I had a little trouble getting Apache BasicAuth to work on a new page last night. (Hey, it was late, I was tired....) Did I say to myself "Eh, nobody will hit this overnight, so I'll just come back and fix it in the morning"?
No. I stayed up and fixed it. There'd be no one to blame but myself if I hadn't.
Parent's link is to "Countdown," an interesting James Caan movie which was based on a novel, "The Pilgrim Project." Imagine the Apollo project fell so far behind the Russians that the US decided to roll all the dice. The Pilgrim Project would have sent up an unmanned "chuckwagon" with a year's worth of food and air, and used a refitted Mercury capsule to land ONE man on the moon... stranding him there until Apollo could come pick him up.
Y'know, that sort of "stunt" approach doesn't seem all that far removed from what we actually got. I get depressed every time I think about where we could have been by now... and we're still eating our seed corn.
The masks aren't connected to oxygen tanks or oxygen lines, BTW; they're connected to "oxygen generators." Pulling down on the mask pulls a pin and starts a chemical reaction, which is why they emphasize that bit in the demo; you don't pull the pin, no O2 for YOU.
And yes, "bullet depressurizes airliner" is BUSTED.
So far it's come up with "function not implemented" on all my Ubuntu Dapper LTS servers, which means most of my machines, but it did come up "Exploit gone!" on my 7.10 X64 and a couple of Debian 4.0 boxes.
Note that if you compile disable-vmsplice-if-exploitable.c on an X86 box you'll need to compile it again for any X86-64 boxes you have.
"If you do a double blind test with the direct signal from the turntable compared to the same through 16bit 44.1KHz digital ad/da conversion, people cannot tell the difference."
Well, of course not! You've run the warm, life-infused analog through a devil-spawn digital thingie, so of course it will become just as soulless as the evil MP3. ~
(Mike Doonesbury is holding up a lamp, which has an obvious microphone sticking out the top)
Mike: "Gee, Zonker, I bet this frame up really has you upset."
Zonker: "Yeah, Mike, you know me -- I get high on LIFE! And AMERICA!"
Guy wearing headphones: (thinks) "Oops...."
"sometimes I tap a phone number expecting to edit contact info and it makes an unexpected call."
That happened to me when I got a Treo. It actually puzzled me why I never ran into that with my Palm T|X. "Duh! The T|X can't MAKE phone calls." You add features, you also have to add some way to access them.
"If wireless solutions are able to deliver on their promises of high speeds with no usage limits,"
Excuse me? NO usage limits? At all? Even if you envision the wireless solution as a peer-to-peer cloud rather than a fix for the last mile issue, 'no usage limit' sounds unrealistic.
Assume that everyone who comes to the cloud brings excess capacity to the party. Assume that the cloud is given free rein to use the spectrum currently being wasted (IMHO) on broadcast TV and radio. Is even that going to be enough to sate everyone's demand for rich media?
When (not if) the cloud needs to connect to a backbone, there is certainly going to be a limit there.
If we're talking about service at a price that a mere mortal can afford I expect there will be limits, and they will be set low enough to pinch.
There's another story that should come to mind when AI researchers start committing suicide... "Press Enter []" from John Varley's short-story collection, Blue Champagne.
"when they're up for renewal we're moving them to a different registrar."
ARRRGH! NO! If you put it off "until it's up for renewal", you will be told with a sneer that "We don't allow transfers within six (days|weeks|months) of expiration. If you don't resub with us for another year, you can't transfer it -- AND our Domain Squatter Facilitation Dept. guarantees you will lose the domain."
You do not lose a penny by transferring it right now, as the new registrar will give you full credit for the time remaining at NSI. MOVE IT NOW! NOW!! NOW!!!
Saying that "sickle-cell protects against malaria" is a bit simplistic.
The "sickle-cell" malformation of red blood cells occurs when someone gets the trait from both mother and father. If you have the sickle-cell trait on one chromosome, you get resistance to malaria without developing sickle-cell anemia, and that is a much better result for the individual. It sucks when you get two copies of the gene, but having that resistance in the population is worth it, from a purely statistical (and thus evolutionary) point of view.
There is evidence that a similar situation exists regarding the genetic disease Tay-Sachs and bubonic plague. One copy of the gene is not a problem, but you need to watch that cousin-marrying.
bigpicture, may I make a correction? The Google slogan is not "do no evil." It's "don't BE evil."
I think it's an important distinction because one could argue that "do no evil" is an impossible standard to live up to. If, however, someone innocently did something, realized after the fact that it was evil, acknowledged it, and tried to make up for it, I would say they were not/being/ evil.
