Well, you're already using spreaming MP3, which is NOT a loss-less format, plus, you're using UDP, connectionless transfer, and at quite high tranfer speeds, which means many packets simply won't get there, so infact you do loose audio quality with streaming audio.
Now, if you were transfering.wav files via ftp, that would be loss-less as wav is a loss-less format and ftp transfers via TCP, which means you're actually end up getting every bit you were supposed to get.
The framers of the Constution felt that the document proper should do nothing but describe the workings of Government.
The first ten amendments, called the 'bill of rights' were planned from the outset, infact, some states only ratified the Constution on the understanding that those ten amendments would be ratified once the Constution was in place.
As far as the eighteenth amendment goes, something nightmarish like that happens every time there's an unhealthy rash of conservitisim in this country. And it was quickly repealed.
I have NEVER complained about a story on Slashdot prior to this, but this story has gone way too far.
Nerds don't read Star, or Hello! Magizines, and I have yet to meet anyone amung even their readership who would suggest that anything ever printed in them is stuff that matters.
Linus' breeding habits are none of our buisness. He is not a movie star, and the Free Software Community is not his fan club. I am not a Linus groupie, and I doubt there are too many slashdot readers who are*.
We often see stories comming out of the mainstream press talking about "Opne Source Leaders", and the shouts ring out on Slashdot "Linus and ESR are not my leaders!" but then we fall over ourselves to gossip about their privite lives? This story does not go far to show the outside world what, exactly, it is that we are about.
* If you are a Linus groupie, the please GET A LIFE. Learn to program, write a book, take up chess, anything. And if that dosen't work, become a groupie for some pop culture item so you'd at least have company. How about Brittney? she can't sing, but she looks a hell of a lot better in a tank top than would Linus.
From the I can't believe they're this stupid dept.
Could this be the Technolibertarian's dream come true and the end for constant vigilance and street corner phophetizing as we know it? FuckedFromtheOutset has announced a preliminary effort to start the planning process on some more vaporwear. Music DNA, that the company claims *cough* that it is capable of identifing and tracking of billions of existing and new MP3 files on the internet providing (get this) exact accounting for the copyright. "Thus enabling file sharing and linking value added data to songs" Fucked said in a pathetic attempt to spin. When asked if they were suggesting that it is currently illegal to share files, Fucked said "No Comment."
Fucked also announced that, in order to cover it's massive burn rate, it has duped some brainless Europeans (similar to brainless Americans, but know more than one lanugage) into throwing money at Fucked. Musican Eric Clapton has been starving in recent months due to the evils of Napster, but still managed to scrape up a few million dollars to throw into the furnace. "Mr. Clapton's investment in the company speaks of the importance importance Music DNA will have in returning to the record labels their rightful monopolies, I mean, I saw the guy, he's all skin and bones." Someone said in another interestingly unattributed quote.
The company anticipates that with industry-wide adoption of its music registry, acceptence by every node on the internet, a constutional amendment, a UN Resolution, and a few minor acts of God, the system will enable copyright holders to identify their content usage through at least a portion of the internet, thus ensuring that ownership and royalty right are fully "exploited, oops, don't print that, I meant 'monetized'". According to Fucked, Music DNA dosen't have an offical ship date but should come out "in a few months".
Music DNA is an extension of other FuckedFromTheOutset products which have already made a huge impact on the distribution of copyrighted material across the Internet, which include a bunch of neat sounding jargon and buzzwords. "I assure you, we have tons of buzzwords. MCSE's bow to our buzzword dominance".
FuckedFromTheOutset bullshits about how the process works: "Ok, see, it's sorta like this, Songs have patterns, right? and these don't change much if you have an exact digital copy, like a compressed 40kpbs mp3 recorded throught an analog bridge, see? So bitrate dosen't matter because this is about the information carred in it, all codec's have the same information, they don't try to elimanate information and guess at what's in the gaps." our weakly attributed source continued making a fool of himself for a few minutes, then said "Search engines can increase by atleast tenfold the amount of time and bandwith their spiders crawl through to make sure they're not linking to copyrighted materal, they're really gung ho about that, plus, an analyzer can be incorperated into a peice of client software residing on the PC to er, make sure the music is complete? Appearently, one can't figure that out by listening to it. We've talked with the XMMS people, they're all over that."
