"The gravity well" isn't some mystical entity that affects things within it in strange ways. It follows a nice inverse-square law and its effects are very easy to calculate. If the object is a comet, it will be difficult to calculate its exact impact point because of outgassing and the like, but if it's an asteroid the impact point will probably be known weeks or months in advance.
If we knew of a comet or asteroid coming to smack us down with enough lead time (months or years), we could certainly deflect it. As a last-ditch effort, an Orion spacecraft could be thrown together using available nuclear weapons. It would dump a ton of fallout into the atmosphere, but that's probably better than being smashed by a giant rock. If we had several years' warning, a more conventional mission using normal rockets to deflect the asteroid with a couple of nukes would be doable.
Newton's law of gravitation is much simpler than the incredibly chaotic system that makes up our climate. Once such an asteroid is discovered and the details published, anybody with a year or two of university-level math and physics will be able to verify its path.
Here's an ethical problem: code from a petty egomaniac is of suspect quality, and incorporating it into your code is putting all of your users at risk.
You seem to have one person who disagrees and it doesn't seem like you'll get their consent, but shouldn't you at least ask the other developers?
They're already giving very clear and explicit permission in the form of the GPL license that their code is released under. I don't see why you need to ask when it's plastered all over the COPYING file, "take this code, please!"
It's probably the exact same MS Paint with all versions of windows. If it replaces this MS Paint, it will indeed be replacing the MS Paint that comes with all Windows operating systems, it just won't be replacing it on all Windows operating systems.
Secondly, there are still missions that require both heavy lifting and human beings. For example, if NASA were to choose to repair the HST using a non-robotic mission, it would be the Shuttle that carried the repairmen aloft.
Why can't these missions be accomplished by sending the humans and the cargo aloft in separate rockets? That way everything stays safely specialized, and they can still meet up in orbit and do whatever it is they need to do.
The only thing the Shuttle does that multiple launches can't do is bring stuff back, and as I recall this capability has been used only a handful of times.
Yeah, DNA was so uninvolved in the latest radio series that he even managed to act in the thing from beyond the grave.
I was under the impression that DNA did a great deal of work for the third series, including the aforementioned voice recording, before his untimely demise. Is that incorrect?
Why does the BBC radio series get "even" tacked on the front? That was the original format, the books were just knockoffs! (Of course, they were still great. The TV series was great too, and the new radio series.)
In a developed country lawmakers think about things like this in advance and make laws....
Ahahaha, that's a good one! Tell me another one!
Seriously, though, were you awake during the 80s and 90s? The developed countries did the exact same thing India is doing now, it's just that they have a longer experience with ubiquitous computing and got the obvious bits out of the way already.
This is wacky. You dismiss WEP and SSID hiding as useless, yet seriously recommend turning off the DHCP server will help?
You obviously missed my tongue firmly lodged in my cheek.
Yeah, that happens when everything is done in text. Sorry.
I'm saying ALL of the above are useless, because ALL of the above can be worked around. I should know, I've done it. Purely in a test environment, of course. Nevermind that the name of the test environment bears a strong resemblance to the name of the city in which I live...
And here we differ greatly. To me, "useful" doesn't mean that it can resist every conceivable attack that can come from the hand of man. If I can turn away casual attackers by doing something, then it is useful even if a determined attacker can get through it.
Yes, implementing any of the above will cause the casual complete idiot to go ten feet down the street and play with your neighbor's wide open AP with the SSID still set to "netgear", but we're more concerned with the not-at-all-casual person who knows what he's doing, for that's the one who will cause you the most grief.
Personally, I'm more concerned about casual people, because they're a thousand times more common than people like you or me. Also, I can conceivably stop casual people, whereas I can't stop people like you or me without more effort than I'm willing to put in.
The only solution I've seen that actually worked was someone who put up a nice, wide open access point and then stuck a firewall/VPN behind it. You have to connect to the VPN over the wireless connection to get anywhere.
This is indeed the way to go if you need to be completely secure, and it's what I'd do if I really had to. However, if somebody really wants to get on my network, I won't be too sad about it. My important computer is secure, and my connection will stand up to whatever you do with it until I see your traffic and figure out how to get you off. What I don't want is random people coming on my network every day, and WEP is good enough for that.
You read slashdot, which means that you see a disproportionate number of stories about raids on copyright infringers. You can rest easy; the amount of effort being expended on things like this is miniscule. It just sounds like a lot because you're getting news from a site which focuses on it so heavily.
This is wacky. You dismiss WEP and SSID hiding as useless, yet seriously recommend turning off the DHCP server will help?
