*I* finished watching season 2 at the same time as season 4 came to an end. Space (the Canadian equivalent to the Sci Fi channel, only with less money) was showing season 2 when Sci Fi was wrapping up season 4.
Watching the entire series is 100% worth the time. I had just finished the end of season 2 when the series was cancelled (we get Sci-Fi channel stuff a little slowly up here in Canada, since we don't get the Sci-Fi channel). I watched it through to the end, and I'm very glad I did.
You should keep in mind when I say this that I watch next to no television at all. Farscape was a truly unique series.
If I were Katie Jones, I'd setup Google AdWords on my front page, and perhaps a sponsored link to the katie.com book on Amazon, and use the proceeds to power a legal fund.
Suppose for a moment that I could buy eBooks of any of my favorite authors, on a web site, for a few dollars a book, and that every book came unencumbered by DRM, so I could read it on my big-screened home PC, or on my laptop in bed, or on my plam on the bus, or on my PC at work when I wish to be subversive, or have the book read to me by text-to-speech software on long drives to my girlfriend's parents' place, 6 hours away.
If this were the state of eBooks right now, I would be SOOOOO broke, and I'd have a lot of eBooks.
I've read books on my PC before; in fact, given my web-surfing habbits of late, I spend a great deal more time reading on my PC than I do anything in paper format, so obviously this isn't about high-contrast screens or portable readers.
The eBook industry is shooting itself in the foot, the same way the music industry is starting to; with DRM and copy protection. Only in eBook-land, DRM is pervasive, whereas with music, DRM is only seem in a handfull of albums, and is largely ineffective.
Another big sticking point for DRM; when I buy a hardcopy book, I can read it in all those places I mentioned above (except the text-to-speech bit...), but also I can stick it on a book-shelf, and read it again in 20 years. That's not necissarily the case with anything DRMed. I don't know if the company that sold me the book and/or reader will still be around, or if their software will still work 20 years down the road. I don't want to have to dig out my old pentium 5 from the basement just to read an old favorite.
What you need is an escrow service that works for both buyer and seller; the buyer sends money to the escrow service, the seller sends the item to the escrow service. The escrow service forwards both the cash and the item on to their respective parties. This would only be worthwhile for fairly big-ticket items, as you end up paying extra in shipping.
There are also two other big problems here; one is that everyone has to trust the escrow service ("Haha! I have your laptop AND your money!"), the second is that I know if I were going to set something like this up, I'd want good insurance to protect myself against fraud ("The laptop worked when the sender sent it, but didn't when I got it, obviously the escrow service broke it!"), and I'm just guessing here, but I doubt that would come cheap (in fact, I'm not sure it would be available at all... You may have to "self-insure" by charging high rates).
As I said, an interesting idea, but it would only work for high price items.
One critical area which wasn't mentioned is the problems involved with having a camera which affects your controls. For example, consider Onimusha, or Resident Evil, where pressing "up" makes your character run forward, vs. say Mario Sunshine where "up" makes your character run away from the camera.
The first style of control can be done very well (although Resident Evil is obviously NOT an example of this:), and the second can have major problems.
The big problems with the second one come from poor automatic camera controls; if the camera swings wildly or suddenly, your character suddenly starts running off in a different direction. Mario64 suffered from this a great deal; you'd be running along a beam, and the camera would pan around you. In order to stay on the beam, you'd have to continuously and slowly rotate the stick to counter the camera movement. Of course you may argue that the designer did this intentionally to make "walking along a beam" more challenging. There are plenty of examples of similar platform games where similar problems impede game enjoyment.
The original 3D Spiderman game for the Dreamcast and PS1, and the Spiderman: The Movie game both tried to overcome this problem in a novel way; if you were pressing a direction, and the camera moved, spidy would just keep going in whatever direction he was going; the axes the controls operated on would not change until the button was released.
