Same thing with security people, customs, immigration etc etc. We expect them to be rude and aggressive - but in point of fact they have absolutely no right to be.
Maybe it's just you. All those people are generally very polite and friendly to me - maybe because it's because I'm polite and friendly back?
I have binds for binding and buy items quickly because I KNOW THE PRICE OF THE ITMES. Now you go and buy a rifle and guess what? The 10% price increase means you won't be able to afford ammo. Good luck!
So develop new strategies and tactics on the fly, instead of repetitively pressing exactly the same buttons again and again and again and again. I got bored of CS about five or six years ago because nothing new ever happened, and nothing really changed. Except, in this case encouraging players out of the safe little sandboxes they've been playing in for years, and forcing new strategies upon them could result in some less predictable, more challenging gameplay.
I've no idea how this experiment will go. But I knew that many CS players would be bitterly ranting and bitching at its announcement - as they've done for any changes made at all, pretty much back to the very beginnings of the game...
By the way - I'm assuming the submitter meant "Will Google become irrelevent in Belgium" not the entire language, though the average/.er's grasp on geography makes me wonder sometimes.
Belgium is a country with three official languages and three main regions - the Flemish-speaking Flanders (6 million people), the French-speaking Wallonia (3.3 million people) and the mostly-French-speaking, officially-bilingual capital Brussels (1 million people). Plus to add to the fun, there are 70,000 German-speakers in the east of the country.
There are some pretty harsh rivalries between the currently-financially-stable Flanders and the recession-hit Wallonia - it's impressive that the country hasn't split apart already. The situation is... complicated, politically.
But then Belgium's really dull and nothing happens here, right? I know otherwise, because I live here.
Liquid hydrogen is of relatively low density. That's why it has to be under pressure to even be liquid.
Ignoring the solid-water gaffe (assuming your air-conditioning simply isn't turned down too low...)
Liquid hydrogen has to be cold. It's not like, say, propane or butane which will liquefy under pressure even at room temperature - liquid hydrogen's boiling point is sufficiently low that if you pressurise the gas at room temperature, all you get is a pressurised gas.
Useful for storing smaller quantities of hydrogen in a safe manner, but for petrol-competitive amounts you need to vastly increase the density. By cooling it, and letting it liquefy. This does mean that insulated, non-actively-cooled tanks of liquid hydrogen have to vent what boils off - if it was completely sealed, then you'd end up with a tank of ridiculously high-pressure hydrogen gas. Liquid nitrogen does something similar, although you don't have the problem of venting a flammable gas with a container filled with liquid nitrogen...
or 3, check the IP address out and find out if it connects to a TOR server. It would seem that this should be possible without seizing the computer.
... But the machine could potentially be both a Tor node and be responsible for accessing the child porn website - without the aid of some separate, anonymous request routed over Tor. One hypothetical case would be a desktop machine that also runs a Tor node in the background. Without a close look at the machine, the police have no sensible way of telling.
People can't afford to buy an Dual SLI system unless they want to spend two months worth of paychecks.
BUT YOU DON'T NEED A SODDING EXPENSIVE DUAL-THINGY MACHINE TO HAVE FUN PLAYING PC GAMES!
Almost any halfway-decent modern PC will do a halfway-decent job of playing most computer games at more than acceptable visual quality levels. Yes, you can spend ridiculous amounts of money on something that'll let you run a stupid resolutions and framerates, but the games themselves are the same. Take Half-Life 2, for instance - Valve obviously put a lot of work into making it run well on low-end machines. I first played it on an elderly, near-agricultural 1.1GHz Athlon with a cheapy GeForce 4 graphics card. It was still fun, and looked and sounded better than on the eventual Xbox version.
Yes, the machine cost more than a games console - but it was also the machine I used for all my other computing stuff. I'd upgraded it a bit for games, but that extra gaming ability cost a lot less than an Xbox or Playstation 2 of the time.
My current games machine wasn't even bought to play games - it's a MacBook Pro. But it's a lot faster than my desktop PC, and that additional games-playing-ness amounted to the price of an OEM copy of Windows XP.
