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brainless

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Everything posted by brainless

  1. woah, that's a nice way of doing that......I had to do the same at work a few months ago but since I didn't hear about the MMC back then we did it the "dump password file->brute force it"-way.Maybe we could make it an extensive tutorial covering both methods? "my way" is especially useful if you're locked out of the admin account...(anyways, I don't have this problem anymore with my personal computer - I can just boot from a live-CD, chroot into my hard drive and change the password )
  2. quakesand: Croation is the language spoken in Croatia [cia.gov]. The dream of actually intelligent artificial intelligence will not be fulfilled before we don't get computers which can see something different than "0" and "1" (though this sentence leaves room for debate: "What is intelligence?"). This is something a computer itself will never develop... Virii and Crawlers don't do real thinking (even though the google algorithm is a pretty neat thing of software... though I actually found a way to trick it into delivering links I actually don't want to find...). The common self-spreading virus does a thing like this: 1) Scan for a computer which has a known vulnerability, usually a virus-specific one (and only this one). 2) Explot it. 3) Repeat. That's just like a mindless factory robot: 1) Check whether the thing to attach something to is there. 2) Attach it. 3) Repeat. Crawling the web consists of two major components: 1) Follow a link. 2) Look up the words words and links in this site. 3) Index the words and follow any links found on this site (if the robots file does not specify something else, though a bot could easily be programmed to ignore the robots file). Even a more complex algorithm would still be the same: Follow the algorithm. If something happens which does not meet the algorithm's criteria - the program either malfunctions (bad) or returns an error and then dies/continues (good). I would accept a "thinking program" if it is able to fix its own bugs. Without _any_ human intervention.
  3. So what are you asking for? If a police state isn't enough, a police world could do the job? Even though this does not make me trust my data to G (changing the CEO might mean changing corporate policy), I am happy to hear that at least some companies pay respect to the separation of political forces. This is the way free states are supposed to work: Those who actually do the repression should not be free to decide why to be repressive... Notice the difference? What's wrong with morphing a picture and what's wrong with physically attacking people?To clarify one thing: The real terrorists are on the other side of the barricades. Who teargassed a couple of city blocks in Seattle, 1999 [with clouds of tear gas getting into flats of people living there, forcing them onto the streets]? Who severely injured hundreds and killed one in Genua, 2001? Who's beating up people who try to stay alive?
  4. delivi: How exactly did you find out about Firefox 2 having more bugs than IE 5? Given the amount of bugs IE 5 has even today, this is a somewhat risky claim, especially if you don't back it up...
  5. adriantc: Then join the translation team. Complaining is easy but if you ever tried translating software you'd realize that doing a decent translation is kind of hard to achieve... ...this site might be a good start for a romanian Firefox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Localization There's usually lots of stuff wrong with software, a rough estimate would be one bug in a hundred lines of code... ...depending on your surfing habits these changes probably won't affect you too much since only the fourth number has changed (2.0 -> 2.0.0.1; the first number is for major releases --lots of new features--, the second is for minor updates --fixing important stuff, adding small features--, updates with even less changes than on the minor level can probably ignored if they don't fix anything happening to you on a regular basis or if you don't want to be on the bleeding edge all the time...)
  6. In a few days, I'll finish my community service as required by the draft. But what then? I actually wondered about this when I began the service 8 1/2 months ago and applied to an orphanage in South Africa but I never got any response from them :/ Half a month ago I decided that I can't wait for a response any longer (well, 6 months should be long enough for anyone to at least confirm that they received an application) and began working on the Camphill application form which I sent in to some irish Camphill Communities [camphill.ie]. To my surprise I received the first response right the next day but they were unable to offer me a room and work before June/July 2007. I feared I'd have to get myself a job for these 6 months but two days ago I received a mail from another Camphill Community: If I'm willing to do so, I could join them in late January - and I'm willing to The last thing dividing me from Ireland are some formal things like handing in my CV, a police report, a health report and letters from two people saying that I'm ok for working with people with special needs... ...and then I'll be off to Ireland within a month
  7. husker: Did you actually read and understand the article you pointed at?many of the other people who posted here: Read and understand the first line in this post :lol:I wonder what would happen if you asked people on the street about the origin of Xmas? And what would people's reaction be when they are told?
