in parched 'Aust, I came across one which had a conductivity meter in the U bend which could tell the difference between tap water and a urine solution. Change in conductivity triggers a small motor to pull the chain. Somewhat un-nerving first time.
If you are the ambitious driven type you will either:-
Make yourself a multi-billion dollar mint.
Have a complete psychiatric breakdown.
The ratio of the probabilities is of the order of at least 1:100,000,000
For the 'rest of us' it is a virtual certainty that you will be 'spat out' at the age of about 45, or if you are very lucky you might just last until you are 50ish.
My advice to a youngster is to avoid the IT business as far as possible. Whilst it can be fascinating and profitable work for a while, any form of rewarding family life is out of the question. Basically the industry treats its personnel like many organisms treat their food.
Don't get your wedding ring stuck between the power bus-bars.
You'll lose a finger.
Not funny, it's happened.
So irrespective of what she who must be obeyed has to say on the matter rings and watches must go in pockets before working on high current low voltage systems.
If we have to keep adding leapseconds, albeit occasionally, to keep the clock and the rotation of the Earth in sync, then that means that the clock is running slow, or the Earth is turning too fast.
To correct this, change the number of cycles of the Cesium or Rubidium atomic frequency in the definition of time, or make the Earth turn slower.
I'm positing that it's much easier to change the number in the definition of time than it is to change the period of the Earth's rotation.
To avoid a gratuitous/.ing of what would appear to be a private site here's the start of www.leapsecond.com
======
Ten years ago I wanted to build a LED digital analog clock that would be accurate to better than one second per year -- so I would have the fun of adjusting it when a leap second occurred.
This simple goal resulted in a most interesting journey into electronics, horology, astronomy, test equipment, quartz oscillators, rubidium and cesium atomic clocks, hydrogen masers, frequency counters and phase comparators, GPS, Loran C, GOES, and WWV / WWVB radio receivers.
By now I've exceeded that goal by a factor of a million: the best clocks in my collection (active hydrogen masers) are accurate to better than one microsecond per year. Excluding national government laboratories, my home time lab now has the most accurate clock in the world. That makes me one of the time-nuts.
Perhaps you've heard: A man with one clock knows what time it is. A man with two clocks is never sure. But I would add further: A man with three clocks is more sure than a man with two clocks. And so the clock collection started...
"With any luck and some overdue justice for the American people, he will eventually be impeached, tried & convicted, and then turned over to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
I do hope so, please tell us how the rest of the world can help. I think the bombing of the house where Saddam was mistakenly supposed to be was cold blooded murder by the pilot of the 'plane, the USAF planners, and ultimately the President. Exactly how we can bring those responsible for the crime to Justice, I know not.
I look forward to the KSuSe ( or SuSE-Europe ) fork of SuSE. GNOME is just a politically motivated Simplified Unix Interface with ugly graphics for the occasional user with no appreciation of the aesthetic. On the other hand KDE is a rich and rewarding computing environment which provides a visually tasteful and effective workplace.
This is yet another classic example of an American Corporate being totally out of touch with the customer base out here in the Rest-of-the-World. Message to Novell:- "Enjoy the continuing death experience".
Message to shareholders:- "Cash up quick before they stuff up completely and blow all your dough".
How about ones that are qualified to properly dispose of nuclear waste.
They have just desolated huge areas of Washington State (Hanford) in the US and Cumberland (Sellafield) in the UK. Thus the polititians are looking for alternatives. My own sugestion is to drill a hole into the ground as far as is possible i.e. several kilometres, let off an appropriate nuke to create an underground chamber. Drill again to make an entrace to the chamber. Drop waste down hole, repeat exercise as needed. Do this in a uninhabited part of the world.
"nuclear power is one of the BEST options we collectively have for the future, and being "anti-nuclear" just for the sake of it is probably one of the most patently absurd, ridiculous, and ignorant positions you can take".
That is total nonsense!
