Is it possible to have Secure WIFI network without the big WPA2-Enterprise? (Certificate from cisco and such?)
Yeah. Just plug the WIFI router to a Linux box, and have clients make SSH tunnels to it, authenticated by private key. Then have the local host forward all outgoing packets to the tunnel, and the server will forward what comes in from the tunnel. You don't have a proper key, you can get packets over the WIFI but not over the server.
In other words, forget WIFI-specific authentication schemes, and just build a virtual private network over SSH.
Re:But does it have a useable file-save dialogue?
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Unfortunatly the marching morons from Windows INSIST that the directories must be first. Putting them in alphabetical order with the rest of the files is "not user friendly". This is in the modern world where "whatever Windows does" is equivalent to "user friendly".
You don't need to display the list for autocomplete. Simply read the filenames, open the dialog, start reading keystrokes and stat the files in the background; if the user uses autocomplete and narrows the files to one, stat that file. If you move to another directory, stop statting the files from the previous ones in the background and start the process from the beginning in this new directory.
In other words, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the displayed list or anyones demands, it is simple lazines from Gnome developers.
If you live outside of the US and have done something that the US have made illegal then don't go there.
Better yet: Don't go to the US, period.
After all, even if you haven't done anything illegal, you may be kept indefinitely in captivity without being allowed to prove your innocence before a court; I am referring, of course, to the Guantanamo Bay. Since you won't be facing a court, it won't matter if you have actually broken any law; since you are not US citizen, you cannot expect to be protected by any laws there. Apart from this the corrupt police force actively forges evidence and extorts witnesses to send innocent people to death row, and higher-ups tolerate this since executions make them seem "tough on crime".
I'm not trying to troll or bait flames, I'm simply commenting on what the situation seems to me, a non-US citizen. I'm not setting a foot in the country until it has an administration and police force which respects every last letter of the law, and no one can be held without facing formal charges in a court of law.
I have no ideal. I'm simply pointing out the obvious - namely, that dealing with the RIAA is going to make you their victim sooner or later.
but you really should get out more often. Without content from the 'majors', all of whom insist on DRM, online music stores are dead in the water.
If I go out, then I have no need for online stores;).
It's not like music stores actually like DRM: most indie labels, for example, allow their music to be sold without DRM, and most music stores will jump at the opportunity do so. Sales of indie content alone, though, are nowhere (and I mean: nowhere) near enough for the stores to survive.
That is unfortunate, but does not change anything. Dealing with the RIAA is still going to get you hurt and dealing DRM is still going to cost you. If you can't find a way to survive without either, I suggest that you close your doors or perhaps sell something else while the mess gets sorted out.
Please note that I have no personal interest either way: I own enough music in CD's to last me until RIAA and DRM collapse, or the rest of my life, whichever comes first. I'm simply pointing out that, as far as I can tell, dealing with RIAA or having anything to do with DRM are self-destructive courses of action.
"Don't deal with the RIAA" sounds good, but it's just not practical in the real world.
In the real world, it doesn't matter if you have no alternatives, a given course of action is still just as likely to result in you getting hurt. And helping DRM along still means you're screwing up the whole world, even if it's the only thing between yourself and bankrupty.
This should end the need for wasting countless millions on professional seismic research stations. Once again, free software triumphs.
Actually, hard drives capable of stuffing a billion bits per square centimeter and needing the ability to position the head above each one separately triumph. And you know what drives hard drive development ? The need for inexpensive record space of course. And what causes this need ? Pirated movies, games and music.
BTW, if you think MS is getting screwed by class breaks like this, think again. Content providers (think: RIAA members) will call in their non-refundable advances (usually over $25K per label!) received from distribution partners (think: music stores) for "material breach of contract". MS will fix the issue, the RIAA gets richer, and the guys that actually try to get music to you get screwed. Oh, well, they're used to it...
So, basically, the people who screw the consumer by helping adoption of DRM by selling DRM restricted products, got screwed when their filthy master turned on them ? My tears are flowing like waterfalls.
Don't do business with the RIAA if you don't want to get screwed, don't touch DRM with a ten-feet pole if you don't want to get hurt, and don't compromise your morals for short-term profits if you don't want nasty consequences down the line. Keep a company of evil extortionist scum - the RIAA - and of course they are going to turn on you whenever they are able. They're evil, after all.
The "guys" got no more what they deserved, and likely a lot less. Let it be a lesson for them. Don't deal with the RIAA and don't deal in DRM.
If a user puts an unpatched computer on a network, they are grossly negligent and should be liable for any damages it causes.
So basically, plugging a computer into a network opens you up to the RIAA-style legal blackmail - after all, finding out if your computer was "sufficiently patched and configured" to clear you of negligence charges is going to make file sharing cases seem simple. Oh, and does running some non-mainstream program - such as Firefox - make you negligent ? After all, an obscure program could well have obscure bugs in it; in other words: "No one ever got sued (or at least convicted) for running Microsoft".
