Thanks! Rained in here tonight, but I'll be out with binoculars if there's a clear night in the next few days. I'm lucky to live under relatively dark skies.
Of course I'm in the very small camp (small around here anyway) that thinks physics trumps capitalism, ie. that the problems involved in traveling that distance make extra-solar human travel effectively impossible. That's a useful way to think about the scale involved I think (hope).
from any one of those planets to ours... at the risk of offending the "human-colonisation-of-space" brigade, a great exercise is to try making some sort of scale representation. Like, if earth is as far from the sun as the size of a grain of sugar, how far away is this system? Hmmm, well, if we're 12 light-minutes from the sun (forgive me if I got that wrong, it's been a long time), and the parent star is 41 light years away, is that like... next door? next town? next country?
Anyone?
So things went pretty much as you'd have expected from reading the comments on a typical RIAA / music / copright story on Slashdot, six or seven years ago - say, when Napster happened. Back then, those of us who that a band could give away their material, and if they were any good, some significant fraction of the audience would willingly pay for it --enough to make it a viable approach -- were seen as loony swivel-eyed furry-toothed freetards, if I remember correctly.
Whilst you're right that China is a lot less free that the US, still, you've over-stated the "grim socialist" aspect -- you may not have noticed but in the last 20 years they've let the market economy rip, with spectacular results. This bit:
Hot water is a luxury available in cities, and even the running cold water (where available) could be out for days and weeks at a time. Wait for for an apartment is counted in years (and decades), as is the wait for telephone connection. Cars are small, unreliable, polluting, expensive, but you can't get them anyway. Same is true of electronics and most other manufactured things. ... slightly over-eggs the pudding, I'm afraid, certainly as far as the huge industrial cities and conurbations go.
There's an adult comic called "Viz" in the UK which features a character called "Mrs Brady, Old Lady". The gist of it is "aren't old people funny (and they smell of wee)" -- variations on that theme, highly unsympathetic on the subjects of elderly working class women, dementia, loneliness, physical ailments (described in appallingly vivid detail) and of course reminiscences of the past. At one point they had her frequently using the words j"jew" and "turk" as terms of abuse in a context I'd never heard them (as in, "watch out for that new greengrover, he'll jew you out of your change, the nasty turk" -- of course these are wildly offensive, but interesting as the presumably date to at least the time of the Ottomans (pre-1914) and certainly before the Holocaust finally made casual like that anti-semitism unacceptable.
Should all ability for the user to download and install applications be removed? But of course. Actually, they should never have that right in the first place. That's why they're called users not system administrators. Welcome to 1972.
Well golly gee wow, it's almost as if they were setting things up so that there'll be further terrorist atrocities on US soil. Under Dubya would be good, he would undoubtedly claim that it proves they're right about everything. Under the presumed forthcoming Democrat president, even better, as the Republicans and the spookocrat types would obviously say that demonstrated that if you support civil rights, you're supporting terrorism, yadda yadda.
you could argue that reading the documentation for a new firewall would be a useful thing to do as well.
Er, yeah, but... these are Mac users you're talking about. The people who've been sold a computer that ordinary people can use without being computer experts, and which doesn't get viruses like Windows does. (Not counting the Linux refugees, of course.)
Oh dear. Look, I'm sorry to break it to you, but that "hardware firewall"? That's a computer, running software. Your Windows machine's built-in, "software", firewall? That's a computer, running software.
I think the distinction you're trying to make is between dedicated appliances and general purpose computers. Well, there's a security advantage to having your firewall device be on a separate host than the machine you use for web and mail - but most of that advantage is that you've got a separate device telling you what's going in and out, so if your sexytime box gets pwned you can at least tell from the firewall logs. (You do review the logs, don't you? I bought a $60 Linksys box a couple of months back which even supports syslog to an external server, and you can't say fairer than that. Hmmm, that makes three devices... I suppose you could get a NSLU2 slug for $80, stick a cheap USB drive on it and use that for syslog, with OpenSlug... but I'm thinking out loud here:))
(BTW, yes - despite what the firewall nazis will be saying downthread -- to my mind anyway, a NAT device *IS* a firewall, of a sort; they're both doing stateful packet routing against a rulebase after all. You just need to be sufficiently clueful to understand what it's doing for you; it's certainly *not* a magic attack-proof gadget that keeps you secure.)
