Sun does not produce laptop SPARC systems. It hasn't produced a portable system since 1993 or so. Tadpole may still produce them, but they're not Sun either.
Having just been through an attempt at getting my Rage 128GL based All-in-Wonder working correctly with OpenBSD/Xfree86 on a VIA Apollo based board, I beg to differ. Between that and Win98/VIA DMA drivers/DirectCrash 8, I've been through driver hell. All because I want to drop out of OBSD once in a while and play M$ Train Simulator. (I know...I know... But I just can't kick the habit...)
I bought an cheesy no-name GeForce2 MX board, and it just worked. Bye bye ATI... Never again.
Let's start with the automatic assumption that China and Russia are the fountainheads of evil, and that America and Britain are the epitomies of good. Britain and American....
Assumption? In this example, it's a fact that Iraq gets it's millitary hardware and support from China and Russia. It's indisputable. Those countries have no beef with Iraq, and Iraq is one of their better customers. I made absolutely no character judgement of Russia or China. Both have struggling economies, and are profitably taking advantage of the situation. I'll reserve the "fountainhead of evil" category for Iraq, a country with a meglomaniac for a leader who continues to reasearch weapons of mass destruction and has a penchant for using them. Iraq also happens to be a major target of US spy-sats these days. I thought the example was relevant to current world events, and explained the technical reasoning that seems irrelevant to the U.N. whiners. Do you have proof otherwise? Please confine your answer to the subjects of a technical discourse of spy-sat operations, and sources of Iraqi military hardware and intelligence.
Britain and American....let's see...these are the same countries that have done their best to divest their citizens of any thin shred of privacy, right?
And you assume I agree with the privacy policies of Britan and the US? In fact, I don't. Thanks for asking.
And if you think paying someone $10 a month for work that your own country's citizens wouldn't do for $10/hour *isn't* economic imperialism, you need to read a few econ books.
And you assume I agree with the policy of shipping manufacturing jobs overseas? Most of the time, I don't. But thanks for asking... BTW, how much would those people be making if those factories had stayed in the US or UK? I'll guess somewhat less than $10 a month... I may be wrong.
To be honest, I'm shoked that you have the gall to complain about third world countries....with imperialist tendencies. Does Philippines, Panama, Hawaii, California mean anything to you? Study your own history first, before mouthing off about imperialism. Or is what Americans did in those territories ok because it was so long ago?
Go ahead... Be shocked. I suggest upping the voltage a bit.
I cannot change the past. I refuse to be held responsible for events that occured before my existance. The US has as checkered a history as any other country. But I can oppose imperialism here and now, and I do so. Thanks for asking... Oh... BTW - That was called "pre-judging". It's where you have some picture of what I am in your mind, and you refuse to employ logic and allow facts to modify that picture, or you gloss over your lack of knowlege about me so that you can be comfortable and secure in your little ideological corner. It's a major source of human misery throughout history. Please get help.
You're wrong about the other thing, too. Much of the world DID learn alot from WWI and WWII. It was America that DIDN'T.
Yea... Iraq displayed how much they learned from WWI & WWII when they invaded Kuwait. Then there's all the countries ruled by strong dictators that fall and end up plunging back into the stone age, like Somalia, Congo... China routinely threatens Taiwan, over a civil war 50 years in the past. I could go on, but it would quickly wander OT. I suppose you had some specific thing in mind? I'm all ears. Flame away. What thing did the rest of the world learn in WWI and WWII that America didn't? And I don't want to hear about methods for effecient rubble removal, and you might take note of the post WWII US policy of rebuilding former enemies. A policy which to my knowlege was unique, and had no historical precident.
And, I suppose, you think that America is just the country to do that, don't you?
Well, I'm certainly not going to sit on my ass and wait for you to pick up the torch!
The good-old world-policeman ruse.
So why the hell didn't europe take care of that little yugoslavian mess themselves a couple years ago? None of the people in the US millitary I know wanted to go. Let me guess they were too busy debating Mao's little insights on Marxism?
And, naturally, to do your job well, you need good equipment, like....oh I don't know....lots of spy satellites? Echelon maybe? Need I go on?
Obviously we need better, so we can avoid bombing the local Chinese embassy... Or was that a hint for attempting to interfere with the 1996 US election... Hmmm...
Any country with the puritanical self-righteousness to assume that they know exactly what to do to solve all of the world's problems, will inevitably, and in short order, be proven wrong.
Hey!!! We found something we can agree on! Yea, America is going to be wrong in the future. We'll try and make it the exception, rather than the rule. We're definitly going to try and not make the same old tired mistakes that europe (socialism puts the rope in europe... right around its own neck...) and much of the rest of the world keep making. We're going to try and guide some of the third-world countries through some of the developmental pitfalls we've experienced, and hopefully help them avoid some of the really nasty ones. I don't know where we're all going. But we're going there together, and we're going to have to learn to live with each other. In the mean time...
And next time, kindly keep your pro-American nonsense off the threads, or at least temper it to whatever meager extent you are able with intelligence and facts.