I too live in New Zealand, and believe that it is essential for us to be Nuclear Free for these reasons:
Putting nuclear reactors for power genetation, in a country which is both on an active fault-line between a pair of tectonic plates, and more or less wholly dependent on food exports and tourism is just total stupidity. The consequencies to our economic wellbeing if a reactor got damaged by an earthquake are simply that NZ would cease to exist as somewhere for the four million of us to live.
Nuclear reactors make plutonium. The population as a whole does not want to give any government the means to make the fuel component for totally immoral & obscene weapons of mass destruction.
There are plenty of other energy sources: 2000+ years of lignite and coal; more hydro; sunshine - lots of it; tides - the rip through Cook Strait is about 10 knots at full flow; wind - NZ is one of the windiest inhabitated place on Earth.
The posession of WMDs does not produce "Peace". Look how the US has been in a state of "War" to varying degrees for the last 60 years, in fact since the the inception of the Nuclear Age.
Now you know the very good reasons why NZ is non-nuclear, and will probably continue to be for a very long time irrespective of the shade of the governing party.
What the rest of the world wants is for dear, doddery, old Uncle Sam to nurture his delinquent creatation and put it back on the rails by:-
Stopping spivs stealing TLDs from small, and naive states.
Stopping spivs hoarding domain names thus creating a very expensive market for what should be an administration-cost only resource.
Stopping organisations hoarding many millions of unused IP numbers.
Stopping the registration of Out-of-Country servers and email addresses.
Stopping the largest supplier of software foisting insecure by default machines on innocent customers who then use them on the 'Net, thus allowing the creation of million machine bot-nets to be used for criminal purposes.
Stopping the broadcasting of billions of spam messages which are mostly used for criminal purposes.
Controlling the veritable flood of revolting, depraved, and offensive images and film clips.
Once the addressing of these issues has at least been attempted by the US Government and its co-conspirator the ICANN, the rest of the world might agree that the Internet is being properly administered. Until that time, so sorry Uncle Sam, but you are a failing parent.
Strongly put maybe, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned that's what the issues are all about. In a word, shared Sovereignty over what has become an internationally shared resource.
OrgName: Department of Social Security of UK OrgID: DSSU Address: Naming and Addressing Authority c/o DITA Address: Government Buildings - GZI Address: Moorland Road Address: Lytham St. Annes, Lancashire FY8 3ZZ City: StateProv: PostalCode: Country: GB
Why don't the banks issue super-lightweight client LiveCDs to access their online banking services? The advantages of a special protected client environment with no permanent storage are so huge, I suspect that for some unknown reason the US banking industry actually wants to be phished.
Could some kind body explain why? It can't simply be that the banks are dumb can it?
Learn how to! Programming is not difficult, to say otherwise means that you have bought the lie which has made His Billness so wealthy. You need: literacy - which includes the ability to perceive the information in the transparent lines hiding on the last page in most computer books:-) - a reasonably logical mind; a good memory so you can remember the lore; the ability to organize your time; and to be a stickler for details.
There are so many really good books and papers, to say nothing of very high quality example source code, out there on the 'Net for free that there is no financial barrier either. Frankly it's just a matter of adjusting the self-confidence and putting the intellectual arse ( ass ) into gear.
Who should pay for content? The reader of course.
on
Why Do You Block Ads?
·
· Score: 1
The consumer of the content should pay to read it. Why are people happy to spend tens of dollars for a book yet cannot bring themselves to pay to view an informative Web site or quality radio or television programs? I just don't get it.
Similarly for all media. Ad supported channels ( in the broadest sense of the word ) are total crap when compared to the user supported media, because the user/viewer/reader ceases to be the customer.
I subscribe to and pay for two web sites both of which deserve my money. I used to subscribe to this one, but for some unknown reason/. suddenly refused to have anything to do with my Visa card. You ought to sort that out/., because you are missing out on revenue. As far as I am concerned Firefox copes with the problem for free so it is no longer a problem.
It's all down to economics and greed. With $50,000,000,000.00 in the bank Microsoft have the money to do the job properly, but without legislation they are not going to spend any of it to perfect their product.
