Depends on your dictionary. You'll get a different answer using the official Scrabble Tournament Word List from 2006 (the most recent one, with annoying new additions like "za" and "qi"), from which is derived the Official Scrabble Dictionary (which lacks the long words and "expunged" words).
The TWL06 answer is sweaterdresses, which clocks in at one letter longer than devertebrated and two letters past stewardesses.
And the command needed is egrep -i '^[qwertasdfgzxcvb]{12,}$' twl06.txt
You're referring to an issue that was solved earlier by altering the User-Agent string to reflect that it was a Debian fork, and you didn't mention that the main reason for this was back-porting later Firefox security fixes to older Firefox versions. The issue at hand is that the Firefox logo has a branding license (see grandparent post) which is incompatible with Free Software licenses and thus it cannot be wholly released as Free Software. (If I recall correctly, the branding license is more clearly incompatible in small part due a policy change on these forks, amplifying the logo issue that had been largely ignored up until that point).
This issue surfaces with Debian because they, like Stallman (but unlike Shuttleworth for Ubuntu), will not make compromises in their definition of Free Software. The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) are not compatible with the Firefox branding licenses, and that will not change in the future (DFSG is also not compatible with the GFDLv2, another non-code license, which causes similar issues).
You don't get into a good school like MIT with just straight-A's and perfect test scores. You need to establish that you're a leader with real character and motivation. Your extra-curricular activities and your choice of electives speak highly here.
As to what to do, that's for her to decide. She merely needs to be exposed to the options. Encourage her to follow whatever path she likes, but to consider schools with good engineering/math/science options for her to be exposed to later.
To more directly answer your question, psychology and medicine come to mind, as do many of the tech-based artistic fields. I recall only a few years ago that the head of Northeastern University's multimedia program (within the art school rather than the computer science school) was noting that there was a great deal of scripting and other coding skills being employed by his students for their movies. The natural next step was a collection of dual-majors trickling in, marrying Computer Science with Multimedia, Digital Art, Music Technology, and Game Design (which is still in the final approval stages).
But really, that's not important. The "right question" to ask her is: "what do you want to do, and what interests do you have right now?" It's completely normal for her to have no idea. That simply means that the college she chooses must be versatile in many directions, including where she excels by the numbers AND where she is interested (or may be interested). The point here is that you should not tell her what she should do. Just open a few doors.
Re:There is another variable (i.e. I call BS, YMMV
on
Fewer Shuffles Suffice
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Riffle shuffling is "professional-grade" in that it is the most thorough, and it is standard in the States. Throughout Asia and other parts, the "Hindu shuffle," which is very similar to the overhand method, is the most prevalent (as explained at WikiPedia:Shuffling#Hindu shuffle).
Most of the Asians and Australians I've played with actually use Hindu rather than overhand, so I'd guess that's what you saw. The difference is in the delivery of the cards from one pile to the other; in overhand, you're dropping them from one stack to the other (so the hand holding the original stack is doing all the action), whereas in Hindu, the action is in your free hand, which takes the cards from the main stack and slaps them back in a different position. This is typically done horizontally whereas overhand can be done in almost any position (usually at an almost vertical angle to use gravity).
Hmm, that's a better description than on Wikipedia. I'll be right back...
There is another variable (i.e. I call BS, YMMV)
on
Fewer Shuffles Suffice
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I've played far more than my share of cards, from CCGs and other proprietary games to standard 4-suit 52-card playing cards (learning to shuffle 200-card decks in Magic:TG before we discovered that a 60 card deck was optimal sure made me good at shuffling!), and let me say this: some people shuffle better than others.
Quality of shuffling varies widely; If I concentrate, I can get a clean broken-in deck to shuffle perfectly alternating cards from each half (though this is undesirable as it is not random). On the other end of the spectrum, many people shuffle very large chunks alternating, which is only as random as the cards are clean (which is to say, usually not very random).
