Unfortunately without any specific details (and if Micorosft really spent millions there should be a media trail -- those sorts of projects don't slip under the radar) this sounds rather incredulous.
I'm not so sure if they concentrated on speed, or rather if speed naturally results from the lack of basic features like transactional integrity. dBase is tremendously faster than a real RDBMS in some scenarios (for instance mass bulk inserts), but this doesn't indicate that the dbase team focused on speed.
Given the current political climate there seems to be a lot of ignorance over the difference between "bias" and "fact". Indeed often people confuse a lack of bias with a counter bias.
For instance, if indeed AMD is the superior consumer chip, perhaps offering measurably better performance/value, then it is entirely reasonable that a site would say such, and it isn't a "bias" to pronounce the AMD the superior choice of the current candidates. Similarly if George W. Bush dines on kittens for dinner, and someone reports it, that doesn't mean that they are biased against Bush.
Only your public key is stored in DNS - if the registrar is hacked into the most they can do is to replace the published public key with their own, though of course that'll be detected quite quickly.
Of course that doesn't preclude the possibility that a rogue employee could take the private key which you have to make accessible on your mail servers and sell it to a spammer, but on the flip side revocation is extremely easy - simply replace the private key and then the public key in your DNS -- presumably (I have not bothered reading the spec) there is a time window of key caching/key checking. Perhaps for a short while you have both keys to allow for the sending with the new key and for the old key to be gradually moved as anyone receiving mail with it gets it.
However the purpose of a CA is not to prove that the sender is the domain that they say they are, but that the sender is legitimately the BUSINESS that they say they are. For instance you cannot receive a name authenticated CA certificate for Paypa1.com -- there is a manual process that will see the obvious fraudulent use and they'll deny the request. The same would happen for any domain with Citibank, Wellsfargo, etc, in the domain in an obviously fraudulent manner (i.e. secure-citibank.com).
To touch upon what another poster said, it is unlikely that the price of name authenticated CAs will drop because it is a highly manual process of validating business names and legitimacy -- this isn't a mechanical process like a domain registrar.
But until pretty much the whole world's using DomainKeys, unsigned emails can't be dropped.
-Your receive a message -You check the DNS for the key -It has one, but the message isn't signed. Drop the message.
Receivers that don't check the key of course won't realize they're getting fraudulent mail, but those that do will with absolutely certainty - if Google publishes that they sign their emails, then you can be absolutely certain that unsigned emails are fakes and dump them. If the sending domain doesn't have a key then you obviously can't take advantage of this.
An important hole in the phishing protection is that there will quickly be domains like...
Excellent point that is very true. While this is another tool for the clueful, the clueless will happily believe derivatives, and as you mentioned they will be fully "authenticated". paypa1.com anyone?
...since Yahoo's system only tells you whether mail did indeed come from their servers...
Well if it came from their server, then obviously Yahoo has decided that the user initiating the message has the right to send a message from that account (i.e. you've authenticated as joe_blow to send a message as joe_blow@yahoo.com). Presumably unauthenticated mail sending (i.e. classic SMTP) isn't too common anymore.
I suppose the grizzled veteran truck driving, wife beating, dog shooting fans of a right wing show like the O'Reilly factor are better equipped to understand the real world?
While it is absolutely true that as the election draws closer to a close Mr. Stewart seems to be leaning to the "left", I truly honestly believe that he is not partisan from the "I got my brand at 18 and I'll vote this way for the rest of my life" (which is the pathetic, democracy-killing way that many Americans sadly vote-these little puppets don't care about the issues or the campaign, they just need to ensure that they don't "flip-flop" by ever reassessing reality): It's obviously that he simply believes that the Bush administration has done bad things for the US, and wants him out. Kerry is the only credible option, so it seems like he's supporting Kerry when in actuality he was highly critical of Kerry until recently. The idea of "right" and "left" wing parties (especially when both are really sitting in the center) is pretty irrelevant when you only have two choices.
Well considering many of the developers would not work under a BSD license
Funny that a large portion of the most important software running the internet, and used as the foundation even for much of the GPL software, was developed under the BSD license (and of course we know that a large percentage of GPL software was built by studying commercial or BSD software and then making a clone and then turning around and making purile claims of intellectual purity). Of course you just have to look at all of those crazy Apache forks out there...
