In a sense, I agree with you. It is wrong for the base commanders to say "we are not a gas stop" and then offer food and shelter. They should make him stay out in his plane and not give him any food.
They have already compromised their principles by giving him food and shelter (especially shelter, since he already has some of his own), so why are they sticking to the "no fuel" principal?
And as for them not having the right kind of fuel, they are clearly saying that even if they did, they would not give it to him.
He already has a better offer than that from the New Zealanders.
He landed in the right place - a place where he has the NZers and the Americans to compete with each other!:)
In all seriousness, if the Antarctic bases are not gas stations, then why are they providing him with accommodation and food - why are they providing hospitality services? Because he otherwise might die??? - there was a damn good chance of that anyway! I see parallels between this situation and the situation where the Internet moved from being an academic-only research tool into being a commercial enterprise that was open for all. I don't think scientists should "own" Antarctica, just as I don't think that academia should "own" TCP/IP, and neither do I think that the various bases down there should be afraid of doing business with the tour operators and adventurers.
If I'm not mistaken, there is a fundamental bug in the dropshadow algorithm. If Window 1 is above Window 2, and Window 2 is above Window 3, then the dropshadow of Window 1 on Window 3 should be offset by twice the amount that the dropshadow of Window 1 is on Window 2. The shadow of Window 1 has "further" to travel (into the screen) to reach Window 3 than it has to reach Window 2.
Looking at the screenshots, it seems that the dropshadows of all windows on all of the windows below them are offset by the same amount.
A couple of months ago, I got a Nigerian email which had the usual story of a banker who was killed in a plane crash (flight number and date provided) etc etc etc. What was unusual was that the the email, which was sent to my.ie email address, said "Mr. X, who was Irish, was killed on flight blah blah".
Now, Nigerian spammers don't usually take the trouble of figuring out the nationality of their potential victims. So, my curiosity aroused, I decided to investigate.
Google is your friend. I punched in the flight number and the date and, lo and behold, there was indeed such a flight that crashed on Guam with the loss of all on board. It was a flight from South Korea to the U.S. West Coast. I found some web pages put up by the Government of Guam which had horrific pictures of bits of planes on the sides of hills etc.
There was even a passenger manifest on this site. Most of the people on board were South Korean nationals. Then I decided to check - were there any Irish nationals on board? No, there were not!
So I emailed the spammer back -
Good news! Your friend is alive! He was not on the plane! According to the Government of Guam website (url provided), there were no Irish people on board!
He emailed me back trying to convince me that I was mistaken. That was the last I heard from him.
Whoever was responsible for writing such anti-spam software would be the first person to get hit with a massive lawsuit the first time some spammer found a way to "aim" this sort of scheme at an innocent bystander.
And why would the lawsuit be directed at the person who developed the software - why would it not be aimed at the spammer? Does the law have a problem with me using automatic tools to preview emails that are sent to me - whether they be sent to me by friends, associates, spammers, or worse?
Take this into the postal world. Imagine that there are people that are employed to check out the legitimacy of any business that send us stuff through the post. Imagine also that an Evil Person (tm) decided to use the system to cause havoc at a legitimate business by sending us all falsified post from that business. Would the business in question have a case against us? Or even against the people we employ to check out the legitimacy of the business? I don't think so.
"The current US-operated GPS system only allows this type of accuracy for military purposes. I feel it is a little irresponsible to give civilians (including criminals and terrorists) access to such accurate targeting systems."
A pair of blunt scissors is all you need to open most things. I feel it is a little irresponsible to give civilians (including criminals and terrorists) access to box cutters (as was used by the terrorists two years ago). Sheesh.
May I suggest that someone put together a DMCAbot honeypot with loads of.zip filenames which contain words that appear in many popular games and other copyrighted materials.
If you could go to a court with, say, 100 of these ridiculous claims from a particular firm of lawyers for files in your honeypot, then maybe the courts would listen and do something about these claims?
