I wonder what would have happen if the Romans tried to fix the mini ice age? Probably not much since they didn't have the technology or the population to do much. But if they had have, wouldn't it have made global warming much worse now?
Hmmph. I can see I need to give up my non agricultural job and anything invented in the last couple of hundred years but I was under the impression that humans have been making beer for several thousand years. So at least I'd have that. Seems not.
What do you mean by "such a hack"? In windows the application sends samples to the audio driver. With a USB sound card the audio driver can just allocate the correct amount of USB bandwidth for audio and then stream the samples out to the soundcard. That can just convert digital to analogue. It seems like a great idea to me, especially as the D to A converter in an external soundcard is very easy to shield from noise. And they work on laptops too. And CD quality audio is not too bandwidth intensive - only 44.1*(16bit/8)*2 channels=176K/sec. Given USB 2.0 bus bandwidth is ~60MB/sec that's not much. Even 5.1 at a hugher sample rate and bit depth should be streamable without problems because of the way ISO transfers work with pre allocated bandwidth. Once Wireless USB takes off you could even stream audio from your laptop to your hifi.
Ok this assumes that the soundcard supports the format the application asked for, otherwise someone does sample rate conversion, but that's no biggies. You can spend a lot of money and get a card that supports every rate under the sun or spend a little and get one that supports a few and relies on rate conversion.
I think it's a great idea. There's even an USB audio device class so you don't need to use a driver written by the vendor, juse use the one bundled with the OS. You can make microphones and telephones too and plug them in and they will work.
At University I had a friend who was an audiophile. One day he came in looking very pissed off. I asked him why and he ranted that one of his female flatmates female friends had told him he was "the sort of man who stops having sex so he could turn over the record".
All those complex arguments I tried to use to convince him he was wrong and that music really does sound better on a decent quality CD player than a vastly more expensive record player were so utterly outmatched by those few words.
You know if you'd have offered to swap your Indian passport for either then you would have won. When I saw you username, I feared checkmate...
Take Fox news for instance: Delibrately calling Obama as osama, The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth incident... and these are just samples where i wish the ruthlessly effective libel law of EU applied in US. Imagine the SBVT campaigners for bush being arrested, handcuffed and convicted to 3 months in prison. Or Fox news CEO being convicted of Libel and forced to resign and pay huge compensations. Or the bald idiot who exposed the CIA agent being forced to serve 18 yrs in prison.... At least in England which is the epitome of strong libel laws none of the examples you quoted would apply. Politicians generally don't sue journalists for publishing lies about them. A quick look at the English tabloids, particularly the ones owned by the people that own Fox news would tell you that. I suppose Jeffrey Archer is an example of a politician suing a newspaper, but it's not a very good case for libel laws. Since he was later found guilty of perjury during the case and sent to prison
In Singapore, English style libel laws have been used by the perpetual governing party to silence the opposition. In the cases you cite, the equivalent would have been Kerry or Obama being sued for libelling Bush because they got one fact wrong in an otherwise scrupulously truthful speech.
It's the same in Zimbabwe - the ruling party has used libel like laws to crush its critics.
Imagine the SBVT campaigners for bush being arrested, handcuffed and convicted to 3 months in prison. Or Fox news CEO being convicted of Libel and forced to resign and pay huge compensations. Or the bald idiot who exposed the CIA agent being forced to serve 18 yrs in prison.... I think you're a thug quite frankly. You wish that draconian and antidemocratic laws be implemented so you can use them against your political enemies but you don't have the insight to realise that if those powers existed they would use them against you and your political friends. Especially given that the people in power are currently your enemies.
The grass is always greener on the other side I suppose. And libel/privacy laws don't seem such a good idea when you see the downside of them. Neither does criminalizing people like David Irving.
No, Richard Dawkins is the one true prophet and we will roast the theists in the flames of derision on the internet;-)
Actually the wittiest version of an athiest shahadah is James Watson's "DNA is God and RNA is his prophet".
