Behold the wise Penguin, who makes progress— after watching to see whether or not the first foolish penguin that jumps in makes its progress into a waiting Leopard Seal's stomach.
It's weird to me that no-one seems to have realised yet that you could mass-murder much more people, and in a much easier fashion, just coordinating directly in an airport, in the checkin queues. No one has checked your bag at all yet, and you can blow yourself to smithereens just for the price of not looking too suspicious.
A better choice would be for vectoring bioweapons of disabling but not necessarily lethal power. Built into a suitcase a mechanism to release micro-aerosol Flu virus, say, with a fatality rate under 100ppm, but with a 90%+ chance of a week of work lost. Wait in line for an hour while the aerosol disperses; about 2/3 of the way through the line, "remember" you left something important in the car, and grumpily hurry off... with the evidence. Of course, real bioweapons would be more disruptive, but are harder to obtain, and would require suicide volunteers— at least, until after the "volunteers" get used to expecting the bioweapons used to be non-fatal. Non-lethal bioweapons will serve nicely for intermediate practice.
Low grade, widespread nuisance grade terrorism can be almost as disruptive as high grade isolated incidents... especially when it's easier to get away with it. "The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it." (The second duty is to eat breakfast.)
I run a niche auction site with about 50,000 members. Do I deserve to have a wiki entry? No. Does my website? No.
I'd disagree with the latter. Presumably, it is of modest interest to about 10 ppm of the human race. That's not bad. Probably not enough for a separate biography page about you, but the site, and possibly including a nano-bio of you as a component.
I believe an example I saw given on Wikipedia was "will they still matter in 50 years?".
To whom? The general public, or a historian working in the area the article is relevant to? Most people wouldn't have expected 19th century voting technology to be of major import today if you asked them 20 years ago. Yet the issues from the last major voting technology advancements are the same as today.
I still think the wikipurgers are way out of hand.
Everywhere I go, especially when I ride public transit, I see people listening to iPods.
That must be the problem. The RIAA just wants people buying music, rather than listening to it. It explains a lot about the boy-bands and skanky-divas of the last couple decades: they're just to look at.
If Comcast truly is using Sandvine boxes, then this could be a network controller station with the preset examples still in place.
That would seem a very promising explanation, then. "Never attribute to malice what may be adequately explained by stupidity"... perhaps especially when dealing with Comcast's network support team.
The problem is that the staff that handles returns are Luddites. Sure, they can start looking inside the boxes, but that doesn't mean they'll be able to differentiate a 500 GB hard drive from a 5 GB hard drive.
By the way, Rudy was there on 9/11 and saw first hand what will surely happen again if you don't vote for him.
And the people of NYC were there, too, and saw what will surely happen again if you do vote for him. His popularity in NYC is second only to the typical homeless man's urine; compared to any eligible candidate, he's about 228,569,784th.
So... I should turn in Ronald McDonald to Homeland Security??
Oh, no. He's merely a tragic exile and a shell of his former self. He deserves our pity, not our hatred.
His illegitimate daughter, on the other hand, is a clear agent for the powers in McDonaldland. As for Jim Skinner, I think his name suggests his deserved fate....
Keep in mind that until a year or so ago a single Bush-appointed kid was responsible for censoring all of NASA's press releases about basic science. The kid in question had no college degree, no background in science, and his sole qualification appeared to be having been head of the Texas young republicans at his school. This despite opposition from most of NASA.
Periodically scatter traces of phenolphthalein powder in his work environment; repeat until someone with a brain is hired.
That sounds similar (perfect compared) to what happened to Baaabra's house photos to me.
No, IIR in that case, no-one had noticed that it was her house in the collection up until that point. With the court documnets, there were a few blog lawyers paying attention to the ruling (including the embarassing bits) right as it came out.
It's about the FBI pulling Ministry of Truth revisionism on online court records. YRO actually is an appropriate category. Your right to know.
True. And more worrisome, the 2nd Circuit trying MinTruth tricks at the FBI's request, and evidently without due consideration of the legal issues for the redaction. The minor picadillo of a coerced confession by the FBI isn't very happy news, but it's not the original offense but the attempted coverup that really makes 'em all look bad.
