Even better, write a whole service for it, call it "Damned Numbers Service", or DNS for short, and...wait, nevermind. I see someone has done it. Sorry!
I have been using AMD for 2 years (an AMD K6-2 300 and a first gen Athlon 600), and my next computer will have at least a 1GHz Athlon in it (as soon as PC2100 RAM is available and relatively affordable, and the AMD 760 chipset is in a ASUS motherboard).
I trust AMD enough to be stable for my needs; that my 300 is stable enough for my parents needs, and that my 1GHz AMD will be stable enough for my future needs. Admittedly, there were some problems with AGP cards with AMD chipset implementations (a lot of problems with 3rd party AGP implementations with the K6-X chips, and the GeForce cards on the ASUS K7M motherboard; problems, AFAIK, that have been worked out), but at a university, high-end graphics is not high on the priority list, at least from my background as a part-time computer technician at my University for 2 years (the CAD labs were the exception, of course).
That's assuming that enough people are intelligent enough to even have some sort of logging on their computer....Bluntly, I try not to make assumptions that people are intelligent.
Oops, I didn't mean that the law is the ultimate determinant of right/wrong; if you don't like laws, feel free to break them: it's your moral choice to obey them or not.
Arguably, I don't obey *all* of the laws to fit in this society; the general guidelines imply that several laws are minor and are rarely adhered to. Speed laws are a good example of this. Do you feel, as a member of this society, you must obey all of society's laws? Especially the DMCA?
I don't consider that society implies that individuals don't matter; I consider that society is more of a set of guidelines for a group of individuals to interact within a structured framework. If you wish to be a part of that society, you have to adhere to those guidelines. To think that individuals don't matter in a society is wrong wrong wrong; it's like saying that the foundations don't matter in a building.
> but expressing opinions of any kind on slashdot
> is not adhereing to the "code"
Since when? CmdrTaco, Roblimo, and every Tom, Dick, and Joe that is either a regular contributor or a frequent poster expresses opinions; I will just assume that I can post of my opinions freely. I have a positive karma that allows a 2 point posting by default. More importantly, from posting an opinion, I am having an intelligent conversation with an intelligent person. Therefore, opinions seem to be acceptable posting material.
be a more elegant solution? (assuming you can block everything off, except port 53, and that the rules regarding precidence allow it) While I had originally stated that only 4000-6000 were hit, trust me; I got scans on top of scans of top of scans.
Admittedly, my ipchains experience is very fictional; though with DrawBridge for the secure BSD (Open? Free? I forget) you could do that.
You are right, was smoking crack when I said ACK. I haven't decoded a rogue packet yet, anyways. Though I was under the impression all a port scan did was send SYN packets out and wait for a SYN/ACK; it didn't bother with looking for the RST or trying to complete the 3-way handshake. If a SYN/ACK is received you got an open port, if not, you move on.
Good point about spoofing; though because I spoke with @Home about it, and they stated that they did it, I would lean toward the DNS server being the culprit. All I can really do is to try to decode a packet and see if it shares the same MAC address as the router (not on same subnet as DNS server). If the same, I can't rule it out, if different, you are dead right.
Do you have a good link for a caching-only nameserver; should I assume that my 486 DX-4 is going to see some serious Linux action if I plan this?
I disagree with your comment about DNS server quality of ISPs; reading the output from my sniffer, I think @Home actually does a great job with their DNS server; it is very quick, according the deltas I see in the output. Just those crummy scans drive me nuts!
> I hate to break it to you, but that's not a
> portscan
What would the packet data look like? If I run my sniffer on the the packet, and see only the ACK flag set on the TCP packet, that I am seeing the first packet in a TCP 3-way handshake. That I have no logs indicating a prior packet from myself. That if I see that over 10 ports in a 20 port range, that I am seeing a port scan. Please correct me if I am wrong.
> If you are running a forwarding nameserver
Assume I am not. Assume I am running Zone Alarm, personal edition, on a Windows 9X box.
I think I am just Devil's advocating here; but please read on, Talesout.