I dont know how to put it as pithily as that but it seems to me that most of the attributes of a Judeo Christan good apart from consciousness fit quite well with evolution. Omnipotent, omnipresent and Omniscient? Well it acts on every organism with herditity and improves its ability to reproduce. Evolved organisms seem to exploit every physical effect humans understand and probably all the ones we don't. And if you are omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient, how conscious can you be? Consciousness to me implies that you constantly learn and change, and that implies that you are not all of the three Os.
Actually MLK was pretty much selfish and manipulative in his relations with women from what I've read. He was no Gandhi. Then again huge numbers of people died following Partition in India which Gandhi was reponsible for and very few people died because of MLK. You can sort of see why too. MLK was essentially a pragmatist and knew the best deal he could get for his supporters and how to get it with minimal trouble. Gandhi while very good was completely unwordly.
So it's simplistic to say that good people do good things and bad people to bad things. Some people have even argued that it's good for politicians to be interested in sex and money because it makes causes them to be more cautious about what they can achieve for fear of losing either.
If someone proxies the bank and tries to make you sign for a different transaction, it should be possible for the bank to detect this. Hmm, shit. No it's not. You could enter "transfer 10 pounds to account 1" into the proxy. And the proxy could enter "transfer 1000000 into account 666". Then the bank would generate the two numbers, and send them to the proxy would send them to you to be signed. You enter your pin and the two numbers into the digipass and it would generate a signature. You'd enter it into the proxy and it would say "ok, transferred 10 pounds to account 1" and the proxy would enter it into the bank which would say "ok, transferred 1000000 into 666".
The problem is that the amount and destination account should be visible to the user, not both hashed into a pair of opaque 4 digit numbers.
On the other hand if you transfer money outside Sweden you get a letter to confirm it. So I guess you could always call them and tell them if you'd been proxied. And https does help too, since on a decent browser you'd get a warning that the site certificate didn't match SE banken.
And it still seems better than the systems used by other banks, e.g. a hardtoken where you just press a button to get a login password. And that in turn is better than just entering a username and passeword into a https page.
It stil makes me wonder why they don't make it foolproof though, it seems like it's so close.
SE Banken in Sweden gives you a digipass, a little gizmo that looks like a keychain pocket calculator. To use it you enter a pin and two 4 digit numbers generated by the bank website. The digipass then hashes them to generate a four digit number which you enter to login and then to authorise each transaction.
Which may not be perfect, but I think it's pretty good. You need your pin and the hardtoken to do anything. https should take care of man in the middle attacks, but the hardtoken should help - the numbers they send you could be a hash of the time, amount, destination bank code and some random numbers. If someone proxies the bank and tries to make you sign for a different transaction, it should be possible for the bank to detect this.
I think these cost a few dollars, much less than the RSA token. And obvously a keylogger on the PC doesn't let the attacker to anything useful, so long as the signing keys in the device are not compromised.
You know, the man starred in over 100 movies, won an Academy Award, was the longest serving president of the Screen Actors Guild, and marched with Martin Luther King on Washington. But all people can do is make jokes about him being in the NRA. Very true.
It was sickening how Michael Moore smeared the NRA as being a renamed KKK in Bowling For Columbine and then ambushed Heston when he had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimers Disease.
Heston defied his friends to support civil rights in the 1960's and again to oppose gun control and most of the liberal consensus in the 1980's and that took guts, something a crowd pleaser like Moore will never understand. All Moore ever does is to confirm his audience's prejudices with slick, mendacious editing.
An interesting story to tell people if they consider outsourcing. Seems like factories are not a commodity after all. In this case the Hungarian one ended up costing them $2B.
Do you work for Big Oil by any chance? Look it's - simple CO2 causes global warming. Clearly the Venusians had a Republican government that allowed people to use air conditioners, private jets and cars and that caused the planet to die. This peer reviewed science shows everyone must be forced to either return to an Amist lifestyle or buy carbon credits and that will solve the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what would have happen if the Romans tried to fix the mini ice age? Probably not much since they didn't have the technology or the population to do much. But if they had have, wouldn't it have made global warming much worse now?
