Space shuttles, cheap orbiters, SpaceX... all these are mere clockwork toys compared to the might of the Saturn V SI-C first stage and its five F-1 engines. Wernher von Braun out-rices you. Real astronauts fly to the moon. They findleftover bits decades later and think they're asteroids! You can't tell me these SpaceX girly men are going to do anything this goddamn indefatigably cool.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
After what was expected to be an unusually quiet Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released eight patches for applications with an insufficient number of security holes.
The updates include "critical" patches to Windows Media Player visualisations, Zune player software, that really cute dinosaur cursor and Age Of Empires II. The exploits opened by these patches allow a malicious user to take webcam pictures of your pimply butt, steal your pizza delivery and have sex with your girlfriend. The exploits have already been marketed to the Dark Security market by Microsoft Russia.
"Windows 7 won't be vulnerable! Did we mention how fantastic Windows 7 will be? Also, Vista's pretty good! Really! The London Stock Exchange was probably still on XP!"
Several faintly cat-piss-smelling Linux users pointed and laughed in a nerdy bray at the news and a much larger number of annoying Mac users showed off their new model iPod Nanos.
A future without batteries - no need to charge phones or MP3 players, or even electric cars. No lost phone chargers, no running out of power sockets. Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner demonstrated a Wireless Energy Resonant Link as he spoke at the annual Intel developers forum in San Francisco yesterday.
Rattner demonstrated this by causing his ears to light up at 60 watts of power a yard from a power transmitter operated by his assistant Igor. Only four journalists were incinerated when the power earthed through them from his fingertips.
Rattner reassured us that pumping kilowatts of power around the home through magnetic induction power is absolutely harmless. "The human body is not affected by magnetic fields," he said as one journalist with a pacemaker collapsed and another with a knee replacement watched his leg catch fire. "There's no danger whatsoever from it, any more than there is from mobile phones cooking your brain, microwave leakage blinding you, chemical waste unraveling all the DNA in your balls or statistical clusters of kids with cancer wherever high-tension power lines run overhead. Asbestos and thalidomide were horribly slandered in their day too."
"Of course, Nikola Tesla did it first in 1899," said enthusiast Albert Tedious-Anorak, 54, of Little Boring. "I detailed this at length on Wikipedia, but they refused to believe the value of my revelations on this matter due to a conspiracy of Edison fans amongst the site administrators."
XFF headers are (obviously) not to be trusted in all cases; Wikimedia trusts them on an ISP-by-ISP basis. Virgin Media's were set up to be trusted, but it appears they've either fiddled the format of them again or just started leaving them out.
Oh, and Blind Faith by Blind Faith and Houses of the Holy, also depicting nude underage persons, are still readily available in any high street CD store in the UK.
It is clearly false that all images of an unclothed person under the age of consent (16 in the UK) is automatically child porn and illegal. However, that's the rule the IWF works to.
Like DRM, if anyone works out there's an IWF and how it works, then they've already lost. They're tolerated precisely as long as they target only clearly illegal material. Here, they're expanding their remit.
The technical press are swarming. Dunno if the national press are too as yet.
The IWF apparently sought the advice of police before blocking. Now,
the police in the UK are notorious for trying it on with censorship
cases, so that doesn't mean the image is illegal.
The album was released in 1976; child porn was illegalised in the UK
in 1978. If the album was distributed in the UK since 1978 with that
cover, it's probably legal.
The album cover has been reprinted in many books. Most of those books
are in the Briitsh Library. Are those now obscene?
Question for all: Has this precise image ever come to court? In the UK, in the world?
The IWF had it pointed out that they were censoring encyclopedia
text, which was clearly not illegal. The IWF responded that they
needed to block the page to block the image effectively. This is of
course utterly ludicrous bollocks, but apparently that's the advice
the IWF have received.
They were also asked if they'd be censoring Amazon as well. They said
they'd have to get back on that one.
It's the clbuttic error, but this time on a top-10 site for everyone.
Disclaimer: I do press for Wikipedia/Wikimedia in the UK as a volunteer (and I've been on my email and phone all last night to about 2am and today since 9am). However, I am not a WMF employee and cannot legally claim to speak for them, only as a volunteer editor.
VARIETY, Lack Of - Steven Soderbergh's new musical version of Cleopatra - in 3-D! - proves an incredible box-office same-old same-old. Starring Catherine Zeta-Jones as the fishnet-clad vaudeville jazz empress and Hugh Jackman as the mutant self-healing Roman general - in 3-D! - the film carries the Ocean's Eleven franchise somewhere beyond its ultimate extent.