Oh, no, I am not saying it is a waste of time to oppose anything stupid; I am just saying:
A) Prove it is stupid.
B) Verify that it is stupid.
C) Consider several methodologies to fight it, especially considering the ones that use the system in place (or change the system, your choice)
E) Accept the results.
I fully agree with you that you must stand up for your rights, and routinely defend them. I just never remember being granted the right to reverse engineer whatever I want. Why do you think you have that right?
I agree with you that big business has a lot of power in today's society. But why does big business want my rights, and want to control me? Arguably, several business already have ungodly amounts of power over me: Lego, Blizzard, my company of employment, Lucas Films, to name a few.
How do you propose we "look at [a law] seriously and figure out whether [a law] is right or not?" and then get our esteemed decision acted upon? I am inferring from you that voting is not the answer.
Morality has something to do with legality? I have to disagree with that for the most part. An example: in my home country of Canada, as of 1983, it was perfectly legal for a someone to rape their spouse. Is that moral? Maybe originally, one day, laws were based on morality; but now?
"If morality doesn't matter, and only the "legal" system matters, well then, we've all already given up our rights."
Why do you say that? Your "rights" are guaranteed by law, are they not? Either you understand that the laws of the land work for you as well or against you, or move somewhere else. I choose to live here; I must live with the consequences of that action.
To sum up, while the legal system has flaws, ultimately, it is all you have. It's not the best you could have, but it's not the worst. If you can use it to kill the DMCA, go for it; if not, you can't.
I will argue that the moral line between right and wrong doesn't exist; that ultimately, you can be perfectly amoral if you so choose: good vs evil is a purely artificial battle, and that you can choose just not to participate in it.
Honestly, I can do anything I can mentally conceive, and physically enact, if I want to. Morally, I believe that everyone, *as an individual*, has that basic right.
However:
I have to voluntarily surrender (most of) my amorality to be a part of this society, the Western society. I have to accept the general guidelines, laws, and morals of society to be a functioning part of it. Continuing on, to work at the company I am employed at, I have to accept their additional moral structure as part of my employment contract. Continuing even further, I am part of a profession, and I must also respect, and uphold my professions code of ethics if I wish to maintain my membership.
In fact, you could even state that to be a part of the Slashdot community, I adhere to the unspoken moral system of the intelligent posters, in that I speak my mind on the manners in an intelligent fashion, I try to be respectful to other intelligent posters (as is yourself) who may or may not agree with me, and don't "First Post", troll, spam, or flame.
However:
The amount of variation in Western morals is immense, for even for most of the non-arbitrarily defined laws and morals. Is the DMCA a moral law? Obviously, to someone, it must be; as it *is* law. To most people here, it isn't. That's a pretty wide gulf on the morality scale, and because of that, no-one is right on it. The "stretch", so to speak, I have to exercise in moral boundaries is immense; and, quite unfortunately, the accountability in today's society for "being moral" is horrible weak.
Yes, considering myself amoral is probably sociopathic; but, in the end, to be a part of this society, I have the responsibility to learn, and adhere to, that society's basic principles, or suffer the punishments for ignoring them. It is my choice to be a Westerner; as such, I am bound by the culture I have voluntarily chosen.
I hope I have answered your implicit question and assuaged your worries about my moral structure, Mr. Ramsey. Thank you for the opportunity to express myself, and the opportunity to make me think by challenging my beliefs in a polite fashion.
The problem then being that for @Home subscribers (like myself), you can't block the addresses for @Home servers.
As an @Home subscriber, I am routinely probed at high (>1024) ports for TCP *and* UDP by the @Home *DNS* servers (either primary or secondary, forget which one). When I phoned to complain, here is the reasons I got for it:
1) They were verifying my connection.
2) They were checking to see if I had any illicit servers in that range (from UDP 4000-6000, got to make sure that I don't have a rogue licensing server there)
3) They were sending packet data to my cable modem, NOT my computer.
After I heard excuse number three, I realised the advanced level of stupid I was dealing with, and promptly disengaged the phone call.
Still leaving me with the original problem; that @Home's DNS servers are port probing me.
