I have a relative in the Fire Alarm business and he tells me about the restrictions on strobe lights on long corridors, they have to flash simultaneously because the random flashes could cause a seizure during a fire. I thought, "wow, that's right. I wonder if they actualy thought about it before hand, or if they wrote the regulation based on a real incident."
Anyway, having that on my mind, I was looking at some of the more garish web sites and thought to myself, "I wonder if someone would construct a site that could trigger an epileptic seizure. Well, now we know.
As for "Anonymous" be the same anti-scientology "Anonymous," I would bet with 99% confidence that if there is such an accusation, it is scientology that did it. We know "why" anonymous is going after scientology, whether you agree or disagree, they have a cause. The epilepsy incident has nothing to do with that cause, and furthermore undermines it. It only makes sense that since it undermines the cause of "anonymous," it was likely done by scientology since they are the ones with the actual motive.
Hey, many people can say that they need advance audio features in a special card, and that's cool and all, but the other 100 million users have tiny little speakers and now that laptops are outselling desktops, sound cards are moot. The cheap-ass sound chips that embedded in motherboards or build into laptops are what most all people are going to use.
Creative sucks, they always have, their drivers have sucked and their support sucks and this is just a little more public proof. If they were smart, (and they are not) they'd give the guy a grant and slap a disclaimer on his work. He is "selling" their product for them. He is allowing people to use their products who otherwise wouldn't or couldn't. Stopping such support just, again, shows how much they suck and how stupid they are.
The parallel printer port, sniff, obsolete? It was such a great I/O port. bi-directional 8 bits. Enough bits to create good control and multiplex signals. You could even trigger interrupts.
It really is a sad time that these ports are no longer on computers. USB is OK, I guess, but writing right to the port with in/out instructions is glorious!
'd say the main difference is that those stories didn't already sound outlandish and insane when they were written. Some guy walking over water and turning water into wine, not to mention being resurrected after death, that ain't so unbelievable to someone living about 2 millenia ago.
I would disagree with you 100%. In fact, those things are *more* believable today, and can in many ways be explained. Back then it was miraculous. Some alien planes locking an alien god into a mountain, told somewhere in the middle of the 20th century? Well, I didn't live back then, but I'd say the majority of halfway sane people would consider such a story a wee bit dumb, hard to believe and maybe call anyone really calling that some sensible 'faith' a moron.
Noah's ark wasn't as stupid and impossible? Burning bushes and parting seas? You are "used" to the absurdities in the bible, thus they do not see as crazy, but they are.
Whether you take the bible, the quran or the vedes, all of them contain messages how you should interact with each other, and those messages are usually positive. In the COS, you're already surrounded by "enemies" who you have to outperform.
In islam, the rules of cooperation are only for muslims, not people of other religions. scientology is no different.
I don't give a fuck if you believe in Xenu or Jesus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but the Church Scientology lies to and steals from it's 'believers', and does horrible psychological damages to people and their familes. No mainstream religion is remotely as corrupt and sadistic.
I guess you don't have much knowledge of the spanish inquisition. Nor the cooperation between Nazi germany and the pope. Nor the alliance and the catholic church and the french royalty. Nor the bloody 2000 year history of christianity.
There is no crime that you could accuse scientology that christianity has not done. All that is missing scientology is the child molesters.
And don't even get started on islam and sharia law. Yikes!
Seriously, if there is *anyone* here criticizing Scientology, but believing the quaran or the bible, you are hypocrites.
Scientology is no more ridiculous than christianity, islam, or judaism. OK, spaceships that look like DC3s, OK, that's weird, but no more so than virgin births, 5000 year old flat earth, talking snakes, noah's ark, or killing your first born.
We *already* live in a parallel computing environment. Almost every computer has a large number of processes and threads running simultaneously. This *is* parallelism.
Granted, yes, certain products could benefit by extreme threading, i.e. like PostgreSQL breaking the hierarchy of query steps into separate threads and running them in parallel, like doing a more exhaustive search for the query planner using multiple threads, and stuff like that, but there is always going to be the competition between performance for a single logical process vs the performance for the system as a whole.