I'll start tempering, just as soon as you stop making assumptions about my opinions and my intelligence. BTW - we have some spy-sats overhead. You're welcome to try tracking them if you can. We're going to move them around once in a while. Sometimes this will be for operational purposes, which we consider state secrets. Other times, it's to avoid hitting the amaturish crap you keep launching (Oh, am I making an assumption again?? My bad...). Sometimes we move them around just to fsck with your head. In any event... They're staying up there. Deal with it.
And clueless slashdot posters... Spy sats change their orbits from time to time. These changes are obviously made to support a particular observational project. It would be foolish to routinely publish this information, as it can give away the goal or target the change was made for. This is called operational data, and its classified, hence not released to the public.
Let's use an example... Say we're monitoring Iraq's ballistic missile development. They've bought orbital intel from the Chinese or Russians or whomever, on American and British spy-sats. They know when they're overhead, and can plan their activities accordingly. When the spy-sats are overhead, they park mobile launchers in hangars, keep everyone indoors, and generally try and make a place look uninteresting. So, in order to avoid this rouse a subtle change in the orbit of a spy-sat might be made, to invalidate their intel over a period of time and increase the odds of catching them off gaurd. A larger change might be made to bring a close pass in range of the cameras/radars within an orbit or two, in order to catch some interesting event.
The end result is, whatever orbit data is available on the spy-sats, it's virtually always out of date. It's intentional, and actually a requirement for the spy-sats to get their job done. Get over it.
To be honest, I'm really shocked at the amount of Euro "anti-american" crap flying around here. We share much of this data with your countries. The people in the UN complaining about this are the third-world represenatives who's countries can't track the spy-sats themselves, and are sick of having their own imperialist tendancies thwarted by the bigger more advanced nations. Much of the world didn't learn the lessons of WW1 and WW2. This is one of those cases where they can't be allowed to learn them the hard way, no matter how much they complain.
Not that bad in 24.1.*.* yet. I've logged about 1100 hits via IPF, as of 7:30am PDT Sunday. I don't run a web server, and setup IPF to log hits on port 80 back during v1.0. Since each machine appears to try twice, that's only about 550 attempts.
Of course... OpenBSD never gets tired of saying "No! Go away!". About they best they can hope for is to fill my/var partition.
BTW - The "blinken lights" on most hubs & routers are "pulse streched", which means there's a minimum amount of time they are on. Events start overlapping, and the light just stays on.
While I agree with most of what you said... This little bit had me ROTFLMAO.
Take his passport.
Yea... Right... In a country with virtually *no* border control. He walks across the border to Mexico at any number of places along our border, and stops by the Russian embassy and says "I'm Dimitri Sklyrov. The americans have taken my passport, and are trying to impose their law on the activities of honest hard working Russian citizens in the Rodina. I'd like to go home, can you help me get a new passport? I can buy my own plane ticket." They'd match his fingerprints and verify his identity and he'd be on the next non-stop over the pole to Moscow, putting the "flight" in "flight risk".
We should just let him go, and prevent an international incident. Test the law in court against an american citizen.
You're entitled to your opinion, but the simple fact of the matter is that you don't have that bandwidth...you share that bandwidth. Anyone else on your "segment" has to
make do with whatever you decide not to use.
Unfortunately, I see both points of view. The problem is, often there's nobody willing to provide the service we need. The local Cable/DSL monopoly provider simply refuses to negotiate a mutually acceptable AUP, or offer multi-tier service, and you're SOL. I'd drop cable for DSL in a heartbeat if I could get an unrestrictive AUP and two static IP's for less than $100/month. But I live 582 feet too far from the CO, and expantion has been a long time coming. My alternative is a T1 line of some sort, and they cost big-$$, and need CSU/DSU's and arcane V.35 cables, etc... What we have now, is similar to the stance of the phone company before "required to serve" regulations went into effect. You got one phone line. Need two? Tough.
my first dial-up was to a main-frame with a homemade PET at 300 baud in 1978...Heck I just wanted to play Star Trek... anyone else remember THAT?
Yup... and punch cards, and paper tape, printing consoles, bridge cards (and skinned knuckles)... Which brings us to acoustic adapters. You see, it was illegal to actually connect anything to the phone line back then. At least anything that wasn't approved by Ma Bell. The acoustic adapter was created to skirt the rules. Not entirely different from quietly running your own mailserver on a cable connection.
AT&T's "native" ISP is @home - generally considered sucky and clueless by most. The AOL/TW ISP is RoadRunner - who runs a very solid ship by comparison, and is, as far as I can tell, the most homenet/geek friendly cable ISP out there.
I haven't had any experience with Roadrunner, but I've had @Home in the SF bay area for 2 years. They let me install on a Sun Workstation, and gave me static IP's, which I still have. The only problem I have with them is they can't seem to automatically bill my credit card correctly.
I'm worried that AOL will force me to DHCP, and some silly client. Geek friendly for me is two static IP's, and leave me alone. Somehow I think AOL won't be able to deliver that.
They have evidece to show that there might be another
good lightshow comming to Yellowstone
Another good lightshow!?!?! I think you're underestimating the magnitude a tad... When this thing goes, you won't have to worry about global warming for about 100 years, possibly longer. If you live in the US, or Canada, you'll have to worry about food though, because it will cover much of the north american breadbasket with a foot of ash.
