Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

In my case, I answered that I have no toys, but that isn't entirely accurate. It's more that my daughter has inherited all my toys at this point -- so when I sit down with her to play legos, it's her toys I'm playing with now.

The quantity of toys in our house has only increased. Anything that was mine is now hers, but that doesn't mean I don't get to sit and play with them anytime I want -- with a 4yo playmate to sit down and play with me at that!

Yaz

That's a pretty big assumption. Could it not be more likely that HDM made the list and CoN didn't because a) HDM being banned by Catholic schools was fairly recent and somewhat wide-spread, whereas CoN was, from what I can find, only ever challenged in a few school districts, some of which happened decades ago, and/or b) because the poll writer lives somewhere where CoN wasn't challenged or banned, and thus wasn't aware that it had been challenged/banned elsewhere?

FWIW, I went to public school, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was required reading in Grade 5. I didn't write the poll, but had I done so, I probably would have left it off too purely due to not being aware that anywhere had ever found it sufficiently controversial to keep away from young readers.

But hey, if it makes you feel better to blame atheism, have at it. Most of us have heard worse, and have had to form pretty damn thick skin.

Yaz

Install iTunes somewhere, sign up for an account (you can do so without providing a credit card number), and download the album. Apple has been selling music DRM free for the last several years, so it's just standard AAC. Once you have it, remove your account, delete iTunes, and add the music to whatever music program you prefer to use.

Unless, of course, you live in Canada, where copying music from a friend is still perfectly legal.

Yaz

Except this is pretty much exactly how the system was setup.

In "releasing" the album, Apple pretty much just added a database entry for every user on iTunes to say that they had already purchased the album. It was then supposed to[0] show up in your iTunes library as "in the cloud", with an option to download it.

Nobody was forced to download the album. The only way you'd download it without needing to do so specifically is if you had previously turned on the option to automatically download all new iTunes purchases (which defaults to off). And the only way you'd have to worry about using cellular data for this is if you had the option to download iTunes Music purchases over mobile enabled as well (otherwise, it would wait until you're on WiFi). So yeah -- this is completely a tempest in a teapot from people who don't like U2 seeing a free album available for download showing up in their libraries.

Hopefully Apple have learned their lesson. It was a publicity stunt, and while it upset some people, here we are talking about it. I don't think it went off the way they were hoping it would, and hopefully they've learned some lessons in the process.

[0] - Here in Canada at least, it appears the setup for this album didn't work for a very large number of users. I know in my case, the U2 album did not show up on my iPad as it was supposed to, nor did it show up in any of my iTunes libraries. And I do have the auto-download option enabled. In order to get the album, I had to go into iTunes and find the section that shows all your existing purchases, and then select the "Not on This Device" list, and only then could I download the album. And looking at the album reviews on iTunes Canada, it seems that I was hardly the only person to experience this -- nearly every review when I last checked last night was form people trying to figure out how to get their "free" album. I haven't seen this level of complaints outside of Canada, so I'm assuming either a) something screwed up with the iTunes Canada edition of the album's launch, or b) iTunes Canada did something different in order to not run afoul of some legislation (although I can't for the life of me guess what legislation that might be). This situation seems to have been lost in the noise of everyone else complaining about getting a free album, so I haven't heard much commentary on the situation.

Yaz

FWIW, I agree that it may not entirely be "real-world accurate". It does pre-suppose that whomever is attempting to crack your password already knows something about the structure of your password (such as it being a dictionary word followed by a repeating sequence, as in the original "Ten!!!!!!!!!!!" example). However, if we take this at face value, it does give us a better worst-case scenario for password strength than those which simply presume a brute-force approach.

That is, given someone looking over your shoulder (but without sufficient accuracy to see exactly what you're typing), and then applying computational tools, how quickly could your password be cracked? That's certainly an interesting question to have the answer to, and if your password is resistant to a known-pattern based cracking approach, it's certainly going to kill any attempts to purely brute-force it.

Yaz

Nit-pick here, but using GPL code doesn't require you to issue source, even if you've made modifications. It's not until you distribute said modified code that you need to release source (and even then, you only technically have to provide source to those you've distributed binaries to, and not just anyone who happens to request it).

Thus if I take some GPL code, modify it, and use it in an internal process that isn't shared with anyone, there is no requirements for me to make sources available. But as soon as I share the artifacts with anyone else, they have the right to my source modifications, and all those rights entail.

How that relates to this case, I have no idea.

Yaz

Well, you could always read the source and verify that this is not the case.

Yaz

There are a number of ways to calculate password effectiveness. If you assume zero knowledge of the password characteristics, then the 290 million years the website you linked to calculated may be accurate.

Hackers, however, have typically found that certain patterns are used by humans more frequently than others, and instead of brute-forcing the password from the beginning (following UTF-8 order " ", " ", " !"... etc.), you can instead skip a significant part of the overall password space by only testing these common patterns.

I prefer this tool, which evaluates password entropy. The figures it comes up with do tend to presume that something about the structure of the password is known (i.e: in your example that it is a word followed by a repeating symbol), but IMO this is a good figure to base your password decisions off as it represents a worst-case scenario, and not the best-case scenario the tool you linked presumes.