  8. bunlytek: Nice try but computers are way less capable of doing things than a human brain. well, if you leave out stuff like memories and maths "The web" is not thinking for itself, it always requires a human being feeding something into it; if asked whether something is right or wrong, just about no computer will say "something in between"...
  9. I just spent some hours watching TV (for the first time in years and I don't intend to do something as stupid as watching TV again) with my dad. Well, he just got out of hospital so I've got an excuse for watching TV with him :)On one of the stations, they showed a movie about a german submarine in the second world war (with lots of shooting, explosions, blood, dead people and the bad bad government people who lost their grip on reality) - and when the submarine crew managed to get to their port of destination, they happened to leave the submarine just in time for an air raid, during which the submarine sank and all of the crew [except for the emo guy who was about to freak out during all the time] got killed.After the movie, my dad pointed out that "war doesn't make sense and never will" - at first, I agreed but when I thought about this when I lay in my bed, a thought struck me: War does make sense and will always do.This theory covers only capitalist societies but it's probably possible to extend it to cover other forms of organizing society:In capitalism, there are two main principles people follow:1) get rich (accumulate as much capital [of virtual value, e.g. money, or real value, e.g. housing, cars, ...] as possible)2) one is only rich due to others being poorTherefore: To become rich quicker than the average person, you have to make the average person get rid of their money, preferrably into your pockets and without your money going the same way.Enters: War BusinessThe common nation is financed by collecting taxes from its citizens.The common nation has an own, armed branch of society (except for Liechtenstein whose last soldier died in 1939 and which hires swiss mercenaries ever since).Military equipment is very expensive, at least in absolute numbers - common budgets contain hundred millions or even billions of Euros.Some nations own high-end military systems, keeping it up-to-date and runnung costs them huge amounts of money each year. But: They only need equipment for a certain number of soldiers (only once per soldier) and a certain number of tanks, planes, bombs. Once they have been equipped with this, they will reduce their military spendings on a large scale.Since a nation with high-end military equipment usually can't get involved into an armed conflict (think of the public opinion, with "public" meaning not only national but also international), they need to get rid of their equipment one way or another when they plan to upgrade.As it will be hard to explain to the average citizen why high-end equipment, paid for by the tax-payer, should be destroyed, it will be sold to "Less Developed Nations" [which can't afford brand new equipment]. This way, Developed Nations get rid of yesterday's war machines and LDNs get their hands on quite new war tools at second-hand prices.At some point in this chain, the old stuff can not be sold to another nation anymore, even though there are lots of years left before it will not be usable anymore. So what should we do with bombs from ten years ago?When we arrive at this point, a war comes in handy: It kills people [well, that's bad enough] and, more interesting from a capitalist point of view, infrastructure and military hardware: bombs (why would anyone want to blow up a million-dollar-piece of metal and explosives?), tanks, planes etc.And this is the interesting thing: Military hardware is state-owned capital. Paid for by public money for things produced in mostly private factories. The money earned in a weapons factory goes to one single person or a group of persons which is significantly smaller than the population of this state; the tax-payer's money does not flow back into his own pockets (well, a little part does; the large sums will be collected somewhere else).After the war, the average person will end up with less capital than before (less money; less infrastructure; less military equipment) and the average person will be busy rebuilding what has been destroyed during the war.On the other hand are those persons who sold the weapons - paying someone to count their money and trying to get the next round going since they won't have to face what they produce. As long as they don't have to do the fighting or cleaning up, there is no reason for them to stop putting weapons into this world.-----Short infos:* Most of the world's weapons are exported from the USA (#1), Russia, Germany (#3), the United Kingdom, France and Israel (#6). China is producing lots of weaponry for its own use.* Germany has given away two high-end submarines to Israel (about 300 million Euros each) and signed a contract to sell three more of them at one third of the regular price to Israel while Israel destroyed most of the infrastructure in the Lebanon's south. The four submarines which are not paid for by Israel are a gift from Germany, 1.2 billion Euros of taxpayer's money.* These submarines are slightly modified in Israel to make them able to launch Israel's nukes.* When the USA pull their military out of one place, they usually sell most of the weapons they brought there because it's cheaper to sell them there and buy new ones than taking them back home.* everytime the political signs point to "war", the value of shares from companies producing military equipment rises
  10. iervan: It's no use to put HTML into a forums post - without the proper plug-ins installed, it won't be parsed (and I suppose OpaQue is smart enough not to install this ). Probably none of us has this image on his/her hard drive anyway :)To answer your question: You'll need to repartition your harddrive (add an ext3-partition and a swap partition) I need to get back to work, maybe I'll check in later today...