Hiding your SSID and enabling WEP will turn away all casual freeloaders. Yes, WEP is crackable, but you still need to be fairly knowledgeable to do it. Doing these two things will save you from 99% of the attackers out there. Turn on MAC restrictions, and you've probably gotten rid of 90% of what's left. Turning off the DHCP server can't hurt, but anybody who can get through the WEP and the MAC filtering will be able to guess a working address without any thought.
Actually, old-school Mac games used to use the standard interface elements, and I appreciated that. I am not a fan of how every game does its own interface; it tends to produce a result that's ugly, slow, and less functional than what the OS provides.
This whole interface consistency thing is one of those subtle things about the Mac that makes Mac people wonder how the rest of the world lives without it, while the rest of the world wonders what the big deal is.
Having a consistent interface between applications helps tremendously. If I want to close a window, the widget is always in the same place. To copy text, I always press command-C no matter what program I'm in. Every program uses the exact same file chooser, which I can customize and have the changes show up in all apps, and use the same keyboard shortcuts for each, etc.
Now I open OpenOffice and open a file. Command-O doesn't work, small but important. So I hit control-O and, doh, here is this incredibly ugly, nonfunctional file chooser. It gives me a very different view of my filesystem with none of the amenities I expect, like a preview of selected files. I go to look through the menus, but the menus are in the wrong place! The menus also act strange, since the delays and hot regions are totally different. And so it continues. Basically, this application is different from every other app on my system. The different looks are more of a symptom than a cause, but it would be hard to fix one without fixing the other. I've never seen an app that didn't look like a Mac app but acted exactly like one, so looking like a reject from the Motif world is a good indication that it's going to behave badly.
One more thing, can Slashdot's editors please stop whining about NYT's registration? To read their news for free just for filling in some info seems like a generous trade.
I don't think the editors care. However, people used to get up in arms about the registration back when slashdot didn't warn people about it. In fact, many people still complain about NYTimes links even with the warning. Your beef is with the complainers, not with the editors.
OS X is the only mainstream OS where cruddy, flat, Win95-style UI won't fly at all.
First of all, what you call "Win95-style" came from UNIX toolkits; and those GUIs were distinguished by using 3D elements. For a decade, Apple's toolkits were completely flat-chested black-and-white until Apple came around to copying to Motif look as well. Then, eventually, Apple went overboard in their quest for a distinctive look and gave us gumdrops; lots of people don't like that look.
What's your point? I'm aware of all of this, but it is completely irrelevant with the question at hand: OO looks extremely ugly and out of place on OS X, whereas it fits in with typical Linux and Windows GUIs.
Of course, OOo under X11 on Macintosh sucks, but that's because X11 on Macintosh is poorly integrated. Apple should improve X11 integration on OS X, rather than trying to force everybody to write "native" Cocoa applications.
How could this be done? I don't see how you could improve X11 integration to make the apps look native. X11 is a very small protocol that doesn't cover widgets or anything else like that. Apple couldn't magically make OO use native Aqua widgets, standard file dialogs, etc.
OS X is the only mainstream OS where cruddy, flat, Win95-style UI won't fly at all. Having seen OO on Windows and on various Unixen, it looks like they're doing all of the UI elements themselves, and I'd bet this is a huge sticking point for a native OS X version.
My PowerBook's power adapter is rated for 60W max, and I believe the computer itself draws an average of maybe 20W when it's running. (The battery is 50Wh, and I get 2-3 hours on a charge.) I know that Apple machines tend to be a bit thriftier on power than PCs, but I'd be surprised if a normal PC laptop couldn't get by just fine on 75W. Should I be surprised?
If the big airlines keep up their "the only people who hate the customer more than we do is the TSA" approach to customer service, the little guys who don't actually suck might just end up taking over.
They're not live. Next time you take a flight, pay special attention to the equipment area up front as you're getting on the plane. You'll probably pass by a big rack of VCRs (!) that handle all of the on-board TV programming. You can also tell that it's done by VCRs by seeing the distinctive static pattern whenever they pause the thing for announcements and the like.
BitTorrent's protocol is built around the idea of SHA-1 hashing everything in sight. This is both to avoid corruption and to prevent fake dataa. Assuming SHA-1 is secure, then it will be impossible to fake the distro without also faking the.torrent file. If you can fake the.torrent, then you could have faked the distro via traditional means as well, so it's no difference.
The United States went from backwater former English colony to world superpower back when "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" was the official immigration policy. Why wouldn't the same be true today? My great grandparents came through Ellis Island during the time when the US was enormously open to immigration, and I'm extremely glad they did even if I don't currently live there. Chances are high that many American slashdotters' ancestors came to the US the same way. Why all the hate today?
