I have no firewall, or router. I'm running XP SP1. And I've never had a single problem (my virus scanner hasn't even had to do any work . . . and I have open shares, including an upload folder!).
By conventional logic, my box should be dead by now. Especially since I keep it on nearly 24/7, connected up to teh intarweb. Go ahead and say I'm just lucky, but I think that if you just have a computer reasonably configured, the over-the-top security that most people think is necessary . . . well, it isn't. I do update with security patches often, and that's about as far along as I go with conventional means of protection.
So what's the secret, then? I don't entirely know, I think it must be alot of little things combining. Partially, I think things aren't quite as horribly insecure as people think; just that when they are, and they often are by default, things go so horribly wrong that it colours one's perspective on the issue. The other thing is, I don't use any Microsoft products other than Windows itself, really. Third-party chat, Eudora for e-mail, Firefox and Opera for browsing, WordPerfect and OpenOffice for all the office-style needs, etc etc. True, that isn't at all what the original article is talking about, but I'm hardly the first to deviate from topic here.
As far as I can tell (and I'm wrong, but give me some leeway here), all SP2 did was break some things. Firstly, it caused my parent's anti-virus scanner to stop working. Yes, and it's no hopelessly obscure scanner, though I suppose most people haven't heard of Kaspersky Labs, even though in my tests it's far superior, in every way, to the "standard" options (Norton, McAfee, AVG). Then, once a worm (well, several) came and fucked up the computer (alas, I don't live in my parent's basement like the stereotypical nerd, so, being away from home, I had no idea the destruction that was being wrought on their brand-new Athlon64 system) I was unable to entirely fix it . . . oh, I got pretty close, but of course I couldn't fix it entirely, some core files were just gone. However, repairing from the XP cd (yes, it was even a legal copy!) wouldn't work because---aha!---it said "wrong version of windows, please insert the correct version" . . . with the way things had been fucked up, though, it seems impossible to uninstall SP2. So, the computer is working decently, but some things just won't be fixed, until I can get my hands on an SP2 install disk. Which will be illegal, I suppose, but you know, doing it the legal way doesn't seem to have worked that great anyways. With all my friends and their illegal versions of Win2k, though, they've been . . . okay, no, those have gotten pretty fucked up too, but I have some very careless friends, and Win2k is far from airtight (as with any version of windows, though by now you can put a box running Win95 on the net and have no fear . . . no one cares enough to try to attack it anymore! Trust me, I've tried. Obsolete is the way to go, if you're using windows!).
But anways, I could continue, but the bottom line is, look around, and you'll see alot of downsides to SP2. Yeah, there are some bonuses, but the bottom line is, my machine can currently run pretty much anything ever released for any version of windows, so I'm damn well keeping it SP1 until I actually have a reason to switch. I don't expect anything catastrophic to go wrong (for example, my own machine doesn't have a 64-bit processor, so it's okay as far as my Kaspersky AVP copy goes . . . ironic that SP1 works better with Athlon64s than SP2, innit?), but enough people have a hard enough time running older programs in XP, I don't want to press my luck. And my machine is secure to a seemingly absured level; I don't remember the last time I even picked up any malware, and never has it gotten anywhere other than "bam! deleted", so the "security improvements" in SP2 don't sway me one bit.
Perhaps I'm missing something? Perhaps SP2 is better than I've seen it to be? But judging from what I've experienced, there are little to no advantages that would actually matter to me. But, still, people, go ahead and try to convince me if you think I'm speaking like a raving lunatic.
I should say "built in filters", since they're just filters for decoding, nothing more (it'd be a bit pointless to include more in the program, especially since in the current state mplayerc.exe is compact enough to fit onto a floppy!)