Lots of people have fairly modern PCs, not primarily bought for gaming. Yes, there's a niche, hardcore market of nutters who spend a fortune extracting every last ounce of performance out of cutting-edge hardware, but modern computers are pretty capable. And the minimum specs for a Windows Vista machine should result in some pretty nifty graphics capabilities as standard, for everyone....
There is some controversity on this siezure, as there are rumors that the prosecutors knew that they won't find anything on a tor-node. It is important to note that none of the tor-nodes-owners has been charged with anything; running tor on a server is NOT the reason these people were targetted.
A machine connects to a child porn website. The website server records its IP address. The police obtain the server's logs, locate the suspicious machine and are informed by its owner that it's a Tor node.
Should the police:
Instantly believe this explanation, and eliminate this machine from their enquiries without a further word; OR
Seize the machine, and check it over to make sure that the owner's excuses are indeed true, and that the machine isn't compromised or running other data-relaying software or whatever on behalf of an elusive child pornographer.
If it is a 100% legitimate Tor node, then the police won't find anything untoward. But the police still have to check - because otherwise, "I was running a Tor node, honest guv'nor!" could become a standard get-out-of-custody-free card for anyone else whose computer is under investigation.
One of those $20 games that I got more enjoyment out of then some $60 ones.
... And in the case of Trackmania Nations, it's free. Done with sponsorship from NVidia and some gaming tournament, apparently - there's in-game advertising, yes, but it looks perfectly natural since it's inside a colossal stadium.
It's a strange multiplayer game, in that the lack of inter-car collisions means you can't actually interact with your opponents in a physical sense - but when I played it a few months ago, there's a great social aspect to it all.
One important factor is that despite being a free game, you can still design your own tracks - bolt together big sections of prefabricated track units, and share the results with your friends. It's great fun.
haha, those comments are awesome. That's your mod? I really enjoy the two episodes released so far and can't wait for the third. Any idea when that will be?
Yup, it's mine - final part of Metastasis should get released by the end of the year. Or something. Before Episode Two, anyway.;-)
Actually, despite being in a very much corporate environment right now, I think I'll reboot this 'ere MacBook Pro into Windows XP, and let the office ring with the sound of gunfire. And other noises associated with MINERVA development. Bonus points if random co-workers look at me strangely...
At this point, I'd be suspicious if a Valve game was released on schedule. Their understanding of the concept of time is a little... unusual, to say the least.
Incidentally I have just played through HL2 again and was reminded just how great it was (I kept finding ways to do things that I didn't notice before), now I am off home to get Ep1.
If you're looking for other, highly apocryphal single-player Half-Life 2, there's always my very own MINERVA. People seem to quite like it. Some mini-reviews from random forums:
"Despite the website that oozes more angst and self-hatred than an emo concert at an emo convention, this is worth downloading."
"That pompous, cliche tone gave the sense that a smarmy Brit with two dictionaries, three encylopedias and a latin textbook shoved up his ******* was faxing you orders. That might fly in Far Cry or some other attempt at remotely-located-brainiac-is-playing-God/head-game s-with-you, but not the HL2 universe in which this is situated."
"A second-rate Half-Life 2 mod."
"i made a box map with a giant penis that has better lighting that this shit"
"So the deal is I am going to break up with my girlfriend, stop going to college, quit my job and make the best game in history, and make fun of adam foster in the credits for his use of shoddy worksmanship which has befuddled you all."
I read it all on the internet, so it must be true...;-)
It's not just a monster-infested space station in the second game (actually, it's a ship, not a space station) - it's infested with your former crewmates.
... Many of whom willingly gave in to the Many. That's the nastiest bit.
I never said OS X was without flaws. The fact that I got a kernel panic is evidence of a significant bug somewhere. I just see them -much less often- on Mac OS X than on other PC based OSs I've worked with (since 1978, when I bought my TRS 80 Model 1).
I get a kernel panic on my MacBook Pro around once a month or so - usually caused by very different things. I tried enabling wireless on a train once, just to see how many networks were zooming past - and then tried connecting to a network to see what happened. Oops. Kernel panic. That's me taught! Also, even iPhoto's also caused one (the problem-reporting thing which appeared on startup reckoned there was a problem with the ATI graphics drivers), I've even occasionally had ones out of the blue while web-browsing (see photo)...