What are the legal ramifications of this? This is unwanted traffic; doesn't that constitute cracking? Isn't that illegal? Can I talk @Home to court for this?
Exactly, Shakespeare quotes it best in Hamlet:
"Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so". (it's a paraphrase, too lazy to find it on the web)
Everyone has different morals, and no-one should ever be subject, against their will, to someone else's morals or beliefs.
Morals are very rarely consistent across societies, rarely consistent in a culture across a period of time, and usually inconsistent between members of the same culture in the same time. Ergo, morality is not something you should ever take a given; and you can't whine about something that is evil because you don't like it. Like a previous poster said, that is for people like Jerry Falwell and other moronic religous zealots.
And besides, morality and legality have little to do with each other, right?
Of course, now with the DMCA, this becomes a legal issue. Can you prove that the DMCA is an illegal or unconstitutional? Can you state that the DMCA goes against fair use? If you can, then great, go to it. If you can't, life's tough, live with it.
If you can ignore the law, successfully, under civil disobediance, and get it overturned, then good. If not, tough.
Or, like the EFF, you can try to prove that the law is detrimental, and try to beat it that was. What are the precidents for other laws of this caliber? Bluntly put, what are the odds of this being more than a ineffectual waste of time? Or even succeeding?
Bluntly put, you have a legal system in place; use it, and accept the decision on it. The morality side of things is a waste of time; my morals are my own, not yours, not his or hers, not theirs, and not Slashdot's.
> nmap'ing a Win2k professional box results is a
> vastly superior tcp/ip stack results
Oh? I didn't realize/remember that Win2K had nmap results floating around; maybe I missed it at Fyodor's. How does the new IP stack compare with FreeBSD/Linux in terms of implementation? By what you say, Win2K is a better stack implementation than Win9X/NT, but by judging what Fyodor has to say about it, that's not really that hard to beat.
But there must be a way to check for the code; a utility at www.insecure.org called nmap analyzes the differences in the TCP/IP stack implementation of the different OSes. There must be something that allows the similar debugging in at the application level of most networking programs.
As well, what about the debugging output of various programs? Can you use the output of, say dbx, debug, or other programs to determine if the code has a certain level of similarities? I mean, if the code has 200 identical assembly commands as a native Linux command on the same hardware, wouldn't that be a strong enough indicator of code copying?
Lastly, if Microsoft is violating the GPL, it doesn't matter if they are causing financial damage to the original programmers. They are breaking a licensing agreement, pure and simple; and that's grounds for litigation. I don't understand why financial damage is even brought up in the article.
Of course, it's Monday morning, I am only one cup of coffee awake, and it's too early to think.
You properly clarified me; when I vaguely said computer error, I mean "Weather.com"'s computer/server/image spicing/etc, not my computer. Thank you for clarifying me.
If you watch the time delayed image, what you see is the clouds on the left side of The Line fading gradually, which is what I would expect the clouds to to during nightfall. On the right side of the very clearly and probably artificial Line, you see pretty much nothing. The image of North America is probably just a back drop; sub-imposed under the picture of the clouds.
Sorry for fooling you about knowing how weather satellites work; IANA weather satellite expert; I know nothing about the orbits or said sats; or the type and quality of said sats information. Again, I apologize for the implicit deception. Just making some random observations about this.
I just noticed that; that seems really odd, but I wonder if it related. First off, the line is too well defined and too North/South to make me think of a terminator line. But it couldn't be caused by satellite coverage blackout for the same reasons. Secondly, the places with the visibility problems are on the night side of the terminator, so the satellites shouldn't be affected by solar radition. You would think that because it's night, you would see this, but again, the line is too north/south for a terminator line.
If anything, it is probably just a computer error.
I can't disagree with you more. I learned C64 BASIC before I learned algebra. Because I learned C64 BASIC, learning ANSI was so easy: for loops, variables, print statements, logic analysis, just made sense in C after using BASIC. My only big glitch was learning pointers; that really threw me.
Besides, C++ is a horrible first language to learn. It's akin to teaching a first time pilot how to fly a jumbo jet; there's just too much to learn before hand. Give them a simple language to cut their teeth on; the rest will follow.
