Yeah, maybe the doctor shouldn't prescribe antibiotics for little Timmy when his mom brings him in with an ear infection. However, if he doesn't, he can be sure that Timmy will be seeing another doctor next time he gets sick. People want doctors to do something. Being told that "it will go away, just give it some time" makes the patient feel that the doctor is unwilling to help—especially because "everyone knows" that antibiotics will fix anything.
So maybe a few homeopathic solutions or healing herbs would come in handy to the doctor who wants return business, but doesn't want to prescribe unneeded antibiotics. And who knows, the patient might get well faster because he feels better: the doctor clearly cares about his welfare, he's been given "medicine", all should be well. People aren't machines; they don't respond well to being treated as though they were. Whatever happened to the art of medicine?
Yeah, there is no high like a powerful storm. While working for the U.S. Forest Service as a fire lookout (back in the 70s) I got to see quite a few lightning storms from the inside...on a mountain top. No tornadoes (I was in Eastern Oregon), but the sheer magnitude of the forces at work inside an electrical storm gave me such an adrenaline rush that it became quite the addiction. "Oh please Lord, send me some more storms, and may they be with much lightning, little rain, and cause lots of fires." Like they say, long weeks of boredom, punctuated by hours of sheer terror. My building never actually got hit, but the metal (nails, fasteners, antenna) on the outside glowed blue and shot off sparks into the sky a couple of times. Yeee haw!
I think waiting for storms inside a comfy building beats chasing them any day, though.
The facts are irrelevant here. What's at issue is whether someone who makes remarks alleged to be defamatory has a right to anonymity. The offended party wants to take those who made the comments to court, but he can't do that if the doesn't know who they are. The right to seek redress in a court of law is also a right, and shouldn't be lightly dismissed. I see this as a conflict of personal rights, and I'm not sure quite how I feel about it.
To what extent is this a First Amendment issue at all? Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution is there a guarantee of anonymous free speech. If you get up in a public assembly and state your opinions, then you show your face. If you own a newspaper or T.V. station and use it to editorialize about government policy, everyone knows who you are. The First Amendment guarantees that you can't be punished for expressing your opinion; it is silent on whether you can do so anonymously.
The internet has, for the first time, made anonymous public communication easy and potentially influential. Previously, one would have had to resort to unsigned placards posted in the dark of night (or perhaps the odd shout of "The King is a fink!"). I am inclined to find little merit in the claim that one should be able to disparage individuals or businesses anonymously, but I do think that the issue of anonymous political speech should be taken very seriously. One could argue that in the United States, we don't need the protection of anonymity because our right to speak is already protected, and the government can take no action against us, no matter what we say. However, there is more than one way in which the government can punish those who speak the truth (think "whistleblowers"), and there are other perils to speaking one's mind publicly in a forum that has such wide circulation as the internet—I do have reasons for habitually posting under a pseudonym, after all.
I'm glad that the courts are treading carefully with cases such as this one.
I was actually thinking about this while taking my shower this morning (the place where I do my second-best thinking). I felt uneasy about my assertion; it's obviously glib, and I'm not even sure it's intuitively appealing. I'm not mathematically inclined, so I was trying to analyze it in logical terms.
The assertion I so flippantly made could be expressed as Non-correlation between two series of events proves they are not causally related.. To prove this logically false requires only a single counter-example.
So what could be a counter-example of my proposition? Suppose we have two sequences of events, a and b. Can we imagine any such series where we can say that a and b are causally related, but where there is no correlation? Note that I'm not saying that there appears to be no correlation, but that there is no correlation. This is not the real world, this is a Gedankenexperiment.
I got to thinking about all kinds of silly scenarios (e.g. one involved the price of bananas and quantity of monkey flatulence in the Brooklyn zoo...you really don't want to know more). But I couldn't really think of one. Then I got to thinking that maybe it's a bit silly to think that you can take any two series of events and ask whether they are causally related or not. What does "causal" mean, anyhow?
I wonder why Blizzard only gives us this one option. Why didn't they introduce two new classes—the evil Deathknight and some souped up Paladin? Or just about anything that's not a prep course for working at Abu Ghraib.
Part of that is evoking ANY kind of feeling when you're doing quests, even if it's reprehensible stuff. You connect that way.
Yeah, it made me "connect" when I started my Death Knight and was told to slay some helpless prisoner. There was no option for "Do your own damned killing, you pompous teakettle", so I don't have a Death Knight in the game. I'm funny that way.
If alcohol prohibition required an amendment to the constitution then how was the gov't suddenly able to prohibit another substance w/o changing the constitution?
