I'll check his blog, which didn't exist (afaik) until after the TSA started messing with him. From that first hack, and his reaction, his credibility was pretty much shot (at least in terms of employment based on the hack, which is what this particular thread is addressing).
But maybe he did this one right. I'll read TFA, but it initially looked like another "look at me!" stunt.
When are companies gonna get smart and actually HIRE this fucker? They're not going to hire him, because he's a loose cannon. The next thing an employer will find is a hack of their own site security on his webpage.
He has no scruples, or responsibility. He's the equivalent of an attention whore grey-hat hacker, while hiding behind the "someone needed to expose this" front. Although close, it's not like the Month-of--bugs. They are not doing it for notoriety, as this guy appears to be doing. His credibility would be much higher if he wasn't using political messages and if he actually notified the people involved.
Most universities with any sort of net access have rules stating that the sysadmins, in the course of their duties, can take action to stop attacks on the network.
The sysadmin initially blocked the port and called it good, probably with the intent to inform management and let them deal with it. One could argue that "I pay tuition and I was blocked illegally" but nobody here is saying that violated any rights.
Blocking was not sufficient to prevent the attacks, so the sysadm escalated his effort. That is a reasonable discharge of his duties IMHO, but some people are saying that this was illegal. I claim that doing nothing, or blocking the whole dorm would probably have been far worse for the rights of the students.
It's important to consider the rights of the guilty... the last thing we need is a drumhead legal system. But the rights of the innocent must be considered first. The impact of doing nothing or blocking everything was too great.
Burning may add some smog, but it has nothing to do with releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Most of the ash stays on the ground, and the carbon that was released will be taken in by the next batch of sugar cane. It is a zero sum.
The whole biofuel thing has to do with taking carbon out from deep in the ground and releasing it into the air. Sugar cane pulls out carbon from the air. So, sure it causes some local smog which is removed with wind and rain, but it doesn't cause a net change in the CO2 in the atmosphere. The smog appears worse to the local population, but the CO2 is worse the the planet.
Oil companies were saying "We'll need to build more coal plants to support the electric cars! You don't want more coal plants, do you?"
Now a shill is saying "We'll all starve if we use biodiesel or ethanol! You don't want to starve, do you?"
If a new car ran on 1/4" bolts, the price of 1/4" bolts would go up. But guess what, so would production. And it doesn't even have to be the kind of production that takes up food. Methanol could be produced by the corn stalks along with all sorts of other waste materials, and then the remainder used to enhance the ground again. Or you could use the corn oil for biodiesel and the starch for ethanol. But you don't even need to use corn, either. You can grown an amazing amount of corn in a very small area, without using all the idiotic equipment or chemicals. Who cares if it has some worms if it'll just be fermented or pressed?
This is what happens when money and politics (but mostly money) start to collide with society who's looking at the situation and saying "Hey, you can't do that!" There are big, big companies getting fat by polluting where we all have to live, and using our money to propagandize it so that we're happy to line thier pockets at our expense.
The biggest problem with all of this are the propaganda machines. They've been in full swing for decades now, and I'm getting tired of it. This blog was a shining example.
You ever see a rig take off from a light? That big black plume of smoke coming out of the stack is 100% shit. I'm thinking the same thing about your post.
The "black" that comes out of the diesel pipe is a lot of soot for sure. It's mostly particulate matter, and contributes to smog and can promote asthma.
However, that has nothing to do with the environmental damage of CO and CO2, the "greenhouse gasses". Diesel doesn't contribute to a global issue nearly as much (being mostly localized). And if the diesel is made from grown material (which pulls the carbon out of the air), it has a net change of zero. I remember having a 15yo tell me the same thing once, basing all his knowledge on what he observed. I'm glad to see foolish youthdom is still flourishing. But you're still provably wrong.
Likewise, the sulfur in diesel which would cause acid rain, is also beside the point. It doesn't come with diesel as a necessity, and biodiesel also doesn't have sulfur as a requirement.
Lastly, alcohol can be produced from things other than sugar, resulting in methanol (which burns about as well as ethanol) and is toxic... so the modern teetotalers shouldn't care.
