Not that Windows is blameless here, mind you, but I seriously suspect that I could cococt a shellscript that could do something similar (at least in terms of self-propagating) and send it to all my friends who run UNIX. And then you'd see! Oh, wait, THEY KNOW BETTER THAN TO RUN UNKNOWN CODE.
I've got two windows boxen at home. They've never been infected. My virus scanner doesn't save me -- running them behind a firewall and not executing random content on them does. It's not Windows that's the problem -- it's those damned Windows users.
Now, excuse me while I call my parents to have them update their virus definitions...
If you're going to be snippy about it, maybe you should read the article. --- NASA documents show that NASA kept Northwest's passenger name records until September 2003.
Such records typically include credit card numbers, addresses and telephone numbers. NASA said it used the information to investigate whether "data mining" of the records could improve assessments of threats posed by passengers, according to the agency's written responses to questions. ---
Notice the part where they mention credit card umbers, addresses, and telephone numbers.
Notice, also, the implicit part in the way we *should* be dealing with rights management where the question is not whether or not I have a good enough reason to hide something, but whether or not the government has a good enough reason to requisition it. In other words, I'm not James Bond, but I don't fucking care -- because I'm not ObL either, and the government doesn't get to just willy-nilly grab my flight information. More importantly, Northwest doesn't get to willy-nilly hand them over because "it seemed like a good idea at the time."
My #1 favorite all-time FPS was Rainbow Six. When I played it, I was at the edge of my seat, crawling around corners, slicing the pie and making sure I was doing a full vertical scan of each slice to make sure I didn't miss a tango. When that shot came from nowhere that took me down and got me watching the ceiling as the world turned red, then black, it was emotionally devastating. Knowing it could come at any moment made me careful, deliberate, and aware of how exposed I was at any given point.
And then I went and actually started training with firearms and entering tactical simulators with live weapons and you know what?
I rocked. Seriously -- in my first multi-day training session, I was #2. Which, given that I was a civilian and the #1 guy was an experienced SWAT officer, was just fine with me. I believe Rainbow Six engrained habits into me that were invaluable in my actual, very expensive, "people can really die if I screw up" training.
But again, that's only because I took deaths in Rainbow Six very seriously -- not because I was trying to see it as a sim, but because it hooked me so hard.
I don't have the same experience today with Halo (pretty much the only FPS I've played extensively since R6), probably because of the ability to sustain multiple shots and the completely unrealistic gameplay ('unrealistic' isn't bad in this case -- Halo's not supposed to be realistic).
But I will say this about Halo -- The reason it's hooking me so bad is because of the ability to do dual-player cooperative in the same room. There's nothing like the joy of playing with one of my friends because he and I (perhaps because we've had some of the same real-life training) are so tuned to each other's movements and approach to clearing areas. That meshing of styles is rare (it hasn't happened with my other friend who plays Halo a lot), and it's glorious to see -- advancing/retreating while not covering (but covering for) each other, calling out when reloading so the other guy can stand watch, calling out grenades... It's a sort of intimacy, to be honest, and it's the reason why in a real gun fight, I'd want him at my back. So while R6 may have honed my tactical movement, I think Halo's honing my tactical coordination and cooperation.
I've done the paintball thing, but usually, because there've been various people in the game that we didn't know, it was difficult to coordinate any actual real group of people. It felt like a spray-and-pray which is still fun, but doesn't feel all that educational.
John Huston directed his last movie at 81. Bernardo Bertolucci's still making movies at 63. Kubrick directed his last movie at 71. Bogdanovich is still going strong at 65.
Lucas is 60. The big wait between IV-VI and I-III was because, allegedly, he waited until the tech got better. Is there anything in CG that we can't do anymore? It felt like the bottleneck in I-III was not CG capability but, well, directorial prowess (and the story sucked too) -- so he could start on Eps VII-IX say, two years from now. Two years per movie would land us at 2012, when he'd be 66 which isn't really all that old... especially given that he's been eating stem cells to keep young, healthy, and strong.