This is a perfect example of the Streisand effect. Note how much attention gets drawn to the two or three paragraphs (or pages?) that were redacted.
Not quite perfect; it was starting to get attention from a few law bloggers. Censoring it, however, highlighted the import. Without the censorship, the odds would have been 9/10 that it never would have escaped the academic blogosphere. Now, its out like the aftermath of a fifteen burito lunch.
And this is why you don't understand Mac's and the people who buy them. You look at the Mac and all you see if the Shiny.
Incorrect. I also see Mac's nice relatively stable underpinnings. This is why I use one at work, and contributes to why I have recommended my department at work make Apple the sole source for laptop and desktop computer hardware this year. However, when I look at the Mac Users, all I see is the gleam of Shiny reflected from their eyes.
I have a fair amount of respect for Apple products. (Unix certification is a respectable achievement.) Most Apple users... less so.
Actually FTA, it's Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Belleci who get to play with radiation. Presumably this means Kari will get to play Damsel in Distress while Grant builds a robotic suit for Tory to try to beat it up with. When they can't handle it, then we cut to Adam and Jamie as you suggest.
They'll also probably all be up for the Von Boom Award as well, but that's later.
Take the episode where they tested if cell phones could cause a fire at a gas pump. As far as I can tell, they never even bothered to investigate if there have been any documented cases of this happening.
By it's very definition, it is impossible to "murder" a cockroach.
Probably, although not all jurisdictions explicitly require a human; I(AmNotALawyerNorASubject) presume a cockroach does not meet the standards for "a reasonable creature in being" to meet the common-law definition of murder in the UK.
There's one thing that the record companies provide that you can't typically get on your own, and that's publicity.
Yeah? You can get it from a Spammer, too.
More importantly, record companies used to serve an editorial function, and indicate a level of quality as well. If someone figures out how to incorporate (a) reliable distribution, (b) editorial judgment, (c) a way to get about 5% of what all of the bands take in as profits, and achieve (d) a little word of mouth, the Internet will beat a route to their servers. The hardest part is designing part (a) so that the operation can fully scale from the first local band you hand a Benjamin to so they try you out, to the day you drive the last of the current RIAA members into bankruptcy because every Big Talent (and little talent) and customer on the planet prefers doing business with you — no matter how fast you move from one to the other.
I'd be surprised if someone at Google isn't working on this as their side project; it's an obvious opportunity to make an honest gigabuck or two.
Don't 4chan users already do this all the time by putting books inside jpgs?
That's a particularly simple form of steganography, yes, but it's easily (almost trivially) detected by anyone who suspects the existence of covert messages being sent. (EG, in Cygwin's bash, "for FOO in *.gif *.jpg *.png ; do unzip -l $FOO ; done", and examine results for a quick 'n sloppy pass; a few minutes work more could give something to automatically announce "hidden" zip files and their contents.) There are more sophisticated and subtle forms, such as altering low bit color channels, which make it much harder for Eve Mallory & Co. to even determine that a covert message has been sent... which is what Alice and Bob are generally trying to achieve when they use steganography.
The should have released it 'on time' regardless if that made it feature-poor and buggy. These comentators don't understand Apple customers. Apple customers value quality. You try to sell them crap and they will eat you alive.
I'll join in with the chorus of "Bullshit" as to the position on Apple Customers. Apple Customers value Shiny, and will continue to swarm accordingly. Steve Jobs would have to release at least two and probably three gold-plated turds in a row before this would change noticably.
On the other hand, I'll agree with your assessment that Apple made the right call to keep to their development timetable. In the long run, I believe the continued evolutionary approach Apple is using, where users can be confident that the new features will still be bolted to solid and reliable underpinnings, will net them more customers. Reliability issues don't affect short term sales as much as long-term. If your OS is unreliable, unstable, buggy, and riddled with usability and security nuisances, it is more likely to get a reputation that way and users are more likely to look at something without such a reputation.
