"This weekend provides one of the year's a href="http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns? id=dn9732&feedId=space_rss20">best opportunities to see some "shooting stars". The annual Perseid meteor display is expected to peak on Friday and Saturday night...."
Aren't slashdot editor's meant to be able to understand HTML? Another prime example for my signature:
The language difference between reading and playing videogames would be "reactive" and "proactive" respectively. Reading a book is simply that, you read it. However, it's "playing" a videogame, and it's you in there choosing your actions. For instance, in GTA you can pick up a hooker and bang her in your car, then when you pay her you can let her walk off for a bit and shoot her in the back of the head with a sniper and get a full refund for her services. A few people get a kick out of this. My first thought was "Hrm. Economical."
Thus it's important to distinguish between where having a cheap laugh in GTA is caused by the way you play with the game dynamics ends and where having a cheap laugh in GTA is caused because you think it's hilarious that a hooker is getting screwed over. Hence it's not the game, it's the person.
Also, videogames are labelled violent the same way that movies are labelled violent. We call movies violent because some guy gets his head blown off and giblets over the camera. That's probably High or High-Impact violence. Videogames have degree Animated Violence. It's still violent, just one less notch away from real life violence.
One of my friends has an ad-system on his page and he says that real estate ads pull in a few dollars per "click". Nothing to back that up apart from what he's said.
The 5% came from the fact that you want to send out a legit-looking email, say a family letter from a person with a fairly generic name. If you just send a family letter without buzzwords like viagra and cheap software or s3x, it should pass most spam filters and you can put the ads at the bottom. When you get an email from "John Smith" about his recent holiday, then you're more likely to open it. I know for most spam it hardly gets opened, but given that you're not looking to sell viagra or shares you don't necessarily need to worry about making the email look like spam by using tricks to get past spam filters, making it more likely the end-user will open it.
If millions of people play violent video games and don't act out what they see in the games, then when somebody does... maybe it's not the game, it's the person.
1. The owners might just notice the keyboards are slightly different 2. The keyboard still needs software for keylogging functionality, so they're going to have to install software (and since most internet cafe computers are stored inside locked boxes, there's no incentive to forceably open the boxes to install a keyboard and then software when they could just install software)
Hence my point that this isn't any more scarier than a software keylogger, just stupider.
The keyboards still need software to phone home, so it's practically no different to a software keylogger. Hence it would be cheaper and easier to give away a free CD with some stupid home-brew game on it with a keylogger hidden and get the same end-result.
The internet cafe owners could just install software keyloggers. To use the keyboard to log keystrokes you'd need the software anyway. My point was this is no more scary than a more powerful software keylogger, so they don't need to hype it up.
You don't have to click on the messages in spam to benefit it. If your ad provider gives you money per n impressions, then you just send out a reasonably legit looking email and hope that maybe 5% open it. 5% of 1 million = 50000, and if your ad company gives you a "click" for every 1000 impressions, that's 50x whatever the ad is. If you're doing something obscure like real estate that gives a few dollars per "click", then churning out about a million emails an hour will leave you with more than enough to put the kids the college.
A keyboard keylogger? "Scary". I think not. It's not like these people are going to bust into internet cafe's, pick the lock and change the keyboard without anybody noticing. Nor are they going to do it to somebody's personal PC ("Hey, my keyboard's different. Oh well..."). The only market I see for this is for corporations, and they can either use a hardware dongle, or have a software keylogger. They can also run the user in a sandbox that prevents them from detecting the software one, and the software one probably has more power in it anyway.
Undetectable data transfer is at least worrying, not the fact you can embed it in the keyboard. Also, external hardware devices can't be plugged in and execute arbitrary code, which means you require software installed, which can be detected. Not such an undetectable spy device now, is it?
What happened to the MP3 phones? They lost out to devices that can do the job better and cheaper. The same with media PC's. Given the size restrictions, media PC's performance are heavily watered down and harder to interface with (a remote that gives you little control or a mouse on a couch), so when you expect a full on media experience you instead get a mediocre one. You could buy a decent home theater system that's more powerful for around the same price, sans PC functionality.
Being largely self taught isn't going to work in your favour. I can deploy Exchange 2003 to a corporate network, but not in the most efficient way. A decent deployment can be painfully complicated.
This goes for all software, knowing how to do it from picking around on tutorials on the internet is going to get the job done, but not in the same way as somebody who has got the Exchange certification. My advice to you is to go to your local Microsoft certifier and get some basic sysadmin certification at the very least, and then move on to *nix.
Unfortunately that removes WGA, along with all of the functionality of their business applications, such as the suites from Autodesk, Macromedia, Adobe, as well as specialised stuff such as MapInfo. But there's always an open source alternative that's 3 versions behind, anyway.