Several reasons. First, alcohol had a constituency that was not only large, but crossed social lines. People from all social classes liked to drink alcohol...and continued to drink it, despite prohibition. Getting rid of alcohol required a big hammer (though, as we know, the hammer wasn't big enough).
Marijuana, on the other hand, was smoked only by them. You know, people without political clout, poor, existing at the margins of society. Yet even then, not even the Federal government thought it had the power to outlaw "substances"—the trick was turned with a tax. That's right...marijuana is taxable. Not having a tax stamp on it makes it illegal. If you apply for a tax stamp, you get arrested for having an illegal substance. Clever, huh?
Of course, the Federal government no longer has such compunctions. If someone invents a new "substance" that can be "abused" (I suppose that means one can enjoy it), the Feds have gotten everyone so used to the idea that "substances" can be illegal that they only have to wave their administrative wand.
Why does this work? Because the people stand for it, of course.
So explain how a person is greedy without using the brain as a part of that explanation.
In what sense is something like "greed" explained by talking about brain chemicals? What sort of "explanation" is this? How does it clear things up? What is it that you didn't understand about greed before that you do understand after you listen to a guy talk about brain chemicals?
Not everything that is scientific is also relevant.
Yeah, I don't really care how quickly these "elite" players level or what fabulous gear they have. If they want to be so intense about a game, let them. However, I would like to participate in raids—and retain my status as a reasonably casual player. Having played WoW for about a year, I've found the present guild structure to be inadequate for my needs. By "inadequate" I mean that the guild system seems to be the only way to access "high-level" content, specifically raids, but I'm not likely to find a guild that will both let me raid and retain my status as a casual player. (I play about 2-3 hours a day on the average.) As far as I've been able to discern, guilds fall into 2 categories: there are a great many obscure guilds with just a few members, and then there are the "elite" guilds—which want you to devote your life to WoW). To me, this seems to be a silly limitation that could be overcome by some creativity on the part of Blizzard (and other MMPORPG designers).
I'd like to raid, but I'd like to do it when I've got free time—that is, casually. And I don't really want to spend my precious playing time on guild politics. Couldn't Blizzard put a little creative energy into devising a system that would allow for the convenient formation of ad hoc raid groups? I'm thinking of something like entering a time in the in-game calendar when you're available for raiding, and automagically getting matched with people who are available at the same time.
I know "pick up" groups are a crapshoot. When you get to the larger groups required for raids, your chances of forming a functional group by random selection drop accordingly. But surely that problem could be fixed, or at least ameliorated. How about a reputation system that allows you to rate the ability and social skills of the members of your raid team after you're done? This would provide an incentive for people to play nice, and it would give you a way to judge whether a particular player who you don't know is someone you want to have along or not. Maybe we could also keep track of leadership skills (again, by raid members voting after the raid is done). Perhaps leaders could announce raids via the calendar system, and have the privilege of rejecting anyone with a score lower than x.
You're absolutely right that professionals have a big stake in definitions. That's part of being a professional, I guess—and having to keep up the appearance of rigorous scientific standards. You and I aren't under that sort of compulsion, though, so I thought I'd suggest a more informal approach to deciding who's nuts.
You make a good point in your last paragraph—there's plenty of people with harmless beliefs or behaviors that deviate from the norm. I believe they're called "eccentrics". Perhaps the important criterion for "crazy" is that crazy people don't do well. Their beliefs or compulsive behaviors cripple their lives.
It's a bit hard to define a hard and fast cutoff between a mostly harmless cultural myth and a life damaging delusion, particularly when the belief may not be susceptible to objective proof or disproof.
Really? I'd figured that sanity might be a scarce commodity in this forum, but do you truly need a definition to tell whether someone is crazy or not? Is it really that hard? Let's say you get to talking with some guy who's wearing a tin foil beret in the elevator. The conversation goes like this:
Beret: You know, it's amazing.
You: Huh? What?
Beret: This elevator is a near-perfect Faraday cage. Except for some leakage around the wiring, and some minor gaps here and there. Yet, the radiation goes right through.
You: Huh? What?
Beret: I'm glad you asked! The government has been using its spy satellites to beam mind control signals at me. They make me want to do crazy stuff, like take off my clothes and paint my body with woad. The amazing thing is that the signal strength is not diminished a whit by being inside an elevator! Nor by riding in a train through deep underground tunnels, on top of mountain peaks, scuba diving, or hiding in my aunt Bertha's closet. And I think the guy who sold me this tres chic aluminium beret was just a spammer, working for them. No matter where I go, no matter what precautions I take, I still want to paint myself blue!
You: Spasmodically start punching button to next floor so elevator will stop and you can get out.
Beret: You...ah...wouldn't have any woad on you by any chance?(Starts stripping off his shirt).