I have to admit, at first I was quite pleased with VLC, but on further consideration I've grown to dislike it. Firstly, there's an annoying jagged diagonal line through the picture during large amounts of movement; I've noticed it on every windows system I've installed it on, and one person I gave it to wisely started using the copy of BSPlayer I had also given her instead. True, with VLC you don't have to mess around with codecs, it's all built in . . . but this is one of the downsides, in a way, since then when things do go wrong the user is both clueless and powerless.
A better solution is something like Media Player Classic, which is very simlilar to good ol' Windows Media Player Pre-Evil (and still exists as mplayer2.exe), but with countless little extra features. The interesting bit is that it has quite a few built-in codecs, but these can be disabled, overridden, and indeed quite extensively customized in the background. And it runs from the exe, no installation even necessary. So in sum, it's a simple solution for inexperienced people (the kind that VLC is most useful for, what with requiring no knowledge or extra installation on their part) but also a powerful one for those that really know what they're doing. And of course, there are quite a few other good players with their own little quirks and benefits (Sasami2k for example--oh, if only it was still being developed! It showed serious promise).
And really, that diagonal line in VLC just bugs the crap out of me (and, as noted, this is not just a quirk on my end, one of my friends picked up the annoyance for it all by herself).
Indeed, an example where an actual communist party was elected (if you people out there think that Stalin represented actual marxism/communism, then I'm not sure I can break through that ignorance) and was deposed by forces quite decidedly undemocratic. (Anyone sketchy on the facts can brush up on them somplace like wikipedia). The sad truth is, the factions and people that believed in Communism as an actual expression of what is best for the people, well, they were often put down by heavy-handed measures on the parts of their opponents. The ones that espoused the ideology but really were just in it for power, those were the successful ones (and when they weren't, afterwards they were taken care of by those that were; Trotsky actually believed in what the Soviets claimed to, but Stalin, in it only for himself and unencumbered by any ideology otherwise, easily ousted Trotsky).
Note, also, the times that communists have been cheated out of elections; in the Weimar Republic in germany, near the end, both the Nazis and the Communists were making significant gains in the elections. The Nazis spread fear about the Communists, burned down the Reichtag building and blamed it on communists, and just generally used underhanded methods to manipulate people into handing power over to them.
And sometimes communists (or movements that started out as communist, but later became just power hungry regimes, a common story with revolutions in general, the French Revolution being a shining example of good intentions gone bad) had no option of democratic elections, because there were none in the country in question. So the fact that few communists have been elected worldwide is not that much of a strike against them; the number of examples when fundamentally different systems were elected to power are few as is, it's hardly a show of superiority when the status quo is re-asserted.
Although, to go to the literal wording of the grandparent: name a communist that was elected in a real election. Well, that isn't very hard at all, there are even communists elected at this very moment around the world, maybe not as the ruling governments, but if you're looking just at communists that have been elected in real elections you don't have to look very far. I searched for about half a second and already came up with some evidence of communist activity and success in the democratic process.
Methinks the grandparent is perhaps a tad irrationally biased, to make such blanket statements.
or at least, there's an identical tune in Disney's Robin Hood, during the opening credits. That's what's always bugged me about the hamster dance, I mean, besides the obvious annoyances; the song it appears to copy the notes from is actually a decent song, but oh, how it destroys it.
You really can't defend such a blanket statement such as "just imposing another form of regulations on the market...never does it good". The industries in North America are regulated to hell, whether you realize it or not, but curiously, they haven't gone to hell . . . thing about the free market, it often encourages people and companies to benefit in the short term at the expense of others and of the long term (if you don't, you're beaten out by those who do). Just as laws are vital for our society at large to actually function, so too are some degree of regulations on the marketplace (especially nowadays, when it's far more than a traditional marketplace in literal meaning).
The idea is, the precedent has been set that modifying your own property, when it doesn't impact others, is not illegal; if modifying your game code impacts others, that's one thing (ie. if you take your modified code out on "the open road" and game online with it, potentially using it to cheat; much like speeding, though without the possible death part).