The problems here is that there are situations where you'd, say, climb up a wall pressing up, have the camera swing around to a below-view, then try and run away from something. You'd go from "up" to "down", but since the camera had changed, your character would stop moving forward for a moment, then keep on going. The worst areas where were spidy got up near a corner. You'd press in a direction, he'd move onto a new surface that you didn't want him to, the camera would swing around 90 degrees to show the new surface, you'd press a different direction, and spidy would move in what felt like some random direction, usually onto another surface, swinging the camera around again. It felt very clumsy, and I recall being extremely frustrated with that game on several occasions.
When your link goes down...
on
Broadband Blimps
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
When your link goes down, tell 'em Nathan Zachary DOSed you!
The travelling salesmen problem is "Find the shortest path which visits every node in the network" (I.E: Find the shortest possible route to visit every city in a given set).
The "shortest path between two nodes" is definately in P, computable by Dijkstra's Shortest Path algorithm, for example.
I really don't understand this trend toward portable video players. I think the only rational explanation is clueless execs who see the profitability of portable audio players and want to jump on the bandwagon.
Audio is portable, video isn't. You can listen to a song while you bike, while you jog, while you're at work, while you're driving. You cannot (or should not) watch TV during any of these activities (save perhaps jogging on a treadmill - although a treadmill isn't exactly portable either).
Furthermore, no one craves the ultimate small-screen experience. With video, bigger is better.
Finally, I can load up my iPod with my favorite songs, and listen to them all day. I cannot do this with video; most people have no problem listening to the same song a few times a week, or even a few times a day. Few people watch the same TV episode more than once a year.
Now, if you had a media player that had all the featuers of your competitor's music player, at the same price as that music player, I'd buy your media player, 'cause hey, you never know when you'll need to watch T'Pol getting busy in that decontamination chamber, but sicne the manufacturing cost of the video player is so much higher, this is extremely unlikely.
A virus writer creates a computer virus which causes a minor inconvenience for a relatively large number of people (and a major inconvenience for a few system administrators). Keep in mind that these people are the people who open up a word document called "I love you".
A murderer kills someone. He ends their life, forever. They will no longer feel happiness, or sadness, or laugh, or click on "I love you" attachments". A murderer devastates the lives of the countless people who are friends and family of their victim.
These two acts are not comparable. An "equivalent punishment", be it captial (which I'm opposed to in either crime) or some other, only makes sense if you have a greatly over-inflated view of the "value" of economics.
Such a CD should be shareable amongst users, so that if someone doesn't have an update CD, he/she can simply get one from a friend or an acquaintance.
Well, first off, there's nothing to stop you doing this now. You can just download all the patches individually and burn them to a CD. But what's the problem with this?
The short; this just means you'll be distributing virii by sneakernet. (Which is, admittedly, much slower than the Internet, but none the less...)
You know, back before we had this newfangled "interweeb", we still had virii and worms. They were passed around on corperate networks, from networks to other machines and networks by floppy disk, and also they were sometimes distributed on BBSs with sloppy sysadmins.
A "sharable" disk means that, instead of going through the effort of downloading those hundreads of megs of patches, I can just go copy a friend's disk. A copy of a "friend or an aquaintence"'s disk, however, is not a copy from a trusted source. Where did they get the disk from anyways? Who did they copy it from? It would strike me as very easy to craft a disc which would install a few intentionally malformed patches.
There are a couple of solutions to this problem. You could, for example, make your machine compare a the cryptographic hash of each patch against a known cryptographic hash. In order to get the known hash, however, you'd have to connect to that ol' public network again, with an unprotected machine. Since this functionality does not exist in current versions of Windows, you would also need some kind of initial patch from Microsoft to pull this off.
Another fix would be to cryptographically sign everything with a public key cryptosystem. This works great, so long as noone breaks your cryptosystem and/or finds the private key. Again, the functionality doesn't exist in today's implementations of Windows, so you still need another initial patch. (At least, as far as I know... I suppose XP might have signed updates; I've never tried to forge one.) This might be promising for future versions of windows. Microsoft has already bet your system security on a public key system with signed.NET objects, so this isn't so bad.