Besides, if your computer or network got damaged from traffick coming from my hijacked computer, then clearly you have been at least as negligent as I, since you failed to adequately secure your computer before plugging it to the network. So, given that you got damaged because of your own negligence, why should I pay for it ? Or, more to the point: why should I be responsible for my negligence but you not responsible for yours ?
No; the culprit here is the guy who hijacked my machine, not me. I cannot be blamed for you failing to adequately protect yourself from damage, anymore than I could be blamed if someone walked over my lawn to break into your house, or a hostage could be blamed for aiding terrorists since he didn't exercise enough caution to avoid being captured by them. The whole concept is absurd and totally unjust, and will also make running any new or non-mainstream program an unacceptable risk, since you never know if that program has any obscure security bugs that could make you liable for potentially infinite damages. It will grind software development to halt and disintegrate computer networks since plugging your computer into them becomes the financial equivalent of grabbing a high-tension wire. Even the US Government can't possibly be stupid enough to pass this law.
No need for a new law, just enforce the ones we already have for dealing with this sort of behavior.
Yeah, go after the guy who hijacks people's machines in the first place, don't blame his victims for failing to defend themselves. Your whole idea is basically the same as throwing a serial rapist's first victim to jail because she failed to stop him and is therefore, by your twisted logic, responsible for every rape he does afterwards.
IANAP, but I would tend to consider the lack of shadow as a proof for the big bang, not against.
If this radiation comes from the big bang, then it comes from every direction and this cluster of galaxies is as much the center of the universe as the earth itself. OTOH, having a "bright" and a "dark" side of this cluster would indicate that this radiation has a located source and therefore would invalidate the big bang theory.
Ambient Occlusion. If there is light that seems to originate from every point (such as Big Bang's cosmic radiation), then a nearby large object will block every ray that originated from behind it from reaching you, and consequently you are in it's shadow. There are no dark side or light side, the shadow is cast to every direction simultaneously. It isn't a cone either, but a dark area around the object, which slowly fades towards unnoticeable when you go farther.
Think of it as having several lights shining into an object from all directions. If you are near the object, then it blocks at least some of them. While several lights still shine on you, the combined brightness is diminished.
Now, I haven't read the article so I have no idea if this is what they're talking about. But ambient light can be shadowed just like all other light.
People just don't want to believe that the $399 PC they bought is really crap, made with substandard parts. I waited longer for mine, spent the money on brands that experience told me I could trust, and I rarely have any OS glitches. It just.. runs stably.
I, too, have piece of shit PC's put together with glue and shoestring budget, and they... run stably for months on end, limited by the reliability of local electric grid, doing torrents and fileserver and FoldingAtHome and VNCserver and GTK-Gnutella and PostgreSQL and Tomcat and Usenet and Web proxy. With Linux:).
I believe it is a matter of resources. Most hardware has bugs. Linux has enough development resources to include fixes and workarounds for every obscure bug on every obscure chipset it runs on, while Microsoft does not. Apart from raw resources, Linux is better organized - once the fix has been included, it won't have to be ripped out just because the scheduler or virtual memory subsystem got redone, and is consequently likely to stay in the codebase ad infinitum. Microsoft has made airs about rewriting large parts of its operating system for Vista (which, really, tells about bad planning more than anything else); if a fix was in these parts, it's gone. And if it was in third-party drivers, and those drivers no longer work...
What happens when you mix dark energy with dark matter?
You get a voidstone, which can be used to make a sphere of annihilation. There's plenty of them in the Negative Energy/Material Plane.
Alternatively, you could use the inspiration to make a "moody" 3D shooter - I'm eagerly waiting for "Bleak Blakness of the Dark Side of the Lightless Shadows of the Coal Mine of Insufficient Lightning". They've promised it's going to have not a single pixel brighter than RGB(0,0,0) - no wonder it requires a GeForce 10000 !
Offtopic, but I've wanted to say that ever since I read Carmack's complaints how he can't do "moody" (read: dark) games in a mobile phone. Nothing is as annoying as having to turn monitor brightness to max and still have trouble seeing just because some second-rate designer doesn't want me to see what's going on...
Re:But does it have a useable file-save dialogue?
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GNOME 2.16 Released
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This that's bad? Get this: over my many years of using Linux, my ~/ has quite a lot of dot files and entries in it. The file picker opens in my home dir, of course, so every bloody time I open it it stats all those hidden files. The punch line? It doesn't even show them! It's all for nothing!
It's all for nothing anyway. For autocomplete to work, you only need file names, which you can get from simply reading the directory; there is no need to stat files at all. Now, the autocomplete does need to know if a given file is a directory or regular file, but only after it's obvious which file the user wants (that is, only when the list of possible matches has been narrowed down to 1), so the file can be statted then.
But hey, optimization is hard, right ? It means you'll have to write the whole thing in assembler, since it's not like simply thinking a little what you're doing and why could possibly result in speed gains.
Oh, and my pet peeve: the more Eye of Gnome windows you have open, the more time it takes to open new ones. There's plenty of memory free, processor is 90% idle, and yet EoG takes over 15 seconds to open - assuming it opens at all instead of crashing. Of course EoG has other problems (like opening too small when viewing large images) but that's the nastiest problem.
