It appears as if you haven't RTFM (read the Slashdot help section here), nor did you do any thoughtful research to back your claim. Scientologists Force Comment Off Slashdot
Slashdot Management certainly tries to be as open as possible with regards to posting, but there are forces outside of its control.
I suggest you hit the dictionary, because "paranoia" does not necessarily imply delusional thoughts, let alone a mental illness.
I just referenced WordWeb, and in that case you are wrong. Defining words can be difficult, even more so for the professional who makes a living at it. Most people on Slashdot often refer to specific formal definitions while being "grammar Nazi's", often without realizing that the professionals get there definitions from the places like Slashdot by people who actually use the words in contemporary and cultural context.
I realize that the GP was using the smiley emoticon, so by implication my reply can be thought of as rhetorical. I think we all know the contexts in which "paranoia" can be used as a medical term or a colloquial pejorative, etc.
Print is only technically traceable. Your local PD will not have access to a database that links the inkjet patterns to your name. If, in fact, such a mythical database even exists (doubtful, requires competence from the government and honesty from corporations), it is not a simple matter to perform a lookup. GP's suggestion is near perfect.
If you are familiar with the EFF you would have realized that your statement is wrong. Here's at least one EFF link, Printers, and another Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents. As everybody knows, companies do keep information on purchasers, sometimes indefinitely, and credit card details etc can easily be matched up with a database of serial numbers.
That works great until said country "sees the light" and aligns with the U.S., or any other country that already is.
Generally good quality professional businesses of this sort don't keep logs, or keep logs for very short periods of time (i.e. by the time a formal request for information is made, the logs have been cleared). I'm not up-to-date on specific businesses (I don't use them personally) so I won't mention any.
Hint; if the country has a bank that is considered to be a tax haven, then that country probably has other types of haven-like businesses. Google, as usual, is your friend here, as well as good quality Web sites that teach about privacy, or maybe even Wikileaks has information to good resources. Of course there is Tor, or Tor used in combination with professional proxies.
I was pretty much assuming you would have a sense of humour. I figured my response may likely even get a Troll moderation, but sometimes its good to take chances. Just playing around a bit. People take things too seriously sometimes.
Because after all, we know that words only have one meaning, so if someone uses the word "hacker" one way, it must mean the same thing as when everyone uses the word hacker.
I think everybody in the Linux and MS-DOS-prompt community knows what a hacker is. However, I will supply you with a formal definition:
According to Eric S. Raymond, a confirmed higher deity and the mastermind behind the geek unification conspiracy, hackers are a group of neo-pagan, anarchist, smelly, arrogant, gun nuts and highly intelligent bastards who wish to establish an intellectual junta, which will be known as The Irate Rand-worshiping Anarchist THC-growing E-lliance, or IRATE.
Unfortunately, the main site content that was lost is the downloadable files, which aren't archived (since they're large.)
Which is what I suspected (I'm a not Flight-sim enthusiast, so am not familiar with their site, but I presumed there were probably large binaries). They may at least be able to get back a significant part of their forums and text based articles however. It's a start.
I daydream while driving. At first when I realized this it scared the living bajeebus out of me. Eventually I got over it. So this really is not surprising in the least.
What you are experiencing when you drive is probably highway hypnosis which is very common for people to experience and quite normal. It's also one of the reasons that planners and engineers put bumps and gravel on the edges of highways; to "wake" people up if they drift off too much. It's also one of the reasons why seemingly straight roads have slight curves designed into them; so as too not make the driving experience too repetitive. Doing repetitive tasks puts part of your brain in "automatic", which psychologists call "automaticity".
Daydreaming, and taking cat-naps at work are also helpful for productivity. Unfortunately Managers don't read science articles, and when they do they dismiss the results as a joke because they think they are smarter than scientists.
Watched? You WATCHED One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? What good does that do, if you don't turn the pages? Isn't anyone literate anymore? Does no one READ anything that Hollywood doesn't produce? Phhhhtt.
FYI, I've watched the movie and I've read the book. The same with Catch 22, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughter House 5, and many, many others. Unfortunately the movie producer Michael Douglas was not featured in the book, so it wouldn't have been relevant to mention the book in my post.
And yes, I may have read books that Hollywood hasn't produced. I don't know, because I generally don't check to see if Hollywood made a movie of it before reading.
How is this even remotely surprising? Being "mentally challenged" doesn't mean you have to look odd. We're looking at the tail end of the bell curve here, not some alien species.
I'm not sure if this is even surprising. People tend to make fun of people who are different from themselves, or just make fun of the differences that are apparent.