Mor E. Assplease, an investor in the company fumbles: "Obviously, copyright protection rackets maintainence is a seminal issue confronting the Cyber-eNew iEconomy.com at the moment, and music is at the heard of the matter. With Music DNA, Napster and Scour could cover their asses by putting a lame block that dosen't work to appease the courts. We can now account to the artists and songwriters who have been shortchanged by the labels for long before the eInternet iEconomy.com, or wait, I didn't mean that". The company's Olsen Wells expresses his hopes for the process, adding that "as the industry transitions from music as a product to music as a service, Music DNA could conceivably have the greatest single impact on the music buisness since the creation of the MP3 format". When asked if he could clarify that statment, remove a few buzzwords, or somehow make it make sense, Wells replied "No Comment".
Richard Stallman, leader of the Free Software Foundation, and proponent of free music, corrected our use of the word 'Linux' (appearently, it's GNU/Linux) but then began to laugh hysterically as we attempted to explain what Music DNA was. "I can just mess it up with dd on my Linux box" He continued, "GNU! GNU/Linux box I mean! please don't print that".
Lawrence Lessing, a Technolibertian known for his book Code and other Laws of Cyberspace, when asked about it, faught to keep an amused look off of his face and said "Well, we've obviously overestimated the enemy here, I'll have to drastically restructure my 'invisable hand' theory, it assumes a much higher caliber opponent than that with which we are dealing".
Re:Rich? Give me a friggin break
on
Hacking The City
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· Score: 1
Nether of which are very useful.
I do know that one can pick up half priced books fairly easly, and as I look through some of my books, most of them have copyrights in the early ninties (many of which I have bought recently
The unix API has been pretty stable for at least a decade, C was standardized in about the mid eighties?. Python and Perl are both a good ten years old.
My point is that good stuff with staying power dosen't tend to change a great deal, even in the tech world. I don't see to much reason Libraries couldn't buy good books that are not out of date if they knew what to buy.
Perhaps if this guy could prod his library into buying The C Programming Language, The Mythical Man-Month, or a less well known but very good book Expert C Programming (copyright c 1992), he could "afford to read books" and give them valuable tools with which to serve the community.
That being said, I am a High School student, but I have a fairly decent library. My biggest expense is for computer books, second is the services such as gas and my cable line, and computer equipmnet (notably absent is computer software as I have not paid for any in a very long time).
I am fortunate to have a very good job with the State after school, so I have a fair amount of discretionary income for my age, but it generally takes me two weeks to read a computer book well, and I've spend $20.00 on new books but as high as $70.00 (they are overpriced text books but the subject matter is such that it is not covered in any mainstream tech books). A good average cost would be about $30.00.
With that average, I spend about $15.00 per week on computer books, in practice, it is much more as I buy many books for refrence and does not dedicate a great deal of time to them. My point is that if one can not afford $15.00 per week for computer books, then one is not as deticated to that as this poster would have us believe, or one can not afford to waste time and energy posting to slashdot.
He had it first, South Africa could have gotten it first and it would have been fair game. As to.us, it does exist, but it is so mismanaged as to make it unusable. I wish it wern't because I think it would be cool to have domains based on regions (ie jordanb.il.us).
You are right about being able to orbit at any altitude, of course, friction of the atmosphere would become significant at lower altitudes.
You were only partially right when you said that the earth's gravity pulls at 9.8 m/(s^2), actually, according to Universal Gravity, two bodies will attract eachother with a force governed by the following equation:
F=(G M m)/(r^2)
Where F is the force of attraction, G is the gravitational constant (about 6.67*10^-11 m^3/(kg/s^2)), M and m are the masses, and r is the distance between the the two bodies' centers of gravity.
That is all well and good, but it dosen't tell us what the force of attraction for the earth is. To discover that, we have to use another equation, Newton's second law:
F= m a
Where F is force, m is mass, and a is (you gussed it) acceleration.
