"cleartext" implies a situation where the letters a user is typing in on his keyboard are being sent unencrypted over the network, like over a normal telnet connection.
The state of the password being sent really isn't what's being discussed, since once the connection is unencrypted, it doesn't matter.
> They should ban together and refuse. That is what they need to do to protect the system. Yes, I > understand that it is difficult but if they don't bitch all the way up the line, then who will ?
You have no idea how government entities function, do you?:)
10% of the people (maybe even less) working at a site will actually be good workers who give a fig about their job and how well things are run. The issue is that this segment is never in a position to institute change. These people don't stick around long, they become cynical quite fast and generally quit and return to jobs in the private sector (which often have just as fucked up management systems, but in completely different ways).
Another 10% of the people are the ones who can make decisions, but have absolutely no background to make effective decisions (they got where they are mostly via seniority). They instead opt to spend their days in endless meetings hoping someone else makes a decision so they can go back to "fine tuning" the organization chart.
The remaining 80% is dead wood. Completely lazy, useless fatasses who know it's damn near impossible to fire a government employee and only show up to ensure they keep getting a paycheck. Their sole desire is to avoid rocking the boat, in effort to avoid losing their gravy train. Most of them have held government jobs for so long no one even notices how bloody useless they are, except for the original 10% who are powerless to do anything about it.
Point being, a majority of the people working for the USPTO plain out doesn't give a shit. They will NEVER "strike" or "take it to the press", soley because it means they would actually have to scrape their butts out of their chair and rub some of their brain cells together.
> Sure, your 4 year old has some pretty drawings, but should they be put in a library someplace?
SSSSHHH.
Don't you see where this is going? The next obvious step is government installed "web vaults" where people can submit their oh-so-valuable chicken scratchings and they will be stored, under the same URL, for eternity.
No more geoshitties man, we're talking lifetime free webspace for every citizen in the US!
"This software will compare the song to a database that contains the "top-30" hit songs of the past five years in order to search for mathematical similarities. The algorithm then assigns each song a score between one and 10. Any song rated more than seven is likely to become a hit."
Now think about this.. use musical eras like the 80's and early 90's as an example because it's reasonably safe to assume this technology didn't exist at that point.
Look at the charts in 5 year chunks, it all sounds the same. In the 80's, everyone either used a synthesizer or had a raging, face-melting solo at some point in the song. Or the early 90's, "grunge" was being pounded into our head incessantly.
It was like that because it was popular. Band X makes it big, and suddenly Bands X1 through X255 appear on the charts mimicing this sound. This seems to happen in, amazingly enough, cycles of 5 years.
Seems to me this software does nothing to show the "hitability" of a song, but rather telling you whether or not it sounds just like what's currently popular, and has been for the past couple years.
Seems about as magical to me as as an algrorythm claiming it can detect boys that like looking at porn.
> She is BREAKING THE LAW. Why shouldn't she be punished?
Because RIAA is cowing people by claiming astronomical damages, encouraging people who can't afford a legal battle (especially not afford to pay damages if they lose) to settle for a reletively miniscule amount.
This in effect forces people to admit their guilt without a trial, which last time I checked was not how the american legal system was supposed to work.
Whether she is guilty or not really isn't at issue. The RIAA's blatantly bullying tactics are.
> Of course, it's a given that we MUST become a spacefaring race, right?
No not at all.
I just see it as an inevitable development. Humans are just too darned curious. If a means of efficient travel is developed, a portion of us would without second thoughts utilize them.
Even better, funding interest in FNAL is waning year by year, even though it is at the moment the largest accelerator on the planet (CERN will take that role whenever it's completed).
The inability for the common grunt to see any value in this research is putting some real strain in the system; people want results and stuff they can buy at wal-mart. Banging subatomic particles together, to date, isn't accomplishing that.
But this stuff is critically important for humanity to figure out, because the way I see it before we can become a spacefaring race, we need to know how the universe works, from the ground up.
I sympathize your idealism, I mean yes many of us are very fortunate, but it's cuddly statements like yours that motivate employers to exploit their workers.
If they think they can get you to do it without quitting, THEY WILL.
Just because I'm luckier than most in the world, doesn't mean I have to stand there and let some corporate goon give it to me in the ass.
Wasn't that an old SNL skit, or maybe Kids in the Hall?
Some oriental guy had a chick at his house, was trying to impress her with all his technology gadgets and he spent a bit chunk of the skit crawling around for his music album, ala looking for a lost contact lens.