The recently-ousted Kansas Bored of Education needs some ammo to show how the ("theory") of evolution changes and is clearly weak, unlike the Highly Stable (and very) Intelligent Design facts, despite partisan conflicting evidence. Facts don't change, unlike these inferior "theories".
You completely neglect the fact that the entire endgame is based around these 25-man raids and once you get to the maximum level, there is nothing left to do other than PvP - and even then those players that do 25-man raids have better gear/stats than those that don't. You can actually see the stats of most raid gear by going to the euro wow site and poking around.
I do not deny that the end-game consists of harder and harder raids. 10-man karazhan can be pugged, but it'll be a while before pugs can beat it. But most people can get 9 others together with a common goal. If you haven't met 9 others on the way to 70 that would want you in the group, you're doing something wrong.
For the casual player, 5-man instances are the end-game. And then 5-man heroics, and there are a LOT of 5-man instances. Those are difficult, and will last the casual player a long, long time, and the gear isn't too shabby. (Note that if you have more than a couple hours to play each day, you're not a casual player... if you're spending more than about 15-20 hours a week, you're pushing into the "hardcore". I'm talking about the person that can play for a few hours during the week and maybe 6 on a weekend.)
Those that are more powergamer than casual... well, you have to deal with raids or pvp -- but, even a casual player can get really good items with crafting. And anyone can do this at any conviction level. The best 2H sword in the game is made with blacksmithing, for example. Many really great items are now made with crafting, usable or with bonuses for those with the craft. This means anyone can get some items as good as the best current raid gear.
The release of BC made a big difference in the intended audience, from what I can tell. I was a powergamer, but now I'm finding I can relax and am enjoying the game far more.
The interesting thing about WoW is that it didn't refine it more than it dumbed it down.
Blizzard in turn made their game easier to access, smaller in scale and easier to travel due to easy transportation, and less intense graphics. Making it accessible and dumbing it down are completely different things. An intuitive GUI is far more complex than one that is "dumbed down". I do realize you're not using that as derogatory, but it's difficult to separate the two. It's really quite complex the way they handled it. In addition, they made the interface nearly completely programmable, which allows gamers to truly geek-out and enhance their own experience.
Blizzard graphics in WoW are actually quite intense. They have their own style and incredibly complex textures. They use fewer polygons in some areas, but are not blocky because they avoid the blockiness by reducing the number of 90-degree angles. (Thus, things don't look blocky to the eye -- cf: City of Heroes.) Many small items or sections use lots of polygons to give it a "full" and complex feel even when surrounding things are relatively low poly counts.
The main gameplay thing that wow mostly eliminated was camping global spawns. If getting rid of what most people consider an utterly stupid concept is "dumbing it down" then I want to play that dumb game. Some people actually enjoyed that aspect of competition in EQ -- but most people who have outgrown pimples eschew such games. Blizzard took most of the best parts of many games, and did it right, making a fun game and hoped people would play it instead of implementing cheesy tricks to keep people playing longer. They also know their audience isn't the hardcore kid with nothing better to do than call his 20 friends when a spawn happened. It's now the somewhat richer adult, often with a wife and kids, who has a few hours here and there to play, and most importantly is willing to pony up $15/month to have fun during that time.
They also have some of the "hardcore" kind of things that others have grown to recognize, and love/hate it. I'm talking 40-man raids (recently changed to 25-man), which are difficult.
The only thing that's actually dumbed down is pvp. And even that could be changed, if they wanted, without affecting other worlds. There are actually only 2 groups of people - casuals and powergamers, and people fall between those two. PvPers are often a subset of powergamers, and RPers may be anything.
Of the three groups people you discuss, no matter what game, the casuals will always bitch about the powergamers who will always bitch about the RPers, who will always bitch (in ye olde english) about everyone who doesn't RP. But WoW actually caters to the three groups much better than other games, and I'd even say succeeds quite well. You can accomplish something as a casual, and you can accomplish something as a powergamer. And there's a little corner for thee, Master RPer. Goeth now and stand there and leaveth the rest alone:-)
With only a few exceptions, it was all cheesy, and almost all action based. Lucas just made the action part look damn good for the time. I gotta agree with you here. I remember seeing light sabres in other movies, but Lucas did it extremely well for the time. It's funny, since he grabbed a horribly cliche script but made it look good.
