but watching both buildings collapse on TV was crazy enough as is. I had been laying in bed trying to oversleep for my Poly Sci class, when my roomates mother called. My other roomate (I have 2) answered the phone, half-awake, and mumbled something about a terrorist attack in NY. I'm thinking that it's just one of my friends pulling a practicle joke, but I thought I'd turn on the TV to see. Every other station had a picture of the two WTC buildings on fire.
Now I'm thinking bombing, although it's kin dof strange that the bombs would go off near the top of the building. It was bad, but it didn't look like a significant number of people were going to be hurt/killed (significant > 300). Then of course, right before my eyes (and the reporter didn't even seem to notice, incidently), one of the towers just collapses, almost in slow motion. That's when it hit me - a lot of people just died.
Right before I went to my poly sci class, the other tower collapsed too. I had no idea what was going to happen next. Maybe a plane was heading for D.C. and going to hit the white house? Maybe that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was heading for Chicago (where I'm from). I'm just glad this wasn't even better planned out. Think, if they (whoever is behing this) hijacked planes in Chicago, San Fransico, Los Angeles, etc, a whole lot more people would be dead today.
- Yes I've heard, kills men by the hundreds and if he were here, he'd consume the terrorists with fireballs from his eyes, and bolts of lightning from his ass(ARSE)
- I am Collen Powel, and I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyranny. You have come to fight as free men and free men you are - What will you do with that freedom? will you fight?
= Fight against that! No, we will run, and we will live
- Aye, fight and you may die run and you'll live at least a while, and dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that, for one chance JUST ONE CHANCE to come back here and tell our enemies that you can take our lives, but you can never take our FREEDOM!!!!
F-bacher
This isn't the same as Pearl Harbor
on
Our New Pearl Harbor
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
When Pearl Harbor was bombed, we knew who to retailiate against. There was a target we could single out and mobilize against. Here we don't know who attacked us, or how we would retaliate. It's like swatting a fly in an open field; there may not be a lot of flies, but because they are so hard to pinpoint, or even hit (since they can move freely), swatting even some of the flies is probabalistic at best.
I hope Bush has a good plan, because I have no idea what I would do in his shoes (except for maybe go back to Washington and make a comforting speech).
>>Apple to make a deal. Port Mac OS X to Intel and give it away free for 5 years
Is apple switching to intel in this equation? Or are you just hoping apple will do this so it will die out? Do you have any idea how hard that would be? They'd lose the Classic compatibility layer they worked on forever, plus every standard program (aka one's that cost money) would have to be recompiled. So what would OS X on intel run? Unix freebies (not that they aren't good) and recompiled cocoa apps (not a whole lot of those yet).
>>Does it frighten anyone else that the government is getting it's hands into the workings of big business?
Nah, I'll probably just move to Canada at some point, or maybe one of those undiscovered islands around the equator so I can make a "suprise" apearance on Surviver XXI.
>>So some in our government think that they should decide what is and isn't included in the new release of this operating system. What next?
1. Ford doesn't even have close to 90% marketshare
2. Ford isn't bundeling technology with their cars to drive out competition.
3. Taking out the engines, seats, and wheels of an Window would be like removing the kernel, the GUI, and all the dlls. No one is advocating that.
The digital divide exists BECAUSE of famine, technological obselence, war, poverty, etc. The sad thing is a lot of the problems are the result of colonialist policies that destroyed the economies of Africa, South America, and parts of South Asia.
Also, there's plenty of food to go around; it's really just a problem of distribution. Of course, overpopulation (because 3rd world countries usually have less educated citizens and lower standards of living,, so they have more kids to work/are educated to know to use a condom or other protected) doesn't help.
There are a lot of root causes that aren't being addressed in all these issues. The solution to a lot of these problems - the resurection of 3rd world economies.
Well, considering these organisms thrive when the sun comes out, I'd assume it would be photsynthesis. I have no idea what the organisms are made of, but if they are able to transform sun light into an energy form that they can live on, then they're set. Also, there's a lot of ice around them, along with rocks and soil that could be rich in a material that the organisms like. There are plenty of organisms that live on nasty stuff on earth, so I'm sure organisms on Mars could find something to eat.
The key is, matter and energy are interchangeable if you know the right processing method.
So 2 billion years ago, a small class of organisms survived the collapse of Mars' attmosphere. And so many billions of years later a distant (and possibly radically different) relative of that organism still thrives (atleast during the spring). That's pretty cool.