The discussion on the local Mac mailing list isn't about whether to switch from Mac to PC, but whether users of X.4 really want to pay for X.5, or see what comes out in X.6. A minority of starving budget-strained starving students with X.3 are waiting for X.6 also, but remaining users of X.2 through X.3 versions seem to be generally for upgrading. In contrast, if even half of current Windows 2000 users had switched to Vista when it came out, Vista would have almost double its present market share.
It's not that Apple makes such wonderful products; it's that the dominant alternative is so bad, it's market position is threatened by a collective of hobbyists. All Apple needs to do to win is try and continue making sure their products contain as little obvious SUCK as possible. Solid, certain, evolutionary baby steps. Even when making the giant leap from OS 9 to OS X, Steve sold dual-boot systems for about three years. If Bill required every Vista system include a license to dual boot to XP, he'd have much happier users. (Not happy, perhaps, but not rioting.)
Exposed roach to greater than 1000, but less than 10000 roentgens.
How much is that in megatons?
Different types of unit. From my vaguely recalled nuke classes from a decade ago, a 1 megaton nuclear blast with clear line-of-sight gives a human the smaller dose at on the order of 30 miles from ground zero, the higher dose at on the order of 10 miles. A 1000 roentgen whole-body dose is sometimes survivable with extensive medical treatment, but requires a compatible bone marrow transplant within under a week. The higher dose is uncurable, as it eventually kills the central nervous system, although the cause of death is usually from the failure of the digestive track (which might theoretically be "curable", if it didn't require a complete transplant from a compatible donor and weren't ultimately futile anyway). The best treatment at that point is probably three shots of morphine at one hour intervals, in 50, 100, and 200mg doses.
Slashdot Mirror
Glenda Ruth Blaine uses a picture-based password in Niven and Pournelle's The Gripping Hand.
Behold the wise Penguin, who makes progress— after watching to see whether or not the first foolish penguin that jumps in makes its progress into a waiting Leopard Seal's stomach.
It's weird to me that no-one seems to have realised yet that you could mass-murder much more people, and in a much easier fashion, just coordinating directly in an airport, in the checkin queues. No one has checked your bag at all yet, and you can blow yourself to smithereens just for the price of not looking too suspicious.
A better choice would be for vectoring bioweapons of disabling but not necessarily lethal power. Built into a suitcase a mechanism to release micro-aerosol Flu virus, say, with a fatality rate under 100ppm, but with a 90%+ chance of a week of work lost. Wait in line for an hour while the aerosol disperses; about 2/3 of the way through the line, "remember" you left something important in the car, and grumpily hurry off... with the evidence. Of course, real bioweapons would be more disruptive, but are harder to obtain, and would require suicide volunteers— at least, until after the "volunteers" get used to expecting the bioweapons used to be non-fatal. Non-lethal bioweapons will serve nicely for intermediate practice.
Low grade, widespread nuisance grade terrorism can be almost as disruptive as high grade isolated incidents... especially when it's easier to get away with it. "The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it." (The second duty is to eat breakfast.)
I run a niche auction site with about 50,000 members. Do I deserve to have a wiki entry? No. Does my website? No.
I'd disagree with the latter. Presumably, it is of modest interest to about 10 ppm of the human race. That's not bad. Probably not enough for a separate biography page about you, but the site, and possibly including a nano-bio of you as a component.
I believe an example I saw given on Wikipedia was "will they still matter in 50 years?".
To whom? The general public, or a historian working in the area the article is relevant to? Most people wouldn't have expected 19th century voting technology to be of major import today if you asked them 20 years ago. Yet the issues from the last major voting technology advancements are the same as today.
I still think the wikipurgers are way out of hand.
Everywhere I go, especially when I ride public transit, I see people listening to iPods.
That must be the problem. The RIAA just wants people buying music, rather than listening to it. It explains a lot about the boy-bands and skanky-divas of the last couple decades: they're just to look at.
If Comcast truly is using Sandvine boxes, then this could be a network controller station with the preset examples still in place.
That would seem a very promising explanation, then. "Never attribute to malice what may be adequately explained by stupidity"... perhaps especially when dealing with Comcast's network support team.