SkyOS's biggest benefit -- from what I hear, multiple SkyOS boxes across the nation could actually network together and form a pseudo-intelligent network-driven parallel processing system that could be used for scientific calculation, SETI, or even potentially combatting a very serious virus outbreak, if one was to occur. AND, because it'd be completely distributed, it'd be very hard to take it out with an attack on any of its nodes.
Terminally incapable of detecting a joke, CrankyFool replied...
What you're looking for is a 'twistup corkscrew,' or the 'ah-so cork puller.' See here for a good picture.
It doesn't damage the cork at all, and it's a very good idea for wines with older corks. It takes a bit of practice to do right, but I only screwed up one cork (pushed it in rather than pulling it out) before getting it. The other advantages include the fact it's one of the smallest corkscrews (if we redefine corkscrew to be "things you can open wine with") you could carry and the fact it's cheap. They sell for $3-$4 around here, and everything here (SF Bay) is expensive.
I can't clarify this, but I had an interesting experience a year or two ago that might be relevant.
The long version is written up here .
The short version is: A handicapped friend had an unusual and extraordinary need. We met up with a master gunsmith who was so fascinated by this new challenge he'd never had before that he swept us to the head of the line despite having weeks of backlog and spent a weekend machining this unique one-off item for us. Oh and then, because "you couldn't afford to pay what this actually cost," refused to accept money for it.
We're (pretty much) all geeks here. We're all attracted to that challenge, to that thing we've never done before. I know I'm much more likely to do something for free (or at least below market rates) if it's interesting and unusual than if it's yet another damned system administration task. I know I'm not alone in our field, and my experience suggests that masters of the more mechanical arts are often similar in their attraction to the unusual job. Especially given the small number of people who'd be worthy of having such a watch, and the fact that this isn't being asked for for-profit, I would't be surprised if this guy cut them a break on it if NASA wasn't paying.
OK, that was a slightly trollish subject line, but I'll try to make up for it.
I think that as geeks, we all (well, most of us -- I don't have arms, you insensitive clod!) go through the phase where we want that digital watch that has EVERYTHING. It should have at least two different clocks! And a stopwatch! And two timers! And, umm, a calculator. While we're at it, throw a little game in there (I seem to recall one of my first watches had a Simon Says game). Hell, these days, you can get a watch with a USB connection.
Nothing wrong with that, mind you, but at some point some of us change our preferences. Maybe it's because I spend my time on computers 85% of my waking hours, but I've become fond of such things as writing letters with a fountain pen on some nice vellum paper -- Coinciding with my preference for simple, elegant analog watches. This watch on my wrist can't do much -- it tells the time, and the date, and actually has an alarm, but that's about it. It won't tell me what time it is in Hong Kong and it's not heavy enough to kill someone with blunt trauma like those big Citizens. But you know what? I like it. It's light, it's thin, and it looks pretty on my wrist.
I don't mean to suggest there's some sort of 'maturity' that causes some of us to like analog watches -- liking analog watches isn't better than liking digital watches, just different. It's not the height of efficiency, but... efficiency is for machines, not necessarily for people.
If I could afford it and I had the same problem, I'd have gone for mechanical watches too. I'd buy one of these, but I'd feel like a total poseur.
And we're already starting to see spam proudly proclaiming that it's "CAN-SPAM-compliant!" I suspect that we'll soon be able to put in filters to block any message that claims it complies with CAN SPAM because that will be a guarantee that it is, in fact, spam.
And, on the opposite side of the fence, I'm seeing some people claim that relay-testing is now prohibited under CAN SPAM (because CAN SPAM makes unauthorized relaying a crime).
Yeah, I'm pretty comfortable stating it's a fine assault rifle.
Note the link you provided mentions one problem with it -- that it's heavy -- and notes the author never actually carried it into combat. AND it notes that people who actually used it have taken the author to task for dogging the Galil.