  11. TV Show: Real people with real problems act as unreal persons with invented problems who real people with real problems look at to forget about their real problems.After all you told us, the most likely reason you have for bashing someone else is "he's been looking at me funny". Would you like to be beaten up for looking at someone else? If you do, go ahead. If you don't, better think again...
  12. ...I didn't like "Im Westen nichts Neues" too much ... but then, it's one of the best war novels I've read, too :)Somehow I can't recall if I already posted that I've read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by John Perkins but since I've mentioned it now, I can inform you about me being almost finished with "The wisdom of the crowd"...
  13. maybe this person intentionally set this router up to be publicly available? That's what many people around here do to make internet access available from all over the city (and in some places the network of wifi routers is dense enough to allow you to access your computer at home while being on the other side of the city)......anyways, if you don't have an own method of getting into the internet, I'd consider using "their" router perfectly ok - under the terms of fair use: Don't do anything stupid, don't hog up the bandwidth and definitely don't get them into trouble for <illegal thing> done using their connection.
  14. what you're describing is just another materialization of the virtual thing "money".In the USoNA you have the USoNA-Dollar, in Japan you have the Yen, in the WEU you have the Euro - that's all money, so are your points from the web.If you swap a cow for a horse or a horse for a pair of wheels, you trade something of a real value for something else with a real value (but don't ask me if swapping a cow for a horse is a fair deal).But why should that guy with the wheels want a horse? Why should you carry all your belongings around with you if you go out to find what you need? Enters: Money. Under other circumstances worthless stuff which receives value y the trust put into it by society(-ies)...
  15. It's been mostly a leisure trip for me but I still learned a lot during my week on Sicily As to the equipment: We did not use anything special - except if you consider the usual stuff for walking off-road special: stable boots (IF you do a bad step, your ankles are a little stabilized so that IF you fall, your ankles are not twisted), a backpack plus some food and drinks, warm clothing (well, it's been quite warm up there but on mountains you often get strong winds, just like in the flat land)... ...rubber shoes were ok since we did not intend to step on the hot lava and your common boots don't melt at the temperatures the ground reaches were there is no lava - just about everywhere we went, we could touch it without burning our hands, that's usually a good sign if you're worried about heat flakes: if you get the chance to climb it ... then do it, it's an awesome experience
  16. uhm ... using common eMail, this should be technically impossible (well, you could register as content producer and wait for DRM in eMails and next generation-Operating Systems... just set the mail's rights to "read once" and you're done ).One approach to this would be creating an HTML-formatted mail and embed a javascript which triggers the "delete"-Button whenever the person reading the mail does anything but that'll give you lots of problems which you'll have to figure out:a) is the person you attack vulnerable? Disabling javascript support in the mail program (or using a mail program incapable of rendering HTML mails/incapable of interpreting javascript) would make the victim invulnerable. How to trigger the "delete"-button? You'll probably have to create a hand-tailored script to fit the victim's mail service provider's front-end or the victim's mail programgiven that, it's just about impossible to achieve your goal without cracking either the mail server used to store the mail or the victim's system.Any other solution would be just as hard to do - whatever is displayed on the screen can be captured using the victim's favorite method to do screenshots (well, it's harder to take a screenshot of a video but you're not going to do a video, do you? You'd have to disable the victim's cache anyway...)so: do it any other way but don't use eMail. Make a phone call, speak to the victim in person, write with chalk on the street in front of the victim's house but don't even try to do it by mail...