Maybe when/if we get more cores than processes it makes sense, but right now we use all the cores we have. As long as your load average is non-zero, you may be able to benefit from more cores.
The point of all this is that the browser is insecure. OK, I grok that.
The *problem* is lazy programmers and "who gives a shit" product managers. I worked on a web system a few years ago and they wanted to do a lot of "cross site scripting" and I told them that was bad. They said, write an activeX control to do it. We'll leave the API undocumented and it will be safe. LOL.
Security breaches are the result of "product managers" who demand more than is safe on a web browser, software engineers that are too lazy to create a secure protocol, marketing weasels who set the deadlines too early to do it right, and customers who don't know any better.
Preface: At this point in time I have a 16 year old son and a 2 year old daughter.
So where/how do draw the line between on one hand "mere mischief", and on the other hand "harassment and intimidation"?
That is the hard part, isn't it? The fact that it is not easy should not mean that we should abandon it.
I'm annoyed each time I get into the elevator in my house and see the increasing amount of stickers and scribble on the walls.
I agree will Bill Maher, if you are not annoyed every day, you are not living in a free society. Seriously, as a child the world had to deal with your crap, now as an adult, it is only fair that you deal with the crap of other kids.
Oh, come on, it's not like I'm suggesting the death penalty for throwing a piece of gum on the ground. But I also don't think children, or adults, should be given a free ride to destroy or tamper with the property of others.
Children and adults are different. Their brains are different, the area where judgment is made doesn't fully develop until late teens, and in some cases early 20s. This is a medical fact. This punishment society we live in wastes years of young people's lives needlessly.
And when kids do things that cause harm to others, we should punish them so they learn their behavior was wrong. As a parent, I can say 100% that this sort of thinking is counter productive to raising a good child. Children know what is right and wrong already, and if they don't, explaining it clearly is usually enough. A child gets more out of encouragement than they do out of punishment. "Punishment" often does little good for those being punished, but gives those doing the punishing a sick dose of self satisfaction.
I feel certain that I would have stopped a lot earlier with those activities if I had been discovered and punished for them. That may very well be true, but what if you we convicted of a crime that had real jail time and a permanent record? Would your life be what it is today?
Again, you are being "absolutist" about this, and that is the problem. Your descriptions do not describe mere mischief, but harassment and intimidation. They *may be* acts described as vandalism, but they are more serious than what I'm talking about.
Putting a sticker on a street sign. Carving your name in a tree. Small mischievous things are far different than wholesale destruction.
This "zero tolerance" absolutist world we live in doesn't allow children to make mistakes or recover from bad judgment. One mistake and they want to bring the full force of law down on you.
Some transgressions should not be considered crime even though they share some similarity, and in some cases repercussions, as real crime. Kids have bad judgment, it is a fact and it is a flaw in human beings. We should seriously consider this during prosecution.
You've never broken the law? You've never exceeded the legally posted speed limit? You've never spit on the street? Tell me where you live and I bet I can find a few local ordinances you've broken.
I hear a lot of people make the analogy that computer breaches are like breaking and entering, and while some of the actions are, some are clearly not.
Mischief is the motivation of youth. Vandalism is a form of expression. We've all participated in it in some form, so everyone get off their high horse, and rather than "get tough on crime," its time to figure out the difference between kids having fun and serious criminals. It is also time to make computer systems in "the digital world" as resilient to mischief and vandalism as real physical buildings are in the real world.
We've all carved our names in a tree in a park. We've all stolen a pack of gum or something from a store. We've all done petty crimes when we were young. The difference in the digital world is that everything is so brittle and poorly built and the mischief that is expected from youth ends up costing companies [B|M]illions of dollars. In the classic movie, "War Games," a kid practically starts world war III, the analogy fits if you excuse the hyperbole.