(one of my favorite anecdotes to tell about how Israeli military weapons design works differently from US military weapons design goes something like this: One of the problems they were trying to fix when designing the Galil was the more-than-acceptable rate of magazine lips bending in the field, resulting in unreliable feeding. The designers spent some time in the trenches with the soldiers and found out they were using magazine lips as bottle openers, eventually resulting in bending the lips. Solution? They designed the bayonet lug on the Galil so it could be used as a bottle opener.)
You're quite likely kidding, but it's actually an interesting question.
We've seen cases before where American aid to Israel was structured in such a way as to encourage it to purchase stuff from America companies rather than do things itself; one example of this was the Galil -- Israel designed and manufactured a pretty damn fine assault rifle, but then found that the money coming from the US was structured such that it was much, much cheaper to just buy M16s.
Now, mind you, that's probably influenced by the huge brib^H^H^H^Hcontributions defense companies give the government, and I don't think M$ contributes quite *that* much, but we're not very far away from a situation where, say, the next appropriations bill to support Israel has $X million for software purchases from US firms.
(Oh, and I was born and raised Israeli, have lived in the US since 1985, prefer Unix and am writing this on a WinXP laptop. My loyalties are all over the place:) )
And don't be so sure of the tax bucks either. Companies spend tremendous resources and much effort on minimizing their tax burdens, sometimes to absolutely ridiculous extents.
As an example: I have a friend who works for an asset management company. Their growth rate has been steadily at >25% for the last few years, which results in their income growing by >25% per year, and their CEO takes pride in the fact they've had a number of consecutive net loss years -- because those are dollars they're _NOT_ paying the IRS.
If a company's not paying all that much in taxes, and they're not employing that many Americans, why should they get any tax advantages?
That'd be awefully tough for them to do -- ReplayTV was doing DVR/PVRs before Tivo was. In fact, the existence of ReplayTV is a good example of prior art in this field and, unlike the examples others brought up of home-made solutions using PCs, is exactly like a Tivo in being a set-top box built for this one dedicated purpose.
Every once in a while my dad asks me a question and I find the answer on google. He inevitably asks me "how'd you do that? I tried it on google and I didn't find what I wanted."
Paris Hilton is a good example of this -- searching for Paris Hilton results in the top five entries being about the celebrity -- but as soon as I searched for Paris Hilton Hotel I found the Hilton in Paris... It's not really that hard (to me -- I may be more advanced than the target audience of these other search engines)
About two months ago I emailed the owner of sunmamanagers with a request to see if there's something we could do about the suspicious flood of incredibly newbie and elementary questions we'd been getting lately, all from Indian-sounding names @yahoo.com. I don't really care that they're Indians, but for Christ's sake, Sun Managers used to be about "I'm an experienced sysadmin and this absolutely strange thing that isn't covered anywhere is happening," not "I need a script that will do . Please help."
Well, certainly having an AC point this out to us in the middle of a discussion on a completely different topic has convinced me. Your wit, charm, and on-topicness (on-topicsity? on-topicsisity?) are irresistible! Down with Michael! Down with the lot of them! Anonymous Cowards of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but modpoints!
I called the Exploratorium. They said they were _supposed_ to receive one of these, but so far it's late checking in, and they're losing hope it'll actually arrive.
I heard about this some time ago. I seem to recall that due to the fact it's travelling along the tree tops, it has a problem actually seeing the forest because the trees get in the way...
Slashdot Mirror
Now we know why the Phantom's not in production yet -- they've had a problem securing a reliable supply of P4-800 or Athlon XP 333MHz.
(No, the above was not a transcription error -- the original article does actually refer to 800MHz P4s and 333MHz Athlon XPs)
"I'm a linux newbie and have been for about 5 years."
...
Umm
Would this be a bad time to mention Shuttle's based in Taiwan? Or that official estimates are that about 24% of Taiwanese are Buddhists?
