What's the actual command grammar here? If it's just parsing a verb-noun command, it's not like "Infocom" but merely one of the many precursors or poseurs which also littered the landscape.
Infocom's parser handled a fairly diverse set of grammars for commands:
floyd, put the wrench in the cardboard box.
put all the goo, the interface card and the canteen under the table.
open the satchel then put the thing into it
Until it can handle such a diverse command set, I wouldn't try to suggest it's like Infocom games.
All of "Disney Classics" are just that-- classics that have been through Disney's machine.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? Pinocchio? Cinderella? Sleeping Beauty? Aladdin? The Sword and the Stone? Brer Rabbit? Dumbo? Jungle Book? They're all classic folktales from various cultures. Disney never claimed to create the concept, just the adaptation you see under their banner.
That's why the official titles are Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or Disney's The Little Mermaid. Same goes for Disney's Atlantis. They're adaptations of classic stories.
With each new medium (voice, tablets, scrolls, books, silent movies, talkies, animated movies, modern cinema and now computer-rendered movies), classic stories are told and retold and re-retold with the new medium's strengths or with a new angle to keep it fresh.
There are some legitimate causes for complaint if a new work draws too substantially or too unoriginally from an older work; Lion King, Mononoke, and Atlantis may suffer from being on the borderline of this issue. But to say that Disney isn't putting something original or fresh into any of their adaptations of cultural classics is a big stretch.
This has been going on far longer than Disney's corporate life, so why piss on Disney's parade? Oh, yeah, this is slashdot, where groupthink and corporate bashing is the norm. Where selling an adaptation of a public-domain concept is considered evil. Get over it.
No, the bad news is for IE users who think this will block DoubleClick.
The article states DoubleClick expects to be compliant with P3P before IE6 is released, which means IE6's defaults will allow DoubleClick cookies. Doncha think DoubleClick and Microsoft are gonna be talking about such business-model show-stoppers and finding ways to make each other happy? Users will still have to take individual opt-out actions to stop being tracked.
Even so, cookies are not the only way that people can be tracked. Any group of companies could just share apache logs and do some simple Perl analysis to correlate a huge number of visitors. Some factors like NAT and PPP reduce the effectiveness, but the majority of useful data can still be data-mined. Cookies are just the lazy way of doing the same thing, as well as providing stateful visits to the sites themselves.
I couldn't find a larger image than the one in this CNN story; you get body shape with ghostly clothing over it. The subject has to stand on a platform inches away from the scanner. It's to be used where strip-searches would otherwise be warranted, or in high-profile airport situations.
A full listing of every legislator and executive who passed a law that was subsequently shot down as unconstitutional.
The US Government put in place certain 'checks and balances.' Between each branch of government, an interaction takes place to ensure that the original standards of the government are kept in force.
The President may Veto unsavory bills.
The Congress may block Presidential appointments.
The President may appoint Judges.
The Congress may amend the Constitution.
The Judiciary may strike down laws that do not pass the Constitution's guarantees.
Surely it is the job of the Judiciary to perform this very important task, but why do we have to rely on them so much? Is it too much to ask for legislators who know what is constitutional or not? Most of them are lawyers by practice, they should understand the issues.
I'd love to see a roster listing the authors of legislation, and the executive who signed them into law, next to each law that has been struck down.
Sen. Doodah (R-TX) and Sen. Blofeld (D-HI) authored Think of the Children Act 2001, signed by Pres. Yeehaw. Found UNCONSTITUTIONAL 6-3 in 2002.
Start with the federal laws, and then get down to state laws for each state. Put lawmakers on notice: you have taken an oath to defend the Constitution from enemies abroad and at home. We demand an end to the erosion of basic rights well-established by our nation's founders.
So how does tripling the dot-count to achieve colour reduce the dpi by about a factor of 3? Shouldn't that be a factor of sqrt(3)?
The article probably just glossed over it. The pixels are 300x300/sqin, but the colored filter overlay can be 300x80/sqin. You'd think 300x100, but the filter reduces the resolution further to keep the colors separate, I would guess. Maybe they just enforce 80x80sqin for square pixel mapping.
