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gaurdro

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  1. They put errors in the CSS code to see if the browser would properly ignore the bad coding. it's sorta like when you are skimming a word seek puzzle. if you're using english correctly you'll ignore the almost words but if you're not you'll use invalid words. Each browsers interprets the page differently(non standardly), so it appears different. if you've done much web development or design you know that firefox and IE don't usually agree unless you add a bunch of code that one ignores and the other picks up on. a good example of this is css induced transparency. for IE you have to use a special extra function to make it work (the function is ignored by all the rest of the browsers) because IE doesn't bother using the normal transparency commands. the same is true for making rounded corners on images.
  2. The lag and general performance hit of using the file compression is because the processor has to decompress data before it can be used. Knowing M$ I'm sure they didn't put too much planning into what method was used to compress the files. Note that they didn't bother to put in any settings for compression. also from my experience WinXP forces a decompress/recompress cycle when copying from one compressed partition to another. this may simply be due to how the compression is carried out on the filesystem or may be poor planning on the developers. With any sort of compression there will always be a performance hit just because of the necesity of decompression before use. this is true with all compression regardless of how fast the algorithm is or how little the data is actually being compressed. as a fairly good example of this. even with the command line Winzip will take longer to "unzip" a storage only zip file than a copy and bulk rename of an equivalent files.
  3. I personally would go with the basis for the mac os. which is linux. while it has a history of being difficult to use and lack of support for windows and mac programs, it has become very user friendly. I use suse linux enterprise desktop 10 on both my desktop an imac and my gateway latptop. it works wonderfully and without any learning curve whatsoever. it can be setup easily to look and behave like windows or mac. the support for windows and mac progams are slow in coming but are getting much better and in a few years linux most likely will be able to emulate windows and macintosh perfectly as far as programs are concerned. The technical side of linux is easily taken care of in suse by very easy to use administration tools located easily on the program bar.
  4. i think global warming is a part of a cycle of heating and cooling on this planet. humans however have made things significantly worse so in turn when things snap to the cold things will probably be even worsejust a note. trees emitt methane, moreso than a cow. methane is the granddaddy of all greenhouse gases. another thing adding to the problem is the last ice age trapped tons of co2, methane and other greenhouse gases and as glaciers, etc. melt they are releasing more and more of the stuff that we don't want in our atmosphere
  5. I've not only heard of this type of virus a computer sciences major friend of mine wrote a proof of concept "computer killer" as a part of his thesis. there are a lot of things that a virus can do to mess with hardware.-processor modulations(stated above)-faked dropped bits in ram. this affects typically network cards and harddrives. normally a chip of ram drops a bit of data every quadrillion cycles or so. no big deal. this one fakes dropped bits every 100 cycles with a chip that during post checks good. this eventually leads to bad data being processed and junk instruction being sent to hardware. this can be rather devastating during shutdown because it'll give harddrive addresses that are severly out of range. -forcing open transistors. sending bad data through the various busses can damage the power supply by shorting between conections on the mother board. -there's a technique called "drive bashing" that on all drives with moving parts. it is a raw read/write that forces the internal parts to crash against the edges of the inside of the drive. a symptom of this occurs naturally in harddrives. if your harddrive is clicking, get it replaced because it's about to die (unless it's scsi).
  6. It is a simple matter of definition that a black hole cannot be a white dwarf. it is possible that a white dwarf may turn into a black hole but once light stops escaping it ceases to be a white dwarf and becomes a black hole. it is more probable that black holes don't go away because there is no net radiation from the hole. therefore all the matter(remember e=mc2) and energy is contained and in most cases added to. they do emit "Hawking Radiation" but this is even below the level of background noise in the universe so there is still a net influx of energy.
  7. here's my opinion on the matter. we should take their license away on the first dui. on the second remove(and resell) the car not back to person or the family. on the third a "no appeal" death sentence.this would stop the problem and would eventually weed out the genes that make some of us suceptible to alcohol addiction.
  8. the governement conveniently likes to forget that traffic fatalities increase drasticaly (i think 400%) when seat belts became standard issue in cars and the first round of "modern" safety legislation went through. this made cars have crumple zones to decrease forces exerted on the passangers.also if you have a family history of heart defects or have heart disease wearing a seatbelt in a potentially fatal accident will most likely kill you much more painfully than going through the windsheild.
  9. I'm not sure where you've based this from. but um black holes can be created from white dwarfs but they are not one in the same. white dwarfs still have a small enough gravitaitonal field that light esapes. black holes, however, don't let anything escape. and while black holes produce "Hawking radiation", they never die as a star would. by the way approximately 40 tons of matter collide with our sun every day so it would follow that things (especially iron which doesn't fuse any further) could hit and add to the mass of white dwarfs or any celestial being.