Since this is (the "mentally challenged", "morons", "retarded", or whatever happens to be the next euphemism, insult, or what have you) is a distinct and marginalized group, and not necessarily a visible minority, it can be viewed as being rude or politically incorrect to make fun of these differences. Certainly having the marginal group as the prop for the punch line has some social implications. There is certain thoughtfulness that should be taken with humour (both on the giving and the receiving sides). I posit that if people are able to laugh at themselves (including there race, intelligence, sexuality or what have you), then they are on the right track to having a "healthy" attitude towards more politically dubious forms of humour. Politicians certainly all sound alike to me, even though they are merely on the tail end of the bell curve.
Without reading through your link (first), I thought it would be appropriate to note that War and human conflict in general is probably going to be a significant impact in reducing the human population over the next decades or centuries. Nuclear weapons and dirty bombs combined with disparate and varied terrorist groups would likely be the cause of the more widespread and dramatic lowering of the human population. Easy to manufacture biological agents would have a lesser impact. Censorship of the Internet (the vast storehouse and dissemination media of information) and the outlawing of strategic chemicals would likely only have a positive psychological effect on the masses. There are interesting times ahead. I am anticipating a more medieval world.
Mosquitoes certainly have their role in the ecosystem and killing them will certainly have unforeseen consequences. More like in the Mao and sparrows story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sparrow_Campaign [wikipedia.org]
Humans are part of the ecosystem, and not allowing natural checks and balances to occur on the human population also has devastating effects on the environment. I'm not advocating culling humans however.
Mosquitoes certainly have their role in the ecosystem and killing them will certainly have unforeseen consequences. More like in the Mao and sparrows story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sparrow_Campaign
I don't want to sound ungrateful or anything but is $100K really all that much considering how expensive it must be to do this kind of research?
I could presume it is enough money to pay for the salary of the one researcher that was awarded this grant. It's not a lot of money, but Microsoft has spread their grants to other researchers working on other projects as well.
The whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag is obviously from someone who has neither RTFA nor knows how bad fire ant populations can get.
That was me, and I did read the article. Perhaps a look at some of my comments will explain my rationale. I'll keep an open mind about the situation, but failure to ask questions like this is purposefully being ignorant. We should always ask ourselves about possible consequences that we can anticipate and consider the fact that we may not have the knowledge or foresight to anticipate every possible scenario or outcome. I think its a good question to ask, and does not necessarily imply prejudice about the topic.
Have you ever read the essay, "Santaland Diaries," by David Sedaris?
No.
Have you ever watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Michael Douglas, the producer, complained to somebody that the mental patients never seem to get out of character. Somebody informed him that many of the extras on the film were recruited from an actual mental hospital.
No risk-free solution exists to stop future infestations except cessation of all inter-continental shipping. The OP raises the possibility of a risk from using this solution. What other alternatives does he suggest?
I don't know! I will however leave you with some thoughts on the matter.
Well I'm no expert, but I do remember reading that DDT is highly over-rated as a harmful agricultural pest control (especially for use in Africa where there are problems with malaria). In general (it would be helpful if) more natural approaches to agriculture would be pursued. There is also the genetic engineering approach (for the agricultural problem of red ants) and the material engineering approach for the electrical infrastructure problem.
I won't say a lot here because my knowledge here is vague and scattered. The above suggestions are some ideas, but not necessarily solutions in and of themselves. The main ideas behind my arguments is that extreme caution should be used (with radical approaches like this), especially with something that has a history of going wrong. Even if the experts think they have the knowledge and experience to understand and deal with the situation, there may always be something that they never considered that may go wrong in the future.
It should also be noted that there is no natural problem here. Nature behaves the way it always has for millennia. Humans merely started creating these problems for themselves through the explosive growth of technological developments over the last few centuries. The ecology of Texas has been around a lot longer than the colonists started exploiting its resources. I think we should at least try to work with nature a bit more instead of working against it. It's just an idea, and not an evangelical dogma that I am presenting. New Orleans is sinking because of the diversion of the Mississippi river (one of the reasons that I heard about on PBS's Nova many years ago). Maybe we an start working with nature a bit more by, for example, not building cities and towns in flood plains. Maybe introducing zombie species is the best idea in case of the fire ants, but I would suggest trying to pursue and research less potentially dangerous solutions. Texas seems to have been managing itself fairly well over the last couple of decades. I'm not sure what the rush is to start using this radically new approach.
Slashdot Mirror
On second reading:
just post as a comment. Slashdot would never remove content...
I've come to realize this as an attempt at humour. Whooosh!!!
It appears as if you haven't RTFM (read the Slashdot help section here), nor did you do any thoughtful research to back your claim.
Scientologists Force Comment Off Slashdot
Slashdot Management certainly tries to be as open as possible with regards to posting, but there are forces outside of its control.
I suggest you hit the dictionary, because "paranoia" does not necessarily imply delusional thoughts, let alone a mental illness.