Nice analogy, but it's completely wrong. Replace "If someone comes to the US from Afghanistan, and kills their sister" with "If someone kills his sister in Afghanistan and
comes to the US" and you'll be closer to what happened with Sklyarov.
The details are in the complaint I'm sure, but I believe (IANAL) they can only charge him with a DMCA violation for diseminating information at the symposium. His company is in violation for selling the program in the US. But he'd have to be in a decision making capacity within the company to get detained for that.
But the DMCA is so screwed up, and hands so much power to the corperations... I'd probably better get back to work before someones hauls me away for discussing an alledged violator of the DMCA, which might threaten the works of some copyright holder...
Imagine the stink the US would kick up when a US citizen is arrested for
actions he committed WHILE IN THE US!, but is then prosecuted for in a third country.
Indeed... There would be quite a stink. But that's not what happened. In this case, he came here to give a talk. So he set foot on US soil, and came under the jurisdiction of US law the minute he arrived. In Afghanistan, it is legal to kill your sister for numerous acts of "indecency". Do it here in the US, its called homicide, and you can get strapped to a table and lethally poisioned for it. If someone comes to the US from Afghanistan, and kills their sister for being "indecent", do you justify their crime by stating that "it's legal in their country". Of course not. The DMCA states, despite the 1st amendment, that it's illegal to give the talk he gave.
Skylarov is screwed, until such time as the DMCA is overturned or otherwise ruled unconstitutional. I hope that day comes soon.
I actually sent email to the DVDCCA email address, asking them if, as a copyright holder interested in publishing
a DVD, I needed to sign a license with the DVDCCA. The reply (from John Hoy!) said that no, all I needed to do
was request CSS encryption when I sent my master to the authoring facility.
So the "authoring facility" calls you up and asks for your key, and proceeds to master your DVD with CSS encryption using a key that can't be decrypted by any DVD player on the planet. Someone has to own the keys built into the players. That's the other half of this racket. You can publish all you want, but unless you sell your soul, and join the club, you don't get access to the installed base of players.
Which raises an interesting point... Is a CSS descrambler/player illegal if it doesn't include the keys for decrypting? If I have to enter the decryption key manually, or read it from a file that isn't included, is it then legal?
Well... There goes the only stable supply of orange crush in the SF bay area. Webvan trucked it in from Dallas, TX. The California bottling plants haven't made the stuff in years.
Anyone know of a store that carries it, in the greater SF bay area? I only have 2 bottles left!
Yea, but here in the US, to buy anything past a "G", you have to have a NAR cert, and the BATF has been getting really picky about the "magazine" bunker requirements for storage.:-)
Wouldn't want to slap too many limitations on potential darwin-award^U^U^U^U^U errr... space pioneers!
The world is moving toward socialism. (snip) Which is a good thing.
Not everybody agrees with you. Being successful is not a crime to be punished. I oppose any system that takes from those that "can and do" and gives to those who "can and don't".
Currently Sun is one of the companies that doesn't know quite what to make of little free OS we know and love.
Ever hear of a little company called Cobalt? Or a little software venture called iPlanet?
Sun get's Linux. It has for quite some time. The pressure to adopt it isn't as great as other companies because Solaris is the #1 commercial Unix platform.
I'll bet a fair number of those JavaOne demo's also run on Solaris, NT, AIX, etc... That's sorta the point. Demo'ing them on Linux let's the marketing people leverage the hype. Sort of the marketing version of karma-whoring. Leveraging the hype is pretty much all they're after too, as most ISV's are having a difficult time figuring out how to make money selling software for Linux. Porting to Linux is easy, it performs well, and grabs attention. But the people on the other platforms are more likely to write big checks.
Leaded auto gas in the US was phased out in the 80's. Here in California, we typically have 3 grades of gas available, rated by octane number, 87, 89, and 92. Some rare stations will only carry 87 and 92 octane, which is how the stuff is actually produced. The 89 octane stuff is a mix of the other two. There's also usually one or two speed shops in any given area that sells 115 octane racing fuel, fills NO2 bottles, and also sells nitro-methane to the psychotic speed freaks.
Diesel availability varies by location. In the inner city, it's available near the freeways to support trucking. Often these are "cardlock" facilities, open only to commercial traffic. In the suburbs, and rural areas, about 40% of the stations seem to carry diesel. In the western US, diesel pickup trucks are popular with small businesses, farmers, and the odd individual nutcase like me that likes to get 20mpg in a 8000lb. vehicle. European style auto-diesels haven't met much success over here, but they can be found.
About half the stations have some minimal form of LPG fueling system, but these are almost never used for fueling LPG powered vehicles. Rather, they're used for filling barbeque fuel tanks, and LPG tanks for campers & travel trailers, motorhomes, etc...
Other alternative fuels out here are bio-diesel, which is manufactured from vegetable oil, and pretty much a direct replacement for petro-diesel, and CNG. Bio-diesel is not easy to find, but popular with the yacht crowd since it's biodegradeable. A vehicle fueling station opened recently in San Francisco. CNG is compressed natural gas, and is popular with short haul trucking & delivery, and municipal buses. These virtually always have their own fueling facilities, closed to the public. It is possible for a homeowner to buy a compressor and fuel at home, since most homes are tied to utility NG sources. But it's not a popular choice.