So yeah, maybe it's a bit against the DMCA . . . but, laws contradict eachother all the time nowadays, the idea here is to establish that by prior laws and values set, it shouldn't be illegal, thus, regardless of whether the exact literal wording of the DMCA ends up backing up the lawsuit or not, it shouldn't be illegal.
To say "it's a statement of fact" is to take it too far; and after all, there is such a thing as civil disobedience (even if, yes, it's illegal, so if we want to live in a black-and-white world we can just use that as an excuse to stop the argument now), and it's definitely true that some laws are stronger (more enforced, more respected, more likely to stay in their current forms) than others.
So in conclusion, I declare that your attempted analogy works against you!
I do vaugely recall, sometimes, yes, using WinAmp and it slightly skips when updating a file's ID tag . . . but only with Winamp 2.x, and then with the derived version 5.x's. With Winamp3, though, I've never noticed a single skip. Even with the ultra-slow Wasabi.player, that aspect seems fine.
To be honest, I would say that it's a very, very small percentage of people that are won over by tiny things like the different ways of using ID3 tags in iTunes or so forth, even if we accept those points (and they are somewhat questionable; how much iTunes falls under an "ease of use" description depends wildly on the person using it, some people (myself included, but don't hold that against me, fanboys out there) don't find iTunes all that, shall we say, unproblematic to use). People use it because it's a widely known alternative, and marketed (yes, even though it's free, don't deny that it's marketed) especially towards the less knowledgeable users . . . I know one person who uses it essentially because it happened to come with her computer. That's it. For some odd reason, Windows Media Player didn't, though she expressed her preference of that over what she has, she just doesn't know what else to use (which has me writhing in agony, let me tell you, since I'm not exactly a fan of the new versions of WMP either, it's the proverbial rock and a hard place).
My point is: iTunes is not successful because of any small little innovations that people might notice. It's because it's easily used by (and also relatively well known by, mainly due to the iPod) the kinds of users that would never spend their time noticing those small things and then sitting down thinking about them. So even if we concede iTunes any innovations, it's not those innovations that are propping it up so high nowadays.
Thoughout all of Grade 11, for example, because the school computer system used a really odd, external program to let the students change their novell login passwords, I accidentally made my account unopenable (I set it to a password that wasn't a valid password; it let me set it to that, I laughed at how outrageous it was that it let me do that, and then my smile turned upside down when I realized I had essentially broken my account). Actually, upon reflection that might not have been the problem; my sister, with a simularly screwy last name (I mean, no, my name here is my real name;)) has often found herself unable to log on in simular schooling situations.
But anyways, the lucky bit was that the login name was simply derived from the person's name, and then the password was "student" until they changed it. Many people didn't. So what I did was just make a big list in my student agenda (I used it exclusively for things like this, never for actually writing down homework that was due or useless things like that) of possible logins, often culled from the birthday list on the daily announcements (which were hung conveniently up in the library), and whenever I needed to go on one of the schools computers, I could just open up my list. Which came in handy, since I often did things that would have red-flagged me to the sometimes-watchful admins.
The most interesting stuff happened back in Junior High, though, when I found out a simple little way (long story short, "backspace") of accessing the wider store of data on the network. My friends and I found ways to easily share our personal folders with eachother, as well as hijack other peoples' when we needed more than the puny 5MB that the Junior High gave us as storage space.
Of course, the years after us mainly did childish stuff like steal mouse balls. Kids these days . . .;)
A good point, and one often overlooked; the assumption usually made is that US Laws == Universal Laws, and this is a dangerous (and seriously questionable) assumption.
" Its difficult to stop a speeding train, even if its heading for a wreck."
I suppose I can see why this was moderated "flamebait", but on the other hand, I don't think it should have, that's a bit unfair to the poster; it's an apt analogy, I think.
it's "thank goodness I live in Canada... where there aren't so many people so rabidly fundamental that they try anything, everything, even silly things like stickers to try to make children ignore evidence!"
