Likely if not the manuals, they would never guess -who- they were. Plus, if they spent months (...as the government says, did they ever mention the location of school?) on learning, why take the manuals -in trunk-? Back seat, last-minute reading, okay. But books in trunk?
About the only explaination I can think of that keeps the government's hands somewhat clean (at least in the matter of WTC) and doesn't get cut by the Razor, is that still nobody has any idea who really did it, but admitting to it would be too much of disgrace, so a probable, convenient "guilty" was chosen, framed and executed.
"Obviously the terrorists are not attacking because they are all clinically mad, but because they are, in simplified terms, very, very angry." But that doesn't explain some awfully DUMB things they did. "errors" that could have compromised the whole plan and person with IQ of 60 would spot them. Either they had some hidden agenda (what?) behind them, or they were made purposedly to be spotted by everyone, as "clues" - not by the terrorists.
"Unless you are arguing that the organisations that claim credit for this don't exist at all?" Al Quaida never took credit for 9/11. Some hardly known organisation from Japan did, claiming it's revenge for Hiroshima. Some other bullshit and nonexistant organisations did as well. Al Quaida is usually proud to announce their attacks. Sure Bin Laden was happy and voiced it. But he never publically admitted it was him responsible for it.
"I don't know which clues you are referring to as "too obvious""
Videotape found in ruined house in Afghanistan. Why would they LEAVE it there? It's only, unique, a memento of great value, showing the moments of Bin Laden's triumph. There's no other things like this. Who would leaving it like that, in rubble of ruined house, for US Army to find? Agents would.
Pilot manuals in arabic, found in an abandonned car by the airport. So they were learning and repeating how to fly for the last moment. Then risked compromising the whole plan by leaving them in the car, where a common thief could pick them and then tip the police (even anonymously) about what goes on. They left the car like that, with all the possible clues (fingerprints, pieces of clothes, whatever) and didn't even bother to have it taken away. They didn't even bother to dump the manuals in the dumpster so that nobody gets the idea that was the car of the terrorists. License plates + traffic monitoring cameras could lead the Police back to their hideouts and contacts for more clues. Who would leave the car with the manuals? Agents would.
What do the classified security camera tapes contain to make them classified? Something that a joe average could spot, recognize and give a tip the FBI to catch the terrorists? Or something the government didn't like Joe Average to see?
"Furthermore, hiring killers with nothing to lose for ruthless deeds is probably not quite as easy as in the movies" I know a phone number. $200 for a joe average within 200km radius. VIPs and difficult hits respectively more. You can specify just normal hit, hit preceeded with serious pain or just some kind of temporary or permanent bodily harm without killing. Almost risk-free, people who do it leave the country within hours, and are never seen again. Sure this is Poland, not USA, you don't have former soviet republics across the border, plus finding a suicidal maniac is harder than hiring a common thug working for russian mafia. But if -I- know such a phone number, then how hard is it for, say, head of CIA to find the right people?
"Remember that the top men would have to gauge the consciences of their potential agents perfectly to be able to even approach them without risking their political careers."
Or keep them closely monitored afterwards. Not taking "no" for an answer. And picking people with far more than just remainder of their life to lose. ("dead man" with a family?)
"Misjudge one potential agent out of fifty" and they know too little to be of any help for the press. Just insert "schizophrenia" in their medical records and you're safe. Three-four beyond the "core team" would know the plane has to hit the tower - just the pilots, maybe two agents to perform misc duties, two-three CGI gurus preparing the movies. The rest just gets president-signed orders with "top-secret" stamp without explainations of reasons why to arrest some guy, why to confiscate some tapes, why to provide a car without leaving buyer's trail, to pass an investigation to specified CIA agents. You do tiny tasks without seeing the whole image and never realize what you did just helped removing inconvenient witness. Misjudge one agent of ten and you have to kill him. That's about it.
The problem is Occam's Razor makes two rather clean cuts here. Start from motives, proceed through proofs to hypothesis that could work to fulfill these motives while (by-)producing these proofs.
One cut - terrorists, the official version. Mad as a hatter, no need for much more, everything that could feel wrong can be explained by them being mad. Even clues that are TOO obvious (simply stink, nobody intelligent enough would leave THAT visible clues. But... they are mad.)