The 21st century began 2001-01-01. The first decade of your life's over the day you've lived 10 years, i.e. your 11th birthday. Same principle applies here.
This, of course, assumes that "century" is a fixed length of time. Is this actually accurate, with leap years and such ? And let's not forget that we've switched calendars a few times between year 1 and now...
We know they're fucking idiots anyway because they claim to have copyrighted the ordering of their list. Well, if they did it right, then they can't copyright it, because the order is based on the facts, and you can't protect those - the fact of number of units sold is what they're trying to copyright here.
Even if a top-100 list can't be copyrighted, I'm sure that "A method for ordering entities in descending order by some measurement of success and displaying the first n entries (where n is an integer) from the ordered list using a computer" can be patented.
Besides, a top-100 list is a compilation of facts, so in all likelihood it can be copyrighted - or can you just photocopy a phone book ?
You'll have to make a completely text-based test based on reasoning, and that's still not solved.
Yeah. What if you're blind, deaf and stupid ?-)
Hmm... Maybe you could make the user classify random pieces of text as "Offtopic", "Insightfull", "Informative" etc ? Then have someone else declare this classification correct or incorrect. That way you'll recognize spambots from human for sure;).
There is no such understanding regarding currencies in an online game, and the poster that compared it to stealing Monopoly money is exactly correct.
However, this is not a fundamental rule of nature, but simply as matters currently are. Nothing stops the gaming companies from making such agreements with their customers.
It should also be noted that "real money" has no inherent value. It's value derives from the fact that pretty much everyone accept it in exchange for goods or services. Now, quite a few of these goods and services are basically virtual in these days; take, for example, a song bought from iTunes - it has no physical form. Given this, and given that in-game currency can be exchanged for in-game goods and services, and in some cases these goods or the currency can be exchanged for "real money", it is clear that it has at least some value in Real Life.
You have to jump through more hoops to exchange the Godslayer of Hit Points to a pepperoni pizza than to get the pizza with dollars, but it is possible (sell the sword at E-bay, buy the pizza with what you got). Therefore, the virtual sword has real-world value.
I believe this is at least one of the reasons why gaming companies take such a grim view on E-bay activity - they don't want to be held to the same standards as financial institutions, and that requires preventing in-game goods from acquiring real-life value. But despite their best efforts, that value is there. Therefore, equating in-game currencies to Monopoly money is not correct.
If someone is so wrapped up in some damn game that they're willing to spend real money just to increase their standing, that sounds to me like a problem for a psychiatrist, not the courts.
Perhaps, but this is hardly a new phenomenon. Paying money for a Big-Ass Sword of Slaying for your virtual avatar is really no different than paying money for fashionable clothes; in both cases it's a matter of spending money to change how you're perceived by others, in other words: to boost your ego.
Or just take a look at how some people here put great weight to their Slashdot ID number, with the idea that smaller is better since it implies that the person has been reading Slashdot for a longer time. Of course this is ridiculous, but it still happens. It's how human societies work: they establish a pecking order, and since the people who make up these communities never meet face-to-face, it by neccessity has to be based on how their virtual avatar is perceived.
A guy who pays a hundred dollars for a neat armor for his game character is really no different than the guy who pays hundred dollars for designer jeans. In either case the motives are the same: to be perceived better by your peers.
Except that if your child is molested, you do not believe that the legal system is set up properly if he gets away with it by not being caught, and manages to stay under the radar until the statute of limitations runs out.
I hereby accuse you of molesting my children. Of course I can't prove it, since I don't have any children, but you've been accused and can therefore be added to this list. See the problem ?
But nice attempt at "think of the children" -style moral panic nonetheless.
THe example of a man with HIV having unprotected sex with partners without informing them, there is an action that should be criminal, since you are more than just gambling with another person's life.
It is. Attempted murder, with the HIV virus as your weapon. And the act of purposefully spreading deadly infectious disease propably counts as terrorism too.
Ok. COps deny a lawyer, because they are attempting to sweat a confession. Hours later, after filling him with coffe and water, they deny him use of the bathroom. They get their confession after hours of interrogation. But he requested a lawyer. No confession. He goes free. State cannot prosecute. State does NOT prosecute. This guy wins the criminal lottery and goes free?
Yeah. That sucks. Almost as much as some innocent guy who the cops intimidated until he was ready to confess anything to be let to the bathroom. You see, anyone can be made to confess anything given suitably hard interrogation. That's why forced confession - and I count intimidation as use of force here - is completely worthless.
The police are supposed to uphold the law, not break it. To protect the innocent, not crush them at will. To catch the villains, not become them. What's the use of guards if they are worse than the ones they are supposed to guard against ?
And I thought size didn't matter! If you really think that then you're stupid. Between being locked in a 10x10 cell and being able to live everywhere but a few areas is a bit different, even if only by a matter of degree.
So, should those living in a 5x10 cell have their sentence halved ?