From a societal point of view, we need to separate the smarts kids being mischievous from the criminals committing real harm, just like we do in the real world.
It's easy to see why an entity like RIAA should be forced to pay legal fees if it loses or drops its case, but making that award automatic would be even worse in the long run.
If a person sues a chemical company for polluting a lake, and the company gets off, it will wreck the person who tried to sue. A few million is corporate discovery costs and lawyers it too much to risk.
I think the relative difference in resources between the litigating entities should be considered. In the "david vs goliath" scenario, david should never be made to pay and goliath should be made to pay upon loss. That is hard to codify into law.
Hardware is fast these days... Sacrificing a few cycles for security isn't even noticeable.
I have been hearing that since the NEC V20 ran at 8MHZ. Every time someone says "computers are fast these days,... sacrificing a few cycles.." it is like saying 640K should be enough for anyone.
I'm not sure I'd say P.C. gaming is "dead" but I have my doubts about long term viability. As P.C. become even more connected to the outside world and more and more of your collateral exists in digital form on your P.C. The need for security and reliability increase even more. To circumvent the security in order to get good performance for games means that hackers can circumvent the security for their purposes as well.
A console who's sole purpose for existing is to play games doesn't need to (a) be a general purpose computing system and (b) contain anything particularly sensitive. It can dispense with operating system security. There is no way a P.C. can ignore the very real threat of intrusion, data theft, and risk of hijacking.
So, if a video card for your computer costs as much as a whole gaming system, what's the benefit of the video card? More over, if you have to jeopardize the security and integrity of your system to play games, is it worth it?
I can't say, I'm not a gamer and besides a little solitaire, I don't play games on my computer. So, in the abstract, I can't see the advantage of playing games on a computer when good/cheap consoles exist.
Make no mistake, the resurgence of *any* religion is the end of progress or people toward freedom. All religion is about control. All religion is about hate. All religion is about making the peasants suffer in quiet while they dream of a better after-life.
Anyone that believes in a "religion" that professes non-sense like heaven or an after-life without any supporting real and verifiable proof is an idiot. Sorry to you believers, but you are fools of the worst kind and your belief or your support of such beliefs supports those who are far more radical than yourselves.
Anyone who gives any money of any kind to a religious based charity is just as guilty as the religious terrorists themselves.
You may say this is harsh, you my think this a troll or intolerance, but anyone who has studied history or current events will be forced to admit that all money spent by religious charities or missionaries, regardless of the stated purpose, is done for the single purpose of expanding the influence of the religion. Conversion by the sword, the destruction of central american cultures by "christian missionaries," the push against science in education, the push of christian doctine into U.S. law, islamist censors, etc.
You are all guilty, so stop whining. Being tolerant of any religious doctrine in the public sector simply invites more abuse of human rights. There's no half way, you either reject religion outright or you become a subject of it.
All this rush to store hydrogen, why not find a way to extract it WITHOUT creating CO2. Currently all commercial processes for extracting hydrogen use fossil fuels to do so.
Maybe solar and/or wind will be used, but the efficiency is still low.
While I am an atheist, I like to think of "god" in references as an "abstract concept" rather than an actual entity. In doing so, many sayings, make some sense. This one for instance, always makes me laugh.
"If you want to know what god thinks of money, just look at those to whom he has given it."
Government bodies can take land by eminent domain when it is for the public good. Why can't they do that with IP? This whole thing stinks. Our democracy is a joke.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a relative in the Fire Alarm business and he tells me about the restrictions on strobe lights on long corridors, they have to flash simultaneously because the random flashes could cause a seizure during a fire. I thought, "wow, that's right. I wonder if they actualy thought about it before hand, or if they wrote the regulation based on a real incident."
Anyway, having that on my mind, I was looking at some of the more garish web sites and thought to myself, "I wonder if someone would construct a site that could trigger an epileptic seizure. Well, now we know.
