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These powerpoint slides describe the "hairdryer attack" in question, for the curious.

BEN HOCKING IS A MORON

Spammers, please take note of the following email addresses:

hocking@cs.virginia.edu
benjaminhocking@yahoo.com

434-982-2298

MORON PICTURE

We used to fight for the rights of oppressed people

Such as the Nez Perce?

"We must have Hawaii to help us get our share of China." -President McKinley arguing for the annexation of Hawaii

Here's what Mark Twain had to say about America fighting for the rights of oppressed people in China and the Phillipines:

To the Person Sitting in Darkness

KFG

November 2, 1999

My science book said that a microwave oven uses a laser resonating at the natural frequency of water. Does such a laser exist or was that a major typo?

It's a common misconception that the microwaves in a microwave oven excite a natural resonance in water. The frequency of a microwave oven is well below any natural resonance in an isolated water molecule, and in liquid water those resonances are so smeared out that they're barely noticeable anyway. It's kind of like playing a violin under water--the strings won't emit well-defined tones in water because the water impedes their vibrations. Similarly, water molecules don't emit (or absorb) well-defined tones in liquid water because their clinging neighbors impede their vibrations.

Instead of trying to interact through a natural resonance in water, a microwave oven just exposes the water molecules to the intense electromagnetic fields in strong, non-resonant microwaves. The frequency used in microwave ovens (2,450,000,000 cycles per second or 2.45 GHz) is a sensible but not unique choice. Waves of that frequency penetrate well into foods of reasonable size so that the heating is relatively uniform throughout the foods. Since leakage from these ovens makes the radio spectrum near 2.45 GHz unusable for communications, the frequency was chosen in part because it would not interfere with existing communication systems.

I haven't yet seen anyone comment on AdTI's namesake. Alexis de Tocqueville was the 19th century French author of Democracy in America , an influential examination of American government, politics, and society. Highly educated, he deeply valued truth, knowledge, and freedom.

A hypocrite, according to Webster, is someone who "puts on a false appearance of virtue." Kenneth Brown, by naming his organization after Alexis de Tocqueville, does exactly that: he's trying to pass off his loathesome tripe as scholarly research. It's obvious to anyone who cares to look beneath the surface that AdTI is a sham, but it's still a crime against that which de Tocqueville loved that Brown insists on dragging the name Alexis de Tocqueville through the mud.

Here, I'll fix it. Your post with clickable links:

For a comparison between Grsecurity and SELinux: click here

They also document and explain many of the issues facing the LSM project as well: here

It will be interesting to see how the Gentoo Hardened Project will respond to this as well as they have done a great deal of work with grsecurity and provided some exceptional Grsecurity documentation (for the 1.9.x series).
Hardened Gentoo
Gentoo Grsecurity Guide

It will be sad to see this project fade away, especially for those needing an expressive security RBAC/MAC/PAX system. Grsecurity, combined with PAX, provided a well rounded security system that was sensible, somewhat easy to learn, and easier to administrate thanks to the powerful gradm Learning capability.

OP is probably thinking of Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter.

Nope. That'd be The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe.

AdTI seems to be pretty much diametrically opposed to the principles most highly praised by Alexis himself.

For example, they advocate removing the power to invent from the hands of random individuals and placing it in the hands of selected colossal corporations, and vigorously oppose any attempt to intervene on behalf of said individuals. This makes them pretty much the sworn enemies of Open Source, whereas Open Source is an industrial principle which de Tocqueville himself would have enthusiastically supported.

I do wonder, though, whether things would be different today if a couple of the early spammers had met with serious retribution instead of nothing worse than floods of unwanted magazine subscriptions ("Spam King" Jeff Slaton boasted he was building a rammed-earth house in Albuquerque using all the magazines that he was getting...)

There's quite a bit of those "the physics of X" articles here.

...um, and how did Galileo die, again?

... he died from old age

Maxwell anyone? Remembering some of my physics:
If it is generating heat and not light then as I understand it, it is black body radiation.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Now you're complaining about a President that is stopping the hypocrisy. He's telling evil governments of all sizes to stop hurting people. The first priority is those who are exporting death. You can see the U.S.A. government is also removing support for repressive "friendly" regimes such as Saudi Arabia. The U.S.A. is also giving proper consideration to the authority of a U.N. which is dominated by governments which are not democracies.

