Hey! I'm the web designer for the Yearning For Zion ranch, you insensitive clod!
Re:Can Oscar's be given posthumously?
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Batman Discussion
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-I imagine even a modern metropolis would have numerous places you could stash a hundred barrels of gas for a day or two without someone finding them. Homeless people certainly find places to squat for longer periods
I don't know about hundred barrels of gas, but you can certainly hide forty or so Mooninites for a couple of weeks. All hell will break lose, however, when the authorities finally do notice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare
If 300 had NIN in it, it would have been the only thing I liked about 300.
I liked both the comic and the movie, but you just reminded me of a joke: How did "300" get its name? Someone asked, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how gay is this movie?"
Yeah, the FBI's management is definitely acting stupid on this. I suspect that the scientists at the FBI understand all of this and have confidence in their data, but then the supervisors see stuff like the Arizona results and say, "WTF? OMG!" and then try to suppress it out of their own fear and innumeracy.
The odds might be technically accurate, but are they the correct odds for the FBI to be selling?
If a typical situation is having a suspect already in custody and then having the authorities run the suspect's DNA against a sample found at the crime scene, 110 billion is probably fair enough. If the authorities find some DNA and fish through the system for someone who matches, 110 billion is meaningless.
Well, let's rephrase it as the birthday problem. Someone in a classroom left a tack on the teacher's chair. Unfortunately, the tack was originally the prize in some stupid contest and for some reason claims to list its owner's birthday.
If there is someone you already suspect and their birthday matches, that's great. On the other hand, if there's only 23 people in the class and one has the same birthday as is shown on the tack, how sure are you that you've got the right person? Finally, if two people in the class share the same birthday (and remember, the odds are 50-50 that two such people exist), does this have any bearing on the preceding?
From the description, this seems like an example of the birthday problem. Briefly, in a group of 23 people the odds are 50-50 that two of them will have the same birthday, while in a group of 57 the odds are better than 99%. However, the odds that someone in the first group will share *your* birthday are far less, roughly 6.1%. Quoting the Wikipedia article, "For a greater than 50% chance that one person in a roomful of n people has the same birthday as you, n would need to be at least 253. Note that this number is significantly higher than 365/2 = 182.5: the reason is that it is likely that there are some birthday matches among the other people in the room."
Likewise, the odds of there being two people with matching DNA in a database are far higher than the odds of someone else matching *your* DNA. So it seems possible that the FBI could be quoting accurate odds, while at the same time there being lots of matches within the database.
Well, I've got an old HP Pavillion 521n and (until recently) its on-board video didn't work with X11. I spent hours tweaking config files, nada. The semi-good news is that the latest Ubuntu was finally able to auto-config the thing. (And yes, I do know a thing or two about X11.)
If you're using JSON, you're using eval(). Sure, there are some workarounds that avoid calling the eval() function directly, but in the end, they all eval-uate remote code.
Did you even bother to read that page that you directed me to?
To defend against this, a JSON parser should be used. A JSON parser will recognize only JSON text, rejecting all scripts. In browsers that provide native JSON support, JSON parsers are also much faster than eval.
So, you're claiming that a JSON parser, which is faster than eval, checks its input and then calls eval. I think I see a contradiction.
Or are you talking about legacy browsers that don't yet provide JSON support? In that case, I hope that you aren't invoking eval either directly or from some home-grown function library, but are using that json2.js that you point to; yes, it sometimes (not always!) uses eval, but only after checking that the browser doesn't provide a native JSON object. Furthermore, if you eliminate comments and blank lines from json2.js, you're left with 174 lines of code, of which one line invokes eval, and most of the rest make sure that there isn't anything bad hidden inside the text. I suspect that those 173 lines of code are better than anything that you or I could whip out on short notice.
I turn off referrer headers for privacy (set network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0 in about:config in Firefox). Now it seems that it can also save me from malware:-).
Why would you want it enabled, anyway?
Silly websites that check it as some sort of "security." Easily foiled by sending the site's own URL as the referer though.
Of course, that might revive any Javascript malware.
