spatial memory to find it again. Having a decent graphics card to render the shrinking effect makes the transition smooth and nice.
Having a graphics card for your windowing system also allows for reflection, transparency, and other effects like that. I haven't seen a good use for those effects in user interface yet, but I think they could turn out useful.
I enjoyed it. The advertising was painful, though. I could deal with either ridiculous product placement, OR the commercial breaks, but both?! How much money did they give these guys?
In any case, I had never seen Painkiller multiplayer before and it looks really fun. The description of the map was good of them to give, making me think about strategy on my own. I didn't think there was enough ingame footage -- but what they had was really interesting anyway.
I like comparing different games and how the pro players play them. Painkiller appears to be about the items and movement -- the gold and silver armors, the megahealth, the rocket launchers, etc. In contrast, I've been to pro Halo tournaments and seen that Halo is a totally different game -- it's much more one of stealth. In Painkiller the deal is that you can move really fast, get from one end of the map to the other in a couple seconds. In Halo, most of the weapons are insta-hit, the movement is slow, and so aiming is no longer a skill and is instead just something you do -- if you see the enemy, you have your cursor on him and you are firing. The skill there is stealth -- grabbing the camouflage powerup, sneaking up behind people, stuff like that.
The players seem also to have a good sense for when items are going to appear. I guess that is very important in a game where armor is probably the most important thing to swing the tide of a fight.
Let them port it. You can't fundamentally stop it anyway; that's why it's free software.
My other gripe with the article, and this is relatively common on Slashdot summaries, but quite annoying, is when you put several different links next to each other in a phrase, like "some more determined efforts underway currently".
This is really annoying and bad, for two reasons:
1. It's not obvious that there are three links -- it looks like one.
2. I have no idea where any of the links go, and no description giving me a clue.
Instead please do:
"...some more determined efforts underway currently (link 1, link 2)."
It had a sweet tech tree too... incredibly deep; even after playing the game many times I still didn't remember how to get those sweet uber powerful laser cannons, whatever they were called. :)
As soon as this gets ported to Mac OS X I'm gonna try and dig out my old CD and see if I can play. I'm excited...
Quote from review: "Do you plan on participating in Player Vs. Player combat on a regular basis? If the answer is yes, you know where to go."
Yes, I know to go to a different game, like Guild Wars. Not World of Warcraft.
Before subscribing, know that WoW is NOT a PvP game, and the PvP is not fun at all. (At least, not yet -- but I don't expect them to make it fun, because their approach in developing WoW is to appeal to people who just want to advance in the game, and who don't tend to like PvP). WoW is good if you're one of the advancement-oriented RPGers.
However, if you're like me and are interested in strategic, skill-intensive PvP, pick a different game. I've been playing Guild Wars, and THAT is much more along the lines of what I'm looking for.
WoW's PvP servers simply allow random ganking by the opposing faction (alliance or horde) in certain areas. Your faction is determined upon character creation (based on race), and you cannot even TALK to the other faction. This to me is boring and meaningless. Especially since there's no penalty to dying in PvP -- if you are being attacked, simply die; you lose nothing. In Shadowbane I had fond memories of frantically calling for a summon when three people from an enemy guild showed up while I was carrying a valuable rune or something. There's no such rush of adrenaline here.
Honestly I prefer the LCD on my Powerbook to any CRT I have ever used in terms of picture quality. It's bright, crisp, and I can game on it without any problem (haven't felt like it was refreshing too slow), but maybe other people are more sensitive than me to that.
Yay for Mac OS X! The spec tells you where to put Preferences in any application -- under the application-name menu. So I get to do File > Preferences. It's great and a fantastic solution to this annoying issue.
For non-users of Mac OS X, there's always an 'Apple' menu with the same items no matter what application you have focused. Next to it is the name of the app, in bold, which is also a menu. Items include
About, Preferences, Services (which are like GUI pipe commands, so you can select some text and go Services > Open URL), Hide, Hide Others, Show All, and Quit.
Blizzard can sit on WoW as long as they want.
They're not, though. They're pushing themselves to release it in November. Recently they posted a rather large list of features that weren't gonna make release (things like hero classes, plus it looks like they are dropping any decent organized PvP) - a bunch of gamebreakers for me. I'm in the beta, but I'm not going to purchase WoW until they make the game massively better, which will probably be several months into 2005.