OK, so you might react the same way if some Jehova's Witness starts to proselytize you in an elevator...but I guess I was resting under the rather comfortable delusion that there is a set of people that at least 95% of the rest of the population would agree is bugnuts. Ah well, maybe the world has changed.
Maybe people are more accepting of today's crazies because their delusions have become so technological. (A smart move to strengthen their hand with the Slashdot crowd!)
People used to feel compelled by curses; now they're under compulsion from weird rays emitted by satellites or airplanes. People were once persecuted by demons, now it's government spooks. People used to get kidnapped by fairies, now it's aliens in space ships. People used to talk to their voices in public...now you can't tell whether maybe they are just talking through their cell phone headsets.
It is a scummy thing to do, but hardly illegal, and it's being made out to be a lot worse than it actually is. Had it been disabled by default, or perhaps included instructions on the site it directs you to on how to disable it then it wouldn't be an issue.
I can see the dialog now:
Would you like us to randomly direct your web browser to our advertising site instead of the site you are really trying to access? Enter Yes or No:
Do you think maybe there's a reason why they chose not to make this feature "opt in"? Like maybe you'd have to be into serious self-flagellation to actually want your router to mess with you like this? Hence the resort to deception.
As for being "made out to be a lot worse than it actually is", I suppose that calling this behavior "DNS highjacking" is just a wee bit hyperbolic. No DNS records are being messed with...just you, the customer. I don't know anything about you, but when I buy a router, I am buying a device that allegedly enhances the security of my computer's connection to the outside world. I expect the router to serve my interests—and that means doing nothing to interfere with my outbound signal traffic, and protecting me from the huge amount of malicious port probes and other unwanted in-bound traffic. For me, it is essential that a router be trustworthy. Just as I require the locksmith who installs a new lock on my front door to be trustworthy, I must be able to trust my router to act on my behalf, and not in the interests of, say, the manufacturer's marketing department. What D Link has done is something like a locksmith who gives a copy of my door key to a burglar alarm salesman, so that salesman can walk uninvited into my home to sell me an alarm. When I complain, the locksmith says he did me a favor—besides, I could have just asked him not to give away keys.
I don't know about you, but this incident has completely undermined my faith in D Link. I have one of their routers now, and will be replacing it with a Linksys ASAP.
Why is it that so many people in a computer technology forum are so resistant to the kind of endless change that computer technology brings?
Because not every idea is really a change (i.e., new), nor is every change for the better. Some ideas suck. In fact, I would say that the overwhelming majority of ideas suck. I refer you to what is now known as the "dot com bubble"—probably one of the greatest concentrations of stupid ideas ever seen on this planet. Need I elaborate?
Yes, the WWW was a good idea. Now, ask yourself why it succeeded. Was it because people dumped truckloads of money into it? Did it succeed because of the breathless hype generated by corporate hucksters? No, it succeeded because it was made use of existing infrastructure, and filled a number of genuine needs. Above all, it was simple...or at least no more complex than it had to be. As a result, the web wasn't built—it just grew. (More precisely, a lot of people built little bits of the web, and before the corporations or the bureacrats noticed, it was there.)
Now...virtual worlds. For fun, they're a great idea—I love MMORPGs. But you say:
I believe that there is also some compelling B2B drivers for virtual worlds too.
After wiping the glaze induced by that massive cliche off my eyeballs, I continued reading. In the remainder of that paragraph, you seem to be saying that "virtual world" technology is some kind of solution to the need of "geographically distributed" "knowledge workers" for "quality communication needed for productivity". And you seem to assert that "Virtual worlds may be be a low cost alternative that has more immersion than text based IM". Did you actually type that, or accidentally trigger a random buzzword generator?
Let me see...how would this work. Instead of having a little icon flash on my desktop that means my boss wants to ask me a question and just opening the IM box and answering him, I'd have to start up my World of Bosscraft [tm] app, wake up my avatar, hike down the virtual hallway to my boss' virtual office...only to find that Andy from IT got there first, and I have to wait. Waiting is boring. I notice Andy is several levels lower than me, so I hit him with Fireball IV...oops no wong key dammit that was the AE Fireblast...the whole office is in flames now...the boss's Henchman of Doom is coming out of his closet...and he's 30 levels higher than me...oh noes.
I haven't really had time to study it, but as far as I can tell from the original paper (available as PDF from http://eprints.eemcs.utwente.nl/10783/) this is a user-friendly mechanism for creating a session key for two parties who are in close proximity. The key isn't supposed to be permanent. The security is provided by the fact that the picture of the other party is obtained through a "side channel" (i.e., light rays and not the channel through which the actual data exchange takes place—e.g. bluetooth). The seed for the key is obtained via some sort of biometric analysis that's "fuzzy" enough so that the keys will match for both pairs of images on both devices. There's no real security advantage over simply exchanging a key verbally on the spot—it's just easier than remembering a key and entering it on the device.
