As with other forms of stereograms, your eyes must be focused on the screen, while angled towards the 2 images. Even if you do see the 3D image it will always seem a little off since these 2 factors will not be giving your brain the same information. Tilt your head to one side and the illusion of depth will be lost.
Couldn't you have the computer generate an image which is blurry but becomes sharp when you focus your eyes to the correct distance behind the screen ? For that matter, would it be impossible to have the computer generate holographs ?
I don't think you could use a normal screen to show a holographic movie, thought.
Obviously this would take a lot of work to get it started but the changes it would bring in communication are unimaginable.
It won't ever happen. Not for any technical reason, but because it would make it harder to spy on and censor the net for you, so your overlords - both the corporate and political ones - won't ever let it happen.
Just look at the campaign against open access points. They would be the obvious first step towards your proposal; but running one gives you unlimited legal responsibility - contrast this with the "common carrier" immunity companies enjoy - but there's also been talk of making it outright illegal, precisely because it allows people to communicate anonymously and untracably.
No, it seems inevitable that the Internet will be a victim of the War on Freedom, sooner or later.
However, all of my goods are delivered to me by a guy on a 125cc motorbike. Why should I pay for driveway upgrades when the existing driveway is already more than suitable for my needs?
That's okay, my truck will simply drive right over your motorcycle. Why should I pay extra for the wear in the brakes and the gas needed to reaccelerate, when it won't be my goods which get toasted ?
Mind you, my personal favorite solution to this problem would be to equip every device with a wireless network interface, let them all connect to all other devices in range, and use some kind of self-organizing method to have this mesh route the messages. Screw the ISPs, just use flying cars.
As a nice side result, you could easily make this system pretty much impossible to trace. Of course, that's why it won't ever happen: can't let people be anonymous, they might plot to overthrow their overlords.
The last two computers I bought were under 300 Mhz and under $400. Neither has a video card, both completely solid state, completely silent, and fit in a coat pocket (not that they are portable of course). Both consume less than 10W. I don't anticipate buying another personal computer without similar characteristics.
Care to name them ? Because I've been looking for something just like this, to act as a lightweight server for my home network. The problem is, the only possible location is in my bedroom:(...
No, the right to property is an inalienable right of a human being.
On what do you base this claim ?
You own your body.
I am my body, at least in part.
You own the product of your body's labor.
In some cases, yes, in others, no, depending on the applicable laws. You don't own your children, for example.
If you build a chair, it's your chair, because it's the product of your body's labor. (If somebody else wants your chair, that is theft of your body's labor. That's a violation.) (Let them go build their own damn chair with their own body.)
Your body's ability to do labor, however, is in part thanks to the labor of various people, such as farmers (for providing your body with energy), teachers, bot school and otherwise (for teaching you the cultural heritage you draw from when you direct your labor), policemen and other public servants (for upkeeping an ordered society where you live long enough to complete your chair), smiths (for making nails and a hammer), woodcutters (for getting you wood), and so on. Since these people all contributed to your chair, shouldn't they also own a part of it ?
The approach of "you own what you make" works great as a rule of thumb, but falls apart really fast when you try to make it into a philosophical imperative. After all, you didn't come from nothing, so logically speaking you - and thus everything you make - should be owned by everyone who helped mold you, according to that rule.
The state, aka government, only exists because the people created it.
Correct. And it was created for the specific purpose of making and enforcing rules which wouldn't otherwise exist. Private property is one of these.
haha, I could hand Montana the keys to the place, and they still couldn't launch them.
Given physical access to a device, it is very likely that any access control device can be bypassed.
In all seriousness, you should start talking to your politicians about this. Be sure a lot of that money stays in Montana in the way of schools, libraries, and medical services.
I don't live in Montana. In fact I don't even live in the USA.
No, Montana doesn't have "nukes", there are "nukes" in Montana. They are not the property of the state or any state agency. So um, good luck with just waltzing in and trying to point one at another part of your own country.
If it really comes down to using nukes, it doesn't matter who's property they are, it only matters who can control them by force. Can Montana send enough people waltzing in with assault rifles doing the beat to get their people to the control room, before the people there can disable/launch them ? If yes, then Montana has nukes.
The whole concept of property is somewhat confusing anyway, when we are talking about state or states, since prorty ownership is simply a state-granted exclusive right of control to something to begin with.
While it isn't backscatter spam since the initial content isn't delivered, it is still backscatter and Google is still doing the wrong thing.