Have you played it? It's vaguely fun, but there's nothing really compelling about it. (Or EQ2 for that matter.)
Now, I think Guild Wars will be totally sweet, and I'm going to massively play it this weekend. Check it out. (Windows only right now, I hope they port it!)
Hey. Don't dis the Stokes equation; it is real and it is very cool.
To explain it a bit, a manifold is a 'thing with a border', and it can be manydimensional, but let's look at it in 2D. If I have a circle in the plane, this says that I can find the area in two ways -- either I can use the integral to form the area itself using a regular area integral, or I can do a line integral along the curve of the circle.
Now, you can extend this in many different ways. Instead of simply finding the area, I could integrate some more complicated function (Ampere's Law maybe.) Or you could extend it into the third dimension -- instead of integrating inside the sphere, do a surface integral across the surface.
Basically, it says that you can always do either the 'inside integral' or the 'boundary integral'.
(Someone correct me if I've oversimplified somewhere)
You can build an RFID tag that will DOS the system, but you first need to know how RFID works.
The RFID tag is simply a sequence of bits. You can ask about portions of its tag -- "do you start with sequence X". There is no way to communicate with only one tag; if you send a request, all tags in range hear it and send an affirmative signal if they do start with that sequence (and nothing otherwise).
When a reader needs to scan many RFID tags at once, it sends a signal saying 'Whose next bit is a 1?' and 'Whose next bit is a 0?' and counts the chirps for each response. When it gets zero chirps, it knows to stop (there are no tags with that ID). If it gets only one chirp, it has found a unique tag and records it. Otherwise, it recurs down both trees.
If you build a device that always says 'yes' to both questions, the reader will have to recur down both trees 'forever' or give up until you leave range.
This seems to have the desired effect of preventing RFID scans without your knowledge, and it would certainly be handy to be able to turn it off at will.
LincolnQ
Anyway, the writing is almost entirely an appeal to emotion.
Look at this crap. "Since the devastating terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, one American leader has maintained an unbending resolve to protect our homeland and interest against Islamic savages and those foreign governments appeasing them."
Islamic savages?! Why not just "savages"? Why did the author put the word Islamic in there? Muslims are not inherently bad people. The intent of that phrase is to alienate them, make them seem "different" (and thus, it is implied, they aren't really people, they're evil, they should be destroyed, whatever... yeah, I know, slippery slope, but read on.)
"While out-of-touch U.S. politicians and world leaders have attacked President Bush's tactics, they can't question his steely commitment to keep America safe." Out-of-touch is a red herring, so let's remove it:
"While other U.S. politicians and world leaders have attacked President Bush's tactics, they can't question his steely commitment to keep America safe."
They can't question his commitment to keep America safe? Well, they CAN, and it has been done. The way it is often questioned is by comparing it to other priorities -- would Bush rather keep America safe, for example, than gain control of some oil fields in Iraq (so his family and friends can make more money?) I don't have an answer for this -- but it has certainly been reasonably questioned, by people like Michael Moore. (Even if you think this is a stupid question, at least take a moment to consider the response -- what evidence do you have for your argument in either direction?)
Let's continue.
Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil are rare. Take a look at this timeline, which seems relatively complete. Find the ones on U.S. soil. It turns out that there's only 5: 1920 1975 1993 1995 2001. So there may or may not be any statistical change in the past four years -- we wouldn't know; the sample size is too small. This is a totally unfounded assertion.
I was going to stop, but this article is too hilarious.
SELLING THEIR SOULS FOR PROFIT! YES! IT'S LIKE A VIDEO GAME!
Seriously, what the shit is this shit? Most people in America would not profit from being attacked, and would therefore do what they could to prevent attacks. This much is true. Or is the author referring to making the decisions themselves?
A lesser leader might have caved in. Or he might not have. What about a greater leader? Would HE have definitely NOT caved in? Is Bush right on the edge of caving and not caving? My point is that this is an entirely meaningless statement, intended again to make the reader think, "who's the lesser leader?"
Argh! Can't stop!
No. These are Windows (binaries only, which makes me think they guy didn't hack the code at all). I guess they're just compiled differently.