The bugs responsible might be in the process or being patched out every time there's a MacOS X update, but I've no real way of knowing. It's still a pretty stable machine, although worse than my old iBook (which still locked up every so often with the multilingual messages). But, embarrassingly, it's nowhere near as stable as my Windows XP desktop machine - which I do Half-Life 2 mod development stuff on, so seriously stretch the graphics card, memory, processor etc.
My crashy-crashy-shite-machine is that same PC running Linux. Rock-solid in Windows XP, it locks up all the time in Linux. A recent-ish 64-bit SUSE release. And yes, I've updated everything, downloaded new nVidia drivers, blah blah blah, and it still locks up at random whenever I do anything graphics related.
Kind of a turn-around from some years ago, when I reckoned Linux was uncrashable, Windows a disaster and Macs I could crash by standing nearby...;-)
Clearly we need to clean up a lot of keyboard junk. CAPS LOCK is just the start. Who knows where we'll finish?
The ever-trendy Apple tried that, and removed quite a few keys. On this 'ere MacBook Pro, there's no SysRq, no Home, no Insert, no PgUp... And more importantly, no Delete.
Which makes running Windows XP a little interesting without a remapped keyboard...;-)
Aaaaand here's his mea culpa. Microsoft buys Bungie, dramatically alters scope of Halo, makes it a one-platform-launch. Delays game for years. Alters art direction, ends up being a pale shadow of the Marathon design. Myth is sold to a 3rd party developer who produces a lacklustre sequel. Halo is a great success - the only success, really - for Xbox. Crawls onto other platforms much later, the last of which is the Mac - four years after it was demo'd on a blue and white G3 tower at Macworld.
There's a fascinating video from Bungie out there somewhere, demonstrating various stages in the development of Halo. It becomes immediately obvious that it was a rather tortured project, with little cohesive game direction behind it, and wildly changing ideas as to what the final product should be. Starting as an RTS, moving to third-person, and so on. The stunning films produced for MacWorld and E3 on are revealed as smoke-and-mirrors - there was a work-in-progress engine there, some nice vehicle physics and some semi-working weapons, but no AI, no missions, and most importantly - no game.
Probably the only thing that really made it through intact to the Xbox FPS was the art direction. (Compare the video from E3 2000 with parts of the final game. Pretty close.) The gamers' nebulous ideal of an earth-shattering Halo, which Microsoft allegedly killed, suppressed or altered, actually never really existed.
Original goals for Halo: hazy. Obviously he's not making that mistake again.
So, after a quick read, it looks like the attacker has to convince a user to get to the attacked website via his own website - how else would he be able to forcefeed his own code into the $error variable to begin with?
Cross-site scripting attacks are possible through many different vectors - sometimes you can include it in a GET address (e.g. 'image.php?name=foo.jpg&caption=<script goes here>'), sometimes in text submitted to the website (one I saw wasn't escaping private, inter-user messages - so I promptly sent Javascript to the administrator), or whatever.
Essentially, if you can get the website to output your own text in an unescaped form (i.e. '>' and friends aren't converted into '>' etc.), you can print raw Javascript, which the user's browser promptly executes. Javascript is quite a helpful language, so has functions for getting the values of cookies, etc. - which you can then send off to a third-party server under your control.
I had to do a rough security audit about a year ago on a website. From knowing absolutely nothing about the specifics of cross-site-scripting and SQL injection attacks, in a couple of hours I was hijacking administrator sessions or getting the website to dump passwords, private data, you name it. It was embarrassingly easy. So, some tips for web programmers on the receiving end of all this:
ALWAYS escape your output, whether it's user-provided or not. Be it a simple htmlspecialchars() in PHP, or a fancy {$your_variable|escape:'html':'UTF-8'} in Smarty, or whatever your templating or programming language provides, never forget.
Be suspicious of all user-provided content. If it's a URL, make sure it's not a javascript: one - and if it's an email address or subject, make sure it's not got mail()-mangling newlines in it. You can send spam by adding extra headers that way, you know.
Make sure all your database queries are clean. If it's supposed to be an integer, enforce that it's an integer. If it's a string, make sure it's properly escaped. Regardless of where it came from. Bound queries, or whatever they're called, are very useful for this - in my own stuff, I've been doing (integer )$id,... '".mysql_real_escape_string( $text )."'... when creating the queries.