Methods of shuffling also vary. There is the standard "Riffle" shuffle that was probably used in this study, there is overhand shuffling (taking small piles of cards from one or both sides of the deck and assembling them in a different order elsewhere), and there are several other methods. Because my riffle can sometimes be too precise, I will actually alternate riffle and overhand shuffles, performing three of each when I shuffle a deck.
In Magic: The Gathering, it is common to table-shuffle, which is essentially dealing out the cards into a set number of piles (usually 4-6 as they each divide a 60 card deck evenly, thus letting you ensure the cards are all there). This assures absolutely no clumping of dirty cards. Since it isn't very random, it should be followed by proper shuffling. (M:TG tournament rules now require three riffle shuffles since some people insist upon table-shuffling to preserve their expensive cards.) I use this method when dealing with dirty standard cards, too.
The WikiPedia page on Shuffling is actually amazingly informative, covering different shuffling methods, fake shuffle tricks (for magic tricks or cheating), shuffle-tracking (for gamblers), and far more math than the article linked in this sciencenews.org article. Give it a gander.
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/packagename-version --mandir=/usr/local/stow/packagename-version/share/man && make && make install && cd/usr/local/stow && stow packagename-version
(mandir is optional, but it ensures you don't have to fight between/usr/local/man and/usr/local/share/man.) This is specifically useful because you can use ls or find to see what is provided by the package (just use the stow dir), and far more importantly, you can completely remove a package later (say for an upgrade or replacement).
That's not what screen is for. I use BOTH screen and mrxvt (although anybody not attached to mrxvt but liking the idea of tabs might want to try xfce4-terminal or gnome-terminal or konsole, all of which have tabs plus freaking UTF-8 support).
Screen really shines across SSH. You only need one ssh connection if it results in a screen session. I've got screen -r >/dev/null 2>&1 in my startup scripts (~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc) on all the servers I use. If it doesn't put me in a screen session, I try to figure out if the server has rebooted (in which case I start a new screen session) or if I'm already connected elsewhere (in which case I manually run screen -x).
# colored/pretty directory listings if uname -s |grep BSD >/dev/null then # we're in BSD export LSCOLORS="exgxfxDacxBaBaCaCaeaEa" # match GNU color scheme alias ls='ls -phG' else # we've got GNU alias ls='ls -ph --color=auto' alias l.='ls -A -I"[^.]*"' # show dot-files (only) fi alias ll='ls -l' # long-listing
# grep with color (green instead of red), w/out breaking non-GNU grep export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto' GREP_COLOR='1;32'
# show a file (or stdin) w/out hash comments alias nocom='sed -e "/^[^#]/!d" -e "s/[ ]*$//"'
alias cdo='cd "$OLDPWD"' # could also do cdo='cd -' but that creates output
# show a website's headers alias whead='wget -q --save-headers -O - $1 |sed "0,/^[^A-Za-z0-9]*$/!d"'
# see also my utility shell scripts at http://khopis.com/hacking.html
Don't most X11 implementations block remote access these days? IIRC, even with a disabled firewall, any GDM-driven X11 session will not be listening (for non-localhost) on TCP port 6000 (display:0 ).
I imagine you could do it trivially with X11 forwarding via SSH; use xhost +localhost on the desktop and then on the laptop, run ssh -L6100:localhost:6000 thecomputername in one terminal and x2x localhost:100 -west in another.
Isn't this a simple issue of isolating a few "clean" networks and essentially NAT'ing them, denying access to any external address (at the BGP level, the way Sprint recently blocked Cogent)? Anybody coming in from elsewhere will have to VPN into some time-sensitive opening (see below). Done and done.
Time-sensitive opening: create a giant honeynet on the entry-way IP blocks which host the VPN. The VPN firmware/software would determine which IP:port to connect to with one-time "password" (OTP) generators like SecureID... hell, you could even use the physical SecureID keychain for this part, thus gaining two-factor authentication. Connecting to the wrong one results in getting blocked by the entire VPN network for 10 minutes. Too many failed authentications on a OTP generator will result in that generator being revoked or frozen, just like your online bank account.