Actually, it is a DOS tool. It sends back one message per each nonexistent recipient. Forge a FROM address in the target mailserver, generate 100 random false addresses, and watch as your target server gets 100 bogus messages. Now have each bot in a botnet do the same.
abuse@gmail.com has an auto-response. bogus@gmail.com has an auto-response.
Wath happens if you send the email with two recipients, bogus1@gmail.com and bogus2@gmail.com ? Does if bounce one message from each to the abuse account, and does abuse bounce a copy back to both per each message it received, and do TO headers stay intact in this process ? Because if they do, then for each message the abuse gets, it sends out two, both of which boomerang right back and generate a total of four messages, then 8, 16, 64, 128, 256, 1024... And of course similar loops can be set into motion between any three addresses, making hunting them all down a fun little task for Google engineers.
I love the smell of geometric procession in the morning:). And nothing drives the point "fix this" home like getting someone to DOS themselves.
FWIW, 'agnostic' seems to have come into use due to a shift in the popular meaning of 'atheist'. Acording to Wictionary, the term didn't even exist before 1870. If people would try to quit reading more into a-theism than the word actually suggests, we wouldn't need a term for the neutral category.
If we take "atheist" to mean "someone who doesn't believe in a god", then what do we call the annoying zealot who feels the need to loudly and continuously declare that not only does no god exist, but anyone who believes in one is stupid, delusional, childish, even outright crazy; or perhaps a devious schemer dastardly subverting the minds of the weak-willed to become his devout brainwashed slaves ?
The meanings of words change, sometimes for good reasons.
The travel time helps prevent flash crowds, which keeps the server load more even, not to mention being an essential element in reacting to attacks. Location still has to mean something.
If having lots of characters in the same place causes a problem with server load, then, frankly, the balancing algorithm is shit. What did they do - assign a fixed geographic area for each server ?
Of course, it could be that servers can handle it just fine but the clients can't - they have to render all those hundreds of characters present, after all.
You can enter this into a sleazy internet cafe's browser. It doesn't matter if that transaction's data is stolen or not, because the bank won't authorize your one-time PIN for a second transaction.
It doesn't need to. Joe Robber can simply use a phishing site or man-in-the-middle attack to get the one-time PIN before Joe Merchant can, and cash it in first. You've still lost money without receiving whatever it was you were paying for.
Now, obviously this system has the benefit of limiting the damage: Joe Robber can't get more from your account that you've authorized Joe Merchant for (assuming that the PIN encodes the amount to be transferred in it). However, you still shouldn't conduct business from a sleazy Internet cafe.
In much writing things are still going to take a while. Peer review takes time, because peer reviewers have busy lives.
"Peer review" refers to scientific writing, and specifically to research papers. Is copyright actually significant to those ? From what I've understood, the authors actually have to pay to get their papers published, so it seems to me that having them spread for free would help, not hinder, the scientists.
The reason there is a vibrant indie gaming scene is the relative ease of development, accessibility and ubiquity of the Windows platform. Sure if Linux can take over and become the default OS, the indie scene might move over there, but suggesting that in the meantime people should limit their gaming consumption exclusively to proprietary gaming systems is really stupid and counterproductive.
Linux has independentgames. The indie scene has already expanded into penguinland. Which is good, since - in my experience - getting older games to work on Linux is far easier than getting them to work on Windows; even some of Microsoft's own games (such as Crimson Skies) seem to have trouble on newer Windows machines. Whether this is because of OS incompatibilities or shitty coding in said games I couldn't say.
What makes you think he isn't sincere in his beliefs?
He propably is. The time and effort he has put into his anti-religious efforts suggests he's quite obsessed about them, too.
However, this doesn't change the fact that Dawkins is known for attacks on religion far more than his work in science. This, I believe, justifies calling him a troll, whether these attacks are a weird practical joke or a genuine obsession.
I'm just curious. I personally don't have much interest in the field of "pop-evolutionary biology" but I think it has its place, and serves a useful purpose.
Certainly. A pity that Dawkins's is wasting his time on an ultimately doomed crusade, rather than advancing said field:(.
Domain names are more or less useless when billions of sites, many which capitalize on mistyped or abandoned domain names, exist.
Domain names are very useful because they, unlike IP addresses, are location independent. This means that the Pirate Bay can move their servers from Sweden to some free country, and no one needs to care, since the old address keeps on working despite the packets now traveling somewhere else.
You could have completely randomized domain names and they still would perform a useful service, simply by abstracting and separating logical Internet addresses from the physical ones. Heck, Tor has a system of in-Tor anonymous servers using the pseudo-domain ".onion", so you can run a Web server and no one knows where you are.