"I've always wanted to do a musical," Soderbergh said. "All the ones that were coming along just weren't for me. This one, however, involved dumptrucks full of money backed up to my house."
Soderbergh pooh-poohed suggestions that the film would be some sort of low-rent exploitation quickie that would insult the intelligence of any creature smarter than a flatworm. "I can assure you this will be the most artistically satisfying creation in my entire career as a director," he said, lighting a cigar off a hundred-dollar bill before laying back on a great big bed made of money.
"DUMPTRUCKS!" Soderbergh emphasised. "FULL OF MONEY! BACKED UP TO MY HOUSE!"
There's no prospect of proprietary software being banned in the foreseeable future, as long as copyright is possible for software at all. Remember that free software works via licenses that give you more rights without asking first than the default "all rights reserved."
Hell, games are so popular they can still get away with DRM. The only other software that gets away with DRM, dongles, etc. is insanely expensive vertical-market rubbish, where they have the buyer completely over a barrel. With gamers, it's only addiction.
ajax has declared on the list that Xorg development involves lipstick on pigs. (Obviously Sarah Palin is one of the XFree86 recalcitrants.)
Some of the stuff Xorg does is truly frightening. e.g. you know how it tries to autoconfigure as much as possible, so you won't need an xorg.conf? It does that by poking and prodding at the video card iteratively trying to reverse-engineer what the heck it is... it works, but "elegant"'s not in it.
It will only affect you if you're running ForecastFoxNG, where you can set the weather and the CPU will calculate where the butterfly should flap to get the effect you want (M-x butterfly).
The answer is to buy a new MacBook like a good consumer. Ask Steve! He can display your captured and tormented soul perfectly on the new MacBook Air. If you can't, you just need more Apple products and probably a tattoo.
I'm trying to imagine what a Google laptop would look like. Tasteful understated text ads subliminally woven into the display, probably. Free but doesn't have a hard disk.
Slashdot Mirror
Space shuttles, cheap orbiters, SpaceX ... all these are mere clockwork toys compared to the might of the Saturn V SI-C first stage and its five F-1 engines. Wernher von Braun out-rices you. Real astronauts fly to the moon. They find leftover bits decades later and think they're asteroids! You can't tell me these SpaceX girly men are going to do anything this goddamn indefatigably cool.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
Solaris is the Sysadmin's Friend. It does high-end stuff far more robustly than Linux. Desktop, not so much, but they're trying.
After what was expected to be an unusually quiet Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released eight patches for applications with an insufficient number of security holes.
The updates include "critical" patches to Windows Media Player visualisations, Zune player software, that really cute dinosaur cursor and Age Of Empires II. The exploits opened by these patches allow a malicious user to take webcam pictures of your pimply butt, steal your pizza delivery and have sex with your girlfriend. The exploits have already been marketed to the Dark Security market by Microsoft Russia.
"Windows 7 won't be vulnerable! Did we mention how fantastic Windows 7 will be? Also, Vista's pretty good! Really! The London Stock Exchange was probably still on XP!"
Several faintly cat-piss-smelling Linux users pointed and laughed in a nerdy bray at the news and a much larger number of annoying Mac users showed off their new model iPod Nanos.
A future without batteries - no need to charge phones or MP3 players, or even electric cars. No lost phone chargers, no running out of power sockets. Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner demonstrated a Wireless Energy Resonant Link as he spoke at the annual Intel developers forum in San Francisco yesterday.
Rattner demonstrated this by causing his ears to light up at 60 watts of power a yard from a power transmitter operated by his assistant Igor. Only four journalists were incinerated when the power earthed through them from his fingertips.
Rattner reassured us that pumping kilowatts of power around the home through magnetic induction power is absolutely harmless. "The human body is not affected by magnetic fields," he said as one journalist with a pacemaker collapsed and another with a knee replacement watched his leg catch fire. "There's no danger whatsoever from it, any more than there is from mobile phones cooking your brain, microwave leakage blinding you, chemical waste unraveling all the DNA in your balls or statistical clusters of kids with cancer wherever high-tension power lines run overhead. Asbestos and thalidomide were horribly slandered in their day too."
"Of course, Nikola Tesla did it first in 1899," said enthusiast Albert Tedious-Anorak, 54, of Little Boring. "I detailed this at length on Wikipedia, but they refused to believe the value of my revelations on this matter due to a conspiracy of Edison fans amongst the site administrators."
Be is censoring too.
That's why the "distributed after 1978" bit is relevant.
Houses of the Holy by Led Zeppelin; Blind Faith by Blind Faith; Nevermind by Nirvana.