I'm also not sure which way you'd cut the resolution, horizontal or vertical. Most LCDs pack the filter horizontally (columns of RGB), but they stick to squarish pixels. This would be an application for that Microsoft color-edge mapping algorithm that takes the hue-vs-luminance (or here, hue-vs-value since it's subtractive) tradeoff into account.
And if law were more like open source, it would be better?! Don't get me wrong... open source is fine for open source but not necessarily for law.
Imagine a system of law in which each person could set up their own government, a system of rules to which nobody else had to conform or comply. Imagine the few most popular standards were only useable by the legislators and legal pundits for twenty or thirty years while the bugs were worked out. The general public wouldn't have the understanding to try any of the several governing distributions by themselves, so they'd have to rely on more experienced people to set up their systems. Over the years, hot contentions would organize blocs of specialists who fought for only one or two standards, even though the underlying system was still supposedly a free-to-be-an-individual system.
Hm, the more I look at it, the US government resembles open source, too.
This covers a series of 22 overwrite patterns that are formulated to ensure proper destruction of any trace information on RLL- and MFM-encoded hard drives. It goes into some detail about the ways electron microscopy may be used to recollect trace information. Other patterns exist, and I'm expecting the DoD or NSA has even more rigorous schemes.
Unfortunately, raw degaussing of a whole hard drive device often disables the device's ability to operate in the future, or is not strong enough to ensure the destruction of the data.
Here is just a sample of the road traffic that passed my driveway today. These people reduce my access to the road for a few seconds at a time, and that time adds up fast. I pay taxes for unfettered access to my street, dammit.
[list of 50 license numbers and car descriptions]
This is probably familiar to most of us.
Bastards. Passersby should be taken out back and shot. Road rage might not be perfect but it's a good start.
Really, guy, switch to a decaf brew. Set up filters to delete the stuff that you do get. I can see ISPs grumbling about bandwidth costs, but your reaction is a wee bit overdone.
I have always thought that a public "geocache record" should have more than just the coordinates, but also a freshness date and an two keys which authorizes people to adjust the record.
coordinates of cache are public
freshness date of cache are public
cache creator has a hidden control key code
cache itself has a freshness key code inside
Each visitor to the cache can find contained within a "freshness key code." They can visit the website and use that code to "freshen" the record. Caches can then be auto-retracted from the website (not deleted) if it gets to be too unfresh. Fresher or semi-fresh caches may also appeal to other visitors according to their tastes, so they can query the database to find better caches.
The creator of the cache can retract the cache entirely by using the access code.
Retracting a cache doesn't stop someone from using ancient records. The traffic would fade out, however, if the records clearly show that they were only current as of 2001. Only the hardcore seekers would go for obviously stale caches, because the chances are, the owner took the stale cache bucket away from the site.
The rest is culture: if the websites impress upon people that it's not kosher to tramp off to find a cache that's more than a year stale, such trespassing or fruitless trips would be much more rare.
There are a few very minor limitations on this algorithm that are not mentioned on the page. [...] The algorithm uses the Gregorian Calendar.
The example preceding the #Origins section of the page describes the same issues about the Gregorian calender, including the fact that the Gregorian dates weren't adopted everywhere instantly.
As for which is better for the job, I'll take Doomsday over Zeller. If I wanted a method that required integer division, I'd get out my calculator. Many sufficiently advanced calculators have a shortcut to calculate this, anyway. Perhaps Doomsday is to Bresenham as Zeller is to Interpolation.
Random thoughts about layoffs, Mandrake
on
Mandrake Shakeup
·
· Score: 2
Thought 1: when the seniors are cut and the line employees kept, it's usually due to a shareholder/board decision, for serious business-plan shifts or no-confidence votes. Conversely, when the line employees are cut, it's a decision within the company to reduce complexity but keep the same basic direction.
Thought 2: as a Linux newbie, I tried fresh Mandrake 8.0 iso's first. Tried to get it to work for a Toshiba 1715XCDS crappy laptop. The installer seemed to work okay, but once the installer quit, the actual system was flaky, especially the way Toshiba's lcd/crt switch worked. That, combined with the sugary cute penguin mascot junk EVERYWHERE, I decided to back-step to Red Hat 7.1 which worked much more reliably (though still a couple gotchas). Mandrake was much too cutesy and maybe too bleeding-edge untested.