Dawkins isn't best known for his scientific work. He is best known for his crusade against religion. Publishing one tirade after another about the subject is hard to consider anything but trolling; and he's been pretty succesfull in that, as proven by books like "The Dawkins Delusion" - how many Slashdot trolls can say they got dead-tree books published just to counter their posts ?
If one wanted to be really nasty - considering his convictions - one could even call him a "22nd-Level Crusader":). Also, I seem to recall there was a prestige class which concentrated on jamming the powers of clerics and denying that deities were anything worth worshipping, as opposed to simply powerful but ultimately ordinary beings; I can't recall what it was called, thought.
8/9 threads Macthorpe comments in, the others do. 8/13 for inTheLoo, 5/10 for gnutoo, 9/18 for twitter. Slashdot has half a million users and only a few hundred post in any given thread - this is extremely unlikely to be a chance occurence. Just throwing the data out there...
This, of course, assumes that each of those half a million users are equally active, that is, they post comments with the same frequency. Otherwise, it could simply be that these four are amongst the active few and share the same interests, making them likely to comment on the same articles.
You'd really need to make an in-depth statistical analysis to figure out if this is truly an anomaly; and even if it is, it doesn't neccessarily prove anything - with half a million users, one chance out of 10,000 should happen about 50 times.
If in fact no laws have been broken, then the laws need to be changed (and made retro-active in this case) to punish and make an example of this type of behaviour. People need to be put in jail for this.
Retroactive laws make it impossible to know whether some behavior, which is perfectly legal when it was committed, will get you thrown into prison nonetheless. This makes a mockery of the rule of law, and can not be tolerated.
The only known alternative for the rule of law is the divine right of kings. We have already taken too many steps to that direction, and must not take any more.
However, in Europe where there's almost no fresh customer left, they have to compete for existing customers - who need more incentive to change from an existing service (if it ain't broke...) Thus competition is healthier over there.
Competition in Europe - or at least where I live - is healthy because the phone companies are forced by law to lease their lines to third parties. This means you actually have a choice between ISP's.
Just wait till the market is saturated. Even if there are only a few players, they'll be forced to compete, no matter how unwilling.
Not true. They could simply calculate that it's more profitable to squeeze a high margin from each existing customer, rather than trying to get new ones. Natural monopolies lead to natural cartels.
For the same reason I can't sue you for not giving me money on what ever basis you don't give me money.
The difference being, of course, that my money is mine, but the Government's money is actually public funds, taxes gathered from everyone and used on their behalf. That's why every answer to every request for that money, be it yea or nay, needs to be based on law, rather than the personal preferences of some bureuecrat or politician.
Sorry, dear. Blasting the US and a not-so-hidden comparison with Nazi Germany of the 2nd World War may get you the "Insightful" moderations, but it is, in fact, off-topic and I will not bite.
Said like a fish in the bucket;).
There is no question, whether or not to go to war with cyber-criminals -- they have already gone to war with us.
No, they haven't, any more than a pickpocket has gone to war with anyone. War on Cybercrime might be a catchy slogan, but it is just that - a slogan.
A cybercriminal is a criminal, not an invading horde of huns. You don't attack them, you investigate them and haul their ass to a prison. If they're some rogue hackers, it shouldn't be difficult to get the local courts of their country of origin to deal with them; and if they're state-employed saboteurs, any damage you can cause their systems are trivially dealt with - computers are cheap. In neither case does it make sense to use your own resources for attacking instead of defending.
Every time a spam tries (successfully or not) to creep into your mailbox, every time your sshd logs a login attempt by "admin" or "fifi" -- you are under attack.
Yes, in the same way as you are under attack when someone smashes your car window and steals the stereos.
All we are discussing are the tactics -- and I agree with the officer in the article, who thinks, active measures should be taken in addition to the purely defensive passive ones.
Well, since you mentioned spam specifically, and since the world's top spammers are well known, how about taking the active measure of dragging the assholes before a court and sending them behind the bars where they belong ?
Plus, how do you propagate a 'helpful' worm? Same way as any other? Probably going to get caught by antivirus/firewalls. Work out some deal with AV/firewall vendors?
Why would the AV vendors cut deals with something which lessens the demand for their products ?
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't you have the computer generate an image which is blurry but becomes sharp when you focus your eyes to the correct distance behind the screen ? For that matter, would it be impossible to have the computer generate holographs ?