Temkin
Re:If democratic and elected, not so sad after all
on
Harm From The Hague
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Problem is that whilst there might be plenty of people who can recite the US Constitution there are rather fewer
who understand what it means and why it exists in the first place.
Yes, and there's plenty who claim to be experts who choose to subvert it's meaning to promote their personal agenda.
As for voting, remember the last US election was viewed as a "joke" by the rest of the planet.
Why? Because we didn't have a civil war like many other countries would have? We held an election, it was a statistical dead tie. 500 votes one way or the other is statistically irrelevant, ask any statistician. Legal mechanisms kicked in to try and resolve the mess. The Supreme court ruled the clock had run out, game over. The loosers get to try again in 4 years, and based on the current office holder's performance, I'm reasonably confident it won't be so close next time.
But this has nothing to do with some slave worker in some little country getting to vote on my free speech right to criticize politicians or corperations. They may not have such freedom, and let's face it, you tend to value less the things you don't have.
Were you being sarcastic, or did you just manage to shoot a big hole in your argument?
Neither I hope. I was thinking of the European response to the US withdrawl from the Kyoto protocol in the first case, and the second was sparked by a lawsuit brought by a Canadian company against California for banning MTBE in gasoline. They claimed the ban would violate NAFTA, and actually tried to get the ban thrown out. I threw China in because they have enough population to swing a vote. Mixing these two results in a less than clear argument I'll admit.
Part of the problem in the first case deals with differing views on property, and ownership. You could quite easily make a law in the US to ban cars. No problem, "they're illegal now, round'em all up". Under the US consitution, the government would have to compensate each owner for confiscation of that property, or substantial confiscation of the use of that property. Somehow I doubt the world would want to pay america for their cars. They'd just say "round them up and get rid of them". That may work fine in some parts of the world, but it would start WWIII here. Similarly, I'm sure americans have similar misunderstandings about other cultures, and would end up imposing their view on others in similar fashion.
the people of China is in their full right to demand that U.S reduce their pollution
Ahhh... Yes, you misunderstood me. I intended to point out that some countries have much less interest in protecting the environment, and may insist we REDUCE our environmental protections in order to protect market access. It is possible to overturn some state environmental regulations in the US by claiming it infringes interstate commerce. The point was that the same might be possible on a international scale.
Of course, you could just claim your right to screw everybody else up, and wait for the other countries to attack
when they're fed up.
Despite what you may have read about the american military downsizing, we're still quite capable of solving the world's overpopulation problem with about 30 minutes notice. It would be much less messy to simply convice us we're wrong. With regards to global warming, it's taken on an air of old-time religion, and little things like concrete proof are getting swept under the carpet. So... Hey, take another hit on the propiganda pipe, and bring it on... We'll be here cleaning our guns.
Freedom without responsibility
is not freedom, it is tyranny.
I agree. But you can't yield sovereignty to a body that has no common culture. It leads straight down the path to strife, conflict and war. The former english colonies can't even agree on what constitutes slander. You expect the entire planet to just get along? Not going to happen anytime soon.
You call my views "biased" and "highly skewed" yet do not state in what way. Care to elaborate? --M
I can probably think of a couple cases...
Let's say there's a vote on copyright infringement... The ballot gets printed up with the various options... In China, the ballot gets printed with only one option. One fifth of the world gets it's vote chosen by the local government. You're assuming that it's even possible to hold a fair worldwide election. This isn't the case at the moment.
Temkin
Re:If democratic and elected, not so sad after all
on
Harm From The Hague
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· Score: 1
So, to me the issue is not should we implement a world government, but HOW? As far as I'm concerned it must
be democratically elected, is must fairly represent all of the nations' interests throughout the world, and it should
restrict itself to matters of commerce.
Pardon me, but fuck you and the horse you rode in on! I happen to live in a country (USA) that recognises rights and freedoms available no where else in the world. I'm not about to willingly let someone in another country vote away my freedoms.
Before you know it, Europe will be voting to restrict american's right to own cars, China will vote to restrict american environmental regulations, etc..., etc... The list is endless. Take a look at all the things the US feds control under the guise of "interstate commerce". Ever hear of the tyranny of democracy? Thanks, but I like to have my elected represenatives responsive to me and my culture & countrymen. This would simply be carte blanche for the have-not's to pick apart the have's.
Since the goal of marketing is two fold, inform of the products existance, and sway purchase decisions, this has the potential to actually increase the number of annoying commercials you get to see.
I'll pick a popular theme. Let's say I'm a Unix sysadmin, and I subscribe to the usual trade rags, watch X-files, sci-fi channel, etc... They have a pretty complete profile of me, and based on salary, viewing habits, etc..., throw me in the "professional geek" advertising category. Now I get three times the number Micro$oft ads, IBM ads, etc... They have no way of knowing that I may hate M$, and won't buy their products, but dammit, I'll have to watch the ads. Micro$oft will see to that for sure....
Slashdot Mirror
Sun does not produce laptop SPARC systems. It hasn't produced a portable system since 1993 or so. Tadpole may still produce them, but they're not Sun either.