I think not as many developers work on it because what incentive does a large comany have to return it's modifications back into the free version as opposed to just saying FU, I have my fork.
Most large companies that are contributing to Linux are doing so in a way that turns the momentum towards their own strategic best interest. They want you to integrate their changes because their changes serve them best.
How would you feel if someone took your work, made a change or two and sold it as their own? I'd be pretty pissed.
Why? In no way is "your work" any less available, and at most the value of what they are selling is the value added by the features that they've added (if I take libgzip and add a new flag for rot13 all of the contents, clearly the only value I am setting is the rot13 because people can still get libgzip as free as it's ever been). What you're describing is petty envy - If I can't make a penny off this then neither can you. That pretty much sums up much of the GPL sentiment as expressed by the angry hoardes (it isn't the true spirit of the GPL, but it's the message that the haters get).
While Oracle and SQL Server 2005 have hierarchical commands, they are in actuality recursive function calls and thus much slower than most database set logic.
Of course, if the price drops tomorrow, it's probably the best time to buy in, since this is obviously a temporary glitch.
While it may be a temporary glitch, there is no doubt that such an outage has a real financial impact - banking, which PayPal is to a degree, is based upon trust, and PayPal already starts in a precarious situation given that there are no branches to visit and limit options available outside of their website. This is the sort of thing that sends grandmas and grandpas away from that payment method for a while.
Many telcos are using VoIP in parallel with their PSTN backbones, and this is ok - most users don't even notice this behind the scenes VoIP application.
It has been decades since phone companies actually switched a dedicated piece of copper for a voice call - they long ago realized that they could digitize the call and multiplex the packets over a high speed connection (digitizing at 64Kbps for a voice call, which is why all of the telecom standards such as DS0, DS1, DS3, and so on, are multiples of 64 - it's the number of uncompressed phone calls that the line can handle). What you may be referring to is the fact that up until recently most telcos ran the voice network on somewhat proprietary protocols and network infrastructures (i.e. ATM), but because of the cost benefit of IP many of them have switched to IP for their data networks, allowing them to use the same networks for data as well (although they QOS their own voice traffic so data never preempts a voice call).
Having the DVI, RF and S-Video outs disabled on the box, along with "can't control the digital audio volume via remote" isn't a "one person can't figure out" thing. It is crap
Disabling the outputs is a nuisance, though generally as they roll it out they enable features through the wire as they work out the kinks. I've had a standard digital box for about 4 years, and they just enabled the Dolby Digital on it.
However regarding the digital audio output - of course they don't control the "volume" of the digital output : Digital output obviously has a fixed amount of headroom, say 16-bits, and if you digitally control the volume you're effectively increasing distortion by limiting the granularity. If the manufacturers followed this gentleman's suggestion then listening to the TV quietly at night would sound like garbage.
While Bush supporters try to twist this into a racist card, the simple reality is that you can't walk into an oppressed land and drop in a crate of democracy and expect it to take (especially in a place surrounded by countries that really want to see freedom fail, and a society and religion that has a historical precedent of assigning leadership [government] roles to religious figures). Historically oppressed people are basically pushovers, and the moment the chance comes up a corrupt government will sit on them and a democracy becomes a dictatorship. We're seeing that happen in Russia. It is brutally idealistic to think that democracy can be seeded so easily.
noone (and certianly not Kerry or Edwards) believing that there were WMD in Iraq before 2003
Bush and friends controlled the CIA at that point, and the CIA was saying whatever they wanted to hear, including "Iraq has WMDs!". Most reports point to the fact that the administration basically asked the intelligence agency "Does Iraq have WMDs? [ ] Yes [ ] Yes [ ] Probably"
pre-war Iraq and Afghanistan being idyllic paradises
Ah...Afghanistan. A war that almost no one contends with, but Republican boosters try to shoehorn in to try to prop up Iraq. Afghanistan != Iraq. Understand? Saddam != Osama. It is absolutely frighteningly astounding how difficult this is for Bush boosters to comprehend.
Now speaking of Iraq, who said it was a pardise? I think everyone agreed that it was a brutal dictatorship, but they also believed that it was a fragile house of cards that you can't unbalance without serious consequences. Furthermore if given the choice "potentially make Iraq a better place for 25,000,000 Iraqis, but it'll cost you $400 billion+ and 1100 soldiers lives, as well as devastating your international credibility", few would mark yes on the ballot box. This was not the war that Americans were sold.
