lol, of all the places to make a typo like that, and see it duped on the next poster...
Heroin is the drug - Heroine is a female hero. So a heroine dealer deals female heroes, and knowing how buxom most of them are, probably to the sex trade....
Heroin is a horrific drug, and much worse than beer - instantly and basically permanently addictive and usually destroys the lives of users (much like Meth). I think it should be legal (I think drug enforcement is a waste of time and resources), but require some serious education before you can buy it (as in, do you REALLY want to do this!?). I know 3 ex heroin addicts (I lived in a house with two - 4 of the 6 people in that house had rehabbed together, but for different things), and saw one (a singer in a band I was in) kicking the habit, which is literal kicking when a heroin addict is going through withdrawal. Supposedly the hallucinogen ibogacaine can help them kick the habit without withdrawal symptoms, but the US bans it, so you'd have to go to Canada or Mexico to try that in North America.
I'd probably fall in the hero category - I have no interest in stealing even if I could get away with it, tend to be charitable, and like to help people. If I had a ring of invisibility (like Ring of Gyges), I'm not sure what I'd do with it... maybe eavesdrop? I don't really see any other use for it because I morally don't believe in stealing.
I have an ex-coworker (he retired a few years back) that drove 1 1/2 hours every day on a 63 mile commute to work. Why? Because his wife and daughters wanted to stay on and keep their (horse/cattle) farm, but the farm didn't generate enough income for them to retire comfortably (especially since he had a degree in IT). Rural real estate is also often much cheaper than urban. There are definitely pros and cons to living a ways from work.
Having visited a friend in Boston, a friend of mine said the driver followed awfully close to the next car, and the driver replied that he was always at least 2 carlengths behind the next car. Another friend said the rule was 2 SECONDS behind (which has been updated to 3 seconds now), and the driver said what? that's ridiculous.
That said, I've never seen more bad drivers than Boston - everyone drives like a lunatic there, and yes, I've driven in LA, New York, and Philly and seen nothing close to Boston.
Yeah, but you couldn't go to war at 17, either. When I was 16 and 17 my dad was still filing me as a dependent and payed taxes I owed (how that is handled varies state-to-state).
Personally, I think it is absurd to have a 21 drinking age, so also a 21 pot smoking age seems silly, too. We should legalize and tax all drugs, ditch the expensive drug war, start educating people about how dangerous some of these substances are, and make zero tolerance DUI laws. Note that I don't do drugs, so I have no vested interest in this outside of tax money.
It's an electric hybrid, so I'm sure it can go for a bit if the motor gave out. Actually, I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner, but probably because GM failed at it once. The reality is the gas turbine is the most efficient engine out there as long as it is at max power output, which is ideal for charging batteries. Turbines are rather loud, but with sufficient sound insulation it could work.
Funny thing is, I was just thinking of how inefficient the internal combustion engine is yesterday and wondering why it hasn't been replaced...
actually, from a network standpoint it is quite easy to set up IPv6 and IPv4 if you have a router that supports it (and most modern ones do - you just plug it in at the DNS and run IPv4 and IPv6 daemons) and my web site would and did support it, but when I changed ISPs to qwest from speakeasy (for financial reasons - it is about $70/month cheaper), I got stuck with IPv4 only, so this is an ISP issue - no excuses.
I'd love to use brackets in my browser addresses again (brackets tell the browser to use IPv6)- unless I want to surf privately, that is (like NAT at a coffee shop). The problem is, qwest owns a huge block of IPv4 addresses, so they don't really have a pressing need to set up and support IPv6 and I'm sure they won't until someone else leads the way - that company is a market follower - when competitors move in and smoke them in some area, they react, but not before (which is why their internet speeds have always lagged behind Comcast and generally other DSL competitors, but the only real remaining DSL competitor in my market, Covad, is just as bad).
well the US Department of Defense USAIC has two as well, and if you count the Network Information Center Blocks as well, they have 11 altogether. Sure the Internet was built off of DARPANET, but they pig more IPs than anyone.