XFF headers are (obviously) not to be trusted in all cases; Wikimedia trusts them on an ISP-by-ISP basis. Virgin Media's were set up to be trusted, but it appears they've either fiddled the format of them again or just started leaving them out.
Oh, and Blind Faith by Blind Faith and Houses of the Holy, also depicting nude underage persons, are still readily available in any high street CD store in the UK.
It is clearly false that all images of an unclothed person under the age of consent (16 in the UK) is automatically child porn and illegal. However, that's the rule the IWF works to.
Like DRM, if anyone works out there's an IWF and how it works, then they've already lost. They're tolerated precisely as long as they target only clearly illegal material. Here, they're expanding their remit.
You can get to it via the https connection to Wikipedia.
Facebook group against this
Pledgebank ISP boycott
Wikinews story
The technical press are swarming. Dunno if the national press are too as yet.
The IWF apparently sought the advice of police before blocking. Now, the police in the UK are notorious for trying it on with censorship cases, so that doesn't mean the image is illegal.
The album was released in 1976; child porn was illegalised in the UK in 1978. If the album was distributed in the UK since 1978 with that cover, it's probably legal.
The album cover has been reprinted in many books. Most of those books are in the Briitsh Library. Are those now obscene?
Question for all: Has this precise image ever come to court? In the UK, in the world?
The IWF had it pointed out that they were censoring encyclopedia text, which was clearly not illegal. The IWF responded that they needed to block the page to block the image effectively. This is of course utterly ludicrous bollocks, but apparently that's the advice the IWF have received.
They were also asked if they'd be censoring Amazon as well. They said they'd have to get back on that one.
It's the clbuttic error, but this time on a top-10 site for everyone.
Disclaimer: I do press for Wikipedia/Wikimedia in the UK as a volunteer (and I've been on my email and phone all last night to about 2am and today since 9am). However, I am not a WMF employee and cannot legally claim to speak for them, only as a volunteer editor.
*applause*
Only once a month.
VARIETY, Lack Of - Steven Soderbergh's new musical version of Cleopatra - in 3-D! - proves an incredible box-office same-old same-old. Starring Catherine Zeta-Jones as the fishnet-clad vaudeville jazz empress and Hugh Jackman as the mutant self-healing Roman general - in 3-D! - the film carries the Ocean's Eleven franchise somewhere beyond its ultimate extent.
"I've always wanted to do a musical," Soderbergh said. "All the ones that were coming along just weren't for me. This one, however, involved dumptrucks full of money backed up to my house."
Soderbergh pooh-poohed suggestions that the film would be some sort of low-rent exploitation quickie that would insult the intelligence of any creature smarter than a flatworm. "I can assure you this will be the most artistically satisfying creation in my entire career as a director," he said, lighting a cigar off a hundred-dollar bill before laying back on a great big bed made of money.
"DUMPTRUCKS!" Soderbergh emphasised. "FULL OF MONEY! BACKED UP TO MY HOUSE!"
*applause*
All the gamers jonesing for a fix, obviously.
There's no prospect of proprietary software being banned in the foreseeable future, as long as copyright is possible for software at all. Remember that free software works via licenses that give you more rights without asking first than the default "all rights reserved."
Hell, games are so popular they can still get away with DRM. The only other software that gets away with DRM, dongles, etc. is insanely expensive vertical-market rubbish, where they have the buyer completely over a barrel. With gamers, it's only addiction.
The X Windows Disaster!
ajax has declared on the list that Xorg development involves lipstick on pigs. (Obviously Sarah Palin is one of the XFree86 recalcitrants.)
Some of the stuff Xorg does is truly frightening. e.g. you know how it tries to autoconfigure as much as possible, so you won't need an xorg.conf? It does that by poking and prodding at the video card iteratively trying to reverse-engineer what the heck it is ... it works, but "elegant"'s not in it.
In Modern English, one would throw in a few "faakin caarnt" as well, or risk not being understood.
Whereas "x sucks" is a British phrase suggesting "x gets into your pants."
So they can play GTA IV in their time off.
It will only affect you if you're running ForecastFoxNG, where you can set the weather and the CPU will calculate where the butterfly should flap to get the effect you want (M-x butterfly).
Only for Office 2007.
I eagerly await the Slashdot story about an Apple laptop with liquid nitrogen cooling. Probably Alienware will do it first.
The answer is to buy a new MacBook like a good consumer. Ask Steve! He can display your captured and tormented soul perfectly on the new MacBook Air. If you can't, you just need more Apple products and probably a tattoo.
I'm trying to imagine what a Google laptop would look like. Tasteful understated text ads subliminally woven into the display, probably. Free but doesn't have a hard disk.
"x is pants" is a British phrase meaning "x is rubbish".