With Flash you can create a line, and drag it out with the mouse. Similarily, you can create a path by adding nodes, and then sculpt it. I just made this example.
Clumps of matter formed because the Big Bang was assymetrical. With regards to the Charlie Chaplin comment, your point is perfectly valid. I just got an idea now, however, that maybe with the one edge popping off, you could then rotate it four times and you'd get four different pops, all the same, but different.
If someone could (in)validate that for me it would be nice, since I'm no physicist.
Michio Kaku in his book Hyperspace describes why we can't actually get very far with this theory, is because "nobody is smart enough to figure it out". Since it was an accidental discovery in the 80's, he describes it as "21st century math that accidently made its way into the 20th century". The problem is to do with phase shifts and perturbation theory:
(Excerpted from Hyperspace: A scientific Odyssey through the 10th dimension)
To understand this form of tunneling, think of an imaginary Charlie Chaplin film, in which Chaplin is trying to stretch a bed sheet around an oversize bed. The shit is the kind with elastic bands on the corners. But it is too small, so he has to strain to wrap the elastic bands around each corner of the matress, one at a time. He grins with satisfaction once he has stretched the bed sheet smoothly around all four corners of the bed. But the strain is too great; one elastic band pops off another corner. Every time he yanks an elastic band around one corner, another elastic pops off another corner.
This process is called symmetry breaking. The smoothly strechted bed sheet possess a high degree of symmetry. You can rotate the bed 180 degrees along any axis, and the bed sheet remains the same. This highly symmetrical state is called the false vacuum. Although the false vacuum appears quite symmetrical, it is not stable. The sheet does not want to be in this stretched condition. There is too much tension. The energy is too high. Thus one elastic pops off, and the bed sheet curls up. The symmetry is broken, and the bed sheet has gone to a lower-energy state with less symmetry. By rotating the curled up bed sheet 180 degrees around an axis, we no longer return to the same sheet.
Now replace the bed sheet with ten-dimensional space-time, the space-time of ultimate esymmetry. At the beginning of time, the universe was perfectly symmetrical. If anyone was around at that time, he could freely pass through any of the ten dimensions without a problem. At that time, gravity and the weak, the strong and the electromagnetic forces were all unified by the superstring. All matter and forces were part of the same string multiplet. However, this symmetry couldn't last. The ten-dimensional universe, although perfectly symmetrical, was unstable, just like the bed sheet, and in a false vacuum. Thus tunneling to a lower-energy state was inevitable. When tunneling finally occurred, a phase transition took place, and symmetry was lost.
Because the universe begain to split up into a four- and a six-dimensional universe, the universe was no longer symmetrical. Six dimensions have curled up, in the same way that the bed sheet curls up when one elastic pops off first. For the ten-dimensional universe, however, there are apparently millions of ways in which to curl up. To calculate which state the ten-dimensional universe prefers, we need to solve the field theory of strings using the theory of phase transitions, the most difficult problem in quantum theory.
I dunno if anybody noticed that there was a story going through the pipeline with a huge chunk of text missing, but here's the complete article:
UK music fans no longer face the threat of prosecution for copying their own CDs on to PCs or MP3 players, as long as the songs are only for personal use.
Peter Jamieson, chairman of the British Phonographic Industry, said consumers would only be penalised if they made duplicates of songs for other people
Currently anyone transferring music to portable devices breaks copyright laws.
The music industry has traditionally turned a blind eye, however, in favour of targeting "professional" pirates.
"We believe that we now need to make a clear and public distinction between copying for your own use and copying for dissemination to third parties," said Mr Jamieson, whose organisation represents the UK's record labels.
He told the Commons select committee for culture, media and sport that he wanted to "make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs for their own private use in order to move the music from format to format, we will not pursue them".
Domination 'not healthy'
Mr Jamieson also called for Apple - which makes the popular iPod portable music player - to open up its iTunes software so it is compatible with the technology of other manufacturers.
Apple applies a digital protection system to its downloads, which means they are not usually compatible with other companies' devices.
He said iTunes' dominant market share in downloads was "not particularly healthy" and said he "would advocate that Apple opts for interoperability".
Consumers in the UK pay 79p per track on iTunes and - generally - £7.90 for a full album, although this can vary according to the number of songs and the status of the artiste in question.
In February, music industry investigators claimed someone in almost every street in every town in the UK was illegally copying music and film.
The Federation Against Copyright Theft and British Phonographic Industry said home counterfeiters now accounted for the majority of their investigations
Slashdot Mirror
What does NASA stand for?
Need
Another
Seven
Astronauts
"This weekend provides one of the year's a href="http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns? id=dn9732&feedId=space_rss20">best opportunities to see some "shooting stars". The annual Perseid meteor display is expected to peak on Friday and Saturday night. ..."