For Christ's sake, it's the users, stupid.
Not that Windows is blameless here, mind you, but I seriously suspect that I could cococt a shellscript that could do something similar (at least in terms of self-propagating) and send it to all my friends who run UNIX. And then you'd see! Oh, wait, THEY KNOW BETTER THAN TO RUN UNKNOWN CODE.
I've got two windows boxen at home. They've never been infected. My virus scanner doesn't save me -- running them behind a firewall and not executing random content on them does. It's not Windows that's the problem -- it's those damned Windows users.
Now, excuse me while I call my parents to have them update their virus definitions...
If you're going to be snippy about it, maybe you should read the article.
---
NASA documents show that NASA kept Northwest's passenger name records until September 2003.
Such records typically include credit card numbers, addresses and telephone numbers. NASA said it used the information to investigate whether "data mining" of the records could improve assessments of threats posed by passengers, according to the agency's written responses to questions.
---
Notice the part where they mention credit card umbers, addresses, and telephone numbers.
Notice, also, the implicit part in the way we *should* be dealing with rights management where the question is not whether or not I have a good enough reason to hide something, but whether or not the government has a good enough reason to requisition it. In other words, I'm not James Bond, but I don't fucking care -- because I'm not ObL either, and the government doesn't get to just willy-nilly grab my flight information. More importantly, Northwest doesn't get to willy-nilly hand them over because "it seemed like a good idea at the time."
My #1 favorite all-time FPS was Rainbow Six. When I played it, I was at the edge of my seat, crawling around corners, slicing the pie and making sure I was doing a full vertical scan of each slice to make sure I didn't miss a tango. When that shot came from nowhere that took me down and got me watching the ceiling as the world turned red, then black, it was emotionally devastating. Knowing it could come at any moment made me careful, deliberate, and aware of how exposed I was at any given point.
... It's a sort of intimacy, to be honest, and it's the reason why in a real gun fight, I'd want him at my back. So while R6 may have honed my tactical movement, I think Halo's honing my tactical coordination and cooperation.
And then I went and actually started training with firearms and entering tactical simulators with live weapons and you know what?
I rocked. Seriously -- in my first multi-day training session, I was #2. Which, given that I was a civilian and the #1 guy was an experienced SWAT officer, was just fine with me. I believe Rainbow Six engrained habits into me that were invaluable in my actual, very expensive, "people can really die if I screw up" training.
But again, that's only because I took deaths in Rainbow Six very seriously -- not because I was trying to see it as a sim, but because it hooked me so hard.
I don't have the same experience today with Halo (pretty much the only FPS I've played extensively since R6), probably because of the ability to sustain multiple shots and the completely unrealistic gameplay ('unrealistic' isn't bad in this case -- Halo's not supposed to be realistic).
But I will say this about Halo -- The reason it's hooking me so bad is because of the ability to do dual-player cooperative in the same room. There's nothing like the joy of playing with one of my friends because he and I (perhaps because we've had some of the same real-life training) are so tuned to each other's movements and approach to clearing areas. That meshing of styles is rare (it hasn't happened with my other friend who plays Halo a lot), and it's glorious to see -- advancing/retreating while not covering (but covering for) each other, calling out when reloading so the other guy can stand watch, calling out grenades
I've done the paintball thing, but usually, because there've been various people in the game that we didn't know, it was difficult to coordinate any actual real group of people. It felt like a spray-and-pray which is still fun, but doesn't feel all that educational.
Probably the whole "suck at math" thing.
Not really.
John Huston directed his last movie at 81. Bernardo Bertolucci's still making movies at 63. Kubrick directed his last movie at 71. Bogdanovich is still going strong at 65.
Lucas is 60. The big wait between IV-VI and I-III was because, allegedly, he waited until the tech got better. Is there anything in CG that we can't do anymore? It felt like the bottleneck in I-III was not CG capability but, well, directorial prowess (and the story sucked too) -- so he could start on Eps VII-IX say, two years from now. Two years per movie would land us at 2012, when he'd be 66 which isn't really all that old... especially given that he's been eating stem cells to keep young, healthy, and strong.
