Slashdot Mirror

Do you think that there should be publicly broadcast pornography? Or publicly broadcast videos showing how to make bombs? [Links gratuitously added]

That's why we have things like NetNanny and the V-Chip; ratings for TV, movies and video games; and "Click if you're over 18" buttons on web pages. It's all to allow the consumer to make an informed decision about the content that they choose to view and that they choose to make viewable to their children.

We're all missing it. Luanch a bird with a nuclear reactor in it and when the sludge builds up or the core is depleted, send it on a trajectory for the sun. Keep the platform small so that it won't have a large impact at the sun. References include:

• Nuke launch accidents
• Japan wants to do this by 2040
• Space Nuclear Auxilary Power (SNAP) and RTGs

The other point mentioned briefly in the Japan article is that even if high-energy beams were used, they could be pointed out to sea. Put it out far enough and bouys would be easy to post or, better yet, a small unmanned receiving platform with a cable to the land.

and yes... I am an idiot for not linking to it

Spock: "Atmosphere: breathable oxygen/nitrogen mixture..."

Scotty: "..I should bloody well hope so.....and anyway..Federation Standard Landing Party Procedure states that tricorder readings of atmospheric content should take place BEFORE we set foot on the planet"

Spock: "That's Federation bureaucrats for you....Someone should point out to them that it's only possible to take a tricorder reading once you're actually there..."

Scotty: "but...but...but what happens if the atmosphere wasn't breathable?"

Spock: "It always is...."

Jim: "Anything else on the tricorder Spock?"

Spock: "Yes I'm picking up some primitive radio frequency signals... ...here listen..."

[...it's a brand new dance now...come on baby..do the locomotion...]

Jim: "..primitive indeed..."

Spock: "I bet she's got nice legs though.."

Jim: "Spock!..what's wrong with you...that was Scotty's line..."

WHAT happened next?)

Next Week: Episode 4.

Shamelessly reproduced from: Vax Trek V, the movie, The Crunchy Bits 2.

Indeed. So-called "non-lethal" projectile and chemical weapons are not really non-lethal. That's propaganda: it's what the police call them to make them sound safe. Aw, a fluffy little bean bag. Aw, a plastic bullet. How much can a little thing like that hurt.

The reality is organ damage, serious wounds, broken bones, spinal injury, miscarriage, blindness, and death. And that's when the police don't deliberately aim for maximum injury, or fire at point blank range - the sadistic bastards.

Some weapons manufacturers more accurately label those same weapons "less lethal", meaning they still kill people, but they're not specifically designed for killing.

Such weapons are meant to be used by professional, trained officers in the correct way: such as aiming at people's legs, or the ground, and from a minimum distance. They come with specific instructions to this effect, and warnings of what will happen when these instructions are ignored. Police officers routinely ignore them.

When a police officer aims the same projectile weapons at someone's head, or at their neck, they are intending to kill that person or break their spine, and sometimes they succeed. Disturbingly, police actually do that in crowd control situations.

Even when they hit your back or legs, they can cause severe organ damage and/or broken bones.

And we haven't discussed the chemical weapons, yet. Exercise for the reader.

Here's a fairly good and accurate article.

-- Jamie

The ph33r3d 4$$4$$1N80X

Maybe we will get lucky and only have a small asteroid strike. You know, like one that will only kill everyone in New York City? Maybe then people might listen without have killed too many people and caused too much damage.

Read about the human Kryptonite -- CRTs

I thank you for stating your position calmly and intelligently.
It's a lot easier to feel comfortable with the USA giving up military superiority if one is not a citizen. Surely I do not feel that the USA is completely immune to corruption, for it is a government of the people, and people given power have the freedom to fall into corruption. It's part of what makes us human. However, the USA is quite well organized. The USA's governmental system was "invented by geniuses to be run by idiots," someone said (somewhat tongue-in-cheek). No one person is capable of declaring war. Americans are very afraid of people with too much power in the government, which is why the two-party political system is successful. The Congress must vote to go to war, and the President of the US has only limited skirmish powers.
To further probe the American psyche, one should not neglect the Second Ammendment, which gives the citizens of the US the right to bear arms. This idea is summarized well by James Madison: "James Madison, author of the Second Amendment, tells us that tyranny would not occur here [US] because of "the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation." (found here)

Anyways, in closing, Johnny Cash has something to say about the topic: "I don't believe in violence, I'm a God-fearing man, but I'll stand up for my country just as long as I can stand." And, in the same song "Walk softly but carry a big stick, [President] Teddy used to say."