Read up on anything potentially hazardous, or on anything you don't quite understand. When something goes in a header, make sure it's got appropriate content - both email and HTTP headers can easily be abused through the judicious addition of newlines...
I'd treat it like an HTML validator - it might miss inherent flaws in the design and implementation, but it'll pick up sillier little errors which might actually have very serious consequences.
The scientists found that the Sticker sarcoma cells make very few of the surface proteins that vertebrates use to distinguish self from non-self. It appears that the tumor cells can avoid an all-out attack from the immune system. Instead, the immune system reins in the cancer cells, which can survive in the dogs even after their tumor disappears.
Slashdot Mirror
Same thing with security people, customs, immigration etc etc. We expect them to be rude and aggressive - but in point of fact they have absolutely no right to be.
Maybe it's just you. All those people are generally very polite and friendly to me - maybe because it's because I'm polite and friendly back?
The official site has already launched with trailers and screenshots (mostly prerendered) at http://www.halowars.com./
More importantly, is that Craig Mullins' artwork?
Talk about Bungie connections - at the very least, it's attempting a similar style...
I have binds for binding and buy items quickly because I KNOW THE PRICE OF THE ITMES. Now you go and buy a rifle and guess what? The 10% price increase means you won't be able to afford ammo. Good luck!
So develop new strategies and tactics on the fly, instead of repetitively pressing exactly the same buttons again and again and again and again. I got bored of CS about five or six years ago because nothing new ever happened, and nothing really changed. Except, in this case encouraging players out of the safe little sandboxes they've been playing in for years, and forcing new strategies upon them could result in some less predictable, more challenging gameplay.
I've no idea how this experiment will go. But I knew that many CS players would be bitterly ranting and bitching at its announcement - as they've done for any changes made at all, pretty much back to the very beginnings of the game...
By the way - I'm assuming the submitter meant "Will Google become irrelevent in Belgium" not the entire language, though the average /.er's grasp on geography makes me wonder sometimes.
... complicated, politically.
Belgium is a country with three official languages and three main regions - the Flemish-speaking Flanders (6 million people), the French-speaking Wallonia (3.3 million people) and the mostly-French-speaking, officially-bilingual capital Brussels (1 million people). Plus to add to the fun, there are 70,000 German-speakers in the east of the country.
There are some pretty harsh rivalries between the currently-financially-stable Flanders and the recession-hit Wallonia - it's impressive that the country hasn't split apart already. The situation is
But then Belgium's really dull and nothing happens here, right? I know otherwise, because I live here.
nice to know that nintendo is using cheap parts
Yep - and this should mean that the full-price games will be a lot cheaper, too, since Nintendo doesn't need to claw back money lost on the hardware.
... Right?
If cross-platform games end up being the same price on the Wii as on PS3 and Xbox360, albeit with cruder graphics, then it's time to get suspicious.
Liquid hydrogen is of relatively low density. That's why it has to be under pressure to even be liquid.
Ignoring the solid-water gaffe (assuming your air-conditioning simply isn't turned down too low...)
Liquid hydrogen has to be cold. It's not like, say, propane or butane which will liquefy under pressure even at room temperature - liquid hydrogen's boiling point is sufficiently low that if you pressurise the gas at room temperature, all you get is a pressurised gas.
Useful for storing smaller quantities of hydrogen in a safe manner, but for petrol-competitive amounts you need to vastly increase the density. By cooling it, and letting it liquefy. This does mean that insulated, non-actively-cooled tanks of liquid hydrogen have to vent what boils off - if it was completely sealed, then you'd end up with a tank of ridiculously high-pressure hydrogen gas. Liquid nitrogen does something similar, although you don't have the problem of venting a flammable gas with a container filled with liquid nitrogen...
Anonymity and privacy online will be a thing of the past. All dissenting viewpoints will be monitored; no, wait, ALL viewpoints will be monitored.
Hello 'moxley'. Have you been forgetting to take your pills again?
Stop playing as a child revolutionary, give up on the paranoia and grow up.
or 3, check the IP address out and find out if it connects to a TOR server. It would seem that this should be possible without seizing the computer.