I don't think you could use a normal screen to show a holographic movie, thought.
It won't ever happen. Not for any technical reason, but because it would make it harder to spy on and censor the net for you, so your overlords - both the corporate and political ones - won't ever let it happen.
Just look at the campaign against open access points. They would be the obvious first step towards your proposal; but running one gives you unlimited legal responsibility - contrast this with the "common carrier" immunity companies enjoy - but there's also been talk of making it outright illegal, precisely because it allows people to communicate anonymously and untracably.
No, it seems inevitable that the Internet will be a victim of the War on Freedom, sooner or later.
That's okay, my truck will simply drive right over your motorcycle. Why should I pay extra for the wear in the brakes and the gas needed to reaccelerate, when it won't be my goods which get toasted ?
Mind you, my personal favorite solution to this problem would be to equip every device with a wireless network interface, let them all connect to all other devices in range, and use some kind of self-organizing method to have this mesh route the messages. Screw the ISPs, just use flying cars.
As a nice side result, you could easily make this system pretty much impossible to trace. Of course, that's why it won't ever happen: can't let people be anonymous, they might plot to overthrow their overlords.
True. That piece of paper belongs to the wider world of complex values.
Care to name them ? Because I've been looking for something just like this, to act as a lightweight server for my home network. The problem is, the only possible location is in my bedroom :(...
On what do you base this claim ?
I am my body, at least in part.
In some cases, yes, in others, no, depending on the applicable laws. You don't own your children, for example.
Your body's ability to do labor, however, is in part thanks to the labor of various people, such as farmers (for providing your body with energy), teachers, bot school and otherwise (for teaching you the cultural heritage you draw from when you direct your labor), policemen and other public servants (for upkeeping an ordered society where you live long enough to complete your chair), smiths (for making nails and a hammer), woodcutters (for getting you wood), and so on. Since these people all contributed to your chair, shouldn't they also own a part of it ?
The approach of "you own what you make" works great as a rule of thumb, but falls apart really fast when you try to make it into a philosophical imperative. After all, you didn't come from nothing, so logically speaking you - and thus everything you make - should be owned by everyone who helped mold you, according to that rule.
Correct. And it was created for the specific purpose of making and enforcing rules which wouldn't otherwise exist. Private property is one of these.
Given physical access to a device, it is very likely that any access control device can be bypassed.
I don't live in Montana. In fact I don't even live in the USA.
If it really comes down to using nukes, it doesn't matter who's property they are, it only matters who can control them by force. Can Montana send enough people waltzing in with assault rifles doing the beat to get their people to the control room, before the people there can disable/launch them ? If yes, then Montana has nukes.
The whole concept of property is somewhat confusing anyway, when we are talking about state or states, since prorty ownership is simply a state-granted exclusive right of control to something to begin with.
Actually, it is a DOS tool. It sends back one message per each nonexistent recipient. Forge a FROM address in the target mailserver, generate 100 random false addresses, and watch as your target server gets 100 bogus messages. Now have each bot in a botnet do the same.
What kind of moron designs something like that ?
Wath happens if you send the email with two recipients, bogus1@gmail.com and bogus2@gmail.com ? Does if bounce one message from each to the abuse account, and does abuse bounce a copy back to both per each message it received, and do TO headers stay intact in this process ? Because if they do, then for each message the abuse gets, it sends out two, both of which boomerang right back and generate a total of four messages, then 8, 16, 64, 128, 256, 1024... And of course similar loops can be set into motion between any three addresses, making hunting them all down a fun little task for Google engineers.
I love the smell of geometric procession in the morning :). And nothing drives the point "fix this" home like getting someone to DOS themselves.
If we take "atheist" to mean "someone who doesn't believe in a god", then what do we call the annoying zealot who feels the need to loudly and continuously declare that not only does no god exist, but anyone who believes in one is stupid, delusional, childish, even outright crazy; or perhaps a devious schemer dastardly subverting the minds of the weak-willed to become his devout brainwashed slaves ?
The meanings of words change, sometimes for good reasons.
If having lots of characters in the same place causes a problem with server load, then, frankly, the balancing algorithm is shit. What did they do - assign a fixed geographic area for each server ?
Of course, it could be that servers can handle it just fine but the clients can't - they have to render all those hundreds of characters present, after all.
It doesn't need to. Joe Robber can simply use a phishing site or man-in-the-middle attack to get the one-time PIN before Joe Merchant can, and cash it in first. You've still lost money without receiving whatever it was you were paying for.