Oh, so true. That's why I don't care much about trying to "encode small and save space" anymore; I've realized that I can easily max out the space no matter how much it is, like gas expanding to fill a container . . . no matter how big the container is, the gas will take up the entirety of it. Might as well keep things high enough quality that I have no regrets at all about what I can fit into the space, I figure. (not that I use FLAC most of the time . . . I generally go with just higher-setting Ogg-Vorbis, but I pounce on shared FLAC files when I see them . . . I have many from-the-soundboard concert recordings that I am quite grateful are in FLAC, at very least because of the idea now that I can think "this is as much of the quality as could ever have been preserved", and it's a comforting thought, that recordings like that can exist, in perpetuum, without degredation)
yeah, because the more curvature of space-time (ie. the more gravity) the more time dialates, so what seems to those close to the singularity to be a normal amount of time would be, from the view of those outside, to be an increasingly long amount of time. Once they're even all that close to the event horizon, and increasingly so as they go past it, though, it'd get quite hard to see much of anything from an outside point of view as to what's going on with those poor, doomed souls plummeting towards their now-inescapable end.
Quite a few ways, actually; redshifts, for one. Plus, the current indication that the universe is accelerating in its expansion would be an indication that, obviously, there aren't forces at work powerful enough to keep it from heading outwards indefinitely! Not entirely conclusive, I suppose, but the evidence just keeps mounting, the more you think about it . . . the idea that we're within a giant event horizon is oddly romantic, but really just wishful "that'd be kinda cool" thinking.
For us to be within the event horizon . . . well, the event horizon is not some magical boundry, it's just the point at which the gravitational pull is so intense that nothing can escape even under the most optimal conditions (ie. being light, basically). So for us to be within the event horizon, well, let's just say that we'd've noticed by now . . .
ah, apparently you beat me to it. That's pretty much the point; speaking of, that's why our sun won't be going supernova, right? My knowledge is a bit far in the past, now, but I remember learning at some point that the eventual fate that our Sun will endure, ie. swelling out into a red giant or something of that like, then shrinking down and simmering out its final cold years as a white dwarf, is entirely related to exactly that: it's a medium density star, thus it will last a rather average time, and end "not with a bang, but a whimper".
Ah, Sol, bastion of mediocrity. Without which, of course, conditions wouldn't've let us live so comfortably on this rock!
Just because they're huge in volume doesn't mean that they are huge in density, right? So it's quite possible for them to remain stars without collapsing.
Fair enough, though I would argue that it was more about the logical result of how things were (in the book, it is in the future, just in a completely indeterminate time in said future, emphasising the timelessness and inevitability of it all). Through the end result, the origins can be seen.
btw, good to hear that we're doing well with the help of our East Asian allies.
They've been doing so for awhile; SP2 temporarily broke it already, if my memory serves, but that was worked around. SP2 also did a few other things that seriously messed with some of the abilities of XP to do things with networking (no, I don't just mean the up-front changes like the new version of the firewall and all that, I mean more esoteric things, I just don't quite remember what at the moment). So it wouldn't surprise me if it was trying to kill Ethereal, not at all.
We forgive you: although, I have to admit I'm torn, myself, over the merits of the book. People can say to me "that's the greatest book ever!" and I'll heartily agree, but then people can say "bah, Orwell wrote many books that were better, and hey, for a future dystopia, how could one place 1984 over the much more realistic, pertinent, and original 'Brave New World'?" to which I heartily agree, and then realize I'm being self-contradictory.
Hmm. Odd how I can leave my family's A64 on for seemingly unlimited periods of time, showing almost constant use, and it's never crashed. Yup, it's sure unstable.....
Out of curiosity, what does it take, generally, to kill one? Can you just use a particularily strong magnet? I know they do it somehow at department stores, but I'm sketchy on how it works there, or how one would build a device to achieve a simlilar affect.
