Whenever my staff sends me an Internet around 10 AM, and it's delivering slowly, they just try sending it through different tubes until a fast one is found. Maybe your mother can try the same thing with delivering her giant e-mail attachments.
Just print out the IP packets, load into a truck, and scan them back into electronic format on the other end. That way you eliminate pipes entirely, and can use efficient truck-based transport. Problem solved, world saved, and sentence without verb so grammar nazis annoyed.
No, the difference is, your hacking was malicious in intent.
How do you know his intent ?
Their rootkit was not. It was created for DRM purposes. Not to be used as a rootkit.
So instead of giving control of infected machine (that did not belong to them) to a third party, they simply intended to seize control themselves. Yeah, they're still burglars, but they tried (and failed) to relock the front door after they were done, so they're good burglars who just were too stupid to succeed in locking the door.
In this case, they made a mistake. You willingly and maliciously broke the law. How is that the same?
You are again assuming malice on unkown persons actions, where the exact actions are unkown. You are also assuming lack of malice on Sony's actions. Finally, since the purpose of Sony's DRM (and all DRM) was to strip the users computer from some of its normal capabilities - in other words, to damage it - it is most certainly at least morally wrong and propably illegal as well; but, since Sony is a corporation, and corporations are largely above the law, having bought the people who write it, it is entirely possible that its actions, while certainly illegal if done by an individual, were actually legal for a corporation.
Just to show how the dangerous this really is, the hydrazine generators were deemed unsafe for submarines (but A-O.K. for the Space Shuffles, apparently). What next, dynamite sticks as flares?
Want good work done? Hire good people and keep them happily motivated about their job. Sitting, standing, hopping on one leg, it won't matter. They'll do you proud.
But that costs money, while making people stand while working is cheap, and lets the management show to stockholders that they are doing something.
In the end, managers and stockholders are quite similar to politicians and voters. Short-sighted trend-following with absolutely no concern for actual results in the long run at best case and outright lies at worst.
* write a letter to your enemy... whoops, wrong application."
Well, if the enemy is a robot, cyborg or an ultratechnical soldier, like they often are, then sending them an email virus might be a very effective way of getting rid of them.
First of all AI has no meaning in any game that's you against the world in some impossible odds, because if the opposition can actually think, then it is really impossible.
Not true. You just have to outthink the AI, just like you would a human opponent. A small band of rebels can overcome the empire, in real life and fiction; they just have to use their advantages to their fullest and prevent the empire from using its advantages.
For example you'll never see an AI in a MMORPG capable of coming up with the idea that killing whoever can heal is smart. If they're able to do so, then it is necessary the enemy can be prevented from doing this and in that case they might as well not be able to figure it out in the first place.
Of course, by this logic, why is the enemy there in the first place ? You can stop them from killing yourself, so what's the point of them even trying ?
The challenge when faced with intelligent enemies is to try to predict their moves - figure out your own weak spots, and protect them before entering battle, preferably with a tactic that turns them into traps.
Some lady has a weak password and her Windows box gets owned, MS sucks, Windows blows (now the fact that she _does_ run as an Administrator doesn't help).
Ladies. Plural. After all, new security problems and viruses for Windows are found constantly. That's why Microsoft sucks and Windows blows.
_developers_ working for one of the most popular open source projects have weak passwords, there is a _kernel_ exploit, and people defend it still.
Debian gets hacked. Debian last got hacked three years ago.
FYI I run Linux, OSX and Windows on my machines, but common...why can't we all just get along and admit there are problems with software regardless of the company, mdoel etc.::waking back up to reality::
Of course there are problems with all software. However, Microsoft software tends to have a lot more problems than non-Microsoft software.
An eggshell and a two-meter thick wall of titanium-reinforced armor-grade steel are both breakable, but claiming that this makes them similar is misleading, to put it nicely.
What an excellent way to make every toolkit vulnerable to thousands of race conditions;)
Um, what race conditions ? Here's the basic pseudocode to an X application:
Initialize.
Get next event from X-server.
React to the event if neccessary.
Go to 2.
I don't really see how having 2, 20 or 200 pointing devices could cause any race conditions here. You just get 2, 20 or 200 times the amount of mouse events (assuming they are all actually used and won't just lie there) than before.
You can probably crash 99% of all X11 applications using two pointers
Can anyone out there test this ? Did your Gnome / KDE / Whatever desktop crash with two pointers ?
Lucas wants to undermine this glamour, and show that Vader is really a pathetic character. Second baddest bad guy in the universe is not a happy job.