Both of these can easily be circumvented by a "sharable CD" that uses autorun to install nasty things before you install any patches at all. Of course, autorun is another feature of windows with questionable security.
In the end, the public network isn't really such a bad tool for delivering patches. Microsoft's implementation could be improved upon; upon installation of a "fresh" copy of XP, for example, the install could connect to the net and download all required patches prior to opening any ports on the system. (You don't need RPC to download patches, afterall). This is, more or less, the idea behind having the personal firewall enabled by default (only that's a little more kludgey).
Does my toaster qualify as prior art? It's from the 70s, but it's smart enough to "start a process" (I.E. toasting) whenever I insert bread. My toaster is a fancy one (well, by 1970s standards), where I don't have to press down a lever to start it toasting.
I suppose the question is, does bread qualify as a storage media?
Fortunately my toaster toasts floppies and CDs equally well (although they are not nearly as tasty).
The problem with the latest batch of Logitech Mice is that they all require a much larger activation force on the middle mouse button than on the left or right mouse buttons. You have too really press on that wheel to get it to click, by comparison. This would, admittedly, not be a big problem for most windows users, where the middle mouse button doesn't actually do anything, but any hardcore gamer or unix user would be well advised to stay away from these.
(If I am not mistaken, I believe the new Microsoft "tilt-wheel" suffers from the same problem...)
In terms of precision, the microsoft and logitech optical mice are basically equivalent. The/cordless/ mice from either company suffer some defficiencies compared to the corded versions, however. In order to save power, the cordless mice all have a much lower sampling rate (not sure about the Logitech one with the recharging dock... In theory it wouldn't need to conserve power as much as other cordless mice, but I haven't tried it, so I can't comment on it specifically, but this is true of all the other Logitech cordless mice). The result is that if you whip the mouse across the desk too quickly, it will get confused and your cursor will do wonky things.
Again, not so much an issue for a non-gamer, but I find in most first person shooters that, with a cordless mouse, I can't set the sensitivity where I want it. If it's low enough that I can aim reliably, then when someone shoots me in the back and I try and turn around, I end up looking at the sky, or my feet, facing some random direction.
Holy FSCK! I just tried to run FS2004. I haven't played in a few months, but today it wouldn't run, even with clonecd not running. I tried everything, and in order to get it going, I had to uninstalled CloneCD. The game WILL NOT PLAY with CloneCD on the hard drive, even if CloneCD tray is not running.
Somehow FS2004 has updated it's own copy protection, or else some other application has installed some kind of safedisc update on my machine. Ouch...
If 12 year olds and people who don't even have file sharing software installed are being targeted, then the "wosrt offenders" list must be pretty big.:)
Today, while doing an nmap of my machine to look for security faults, I
accidently mistyped my domain name (instead of my domain name, I accidently typed
"klsdjhfskjdhfkjshdf.com") and got an nmap of sitefinder-idn.verisign.com:
$ nmap -P0 klsdjhfskjdhfkjshdf.com
Starting nmap V. 2.53 by fyodor@insecure.org ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) Interesting ports on sitefinder-idn.verisign.com (64.94.110.11): (The 1510 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed) Port State Service 23/tcp filtered telnet 25/tcp open smtp 79/tcp filtered finger 80/tcp open http 135/tcp filtered loc-srv 136/tcp filtered profile 137/tcp filtered netbios-ns 138/tcp filtered netbios-dgm 139/tcp filtered netbios-ssn 161/tcp filtered snmp 162/tcp filtered snmptrap 514/tcp filtered shell 4444/tcp filtered krb524
Interesting that they have an open SMTP port. Any message sent to an
incorrect email address will end up in verisign's mailbox. Verisign is
intercepting your misaddressed email. Are they reading it?