There were some really good "thinker" series, many of which had trouble with funding, such as Dr Who, B5, Blake's 7, and several on the Sci Fi channel that were cancelled. Of these, B5 and Blakes 7 concentrated on the human (or alien) condition . But the vast majority were cheesy and poorly written, hoping the special effects would overcome poor scripting and acting (such as the old Battlestar Galactica, but many others whose names escape me as I poisoned my brain with booze to forget the terrible pain of bad sci-fi).
However, in a bit of a contradiction, one of my favorite recent sci fi movies would be classified as action: The Fifth Element.
Yes. From what I understand, exchanges of goods are still taxable. Barter systems are harder to track, but do not technically bypass tax laws. But then again, I ain't no stinkin lawyer. Or CPA.
The claim, under penalty of perjury, is that they hold the copyright to the original works to which they think you are infringing.
In other words, if LucasFilms posted a takedown notice to your video of you arguing with your brother and swinging toy lightsabers at each other, it would not be perjury because he owns the copyright to star wars.
This is an excellent demonstration of how the DMCA can be abused. You can say "I own work Foo and your work Bar infringes on it". The perjury part is only "I own work Foo".... and of course, take anything you read on a message board with a grain of salt. the preceeding does not constitute a client-attorney relationship or legal advice because IANAFL. (Hopefully, the NFL won't go after me for including them in that acronym.)
News flash: energy can be converted from one form into another and stored in innumerable ways (and with only moderate loss according to efficiency physics and such). i.e. You can compress air using whatever the hell you want. The local hardware store has a compressor that runs from a wall outlet. Are you willing to make the claim that the hardware store can then use the compressed air to convert back to a wall socket, with only "moderate loss"? I think you're baked.
You can convert electricity to heat at very good efficiency. Once you convert it to mechanical motion, you're likely to lose a lot due to inertia and friction. Solar is only about 30% efficient on some of the best cells out there (although there's some very promising research happening to increase this, possibly to 60% efficiency).
In any case, he's not writing it off completely. But it's definitely NOT zero emissions, unless the energy used to generate it is also zero emissions (such as solar, water, or wind). This is not a trivial amount of energy, either -- I'm not talking about the trivial energy used to press the liter of soybean oil every 50,000 km.
Compare it to the Tesla which is all electric, and gets an estimated 135 mpg based on efficiency calculations. It uses NO GASOLINE, but they had to try to compute it based on large, central electrical plants that have efficiency and emission control as a priority. This is similar. It burns gas, or coal, or isotopes, just not directly.
And to address your first point, "probably" is a great measure of usefulness of technology. This is "probably" a scam due to the danger of accidents causing a nasty explosion. This will "probably" not see the light of day in the next 10 years. But I'm not writing it off completely. All consumer technology like this is in the hands of the people adopting it, so if the people "probably" won't buy it, the tech will die.
Right, this is currently vaporware, but it's a cool idea.
Another guy that started this project is an old/. user and made an OSS project for UAVs. He has since commercialized it, but the OS project is still out there. The hardware is very cheap... like $150 iirc!
Several government agencies, especially national labs, do lots of civilian work. Often the labs do the basic research, and companies turn it into products at affordable prices.
If you read TFA, it stated that only certain agencies had the equipment to make and run the chips in the first place.
They have energy, and that energy gets converted to heat on the "black" side, causing a higher pressure than the white side (which reflects the photons instead of absorbing them).
If you allow people to randomly upgrade their departments without considering the interactivity implications, you could inadvertently cause a major problem in a large government organization.
IMHO, it's a sound decision, and isn't a slap to microsoft at all. Everyone has to evaluate their own situation and upgrade if they feel it benefits them. Hell, having a win98 box (non-networked) and running a robot safely for the past 8 years is certainly safer than upgrading it. TFA was clearly biased, and made some idiotic remarks like "ZOMG, if the government doesn't buy vista, MS will go broke!" as if the millions of XP licenses are suddenly free.
So, hold all the "haha" tags, because a thorough evaluation of major upgrades on critical infrastructure makes some sense.
