I'll probally be moderated for this, but neither of those posts deserved those ratings. Maybe i'll get lucky and the meta-moderation page will give me these posts.
IIRC dark matter refers to matter that must exist for our current theories to work but cannot be detected for whatever reason. So it could very well be floating around Venus, or there could be a huge chunk of it on my monitor. The point is we can't detect it (yet) so we really don't know where it hangs out, why it hangs out there, or if it hangs out anywhere at all.
I don't know about there being a lot more than was originally expected, but I do recall reading that most matter in the universe is dark matter. Something along the lines of 99%. Basically if the only matter that existed in the universe were "light" matter then the universe would be too "light"(weight-wise) and would be expanding at such a rate that single atoms would never have had the oppurtunity to form into anything.
This is an interesting idea though. The only thing I'm thinking is that if the problem is dark matter, shouldn't it effect planets too?
I honestly doubt that this could be a possible explination. I really hope that the people working at NASA already thought up and rejected this idea. If the explanation is this simple I just lost a lot of respect for NASA.
Actually the ether issue is still open. I remember reading about some tests that occured in the 1970 to attempt to detect an "ether drift", but they came up with nothing. IIRC the theory was that if space is filled with ether as a planet, or other large body, moved through space it would have to "push" the ether out of its way. This effect should cause the background radiation temperature in the direction that the planet is moving to be slightly higher than the opposite direction. The test came up showing that the temp was the same. This didn't disprove the existance of ether, however. If anyone can elaborate or simply point out the fact that I'm a moron please do.
I used to work for the network integration section of a certain phone company and no one there had any clue what their client list was. They knew who they had to send bills out to, but they had no idea if the bills were for services, or if they were billing them for a soda. So I do believe that it's 100% possible that this firm had no idea. Besides, what financial incentive would there have been for them to try it? Had the case gone to trial and this were discovered they would have been in a lot of trouble.
Some people prefer BSD, others prefer GPL, others still may prefer QPL, NPL. 3com went with GPL, that was their choice. It's pointless to argue over which license is the best, they all have their good and bad points and all of the arguements have been made a million times already. If product X is released under license Y and you don't like it, write your own version under license Z.
Maybe they don't want Microsoft being able to steal the source code for their drivers. Maybe they want to ensure that all enhancements done to the drivers stay in the community. Maybe Linux and the GPL have so much hype that they decided this was the best move to make.
Lets say I encrypt all of my emails and on in a given week I send 100. 99 of these emails are along the lines of "happy birthday" or "can we meet friday by the new, expensive, super-trendy coffee shop". 1 is "I'm going to rob the bank in 2 days". Now lets pretend that the government has some kick ass crypto cracking computers and they can decrypt one of my emails a day and that they pick emails at random to decrypt. Lets say that that they get really lucky and pick the 1 bad email, out of the 99 good emails on the 25th try. Jackpot, they found out I'm going to rob a bank, oh wait, it's 23 days after the bank was robbed, oh well, they know who did it atleast, but wait, in those 23 days I made arangements to fly to some country that has no extridition treaties with the US.
Basically my point is that the government can be as suspicious of me as they want to be, it makes no difference in the end so I doubt that they'd bother trying. Also, people write letters on post cards, but most are in envelopes and they'd be extremely pissed if the envelope got delivered and it had been opened. It doesn't matter that it was just a letter saying "happy birthday."
Look at programs like "zero tolerance" for an example of the government trampling over people's rights. Under zero tolerance the government could arrest someone, confiscate ALL of the property, and sell that property, on the SUSPICION of you being a drug dealer. That's right, no trial, no rights, go directly to jail do not pass go, just because an ex-girl/boyfriend made an anonymous call to the police telling them you were dealing crack. Scary ain't it?
I really hate to shatter your illusion but in times of national crisis the government can suspend ALL of your constitutional rights. Look at what happened to Japanese Americans during WWII. Most of them on the west coast were put into concentration camps, oops, I forgot, the history books leave that detail out. Also, Congress once did prevent a news paper (I forget which) from printing for a day because it had an article that could be harmful to national security or some such drivel. Or martial law, that's also unconstitutional, but in times of "national crisis" the government will suspend your rights for "the good of the nation."
I once read an article in a local newspaper that talking about Web design and mentioned HTML as being a programming language.