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I have no firewall, or router. I'm running XP SP1. And I've never had a single problem (my virus scanner hasn't even had to do any work . . . and I have open shares, including an upload folder!).
By conventional logic, my box should be dead by now. Especially since I keep it on nearly 24/7, connected up to teh intarweb. Go ahead and say I'm just lucky, but I think that if you just have a computer reasonably configured, the over-the-top security that most people think is necessary . . . well, it isn't. I do update with security patches often, and that's about as far along as I go with conventional means of protection.
So what's the secret, then? I don't entirely know, I think it must be alot of little things combining. Partially, I think things aren't quite as horribly insecure as people think; just that when they are, and they often are by default, things go so horribly wrong that it colours one's perspective on the issue. The other thing is, I don't use any Microsoft products other than Windows itself, really. Third-party chat, Eudora for e-mail, Firefox and Opera for browsing, WordPerfect and OpenOffice for all the office-style needs, etc etc. True, that isn't at all what the original article is talking about, but I'm hardly the first to deviate from topic here.
As far as I can tell (and I'm wrong, but give me some leeway here), all SP2 did was break some things. Firstly, it caused my parent's anti-virus scanner to stop working. Yes, and it's no hopelessly obscure scanner, though I suppose most people haven't heard of Kaspersky Labs, even though in my tests it's far superior, in every way, to the "standard" options (Norton, McAfee, AVG). Then, once a worm (well, several) came and fucked up the computer (alas, I don't live in my parent's basement like the stereotypical nerd, so, being away from home, I had no idea the destruction that was being wrought on their brand-new Athlon64 system) I was unable to entirely fix it . . . oh, I got pretty close, but of course I couldn't fix it entirely, some core files were just gone. However, repairing from the XP cd (yes, it was even a legal copy!) wouldn't work because---aha!---it said "wrong version of windows, please insert the correct version" . . . with the way things had been fucked up, though, it seems impossible to uninstall SP2. So, the computer is working decently, but some things just won't be fixed, until I can get my hands on an SP2 install disk. Which will be illegal, I suppose, but you know, doing it the legal way doesn't seem to have worked that great anyways. With all my friends and their illegal versions of Win2k, though, they've been . . . okay, no, those have gotten pretty fucked up too, but I have some very careless friends, and Win2k is far from airtight (as with any version of windows, though by now you can put a box running Win95 on the net and have no fear . . . no one cares enough to try to attack it anymore! Trust me, I've tried. Obsolete is the way to go, if you're using windows!).
But anways, I could continue, but the bottom line is, look around, and you'll see alot of downsides to SP2. Yeah, there are some bonuses, but the bottom line is, my machine can currently run pretty much anything ever released for any version of windows, so I'm damn well keeping it SP1 until I actually have a reason to switch. I don't expect anything catastrophic to go wrong (for example, my own machine doesn't have a 64-bit processor, so it's okay as far as my Kaspersky AVP copy goes . . . ironic that SP1 works better with Athlon64s than SP2, innit?), but enough people have a hard enough time running older programs in XP, I don't want to press my luck. And my machine is secure to a seemingly absured level; I don't remember the last time I even picked up any malware, and never has it gotten anywhere other than "bam! deleted", so the "security improvements" in SP2 don't sway me one bit.
Perhaps I'm missing something? Perhaps SP2 is better than I've seen it to be? But judging from what I've experienced, there are little to no advantages that would actually matter to me. But, still, people, go ahead and try to convince me if you think I'm speaking like a raving lunatic.
I should say "built in filters", since they're just filters for decoding, nothing more (it'd be a bit pointless to include more in the program, especially since in the current state mplayerc.exe is compact enough to fit onto a floppy!)
I have to admit, at first I was quite pleased with VLC, but on further consideration I've grown to dislike it. Firstly, there's an annoying jagged diagonal line through the picture during large amounts of movement; I've noticed it on every windows system I've installed it on, and one person I gave it to wisely started using the copy of BSPlayer I had also given her instead. True, with VLC you don't have to mess around with codecs, it's all built in . . . but this is one of the downsides, in a way, since then when things do go wrong the user is both clueless and powerless.