I'm big on privacy...but I can't remember the last time I exchanged data with anyone via my PDA or cell phone...other than actually making a phone call, I mean. Are there people out there for whom this is a solution to an actual problem, or is it just an academic exercise?
Back before the national Do Not Call law went through, I used to have a little device that plugged into my phone line between the phone and the line out. Apparently, it was able to tell the difference between a manually dialed call and an auto-dialer; as I recall, it did a good job of weeding out most junk calls. It was called a "Tele-Zapper". After the DNC law passed, I got rid of it, because I figured I'd never need it again. Well, I'm getting more and more junk calls again, so I think I'm going to have to get a new one. I notice Amazon sells them: http://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Technologies-TZ-900-TeleZapper-900/dp/B00006881R/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top. (This is not an endorsement, and I don't work for them...I can only say that I recall the device worked well for me.)
Nothing gets my blood pressure rising more than phone calls coming in that are not welcomed.
Except text messages to my cell phone from some spammer giving me a "hot" stock tip. Heck, some of the messages I get don't even make sense. I only get about 1 a week, but it still bothers me. With T Mobile, at any rate, my only recourse is to turn off text messaging totally—they won't let me submit a "white list" of people I want to text, or anything like that.
You can't reason with scammers, they use playground logic. Scam 'em back with a not so new gadget.
Sure, you can war dial them...but then you'd be breaking the same laws they're breaking. And I have a feeling that you or I are more likely to go to jail than the people who are annoying us.
I didn't RTFM, as I can't bring myself to care about a new programming language proposed by Microsoft, but I am buoyed by the fact that the new language begins with something other than the letter "X". In fact, I feel that this letter has been so overused that it should be officially deprecated by the W3C. Obviously, we have to "grandfather" existing X foo; renaming "XML" to "EKSML", "XSLT" to "EKSLT", and so forth would merely result in a much more valuable resource—the letter E—becoming raddled through overuse. But, read my lips, No more new Ekses!
This message has been brought to you by the letters [A-WYZa-wyz], who think we could get along just fine with a 25 letter alphabet.
So being "Googleable" is the new version of "your papers, please"? Showing up in a Google search helps to get a job? Thanks, my friend, your post has seriously creeped me out.
And here I have been grateful for the fact that there's an obscure singer whose name is the same as mine...he's obscure, but famous enough to drive down hits on me (the result of incautiously posting to USENET in the late 80s and early 90s under my real name) to page 5 or so.
I guess Vernor Vinge couldn't have got it more wrong in his story "True Names", where he predicted that, in the future, people would never use their real names online. People today have no more sense than God gave a goose; they go out of their way to scream details of their private lives all over the "new media". I find it disgusting—not to mention extremely stupid.
As far as I can tell, the article asserts that the "hack" can reveal two types of information about encrypted volumes:
It can make some "low entropy" images (images in the sense of "pictures") visible. I'm not sure what they mean by "low entropy", but I infer that by "pictures taken at night with large areas of high contrast", the writer meant high-contrast images low on detail, but not images that are all black, which, I suppose, would have the lowest "entropy" of all.
The fact that a hidden encrypted disk image exists inside an outer "shell" disk image that is also encrypted can be revealed. The article does not say that the contents of the hidden disk image are revealed—only the fact of its existence.
The technique in question appears to require comparing two copies of the same encrypted disk image, where changes have been made to the newer disk image.
I think. Sometimes, IAWOTTRTFA (it's a waste of time to read the fricking article).
It seems very silly to build a machine that removes carbon dioxide from the air when we have a much cheaper solar-powered alternative at our disposal: trees. Yes, trees remove carbon dioxide from the air, binding the carbon in the form of cellulose (a.k.a. "wood"). The trick is to intelligently manage these natural carbon scrubbers so that they can aid in the fight against climate change.
Obviously, the worst thing you can do with a tree is to burn it: that just releases all its hoarded carbon back into the air as carbon dioxide. Even turning the tree into furniture or toothpicks leaves open the likely possibility that it will some day be burned or left out in the open to rot (an oxidative process). You can leave the tree alone, of course, but that leads to sub-optimal results: most trees grow slowly (therefore binding carbon at a very unsatisfactory pace), and are virtually certain to eventually suffer from some mishap that results in their carbon load being returned to the air, thus undoing all the good they have done in their long lives.