The point is that there is no point in a spammer sending out an email that does not contain instructions on how to obtain the product/service being advertised. And, therefore, it should always be possible to track down the person responsible for the spam. The point is that, without the promise of $500 for each violation, it was not economically viable to track down the spammer. Now, it may very well be.
I once managed to track a spammer to a town about 2 hours drive from where I live. If I had been able to collect $500 out of my efforts, it is something that I would do more often...
But I don't care if `losing a freedom` means someone keeps a note of who I phoned 7 months ago?
Even if who you phoned 7 months ago was a mistress that you had a one week affair with? Or a business off whom you bought viagra but which has since diversified into cocaine and other illegal narcotics?
Do you keep 7 months of receipts? 7 months of bills? Because if law enforcement can use 7 months worth of your communications patterns in court against you, you would better have at least 7 months worth of documentation with which to defend yourself.
Of course, one thing that no-one has mentioned yet is that if privacy is outlawed, then only outlaws will have privacy. I have a mobile phone - now that I know that all calls I make on that phone will be recorded and potentially used by law enforcement, I feel like going across the street to a public phone and making all my calls from there. I don't have anything to hide from the law, but if I happen to get caught up in some difficulties with the law, I don't particularly want the law to have unhindered access to all the details of what I use my phone for, as I use my phone for some very very personal things indeed. And that is the huge problem with this system - it is extremely easy for outlaws to defeat it - all that they have to do is to go "across the street" to a public payphone.
The problem with this is that you are not being attacked in your home - you are being attacked from afar.
If someone puts a cannon on their own property and fires that cannon at mine, do I have a duty to retreat? Or may I, without first seeking legal recourse, bring a cannon into my property and start firing back at them?
I visited his stand at the exhibition - unfortunately, he was not there at the time - there was a note on the stand saying that he was "busy giving press interviews"!
What was displayed on the stand was very low on details as well. There was no detailed description as to how his code did what it claimed - all his paper said was that it was the "XWebs Algorithm" that did the magic! Indeed, there wasn't even a demo browser running on the stand! The only thing that I could pick up is that it seems as if he prioritises requests - though I'm not sure how the prioritisation decision is made. He also seems to make a number of simultaneous DNS requests for the one address! (gack)
However, all is not lost. He claims to have made code that generates thumbnails of web sites better than Microsoft do it (I wasn't aware that Microsoft do that, but there you go). He also has the claim of all media formats supported, as well as a built-in DVD player. I think it might possibly be an interesting product, but more from the UI experience than the speeding-up of the download of data.
I once inadvertantly found myself measuring the speed of light using GPS and broadcast radio time signals
My project was to use a GPS system to generate a precise time signal for an experiment. (As part of the method they use for determining position, GPS systems have to determine the time to within a few nanoseconds or so, and some OEM GPS boards - like the one I was using - provide an accurate one pulse-per-second time signal for use). Anyway, I was having trouble understanding the signal, so I wired the signal, and a broadcast time signal from Moscow, into an oscilloscope.
There was a clear 11ms delay between when the GPS produced it's time signal and when I saw the signal from Moscow. I did the experiment in the west of Ireland, approximately 3,300km from Moscow...
I guess we will never know...
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I guess this means we will now never know the correct answer to -
It appears that bin Laden's operation may be, in some sense, headquartered in Ireland. There are reports that his Islamic "relief" organisation has it's registered office in Dublin.
Back in December, the Irish police arrested 5 people from this office, but subsequently released them. The FBI, apparently, expressed considerable disquiet at this, and offered to fund an operation to continue survellience on these people. The Irish Government refused the "offer". Not sure why - it may have something to do with the Irish interpretation of the word "freedom".
So it appears that if America wants to be completely true to it's desire to punish the Governments that "harbour" terrorists and the civilians that elected them, you are going to have to bomb Dublin. Indeed, apparently, there are also bin Landen offices in the London, Montreal and New York, so maybe you should bomb London and Montreal also, just to be sure...
Re:Some perspective on the causualties
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 1
I seriously can't see 1000+ bona-fide Irish being involved in the disaster
Nor can I. I didn't say that there were 1000+ Irish involved - I said that there were 1000+ Irish missing. Big difference.