I agree, a kid with C++ skills *is* better than a kid with BASIC skills, hands down, almost everytime. But: a kid with BASIC skills is far better than a kid with no programming skills.
As for the industry standard language and OS, you obviously are looking at a pretty narrow field (Windows programming). C is still a standard for most low level devices, and rest assured, C and C++ are not standard across platforms, or even within platforms (try Borland/Visual C++ porting of the same code for the same OS).
Teaching someone a language like BASIC is great idea for a first language for so many reasons:
1) They *have* to change languages is they want to do anything useful. If someone learns Visual C++, they can moan and bitch that they don't want to change, and throw together a half-assed arguement defending their viewpoint (like you did). Not so with BASIC!
2) Basic stuff is covered in BASIC. Most of the important ideas of programming can be learned on BASIC. Looping, variables, memory access (POKE and PEEK), subroutines, etc. Advanced topics have to be covered in an advanced language, admittedly, but why would I have to know about inline functions or pointers or external variables now? Plenty of time to learn after I learn C!
3) It's EASY TO LEARN! One line of program is all you need to run a quick program! 10 PRINT "Hi" No "include"s, no boilerplate, no pre-processor directives, no semi-colons at the end! It's simple!
But, IE works just as well as Netscape 4.72, and I don't have to worry about that AIM/AOL garbage. When Netscape is the better browser, I'll use it. Until then, IE it is. IE is a better product, as it stands now, from my experience. And bluntly, it's my experience only that counts when I make my decision on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better, write a whole service for it, call it "Damned Numbers Service", or DNS for short, and...wait, nevermind. I see someone has done it. Sorry!
I have been using AMD for 2 years (an AMD K6-2 300 and a first gen Athlon 600), and my next computer will have at least a 1GHz Athlon in it (as soon as PC2100 RAM is available and relatively affordable, and the AMD 760 chipset is in a ASUS motherboard).
I trust AMD enough to be stable for my needs; that my 300 is stable enough for my parents needs, and that my 1GHz AMD will be stable enough for my future needs. Admittedly, there were some problems with AGP cards with AMD chipset implementations (a lot of problems with 3rd party AGP implementations with the K6-X chips, and the GeForce cards on the ASUS K7M motherboard; problems, AFAIK, that have been worked out), but at a university, high-end graphics is not high on the priority list, at least from my background as a part-time computer technician at my University for 2 years (the CAD labs were the exception, of course).
That's assuming that enough people are intelligent enough to even have some sort of logging on their computer....Bluntly, I try not to make assumptions that people are intelligent.
Oops, I didn't mean that the law is the ultimate determinant of right/wrong; if you don't like laws, feel free to break them: it's your moral choice to obey them or not.
Arguably, I don't obey *all* of the laws to fit in this society; the general guidelines imply that several laws are minor and are rarely adhered to. Speed laws are a good example of this. Do you feel, as a member of this society, you must obey all of society's laws? Especially the DMCA?
I don't consider that society implies that individuals don't matter; I consider that society is more of a set of guidelines for a group of individuals to interact within a structured framework. If you wish to be a part of that society, you have to adhere to those guidelines. To think that individuals don't matter in a society is wrong wrong wrong; it's like saying that the foundations don't matter in a building.
> but expressing opinions of any kind on slashdot
> is not adhereing to the "code"
Since when? CmdrTaco, Roblimo, and every Tom, Dick, and Joe that is either a regular contributor or a frequent poster expresses opinions; I will just assume that I can post of my opinions freely. I have a positive karma that allows a 2 point posting by default. More importantly, from posting an opinion, I am having an intelligent conversation with an intelligent person. Therefore, opinions seem to be acceptable posting material.
Find it at:
http://www.insecure.org/nmap/index.html
right? I didn't read the specs on it; I thought it's main use was fingerprinting OSes remotely by TCP/IP stack analysis. Thanks for the tip!