Actually, Vader is glamorous, while Anakin is a pathetic human being. Remember, int RotJ, when Luke removes Vader's helmet ? He's no longer an inhuman angel of death, but an old bald guy who can't even breath by himself.
It's the same as Nazi Germany: it was glamorous, but once the glamour was gone, those who had given themselves to it were no different than anyone else. After all, one meaning of "glamour" is "magic enchantment", something that's not quite real.
Vader was just a mask. Anakin was the real man inside. Masks can be seemingly invulnerable and glamorous in their inhumanity, while human beings can't. But human beings can wear masks, either metaphorically or literally. Doing so can make you a titan, but it also makes you less than human. And sooner or later the glamour is gone, and then what ? But the temptation of denying all weakness and appearing glorious, and maybe even believing yourself so, is so very hard to resist...
And of course we don't resist it, any of us, completely; we always keep some parts of ourselves hidden. To do otherwise is to make your weaknesses exposed, and to show weakness is to invite abuse. And so we keep on getting more and more inhuman monsters spreading death and destruction around the world.
So, sayeth the Horned Paperclip, what mask do you want to wear today >?-)
After moving to a better hospital, his condition was upgraded to "alive".
Actually, if you think about it logically, you start being alive, and death, being a later state, is the "upgrade". A bit like Windows Vista is an "upgrade" to Windows XP. Exactly like Windows Vista, actually;).
This leaves the question of what XP SP2 would be - undeath ?-)
Halo is a good example of a game that took FPS and threw in a few new elements -- vehicle combat is one example -- and rejuvenated it to great success.
The way around this is to make a character with primary skills completely contradicting your role, say, pick all schools of magic then specialize in heavy armour and blunt weapons, or pick armourer, heavy armour, light armour, blunt, and such then play the character as an armourless master mage.
If I was a master mage, and was expecting trouble, I'd wear the heaviest armor I could get my hands on (and further enhance it with magic), and then basically act as a tank, bombarding the enemy from the distance and letting the armor take care of any counterattacks.
The "mages can't wear armor" bullshit comes from D&D, where mages need to wave their hands like amateur actors to get anything done - and even there, master mages learn to avoid such things and can wear armor. There is absolutely no reason to extend such absurdity to any fantasy world where magic doesn't require theater performance.
If anything, a master mage needs armor more than a master fighter, since the mage has less melee experience and muscles and is thus less likely to be able to dodge.
not even id has been able to equal the greatness of the titles of that era.
To be fair, nothing can ever equal Doom in FPS games. There had never been anything quite like it; that's why it hit so hard. Every FSP game afterward has been just a gradual evolution, not a true revolution; that's why they don't pack the punch Doom did, even if some of them are as good or better.
There will be games that hit like Doom, but that's because they'll be revolutionary, not just evolutionary. And they won't be shareware, since the game industry is too large nowadays to make a hit without a marketing budget.
What I don't get is why Bill Gates would care either way about when Vista is released. He's already turned over all the day-to-day stuff and is spending his time on charity (which he deserves some credit for, regardless as to how people feel about this company).
Except that Microsoft, which made Gates his money, has been convicted of illegal monopolistic practices. Which means that Gates's money has not been earned or gained by luck, but is the fruit of crime.
If I rob a bank and give some of my loot to charity, do I deserve credit for that ?
Don't get me wrong, charity is certainly not a bad thing; but the idea that a criminal can buy a clean conscience just by sacrificing some of his ill-begotten gains is just a modern-day equivalent of indulgence, and every bit as ludicrous as it was in Middle Ages.
There's no reason why you can't enjoy your work as much as you enjoy the rest of your life. The best way to balance work and home life, is to enjoy both.
If you let work become an important part of your life, you get hit a lot harder when you get fired than if you treated it as just a money source.
The difference between home and work is, quite simply, that your family usually feels some amount of loyalty to you, while your employer doesn't. That's the core of all those "at-will" employment laws: you can be thrown out and replaced at any moment, and it's just business as usual. That, in turn, requires a similar attitude towards your employer from you, since it would be self-destructive to feel loyalty towards someone who doesn't feel any towards you - it would leave you wide open for abuse.
The way economy is currently set up, employment is just a business relationship, with absolutely no loyalty required or expected from either side, and which can be terminated at any time. Treat it as such, or you will wish you had. Don't let work become more than a money source to you; that way losing it is just an inconvenience and not a devastating emotional hit it comes if you made emotional investments to your job.
If you are passionate about what you do, you'll get out of bed in the morning and actually look forward to going to work. Passion also drives you to do your best, not to just get by so you can collect a paycheck.
