Hell, we could sit on our hands for a billion years and still have 2 billion years to play around Alpha Centari.
I thought I read somewhere that the sun's life-expectancy is no longer relevant, as it has been determined that our galaxy is on a collision course with another, that will hit us before that. We need to not only get out of the solar system, we must get out of the galaxy altogether. We're probably doomed.
The girl's legal rights were violated: specifically, her copyright to her video. Regardless of what he thought of the contents, it was illegal for her "boyfriend" to publish her work without her consent.
Doesn't make her any less of a moron, however. If a person wrote a book, got it all finished, and went out into the street and handed it to someone they barely knew and said, "Here, can you run this down to the publisher for me, and put it in my name?" Who would be the idiot, when that stranger takes all the credit for the work? Sure, he's a crook, but the writer in this example is still an idiot, and will either learn the lesson or be taken again later.
The problem is that kids don't have the same amount of life experience.
Too true, and even if they do somehow cram in extra life-experience, Nature is still against them. I read in a recent Time article (April or May 2004 I believe) that an ongoing study is showing that the brain doesn't finish 'cooking' until around age 25, not younger as previously thought. The Sense of Responsibility and Long-Term Consequences is the LAST piece to settle in. The Internet isn't for kids, never was, and just because there are 'kid-friendly' sites out there doesn't change anything.
It is far better to snap early and use fists then to wait and bottle up the pain until they do something far worse.
It makes me think of Ender's Game, near the beginning when Ender first gets to the academy. A bully tries to bully him and he decides to totally go to town all over the guy, just short of killing him, right there in public where everyone can see. It was perfect, because nobody bothered him again after that. He never had to do it again. One of my favorite parts.
People so easily turned into criminals *should* be watched carefully.
It's not that it's easy to shift, but after years and years of being 'accused' of something you're not doing, it may start to settle in that, "Well what the hell, if I'm going to be branded a thief anyhow, I may as well get something out of it."
Where I work, a manager really pissed me off at a meeting a couple months ago. He thought he was being clever and funny, but what came out of his flapping lips was the intimation that every single one of us in the room would rip off the company given half the chance. You know what? I do *now*.
Don't like the copy protection? Don't install the game.
Unfortunately it isn't as simple as that. By the time I'm having problems because some over-paranoid protection scheme is either preventing me from playing altogether, or seriously hitting my framerate (like safedisc), the software is already purchased, unwrapped, installed, and then discovered non-functional. Then it's time to be a pissed-off consumer.
i just warez the game and send a moneyorder (or paypal if they have one) straight to the developer. thats voting with your wallet
What would you say to them?
"Hi there, you don't know me, but I ganked the company that produced the last game you worked on. Here's your cut, and screw them. Boy, sales were really in the toilet on that title, I heard it was so bad they're not hiring you guys back for a sequel. Oh well, enjoy the $20.00"
Actually, not the first time it's happened either. Some game I bought in the last few months, don't remember which one, has some elaborate copy-protection scheme that seems to think I'm running CD emulation software. I'm not, but couldn't play my brand new game without googling for a crack first. That's not right, I shouldn't be forced to resort to such things.
Virtual money is not real money for those reasons.
And more.. I don't know about EVE, since I can't seem to sign up right now (has their card auth server been slashdotted or something? Not many posts here), but in Star Wars Galaxies, even though you can find tons of SWG stuff on Ebay for real money, it's actually forbidden in the user agreement and grounds for account termination. I think that's a great thing really, and a good move on their part. Whether or not their policy is effective at preventing such trades is completely beside the point, for their stance on the validity of game items/money as real world currency is made quite clear to the user, effectively shutting down any scam-related lawsuits that might ensue if they didn't have such a policy. If a player gets scammed out of credits or isk or whatever by some nigerian kid, I hope they learned their lesson and consider themselves fortunate that it wasn't their real money. It was just a large amount of time that they *chose* to spend playing an escapist video game, that's all that such credits really are, so people that have been burned need to just get over it. In the real world we say that Time is Money. Well in virtual worlds Money is Time, for whatever 'money' has come one's way while choosing to spend (waste?) their time is merely a function of their time spent, that they would have spent anyway even if it was for fewer credits than they earned. It's a game fer chrissakes.
Exactly, if Windows did *everything* and did it all perfectly, with all the features anyone could want, then MS would be the only software company in existance, except for game shops. Not good. Give us the basics right out-of-the-box (such as a primitive firewall that is enabled by default) and let us choose to improve our systems to our tastes.
if I didn't do any of that, particularly the log file monitoring, it would be pretty tough to tell whether I was hacked or not
Yeah I agree, if things are running smoothly, that's no sign that you haven't been hacked. Several years ago I didn't know a lot about security, but I had various inklings of what to watch for. I was fairly certain I hadn't had an intrusion. Until one day I went to use a dos command and discovered that most of the contents of my C:\WINDOWS\Command\ folder had been deleted. I'm damn sure it wasn't me that did that.