... But the machine could potentially be both a Tor node and be responsible for accessing the child porn website - without the aid of some separate, anonymous request routed over Tor. One hypothetical case would be a desktop machine that also runs a Tor node in the background. Without a close look at the machine, the police have no sensible way of telling.
... You have a 90Hz refresh rate on your monitor?
;-)
At low resolutions, my rescued-from-disposal EIZO monitors can manage 120Hz.
Of course, my graphics card can't manage to render new frames for all that...
People can't afford to buy an Dual SLI system unless they want to spend two months worth of paychecks.
BUT YOU DON'T NEED A SODDING EXPENSIVE DUAL-THINGY MACHINE TO HAVE FUN PLAYING PC GAMES!
Almost any halfway-decent modern PC will do a halfway-decent job of playing most computer games at more than acceptable visual quality levels. Yes, you can spend ridiculous amounts of money on something that'll let you run a stupid resolutions and framerates, but the games themselves are the same. Take Half-Life 2, for instance - Valve obviously put a lot of work into making it run well on low-end machines. I first played it on an elderly, near-agricultural 1.1GHz Athlon with a cheapy GeForce 4 graphics card. It was still fun, and looked and sounded better than on the eventual Xbox version.
Yes, the machine cost more than a games console - but it was also the machine I used for all my other computing stuff. I'd upgraded it a bit for games, but that extra gaming ability cost a lot less than an Xbox or Playstation 2 of the time.
My current games machine wasn't even bought to play games - it's a MacBook Pro. But it's a lot faster than my desktop PC, and that additional games-playing-ness amounted to the price of an OEM copy of Windows XP.
Lots of people have fairly modern PCs, not primarily bought for gaming. Yes, there's a niche, hardcore market of nutters who spend a fortune extracting every last ounce of performance out of cutting-edge hardware, but modern computers are pretty capable. And the minimum specs for a Windows Vista machine should result in some pretty nifty graphics capabilities as standard, for everyone....
A machine connects to a child porn website. The website server records its IP address. The police obtain the server's logs, locate the suspicious machine and are informed by its owner that it's a Tor node.
Should the police:
If it is a 100% legitimate Tor node, then the police won't find anything untoward. But the police still have to check - because otherwise, "I was running a Tor node, honest guv'nor!" could become a standard get-out-of-custody-free card for anyone else whose computer is under investigation.
One of those $20 games that I got more enjoyment out of then some $60 ones.
... And in the case of Trackmania Nations, it's free. Done with sponsorship from NVidia and some gaming tournament, apparently - there's in-game advertising, yes, but it looks perfectly natural since it's inside a colossal stadium.
It's a strange multiplayer game, in that the lack of inter-car collisions means you can't actually interact with your opponents in a physical sense - but when I played it a few months ago, there's a great social aspect to it all.
One important factor is that despite being a free game, you can still design your own tracks - bolt together big sections of prefabricated track units, and share the results with your friends. It's great fun.
It reminds me a lot of being driven around Genoa, Italy earlier this year by a lovely but utterly terrifying young Russian woman I work with.
Except that traffic had inter-car collision-detection enabled. Eeek.
haha, those comments are awesome. That's your mod? I really enjoy the two episodes released so far and can't wait for the third. Any idea when that will be?
;-)
Yup, it's mine - final part of Metastasis should get released by the end of the year. Or something. Before Episode Two, anyway.
Actually, despite being in a very much corporate environment right now, I think I'll reboot this 'ere MacBook Pro into Windows XP, and let the office ring with the sound of gunfire. And other noises associated with MINERVA development. Bonus points if random co-workers look at me strangely...
And, according to a Mr. Gabe Newell himself, the release of TF2 is to be coincident with the Rapture.
... unusual, to say the least.
At this point, I'd be suspicious if a Valve game was released on schedule. Their understanding of the concept of time is a little
If you're looking for other, highly apocryphal single-player Half-Life 2, there's always my very own MINERVA. People seem to quite like it. Some mini-reviews from random forums:
I read it all on the internet, so it must be true...
It's not just a monster-infested space station in the second game (actually, it's a ship, not a space station) - it's infested with your former crewmates.
... Many of whom willingly gave in to the Many. That's the nastiest bit.