Slashdot Mirror
"The gravity well" isn't some mystical entity that affects things within it in strange ways. It follows a nice inverse-square law and its effects are very easy to calculate. If the object is a comet, it will be difficult to calculate its exact impact point because of outgassing and the like, but if it's an asteroid the impact point will probably be known weeks or months in advance.
If we knew of a comet or asteroid coming to smack us down with enough lead time (months or years), we could certainly deflect it. As a last-ditch effort, an Orion spacecraft could be thrown together using available nuclear weapons. It would dump a ton of fallout into the atmosphere, but that's probably better than being smashed by a giant rock. If we had several years' warning, a more conventional mission using normal rockets to deflect the asteroid with a couple of nukes would be doable.
Newton's law of gravitation is much simpler than the incredibly chaotic system that makes up our climate. Once such an asteroid is discovered and the details published, anybody with a year or two of university-level math and physics will be able to verify its path.
Here's an ethical problem: code from a petty egomaniac is of suspect quality, and incorporating it into your code is putting all of your users at risk.
That's the best I could do, sorry.
You seem to have one person who disagrees and it doesn't seem like you'll get their consent, but shouldn't you at least ask the other developers?
They're already giving very clear and explicit permission in the form of the GPL license that their code is released under. I don't see why you need to ask when it's plastered all over the COPYING file, "take this code, please!"
He's paid for the entire thing himself (about $15,000). DARPA has funded other powered armor projects, but not this one.
It's probably the exact same MS Paint with all versions of windows. If it replaces this MS Paint, it will indeed be replacing the MS Paint that comes with all Windows operating systems, it just won't be replacing it on all Windows operating systems.
Secondly, there are still missions that require both heavy lifting and human beings. For example, if NASA were to choose to repair the HST using a non-robotic mission, it would be the Shuttle that carried the repairmen aloft.
Why can't these missions be accomplished by sending the humans and the cargo aloft in separate rockets? That way everything stays safely specialized, and they can still meet up in orbit and do whatever it is they need to do.
The only thing the Shuttle does that multiple launches can't do is bring stuff back, and as I recall this capability has been used only a handful of times.
Yeah, DNA was so uninvolved in the latest radio series that he even managed to act in the thing from beyond the grave.
I was under the impression that DNA did a great deal of work for the third series, including the aforementioned voice recording, before his untimely demise. Is that incorrect?
Why does the BBC radio series get "even" tacked on the front? That was the original format, the books were just knockoffs! (Of course, they were still great. The TV series was great too, and the new radio series.)
In a developed country lawmakers think about things like this in advance and make laws....
Ahahaha, that's a good one! Tell me another one!
Seriously, though, were you awake during the 80s and 90s? The developed countries did the exact same thing India is doing now, it's just that they have a longer experience with ubiquitous computing and got the obvious bits out of the way already.
Yeah, that happens when everything is done in text. Sorry.
I'm saying ALL of the above are useless, because ALL of the above can be worked around. I should know, I've done it. Purely in a test environment, of course. Nevermind that the name of the test environment bears a strong resemblance to the name of the city in which I live...
And here we differ greatly. To me, "useful" doesn't mean that it can resist every conceivable attack that can come from the hand of man. If I can turn away casual attackers by doing something, then it is useful even if a determined attacker can get through it.
Yes, implementing any of the above will cause the casual complete idiot to go ten feet down the street and play with your neighbor's wide open AP with the SSID still set to "netgear", but we're more concerned with the not-at-all-casual person who knows what he's doing, for that's the one who will cause you the most grief.
Personally, I'm more concerned about casual people, because they're a thousand times more common than people like you or me. Also, I can conceivably stop casual people, whereas I can't stop people like you or me without more effort than I'm willing to put in.
The only solution I've seen that actually worked was someone who put up a nice, wide open access point and then stuck a firewall/VPN behind it. You have to connect to the VPN over the wireless connection to get anywhere.
This is indeed the way to go if you need to be completely secure, and it's what I'd do if I really had to. However, if somebody really wants to get on my network, I won't be too sad about it. My important computer is secure, and my connection will stand up to whatever you do with it until I see your traffic and figure out how to get you off. What I don't want is random people coming on my network every day, and WEP is good enough for that.
You read slashdot, which means that you see a disproportionate number of stories about raids on copyright infringers. You can rest easy; the amount of effort being expended on things like this is miniscule. It just sounds like a lot because you're getting news from a site which focuses on it so heavily.
We didn't evolve with doctors only a phone call away, so I guess doctors must be bad for you too.