We can set F equal to F and yeald:
m a = (G M m) / r^2
We can cancel out the two small 'm's to get:
a = (G M) / r^2
We need a 'r' and a 'M', so I will now stipulate that the radius of the earth is about 6.38*10^6 m and that the mass of the earth is 5.98*10^24 kg. An abitious slashdoter could most likely find much more accurate figures, but these will fit our purposes. Consequently, we can find the acceleration due to gravity with:
a = (6.67*10^-11 * 5.98*10^24) / ((6.38*10^6)^2)
a = 9.799 m/(s^2)
I hope you can see that 'a' would be significantly less were an object higher (say, 500km) from the surface of the earth, as 'r' would increase:
a = (6.67*10^-11 * 5.98*10^24) / ((6.38*10^6 + 500*1000)^2)
a = 8.427 m/(s^2)
Back to the original question: How fast must an object to travel to orbit the earth at the surface? To answer that, we have to call apon yet another equation, that of centripical acceleration in circular motion:
a = (v^2) / r
We know that the centripical acceleration is the acceleration due to gravity, which we found to be 9.799 m/(s^2) at the surface of the earth, and we know 'r' to be the radius of the earth, so to find 'v' (velocity) we could have:
v = sqrt( a r )
v = sqrt( 9.799 * 6.38*10^6)
v = 7906.81 m/s
v = 7.907 km/s (*)
As you can see, this is significantly less than your figure of 30,000 km/s!
(*) Us Americans, who's brains have been destroyed by the English System, would get more sense out of 17,687 mi/hr.
I hear these people talking of chat rooms, I wonder if they mean IRC, or some sort of AOL/Yahoo thing.
My experence with irc.slashnet.org and irc.opennetworks.org, as well as some channels on networks such as Undernet is that there can be very hight brow conversations on IRC. Sure, there are a great many morons on IRC, and some portions of IRC attract them (I would love it if someone could show me an intellegent person on irc.dal.net), but the same is true for Usenet. There are some parts of Usenet (such as comp.*) that are haunts for some of the brightest people on the net, and others, (most of alt.*) that is a wasteland of porn and idiots.
In addition to that, I see the intelligence level on IRC getting higher. I attribute that to programs such as AIM that draw the lusers away from the more 'archaic' IRC.
If I were to shoot someone, and videotape it. Then the act of shooting the person may have been illegal and harmful to the victom, but would the Videotape be illegal, even if its images may be sensitive to the victim (assuming he survived) and his family?
Re:Quimby2000.com doesn't support Linux
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Quimby2000
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· Score: 1
I'm using Netscape Communicator 4.72 on Linux. I had no problems viewing the site
When I read this, I thought Emmerson was the best troll ever on slashdot, and in the top ten on Usenet. I was so amazed at how articulate this guy was, I wanted to see some of his other art, so I checked his history. Consider:
If this guy really is a troll, then he is the best troll ever in the history of Usenet, all bbs's, fidonet, arpanet, and all other such mediums!. Think about it, is it more likely that this guy is a genious with nothing better to do than troll Slashdot, or that he is really what he looks like: a psychopathic right-winged extremist?
If I were to let any of my clients sites go down for more than a day, I'd be dead, I already suffer from
telephone phobia from times when servers have crashed/email has gone weird. These days there is no
excuse for not having backups and at least some idea of an alternative if you do lose a machine (he sez
hypocritically).
Well, M-Net is run by volunteers. One of the biggest problems was that the admins could not find the free time required to do all of the work involved in bringing a new bbs box up.
They could not pull from backups because they did not know how long the box had been compromised. I would also like to point out that they bought new equipment because they have been wanting to upgrade for some time, they just used this as an excuse. The box that was hacked had no physical damage done to it (the admins said as much in the m-net bbs, where there is currently a lively discussion going on about this).
Arbornet does not have the funds for any sort of redundency, it is supported entirely by charitable donations from m-net users
The box being down for a month (I remember it being more like two) was a major inconvience, but I still think a felony charge is way too much for the kid.
Since Debian is the free distro, it can't be bought, can it? Actually, according to netcraft (I can't find it on their site, but I know I saw it there), Debian is the Number 2 Distro in terms of total number of boxes running it.