The point is that more than America was attacked Tuesday. There is an European-wide international day of morning tomorrow, Friday. Which is a Good Thing (tm) - IMO international terrorism needs to be met with international goodwill and brotherhood.
Re:Some perspective on the causualties
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 1
The British Government is saying that maybe 300 to 500 or more Britons were killed. This would make it the worst terrorist attack that Britain has ever experienced as well - far worse than anything the IRA ever did, and they did a lot.
Here in Ireland, there are reports that one of the offices directly hit by the planes employed a lot of Irish people. There are over 1,000 Irish missing - including many of the NY firefighters and police. Of course, many of them will probably be found to be safe and well as communications return to normal.
Make no mistake about it - this was an attack on far more than just America.
As the president of Ireland said, when the final death toll is read out in the weeks to come, it will contain names from every peace loving nation on earth. We already know that there was an Irish woman and her young daughter in one of the planes. No doubt there will be more.
My prayers to both those that I know and those that I do not know in New York and throughout the U.S.
I have learned that an American friend of mine has a son who had breakfast in the WTC yesterday morning. He left at 8:30am, and was a few blocks away when the first plane hit. That is as close I have gotten, so far, to being directly affected by what happened.
But, as the Irish president said yesterday, when the list of the dead is read out in the weeks to come, there will be names from every peace loving country on earth. I am sure that many Americans are feeling personally attacked by what happened, even if they were thousands of miles away and knew no-one in NY or Washington. Let me assure you that the feeling of having being personally attacked goes out much further than the closed borders of America this morning.
Slashdot Mirror
In a sense, I agree with you. It is wrong for the base commanders to say "we are not a gas stop" and then offer food and shelter. They should make him stay out in his plane and not give him any food.
They have already compromised their principles by giving him food and shelter (especially shelter, since he already has some of his own), so why are they sticking to the "no fuel" principal?
And as for them not having the right kind of fuel, they are clearly saying that even if they did, they would not give it to him.
He already has a better offer than that from the New Zealanders.
He landed in the right place - a place where he has the NZers and the Americans to compete with each other! :)
In all seriousness, if the Antarctic bases are not gas stations, then why are they providing him with accommodation and food - why are they providing hospitality services? Because he otherwise might die??? - there was a damn good chance of that anyway! I see parallels between this situation and the situation where the Internet moved from being an academic-only research tool into being a commercial enterprise that was open for all. I don't think scientists should "own" Antarctica, just as I don't think that academia should "own" TCP/IP, and neither do I think that the various bases down there should be afraid of doing business with the tour operators and adventurers.
Johanson has no reasonable expectation to be able to purchase fuel there.
So, he landed at an American base and had "no reasonable expectation" of being able to do business?
Since when were Americans shy of doing a little business?
In all seriousness, I can so see both sides of this. I hope sense prevails.
If I'm not mistaken, there is a fundamental bug in the dropshadow algorithm. If Window 1 is above Window 2, and Window 2 is above Window 3, then the dropshadow of Window 1 on Window 3 should be offset by twice the amount that the dropshadow of Window 1 is on Window 2. The shadow of Window 1 has "further" to travel (into the screen) to reach Window 3 than it has to reach Window 2.
Looking at the screenshots, it seems that the dropshadows of all windows on all of the windows below them are offset by the same amount.
A couple of months ago, I got a Nigerian email which had the usual story of a banker who was killed in a plane crash (flight number and date provided) etc etc etc. What was unusual was that the the email, which was sent to my .ie email address, said "Mr. X, who was Irish, was killed on flight blah blah".
Now, Nigerian spammers don't usually take the trouble of figuring out the nationality of their potential victims. So, my curiosity aroused, I decided to investigate.
Google is your friend. I punched in the flight number and the date and, lo and behold, there was indeed such a flight that crashed on Guam with the loss of all on board. It was a flight from South Korea to the U.S. West Coast. I found some web pages put up by the Government of Guam which had horrific pictures of bits of planes on the sides of hills etc.