It also means that you'll be hit a lot harder when you get fired.
Employers, if you want passion, show loyalty first. Don't fire people and outsource their jobs to India. If you do, then it would be self-destructive for your employees to feel passion, commitment or loyalty to you or their work, so only the stupid or mentally ill ones will.
Treat people as replacable resources and they will return the favor. Give them job security and they may actually feel safe enough to get passionate about the job. No one is going to let something they are likely to lose soon to become an important part of their life.
If a user went to the trouble to earn trust, he would be less likely to blow it by writing overly biased articles.
Or a paid political shill (or a group of shills using a single login) will simply post karma-earning articles on topics his employer doesn't care about, and uses it to forge articles he does care about. Since there's likely to be far more topics in the former than the latter category, he'll keep have excellent karma and can forge articles with impunity.
Think of karma as a kind of currency, and it becomes obvious that this kind of system can actually work for the advantage of political shills. They'll simply need to budget karma use so it stays at near-maximum at all times, making the pages they edit the ones least likely to be reviewed, since the system considers them trustworthy.
The only real problems come from things like games and media applications that use terminally nasty junk like directX.
Ironically enough, in my machine, WarCraft 3 works flawlessly in Wine - except that the movies won't play, but the actual game works fine, as long as I remember to give the -opengl flag on command line - while it crashes under Win98 on the same machine when started.
Now if only they'd make OpenGL windows clip properly, so I could use Poser painlessly:(.
Also, it is a classic case of double standard. Free trade which lines the pockets of an American corporation is OK. Free trade which cannot line the pockets of an American corporation and goes to other nations is not OK.
This is not really a double standard. The "free trade" arguments have never been anything but a thinly veiled power grap, not an actual standard. "Free trade" is simply another weapon in US's arsenal, allowing it to harm other countries economies for its profit.
And god forbid if it is against the beliefs of the taleban elders.
The only thing the US elite truly believes in is lining their pockets.
Right now, with the betting going on overseas, the industry is pulling money out of the US economy and adding it to other country's economies. All taxes aside, the US economy is weakening because it is illegal to gamble online in the US, but not on servers outside the US.
But doesn't the exact same thing happen with outsourcing - you move production or a call center to India, and you pay for Indian workers, therefore moving money from your domestic economy to foreign economy ? And yet the government doesn't seem to have any problems with that...
Still, the point of the article isn't about vaccuum energy, but rather the anthropic principle. The concept is that there's a constant in our universe that almost precisely cancels out this vaccuum energy. This is purely by chance and we see it because if it didn't happen, we wouldn't be around to talk about it.
Anthropic principle is complete and utter rubbish.
Why does the atmosphere have oxygen ? Because if it didn't, you couldn't breath and wouldn't be here to think about it.
Why does the Sun shine ? Because if it didn't, you wouldn't be here to think about it.
Why do things fall down ? Because if they didn't, you wouldn't be here to think about it (since the matter that forms your body wouldn't have ever condensed - in fact the whole universe would be thin hydrogen/helium gas).
Anthropic principle tries to explain the observed qualities of the universe by appealing to the consequences of those qualities - namely, your existence. This, in turn, requires at least one of the following to be true:
There are an infinite number of different universes, one for each possible set of qualities.
The effect can predict the cause. Your current existence somehow reaches back in time to the formative state of the universe and influences the variables there.
The universe was designed by an intelligent designer who purposefully adjusted its qualities to allow your future (at that point) existence.
Apart from requiring that at least one of these to be true, the anthropic principle fails to predict anything at all, and is therefore worthless as a scientific theory - no, wait, since at least the existence of intelligent designer (God) can't be falsified, anthropic principle makes no testable predictions whatsoever, and is therefore not a scientific theory.
It's just a cheap copout used by scientists when they have no idea why the universe has some quality but don't want to admit that.
Oh, and the requirement number one seems to have something fishy about it - I'm not sure that infinite number of universes will neccessarily cover all possible combinations of qualities, and even if it did, why would there be an inifinite number of different universes ?
Actually, those are not female physicists. Those are the paid hookers for the party.
A real scientist doesn't pay for a hooker. He'll build himself female androids / re-animated constructs / golems, depending on if he's living in high-tech future, victorian times or D&D fantasy realm.
Just why do you think mad scientists and wizards are grinning maniacally all the time ?-)
Slashdot Mirror
Just print out the IP packets, load into a truck, and scan them back into electronic format on the other end. That way you eliminate pipes entirely, and can use efficient truck-based transport. Problem solved, world saved, and sentence without verb so grammar nazis annoyed.
How do you know his intent ?