I agree - you could still route traffic through a gateway and put some rules on that gateway server that prevent certain traffic through. NAT also provides anonymity, which IPv6 vehemently does not want, but end users may - I really don't want advertisers to know every place I go, for instance, and IPv6 allows that. On the plus side, it has built in security (IPsec), so only the target site will know your IP.
Well, I guess you could just change your MAC address and regen the IP if you wanted anonymity (the IP formula for IPv6 uses the MAC address to generate the unique address) and then switch it back afterward, but that seems like a pain.
I think certain words carry a certain weight, and overusing them dilutes them. Fuck is a perfect example of a word that has no weight anymore (IMO) - my mom would (and did) literally wash my mouth out with soap for saying that word (shit or crap was about the best I could get away with growing up). Bloody in England had a similar path - it once was taboo to say it, now people use it constantly.
Remember that some words are derogatory, though - nigger, bitch, cow (to a fat woman), etc - even if you don't consider them a big deal, another person might, and they may vocalize it by popping a couple of caps in you (heard of that happening more than once). Food for thought.
Part of the reason for no color was Apple was still targeting business and wanted to be seen as a business machine, not a toy like the Apple ][ line. IMO, Apple made a HUGE mistake of going after the business market exclusively for a while (trying to go head-to-head with IBM) and pretty much pissing on their consumer market. I know several people that (claim) they will never buy another Apple product because of how Apple handled the GS.
The Performa line was generally substandard - they were marketed to the masses at a cheap price. I owned a $3000 PowerPC 7500 and it was leaps and bounds faster than my mom's $1500 Performa bought months later. That machine lasted me 8 years (with processor upgrades and a 3dfx glide card, the latter of which was purchased for me [my first real job was writing GLIDE code]).
I replaced that with a B&W G3, but haven't purchased a mac since - I tried to have the 7500 repaired at FirstTech in Minneapolis (a mac specialist) and they charged me $100 for diagnostic and told me the mobo was for sure blown and that would be $800, and the power supply may be bad as well and that would be $500 to repair (parts and labor). I instantly got "this is shady" vibes, as I was 99% certain it was just the power supply. The internet was fledgling at that point, but I found the part I thought was failing (the power supply) for $50 new and found the mobo for $150 (didn't need it) and repaired it myself in 30 minutes (they wanted 2 hours of labor). FirstTech prices were marked up 300% for mobo and 400% for power supply over that (keep in mind that the power supply in both cases was APPLE manufactured). I have never used a PC repair person since and recommended people avoid FirstTech for repairs at that time (haven't been in the store in years - once bitten, twice shy).
well I'm a lefty and doing things right handed is really hard unless I learn them that way. I learned right handed mouse and right handed cello, guitar, and bass guitar. I couldn't switch hit in baseball or softball to save my life, though (and I tried HARD to learn it - just no accuracy or power - I strike out in slow pitch...). Hmm... I couldn't really play a left handed instrument either when I tried, but piano wasn't bad because I had to learn both hands.
Which is great except the gun show loophole pretty much allows anyone to walk in and buy a gun with cash, no questions asked. There is pending legislation to close it, but I have friends that have been buying guns at such shows since they were 16, including one that bought an assault rifle (not fully automatic - an AR-15 if I recall correctly). Admittedly they started pre-Brady law (1993), but gun shows are still lax from what I remember of the one I attended in the mid-1990s.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - while I don't have a problem with restricting access, I have a fundamental problem with this law unfairly targeting video games and not all media. In mass killings, the top influences were movies and music, not video games (movies were something like 2x more influential than video games, as well). In secret shopper surveys, kids were more than twice as likely to be able to buy R and UR movies and explicit lyric CDs.
The movie ratings system is voluntary just like the video game industry. One of the reasons for the push for the law was because "the movie industry polices itself," but that is fundamentally flawed - that is theaters only - retail is still voluntary, just like for retail video games. If arcades were still around and popular, this would be more akin to stopping kids from access to certain arcade games but still letting them buy the game at the store (if the store allowed).
In the US, the video game rating system is actually stricter on sex/nudity than the movie industry - in fact, it is one of the most restrictive systems in the world, where frontal nudity is always an M and more than ~2 seconds of it is an AO. Violence is typically split into Teen vs M or AO by gore content.
most stores self police already (see secret shopper link above) - in 2008, 80% of kids trying to buy M and AO video games were stopped - in 2000, that number was 17%. In a study, only 8% of kids try to buy games without parental consent, so of the 8% trying to get away with it, only 20% do.