I agree with what you say in principle, however the 'security risk' in question here is the 'malicious user' sitting in front of the keyboard, that just installed the service pack themselves. So I think we can let that one go, it smells of a straw man.
I think it would be neat to have a program that could be easily installed on a box, that would act as the firewall for the system. Traffic that a firewall would normally allow is passed normally. Traffic that would normally be dropped, such as a query to a port that is not open on the firewall, would not be dropped but instead be passed to the honeypot module of the program, and from there responded to in a way set by the user through a scripting interface.
Example: You aren't running a telnet server on your box, so normally a connection attempt to port 23 would be dropped. Here you set your honeypot controls to engage a script that you have made (or that came pre-packaged with the software) showing them a fake login prompt that looks like whatever software you wish them to think you are using. Script appropriate responses to possible actions the hacker might try, based on what software they think you have. Let them appear to login with 'admin/admin' or whatever, and show them fake file directories and whatnot. Certain often-targetted files could be spoofed so the cracker can actually 'read' them and not be tipped off. Basically have the software fuck with them for awhile before revealing that "it's all been logged you luser, the Matrix has you, disconnect before things get worse"
You could make a windows box look like anything else to mess with them, if your arsenal of scripts is deep enough. The program could come with a whole whack of pre-defined scripts, and users could create and upload new scripts to a website for others to install in their systems. And when someone installs and runs the program for the first time, they are *forced* to choose a computer name, OS, and other details, so that every out-of-the-box install of this thing doesn't look like every other one out there, making it less easy to detect.
You'd have to make the main code smart enough to not bother if the intrustion appears to be a worm, otherwise such a machine would likely get pretty bogged down. I don't know how to do any of this, I would just like to have the software.
From the article: "Although 43% said the SP2 installation had gone without a hitch, 49% of those contributing had problems ranging from minor to severe. A few contributors said they had to completely rebuild a system before they could get the update to work."
I've had SP2 installed for a few days and everything's been just fine. Doesn't seem any faster or anything, but everything's still working. It makes me wonder what kinds of junk might be in someone's computer that would cause such horrible problems as needing a rebuild to get working again. Actually, there's a clue there: It is implied that, after problems with the update, a fresh install was performed, and then the update worked. If SP2 works good on a fresh install of XP (and we're talking the same machine here, that had problems on a polluted OS), then the problems were most likely caused by some crap that was on the system before, that shouldn't have been there in the first place. That probably also means that SP2 is working properly on machines that haven't been all crapped up with junk.
Which would also mean that Microsoft isn't at fault for those trashed machines. There I said it.
It's as if there is some un-written rule somewhere that most medical researchers that say " Though shalt not ever engage in research for the purpose of enhancing humans over the norm"
I certainly hope it is more than just the researchers that say this. Watch the movie Gattica and you might change your mind. Let's let a generation or so go by where we've got enhanced people coming down the pike.. We reach a point where a large segment of the population was born 'modified'. The rest of the world is populated by poor slobs that couldn't afford to have their babies jacked up in this fashion. Do you not see a problem with that scenario? The wealthy, already advantaged, would have first dibs on becoming even more advantaged, while the rest of the lower-class world dips even lower by comparison. I know that we do need 'Gods and Clods' as Mr. Brovlovski put it on South Park, but I do not think this is the way to maintain it, nor should we be trying to choose who gets to be 'a God' and who has to be stuck with being 'a Clod'. The way things run currently, a stroke of good luck can turn a Clod into a God overnight, there is always the chance you will rise up and suddenly start outshining the rest. But not if you live in a world where the ones with all the good stuff were born that way and carry a card to prove it.
And remember the words of Geordi LaForge: "Kind of ironic isn't it, that your world is being saved by a man who wouldn't even have existed in your society?" (referring to his blindness, which would have earned his fetus a termination had he attempted to be born there)
its not that people are lazy, people just don't like to work when they can play.
That seems to be exactly what this is about though. The work *is* the reward (feels good to get things done) when this D2 receptor gets zapped by their little DNA injection. A more difficult job and longer hours sounds like hell, but maybe in this altered state you'd actually enjoy that and find the challenge welcome. I'll be the first to say that's no way to live, but many people are forced into that lifestyle anyway, so perhaps they can be helped to at least enjoy it without splattering their brains all over their office wall.