Flawed? So what's the nature of this flaw? Well, it doesn't really, well, work. Not as such. Not as such. Yeah, we've heard there's some BSD firewalls already out there, and apparently some of them are supposed to be pretty secure, but... hell, we don't need firewalls, this is a Mac! And, as the strip "Osama Bin Laden's Computer Nightmare" in the latest issue of Viz so perspicaciously pointed out, Macs can't get viruses.
Yup. I'm puzzled to see this story's currently tagged "censorship", when plainly whatever has happened, isn't censorhip. It's an infringement of personal liberty by a police force which is clearly starting to act, around the edges at the very least, as an arm of the executive. When the police are the same as the state, there's a name for that - it's not censorship, it's "police state".
And it's really depressing to note that even now, the majority of Americans see no problem with ripping up or ignoring international law and treaties, so long as they're told it's being done to "terrorists". On the contrary, Republican candidates are competing to make the most outraegously statement of support for the blatantly criminal action that is Guantanamo. Very, very sad (speaking as a non-American.)
Right, so try to imagine looking at the question "how come?" and, just for fun, thinking of an explanation based purely on non-superstitious explanations for your apparent experience. I can think of three or four without trying too hard.
Having spent time with relatives who live on the far west coast of Ireland (west of Tralee) and gone to college in Coleraine, on the north Atlantic coast, I've a deep fondness for northern atlantic coastal weather... so long as you don't have to walk back from the garage carrying another sack of coal every time the fire runs down. BTW, if your remaining fishermen could try to avoid losing so much gear overseas it would keep our coastline a bit cleaner... (kthxbye:) )
I've always been interested in the incipient Big One ever since the meme that it was due in 1976 and is now overdue went around. As the amount of critical infrastructure situated in and around SoCal has exploded along with the ubiquitous internet / cell connectivity, I can't help thinking that things are going to get pretty ugly when it comes, even if most of the actual buildings stand up and initial casualties are low, because of the density of comms and their upstream dependencies (power, transport links for service engineers, net ops and NOCs that maintain rather than going home to try digging out relatives, etc.
A morbid line of thought, I know, but I do BCP / DR planning for my employer and we had a recent brush with an unplanned disaster (loss of a critical site for two weeks, due to the UK floods in July) which was a very... "interesting" experience. It was interesting how resilient we were despite having to wing it and improvise under tight time pressure; however, we were very very close to the point where it would all have fallen to bits. If a certain electricity substation flooded there'd be no power (== comms, food distribution,...) etc for the whole County. The CEP contingency plan for that is "evacuate Gloucestershire". The moral is, it's all good as long as you've got power, food & water, and your critical employees can and are able to work without putting themselves at risk.
Slashdot Mirror
So... who bent the brush? ;)
Thanks! Rained in here tonight, but I'll be out with binoculars if there's a clear night in the next few days. I'm lucky to live under relatively dark skies.
Is it naked eye? And if so, roughly whereabouts is it? casual stargazers want to know!
Your comment "Blackwater are... psychopathic mercenary scum" was corrupted in transit and appeared as "...dedicated warriors". Dang those cosmic rays.
Of course I'm in the very small camp (small around here anyway) that thinks physics trumps capitalism, ie. that the problems involved in traveling that distance make extra-solar human travel effectively impossible. That's a useful way to think about the scale involved I think (hope).
from any one of those planets to ours... at the risk of offending the "human-colonisation-of-space" brigade, a great exercise is to try making some sort of scale representation. Like, if earth is as far from the sun as the size of a grain of sugar, how far away is this system? Hmmm, well, if we're 12 light-minutes from the sun (forgive me if I got that wrong, it's been a long time), and the parent star is 41 light years away, is that like... next door? next town? next country? Anyone?
yeah, cheers, thanks a lot
Hmmmm.
Three cheers for Radiohead, at any rate.