How does this not solve the problem? You're relatively immune to DDoS attacks, a strong enough level of security ensures only privileged accounts gain access, and facilitating access lists should be as secure as their physical equivalents.
Sorry, "emergency voice mail" sticks out as a very bad idea.
In an emergency, when somebody leaves you an voice mail, you immediately receive it, knowing that it's an emergency voice mail. You are therefore going to want to hear it ASAP. This involves actually dialing a call rather than pressing any button to answer the phone. While answering takes almost no effort and can easily be done without looking away from the road, checking voice mail requires reading the cell phone display and then pressing specific buttons to dial voice mail and enter the password.
If I've learned anything from driving with my cell phone, it's that reading the display and calling are far more dangerous than answering a call, especially if you have an easily accessible headset or speaker phone button. (My friends have learned that I don't know who they are when I answer in the car, since I don't usually look at the phone.)
Of course, the simple solution is to let the user press any button to acknowledge the voice mail and then play it on speaker phone unless a headset is active (all without prompts or passwords/unlocks), but I doubt they've thought that out.
srm and shred aren't assured security if you're on a journaled filesystem. More importantly, if the Flash application is rooting through your filesystem looking for deleted data, "secure deletion" should be applied to Flash itself, not just its cache. That would be outrageous.
My point is that you're merely trying to delete cookies to prevent user tracking. Secure deletion on your physical disk is not needed unless you're looking at a very special kind of content.... Using srm or shred here would be like running your newspaper through the shredder because you never know who might be looking for the smudge marks that indicate what you actually read.
Whoa, that's a Diebold system... Diebold is that company whose name turns up on almost any news item related to voter fraud (and similar corruption) in the US, which you can see more clearly at sites like Black Box Voting.org. I didn't know that there was an option for flashing those systems, already purchased by many municipalities, with a friendlier configuration (Free Software should be mandatory for processes like this which can only function with FULL transparency). This might be a viable out for many a local government.
However... the same problem presented by Diebold's bad code is presented to reprogrammable systems like these. Therefore, as Richard Stallman (among many, many others) advocates, you still need a physical paper trail for FULL accountability. You need those in order to provide the transparency needed to investigate allegations of misconduct, and frankly, despite the increased cost, this is necessary for the assurance of freedom and democracy that it gives. We can't afford not to.
KHTML was in KDE, which happens to use Qt. It wasn't terribly well written (though it was better than gecko at the time Apple forked it), and it wasn't very portable. WebKit is really beefed up, being far better across the board. Qt re-integrated it so that it would be included at the framework level rather than the library level, so you can do far more with it than you can with KHTML or standard webkit.
toy around on a cheaper qtopia device, or just play with Qt on your workstation. when the time comes that it becomes cheaper, you'll be ready.... or you could spend even more and get an iPhone or Andriod phone.
What about Qt? Qt is about the same age and maturity as Linux, with Qtopia having been out there for far longer than iPhone, Android, or OpenMoko. As of August 2006, "there are more than four million Qtopia-based mobile phones in the market including mobile phones from Motorola, ZTE and Cellon" (from the press release announcing the Greenphone).
Qt is old as dirt by today's standards, being one of the most stable and robust frameworks out there, including its embedded platform (which implements its own windowing system to compete with X11 or Windows). The main "problem" with it is that it was never pimped out like Sun's Java was, so nobody has ever heard of it.
OpenMoko, written with Linux, GNU, and GTK+ on X11, has its telephony portions mostly written from scratch. It's so horribly immature that the Qtopia telephony software has been back-ported to Qt/X11 and now ships standard on OpenMoko devices. Truly a testament to Qt's robustness.
With Qt 4.4, Trolltech (now Nokia) put Apple's WebKit into the Qt framework (directly!), so making a webkit-based browser in Qt is a pretty trivial pursuit, as is rendering HTML and JavaScript in any standard app. Nobody seems to realize that this puts Qt/Embedded that much further ahead. Prepare to be stunned as Qt/Embedded quickly dominates the arena that everybody currently assumes is in contention between Google Android and Apple iPhone.