So what is the solution? Bury the trees! Let's devote as much acreage as we can to raising varieties of fast-growing trees (if I recall correctly, a lodgepole pine reaches maturity in about 20 years), then cutting them down and shoving them down the nearest deep hole. Abandoned mineshafts would be both practical and ironically fitting for this purpose. The harvested areas would, of course, be immediately re-planted. Net effect? We bury a bunch of carbon; it's sort of like returning oil and coal to the ground.
Parties interested in supporting my worthy proposal may send me donations (gold, silver or other precious metals only, please). Each donation will inspire me with the sincere intention to bury a tree.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, maybe the doctor shouldn't prescribe antibiotics for little Timmy when his mom brings him in with an ear infection. However, if he doesn't, he can be sure that Timmy will be seeing another doctor next time he gets sick. People want doctors to do something. Being told that "it will go away, just give it some time" makes the patient feel that the doctor is unwilling to help—especially because "everyone knows" that antibiotics will fix anything.
So maybe a few homeopathic solutions or healing herbs would come in handy to the doctor who wants return business, but doesn't want to prescribe unneeded antibiotics. And who knows, the patient might get well faster because he feels better: the doctor clearly cares about his welfare, he's been given "medicine", all should be well. People aren't machines; they don't respond well to being treated as though they were. Whatever happened to the art of medicine?
Yeah, there is no high like a powerful storm. While working for the U.S. Forest Service as a fire lookout (back in the 70s) I got to see quite a few lightning storms from the inside...on a mountain top. No tornadoes (I was in Eastern Oregon), but the sheer magnitude of the forces at work inside an electrical storm gave me such an adrenaline rush that it became quite the addiction. "Oh please Lord, send me some more storms, and may they be with much lightning, little rain, and cause lots of fires." Like they say, long weeks of boredom, punctuated by hours of sheer terror. My building never actually got hit, but the metal (nails, fasteners, antenna) on the outside glowed blue and shot off sparks into the sky a couple of times. Yeee haw!
I think waiting for storms inside a comfy building beats chasing them any day, though.
The facts are irrelevant here. What's at issue is whether someone who makes remarks alleged to be defamatory has a right to anonymity. The offended party wants to take those who made the comments to court, but he can't do that if the doesn't know who they are. The right to seek redress in a court of law is also a right, and shouldn't be lightly dismissed. I see this as a conflict of personal rights, and I'm not sure quite how I feel about it.
To what extent is this a First Amendment issue at all? Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution is there a guarantee of anonymous free speech. If you get up in a public assembly and state your opinions, then you show your face. If you own a newspaper or T.V. station and use it to editorialize about government policy, everyone knows who you are. The First Amendment guarantees that you can't be punished for expressing your opinion; it is silent on whether you can do so anonymously.
The internet has, for the first time, made anonymous public communication easy and potentially influential. Previously, one would have had to resort to unsigned placards posted in the dark of night (or perhaps the odd shout of "The King is a fink!"). I am inclined to find little merit in the claim that one should be able to disparage individuals or businesses anonymously, but I do think that the issue of anonymous political speech should be taken very seriously. One could argue that in the United States, we don't need the protection of anonymity because our right to speak is already protected, and the government can take no action against us, no matter what we say. However, there is more than one way in which the government can punish those who speak the truth (think "whistleblowers"), and there are other perils to speaking one's mind publicly in a forum that has such wide circulation as the internet—I do have reasons for habitually posting under a pseudonym, after all.
I'm glad that the courts are treading carefully with cases such as this one.
I was actually thinking about this while taking my shower this morning (the place where I do my second-best thinking). I felt uneasy about my assertion; it's obviously glib, and I'm not even sure it's intuitively appealing. I'm not mathematically inclined, so I was trying to analyze it in logical terms.
The assertion I so flippantly made could be expressed as Non-correlation between two series of events proves they are not causally related.. To prove this logically false requires only a single counter-example.
So what could be a counter-example of my proposition? Suppose we have two sequences of events, a and b. Can we imagine any such series where we can say that a and b are causally related, but where there is no correlation? Note that I'm not saying that there appears to be no correlation, but that there is no correlation. This is not the real world, this is a Gedankenexperiment.
I got to thinking about all kinds of silly scenarios (e.g. one involved the price of bananas and quantity of monkey flatulence in the Brooklyn zoo...you really don't want to know more). But I couldn't really think of one. Then I got to thinking that maybe it's a bit silly to think that you can take any two series of events and ask whether they are causally related or not. What does "causal" mean, anyhow?
And then I ran out of hot water.
I wonder why Blizzard only gives us this one option. Why didn't they introduce two new classes—the evil Deathknight and some souped up Paladin? Or just about anything that's not a prep course for working at Abu Ghraib.