You know that they have to sell lighter fluid in the state alcohol monopoly in the Nordic countries, right?
Hmmph. I can see I need to give up my non agricultural job and anything invented in the last couple of hundred years but I was under the impression that humans have been making beer for several thousand years. So at least I'd have that. Seems not.
What do you mean by "such a hack"? In windows the application sends samples to the audio driver. With a USB sound card the audio driver can just allocate the correct amount of USB bandwidth for audio and then stream the samples out to the soundcard. That can just convert digital to analogue. It seems like a great idea to me, especially as the D to A converter in an external soundcard is very easy to shield from noise. And they work on laptops too. And CD quality audio is not too bandwidth intensive - only 44.1*(16bit/8)*2 channels=176K/sec. Given USB 2.0 bus bandwidth is ~60MB/sec that's not much. Even 5.1 at a hugher sample rate and bit depth should be streamable without problems because of the way ISO transfers work with pre allocated bandwidth. Once Wireless USB takes off you could even stream audio from your laptop to your hifi.
Ok this assumes that the soundcard supports the format the application asked for, otherwise someone does sample rate conversion, but that's no biggies. You can spend a lot of money and get a card that supports every rate under the sun or spend a little and get one that supports a few and relies on rate conversion.
I think it's a great idea. There's even an USB audio device class so you don't need to use a driver written by the vendor, juse use the one bundled with the OS. You can make microphones and telephones too and plug them in and they will work.
At University I had a friend who was an audiophile. One day he came in looking very pissed off. I asked him why and he ranted that one of his female flatmates female friends had told him he was "the sort of man who stops having sex so he could turn over the record".
All those complex arguments I tried to use to convince him he was wrong and that music really does sound better on a decent quality CD player than a vastly more expensive record player were so utterly outmatched by those few words.
and these are just samples where i wish the ruthlessly effective libel law of EU applied in US.
Imagine the SBVT campaigners for bush being arrested, handcuffed and convicted to 3 months in prison.
Or Fox news CEO being convicted of Libel and forced to resign and pay huge compensations.
Or the bald idiot who exposed the CIA agent being forced to serve 18 yrs in prison.... At least in England which is the epitome of strong libel laws none of the examples you quoted would apply. Politicians generally don't sue journalists for publishing lies about them. A quick look at the English tabloids, particularly the ones owned by the people that own Fox news would tell you that. I suppose Jeffrey Archer is an example of a politician suing a newspaper, but it's not a very good case for libel laws. Since he was later found guilty of perjury during the case and sent to prison
In Singapore, English style libel laws have been used by the perpetual governing party to silence the opposition. In the cases you cite, the equivalent would have been Kerry or Obama being sued for libelling Bush because they got one fact wrong in an otherwise scrupulously truthful speech.
It's the same in Zimbabwe - the ruling party has used libel like laws to crush its critics. Imagine the SBVT campaigners for bush being arrested, handcuffed and convicted to 3 months in prison.
Or Fox news CEO being convicted of Libel and forced to resign and pay huge compensations.
Or the bald idiot who exposed the CIA agent being forced to serve 18 yrs in prison.... I think you're a thug quite frankly. You wish that draconian and antidemocratic laws be implemented so you can use them against your political enemies but you don't have the insight to realise that if those powers existed they would use them against you and your political friends. Especially given that the people in power are currently your enemies.
The grass is always greener on the other side I suppose. And libel/privacy laws don't seem such a good idea when you see the downside of them. Neither does criminalizing people like David Irving.
Any Americans fancy a citizenship-swap?
That reminds me of a great Harrison Ford comment to George Lucas on the Star Wars script.
"You can type this shit, George, but you sure can't say it."
What about Alan Smithee?
At the very least the next boxing match should be less one sided. I'm bringing a baseball bat.
No, Richard Dawkins is the one true prophet and we will roast the theists in the flames of derision on the internet ;-)
Actually the wittiest version of an athiest shahadah is James Watson's "DNA is God and RNA is his prophet".