  17. I've just spent a week on Sicily (that large island southwest of Italy, if anyone's interested ) and on Wednesday, my group and me climbed the Etna, which was particularly active during the last couple of weeks. Already on our way to the base station, it was a spectacular view for us - all the way around the volcano is covered in (hardened) lava. In some places it's as green as any other part of Sicily (which means rather yellow-brown than green) and it doesn't look interesting at all, in other places you can get a picture of how much force there is inside of this volcano - houses have been buried beneath lava and all one can see is the roof, maybe the upper floor... A thousand meters further up the mountain, it's all covered in black dust and small stones, in few places, some kind of plant already began to grow but it's in no way green but plain yellow. Areas which have been covered in "fresh" lava during the large eruption(s) of 2001 did not cool down completely yet and the stone's warm enough to make water boil (well, that's something like 2000 meters above zero so you don't have to get the water to 100?C to make it boil...) and a dozen steps further up the mountain, the soil about twenty centimeters below the surface is frozen... ...and then you look up and notice that there are huge clouds emerging from the crater every other second, every single one creating a mushroom cloud like a miniaturized nuclear bomb: A few hundred meters further along the mountainside (and about an hour and a half later), you reach a small crater (called "hornet") - it makes really strange noises, somewhat like hot air being pushed through small openings at a really fast speed, if you stand at the wrong place (I guess it's a wrong place because of what's following ) the air smells like rotten eggs - and you get the miniaturized but still deadly version of what it must be like at the main crater: yellow glowing pieces of lava are thrown through the air every other second and if you feel like committing suicide, you try to make really good pictures of this thing. I found myself standing in the middle of some freshly thrown pieces of lava when taking this picture (remember: We're talking about molten stones and not about sparks of burning wood): When you put a handkerchief on the rather cold lava a few meters away from the stream of lava flowing down the volcano from this "hornet", it takes only a few seconds for it to burn down. well, the lava's pitch black but obviously hot enough to incinerate paper (sorry, no pic of this)... ...and in the meantime, the main crater is not throwing clouds of smoke anymore (well, with more light it would probably still look much like smoke) but hot lava: On our way back to the parking lot, our guide noticed that a lava stream which was considered "dead" seemed to be back to an active state - after a short debate, we decided to have a look at it instead of going directly back down. It was really worth coming home two hours later than scheduled, I'll just post this picture and tell you that it looked much like this for about one hundred meters in each direction: At this place, you could rather safely get as near to the lava as you liked (well, it's really, really hot...). On our way back down it was rather dark so I didn't take any pictures - but as much of the way felt like a sandy beach, we were able to run down the mountain for some 1500 meters within fifteen minutes (it took hours to get up ). If you ever get the chance to visit an active volcano - do it! it's amazing =)
  18. ok, I am the bad guy who first referenced Star Trek this time. Yes, lots of Star Trek stuff is fiction, some of it is missing every grain of scientific base (take the gravity generation on every spaceship. Even if everything else has been blown apart and the team has to wear space suits, gravity still works; AFAIK every answer to how these generators work is the same as for the Heisenberg Compensator: "they work fine, thanks for asking").on the other hand, there are things which have been just as fictional when they were first used in Star Trek (take the communicators ... they're just about what we have in mobile phones now...) - and with this hint, I'll stop this (at least in this thread since it's leading way off topic......and I am aware of the fact that the warp drive is mostly made up (Dilithium is Lithium with an appended Di-) - the interesting thing, however, is the antimatter-transportation and getting energy out of it (lots of)...salamangkero: The force exerted by fans is not an illusion (but the idea that you usually feel the force exerted by a fan is wrong unless you stick a finger into it ); the force exerted by the fan makes the air move and if it hits something (e.g. your face), you feel the force exerted by the air on your face (if you move against the wind, the air might also feel the force exerted by your body )
  19. quakesand: thanks for trying, but...: When I try to run encrypter.exe from within WinRAR, I get this error message: "The Dynamic Link Library d3d8.dll was not found in the Path." [with Path being the environment variable ]. Maybe you need to ship this [and any other DLL used] with the program? What kind of key would you like to see? The key to use depends on the method you're going to use... anyways, I'll just get my laptop back up and running again, then I'll generate a key pair for public key-encryption to publish here (well, I could just post one of my public keys but that would've been to easy; plus the Windoze-Notepad is unable to cope with them as of today...) techclace: biometrics is basically a nice idea for encryption but I'd rather not use it for important stuff - as of today, face scanning machines don't recognize someone with a bruise in his face when he's been scanned without it...
  20. I don't remember exactly either, I guess it was in one of the TNG episodes (since DS9 only rarely involved warp cores, compared to other series, the Defiant was an almost flawless --though uncomfortable-- spaceship ) and the Voyager-environment allowed for way more interesting stories than mere basic federal technology (species unknown to the Federation until then developed way more interesting stuff; in the final episodes of Voyager we even get to see one of the 6 known Borg transwarp hubs )... ...anyways, back to topic: I'll just quote the Wikipedia article on the War Drive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive): --well, parts of the warp core is quite well explained. To quote a remark of one of the producers of the show when asked how the Heisenberg Compensator [a device used to allow beaming] works simply said "Quite well. Thanks." --
  21. on Windows I'm going for Miranda IM [support for ICQ, Y!, AIM, MSN, IRC] and on my gentoo I have not decided yet [though I don't like the look'n'feel of gaim...]