Having just been through an attempt at getting my Rage 128GL based All-in-Wonder working correctly with OpenBSD/Xfree86 on a VIA Apollo based board, I beg to differ. Between that and Win98/VIA DMA drivers/DirectCrash 8, I've been through driver hell. All because I want to drop out of OBSD once in a while and play M$ Train Simulator. (I know...I know... But I just can't kick the habit...)
I bought an cheesy no-name GeForce2 MX board, and it just worked. Bye bye ATI... Never again.
Temkin
Let's start with the automatic assumption that China and Russia are the fountainheads of evil, and that America and Britain are the epitomies of good. Britain and American....
Assumption? In this example, it's a fact that Iraq gets it's millitary hardware and support from China and Russia. It's indisputable. Those countries have no beef with Iraq, and Iraq is one of their better customers. I made absolutely no character judgement of Russia or China. Both have struggling economies, and are profitably taking advantage of the situation. I'll reserve the "fountainhead of evil" category for Iraq, a country with a meglomaniac for a leader who continues to reasearch weapons of mass destruction and has a penchant for using them. Iraq also happens to be a major target of US spy-sats these days. I thought the example was relevant to current world events, and explained the technical reasoning that seems irrelevant to the U.N. whiners. Do you have proof otherwise? Please confine your answer to the subjects of a technical discourse of spy-sat operations, and sources of Iraqi military hardware and intelligence.
Britain and American....let's see...these are the same countries that have done their best to divest their citizens of any thin shred of privacy, right?
And you assume I agree with the privacy policies of Britan and the US? In fact, I don't. Thanks for asking.
And if you think paying someone $10 a month for work that your own country's citizens wouldn't do for $10/hour *isn't* economic imperialism, you need to read a few econ books.
And you assume I agree with the policy of shipping manufacturing jobs overseas? Most of the time, I don't. But thanks for asking... BTW, how much would those people be making if those factories had stayed in the US or UK? I'll guess somewhat less than $10 a month... I may be wrong.
To be honest, I'm shoked that you have the gall to complain about third world countries....with imperialist tendencies. Does Philippines, Panama, Hawaii, California mean anything to you? Study your own history first, before mouthing off about imperialism. Or is what Americans did in those territories ok because it was so long ago?
Go ahead... Be shocked. I suggest upping the voltage a bit.
I cannot change the past. I refuse to be held responsible for events that occured before my existance. The US has as checkered a history as any other country. But I can oppose imperialism here and now, and I do so. Thanks for asking... Oh... BTW - That was called "pre-judging". It's where you have some picture of what I am in your mind, and you refuse to employ logic and allow facts to modify that picture, or you gloss over your lack of knowlege about me so that you can be comfortable and secure in your little ideological corner. It's a major source of human misery throughout history. Please get help.
You're wrong about the other thing, too. Much of the world DID learn alot from WWI and WWII. It was America that DIDN'T.
Yea... Iraq displayed how much they learned from WWI & WWII when they invaded Kuwait. Then there's all the countries ruled by strong dictators that fall and end up plunging back into the stone age, like Somalia, Congo... China routinely threatens Taiwan, over a civil war 50 years in the past. I could go on, but it would quickly wander OT. I suppose you had some specific thing in mind? I'm all ears. Flame away. What thing did the rest of the world learn in WWI and WWII that America didn't? And I don't want to hear about methods for effecient rubble removal, and you might take note of the post WWII US policy of rebuilding former enemies. A policy which to my knowlege was unique, and had no historical precident.
And, I suppose, you think that America is just the country to do that, don't you?
Well, I'm certainly not going to sit on my ass and wait for you to pick up the torch!
The good-old world-policeman ruse.
So why the hell didn't europe take care of that little yugoslavian mess themselves a couple years ago? None of the people in the US millitary I know wanted to go. Let me guess they were too busy debating Mao's little insights on Marxism?
And, naturally, to do your job well, you need good equipment, like....oh I don't know....lots of spy satellites? Echelon maybe? Need I go on?
Obviously we need better, so we can avoid bombing the local Chinese embassy... Or was that a hint for attempting to interfere with the 1996 US election... Hmmm...
Any country with the puritanical self-righteousness to assume that they know exactly what to do to solve all of the world's problems, will inevitably, and in short order, be proven wrong.
Hey!!! We found something we can agree on! Yea, America is going to be wrong in the future. We'll try and make it the exception, rather than the rule. We're definitly going to try and not make the same old tired mistakes that europe (socialism puts the rope in europe... right around its own neck...) and much of the rest of the world keep making. We're going to try and guide some of the third-world countries through some of the developmental pitfalls we've experienced, and hopefully help them avoid some of the really nasty ones. I don't know where we're all going. But we're going there together, and we're going to have to learn to live with each other. In the mean time...
And next time, kindly keep your pro-American nonsense off the threads, or at least temper it to whatever meager extent you are able with intelligence and facts.
I'll start tempering, just as soon as you stop making assumptions about my opinions and my intelligence. BTW - we have some spy-sats overhead. You're welcome to try tracking them if you can. We're going to move them around once in a while. Sometimes this will be for operational purposes, which we consider state secrets. Other times, it's to avoid hitting the amaturish crap you keep launching (Oh, am I making an assumption again?? My bad...). Sometimes we move them around just to fsck with your head. In any event... They're staying up there. Deal with it.
Temkin
If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?