Retail stores sell unrated movies that have added sexual or violent content, but AFAIK, no video games are sold unrated from any major retailer.
Video games have 1" ratings labels that must be on the lower left hand corner of the box. Movies have inconsistent size, location, and box requirements. CDs I believe also require explicit lyrics to be on the front of the disk (all of mine are, but I only have a few).
So in conclusion, I don't have a problem with restricting sales to minors, but I have a huge problem with video games being the scapegoat. The problem is media in general and the continued perception of video games being like animation and for kids only, which the US seems to hang on to even though it is incorrect. I wonder how many of the same people with that perception went to see Avatar, which was basically one big cartoon marketed to adults...
Ignoring the page encoding/decoding, Haystack is (and must be) a proxy server. I've always seen the centralized servers being a weak link in the first place, but in addition I doubt it would be hard for Iran to reverse engineer, since they can see both the before and after encoding results by just getting a copy of Haystack. They also could just figure out the Haystack IP + port and just start blocking. The same idea placed on a backbone may work great, however (if you could get the backbone operators onboard).
I recall reading that Egyptian mummies were found with traces of moldy bread on wounds, so they probably did have a knowledge of antibiotics in Africa. Many (like Ramses II) also had traces of cocaine and tobacco, indicating they likely had contact with the Americas - that or the formerly verdant parts of the Sahara were capable of growing coke and tobacco and eventually the plants died off there.
Western Europeans like to think they discovered numerous things like, say, the earth is round or that it revolves around the sun, but the Greeks (for one) knew that long before and those things had to be rediscovered, so there would be no surprise in my mind if this is yet another piece of lost knowledge.
I'm not sure how it affects other organisms, but yes, alcohol needs to be about 70% to kill bacteria directly, which is why first aid methanol is sold at 70% or higher concentrations. Grandparent is right that wort is boiled for an hour or more, however, and that should do in most bacteria and other microorganisms (like wild yeasts).
Brewer's yeast is not exactly the best competitor - beer making generally requires a very clean process, often involving soaking pretty much everything in bleach and keeping exposure to open air to a minimum. The exception is lambics, which use wild yeast from exposure to open air, but these need to be brewed during certain months and in certain environments to avoid harmful microorganisms. Generally, beer makers go out of their way to give the brewer's yeast the most favor in the environment.
The TrueType patent(s) you're referring to expired earlier this year (as Slashdot reported). ClearType is actually still patented, but freetype uses a prior art modification to avoid any patent issues. See the freetype patent page
Yeah - I actually find America is backwater in some ways. Nobody gives a rats ass about nudity in Europe, and while people do binge drink, it is nowhere near the problem it is in America (or Russia, but Russia has cultural issues as well - it is considered rude to leave before the vodka bottle is finished, for instance).
Reminded me of the description of travel some (American) friends of mine told after visiting the Soviet Union during the Cold War (they were architecture students). Everything they did was escorted, and the empty banquet halls was dead on, but supposedly the food was better. Rooms were always bugged, and apparently some of the bugs were very obvious.
In North Korea, the people are privileged if they have electricity, much less internet. Take a look at satellite photos of Korea at night - South Korea has huge swaths of white. North Korea is black.
North Korea is a communist dictatorship - by definition the state gives you everything you need and thus there is no reason to buy anything. Mostly that means Kim Jong Il uses tax money to build elaborate palaces and the only reason he doesn't have a Ceauescu-like revolution is because of his massive army and repression of both the people and the press. In fact, I would say his regime is a near perfect mirror of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Aside from McAfee being a mediocre product, they do have market penetration and are a known name brand, probably more-so than BitDefender or Kaspersky, which are far superior products. This also may be a move to infuse money into the company to make them competitive again, and Intel has that.
It is possible to improve a mediocre product - for years I badmouthed Norton for overhead, intrusiveness, slowness, and late updating to new threats, but since 2006 they've made HUGE strides in all those areas. I still think rootkits have their way on far too many Norton protected machines, but as a product it is much, much, much better. McAffe has brand name recognition, now they just need to get their product up-to-snuff.