As for the poor minimum wage kids serving me, tough. I hope they get fired. If making a burger is above their skillset, then they really don't deserve much sympathy.
And I hope that other people will show you as much sympathy as you show them, when you are weak and need it. Maybe that will teach you a little lesson about the nature of evil and why embracing it is not such a good idea after all.
Re:More like a creative way to get work for free..
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If you're going to argue in favor of an economic structure which is different from the common understanding of the word "communism", you would be better off avoiding the term entirely.
I'm not arguing in favor of any economic structure; I'm simply pointing out that the OP sounds communistic to me, and warning him that it can be used against him. Me, I think that any economic or social structure will get perverted to serve the ones in power and oppress everyone else, so it doesn't really matter what it nominally is. And anarchy leads to law of the jungle and dictatorship of the strongest so it doesn't help either.
Best you can do is refuse to abuse others yourself, and try to defend against such abuses against yourself or your loved ones; but human nature can't be changed just by changing the nominal economic or social system, and it's that where the abuse comes from, which means that it will be with us for a long time to come - barring armageddon or other similar event.
Seeing as communism is completely discredited in most people's minds, you'd have better luck convincing people of your ideas if you present them as an adjustment to capitalism.
They aren't my ideas, and they can't be presented as an adjustment to capitalism, since they are fundamentally contradictory to the idea of capitalism. In capitalism, the economic system revolves capital - thus the word capitalism - which is what you invest to get profits. A capitalist tries to maximize his return of investment, so he pays as little for the work as possible, without considering the fairness of that wage. Maximization of return of investment is fundamentally incompatible with paying more than absolutely has to be paid.
In other words, in a capitalist system the profits go to the capitalist - a megacorp, in all likelihood. A system where you geting a fair compensation for your work is a factor is not capitalist.
The failings of the debian project that made me move away from it were numerous but revolved around a lack of direction. The project came across as a collection of developers that solved their own pet problems, instead of a community focused on a clearly defined central goal, led by knowledgeable leaders. What I wanted out of debian was first of all for it to be up-to-date (something it never succeeded in, despite many attempts to "fix" the system), and for it to be well-suited both as a server OS and as a desktop OS. It was well-suited as a server OS, but only if you didn't need to run anything too new, and only if you weren't afraid of the command-line. The only way to make it usable as a desktop OS was endless tinkering.
Okay, so Debian is focused to be a server OS which uses command line a lot - a sensible choice, since remote administration is much easier with ssh than with VNC. Because of this focus, major updates happen rarely, since they tend to require at least some reconfiguration, which means that the system will be running older (but still upkept as far as bugfixes go) software versions.
It is somewhat illogical to accuse Debian from lack of direction, when by your own words it has a direction: a commandline-driven server OS. It has direction, the direction simply happens to be different from what you want it to be.
It's no mystery why the most successful OSS projects have strong central leadership. Vision can't be parallellized. You can maintain a piece of software in cooperative fashion, but if you try to apply direction to it you need one or a few people who have the authority on what that direction is, or your ship will just sail in circles.
Actually, I think that it's the matter of getting a project past the tipping point - the projects where the original developer was not strong never got to the stage where they began attracting more developers. A strong leader isn't neccessarily needed once that point is reached, it's simply inherited from the early stages of development.
Re:More like a creative way to get work for free..
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Seems kinda sinister to me. Personally I would like to gather the rewards for my own efforts, not allow some megacorp to do so.
Careful, now; that attitude makes you sound like a communist. It is the basic idea behind the Communist Manifesto: workers should reap the benefits of their own efforts, this requires that everyone owns the means of production he uses, and since a factory can't be operated by a single person alone, it should be owned communally by all the workers working there who can then share the profits between themselves instead of having a rich capitalist - megacorp in these times - pocket them.
Your desire to gain the benefit from your own work is, therefore, completely un-American. The capitalist way of doing things is that you do the work, the investors get the profits, and you get to compete with the Indians for who can survive with the lowest wage. Since India has a much lower cost of living, you're going to lose. Since your economy is bleeding money to India, the buying power of the people of your country is going to shrink, making it more neccessary for corporations to try to cut costs by hiring more Indians, and the situation is going to get worse and worse.
Sure makes you glad to live in a capitalist country, doesn't it ? And sure makes this post likely to be modded down by free-market fundamentalists who don't quite understand that communism ("people should own the means of production they use, and if a particular means needs more than one people to operate, then those people should own it communally") is not exclusive to free market ("everyone is free to produce what they want and trade with whoever they will").
While we're talking B-Movie monsters, it's worth mentioning the recent paper(PDF warning) by a couple of physicists proving the nonexistence of vampires and ghosts.
Ghost can't be touched => ghost can't touch the floor => ghost can't walk.