Thought 3: another poster made this observation but I thought I'd amplify it. I downloaded ISOs because I wanted more recent versions than were available at Wal*Mart and Best Buy. I would have paid the money either way, to support the companies involved. I'd support modest premium fees for not-yet-boxed ISO images from a fastish FTP site.
The RBL is opt-in. Consumers have the choice of moving to a provider that doesn't opt-in if they desire.
This is a frog-in-the-pot argument. (A frog won't notice the water heating slowly until it's too late to save itself from cooking.)
Let's rephrase this:
The subscriber software application market is opt-in. Consumers have the choice of using other word processors or spreadsheets from competing providers that don't charge for software if they desire. (That is, except for those file formats that are proprietary but ubiquitous throughout many organizations, like Flash or MS-Word. Seen an open source Windows Media Player lately?)
The DVD digital scrambled content is opt-in. Consumers have the choice of viewing movies from tape or laserdisc providers that don't scramble digital content if they desire. (That is, until the players and tapes and laserdiscs are no longer produced. Seen a laserdisc lately?)
Unleaded gasoline and smoke-free flying enjoyed similar "consumer choice" periods until the opponents were worn down. RBL may be seen as a "good thing" too... but if all ISPs choose a solution like RBL, how is it an opt-in for their consumers?
This is a FREE SPEECH monument, not an ANONYMOUS SPEECH monument.
If someone wants to spend the day filling this board with 'goatse.cx' grafitti, that's fine. But they gotta show up and spend the time right there in front of onlookers to do it. And the onlookers can smile at them while erasing the junk.
Not to say ANONYMOUS SPEECH has its values, but I like this just the way it is.
The fault here lies in the game that trusts anything about the client's abilities or limitations.
Peer to peer games assume that everyone involved can be trusted to manage authoritative state of the game. Bad assumption.
Client/server games can be more secure, but only if the server is the only machine with the authoritative state of the game.
If these games assume that the user can't see through walls, then the games are made wrong. Don't even tell the user WHERE the enemies are, unless they're somewhere that the user would have a chance of seeing.
What else do these games assume, that they shouldn't? They assume lighting is muddy-to-black, but the user can tweak with gamma and brightness. They assume textures are certain colors, but the user can replace those. They assume bodies are certain sizes, but I've heard of "twenty-foot-spikey" body mods which end up sticking through the nearest walls for a cheap give-away. They assume that you can only walk a certain speed, that your weapon fires at a certain rate, that you can only walk where walls aren't, or that your gravity is the same as everyone else's. Funny assumptions, given that all the tools to control those are on the client's machine.
Game design should be learning from cryptography design: don't publish what you don't want cracked, harden your data proportional to the value of the data, and by all means, study the man-in-the-middle problems.
Until then, EVERYTHING is potentially unfair.
Aren't copyright laws loosened with regards to educational material?
They're not loosened... it's the same law. What you're referring to is the notion of 'fair use', which has been enshrined in the very same copyright laws that say it is illegal to do the converse: to make full copies for your own profit (distribution), or to make partial copies passing it off as your own work (plagiarism). This is not just for educational use, but that's one large area of concern here.
Re:We're already there
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 5
I think the posting is about using genetically modified organisms as weapons. It's like throwing a resource-hungry but unusuable corn seeds on a pasture, because it will ruin our crops. Why use a naturally-occurring parasite like kudzu when you can slip it in secretly?
Super-infections are almost assuredly available in today's weapons arsenal, even if our current treaties may forbid their use. Stephen King's "The Stand" is a piece of fiction from about 1988(?), and describes what effect a super influenza could do to the world population. Regular anthrax is a likely real weapon, since the effects are so undetectable or similar to the common cold, up until sudden death a few days later.
Eradicating certain plants can be just as devastating. Kudzu has been mentioned here already, and California is realizing that the common but non-native eucalyptus tree is a pest that vigorously reduces biodiversity wherever it's been planted. GM crops tend to look like regular crops, but could affect the viability of the food just as undetectably as anthrax infects people. Plant and leave. In a few months, the victim has absolutely no harvest, or worse, has a field that cannot be reused for some time.
