i know someone who believes this. literally. he's a nice enough guy but i think it bothered him that i didn't just take his word for it that star wars was actually filmed on other planets as real battles took place. for a glimpse into such a mind, this is his web site: http://www.starcityhistory.com/

It was my understanding, gleaned from sources including the good old Jargon File, that one of the most agreed upon standards for hat color definition is a combination of permission and intention:

• White Hats are hired or are granted permission to attempt to crack a system's security by the owner(s), usually for the purpose of auditing security, discovering vulnerabilities, and understanding how to fix or minimize them.
• Gray Hats crack security without authorization, but have no ill intentions once they succeed. These are either practicing their art for practice's sake, doing the owners a favor (unsolicited) by letting them know where the vulnerabilities are so they can fix it, or most likely both.
• Black Hats crack security maliciously, for a wide variety of reasons - some personal, some financial, and some political. They intend to steal, vandalize, or otherwise harm the owners. Self-styled hacktivists may be an exception to some as they have intentions that they may believe are good, but in general fit here because they have niether the permission nor the intention of doing any good for the system's owners. This is probably the case for Cyber Warriors as well - those who are cracking security by order from their government, as soldiers in an online (but very real) war, or as spies. in these cases, it could mean that even a black hat isn't necessarily evil - and anyway, determining good and evil are probably outside of the scope of the discussion.

This is, of course, not the only way in which these terms are used, and they do in fact derive from the old spaghetti western convention of good guys in white cowboy hats, and bad guys in black. Technically, HBGary in TFA was not asked to do any form of cracking, just to develop tools and strategies. These tools, of course, were obviously for government-sanctioned attacks, and would have ended up in the hands of cyber warriors / spies. In use, it would probably qualify as a black-hat operation, although ostensibly for the cause of good if the ultimate goal is to thwart terrorists (though it must be kept in mind that many terrorists believe they are on the side of good. it's a strange world).

exactly. or at least, mostly exactly :D. Allosaurus was actually quite a bit more than 2 meters tall, the height of the 'velociraptors' given in the book and portrayed in the movie. real velociraptors were much smaller, barely a meter tall and feathered - Walking with Dinosaurs got the size and shape right (and wouldn't have known about the feathers at the time of production) and probably behavior as well - the brain size was larger than other dinosaurs but only to a point that it is comparable to some birds - the idea that they were 'at least as smart as chimps' is completely unjustifiable. I tend to think they were fiercer than any extant birds, though, even the cassowary at the zoo which clearly wanted to murder me (with its very Dromeosaur-esque foot claws, i might add). The problem is that Jurassic park claimed that "Deinonychus was a Velociraptor" and therefore was portraying Deinonychus - they probably just liked the name 'raptor'. While this sounds silly, at least their raptors would not be nearly so much a size exaggeration if they were Deinonychus. Utahraptor or Achillobator would have been bigger, possibly close to Allosaur size. but I'd have no problem bringing any of those back either. The message of Jurassic Park was clearly one warning about corporate greed governing science. Not that Dinosaurs are some kind of monsters or that it would be morally wrong to clone them.

...i mean, depending on who you ask. I happen to think it's nice to have some space. Clones of people are people, not soulless automatons or monsters or a race that can legitimately be given different rights. Identical twins show us what cloning would produce. Unfortunately, with current and foreseeable future, cloning is also sloppy and that means producing a lot of non-viable embryos. I dislike this idea, as do most people who feel the only consistent way to define the start of a new human life being when it starts to have a genetic code separate from the mother. This is also why I chose the option to draw the line after creating organs (which would be full of win!) and cloning people. That, and as I pointed out, they would be people, and we are already worrying that we have too many of those! I realize that currently, in essence, every human regardless of their maturity level or intelligence has the right to produce new people, and cloning could be considered to fall under the same rules. What I'm arguing is that we don't need another way to do it, cloning's low viability rate is an ethical consideration, and we probably should be looking at ethical and agreeable ways to solve our current problems without making more.

Now, as for Dinosaurs, I'm all for it! I just reread Jurassic Park (note, not watched, read) and find it to be a great warning about misuse of emerging technologies. It was a warning about greed - a message almost completely lost in the movie, especially since they cast Lord Richard Attenborough as John Hammond, and turned him into a nice guy who made some mistakes (i don't know anyone who can dislike Attenborough). John Hammond in the book is driven by greed and completely out of touch with reality, only pretending to care even about the safety of his own grandchildren. He gets what he deserves for his pride and sociopathic obsession near the end of the book. But cloning Dinosaurs would be epic in giving us a better understanding of the world as it existed before us. My request would be, please don't only focus on Dinosauria. I want to see early Tetrapods, Pelycosaurs, Nothosaurs, Pterosaurs, Rauisuchus, etc. too! And please do clone raptors. Seriously. Just don't put them in an amusement park for children without ever even letting scientists study it.

he doesn't mean to choose 'Nautilus' in your Ubuntu menus, he means choose 'Edit' (and so on) in your Nautilus menu. Nautilus is your default file browser - any time you open your home folder or another you're looking at a Nautilus window. for example, click Places -> Home Folder. you're looking at your home folder, and Ubuntu doesn't bother to tell you the name of the program creating the file browser window for you, but if within that Home Folder window you click Help -> About, you'll see it. (I'm not trying to be pedantic, plenty of things were non-obvious to me when I started so I try not to assume anything is obvious to others).

grasshopper or some form of grub i could imagine getting away with, but cockroaches have a distinctively bad smell and taste even worse. whatever advocacy council pops up to promote the adoption of insect 'meat', however, definitely should talk with Disney about using Timon and Pumbaa (from the Lion King, for those without toddlers) as spokescartoons.

precisely. i chose price because i can't afford one, not because i think they are overpriced. i can imagine having great fun writing simple games for my toddler on an android tablet and maybe even trying to put something in the app market. but working for a small charity, it's out of reach for now.