Aren't slashdot editor's meant to be able to understand HTML? Another prime example for my signature:
The language difference between reading and playing videogames would be "reactive" and "proactive" respectively. Reading a book is simply that, you read it. However, it's "playing" a videogame, and it's you in there choosing your actions. For instance, in GTA you can pick up a hooker and bang her in your car, then when you pay her you can let her walk off for a bit and shoot her in the back of the head with a sniper and get a full refund for her services. A few people get a kick out of this. My first thought was "Hrm. Economical."
Thus it's important to distinguish between where having a cheap laugh in GTA is caused by the way you play with the game dynamics ends and where having a cheap laugh in GTA is caused because you think it's hilarious that a hooker is getting screwed over. Hence it's not the game, it's the person.
Also, videogames are labelled violent the same way that movies are labelled violent. We call movies violent because some guy gets his head blown off and giblets over the camera. That's probably High or High-Impact violence. Videogames have degree Animated Violence. It's still violent, just one less notch away from real life violence.
One of my friends has an ad-system on his page and he says that real estate ads pull in a few dollars per "click". Nothing to back that up apart from what he's said.
The 5% came from the fact that you want to send out a legit-looking email, say a family letter from a person with a fairly generic name. If you just send a family letter without buzzwords like viagra and cheap software or s3x, it should pass most spam filters and you can put the ads at the bottom. When you get an email from "John Smith" about his recent holiday, then you're more likely to open it. I know for most spam it hardly gets opened, but given that you're not looking to sell viagra or shares you don't necessarily need to worry about making the email look like spam by using tricks to get past spam filters, making it more likely the end-user will open it.
If millions of people play violent video games and don't act out what they see in the games, then when somebody does... maybe it's not the game, it's the person.
1. The owners might just notice the keyboards are slightly different
2. The keyboard still needs software for keylogging functionality, so they're going to have to install software (and since most internet cafe computers are stored inside locked boxes, there's no incentive to forceably open the boxes to install a keyboard and then software when they could just install software)
Hence my point that this isn't any more scarier than a software keylogger, just stupider.
The keyboards still need software to phone home, so it's practically no different to a software keylogger. Hence it would be cheaper and easier to give away a free CD with some stupid home-brew game on it with a keylogger hidden and get the same end-result.
The internet cafe owners could just install software keyloggers. To use the keyboard to log keystrokes you'd need the software anyway. My point was this is no more scary than a more powerful software keylogger, so they don't need to hype it up.
You don't have to click on the messages in spam to benefit it. If your ad provider gives you money per n impressions, then you just send out a reasonably legit looking email and hope that maybe 5% open it. 5% of 1 million = 50000, and if your ad company gives you a "click" for every 1000 impressions, that's 50x whatever the ad is. If you're doing something obscure like real estate that gives a few dollars per "click", then churning out about a million emails an hour will leave you with more than enough to put the kids the college.
A keyboard keylogger? "Scary". I think not. It's not like these people are going to bust into internet cafe's, pick the lock and change the keyboard without anybody noticing. Nor are they going to do it to somebody's personal PC ("Hey, my keyboard's different. Oh well..."). The only market I see for this is for corporations, and they can either use a hardware dongle, or have a software keylogger. They can also run the user in a sandbox that prevents them from detecting the software one, and the software one probably has more power in it anyway.
Undetectable data transfer is at least worrying, not the fact you can embed it in the keyboard. Also, external hardware devices can't be plugged in and execute arbitrary code, which means you require software installed, which can be detected. Not such an undetectable spy device now, is it?
What happened to the MP3 phones? They lost out to devices that can do the job better and cheaper. The same with media PC's. Given the size restrictions, media PC's performance are heavily watered down and harder to interface with (a remote that gives you little control or a mouse on a couch), so when you expect a full on media experience you instead get a mediocre one. You could buy a decent home theater system that's more powerful for around the same price, sans PC functionality.
Being largely self taught isn't going to work in your favour. I can deploy Exchange 2003 to a corporate network, but not in the most efficient way. A decent deployment can be painfully complicated.
This goes for all software, knowing how to do it from picking around on tutorials on the internet is going to get the job done, but not in the same way as somebody who has got the Exchange certification. My advice to you is to go to your local Microsoft certifier and get some basic sysadmin certification at the very least, and then move on to *nix.
Maybe www.2advanced.net might be up your alley.
Unfortunately that removes WGA, along with all of the functionality of their business applications, such as the suites from Autodesk, Macromedia, Adobe, as well as specialised stuff such as MapInfo. But there's always an open source alternative that's 3 versions behind, anyway.
What does NASA stand for?
Need
Another
Seven
Astronauts...
Is this nothing more than a cheap excuse to groom students to work on OpenWengo's own software? C'mon now, the OSS market hasn't sunk that low...