Oh, and Qt/Embedded is GPL'd software. Everything is open, your privacy can be assured, and YOU have control of your own phone. The way it should be. Just try and get that from Google or Apple. Hah!
The link as provided above seems to get stuck in a microsoft passport redirector for me. That might be because I'm super-paranoid and I've disabled cookies, referrer ID, and lots of javascript, but it's certainly a tracking link that pushes through Microsoft's servers for that exclusive reason.
I'm guessing a reporter saw 500% and accidentally read it as 500x. Even a 500% (5x) increase from the current ~10% efficiency we have now would be huge, but with the recently coined Photovoltaic Moore's Law, I'd believe it. Maybe this is done by several layers each catching 10% (or less) of the energy?
The effective surface area of an object's three-dimensional "face" vastly exceeds the surface area of another object's two-dimensional face. This means you can actually absorb more of the sun's light. However, only so much light shines in any given area, and it's still a ray from above, so shadows should start to affect this negatively at a certain point, so while this could certainly give a boost, it's not going to do much (certainly not 500x!).
Recall that the telco immunities in the latest FISA passage only affect the telcos, not the government. If they're bold enough, the telcos may be able to help push this forward (since they're no longer able to be held liable, all this does it make their customers more comfortable by earning back their trust). Telcos likely have tons of documents they could publish (without invading customer privacy), teasing the courts with what must be loads more that could be secured with the appropriate warrants.
As to suing the government, I believe you actually have to petition for the right to sue... which may be problematic when there's such obvious intent to keep this under wraps. I'm sticking with my pessimistic intuition that this won't come to light until all the relevant parties have retired or been removed from office (I hope I'm wrong... heck, there's just barely enough time for an impeachment process, too!). Since this hurdle appears to have already been passed, there must be something resembling support -- hark, did the Dems grow a backbone?
The IR-emitting diodes (LEDs) used for Sunglasses that hide your face from cameras (as blogged by Bruce Schneier in July) could easily be applied to your license plates for the same effect.
The legality of such things is another question altogether; it could be a circumvention device for traffic/toll cameras, possibly falling into DMCA territory, but to my knowledge, only blue lights and blinking lights are at all regulated... in fact, you're required to have your plates lit up - why not make it a light that is more intense to the infrared spectrum?.
What are you talking about? Google doesn't use server-grade solutions; just a massive array of desktop-grade components, complete with people at the ready to deal with failures. On their scale, it's cheaper. Of course, this means there there are people in their data centers.
The profitability of raiding such a data center is not in reselling the goods, but in the ransom; with the threat of down-time and the lives of the operators and sysadmins, there's some serious liability to be had, and for the pirates, serious cash.
It would be cheaper for Google to BUY a third-world nation, secure an protective agreement with some larger neighbor, and install the needed facilities. Of course, Google could do the same kind of agreement with nations near their barges, but the patrolling isn't as cost-effective.
AIX has some extremely snazzy LVM tools which fit so well into the system the sometimes people confuse JFS with LVM. JFS can grow but not shrink. However,
because IBM's LVM rig is integrated so perfectly, any administrative action that would require more space simply calls on LVM to make the partition bigger and JFS to grow the filesystem to fill the partition. You don't really need to go in the downward direction.
... unless you're using RPM-based tools or custom tools and you resized the partitions to sane sizes that don't see so sane when you're out of space...
I use JFS primarily (on Linux)... my response to this article was something along the lines of "whoa, ReiserFS can shrink?!"
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on your dictionary. You'll get a different answer using the official Scrabble Tournament Word List from 2006 (the most recent one, with annoying new additions like "za" and "qi"), from which is derived the Official Scrabble Dictionary (which lacks the long words and "expunged" words).
The TWL06 answer is sweaterdresses, which clocks in at one letter longer than devertebrated and two letters past stewardesses.