As for "Anonymous" be the same anti-scientology "Anonymous," I would bet with 99% confidence that if there is such an accusation, it is scientology that did it. We know "why" anonymous is going after scientology, whether you agree or disagree, they have a cause. The epilepsy incident has nothing to do with that cause, and furthermore undermines it. It only makes sense that since it undermines the cause of "anonymous," it was likely done by scientology since they are the ones with the actual motive.
You synopsis is *exactly* what happened. It isn't paranoid it is fact.
Now, why would you buy *anything* from a vendor that disreputable and dishonest?
Hey, many people can say that they need advance audio features in a special card, and that's cool and all, but the other 100 million users have tiny little speakers and now that laptops are outselling desktops, sound cards are moot. The cheap-ass sound chips that embedded in motherboards or build into laptops are what most all people are going to use.
Creative sucks, they always have, their drivers have sucked and their support sucks and this is just a little more public proof. If they were smart, (and they are not) they'd give the guy a grant and slap a disclaimer on his work. He is "selling" their product for them. He is allowing people to use their products who otherwise wouldn't or couldn't. Stopping such support just, again, shows how much they suck and how stupid they are.
The parallel printer port, sniff, obsolete? It was such a great I/O port. bi-directional 8 bits. Enough bits to create good control and multiplex signals. You could even trigger interrupts.
It really is a sad time that these ports are no longer on computers. USB is OK, I guess, but writing right to the port with in/out instructions is glorious!
http://www.linuxpcrobot.org/?q=node/5
'd say the main difference is that those stories didn't already sound outlandish and insane when they were written. Some guy walking over water and turning water into wine, not to mention being resurrected after death, that ain't so unbelievable to someone living about 2 millenia ago.
I would disagree with you 100%. In fact, those things are *more* believable today, and can in many ways be explained. Back then it was miraculous.
Some alien planes locking an alien god into a mountain, told somewhere in the middle of the 20th century? Well, I didn't live back then, but I'd say the majority of halfway sane people would consider such a story a wee bit dumb, hard to believe and maybe call anyone really calling that some sensible 'faith' a moron.
Noah's ark wasn't as stupid and impossible? Burning bushes and parting seas? You are "used" to the absurdities in the bible, thus they do not see as crazy, but they are.
Whether you take the bible, the quran or the vedes, all of them contain messages how you should interact with each other, and those messages are usually positive. In the COS, you're already surrounded by "enemies" who you have to outperform.
In islam, the rules of cooperation are only for muslims, not people of other religions. scientology is no different.
I have a problem when he (and yes, this includes members of my own religion) uses coercion or threats or violence or elitism etc. to force his views.
A brief read about the spanish inquisition, the catholic missionaries, conversion of the sword, etc. etc.
Christianity is no better, and ways worse, than scientology.
Reject every religion or be subject to all of them.
What gets my goat is that you must pay to pray, so to speak.
Scientology is just a little more direct than the catholic church, but the motives are the same.
They won't ask for cash if you want to advance your knowledge of their belief system.
I think that is the best part of their belief system, it restricts the followers to a select group of quantifiable gullible.
I don't give a fuck if you believe in Xenu or Jesus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but the Church Scientology lies to and steals from it's 'believers', and does horrible psychological damages to people and their familes. No mainstream religion is remotely as corrupt and sadistic.
I guess you don't have much knowledge of the spanish inquisition. Nor the cooperation between Nazi germany and the pope. Nor the alliance and the catholic church and the french royalty. Nor the bloody 2000 year history of christianity.
There is no crime that you could accuse scientology that christianity has not done. All that is missing scientology is the child molesters.
And don't even get started on islam and sharia law. Yikes!
Seriously, if there is *anyone* here criticizing Scientology, but believing the quaran or the bible, you are hypocrites.
Scientology is no more ridiculous than christianity, islam, or judaism. OK, spaceships that look like DC3s, OK, that's weird, but no more so than virgin births, 5000 year old flat earth, talking snakes, noah's ark, or killing your first born.
We *already* live in a parallel computing environment. Almost every computer has a large number of processes and threads running simultaneously. This *is* parallelism.