So instead of giving control of infected machine (that did not belong to them) to a third party, they simply intended to seize control themselves. Yeah, they're still burglars, but they tried (and failed) to relock the front door after they were done, so they're good burglars who just were too stupid to succeed in locking the door.
You are again assuming malice on unkown persons actions, where the exact actions are unkown. You are also assuming lack of malice on Sony's actions. Finally, since the purpose of Sony's DRM (and all DRM) was to strip the users computer from some of its normal capabilities - in other words, to damage it - it is most certainly at least morally wrong and propably illegal as well; but, since Sony is a corporation, and corporations are largely above the law, having bought the people who write it, it is entirely possible that its actions, while certainly illegal if done by an individual, were actually legal for a corporation.
Atom bombs.
A lot more efficient than dynamite, but murder for your shock absorbers ;).
But that costs money, while making people stand while working is cheap, and lets the management show to stockholders that they are doing something.
In the end, managers and stockholders are quite similar to politicians and voters. Short-sighted trend-following with absolutely no concern for actual results in the long run at best case and outright lies at worst.
Well, if the enemy is a robot, cyborg or an ultratechnical soldier, like they often are, then sending them an email virus might be a very effective way of getting rid of them.
Not true. You just have to outthink the AI, just like you would a human opponent. A small band of rebels can overcome the empire, in real life and fiction; they just have to use their advantages to their fullest and prevent the empire from using its advantages.
Of course, by this logic, why is the enemy there in the first place ? You can stop them from killing yourself, so what's the point of them even trying ?
The challenge when faced with intelligent enemies is to try to predict their moves - figure out your own weak spots, and protect them before entering battle, preferably with a tactic that turns them into traps.
Ladies. Plural. After all, new security problems and viruses for Windows are found constantly. That's why Microsoft sucks and Windows blows.
Debian gets hacked. Debian last got hacked three years ago.
Of course there are problems with all software. However, Microsoft software tends to have a lot more problems than non-Microsoft software.
An eggshell and a two-meter thick wall of titanium-reinforced armor-grade steel are both breakable, but claiming that this makes them similar is misleading, to put it nicely.
Um, what race conditions ? Here's the basic pseudocode to an X application:
I don't really see how having 2, 20 or 200 pointing devices could cause any race conditions here. You just get 2, 20 or 200 times the amount of mouse events (assuming they are all actually used and won't just lie there) than before.
Can anyone out there test this ? Did your Gnome / KDE / Whatever desktop crash with two pointers ?
Actually, Vader is glamorous, while Anakin is a pathetic human being. Remember, int RotJ, when Luke removes Vader's helmet ? He's no longer an inhuman angel of death, but an old bald guy who can't even breath by himself.
It's the same as Nazi Germany: it was glamorous, but once the glamour was gone, those who had given themselves to it were no different than anyone else. After all, one meaning of "glamour" is "magic enchantment", something that's not quite real.
Vader was just a mask. Anakin was the real man inside. Masks can be seemingly invulnerable and glamorous in their inhumanity, while human beings can't. But human beings can wear masks, either metaphorically or literally. Doing so can make you a titan, but it also makes you less than human. And sooner or later the glamour is gone, and then what ? But the temptation of denying all weakness and appearing glorious, and maybe even believing yourself so, is so very hard to resist...
And of course we don't resist it, any of us, completely; we always keep some parts of ourselves hidden. To do otherwise is to make your weaknesses exposed, and to show weakness is to invite abuse. And so we keep on getting more and more inhuman monsters spreading death and destruction around the world.
So, sayeth the Horned Paperclip, what mask do you want to wear today >?-)
Actually, if you think about it logically, you start being alive, and death, being a later state, is the "upgrade". A bit like Windows Vista is an "upgrade" to Windows XP. Exactly like Windows Vista, actually ;).
This leaves the question of what XP SP2 would be - undeath ?-)
I guess you've never played Battlezone ?-)
If I was a master mage, and was expecting trouble, I'd wear the heaviest armor I could get my hands on (and further enhance it with magic), and then basically act as a tank, bombarding the enemy from the distance and letting the armor take care of any counterattacks.
The "mages can't wear armor" bullshit comes from D&D, where mages need to wave their hands like amateur actors to get anything done - and even there, master mages learn to avoid such things and can wear armor. There is absolutely no reason to extend such absurdity to any fantasy world where magic doesn't require theater performance.
If anything, a master mage needs armor more than a master fighter, since the mage has less melee experience and muscles and is thus less likely to be able to dodge.