SkyOS's biggest benefit -- from what I hear, multiple SkyOS boxes across the nation could actually network together and form a pseudo-intelligent network-driven parallel processing system that could be used for scientific calculation, SETI, or even potentially combatting a very serious virus outbreak, if one was to occur. AND, because it'd be completely distributed, it'd be very hard to take it out with an attack on any of its nodes.
Surely such an idea has tremendous merit!
What you're looking for is a 'twistup corkscrew,' or the 'ah-so cork puller.' See here for a good picture. It doesn't damage the cork at all, and it's a very good idea for wines with older corks. It takes a bit of practice to do right, but I only screwed up one cork (pushed it in rather than pulling it out) before getting it. The other advantages include the fact it's one of the smallest corkscrews (if we redefine corkscrew to be "things you can open wine with") you could carry and the fact it's cheap. They sell for $3-$4 around here, and everything here (SF Bay) is expensive.
The long version is written up here . The short version is: A handicapped friend had an unusual and extraordinary need. We met up with a master gunsmith who was so fascinated by this new challenge he'd never had before that he swept us to the head of the line despite having weeks of backlog and spent a weekend machining this unique one-off item for us. Oh and then, because "you couldn't afford to pay what this actually cost," refused to accept money for it.
We're (pretty much) all geeks here. We're all attracted to that challenge, to that thing we've never done before. I know I'm much more likely to do something for free (or at least below market rates) if it's interesting and unusual than if it's yet another damned system administration task. I know I'm not alone in our field, and my experience suggests that masters of the more mechanical arts are often similar in their attraction to the unusual job. Especially given the small number of people who'd be worthy of having such a watch, and the fact that this isn't being asked for for-profit, I would't be surprised if this guy cut them a break on it if NASA wasn't paying.
OK, that was a slightly trollish subject line, but I'll try to make up for it.
... efficiency is for machines, not necessarily for people.
I think that as geeks, we all (well, most of us -- I don't have arms, you insensitive clod!) go through the phase where we want that digital watch that has EVERYTHING. It should have at least two different clocks! And a stopwatch! And two timers! And, umm, a calculator. While we're at it, throw a little game in there (I seem to recall one of my first watches had a Simon Says game). Hell, these days, you can get a watch with a USB connection.
Nothing wrong with that, mind you, but at some point some of us change our preferences. Maybe it's because I spend my time on computers 85% of my waking hours, but I've become fond of such things as writing letters with a fountain pen on some nice vellum paper -- Coinciding with my preference for simple, elegant analog watches. This watch on my wrist can't do much -- it tells the time, and the date, and actually has an alarm, but that's about it. It won't tell me what time it is in Hong Kong and it's not heavy enough to kill someone with blunt trauma like those big Citizens. But you know what? I like it. It's light, it's thin, and it looks pretty on my wrist.
I don't mean to suggest there's some sort of 'maturity' that causes some of us to like analog watches -- liking analog watches isn't better than liking digital watches, just different. It's not the height of efficiency, but
If I could afford it and I had the same problem, I'd have gone for mechanical watches too. I'd buy one of these, but I'd feel like a total poseur.
And we're already starting to see spam proudly proclaiming that it's "CAN-SPAM-compliant!" I suspect that we'll soon be able to put in filters to block any message that claims it complies with CAN SPAM because that will be a guarantee that it is, in fact, spam.
And, on the opposite side of the fence, I'm seeing some people claim that relay-testing is now prohibited under CAN SPAM (because CAN SPAM makes unauthorized relaying a crime).
Bah.
Yeah, I'm pretty comfortable stating it's a fine assault rifle.
:)
Note the link you provided mentions one problem with it -- that it's heavy -- and notes the author never actually carried it into combat. AND it notes that people who actually used it have taken the author to task for dogging the Galil.