Uh forgot to log in. It's me, myself. Not trying to hide.
Yeah, it made me "connect" when I started my Death Knight and was told to slay some helpless prisoner. There was no option for "Do your own damned killing, you pompous teakettle", so I don't have a Death Knight in the game. I'm funny that way.
Or we could be completely accurate and succinct:non-correlation proves non-causality.
Now, what was this about, again?
Several reasons. First, alcohol had a constituency that was not only large, but crossed social lines. People from all social classes liked to drink alcohol...and continued to drink it, despite prohibition. Getting rid of alcohol required a big hammer (though, as we know, the hammer wasn't big enough).
Marijuana, on the other hand, was smoked only by them. You know, people without political clout, poor, existing at the margins of society. Yet even then, not even the Federal government thought it had the power to outlaw "substances"—the trick was turned with a tax. That's right...marijuana is taxable. Not having a tax stamp on it makes it illegal. If you apply for a tax stamp, you get arrested for having an illegal substance. Clever, huh?
Of course, the Federal government no longer has such compunctions. If someone invents a new "substance" that can be "abused" (I suppose that means one can enjoy it), the Feds have gotten everyone so used to the idea that "substances" can be illegal that they only have to wave their administrative wand.
Why does this work? Because the people stand for it, of course.
In what sense is something like "greed" explained by talking about brain chemicals? What sort of "explanation" is this? How does it clear things up? What is it that you didn't understand about greed before that you do understand after you listen to a guy talk about brain chemicals?
Not everything that is scientific is also relevant.
Yeah, I don't really care how quickly these "elite" players level or what fabulous gear they have. If they want to be so intense about a game, let them. However, I would like to participate in raids—and retain my status as a reasonably casual player. Having played WoW for about a year, I've found the present guild structure to be inadequate for my needs. By "inadequate" I mean that the guild system seems to be the only way to access "high-level" content, specifically raids, but I'm not likely to find a guild that will both let me raid and retain my status as a casual player. (I play about 2-3 hours a day on the average.) As far as I've been able to discern, guilds fall into 2 categories: there are a great many obscure guilds with just a few members, and then there are the "elite" guilds—which want you to devote your life to WoW). To me, this seems to be a silly limitation that could be overcome by some creativity on the part of Blizzard (and other MMPORPG designers).
I'd like to raid, but I'd like to do it when I've got free time—that is, casually. And I don't really want to spend my precious playing time on guild politics. Couldn't Blizzard put a little creative energy into devising a system that would allow for the convenient formation of ad hoc raid groups? I'm thinking of something like entering a time in the in-game calendar when you're available for raiding, and automagically getting matched with people who are available at the same time.
I know "pick up" groups are a crapshoot. When you get to the larger groups required for raids, your chances of forming a functional group by random selection drop accordingly. But surely that problem could be fixed, or at least ameliorated. How about a reputation system that allows you to rate the ability and social skills of the members of your raid team after you're done? This would provide an incentive for people to play nice, and it would give you a way to judge whether a particular player who you don't know is someone you want to have along or not. Maybe we could also keep track of leadership skills (again, by raid members voting after the raid is done). Perhaps leaders could announce raids via the calendar system, and have the privilege of rejecting anyone with a score lower than x.
You're absolutely right that professionals have a big stake in definitions. That's part of being a professional, I guess—and having to keep up the appearance of rigorous scientific standards. You and I aren't under that sort of compulsion, though, so I thought I'd suggest a more informal approach to deciding who's nuts.
You make a good point in your last paragraph—there's plenty of people with harmless beliefs or behaviors that deviate from the norm. I believe they're called "eccentrics". Perhaps the important criterion for "crazy" is that crazy people don't do well. Their beliefs or compulsive behaviors cripple their lives.
Really? I'd figured that sanity might be a scarce commodity in this forum, but do you truly need a definition to tell whether someone is crazy or not? Is it really that hard? Let's say you get to talking with some guy who's wearing a tin foil beret in the elevator. The conversation goes like this:
Beret: You know, it's amazing.
You: Huh? What?
Beret: This elevator is a near-perfect Faraday cage. Except for some leakage around the wiring, and some minor gaps here and there. Yet, the radiation goes right through.
You: Huh? What?
Beret: I'm glad you asked! The government has been using its spy satellites to beam mind control signals at me. They make me want to do crazy stuff, like take off my clothes and paint my body with woad. The amazing thing is that the signal strength is not diminished a whit by being inside an elevator! Nor by riding in a train through deep underground tunnels, on top of mountain peaks, scuba diving, or hiding in my aunt Bertha's closet. And I think the guy who sold me this tres chic aluminium beret was just a spammer, working for them. No matter where I go, no matter what precautions I take, I still want to paint myself blue!