That whole "acknowledge it and try to make up for it" thing was conspicuously absent in the way Microsoft handled the monopoly trial. The post further up about the way IE's proprietary brokenness makes other browsers look "broken" is another good example.
Ah, but it does NOT forbid monopoly. It forbids abuse of your monopoly position to stifle would-be competitors. "Cutting off their air supply," to quote a relevant example.
"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."
Two guys from the East Coast were trying to decide whether to name the town "Portland" or "Boston," and the Portland (Maine) native won the coin toss. True story!
Ticks me off a bit that when I'm setting my time zone these days that it lists a bunch of cities instead of a nice simple old PST7PDT, and more so that I have to settle for "Los Angeles" instead of "Portland" -- but at least the weather widget for the OS X desktop knows Portland is in Oregon.
P.S. - Apizza Scholls rocks our world, but the roasted veggie plate at Ken's Artisan Pizza is damn fine, too.
I like that idea -- if we can figure out how to land someone on Venus and get back alive, a trip to Mars will be a cakewalk by comparison.
Earlier today I was idly musing about what we could use to "fix" Venus. Smacking it with Mars? That could mimic the Terra-Luna system pretty well. A bit wasteful, though, since Mars is almost usable as-is... perhaps we should reach a bit further out for our cueball. If we come up with technology that can reshape the orbit of Mars, it could swipe one of the major Jovian satellites.
But that's not in next year's budget, either. Dang it.
He was the last artist on the classic X-Men before they went on hiatus -- yes, folks, before the late Dave Cockrum and Len Wein brought them back, and before Chris Claremont, Cockrum, John Byrne and Terry Austin turned them into the hottest thing since Superman, the biggest prize puppy in the entire Marvel kennel had been cancelled.
Indeed, it's worth stressing why the penalty should be so severe. The guy positioned himself as a security expert, offering to protect his clients against this very sort of thing.
Gaining someone's trust with the intent to betray it is a particularly pernicious form of moral rot. It is called "embezzlement," and there is a reason it is viewed even more harshly than burglary or robbery under the law.
Losing property to a hostile stranger does not turn society upside down. Burglary (taking someone's property) is often considered rather petty, especially when the property owner is absent.
Robbery (taking property directly from someone) is more serious -- but even though there is an active component of threat, it can be impersonal: "Hand it over and nobody gets hurt." Robbery without violence might disrupt the victim's life, but the disruption might be only to the extent that he or she is reminded that none of us is an invulnerable superbeing.
Embezzling someone's assets invalidates their judgment and throws every decision they have ever made into question. It is psychologically devastating. When someone who has promised to protect you is instead the one who steals from you, he is undermining the basis of civilization itself.
Also, whenever you install the operating system (either because your hardware failed, or you hacked the OS and broke something, or even if you just bought a new mac), you have the option of plugging in your time machine backup hard drive and it will skip the entire setup procedure, booting you strait into the same machine you left off with, all your software already installed and all your documents where you left them.
Just as a data point -- I noticed the "restore from Time Machine" choice on the Leopard install, and as my MacBook was getting a little crowded at 50GB, I bumped it up to 120 and used Time Machine to do the restore.
Hardest part in the entire process was finding the itsy Torx driver needed to swap the caddy onto the new drive.
I was reading the review while the DVD was installing on my MacBook, and I think he nailed it. The changes to the Application folder icons (and so forth) are full of lose; but at least the damn' Calendar icon in the dock shows the right date now without having to launch the program!
Upon getting into Leopard, I was gobsmacked to find ALL of my local machines in the new Sidebar -- Windows, Linux and other Macs. Plus an Iomega networked hard drive that had required a driver disk to introduce itself to Linux and Windows XP. That's worth the price of admission right there; my wife rather frequently needs me to "do something" so her Mac can see a resource elsewhere on the network (usually the "something" involves an XP box).
Oh, Vista was able to find the Iomega, too, so let's call that one a draw.
One group could be called Friends of Ghosts, or FOG, for those who are sympathetic to the poor dear things, while their more skeptical counterparts can engage in Scientific Measurement of Ghosts, aka SMOG.
Dibs on the auburn-haired beauty in the leather catsuit.
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I had a little trouble getting Apache BasicAuth to work on a new page last night. (Hey, it was late, I was tired....) Did I say to myself "Eh, nobody will hit this overnight, so I'll just come back and fix it in the morning"?