Scientists policing themselves...
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 2
As someone else pointed out, "The White House official says she'd like to see scientists police themselves better regarding what they publish and with whom they share data."
The government's desire for this to be kept under wraps is twofold, and both reasons show the standard naivite that all government weapon technology discussions show. One, other countries shouldn't get the idea because it could be used against us. Two, we might find it to be a very effective weapon against other countries.
First, any sufficiently advanced army will definitely read the enemy's newspapers and put students in their schools to get a pulse on the enemy's weapon ideas. They don't need details, just the abstracts. We do it to them, they do it to us.
Second, developing a new class of weapon is a step in the arms race which is always reciprocal. When we develop Weapon A, we better design Defense A to go with it, because someone's going to deliver Weapon A to our enemy to use against us. Any undefendable weapon is a step towards Mutual Assured Destruction, just as we have faced with nukes and are tasting with cyber-warfare.
Our government isn't all naive, and they know these arguments well. It's not enough to stop the trend, though; new weapons are developed all the time, and defenses are shortchanged because it's not an effective use of those funds. In cases like nuclear detonation and super-infections, defenses are impossible or severely limited, yet the weapon still fits the political needs for detente or intimidation. The weapons are still developed, and their eventual use against their creators is nearly inevitable.
Yep, it's iptables instead of the typical ipchains method of firewalling. Unfortunately, the rest of the distro isn't caught up, so it took a while to find how to adjust this setting and not the old ipchains stuff.
They offer "high" and "medium" security levels. I found that with the "high" level, I couldn't get DNS queries to work. This may be suitable for servers that log dotted-ip, expecting some other process to dns-lookup, but it's a little over-tight for a desktop. They do say that generally, but the DNS implication wasn't obvious.
I don't recall Windows 95 hiding subdirectory trees.
The default settings for Win95 (and Win98 and WinNT4 and Win2K): opening a folder will open a new window showing that folder's contents, or replace current window's contents with that folder's contents. You have to select "explore" instead of "open" on a context menu to see the tree pane. You can tweak the file type settings to default to 'explore'.
Many nontechnical people have a hard time understanding a hierarchy, or of file types; this is expressly why Windows 95 defaulted to hiding file extensions and the subdirectory trees.
Add to that the complexity of "where in the hierarchy does this file permanently belong," and the question "at what point in time was the file in a condition you liked?," you get into a major learning curve. Describing a sandbox is a task unto itself. Undisciplined developers often grok CVS but still don't use the delta comments in any meaningful way.
That said, VMS is probably your ideal here for simplifying version management. Too bad it was an integration into the filesystem itself, and didn't expressly deal with multiple writers or delta comments.
For those who haven't used VMS, the filename included a version number: name.extension;version. If you neglected to mention the version number in a system call, it assumed the newest. Every file opened for writing got the next version number and left the old versions untouched; every file opened for read-write cloned the newest old version first and bumped its version number. This builds into a large list of;1;2;3;4;5...;632 version for each file. You could easily back them all up, or prune to the newest version.
I heard about Python several years ago, from a guy who was at Xerox PARC at the time. Yet today, the Python movement doesn't seem to be much farther along.
Java's lost some oomph in the marketing steamroller but gained some badly needed credibility with servlets.
Perl has gone from an obscure report munger to a community powerhouse. You want a feature? Perl has it.
Python's been ported to just about everything including PalmOS, but the shared source code I've found has been extremely limited or arcane. Yes, there are modules out there, but nothing like CPAN or gamelan or even MFC/C++ codeguru.
From the little I've investigated of Python, at three different occasions, it's clean, fast, easy to embed, easy to extend, easy to code for. Some people balk at the indentation style but that took me 30 seconds to get over. Some people balk at the shell interpreter aspect, but that felt like a prolog or lisp pmachine interface to me.
I'm not flaming, just wondering, what has Python been doing with itself, to have grabbed so little attention in the world stage?