Yup - it's the small, simple and readily available things that count, a few ideas:
Most of the ideas you list are pretty good; they can be built and maintained with local resources. However, I have to take exception to this one:
* The little heater with an AA rechargeable battery in it for the fan, that you recharge at the local solar panel
As others have pointed out, solar panels aren't cheap, but I think it is more important to focus on the batteries. Rechargeable batteries don't last forever. After a while, they stop holding their charge and need to be replaced, which drives up the costs over the long term. Yeah, they can be recycled into new rechargeable batteries, but that requires a fairly high-tech factory. After watching lots of ill-fated ideas get abandoned, I've decided that what the world needs is a cheap biodegradable super-capacitor; something with a near-infinite number of charge-discharge cycles, but eco-friendly if you do decide to discard it. (Yes, I know that Nanomaterials More Dangerous Than We Think and Nanotubes "As Deadly as Asbestos", but I don't think that those concerns would effect super-capacitors.) (And what ever happened to the photocapacitor?
The problem seems to be the distinction between Big Rubble like the Earth, Venus, and Mars, and Little Rubble, like the asteroids, Pluto, and other Kuiper Belt objects. The offical dividing line is still unclear.
So, we call Earth, Venus, Mecury and Mars "Barneys" and Pluto and the other Kuiper Belt objects "Bam-Bams".
Yeah, I was looking into buying one. The first problem is that dealers only have them in stock in NY and California; I was planning to check with local dealers to see if there would be any service issues. But the bigger problem was that the local gas utility isn't able to accept my credit card. (In their defense, they are working to fix that; they'd like to get my money.) And the cost of the Phill added to the cost of the car pushed everything over my budget.
Everyone knows that in a crash, gasoline-powered vehicles inevitably explode; I've seen in happen in lots of movies. Therefore, hydrogen must be safer.
This device can only provide enough hydrogen for a 25 mile journey with overnight operation. Battery powered cars get better results with the same amount of charge time, and no one is going crazy to buy them. At $4K, this is a pricy way to make a hydrogen car work less efficiently than an electric car.
The thing is, electric cars need batteries, which are big, potentially dangerous in an accident, and difficult to dispose of when they wear out. It's relatively easy to convert existing engines to run on hydrogen (or natural gas, see below), so the automakers have an easier time switching over their productin lines, and in an sufficiently serious accident the fuel dissipates into the atmosphere quickly (making it safer than gasoline).
In the short run, natural gas might be a good stepping stone to hydrogen. Yes, it will run out eventually, but IIRC you can convert an engine between them without much more effort than switching a home appliance between propane and natural gas. Lots of buses and delivery trucks run on natural gas already; in fact there's a "public" refueling station just a mile from my St. Louis home (but, when I inquired a few weeks ago, they only accept fleet credit cards).
It's that last one that really hurts. We were just eight votes from getting it passed. These are the Democrats who voted against it: Bayh (D-IN) Carper (D-DE) Conrad (D-ND) Inouye (D-HI) Landrieu (D-LA) Lieberman (ID-CT) Nelson (D-NE) Pryor (D-AR) Rockefeller (D-WV)
Well, I am planning to use it as a server, so I don't care about graphics performance. There's also no wireless (it does have a PCMCIA Ethernet card), but it'll be living next to my Linksys, so no problem there, either. But you're right, my original plan was to install DSL or Puppy (without X11), so I may do that anyway. I just need to get a boot floppy...
I guess I should have been more clear; the BIOS reference was just to show the age of the system. In fact, the BIOS has an option to boot from CD, not that it did me much good. Since it's a laptop, finding a replacement drive may be non-trivial but I haven't done any research (like removing the current drive). My other option would be to use a boot floppy. Those were well documented ten years ago, I just need to go Google it.
This past weekend, I decided to try to rehabilitate an old (1996 BIOS) laptop into an externally facing home web server. Hey, guess what? My hardware doesn't support home-burned CDs! I was just starting to look for a distro available in a pressed CD format. I'm glad to find out I can run down to Best Buy on my way home from work and just pick one up.
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Hey! I'm the web designer for the Yearning For Zion ranch, you insensitive clod!
-I imagine even a modern metropolis would have numerous places you could stash a hundred barrels of gas for a day or two without someone finding them. Homeless people certainly find places to squat for longer periods
I don't know about hundred barrels of gas, but you can certainly hide forty or so Mooninites for a couple of weeks. All hell will break lose, however, when the authorities finally do notice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare
If 300 had NIN in it, it would have been the only thing I liked about 300.
I liked both the comic and the movie, but you just reminded me of a joke: How did "300" get its name? Someone asked, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how gay is this movie?"
Yeah, the FBI's management is definitely acting stupid on this. I suspect that the scientists at the FBI understand all of this and have confidence in their data, but then the supervisors see stuff like the Arizona results and say, "WTF? OMG!" and then try to suppress it out of their own fear and innumeracy.
