I've been listening to KSHE since the day they changed format in 1967. They play some great rock and roll.
They're a hundred miles away; Im in the fringe reception area so I listen online. So a few days ago I'm editing random Scribblings and the music stops. I curse Firefox and Flash and ComCast and pull the browser up to refresh the page that plays the music, and I see "Still listening?"
It's still inside the atmosphere
So NASA can stop sending up spacesuits for when the astronauts need to go outside for repairs then? A tracksuit and some sunblock will be so much cheaper and save on weight.
Russia/USSR is going to be pretty pissed to find out that they weren't the first country to put a man in space. Or that they never did for that matter.
They've been working on it for over 12 years; I wrote the following for my web site in 2002. It will be in an upcoming book. Apologies for the mangled unicode, but slashdot's preview is worthless, since "preview" shows the unicode but the submission displays garbage. Here is the article:
McCoy: He's dead, Jim
Several years ago, before PCs were not nearly as com-mon in the home as they are now, a friend of mine asked of my computer, âoebut aren't you afraid it will explode?â
He was a Star Trek fan, and in the old 1950s and 1960s science fiction and spy shows, computers all had a nasty habit of blowing up. All one had to do to these TV or movie computers to make them explode was shoot them, with either a ray gun or a police revolver. Some TV and movie computers would blow up if you âoepressed the wrong buttonâ; one episode of the 1960s TV show The Prisoner (âoeI am not a number! I am a free man!â) had a computer that could answer any question. The bad guys, who had imprisoned the hero, a spy who had resigned his post, wanted to know why he resigned. Of course, before the bad guys could ask the computer âoeWhy did number six resign his post?â the intrepid number six offered that he had a question the computer could not answer.
He typed in to the Remington electric typewriter and fed the paper into the computer, which, of course, promptly started smoking, sparking, and ultimately blew up. The question was simply âoewhy?â
Similarly, in an episode of Star Trek, Spock makes a computer explode by asking it to figure the value of pi to the last decimal place. Of course, any time a Star Trek computer was fired on, whether by a Klingon or Federation phaser, and no matter what civilization designed and built the computer, it would explode in a grand display of fireworks.
I had to explain to my friend that this was all nonsense, that early computers from the early 1950s used thousands of vacuum tubes, requiring high voltages, which could throw showers of sparks and bright purple flashes with the characteristic âoepop!â if there was a short circuit in its 120-240 volt circuitry but would not actually explode, and that modern computers ran on three to twelve volts and wouldn't even get a spark from a short.
I had to explain to my friend that the only explosions were in my games; that the computer itself here in the analog world was safe.
Along with the matter transporter and faster than light travel, the exploding computer was one of those things relegated to science fiction.
Until now.
New Scientist reports that they have found a way to make silicon explode on demand, either by shock, as with that
âoeThis machine is stolen and will self-destruct in ten seconds.â
New Scientist says âoeFor instance, the American spy plane impounded by China last year could have used it to destroy its secret electronics systems.â
They add âoeIn a stolen mobile phone, the network would send a trigger signal to the part of the chip containing the gadolinium nitrate âdetonatorâ(TM), triggering the explosion... and detonate it at will.â
So not only is Star Trek's computer to blow up, its communicators will too! I can see in five years when these bozos have the anti theft circuits in phones. Drop your phone now and it might break. Drop it in five years and it might take your leg off!
Of course, the new viruses in ten years will not just reformat your hard drive; the kids will be writing viruses to make people's computers explode in their homes!
Doncha just love science... Personally, I'm hoping someone with a little common sense will have a talk with these educated morons and explain that just maybe, exploding computers ain't such a good idea after all. Just maybe the US Government might be more concerned with bringing its spy plane crew home alive than exploding its electronics; they could have blown the plane up with conventional explosives, or even driven the thing into the ground, but they didn't.
When my cell phone explodes the manufacturer better hope it takes my head off, because if it doesn't I'm suing the shit out of the morons!
Beam me up, Scotty.