Slashdot Mirror
What's the actual command grammar here? If it's just parsing a verb-noun command, it's not like "Infocom" but merely one of the many precursors or poseurs which also littered the landscape.
Infocom's parser handled a fairly diverse set of grammars for commands:
floyd, put the wrench in the cardboard box.
put all the goo, the interface card and the canteen under the table.
open the satchel then put the thing into it
Until it can handle such a diverse command set, I wouldn't try to suggest it's like Infocom games.
All of "Disney Classics" are just that-- classics that have been through Disney's machine.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? Pinocchio? Cinderella? Sleeping Beauty? Aladdin? The Sword and the Stone? Brer Rabbit? Dumbo? Jungle Book? They're all classic folktales from various cultures. Disney never claimed to create the concept, just the adaptation you see under their banner.
That's why the official titles are Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or Disney's The Little Mermaid. Same goes for Disney's Atlantis. They're adaptations of classic stories.
With each new medium (voice, tablets, scrolls, books, silent movies, talkies, animated movies, modern cinema and now computer-rendered movies), classic stories are told and retold and re-retold with the new medium's strengths or with a new angle to keep it fresh.
There are some legitimate causes for complaint if a new work draws too substantially or too unoriginally from an older work; Lion King, Mononoke, and Atlantis may suffer from being on the borderline of this issue. But to say that Disney isn't putting something original or fresh into any of their adaptations of cultural classics is a big stretch.
This has been going on far longer than Disney's corporate life, so why piss on Disney's parade? Oh, yeah, this is slashdot, where groupthink and corporate bashing is the norm. Where selling an adaptation of a public-domain concept is considered evil. Get over it.
No, the bad news is for IE users who think this will block DoubleClick.
The article states DoubleClick expects to be compliant with P3P before IE6 is released, which means IE6's defaults will allow DoubleClick cookies. Doncha think DoubleClick and Microsoft are gonna be talking about such business-model show-stoppers and finding ways to make each other happy? Users will still have to take individual opt-out actions to stop being tracked.
Even so, cookies are not the only way that people can be tracked. Any group of companies could just share apache logs and do some simple Perl analysis to correlate a huge number of visitors. Some factors like NAT and PPP reduce the effectiveness, but the majority of useful data can still be data-mined. Cookies are just the lazy way of doing the same thing, as well as providing stateful visits to the sites themselves.
This scanner you're referring to does NOT work "50 feet away".
www.cnn.com travel news 2000-08-21
I couldn't find a larger image than the one in this CNN story; you get body shape with ghostly clothing over it. The subject has to stand on a platform inches away from the scanner. It's to be used where strip-searches would otherwise be warranted, or in high-profile airport situations.
off-topic, I know, but...
It's almost the same as someone loosing a worm or other virus onto the net.
Someone using the term 'loosing' properly! Not a mistaken spelling for 'losing'! On the Internet! On Slashdot, no less! Yikes!
Here's what I would love to see:
A full listing of every legislator and executive who passed a law that was subsequently shot down as unconstitutional.
The US Government put in place certain 'checks and balances.' Between each branch of government, an interaction takes place to ensure that the original standards of the government are kept in force.
The President may Veto unsavory bills.
The Congress may block Presidential appointments.
The President may appoint Judges.
The Congress may amend the Constitution.
The Judiciary may strike down laws that do not pass the Constitution's guarantees.
Surely it is the job of the Judiciary to perform this very important task, but why do we have to rely on them so much? Is it too much to ask for legislators who know what is constitutional or not? Most of them are lawyers by practice, they should understand the issues.
I'd love to see a roster listing the authors of legislation, and the executive who signed them into law, next to each law that has been struck down.
Start with the federal laws, and then get down to state laws for each state. Put lawmakers on notice: you have taken an oath to defend the Constitution from enemies abroad and at home. We demand an end to the erosion of basic rights well-established by our nation's founders.
So how does tripling the dot-count to achieve colour reduce the dpi by about a factor of 3? Shouldn't that be a factor of sqrt(3)?
The article probably just glossed over it. The pixels are 300x300/sqin, but the colored filter overlay can be 300x80/sqin. You'd think 300x100, but the filter reduces the resolution further to keep the colors separate, I would guess. Maybe they just enforce 80x80sqin for square pixel mapping.