The other - government. Quite enough of motives are listed by "conspiracy theorists" and most of them quite likely (unlike methods conspiracy theorists "discover", motives they think of are usually quite viable.) People - the government has some methods to "press" people to do things, and good files to find ones that qualify. The "contractor" may be a fellon sentenced for death, with a family to sustain. Or an army officer from the times of cold war, supporter of nuclear attack on Iraq, with cancer. Many, many such. Of course finding them IS difficult and risky, but the small circle of people who planned this (Bush, Rumsfeld, maybe 3-4 more) had enough time and could hand out guidelines of seeking the right people without giving clues what they need them for. So you don't need to put 5000 people in Guantanamo. Just 5, out of 50 involved. About half of them die in the planes. A third got enough $$$ and threats to keep mouth shut. The rest still closely cooperates with the government, producing the tapes etc. The "Government" as a whole of course couldn't pull it out. But a small group of people on the top - 3-5 people dedicated to the idea - why not?
The validator is a great tool for finding bugs in your HTML. Missing closing tags, quotes, messed up parameters. But sometimes validator is overzealous, swallowing (and barfing) pieces of html contained within javascript, parts that are (correctly) commented out, usage of national characters in non-UTF8 non ISO-8859-1 documents, missing parameters that should be long put out of misery (type="text/javascript"), and generally panics and goes berserk in places where it should at most frown. So I use it as an advisory tool. Run the page through it,
* if it points out bugs, thank you, I fix them, * if it dislikes few unimportant arguable bugs, I fix them for bigger e-penis of the "compatibile" tag. * if it barfs a long list of bullshit (URLs containing & are defacto standard for ages now...) screw it.
explain why this is extremely unlikely is the "house of cards" analogy: such an elaborate conspiracy could be defeated by a single leak, and hundreds or thousands of people would have to be involved
Thousands? If, as government says, a SMALL group of terrorists pulled it out, why equally small group of government-related people couldn't? Only 10 or so of them would ever need to know the full set of the true motives behind each of the steps requiring any action from the rest (that's supposedly how Bin Laden did it...). From the rest, whoever could guess the truth, would be called (with big help of likes of you) a wacko conspiracy theorist, or silenced under the Patriot act (arrest without informing anyone, no right for lawyer or contact with outside world, held under arrest indefinitely - a person just vanishes and you can do nothing about it. Unconstitutional, but whoever seriously challenges its constitutionality can be swept under the carpet with the same set of tools.)
Plane piloting manuals in arabic left in abandonned car near the airport. Puhleez.
Crappy VHS and poor puns. I mean, what did you expect, the army promoting the enemy by creating a video that would encourage you to join them? The tape HAD to be crappy to keep people from joining Al Quaida!
Five years... till the computers finished rendering the tape and it can be released. Doctoring the tape with Bin Laden commenting on the attack took them much shorter:)
Today, I would recommend Postgres instead of Oracle to any corporation whose database isn't big enough to justify having a team of DBAs fully dedicated to it. And since Oracle can't compete with Postgres, it competes with file cabinets:) If the institution was still using paper files instead of computers, there's a good chance they will be clueless enough to move to Oracle instead of Postgres:)
He just says there's a huge piece of market for enterprise databases that is untapped because the databases are in paper form. Oracle is probably the strongest player in the traditional old enterprise database market - just the style of databases that was always managed as filing cabinets. Others are strong in different "edge" application of databases - www, scheduling, fora. Great most of MySQL installs is used to serve webpages, manage phpbb, image galleries online etc. You'll hardly ever see hospital holding patient records in MySQL, a banking firm doing the customers' accounting in it, local government filing the land deeds with such. That's the Oracle's primary market. And that's the market where still paper files rule. So Oracle doesn't want to compete with other electronic databases for odd applications like factory machine driving, choices table for autopilot or blog entries storage. It's for enterprises to manage the enterprise data - customers, employees, salaries, sales, storage. And this is where paper records rule and compete with Oracle.
Even in the "heavy" scenes like Kvatch? Well, the only way to survive and do something with sense in Bruma on 6600LE was to keep looking away from the allies:)
Will any of them give me more than 10 FPS during "Breaking Siege of Kvatch", "Battle for Bruma" and the final fight in Imperial City in Oblivion? That should be current benchmark method. All the budget cards I know of simply can't do it.
Oh, but you should still be able to use the controller with one hand! Imagine a game where the character is armed with a boomerang and you're supposed to put it in motion by performing the correct swing with the controller... And the fun if it slips off your hand and cracks against the wall.
Simply put, thin client is usable if the server allows many users to work at the same time. It's multi-user and multi-session. Multisession means sharing, protecting, restricting resources, protecting users from conflicts by accessing shared resources, allowing them to work without interruptions from other users working on the same system.
Multisession was present in UNIX from the beginning, 70's, 80's. Linux supported multisession nearly from the start. The system was designed to be multi-session from the beginning.