Unless, of course, the ghost can fly (for example, by expelling neutrinos or some other hard to detect particles that nonetheless can have nonzero momentum) and is simply pretending to walk to mess with your mind - one would imagine that after overcoming death gravity would not be much of a challenge ? Or maybe the ghost is walking on the ghostly version of the stairs - a bit like it's still wearing clothes despite the clothes not being alive when it was alive (in other words maybe the stairs are part of the ghost) ? Or maybe the ghost is actually somehow imprinted in the house and is just projecting an image of itself walking ? Heck, maybe the ghost is normally dormant (since it has no functional neurons) but jumps into living brains when some come near, and you sense its presence in your body as chills and strange visions ?
About the sudden cold it's hard to say anything, since the author failed to say anything but suggest that there might be drafs in old houses, which is certainly true but does absolutely nothing to prove the nonexistence of ghosts or even rule them out as the possible source of sudden cold.
In other words, the paper fails to prove anything about ghosts but plenty about its author's lack of imagination.
The proof against vampires runs into even simpler problem: a vampire is supposed to be an intelligent being with full access to its logical faculties. In other words, a vampire is quite capable of understanding what will happen if it lets everyone it feeds upon to become a new vampire, and can easily prevent this just by destroying the corpse. In fact, several vampire mythos (such as Dracula) indicate that in order to become a vampire you must drink vampires blood; simply being drained dry by one kills you dead.
Now, I understand that it may be hard to think about the existence of ghosts and vampires seriously; however, when you start accusing others of "pseudoscience", you'd damn well better get even basic logic right yourself. A half-assed paper is half-assed and does no one any good. The paper fails to show that the existence of vampires or ghosts is "contradictory to simple facts". The writer of the paper should devote less time to accuse others of lack of critical thinking and concentrate on improving his own.
Rather, let's have a broad and open and inclusive definition of "planet", and let schools decide how many of them students need to learn.
I have a better idea. Let the lesson be: "The Sun is orbited by lots of obcets of various shapes, sizes and masses. Nine of these objects are called "Planets" for historical reasons."
Basically, stop trying to make systematic classification about what's basically leftoever garbage from when the solar system was born, it's not going to work. Just accept that "planet" is a historical term and not a scientific one and describes objects that are not fundamentally different from lots of other objects, and leave it there. And let the newspapers call any masses found orbiting around other stars "planets" if they will, it gets roughly the right idea accross to the general public, which is a lot more than can be said about most newspaper articles reporting science (or politics).
It's not like knowing those "magical nine names" has really changed anyone's life who isn't an astronomer... and astronomers already know a lot more stuff than just names of nine planets.
On the contrary, knowing the names of the planets has allowed many people to make a decent to good living as astrologers.
That argument is like saying I should be able to drag the photocopier out from the school because I paid for it as well. Or that I should be able to pull up a few boards from the gym to add onto my house. Do you really want to go down that rathole, you are able to see the difference between the two aren't you?
What I can't see is why Microsoft (or "a lot of companies" can complain when they can't profit from their taxes, but I can't. Please explain, oh insane one, so I can avoid falling to this rathole and getting eaten alive by rapid vermin.
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Yeah. Just plug the WIFI router to a Linux box, and have clients make SSH tunnels to it, authenticated by private key. Then have the local host forward all outgoing packets to the tunnel, and the server will forward what comes in from the tunnel. You don't have a proper key, you can get packets over the WIFI but not over the server.
In other words, forget WIFI-specific authentication schemes, and just build a virtual private network over SSH.
You don't need to display the list for autocomplete. Simply read the filenames, open the dialog, start reading keystrokes and stat the files in the background; if the user uses autocomplete and narrows the files to one, stat that file. If you move to another directory, stop statting the files from the previous ones in the background and start the process from the beginning in this new directory.
In other words, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the displayed list or anyones demands, it is simple lazines from Gnome developers.
Better yet: Don't go to the US, period.
After all, even if you haven't done anything illegal, you may be kept indefinitely in captivity without being allowed to prove your innocence before a court; I am referring, of course, to the Guantanamo Bay. Since you won't be facing a court, it won't matter if you have actually broken any law; since you are not US citizen, you cannot expect to be protected by any laws there. Apart from this the corrupt police force actively forges evidence and extorts witnesses to send innocent people to death row, and higher-ups tolerate this since executions make them seem "tough on crime".
I'm not trying to troll or bait flames, I'm simply commenting on what the situation seems to me, a non-US citizen. I'm not setting a foot in the country until it has an administration and police force which respects every last letter of the law, and no one can be held without facing formal charges in a court of law.
I have no ideal. I'm simply pointing out the obvious - namely, that dealing with the RIAA is going to make you their victim sooner or later.
If I go out, then I have no need for online stores ;).
That is unfortunate, but does not change anything. Dealing with the RIAA is still going to get you hurt and dealing DRM is still going to cost you. If you can't find a way to survive without either, I suggest that you close your doors or perhaps sell something else while the mess gets sorted out.
Please note that I have no personal interest either way: I own enough music in CD's to last me until RIAA and DRM collapse, or the rest of my life, whichever comes first. I'm simply pointing out that, as far as I can tell, dealing with RIAA or having anything to do with DRM are self-destructive courses of action.