There's an adult comic called "Viz" in the UK which features a character called "Mrs Brady, Old Lady". The gist of it is "aren't old people funny (and they smell of wee)" -- variations on that theme, highly unsympathetic on the subjects of elderly working class women, dementia, loneliness, physical ailments (described in appallingly vivid detail) and of course reminiscences of the past. At one point they had her frequently using the words j"jew" and "turk" as terms of abuse in a context I'd never heard them (as in, "watch out for that new greengrover, he'll jew you out of your change, the nasty turk" -- of course these are wildly offensive, but interesting as the presumably date to at least the time of the Ottomans (pre-1914) and certainly before the Holocaust finally made casual like that anti-semitism unacceptable.
Quite right, Perlscript is the only way forward.
But it's not a worm. It's a trojaned file the victim downloads and executes. There's no "spreading" from an infected machine.
Out in hall, wasn't it? No, don't get up...
Er, yeah, but... these are Mac users you're talking about. The people who've been sold a computer that ordinary people can use without being computer experts, and which doesn't get viruses like Windows does. (Not counting the Linux refugees, of course.)
I think the distinction you're trying to make is between dedicated appliances and general purpose computers. Well, there's a security advantage to having your firewall device be on a separate host than the machine you use for web and mail - but most of that advantage is that you've got a separate device telling you what's going in and out, so if your sexytime box gets pwned you can at least tell from the firewall logs. (You do review the logs, don't you? I bought a $60 Linksys box a couple of months back which even supports syslog to an external server, and you can't say fairer than that. Hmmm, that makes three devices... I suppose you could get a NSLU2 slug for $80, stick a cheap USB drive on it and use that for syslog, with OpenSlug... but I'm thinking out loud here :))
(BTW, yes - despite what the firewall nazis will be saying downthread -- to my mind anyway, a NAT device *IS* a firewall, of a sort; they're both doing stateful packet routing against a rulebase after all. You just need to be sufficiently clueful to understand what it's doing for you; it's certainly *not* a magic attack-proof gadget that keeps you secure.)
Flawed? So what's the nature of this flaw? Well, it doesn't really, well, work. Not as such. Not as such. Yeah, we've heard there's some BSD firewalls already out there, and apparently some of them are supposed to be pretty secure, but... hell, we don't need firewalls, this is a Mac! And, as the strip "Osama Bin Laden's Computer Nightmare" in the latest issue of Viz so perspicaciously pointed out, Macs can't get viruses.
And it's really depressing to note that even now, the majority of Americans see no problem with ripping up or ignoring international law and treaties, so long as they're told it's being done to "terrorists". On the contrary, Republican candidates are competing to make the most outraegously statement of support for the blatantly criminal action that is Guantanamo. Very, very sad (speaking as a non-American.)
So, how many terminals can one of these DVI doohickeys display, anyway?
Right, so try to imagine looking at the question "how come?" and, just for fun, thinking of an explanation based purely on non-superstitious explanations for your apparent experience. I can think of three or four without trying too hard.
Having spent time with relatives who live on the far west coast of Ireland (west of Tralee) and gone to college in Coleraine, on the north Atlantic coast, I've a deep fondness for northern atlantic coastal weather... so long as you don't have to walk back from the garage carrying another sack of coal every time the fire runs down. BTW, if your remaining fishermen could try to avoid losing so much gear overseas it would keep our coastline a bit cleaner... (kthxbye :) )
I'd like to see a time series of this, showing the changing curve as experience accumulates. Either way round.
I wonder whether this is the missing piece of the puzzle of how Iapetus got it's leading face spattered with fine dust particles? The PSoc blog says the event that caused the dark contamination of the ice occurred , yes, aeons ago...
A morbid line of thought, I know, but I do BCP / DR planning for my employer and we had a recent brush with an unplanned disaster (loss of a critical site for two weeks, due to the UK floods in July) which was a very... "interesting" experience. It was interesting how resilient we were despite having to wing it and improvise under tight time pressure; however, we were very very close to the point where it would all have fallen to bits. If a certain electricity substation flooded there'd be no power (== comms, food distribution,...) etc for the whole County. The CEP contingency plan for that is "evacuate Gloucestershire". The moral is, it's all good as long as you've got power, food & water, and your critical employees can and are able to work without putting themselves at risk.