To be fair, nothing can ever equal Doom in FPS games. There had never been anything quite like it; that's why it hit so hard. Every FSP game afterward has been just a gradual evolution, not a true revolution; that's why they don't pack the punch Doom did, even if some of them are as good or better.
There will be games that hit like Doom, but that's because they'll be revolutionary, not just evolutionary. And they won't be shareware, since the game industry is too large nowadays to make a hit without a marketing budget.
Except that Microsoft, which made Gates his money, has been convicted of illegal monopolistic practices. Which means that Gates's money has not been earned or gained by luck, but is the fruit of crime.
If I rob a bank and give some of my loot to charity, do I deserve credit for that ?
Don't get me wrong, charity is certainly not a bad thing; but the idea that a criminal can buy a clean conscience just by sacrificing some of his ill-begotten gains is just a modern-day equivalent of indulgence, and every bit as ludicrous as it was in Middle Ages.
A stable ABI is by definition one that won't change, for better or otherwise :).
Compile everything statically and you can remove the dynamic linker and other libraries.
Because the people who bought the shares own the company and usually want to maximize the value of their investment.
If you let work become an important part of your life, you get hit a lot harder when you get fired than if you treated it as just a money source.
The difference between home and work is, quite simply, that your family usually feels some amount of loyalty to you, while your employer doesn't. That's the core of all those "at-will" employment laws: you can be thrown out and replaced at any moment, and it's just business as usual. That, in turn, requires a similar attitude towards your employer from you, since it would be self-destructive to feel loyalty towards someone who doesn't feel any towards you - it would leave you wide open for abuse.
The way economy is currently set up, employment is just a business relationship, with absolutely no loyalty required or expected from either side, and which can be terminated at any time. Treat it as such, or you will wish you had. Don't let work become more than a money source to you; that way losing it is just an inconvenience and not a devastating emotional hit it comes if you made emotional investments to your job.
It also means that you'll be hit a lot harder when you get fired.
Employers, if you want passion, show loyalty first. Don't fire people and outsource their jobs to India. If you do, then it would be self-destructive for your employees to feel passion, commitment or loyalty to you or their work, so only the stupid or mentally ill ones will.
Treat people as replacable resources and they will return the favor. Give them job security and they may actually feel safe enough to get passionate about the job. No one is going to let something they are likely to lose soon to become an important part of their life.
Or a paid political shill (or a group of shills using a single login) will simply post karma-earning articles on topics his employer doesn't care about, and uses it to forge articles he does care about. Since there's likely to be far more topics in the former than the latter category, he'll keep have excellent karma and can forge articles with impunity.
Think of karma as a kind of currency, and it becomes obvious that this kind of system can actually work for the advantage of political shills. They'll simply need to budget karma use so it stays at near-maximum at all times, making the pages they edit the ones least likely to be reviewed, since the system considers them trustworthy.
Ironically enough, in my machine, WarCraft 3 works flawlessly in Wine - except that the movies won't play, but the actual game works fine, as long as I remember to give the -opengl flag on command line - while it crashes under Win98 on the same machine when started.
Now if only they'd make OpenGL windows clip properly, so I could use Poser painlessly :(.
This is not really a double standard. The "free trade" arguments have never been anything but a thinly veiled power grap, not an actual standard. "Free trade" is simply another weapon in US's arsenal, allowing it to harm other countries economies for its profit.
The only thing the US elite truly believes in is lining their pockets.
But doesn't the exact same thing happen with outsourcing - you move production or a call center to India, and you pay for Indian workers, therefore moving money from your domestic economy to foreign economy ? And yet the government doesn't seem to have any problems with that...
Anthropic principle is complete and utter rubbish.
Anthropic principle tries to explain the observed qualities of the universe by appealing to the consequences of those qualities - namely, your existence. This, in turn, requires at least one of the following to be true:
Apart from requiring that at least one of these to be true, the anthropic principle fails to predict anything at all, and is therefore worthless as a scientific theory - no, wait, since at least the existence of intelligent designer (God) can't be falsified, anthropic principle makes no testable predictions whatsoever, and is therefore not a scientific theory.
It's just a cheap copout used by scientists when they have no idea why the universe has some quality but don't want to admit that.
Oh, and the requirement number one seems to have something fishy about it - I'm not sure that infinite number of universes will neccessarily cover all possible combinations of qualities, and even if it did, why would there be an inifinite number of different universes ?
A real scientist doesn't pay for a hooker. He'll build himself female androids / re-animated constructs / golems, depending on if he's living in high-tech future, victorian times or D&D fantasy realm.
Just why do you think mad scientists and wizards are grinning maniacally all the time ?-)