In the real world, it doesn't matter if you have no alternatives, a given course of action is still just as likely to result in you getting hurt. And helping DRM along still means you're screwing up the whole world, even if it's the only thing between yourself and bankrupty.
Actually, hard drives capable of stuffing a billion bits per square centimeter and needing the ability to position the head above each one separately triumph. And you know what drives hard drive development ? The need for inexpensive record space of course. And what causes this need ? Pirated movies, games and music.
In other words, piracy saves lives.
So, basically, the people who screw the consumer by helping adoption of DRM by selling DRM restricted products, got screwed when their filthy master turned on them ? My tears are flowing like waterfalls.
Don't do business with the RIAA if you don't want to get screwed, don't touch DRM with a ten-feet pole if you don't want to get hurt, and don't compromise your morals for short-term profits if you don't want nasty consequences down the line. Keep a company of evil extortionist scum - the RIAA - and of course they are going to turn on you whenever they are able. They're evil, after all.
The "guys" got no more what they deserved, and likely a lot less. Let it be a lesson for them. Don't deal with the RIAA and don't deal in DRM.
So basically, plugging a computer into a network opens you up to the RIAA-style legal blackmail - after all, finding out if your computer was "sufficiently patched and configured" to clear you of negligence charges is going to make file sharing cases seem simple. Oh, and does running some non-mainstream program - such as Firefox - make you negligent ? After all, an obscure program could well have obscure bugs in it; in other words: "No one ever got sued (or at least convicted) for running Microsoft".
Besides, if your computer or network got damaged from traffick coming from my hijacked computer, then clearly you have been at least as negligent as I, since you failed to adequately secure your computer before plugging it to the network. So, given that you got damaged because of your own negligence, why should I pay for it ? Or, more to the point: why should I be responsible for my negligence but you not responsible for yours ?
No; the culprit here is the guy who hijacked my machine, not me. I cannot be blamed for you failing to adequately protect yourself from damage, anymore than I could be blamed if someone walked over my lawn to break into your house, or a hostage could be blamed for aiding terrorists since he didn't exercise enough caution to avoid being captured by them. The whole concept is absurd and totally unjust, and will also make running any new or non-mainstream program an unacceptable risk, since you never know if that program has any obscure security bugs that could make you liable for potentially infinite damages. It will grind software development to halt and disintegrate computer networks since plugging your computer into them becomes the financial equivalent of grabbing a high-tension wire. Even the US Government can't possibly be stupid enough to pass this law.
Yeah, go after the guy who hijacks people's machines in the first place, don't blame his victims for failing to defend themselves. Your whole idea is basically the same as throwing a serial rapist's first victim to jail because she failed to stop him and is therefore, by your twisted logic, responsible for every rape he does afterwards.
Ambient Occlusion. If there is light that seems to originate from every point (such as Big Bang's cosmic radiation), then a nearby large object will block every ray that originated from behind it from reaching you, and consequently you are in it's shadow. There are no dark side or light side, the shadow is cast to every direction simultaneously. It isn't a cone either, but a dark area around the object, which slowly fades towards unnoticeable when you go farther.
Think of it as having several lights shining into an object from all directions. If you are near the object, then it blocks at least some of them. While several lights still shine on you, the combined brightness is diminished.
Now, I haven't read the article so I have no idea if this is what they're talking about. But ambient light can be shadowed just like all other light.
I, too, have piece of shit PC's put together with glue and shoestring budget, and they... run stably for months on end, limited by the reliability of local electric grid, doing torrents and fileserver and FoldingAtHome and VNCserver and GTK-Gnutella and PostgreSQL and Tomcat and Usenet and Web proxy. With Linux :).
I believe it is a matter of resources. Most hardware has bugs. Linux has enough development resources to include fixes and workarounds for every obscure bug on every obscure chipset it runs on, while Microsoft does not. Apart from raw resources, Linux is better organized - once the fix has been included, it won't have to be ripped out just because the scheduler or virtual memory subsystem got redone, and is consequently likely to stay in the codebase ad infinitum. Microsoft has made airs about rewriting large parts of its operating system for Vista (which, really, tells about bad planning more than anything else); if a fix was in these parts, it's gone. And if it was in third-party drivers, and those drivers no longer work...
Or a typical 3D game.
You get a voidstone, which can be used to make a sphere of annihilation. There's plenty of them in the Negative Energy/Material Plane.
Alternatively, you could use the inspiration to make a "moody" 3D shooter - I'm eagerly waiting for "Bleak Blakness of the Dark Side of the Lightless Shadows of the Coal Mine of Insufficient Lightning". They've promised it's going to have not a single pixel brighter than RGB(0,0,0) - no wonder it requires a GeForce 10000 !
Offtopic, but I've wanted to say that ever since I read Carmack's complaints how he can't do "moody" (read: dark) games in a mobile phone. Nothing is as annoying as having to turn monitor brightness to max and still have trouble seeing just because some second-rate designer doesn't want me to see what's going on...