I'm also not sure which way you'd cut the resolution, horizontal or vertical. Most LCDs pack the filter horizontally (columns of RGB), but they stick to squarish pixels. This would be an application for that Microsoft color-edge mapping algorithm that takes the hue-vs-luminance (or here, hue-vs-value since it's subtractive) tradeoff into account.
And if law were more like open source, it would be better?! Don't get me wrong... open source is fine for open source but not necessarily for law.
Imagine a system of law in which each person could set up their own government, a system of rules to which nobody else had to conform or comply. Imagine the few most popular standards were only useable by the legislators and legal pundits for twenty or thirty years while the bugs were worked out. The general public wouldn't have the understanding to try any of the several governing distributions by themselves, so they'd have to rely on more experienced people to set up their systems. Over the years, hot contentions would organize blocs of specialists who fought for only one or two standards, even though the underlying system was still supposedly a free-to-be-an-individual system.
Hm, the more I look at it, the US government resembles open source, too.
For a fairly exhaustive paper regarding the secure deletion of data, see the Gutmann paper on USENIX.
Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory by Peter Gutmann
This covers a series of 22 overwrite patterns that are formulated to ensure proper destruction of any trace information on RLL- and MFM-encoded hard drives. It goes into some detail about the ways electron microscopy may be used to recollect trace information. Other patterns exist, and I'm expecting the DoD or NSA has even more rigorous schemes.
Unfortunately, raw degaussing of a whole hard drive device often disables the device's ability to operate in the future, or is not strong enough to ensure the destruction of the data.
Here's just a sample of the spam I got today...
Really, guy, switch to a decaf brew. Set up filters to delete the stuff that you do get. I can see ISPs grumbling about bandwidth costs, but your reaction is a wee bit overdone.
Who keeps the cache deletions current?
I have always thought that a public "geocache record" should have more than just the coordinates, but also a freshness date and an two keys which authorizes people to adjust the record.
coordinates of cache are public
freshness date of cache are public
cache creator has a hidden control key code
cache itself has a freshness key code inside
Each visitor to the cache can find contained within a "freshness key code." They can visit the website and use that code to "freshen" the record. Caches can then be auto-retracted from the website (not deleted) if it gets to be too unfresh. Fresher or semi-fresh caches may also appeal to other visitors according to their tastes, so they can query the database to find better caches.
The creator of the cache can retract the cache entirely by using the access code.
Retracting a cache doesn't stop someone from using ancient records. The traffic would fade out, however, if the records clearly show that they were only current as of 2001. Only the hardcore seekers would go for obviously stale caches, because the chances are, the owner took the stale cache bucket away from the site.
The rest is culture: if the websites impress upon people that it's not kosher to tramp off to find a cache that's more than a year stale, such trespassing or fruitless trips would be much more rare.
There are a few very minor limitations on this algorithm that are not mentioned on the page. [...] The algorithm uses the Gregorian Calendar.
The example preceding the #Origins section of the page describes the same issues about the Gregorian calender, including the fact that the Gregorian dates weren't adopted everywhere instantly.
As for which is better for the job, I'll take Doomsday over Zeller. If I wanted a method that required integer division, I'd get out my calculator. Many sufficiently advanced calculators have a shortcut to calculate this, anyway. Perhaps Doomsday is to Bresenham as Zeller is to Interpolation.
Thought 1: when the seniors are cut and the line employees kept, it's usually due to a shareholder/board decision, for serious business-plan shifts or no-confidence votes. Conversely, when the line employees are cut, it's a decision within the company to reduce complexity but keep the same basic direction.
Thought 2: as a Linux newbie, I tried fresh Mandrake 8.0 iso's first. Tried to get it to work for a Toshiba 1715XCDS crappy laptop. The installer seemed to work okay, but once the installer quit, the actual system was flaky, especially the way Toshiba's lcd/crt switch worked. That, combined with the sugary cute penguin mascot junk EVERYWHERE, I decided to back-step to Red Hat 7.1 which worked much more reliably (though still a couple gotchas). Mandrake was much too cutesy and maybe too bleeding-edge untested.