And learn to control your dreams on your own. I found this site the other day, and have been doing the first exercise for 3 days now. I've managed to have lucid dreams (or at least semi-lucid) twice already. (lucid meaning you realize that you're dreaming) Once you're in a lucid dream, it's sort of like the Matrix... you know anything is possible, and can do anything you want.

And of course, who could forget spending hours buried in the text files of the Temple of the Screaming Electron.

There is an algorithm for several parties to have a conversation while keeping the actual sender of each message anonymous.

It is called the Dining Cryptographers Problem.

This could be a part of the golden shield project.
For the past few years, China has placed top priority on the development of its golden shield project, which with the help of American companies like Cisco and Canadian companies like lucent, is the most ambitious surveillance project in history. It essentially allows public security (gong'an ju) unprecendented access to citizen's data, both government (i.e. danwei information) and private (email, telephone conversations, text messages, etc.). They want to make sure its citizens aren't discussing democracy, praticing falun gong, or any other unauthorized religion like roman catholicism (or any church that doesn't have a "patriotic" association with the government, or having an unauthorized birth.
I'm laughing at myself cuz I know I sound slightly paranoid, but it's true.
More info on golden shield (these three links are the same report, i'm posting three links as a hedge against any slashdot effect)here here and here
*** If you're really interested in this subject, check out Ethan Gutmann's upcoming book losing the new china his insight and understanding will really blow your mind.

reminds me of a song Christmas At Ground Zero, by Weird Al What a nice gift to ease the minds of those you love this christmas...

>unless the guv'mnt decides to install those big gate antennas all over your local neighborhood,

Post Offices first, because mumble, anti-terrorism, antrax mutter. Then banks, because blah critical infrastructure waffle war on drugs something. Then mall entrances, because, well, we damn well can. We can stop there, because anyone that doesn't get snared by those at least once a week probably lives with their sister-momma in a shack in the bayou, and the Feds can pretty much whack them whenever they want.

I'd agree, and according to the terms of the Clarke-Asimov Treaty (or Asimov-Clarke Treaty, if you prefer), Asimov did too :)

Let me help your visitors out: Ruby Orange and Mutley Sleeps

If you can't learn another job, you're a fucking moron. American high-tech is no high tech anymore if it can be outsourced abroad. Go back to school and stop whining.

I wish I could be her sex slave.

Send a CIA death squad.

More information at this page.

Pictures of the Shuttle on-orbit can be found here.

Basically, the Starfire Optical Range can operate as a directed energy weapon using a high-power laser to ionize a conductive path through air, then pulsing a high-voltage, high-current jolt through it. It's actually pretty useful for atmospheric studies as well.

Ummm...both Epitaph and Fat are members of the RIAA (I would point you to the official RIAA website, but it is impossible to get to). Nice try.

Here Enjoy.

Hope this is not too off-topic. The device is called a fabber not a fab (but no doubt if it were ever common, it would become a noun and verb as just "fab", similar to "Fax".

Here is a good link: fabber.

Over the years NASA has had a few successful programs that were swept under the carpet or killed. These were always low cost projects that never got much support and were progressing quite well for the money invested. Not only did they not get support the support they needed but they often had to fight for every dime against NASA.

The first example is the Lifting Body program in the early sixties. The Lifting Body Fact Sheet outlines the history of this project similar to the DynaSoar project of the Air Force at about the same time frame. The biggest difference was that the Lifting Body program cost about 3% of the other program and had real flight data from hundreds of flights. Guess which one got cancelled first?

Then there is the DCX project and thats an interesting study of how successful projects are quietly killed off. For general info see Delta Clipper and DC X FAQ for grneral info. I have run across several documents over the years that highlight how congress and others tried to kill off the DC X. Initially it was under DARPA (the Internet folk) and later it ended up under NASA budget. After NASA got it it was quietly eliminated in favor of the X33. Now the X33 was a great public works project as it required development of new technology where the DC-X was designed to be inexpensive and be iteratively developed to its full potential. Which one was selected for development into the next generation space craft?

Maybe the X33 was retasked for airforce use as the Arora. Hows that for a wild speculation?

In the Moon shot NASA iterated through several platforms while learning and growing along the way. The STS was more of a waterfall big bang approach and when it arrived it was already obsolete. Maybe NASA is just a public works errort after all.

Consider the following scenario: a site on kids.us wants to make videos of presidential addresses available. Does the site need to censor these addresses? President Bush has even labeled countries as evil and said that we will "hunt the terrorists [read Al Quaeda] down". I think it will be a shame if kids.us is that restrictive.

However, Quakers are not prohibited from reading about violence, are they? They could still use the site. The standard of "it will offend someone" is impossible to adhere to.