DOS was strictly single-user. Windows 95, 98 made first lame attempts at multi-user. WinNT provided something called terminal services but that was just multi-access to common shared resource. Win2K didn't really move ahead. WinXP tried the first pseudo-multisession, similar to win3.11 pseudo-multitasking - user switching.
The first real multisession, with great fanfares, came with XP Service Pack 2, allowing multiple users to conveniently, safely and without problems use the same machine simultaneously. In this case "multiple" meaning "two".
If you want to try out the Microsoft's bleeding edge technology, feel free to do so.
Read some developer comments about using these. The guy spent 20 minutes to make the arrow fly with Havoc. Then next 2 weeks to make it behave realistically after hitting the target. They spent about a year debugging scripts of Radiant AI because its results made the NPCs to do things that were just breaking the game. (two NPCs fighting each other to death over which one can take a bed to sleep. Or a guard leaving his post while on duty to hunt some food, the rest of the city guard going after the slacker to arrest him for desertion, citizens going rampage stealing and fighting because law enforcement is gone) In the end the AI scripts got so dumbed down to prevent this kind of "creativeness" from the side of the NPCs that in most cases it consists of going to fixed-choice bed, using predefined respawning food container to find food, then walking randomly in fixed radius around a marker, offering services.
Getting the purchased Radiant AI debugged and correctly (for certain values of "correctly") implemented took them several times as much resources as it took them to build the scripted behaviour of characters in Morrowind from scratch. Similarly Havoc, Facegen, Speedtree all costed more work to be implemented and tweaked to work properly than it took writing their (simple) counterparts in earlier games from scratch.
Slashdot Mirror
One already paid for, without refund, too?
> Can you point to even one case where Microsoft prosecuted an individual for modding his Xbox?
Yes, in their internal court. Sentence: Lifetime ban from the Live service.
> The hack only allows piracy. As Microsoft said, the rest of the security system isn't broken at all.
Luckily the hack also allows use of good old-fashioned backup/working copies. Less "omg my disk got scratched fuck help".
Yep. There was. A single bit, direction of speed vector. Same as in the original Murphy's case, accelerometer working backwards.
Likely if not the manuals, they would never guess -who- they were.
Plus, if they spent months (...as the government says, did they ever mention the location of school?) on learning, why take the manuals -in trunk-? Back seat, last-minute reading, okay. But books in trunk?
About the only explaination I can think of that keeps the government's hands somewhat clean (at least in the matter of WTC) and doesn't get cut by the Razor, is that still nobody has any idea who really did it, but admitting to it would be too much of disgrace, so a probable, convenient "guilty" was chosen, framed and executed.
"Obviously the terrorists are not attacking because they are all clinically mad, but because they are, in simplified terms, very, very angry."
But that doesn't explain some awfully DUMB things they did. "errors" that could have compromised the whole plan and person with IQ of 60 would spot them. Either they had some hidden agenda (what?) behind them, or they were made purposedly to be spotted by everyone, as "clues" - not by the terrorists.
"Unless you are arguing that the organisations that claim credit for this don't exist at all?"
Al Quaida never took credit for 9/11. Some hardly known organisation from Japan did, claiming it's revenge for Hiroshima. Some other bullshit and nonexistant organisations did as well. Al Quaida is usually proud to announce their attacks. Sure Bin Laden was happy and voiced it. But he never publically admitted it was him responsible for it.
"I don't know which clues you are referring to as "too obvious""
Videotape found in ruined house in Afghanistan. Why would they LEAVE it there? It's only, unique, a memento of great value, showing the moments of Bin Laden's triumph. There's no other things like this.
Who would leaving it like that, in rubble of ruined house, for US Army to find?
Agents would.
Pilot manuals in arabic, found in an abandonned car by the airport. So they were learning and repeating how to fly for the last moment. Then risked compromising the whole plan by leaving them in the car, where a common thief could pick them and then tip the police (even anonymously) about what goes on. They left the car like that, with all the possible clues (fingerprints, pieces of clothes, whatever) and didn't even bother to have it taken away. They didn't even bother to dump the manuals in the dumpster so that nobody gets the idea that was the car of the terrorists. License plates + traffic monitoring cameras could lead the Police back to their hideouts and contacts for more clues.
Who would leave the car with the manuals?
Agents would.
What do the classified security camera tapes contain to make them classified? Something that a joe average could spot, recognize and give a tip the FBI to catch the terrorists? Or something the government didn't like Joe Average to see?