  10. I'm sorry to say this is false. while burning any carbon based fuel does emmit substances considered as pollutants. no carbon fuels, especially gasoline and other hydrocarbons, contain chlorine or flourine so there is no way that a gas burning car could emit this class(chlorofluorocarbon) of compound. the race of things doesn't actually benefit the environment. the ethanol fuels emit 10% less carbon emmissions but creating them produces 40% more emissions than petroleum. the "natural oil" burning diesel vehicles are still burning a huge amount of carbon but with more phosphorous, which creates phosphoric acid. this acid is worse than sulfic and sulfurous acids because they interfere with several hormones that plants use to regulate growth. a widespread phosphoric acid rain would give us trees that grow one foot up and attempt to grow a hundred feet of roots(which emit carbon dioxide and methane; two green house gases). even "clean" power sources aren't at all. hydrogen fuel only emits water(another greenhouse gas) but takes five times(in contained, usable energy) the amount of fuel in oil. we don't have a good system for separating water, which takes a huge amount of energy anyway. we instead get hydrogen from huge hydrocarbon chains that we can successfully partially burn leaving some hydrogen, some water, and a whole lot of carbon oxides. electric cars just pass the buck. we don't have very much of our power grid off the oil drip so when you fill up the battery your not really gaining an efficiency but producing the emissions at one local not just where you're driving. not to mention all the money, time and energy(mostly from oil) wasted on these fruitlessly dependent alternatives. what we need is a thrust to nuclear technology. fission isn't clean but fusion is and we are very close to getting it to work. it does sound like science fiction but trust me, as a physics major planning to conduct research into fusion technology, that it is possible and will make a truly clean fuel. taking only hydrogen(which can be produced with the clean energy) and producing only the inert gas helium. when we get really good at it we may be able to fuse all the way to iron. extracting 98% of the energy from hydrogen atoms. this includes the energy used running the machines to keep the reactors running and the energy used to split water. i think we will burn through all the oil, coal, natural gas, tar sand, oil shale, etc. before we have a working alternative completely seperated from fossil fuels. it's that we, the united states, use more electricity than china and more oil that china and russia combined. but we have only a quarter the population of china. hmm doesn't seem right does it.
  11. Here's my view on such things. the conciousness that you are is merely one of infinite that your physical body has been. when there is a choice between two(or more) outcomes i believe the unverse follows all of them concurrently. so in my estimation by the time your born you've died an infinite amount of times in every way imaginable already. as for what happens after all your conciousness' die, i believe that what you want/believe to happen will. if that means going to heaven, great, if you're to be reborn you will be etc.
  12. a security threat to be concerned with is the increasing prevalence of viruses containing advanced rootkits to hide their actions or data on the computer. even from the anti-stuff tools. a rootkit was originally a name for tools that hackers/crackers would use to maintain root on unix/linux machines. root is the uber user with all the permissions on a linux box. on windows these tools can be used to hide data on the harddrive and in the registry by manipulating the way the data is stored. THe windows api(the thing windows uses to communicate to the hardware) reads things in certain ways but the data/structures can be vastly different. an example of this is in the registry the data is stored as numbered strings while the api reads them as null terminated string. the data a rootkit would write is:/hkey_something_or_other/folder/"data that is seen\x0(the null character)data i want hidden"and windows will return:/hkey_something_or_other/folder/"data that is seen"the rootkit reads the raw data and bypasses the windows api so it can read the full data. these programs are everywhere already. windows even has one to deal with the special files on an ntfs filesystem and another to deal with windows update. i've heard that there are many tools to find these things but as of yet i haven't looked into any of them. Notice from truefusion: Moved to the Security Issues & Exploits forum.
  13. Blackholes are mostly theory because as we construct them now they violate a few of the "laws" of physics. one such being non-overlapping massive domains. which is just saying that two massive objects can't overlap in space. you can't be in the exact same location as someone else. gravity is a force generally thought of as being caused by a massive object. in the creation of a black hole, typically from a nuetron star or a white dwarf, which are already extremely massive and dense. the gravitational pull is so great that it begins to pull the outside in and the postulate of masses can't overlap is broken. the object becomes so dense that it creates an "event horizon". this is the proverbial point of no return. once ANYTHING crosses the event horizon it cannot return. the reason light can't escape is due to the fact that a superdense object tends to warp space. which makes light bend around it. in the case of a black hole the bending of space is such that the light always is placed on a collision course with the black hole itself. the word "laws" is in quotes because we don't know the true laws of the universe yet. we can only guess which would more likely place them under the scope of theorys but most people get really uncomfortable when one says "the theory of gravity states".
  14. I use a nice set of programs for free to keep my computer secure.antivirus: avg- you have to look for the free one but it is there.adware/spyware: ad-aware 6 and spybot s & d.firewall: agnitum basic
  15. It's user beware with online dating. In my opinion it shouldn't matter what disabilities she/he has. Yeah if you just want to get laid i could see being instantly repulsed but i would hope you aren't online trying to do that. I met my current girlfriend on an online dating site and later found out she was a deaf mute, which i had no clue of beforehand. she has the absolute best personality and a great set of green eyes and we're very happy together.
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