The problem is that the staff that handles returns are Luddites. Sure, they can start looking inside the boxes, but that doesn't mean they'll be able to differentiate a 500 GB hard drive from a 5 GB hard drive.
By the way, Rudy was there on 9/11 and saw first hand what will surely happen again if you don't vote for him.
And the people of NYC were there, too, and saw what will surely happen again if you do vote for him. His popularity in NYC is second only to the typical homeless man's urine; compared to any eligible candidate, he's about 228,569,784th.
So... I should turn in Ronald McDonald to Homeland Security??
Oh, no. He's merely a tragic exile and a shell of his former self. He deserves our pity, not our hatred.
His illegitimate daughter, on the other hand, is a clear agent for the powers in McDonaldland. As for Jim Skinner, I think his name suggests his deserved fate....
Just to make sure this doesn't happen in the future I'll hammer the server directly.
Yeah.
while true ; do nice -n 20 curl "http://www.comcast.com/MediaLibrary/1/1/About/PressRoom/Images/LogoAndMediaLibrary/Photography/ComcastTechnicians/push05.jpg" -fLso /dev/null ; done
Yeah, hammer the server directly. That's the ticket.
The Fallout series, Master of Magic, the Master of Orion series, Total Annihilation, Sim City....
Keep in mind that until a year or so ago a single Bush-appointed kid was responsible for censoring all of NASA's press releases about basic science. The kid in question had no college degree, no background in science, and his sole qualification appeared to be having been head of the Texas young republicans at his school. This despite opposition from most of NASA.
Periodically scatter traces of phenolphthalein powder in his work environment; repeat until someone with a brain is hired.
That sounds similar (perfect compared) to what happened to Baaabra's house photos to me.
No, IIR in that case, no-one had noticed that it was her house in the collection up until that point. With the court documnets, there were a few blog lawyers paying attention to the ruling (including the embarassing bits) right as it came out.
It's about the FBI pulling Ministry of Truth revisionism on online court records. YRO actually is an appropriate category. Your right to know.
True. And more worrisome, the 2nd Circuit trying MinTruth tricks at the FBI's request, and evidently without due consideration of the legal issues for the redaction. The minor picadillo of a coerced confession by the FBI isn't very happy news, but it's not the original offense but the attempted coverup that really makes 'em all look bad.
This is a perfect example of the Streisand effect. Note how much attention gets drawn to the two or three paragraphs (or pages?) that were redacted.
Not quite perfect; it was starting to get attention from a few law bloggers. Censoring it, however, highlighted the import. Without the censorship, the odds would have been 9/10 that it never would have escaped the academic blogosphere. Now, its out like the aftermath of a fifteen burito lunch.
Eh. What do you expect from someone who awoke at the crack of noon?
And this is why you don't understand Mac's and the people who buy them. You look at the Mac and all you see if the Shiny.
Incorrect. I also see Mac's nice relatively stable underpinnings. This is why I use one at work, and contributes to why I have recommended my department at work make Apple the sole source for laptop and desktop computer hardware this year. However, when I look at the Mac Users, all I see is the gleam of Shiny reflected from their eyes.
I have a fair amount of respect for Apple products. (Unix certification is a respectable achievement.) Most Apple users... less so.
Actually FTA, it's Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Belleci who get to play with radiation. Presumably this means Kari will get to play Damsel in Distress while Grant builds a robotic suit for Tory to try to beat it up with. When they can't handle it, then we cut to Adam and Jamie as you suggest.
They'll also probably all be up for the Von Boom Award as well, but that's later.
Take the episode where they tested if cell phones could cause a fire at a gas pump. As far as I can tell, they never even bothered to investigate if there have been any documented cases of this happening.
See "peer review" remark. Have you bothered?
That depends. Are you still beating your wife?
"I feel questions about my sex life are inappropriate for this forum."
By it's very definition, it is impossible to "murder" a cockroach.
Probably, although not all jurisdictions explicitly require a human; I(AmNotALawyerNorASubject) presume a cockroach does not meet the standards for "a reasonable creature in being" to meet the common-law definition of murder in the UK.