However all of the humanitarian talk about making Iraq a better place is a startling display of denial - the war was never, ever about making Iraq a better place for Iraqis. In fact Bush gave speeches early in his term specifically saying that he does not believe in nation building (perhaps it was an earlier moment of clarity).
America safer with Saddam in power
Saddam ruled Iraq as a police state and held tight control over the entire country. As it currently stands, with several hundred thousand heavily armed American troops, much of the country is completely lawless, and regional tribes run the show. Saddam was known to execute international terrorists (basically because he was a selfish man - he wanted the West to hurt, but he wanted to keep himself from hurt even more. Note that Saddam did have chemical weapons in Gulf War I, but he declined to use them even in `self-defense' out of personal fear). Now Al Queda can basically set up a several thousand square mile training camp. Consider also that Osama used the invited American presence in Saudi Arabia to fuel the rage of his followers -- now how do you think they'll do for material with the US occupation of Iraq (occupation is the term the Bush administration gave it).
America safer with Saddam in power, less people dying from the next X amount of years under Bathist rule than under a war which will spread freedom and liberty into the middle east
How utterly naive. Several years back I worked with a very intelligent woman from Iran who moved over here, and of course I envisioned that she must be overwhelmed with the freedoms we have in the West, and she must be ready to boil over with rage at the evil tyranny of Iran. How surprizing when she basically defended it, criticized the godlessness of North America, and has actually gone back several times to visit family. Many of these people actually believe in the merits and importants of a theocracy, and a belief that government is left to a strata of society. Of course democracy could eventually take hold over a natural evolution, but it is a very, very long road. The internet does more to spread democracy than American troops ever will.
MapPoint, and its younger brother Streets and Trips, uses vector geographical information as well (indeed I would expect every real mapping software to). It resizes to varying levels, allowing you to display political boundaries (states, countries, counties, etc).
Actually didn't the missile that hit the barracks get hit, and knocked off course, by a patriot? My recollection of that story was that the interception was complete (not dead on, as that is rather difficult at those speeds, but close enough to severely affect the trajectory), but in a stroke of bad luck the new trajectory was straight for the barracks.
The joy of the orginal DOOM was that they actually bothered to hide the monsters in the walls - two imps appearing from a secret room is far more exciting than creature after creature appearing from nowhere.
There's quite a lot of that in Doom 3 as well - backtrack a bit and you'll find a small recess in a wall, or a slightly deeper recess, usually with some token amount of ammo in it, where the imp came from.
...but gameplay wise it becomes boring and repetitive very quickly...
Out of curiousity, how long of gaming sessions did you play? I found that I lost an appreciation for the game when I played more than two hours or so -- at that point I simply wanted to see the next unique area, and each new imp represented a nuisance waste of time. That was a sign that it was time to hit F5 and quit it for the night, and the next time I started it up it was fun again.
On second thought, if you just run around the game without ever using the flashlight, you won't be able to see anything anyway, so you won't realize that you're only getting 13 frames per second!
I completed Doom 3 on my rather antiquated GF4 Ti4400, and have a few comments regarding this:
The demands of the game vary considerably. On my lowly GF4 Ti4400 I ran at Medium quality, achieving a very acceptable framerate, for the majority of the game. There were a couple of sections that became a slideshow and required a downgrade to Low (one I suspect was a bug and perhaps someone accidentally duplicated a model a thousand times or so, as there was nothing visually exceptional in the area. The other was a massive opponent), but otherwise it ran great. The FX5200 would do that much better. The hardware complaints are generally people who think that they have some constitutional right to crank every visual setting to the top and achieve smooth gameplay on any rig
The comments about the flashlight are completely misguided, and are the result of people with their brightness turned down too far, or who played the game in a bright environment (which results in your own eyes having a vastly decreased ability to perceive the subtle darkness changes). Follow the instructions on the box and play in a darkened room and you'll have no problem apart from one or two short scenes that truly are dark. The idea that people used a patch because they can't read is baffling. If id is at fault, it's that they didn't supply a THX style visual diagnostic screen for people to adjust to, and that they don't put the "Are you in a dark room?" as a confirmation when you launch the game
This is, of course, presuming that you have the password to the administrator account. Simply knowing the admin shares (which is what the hidden shares of C$ and so on - in Windows $ suffixed shares are "hidden", though the hiding is from an asthetic perspective rather than any sort of security through obscurity) is useless otherwise.