Don't have a Linux firewall (YET), but wouldn't
ipchains -s $scanner -p tcp -d $ipaddress ALL -j DENY
ipchains -s $scanner -p tcp -d $ipaddress 53 -j ALLOW
be a more elegant solution? (assuming you can block everything off, except port 53, and that the rules regarding precidence allow it) While I had originally stated that only 4000-6000 were hit, trust me; I got scans on top of scans of top of scans.
Admittedly, my ipchains experience is very fictional; though with DrawBridge for the secure BSD (Open? Free? I forget) you could do that.
No problem! Though "trying on 53" comment lost me; what do you mean?
You are right, was smoking crack when I said ACK. I haven't decoded a rogue packet yet, anyways. Though I was under the impression all a port scan did was send SYN packets out and wait for a SYN/ACK; it didn't bother with looking for the RST or trying to complete the 3-way handshake. If a SYN/ACK is received you got an open port, if not, you move on.
Thanks for the correction!
Good point about spoofing; though because I spoke with @Home about it, and they stated that they did it, I would lean toward the DNS server being the culprit. All I can really do is to try to decode a packet and see if it shares the same MAC address as the router (not on same subnet as DNS server). If the same, I can't rule it out, if different, you are dead right.
What is YMMV?
Do you have a good link for a caching-only nameserver; should I assume that my 486 DX-4 is going to see some serious Linux action if I plan this?
I disagree with your comment about DNS server quality of ISPs; reading the output from my sniffer, I think @Home actually does a great job with their DNS server; it is very quick, according the deltas I see in the output. Just those crummy scans drive me nuts!
> I hate to break it to you, but that's not a
> portscan
What would the packet data look like? If I run my sniffer on the the packet, and see only the ACK flag set on the TCP packet, that I am seeing the first packet in a TCP 3-way handshake. That I have no logs indicating a prior packet from myself. That if I see that over 10 ports in a 20 port range, that I am seeing a port scan. Please correct me if I am wrong.
> If you are running a forwarding nameserver
Assume I am not. Assume I am running Zone Alarm, personal edition, on a Windows 9X box.
I think I am just Devil's advocating here; but please read on, Talesout.
Oh, no, I am not saying it is a waste of time to oppose anything stupid; I am just saying:
A) Prove it is stupid.
B) Verify that it is stupid.
C) Consider several methodologies to fight it, especially considering the ones that use the system in place (or change the system, your choice)
E) Accept the results.
I fully agree with you that you must stand up for your rights, and routinely defend them. I just never remember being granted the right to reverse engineer whatever I want. Why do you think you have that right?
I agree with you that big business has a lot of power in today's society. But why does big business want my rights, and want to control me? Arguably, several business already have ungodly amounts of power over me: Lego, Blizzard, my company of employment, Lucas Films, to name a few.
How do you propose we "look at [a law] seriously and figure out whether [a law] is right or not?" and then get our esteemed decision acted upon? I am inferring from you that voting is not the answer.
Morality has something to do with legality? I have to disagree with that for the most part. An example: in my home country of Canada, as of 1983, it was perfectly legal for a someone to rape their spouse. Is that moral? Maybe originally, one day, laws were based on morality; but now?
"If morality doesn't matter, and only the "legal" system matters, well then, we've all already given up our rights."
Why do you say that? Your "rights" are guaranteed by law, are they not? Either you understand that the laws of the land work for you as well or against you, or move somewhere else. I choose to live here; I must live with the consequences of that action.
To sum up, while the legal system has flaws, ultimately, it is all you have. It's not the best you could have, but it's not the worst. If you can use it to kill the DMCA, go for it; if not, you can't.
I will argue that the moral line between right and wrong doesn't exist; that ultimately, you can be perfectly amoral if you so choose: good vs evil is a purely artificial battle, and that you can choose just not to participate in it.
Honestly, I can do anything I can mentally conceive, and physically enact, if I want to. Morally, I believe that everyone, *as an individual*, has that basic right.
However:
I have to voluntarily surrender (most of) my amorality to be a part of this society, the Western society. I have to accept the general guidelines, laws, and morals of society to be a functioning part of it. Continuing on, to work at the company I am employed at, I have to accept their additional moral structure as part of my employment contract. Continuing even further, I am part of a profession, and I must also respect, and uphold my professions code of ethics if I wish to maintain my membership.