  22. didn't you ever pay attention while watching Star Trek? well, igniting it isn't the problem since you just have to have some matter and let the antimatter get in touch with it... ...the Star Trek solution is a complex system of electromagnetic valves so there's at any given point only a small amount of antimatter in the matter/antimatter-reaction chamber (and what happens if you let a half man-sized chamber of antimatter get in touch with matter can be seen in the photon torpedoes ) wasn't Nibbler's species just producing black matter? ("it's so heavy that one tea spoon of it weighs as much as 10 000 tea spoons of it")
  23. Noone but the Hizb Allah will. This has been true for just about every armed group of a significant size (take the IRA [irish Republican Army] as an example), this will be true for the Hizb Allah as well....I was going to start a debate on some UN resolutions on this topic but this is better placed in an own topic...
  24. a link to the game's website would be nice - and/or accurate description on where to find it. It definitely is not among the top 10 on FilePlanet..[update] well, it's not among the top 10 but, at the time of this post, ranked 18 [all files]/ranked 25 [action games]...
  25. It seems to me that walled borders are becoming more and more popular - even though the most infamous example of a Wall ("The Wall") kind of failed: a) India and Pakistan have a long history of conflict about who's going to get how much of a region called Cashmere [China's involved there, too, but they're kind of not on the stage]. In order to protect each country from militant extremists leaking into India/Pakistan from Pakistan/India, especially in/near Cashmere, large parts of the front line have been "secured" with lots of steel, concrete and barbed wire. This is mostly a Wall in the conventional sense, guarded by patrols (which are said to become less frequent but to be honest, I haven't followed developments in this conflict for quite some time :/) ...and follows: High-Tech Walls: Israel built a "security fence" around parts of the West Bank and will probably continue it until all of the West Bank is imprisoned. [i.e. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/]. I don't want to discuss the impact of this Wall, at least not yet... c) Between the Gaza Strip and the (egyptian) Sinai, Israel is trying to create a ditch 4km long, 15 to 25m deep and 100 to 120m wide. The goal: Prevent Palestinians from smuggling weapons from Egypt into the Gaza Strip through tunnels... d) the USoNA/Mexican border is already pretty good equipped but it's supposed to be upgraded soon. e) the borders of the EU are, in some places (e.g. the spanish 'outposts' Ceuta and Melilla) secured with six meters high fences w/ barbed wire, surveillance cameras and armed guards; since some hundred african people tried to get access to Europe by climbing over these fences [dozens got severely injured by the barbed wire; some were shot by the guards; two or three dozens got into european territory and are probably on the european continent by now], these fences have been subject to 'improvements'. Along the spanish and french coastline with the mediterranean sea, high-tech infrared cameras are being tested which are said to be able to distinguish two sources of heat (e.g. two people trying to cross at the passage of Gibraltar) in a distance of about 12km (that's about the shortest distance between Spain and Morocco); similar systems have been discussed in Italy [does anyone know what happened to them?] f) Saudi-Arabia is about to build a wall between... f1) the "Saudi Great Wall" between Saudi-Arabia and Iraq: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ - approximate cost: 450 million Euros on roughly 900km of wall (that's 5 000 Euros per meter, if I'm not mistaken ... just imagine how much and highly developed stuff to stop people from passing by you can put into one meter for 5 000 Euros...). Deadline for this project: "within a year"... f2) in the long run (beginning late 2004), all the Saudi-Arabian borderline is supposed to be equipped with such a wall: http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1&sectio;m=2&y=2004 - approximate worth back then: "up to $8.75 billion"; now: "up to $12 billion"). g) In addition to the walls around some nations, so-called "Fenced Communities" are spreading all over the place where rather wealthy people gather in suburbs. All around the suburb there are walls/fences; to enter the "Community" you have to prove that you're living in there (or have been invited by someone living there), often there's some private security hired to drive around the neighborhood and watch out for "suspicious" activities...
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