Good Video on Economy and Ron Paul's Predictions

It's the philosopher's stone video. Can be found to the left. I tried to embed video, but can't find it on his private channel. It's a good channel anyway.

UPDATE Dec 20, 2008: I am now able to embed the video. See below:

YAL - Young Americans for Liberty

Just wanted to point any who may actually follow this blog over to another called Young Americans for Liberty. There are several writers for this blog, and they are just getting started. I wish them good luck. They are against moving toward a socialist state, because they too understand that for socialism to ever work in theory, there must be some entity who restricts the liberty of individuals (not to mention that in practice this entity always merely takes over the seat of the wealthy of the capitalist system). This entity must exert its power over everyone and force them to participate in the system for it to ever work, and for this reason, it is anti-freedom. It is sickening to all who believe in freedom. They also understand that the right wing, as it has been hijacked, in its zeal to root out terrorists has severely infringed on the rights and privacy of American citizens. The sad part of this is that most are willing to give up their freedom to a paternalistic government that will protect them. In the end, this is a group of people who understand that more government power is never the answer to our problems, no matter what side uses it. Here are some sweet bumper stickers that their blog led me to.

6 Darkfall Gamplay Vids

A raid on a town is repelled:



Naval battles:



Shows various areas and a little of the banking system and inventory screen:



More fighting, and some spells:



A bow wielding chick goes first-person and takes out some players from a tree, until a mage pwns her with a fireball to the chest. Mounted combat, and a dude using some super jump spell to surprise attack.



The only words to express it are "holy shit." Probably the most epic MMO battle ever. Buildings rise from the ground at the beginning. And what the hell are those crazy ass siege vehicles towards the end that punch through the walls of the city? I can't wait for this game.

Darkfall is Coming (And I will be counting the days)

Ron Paul on The Auto Bailout

We better start listening.
Barney tells him time has expired.
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/

Schneier Echo: Terrorists Using Things

All from his blog. The further indented parts are him quoting, not direct quotes from Schneier:

Mumbai Terrorists Used Google Earth, Boats, Food

The Mumbai terrorists used Google Earth to help plan their attacks. This is bothering some people:

Google Earth has previously come in for criticism in India, including from the country's former president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

Kalam warned in a 2005 lecture that the easy availability online of detailed maps of countries from services such as Google Earth could be misused by terrorists.

Of course the terrorists used Google Earth. They also used boats, and ate at restaurants. Don't even get me started about the fact that they breathed air and drank water.

A Google spokeswoman said in an e-mail today that Google Earth's imagery is available through commercial and public sources. Google Earth has also been used by aid agencies for relief operations, which outweighs abusive uses, she said.

That's true for all aspects of human infrastructure. Yes, the bad guys use it: bank robbers use cars to get away, drug smugglers use radios to communicate, child pornographers use e-mail. But the good guys use it, too, and the good uses far outweigh the bad uses.

DNS Attack

A great article from Wired about the events surrounding Dan Kaminsky's DNS hack. I had no idea all of this was going on behind the scenes. It is a long one, but worth it.

Disappearing Acorns

This is too weird. Just read it. Also, the comments are very interesting. The Slashdot reader base is very intelligent, and it seems like more and more people are shunning climate alarmism. This link was supplied by the first commenter.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/11/26/1227491635989.html

Censorship in Austrailia

Why do people want to censor everything? Is it out of a need to feel in complete control of everything? If you don't like it, then you don't have to play it or read it or watch it, and you can "suck my balls" as Eric Cartman would say. This is ridiculous.

Scheme to Detect Steganography in Images

But it can't detect the scheme I used to embed into IPv6 addresses for my honors thesis. Mine is meant to be completely random, unlike the noisy redundant data within images or sound files. New Scientist Article here.

Hacking Online Voting Sites

This is a hilarious article about some students who automated repeated votes for their schools on the Victoria's Secret contest to see who would be the first school with their name on the collegiate ladies' undergarments. This is not something that is hard at all to do, if it's anything like the other schemes I've seen. For instance, when ESPN hosted an online vote for the Heisman trophy that was actually going to factor the public opinion into who received the trophy, I thought about writing an automated Perl script to vote for D-Mac over and over (it's BS that they denied him the Heisman as a sophomore, based on the fact that he was a sophomore, and then gave Timmy Tebow the Heisman as a sophomore no problem). The ESPN site basically just checked a cookie that it set in your browser to make sure you couldn't vote multiple times, and the manual solution was as simple as deleting your browser cache. It would have been trivial to automate this with a program that accepted and used cookies temporarily for each vote and then dropped them. I guess none of the big tech schools' students that the article mentioned have any interest in football though, because that type of attack never occurred. For the right to be the first school with their name on some panties though...

HOWTO: Get Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2 Working on Ubuntu 8.04

I just had to jump through a few hoops to get the Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2 gamepad to work on my Ubuntu installation, and I wanted to write down how I got it working. This is mainly so I will have a reminder, if I ever have to do this again in the future, but it could help someone.