I just referenced WordWeb, and in that case you are wrong. Defining words can be difficult, even more so for the professional who makes a living at it. Most people on Slashdot often refer to specific formal definitions while being "grammar Nazi's", often without realizing that the professionals get there definitions from the places like Slashdot by people who actually use the words in contemporary and cultural context.
I realize that the GP was using the smiley emoticon, so by implication my reply can be thought of as rhetorical. I think we all know the contexts in which "paranoia" can be used as a medical term or a colloquial pejorative, etc.
paranoia isn't just a psychological problem, it's a protective mechanism. :)
Wrong. Paranoia is a delusion and a "mental illness". Fear of persecution is a "protective mechanism".
Print is only technically traceable. Your local PD will not have access to a database that links the inkjet patterns to your name. If, in fact, such a mythical database even exists (doubtful, requires competence from the government and honesty from corporations), it is not a simple matter to perform a lookup. GP's suggestion is near perfect.
If you are familiar with the EFF you would have realized that your statement is wrong. Here's at least one EFF link, Printers, and another Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents. As everybody knows, companies do keep information on purchasers, sometimes indefinitely, and credit card details etc can easily be matched up with a database of serial numbers.
There is nothing magical or mythical here.
That works great until said country "sees the light" and aligns with the U.S., or any other country that already is.
Generally good quality professional businesses of this sort don't keep logs, or keep logs for very short periods of time (i.e. by the time a formal request for information is made, the logs have been cleared). I'm not up-to-date on specific businesses (I don't use them personally) so I won't mention any.
and where would that be ?
Hint; if the country has a bank that is considered to be a tax haven, then that country probably has other types of haven-like businesses. Google, as usual, is your friend here, as well as good quality Web sites that teach about privacy, or maybe even Wikileaks has information to good resources. Of course there is Tor, or Tor used in combination with professional proxies.
Wikileaks dude
Slashdot should get first dibs here. Post it through an off-shore proxy server in a country that isn't subservient to US requests).
I was pretty much assuming you would have a sense of humour. I figured my response may likely even get a Troll moderation, but sometimes its good to take chances. Just playing around a bit. People take things too seriously sometimes.
Because after all, we know that words only have one meaning, so if someone uses the word "hacker" one way, it must mean the same thing as when everyone uses the word hacker.
I think everybody in the Linux and MS-DOS-prompt community knows what a hacker is. However, I will supply you with a formal definition:
According to Eric S. Raymond, a confirmed higher deity and the mastermind behind the geek unification conspiracy, hackers are a group of neo-pagan, anarchist, smelly, arrogant, gun nuts and highly intelligent bastards who wish to establish an intellectual junta, which will be known as The Irate Rand-worshiping Anarchist THC-growing E-lliance, or IRATE.
- Ref: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Hacker
Unfortunately, the main site content that was lost is the downloadable files, which aren't archived (since they're large.)
Which is what I suspected (I'm a not Flight-sim enthusiast, so am not familiar with their site, but I presumed there were probably large binaries). They may at least be able to get back a significant part of their forums and text based articles however. It's a start.
Which reminds me. They could always use the WayBack Machine to (help in) retrieving their archives:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.avsim.com/
Google Cache seems to archive only the most recent pages:
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.avsim.com%2F&submit2=Google
From the article
... we backed up the servers between our two servers.
Nope, backing up a server to another online server is not a backup, it's merely another online copy.
Unfortunately I'm French so I don't shower that often, and I don't eat a lot of vegetables so I don't do number 2 often either.
I appreciate your candidness, but sometimes people give more information than I'd prefer to know about -:)
I daydream while driving. At first when I realized this it scared the living bajeebus out of me. Eventually I got over it. So this really is not surprising in the least.
What you are experiencing when you drive is probably highway hypnosis which is very common for people to experience and quite normal. It's also one of the reasons that planners and engineers put bumps and gravel on the edges of highways; to "wake" people up if they drift off too much. It's also one of the reasons why seemingly straight roads have slight curves designed into them; so as too not make the driving experience too repetitive. Doing repetitive tasks puts part of your brain in "automatic", which psychologists call "automaticity".
Daydreaming, and taking cat-naps at work are also helpful for productivity. Unfortunately Managers don't read science articles, and when they do they dismiss the results as a joke because they think they are smarter than scientists.
Watched? You WATCHED One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? What good does that do, if you don't turn the pages? Isn't anyone literate anymore? Does no one READ anything that Hollywood doesn't produce? Phhhhtt.
FYI, I've watched the movie and I've read the book. The same with Catch 22, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughter House 5, and many, many others. Unfortunately the movie producer Michael Douglas was not featured in the book, so it wouldn't have been relevant to mention the book in my post.
And yes, I may have read books that Hollywood hasn't produced. I don't know, because I generally don't check to see if Hollywood made a movie of it before reading.