The word 'encryption' should be defined so that simplistic methods invented about 2000 years ago are excluded from the legal definition. IOW the encryption methods should be strong and the key to the data held other than on the medium carrying the data. It is morally wrong to manufacture criminals out of intelligent teenagers overflowing with curiosity. Remember that the corollary to "... and lead us not into temptation", is "Thou shall not tempt others".
Trouble with Bruce's suggestion is that it will open up a fountain of money where those bank customers with reduced moral fortitude will yield to temptation and claim that the "Phishers got my number" when the truth of the matter is that the customer Phished the account [him|her]self.
I voted last week using a piece of paper and a felt tipped pen. It worked well, I made my marks to indicate my votes, and the polling booth staff counted my votes after the poll closed. Simple, straightforward, no computers involved in the counting process to enable election fraud. Debian used to run Apache which displays the results on the WWW.
So could some kind soul please explain how and why using a complicated machine to record the voter's choice enhances democracy?
The dozens of spurious web sites all get the word common to them all. Basically none of them actually _need_ a password at all, because there are no money or privacy issues, so a common word is a satisfactory solution.
Also they all have very effective mnemonics, so I won't forget them. Now-a-days KDE's Kwallet system is a very effective solution to the dozens of web site passwords stupidity.
They could just want all that anthrax strain, which is used for vaccinations, to do just that. Vaccinate all the armed forces people first and then the whole of the US population. It is realistically possible that for just once this is on the straight. Now, as my previous postings show, I'm not Uncle Sam's lover, but don't ascribe to malice...
... those of us who live in rest of the world have just discovered exactly, and without any doubt whatsoever, what makes large sectors of USAian society tick.
We feel obligated to do the decent thing and tell you lot that it was just this kind of behaviour which triggered both the French and Russian Revolutions, because I'm certain that neither your news media nor your education systems will do so. Do you really want such an orgy of blood-letting on American soil?
Evidently one civil war is not enough to get the message across that civil unrest, rioting, murder, mayhem and the Guillotine are not much fun.
A decent coffee machine complete with electric grinder.
A large double sided work space so you can get out the paper and pencil and get on with the real work with your back to the distractions on the screen(s).
A comfortable revolving chair. Don't stint on this. Spend time finding the one that fits you.
Two LCD screens. You need to be able to see the code you are working on at the same time at what it produces.
The computer itself in a different room, or at least a sound-proof closet.
A mute on the 'phone bell.
A book-shelf within easy reach, filled with informative and grammatically correct books which open flat on the table. ( Wish for the moon I fear )
An effective spam filter.
Last but not least, a modern computer with lots of ram and an automatic backup system. e.g. a RAID of some sort.
In no particular order, these are the 'Nuclear Nations':-
France
United Kingdom
Israel
India
Pakistan
China
Russia
United States of America
There is also reputed to be a fair amount of 'missing material' of which nobody knows the exact quantity or location.
Frightening isn't it?
The world's gone MAD, totally MAD
Slashdot Mirror
in parched 'Aust, I came across one which had a conductivity meter in the U bend which could tell the difference between tap water and a urine solution. Change in conductivity triggers a small motor to pull the chain. Somewhat un-nerving first time.
The ratio of the probabilities is of the order of at least 1:100,000,000
For the 'rest of us' it is a virtual certainty that you will be 'spat out' at the age of about 45, or if you are very lucky you might just last until you are 50ish.
My advice to a youngster is to avoid the IT business as far as possible. Whilst it can be fascinating and profitable work for a while, any form of rewarding family life is out of the question. Basically the industry treats its personnel like many organisms treat their food.
You'll lose a finger.
Not funny, it's happened.
So irrespective of what she who must be obeyed has to say on the matter rings and watches must go in pockets before working on high current low voltage systems.
To correct this, change the number of cycles of the Cesium or Rubidium atomic frequency in the definition of time, or make the Earth turn slower.
I'm positing that it's much easier to change the number in the definition of time than it is to change the period of the Earth's rotation.