Incidentally, my biggest issue with McAfee, aside from mediocre protection, is that it is intrusive and hard to remove - I've never found it to be particularly slow or resource intensive. Of course, the only box I've tried it on (accidentally due to it being bundled with Acrobat or something like that) was built for speed - quad core 2GHz (Core 2 Q9000 - note the box was built in early 2009) and 8GB of high speed RAM - the only time I've brought that box to its knees was doing a parallel compile while running Linux in a VM also doing a parallel compile (of the same software) and running an extremely GPU intensive pre-processor program to create relaxed cone-step maps (and that sucker was throttled...).
yeah - this was also in PopSci and didn't have much info, just that it was already being used in Iran, but you can get the gist of it from the faq:
Haystack hides traffic to any from the internet at large inside traffic that looks like perfectly normal web connections to innocuous sites. The Haystack client connects to our servers which in turn talk to websites on behalf of our users.
also
From a user's point of view, Haystack appears to be a normal HTTP proxy, which means that Haystack not only supports all modern web browsers, but many other network programs as well, including Yahoo Messenger, FTP clients, and IRC clients.
So basically, it is a proxy system that goes a bit above and beyond a normal proxy server because it needs to mangle the headers to look like it is coming from a "good" site and it also needs to do something to keywords that would be picked up by deep packet filtering (which Iran uses). According to the faq again, the data is enciphered to look like normal, unencrypted web traffic, so this is apparently how they get around deep packet filtering.
They claim that the only way it is block-able is by completely disabling the internet, and from a received page point of view I can see that because the header could be completely mangled to look like it came from a legitimate site. The problem would be if the proxy was found and blocked - in that case, there would be no way to request pages, and I'm not sure how they intend to get around that aside from moving the proxy server frequently.
There is an ironic (if you believe situational irony is irony) solution to blocking this traffic - IPsec with AH (part of IPv6, but you can get it for IPv4) - AH guarantees the source, but IPsec secures the data, so you fix the packet source problem, but break the ability to snoop.
Slashdot Mirror
lol, of all the places to make a typo like that, and see it duped on the next poster...
Heroin is the drug - Heroine is a female hero. So a heroine dealer deals female heroes, and knowing how buxom most of them are, probably to the sex trade....
Heroin is a horrific drug, and much worse than beer - instantly and basically permanently addictive and usually destroys the lives of users (much like Meth). I think it should be legal (I think drug enforcement is a waste of time and resources), but require some serious education before you can buy it (as in, do you REALLY want to do this!?). I know 3 ex heroin addicts (I lived in a house with two - 4 of the 6 people in that house had rehabbed together, but for different things), and saw one (a singer in a band I was in) kicking the habit, which is literal kicking when a heroin addict is going through withdrawal. Supposedly the hallucinogen ibogacaine can help them kick the habit without withdrawal symptoms, but the US bans it, so you'd have to go to Canada or Mexico to try that in North America.
I'd probably fall in the hero category - I have no interest in stealing even if I could get away with it, tend to be charitable, and like to help people. If I had a ring of invisibility (like Ring of Gyges), I'm not sure what I'd do with it... maybe eavesdrop? I don't really see any other use for it because I morally don't believe in stealing.
I have an ex-coworker (he retired a few years back) that drove 1 1/2 hours every day on a 63 mile commute to work. Why? Because his wife and daughters wanted to stay on and keep their (horse/cattle) farm, but the farm didn't generate enough income for them to retire comfortably (especially since he had a degree in IT). Rural real estate is also often much cheaper than urban. There are definitely pros and cons to living a ways from work.
Having visited a friend in Boston, a friend of mine said the driver followed awfully close to the next car, and the driver replied that he was always at least 2 carlengths behind the next car. Another friend said the rule was 2 SECONDS behind (which has been updated to 3 seconds now), and the driver said what? that's ridiculous.
That said, I've never seen more bad drivers than Boston - everyone drives like a lunatic there, and yes, I've driven in LA, New York, and Philly and seen nothing close to Boston.