I've also heard this attributed to one of Pyramid's VP's, while drawing comparisons to Sequent systems. Anyone remember Pyramid?
Temkin
And clueless slashdot posters... Spy sats change their orbits from time to time. These changes are obviously made to support a particular observational project. It would be foolish to routinely publish this information, as it can give away the goal or target the change was made for. This is called operational data, and its classified, hence not released to the public.
Let's use an example... Say we're monitoring Iraq's ballistic missile development. They've bought orbital intel from the Chinese or Russians or whomever, on American and British spy-sats. They know when they're overhead, and can plan their activities accordingly. When the spy-sats are overhead, they park mobile launchers in hangars, keep everyone indoors, and generally try and make a place look uninteresting. So, in order to avoid this rouse a subtle change in the orbit of a spy-sat might be made, to invalidate their intel over a period of time and increase the odds of catching them off gaurd. A larger change might be made to bring a close pass in range of the cameras/radars within an orbit or two, in order to catch some interesting event.
The end result is, whatever orbit data is available on the spy-sats, it's virtually always out of date. It's intentional, and actually a requirement for the spy-sats to get their job done. Get over it.
To be honest, I'm really shocked at the amount of Euro "anti-american" crap flying around here. We share much of this data with your countries. The people in the UN complaining about this are the third-world represenatives who's countries can't track the spy-sats themselves, and are sick of having their own imperialist tendancies thwarted by the bigger more advanced nations. Much of the world didn't learn the lessons of WW1 and WW2. This is one of those cases where they can't be allowed to learn them the hard way, no matter how much they complain.
Temkin
Not that bad in 24.1.*.* yet. I've logged about 1100 hits via IPF, as of 7:30am PDT Sunday. I don't run a web server, and setup IPF to log hits on port 80 back during v1.0. Since each machine appears to try twice, that's only about 550 attempts.
Of course... OpenBSD never gets tired of saying "No! Go away!". About they best they can hope for is to fill my /var partition.
BTW - The "blinken lights" on most hubs & routers are "pulse streched", which means there's a minimum amount of time they are on. Events start overlapping, and the light just stays on.
Temkin
While I agree with most of what you said... This little bit had me ROTFLMAO.
Take his passport.
Yea... Right... In a country with virtually *no* border control. He walks across the border to Mexico at any number of places along our border, and stops by the Russian embassy and says "I'm Dimitri Sklyrov. The americans have taken my passport, and are trying to impose their law on the activities of honest hard working Russian citizens in the Rodina. I'd like to go home, can you help me get a new passport? I can buy my own plane ticket." They'd match his fingerprints and verify his identity and he'd be on the next non-stop over the pole to Moscow, putting the "flight" in "flight risk".
We should just let him go, and prevent an international incident. Test the law in court against an american citizen.
Temkin
You're entitled to your opinion, but the simple fact of the matter is that you don't have that bandwidth...you share that bandwidth. Anyone else on your "segment" has to make do with whatever you decide not to use.
Unfortunately, I see both points of view. The problem is, often there's nobody willing to provide the service we need. The local Cable/DSL monopoly provider simply refuses to negotiate a mutually acceptable AUP, or offer multi-tier service, and you're SOL. I'd drop cable for DSL in a heartbeat if I could get an unrestrictive AUP and two static IP's for less than $100/month. But I live 582 feet too far from the CO, and expantion has been a long time coming. My alternative is a T1 line of some sort, and they cost big-$$, and need CSU/DSU's and arcane V.35 cables, etc... What we have now, is similar to the stance of the phone company before "required to serve" regulations went into effect. You got one phone line. Need two? Tough.
my first dial-up was to a main-frame with a homemade PET at 300 baud in 1978...Heck I just wanted to play Star Trek... anyone else remember THAT?
Yup... and punch cards, and paper tape, printing consoles, bridge cards (and skinned knuckles)... Which brings us to acoustic adapters. You see, it was illegal to actually connect anything to the phone line back then. At least anything that wasn't approved by Ma Bell. The acoustic adapter was created to skirt the rules. Not entirely different from quietly running your own mailserver on a cable connection.
Temkin
AT&T's "native" ISP is @home - generally considered sucky and clueless by most. The AOL/TW ISP is RoadRunner - who runs a very solid ship by comparison, and is, as far as I can tell, the most homenet/geek friendly cable ISP out there.
I haven't had any experience with Roadrunner, but I've had @Home in the SF bay area for 2 years. They let me install on a Sun Workstation, and gave me static IP's, which I still have. The only problem I have with them is they can't seem to automatically bill my credit card correctly.
I'm worried that AOL will force me to DHCP, and some silly client. Geek friendly for me is two static IP's, and leave me alone. Somehow I think AOL won't be able to deliver that.
Temkin
They have evidece to show that there might be another good lightshow comming to Yellowstone
Another good lightshow!?!?! I think you're underestimating the magnitude a tad... When this thing goes, you won't have to worry about global warming for about 100 years, possibly longer. If you live in the US, or Canada, you'll have to worry about food though, because it will cover much of the north american breadbasket with a foot of ash.
Temkin (B.S. Geology)
Nice analogy, but it's completely wrong. Replace "If someone comes to the US from Afghanistan, and kills their sister" with "If someone kills his sister in Afghanistan and comes to the US" and you'll be closer to what happened with Sklyarov.