To avoid a gratuitous /.ing of what would appear to be a private site here's the start of www.leapsecond.com
======
Ten years ago I wanted to build a LED digital analog clock that would be accurate to better than one second per year -- so I would have the fun of adjusting it when a leap second occurred. This simple goal resulted in a most interesting journey into electronics, horology, astronomy, test equipment, quartz oscillators, rubidium and cesium atomic clocks, hydrogen masers, frequency counters and phase comparators, GPS, Loran C, GOES, and WWV / WWVB radio receivers. By now I've exceeded that goal by a factor of a million: the best clocks in my collection (active hydrogen masers) are accurate to better than one microsecond per year. Excluding national government laboratories, my home time lab now has the most accurate clock in the world. That makes me one of the time-nuts. Perhaps you've heard: A man with one clock knows what time it is. A man with two clocks is never sure. But I would add further: A man with three clocks is more sure than a man with two clocks. And so the clock collection started...
======
Take it easy folks.
Ben Franklin wrote those words over 200 years ago.
They apply today just as much as they did then.
Somebody needs to remind the current incumbent of the White House about his nation's history.
This is yet another classic example of an American Corporate being totally out of touch with the customer base out here in the Rest-of-the-World. Message to Novell:- "Enjoy the continuing death experience". Message to shareholders:- "Cash up quick before they stuff up completely and blow all your dough".
They have just desolated huge areas of Washington State (Hanford) in the US and Cumberland (Sellafield) in the UK. Thus the polititians are looking for alternatives. My own sugestion is to drill a hole into the ground as far as is possible i.e. several kilometres, let off an appropriate nuke to create an underground chamber. Drill again to make an entrace to the chamber. Drop waste down hole, repeat exercise as needed. Do this in a uninhabited part of the world.
That is total nonsense!
I too live in New Zealand, and believe that it is essential for us to be Nuclear Free for these reasons:- Putting nuclear reactors for power genetation, in a country which is both on an active fault-line between a pair of tectonic plates, and more or less wholly dependent on food exports and tourism is just total stupidity. The consequencies to our economic wellbeing if a reactor got damaged by an earthquake are simply that NZ would cease to exist as somewhere for the four million of us to live.
- Nuclear reactors make plutonium. The population as a whole does not want to give any government the means to make the fuel component for totally immoral & obscene weapons of mass destruction.
- There are plenty of other energy sources: 2000+ years of lignite and coal; more hydro; sunshine - lots of it; tides - the rip through Cook Strait is about 10 knots at full flow; wind - NZ is one of the windiest inhabitated place on Earth.
- The posession of WMDs does not produce "Peace". Look how the US has been in a state of "War" to varying degrees for the last 60 years, in fact since the the inception of the Nuclear Age.
Now you know the very good reasons why NZ is non-nuclear, and will probably continue to be for a very long time irrespective of the shade of the governing party.- Stopping spivs stealing TLDs from small, and naive states.
- Stopping spivs hoarding domain names thus creating a very expensive market for what should be an administration-cost only resource.
- Stopping organisations hoarding many millions of unused IP numbers.
- Stopping the registration of Out-of-Country servers and email addresses.
- Stopping the largest supplier of software foisting insecure by default machines on innocent customers who then use them on the 'Net, thus allowing the creation of million machine bot-nets to be used for criminal purposes.
- Stopping the broadcasting of billions of spam messages which are mostly used for criminal purposes.
- Controlling the veritable flood of revolting, depraved, and offensive images and film clips.
Once the addressing of these issues has at least been attempted by the US Government and its co-conspirator the ICANN, the rest of the world might agree that the Internet is being properly administered. Until that time, so sorry Uncle Sam, but you are a failing parent.Strongly put maybe, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned that's what the issues are all about. In a word, shared Sovereignty over what has become an internationally shared resource.
chris@imogen ~ $ whois 51.0.0.0
OrgName: Department of Social Security of UK
OrgID: DSSU
Address: Naming and Addressing Authority c/o DITA
Address: Government Buildings - GZI
Address: Moorland Road
Address: Lytham St. Annes, Lancashire FY8 3ZZ
City:
StateProv:
PostalCode:
Country: GB
NetRange: 51.0.0.0 - 51.255.255.255
CIDR: 51.0.0.0/8
NetName: ITSANET
NetHandle: NET-51-0-0-0-1
Parent:
NetType: Direct Assignment
Comment:
RegDate: 1991-09-16
Updated: 1999-04-13
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2005-10-16 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.