'Hacker' has come to mean 'criminal' to the general public, and I think I've been seeing signs of the community accepting that.
I never use it to describe myself, nor do any other 'hackers' I know. Might I point out that even a Slashdot story recently used the word to describe computer criminals (I'm too lazy to look up the link). This is a Good Thing in my opinion, as I don't think we'd ever be able to reverse the meaning of the word in the public perception. As is, its use will only make us appear to be something we're not, and associate us with script kiddies like the ones that attacked Western Union.
I think the word 'geek' is replacing it. I think it is a great word to use because it is used by the general public to insult our kind. Sort of how homosexuals picked up the words 'gay' and 'queer' to describe themselves.
Tod Phipps and Thomas Jefferson
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ICANN Elections
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· Score: 1
Jefferson took property a step further. He replaced the word property with
"the right to pursuit of happiness." Jefferson wanted to make certain that the rights were not
limited to land. In effect, Jefferson made a momentous step toward recognizing virtual rights.
But wasn't it Jefferson who said:
If nature has make one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of the every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character too, is that no one possess the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who recieves an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me . . . Inventions, then, cannot, in nature, be subject of property."
I got that little peice of Jefferson wisdom from Lawrence Lessing's book (Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace). He (Lessing) disagrees with it slightly (as do I, but you'll have to read the book for his argument). IP is a Good Thing only if it promotes the "sciences and useful arts" more than it hurts. I believe that limited Copyright and sane patents do that, but current statute and practice surrounding IP only makes it a weapon for corporatism.
I find this man's (Tod Phipps) view of IP as a extention of real-space property alarming. Property exists in real space due to scarcity, but, as Jefferson pointed out quite well, there is no such restraint for Intellectual Property. Phipps recognizes that IP (mostly in the form of instructions fed to logic circuts) will become incresingly important in all of our lives, but then he seems to make the logical leap that its importance should mean that the creater (or copyright holder as the case might be) should have greater control over the idea in the "Digital Millenium" (to coin a term 8-) ).
Tod Phipps is not the only canadate that I have issues with, but I think his mindset is most certantly not the kind of thing I would like to see added to ICANN's already IP-centric methodolgy.
I'll most likely vode for Lessing, although I will nominate Auterbach and I might vote for him, I think he, Simmions, and Berbag all look like good canadates. I'll have to find out more about them.
So many people say that copyright laws need to be thrown out or changed... Want copyright laws reduced to
5 years? That means a 5 year old Linux kernel would be free for anyone to do as they wish with, without
GPL'ed restrictions. All the old GNU binutils would have no protection at all. While I agree that insanely
long copyrights don't do a lot of good for society, people are trading ROMS for some rather recent games.
I'm not too worried about a company getting an advantage with a five year old Linux kernel. Or even the portions of the current kernel that are more than five years old.
Also, you forget that part of the reason for the GPL is to fight copyright, so even if copyright law does not exist, many of the liberties it gives will be by default due to lack of copyright. Companies could still use trade secret laws to restrict distrabution of their sources, so free software would be somewhat weaker with no copyright.
I'm not in favor of removing copyright altogether for that reason and because I'm not entirely convinced that limited copyright would not hurt inovation more than it would help it. I think copyright should be 12 years (as it was initally) for all material that does not change much (ie books) and five years or less for material that does get frequently revised like software. That way, all of the important new portions of software like Linux or WindowsFOO will still be under copyright while old hat stuff like GNU yes and pong would be public domain.
First of all, you probably mean USian liberty. America is a continent, not a nation.
Yeah, and 'US' is part of an acronym, not the name of a country.
IIRC, the name of the country is The United States of America. This name makes it difficult to find a word meaning 'person of the country', but 'American' works better than 'United States of American' or your absurd 'USian'.
Ah well, the predominate feature among flames is that they are not well thought out.
I've heard rumors that the FBI (or possibly the NSA) pays the CICS to spy on American citizens to avoid violating US law.