The SMTP daemon running on the sitefinder machine appears to be a custom SMTP implementation:
$ telnet alskdjklajsdlkajsdkljds.com smtp Trying 64.94.110.11... Connected to alskdjklajsdlkajsdkljds.com. Escape character is '^]'. 220 sitefinder.verisign.com VeriSign mail rejector (Postfix)
The "VeriSign mail rejector" rejects any message sent to it with reason 550:
<mrbiggles@lasdkjalskdjlaksjd.com>: 64.94.110.1 1 does not like recipient. Remote host said: 550 <unknown[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]>: Client host rejected: The domain you are trying to send mail to does not exist. Giving up on 64.94.110.11.
It does this whether the domain you are trying to reach actually exists or not.
(Hey, at least it's not an open relay!)
If you have a band, and you sell your own music, the music industry takes a $0.77 cut from every CD-R you burn and sell. The music industry gets paid for ALL content up here, not just their own.
A bounce is a good thing, since it tells the sender of the virus "Hey, you've got a virus". This encourages the sender to remove the virus from their system, and results in a net reduction of network volume.
The problem, of course, is that many of these email worms forge the from. But... the virus filter takes the time to identify that there is a virus, and the filter knows that it's Sobig.F, so why can't the filter also be smart enough to not send a bounce FOR Sobig.F? This seems like it should be trivial to implement.
Ahh well... Speaking as someone who works at a data switch and router company, more network traffic is a good thing.:)
So if the RIAA was collecting information about what songs this young offender had on her machine, was the RIAA in violation of COPPA?
(Probably not, since I don't think the RIAA falls under the definition of "operator" under COPPA in this case, but it's still interesting to think about...)
I was just thinking about this the other day. This would be the "killer app" that would make me buy an iPod. I want an iPod dock built into my dash. Maybe a head unit consisting of a flip down display with a big 8-track-like recepticle for my iPod. Play tunes while I drive, using controls on my dash, just like a car stereo, then pop it out and carry it around while I'm at work.
One of my personal favorites is Liquid Nitrogen Marshmellows. Take standard large-size marshmellows (the same size you'd use to roast over a campfire), dump them one at a time in a big vat of liquid nitrogen, take them out with tongs (NOT you hand:), and put them on a plate. Once they're on the plate, you can pick them up with your bare hand and pop them in your mouth.
When you bite them, they shatter. It's a truely unique sensation.
(And no, I'm not kidding. The marshmellows have too low a specific heat to do your hand or mouth any damage).
It was Leonard Adleman (of RSA fame) who first proposed the idea of using DNA to perform simple computations in a 1994 paper entitled "Molecular computation of solutions to combinatorial problems" (you can find it here.
Adleman's DNA computer computed the answer to the Hamiltonian Path problem for a small graph. The Hamiltonian Path problem is solvable on a conventional computer, however it is an "NP-Complete" problem, which means that all known deterministic algorithims have a running time which is exponential with respect to the problem size.
Adleman's solution was to encode random paths through the graph in billions of DNA strands, then use custom engineered enzymes to eliminate those strands that were not a Hamiltonian path. Essenially, he simulated a non-deterministic machine through massive parallelism.
While this is increadibly clever, and very interesting, it isn't necissarily practical; at least, not for NP-complete problems. Adleman acheived linear execution time for an NP-complete problem, but he did so at the expense of requiring an exponential number of DNA strands with respect to his problem size. A small graph with only a few hundred nodes would require more strands of DNA than there are atoms in the universe.
This is not to say that DNA computers are of purely academic interest; Adleman's computer was merely a "proof of concept". I'm sure there exist problems in P which would benefit immensely from massively parallel computing. It's just a question of finding problems which are cost effective to implement.
Perhaps many of these "distributed" computing efforts that are underway now would better be served by a DNA computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, that wasn't terribly clear;
*I* finished watching season 2 at the same time as season 4 came to an end. Space (the Canadian equivalent to the Sci Fi channel, only with less money) was showing season 2 when Sci Fi was wrapping up season 4.