It's all for nothing anyway. For autocomplete to work, you only need file names, which you can get from simply reading the directory; there is no need to stat files at all. Now, the autocomplete does need to know if a given file is a directory or regular file, but only after it's obvious which file the user wants (that is, only when the list of possible matches has been narrowed down to 1), so the file can be statted then.
But hey, optimization is hard, right ? It means you'll have to write the whole thing in assembler, since it's not like simply thinking a little what you're doing and why could possibly result in speed gains.
Oh, and my pet peeve: the more Eye of Gnome windows you have open, the more time it takes to open new ones. There's plenty of memory free, processor is 90% idle, and yet EoG takes over 15 seconds to open - assuming it opens at all instead of crashing. Of course EoG has other problems (like opening too small when viewing large images) but that's the nastiest problem.
This, of course, assumes that "century" is a fixed length of time. Is this actually accurate, with leap years and such ? And let's not forget that we've switched calendars a few times between year 1 and now...
Even if a top-100 list can't be copyrighted, I'm sure that "A method for ordering entities in descending order by some measurement of success and displaying the first n entries (where n is an integer) from the ordered list using a computer" can be patented.
Besides, a top-100 list is a compilation of facts, so in all likelihood it can be copyrighted - or can you just photocopy a phone book ?
Yeah. What if you're blind, deaf and stupid ?-)
Hmm... Maybe you could make the user classify random pieces of text as "Offtopic", "Insightfull", "Informative" etc ? Then have someone else declare this classification correct or incorrect. That way you'll recognize spambots from human for sure ;).
However, this is not a fundamental rule of nature, but simply as matters currently are. Nothing stops the gaming companies from making such agreements with their customers.
It should also be noted that "real money" has no inherent value. It's value derives from the fact that pretty much everyone accept it in exchange for goods or services. Now, quite a few of these goods and services are basically virtual in these days; take, for example, a song bought from iTunes - it has no physical form. Given this, and given that in-game currency can be exchanged for in-game goods and services, and in some cases these goods or the currency can be exchanged for "real money", it is clear that it has at least some value in Real Life.
You have to jump through more hoops to exchange the Godslayer of Hit Points to a pepperoni pizza than to get the pizza with dollars, but it is possible (sell the sword at E-bay, buy the pizza with what you got). Therefore, the virtual sword has real-world value.
I believe this is at least one of the reasons why gaming companies take such a grim view on E-bay activity - they don't want to be held to the same standards as financial institutions, and that requires preventing in-game goods from acquiring real-life value. But despite their best efforts, that value is there. Therefore, equating in-game currencies to Monopoly money is not correct.
Perhaps, but this is hardly a new phenomenon. Paying money for a Big-Ass Sword of Slaying for your virtual avatar is really no different than paying money for fashionable clothes; in both cases it's a matter of spending money to change how you're perceived by others, in other words: to boost your ego.
Or just take a look at how some people here put great weight to their Slashdot ID number, with the idea that smaller is better since it implies that the person has been reading Slashdot for a longer time. Of course this is ridiculous, but it still happens. It's how human societies work: they establish a pecking order, and since the people who make up these communities never meet face-to-face, it by neccessity has to be based on how their virtual avatar is perceived.
A guy who pays a hundred dollars for a neat armor for his game character is really no different than the guy who pays hundred dollars for designer jeans. In either case the motives are the same: to be perceived better by your peers.
I hereby accuse you of molesting my children. Of course I can't prove it, since I don't have any children, but you've been accused and can therefore be added to this list. See the problem ?
But nice attempt at "think of the children" -style moral panic nonetheless.
It is. Attempted murder, with the HIV virus as your weapon. And the act of purposefully spreading deadly infectious disease propably counts as terrorism too.
Yeah. That sucks. Almost as much as some innocent guy who the cops intimidated until he was ready to confess anything to be let to the bathroom. You see, anyone can be made to confess anything given suitably hard interrogation. That's why forced confession - and I count intimidation as use of force here - is completely worthless.
The police are supposed to uphold the law, not break it. To protect the innocent, not crush them at will. To catch the villains, not become them. What's the use of guards if they are worse than the ones they are supposed to guard against ?
So, should those living in a 5x10 cell have their sentence halved ?
And I hope that other people will show you as much sympathy as you show them, when you are weak and need it. Maybe that will teach you a little lesson about the nature of evil and why embracing it is not such a good idea after all.
I'm not arguing in favor of any economic structure; I'm simply pointing out that the OP sounds communistic to me, and warning him that it can be used against him. Me, I think that any economic or social structure will get perverted to serve the ones in power and oppress everyone else, so it doesn't really matter what it nominally is. And anarchy leads to law of the jungle and dictatorship of the strongest so it doesn't help either.
Best you can do is refuse to abuse others yourself, and try to defend against such abuses against yourself or your loved ones; but human nature can't be changed just by changing the nominal economic or social system, and it's that where the abuse comes from, which means that it will be with us for a long time to come - barring armageddon or other similar event.