You: Spasmodically start punching button to next floor so elevator will stop and you can get out.
Beret: You...ah...wouldn't have any woad on you by any chance?(Starts stripping off his shirt).
OK, so you might react the same way if some Jehova's Witness starts to proselytize you in an elevator...but I guess I was resting under the rather comfortable delusion that there is a set of people that at least 95% of the rest of the population would agree is bugnuts. Ah well, maybe the world has changed.
Maybe people are more accepting of today's crazies because their delusions have become so technological. (A smart move to strengthen their hand with the Slashdot crowd!) People used to feel compelled by curses; now they're under compulsion from weird rays emitted by satellites or airplanes. People were once persecuted by demons, now it's government spooks. People used to get kidnapped by fairies, now it's aliens in space ships. People used to talk to their voices in public...now you can't tell whether maybe they are just talking through their cell phone headsets.
I can see the dialog now:
Would you like us to randomly direct your web browser to our advertising site instead of the site you are really trying to access? Enter Yes or No:
Do you think maybe there's a reason why they chose not to make this feature "opt in"? Like maybe you'd have to be into serious self-flagellation to actually want your router to mess with you like this? Hence the resort to deception.
As for being "made out to be a lot worse than it actually is", I suppose that calling this behavior "DNS highjacking" is just a wee bit hyperbolic. No DNS records are being messed with...just you, the customer. I don't know anything about you, but when I buy a router, I am buying a device that allegedly enhances the security of my computer's connection to the outside world. I expect the router to serve my interests—and that means doing nothing to interfere with my outbound signal traffic, and protecting me from the huge amount of malicious port probes and other unwanted in-bound traffic. For me, it is essential that a router be trustworthy. Just as I require the locksmith who installs a new lock on my front door to be trustworthy, I must be able to trust my router to act on my behalf, and not in the interests of, say, the manufacturer's marketing department. What D Link has done is something like a locksmith who gives a copy of my door key to a burglar alarm salesman, so that salesman can walk uninvited into my home to sell me an alarm. When I complain, the locksmith says he did me a favor—besides, I could have just asked him not to give away keys.
I don't know about you, but this incident has completely undermined my faith in D Link. I have one of their routers now, and will be replacing it with a Linksys ASAP.
Because not every idea is really a change (i.e., new), nor is every change for the better. Some ideas suck. In fact, I would say that the overwhelming majority of ideas suck. I refer you to what is now known as the "dot com bubble"—probably one of the greatest concentrations of stupid ideas ever seen on this planet. Need I elaborate?
Yes, the WWW was a good idea. Now, ask yourself why it succeeded. Was it because people dumped truckloads of money into it? Did it succeed because of the breathless hype generated by corporate hucksters? No, it succeeded because it was made use of existing infrastructure, and filled a number of genuine needs. Above all, it was simple...or at least no more complex than it had to be. As a result, the web wasn't built—it just grew. (More precisely, a lot of people built little bits of the web, and before the corporations or the bureacrats noticed, it was there.)
Now...virtual worlds. For fun, they're a great idea—I love MMORPGs. But you say:
After wiping the glaze induced by that massive cliche off my eyeballs, I continued reading. In the remainder of that paragraph, you seem to be saying that "virtual world" technology is some kind of solution to the need of "geographically distributed" "knowledge workers" for "quality communication needed for productivity". And you seem to assert that "Virtual worlds may be be a low cost alternative that has more immersion than text based IM". Did you actually type that, or accidentally trigger a random buzzword generator?
Let me see...how would this work. Instead of having a little icon flash on my desktop that means my boss wants to ask me a question and just opening the IM box and answering him, I'd have to start up my World of Bosscraft [tm] app, wake up my avatar, hike down the virtual hallway to my boss' virtual office...only to find that Andy from IT got there first, and I have to wait. Waiting is boring. I notice Andy is several levels lower than me, so I hit him with Fireball IV...oops no wong key dammit that was the AE Fireblast...the whole office is in flames now...the boss's Henchman of Doom is coming out of his closet...and he's 30 levels higher than me...oh noes.
Yeah, that's a great idea. Go for it.
I haven't really had time to study it, but as far as I can tell from the original paper (available as PDF from http://eprints.eemcs.utwente.nl/10783/) this is a user-friendly mechanism for creating a session key for two parties who are in close proximity. The key isn't supposed to be permanent. The security is provided by the fact that the picture of the other party is obtained through a "side channel" (i.e., light rays and not the channel through which the actual data exchange takes place—e.g. bluetooth). The seed for the key is obtained via some sort of biometric analysis that's "fuzzy" enough so that the keys will match for both pairs of images on both devices. There's no real security advantage over simply exchanging a key verbally on the spot—it's just easier than remembering a key and entering it on the device.