That's 16777215 routeable addresses.
Why do they need enough for every unemployed Briton to have four or five each?
Why don't the banks issue super-lightweight client LiveCDs to access their online banking services? The advantages of a special protected client environment with no permanent storage are so huge, I suspect that for some unknown reason the US banking industry actually wants to be phished.
Could some kind body explain why?
It can't simply be that the banks are dumb can it?
Learn how to! Programming is not difficult, to say otherwise means that you have bought the lie which has made His Billness so wealthy. You need: literacy - which includes the ability to perceive the information in the transparent lines hiding on the last page in most computer books :-) - a reasonably logical mind; a good memory so you can remember the lore; the ability to organize your time; and to be a stickler for details.
There are so many really good books and papers, to say nothing of very high quality example source code, out there on the 'Net for free that there is no financial barrier either. Frankly it's just a matter of adjusting the self-confidence and putting the intellectual arse ( ass ) into gear.
I subscribe to and pay for two web sites both of which deserve my money. I used to subscribe to this one, but for some unknown reason /. suddenly refused to have anything to do with my Visa card. You ought to sort that out /., because you are missing out on revenue. As far as I am concerned Firefox copes with the problem for free so it is no longer a problem.
Pure Poppycock!
In that case I'm sure NASA would be very interested in being told where the bugs in the Shuttle's control software is situated.
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.ht ml
It's all down to economics and greed. With $50,000,000,000.00 in the bank Microsoft have the money to do the job properly, but without legislation they are not going to spend any of it to perfect their product.
The word 'encryption' should be defined so that simplistic methods invented about 2000 years ago are excluded from the legal definition. IOW the encryption methods should be strong and the key to the data held other than on the medium carrying the data. It is morally wrong to manufacture criminals out of intelligent teenagers overflowing with curiosity. Remember that the corollary to "... and lead us not into temptation", is "Thou shall not tempt others".
Trouble with Bruce's suggestion is that it will open up a fountain of money where those bank customers with reduced moral fortitude will yield to temptation and claim that the "Phishers got my number" when the truth of the matter is that the customer Phished the account [him|her]self.
When speaking to a student, can they say "Exterminate" correctly?
I voted last week using a piece of paper and a felt tipped pen. It worked well, I made my marks to indicate my votes, and the polling booth staff counted my votes after the poll closed. Simple, straightforward, no computers involved in the counting process to enable election fraud. Debian used to run Apache which displays the results on the WWW.
So could some kind soul please explain how and why using a complicated machine to record the voter's choice enhances democracy?
- My own login on my machine.
- The root login on my machine.
- The root login on my IPCop firewall.
- The banking website.
- The dozens of spurious web sites all get the word common to them all. Basically none of them actually _need_ a password at all, because there are no money or privacy issues, so a common word is a satisfactory solution.
Also they all have very effective mnemonics, so I won't forget them. Now-a-days KDE's Kwallet system is a very effective solution to the dozens of web site passwords stupidity.They could just want all that anthrax strain, which is used for vaccinations, to do just that. Vaccinate all the armed forces people first and then the whole of the US population. It is realistically possible that for just once this is on the straight. Now, as my previous postings show, I'm not Uncle Sam's lover, but don't ascribe to malice ...
We feel obligated to do the decent thing and tell you lot that it was just this kind of behaviour which triggered both the French and Russian Revolutions, because I'm certain that neither your news media nor your education systems will do so. Do you really want such an orgy of blood-letting on American soil?
Evidently one civil war is not enough to get the message across that civil unrest, rioting, murder, mayhem and the Guillotine are not much fun.
In no particular order, these are the 'Nuclear Nations':-
- France
- United Kingdom
- Israel
- India
- Pakistan
- China
- Russia
- United States of America
There is also reputed to be a fair amount of 'missing material' of which nobody knows the exact quantity or location.Frightening isn't it?
The world's gone MAD, totally MAD