First, when I plugged the thing in, it was already recognized, which I could see via the dmesg and lsusb commands.


From dmesg (after pluggin in the USB receiver for the cordless controller)

[ 933.085195] usb 5-2: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
[ 933.094885] usb 5-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 933.151596] input: Logitech Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb5/5-2/5-2:1.0/input/input12
[ 933.203335] input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.10 Gamepad [Logitech Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-2

From lsusb

Bus 005 Device 003: ID 046d:c219 Logitech, Inc.

So, from this, I knew at least some default drivers or something were working. This "hid" stuff and the uhci_hcd relates to the driver module, I believe.

I installed jscalibrator, but it didn't recognize any input, and the GUI was poorly presented with words running off the left side of the page and whatnot.

I then installed joystick with

sudo apt-get install joystick

Then I used the following two commands:

jscal /dev/input/js0
jstest /dev/input/js0

I could then see feedback in the jstest program when using any of the buttons on the gamepad.

After all of this, the dpad and analog directional sticks would not work in znes, although all other buttons would. After unplugging the receiver and plugging it into a different USB port, however, all buttons worked in znes. Now I just need to get sound working, but I wanted to log my steps for getting the gamepad working first.

UPDATE: 11-30-2008

I was able to get sound working the other day by installing this package: libsdl1.2-alsa. Then running the command

zsnes -ad sdl

The normal start command wasn't giving me sound. With the '-ad sdl' argument, the sound was there, but it was crackly (yes, I used that word). Setting the sample rate to 48000 seems to have solved that problem, however. Also, I checked out this forum topic on the Ubuntu forums, and acoustibop mentions installing an sdl library package that includes all the different sound architectures (including alsa and oss).

As a general improvement for sound in games, try installing libsdl1.2debian-all. This will remove libsdl1.2-alsa but don't worry, support for ALSA will be reinstalled as part of libsdl1.2debian-all.

So, I did that as well, and now the command

zsnes

by itself launches the emulator with sound enabled, and everything seems to work just fine.

The Universe as Information or the Expression of an Idea

Here is a good article from New Scientist that is more confirmation of what today's science is telling us about the nature or reality. "What makes up things are not more things, but what makes up things are ideas, thoughts, information," from What the Bleep do we Know

From the article:

Matter is built on flaky foundations. Physicists have now confirmed that the apparently substantial stuff is actually no more than fluctuations in the quantum vacuum.
[...]
Each proton (or neutron) is made of three quarks - but the individual masses of these quarks only add up to about 1% of the proton's mass. So what accounts for the rest of it? Theory says it is created by the force that binds quarks together, called the strong nuclear force. In quantum terms, the strong force is carried by a field of virtual particles called gluons, randomly popping into existence and disappearing again. The energy of these vacuum fluctuations has to be included in the total mass of the proton and neutron
[...]
The Higgs field is also thought to make a small contribution, giving mass to individual quarks as well as to electrons and some other particles. The Higgs field creates mass out of the quantum vacuum too, in the form of virtual Higgs bosons. So if the LHC confirms that the Higgs exists, it will mean all reality is virtual.

Another Minority Report Human Computer Interface

From the article:

The SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.

NSA History - Report

A new NSA history report was released. I'd like to read it if I have time. Here is an article about it from the Wall Street Journal. This may be the report, but I just wanted to mark it as something to go back to. I haven't actually read through any of this. No time right now.

New Star Trek Movie

Can't wait for it to come out in May '09.

Geting Files From Firefox Cache - Two Methods

The hard way:
type "about:cache" in the url bar (without quotes). Go to the folder specified, and grab the file.

The easy way:

1) Right-click on page.
2) Select "View Page Info"
3) Click the "Media" tab (for flash files, images, etc)
4) Find your file
5) "Save As"

State of Surveillance

I am going to start a running log of all Orwellian surveillance news called the "State of Surveillance." Not surprisingly most of the news in this log will probably be coming out of the UK. This first article on black boxes that will monitor and record all internet traffic.

Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database.

This Slashdot entry says that it would monitor all upstream traffic only.

Threading the Needle

This is a picture just recently taken by the Hubble space telescope after it was switched over to backup systems after the failure of its primary components. It shows two galaxies after the one on the left passed through the center of the one on the right. The red patch in the lower left of the galaxy on the right used to be its nucleus.

Don't Buy Toshiba Products

Just saw this article about a Toshiba with 3 GPUs, and I wanted to say, "DO NOT BUY IT." Do not ever buy crappy ass overheating Toshiba products. Ever. I hope the Google web crawlers find the words in this post, so people can search them. Ever type in something like "fuck mother fucking bullshit toshiba" just to see what comes up? Well maybe you have just found this post. Everyone I know who has owned a Toshiba has had it overheat, and Toshiba also has terrible customer service. Go Dell or go home, as far as laptops are concerned.