Until somebody nukes the Vatican out of existence, evolution will only be a nice, long block of conjecture.
With Flash you can create a line, and drag it out with the mouse. Similarily, you can create a path by adding nodes, and then sculpt it. I just made this example.
Yep.
"innovative 'node sculpting'"
You mean like the way Flash has been handling it for years?
Clumps of matter formed because the Big Bang was assymetrical. With regards to the Charlie Chaplin comment, your point is perfectly valid. I just got an idea now, however, that maybe with the one edge popping off, you could then rotate it four times and you'd get four different pops, all the same, but different.
If someone could (in)validate that for me it would be nice, since I'm no physicist.
Jesus that's a bad typo. But I guess I can claim that for every dupe an editor makes I get a typo... so I'm still in the green.
Michio Kaku in his book Hyperspace describes why we can't actually get very far with this theory, is because "nobody is smart enough to figure it out". Since it was an accidental discovery in the 80's, he describes it as "21st century math that accidently made its way into the 20th century". The problem is to do with phase shifts and perturbation theory:
(Excerpted from Hyperspace: A scientific Odyssey through the 10th dimension)
To understand this form of tunneling, think of an imaginary Charlie Chaplin film, in which Chaplin is trying to stretch a bed sheet around an oversize bed. The shit is the kind with elastic bands on the corners. But it is too small, so he has to strain to wrap the elastic bands around each corner of the matress, one at a time. He grins with satisfaction once he has stretched the bed sheet smoothly around all four corners of the bed. But the strain is too great; one elastic band pops off another corner. Every time he yanks an elastic band around one corner, another elastic pops off another corner.
This process is called symmetry breaking. The smoothly strechted bed sheet possess a high degree of symmetry. You can rotate the bed 180 degrees along any axis, and the bed sheet remains the same. This highly symmetrical state is called the false vacuum. Although the false vacuum appears quite symmetrical, it is not stable. The sheet does not want to be in this stretched condition. There is too much tension. The energy is too high. Thus one elastic pops off, and the bed sheet curls up. The symmetry is broken, and the bed sheet has gone to a lower-energy state with less symmetry. By rotating the curled up bed sheet 180 degrees around an axis, we no longer return to the same sheet.
Now replace the bed sheet with ten-dimensional space-time, the space-time of ultimate esymmetry. At the beginning of time, the universe was perfectly symmetrical. If anyone was around at that time, he could freely pass through any of the ten dimensions without a problem. At that time, gravity and the weak, the strong and the electromagnetic forces were all unified by the superstring. All matter and forces were part of the same string multiplet. However, this symmetry couldn't last. The ten-dimensional universe, although perfectly symmetrical, was unstable, just like the bed sheet, and in a false vacuum. Thus tunneling to a lower-energy state was inevitable. When tunneling finally occurred, a phase transition took place, and symmetry was lost.
Because the universe begain to split up into a four- and a six-dimensional universe, the universe was no longer symmetrical. Six dimensions have curled up, in the same way that the bed sheet curls up when one elastic pops off first. For the ten-dimensional universe, however, there are apparently millions of ways in which to curl up. To calculate which state the ten-dimensional universe prefers, we need to solve the field theory of strings using the theory of phase transitions, the most difficult problem in quantum theory.
Go back to contradicting science and not believing in evolution.
I dunno if anybody noticed that there was a story going through the pipeline with a huge chunk of text missing, but here's the complete article:
UK music fans no longer face the threat of prosecution for copying their own CDs on to PCs or MP3 players, as long as the songs are only for personal use.
Peter Jamieson, chairman of the British Phonographic Industry, said consumers would only be penalised if they made duplicates of songs for other people
Currently anyone transferring music to portable devices breaks copyright laws.
The music industry has traditionally turned a blind eye, however, in favour of targeting "professional" pirates.
"We believe that we now need to make a clear and public distinction between copying for your own use and copying for dissemination to third parties," said Mr Jamieson, whose organisation represents the UK's record labels.
He told the Commons select committee for culture, media and sport that he wanted to "make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs for their own private use in order to move the music from format to format, we will not pursue them".
Domination 'not healthy'
Mr Jamieson also called for Apple - which makes the popular iPod portable music player - to open up its iTunes software so it is compatible with the technology of other manufacturers.
Apple applies a digital protection system to its downloads, which means they are not usually compatible with other companies' devices.
He said iTunes' dominant market share in downloads was "not particularly healthy" and said he "would advocate that Apple opts for interoperability".
Consumers in the UK pay 79p per track on iTunes and - generally - £7.90 for a full album, although this can vary according to the number of songs and the status of the artiste in question.
In February, music industry investigators claimed someone in almost every street in every town in the UK was illegally copying music and film.
The Federation Against Copyright Theft and British Phonographic Industry said home counterfeiters now accounted for the majority of their investigations