Thought 3: another poster made this observation but I thought I'd amplify it. I downloaded ISOs because I wanted more recent versions than were available at Wal*Mart and Best Buy. I would have paid the money either way, to support the companies involved. I'd support modest premium fees for not-yet-boxed ISO images from a fastish FTP site.
The RBL is opt-in. Consumers have the choice of moving to a provider that doesn't opt-in if they desire.
This is a frog-in-the-pot argument. (A frog won't notice the water heating slowly until it's too late to save itself from cooking.)
Let's rephrase this:
The subscriber software application market is opt-in. Consumers have the choice of using other word processors or spreadsheets from competing providers that don't charge for software if they desire. (That is, except for those file formats that are proprietary but ubiquitous throughout many organizations, like Flash or MS-Word. Seen an open source Windows Media Player lately?)
The DVD digital scrambled content is opt-in. Consumers have the choice of viewing movies from tape or laserdisc providers that don't scramble digital content if they desire. (That is, until the players and tapes and laserdiscs are no longer produced. Seen a laserdisc lately?)
Unleaded gasoline and smoke-free flying enjoyed similar "consumer choice" periods until the opponents were worn down. RBL may be seen as a "good thing" too... but if all ISPs choose a solution like RBL, how is it an opt-in for their consumers?
Read the article... it also measures body temp and will detect if you're wearing it while sleeping.
This is a FREE SPEECH monument, not an ANONYMOUS SPEECH monument.
If someone wants to spend the day filling this board with 'goatse.cx' grafitti, that's fine. But they gotta show up and spend the time right there in front of onlookers to do it. And the onlookers can smile at them while erasing the junk.
Not to say ANONYMOUS SPEECH has its values, but I like this just the way it is.
The fault here lies in the game that trusts anything about the client's abilities or limitations.
Peer to peer games assume that everyone involved can be trusted to manage authoritative state of the game. Bad assumption.
Client/server games can be more secure, but only if the server is the only machine with the authoritative state of the game.
If these games assume that the user can't see through walls, then the games are made wrong. Don't even tell the user WHERE the enemies are, unless they're somewhere that the user would have a chance of seeing.
What else do these games assume, that they shouldn't? They assume lighting is muddy-to-black, but the user can tweak with gamma and brightness. They assume textures are certain colors, but the user can replace those. They assume bodies are certain sizes, but I've heard of "twenty-foot-spikey" body mods which end up sticking through the nearest walls for a cheap give-away. They assume that you can only walk a certain speed, that your weapon fires at a certain rate, that you can only walk where walls aren't, or that your gravity is the same as everyone else's. Funny assumptions, given that all the tools to control those are on the client's machine.
Game design should be learning from cryptography design: don't publish what you don't want cracked, harden your data proportional to the value of the data, and by all means, study the man-in-the-middle problems. Until then, EVERYTHING is potentially unfair.
Aren't copyright laws loosened with regards to educational material?
They're not loosened... it's the same law. What you're referring to is the notion of 'fair use', which has been enshrined in the very same copyright laws that say it is illegal to do the converse: to make full copies for your own profit (distribution), or to make partial copies passing it off as your own work (plagiarism). This is not just for educational use, but that's one large area of concern here.
I think the posting is about using genetically modified organisms as weapons. It's like throwing a resource-hungry but unusuable corn seeds on a pasture, because it will ruin our crops. Why use a naturally-occurring parasite like kudzu when you can slip it in secretly?
Super-infections are almost assuredly available in today's weapons arsenal, even if our current treaties may forbid their use. Stephen King's "The Stand" is a piece of fiction from about 1988(?), and describes what effect a super influenza could do to the world population. Regular anthrax is a likely real weapon, since the effects are so undetectable or similar to the common cold, up until sudden death a few days later.
Eradicating certain plants can be just as devastating. Kudzu has been mentioned here already, and California is realizing that the common but non-native eucalyptus tree is a pest that vigorously reduces biodiversity wherever it's been planted. GM crops tend to look like regular crops, but could affect the viability of the food just as undetectably as anthrax infects people. Plant and leave. In a few months, the victim has absolutely no harvest, or worse, has a field that cannot be reused for some time.