Of course, things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Duke_University_lacrosse_case show that prosecutors are more than willing to ignore DNA testing when it doesn't help their case.
The odds might be technically accurate, but are they the correct odds for the FBI to be selling?
If a typical situation is having a suspect already in custody and then having the authorities run the suspect's DNA against a sample found at the crime scene, 110 billion is probably fair enough. If the authorities find some DNA and fish through the system for someone who matches, 110 billion is meaningless.
Well, let's rephrase it as the birthday problem. Someone in a classroom left a tack on the teacher's chair. Unfortunately, the tack was originally the prize in some stupid contest and for some reason claims to list its owner's birthday.
If there is someone you already suspect and their birthday matches, that's great. On the other hand, if there's only 23 people in the class and one has the same birthday as is shown on the tack, how sure are you that you've got the right person? Finally, if two people in the class share the same birthday (and remember, the odds are 50-50 that two such people exist), does this have any bearing on the preceding?
From the description, this seems like an example of the birthday problem. Briefly, in a group of 23 people the odds are 50-50 that two of them will have the same birthday, while in a group of 57 the odds are better than 99%. However, the odds that someone in the first group will share *your* birthday are far less, roughly 6.1%. Quoting the Wikipedia article, "For a greater than 50% chance that one person in a roomful of n people has the same birthday as you, n would need to be at least 253. Note that this number is significantly higher than 365/2 = 182.5: the reason is that it is likely that there are some birthday matches among the other people in the room."
Likewise, the odds of there being two people with matching DNA in a database are far higher than the odds of someone else matching *your* DNA. So it seems possible that the FBI could be quoting accurate odds, while at the same time there being lots of matches within the database.
Use a free cert from http://startssl.com/, whose root is already in Firefox 2 and 3. Yeah, this won't help with IE (see https://www.startssl.com/?app=25#11), but you gotta start somewhere.
Well, I've got an old HP Pavillion 521n and (until recently) its on-board video didn't work with X11. I spent hours tweaking config files, nada. The semi-good news is that the latest Ubuntu was finally able to auto-config the thing. (And yes, I do know a thing or two about X11.)
If you're using JSON, you're using eval(). Sure, there are some workarounds that avoid calling the eval() function directly, but in the end, they all eval-uate remote code.
Did you even bother to read that page that you directed me to?
To defend against this, a JSON parser should be used. A JSON parser will recognize only JSON text, rejecting all scripts. In browsers that provide native JSON support, JSON parsers are also much faster than eval.
So, you're claiming that a JSON parser, which is faster than eval, checks its input and then calls eval. I think I see a contradiction.
Or are you talking about legacy browsers that don't yet provide JSON support? In that case, I hope that you aren't invoking eval either directly or from some home-grown function library, but are using that json2.js that you point to; yes, it sometimes (not always!) uses eval, but only after checking that the browser doesn't provide a native JSON object. Furthermore, if you eliminate comments and blank lines from json2.js, you're left with 174 lines of code, of which one line invokes eval, and most of the rest make sure that there isn't anything bad hidden inside the text. I suspect that those 173 lines of code are better than anything that you or I could whip out on short notice.
I turn off referrer headers for privacy (set network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0 in about:config in Firefox). Now it seems that it can also save me from malware :-).
Why would you want it enabled, anyway?
Silly websites that check it as some sort of "security." Easily foiled by sending the site's own URL as the referer though.
Of course, that might revive any Javascript malware.
if you're using JSON (fairly common now), there's a good chance you're using eval().
Jeez, I hope not. I thought that by now everyone knew that using eval() is setting yourself up for failure.
Man, I knew what you'd linked to before I even hovered over the link.
Yup - it's the small, simple and readily available things that count, a few ideas:
Most of the ideas you list are pretty good; they can be built and maintained with local resources. However, I have to take exception to this one:
* The little heater with an AA rechargeable battery in it for the fan, that you recharge at the local solar panel
As others have pointed out, solar panels aren't cheap, but I think it is more important to focus on the batteries. Rechargeable batteries don't last forever. After a while, they stop holding their charge and need to be replaced, which drives up the costs over the long term. Yeah, they can be recycled into new rechargeable batteries, but that requires a fairly high-tech factory. After watching lots of ill-fated ideas get abandoned, I've decided that what the world needs is a cheap biodegradable super-capacitor; something with a near-infinite number of charge-discharge cycles, but eco-friendly if you do decide to discard it. (Yes, I know that Nanomaterials More Dangerous Than We Think and Nanotubes "As Deadly as Asbestos", but I don't think that those concerns would effect super-capacitors.) (And what ever happened to the photocapacitor?