The sad thing is that to most people HTML is a programming language. Remember we live in a society where most people's solution to the blinking 12:00 on a VCR is to cover it with electrical tape.
Also, there is still a great deal of debate over the entire Linux vs. GNU/Linux thing, I personally go with Linux but that's just me. Actually had they replaced Linux with Hurd it would have been entirely accurate.
We're much more likely to see problems caused by idiots rather than computers. Think about what's probally already started happening. People are going to be buying more canned goods and other non-perishables. People are going to buy bomb shelters and take their money out of banks. Banks are going to go under, food prices will sky-rocket, as will any other materials used in a bomb shelter. Then guess what happens when jan 1st rolls around and the world hasn't exploded? Well with all of those non-perishables people aren't going to buy food, especially due to the increased prices because of the limited supply the day before. People aren't going to trust the banks with their money, after all, many went under because they weren't Y2K (read: moron) compliant.
Oh and we can't forget the inevitable rioting that's going to occur. Americans will use any excuse to riot. Your favorite team lost the world series, riot. Your favorite team won the world series, riot. Y2K aka armagedon is here, riot.
Why would 9/9/99 be a problem for any computer? Why wasn't 8/8/88 a problem, or 7/7/77. And what's going to happen on 0/0/00? Seriously though, does anyone have a good explination for why 9/9/99 would cause a computer to have a cpu fart?
I don't know anything about quicktime being open source, but I know the codecs are not. What good is quicktime without the codecs? Developing the file format is quite simple, it's developing the codec that takes time. The description of the file format for SDMJPEG is maybe 50 lines. IMHO Loki did a good thing by creating their own format. I wouldn't trust Apple for a second when it comes to open source. IIRC Apple can still revoke the license on whatever parts of OS X that they released as "open source".
The GPL has no such credits requirement. Atleast I don't remember ever seeing it. Is it possible you are thinking of the advertising clause in the BSD license (which has been removed). AFAIK, the reason BSD and GPL were not compatible was the advertising clause, which seems to indicate that the GPL cannot have a credits requirement of any sort.
How is he showing "genuine class" by making a little kid cry or throwing his fan mail in the garbage? Fine, he thinks the movies are bunk, but that doesn't mean he should take it out on his fans.
First she didn't sue south park. She complained to a regulatory commision. As far as I can tell this is roughly the same as complaining to the FCC in the US. Second, for all of you saying, "canada is stupid because of this," think about it for a second. What would have happened if this lady lived in the US. It WOULD have been a law suit and she probally would have won. The commision she complained to essentially said, "ma'ma you are an idiot." They didn't take any negative action against the show and said that it, "is an adult cartoon," or that she shouldn't be letting her kid watch it in the first place. I think canada did a much better job dealing with this than the us would have. Yet another reason to move to canada some day.
It wasn't the NSA, the rating was the "equivalent of a C2 rating" which means absolutely bunk. If it were really C2 Microsoft would have gotten a real C2 rating. And I think all NSA ratings, except D1 which offers no protection require that the machine not be connected to a network and not have a floppy drive. Nothing connected to any network is every 100% secure.
Does anyone else rember the ComBot backdoor? Basically what happened was ComStud, the guy who wrote ComBot (an irc robot) put in a few lines of code that allowed him to have full access to the bot. It wasn't 100% obvious what was going on because the backdoor was placed in two files (one part copied the crypt()'d version of "HAQD" into a global string w/ the comment/* Don't ask, it works */). This was located in main.c. The other part was located in ctcp.c which would crypt() the first word of the ctcp command and if it matched the other string it would treat the command as if it came from the owner of the bot. It took a little while to get discovered, but it did.
Basically being open source doesn't prevent something from being back doored, but it does make it harder. Not to mention the ComBot example isn't the greatest, it could have been hidden better.
The only thing I liked about the last few seasons was the baseball episode. There wasn't any of the super-conspiricy crap. There wasn't any of the "we'll give you another hint to what the question you should be asking is" crap. It was an alien playing baseball, plain, simple, and really funny.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll probally be moderated for this, but neither of those posts deserved those ratings. Maybe i'll get lucky and the meta-moderation page will give me these posts.