However, I just had a thought: the standard shouldn't be whether it's appropriate for kids, but whether it's safe for kids. Let me clarify with an example: an organic chemistry text-book is not appropriate for kids, but if someone wants to post it - let them. That way, if a school computer is set to only allow access to kids.us, and a teacher wants to look up some information, they probably still can get it.

The US police has a sexual fixation on arresting people. I don't think there is any other country in the world where the police arrest as menay people as in the US for the most ridicoulus reasons. It's liek I sometimes are convinced that the get a bonus for arresting the most every week or so!

You have a very good point. Here in America ("The Land of the Free") we do have a higher percentage of the population incarcerated than in any other country in the world.

Don't take the freedoms in your country for granted. We did here in the US, and look what happened to us!

When I think of BBS's, I think of "The General" (a huge multi-line board here in Houston that had a lot of .. interesting software). More fondly though, I think of "The Dojo", and the interesting and informative discussions that took place on NirvanaNet. & the Temple of the Screaming Electron" (&totse), one of the boards involved in NirvanaNet, eventually setup a basic website. Fun times. Ah. 20-something, and this story makes me feel old .

When I think of BBS's, I think of "The General" (a huge multi-line board here in Houston that had a lot of .. interesting software). More fondly though, I think of "The Dojo", and the interesting and informative discussions that took place on NirvanaNet. & the Temple of the Screaming Electron" (&totse), one of the boards involved in NirvanaNet, eventually setup a basic website. Fun times. Ah. 20-something, and this story makes me feel old .

Isn't this a Twilight Zone episode:

BUTTON, BUTTON

Doesn't TV teach us anything?

'Construction Shack'
by Clifford Simak (Short story, 1973)

A manned expedition discovers that Pluto is an artificial world, built by alien engineers billions of years ago. But if the 'construction shack' was the size of a world, how big was the entire project?

And I came across this bit which is also interesting, although slightly off topic.

One Thousand years in Space Travel

some of the author's notes are interesting:

FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTIONS:

(A) The human race is not wiped out or set back to the stone age by nuclear war, giant meteor strike, global warming or new ice age (Footnote 3) in the course of the next two hundred years or so. After that, these events could no longer stop us. If we are then spared a nearby (10 LY) supernova for another 300 or 400 years, we (Footnote 4) should be virtually immortal.

(B) There are no unexpected scientific discoveries that change the rules. Faster that light travel is the classic example. If any such assumptions were included, this whole work would then be nothing but science fiction (Footnote 5).

{...}

ABOUT THE INDICATORS:

It may not be apparent, but when you study the timetable below, especially for later periods, the figures for economy, energy generation and non-Earth population are all based on remarkably modest growth rates. In each case they are similar to that experienced over the last 300 years here on Earth.(Footnote 10)

>Which building number does not exist on the Microsoft campus?

Building 7?

>What does v- at the beginning of an email address mean?

Don't know. Still working on that one. Hard to even find email addresses that start with that. I would either wager a bet that it denotes a head of the department, or that the email address is very old and possibly was on another (VAX/VMS?) system when the account was created.

>What is the name of the asian supermarket near the campus?

Uwajima-Ya Japanese supermarket?

>What is the name of the bank that has the closest affiliation with Microsoft employees?

Still working on that, but I'll hedge a guess: "Bank of America"?

>If you can get any of these right, I might believe you. My current guess would be that, no, you won't be able to.

I'm not even the original poster, and it looks like I have at least one or two right. Harder questions, sherlock!

Folks are missing an important point here. Anyone who truly understands the Law of Fives or the Church of the Subgenius will probably already get this. For those that don't, consider this: http://www.totse.com/en/religion/the_occult/libr00 4.html. It's both a serious occult study and a joke. Thus endeth the lesson.

"I suspect a well practiced juggler could adjust to the diffences in Space fairly quickly."

This has already been done. Senator Jake Garn is a juggler, and attempted to juggle while on a space shuttle mission in 1985. They also played with Slinkys, Yo-yos, and Wheel-Os.

Ralph

My recommendation is: those who are uncertain of their HTML coding abiliities should stick to plain-text and simply give the URLs:

• NASA BPP, proposal summaries (not sure if that was the intended link -- but you can search NASA yourself I suppose>)
• LLNL: Condensed Matter, abstract
• AntiGravity Research Conference
• Ning Lees Research (actually "Skeggs & Ning Li on Gravitational Modification")
• Nasa pumps 600k into research and has had tests
• AEI: John Hutchinson's Theories
• Japanese Anti-Gravity Experiment

That's all I have to contribute. Despite all the debate, "build your own UFO" looks like a fun thing to distract myself with some weekend.