Using that tooling instead, your passwords strength and estimated crack time is as follows:

• password: Ten!!!!!!!!!!!
• entropy: 18.669
• crack time (seconds): 20.836
• crack time (display): instant
• score from 0 to 4: 0
• calculation time (ms): 3

FWIW, (and purely for the sake of comparison) one of the passwords I use online has, according to this tool, an entropy of 61.819 and a crack time of 203355820622500.06s (about 6.4 million years). And yes, it's something I both change often and have memorized.

Yaz

"Although there are those who think bacon is tasty, a loud protests I've posted recently on message boards, forums, and here on /. over the past two weeks would indicate otherwise."

(Yeah, I've been here long enough to know that nobody at /. does any actual editing. Still, can I make fun of the submitter for making it sound like (s)he's the one who is going around and posting all the loud protests, and then trying to make it seem like some sort of movement?)

Yaz

I have at least seven different e-mail addresses on different domains, including gmail.com. Does that also qualify me to be a Google nut?

Android phones (particularly on the high end) are big for exactly the reasons I described. They were big because of technical issues making them small. But if as a by-product that means a phone that works for the fat-fingered four-eyed brigade, well, I have no problems with that. But it's somewhat silly to be overly proud of the fact that you carry around a large phone, when the reasons why it's large are due to technical limitations for it being small. That would be akin to claiming your portable record player is way superior to an iPod because it's bigger. This is still a technology site, isn't it? (I know -- hard to tell sometimes these days).

Oh, and FWIW, I don't own or carry a phone of any kind, so I don't have a horse in the race either way. I'm glad you found the right phone for you, but I wouldn't go around bragging about your phone being generally better just because it's bigger, particularly when the truth of the matter is it's primarily bigger as it requires more hardware to overcome software issues.

Yaz

Let's try to remember for a moment why Andriod phones were bigger in the first place.

Andriod apps written against Davlik are garbage collected, however the garbage collection process on a phone with the typical quantity of phone memory requires a) frequent collection runs, and b) causes pauses. In order to alleviate this effect, Andriod device manufacturers started popping multi-core CPUs into their devices, simply to be able to handle garbage collection in the background, and make their devices appear closer to real-time performance and reduce UI "hiccoughs". Particularly early versions of these processors were more power hungry, requiring a larger battery to meet the same per-charge runtime as the iPhone. This required a larger overall package.

As such, the Andriod phones aren't larger because larger is better. They're larger because they couldn't compete with the iPhone in terms of performance or battery life if they were the same size.

Keep that in mind the next time you want to brag about your giant phone :).

Yaz

If it makes you feel any better, unless you watched a completely different video than I did (something other the what has been in the news recently), you didn't see a beheading. Did you see the blood spurt/drain out as the carotid/jugular were severed? Did you see the disarticulation of the spine? Those weren't in any version of the video I saw. It moves from a guy making a sawing motion with a knife in front of a guy throat, to a picture of the disembodied head sitting atop the body.

That's not to say that the guy is any less dead, or that it was any less horrific. But there was a lot of somewhat creative editing going on in that video. Shadows seem to shift at different points relative to the background, indicating that some of the later parts may have been recorded an hour or two after the earlier parts. There is some analysis that seems to indicate the "terrorist" may have been two different people at different points in the video. There are a lot of cuts, and quite a bit you don't see.

I'm not saying the video is a complete fake. The guy obviously suffered a horrific death, and the perpetrators need the full weight of the western worlds power brought down upon them. But don't beat yourself up about watching a beheading -- what was shown was both sad and shocking, but it left out the actual beheading part (again, unless there is some special uncut version out there I haven't heard about).

Yaz

That depends on the game, which supports my thesis.

Strong AI is difficult to do, and can be the real differentiator between a great game and a cheap copycat. Likewise for a physics engine or a rendering engine.

If your game doesn't feature any form of AI, or is easily reproduced with off-the-shelf physics and/or rendering engines, then your game is probably trivial. And if it took you years to put together your trivial game when it only takes the next guy days to replicate it -- than as I've said, you did something wrong.

Yaz

Chess has evolved over time, and wasn't the product of a single development team, so it's not exactly an apples-to-oranges comparison. It took roughly 900 years of evolution for chess to take on its modern form, and there have been many variations of chess (Wikipedia claims more than 2000 published variations).

Early versions of chess weren't unplayable, in-development versions. They were proper, stand-alone games. You could think of modern chess as actually having been a "rip-off" of these earlier games. Indeed, several of the basic game mechanics were seen in earlier games that predated chess by centuries (pieces on an X-by-Y grid, for example, was used 600 years before the earliest variants of chess in Ludus latrunculorum). Indeed, if chess hadn't freely borrowed from games that came before it, it wouldn't exist today.

As such, chess evolved in exactly the way this article is railing against. Over the years, people who had nothing to do with the original "developers" of the earliest chess forked their own versions with slightly different rule-sets, and those with rule-sets that provided for an improved game were adopted by others, who then adapted those rules with their own improvements. Without these "copy-cats", we'd be sitting down to play Chaturanga right now instead of chess.

Yaz