The details are in the complaint I'm sure, but I believe (IANAL) they can only charge him with a DMCA violation for diseminating information at the symposium. His company is in violation for selling the program in the US. But he'd have to be in a decision making capacity within the company to get detained for that.
But the DMCA is so screwed up, and hands so much power to the corperations... I'd probably better get back to work before someones hauls me away for discussing an alledged violator of the DMCA, which might threaten the works of some copyright holder...
Temkin
Imagine the stink the US would kick up when a US citizen is arrested for actions he committed WHILE IN THE US!, but is then prosecuted for in a third country.
Indeed... There would be quite a stink. But that's not what happened. In this case, he came here to give a talk. So he set foot on US soil, and came under the jurisdiction of US law the minute he arrived. In Afghanistan, it is legal to kill your sister for numerous acts of "indecency". Do it here in the US, its called homicide, and you can get strapped to a table and lethally poisioned for it. If someone comes to the US from Afghanistan, and kills their sister for being "indecent", do you justify their crime by stating that "it's legal in their country". Of course not. The DMCA states, despite the 1st amendment, that it's illegal to give the talk he gave.
Skylarov is screwed, until such time as the DMCA is overturned or otherwise ruled unconstitutional. I hope that day comes soon.
Temkin
I actually sent email to the DVDCCA email address, asking them if, as a copyright holder interested in publishing a DVD, I needed to sign a license with the DVDCCA. The reply (from John Hoy!) said that no, all I needed to do was request CSS encryption when I sent my master to the authoring facility.
So the "authoring facility" calls you up and asks for your key, and proceeds to master your DVD with CSS encryption using a key that can't be decrypted by any DVD player on the planet. Someone has to own the keys built into the players. That's the other half of this racket. You can publish all you want, but unless you sell your soul, and join the club, you don't get access to the installed base of players.
Which raises an interesting point... Is a CSS descrambler/player illegal if it doesn't include the keys for decrypting? If I have to enter the decryption key manually, or read it from a file that isn't included, is it then legal?
Temkin
Well... There goes the only stable supply of orange crush in the SF bay area. Webvan trucked it in from Dallas, TX. The California bottling plants haven't made the stuff in years.
Anyone know of a store that carries it, in the greater SF bay area? I only have 2 bottles left!
Temkin
Yea, but here in the US, to buy anything past a "G", you have to have a NAR cert, and the BATF has been getting really picky about the "magazine" bunker requirements for storage. :-)
Wouldn't want to slap too many limitations on potential darwin-award^U^U^U^U^U errr... space pioneers!
Temkin
The world is moving toward socialism. (snip) Which is a good thing.
Not everybody agrees with you. Being successful is not a crime to be punished. I oppose any system that takes from those that "can and do" and gives to those who "can and don't".
Temkin
Still feel like using the turn "socialist" as an insult?
Yes... Because as an alternative, socialism still sucks.
Temkin
I am glad to hear the actual details and not some PR created legally scrubbed crap (assuming there was no scrubbing in there...)
It's scrubbed. The original story mentioned one of their network tech's quit mid-crisis. Not that I blame them for brushing that under the carpet.
Temkin
Currently Sun is one of the companies that doesn't know quite what to make of little free OS we know and love.
Ever hear of a little company called Cobalt? Or a little software venture called iPlanet?
Sun get's Linux. It has for quite some time. The pressure to adopt it isn't as great as other companies because Solaris is the #1 commercial Unix platform.
I'll bet a fair number of those JavaOne demo's also run on Solaris, NT, AIX, etc... That's sorta the point. Demo'ing them on Linux let's the marketing people leverage the hype. Sort of the marketing version of karma-whoring. Leveraging the hype is pretty much all they're after too, as most ISV's are having a difficult time figuring out how to make money selling software for Linux. Porting to Linux is easy, it performs well, and grabs attention. But the people on the other platforms are more likely to write big checks.
Temkin
Leaded auto gas in the US was phased out in the 80's. Here in California, we typically have 3 grades of gas available, rated by octane number, 87, 89, and 92. Some rare stations will only carry 87 and 92 octane, which is how the stuff is actually produced. The 89 octane stuff is a mix of the other two. There's also usually one or two speed shops in any given area that sells 115 octane racing fuel, fills NO2 bottles, and also sells nitro-methane to the psychotic speed freaks.
Diesel availability varies by location. In the inner city, it's available near the freeways to support trucking. Often these are "cardlock" facilities, open only to commercial traffic. In the suburbs, and rural areas, about 40% of the stations seem to carry diesel. In the western US, diesel pickup trucks are popular with small businesses, farmers, and the odd individual nutcase like me that likes to get 20mpg in a 8000lb. vehicle. European style auto-diesels haven't met much success over here, but they can be found.
About half the stations have some minimal form of LPG fueling system, but these are almost never used for fueling LPG powered vehicles. Rather, they're used for filling barbeque fuel tanks, and LPG tanks for campers & travel trailers, motorhomes, etc...