In a related story, I just saw an old Movie called The FBI Files. It was complete prophaganda, (J Edgar Hoover was made to look like some great wonderful guy (he was still the Dictator of the FBI when the movie was made)) but the interesting part was when they talked of the 'evils of communisim', complete with the stalking^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsurveillance of a 'commie'.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you're already using spreaming MP3, which is NOT a loss-less format, plus, you're using UDP, connectionless transfer, and at quite high tranfer speeds, which means many packets simply won't get there, so infact you do loose audio quality with streaming audio.
Now, if you were transfering .wav files via ftp, that would be loss-less as wav is a loss-less format and ftp transfers via TCP, which means you're actually end up getting every bit you were supposed to get.
Yeah, And I bet his grammer is better than yours at least. :)
The framers of the Constution felt that the document proper should do nothing but describe the workings of Government.
The first ten amendments, called the 'bill of rights' were planned from the outset, infact, some states only ratified the Constution on the understanding that those ten amendments would be ratified once the Constution was in place.
As far as the eighteenth amendment goes, something nightmarish like that happens every time there's an unhealthy rash of conservitisim in this country. And it was quickly repealed.
I have NEVER complained about a story on Slashdot prior to this, but this story has gone way too far.
Nerds don't read Star, or Hello! Magizines, and I have yet to meet anyone amung even their readership who would suggest that anything ever printed in them is stuff that matters.
Linus' breeding habits are none of our buisness. He is not a movie star, and the Free Software Community is not his fan club. I am not a Linus groupie, and I doubt there are too many slashdot readers who are*.
We often see stories comming out of the mainstream press talking about "Opne Source Leaders", and the shouts ring out on Slashdot "Linus and ESR are not my leaders!" but then we fall over ourselves to gossip about their privite lives? This story does not go far to show the outside world what, exactly, it is that we are about.
* If you are a Linus groupie, the please GET A LIFE. Learn to program, write a book, take up chess, anything. And if that dosen't work, become a groupie for some pop culture item so you'd at least have company. How about Brittney? she can't sing, but she looks a hell of a lot better in a tank top than would Linus.
I have a working Woz signature Apple ][gs that I got through similar circumstances.
From the I can't believe they're this stupid dept.
Could this be the Technolibertarian's dream come true and the end for constant vigilance and street corner phophetizing as we know it? FuckedFromtheOutset has announced a preliminary effort to start the planning process on some more vaporwear. Music DNA, that the company claims *cough* that it is capable of identifing and tracking of billions of existing and new MP3 files on the internet providing (get this) exact accounting for the copyright. "Thus enabling file sharing and linking value added data to songs" Fucked said in a pathetic attempt to spin. When asked if they were suggesting that it is currently illegal to share files, Fucked said "No Comment."
Fucked also announced that, in order to cover it's massive burn rate, it has duped some brainless Europeans (similar to brainless Americans, but know more than one lanugage) into throwing money at Fucked. Musican Eric Clapton has been starving in recent months due to the evils of Napster, but still managed to scrape up a few million dollars to throw into the furnace. "Mr. Clapton's investment in the company speaks of the importance importance Music DNA will have in returning to the record labels their rightful monopolies, I mean, I saw the guy, he's all skin and bones." Someone said in another interestingly unattributed quote.
The company anticipates that with industry-wide adoption of its music registry, acceptence by every node on the internet, a constutional amendment, a UN Resolution, and a few minor acts of God, the system will enable copyright holders to identify their content usage through at least a portion of the internet, thus ensuring that ownership and royalty right are fully "exploited, oops, don't print that, I meant 'monetized'". According to Fucked, Music DNA dosen't have an offical ship date but should come out "in a few months".
Music DNA is an extension of other FuckedFromTheOutset products which have already made a huge impact on the distribution of copyrighted material across the Internet, which include a bunch of neat sounding jargon and buzzwords. "I assure you, we have tons of buzzwords. MCSE's bow to our buzzword dominance".
FuckedFromTheOutset bullshits about how the process works: "Ok, see, it's sorta like this, Songs have patterns, right? and these don't change much if you have an exact digital copy, like a compressed 40kpbs mp3 recorded throught an analog bridge, see? So bitrate dosen't matter because this is about the information carred in it, all codec's have the same information, they don't try to elimanate information and guess at what's in the gaps." our weakly attributed source continued making a fool of himself for a few minutes, then said "Search engines can increase by atleast tenfold the amount of time and bandwith their spiders crawl through to make sure they're not linking to copyrighted materal, they're really gung ho about that, plus, an analyzer can be incorperated into a peice of client software residing on the PC to er, make sure the music is complete? Appearently, one can't figure that out by listening to it. We've talked with the XMMS people, they're all over that."