But the ammount of funding determines how many doctors they can have on-hand, and hence, how many people they can treat at once.
True, but there is a flip side of the coin - the more convenient and speedy a hospital visit is, the less discouraged nuisance visitors are. A fair percentage of the people crowding hospital rooms are there because they have the sniffles or minor pains that should be dealt with via a visit to their family doctor, or just by waiting for it to pass. I don't want to sound insensitive, but here in Ontario our waiting rooms are mostly crowded by seniors sure that every pain is death knocking on their door and they're desperate for the heroic doctor to wave the wand of immortality over them - we throw more and more money at it (I believe another $40 billion or so was just thrown at the problem), but the more you alleviate the crowding the easier it is for someone to go head to the emergency room "just to be sure".
So all you have to do is lookup the DNS server's IP, and send a packet 'from' that IP with the information they're about to lookup. If you time it right, it's trivial.
I think you're making it sound a little easier than it really is. Apart from having to send a reply packet at precisely the right time when the user sent out a request, usually to a relatively close DNS server that responds almost instantly, that DNS response has to contain the same 32-bit ID as the user's DNS request (which is how the client matches up requests and responses). Some clients used to sequentially increment from 1, but even then you'd have to know how many DNS lookups have been performed since the machine was booted up to accurately guess the ID. The alternative? Between the time that the machine sends out a request and the relatively local ISP DNS replies, you'll have to bombard the user's machine with 4 billion forged DNS replies to ensure that you've duped them.
Trivial from a brute force perspective, but it certainly isn't as easily exploitable as you imply.
Perhaps the joking aspect of the grandparent post wasn't evident enough.
Per the friend/foe categorization, I was hardly serious when I declared you a mortal enemy - I tend to track those who marks me as a foe out of humor. 9 times out of 10 it's a troll, and the other 1 out of 10 it's someone how cannot fathom a world where there are contrary opinions. I suspect that you're the latter. Perhaps one day you'll find your dream board where everyone thinks and acts just like you.
Oh sorry forget that - just read through your hard right conspiracy theory nutbar posts, trying to make sense of why you decided to go through the trouble of marking me a foe, and I realized that I must have said something that defied your perverted perception of reality at some point, thus making me your mortal enemy. I couldn't be more pleased, and I savour seeing people like you in my freak category. Thanks for adding the psycho tag to your posts.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately without any specific details (and if Micorosft really spent millions there should be a media trail -- those sorts of projects don't slip under the radar) this sounds rather incredulous.
I'm not so sure if they concentrated on speed, or rather if speed naturally results from the lack of basic features like transactional integrity. dBase is tremendously faster than a real RDBMS in some scenarios (for instance mass bulk inserts), but this doesn't indicate that the dbase team focused on speed.
"AnandTech and Tom's Hardware are so AMD-biased"
Given the current political climate there seems to be a lot of ignorance over the difference between "bias" and "fact". Indeed often people confuse a lack of bias with a counter bias.
For instance, if indeed AMD is the superior consumer chip, perhaps offering measurably better performance/value, then it is entirely reasonable that a site would say such, and it isn't a "bias" to pronounce the AMD the superior choice of the current candidates. Similarly if George W. Bush dines on kittens for dinner, and someone reports it, that doesn't mean that they are biased against Bush.
Only your public key is stored in DNS - if the registrar is hacked into the most they can do is to replace the published public key with their own, though of course that'll be detected quite quickly.
Of course that doesn't preclude the possibility that a rogue employee could take the private key which you have to make accessible on your mail servers and sell it to a spammer, but on the flip side revocation is extremely easy - simply replace the private key and then the public key in your DNS -- presumably (I have not bothered reading the spec) there is a time window of key caching/key checking. Perhaps for a short while you have both keys to allow for the sending with the new key and for the old key to be gradually moved as anyone receiving mail with it gets it.
However the purpose of a CA is not to prove that the sender is the domain that they say they are, but that the sender is legitimately the BUSINESS that they say they are. For instance you cannot receive a name authenticated CA certificate for Paypa1.com -- there is a manual process that will see the obvious fraudulent use and they'll deny the request. The same would happen for any domain with Citibank, Wellsfargo, etc, in the domain in an obviously fraudulent manner (i.e. secure-citibank.com).