This is a great scientific find (if these do turn out to be organisms), especially if by studying them we can figure out how they manage to survive at subzero temperatures. Considering we're over do for another ice age, that could come in handy.
F-bacher
Re:Think of the savings in $$$!
on
E-Paper Moves Closer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You've got to be kidding. Did you read my post or just the title? I didn't mention books, nor even make a subtle reference to IP. I'm talking about personal papers for businesses and homework assignments for schools. eBooks may be more expensive, but ePaper in general will be cheaper because of the personal data you can store on it.
For some strange reason I think he used copy and paste. It's not like a bunch of trolls like to start off each new slashdot story with an ascii art masturbation or a flamebait linux sucks story or so and so has died.
I know tons of businesses and schools (in particular) use piles upon piles of paper every year. If E-paper ever gets really good, then not only could there be substantial savings for mass-paper users (anyone from the policy debate community knows what I'm talking about), but also it could help slow the rate at which land fills grow, and also slow deforestattion (yeah, there are ton of other causes like population growth, acid rain, blah blah blah)... of course the key would be proliferating this kind of technology to less well to do nations.
I know all the *nix have a lot of similarities, but HP has kind of been with HPUX for awhile now. Could they be able to support linux within a year? That could require a lot of training. And any transition requires even more spending money (something I'm guessing they have less to throw around after buying Compaq).
Honestly I think they're going to be more conservative and go for printers and other accessories, not necessarially linux anytime soon.
And there's a nice picture of Tux on HP's webpage.
F-bacher
How will they market that?
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
So when most people go out and buy a computer, they see a lot of mhz and think it's really fast. So if they're use to 2ghz+ pentiums, why would they even think of buying a 1ghz itanium? Sure, I know it'll probably be faster, but how does intel plan to market these? Will they also drop mhz ratings like AMD? Or will they go on some major re-educaiton campaign, like Apple?
1. Loss of all privacy (you can't disconnect from this net unless you get captured by Picard)
2. Loss of all freedom. Because all your actions are triggered by thoughts from your brain, all of your actions could be preempted by the rest of the world. That sounds great for stoppin crime, but aweful for people who break from social norms
3. Propogation of viruses. You thought the internet was bad at doing this. Remember when Picard infected Hue with those non-Borgian thoughts? That almost screwed up the Borg's entire existence.
People can probably think up some more.
F-bacher
Re:Why can't /. editors proof read before posting?
on
Working Nerve Chip
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Well, #2248298 says the same thing your post does, and it was posted 2 minutes bfore yours according to the time stamp. So I guess that would make your post redundant.
I remember seeing an episode once where this scientist was kind of a dork in every sense, and then he created these computer like antibodies that would be able to attack any bad thing that entered the body. This was great at first, as he remained healthy, and then his physical fitness also seemed to improve. Well, then these antibodies went a little nuts and started making other improvements in the body: like after he went swimming, her developed gills. Then I remember after he tried to kill himself, his body created sporers to protected himself from hurting his body. And then he blew up a lab and killed himself.
Yeah, this is as much scifi as the article says the end use of these guys are, but the more we have computeresque things in our body, the more scared I get.
F-bacher
P.S. Oh yeah, and that guy had sex with his gf and she got pregnant, so the antibodies passed on to her. Dun dun da!
"One of Passport's greatest security weaknesses may be the single sign-on process, analysts said. The single point of entry could also be a single point of failure. Since the ID is always an e-mail address, someone looking to break into an account might easily obtain half the information needed to do so."
Because people usually don't pick very secure passwords, it's better to have multiple passwords so that an evesdropper or other malicious person can't crack into all yur accounts. U of I just made people intentionally set all their 3 or 4 passwords instead of just giving them one the applied to all 4 (although most people tend to choose the same password for all their online services anyway)
Also, because Passport's trying to incorporate a lot of information in one place that used to be distrubuted in many different places, if some one hacks into Passport, there goes all your privacy.
is it atleast marked? Or do I have to guess which machine will let me look around the internet uninhibited? That'd probably worse control: it's like the watch tower in the prison scenario. It's one type of control when you know there's a watchman, but it's another when you're not sure if there's one at all.
So he's pissed at Bush for his descision (or indescision, if you take it that way) on stem cell research and how he see's conservatism effecting biological advances, so he doesn't give money to a college to biolgy research in protets? This doesn't make sense. Maybe if he gave his money to a college in Britain that has much more liberal stances on, well, everything. That might start to get the attention of people and make a statement. But this just seems stupid.