But yes, there were 4 seasons of farscape.
Watching the entire series is 100% worth the time. I had just finished the end of season 2 when the series was cancelled (we get Sci-Fi channel stuff a little slowly up here in Canada, since we don't get the Sci-Fi channel). I watched it through to the end, and I'm very glad I did.
You should keep in mind when I say this that I watch next to no television at all. Farscape was a truly unique series.
If I were Katie Jones, I'd setup Google AdWords on my front page, and perhaps a sponsored link to the katie.com book on Amazon, and use the proceeds to power a legal fund.
Suppose for a moment that I could buy eBooks of any of my favorite authors, on a web site, for a few dollars a book, and that every book came unencumbered by DRM, so I could read it on my big-screened home PC, or on my laptop in bed, or on my plam on the bus, or on my PC at work when I wish to be subversive, or have the book read to me by text-to-speech software on long drives to my girlfriend's parents' place, 6 hours away.
If this were the state of eBooks right now, I would be SOOOOO broke, and I'd have a lot of eBooks.
I've read books on my PC before; in fact, given my web-surfing habbits of late, I spend a great deal more time reading on my PC than I do anything in paper format, so obviously this isn't about high-contrast screens or portable readers.
The eBook industry is shooting itself in the foot, the same way the music industry is starting to; with DRM and copy protection. Only in eBook-land, DRM is pervasive, whereas with music, DRM is only seem in a handfull of albums, and is largely ineffective.
Another big sticking point for DRM; when I buy a hardcopy book, I can read it in all those places I mentioned above (except the text-to-speech bit...), but also I can stick it on a book-shelf, and read it again in 20 years. That's not necissarily the case with anything DRMed. I don't know if the company that sold me the book and/or reader will still be around, or if their software will still work 20 years down the road. I don't want to have to dig out my old pentium 5 from the basement just to read an old favorite.
What you need is an escrow service that works for both buyer and seller; the buyer sends money to the escrow service, the seller sends the item to the escrow service. The escrow service forwards both the cash and the item on to their respective parties. This would only be worthwhile for fairly big-ticket items, as you end up paying extra in shipping.
There are also two other big problems here; one is that everyone has to trust the escrow service ("Haha! I have your laptop AND your money!"), the second is that I know if I were going to set something like this up, I'd want good insurance to protect myself against fraud ("The laptop worked when the sender sent it, but didn't when I got it, obviously the escrow service broke it!"), and I'm just guessing here, but I doubt that would come cheap (in fact, I'm not sure it would be available at all... You may have to "self-insure" by charging high rates).
As I said, an interesting idea, but it would only work for high price items.
One critical area which wasn't mentioned is the problems involved with having a camera which affects your controls. For example, consider Onimusha, or Resident Evil, where pressing "up" makes your character run forward, vs. say Mario Sunshine where "up" makes your character run away from the camera.
:), and the second can have major problems.
The first style of control can be done very well (although Resident Evil is obviously NOT an example of this
The big problems with the second one come from poor automatic camera controls; if the camera swings wildly or suddenly, your character suddenly starts running off in a different direction. Mario64 suffered from this a great deal; you'd be running along a beam, and the camera would pan around you. In order to stay on the beam, you'd have to continuously and slowly rotate the stick to counter the camera movement. Of course you may argue that the designer did this intentionally to make "walking along a beam" more challenging. There are plenty of examples of similar platform games where similar problems impede game enjoyment.
The original 3D Spiderman game for the Dreamcast and PS1, and the Spiderman: The Movie game both tried to overcome this problem in a novel way; if you were pressing a direction, and the camera moved, spidy would just keep going in whatever direction he was going; the axes the controls operated on would not change until the button was released.