The question has been answered apparently, and it doesn't bode well for us.;) Don't piss off the girlfriend, or she'll take a dustbuster to your music collection.
> It may be shortsighted of me, but building one > would probably cost less and could be done failry > quickly.
Building one wouldn't remove a potential competitor though.;)
If you can get a search engine AND make it easier to dominate the market, AND the price difference between the two is within reason.. why not just assimilate someone?
> Do we need manned spacecraft to do our research? > This is the important question that is being > floated under the surface.
Not really. A better question would be: "do we need the government to be the sole gatekeeper of manned spaceflight?"
What I see this as (if it continues forth as this release suggests) is the changing of the guard. With privatized spaceflight becoming a very real possibility within the next year, and NASA coming under increased scrutiny, it's a bit inevitable.
NASA had it's time at the top, and will continue to be so for a long time (and probably turn into a regulatory body), but it's time for it to step aside and let private interests fuel the next space race.
NASA's proven it can be done, and will always have an important place in history but it seems to me that the mire of government bureaucracy has made it unable to compete as it once could.
Not that I'm an authority on any of this, it's just my gut reaction.
Historically, it has been considered rude to wear a hat indoors. That's where it got it's start.
Schools probably make a deal out of it as an expression of control over the students, but that doesn't change that it was at one point a universally accepted convention.
> maybe all the guys who choose to play as a female > characters are in fact attracted to the strengths > and perceived weaknesses of females
Not a bad guess, but you can hardly include "all" guys in such a claim.
I play female toons just for some variety in the game.. rank after rank of male characters gets dull. I also tend to go for the "ugly" races, whatever varient of halflings and gnomes the game in question implements.
So at least for me, it's more a quest for a bit of individuality. I don't try to act like I'm female, and no one around me has any misconceptions about the sex of who's behind the steering wheel.
> The highest uptime I've ever seen was about 101 > days; oddly all our changes happen right around > then,
Not going to start a pissing contest for the trolls and be specific, but I've seen numerous machines that exceed that number, by a lot. It seems dependent on what they do and what kind of load they're put under.
Obviously a good UPS helps too.
In my experience, regular downtime is actually a good thing. In EVERY case where I've dealt with a machine that had a 3 digit uptime, as soon as it reboots and/or stays down for more than a few minutes, hardware dies. Considering such outages are often unplanned (and there's often many machines at once).. it makes a stressful situation much more so.
Frequently and routinely shutting machines down allows one to deal with these failures much more smoothly.
> How hard can it be to have a closed network for all coding purposes?
Oddly enough, as obvious as this seems, people are actually quite resistant to it. I've worked at two software development houses, and while that's not a terribly accurate representation of the entire industry, they both had the exact same attitude: "No, we don't need the dev machines on a private network, we're fine like it is.".
At one of them, I suggested it as a solution in response to a similar situation; source got into the wrong hands. Even then they said they didn't want to do it, they preferred to rely on employee training and discipline.
Whether it's indifference or ignorance, who knows. Common sense isn't, I guess.:p
i have it on good authority that all the different names for space rocks ending up on earth were created as some sort of scientist inner circle challenge to confuse common men.
As we all know, the first attempt was in naming stone spikes that grow in caves, but unfortunatley many people actually learned what the proper terms were.
> Actually, at 36,000 km from earth, objects take a > day, not a year to complete a full orbit
That's a heck of a relief, I'd had to imagine what happened if the top of the elevator was stuck in a one year orbit and the bottom was forced to "orbit" at the speed the earth revolves.
I imagine it would end up being like cutting wet clay with a wire.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the moon was REALLY formed.
Slashdot Mirror
Otherwise known as "calvinball".
"cleartext" implies a situation where the letters a user is typing in on his keyboard are being sent unencrypted over the network, like over a normal telnet connection.
The state of the password being sent really isn't what's being discussed, since once the connection is unencrypted, it doesn't matter.
> They should ban together and refuse. That is what they need to do to protect the system. Yes, I
:)
> understand that it is difficult but if they don't bitch all the way up the line, then who will ?
You have no idea how government entities function, do you?
10% of the people (maybe even less) working at a site will actually be good workers who give a fig about their job and how well things are run. The issue is that this segment is never in a position to institute change. These people don't stick around long, they become cynical quite fast and generally quit and return to jobs in the private sector (which often have just as fucked up management systems, but in completely different ways).