It's just a Belkin Speedpad that gamers use for FPSs.
Is that what it is? I couldn't get to the site (wonder why?) but if it's the Belkin Nostromo Speedpad they're talking about, well yeah it's not a one-handed keyboard but it does truly rock and everybody should have one. A friend brought one over once and let me try it. The very next day I went and got one. I actually bought a floor model, sans driver disc and box because that's all that was left. I already had the drivers thanks to my buddy so that was fine, turns out they're easy to get from the web also. As soon as I spotted them in the store again, I bought another one in case the first one wore out and the maker disappeared, that's how much I like it. For games where you don't chat at people, it is excellent. I have found uses for it in applications also, for it mimics keyboard keypresses to any windows software, whether games or just notepad. It can do macros, which can be very handy for some repetitive things you might find youself doing in an app from time to time, and the app itself doesn't support macros. I've probably saved hours with it outside of games, and with games it is *SHWEET*. A minor hassle to get it all set the way you want for a new game, but once you've got a good profile saved for what you're doing it is awesome. The auto-profile-select feature seems a bit buggy under XP (it worked better in Win98) so I just choose my profile manually. A small sacrifice for the usefulness it offers.
The post I replied to had an angry tone to it, that this was all just silly -- just plant some trees and be done with it. If I had mod points, I wouldn't have replied at all, just modded it down as offtopic.
Who says that speeding would have any fault in the accident?
Indeed, and who is to say that speeding more wouldn't have prevented the accident entirely? Sometimes you just have to go a bit faster to get past something dangerous, this has happened to me a few times.
Is the DoJ 'all over' every other form of communication though? They're not tapping my ordinary PSTN line are they? But I could be a criminal, or a terrorist! All forms of communication are being used by pretty much everyone, especially criminals and terrorists (more likely to try exotic alternatives to a standard telephone than your grandma), so I don't get the distinction.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, we could sit on our hands for a billion years and still have 2 billion years to play around Alpha Centari.
I thought I read somewhere that the sun's life-expectancy is no longer relevant, as it has been determined that our galaxy is on a collision course with another, that will hit us before that. We need to not only get out of the solar system, we must get out of the galaxy altogether. We're probably doomed.
You're supposed to give her a PEARL necklace.
Whenever you engage in a metaphysical discussion about the meaning of life, his answer will invariably come up at some point.
Unfortunately far too often. I love that whole ultimate Question business, but whenever someone brightly quips, "42!" I just want to throttle them.
80085
The girl's legal rights were violated: specifically, her copyright to her video. Regardless of what he thought of the contents, it was illegal for her "boyfriend" to publish her work without her consent.
Doesn't make her any less of a moron, however. If a person wrote a book, got it all finished, and went out into the street and handed it to someone they barely knew and said, "Here, can you run this down to the publisher for me, and put it in my name?" Who would be the idiot, when that stranger takes all the credit for the work? Sure, he's a crook, but the writer in this example is still an idiot, and will either learn the lesson or be taken again later.
The problem is that kids don't have the same amount of life experience.
Too true, and even if they do somehow cram in extra life-experience, Nature is still against them. I read in a recent Time article (April or May 2004 I believe) that an ongoing study is showing that the brain doesn't finish 'cooking' until around age 25, not younger as previously thought. The Sense of Responsibility and Long-Term Consequences is the LAST piece to settle in. The Internet isn't for kids, never was, and just because there are 'kid-friendly' sites out there doesn't change anything.
It is far better to snap early and use fists then to wait and bottle up the pain until they do something far worse.
It makes me think of Ender's Game, near the beginning when Ender first gets to the academy. A bully tries to bully him and he decides to totally go to town all over the guy, just short of killing him, right there in public where everyone can see. It was perfect, because nobody bothered him again after that. He never had to do it again. One of my favorite parts.
People so easily turned into criminals *should* be watched carefully.
It's not that it's easy to shift, but after years and years of being 'accused' of something you're not doing, it may start to settle in that, "Well what the hell, if I'm going to be branded a thief anyhow, I may as well get something out of it."
Where I work, a manager really pissed me off at a meeting a couple months ago. He thought he was being clever and funny, but what came out of his flapping lips was the intimation that every single one of us in the room would rip off the company given half the chance. You know what? I do *now*.
Don't like the copy protection? Don't install the game.
Unfortunately it isn't as simple as that. By the time I'm having problems because some over-paranoid protection scheme is either preventing me from playing altogether, or seriously hitting my framerate (like safedisc), the software is already purchased, unwrapped, installed, and then discovered non-functional. Then it's time to be a pissed-off consumer.
i just warez the game and send a moneyorder (or paypal if they have one) straight to the developer. thats voting with your wallet
What would you say to them?