To touch upon what another poster said, it is unlikely that the price of name authenticated CAs will drop because it is a highly manual process of validating business names and legitimacy -- this isn't a mechanical process like a domain registrar.
Right "you" means "agent receiving email", which could be an MTA or could even be an end user client.
But until pretty much the whole world's using DomainKeys, unsigned emails can't be dropped.
-Your receive a message
-You check the DNS for the key
-It has one, but the message isn't signed. Drop the message.
Receivers that don't check the key of course won't realize they're getting fraudulent mail, but those that do will with absolutely certainty - if Google publishes that they sign their emails, then you can be absolutely certain that unsigned emails are fakes and dump them. If the sending domain doesn't have a key then you obviously can't take advantage of this.
An important hole in the phishing protection is that there will quickly be domains like...
Excellent point that is very true. While this is another tool for the clueful, the clueless will happily believe derivatives, and as you mentioned they will be fully "authenticated". paypa1.com anyone?
...since Yahoo's system only tells you whether mail did indeed come from their servers...
Well if it came from their server, then obviously Yahoo has decided that the user initiating the message has the right to send a message from that account (i.e. you've authenticated as joe_blow to send a message as joe_blow@yahoo.com). Presumably unauthenticated mail sending (i.e. classic SMTP) isn't too common anymore.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040930/nyth190_1.html
I suppose the grizzled veteran truck driving, wife beating, dog shooting fans of a right wing show like the O'Reilly factor are better equipped to understand the real world?
While it is absolutely true that as the election draws closer to a close Mr. Stewart seems to be leaning to the "left", I truly honestly believe that he is not partisan from the "I got my brand at 18 and I'll vote this way for the rest of my life" (which is the pathetic, democracy-killing way that many Americans sadly vote-these little puppets don't care about the issues or the campaign, they just need to ensure that they don't "flip-flop" by ever reassessing reality): It's obviously that he simply believes that the Bush administration has done bad things for the US, and wants him out. Kerry is the only credible option, so it seems like he's supporting Kerry when in actuality he was highly critical of Kerry until recently. The idea of "right" and "left" wing parties (especially when both are really sitting in the center) is pretty irrelevant when you only have two choices.
Well considering many of the developers would not work under a BSD license
Funny that a large portion of the most important software running the internet, and used as the foundation even for much of the GPL software, was developed under the BSD license (and of course we know that a large percentage of GPL software was built by studying commercial or BSD software and then making a clone and then turning around and making purile claims of intellectual purity). Of course you just have to look at all of those crazy Apache forks out there...
I think not as many developers work on it because what incentive does a large comany have to return it's modifications back into the free version as opposed to just saying FU, I have my fork.
Most large companies that are contributing to Linux are doing so in a way that turns the momentum towards their own strategic best interest. They want you to integrate their changes because their changes serve them best.
How would you feel if someone took your work, made a change or two and sold it as their own? I'd be pretty pissed.
Why? In no way is "your work" any less available, and at most the value of what they are selling is the value added by the features that they've added (if I take libgzip and add a new flag for rot13 all of the contents, clearly the only value I am setting is the rot13 because people can still get libgzip as free as it's ever been). What you're describing is petty envy - If I can't make a penny off this then neither can you. That pretty much sums up much of the GPL sentiment as expressed by the angry hoardes (it isn't the true spirit of the GPL, but it's the message that the haters get).
One technique (albeit the examples are specific to SQL Server, the technique works elsewhere as well).
r archies.htm
http://www.yafla.com/papers/sqlhierarchies/sqlhie
While Oracle and SQL Server 2005 have hierarchical commands, they are in actuality recursive function calls and thus much slower than most database set logic.
Of course, if the price drops tomorrow, it's probably the best time to buy in, since this is obviously a temporary glitch.
While it may be a temporary glitch, there is no doubt that such an outage has a real financial impact - banking, which PayPal is to a degree, is based upon trust, and PayPal already starts in a precarious situation given that there are no branches to visit and limit options available outside of their website. This is the sort of thing that sends grandmas and grandpas away from that payment method for a while.
Many telcos are using VoIP in parallel with their PSTN backbones, and this is ok - most users don't even notice this behind the scenes VoIP application.