Yeah, but you couldn't go to war at 17, either. When I was 16 and 17 my dad was still filing me as a dependent and payed taxes I owed (how that is handled varies state-to-state).
Personally, I think it is absurd to have a 21 drinking age, so also a 21 pot smoking age seems silly, too. We should legalize and tax all drugs, ditch the expensive drug war, start educating people about how dangerous some of these substances are, and make zero tolerance DUI laws. Note that I don't do drugs, so I have no vested interest in this outside of tax money.
James Spader is in EVERYTHING bad
there, I corrected it for you. It is Kevin Bacon that is in everything.
It's an electric hybrid, so I'm sure it can go for a bit if the motor gave out. Actually, I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner, but probably because GM failed at it once. The reality is the gas turbine is the most efficient engine out there as long as it is at max power output, which is ideal for charging batteries. Turbines are rather loud, but with sufficient sound insulation it could work.
Funny thing is, I was just thinking of how inefficient the internal combustion engine is yesterday and wondering why it hasn't been replaced...
actually, from a network standpoint it is quite easy to set up IPv6 and IPv4 if you have a router that supports it (and most modern ones do - you just plug it in at the DNS and run IPv4 and IPv6 daemons) and my web site would and did support it, but when I changed ISPs to qwest from speakeasy (for financial reasons - it is about $70/month cheaper), I got stuck with IPv4 only, so this is an ISP issue - no excuses.
I'd love to use brackets in my browser addresses again (brackets tell the browser to use IPv6)- unless I want to surf privately, that is (like NAT at a coffee shop). The problem is, qwest owns a huge block of IPv4 addresses, so they don't really have a pressing need to set up and support IPv6 and I'm sure they won't until someone else leads the way - that company is a market follower - when competitors move in and smoke them in some area, they react, but not before (which is why their internet speeds have always lagged behind Comcast and generally other DSL competitors, but the only real remaining DSL competitor in my market, Covad, is just as bad).
well the US Department of Defense USAIC has two as well, and if you count the Network Information Center Blocks as well, they have 11 altogether. Sure the Internet was built off of DARPANET, but they pig more IPs than anyone.
I agree - you could still route traffic through a gateway and put some rules on that gateway server that prevent certain traffic through. NAT also provides anonymity, which IPv6 vehemently does not want, but end users may - I really don't want advertisers to know every place I go, for instance, and IPv6 allows that. On the plus side, it has built in security (IPsec), so only the target site will know your IP.
Well, I guess you could just change your MAC address and regen the IP if you wanted anonymity (the IP formula for IPv6 uses the MAC address to generate the unique address) and then switch it back afterward, but that seems like a pain.
I think certain words carry a certain weight, and overusing them dilutes them. Fuck is a perfect example of a word that has no weight anymore (IMO) - my mom would (and did) literally wash my mouth out with soap for saying that word (shit or crap was about the best I could get away with growing up). Bloody in England had a similar path - it once was taboo to say it, now people use it constantly.
Remember that some words are derogatory, though - nigger, bitch, cow (to a fat woman), etc - even if you don't consider them a big deal, another person might, and they may vocalize it by popping a couple of caps in you (heard of that happening more than once). Food for thought.
Part of the reason for no color was Apple was still targeting business and wanted to be seen as a business machine, not a toy like the Apple ][ line. IMO, Apple made a HUGE mistake of going after the business market exclusively for a while (trying to go head-to-head with IBM) and pretty much pissing on their consumer market. I know several people that (claim) they will never buy another Apple product because of how Apple handled the GS.
The Performa line was generally substandard - they were marketed to the masses at a cheap price. I owned a $3000 PowerPC 7500 and it was leaps and bounds faster than my mom's $1500 Performa bought months later. That machine lasted me 8 years (with processor upgrades and a 3dfx glide card, the latter of which was purchased for me [my first real job was writing GLIDE code]).
