Slashdot Mirror

How to make an atom bomb

Are they even allowed to publish this kind of information? Or is it withheld under the PATRIOT act with the rest of our civil liberties?
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NoVA Underground: Arlington, Alexandria, Loudoun, Prince William, Fairfax County forums and chat

Box responds, just not on port 80... someone has the max apache clients set too low. Anyway, MirrorDot mirror:

http://mirrordot.org/stories/bd14487390c17a50503ea 63520d2685a/index.html
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NoVA Underground: Loudoun, Arlington, Alexandria, Prince William and Fairfax County forums

Oh joy pop-up blocking for IE! Like I need IE hogging MORE resources. Oooo, and a FIREWALL. Tiny Personal Firewall does a better job than a Windows firewall ever could. Stability? XP is pretty damn stable. My only real issue is all the ram it hogs after a box has been up for a couple weeks or so.
Yeah yeah, "switch to linux." I don't even want to start that thread here. Linux is definitely my choice for a server operating system. Nothing beats it hands down (well, maybe FreeBSD for some implementations, but shhhhh don't start a flamewar). When I use my home desktop machine, I want it to get the work done that I want to get done and that's it. I don't want to worry about GLIBC incompatibilities, dependencies, or whatever. I have used Linux as a desktop OS on and off for the past 6 years or so and while I'm extremely impressed by its progress, it still doesn't come close to the speed and ease of Windows XP for getting things done.
Mac OS X on the other hand... Damn, if only I could afford the hardware.
</rant>
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NoVA Underground: Northern Virginia message boards and chat, with Fairfax County public ticket/arrest search

[S]ome of the security work in IE7 relies on operating system functionality in XPSP2
So does that mean I won't be able to run it on XP with SP1 either? I mean obviously I use Firefox, but if I'm going to be forced to have Microsoft's shitty browser installed, I'd rather it be the latest, greatest and most secure. And I still don't trust SP2 and all the crap it dumps on your box.
Just a thought.
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NoVA Underground: Northern Virginia message boards and chat, with Fairfax County public ticket/arrest search

Why stop at dual core?
Once a way to link multiple cores of a CPU is firmly implemented scaling the chip to 4, 8, or even 32768 cores should be relatively easy.
With chip dies getting smaller and smaller the only real reasons not to continue this multi-core scaling would be physical space and power usage.
Perhaps they could scale multiple cores vertically instead of just making the chip wider and longer.
And perhaps the cores could only be "turned on" when called for instead of using up juice all the time.

Interesting look at the future of chips.
Sony's Playstation 3 is using a "cell processor" or similar multi-core design that has already been covered here in the past.

Arstechnica article on the cell processor here.
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NoVA Underground: Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Arlington, Price William chat and local forums

We have so much dark fiber laid it's ridiculous.
In a big city or town in other countries most buildings have ethernet running throughout with one tap to a fiber backbone in the telephone closet. Here every office suite is expected to pay a premium for DSL. And you wonder why we're behind on the times, it's our marketing and poor policy machines at work.
Residential users are a little different, but very rarely do you hear of a homeowners association getting together and buying a fiber trunk or something.
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NoVA Underground: Where Northern Virginia comes out to play

frickin lasers on their heads!?!?!
sorry
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NoVA Underground: Where Northern Virginia comes out to play

What is the current status of legality of reverse-engineering of software in the US? I know that hardware reverse-engineering has stood up in court time and time again, but software is a different story. Especially with a powerful plaintiff such as Microsoft.
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NoVA Underground: Where Northern Virginia comes out to play

According to their fact sheet (pdf) the mission will be completely autonomous. The DART spacecraft even has collision avoidance algorithms. It seems that this spacecraft was designed only to repair one particular satellite (MUBLCOM), although several of this satellite currently exist. Anyone know if the services of this DART spacecraft can only be used once, or can it travel the LEO repairing all MUBLCOM's it comes in contact with?
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NoVa Underground: Where Northern Virginia comes out to play. This means you Fairfax County

Screw paying for a joke. Here's the full article now with new and improved karma whoring goodness.

Okay, We Give Up
From the April 2005 Issue of Scientific American.
Who said scientists had no sense' of humor?

There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day.

Okay, We Give Up

MATT COLLINS
THE EDITORS editors@sciam.com
COPYRIGHT 2005 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.
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NoVa Underground: Where Northern Virginia comes out to play

How does Novell expect to remain competitive in the world of free linux. Especially with RedHat dominating the paid business sector.
They were one of the pioneers of many technologies available today. It will be sad to watch their slow painful death.
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NoVA Underground: Where Northern Virginia comes out to play

For an Indie artist P2P is essential for helping to distribute their art to the public. They usually do not have the means to host a web server for themselves for listeners to download MP3's. Several websites exist for independent artists to share their music such as SoundClick and (the late) mp3.com which is nice when a potential fan already knows the artists' name and music. However in order to get introduced to the indie artist a listener must find his music somewhere. These days it definitely won't be on the radio or MTV, so that only leaves word of mouth or a BitTorrent amongst illegal ones on a P2P website somewhere. Speaking about Indie artists, check out DZK, a talented artist I never would have found if not for P2P.
- Cary
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Anyone from Fairfax County or Northern Virginia?