And the command needed is egrep -i '^[qwertasdfgzxcvb]{12,}$' twl06.txt
You're referring to an issue that was solved earlier by altering the User-Agent string to reflect that it was a Debian fork, and you didn't mention that the main reason for this was back-porting later Firefox security fixes to older Firefox versions. The issue at hand is that the Firefox logo has a branding license (see grandparent post) which is incompatible with Free Software licenses and thus it cannot be wholly released as Free Software. (If I recall correctly, the branding license is more clearly incompatible in small part due a policy change on these forks, amplifying the logo issue that had been largely ignored up until that point).
This issue surfaces with Debian because they, like Stallman (but unlike Shuttleworth for Ubuntu), will not make compromises in their definition of Free Software. The Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) are not compatible with the Firefox branding licenses, and that will not change in the future (DFSG is also not compatible with the GFDLv2, another non-code license, which causes similar issues).
You don't get into a good school like MIT with just straight-A's and perfect test scores. You need to establish that you're a leader with real character and motivation. Your extra-curricular activities and your choice of electives speak highly here.
As to what to do, that's for her to decide. She merely needs to be exposed to the options. Encourage her to follow whatever path she likes, but to consider schools with good engineering/math/science options for her to be exposed to later.
To more directly answer your question, psychology and medicine come to mind, as do many of the tech-based artistic fields. I recall only a few years ago that the head of Northeastern University's multimedia program (within the art school rather than the computer science school) was noting that there was a great deal of scripting and other coding skills being employed by his students for their movies. The natural next step was a collection of dual-majors trickling in, marrying Computer Science with Multimedia, Digital Art, Music Technology, and Game Design (which is still in the final approval stages).
But really, that's not important. The "right question" to ask her is: "what do you want to do, and what interests do you have right now?" It's completely normal for her to have no idea. That simply means that the college she chooses must be versatile in many directions, including where she excels by the numbers AND where she is interested (or may be interested). The point here is that you should not tell her what she should do. Just open a few doors.
Riffle shuffling is "professional-grade" in that it is the most thorough, and it is standard in the States. Throughout Asia and other parts, the "Hindu shuffle," which is very similar to the overhand method, is the most prevalent (as explained at WikiPedia:Shuffling#Hindu shuffle).
Most of the Asians and Australians I've played with actually use Hindu rather than overhand, so I'd guess that's what you saw. The difference is in the delivery of the cards from one pile to the other; in overhand, you're dropping them from one stack to the other (so the hand holding the original stack is doing all the action), whereas in Hindu, the action is in your free hand, which takes the cards from the main stack and slaps them back in a different position. This is typically done horizontally whereas overhand can be done in almost any position (usually at an almost vertical angle to use gravity).
Hmm, that's a better description than on Wikipedia. I'll be right back...
I've played far more than my share of cards, from CCGs and other proprietary games to standard 4-suit 52-card playing cards (learning to shuffle 200-card decks in Magic:TG before we discovered that a 60 card deck was optimal sure made me good at shuffling!), and let me say this: some people shuffle better than others.
Quality of shuffling varies widely; If I concentrate, I can get a clean broken-in deck to shuffle perfectly alternating cards from each half (though this is undesirable as it is not random). On the other end of the spectrum, many people shuffle very large chunks alternating, which is only as random as the cards are clean (which is to say, usually not very random).
Methods of shuffling also vary. There is the standard "Riffle" shuffle that was probably used in this study, there is overhand shuffling (taking small piles of cards from one or both sides of the deck and assembling them in a different order elsewhere), and there are several other methods. Because my riffle can sometimes be too precise, I will actually alternate riffle and overhand shuffles, performing three of each when I shuffle a deck.