I dont know how to put it as pithily as that but it seems to me that most of the attributes of a Judeo Christan good apart from consciousness fit quite well with evolution. Omnipotent, omnipresent and Omniscient? Well it acts on every organism with herditity and improves its ability to reproduce. Evolved organisms seem to exploit every physical effect humans understand and probably all the ones we don't. And if you are omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient, how conscious can you be? Consciousness to me implies that you constantly learn and change, and that implies that you are not all of the three Os.
The things one has to do to get a +5... You could do this
You must be a hit with the valley girls.
Eww! You have sex with dead rabbits?
Don't tell him that.
Why not just kill the people who don't have the gene? That'll level the playing field.
Actually MLK was pretty much selfish and manipulative in his relations with women from what I've read. He was no Gandhi. Then again huge numbers of people died following Partition in India which Gandhi was reponsible for and very few people died because of MLK. You can sort of see why too. MLK was essentially a pragmatist and knew the best deal he could get for his supporters and how to get it with minimal trouble. Gandhi while very good was completely unwordly.
So it's simplistic to say that good people do good things and bad people to bad things. Some people have even argued that it's good for politicians to be interested in sex and money because it makes causes them to be more cautious about what they can achieve for fear of losing either.
The problem is that the amount and destination account should be visible to the user, not both hashed into a pair of opaque 4 digit numbers.
On the other hand if you transfer money outside Sweden you get a letter to confirm it. So I guess you could always call them and tell them if you'd been proxied. And https does help too, since on a decent browser you'd get a warning that the site certificate didn't match SE banken.
And it still seems better than the systems used by other banks, e.g. a hardtoken where you just press a button to get a login password. And that in turn is better than just entering a username and passeword into a https page.
It stil makes me wonder why they don't make it foolproof though, it seems like it's so close.
SE Banken in Sweden gives you a digipass, a little gizmo that looks like a keychain pocket calculator. To use it you enter a pin and two 4 digit numbers generated by the bank website. The digipass then hashes them to generate a four digit number which you enter to login and then to authorise each transaction.
Which may not be perfect, but I think it's pretty good. You need your pin and the hardtoken to do anything. https should take care of man in the middle attacks, but the hardtoken should help - the numbers they send you could be a hash of the time, amount, destination bank code and some random numbers. If someone proxies the bank and tries to make you sign for a different transaction, it should be possible for the bank to detect this.
I think these cost a few dollars, much less than the RSA token. And obvously a keylogger on the PC doesn't let the attacker to anything useful, so long as the signing keys in the device are not compromised.
I think in this case it should be "when al you have is the sniper rifle, everything looks like a skull"
It was sickening how Michael Moore smeared the NRA as being a renamed KKK in Bowling For Columbine and then ambushed Heston when he had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimers Disease.
Actually cartoon which implies KKK=NRA was shot in South Park style before an interview with the South Park creators, even though they didn't make the cartoon and definitely didn't agree with its message.
Heston defied his friends to support civil rights in the 1960's and again to oppose gun control and most of the liberal consensus in the 1980's and that took guts, something a crowd pleaser like Moore will never understand. All Moore ever does is to confirm his audience's prejudices with slick, mendacious editing.
It was the ones made in Hungary that were the problem
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,59943-page,1/article.html?tk=dn082901X
http://everything2.com/e2node/IBM%2520DeskStar
The ones made in Thailand IIRC were OK. So this one bad plant in Hungary caused IBM to sell it's hard drive business with a $2B loss.
An interesting story to tell people if they consider outsourcing. Seems like factories are not a commodity after all. In this case the Hungarian one ended up costing them $2B.
Do you work for Big Oil by any chance? Look it's - simple CO2 causes global warming. Clearly the Venusians had a Republican government that allowed people to use air conditioners, private jets and cars and that caused the planet to die. This peer reviewed science shows everyone must be forced to either return to an Amist lifestyle or buy carbon credits and that will solve the problem.
I always thought iAnal was some new Apple product, a CAD package for fashion designers or hairdressers perhaps.
It takes really takes tactlessness to put something that looks like a slave collar around the neck of an African American model.