A better solution is something like Media Player Classic, which is very simlilar to good ol' Windows Media Player Pre-Evil (and still exists as mplayer2.exe), but with countless little extra features. The interesting bit is that it has quite a few built-in codecs, but these can be disabled, overridden, and indeed quite extensively customized in the background. And it runs from the exe, no installation even necessary. So in sum, it's a simple solution for inexperienced people (the kind that VLC is most useful for, what with requiring no knowledge or extra installation on their part) but also a powerful one for those that really know what they're doing. And of course, there are quite a few other good players with their own little quirks and benefits (Sasami2k for example--oh, if only it was still being developed! It showed serious promise).
And really, that diagonal line in VLC just bugs the crap out of me (and, as noted, this is not just a quirk on my end, one of my friends picked up the annoyance for it all by herself).
Indeed, an example where an actual communist party was elected (if you people out there think that Stalin represented actual marxism/communism, then I'm not sure I can break through that ignorance) and was deposed by forces quite decidedly undemocratic. (Anyone sketchy on the facts can brush up on them somplace like wikipedia). The sad truth is, the factions and people that believed in Communism as an actual expression of what is best for the people, well, they were often put down by heavy-handed measures on the parts of their opponents. The ones that espoused the ideology but really were just in it for power, those were the successful ones (and when they weren't, afterwards they were taken care of by those that were; Trotsky actually believed in what the Soviets claimed to, but Stalin, in it only for himself and unencumbered by any ideology otherwise, easily ousted Trotsky).
Note, also, the times that communists have been cheated out of elections; in the Weimar Republic in germany, near the end, both the Nazis and the Communists were making significant gains in the elections. The Nazis spread fear about the Communists, burned down the Reichtag building and blamed it on communists, and just generally used underhanded methods to manipulate people into handing power over to them.
And sometimes communists (or movements that started out as communist, but later became just power hungry regimes, a common story with revolutions in general, the French Revolution being a shining example of good intentions gone bad) had no option of democratic elections, because there were none in the country in question. So the fact that few communists have been elected worldwide is not that much of a strike against them; the number of examples when fundamentally different systems were elected to power are few as is, it's hardly a show of superiority when the status quo is re-asserted.
Although, to go to the literal wording of the grandparent: name a communist that was elected in a real election. Well, that isn't very hard at all, there are even communists elected at this very moment around the world, maybe not as the ruling governments, but if you're looking just at communists that have been elected in real elections you don't have to look very far. I searched for about half a second and already came up with some evidence of communist activity and success in the democratic process.
Methinks the grandparent is perhaps a tad irrationally biased, to make such blanket statements.
or at least, there's an identical tune in Disney's Robin Hood, during the opening credits. That's what's always bugged me about the hamster dance, I mean, besides the obvious annoyances; the song it appears to copy the notes from is actually a decent song, but oh, how it destroys it.
You really can't defend such a blanket statement such as "just imposing another form of regulations on the market...never does it good". The industries in North America are regulated to hell, whether you realize it or not, but curiously, they haven't gone to hell . . . thing about the free market, it often encourages people and companies to benefit in the short term at the expense of others and of the long term (if you don't, you're beaten out by those who do). Just as laws are vital for our society at large to actually function, so too are some degree of regulations on the marketplace (especially nowadays, when it's far more than a traditional marketplace in literal meaning).
The idea is, the precedent has been set that modifying your own property, when it doesn't impact others, is not illegal; if modifying your game code impacts others, that's one thing (ie. if you take your modified code out on "the open road" and game online with it, potentially using it to cheat; much like speeding, though without the possible death part).