IIRC dark matter refers to matter that must exist for our current theories to work but cannot be detected for whatever reason. So it could very well be floating around Venus, or there could be a huge chunk of it on my monitor. The point is we can't detect it (yet) so we really don't know where it hangs out, why it hangs out there, or if it hangs out anywhere at all.
I don't know about there being a lot more than was originally expected, but I do recall reading that most matter in the universe is dark matter. Something along the lines of 99%. Basically if the only matter that existed in the universe were "light" matter then the universe would be too "light"(weight-wise) and would be expanding at such a rate that single atoms would never have had the oppurtunity to form into anything.
This is an interesting idea though. The only thing I'm thinking is that if the problem is dark matter, shouldn't it effect planets too?
I honestly doubt that this could be a possible explination. I really hope that the people working at NASA already thought up and rejected this idea. If the explanation is this simple I just lost a lot of respect for NASA.
Actually the ether issue is still open. I remember reading about some tests that occured in the 1970 to attempt to detect an "ether drift", but they came up with nothing. IIRC the theory was that if space is filled with ether as a planet, or other large body, moved through space it would have to "push" the ether out of its way. This effect should cause the background radiation temperature in the direction that the planet is moving to be slightly higher than the opposite direction. The test came up showing that the temp was the same. This didn't disprove the existance of ether, however. If anyone can elaborate or simply point out the fact that I'm a moron please do.
I used to work for the network integration section of a certain phone company and no one there had any clue what their client list was. They knew who they had to send bills out to, but they had no idea if the bills were for services, or if they were billing them for a soda. So I do believe that it's 100% possible that this firm had no idea. Besides, what financial incentive would there have been for them to try it? Had the case gone to trial and this were discovered they would have been in a lot of trouble.
Some people prefer BSD, others prefer GPL, others still may prefer QPL, NPL. 3com went with GPL, that was their choice. It's pointless to argue over which license is the best, they all have their good and bad points and all of the arguements have been made a million times already. If product X is released under license Y and you don't like it, write your own version under license Z.
Maybe they don't want Microsoft being able to steal the source code for their drivers. Maybe they want to ensure that all enhancements done to the drivers stay in the community. Maybe Linux and the GPL have so much hype that they decided this was the best move to make.
Lets say I encrypt all of my emails and on in a given week I send 100. 99 of these emails are along the lines of "happy birthday" or "can we meet friday by the new, expensive, super-trendy coffee shop". 1 is "I'm going to rob the bank in 2 days". Now lets pretend that the government has some kick ass crypto cracking computers and they can decrypt one of my emails a day and that they pick emails at random to decrypt. Lets say that that they get really lucky and pick the 1 bad email, out of the 99 good emails on the 25th try. Jackpot, they found out I'm going to rob a bank, oh wait, it's 23 days after the bank was robbed, oh well, they know who did it atleast, but wait, in those 23 days I made arangements to fly to some country that has no extridition treaties with the US.
Basically my point is that the government can be as suspicious of me as they want to be, it makes no difference in the end so I doubt that they'd bother trying. Also, people write letters on post cards, but most are in envelopes and they'd be extremely pissed if the envelope got delivered and it had been opened. It doesn't matter that it was just a letter saying "happy birthday."
Look at programs like "zero tolerance" for an example of the government trampling over people's rights. Under zero tolerance the government could arrest someone, confiscate ALL of the property, and sell that property, on the SUSPICION of you being a drug dealer. That's right, no trial, no rights, go directly to jail do not pass go, just because an ex-girl/boyfriend made an anonymous call to the police telling them you were dealing crack. Scary ain't it?
I really hate to shatter your illusion but in times of national crisis the government can suspend ALL of your constitutional rights. Look at what happened to Japanese Americans during WWII. Most of them on the west coast were put into concentration camps, oops, I forgot, the history books leave that detail out. Also, Congress once did prevent a news paper (I forget which) from printing for a day because it had an article that could be harmful to national security or some such drivel. Or martial law, that's also unconstitutional, but in times of "national crisis" the government will suspend your rights for "the good of the nation."
I once read an article in a local newspaper that talking about Web design and mentioned HTML as being a programming language.
The sad thing is that to most people HTML is a programming language. Remember we live in a society where most people's solution to the blinking 12:00 on a VCR is to cover it with electrical tape.