Limits and free don't usually make sense when used to describe the same subject In a reasonable society that might be true. Take, for example, whenever you attempt to speak someone else talks over you at a much higher volume. He is not stopping you from talking, per se, but rather, exercising his free speech. If you say "don't talk over me" or eject him from the room, you are limiting him.
Thus, in even this simple example, free speech must be used responsibly to remain free. That's exactly the point I was making. Great, you can now publish other people's comments without fear of prosecution. But what if someone says something blatantly illegal, and you've taken steps to prevent stopping him? Freely speaking doesn't mean free from repercussions. (Go smack talk to the sox in boston and see if you don't get punched in the mouth.)
Slashdot Mirror
Gootube was easy.....
Doogleclick?
Doobleclick?
Goobleclick?
Youtoogleclick?
I concede that he did this one right, unlike his trivial boarding pass look-at-me hack.
Good for him! It shows some actual research.
I'll check his blog, which didn't exist (afaik) until after the TSA started messing with him. From that first hack, and his reaction, his credibility was pretty much shot (at least in terms of employment based on the hack, which is what this particular thread is addressing).
But maybe he did this one right. I'll read TFA, but it initially looked like another "look at me!" stunt.
He has no scruples, or responsibility. He's the equivalent of an attention whore grey-hat hacker, while hiding behind the "someone needed to expose this" front. Although close, it's not like the Month-of--bugs. They are not doing it for notoriety, as this guy appears to be doing. His credibility would be much higher if he wasn't using political messages and if he actually notified the people involved.
Magnets. Always with the magnets.
Principal Skinner is impressed!
Most universities with any sort of net access have rules stating that the sysadmins, in the course of their duties, can take action to stop attacks on the network.
The sysadmin initially blocked the port and called it good, probably with the intent to inform management and let them deal with it. One could argue that "I pay tuition and I was blocked illegally" but nobody here is saying that violated any rights.
Blocking was not sufficient to prevent the attacks, so the sysadm escalated his effort. That is a reasonable discharge of his duties IMHO, but some people are saying that this was illegal. I claim that doing nothing, or blocking the whole dorm would probably have been far worse for the rights of the students.
It's important to consider the rights of the guilty... the last thing we need is a drumhead legal system. But the rights of the innocent must be considered first. The impact of doing nothing or blocking everything was too great.
Burning may add some smog, but it has nothing to do with releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Most of the ash stays on the ground, and the carbon that was released will be taken in by the next batch of sugar cane. It is a zero sum.
The whole biofuel thing has to do with taking carbon out from deep in the ground and releasing it into the air. Sugar cane pulls out carbon from the air. So, sure it causes some local smog which is removed with wind and rain, but it doesn't cause a net change in the CO2 in the atmosphere. The smog appears worse to the local population, but the CO2 is worse the the planet.
Oil companies were saying "We'll need to build more coal plants to support the electric cars! You don't want more coal plants, do you?"
Now a shill is saying "We'll all starve if we use biodiesel or ethanol! You don't want to starve, do you?"
If a new car ran on 1/4" bolts, the price of 1/4" bolts would go up. But guess what, so would production. And it doesn't even have to be the kind of production that takes up food. Methanol could be produced by the corn stalks along with all sorts of other waste materials, and then the remainder used to enhance the ground again. Or you could use the corn oil for biodiesel and the starch for ethanol. But you don't even need to use corn, either. You can grown an amazing amount of corn in a very small area, without using all the idiotic equipment or chemicals. Who cares if it has some worms if it'll just be fermented or pressed?
This is what happens when money and politics (but mostly money) start to collide with society who's looking at the situation and saying "Hey, you can't do that!" There are big, big companies getting fat by polluting where we all have to live, and using our money to propagandize it so that we're happy to line thier pockets at our expense.
The biggest problem with all of this are the propaganda machines. They've been in full swing for decades now, and I'm getting tired of it. This blog was a shining example.
The "black" that comes out of the diesel pipe is a lot of soot for sure. It's mostly particulate matter, and contributes to smog and can promote asthma.
However, that has nothing to do with the environmental damage of CO and CO2, the "greenhouse gasses". Diesel doesn't contribute to a global issue nearly as much (being mostly localized). And if the diesel is made from grown material (which pulls the carbon out of the air), it has a net change of zero. I remember having a 15yo tell me the same thing once, basing all his knowledge on what he observed. I'm glad to see foolish youthdom is still flourishing. But you're still provably wrong.