In Magic: The Gathering, it is common to table-shuffle, which is essentially dealing out the cards into a set number of piles (usually 4-6 as they each divide a 60 card deck evenly, thus letting you ensure the cards are all there). This assures absolutely no clumping of dirty cards. Since it isn't very random, it should be followed by proper shuffling. (M:TG tournament rules now require three riffle shuffles since some people insist upon table-shuffling to preserve their expensive cards.) I use this method when dealing with dirty standard cards, too.
The WikiPedia page on Shuffling is actually amazingly informative, covering different shuffling methods, fake shuffle tricks (for magic tricks or cheating), shuffle-tracking (for gamblers), and far more math than the article linked in this sciencenews.org article. Give it a gander.
GNU Stow is the king of DIY software packaging.
(mandir is optional, but it ensures you don't have to fight between /usr/local/man and /usr/local/share/man.) This is specifically useful because you can use ls or find to see what is provided by the package (just use the stow dir), and far more importantly, you can completely remove a package later (say for an upgrade or replacement).
That's not what screen is for. I use BOTH screen and mrxvt (although anybody not attached to mrxvt but liking the idea of tabs might want to try xfce4-terminal or gnome-terminal or konsole, all of which have tabs plus freaking UTF-8 support).
Screen really shines across SSH. You only need one ssh connection if it results in a screen session. I've got screen -r >/dev/null 2>&1 in my startup scripts (~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc) on all the servers I use. If it doesn't put me in a screen session, I try to figure out if the server has rebooted (in which case I start a new screen session) or if I'm already connected elsewhere (in which case I manually run screen -x ).
# a limited selection of my simplest shell aliases, w/out commercial UNIX clauses
# search running processes (like "psl firefox")
alias psl='ps auxww |egrep'
# colored/pretty directory listings
if uname -s |grep BSD >/dev/null
then # we're in BSD
export LSCOLORS="exgxfxDacxBaBaCaCaeaEa" # match GNU color scheme
alias ls='ls -phG'
else # we've got GNU
alias ls='ls -ph --color=auto'
alias l.='ls -A -I"[^.]*"' # show dot-files (only)
fi
alias ll='ls -l' # long-listing
# grep with color (green instead of red), w/out breaking non-GNU grep
export GREP_OPTIONS='--color=auto' GREP_COLOR='1;32'
# show a file (or stdin) w/out hash comments
alias nocom='sed -e "/^[^#]/!d" -e "s/[ ]*$//"'
alias cdo='cd "$OLDPWD"' # could also do cdo='cd -' but that creates output
# show a website's headers
alias whead='wget -q --save-headers -O - $1 |sed "0,/^[^A-Za-z0-9]*$/!d"'
# see also my utility shell scripts at http://khopis.com/hacking.html
Don't most X11 implementations block remote access these days? IIRC, even with a disabled firewall, any GDM-driven X11 session will not be listening (for non-localhost) on TCP port 6000 (display :0 ).
I imagine you could do it trivially with X11 forwarding via SSH; use xhost +localhost on the desktop and then on the laptop, run ssh -L6100:localhost:6000 thecomputername in one terminal and x2x localhost:100 -west in another.
I use "cd $OLDPWD" over "cd -" every time. Why? Because it doesn't echo the damn path back to me.
alias cdo='cd $OLDPWD'
Isn't this a simple issue of isolating a few "clean" networks and essentially NAT'ing them, denying access to any external address (at the BGP level, the way Sprint recently blocked Cogent)? Anybody coming in from elsewhere will have to VPN into some time-sensitive opening (see below). Done and done.
Time-sensitive opening: create a giant honeynet on the entry-way IP blocks which host the VPN. The VPN firmware/software would determine which IP:port to connect to with one-time "password" (OTP) generators like SecureID ... hell, you could even use the physical SecureID keychain for this part, thus gaining two-factor authentication. Connecting to the wrong one results in getting blocked by the entire VPN network for 10 minutes. Too many failed authentications on a OTP generator will result in that generator being revoked or frozen, just like your online bank account.
How does this not solve the problem? You're relatively immune to DDoS attacks, a strong enough level of security ensures only privileged accounts gain access, and facilitating access lists should be as secure as their physical equivalents.