Also, there is still a great deal of debate over the entire Linux vs. GNU/Linux thing, I personally go with Linux but that's just me. Actually had they replaced Linux with Hurd it would have been entirely accurate.
We're much more likely to see problems caused by idiots rather than computers. Think about what's probally already started happening. People are going to be buying more canned goods and other non-perishables. People are going to buy bomb shelters and take their money out of banks. Banks are going to go under, food prices will sky-rocket, as will any other materials used in a bomb shelter. Then guess what happens when jan 1st rolls around and the world hasn't exploded? Well with all of those non-perishables people aren't going to buy food, especially due to the increased prices because of the limited supply the day before. People aren't going to trust the banks with their money, after all, many went under because they weren't Y2K (read: moron) compliant.
Oh and we can't forget the inevitable rioting that's going to occur. Americans will use any excuse to riot. Your favorite team lost the world series, riot. Your favorite team won the world series, riot. Y2K aka armagedon is here, riot.
God bless morons one and all...
Why would 9/9/99 be a problem for any computer? Why wasn't 8/8/88 a problem, or 7/7/77. And what's going to happen on 0/0/00? Seriously though, does anyone have a good explination for why 9/9/99 would cause a computer to have a cpu fart?
I don't know anything about quicktime being open source, but I know the codecs are not. What good is quicktime without the codecs? Developing the file format is quite simple, it's developing the codec that takes time. The description of the file format for SDMJPEG is maybe 50 lines. IMHO Loki did a good thing by creating their own format. I wouldn't trust Apple for a second when it comes to open source. IIRC Apple can still revoke the license on whatever parts of OS X that they released as "open source".
The GPL has no such credits requirement. Atleast I don't remember ever seeing it. Is it possible you are thinking of the advertising clause in the BSD license (which has been removed). AFAIK, the reason BSD and GPL were not compatible was the advertising clause, which seems to indicate that the GPL cannot have a credits requirement of any sort.
How is he showing "genuine class" by making a little kid cry or throwing his fan mail in the garbage? Fine, he thinks the movies are bunk, but that doesn't mean he should take it out on his fans.
You know what? I remember hearing about 2 years ago that he had died. I was kinda surprised when I heard this on the radio this morning.
I happen to think that space balls had far better dialog than any star wars movie ever. "Water my ass! Get this man some peto-bismal!"
if you go to www.caldera.org/lizard it redirs you to localhost/lizard/
if you go to www.caldera.org/lizard/ it works. screwy server to say the least.
First she didn't sue south park. She complained to a regulatory commision. As far as I can tell this is roughly the same as complaining to the FCC in the US. Second, for all of you saying, "canada is stupid because of this," think about it for a second. What would have happened if this lady lived in the US. It WOULD have been a law suit and she probally would have won. The commision she complained to essentially said, "ma'ma you are an idiot." They didn't take any negative action against the show and said that it, "is an adult cartoon," or that she shouldn't be letting her kid watch it in the first place. I think canada did a much better job dealing with this than the us would have. Yet another reason to move to canada some day.
It wasn't the NSA, the rating was the "equivalent of a C2 rating" which means absolutely bunk. If it were really C2 Microsoft would have gotten a real C2 rating. And I think all NSA ratings, except D1 which offers no protection require that the machine not be connected to a network and not have a floppy drive. Nothing connected to any network is every 100% secure.
Does anyone else rember the ComBot backdoor? Basically what happened was ComStud, the guy who wrote ComBot (an irc robot) put in a few lines of code that allowed him to have full access to the bot. It wasn't 100% obvious what was going on because the backdoor was placed in two files (one part copied the crypt()'d version of "HAQD" into a global string w/ the comment /* Don't ask, it works */). This was located in main.c. The other part was located in ctcp.c which would crypt() the first word of the ctcp command and if it matched the other string it would treat the command as if it came from the owner of the bot. It took a little while to get discovered, but it did.
Basically being open source doesn't prevent something from being back doored, but it does make it harder. Not to mention the ComBot example isn't the greatest, it could have been hidden better.
The only thing I liked about the last few seasons was the baseball episode. There wasn't any of the super-conspiricy crap. There wasn't any of the "we'll give you another hint to what the question you should be asking is" crap. It was an alien playing baseball, plain, simple, and really funny.