I remember seeing that 3D-glasses muppet show to, and it gave me a scare every once in a while. It really did trick my eyes into believeing flying debris and miscellaneous muppets were flying right toward my face.
Maybe if more games like Q3 incorporated this type of 3D into the game, we'd have less "run around like a moron and blow things up cause I'll just come back to life," and more "holy crap that rocket looks like it was about to really come out and hit me; maybe I should watch myslef a little more carefully and develope a more sustainable strategy."
Or maybe this will lead more Q3 playing grandmas to have heart attacks.
Okay, so if I follow the logic behing battlebots.org going to the show battlebots, then if a company M, we'll call "Microsoft" advertised as owning a business on 123 Mapple Street in another town, can they take my humble aboad because I have the same address (minus the city name?)
How could I conclude that? Because their argument is about confusion. Customers are going to see Maple Street, look for 123, and expect to see Microsoft. Heck, if I'm some other business, maybe they'll shop from me than from Microsoft (perish the though!).
This sounds ubsurd, but this is exactly what's happening to the internet. Because utl's and doman names are abstract, aka not touch-and-feel types of property, and not a lot of people can really relate to (aka non-geeks), no one really cares if big businesses have there way with property that has been fairly, and from every way I see it, lawfully obtained.
The real problem, atleast as I see it, as that you never really own your domain name. Unlike your house, which besides taxes and general upkeeping (can't be a fire hazard) is yours if you pay in full, domains are sort of licensed by the DNS (I'm a little shady on this part, but I had to pay for my domain name, year after year, so I assumed everyone does).
F-bacher
Re:Stephen King, author, dead at 54
on
Lightning Research
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Why the hell does someone always post this stupid lie everytime a slashdot story is posted? I thought someone was serious the first time.
Heck yeah! Remember from Back to the Future? You could get 1.21 Gigawatts of power from a single bolt of lightning!
The catch is that lightening doesn't usually strike at the same place over and over. With a nice, big thunderstorm you could get a bunch of thunderstrikes, but most of the time I'd bet you could only get a couple. It may be more costly to create and maintain the facility to harness lightening than the savings would be from the generated energy.
Slashdot Mirror
but watching both buildings collapse on TV was crazy enough as is. I had been laying in bed trying to oversleep for my Poly Sci class, when my roomates mother called. My other roomate (I have 2) answered the phone, half-awake, and mumbled something about a terrorist attack in NY. I'm thinking that it's just one of my friends pulling a practicle joke, but I thought I'd turn on the TV to see. Every other station had a picture of the two WTC buildings on fire.
Now I'm thinking bombing, although it's kin dof strange that the bombs would go off near the top of the building. It was bad, but it didn't look like a significant number of people were going to be hurt/killed (significant > 300). Then of course, right before my eyes (and the reporter didn't even seem to notice, incidently), one of the towers just collapses, almost in slow motion. That's when it hit me - a lot of people just died.
Right before I went to my poly sci class, the other tower collapsed too. I had no idea what was going to happen next. Maybe a plane was heading for D.C. and going to hit the white house? Maybe that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was heading for Chicago (where I'm from). I'm just glad this wasn't even better planned out. Think, if they (whoever is behing this) hijacked planes in Chicago, San Fransico, Los Angeles, etc, a whole lot more people would be dead today.
F-bacher
- Sons of america, I am Collen Powel
= Collen Powel is 7 feet tall
- Yes I've heard, kills men by the hundreds and if he were here, he'd consume the terrorists with fireballs from his eyes, and bolts of lightning from his ass(ARSE)
- I am Collen Powel, and I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyranny. You have come to fight as free men and free men you are - What will you do with that freedom? will you fight?
= Fight against that! No, we will run, and we will live
- Aye, fight and you may die run and you'll live at least a while, and dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that, for one chance JUST ONE CHANCE to come back here and tell our enemies that you can take our lives, but you can never take our FREEDOM!!!!
F-bacher
When Pearl Harbor was bombed, we knew who to retailiate against. There was a target we could single out and mobilize against. Here we don't know who attacked us, or how we would retaliate. It's like swatting a fly in an open field; there may not be a lot of flies, but because they are so hard to pinpoint, or even hit (since they can move freely), swatting even some of the flies is probabalistic at best.
I hope Bush has a good plan, because I have no idea what I would do in his shoes (except for maybe go back to Washington and make a comforting speech).
F-bacher
>>HP-Compaq owns like 70% of PC markets
Uhmmm... no.