Sorry, "emergency voice mail" sticks out as a very bad idea.
In an emergency, when somebody leaves you an voice mail, you immediately receive it, knowing that it's an emergency voice mail. You are therefore going to want to hear it ASAP. This involves actually dialing a call rather than pressing any button to answer the phone. While answering takes almost no effort and can easily be done without looking away from the road, checking voice mail requires reading the cell phone display and then pressing specific buttons to dial voice mail and enter the password.
If I've learned anything from driving with my cell phone, it's that reading the display and calling are far more dangerous than answering a call, especially if you have an easily accessible headset or speaker phone button. (My friends have learned that I don't know who they are when I answer in the car, since I don't usually look at the phone.)
Of course, the simple solution is to let the user press any button to acknowledge the voice mail and then play it on speaker phone unless a headset is active (all without prompts or passwords/unlocks), but I doubt they've thought that out.
srm and shred aren't assured security if you're on a journaled filesystem. More importantly, if the Flash application is rooting through your filesystem looking for deleted data, "secure deletion" should be applied to Flash itself, not just its cache. That would be outrageous.
My point is that you're merely trying to delete cookies to prevent user tracking. Secure deletion on your physical disk is not needed unless you're looking at a very special kind of content. ... Using srm or shred here would be like running your newspaper through the shredder because you never know who might be looking for the smudge marks that indicate what you actually read.
Whoa, that's a Diebold system ... Diebold is that company whose name turns up on almost any news item related to voter fraud (and similar corruption) in the US, which you can see more clearly at sites like Black Box Voting.org. I didn't know that there was an option for flashing those systems, already purchased by many municipalities, with a friendlier configuration (Free Software should be mandatory for processes like this which can only function with FULL transparency). This might be a viable out for many a local government.
However ... the same problem presented by Diebold's bad code is presented to reprogrammable systems like these. Therefore, as Richard Stallman (among many, many others) advocates, you still need a physical paper trail for FULL accountability. You need those in order to provide the transparency needed to investigate allegations of misconduct, and frankly, despite the increased cost, this is necessary for the assurance of freedom and democracy that it gives. We can't afford not to.
Yes, I do that on Linux regularly.
Just add this to your crontab:
0 * * * * rm -rf ~/.macromedia ~/.adobe
(If you actually use their other products, you might want to be more specific, like ~/.adobe/Flash_Player)
KHTML was in KDE, which happens to use Qt. It wasn't terribly well written (though it was better than gecko at the time Apple forked it), and it wasn't very portable. WebKit is really beefed up, being far better across the board. Qt re-integrated it so that it would be included at the framework level rather than the library level, so you can do far more with it than you can with KHTML or standard webkit.
toy around on a cheaper qtopia device, or just play with Qt on your workstation. when the time comes that it becomes cheaper, you'll be ready. ... or you could spend even more and get an iPhone or Andriod phone.
What about Qt? Qt is about the same age and maturity as Linux, with Qtopia having been out there for far longer than iPhone, Android, or OpenMoko. As of August 2006, "there are more than four million Qtopia-based mobile phones in the market including mobile phones from Motorola, ZTE and Cellon" (from the press release announcing the Greenphone).
Qt is old as dirt by today's standards, being one of the most stable and robust frameworks out there, including its embedded platform (which implements its own windowing system to compete with X11 or Windows). The main "problem" with it is that it was never pimped out like Sun's Java was, so nobody has ever heard of it.
OpenMoko, written with Linux, GNU, and GTK+ on X11, has its telephony portions mostly written from scratch. It's so horribly immature that the Qtopia telephony software has been back-ported to Qt/X11 and now ships standard on OpenMoko devices. Truly a testament to Qt's robustness.
With Qt 4.4, Trolltech (now Nokia) put Apple's WebKit into the Qt framework (directly!), so making a webkit-based browser in Qt is a pretty trivial pursuit, as is rendering HTML and JavaScript in any standard app. Nobody seems to realize that this puts Qt/Embedded that much further ahead. Prepare to be stunned as Qt/Embedded quickly dominates the arena that everybody currently assumes is in contention between Google Android and Apple iPhone.