I'm big on privacy...but I can't remember the last time I exchanged data with anyone via my PDA or cell phone...other than actually making a phone call, I mean. Are there people out there for whom this is a solution to an actual problem, or is it just an academic exercise?
Back before the national Do Not Call law went through, I used to have a little device that plugged into my phone line between the phone and the line out. Apparently, it was able to tell the difference between a manually dialed call and an auto-dialer; as I recall, it did a good job of weeding out most junk calls. It was called a "Tele-Zapper". After the DNC law passed, I got rid of it, because I figured I'd never need it again. Well, I'm getting more and more junk calls again, so I think I'm going to have to get a new one. I notice Amazon sells them: http://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Technologies-TZ-900-TeleZapper-900/dp/B00006881R/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top. (This is not an endorsement, and I don't work for them...I can only say that I recall the device worked well for me.)
Except text messages to my cell phone from some spammer giving me a "hot" stock tip. Heck, some of the messages I get don't even make sense. I only get about 1 a week, but it still bothers me. With T Mobile, at any rate, my only recourse is to turn off text messaging totally—they won't let me submit a "white list" of people I want to text, or anything like that.
Sure, you can war dial them...but then you'd be breaking the same laws they're breaking. And I have a feeling that you or I are more likely to go to jail than the people who are annoying us.
I didn't RTFM, as I can't bring myself to care about a new programming language proposed by Microsoft, but I am buoyed by the fact that the new language begins with something other than the letter "X". In fact, I feel that this letter has been so overused that it should be officially deprecated by the W3C. Obviously, we have to "grandfather" existing X foo; renaming "XML" to "EKSML", "XSLT" to "EKSLT", and so forth would merely result in a much more valuable resource—the letter E—becoming raddled through overuse. But, read my lips, No more new Ekses!
This message has been brought to you by the letters [A-WYZa-wyz], who think we could get along just fine with a 25 letter alphabet.
I agree that the Internet is evil, but don't you think we should give it just one more chance?
isbor, uor ykes vhae eben ewnz0rd. Efle!
So being "Googleable" is the new version of "your papers, please"? Showing up in a Google search helps to get a job? Thanks, my friend, your post has seriously creeped me out.
And here I have been grateful for the fact that there's an obscure singer whose name is the same as mine...he's obscure, but famous enough to drive down hits on me (the result of incautiously posting to USENET in the late 80s and early 90s under my real name) to page 5 or so.
I guess Vernor Vinge couldn't have got it more wrong in his story "True Names", where he predicted that, in the future, people would never use their real names online. People today have no more sense than God gave a goose; they go out of their way to scream details of their private lives all over the "new media". I find it disgusting—not to mention extremely stupid.
As far as I can tell, the article asserts that the "hack" can reveal two types of information about encrypted volumes:
The technique in question appears to require comparing two copies of the same encrypted disk image, where changes have been made to the newer disk image.
I think. Sometimes, IAWOTTRTFA (it's a waste of time to read the fricking article).
It seems very silly to build a machine that removes carbon dioxide from the air when we have a much cheaper solar-powered alternative at our disposal: trees. Yes, trees remove carbon dioxide from the air, binding the carbon in the form of cellulose (a.k.a. "wood"). The trick is to intelligently manage these natural carbon scrubbers so that they can aid in the fight against climate change.
Obviously, the worst thing you can do with a tree is to burn it: that just releases all its hoarded carbon back into the air as carbon dioxide. Even turning the tree into furniture or toothpicks leaves open the likely possibility that it will some day be burned or left out in the open to rot (an oxidative process). You can leave the tree alone, of course, but that leads to sub-optimal results: most trees grow slowly (therefore binding carbon at a very unsatisfactory pace), and are virtually certain to eventually suffer from some mishap that results in their carbon load being returned to the air, thus undoing all the good they have done in their long lives.
So what is the solution? Bury the trees! Let's devote as much acreage as we can to raising varieties of fast-growing trees (if I recall correctly, a lodgepole pine reaches maturity in about 20 years), then cutting them down and shoving them down the nearest deep hole. Abandoned mineshafts would be both practical and ironically fitting for this purpose. The harvested areas would, of course, be immediately re-planted. Net effect? We bury a bunch of carbon; it's sort of like returning oil and coal to the ground.
Parties interested in supporting my worthy proposal may send me donations (gold, silver or other precious metals only, please). Each donation will inspire me with the sincere intention to bury a tree.