How is this even remotely surprising? Being "mentally challenged" doesn't mean you have to look odd. We're looking at the tail end of the bell curve here, not some alien species.
I'm not sure if this is even surprising. People tend to make fun of people who are different from themselves, or just make fun of the differences that are apparent.
Since this is (the "mentally challenged", "morons", "retarded", or whatever happens to be the next euphemism, insult, or what have you) is a distinct and marginalized group, and not necessarily a visible minority, it can be viewed as being rude or politically incorrect to make fun of these differences. Certainly having the marginal group as the prop for the punch line has some social implications. There is certain thoughtfulness that should be taken with humour (both on the giving and the receiving sides). I posit that if people are able to laugh at themselves (including there race, intelligence, sexuality or what have you), then they are on the right track to having a "healthy" attitude towards more politically dubious forms of humour. Politicians certainly all sound alike to me, even though they are merely on the tail end of the bell curve.
Without reading through your link (first), I thought it would be appropriate to note that War and human conflict in general is probably going to be a significant impact in reducing the human population over the next decades or centuries. Nuclear weapons and dirty bombs combined with disparate and varied terrorist groups would likely be the cause of the more widespread and dramatic lowering of the human population. Easy to manufacture biological agents would have a lesser impact. Censorship of the Internet (the vast storehouse and dissemination media of information) and the outlawing of strategic chemicals would likely only have a positive psychological effect on the masses. There are interesting times ahead. I am anticipating a more medieval world.
Mosquitoes certainly have their role in the ecosystem and killing them will certainly have unforeseen consequences. More like in the Mao and sparrows story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sparrow_Campaign [wikipedia.org]
Humans are part of the ecosystem, and not allowing natural checks and balances to occur on the human population also has devastating effects on the environment. I'm not advocating culling humans however.
Mosquitoes certainly have their role in the ecosystem and killing them will certainly have unforeseen consequences. More like in the Mao and sparrows story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sparrow_Campaign
And besides, Sparrows are too cute to kill.
I don't want to sound ungrateful or anything but is $100K really all that much considering how expensive it must be to do this kind of research?
I could presume it is enough money to pay for the salary of the one researcher that was awarded this grant. It's not a lot of money, but Microsoft has spread their grants to other researchers working on other projects as well.
The whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag is obviously from someone who has neither RTFA nor knows how bad fire ant populations can get.
That was me, and I did read the article. Perhaps a look at some of my comments will explain my rationale. I'll keep an open mind about the situation, but failure to ask questions like this is purposefully being ignorant. We should always ask ourselves about possible consequences that we can anticipate and consider the fact that we may not have the knowledge or foresight to anticipate every possible scenario or outcome. I think its a good question to ask, and does not necessarily imply prejudice about the topic.
Have you ever read the essay, "Santaland Diaries," by David Sedaris?
No.
Have you ever watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Michael Douglas, the producer, complained to somebody that the mental patients never seem to get out of character. Somebody informed him that many of the extras on the film were recruited from an actual mental hospital.
I'm not going to mention Kramer here.
No risk-free solution exists to stop future infestations except cessation of all inter-continental shipping. The OP raises the possibility of a risk from using this solution. What other alternatives does he suggest?
I don't know! I will however leave you with some thoughts on the matter.
Well I'm no expert, but I do remember reading that DDT is highly over-rated as a harmful agricultural pest control (especially for use in Africa where there are problems with malaria). In general (it would be helpful if) more natural approaches to agriculture would be pursued. There is also the genetic engineering approach (for the agricultural problem of red ants) and the material engineering approach for the electrical infrastructure problem.
I won't say a lot here because my knowledge here is vague and scattered. The above suggestions are some ideas, but not necessarily solutions in and of themselves. The main ideas behind my arguments is that extreme caution should be used (with radical approaches like this), especially with something that has a history of going wrong. Even if the experts think they have the knowledge and experience to understand and deal with the situation, there may always be something that they never considered that may go wrong in the future.
It should also be noted that there is no natural problem here. Nature behaves the way it always has for millennia. Humans merely started creating these problems for themselves through the explosive growth of technological developments over the last few centuries. The ecology of Texas has been around a lot longer than the colonists started exploiting its resources. I think we should at least try to work with nature a bit more instead of working against it. It's just an idea, and not an evangelical dogma that I am presenting. New Orleans is sinking because of the diversion of the Mississippi river (one of the reasons that I heard about on PBS's Nova many years ago). Maybe we an start working with nature a bit more by, for example, not building cities and towns in flood plains. Maybe introducing zombie species is the best idea in case of the fire ants, but I would suggest trying to pursue and research less potentially dangerous solutions. Texas seems to have been managing itself fairly well over the last couple of decades. I'm not sure what the rush is to start using this radically new approach.