Time Europe article titled The Amazing Vikings. It was part of a feature Time did two years ago.

In addition to going to America 500 years before Columbus, they also did trades all the way down in Irak and formed the worlds oldest parliament.

And it seems they did mushrooms to go beserk. Cool guys.

Yes, sherman was distributing bomb making information. So did my highschool library. i learned how to make contact explosives, thermite, learned about fuel air explosions (and had some unsuccessful trials) and in class friends told me how to make pipe bombs out of common household items. and if you havn't already noticed, that sort of info is available from thousands of websites and before that bbs.

so this case had better not be about distribution of information (information wants to be free, right?). he already admitted to defacing websites (he should have kept quiet) so they should fine him or give him something comparable to the punishment for graffiti. either way, the way they did it seems more like an intimidation tactic to keep people from doing what he did.

First, remember that RMS was able to wreak havoc on the computing world only because he is in league with the aliens who abducted Elvis and assassinated JFK.

He is also a known cattle mutilator and evil character.

Do us all a favor. If you're gonna troll, at least do it with some taste. Spell names correctly. Try to make the troll have at least some sort of acquaintance with actual history. And for the love of God, don't quote Metallica in a discussion about technology.

No, I am talking about these toads

1705, according to the history of ships named Enterprise.

From an email from AT&T:
Teleport Communications (TCG), as you may or may not know, has their main network hub in the B6 level of 2 World Trade Center.
B6 is about 75 feet below street level, and holds (in addition to TCG) generators, pumps, ventilation equipment, and other physical plant.

http://www.totse.com/en/computers/computer_magazin es/tc13142.html

First, the Tevatron's magnets store as much as 400 million joules of energy, equivalent to about 1,000 sticks of dynamite. Second, the beam accelerated by the Tevatron to 1 TeV is equivalent to more than 10 million joules, enough to drill a hole through the surrounding magnet. Third, the magnets require 25,000 liters of liquid helium, which could rapidly expand to 50 million liters of gas, enough to fill a blimp as long as a football field and five stories high.

Here's a list you can start with.

*Warning: Master of the Obvious Statement* All this means is that we have to look outside magnetic disk as storage medium... which from what I've understand we've been able to accomplish and should be available just before we top out our magnetic disk. Some examples: Optical Storage, holding 1 terabyte per square centimeter . Or how about organic storage. Don't forget about the storage capablilites of beowulf clusters and server farms (granted that can get very expensive very quickly). And god only knows what IBM is working on. All I'm saying is that before anyone panics(then again this problem is more aimed at entities such as the IRS, places that need that much storage and not the typical pc user), just take a look around to see whats out there.

explosives, or other relatively sophisticated weaponry.

what is so sophisticated about diesel fuel and fertilizer? really there are alot of explosives that are cheap and easy to make. a simple google search will provied instructions on how to construct such devices. you can even purchase the books online if you cannot make it down the library.

really though if someone wants you dead there isnt much you can do to stop them especially if you are not aware of their desire. banning guns treats the symptom and not the problem. the only solution that involves banning stuff is to ban everything. the only way to stop people from violating the rights of others is to strap everyone to a bed at birth and not allow them to come into contact with others.

use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that

Let us not forget about these guys.

I hadn't thought about it for a long time, but back when I was a kid, and was all over the BBS scene, I used to enjoy time on The Dojo. It's since passed away, though they seem to think his website is here, I think they're wrong.. doesn't seem like the old SysOp's style to me. Anyway, the most remarkable thing about being on The Dojo was the NirvanaNet FidoNet-style feed, which was headed up by a few boards, including &TotSE (The Order of the Screaming Electron). Sometimes I miss those BBS days; the web seems to have become more impersonal as it's progressed.. or maybe I'm just getting more cynical. All the same, BBS's were great fun :)

Actually there are several driving techniques sites. Here are a few:

Drivers Club

Bootlegger turn

The Chronicle's list of driving related sites

1. Before MS came along, computers were unaffordable. Now we all reap the benefits of a computer in every home.

It was very generous of Microsoft to keep prices down on all of those computers they sell. Oh, wait, Microsoft doesn't sell computers. In fact, the price of computers is low enough that the price of Windows is is a big chunk of the total cost of a new (low-end) machine. If you want to thank someone for affordable computers, thank Compaq for producing the first clone of the IBM PC.

3. Believe it or not, Microsoft actually do produce good software. Certainly Windows 3.1 wasn't very stable, but in 1992 what competition was there? Certainly not Linux. And even given that, if you ask me if I want my secretary on the current state of the art Linux, or on Windows 3.1 and Word 2, I'll bet you a dollar to a hundred that she'll be more effective on Windows 3.1

What competition? How about OS/2, or DESQView? Many people were enjoying protected memory and pre-emptive multi-tasking before Microsoft chose to share it with us.