"Hi there, you don't know me, but I ganked the company that produced the last game you worked on. Here's your cut, and screw them. Boy, sales were really in the toilet on that title, I heard it was so bad they're not hiring you guys back for a sequel. Oh well, enjoy the $20.00"
Not many legitimate users of Nero?
I use Nero on a regular basis. The last time I used it to illegally copy a game was.. Umm.. Did I?
Actually, not the first time it's happened either. Some game I bought in the last few months, don't remember which one, has some elaborate copy-protection scheme that seems to think I'm running CD emulation software. I'm not, but couldn't play my brand new game without googling for a crack first. That's not right, I shouldn't be forced to resort to such things.
Virtual money is not real money for those reasons.
And more.. I don't know about EVE, since I can't seem to sign up right now (has their card auth server been slashdotted or something? Not many posts here), but in Star Wars Galaxies, even though you can find tons of SWG stuff on Ebay for real money, it's actually forbidden in the user agreement and grounds for account termination. I think that's a great thing really, and a good move on their part. Whether or not their policy is effective at preventing such trades is completely beside the point, for their stance on the validity of game items/money as real world currency is made quite clear to the user, effectively shutting down any scam-related lawsuits that might ensue if they didn't have such a policy. If a player gets scammed out of credits or isk or whatever by some nigerian kid, I hope they learned their lesson and consider themselves fortunate that it wasn't their real money. It was just a large amount of time that they *chose* to spend playing an escapist video game, that's all that such credits really are, so people that have been burned need to just get over it. In the real world we say that Time is Money. Well in virtual worlds Money is Time, for whatever 'money' has come one's way while choosing to spend (waste?) their time is merely a function of their time spent, that they would have spent anyway even if it was for fewer credits than they earned. It's a game fer chrissakes.
Loved that story btw... I wanna be a pirate!!
Exactly, if Windows did *everything* and did it all perfectly, with all the features anyone could want, then MS would be the only software company in existance, except for game shops. Not good. Give us the basics right out-of-the-box (such as a primitive firewall that is enabled by default) and let us choose to improve our systems to our tastes.
if I didn't do any of that, particularly the log file monitoring, it would be pretty tough to tell whether I was hacked or not
Yeah I agree, if things are running smoothly, that's no sign that you haven't been hacked. Several years ago I didn't know a lot about security, but I had various inklings of what to watch for. I was fairly certain I hadn't had an intrusion. Until one day I went to use a dos command and discovered that most of the contents of my C:\WINDOWS\Command\ folder had been deleted. I'm damn sure it wasn't me that did that.
I agree with what you say in principle, however the 'security risk' in question here is the 'malicious user' sitting in front of the keyboard, that just installed the service pack themselves. So I think we can let that one go, it smells of a straw man.
I mean, obviously the students are trying to win $27,000...
From the Vancouver Sun:
Six years, $75,000 and hundreds of man-hours logged by 160 engineering students and graduates went into its design and construction.
I think it stopped being about money awhile ago, which doesn't leave much other than coolness factor, and that's debatable as well.
I think it would be neat to have a program that could be easily installed on a box, that would act as the firewall for the system. Traffic that a firewall would normally allow is passed normally. Traffic that would normally be dropped, such as a query to a port that is not open on the firewall, would not be dropped but instead be passed to the honeypot module of the program, and from there responded to in a way set by the user through a scripting interface.
Example: You aren't running a telnet server on your box, so normally a connection attempt to port 23 would be dropped. Here you set your honeypot controls to engage a script that you have made (or that came pre-packaged with the software) showing them a fake login prompt that looks like whatever software you wish them to think you are using. Script appropriate responses to possible actions the hacker might try, based on what software they think you have. Let them appear to login with 'admin/admin' or whatever, and show them fake file directories and whatnot. Certain often-targetted files could be spoofed so the cracker can actually 'read' them and not be tipped off. Basically have the software fuck with them for awhile before revealing that "it's all been logged you luser, the Matrix has you, disconnect before things get worse"
You could make a windows box look like anything else to mess with them, if your arsenal of scripts is deep enough. The program could come with a whole whack of pre-defined scripts, and users could create and upload new scripts to a website for others to install in their systems. And when someone installs and runs the program for the first time, they are *forced* to choose a computer name, OS, and other details, so that every out-of-the-box install of this thing doesn't look like every other one out there, making it less easy to detect.