The problems here is that there are situations where you'd, say, climb up a wall pressing up, have the camera swing around to a below-view, then try and run away from something. You'd go from "up" to "down", but since the camera had changed, your character would stop moving forward for a moment, then keep on going. The worst areas where were spidy got up near a corner. You'd press in a direction, he'd move onto a new surface that you didn't want him to, the camera would swing around 90 degrees to show the new surface, you'd press a different direction, and spidy would move in what felt like some random direction, usually onto another surface, swinging the camera around again. It felt very clumsy, and I recall being extremely frustrated with that game on several occasions.
When your link goes down, tell 'em Nathan Zachary DOSed you!
The travelling salesmen problem is "Find the shortest path which visits every node in the network" (I.E: Find the shortest possible route to visit every city in a given set).
The "shortest path between two nodes" is definately in P, computable by Dijkstra's Shortest Path algorithm, for example.
I really don't understand this trend toward portable video players. I think the only rational explanation is clueless execs who see the profitability of portable audio players and want to jump on the bandwagon.
Audio is portable, video isn't. You can listen to a song while you bike, while you jog, while you're at work, while you're driving. You cannot (or should not) watch TV during any of these activities (save perhaps jogging on a treadmill - although a treadmill isn't exactly portable either).
Furthermore, no one craves the ultimate small-screen experience. With video, bigger is better.
Finally, I can load up my iPod with my favorite songs, and listen to them all day. I cannot do this with video; most people have no problem listening to the same song a few times a week, or even a few times a day. Few people watch the same TV episode more than once a year.
Now, if you had a media player that had all the featuers of your competitor's music player, at the same price as that music player, I'd buy your media player, 'cause hey, you never know when you'll need to watch T'Pol getting busy in that decontamination chamber, but sicne the manufacturing cost of the video player is so much higher, this is extremely unlikely.
A virus writer creates a computer virus which causes a minor inconvenience for a relatively large number of people (and a major inconvenience for a few system administrators). Keep in mind that these people are the people who open up a word document called "I love you".
A murderer kills someone. He ends their life, forever. They will no longer feel happiness, or sadness, or laugh, or click on "I love you" attachments". A murderer devastates the lives of the countless people who are friends and family of their victim.
These two acts are not comparable. An "equivalent punishment", be it captial (which I'm opposed to in either crime) or some other, only makes sense if you have a greatly over-inflated view of the "value" of economics.
Was I the only one who instantly thought of the scene where Leia kisses him when they read that?
Well, first off, there's nothing to stop you doing this now. You can just download all the patches individually and burn them to a CD. But what's the problem with this?
The short; this just means you'll be distributing virii by sneakernet. (Which is, admittedly, much slower than the Internet, but none the less...)
You know, back before we had this newfangled "interweeb", we still had virii and worms. They were passed around on corperate networks, from networks to other machines and networks by floppy disk, and also they were sometimes distributed on BBSs with sloppy sysadmins.
A "sharable" disk means that, instead of going through the effort of downloading those hundreads of megs of patches, I can just go copy a friend's disk. A copy of a "friend or an aquaintence"'s disk, however, is not a copy from a trusted source. Where did they get the disk from anyways? Who did they copy it from? It would strike me as very easy to craft a disc which would install a few intentionally malformed patches.
There are a couple of solutions to this problem. You could, for example, make your machine compare a the cryptographic hash of each patch against a known cryptographic hash. In order to get the known hash, however, you'd have to connect to that ol' public network again, with an unprotected machine. Since this functionality does not exist in current versions of Windows, you would also need some kind of initial patch from Microsoft to pull this off.
Another fix would be to cryptographically sign everything with a public key cryptosystem. This works great, so long as noone breaks your cryptosystem and/or finds the private key. Again, the functionality doesn't exist in today's implementations of Windows, so you still need another initial patch. (At least, as far as I know... I suppose XP might have signed updates; I've never tried to forge one.) This might be promising for future versions of windows. Microsoft has already bet your system security on a public key system with signed .NET objects, so this isn't so bad.
Both of these can easily be circumvented by a "sharable CD" that uses autorun to install nasty things before you install any patches at all. Of course, autorun is another feature of windows with questionable security.