Mor E. Assplease, an investor in the company fumbles: "Obviously, copyright protection rackets maintainence is a seminal issue confronting the Cyber-eNew iEconomy.com at the moment, and music is at the heard of the matter. With Music DNA, Napster and Scour could cover their asses by putting a lame block that dosen't work to appease the courts. We can now account to the artists and songwriters who have been shortchanged by the labels for long before the eInternet iEconomy.com, or wait, I didn't mean that". The company's Olsen Wells expresses his hopes for the process, adding that "as the industry transitions from music as a product to music as a service, Music DNA could conceivably have the greatest single impact on the music buisness since the creation of the MP3 format". When asked if he could clarify that statment, remove a few buzzwords, or somehow make it make sense, Wells replied "No Comment".
Richard Stallman, leader of the Free Software Foundation, and proponent of free music, corrected our use of the word 'Linux' (appearently, it's GNU/Linux) but then began to laugh hysterically as we attempted to explain what Music DNA was. "I can just mess it up with dd on my Linux box" He continued, "GNU! GNU/Linux box I mean! please don't print that".
Lawrence Lessing, a Technolibertian known for his book Code and other Laws of Cyberspace, when asked about it, faught to keep an amused look off of his face and said "Well, we've obviously overestimated the enemy here, I'll have to drastically restructure my 'invisable hand' theory, it assumes a much higher caliber opponent than that with which we are dealing".
Nether of which are very useful.
I do know that one can pick up half priced books fairly easly, and as I look through some of my books, most of them have copyrights in the early ninties (many of which I have bought recently
The unix API has been pretty stable for at least a decade, C was standardized in about the mid eighties?. Python and Perl are both a good ten years old.
My point is that good stuff with staying power dosen't tend to change a great deal, even in the tech world. I don't see to much reason Libraries couldn't buy good books that are not out of date if they knew what to buy.
Perhaps if this guy could prod his library into buying The C Programming Language, The Mythical Man-Month, or a less well known but very good book Expert C Programming (copyright c 1992), he could "afford to read books" and give them valuable tools with which to serve the community.
That being said, I am a High School student, but I have a fairly decent library. My biggest expense is for computer books, second is the services such as gas and my cable line, and computer equipmnet (notably absent is computer software as I have not paid for any in a very long time).
I am fortunate to have a very good job with the State after school, so I have a fair amount of discretionary income for my age, but it generally takes me two weeks to read a computer book well, and I've spend $20.00 on new books but as high as $70.00 (they are overpriced text books but the subject matter is such that it is not covered in any mainstream tech books). A good average cost would be about $30.00.
With that average, I spend about $15.00 per week on computer books, in practice, it is much more as I buy many books for refrence and does not dedicate a great deal of time to them. My point is that if one can not afford $15.00 per week for computer books, then one is not as deticated to that as this poster would have us believe, or one can not afford to waste time and energy posting to slashdot.
But if your company is on Nastaq, or the DoS gets on the news, the FBI will be all over it.
He had it first, South Africa could have gotten it first and it would have been fair game. As to .us, it does exist, but it is so mismanaged as to make it unusable. I wish it wern't because I think it would be cool to have domains based on regions (ie jordanb.il.us).
Yeah, CCTV is all over the place here in the states...
Run tuxracer from the terminal, then you'll be able to see error messages.
You can use linux binaries too, they're called debs and rpms. just apt-get install tuxracer, or rpm -i tuxracer*.rpm.
Unix is user friendly, it's just very careful of who it chooses as friends.
You are right about being able to orbit at any altitude, of course, friction of the atmosphere would become significant at lower altitudes.