They aren't my ideas, and they can't be presented as an adjustment to capitalism, since they are fundamentally contradictory to the idea of capitalism. In capitalism, the economic system revolves capital - thus the word capitalism - which is what you invest to get profits. A capitalist tries to maximize his return of investment, so he pays as little for the work as possible, without considering the fairness of that wage. Maximization of return of investment is fundamentally incompatible with paying more than absolutely has to be paid.
In other words, in a capitalist system the profits go to the capitalist - a megacorp, in all likelihood. A system where you geting a fair compensation for your work is a factor is not capitalist.
Okay, so Debian is focused to be a server OS which uses command line a lot - a sensible choice, since remote administration is much easier with ssh than with VNC. Because of this focus, major updates happen rarely, since they tend to require at least some reconfiguration, which means that the system will be running older (but still upkept as far as bugfixes go) software versions.
It is somewhat illogical to accuse Debian from lack of direction, when by your own words it has a direction: a commandline-driven server OS. It has direction, the direction simply happens to be different from what you want it to be.
Actually, I think that it's the matter of getting a project past the tipping point - the projects where the original developer was not strong never got to the stage where they began attracting more developers. A strong leader isn't neccessarily needed once that point is reached, it's simply inherited from the early stages of development.
Careful, now; that attitude makes you sound like a communist. It is the basic idea behind the Communist Manifesto: workers should reap the benefits of their own efforts, this requires that everyone owns the means of production he uses, and since a factory can't be operated by a single person alone, it should be owned communally by all the workers working there who can then share the profits between themselves instead of having a rich capitalist - megacorp in these times - pocket them.
Your desire to gain the benefit from your own work is, therefore, completely un-American. The capitalist way of doing things is that you do the work, the investors get the profits, and you get to compete with the Indians for who can survive with the lowest wage. Since India has a much lower cost of living, you're going to lose. Since your economy is bleeding money to India, the buying power of the people of your country is going to shrink, making it more neccessary for corporations to try to cut costs by hiring more Indians, and the situation is going to get worse and worse.
Sure makes you glad to live in a capitalist country, doesn't it ? And sure makes this post likely to be modded down by free-market fundamentalists who don't quite understand that communism ("people should own the means of production they use, and if a particular means needs more than one people to operate, then those people should own it communally") is not exclusive to free market ("everyone is free to produce what they want and trade with whoever they will").
Mod me down, but I'm still right.
Ghost can't be touched => ghost can't touch the floor => ghost can't walk.
Unless, of course, the ghost can fly (for example, by expelling neutrinos or some other hard to detect particles that nonetheless can have nonzero momentum) and is simply pretending to walk to mess with your mind - one would imagine that after overcoming death gravity would not be much of a challenge ? Or maybe the ghost is walking on the ghostly version of the stairs - a bit like it's still wearing clothes despite the clothes not being alive when it was alive (in other words maybe the stairs are part of the ghost) ? Or maybe the ghost is actually somehow imprinted in the house and is just projecting an image of itself walking ? Heck, maybe the ghost is normally dormant (since it has no functional neurons) but jumps into living brains when some come near, and you sense its presence in your body as chills and strange visions ?
About the sudden cold it's hard to say anything, since the author failed to say anything but suggest that there might be drafs in old houses, which is certainly true but does absolutely nothing to prove the nonexistence of ghosts or even rule them out as the possible source of sudden cold.
In other words, the paper fails to prove anything about ghosts but plenty about its author's lack of imagination.
The proof against vampires runs into even simpler problem: a vampire is supposed to be an intelligent being with full access to its logical faculties. In other words, a vampire is quite capable of understanding what will happen if it lets everyone it feeds upon to become a new vampire, and can easily prevent this just by destroying the corpse. In fact, several vampire mythos (such as Dracula) indicate that in order to become a vampire you must drink vampires blood; simply being drained dry by one kills you dead.
Now, I understand that it may be hard to think about the existence of ghosts and vampires seriously; however, when you start accusing others of "pseudoscience", you'd damn well better get even basic logic right yourself. A half-assed paper is half-assed and does no one any good. The paper fails to show that the existence of vampires or ghosts is "contradictory to simple facts". The writer of the paper should devote less time to accuse others of lack of critical thinking and concentrate on improving his own.
I have a better idea. Let the lesson be: "The Sun is orbited by lots of obcets of various shapes, sizes and masses. Nine of these objects are called "Planets" for historical reasons."
Basically, stop trying to make systematic classification about what's basically leftoever garbage from when the solar system was born, it's not going to work. Just accept that "planet" is a historical term and not a scientific one and describes objects that are not fundamentally different from lots of other objects, and leave it there. And let the newspapers call any masses found orbiting around other stars "planets" if they will, it gets roughly the right idea accross to the general public, which is a lot more than can be said about most newspaper articles reporting science (or politics).
On the contrary, knowing the names of the planets has allowed many people to make a decent to good living as astrologers.
What I can't see is why Microsoft (or "a lot of companies" can complain when they can't profit from their taxes, but I can't. Please explain, oh insane one, so I can avoid falling to this rathole and getting eaten alive by rapid vermin.