No. I stayed up and fixed it. There'd be no one to blame but myself if I hadn't.
Parent's link is to "Countdown," an interesting James Caan movie which was based on a novel, "The Pilgrim Project." Imagine the Apollo project fell so far behind the Russians that the US decided to roll all the dice. The Pilgrim Project would have sent up an unmanned "chuckwagon" with a year's worth of food and air, and used a refitted Mercury capsule to land ONE man on the moon... stranding him there until Apollo could come pick him up.
Y'know, that sort of "stunt" approach doesn't seem all that far removed from what we actually got. I get depressed every time I think about where we could have been by now... and we're still eating our seed corn.
The masks aren't connected to oxygen tanks or oxygen lines, BTW; they're connected to "oxygen generators." Pulling down on the mask pulls a pin and starts a chemical reaction, which is why they emphasize that bit in the demo; you don't pull the pin, no O2 for YOU.
And yes, "bullet depressurizes airliner" is BUSTED.
So far it's come up with "function not implemented" on all my Ubuntu Dapper LTS servers, which means most of my machines, but it did come up "Exploit gone!" on my 7.10 X64 and a couple of Debian 4.0 boxes.
Note that if you compile disable-vmsplice-if-exploitable.c on an X86 box you'll need to compile it again for any X86-64 boxes you have.
Anyone notice how much McCain looks like Col. Tigh? Ron Paul tied him into knots with a single question in a recent debate.
Huckabee scares the hell out of me, not just because I'm a Heinlein fan.
"Nehemiah Scudder won the election in 2012. There was no election in 2016."
I'm with you -- Ron Paul, even if it's a write in.
"If you do a double blind test with the direct signal from the turntable compared to the same through 16bit 44.1KHz digital ad/da conversion, people cannot tell the difference."
Well, of course not! You've run the warm, life-infused analog through a devil-spawn digital thingie, so of course it will become just as soulless as the evil MP3. ~
Mike: "Gee, Zonker, I bet this frame up really has you upset."
Zonker: "Yeah, Mike, you know me -- I get high on LIFE! And AMERICA!"
Guy wearing headphones: (thinks) "Oops...."
"sometimes I tap a phone number expecting to edit contact info and it makes an unexpected call."
That happened to me when I got a Treo. It actually puzzled me why I never ran into that with my Palm T|X. "Duh! The T|X can't MAKE phone calls." You add features, you also have to add some way to access them.
"If wireless solutions are able to deliver on their promises of high speeds with no usage limits,"
Excuse me? NO usage limits? At all? Even if you envision the wireless solution as a peer-to-peer cloud rather than a fix for the last mile issue, 'no usage limit' sounds unrealistic.
Assume that everyone who comes to the cloud brings excess capacity to the party. Assume that the cloud is given free rein to use the spectrum currently being wasted (IMHO) on broadcast TV and radio. Is even that going to be enough to sate everyone's demand for rich media?
When (not if) the cloud needs to connect to a backbone, there is certainly going to be a limit there.
If we're talking about service at a price that a mere mortal can afford I expect there will be limits, and they will be set low enough to pinch.
"Because... ruining people's lives with lawsuits isn't equivalent to murder?"
I'd say it's close enough to make this an interesting topic of debate.
There's another story that should come to mind when AI researchers start committing suicide... "Press Enter []" from John Varley's short-story collection, Blue Champagne.
"when they're up for renewal we're moving them to a different registrar."
ARRRGH! NO! If you put it off "until it's up for renewal", you will be told with a sneer that "We don't allow transfers within six (days|weeks|months) of expiration. If you don't resub with us for another year, you can't transfer it -- AND our Domain Squatter Facilitation Dept. guarantees you will lose the domain."
You do not lose a penny by transferring it right now, as the new registrar will give you full credit for the time remaining at NSI. MOVE IT NOW! NOW!! NOW!!!
The "sickle-cell" malformation of red blood cells occurs when someone gets the trait from both mother and father. If you have the sickle-cell trait on one chromosome, you get resistance to malaria without developing sickle-cell anemia, and that is a much better result for the individual. It sucks when you get two copies of the gene, but having that resistance in the population is worth it, from a purely statistical (and thus evolutionary) point of view.
There is evidence that a similar situation exists regarding the genetic disease Tay-Sachs and bubonic plague. One copy of the gene is not a problem, but you need to watch that cousin-marrying.
bigpicture, may I make a correction? The Google slogan is not "do no evil." It's "don't BE evil."
/being/ evil.