Jack Skellington?
The problem seems to be the distinction between Big Rubble like the Earth, Venus, and Mars, and Little Rubble, like the asteroids, Pluto, and other Kuiper Belt objects. The offical dividing line is still unclear.
So, we call Earth, Venus, Mecury and Mars "Barneys" and Pluto and the other Kuiper Belt objects "Bam-Bams".
Two words: detached garage.
Yeah, I was looking into buying one. The first problem is that dealers only have them in stock in NY and California; I was planning to check with local dealers to see if there would be any service issues. But the bigger problem was that the local gas utility isn't able to accept my credit card. (In their defense, they are working to fix that; they'd like to get my money.) And the cost of the Phill added to the cost of the car pushed everything over my budget.
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=608999&cid=24130063
Everyone knows that in a crash, gasoline-powered vehicles inevitably explode; I've seen in happen in lots of movies. Therefore, hydrogen must be safer.
This device can only provide enough hydrogen for a 25 mile journey with overnight operation. Battery powered cars get better results with the same amount of charge time, and no one is going crazy to buy them. At $4K, this is a pricy way to make a hydrogen car work less efficiently than an electric car.
The thing is, electric cars need batteries, which are big, potentially dangerous in an accident, and difficult to dispose of when they wear out. It's relatively easy to convert existing engines to run on hydrogen (or natural gas, see below), so the automakers have an easier time switching over their productin lines, and in an sufficiently serious accident the fuel dissipates into the atmosphere quickly (making it safer than gasoline).
In the short run, natural gas might be a good stepping stone to hydrogen. Yes, it will run out eventually, but IIRC you can convert an engine between them without much more effort than switching a home appliance between propane and natural gas. Lots of buses and delivery trucks run on natural gas already; in fact there's a "public" refueling station just a mile from my St. Louis home (but, when I inquired a few weeks ago, they only accept fleet credit cards).
Dodd Amdt. http://senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&session=2&vote=00164
To strike title II.
YEAs 32
NAYs 66
Not Voting 2
Specter Amdt. http://senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&session=2&vote=00165
To limit retroactive immunity for providing assistance to the United States to instances in which a Federal court determines the assistance was provided in connection with an intelligence activity that was constitutional.
YEAs 37
NAYs 61
Not Voting 2
Bingaman Amdt. http://senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&session=2&vote=00166
To stay pending cases against certain telecommunications companies and provide that such companies may not seek retroactive immunity until 90 days after the date the final report of the Inspectors General on the President's Surveillance Program is submitted to Congress.
YEAs 42
NAYs 56
Not Voting 2
It's that last one that really hurts. We were just eight votes from getting it passed. These are the Democrats who voted against it: Bayh (D-IN) Carper (D-DE) Conrad (D-ND) Inouye (D-HI) Landrieu (D-LA) Lieberman (ID-CT) Nelson (D-NE) Pryor (D-AR) Rockefeller (D-WV)
Well, I am planning to use it as a server, so I don't care about graphics performance. There's also no wireless (it does have a PCMCIA Ethernet card), but it'll be living next to my Linksys, so no problem there, either. But you're right, my original plan was to install DSL or Puppy (without X11), so I may do that anyway. I just need to get a boot floppy...
I'll gladly give Best Buy $19.95 to avoid waiting a month for delivery.
I guess I should have been more clear; the BIOS reference was just to show the age of the system. In fact, the BIOS has an option to boot from CD, not that it did me much good. Since it's a laptop, finding a replacement drive may be non-trivial but I haven't done any research (like removing the current drive). My other option would be to use a boot floppy. Those were well documented ten years ago, I just need to go Google it.
I would assume that, since the blurb says it's "the latest Long Term Support version," it includes some form of long term support.
Bzzz, sorry, thanks for playing.
Re-read what you just said: "the latest Long Term Support version"
This just means that you're getting the same version you'd get *if* you paid for support, it doesn't mean that you yourself are getting support.
This past weekend, I decided to try to rehabilitate an old (1996 BIOS) laptop into an externally facing home web server. Hey, guess what? My hardware doesn't support home-burned CDs! I was just starting to look for a distro available in a pressed CD format. I'm glad to find out I can run down to Best Buy on my way home from work and just pick one up.