Now, obviously this system has the benefit of limiting the damage: Joe Robber can't get more from your account that you've authorized Joe Merchant for (assuming that the PIN encodes the amount to be transferred in it). However, you still shouldn't conduct business from a sleazy Internet cafe.
"Peer review" refers to scientific writing, and specifically to research papers. Is copyright actually significant to those ? From what I've understood, the authors actually have to pay to get their papers published, so it seems to me that having them spread for free would help, not hinder, the scientists.
But it's not in the interests of the vast majority of lawyers, so it won't happen.
Linux has independent games. The indie scene has already expanded into penguinland. Which is good, since - in my experience - getting older games to work on Linux is far easier than getting them to work on Windows; even some of Microsoft's own games (such as Crimson Skies) seem to have trouble on newer Windows machines. Whether this is because of OS incompatibilities or shitty coding in said games I couldn't say.
He propably is. The time and effort he has put into his anti-religious efforts suggests he's quite obsessed about them, too.
However, this doesn't change the fact that Dawkins is known for attacks on religion far more than his work in science. This, I believe, justifies calling him a troll, whether these attacks are a weird practical joke or a genuine obsession.
Certainly. A pity that Dawkins's is wasting his time on an ultimately doomed crusade, rather than advancing said field :(.
Domain names are very useful because they, unlike IP addresses, are location independent. This means that the Pirate Bay can move their servers from Sweden to some free country, and no one needs to care, since the old address keeps on working despite the packets now traveling somewhere else.
You could have completely randomized domain names and they still would perform a useful service, simply by abstracting and separating logical Internet addresses from the physical ones. Heck, Tor has a system of in-Tor anonymous servers using the pseudo-domain ".onion", so you can run a Web server and no one knows where you are.
How about "22nd-Level Troll" ?
Dawkins isn't best known for his scientific work. He is best known for his crusade against religion. Publishing one tirade after another about the subject is hard to consider anything but trolling; and he's been pretty succesfull in that, as proven by books like "The Dawkins Delusion" - how many Slashdot trolls can say they got dead-tree books published just to counter their posts ?
If one wanted to be really nasty - considering his convictions - one could even call him a "22nd-Level Crusader" :). Also, I seem to recall there was a prestige class which concentrated on jamming the powers of clerics and denying that deities were anything worth worshipping, as opposed to simply powerful but ultimately ordinary beings; I can't recall what it was called, thought.
This, of course, assumes that each of those half a million users are equally active, that is, they post comments with the same frequency. Otherwise, it could simply be that these four are amongst the active few and share the same interests, making them likely to comment on the same articles.
You'd really need to make an in-depth statistical analysis to figure out if this is truly an anomaly; and even if it is, it doesn't neccessarily prove anything - with half a million users, one chance out of 10,000 should happen about 50 times.
Retroactive laws make it impossible to know whether some behavior, which is perfectly legal when it was committed, will get you thrown into prison nonetheless. This makes a mockery of the rule of law, and can not be tolerated.
The only known alternative for the rule of law is the divine right of kings. We have already taken too many steps to that direction, and must not take any more.
Competition in Europe - or at least where I live - is healthy because the phone companies are forced by law to lease their lines to third parties. This means you actually have a choice between ISP's.
Not true. They could simply calculate that it's more profitable to squeeze a high margin from each existing customer, rather than trying to get new ones. Natural monopolies lead to natural cartels.
The difference being, of course, that my money is mine, but the Government's money is actually public funds, taxes gathered from everyone and used on their behalf. That's why every answer to every request for that money, be it yea or nay, needs to be based on law, rather than the personal preferences of some bureuecrat or politician.
Said like a fish in the bucket ;).
No, they haven't, any more than a pickpocket has gone to war with anyone. War on Cybercrime might be a catchy slogan, but it is just that - a slogan.
A cybercriminal is a criminal, not an invading horde of huns. You don't attack them, you investigate them and haul their ass to a prison. If they're some rogue hackers, it shouldn't be difficult to get the local courts of their country of origin to deal with them; and if they're state-employed saboteurs, any damage you can cause their systems are trivially dealt with - computers are cheap. In neither case does it make sense to use your own resources for attacking instead of defending.
Yes, in the same way as you are under attack when someone smashes your car window and steals the stereos.
Well, since you mentioned spam specifically, and since the world's top spammers are well known, how about taking the active measure of dragging the assholes before a court and sending them behind the bars where they belong ?
Why would the AV vendors cut deals with something which lessens the demand for their products ?