Other alternative fuels out here are bio-diesel, which is manufactured from vegetable oil, and pretty much a direct replacement for petro-diesel, and CNG. Bio-diesel is not easy to find, but popular with the yacht crowd since it's biodegradeable. A vehicle fueling station opened recently in San Francisco. CNG is compressed natural gas, and is popular with short haul trucking & delivery, and municipal buses. These virtually always have their own fueling facilities, closed to the public. It is possible for a homeowner to buy a compressor and fuel at home, since most homes are tied to utility NG sources. But it's not a popular choice.
Temkin
Problem is that whilst there might be plenty of people who can recite the US Constitution there are rather fewer who understand what it means and why it exists in the first place.
Yes, and there's plenty who claim to be experts who choose to subvert it's meaning to promote their personal agenda.
As for voting, remember the last US election was viewed as a "joke" by the rest of the planet.
Why? Because we didn't have a civil war like many other countries would have? We held an election, it was a statistical dead tie. 500 votes one way or the other is statistically irrelevant, ask any statistician. Legal mechanisms kicked in to try and resolve the mess. The Supreme court ruled the clock had run out, game over. The loosers get to try again in 4 years, and based on the current office holder's performance, I'm reasonably confident it won't be so close next time.
But this has nothing to do with some slave worker in some little country getting to vote on my free speech right to criticize politicians or corperations. They may not have such freedom, and let's face it, you tend to value less the things you don't have.
Temkin
Were you being sarcastic, or did you just manage to shoot a big hole in your argument?
Neither I hope. I was thinking of the European response to the US withdrawl from the Kyoto protocol in the first case, and the second was sparked by a lawsuit brought by a Canadian company against California for banning MTBE in gasoline. They claimed the ban would violate NAFTA, and actually tried to get the ban thrown out. I threw China in because they have enough population to swing a vote. Mixing these two results in a less than clear argument I'll admit.
Part of the problem in the first case deals with differing views on property, and ownership. You could quite easily make a law in the US to ban cars. No problem, "they're illegal now, round'em all up". Under the US consitution, the government would have to compensate each owner for confiscation of that property, or substantial confiscation of the use of that property. Somehow I doubt the world would want to pay america for their cars. They'd just say "round them up and get rid of them". That may work fine in some parts of the world, but it would start WWIII here. Similarly, I'm sure americans have similar misunderstandings about other cultures, and would end up imposing their view on others in similar fashion.
the people of China is in their full right to demand that U.S reduce their pollution
Ahhh... Yes, you misunderstood me. I intended to point out that some countries have much less interest in protecting the environment, and may insist we REDUCE our environmental protections in order to protect market access. It is possible to overturn some state environmental regulations in the US by claiming it infringes interstate commerce. The point was that the same might be possible on a international scale.
Of course, you could just claim your right to screw everybody else up, and wait for the other countries to attack when they're fed up.
Despite what you may have read about the american military downsizing, we're still quite capable of solving the world's overpopulation problem with about 30 minutes notice. It would be much less messy to simply convice us we're wrong. With regards to global warming, it's taken on an air of old-time religion, and little things like concrete proof are getting swept under the carpet. So... Hey, take another hit on the propiganda pipe, and bring it on... We'll be here cleaning our guns.
Freedom without responsibility is not freedom, it is tyranny.
I agree. But you can't yield sovereignty to a body that has no common culture. It leads straight down the path to strife, conflict and war. The former english colonies can't even agree on what constitutes slander. You expect the entire planet to just get along? Not going to happen anytime soon.
Temkin
You call my views "biased" and "highly skewed" yet do not state in what way. Care to elaborate? --M
I can probably think of a couple cases...
Let's say there's a vote on copyright infringement... The ballot gets printed up with the various options... In China, the ballot gets printed with only one option. One fifth of the world gets it's vote chosen by the local government. You're assuming that it's even possible to hold a fair worldwide election. This isn't the case at the moment.
Temkin
So, to me the issue is not should we implement a world government, but HOW? As far as I'm concerned it must be democratically elected, is must fairly represent all of the nations' interests throughout the world, and it should restrict itself to matters of commerce.
Pardon me, but fuck you and the horse you rode in on! I happen to live in a country (USA) that recognises rights and freedoms available no where else in the world. I'm not about to willingly let someone in another country vote away my freedoms.
Before you know it, Europe will be voting to restrict american's right to own cars, China will vote to restrict american environmental regulations, etc..., etc... The list is endless. Take a look at all the things the US feds control under the guise of "interstate commerce". Ever hear of the tyranny of democracy? Thanks, but I like to have my elected represenatives responsive to me and my culture & countrymen. This would simply be carte blanche for the have-not's to pick apart the have's.
Temkin
Since the goal of marketing is two fold, inform of the products existance, and sway purchase decisions, this has the potential to actually increase the number of annoying commercials you get to see.
I'll pick a popular theme. Let's say I'm a Unix sysadmin, and I subscribe to the usual trade rags, watch X-files, sci-fi channel, etc... They have a pretty complete profile of me, and based on salary, viewing habits, etc..., throw me in the "professional geek" advertising category. Now I get three times the number Micro$oft ads, IBM ads, etc... They have no way of knowing that I may hate M$, and won't buy their products, but dammit, I'll have to watch the ads. Micro$oft will see to that for sure....
Welcome to your own personalized hell...
Temkin