Another 10% of the people are the ones who can make decisions, but have absolutely no background to make effective decisions (they got where they are mostly via seniority). They instead opt to spend their days in endless meetings hoping someone else makes a decision so they can go back to "fine tuning" the organization chart.
The remaining 80% is dead wood. Completely lazy, useless fatasses who know it's damn near impossible to fire a government employee and only show up to ensure they keep getting a paycheck. Their sole desire is to avoid rocking the boat, in effort to avoid losing their gravy train. Most of them have held government jobs for so long no one even notices how bloody useless they are, except for the original 10% who are powerless to do anything about it.
Point being, a majority of the people working for the USPTO plain out doesn't give a shit. They will NEVER "strike" or "take it to the press", soley because it means they would actually have to scrape their butts out of their chair and rub some of their brain cells together.
> Sure, your 4 year old has some pretty drawings, but should they be put in a library someplace?
SSSSHHH.
Don't you see where this is going? The next obvious step is government installed "web vaults" where people can submit their oh-so-valuable chicken scratchings and they will be stored, under the same URL, for eternity.
No more geoshitties man, we're talking lifetime free webspace for every citizen in the US!
The article states:
"This software will compare the song to a database that contains the "top-30" hit songs of the past five years in order to search for mathematical similarities. The algorithm then assigns each song a score between one and 10. Any song rated more than seven is likely to become a hit."
Now think about this.. use musical eras like the 80's and early 90's as an example because it's reasonably safe to assume this technology didn't exist at that point.
Look at the charts in 5 year chunks, it all sounds the same. In the 80's, everyone either used a synthesizer or had a raging, face-melting solo at some point in the song. Or the early 90's, "grunge" was being pounded into our head incessantly.
It was like that because it was popular. Band X makes it big, and suddenly Bands X1 through X255 appear on the charts mimicing this sound. This seems to happen in, amazingly enough, cycles of 5 years.
Seems to me this software does nothing to show the "hitability" of a song, but rather telling you whether or not it sounds just like what's currently popular, and has been for the past couple years.
Seems about as magical to me as as an algrorythm claiming it can detect boys that like looking at porn.
> She is BREAKING THE LAW. Why shouldn't she be punished?
Because RIAA is cowing people by claiming astronomical damages, encouraging people who can't afford a legal battle (especially not afford to pay damages if they lose) to settle for a reletively miniscule amount.
This in effect forces people to admit their guilt without a trial, which last time I checked was not how the american legal system was supposed to work.
Whether she is guilty or not really isn't at issue. The RIAA's blatantly bullying tactics are.
> Of course, it's a given that we MUST become a spacefaring race, right?
No not at all.
I just see it as an inevitable development. Humans are just too darned curious. If a means of efficient travel is developed, a portion of us would without second thoughts utilize them.
Even better, funding interest in FNAL is waning year by year, even though it is at the moment the largest accelerator on the planet (CERN will take that role whenever it's completed).
The inability for the common grunt to see any value in this research is putting some real strain in the system; people want results and stuff they can buy at wal-mart. Banging subatomic particles together, to date, isn't accomplishing that.
But this stuff is critically important for humanity to figure out, because the way I see it before we can become a spacefaring race, we need to know how the universe works, from the ground up.
it's a double edged sword. I personally do not think the schools have any business moderating events that take place outside of school.
I sympathize your idealism, I mean yes many of us are very fortunate, but it's cuddly statements like yours that motivate employers to exploit their workers.
If they think they can get you to do it without quitting, THEY WILL.
Just because I'm luckier than most in the world, doesn't mean I have to stand there and let some corporate goon give it to me in the ass.
Wasn't that an old SNL skit, or maybe Kids in the Hall?
;) Don't piss off the girlfriend, or she'll take a dustbuster to your music collection.
Some oriental guy had a chick at his house, was trying to impress her with all his technology gadgets and he spent a bit chunk of the skit crawling around for his music album, ala looking for a lost contact lens.
The question has been answered apparently, and it doesn't bode well for us.
> It may be shortsighted of me, but building one
;)
> would probably cost less and could be done failry
> quickly.
Building one wouldn't remove a potential competitor though.
If you can get a search engine AND make it easier to dominate the market, AND the price difference between the two is within reason.. why not just assimilate someone?
> Do we need manned spacecraft to do our research?
> This is the important question that is being
> floated under the surface.
Not really. A better question would be: "do we need the government to be the sole gatekeeper of manned spaceflight?"