You were only partially right when you said that the earth's gravity pulls at 9.8 m/(s^2), actually, according to Universal Gravity, two bodies will attract eachother with a force governed by the following equation:
F=(G M m)/(r^2)
Where F is the force of attraction, G is the gravitational constant (about 6.67*10^-11 m^3/(kg/s^2)), M and m are the masses, and r is the distance between the the two bodies' centers of gravity.
That is all well and good, but it dosen't tell us what the force of attraction for the earth is. To discover that, we have to use another equation, Newton's second law:
F= m a
Where F is force, m is mass, and a is (you gussed it) acceleration.
We can set F equal to F and yeald:
m a = (G M m) / r^2
We can cancel out the two small 'm's to get:
a = (G M) / r^2
We need a 'r' and a 'M', so I will now stipulate that the radius of the earth is about 6.38*10^6 m and that the mass of the earth is 5.98*10^24 kg. An abitious slashdoter could most likely find much more accurate figures, but these will fit our purposes. Consequently, we can find the acceleration due to gravity with:
a = (6.67*10^-11 * 5.98*10^24) / ((6.38*10^6)^2)
a = 9.799 m/(s^2)I hope you can see that 'a' would be significantly less were an object higher (say, 500km) from the surface of the earth, as 'r' would increase:
a = (6.67*10^-11 * 5.98*10^24) / ((6.38*10^6 + 500*1000)^2)
a = 8.427 m/(s^2)Back to the original question: How fast must an object to travel to orbit the earth at the surface? To answer that, we have to call apon yet another equation, that of centripical acceleration in circular motion:
a = (v^2) / r
We know that the centripical acceleration is the acceleration due to gravity, which we found to be 9.799 m/(s^2) at the surface of the earth, and we know 'r' to be the radius of the earth, so to find 'v' (velocity) we could have:
v = sqrt( a r )
v = sqrt( 9.799 * 6.38*10^6) v = 7906.81 m/s v = 7.907 km/s (*)As you can see, this is significantly less than your figure of 30,000 km/s!
(*) Us Americans, who's brains have been destroyed by the English System, would get more sense out of 17,687 mi/hr.
I hear these people talking of chat rooms, I wonder if they mean IRC, or some sort of AOL/Yahoo thing.
My experence with irc.slashnet.org and irc.opennetworks.org, as well as some channels on networks such as Undernet is that there can be very hight brow conversations on IRC. Sure, there are a great many morons on IRC, and some portions of IRC attract them (I would love it if someone could show me an intellegent person on irc.dal.net), but the same is true for Usenet. There are some parts of Usenet (such as comp.*) that are haunts for some of the brightest people on the net, and others, (most of alt.*) that is a wasteland of porn and idiots.
In addition to that, I see the intelligence level on IRC getting higher. I attribute that to programs such as AIM that draw the lusers away from the more 'archaic' IRC.
If I were to shoot someone, and videotape it. Then the act of shooting the person may have been illegal and harmful to the victom, but would the Videotape be illegal, even if its images may be sensitive to the victim (assuming he survived) and his family?
I'm using Netscape Communicator 4.72 on Linux. I had no problems viewing the site
When I read this, I thought Emmerson was the best troll ever on slashdot, and in the top ten on Usenet. I was so amazed at how articulate this guy was, I wanted to see some of his other art, so I checked his history. Consider:
If this guy really is a troll, then he is the best troll ever in the history of Usenet, all bbs's, fidonet, arpanet, and all other such mediums!. Think about it, is it more likely that this guy is a genious with nothing better to do than troll Slashdot, or that he is really what he looks like: a psychopathic right-winged extremist?
I don't really find this guy funny.
This is BIND You don't have to make a fake release to create security exploits, they're a standard feature.
I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said that the true challenge of a democracy is not to protect the majority, but rather, to protect the minority.
Well my first thought was A MONTH???.
If I were to let any of my clients sites go down for more than a day, I'd be dead, I already suffer from telephone phobia from times when servers have crashed/email has gone weird. These days there is no excuse for not having backups and at least some idea of an alternative if you do lose a machine (he sez hypocritically).Well, M-Net is run by volunteers. One of the biggest problems was that the admins could not find the free time required to do all of the work involved in bringing a new bbs box up.