I think it's an important distinction because one could argue that "do no evil" is an impossible standard to live up to. If, however, someone innocently did something, realized after the fact that it was evil, acknowledged it, and tried to make up for it, I would say they were not
That whole "acknowledge it and try to make up for it" thing was conspicuously absent in the way Microsoft handled the monopoly trial. The post further up about the way IE's proprietary brokenness makes other browsers look "broken" is another good example.
"if antitrust forbids monopoly abuse"
Ah, but it does NOT forbid monopoly. It forbids abuse of your monopoly position to stifle would-be competitors. "Cutting off their air supply," to quote a relevant example.
"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."
I have a fav'rite movie
It's called "Jurassic Park"
It has velociraptors
Eating lawyers in the dark
I'd like to watch it every day
And if you ask me why I'll say
"'cause Steven Spielberg has a way
With fossil dino D.N.A!"
The screenshot in TFA pretty clearly indicates the bot is masquerading as a male and is targeting women rather than men.
Somehow I find that idea even more disturbing.
Two guys from the East Coast were trying to decide whether to name the town "Portland" or "Boston," and the Portland (Maine) native won the coin toss. True story!
Ticks me off a bit that when I'm setting my time zone these days that it lists a bunch of cities instead of a nice simple old PST7PDT, and more so that I have to settle for "Los Angeles" instead of "Portland" -- but at least the weather widget for the OS X desktop knows Portland is in Oregon.
P.S. - Apizza Scholls rocks our world, but the roasted veggie plate at Ken's Artisan Pizza is damn fine, too.
I like that idea -- if we can figure out how to land someone on Venus and get back alive, a trip to Mars will be a cakewalk by comparison.
Earlier today I was idly musing about what we could use to "fix" Venus. Smacking it with Mars? That could mimic the Terra-Luna system pretty well. A bit wasteful, though, since Mars is almost usable as-is... perhaps we should reach a bit further out for our cueball. If we come up with technology that can reshape the orbit of Mars, it could swipe one of the major Jovian satellites.
But that's not in next year's budget, either. Dang it.
He was the last artist on the classic X-Men before they went on hiatus -- yes, folks, before the late Dave Cockrum and Len Wein brought them back, and before Chris Claremont, Cockrum, John Byrne and Terry Austin turned them into the hottest thing since Superman, the biggest prize puppy in the entire Marvel kennel had been cancelled.
Indeed, it's worth stressing why the penalty should be so severe. The guy positioned himself as a security expert, offering to protect his clients against this very sort of thing.
Gaining someone's trust with the intent to betray it is a particularly pernicious form of moral rot. It is called "embezzlement," and there is a reason it is viewed even more harshly than burglary or robbery under the law.
Losing property to a hostile stranger does not turn society upside down. Burglary (taking someone's property) is often considered rather petty, especially when the property owner is absent.
Robbery (taking property directly from someone) is more serious -- but even though there is an active component of threat, it can be impersonal: "Hand it over and nobody gets hurt." Robbery without violence might disrupt the victim's life, but the disruption might be only to the extent that he or she is reminded that none of us is an invulnerable superbeing.
Embezzling someone's assets invalidates their judgment and throws every decision they have ever made into question. It is psychologically devastating. When someone who has promised to protect you is instead the one who steals from you, he is undermining the basis of civilization itself.
Just as a data point -- I noticed the "restore from Time Machine" choice on the Leopard install, and as my MacBook was getting a little crowded at 50GB, I bumped it up to 120 and used Time Machine to do the restore.
Hardest part in the entire process was finding the itsy Torx driver needed to swap the caddy onto the new drive.
I was reading the review while the DVD was installing on my MacBook, and I think he nailed it. The changes to the Application folder icons (and so forth) are full of lose; but at least the damn' Calendar icon in the dock shows the right date now without having to launch the program!
Upon getting into Leopard, I was gobsmacked to find ALL of my local machines in the new Sidebar -- Windows, Linux and other Macs. Plus an Iomega networked hard drive that had required a driver disk to introduce itself to Linux and Windows XP. That's worth the price of admission right there; my wife rather frequently needs me to "do something" so her Mac can see a resource elsewhere on the network (usually the "something" involves an XP box).
Oh, Vista was able to find the Iomega, too, so let's call that one a draw.
One group could be called Friends of Ghosts, or FOG, for those who are sympathetic to the poor dear things, while their more skeptical counterparts can engage in Scientific Measurement of Ghosts, aka SMOG.
Dibs on the auburn-haired beauty in the leather catsuit.