In the end, the public network isn't really such a bad tool for delivering patches. Microsoft's implementation could be improved upon; upon installation of a "fresh" copy of XP, for example, the install could connect to the net and download all required patches prior to opening any ports on the system. (You don't need RPC to download patches, afterall). This is, more or less, the idea behind having the personal firewall enabled by default (only that's a little more kludgey).
Does my toaster qualify as prior art? It's from the 70s, but it's smart enough to "start a process" (I.E. toasting) whenever I insert bread. My toaster is a fancy one (well, by 1970s standards), where I don't have to press down a lever to start it toasting.
I suppose the question is, does bread qualify as a storage media?
Fortunately my toaster toasts floppies and CDs equally well (although they are not nearly as tasty).
The problem with the latest batch of Logitech Mice is that they all require a much larger activation force on the middle mouse button than on the left or right mouse buttons. You have too really press on that wheel to get it to click, by comparison. This would, admittedly, not be a big problem for most windows users, where the middle mouse button doesn't actually do anything, but any hardcore gamer or unix user would be well advised to stay away from these.
/cordless/ mice from either company suffer some defficiencies compared to the corded versions, however. In order to save power, the cordless mice all have a much lower sampling rate (not sure about the Logitech one with the recharging dock... In theory it wouldn't need to conserve power as much as other cordless mice, but I haven't tried it, so I can't comment on it specifically, but this is true of all the other Logitech cordless mice). The result is that if you whip the mouse across the desk too quickly, it will get confused and your cursor will do wonky things.
(If I am not mistaken, I believe the new Microsoft "tilt-wheel" suffers from the same problem...)
In terms of precision, the microsoft and logitech optical mice are basically equivalent. The
Again, not so much an issue for a non-gamer, but I find in most first person shooters that, with a cordless mouse, I can't set the sensitivity where I want it. If it's low enough that I can aim reliably, then when someone shoots me in the back and I try and turn around, I end up looking at the sky, or my feet, facing some random direction.
Holy FSCK! I just tried to run FS2004. I haven't played in a few months, but today it wouldn't run, even with clonecd not running. I tried everything, and in order to get it going, I had to uninstalled CloneCD. The game WILL NOT PLAY with CloneCD on the hard drive, even if CloneCD tray is not running.
Somehow FS2004 has updated it's own copy protection, or else some other application has installed some kind of safedisc update on my machine. Ouch...
Flight Simulator 2004 does something similar, right out of the box. If I have CloneCD tray running, FS2004 won't run, even with the CD in the drive.
Duplicating search terms has an interesting result:
candle truck
1-1 of about 101,000
candle candle truck truck
1-1 of about 82,200
candle candle candle truck truck truck
1-1 of about 73,700
candle candle candle candle truck truck truck truck
1-1 of about 68,600
Another interesting one is
candle candle truck
1-2 of about 89,200
If 12 year olds and people who don't even have file sharing software installed are being targeted, then the "wosrt offenders" list must be pretty big. :)
Today, while doing an nmap of my machine to look for security faults, I
accidently mistyped my domain name (instead of my domain name, I accidently typed
"klsdjhfskjdhfkjshdf.com") and got an nmap of sitefinder-idn.verisign.com:
$ nmap -P0 klsdjhfskjdhfkjshdf.com
Starting nmap V. 2.53 by fyodor@insecure.org ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ )
Interesting ports on sitefinder-idn.verisign.com (64.94.110.11):
(The 1510 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
Port State Service
23/tcp filtered telnet
25/tcp open smtp
79/tcp filtered finger
80/tcp open http
135/tcp filtered loc-srv
136/tcp filtered profile
137/tcp filtered netbios-ns
138/tcp filtered netbios-dgm
139/tcp filtered netbios-ssn
161/tcp filtered snmp
162/tcp filtered snmptrap
514/tcp filtered shell
4444/tcp filtered krb524
Interesting that they have an open SMTP port. Any message sent to an
incorrect email address will end up in verisign's mailbox. Verisign is
intercepting your misaddressed email. Are they reading it?