"Furthermore, hiring killers with nothing to lose for ruthless deeds is probably not quite as easy as in the movies"
I know a phone number. $200 for a joe average within 200km radius. VIPs and difficult hits respectively more. You can specify just normal hit, hit preceeded with serious pain or just some kind of temporary or permanent bodily harm without killing. Almost risk-free, people who do it leave the country within hours, and are never seen again. Sure this is Poland, not USA, you don't have former soviet republics across the border, plus finding a suicidal maniac is harder than hiring a common thug working for russian mafia. But if -I- know such a phone number, then how hard is it for, say, head of CIA to find the right people?
"Remember that the top men would have to gauge the consciences of their potential agents perfectly to be able to even approach them without risking their political careers."
Or keep them closely monitored afterwards. Not taking "no" for an answer. And picking people with far more than just remainder of their life to lose. ("dead man" with a family?)
"Misjudge one potential agent out of fifty"
and they know too little to be of any help for the press. Just insert "schizophrenia" in their medical records and you're safe. Three-four beyond the "core team" would know the plane has to hit the tower - just the pilots, maybe two agents to perform misc duties, two-three CGI gurus preparing the movies. The rest just gets president-signed orders with "top-secret" stamp without explainations of reasons why to arrest some guy, why to confiscate some tapes, why to provide a car without leaving buyer's trail, to pass an investigation to specified CIA agents. You do tiny tasks without seeing the whole image and never realize what you did just helped removing inconvenient witness. Misjudge one agent of ten and you have to kill him. That's about it.
The problem is Occam's Razor makes two rather clean cuts here. Start from motives, proceed through proofs to hypothesis that could work to fulfill these motives while (by-)producing these proofs.
One cut - terrorists, the official version. Mad as a hatter, no need for much more, everything that could feel wrong can be explained by them being mad. Even clues that are TOO obvious (simply stink, nobody intelligent enough would leave THAT visible clues. But... they are mad.)
The other - government. Quite enough of motives are listed by "conspiracy theorists" and most of them quite likely (unlike methods conspiracy theorists "discover", motives they think of are usually quite viable.) People - the government has some methods to "press" people to do things, and good files to find ones that qualify. The "contractor" may be a fellon sentenced for death, with a family to sustain. Or an army officer from the times of cold war, supporter of nuclear attack on Iraq, with cancer. Many, many such. Of course finding them IS difficult and risky, but the small circle of people who planned this (Bush, Rumsfeld, maybe 3-4 more) had enough time and could hand out guidelines of seeking the right people without giving clues what they need them for. So you don't need to put 5000 people in Guantanamo. Just 5, out of 50 involved. About half of them die in the planes. A third got enough $$$ and threats to keep mouth shut. The rest still closely cooperates with the government, producing the tapes etc.
The "Government" as a whole of course couldn't pull it out. But a small group of people on the top - 3-5 people dedicated to the idea - why not?
The validator is a great tool for finding bugs in your HTML. Missing closing tags, quotes, messed up parameters. But sometimes validator is overzealous, swallowing (and barfing) pieces of html contained within javascript, parts that are (correctly) commented out, usage of national characters in non-UTF8 non ISO-8859-1 documents, missing parameters that should be long put out of misery (type="text/javascript"), and generally panics and goes berserk in places where it should at most frown.
So I use it as an advisory tool. Run the page through it,
* if it points out bugs, thank you, I fix them,
* if it dislikes few unimportant arguable bugs, I fix them for bigger e-penis of the "compatibile" tag.
* if it barfs a long list of bullshit (URLs containing & are defacto standard for ages now...) screw it.
explain why this is extremely unlikely is the "house of cards" analogy: such an elaborate conspiracy could be defeated by a single leak, and hundreds or thousands of people would have to be involved
Thousands?
If, as government says, a SMALL group of terrorists pulled it out, why equally small group of government-related people couldn't?
Only 10 or so of them would ever need to know the full set of the true motives behind each of the steps requiring any action from the rest (that's supposedly how Bin Laden did it...). From the rest, whoever could guess the truth, would be called (with big help of likes of you) a wacko conspiracy theorist, or silenced under the Patriot act (arrest without informing anyone, no right for lawyer or contact with outside world, held under arrest indefinitely - a person just vanishes and you can do nothing about it. Unconstitutional, but whoever seriously challenges its constitutionality can be swept under the carpet with the same set of tools.)
Plane piloting manuals in arabic left in abandonned car near the airport. Puhleez.
Crappy VHS and poor puns. I mean, what did you expect, the army promoting the enemy by creating a video that would encourage you to join them? The tape HAD to be crappy to keep people from joining Al Quaida!