Oh, and Qt/Embedded is GPL'd software. Everything is open, your privacy can be assured, and YOU have control of your own phone. The way it should be. Just try and get that from Google or Apple. Hah!
The link as provided above seems to get stuck in a microsoft passport redirector for me. That might be because I'm super-paranoid and I've disabled cookies, referrer ID, and lots of javascript, but it's certainly a tracking link that pushes through Microsoft's servers for that exclusive reason.
You're better off clicking on http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10532858?source=most_viewed instead.
I'm guessing a reporter saw 500% and accidentally read it as 500x. Even a 500% (5x) increase from the current ~10% efficiency we have now would be huge, but with the recently coined Photovoltaic Moore's Law, I'd believe it. Maybe this is done by several layers each catching 10% (or less) of the energy?
The effective surface area of an object's three-dimensional "face" vastly exceeds the surface area of another object's two-dimensional face. This means you can actually absorb more of the sun's light. However, only so much light shines in any given area, and it's still a ray from above, so shadows should start to affect this negatively at a certain point, so while this could certainly give a boost, it's not going to do much (certainly not 500x!).
I could have sworn I read something about 3-d solar panels a while ago, but nobody else seems to have. There seem to be tons of hits searching for 3-d solar cell, many of which are from 2007.
Recall that the telco immunities in the latest FISA passage only affect the telcos, not the government. If they're bold enough, the telcos may be able to help push this forward (since they're no longer able to be held liable, all this does it make their customers more comfortable by earning back their trust). Telcos likely have tons of documents they could publish (without invading customer privacy), teasing the courts with what must be loads more that could be secured with the appropriate warrants.
As to suing the government, I believe you actually have to petition for the right to sue ... which may be problematic when there's such obvious intent to keep this under wraps. I'm sticking with my pessimistic intuition that this won't come to light until all the relevant parties have retired or been removed from office (I hope I'm wrong ... heck, there's just barely enough time for an impeachment process, too!). Since this hurdle appears to have already been passed, there must be something resembling support -- hark, did the Dems grow a backbone?
The IR-emitting diodes (LEDs) used for Sunglasses that hide your face from cameras (as blogged by Bruce Schneier in July) could easily be applied to your license plates for the same effect.
The legality of such things is another question altogether; it could be a circumvention device for traffic/toll cameras, possibly falling into DMCA territory, but to my knowledge, only blue lights and blinking lights are at all regulated ... in fact, you're required to have your plates lit up - why not make it a light that is more intense to the infrared spectrum?.
What are you talking about? Google doesn't use server-grade solutions; just a massive array of desktop-grade components, complete with people at the ready to deal with failures. On their scale, it's cheaper. Of course, this means there there are people in their data centers.
The profitability of raiding such a data center is not in reselling the goods, but in the ransom; with the threat of down-time and the lives of the operators and sysadmins, there's some serious liability to be had, and for the pirates, serious cash.
It would be cheaper for Google to BUY a third-world nation, secure an protective agreement with some larger neighbor, and install the needed facilities. Of course, Google could do the same kind of agreement with nations near their barges, but the patrolling isn't as cost-effective.
Ooh, good to know! thanks, I'll bookmark this thead.
AIX has some extremely snazzy LVM tools which fit so well into the system the sometimes people confuse JFS with LVM. JFS can grow but not shrink. However, because IBM's LVM rig is integrated so perfectly, any administrative action that would require more space simply calls on LVM to make the partition bigger and JFS to grow the filesystem to fill the partition. You don't really need to go in the downward direction.
... unless you're using RPM-based tools or custom tools and you resized the partitions to sane sizes that don't see so sane when you're out of space...
I use JFS primarily (on Linux) ... my response to this article was something along the lines of "whoa, ReiserFS can shrink?!"