(one of my favorite anecdotes to tell about how Israeli military weapons design works differently from US military weapons design goes something like this: One of the problems they were trying to fix when designing the Galil was the more-than-acceptable rate of magazine lips bending in the field, resulting in unreliable feeding. The designers spent some time in the trenches with the soldiers and found out they were using magazine lips as bottle openers, eventually resulting in bending the lips. Solution? They designed the bayonet lug on the Galil so it could be used as a bottle opener.)
This is going to get modded offtopic, isn't it?
You're quite likely kidding, but it's actually an interesting question.
:) )
We've seen cases before where American aid to Israel was structured in such a way as to encourage it to purchase stuff from America companies rather than do things itself; one example of this was the Galil -- Israel designed and manufactured a pretty damn fine assault rifle, but then found that the money coming from the US was structured such that it was much, much cheaper to just buy M16s.
Now, mind you, that's probably influenced by the huge brib^H^H^H^Hcontributions defense companies give the government, and I don't think M$ contributes quite *that* much, but we're not very far away from a situation where, say, the next appropriations bill to support Israel has $X million for software purchases from US firms.
(Oh, and I was born and raised Israeli, have lived in the US since 1985, prefer Unix and am writing this on a WinXP laptop. My loyalties are all over the place
You know, I'm a Jew.
And my grandparents had nice tattoos of numbers on their forearms.
And I lost family there.
And I think it's funny. I wouldn't buy it, I wouldn't play it. But talking about a fictional game? It's funny.
And don't be so sure of the tax bucks either. Companies spend tremendous resources and much effort on minimizing their tax burdens, sometimes to absolutely ridiculous extents.
As an example: I have a friend who works for an asset management company. Their growth rate has been steadily at >25% for the last few years, which results in their income growing by >25% per year, and their CEO takes pride in the fact they've had a number of consecutive net loss years -- because those are dollars they're _NOT_ paying the IRS.
If a company's not paying all that much in taxes, and they're not employing that many Americans, why should they get any tax advantages?
That'd be awefully tough for them to do -- ReplayTV was doing DVR/PVRs before Tivo was. In fact, the existence of ReplayTV is a good example of prior art in this field and, unlike the examples others brought up of home-made solutions using PCs, is exactly like a Tivo in being a set-top box built for this one dedicated purpose.
Actually, the vast majority of people who die in plane accidents haven't purchased a plane. Don't give up hope yet!
Every once in a while my dad asks me a question and I find the answer on google. He inevitably asks me "how'd you do that? I tried it on google and I didn't find what I wanted."
Paris Hilton is a good example of this -- searching for Paris Hilton results in the top five entries being about the celebrity -- but as soon as I searched for Paris Hilton Hotel I found the Hilton in Paris... It's not really that hard (to me -- I may be more advanced than the target audience of these other search engines)
Thank God someone else noticed it.
About two months ago I emailed the owner of sunmamanagers with a request to see if there's something we could do about the suspicious flood of incredibly newbie and elementary questions we'd been getting lately, all from Indian-sounding names @yahoo.com. I don't really care that they're Indians, but for Christ's sake, Sun Managers used to be about "I'm an experienced sysadmin and this absolutely strange thing that isn't covered anywhere is happening," not "I need a script that will do . Please help."
Well, certainly having an AC point this out to us in the middle of a discussion on a completely different topic has convinced me. Your wit, charm, and on-topicness (on-topicsity? on-topicsisity?) are irresistible! Down with Michael! Down with the lot of them! Anonymous Cowards of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but modpoints!
I called the Exploratorium. They said they were _supposed_ to receive one of these, but so far it's late checking in, and they're losing hope it'll actually arrive.
They sure could have used this when they were getting attacked by the oliphants ...
I heard about this some time ago. I seem to recall that due to the fact it's travelling along the tree tops, it has a problem actually seeing the forest because the trees get in the way ...