Sorry, I stated wrong answer. It wasn't "no comment"...
"Mr Bush, are you an alien?"
"Sorry but this information is confidential."
It's times like this when I regret I have no mod points :)
But certainly if Bush states "No comment" on question whether he's an alien or not doesn't help the case.
Besides, Michael Jackson IS a zombie.
Five years... till the computers finished rendering the tape and it can be released. :)
Doctoring the tape with Bin Laden commenting on the attack took them much shorter
Today, I would recommend Postgres instead of Oracle to any corporation whose database isn't big enough to justify having a team of DBAs fully dedicated to it. :) If the institution was still using paper files instead of computers, there's a good chance they will be clueless enough to move to Oracle instead of Postgres :)
And since Oracle can't compete with Postgres, it competes with file cabinets
He just says there's a huge piece of market for enterprise databases that is untapped because the databases are in paper form.
Oracle is probably the strongest player in the traditional old enterprise database market - just the style of databases that was always managed as filing cabinets. Others are strong in different "edge" application of databases - www, scheduling, fora. Great most of MySQL installs is used to serve webpages, manage phpbb, image galleries online etc. You'll hardly ever see hospital holding patient records in MySQL, a banking firm doing the customers' accounting in it, local government filing the land deeds with such. That's the Oracle's primary market. And that's the market where still paper files rule. So Oracle doesn't want to compete with other electronic databases for odd applications like factory machine driving, choices table for autopilot or blog entries storage. It's for enterprises to manage the enterprise data - customers, employees, salaries, sales, storage. And this is where paper records rule and compete with Oracle.
1) Not each kernel coming from Microsoft is a Microkernel.
2) It wasn't a kernel, it was a chair.
I'd buy 360 it if Bethesda ever released Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul for it. Sorry, without it Oblivion is just a diablo-like hack&slash, not a RPG.
Even in the "heavy" scenes like Kvatch? :)
Well, the only way to survive and do something with sense in Bruma on 6600LE was to keep looking away from the allies
Will any of them give me more than 10 FPS during "Breaking Siege of Kvatch", "Battle for Bruma" and the final fight in Imperial City in Oblivion?
That should be current benchmark method. All the budget cards I know of simply can't do it.
Oh, but you should still be able to use the controller with one hand! Imagine a game where the character is armed with a boomerang and you're supposed to put it in motion by performing the correct swing with the controller...
And the fun if it slips off your hand and cracks against the wall.
Simply put, thin client is usable if the server allows many users to work at the same time. It's multi-user and multi-session. Multisession means sharing, protecting, restricting resources, protecting users from conflicts by accessing shared resources, allowing them to work without interruptions from other users working on the same system.
Multisession was present in UNIX from the beginning, 70's, 80's. Linux supported multisession nearly from the start. The system was designed to be multi-session from the beginning.
DOS was strictly single-user.
Windows 95, 98 made first lame attempts at multi-user. WinNT provided something called terminal services but that was just multi-access to common shared resource. Win2K didn't really move ahead. WinXP tried the first pseudo-multisession, similar to win3.11 pseudo-multitasking - user switching.
The first real multisession, with great fanfares, came with XP Service Pack 2, allowing multiple users to conveniently, safely and without problems use the same machine simultaneously. In this case "multiple" meaning "two".
If you want to try out the Microsoft's bleeding edge technology, feel free to do so.
Because it's based on a huge, monstrous monolithic microkernel.
yup. no kernel - no argument.
Read some developer comments about using these. The guy spent 20 minutes to make the arrow fly with Havoc. Then next 2 weeks to make it behave realistically after hitting the target. They spent about a year debugging scripts of Radiant AI because its results made the NPCs to do things that were just breaking the game. (two NPCs fighting each other to death over which one can take a bed to sleep. Or a guard leaving his post while on duty to hunt some food, the rest of the city guard going after the slacker to arrest him for desertion, citizens going rampage stealing and fighting because law enforcement is gone)
In the end the AI scripts got so dumbed down to prevent this kind of "creativeness" from the side of the NPCs that in most cases it consists of going to fixed-choice bed, using predefined respawning food container to find food, then walking randomly in fixed radius around a marker, offering services.
Getting the purchased Radiant AI debugged and correctly (for certain values of "correctly") implemented took them several times as much resources as it took them to build the scripted behaviour of characters in Morrowind from scratch. Similarly Havoc, Facegen, Speedtree all costed more work to be implemented and tweaked to work properly than it took writing their (simple) counterparts in earlier games from scratch.