This is wacky. You dismiss WEP and SSID hiding as useless, yet seriously recommend turning off the DHCP server will help?
Hiding your SSID and enabling WEP will turn away all casual freeloaders. Yes, WEP is crackable, but you still need to be fairly knowledgeable to do it. Doing these two things will save you from 99% of the attackers out there. Turn on MAC restrictions, and you've probably gotten rid of 90% of what's left. Turning off the DHCP server can't hurt, but anybody who can get through the WEP and the MAC filtering will be able to guess a working address without any thought.
Actually, old-school Mac games used to use the standard interface elements, and I appreciated that. I am not a fan of how every game does its own interface; it tends to produce a result that's ugly, slow, and less functional than what the OS provides.
This whole interface consistency thing is one of those subtle things about the Mac that makes Mac people wonder how the rest of the world lives without it, while the rest of the world wonders what the big deal is.
Having a consistent interface between applications helps tremendously. If I want to close a window, the widget is always in the same place. To copy text, I always press command-C no matter what program I'm in. Every program uses the exact same file chooser, which I can customize and have the changes show up in all apps, and use the same keyboard shortcuts for each, etc.
Now I open OpenOffice and open a file. Command-O doesn't work, small but important. So I hit control-O and, doh, here is this incredibly ugly, nonfunctional file chooser. It gives me a very different view of my filesystem with none of the amenities I expect, like a preview of selected files. I go to look through the menus, but the menus are in the wrong place! The menus also act strange, since the delays and hot regions are totally different. And so it continues. Basically, this application is different from every other app on my system. The different looks are more of a symptom than a cause, but it would be hard to fix one without fixing the other. I've never seen an app that didn't look like a Mac app but acted exactly like one, so looking like a reject from the Motif world is a good indication that it's going to behave badly.
One more thing, can Slashdot's editors please stop whining about NYT's registration? To read their news for free just for filling in some info seems like a generous trade.
I don't think the editors care. However, people used to get up in arms about the registration back when slashdot didn't warn people about it. In fact, many people still complain about NYTimes links even with the warning. Your beef is with the complainers, not with the editors.
What's your point? I'm aware of all of this, but it is completely irrelevant with the question at hand: OO looks extremely ugly and out of place on OS X, whereas it fits in with typical Linux and Windows GUIs.
Of course, OOo under X11 on Macintosh sucks, but that's because X11 on Macintosh is poorly integrated. Apple should improve X11 integration on OS X, rather than trying to force everybody to write "native" Cocoa applications.
How could this be done? I don't see how you could improve X11 integration to make the apps look native. X11 is a very small protocol that doesn't cover widgets or anything else like that. Apple couldn't magically make OO use native Aqua widgets, standard file dialogs, etc.
OS X is the only mainstream OS where cruddy, flat, Win95-style UI won't fly at all. Having seen OO on Windows and on various Unixen, it looks like they're doing all of the UI elements themselves, and I'd bet this is a huge sticking point for a native OS X version.
My PowerBook's power adapter is rated for 60W max, and I believe the computer itself draws an average of maybe 20W when it's running. (The battery is 50Wh, and I get 2-3 hours on a charge.) I know that Apple machines tend to be a bit thriftier on power than PCs, but I'd be surprised if a normal PC laptop couldn't get by just fine on 75W. Should I be surprised?
If the big airlines keep up their "the only people who hate the customer more than we do is the TSA" approach to customer service, the little guys who don't actually suck might just end up taking over.
They're not live. Next time you take a flight, pay special attention to the equipment area up front as you're getting on the plane. You'll probably pass by a big rack of VCRs (!) that handle all of the on-board TV programming. You can also tell that it's done by VCRs by seeing the distinctive static pattern whenever they pause the thing for announcements and the like.
No, but if you end up getting married, I'd damned well better be getting an invitation, or at least a phone call saying so.
BitTorrent's protocol is built around the idea of SHA-1 hashing everything in sight. This is both to avoid corruption and to prevent fake dataa. Assuming SHA-1 is secure, then it will be impossible to fake the distro without also faking the .torrent file. If you can fake the .torrent, then you could have faked the distro via traditional means as well, so it's no difference.
The United States went from backwater former English colony to world superpower back when "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" was the official immigration policy. Why wouldn't the same be true today? My great grandparents came through Ellis Island during the time when the US was enormously open to immigration, and I'm extremely glad they did even if I don't currently live there. Chances are high that many American slashdotters' ancestors came to the US the same way. Why all the hate today?
If American businesses feel that the cost/results ratio is too high for American labor, maybe American labor should think about lowering its prices.