You'd have to make the main code smart enough to not bother if the intrustion appears to be a worm, otherwise such a machine would likely get pretty bogged down. I don't know how to do any of this, I would just like to have the software.
Please? Somebody?
From the article: "Although 43% said the SP2 installation had gone without a hitch, 49% of those contributing had problems ranging from minor to severe. A few contributors said they had to completely rebuild a system before they could get the update to work."
I've had SP2 installed for a few days and everything's been just fine. Doesn't seem any faster or anything, but everything's still working. It makes me wonder what kinds of junk might be in someone's computer that would cause such horrible problems as needing a rebuild to get working again. Actually, there's a clue there: It is implied that, after problems with the update, a fresh install was performed, and then the update worked. If SP2 works good on a fresh install of XP (and we're talking the same machine here, that had problems on a polluted OS), then the problems were most likely caused by some crap that was on the system before, that shouldn't have been there in the first place. That probably also means that SP2 is working properly on machines that haven't been all crapped up with junk.
Which would also mean that Microsoft isn't at fault for those trashed machines. There I said it.
It's as if there is some un-written rule somewhere that most medical researchers that say " Though shalt not ever engage in research for the purpose of enhancing humans over the norm"
I certainly hope it is more than just the researchers that say this. Watch the movie Gattica and you might change your mind. Let's let a generation or so go by where we've got enhanced people coming down the pike.. We reach a point where a large segment of the population was born 'modified'. The rest of the world is populated by poor slobs that couldn't afford to have their babies jacked up in this fashion. Do you not see a problem with that scenario? The wealthy, already advantaged, would have first dibs on becoming even more advantaged, while the rest of the lower-class world dips even lower by comparison. I know that we do need 'Gods and Clods' as Mr. Brovlovski put it on South Park, but I do not think this is the way to maintain it, nor should we be trying to choose who gets to be 'a God' and who has to be stuck with being 'a Clod'. The way things run currently, a stroke of good luck can turn a Clod into a God overnight, there is always the chance you will rise up and suddenly start outshining the rest. But not if you live in a world where the ones with all the good stuff were born that way and carry a card to prove it.
And remember the words of Geordi LaForge: "Kind of ironic isn't it, that your world is being saved by a man who wouldn't even have existed in your society?" (referring to his blindness, which would have earned his fetus a termination had he attempted to be born there)
its not that people are lazy, people just don't like to work when they can play.
That seems to be exactly what this is about though. The work *is* the reward (feels good to get things done) when this D2 receptor gets zapped by their little DNA injection. A more difficult job and longer hours sounds like hell, but maybe in this altered state you'd actually enjoy that and find the challenge welcome.
I'll be the first to say that's no way to live, but many people are forced into that lifestyle anyway, so perhaps they can be helped to at least enjoy it without splattering their brains all over their office wall.
It's just a Belkin Speedpad that gamers use for FPSs.
Is that what it is? I couldn't get to the site (wonder why?) but if it's the Belkin Nostromo Speedpad they're talking about, well yeah it's not a one-handed keyboard but it does truly rock and everybody should have one. A friend brought one over once and let me try it. The very next day I went and got one. I actually bought a floor model, sans driver disc and box because that's all that was left. I already had the drivers thanks to my buddy so that was fine, turns out they're easy to get from the web also. As soon as I spotted them in the store again, I bought another one in case the first one wore out and the maker disappeared, that's how much I like it. For games where you don't chat at people, it is excellent. I have found uses for it in applications also, for it mimics keyboard keypresses to any windows software, whether games or just notepad. It can do macros, which can be very handy for some repetitive things you might find youself doing in an app from time to time, and the app itself doesn't support macros. I've probably saved hours with it outside of games, and with games it is *SHWEET*. A minor hassle to get it all set the way you want for a new game, but once you've got a good profile saved for what you're doing it is awesome. The auto-profile-select feature seems a bit buggy under XP (it worked better in Win98) so I just choose my profile manually. A small sacrifice for the usefulness it offers.
The post I replied to had an angry tone to it, that this was all just silly -- just plant some trees and be done with it. If I had mod points, I wouldn't have replied at all, just modded it down as offtopic.
Who says that speeding would have any fault in the accident?
Indeed, and who is to say that speeding more wouldn't have prevented the accident entirely? Sometimes you just have to go a bit faster to get past something dangerous, this has happened to me a few times.
Is the DoJ 'all over' every other form of communication though? They're not tapping my ordinary PSTN line are they? But I could be a criminal, or a terrorist! All forms of communication are being used by pretty much everyone, especially criminals and terrorists (more likely to try exotic alternatives to a standard telephone than your grandma), so I don't get the distinction.