>>Apple to make a deal. Port Mac OS X to Intel and give it away free for 5 years
Is apple switching to intel in this equation? Or are you just hoping apple will do this so it will die out? Do you have any idea how hard that would be? They'd lose the Classic compatibility layer they worked on forever, plus every standard program (aka one's that cost money) would have to be recompiled. So what would OS X on intel run? Unix freebies (not that they aren't good) and recompiled cocoa apps (not a whole lot of those yet).
F-bacher
>>Does it frighten anyone else that the government is getting it's hands into the workings of big business?
Nah, I'll probably just move to Canada at some point, or maybe one of those undiscovered islands around the equator so I can make a "suprise" apearance on Surviver XXI.
>>So some in our government think that they should decide what is and isn't included in the new release of this operating system. What next?
Hopefully competition.
F-bacher
1. Ford doesn't even have close to 90% marketshare
2. Ford isn't bundeling technology with their cars to drive out competition.
3. Taking out the engines, seats, and wheels of an Window would be like removing the kernel, the GUI, and all the dlls. No one is advocating that.
F-bacher
The digital divide exists BECAUSE of famine, technological obselence, war, poverty, etc. The sad thing is a lot of the problems are the result of colonialist policies that destroyed the economies of Africa, South America, and parts of South Asia.
Also, there's plenty of food to go around; it's really just a problem of distribution. Of course, overpopulation (because 3rd world countries usually have less educated citizens and lower standards of living,, so they have more kids to work/are educated to know to use a condom or other protected) doesn't help.
There are a lot of root causes that aren't being addressed in all these issues. The solution to a lot of these problems - the resurection of 3rd world economies.
F-bacher
Well, considering these organisms thrive when the sun comes out, I'd assume it would be photsynthesis. I have no idea what the organisms are made of, but if they are able to transform sun light into an energy form that they can live on, then they're set. Also, there's a lot of ice around them, along with rocks and soil that could be rich in a material that the organisms like. There are plenty of organisms that live on nasty stuff on earth, so I'm sure organisms on Mars could find something to eat.
The key is, matter and energy are interchangeable if you know the right processing method.
F-bacher
So 2 billion years ago, a small class of organisms survived the collapse of Mars' attmosphere. And so many billions of years later a distant (and possibly radically different) relative of that organism still thrives (atleast during the spring). That's pretty cool.
This is a great scientific find (if these do turn out to be organisms), especially if by studying them we can figure out how they manage to survive at subzero temperatures. Considering we're over do for another ice age, that could come in handy.
F-bacher
You've got to be kidding. Did you read my post or just the title? I didn't mention books, nor even make a subtle reference to IP. I'm talking about personal papers for businesses and homework assignments for schools. eBooks may be more expensive, but ePaper in general will be cheaper because of the personal data you can store on it.
F-bacher
For some strange reason I think he used copy and paste. It's not like a bunch of trolls like to start off each new slashdot story with an ascii art masturbation or a flamebait linux sucks story or so and so has died.
F-bacher
I know tons of businesses and schools (in particular) use piles upon piles of paper every year. If E-paper ever gets really good, then not only could there be substantial savings for mass-paper users (anyone from the policy debate community knows what I'm talking about), but also it could help slow the rate at which land fills grow, and also slow deforestattion (yeah, there are ton of other causes like population growth, acid rain, blah blah blah)... of course the key would be proliferating this kind of technology to less well to do nations.
F-bacher
I know all the *nix have a lot of similarities, but HP has kind of been with HPUX for awhile now. Could they be able to support linux within a year? That could require a lot of training. And any transition requires even more spending money (something I'm guessing they have less to throw around after buying Compaq).
Honestly I think they're going to be more conservative and go for printers and other accessories, not necessarially linux anytime soon.
F-bacher
Look at this: Linux Evangelist
And there's a nice picture of Tux on HP's webpage.
F-bacher
So when most people go out and buy a computer, they see a lot of mhz and think it's really fast. So if they're use to 2ghz+ pentiums, why would they even think of buying a 1ghz itanium? Sure, I know it'll probably be faster, but how does intel plan to market these? Will they also drop mhz ratings like AMD? Or will they go on some major re-educaiton campaign, like Apple?
F-bacher
Here's why this is bad:
1. Loss of all privacy (you can't disconnect from this net unless you get captured by Picard)
2. Loss of all freedom. Because all your actions are triggered by thoughts from your brain, all of your actions could be preempted by the rest of the world. That sounds great for stoppin crime, but aweful for people who break from social norms
3. Propogation of viruses. You thought the internet was bad at doing this. Remember when Picard infected Hue with those non-Borgian thoughts? That almost screwed up the Borg's entire existence.