In fact, you could even state that to be a part of the Slashdot community, I adhere to the unspoken moral system of the intelligent posters, in that I speak my mind on the manners in an intelligent fashion, I try to be respectful to other intelligent posters (as is yourself) who may or may not agree with me, and don't "First Post", troll, spam, or flame.
However:
The amount of variation in Western morals is immense, for even for most of the non-arbitrarily defined laws and morals. Is the DMCA a moral law? Obviously, to someone, it must be; as it *is* law. To most people here, it isn't. That's a pretty wide gulf on the morality scale, and because of that, no-one is right on it. The "stretch", so to speak, I have to exercise in moral boundaries is immense; and, quite unfortunately, the accountability in today's society for "being moral" is horrible weak.
Yes, considering myself amoral is probably sociopathic; but, in the end, to be a part of this society, I have the responsibility to learn, and adhere to, that society's basic principles, or suffer the punishments for ignoring them. It is my choice to be a Westerner; as such, I am bound by the culture I have voluntarily chosen.
I hope I have answered your implicit question and assuaged your worries about my moral structure, Mr. Ramsey. Thank you for the opportunity to express myself, and the opportunity to make me think by challenging my beliefs in a polite fashion.
The problem then being that for @Home subscribers (like myself), you can't block the addresses for @Home servers.
As an @Home subscriber, I am routinely probed at high (>1024) ports for TCP *and* UDP by the @Home *DNS* servers (either primary or secondary, forget which one). When I phoned to complain, here is the reasons I got for it:
1) They were verifying my connection.
2) They were checking to see if I had any illicit servers in that range (from UDP 4000-6000, got to make sure that I don't have a rogue licensing server there)
3) They were sending packet data to my cable modem, NOT my computer.
After I heard excuse number three, I realised the advanced level of stupid I was dealing with, and promptly disengaged the phone call.
Still leaving me with the original problem; that @Home's DNS servers are port probing me.
What are the legal ramifications of this? This is unwanted traffic; doesn't that constitute cracking? Isn't that illegal? Can I talk @Home to court for this?
Exactly, Shakespeare quotes it best in Hamlet:
"Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so". (it's a paraphrase, too lazy to find it on the web)
Everyone has different morals, and no-one should ever be subject, against their will, to someone else's morals or beliefs.
Morals are very rarely consistent across societies, rarely consistent in a culture across a period of time, and usually inconsistent between members of the same culture in the same time. Ergo, morality is not something you should ever take a given; and you can't whine about something that is evil because you don't like it. Like a previous poster said, that is for people like Jerry Falwell and other moronic religous zealots.
And besides, morality and legality have little to do with each other, right?
Of course, now with the DMCA, this becomes a legal issue. Can you prove that the DMCA is an illegal or unconstitutional? Can you state that the DMCA goes against fair use? If you can, then great, go to it. If you can't, life's tough, live with it.
If you can ignore the law, successfully, under civil disobediance, and get it overturned, then good. If not, tough.
Or, like the EFF, you can try to prove that the law is detrimental, and try to beat it that was. What are the precidents for other laws of this caliber? Bluntly put, what are the odds of this being more than a ineffectual waste of time? Or even succeeding?
Bluntly put, you have a legal system in place; use it, and accept the decision on it. The morality side of things is a waste of time; my morals are my own, not yours, not his or hers, not theirs, and not Slashdot's.
Um, smoking crack? That's a good point, my only excuse is that it's a Monday, and I am still asleep and this is all a dream.
Thanks for the wake up call!
> nmap'ing a Win2k professional box results is a
> vastly superior tcp/ip stack results
Oh? I didn't realize/remember that Win2K had nmap results floating around; maybe I missed it at Fyodor's. How does the new IP stack compare with FreeBSD/Linux in terms of implementation? By what you say, Win2K is a better stack implementation than Win9X/NT, but by judging what Fyodor has to say about it, that's not really that hard to beat.