So yeah, maybe it's a bit against the DMCA . . . but, laws contradict eachother all the time nowadays, the idea here is to establish that by prior laws and values set, it shouldn't be illegal, thus, regardless of whether the exact literal wording of the DMCA ends up backing up the lawsuit or not, it shouldn't be illegal.
To say "it's a statement of fact" is to take it too far; and after all, there is such a thing as civil disobedience (even if, yes, it's illegal, so if we want to live in a black-and-white world we can just use that as an excuse to stop the argument now), and it's definitely true that some laws are stronger (more enforced, more respected, more likely to stay in their current forms) than others.
So in conclusion, I declare that your attempted analogy works against you!
I do vaugely recall, sometimes, yes, using WinAmp and it slightly skips when updating a file's ID tag . . . but only with Winamp 2.x, and then with the derived version 5.x's. With Winamp3, though, I've never noticed a single skip. Even with the ultra-slow Wasabi.player, that aspect seems fine.
To be honest, I would say that it's a very, very small percentage of people that are won over by tiny things like the different ways of using ID3 tags in iTunes or so forth, even if we accept those points (and they are somewhat questionable; how much iTunes falls under an "ease of use" description depends wildly on the person using it, some people (myself included, but don't hold that against me, fanboys out there) don't find iTunes all that, shall we say, unproblematic to use). People use it because it's a widely known alternative, and marketed (yes, even though it's free, don't deny that it's marketed) especially towards the less knowledgeable users . . . I know one person who uses it essentially because it happened to come with her computer. That's it. For some odd reason, Windows Media Player didn't, though she expressed her preference of that over what she has, she just doesn't know what else to use (which has me writhing in agony, let me tell you, since I'm not exactly a fan of the new versions of WMP either, it's the proverbial rock and a hard place).
My point is: iTunes is not successful because of any small little innovations that people might notice. It's because it's easily used by (and also relatively well known by, mainly due to the iPod) the kinds of users that would never spend their time noticing those small things and then sitting down thinking about them. So even if we concede iTunes any innovations, it's not those innovations that are propping it up so high nowadays.
Thoughout all of Grade 11, for example, because the school computer system used a really odd, external program to let the students change their novell login passwords, I accidentally made my account unopenable (I set it to a password that wasn't a valid password; it let me set it to that, I laughed at how outrageous it was that it let me do that, and then my smile turned upside down when I realized I had essentially broken my account). Actually, upon reflection that might not have been the problem; my sister, with a simularly screwy last name (I mean, no, my name here is my real name ;)) has often found herself unable to log on in simular schooling situations.
But anyways, the lucky bit was that the login name was simply derived from the person's name, and then the password was "student" until they changed it. Many people didn't. So what I did was just make a big list in my student agenda (I used it exclusively for things like this, never for actually writing down homework that was due or useless things like that) of possible logins, often culled from the birthday list on the daily announcements (which were hung conveniently up in the library), and whenever I needed to go on one of the schools computers, I could just open up my list. Which came in handy, since I often did things that would have red-flagged me to the sometimes-watchful admins.
The most interesting stuff happened back in Junior High, though, when I found out a simple little way (long story short, "backspace") of accessing the wider store of data on the network. My friends and I found ways to easily share our personal folders with eachother, as well as hijack other peoples' when we needed more than the puny 5MB that the Junior High gave us as storage space.
Of course, the years after us mainly did childish stuff like steal mouse balls. Kids these days . . . ;)
A good point, and one often overlooked; the assumption usually made is that US Laws == Universal Laws, and this is a dangerous (and seriously questionable) assumption.
" Its difficult to stop a speeding train, even if its heading for a wreck." I suppose I can see why this was moderated "flamebait", but on the other hand, I don't think it should have, that's a bit unfair to the poster; it's an apt analogy, I think.
it's "thank goodness I live in Canada ... where there aren't so many people so rabidly fundamental that they try anything, everything, even silly things like stickers to try to make children ignore evidence!"