Yet you're against the leader who is stopping the hypocrisy, and support someone who is making a profession of it.
John Kerry thinks it is a good thing to

• claim he voted for and against something,
• to state Saddam was a danger and was not a danger,
• who lies about Vietnam and his behavior
  • advertises that his being a Vietnam veteran is important
  • led Vietnam Veterans Against The War
  • used unconfirmed statements from VVAW's Winter Soldier Investigation in testimony to Congress...and these atrocity stories were from people who were never Vietnam combat veterans
  • lied that he was only an observer at Winter Soldier
  • said on "Meet the Press" that he committed atrocities
  • did not see atrocities and not in battle described on his web site
  • lied that he was not at a VVAW meeting in Kansas City
• and who can't even stop himself from saying
  • he doesn't own an SUV (New Hampshire),
  • does own an SUV (Michigan),
  • doesn't own an SUV (Earth Day - the family owns it),
  • and does own an SUV (say, does the family Gulfstream jet aircraft count?),
  • and family has more SUVs

Now, how are you going to "make sure" someone like that is going to do any specific thing which you approve of? Be consistent, you say.

As is Douglas Engelbart. Pitiful.

I read Bram Stokers Dracula at work on my Dell Axim.

The Axim was only $175 brand new. It came with an EBook reader and some free EBooks. It also has a SD slot plus a CF slot so you can add over 1GB of storage. (That's a lot of books).

Here is a link to the Dell Axim X5 This is the more powerful version that will play video as well.

Here is where I downloaded Dracula from

I've already moderated in this topic (actually, I downmodded Gupta's troll), so I'm posting anonymously.

The paper Gupta "borrows" from is actually a pretty interesting read. Had he just linked to it (rather than plagiarized it), I would have modded the comment +1 Interesting.

(Or should that have been linked here?)

Anyone remember the Data Discman?

sorry, links got messed up MED Research Hospital robot

sorry, links got messed up MED Research Hospital robot

I can't see it in the story, how many wires/fiber pairs were used?

If it was a single pair, then DAAAAAAAMN...

If it were a single pair a 10gbps would handle this transfer easily. On a similar note, LamdaRail is like Internet2, but more geared towards research and its planning to have at least 10gbps backbone. I don't know why there isn't much more info about it. The LambaRail homepage can be found here, but there isn't much info there either. Being that where I work is supposed to be a participant in LambdaRail, I have heard some speculations that the backplane is supposed to be at least 40gpbs either implementing 4 10gpbs connections or some kind of new optical transfer method that utilizes multiple wavelengths of light over the same wire.

Ya, and the MS version introduces a bug so that a friend function accessing a private member doesn't work (Even though they fix it)

Those links again, done right:
http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Funhouse.html
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0285.html
http://www.kith.org/logos/wander/10.west/Buddy.htm l

that aren't even ranked in the top 100

slashdot their site to teach them a lesson!

(no, I don't know how that's suppsoed to help.

Those links are here and here. Sorry, I was using the URL while still referring to the local server (I type in www.people instead of www.people.virginia.edu because it's on the LAN and I'm lazy).

Those links are here and here. Sorry, I was using the URL while still referring to the local server (I type in www.people instead of www.people.virginia.edu because it's on the LAN and I'm lazy).

A Harvard degree does not impress me.

You can get through a liberal arts education and still be considered a dumbass in my book.

No offense intended. Those jocks probably are smart. Incidentally I was an uber jock in highschool and I know for a fact that Brown and Dartmouth cheat by giving academic scholarships to athelets that do not deserve them. (Dartmouth was the worst btw: they kept sending letters to a B student football player and didn't even accept our fucking valedictorian - man he was pissed when he found out.)

Here's a link to a paper I wrote on a somewhat related topic.

Basically I argue that there is a tradeoff between security and general functionality. Technical advances do not change the basic trade off and have historically resulted in additional functionality but no additional security.

(Usability is just a sub-case of functionality in general.)

I would be curious to know what slashdot'er think of this idea.

Every large project should use some sort of diagramming/planning.

Planning, of course; diagramming, not so much. Design should be done primarily using English (or your local language) text, supplimented with diagrams.

Software is a linguistic construction; blueprints or schematic diagrams are not as useful as they are in electronics or building construction. The fetish for diagrams over text usually indicates someone who can't write decent prose. And if you can't write decent prose well, you can't write decent code. (Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. -- Dijkstra)

the earlier we start thinking about something, the less likely it is we'll mess it up once we can do it.

...except, of course, the World Wide Web as invented by Tim Berners-Lee - that means all the eCommerce is ours also.

Not much use without hypertext, as invented by Vannevar Bush.

Or a graphical user interface - courtesy of Xerox.

Or a hard drive - courtesy of IBM.

Or an Intel CPU (and derivatives).

stories like this.

The UI of star trek (at least TNG and onwards) has been horrible.

That can be said about actually every major science fiction flick or tv series. What's funny is about the same time when ST:TOS was on the air, Douglas Engelbart was already working on the real user interface for the 21st century computers - mouse, pointer, windows etc. In 1968, you could even attend The Mother Of All Demos to see the 21st century computing. Of course, the event passed virtually unnoticed and everybody was excited by famous (yet utterly missed) vision of 2001 in the Clarke/Kubrick movie. Probably somewhere someone right now knows what the computers of 2050 will look like - and he might even right now show the demo. Virtually unnoticed, as always.

I suppose every time you use windows, icons, your mouse, or pointers, it just pisses you off that a bunch of Smalltalkers at Parc years ago foisted that on us! And damn that MVC concept too. And the whole messaging thing, and first class objects, and, well all that other OO stuff, bunch of stuff Smalltalkers foisted on us. I guess they foisted garbage collection onto Java too, huh?

Okay, now off-topic but all Smalltalk did was put these things together into one package:

Mouse/Pointer: Doug Englebart
Menus, drag and drop, word processor, etc: Ivan Sitherland.
OO: Simula
Garbage Collection: LISP (and others)

All these things came well before Smalltalk. Smalltalk isn't even the same OO as the successful object-oriented languages: Java, C#, C++, SIMULA. SWT is good because it came from good people at IBM and uses native widgets, not because it came from Smalltalk. For example, it has manual allocation/free of resources -- not very smalltalk-like, is it?

• Vannevar Bush
• Ted Nelson

It seems that everyone changes sides on the "piracy" debate depending on what's better for them personally. When the US was founded, all "IP" was rigidly controlled by Europeans, so the US had fairly loose patent and copyright laws, and it was common for US publishers to "pirate" European authors.

"It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when the relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is give late in the progress of society. It would be curious, then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature. When she made them like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."

In "The Wealth of Nations", Adam Smith explains the "Diamond-Water paradox". The most useful, valuable, life-sustaining entity on the planet is water - yet, it has practically no price, since supply is free ( it rains ! ). The least useful frivilous commodity is the diamond, but it has enormous, immense value in the eyes of man.

So, Smith says, an economist must never attempt to tie value with price, since they don't have much of a relationship. Porn on the net is much more valuable than all the useful techie manuals & MIT courseware put together, because Porn is the ultimate diamond.

You're in luck, CleverNickName!

Kevin Bacon is surely going to be in a lot of trouble.

> (You can even double check me: I can't remember a single instance in the Bible where God's command wasn't questioned...)

"Be fruitful and multiply" seemed to go by without much backtalk.

Apparently, you haven't done much Bible reading. The story of Onan (Revised Standard Version) appears pretty early on; it is in Genesis 38.

For King James Version enthusiasts, here's your preferred text.

> (You can even double check me: I can't remember a single instance in the Bible where God's command wasn't questioned...)

"Be fruitful and multiply" seemed to go by without much backtalk.

Apparently, you haven't done much Bible reading. The story of Onan (Revised Standard Version) appears pretty early on; it is in Genesis 38.

For King James Version enthusiasts, here's your preferred text.

Kerry didn't broadcast speaches designed to harm soldier's moral,

False. Kerry did indeed broadcast a major speech to harm soldiers' morale. And it was played to the POW's at the Hanoi Hilton by their captors.

In fact, the worse thing Kerry did, and the only reason many of us consider him to be dishonorable is that speech.

Here are some quotes (although hearing the audio is much stronger, as he makes his accusations in the same snearing voice that today is more often heard saying "Do you know who I am?" as he butts into lines):

"we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command"

This is a falsehood. Subsequent investigations were unable to substantiate a single allegation from that investigation. Many of the speakers were not actual Vietnam Veterans or had not ever been to where they claimed to have witnessed atrocities.

There were, of course, atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam, and several hundred American servicemen were punished for them, but they were never policy. The Viet Cong had a policy of atrocities - mostly against other Vietnamese - which Kerry never mentioned even once.

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks,

Can you imagine how Vietnam Vets and serving soldiers felt hearing this? Is it any wonder that many were mistreated when they returned home?

We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them.

This particular lie became one of the longest lasting memes of Vietnam War revisionist history.

We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater.

He attempts to paint Americans as anti-Asian racists. This assertion is absurd. The same weapons were in Europe at the time and were ready to go if the Soviets invaded. And Kerry knew this.

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

"Vietnamizing the Vietnamese" is a phrase totally made up for this speech, and a total distortion of what was actually going on.

"we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions;"

Totally false. The Viet Cong/Viet Minh used atrocities as a matter of policy. It was common to kill the entire family of a village chieftan if the village did not support the Viet Cong. This was done tens of thousands of times. And it is but one of the many atrocities done by the VC.

When the Viet Cong captured and held Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive, they executed 3,000 civilians and threw the bodies in mass graves.

But to Kerry, the US was more guilty than any other body?

blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties.

This is utterly false. Blacks served and died in very close to the percentages of blacks in the general population. Volunteers had a higher death rate overall than draftees.

Two more important facts about this speech:

1) Kerry, who behaved as if it was a spontaneous speech, actually didn't even write it. It was written by Adam Walinskey.

2) This was given under oath. He committed a felony giving it.

The text of the speech can be found here

Wow, he must be only twenty or thirty feet away, in a crowd, no less.

If anyone reads anything into that pic, they're really reaching.

Of course the guy's at a peace rally. Unlike the majority of the people there, Kerry had an actual understanding of war, and actual combat expiriences that led him to protest the war after his return.

The realness of the other photo in no way discredits Kerry as a candidate, or as veteran. He was one of many Viet Nam veterans who had the balls to speak out against the war when he returned.

A lot of crap is comming out from the right-wing chickenhawks who are beginning to realize that this is a candidate who served in some of the worst combat zones any vet has seen, and earned a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and Presidential Unit Citation while doing so. The guy has a dislike for the intelligence community and has gone after them before.

Real or not, I'm pretty sure those pictures are not going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference.

John Kerry served in Vietnam, and afterwards appeared in several protests against the war, most famously throwing (fake) war medals back over the fence of the White House. At roughly the same time, Jane Fonda was protesting by propagandizing for the North Vietnamese, using her celebrity status to help draw support the communist government there. Many of my father's generation who served in the military see her as committing traitorous acts, so this doctored photo invokes a very strong reaction by linking Fonda and Kerry.

I find it interesting that while the two never personally met, they both engaged in protesting with roughly the same intensity against the government. After learning that the photo was doctored, many uneducated voters may discount Kerry's years of protests, and might actually think he supports the military.... Should be interesting in the fall.

screw that, prepare for the end with this.

I'd love to see a credible source for your "slow as a scripting language" claim.

I can't provide a URL at this time, but we're talking writing a register to memory and reading again from the same memory location right back into that register. According to an article I read about Proebsting's Law (compiler technology progresses roughly 12 times more slowly than integrated circuit density, that is, about 18 years to double), most other modern compilers do at least peephole optimization (eliminating redundant store/load pairs for non-volatile variables) even on their -O0 (optimize zero) settings. Compiling each subexpression into its own independent basic block works well for debugging but not for compiling production software.

I'm getting sick and tired of the AMD is cool now that they have _the_ 64bit processor.

They (64bit procs) have been out for over 10 years now, its no big deal.

Look where Intel is now: AMD is ahead in 64-bit processors.

But, when the whole system is still bound because the memory bandwidth is bottlenecked, how does this make it ahead of Intel. For example, take a look at the memory bandwidth of the Itanium vs the Opteron. Hint, the numbers for the Itanium are 3453.0 3453.1 4020.4 4027.8, and the numbers for the Opteron are 1975 1747 1945 2018. Yes, thats 2x the performance, and that is with a 1.0GHz Itanium from a few years ago.

You also got to take into account that the compilers for the AMD Opterons are about 6 months old, the Intel Itanium compilers are years old, and made by the people that make the processors.

Interesting note, current ISS commander Michael Foale was onboard Mir when they had the accident with the Progress vehicle. This guy seems to be really unlucky.

Or perhaps it's a case of once-bitten twice-shy. Foale was busy conducting experiments in Spektr when the Progress bounced off it on its little detour past the docking port.

Underneath that cool test-pilot exterior (and a pair of Ray-Bans) is a guy whose eyes are always moving, always watching... ready for that *thump* *crunch* *hissssss* that means IT'S ALL HAPPENING AGAIN!!! OH MY GOD!!! EVAC PROCEDURES, SOYUZ SEPARATION SEQUENCE STA... oh, never mind, just a piece of insulation, sorry.