Granted, yes, certain products could benefit by extreme threading, i.e. like PostgreSQL breaking the hierarchy of query steps into separate threads and running them in parallel, like doing a more exhaustive search for the query planner using multiple threads, and stuff like that, but there is always going to be the competition between performance for a single logical process vs the performance for the system as a whole.
Maybe when/if we get more cores than processes it makes sense, but right now we use all the cores we have. As long as your load average is non-zero, you may be able to benefit from more cores.
The point of all this is that the browser is insecure. OK, I grok that.
The *problem* is lazy programmers and "who gives a shit" product managers. I worked on a web system a few years ago and they wanted to do a lot of "cross site scripting" and I told them that was bad. They said, write an activeX control to do it. We'll leave the API undocumented and it will be safe. LOL.
Security breaches are the result of "product managers" who demand more than is safe on a web browser, software engineers that are too lazy to create a secure protocol, marketing weasels who set the deadlines too early to do it right, and customers who don't know any better.
Preface:
At this point in time I have a 16 year old son and a 2 year old daughter.
So where/how do draw the line between on one hand "mere mischief", and on the other hand "harassment and intimidation"?
That is the hard part, isn't it? The fact that it is not easy should not mean that we should abandon it.
I'm annoyed each time I get into the elevator in my house and see the increasing amount of stickers and scribble on the walls.
I agree will Bill Maher, if you are not annoyed every day, you are not living in a free society. Seriously, as a child the world had to deal with your crap, now as an adult, it is only fair that you deal with the crap of other kids.
Oh, come on, it's not like I'm suggesting the death penalty for throwing a piece of gum on the ground. But I also don't think children, or adults, should be given a free ride to destroy or tamper with the property of others.
Children and adults are different. Their brains are different, the area where judgment is made doesn't fully develop until late teens, and in some cases early 20s. This is a medical fact. This punishment society we live in wastes years of young people's lives needlessly.
And when kids do things that cause harm to others, we should punish them so they learn their behavior was wrong.
As a parent, I can say 100% that this sort of thinking is counter productive to raising a good child. Children know what is right and wrong already, and if they don't, explaining it clearly is usually enough. A child gets more out of encouragement than they do out of punishment. "Punishment" often does little good for those being punished, but gives those doing the punishing a sick dose of self satisfaction.
I feel certain that I would have stopped a lot earlier with those activities if I had been discovered and punished for them.
That may very well be true, but what if you we convicted of a crime that had real jail time and a permanent record? Would your life be what it is today?
Again, you are being "absolutist" about this, and that is the problem. Your descriptions do not describe mere mischief, but harassment and intimidation. They *may be* acts described as vandalism, but they are more serious than what I'm talking about.
Putting a sticker on a street sign. Carving your name in a tree. Small mischievous things are far different than wholesale destruction.
This "zero tolerance" absolutist world we live in doesn't allow children to make mistakes or recover from bad judgment. One mistake and they want to bring the full force of law down on you.
Some transgressions should not be considered crime even though they share some similarity, and in some cases repercussions, as real crime. Kids have bad judgment, it is a fact and it is a flaw in human beings. We should seriously consider this during prosecution.
You've never broken the law? You've never exceeded the legally posted speed limit? You've never spit on the street? Tell me where you live and I bet I can find a few local ordinances you've broken.
Don't lose the point by being pedantic.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Equating serious crime with mischief. Vandalism is by no means the violent act that rape is.
I hear a lot of people make the analogy that computer breaches are like breaking and entering, and while some of the actions are, some are clearly not.
Mischief is the motivation of youth. Vandalism is a form of expression. We've all participated in it in some form, so everyone get off their high horse, and rather than "get tough on crime," its time to figure out the difference between kids having fun and serious criminals. It is also time to make computer systems in "the digital world" as resilient to mischief and vandalism as real physical buildings are in the real world.