There was even a passenger manifest on this site. Most of the people on board were South Korean nationals. Then I decided to check - were there any Irish nationals on board? No, there were not!
So I emailed the spammer back -
He emailed me back trying to convince me that I was mistaken. That was the last I heard from him.
Whoever was responsible for writing such anti-spam software would be the first person to get hit with a massive lawsuit the first time some spammer found a way to "aim" this sort of scheme at an innocent bystander.
And why would the lawsuit be directed at the person who developed the software - why would it not be aimed at the spammer? Does the law have a problem with me using automatic tools to preview emails that are sent to me - whether they be sent to me by friends, associates, spammers, or worse?
Take this into the postal world. Imagine that there are people that are employed to check out the legitimacy of any business that send us stuff through the post. Imagine also that an Evil Person (tm) decided to use the system to cause havoc at a legitimate business by sending us all falsified post from that business. Would the business in question have a case against us? Or even against the people we employ to check out the legitimacy of the business? I don't think so.
"The current US-operated GPS system only allows this type of accuracy for military purposes. I feel it is a little irresponsible to give civilians (including criminals and terrorists) access to such accurate targeting systems."
A pair of blunt scissors is all you need to open most things. I feel it is a little irresponsible to give civilians (including criminals and terrorists) access to box cutters (as was used by the terrorists two years ago). Sheesh.
May I suggest that someone put together a DMCAbot honeypot with loads of .zip filenames which contain words that appear in many popular games and other copyrighted materials.
If you could go to a court with, say, 100 of these ridiculous claims from a particular firm of lawyers for files in your honeypot, then maybe the courts would listen and do something about these claims?
(if you sat enough monkeys at computers typing C, how long would it take until you get MS Office?).
Two weeks.
The point is that there is no point in a spammer sending out an email that does not contain instructions on how to obtain the product/service being advertised. And, therefore, it should always be possible to track down the person responsible for the spam. The point is that, without the promise of $500 for each violation, it was not economically viable to track down the spammer. Now, it may very well be.
I once managed to track a spammer to a town about 2 hours drive from where I live. If I had been able to collect $500 out of my efforts, it is something that I would do more often...
Client Info Schema and System Info Schema.
They appear to get a copy of your registry, as well as information like processor architecture, manufacturer, printer(s?) etc
But I don't care if `losing a freedom` means someone keeps a note of who I phoned 7 months ago?
Even if who you phoned 7 months ago was a mistress that you had a one week affair with? Or a business off whom you bought viagra but which has since diversified into cocaine and other illegal narcotics?
Do you keep 7 months of receipts? 7 months of bills? Because if law enforcement can use 7 months worth of your communications patterns in court against you, you would better have at least 7 months worth of documentation with which to defend yourself.
If *access* to the gathered information is regulated properly, I don't see a problem.
The Data Protection Commissioner has outlined some of the problems that exist with such a data retention scheme, even if access is "properly regulated".
Of course, one thing that no-one has mentioned yet is that if privacy is outlawed, then only outlaws will have privacy. I have a mobile phone - now that I know that all calls I make on that phone will be recorded and potentially used by law enforcement, I feel like going across the street to a public phone and making all my calls from there. I don't have anything to hide from the law, but if I happen to get caught up in some difficulties with the law, I don't particularly want the law to have unhindered access to all the details of what I use my phone for, as I use my phone for some very very personal things indeed. And that is the huge problem with this system - it is extremely easy for outlaws to defeat it - all that they have to do is to go "across the street" to a public payphone.
True story from my days working at an ISP.
One of the sales droids was explaining the virtues of the web and e-commerce etc when the customer asked for a small clarification -
"HTML - how to you spell that?"
The problem with this is that you are not being attacked in your home - you are being attacked from afar.
If someone puts a cannon on their own property and fires that cannon at mine, do I have a duty to retreat? Or may I, without first seeking legal recourse, bring a cannon into my property and start firing back at them?
Any /. readers know the legal answer to this one?
I visited his stand at the exhibition - unfortunately, he was not there at the time - there was a note on the stand saying that he was "busy giving press interviews"!