I never said OS X was without flaws. The fact that I got a kernel panic is evidence of a significant bug somewhere. I just see them -much less often- on Mac OS X than on other PC based OSs I've worked with (since 1978, when I bought my TRS 80 Model 1).
;-)
I get a kernel panic on my MacBook Pro around once a month or so - usually caused by very different things. I tried enabling wireless on a train once, just to see how many networks were zooming past - and then tried connecting to a network to see what happened. Oops. Kernel panic. That's me taught! Also, even iPhoto's also caused one (the problem-reporting thing which appeared on startup reckoned there was a problem with the ATI graphics drivers), I've even occasionally had ones out of the blue while web-browsing (see photo)...
The bugs responsible might be in the process or being patched out every time there's a MacOS X update, but I've no real way of knowing. It's still a pretty stable machine, although worse than my old iBook (which still locked up every so often with the multilingual messages). But, embarrassingly, it's nowhere near as stable as my Windows XP desktop machine - which I do Half-Life 2 mod development stuff on, so seriously stretch the graphics card, memory, processor etc.
My crashy-crashy-shite-machine is that same PC running Linux. Rock-solid in Windows XP, it locks up all the time in Linux. A recent-ish 64-bit SUSE release. And yes, I've updated everything, downloaded new nVidia drivers, blah blah blah, and it still locks up at random whenever I do anything graphics related.
Kind of a turn-around from some years ago, when I reckoned Linux was uncrashable, Windows a disaster and Macs I could crash by standing nearby...
Clearly we need to clean up a lot of keyboard junk. CAPS LOCK is just the start. Who knows where we'll finish?
;-)
The ever-trendy Apple tried that, and removed quite a few keys. On this 'ere MacBook Pro, there's no SysRq, no Home, no Insert, no PgUp... And more importantly, no Delete.
Which makes running Windows XP a little interesting without a remapped keyboard...
That's a bit of it, yes - the second half also makes for interesting viewing!
Aaaaand here's his mea culpa. Microsoft buys Bungie, dramatically alters scope of Halo, makes it a one-platform-launch. Delays game for years. Alters art direction, ends up being a pale shadow of the Marathon design. Myth is sold to a 3rd party developer who produces a lacklustre sequel. Halo is a great success - the only success, really - for Xbox. Crawls onto other platforms much later, the last of which is the Mac - four years after it was demo'd on a blue and white G3 tower at Macworld.
There's a fascinating video from Bungie out there somewhere, demonstrating various stages in the development of Halo. It becomes immediately obvious that it was a rather tortured project, with little cohesive game direction behind it, and wildly changing ideas as to what the final product should be. Starting as an RTS, moving to third-person, and so on. The stunning films produced for MacWorld and E3 on are revealed as smoke-and-mirrors - there was a work-in-progress engine there, some nice vehicle physics and some semi-working weapons, but no AI, no missions, and most importantly - no game.
Probably the only thing that really made it through intact to the Xbox FPS was the art direction. (Compare the video from E3 2000 with parts of the final game. Pretty close.) The gamers' nebulous ideal of an earth-shattering Halo, which Microsoft allegedly killed, suppressed or altered, actually never really existed.
Original goals for Halo: hazy. Obviously he's not making that mistake again.
A pseudocode representation of how it works:I think it's still under development.
Cross-site scripting attacks are possible through many different vectors - sometimes you can include it in a GET address (e.g. 'image.php?name=foo.jpg&caption=<script goes here>'), sometimes in text submitted to the website (one I saw wasn't escaping private, inter-user messages - so I promptly sent Javascript to the administrator), or whatever.
Essentially, if you can get the website to output your own text in an unescaped form (i.e. '>' and friends aren't converted into '>' etc.), you can print raw Javascript, which the user's browser promptly executes. Javascript is quite a helpful language, so has functions for getting the values of cookies, etc. - which you can then send off to a third-party server under your control.
I had to do a rough security audit about a year ago on a website. From knowing absolutely nothing about the specifics of cross-site-scripting and SQL injection attacks, in a couple of hours I was hijacking administrator sessions or getting the website to dump passwords, private data, you name it. It was embarrassingly easy. So, some tips for web programmers on the receiving end of all this:
I'd treat it like an HTML validator - it might miss inherent flaws in the design and implementation, but it'll pick up sillier little errors which might actually have very serious consequences.
It's