The SMTP daemon running on the sitefinder machine appears to be a custom
SMTP implementation:
$ telnet alskdjklajsdlkajsdkljds.com smtp
Trying 64.94.110.11...
Connected to alskdjklajsdlkajsdkljds.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 sitefinder.verisign.com VeriSign mail rejector (Postfix)
The "VeriSign mail rejector" rejects any message sent to it with reason 550:
<mrbiggles@lasdkjalskdjlaksjd.com>:
64.94.110.
Remote host said: 550 <unknown[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]>: Client host rejected: The domain you are trying to send mail to does not exist.
Giving up on 64.94.110.11.
It does this whether the domain you are trying to reach actually exists or not.
(Hey, at least it's not an open relay!)
If you have a band, and you sell your own music, the music industry takes a $0.77 cut from every CD-R you burn and sell. The music industry gets paid for ALL content up here, not just their own.
A bounce is a good thing, since it tells the sender of the virus "Hey, you've got a virus". This encourages the sender to remove the virus from their system, and results in a net reduction of network volume.
:)
The problem, of course, is that many of these email worms forge the from. But... the virus filter takes the time to identify that there is a virus, and the filter knows that it's Sobig.F, so why can't the filter also be smart enough to not send a bounce FOR Sobig.F? This seems like it should be trivial to implement.
Ahh well... Speaking as someone who works at a data switch and router company, more network traffic is a good thing.
So if the RIAA was collecting information about what songs this young offender had on her machine, was the RIAA in violation of COPPA?
(Probably not, since I don't think the RIAA falls under the definition of "operator" under COPPA in this case, but it's still interesting to think about...)
I was just thinking about this the other day. This would be the "killer app" that would make me buy an iPod. I want an iPod dock built into my dash. Maybe a head unit consisting of a flip down display with a big 8-track-like recepticle for my iPod. Play tunes while I drive, using controls on my dash, just like a car stereo, then pop it out and carry it around while I'm at work.
One of my personal favorites is Liquid Nitrogen Marshmellows. Take standard large-size marshmellows (the same size you'd use to roast over a campfire), dump them one at a time in a big vat of liquid nitrogen, take them out with tongs (NOT you hand :), and put them on a plate. Once they're on the plate, you can pick them up with your bare hand and pop them in your mouth.
When you bite them, they shatter. It's a truely unique sensation.
(And no, I'm not kidding. The marshmellows have too low a specific heat to do your hand or mouth any damage).
It was Leonard Adleman (of RSA fame) who first proposed the idea of using DNA to perform simple computations in a 1994 paper entitled "Molecular computation of solutions to combinatorial problems" (you can find it here.
Adleman's DNA computer computed the answer to the Hamiltonian Path problem for a small graph. The Hamiltonian Path problem is solvable on a conventional computer, however it is an "NP-Complete" problem, which means that all known deterministic algorithims have a running time which is exponential with respect to the problem size.
Adleman's solution was to encode random paths through the graph in billions of DNA strands, then use custom engineered enzymes to eliminate those strands that were not a Hamiltonian path. Essenially, he simulated a non-deterministic machine through massive parallelism.
While this is increadibly clever, and very interesting, it isn't necissarily practical; at least, not for NP-complete problems. Adleman acheived linear execution time for an NP-complete problem, but he did so at the expense of requiring an exponential number of DNA strands with respect to his problem size. A small graph with only a few hundred nodes would require more strands of DNA than there are atoms in the universe.
This is not to say that DNA computers are of purely academic interest; Adleman's computer was merely a "proof of concept". I'm sure there exist problems in P which would benefit immensely from massively parallel computing. It's just a question of finding problems which are cost effective to implement.
Perhaps many of these "distributed" computing efforts that are underway now would better be served by a DNA computer.