It has been decades since phone companies actually switched a dedicated piece of copper for a voice call - they long ago realized that they could digitize the call and multiplex the packets over a high speed connection (digitizing at 64Kbps for a voice call, which is why all of the telecom standards such as DS0, DS1, DS3, and so on, are multiples of 64 - it's the number of uncompressed phone calls that the line can handle). What you may be referring to is the fact that up until recently most telcos ran the voice network on somewhat proprietary protocols and network infrastructures (i.e. ATM), but because of the cost benefit of IP many of them have switched to IP for their data networks, allowing them to use the same networks for data as well (although they QOS their own voice traffic so data never preempts a voice call).
Having the DVI, RF and S-Video outs disabled on the box, along with "can't control the digital audio volume via remote" isn't a "one person can't figure out" thing. It is crap
Disabling the outputs is a nuisance, though generally as they roll it out they enable features through the wire as they work out the kinks. I've had a standard digital box for about 4 years, and they just enabled the Dolby Digital on it.
However regarding the digital audio output - of course they don't control the "volume" of the digital output : Digital output obviously has a fixed amount of headroom, say 16-bits, and if you digitally control the volume you're effectively increasing distortion by limiting the granularity. If the manufacturers followed this gentleman's suggestion then listening to the TV quietly at night would sound like garbage.
So don't leave us hanging here. What happened??!?
It turned out that the chick was a dude!
Arabs not being able to handle democracy
While Bush supporters try to twist this into a racist card, the simple reality is that you can't walk into an oppressed land and drop in a crate of democracy and expect it to take (especially in a place surrounded by countries that really want to see freedom fail, and a society and religion that has a historical precedent of assigning leadership [government] roles to religious figures). Historically oppressed people are basically pushovers, and the moment the chance comes up a corrupt government will sit on them and a democracy becomes a dictatorship. We're seeing that happen in Russia. It is brutally idealistic to think that democracy can be seeded so easily.
noone (and certianly not Kerry or Edwards) believing that there were WMD in Iraq before 2003
Bush and friends controlled the CIA at that point, and the CIA was saying whatever they wanted to hear, including "Iraq has WMDs!". Most reports point to the fact that the administration basically asked the intelligence agency "Does Iraq have WMDs? [ ] Yes [ ] Yes [ ] Probably"
pre-war Iraq and Afghanistan being idyllic paradises
Ah...Afghanistan. A war that almost no one contends with, but Republican boosters try to shoehorn in to try to prop up Iraq. Afghanistan != Iraq. Understand? Saddam != Osama. It is absolutely frighteningly astounding how difficult this is for Bush boosters to comprehend.
Now speaking of Iraq, who said it was a pardise? I think everyone agreed that it was a brutal dictatorship, but they also believed that it was a fragile house of cards that you can't unbalance without serious consequences. Furthermore if given the choice "potentially make Iraq a better place for 25,000,000 Iraqis, but it'll cost you $400 billion+ and 1100 soldiers lives, as well as devastating your international credibility", few would mark yes on the ballot box. This was not the war that Americans were sold.
However all of the humanitarian talk about making Iraq a better place is a startling display of denial - the war was never, ever about making Iraq a better place for Iraqis. In fact Bush gave speeches early in his term specifically saying that he does not believe in nation building (perhaps it was an earlier moment of clarity).
America safer with Saddam in power
Saddam ruled Iraq as a police state and held tight control over the entire country. As it currently stands, with several hundred thousand heavily armed American troops, much of the country is completely lawless, and regional tribes run the show. Saddam was known to execute international terrorists (basically because he was a selfish man - he wanted the West to hurt, but he wanted to keep himself from hurt even more. Note that Saddam did have chemical weapons in Gulf War I, but he declined to use them even in `self-defense' out of personal fear). Now Al Queda can basically set up a several thousand square mile training camp. Consider also that Osama used the invited American presence in Saudi Arabia to fuel the rage of his followers -- now how do you think they'll do for material with the US occupation of Iraq (occupation is the term the Bush administration gave it).