There's one thing that the record companies provide that you can't typically get on your own, and that's publicity.
Yeah? You can get it from a Spammer, too.
More importantly, record companies used to serve an editorial function, and indicate a level of quality as well. If someone figures out how to incorporate (a) reliable distribution, (b) editorial judgment, (c) a way to get about 5% of what all of the bands take in as profits, and achieve (d) a little word of mouth, the Internet will beat a route to their servers. The hardest part is designing part (a) so that the operation can fully scale from the first local band you hand a Benjamin to so they try you out, to the day you drive the last of the current RIAA members into bankruptcy because every Big Talent (and little talent) and customer on the planet prefers doing business with you — no matter how fast you move from one to the other.
I'd be surprised if someone at Google isn't working on this as their side project; it's an obvious opportunity to make an honest gigabuck or two.
"Think big; win small." -- Darius Regulo, in Charles Scheffield's The Web Between the Worlds.
Don't 4chan users already do this all the time by putting books inside jpgs?
That's a particularly simple form of steganography, yes, but it's easily (almost trivially) detected by anyone who suspects the existence of covert messages being sent. (EG, in Cygwin's bash, "for FOO in *.gif *.jpg *.png ; do unzip -l $FOO ; done", and examine results for a quick 'n sloppy pass; a few minutes work more could give something to automatically announce "hidden" zip files and their contents.) There are more sophisticated and subtle forms, such as altering low bit color channels, which make it much harder for Eve Mallory & Co. to even determine that a covert message has been sent... which is what Alice and Bob are generally trying to achieve when they use steganography.
The should have released it 'on time' regardless if that made it feature-poor and buggy. These comentators don't understand Apple customers. Apple customers value quality. You try to sell them crap and they will eat you alive.
I'll join in with the chorus of "Bullshit" as to the position on Apple Customers. Apple Customers value Shiny, and will continue to swarm accordingly. Steve Jobs would have to release at least two and probably three gold-plated turds in a row before this would change noticably.
On the other hand, I'll agree with your assessment that Apple made the right call to keep to their development timetable. In the long run, I believe the continued evolutionary approach Apple is using, where users can be confident that the new features will still be bolted to solid and reliable underpinnings, will net them more customers. Reliability issues don't affect short term sales as much as long-term. If your OS is unreliable, unstable, buggy, and riddled with usability and security nuisances, it is more likely to get a reputation that way and users are more likely to look at something without such a reputation.
The discussion on the local Mac mailing list isn't about whether to switch from Mac to PC, but whether users of X.4 really want to pay for X.5, or see what comes out in X.6. A minority of starving budget-strained starving students with X.3 are waiting for X.6 also, but remaining users of X.2 through X.3 versions seem to be generally for upgrading. In contrast, if even half of current Windows 2000 users had switched to Vista when it came out, Vista would have almost double its present market share.
It's not that Apple makes such wonderful products; it's that the dominant alternative is so bad, it's market position is threatened by a collective of hobbyists. All Apple needs to do to win is try and continue making sure their products contain as little obvious SUCK as possible. Solid, certain, evolutionary baby steps. Even when making the giant leap from OS 9 to OS X, Steve sold dual-boot systems for about three years. If Bill required every Vista system include a license to dual boot to XP, he'd have much happier users. (Not happy, perhaps, but not rioting.)
How much is that in megatons?
Different types of unit. From my vaguely recalled nuke classes from a decade ago, a 1 megaton nuclear blast with clear line-of-sight gives a human the smaller dose at on the order of 30 miles from ground zero, the higher dose at on the order of 10 miles. A 1000 roentgen whole-body dose is sometimes survivable with extensive medical treatment, but requires a compatible bone marrow transplant within under a week. The higher dose is uncurable, as it eventually kills the central nervous system, although the cause of death is usually from the failure of the digestive track (which might theoretically be "curable", if it didn't require a complete transplant from a compatible donor and weren't ultimately futile anyway). The best treatment at that point is probably three shots of morphine at one hour intervals, in 50, 100, and 200mg doses.