Likewise, the sulfur in diesel which would cause acid rain, is also beside the point. It doesn't come with diesel as a necessity, and biodiesel also doesn't have sulfur as a requirement.
Lastly, alcohol can be produced from things other than sugar, resulting in methanol (which burns about as well as ethanol) and is toxic... so the modern teetotalers shouldn't care.
Virtual coin.
Virtual game.
QQ coin.
It's perfect for those chinese gold farmers.
The recently-ousted Kansas Bored of Education needs some ammo to show how the ("theory") of evolution changes and is clearly weak, unlike the Highly Stable (and very) Intelligent Design facts, despite partisan conflicting evidence. Facts don't change, unlike these inferior "theories".
I do not deny that the end-game consists of harder and harder raids. 10-man karazhan can be pugged, but it'll be a while before pugs can beat it. But most people can get 9 others together with a common goal. If you haven't met 9 others on the way to 70 that would want you in the group, you're doing something wrong.
For the casual player, 5-man instances are the end-game. And then 5-man heroics, and there are a LOT of 5-man instances. Those are difficult, and will last the casual player a long, long time, and the gear isn't too shabby. (Note that if you have more than a couple hours to play each day, you're not a casual player... if you're spending more than about 15-20 hours a week, you're pushing into the "hardcore". I'm talking about the person that can play for a few hours during the week and maybe 6 on a weekend.)
Those that are more powergamer than casual
The release of BC made a big difference in the intended audience, from what I can tell. I was a powergamer, but now I'm finding I can relax and am enjoying the game far more.
Blizzard in turn made their game easier to access, smaller in scale and easier to travel due to easy transportation, and less intense graphics. Making it accessible and dumbing it down are completely different things. An intuitive GUI is far more complex than one that is "dumbed down". I do realize you're not using that as derogatory, but it's difficult to separate the two. It's really quite complex the way they handled it. In addition, they made the interface nearly completely programmable, which allows gamers to truly geek-out and enhance their own experience.
Blizzard graphics in WoW are actually quite intense. They have their own style and incredibly complex textures. They use fewer polygons in some areas, but are not blocky because they avoid the blockiness by reducing the number of 90-degree angles. (Thus, things don't look blocky to the eye -- cf: City of Heroes.) Many small items or sections use lots of polygons to give it a "full" and complex feel even when surrounding things are relatively low poly counts.
The main gameplay thing that wow mostly eliminated was camping global spawns. If getting rid of what most people consider an utterly stupid concept is "dumbing it down" then I want to play that dumb game. Some people actually enjoyed that aspect of competition in EQ -- but most people who have outgrown pimples eschew such games. Blizzard took most of the best parts of many games, and did it right, making a fun game and hoped people would play it instead of implementing cheesy tricks to keep people playing longer. They also know their audience isn't the hardcore kid with nothing better to do than call his 20 friends when a spawn happened. It's now the somewhat richer adult, often with a wife and kids, who has a few hours here and there to play, and most importantly is willing to pony up $15/month to have fun during that time.
They also have some of the "hardcore" kind of things that others have grown to recognize, and love/hate it. I'm talking 40-man raids (recently changed to 25-man), which are difficult.
The only thing that's actually dumbed down is pvp. And even that could be changed, if they wanted, without affecting other worlds. There are actually only 2 groups of people - casuals and powergamers, and people fall between those two. PvPers are often a subset of powergamers, and RPers may be anything.
Of the three groups people you discuss, no matter what game, the casuals will always bitch about the powergamers who will always bitch about the RPers, who will always bitch (in ye olde english) about everyone who doesn't RP. But WoW actually caters to the three groups much better than other games, and I'd even say succeeds quite well. You can accomplish something as a casual, and you can accomplish something as a powergamer. And there's a little corner for thee, Master RPer. Goeth now and stand there and leaveth the rest alone
There were some really good "thinker" series, many of which had trouble with funding, such as Dr Who, B5, Blake's 7, and several on the Sci Fi channel that were cancelled. Of these, B5 and Blakes 7 concentrated on the human (or alien) condition . But the vast majority were cheesy and poorly written, hoping the special effects would overcome poor scripting and acting (such as the old Battlestar Galactica, but many others whose names escape me as I poisoned my brain with booze to forget the terrible pain of bad sci-fi).