We've all carved our names in a tree in a park. We've all stolen a pack of gum or something from a store. We've all done petty crimes when we were young. The difference in the digital world is that everything is so brittle and poorly built and the mischief that is expected from youth ends up costing companies [B|M]illions of dollars. In the classic movie, "War Games," a kid practically starts world war III, the analogy fits if you excuse the hyperbole.
From a societal point of view, we need to separate the smarts kids being mischievous from the criminals committing real harm, just like we do in the real world.
It's easy to see why an entity like RIAA should be forced to pay legal fees if it loses or drops its case, but making that award automatic would be even worse in the long run.
If a person sues a chemical company for polluting a lake, and the company gets off, it will wreck the person who tried to sue. A few million is corporate discovery costs and lawyers it too much to risk.
I think the relative difference in resources between the litigating entities should be considered. In the "david vs goliath" scenario, david should never be made to pay and goliath should be made to pay upon loss. That is hard to codify into law.
Hardware is fast these days... Sacrificing a few cycles for security isn't even noticeable.
... sacrificing a few cycles.." it is like saying 640K should be enough for anyone.
I have been hearing that since the NEC V20 ran at 8MHZ. Every time someone says "computers are fast these days,
I'm not sure I'd say P.C. gaming is "dead" but I have my doubts about long term viability. As P.C. become even more connected to the outside world and more and more of your collateral exists in digital form on your P.C. The need for security and reliability increase even more. To circumvent the security in order to get good performance for games means that hackers can circumvent the security for their purposes as well.
A console who's sole purpose for existing is to play games doesn't need to (a) be a general purpose computing system and (b) contain anything particularly sensitive. It can dispense with operating system security. There is no way a P.C. can ignore the very real threat of intrusion, data theft, and risk of hijacking.
So, if a video card for your computer costs as much as a whole gaming system, what's the benefit of the video card? More over, if you have to jeopardize the security and integrity of your system to play games, is it worth it?
I can't say, I'm not a gamer and besides a little solitaire, I don't play games on my computer. So, in the abstract, I can't see the advantage of playing games on a computer when good/cheap consoles exist.
Make no mistake, the resurgence of *any* religion is the end of progress or people toward freedom. All religion is about control. All religion is about hate. All religion is about making the peasants suffer in quiet while they dream of a better after-life.
Anyone that believes in a "religion" that professes non-sense like heaven or an after-life without any supporting real and verifiable proof is an idiot. Sorry to you believers, but you are fools of the worst kind and your belief or your support of such beliefs supports those who are far more radical than yourselves.
Anyone who gives any money of any kind to a religious based charity is just as guilty as the religious terrorists themselves.
You may say this is harsh, you my think this a troll or intolerance, but anyone who has studied history or current events will be forced to admit that all money spent by religious charities or missionaries, regardless of the stated purpose, is done for the single purpose of expanding the influence of the religion. Conversion by the sword, the destruction of central american cultures by "christian missionaries," the push against science in education, the push of christian doctine into U.S. law, islamist censors, etc.
You are all guilty, so stop whining. Being tolerant of any religious doctrine in the public sector simply invites more abuse of human rights. There's no half way, you either reject religion outright or you become a subject of it.
I said "commercial" which I'm sure you accept also implies "viable."
All this rush to store hydrogen, why not find a way to extract it WITHOUT creating CO2. Currently all commercial processes for extracting hydrogen use fossil fuels to do so.
Maybe solar and/or wind will be used, but the efficiency is still low.
While I am an atheist, I like to think of "god" in references as an "abstract concept" rather than an actual entity. In doing so, many sayings, make some sense. This one for instance, always makes me laugh.
"If you want to know what god thinks of money, just look at those to whom he has given it."
My two favorite authors of all time.
Little known fact: Sir Arthur invented the geosynchronous satellite.
One of the most brilliant men alive and one of the few who understand both science and people.
Government bodies can take land by eminent domain when it is for the public good. Why can't they do that with IP?
This whole thing stinks. Our democracy is a joke.