As someone else pointed out, "The White House official says she'd like to see scientists police themselves better regarding what they publish and with whom they share data."
The government's desire for this to be kept under wraps is twofold, and both reasons show the standard naivite that all government weapon technology discussions show. One, other countries shouldn't get the idea because it could be used against us. Two, we might find it to be a very effective weapon against other countries.
First, any sufficiently advanced army will definitely read the enemy's newspapers and put students in their schools to get a pulse on the enemy's weapon ideas. They don't need details, just the abstracts. We do it to them, they do it to us.
Second, developing a new class of weapon is a step in the arms race which is always reciprocal. When we develop Weapon A, we better design Defense A to go with it, because someone's going to deliver Weapon A to our enemy to use against us. Any undefendable weapon is a step towards Mutual Assured Destruction, just as we have faced with nukes and are tasting with cyber-warfare.
Our government isn't all naive, and they know these arguments well. It's not enough to stop the trend, though; new weapons are developed all the time, and defenses are shortchanged because it's not an effective use of those funds. In cases like nuclear detonation and super-infections, defenses are impossible or severely limited, yet the weapon still fits the political needs for detente or intimidation. The weapons are still developed, and their eventual use against their creators is nearly inevitable.
Im waiting for the Tomb Raider mod where i can be Terry Gross.
Let me out for some fresh air...
Yep, it's iptables instead of the typical ipchains method of firewalling. Unfortunately, the rest of the distro isn't caught up, so it took a while to find how to adjust this setting and not the old ipchains stuff.
They offer "high" and "medium" security levels. I found that with the "high" level, I couldn't get DNS queries to work. This may be suitable for servers that log dotted-ip, expecting some other process to dns-lookup, but it's a little over-tight for a desktop. They do say that generally, but the DNS implication wasn't obvious.
I don't recall Windows 95 hiding subdirectory trees.
The default settings for Win95 (and Win98 and WinNT4 and Win2K): opening a folder will open a new window showing that folder's contents, or replace current window's contents with that folder's contents. You have to select "explore" instead of "open" on a context menu to see the tree pane. You can tweak the file type settings to default to 'explore'.
Maybe I'm cynical but your stated goals of
implementing version control and
making it usable by nontechnical people
You face one major uphill battle.
Many nontechnical people have a hard time understanding a hierarchy, or of file types; this is expressly why Windows 95 defaulted to hiding file extensions and the subdirectory trees.
Add to that the complexity of "where in the hierarchy does this file permanently belong," and the question "at what point in time was the file in a condition you liked?," you get into a major learning curve. Describing a sandbox is a task unto itself. Undisciplined developers often grok CVS but still don't use the delta comments in any meaningful way.
That said, VMS is probably your ideal here for simplifying version management. Too bad it was an integration into the filesystem itself, and didn't expressly deal with multiple writers or delta comments.
For those who haven't used VMS, the filename included a version number: name.extension;version . If you neglected to mention the version number in a system call, it assumed the newest. Every file opened for writing got the next version number and left the old versions untouched; every file opened for read-write cloned the newest old version first and bumped its version number. This builds into a large list of ;1 ;2 ;3 ;4 ;5 ... ;632 version for each file. You could easily back them all up, or prune to the newest version.
I heard about Python several years ago, from a guy who was at Xerox PARC at the time. Yet today, the Python movement doesn't seem to be much farther along.
Java's lost some oomph in the marketing steamroller but gained some badly needed credibility with servlets.
Perl has gone from an obscure report munger to a community powerhouse. You want a feature? Perl has it.
Python's been ported to just about everything including PalmOS, but the shared source code I've found has been extremely limited or arcane. Yes, there are modules out there, but nothing like CPAN or gamelan or even MFC/C++ codeguru.
From the little I've investigated of Python, at three different occasions, it's clean, fast, easy to embed, easy to extend, easy to code for. Some people balk at the indentation style but that took me 30 seconds to get over. Some people balk at the shell interpreter aspect, but that felt like a prolog or lisp pmachine interface to me.
I'm not flaming, just wondering, what has Python been doing with itself, to have grabbed so little attention in the world stage?