Thanks for the information; but the question still remains: how would you reconstruct it, assuming that time isn't a factor?
But there must be a way to check for the code; a utility at www.insecure.org called nmap analyzes the differences in the TCP/IP stack implementation of the different OSes. There must be something that allows the similar debugging in at the application level of most networking programs.
As well, what about the debugging output of various programs? Can you use the output of, say dbx, debug, or other programs to determine if the code has a certain level of similarities? I mean, if the code has 200 identical assembly commands as a native Linux command on the same hardware, wouldn't that be a strong enough indicator of code copying?
Lastly, if Microsoft is violating the GPL, it doesn't matter if they are causing financial damage to the original programmers. They are breaking a licensing agreement, pure and simple; and that's grounds for litigation. I don't understand why financial damage is even brought up in the article.
Of course, it's Monday morning, I am only one cup of coffee awake, and it's too early to think.
You properly clarified me; when I vaguely said computer error, I mean "Weather.com"'s computer/server/image spicing/etc, not my computer. Thank you for clarifying me.
If you watch the time delayed image, what you see is the clouds on the left side of The Line fading gradually, which is what I would expect the clouds to to during nightfall. On the right side of the very clearly and probably artificial Line, you see pretty much nothing. The image of North America is probably just a back drop; sub-imposed under the picture of the clouds.
Sorry for fooling you about knowing how weather satellites work; IANA weather satellite expert; I know nothing about the orbits or said sats; or the type and quality of said sats information. Again, I apologize for the implicit deception. Just making some random observations about this.
I just noticed that; that seems really odd, but I wonder if it related. First off, the line is too well defined and too North/South to make me think of a terminator line. But it couldn't be caused by satellite coverage blackout for the same reasons. Secondly, the places with the visibility problems are on the night side of the terminator, so the satellites shouldn't be affected by solar radition. You would think that because it's night, you would see this, but again, the line is too north/south for a terminator line.
If anything, it is probably just a computer error.
They do, it's called flight insurance.
Go outside? It's raining in Illinois, those cloud thingies make it really hard to see the Aurora Borelis!
I can't disagree with you more. I learned C64 BASIC before I learned algebra. Because I learned C64 BASIC, learning ANSI was so easy: for loops, variables, print statements, logic analysis, just made sense in C after using BASIC. My only big glitch was learning pointers; that really threw me.
Besides, C++ is a horrible first language to learn. It's akin to teaching a first time pilot how to fly a jumbo jet; there's just too much to learn before hand. Give them a simple language to cut their teeth on; the rest will follow.
I agree, a kid with C++ skills *is* better than a kid with BASIC skills, hands down, almost everytime. But: a kid with BASIC skills is far better than a kid with no programming skills.
As for the industry standard language and OS, you obviously are looking at a pretty narrow field (Windows programming). C is still a standard for most low level devices, and rest assured, C and C++ are not standard across platforms, or even within platforms (try Borland/Visual C++ porting of the same code for the same OS).
Teaching someone a language like BASIC is great idea for a first language for so many reasons:
1) They *have* to change languages is they want to do anything useful. If someone learns Visual C++, they can moan and bitch that they don't want to change, and throw together a half-assed arguement defending their viewpoint (like you did). Not so with BASIC!
2) Basic stuff is covered in BASIC. Most of the important ideas of programming can be learned on BASIC. Looping, variables, memory access (POKE and PEEK), subroutines, etc. Advanced topics have to be covered in an advanced language, admittedly, but why would I have to know about inline functions or pointers or external variables now? Plenty of time to learn after I learn C!
3) It's EASY TO LEARN! One line of program is all you need to run a quick program! 10 PRINT "Hi" No "include"s, no boilerplate, no pre-processor directives, no semi-colons at the end! It's simple!
Well, that was an interesting lunch break...
Then I quit using it. It's that simple.
But, IE works just as well as Netscape 4.72, and I don't have to worry about that AIM/AOL garbage. When Netscape is the better browser, I'll use it. Until then, IE it is. IE is a better product, as it stands now, from my experience. And bluntly, it's my experience only that counts when I make my decision on it.