I replaced that with a B&W G3, but haven't purchased a mac since - I tried to have the 7500 repaired at FirstTech in Minneapolis (a mac specialist) and they charged me $100 for diagnostic and told me the mobo was for sure blown and that would be $800, and the power supply may be bad as well and that would be $500 to repair (parts and labor). I instantly got "this is shady" vibes, as I was 99% certain it was just the power supply. The internet was fledgling at that point, but I found the part I thought was failing (the power supply) for $50 new and found the mobo for $150 (didn't need it) and repaired it myself in 30 minutes (they wanted 2 hours of labor). FirstTech prices were marked up 300% for mobo and 400% for power supply over that (keep in mind that the power supply in both cases was APPLE manufactured). I have never used a PC repair person since and recommended people avoid FirstTech for repairs at that time (haven't been in the store in years - once bitten, twice shy).
well I'm a lefty and doing things right handed is really hard unless I learn them that way. I learned right handed mouse and right handed cello, guitar, and bass guitar. I couldn't switch hit in baseball or softball to save my life, though (and I tried HARD to learn it - just no accuracy or power - I strike out in slow pitch...). Hmm... I couldn't really play a left handed instrument either when I tried, but piano wasn't bad because I had to learn both hands.
Which is great except the gun show loophole pretty much allows anyone to walk in and buy a gun with cash, no questions asked. There is pending legislation to close it, but I have friends that have been buying guns at such shows since they were 16, including one that bought an assault rifle (not fully automatic - an AR-15 if I recall correctly). Admittedly they started pre-Brady law (1993), but gun shows are still lax from what I remember of the one I attended in the mid-1990s.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - while I don't have a problem with restricting access, I have a fundamental problem with this law unfairly targeting video games and not all media. In mass killings, the top influences were movies and music, not video games (movies were something like 2x more influential than video games, as well). In secret shopper surveys, kids were more than twice as likely to be able to buy R and UR movies and explicit lyric CDs.
The movie ratings system is voluntary just like the video game industry. One of the reasons for the push for the law was because "the movie industry polices itself," but that is fundamentally flawed - that is theaters only - retail is still voluntary, just like for retail video games. If arcades were still around and popular, this would be more akin to stopping kids from access to certain arcade games but still letting them buy the game at the store (if the store allowed).
In the US, the video game rating system is actually stricter on sex/nudity than the movie industry - in fact, it is one of the most restrictive systems in the world, where frontal nudity is always an M and more than ~2 seconds of it is an AO. Violence is typically split into Teen vs M or AO by gore content.
most stores self police already (see secret shopper link above) - in 2008, 80% of kids trying to buy M and AO video games were stopped - in 2000, that number was 17%. In a study, only 8% of kids try to buy games without parental consent, so of the 8% trying to get away with it, only 20% do.
Retail stores sell unrated movies that have added sexual or violent content, but AFAIK, no video games are sold unrated from any major retailer.
Video games have 1" ratings labels that must be on the lower left hand corner of the box. Movies have inconsistent size, location, and box requirements. CDs I believe also require explicit lyrics to be on the front of the disk (all of mine are, but I only have a few).
So in conclusion, I don't have a problem with restricting sales to minors, but I have a huge problem with video games being the scapegoat. The problem is media in general and the continued perception of video games being like animation and for kids only, which the US seems to hang on to even though it is incorrect. I wonder how many of the same people with that perception went to see Avatar, which was basically one big cartoon marketed to adults...
Ignoring the page encoding/decoding, Haystack is (and must be) a proxy server. I've always seen the centralized servers being a weak link in the first place, but in addition I doubt it would be hard for Iran to reverse engineer, since they can see both the before and after encoding results by just getting a copy of Haystack. They also could just figure out the Haystack IP + port and just start blocking. The same idea placed on a backbone may work great, however (if you could get the backbone operators onboard).
I recall reading that Egyptian mummies were found with traces of moldy bread on wounds, so they probably did have a knowledge of antibiotics in Africa. Many (like Ramses II) also had traces of cocaine and tobacco, indicating they likely had contact with the Americas - that or the formerly verdant parts of the Sahara were capable of growing coke and tobacco and eventually the plants died off there.
Western Europeans like to think they discovered numerous things like, say, the earth is round or that it revolves around the sun, but the Greeks (for one) knew that long before and those things had to be rediscovered, so there would be no surprise in my mind if this is yet another piece of lost knowledge.