America safer with Saddam in power, less people dying from the next X amount of years under Bathist rule than under a war which will spread freedom and liberty into the middle east
How utterly naive. Several years back I worked with a very intelligent woman from Iran who moved over here, and of course I envisioned that she must be overwhelmed with the freedoms we have in the West, and she must be ready to boil over with rage at the evil tyranny of Iran. How surprizing when she basically defended it, criticized the godlessness of North America, and has actually gone back several times to visit family. Many of these people actually believe in the merits and importants of a theocracy, and a belief that government is left to a strata of society. Of course democracy could eventually take hold over a natural evolution, but it is a very, very long road. The internet does more to spread democracy than American troops ever will.
MapPoint, and its younger brother Streets and Trips, uses vector geographical information as well (indeed I would expect every real mapping software to). It resizes to varying levels, allowing you to display political boundaries (states, countries, counties, etc).
Actually didn't the missile that hit the barracks get hit, and knocked off course, by a patriot? My recollection of that story was that the interception was complete (not dead on, as that is rather difficult at those speeds, but close enough to severely affect the trajectory), but in a stroke of bad luck the new trajectory was straight for the barracks.
The joy of the orginal DOOM was that they actually bothered to hide the monsters in the walls - two imps appearing from a secret room is far more exciting than creature after creature appearing from nowhere.
There's quite a lot of that in Doom 3 as well - backtrack a bit and you'll find a small recess in a wall, or a slightly deeper recess, usually with some token amount of ammo in it, where the imp came from.
...but gameplay wise it becomes boring and repetitive very quickly...
Out of curiousity, how long of gaming sessions did you play? I found that I lost an appreciation for the game when I played more than two hours or so -- at that point I simply wanted to see the next unique area, and each new imp represented a nuisance waste of time. That was a sign that it was time to hit F5 and quit it for the night, and the next time I started it up it was fun again.
I completed Doom 3 on my rather antiquated GF4 Ti4400, and have a few comments regarding this:
This is, of course, presuming that you have the password to the administrator account. Simply knowing the admin shares (which is what the hidden shares of C$ and so on - in Windows $ suffixed shares are "hidden", though the hiding is from an asthetic perspective rather than any sort of security through obscurity) is useless otherwise.
But the ammount of funding determines how many doctors they can have on-hand, and hence, how many people they can treat at once.
True, but there is a flip side of the coin - the more convenient and speedy a hospital visit is, the less discouraged nuisance visitors are. A fair percentage of the people crowding hospital rooms are there because they have the sniffles or minor pains that should be dealt with via a visit to their family doctor, or just by waiting for it to pass. I don't want to sound insensitive, but here in Ontario our waiting rooms are mostly crowded by seniors sure that every pain is death knocking on their door and they're desperate for the heroic doctor to wave the wand of immortality over them - we throw more and more money at it (I believe another $40 billion or so was just thrown at the problem), but the more you alleviate the crowding the easier it is for someone to go head to the emergency room "just to be sure".
So all you have to do is lookup the DNS server's IP, and send a packet 'from' that IP with the information they're about to lookup. If you time it right, it's trivial.
I think you're making it sound a little easier than it really is. Apart from having to send a reply packet at precisely the right time when the user sent out a request, usually to a relatively close DNS server that responds almost instantly, that DNS response has to contain the same 32-bit ID as the user's DNS request (which is how the client matches up requests and responses). Some clients used to sequentially increment from 1, but even then you'd have to know how many DNS lookups have been performed since the machine was booted up to accurately guess the ID. The alternative? Between the time that the machine sends out a request and the relatively local ISP DNS replies, you'll have to bombard the user's machine with 4 billion forged DNS replies to ensure that you've duped them.
Trivial from a brute force perspective, but it certainly isn't as easily exploitable as you imply.
Perhaps the joking aspect of the grandparent post wasn't evident enough.
Per the friend/foe categorization, I was hardly serious when I declared you a mortal enemy - I tend to track those who marks me as a foe out of humor. 9 times out of 10 it's a troll, and the other 1 out of 10 it's someone how cannot fathom a world where there are contrary opinions. I suspect that you're the latter. Perhaps one day you'll find your dream board where everyone thinks and acts just like you.
Oh sorry forget that - just read through your hard right conspiracy theory nutbar posts, trying to make sense of why you decided to go through the trouble of marking me a foe, and I realized that I must have said something that defied your perverted perception of reality at some point, thus making me your mortal enemy. I couldn't be more pleased, and I savour seeing people like you in my freak category. Thanks for adding the psycho tag to your posts.