However, in a bit of a contradiction, one of my favorite recent sci fi movies would be classified as action: The Fifth Element.
Yes. From what I understand, exchanges of goods are still taxable. Barter systems are harder to track, but do not technically bypass tax laws. But then again, I ain't no stinkin lawyer. Or CPA.
The claim, under penalty of perjury, is that they hold the copyright to the original works to which they think you are infringing.
... and of course, take anything you read on a message board with a grain of salt. the preceeding does not constitute a client-attorney relationship or legal advice because IANAFL. (Hopefully, the NFL won't go after me for including them in that acronym.)
In other words, if LucasFilms posted a takedown notice to your video of you arguing with your brother and swinging toy lightsabers at each other, it would not be perjury because he owns the copyright to star wars.
This is an excellent demonstration of how the DMCA can be abused. You can say "I own work Foo and your work Bar infringes on it". The perjury part is only "I own work Foo".
You can convert electricity to heat at very good efficiency. Once you convert it to mechanical motion, you're likely to lose a lot due to inertia and friction. Solar is only about 30% efficient on some of the best cells out there (although there's some very promising research happening to increase this, possibly to 60% efficiency).
In any case, he's not writing it off completely. But it's definitely NOT zero emissions, unless the energy used to generate it is also zero emissions (such as solar, water, or wind). This is not a trivial amount of energy, either -- I'm not talking about the trivial energy used to press the liter of soybean oil every 50,000 km.
Compare it to the Tesla which is all electric, and gets an estimated 135 mpg based on efficiency calculations. It uses NO GASOLINE, but they had to try to compute it based on large, central electrical plants that have efficiency and emission control as a priority. This is similar. It burns gas, or coal, or isotopes, just not directly.
And to address your first point, "probably" is a great measure of usefulness of technology. This is "probably" a scam due to the danger of accidents causing a nasty explosion. This will "probably" not see the light of day in the next 10 years. But I'm not writing it off completely. All consumer technology like this is in the hands of the people adopting it, so if the people "probably" won't buy it, the tech will die.
Clearly unenforcable.
... and there's one in every port.
The average Internet surfer is like a dirty sailor, and pr*n is like a prostitute.
Right, this is currently vaporware, but it's a cool idea.
/. user and made an OSS project for UAVs. He has since commercialized it, but the OS project is still out there. The hardware is very cheap... like $150 iirc!
Another guy that started this project is an old
The driving force of consumer CPU advancements has always been the gamers.
I don't think the uber gamers who demand the fastest processors will want CPUs made out of snails.
Consider this awesome aspect of the PS3 and watch the /. sony haters heads splode. Cheapest Cell you can get your grubby fingers on.
Several government agencies, especially national labs, do lots of civilian work. Often the labs do the basic research, and companies turn it into products at affordable prices.
If you read TFA, it stated that only certain agencies had the equipment to make and run the chips in the first place.
They have energy, and that energy gets converted to heat on the "black" side, causing a higher pressure than the white side (which reflects the photons instead of absorbing them).
If you allow people to randomly upgrade their departments without considering the interactivity implications, you could inadvertently cause a major problem in a large government organization.
IMHO, it's a sound decision, and isn't a slap to microsoft at all. Everyone has to evaluate their own situation and upgrade if they feel it benefits them. Hell, having a win98 box (non-networked) and running a robot safely for the past 8 years is certainly safer than upgrading it. TFA was clearly biased, and made some idiotic remarks like "ZOMG, if the government doesn't buy vista, MS will go broke!" as if the millions of XP licenses are suddenly free.
So, hold all the "haha" tags, because a thorough evaluation of major upgrades on critical infrastructure makes some sense.
Thus, in even this simple example, free speech must be used responsibly to remain free. That's exactly the point I was making. Great, you can now publish other people's comments without fear of prosecution. But what if someone says something blatantly illegal, and you've taken steps to prevent stopping him? Freely speaking doesn't mean free from repercussions. (Go smack talk to the sox in boston and see if you don't get punched in the mouth.)