People can probably think up some more.
F-bacher
Well, #2248298 says the same thing your post does, and it was posted 2 minutes bfore yours according to the time stamp. So I guess that would make your post redundant.
F-bacher
I remember seeing an episode once where this scientist was kind of a dork in every sense, and then he created these computer like antibodies that would be able to attack any bad thing that entered the body. This was great at first, as he remained healthy, and then his physical fitness also seemed to improve. Well, then these antibodies went a little nuts and started making other improvements in the body: like after he went swimming, her developed gills. Then I remember after he tried to kill himself, his body created sporers to protected himself from hurting his body. And then he blew up a lab and killed himself.
Yeah, this is as much scifi as the article says the end use of these guys are, but the more we have computeresque things in our body, the more scared I get.
F-bacher
P.S. Oh yeah, and that guy had sex with his gf and she got pregnant, so the antibodies passed on to her. Dun dun da!
This says it all:
"One of Passport's greatest security weaknesses may be the single sign-on process, analysts said. The single point of entry could also be a single point of failure. Since the ID is always an e-mail address, someone looking to break into an account might easily obtain half the information needed to do so."
Because people usually don't pick very secure passwords, it's better to have multiple passwords so that an evesdropper or other malicious person can't crack into all yur accounts. U of I just made people intentionally set all their 3 or 4 passwords instead of just giving them one the applied to all 4 (although most people tend to choose the same password for all their online services anyway)
Also, because Passport's trying to incorporate a lot of information in one place that used to be distrubuted in many different places, if some one hacks into Passport, there goes all your privacy.
F-bacher
is it atleast marked? Or do I have to guess which machine will let me look around the internet uninhibited? That'd probably worse control: it's like the watch tower in the prison scenario. It's one type of control when you know there's a watchman, but it's another when you're not sure if there's one at all.
Scared of Social Control,
F-bacher
So he's pissed at Bush for his descision (or indescision, if you take it that way) on stem cell research and how he see's conservatism effecting biological advances, so he doesn't give money to a college to biolgy research in protets? This doesn't make sense. Maybe if he gave his money to a college in Britain that has much more liberal stances on, well, everything. That might start to get the attention of people and make a statement. But this just seems stupid.
F-bacher
I remember seeing that 3D-glasses muppet show to, and it gave me a scare every once in a while. It really did trick my eyes into believeing flying debris and miscellaneous muppets were flying right toward my face.
Maybe if more games like Q3 incorporated this type of 3D into the game, we'd have less "run around like a moron and blow things up cause I'll just come back to life," and more "holy crap that rocket looks like it was about to really come out and hit me; maybe I should watch myslef a little more carefully and develope a more sustainable strategy."
Or maybe this will lead more Q3 playing grandmas to have heart attacks.
F-bacher
Okay, so if I follow the logic behing battlebots.org going to the show battlebots, then if a company M, we'll call "Microsoft" advertised as owning a business on 123 Mapple Street in another town, can they take my humble aboad because I have the same address (minus the city name?)
How could I conclude that? Because their argument is about confusion. Customers are going to see Maple Street, look for 123, and expect to see Microsoft. Heck, if I'm some other business, maybe they'll shop from me than from Microsoft (perish the though!).
This sounds ubsurd, but this is exactly what's happening to the internet. Because utl's and doman names are abstract, aka not touch-and-feel types of property, and not a lot of people can really relate to (aka non-geeks), no one really cares if big businesses have there way with property that has been fairly, and from every way I see it, lawfully obtained.
The real problem, atleast as I see it, as that you never really own your domain name. Unlike your house, which besides taxes and general upkeeping (can't be a fire hazard) is yours if you pay in full, domains are sort of licensed by the DNS (I'm a little shady on this part, but I had to pay for my domain name, year after year, so I assumed everyone does).
F-bacher
Why the hell does someone always post this stupid lie everytime a slashdot story is posted? I thought someone was serious the first time.
F-bacher
Heck yeah! Remember from Back to the Future? You could get 1.21 Gigawatts of power from a single bolt of lightning!
The catch is that lightening doesn't usually strike at the same place over and over. With a nice, big thunderstorm you could get a bunch of thunderstrikes, but most of the time I'd bet you could only get a couple. It may be more costly to create and maintain the facility to harness lightening than the savings would be from the generated energy.
F-bacher