I'm not sure how it affects other organisms, but yes, alcohol needs to be about 70% to kill bacteria directly, which is why first aid methanol is sold at 70% or higher concentrations. Grandparent is right that wort is boiled for an hour or more, however, and that should do in most bacteria and other microorganisms (like wild yeasts).
Brewer's yeast is not exactly the best competitor - beer making generally requires a very clean process, often involving soaking pretty much everything in bleach and keeping exposure to open air to a minimum. The exception is lambics, which use wild yeast from exposure to open air, but these need to be brewed during certain months and in certain environments to avoid harmful microorganisms. Generally, beer makers go out of their way to give the brewer's yeast the most favor in the environment.
The TrueType patent(s) you're referring to expired earlier this year (as Slashdot reported). ClearType is actually still patented, but freetype uses a prior art modification to avoid any patent issues. See the freetype patent page
Yeah - I actually find America is backwater in some ways. Nobody gives a rats ass about nudity in Europe, and while people do binge drink, it is nowhere near the problem it is in America (or Russia, but Russia has cultural issues as well - it is considered rude to leave before the vodka bottle is finished, for instance).
Reminded me of the description of travel some (American) friends of mine told after visiting the Soviet Union during the Cold War (they were architecture students). Everything they did was escorted, and the empty banquet halls was dead on, but supposedly the food was better. Rooms were always bugged, and apparently some of the bugs were very obvious.
In North Korea, the people are privileged if they have electricity, much less internet. Take a look at satellite photos of Korea at night - South Korea has huge swaths of white. North Korea is black.
North Korea is a communist dictatorship - by definition the state gives you everything you need and thus there is no reason to buy anything. Mostly that means Kim Jong Il uses tax money to build elaborate palaces and the only reason he doesn't have a Ceauescu-like revolution is because of his massive army and repression of both the people and the press. In fact, I would say his regime is a near perfect mirror of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Aside from McAfee being a mediocre product, they do have market penetration and are a known name brand, probably more-so than BitDefender or Kaspersky, which are far superior products. This also may be a move to infuse money into the company to make them competitive again, and Intel has that.
It is possible to improve a mediocre product - for years I badmouthed Norton for overhead, intrusiveness, slowness, and late updating to new threats, but since 2006 they've made HUGE strides in all those areas. I still think rootkits have their way on far too many Norton protected machines, but as a product it is much, much, much better. McAffe has brand name recognition, now they just need to get their product up-to-snuff.
Incidentally, my biggest issue with McAfee, aside from mediocre protection, is that it is intrusive and hard to remove - I've never found it to be particularly slow or resource intensive. Of course, the only box I've tried it on (accidentally due to it being bundled with Acrobat or something like that) was built for speed - quad core 2GHz (Core 2 Q9000 - note the box was built in early 2009) and 8GB of high speed RAM - the only time I've brought that box to its knees was doing a parallel compile while running Linux in a VM also doing a parallel compile (of the same software) and running an extremely GPU intensive pre-processor program to create relaxed cone-step maps (and that sucker was throttled...).
According to Merriam-Webster, either whisky or whiskey is correct.
and my favorite part:
Etymology: Irish uisce beatha & Scottish Gaelic uisge beatha, literally, water of life
yeah - this was also in PopSci and didn't have much info, just that it was already being used in Iran, but you can get the gist of it from the faq:
also
So basically, it is a proxy system that goes a bit above and beyond a normal proxy server because it needs to mangle the headers to look like it is coming from a "good" site and it also needs to do something to keywords that would be picked up by deep packet filtering (which Iran uses). According to the faq again, the data is enciphered to look like normal, unencrypted web traffic, so this is apparently how they get around deep packet filtering.
They claim that the only way it is block-able is by completely disabling the internet, and from a received page point of view I can see that because the header could be completely mangled to look like it came from a legitimate site. The problem would be if the proxy was found and blocked - in that case, there would be no way to request pages, and I'm not sure how they intend to get around that aside from moving the proxy server frequently.
There is an ironic (if you believe situational irony is irony) solution to blocking this traffic - IPsec with AH (part of IPv6, but you can get it for IPv4) - AH guarantees the source, but IPsec secures the data, so you fix the packet source problem, but break the ability to snoop.