Oh, so true. That's why I don't care much about trying to "encode small and save space" anymore; I've realized that I can easily max out the space no matter how much it is, like gas expanding to fill a container . . . no matter how big the container is, the gas will take up the entirety of it. Might as well keep things high enough quality that I have no regrets at all about what I can fit into the space, I figure. (not that I use FLAC most of the time . . . I generally go with just higher-setting Ogg-Vorbis, but I pounce on shared FLAC files when I see them . . . I have many from-the-soundboard concert recordings that I am quite grateful are in FLAC, at very least because of the idea now that I can think "this is as much of the quality as could ever have been preserved", and it's a comforting thought, that recordings like that can exist, in perpetuum, without degredation)
yeah, because the more curvature of space-time (ie. the more gravity) the more time dialates, so what seems to those close to the singularity to be a normal amount of time would be, from the view of those outside, to be an increasingly long amount of time. Once they're even all that close to the event horizon, and increasingly so as they go past it, though, it'd get quite hard to see much of anything from an outside point of view as to what's going on with those poor, doomed souls plummeting towards their now-inescapable end.
Quite a few ways, actually; redshifts, for one. Plus, the current indication that the universe is accelerating in its expansion would be an indication that, obviously, there aren't forces at work powerful enough to keep it from heading outwards indefinitely! Not entirely conclusive, I suppose, but the evidence just keeps mounting, the more you think about it . . . the idea that we're within a giant event horizon is oddly romantic, but really just wishful "that'd be kinda cool" thinking.
It would be from the perspective of those inside, I would suppose, seeing as others wouldn't be able to see it anyways!
For us to be within the event horizon . . . well, the event horizon is not some magical boundry, it's just the point at which the gravitational pull is so intense that nothing can escape even under the most optimal conditions (ie. being light, basically). So for us to be within the event horizon, well, let's just say that we'd've noticed by now . . .
ah, apparently you beat me to it. That's pretty much the point; speaking of, that's why our sun won't be going supernova, right? My knowledge is a bit far in the past, now, but I remember learning at some point that the eventual fate that our Sun will endure, ie. swelling out into a red giant or something of that like, then shrinking down and simmering out its final cold years as a white dwarf, is entirely related to exactly that: it's a medium density star, thus it will last a rather average time, and end "not with a bang, but a whimper".
Ah, Sol, bastion of mediocrity. Without which, of course, conditions wouldn't've let us live so comfortably on this rock!
Just because they're huge in volume doesn't mean that they are huge in density, right? So it's quite possible for them to remain stars without collapsing.
Fair enough, though I would argue that it was more about the logical result of how things were (in the book, it is in the future, just in a completely indeterminate time in said future, emphasising the timelessness and inevitability of it all). Through the end result, the origins can be seen.
btw, good to hear that we're doing well with the help of our East Asian allies.
They've been doing so for awhile; SP2 temporarily broke it already, if my memory serves, but that was worked around. SP2 also did a few other things that seriously messed with some of the abilities of XP to do things with networking (no, I don't just mean the up-front changes like the new version of the firewall and all that, I mean more esoteric things, I just don't quite remember what at the moment). So it wouldn't surprise me if it was trying to kill Ethereal, not at all.
We forgive you: although, I have to admit I'm torn, myself, over the merits of the book. People can say to me "that's the greatest book ever!" and I'll heartily agree, but then people can say "bah, Orwell wrote many books that were better, and hey, for a future dystopia, how could one place 1984 over the much more realistic, pertinent, and original 'Brave New World'?" to which I heartily agree, and then realize I'm being self-contradictory.
Hmm. Odd how I can leave my family's A64 on for seemingly unlimited periods of time, showing almost constant use, and it's never crashed. Yup, it's sure unstable.....
Out of curiosity, what does it take, generally, to kill one? Can you just use a particularily strong magnet? I know they do it somehow at department stores, but I'm sketchy on how it works there, or how one would build a device to achieve a simlilar affect.