They could not pull from backups because they did not know how long the box had been compromised. I would also like to point out that they bought new equipment because they have been wanting to upgrade for some time, they just used this as an excuse. The box that was hacked had no physical damage done to it (the admins said as much in the m-net bbs, where there is currently a lively discussion going on about this).
Arbornet does not have the funds for any sort of redundency, it is supported entirely by charitable donations from m-net users
The box being down for a month (I remember it being more like two) was a major inconvience, but I still think a felony charge is way too much for the kid.
Since Debian is the free distro, it can't be bought, can it? Actually, according to netcraft (I can't find it on their site, but I know I saw it there), Debian is the Number 2 Distro in terms of total number of boxes running it.
'Hacker' has come to mean 'criminal' to the general public, and I think I've been seeing signs of the community accepting that.
I never use it to describe myself, nor do any other 'hackers' I know. Might I point out that even a Slashdot story recently used the word to describe computer criminals (I'm too lazy to look up the link). This is a Good Thing in my opinion, as I don't think we'd ever be able to reverse the meaning of the word in the public perception. As is, its use will only make us appear to be something we're not, and associate us with script kiddies like the ones that attacked Western Union.
I think the word 'geek' is replacing it. I think it is a great word to use because it is used by the general public to insult our kind. Sort of how homosexuals picked up the words 'gay' and 'queer' to describe themselves.
But wasn't it Jefferson who said:
If nature has make one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of the every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character too, is that no one possess the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who recieves an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me . . . Inventions, then, cannot, in nature, be subject of property."I got that little peice of Jefferson wisdom from Lawrence Lessing's book (Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace). He (Lessing) disagrees with it slightly (as do I, but you'll have to read the book for his argument). IP is a Good Thing only if it promotes the "sciences and useful arts" more than it hurts. I believe that limited Copyright and sane patents do that, but current statute and practice surrounding IP only makes it a weapon for corporatism.
I find this man's (Tod Phipps) view of IP as a extention of real-space property alarming. Property exists in real space due to scarcity, but, as Jefferson pointed out quite well, there is no such restraint for Intellectual Property. Phipps recognizes that IP (mostly in the form of instructions fed to logic circuts) will become incresingly important in all of our lives, but then he seems to make the logical leap that its importance should mean that the creater (or copyright holder as the case might be) should have greater control over the idea in the "Digital Millenium" (to coin a term 8-) ).
Tod Phipps is not the only canadate that I have issues with, but I think his mindset is most certantly not the kind of thing I would like to see added to ICANN's already IP-centric methodolgy.
I'll most likely vode for Lessing, although I will nominate Auterbach and I might vote for him, I think he, Simmions, and Berbag all look like good canadates. I'll have to find out more about them.
I'm not too worried about a company getting an advantage with a five year old Linux kernel. Or even the portions of the current kernel that are more than five years old.
Also, you forget that part of the reason for the GPL is to fight copyright, so even if copyright law does not exist, many of the liberties it gives will be by default due to lack of copyright. Companies could still use trade secret laws to restrict distrabution of their sources, so free software would be somewhat weaker with no copyright.
I'm not in favor of removing copyright altogether for that reason and because I'm not entirely convinced that limited copyright would not hurt inovation more than it would help it. I think copyright should be 12 years (as it was initally) for all material that does not change much (ie books) and five years or less for material that does get frequently revised like software. That way, all of the important new portions of software like Linux or WindowsFOO will still be under copyright while old hat stuff like GNU yes and pong would be public domain.
Yeah, and 'US' is part of an acronym, not the name of a country.
IIRC, the name of the country is The United States of America. This name makes it difficult to find a word meaning 'person of the country', but 'American' works better than 'United States of American' or your absurd 'USian'.
Ah well, the predominate feature among flames is that they are not well thought out.
I've heard rumors that the FBI (or possibly the NSA) pays the CICS to spy on American citizens to avoid violating US law.
In a related story, I just saw an old Movie called The FBI Files. It was complete prophaganda, (J Edgar Hoover was made to look like some great wonderful guy (he was still the Dictator of the FBI when the movie was made)) but the interesting part was when they talked of the 'evils of communisim', complete with the stalking^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsurveillance of a 'commie'.