1/18/2002
Maybe folks will make art for art's sake, program for the love of code, etc. I love the freedom of being able to write and publish anything I want without making compromises with money issues. Like Rush (the band) sang in Spirit of Radio,
It's really just a question of your honesty, yeah
Your honesty.
One likes to believe in the freedom of music,
But glittering prizes and endless compromises
Shatter the illusion of integrity.
I'll post a journal pimping it, of course.
Odd, I hadn't had mod points for years and when I stopped posting so much, all of a sudden I'm getting fifteen points every few days.
I have to agree with d_r, whoever is doing it is laughable.
You won't gain anything from social "justice" and it will only annoy you and waste your time.
He called me a "miserable son of a bitch" and slammed the phone down.
It never ceases to amaze me how someone who is actively scamming you, and knows they're actively scamming you, somehow expects to be treated with respect.
I'm sorry, but do you think you deserve to be treated as anything but a lying sack of shit?
It isn't possible to run this scam without knowing you're scamming. So if you don't get a good response, you shouldn't be surprised at all.
Don't care if it's the only job you can find. You know you're ripping people off, so you deserve all the shit and abuse you get.
When I was in college, I often took workshops in the summer. Two weeks of eight hour days equaled a normal class for a quarter. It would allow me a couple months vacation.
One was a blacksmithing workshop, where I learned to fashion stuff out of steel, learned a little metallurgy, and learned where a lot of the "old sayings" came from: blacksmithing. One is "too many irons in the fire", which is where this journal's title comes from. I'm working on three books right now.
Most of these are little sweatshop ops out of India, China and Eastern Europe.
Microsoft can scream at the FTC all damn day. These guys, if caught, just uproot, disappear, and come back under another business name, registering new phone numbers, etc.
You do realize that most "darknets" are built on a "bust one, bust all" model? Pretty much the only security is that the bad guys aren't in your darknet, they've never reached a popularity where there's any plausible deniability. The only other people likely to be in your darknet are the other members of your terrorist cell or whatever you're part of, it has never offered anything for "normal people" for you to hide in. And darknets have actually been used as honeypots, to make clueless people give away their IP to join a private group which turns out to be a sting. It is pretty much the exact opposite of anonymity, it's joining a conspiracy and you're at the mercy of the stupidity of everyone in it.
TOR is trying for something entirely different, which is to keep everyone at arm's length from each other. I talk to you over TOR, you get busted well tough shit they still can't find me. The users don't know the server, the server doesn't know the users. Of course by adding that glue in between you run the risk of the man in the middle working out who both ends of the connection are, but that's the trade-off. TOR is trying to do something extremely hard, it tries to offer low latency - easy to make timing attacks, arbitrary data sizes - easy to make traffic correlation attacks and interactive access - easy to manipulate services into giving responses, accessible to everyone and presumably with poison nodes in the mix. It's trying to do something so hard that you should probably assume it's not possible, not because they have any special inside access.
I actually did look at trying to do better, it was not entirely unlike Freenet done smarter only with onion routing instead of relying on statistical noise. It wouldn't try to be interactive so you could use mixmaster-style systems to avoid timing attacks and (semi-)fixed data block sizes to avoid many correlation attempts but I never felt I got the bad node issue solved well. TOR picks guard nodes, but it only makes you bet on a few horses instead of many. It was still too easy to isolate one node from the rest of the network and have it only talk to bad nodes, at which point any tricks you can play is moot because they see all your traffic. Even a small fraction of the nodes could do that on a catch-and-release basis and I never found any good countermeasures.
Just show him the South Park episode "Freemium isn't free" and he'll learn all about modern game mechanics, along with a few lessons in economics and marketing. Before you know it he will be pushing his game in the school yard like a pro.
False dichotomy, the test may be inconclusive.
You apparently didn't read what I said. I wouldn't be shooting you for disagreeing with me. I'd be shooting you for assaulting me.
As for "physically threatening". I've alive, you're dead. Whose testimony on the subject is going to be believed?
Think of it as "The Golden Rule, with a lead binder"
This file will self-destruct in five minutes.