What I see this as (if it continues forth as this release suggests) is the changing of the guard. With privatized spaceflight becoming a very real possibility within the next year, and NASA coming under increased scrutiny, it's a bit inevitable.
NASA had it's time at the top, and will continue to be so for a long time (and probably turn into a regulatory body), but it's time for it to step aside and let private interests fuel the next space race.
NASA's proven it can be done, and will always have an important place in history but it seems to me that the mire of government bureaucracy has made it unable to compete as it once could.
Not that I'm an authority on any of this, it's just my gut reaction.
> What's the point of a no hat policy anyway?
Historically, it has been considered rude to wear a hat indoors. That's where it got it's start.
Schools probably make a deal out of it as an expression of control over the students, but that doesn't change that it was at one point a universally accepted convention.
I run on a 1.5ghz athlon and a geforce ti4200.
Game runs stellar for me. Looks great, even though I had to shut the specular effects off. I seem to average around 60fps which is fine by me.
> maybe all the guys who choose to play as a female
> characters are in fact attracted to the strengths
> and perceived weaknesses of females
Not a bad guess, but you can hardly include "all" guys in such a claim.
I play female toons just for some variety in the game.. rank after rank of male characters gets dull. I also tend to go for the "ugly" races, whatever varient of halflings and gnomes the game in question implements.
So at least for me, it's more a quest for a bit of individuality. I don't try to act like I'm female, and no one around me has any misconceptions about the sex of who's behind the steering wheel.
> The highest uptime I've ever seen was about 101
> days; oddly all our changes happen right around
> then,
Not going to start a pissing contest for the trolls and be specific, but I've seen numerous machines that exceed that number, by a lot. It seems dependent on what they do and what kind of load they're put under.
Obviously a good UPS helps too.
In my experience, regular downtime is actually a good thing. In EVERY case where I've dealt with a machine that had a 3 digit uptime, as soon as it reboots and/or stays down for more than a few minutes, hardware dies. Considering such outages are often unplanned (and there's often many machines at once).. it makes a stressful situation much more so.
Frequently and routinely shutting machines down allows one to deal with these failures much more smoothly.
> Nortel has a nice program called CLIManager (use
r ac t.html
:)
> to be called CLImax), that allows you telnet into
> multiple passports and run commands.
Fermilab has available a tool called rgang that does (minus the output formatting) something like this:
http://fermitools.fnal.gov/abstracts/rgang/abst
We use it regularily on a cluster of 176 machines. It's biggest flaw is it tends to hang when one of the machines it encounters is down.
But it is free so I won't complain.
> How hard can it be to have a closed network for all coding purposes?
:p
Oddly enough, as obvious as this seems, people are actually quite resistant to it. I've worked at two software development houses, and while that's not a terribly accurate representation of the entire industry, they both had the exact same attitude: "No, we don't need the dev machines on a private network, we're fine like it is.".
At one of them, I suggested it as a solution in response to a similar situation; source got into the wrong hands. Even then they said they didn't want to do it, they preferred to rely on employee training and discipline.
Whether it's indifference or ignorance, who knows. Common sense isn't, I guess.
> "Hey...I guess we can't do this."
then: "I wonder if I can download the song off kazaa"
At which point he spends about 30 seconds searching for the song, which some more technologically clued in person has kindly made available.
Users don't grok shift keys and drivers and EULA's. They do grok kazaa however.
i have it on good authority that all the different names for space rocks ending up on earth were created as some sort of scientist inner circle challenge to confuse common men.
As we all know, the first attempt was in naming stone spikes that grow in caves, but unfortunatley many people actually learned what the proper terms were.
Names for space rocks is merely version 2.0.
That's always what I thought what TinyMUSH was created for.. bracket matching training.
5 years later and I can still count parenthesis with the best of 'em.
> There are of course still ways to get at the info
:)
> but they are almost infinitly more complex.
You mean like hitting "print screen" and pasting into a paint program?
> Actually, at 36,000 km from earth, objects take a
> day, not a year to complete a full orbit
That's a heck of a relief, I'd had to imagine what happened if the top of the elevator was stuck in a one year orbit and the bottom was forced to "orbit" at the speed the earth revolves.
I imagine it would end up being like cutting wet clay with a wire.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the moon was REALLY formed.
> But that's the problem with modern business
:)
> thinkers. It's not about providing a service and
> seeing if you can get paid for it.
Wasn't this the type of thinking that prompted the entire dotcom bubble?