Well, I'm sure you know the reason - tradition. Turkeys are native to North America and surely figured largely into the original Thanksgiving feast we commemorate. I prefer to include venison as well, when it's available. Both need a little skill to prepare in a satisfying way. I can tell you the trick to a delicious turkey that isn't dry at all: raise it yourself and be sure to feed it liberally. This worked for us when I was a teenager, and produced incredibly good turkeys, several of which we sold. The only drawback was my brother not eating it because he "knew its name". Or you can deep-fry it, that has become popular in recent years. Personally I find turkey is best with bacon, cheese, etc. in a turkey club panini. But the tradition really is the point.

OMG, he's found Mel's Hole! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel's_hole ] But seriously, you are dead on, and I only wish I could be this direct with such people. Nice or not, I believe it's what he needs to hear.

sounds good, although you can get a fine bottle of 12 year old rum for that price here (Philippines). I only really drink non-coffee energy drinks when it's really hot or I'm driving and a shot of 5 Hour Energy is in order, which probably wouldn't be the time to try one of these.

caffeine and alcohol are a great combination. I'm living in a country where a popular drink, usually called a Boracay, is a mix of rum, milk, sugar, cocoa, and coffee. i guess that covers all the bases. Irish coffee is also quite nice. I think a little alcohol to loosen up the creative side, plus a lot of caffeine for the logical side, is a good way to get that initial boost into the right frame of mind for writing code. as for this Four Loko stuff, I think rum + Mt. Dew is close enough for me, and cheaper.

that might explain its arrival in Mexico, but the origin of the myth is in Puerto Rico, although it seems to be a modification of an old and less well-known Spanish myth about vampiric birds. This modern thing about dogs / coyotes with mange seems to be a result of someone seeing an ugly creature and calling it a 'Chupacabra' in south Texas, without having any idea what the original looked like - and the ensuing media frenzy picked that up and ran with it. It certainly didn't look like a canid, more like a short green humanoid alien with bright red eyes and spikes on its back, and one or two fangs for sucking blood.

you probably have and didn't know it - the original source was seaweed, but for a long time the main production was from wheat glutin, and now it is commercially produced by fermentation of various plant sugars.

dang, i was about to be all like "who the heck are the scientists 'warning', anyway?", and then you one-upped me. it wouldn't be funny now.

there really shouldn't be a Linux game market, just a game market. I know that's not likely to happen anytime soon and it wouldn't even make sense to most of the businessmen whose decisions could cause it to come about, but ideally there should be only one computer version of the game, alongside whatever console versions might be released. Computers have enough hardware in common, and the three major flavors of OS have some differences but they are not necessarily ones that affect games so much, at least now that most of the larger problems like graphics and sound are largely solved. Why make separate box versions for Windows and Mac when you can just put executables and installation systems for both in the same disc? With a little effort Linux can be added to that mix as well, as open source and indie games have proven - the game content itself is / should be platform independent anyway. It is my hope that in the future OS compatibility will just one of the bullets in the Compatibility section on the back of the box.

Steam for Linux would be like this if they made it, as Steam for Mac shows. If you buy the game for one OS, you can download and play it on the other as well (if it has a Mac version and supports "Steam Play"). I have no problem paying for games (other than having no money) and would pay full price, but it doesn't make sense to have different prices for different platforms. Id Software's games usually get a Linux port, and I've found that a great way to play them. Due to my GPU having been released before Nvidia's initiative to provide updated notebook video drivers, I simply cannot get new drivers for Windows (I dual boot). Since I do get the latest drivers for my Linux install, those games actually run much better in Linux for me - wish I could say the same for games running under Wine.

I realize it's unlikely and with Valve having opted not to get involved, any progress is likely to be slow, but Linux is an enjoyable operating system to use, even for gaming. Linux users pay full price for games all the time - they just usually have to play the games on a different platform unless they are made by Id or otherwise have a Linux port available. I agree that the game companies don't have much incentive to invest in cross-platform compatibility at this time, but as it slowly becomes easier and some companies start to do experiment with it, it will be interesting to see what the effects will be. Linux does have more to gain than the game companies do. The number one reason I hear from people who wanted to switch to Linux but decided not to is that they don't want to go without certain software which isn't available for Linux, be it games or things they need for work. It's hard to judge what effect more proprietary Linux software would have on things like market share. I'd love to find out, because once Linux has more market share, there would be more software available to me (so which comes first, the chicken or the egg? or will I get neither?). In the end, people just want the choice to use the software they like with the OS they prefer, and don't really like it that the reasons they sometimes can't are business reasons rather than technical ones. I may in fact be rambling now, so I'll leave it at that.

-Dan