What was displayed on the stand was very low on details as well. There was no detailed description as to how his code did what it claimed - all his paper said was that it was the "XWebs Algorithm" that did the magic! Indeed, there wasn't even a demo browser running on the stand! The only thing that I could pick up is that it seems as if he prioritises requests - though I'm not sure how the prioritisation decision is made. He also seems to make a number of simultaneous DNS requests for the one address! (gack)
However, all is not lost. He claims to have made code that generates thumbnails of web sites better than Microsoft do it (I wasn't aware that Microsoft do that, but there you go). He also has the claim of all media formats supported, as well as a built-in DVD player. I think it might possibly be an interesting product, but more from the UI experience than the speeding-up of the download of data.
I once inadvertantly found myself measuring the speed of light using GPS and broadcast radio time signals
My project was to use a GPS system to generate a precise time signal for an experiment. (As part of the method they use for determining position, GPS systems have to determine the time to within a few nanoseconds or so, and some OEM GPS boards - like the one I was using - provide an accurate one pulse-per-second time signal for use). Anyway, I was having trouble understanding the signal, so I wired the signal, and a broadcast time signal from Moscow, into an oscilloscope.
There was a clear 11ms delay between when the GPS produced it's time signal and when I saw the signal from Moscow. I did the experiment in the west of Ireland, approximately 3,300km from Moscow...
I guess this means we will now never know the correct answer to -
Error reading drive A:
Abort, Retry, Ignore?
It appears that bin Laden's operation may be, in some sense, headquartered in Ireland. There are reports that his Islamic "relief" organisation has it's registered office in Dublin.
Back in December, the Irish police arrested 5 people from this office, but subsequently released them. The FBI, apparently, expressed considerable disquiet at this, and offered to fund an operation to continue survellience on these people. The Irish Government refused the "offer". Not sure why - it may have something to do with the Irish interpretation of the word "freedom".
So it appears that if America wants to be completely true to it's desire to punish the Governments that "harbour" terrorists and the civilians that elected them, you are going to have to bomb Dublin. Indeed, apparently, there are also bin Landen offices in the London, Montreal and New York, so maybe you should bomb London and Montreal also, just to be sure...
I seriously can't see 1000+ bona-fide Irish being involved in the disaster
Nor can I. I didn't say that there were 1000+ Irish involved - I said that there were 1000+ Irish missing. Big difference.
The point is that more than America was attacked Tuesday. There is an European-wide international day of morning tomorrow, Friday. Which is a Good Thing (tm) - IMO international terrorism needs to be met with international goodwill and brotherhood.
The British Government is saying that maybe 300 to 500 or more Britons were killed. This would make it the worst terrorist attack that Britain has ever experienced as well - far worse than anything the IRA ever did, and they did a lot.
Here in Ireland, there are reports that one of the offices directly hit by the planes employed a lot of Irish people. There are over 1,000 Irish missing - including many of the NY firefighters and police. Of course, many of them will probably be found to be safe and well as communications return to normal.
Make no mistake about it - this was an attack on far more than just America.
As the president of Ireland said, when the final death toll is read out in the weeks to come, it will contain names from every peace loving nation on earth. We already know that there was an Irish woman and her young daughter in one of the planes. No doubt there will be more.
My prayers to both those that I know and those that I do not know in New York and throughout the U.S.
I have learned that an American friend of mine has a son who had breakfast in the WTC yesterday morning. He left at 8:30am, and was a few blocks away when the first plane hit. That is as close I have gotten, so far, to being directly affected by what happened.
But, as the Irish president said yesterday, when the list of the dead is read out in the weeks to come, there will be names from every peace loving country on earth. I am sure that many Americans are feeling personally attacked by what happened, even if they were thousands of miles away and knew no-one in NY or Washington. Let me assure you that the feeling of having being personally attacked goes out much further than the closed borders of America this morning.
God bless America. God bless us all.
I'm guessing there will be another delay.
2001-04-10 00:00:00
... and where use different voltages!