What is your evidence for Microsoft benefitting the economy? That they're big and everyone uses them? Standard Oil and AT&T were both big and everyone used them. The economy in both cases improved when they were broken up.

4. Microsoft have benefitted the US economy. It really has. Compared with the UK, for instance, the strength of the US IT industry is vast - and much of this strength is due to Microsoft.

I trust you've tested your theory by comparing the economy with Microsoft to the economy of an alternate universe without Microsoft? We can't know for certain that Microsoft helped the economy. Maybe the economy would be stronger if there were many more companies all fighting against each other on more even terms.

5. Nearly all opposition to MS comes from jealous competitors. Netscape have been beaten fair-and-square by MS, for instance - just compare Netscape 6 with MSIE, for instance.

Just compare Netscape 2 with IE 2. Microsoft didn't really have such a clear lead then. To give themselves the lead, Microsoft used their monopoly to take distribution channels away from Netscape. I don't see anything "fair-and-square" about threatening to kill Office for Mac unless Apple make IE the default Mac browser.

Well, this puts me into an interesting position, Jon, because I like you even less than I do Katie Hafner. But until Ms. Hafner asks me why I don't like Jon Katz, I'll answer your questions.

1. Does she have to be a technology advocate to be on a panel?

No, she doesn't have to have any credentials at all to be on any panel, although one would hope the credentials one does have would lend themselves to whatever the subject is at hand. Her speaker bio for this conference certainly leads one to the impression that she is not only a technology writer, but has been one for 17 years. One would hope, in that sort of starry-eyed mistiness I get whenever I think about journalism, that someone who writes about a subject for such a long time would have some small respect for the figures within that subject, and more importantly would be focused on bringing to light the story that a group or subculture might have to tell. It's not altogether earth-shattering to note that there's people who like computers or who are really driven to create things, but it is important that someone who calls themselves a journalist help these folks express their motivations and story in a way that people not intimately involved with them will understand or at least have a clear picture of what these folks are about. If you're not using your skills as a writer to bring your audience an improved awareness of your subject, then you're just another sideshow barker, gaining a quick buck for your publishing masters by redrawing perfectly normal/human people as scary, freakish monsters bent on the destruction of all.

I see very little evidence that Katie doesn't "use" her subjects, a technique possibly learned from Markoff. She certainly doesn't bring, in her writing, the thoughts of the people she's writing about in the hacking/hacker community; she DOES do an awful lot of finger-pointing and telling you what they're thinking. This is a subtle difference, but important. These figures that she and Markoff choose to cover are alive, and quite capable of communicating, but she chooses instead to speculate on what they're thinking (which she generally doesn't know) and guesses at motivations. She doesn't quote; she narrates. This is not a very flattering approach, and often not all that accurate.

Nowhere in her writing, I might add, does she ever profess an understanding of the draw of technology. She might as well be talking about serial killers, pharmacists, or alligator wrestlers for all she brings to the table in writing about her subject. I can make a pretty assured bet that she would write about all these subcultures with the same distant lack of fundamental characterization. She can string sentences together, but she does her subject (and audience) no favors.

2. You really think she's anti-hacker. I didn't get that from her book at all..plse explain.

There's many examples, and remember she's written several books and articles on hackers and hacker culture, so you can't just say "her book". One burning example of her approach is her hatchet job on Mitnick in Cyberpunk, which is captured wonderfully in Charles Platt's review of Markoff's later book Takedown, where Hafner admits quite freely that she never talked to Mitnick before writing the book, and professes ignorance of her subject. Platt goes on to Focus on Markoff, worse than the two of you (Katz/Hafner) combined, but my insistence that she has not only a lack of understanding of the Hacker Subculture, but a fundamental distrust/dislike of this group of people, stays firm.

As for her upcoming book on The WELL, I'm one of those folks who has really cringed at the Canonization of The WELL by yourself and others, and another "Book of Revelations" onto the pile will no doubt add to that mythology, but I would say that I have very little faith that Hafner will capture anything but a surface glimmer of the motivations of the hacker psyche, assuming of course she actually touches on it at all in this book! There's actually a very good chance she could avoid that aspect entirely. But now we're running into a smorgasbord of conflicting dislikes I have about this whole rotten business that Hafner, Markoff, Yourself, and Littman have in what you've all done.

I apologize to any outside readers if my dislike of Katz has distorted the clarity of what I'm trying to get across. I'll probably cover it some time on my site, in better thought-out detail, starting from Richard Sandza and progressing forward.

- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM