Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Retail, Preparedness, Games
"Getting off easy" defined. dgroskind writes: "This AP story might be interesting as a slashback followup to an item about the theft of the Enigma machine from Bletchly Park. The accused got 10 months with the charge of blackmail left open for possible later prosecution. Also, this story today says a U.S. spy tipped off the Germans that the Enigma code had been broken but they didn't believe it."
Of course, you could tell your boss it got blown up. You may have already written your congressional representatives (especially if you live in South Carolina) about Fritz Holling's proposed SSSCA, but for air-traveling technical types, there's another post-bomb consideration. cloudscout writes: "In the past, I've always been nervous before travelling... am I remembering my toothpaste? Razor? Shoes? Now I've learned there is something else to remember. Charge my batteries. The current state of air travel security means more random searches and since I tend to travel with lots of electronic gadgets, these searches take a while and they test every device. I was chosen for a random search. Notebook, PDA, Digital Camera, Camcorder, Cellphone... the MiniDisc player had a dead battery. I was stuck. I didn't know what to do. They demanded that I prove the devices functionality. I dug around in my bag and, luckily, was able to take a battery from another device in order to power up the MD but it could have been a much worse situation if I didn't have a spare battery. The lesson here? If you're going to fly, be prepared."
Last week, flying between several supposedly very security-conscious airports (Dulles, Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt), I never had to turn my laptop on, probably because I had carefully charged the battery beforehand.
I'll believe it when I record my 2nd sample FMD disk.
Perhaps unimpressed with the perpetually promised quarter-sized CDs mentioned the other day, an Anonymous Coward writes: "What optical medium has 8 layers, stores 24 GBs, and plays at 22Mbits/sec? And it's just the first age, with plans to reach 140 GB soon afterwards.
Constellation 3D are developing FMD-ROM format that will change the capacity of data storage we use today, furtheir information can be obtained from FMD insider which is a news site that reports the progress and general information about this product.
Constellation 3D seem to have lowered their expectations of their first line of products, to something more realistic and affordable, and they expect to make the technology available to some markets by the end of 2002.
Are you ready?"
Street performances need to beware Sturgeon's Law. joestar writes "As said on Slashdot this week-end, Transgaming is about to release - with Electronic Arts and MandrakeSoft - a special Linux distro aimed at games called Mandrake Linux Gaming Edition. Their technology - WineX - is actually a DirectX to Mesa translator that allows to port most recent Windows games to Linux apparently very efficiently compared to a simple Wine port. A great article with lots of details about that project GameSpyDaily has just been released. By the way, WineX is released under the Alladin License."
Picking your poison gets more complicated. Red Hat 7.2 is out, but as you might expect, MandrakeSoft isn't sitting still: The newest Mandrake, 8.1, is also available in stores. (But when will 8.1 PPC be ready? ;))
I just found it interesting that one of two surviving Enigma boxen is "valued at" $144,000. How would such a figure be determined? (I assume that standard "what it would bring at auction" concepts don't apply, there being only two instances, neither of which is -- any more -- on the open market.)
Isn't it possible to hide a weapon or explosive inside of a working device? I mean, there is plenty of room inside the average laptop to stick some nasties... What's the point of making people turn these devices on?
But what if some clueful person in security (yeah yeah I know its not likely) decides that my compnay laptop with Win2k is a "non-functional device"? They'd be pretty much right of course, but does that mean I can't take it with me?
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
...hmmm ....
You'd think the Germans would have figured out that someone cracked Enigma when the Allied forces knew about their secret plans on a consistent basis.
OTOH, kudos to the Brits for knowing how to handle decrypted info. In Zimmermann's Note, for example, they intercepted and cracked the original message, but made it look like lax security in Mexico compromised the Note to the US.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
How are you supposed to write to your representative if their mail isn't getting delivered, due to the Anthrax scare?
First off, I'm a Linux newbie. I've been running Linux for a month. Despite that, I've picked up a lot of stuff quickly. I started off with Mandrake 8.0, which, while good, seemed a little outdated.
And it was. 2 days later Mandrake 8.1 came out. I upgraded, and though buggy, its extremely nice.
However, I've been waiting for RH7.2 for quite some time. I installed RH years ago with my friend Peter, but we didn't know how to do shit (though we did manage to install it fine, go figure). If only we had known to type "startx" maybe we could have become linux zealots back in high school.
In any case, RH 7.2 blows me away. The installation interface is very professional and the default configurations are rock solid. I saw no need to personalize every little thing since everything looked so good right off. Mandrake, despite its simplicity in so many areas, required much more configuration, in my opinion. Theres a lot to set up, and Mozilla still isn't it's default browser.
If I only I knew enough to mount my windows partition under RH 7.2, I might start using it instead of Mandrake.
But then, its only a short wait for the 8.1 gaming edition to come out, and maybe I'll switch again. Linux is fun like that.
Don't flame me too hard for these uninformed opinions. I apologize ahead of time for being too stupid to mount my windows partition.
-NeoTomba
On a serious note, *Nix users beware:
On an international flight coming back into the states, I was taken aside and told I matched a profile and I would be searched. I was told this wasnt unusual and was for the safety of everyone. They decided that my laptop did need to be scanned. For what exactly, I have never been sure. I was running Redhat at the time and their scanning machine had NO provisions for *nix OSes...and I was questioned as to why I was NOT running windows. (like i was automatically suspect because of this!) They had to bring in a computer "expert" (an airport IT guy) to evaluate the computer. He seemed clued in to what was going on and after a quick look see, assured the security goons that there was nothing on my laptop that could end the world. This whole process took almost 2 hours, which isnt terribly long, but long enough to miss my connecting flight out. The moral to this? Be prepared to explain yourself if you have anything the security guys dont recognize.
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
They demanded that I prove the devices functionality.
Ironically, if the device actually was a bomb, that pretty much amounts to them asking you to blow it up right there.
(But don't point that out to them, unless you want to see exactly how humorless airport security is these days.)