That magic disclaimer is in just about every job description I've ever seen. So, yes, it is in your job description, and if you don't do it, it constitutes gross negligence making you ineligible for unemployment.
IMHO the most feasible Known Space book on which to base a TV series would be Flatlander -- you could sell it as a sci-fi cop show centered around Gil the ARM. Hollywood understands cop shows, so they stand less of a chance of screwing it up than they would a more "pure" sci-fi setting.
Crashlander could serve as the basis for a series centered around Beowulf Schaffer, but it would probably devolve into a Star Trek / SG-1 style planet-of-the-week show. The Man/Kzin Wars also has promise as the basis for a TV series (maybe set on a Belt asteroid base along the lines of B5 or DS9).
So I assume you'd be okay if MS started using fuckloads of open source code without bothering to abide by the terms of the license
You are not talking about *USE*, you are talking about *DISTRIBUTION*. I can modify and use a GPL'ed program any fucking way I want to and lock my modifications up in a fucking safe, and there's not a fucking thing anyone can do about it AS LONG AS I DO NOT DISTRIBUTE MY CHANGES. Get it, dipshit? Open source licences grant two rights: the right to make derivitive works and the right to distribute the software and derivitive works. They cannot grant the right to use the software because as the grandparent demonstrated by citing the actual law, you cannot license a right you don't have.
Grow up, learn to read, and get your head out of your ass.
Should we eliminate the privacy of 99% of the population for what the other 1% does? I don't think it should fly in this particular instance.
I don't think it should fly in ANY instance. The rights of the majority should not be infringed to punish a minority, nor should the rights of a minority be infringed to cater to the whim of the majority.
But the big service they offer is "Up2date", which lets you easily manage and update packages on all you systems. Its cool, but $700/year value it is not.
You're exactly right. I think Red Hat is screwing themselves by overpricing RHN/up2date. RHN is a handy tool for managing a server farm, but by itself it's not worth much more than $25/year/server, at least to me. If for example you have 100 servers, under the new pricing scheme that would be $70,000/Yr. For that money, you could hire a decent mid-level administrator who could do a whole lot more than install the latest RPMs.
The nice thing about DVD is that it should be possible to put both versions on the same disk -- after all there are only a few scenes which have changed, so it shouldn't be hard to set it up so you can chose which version of an altered scene you want to see.
What would be really cool is to be able to make a playlist, so you could (for example) have Han shoot first but still have the enhanced Battle of Yavin sequence. That would really exploit the power of the DVD format and make it worth getting.
There are multi-format TBCs that handle PAL and SECAM as well as NTCS and the various HD formats. Of course they tend to be on the high side of a grand.
I had a similar experience, right at the tail end of the dot-com bubble. The owner of the company did the same thing -- not only did she skip the country with her boytoy after having cleaned out the company accounts and leaving the employees with rubber paychecks, she also cleaned out her & her husband's joint accounts and maxxed out their credit cards & home equity line of credit, leaving him with 2 kids and no money.
Since we were working on a Federal contract, and since she had neglected to give the IRS the taxes she withheld from our checks, the FBI and IRS got involved. They tracked her to the Cayman Islands or some similar place with liberal banking laws and no extradition treaty, so even though they knew right where she was they couldn't do squat.
I generally don't condone violence against women, but I'd make an exception in that bitch's case. Of course I'd give her ex husband and kids first crack at her.
Absoloutely correct. The webuser login should not even have PERMISSION to touch the tables directly -- all access to the DB should be via stored procedures. This eliminates the possibility of a SQL injection attack. Of course there are idiot developers out there who insist on using a crappy database which doesn't have stored procedures (or which has finally just introduced limited and buggy stored procedures in it's latest version).
For people who've never worked with a real database, stored procedures work kind of like SUID programs in Unix: they run with their OWNER's permissions instead of the calling user's permissions. This allows you to let a user manipulate a table in a very controlled manner. For example, in this (contrived) Transact-SQL example:
CREATE TABLE dbo.SecurityInfo( UserName char(32) not null, PasswordHash char(32) not null, CONSTRAINT PK_SecurityInfo PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (UserName) ) -- populated with cookie on successful user login CREATE TABLE dbo.SessionInfo ( UserName char(32) not null, SessionCookie char(32) not null CONSTRAINT PK_SesionInfo PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (UserName, SessionID) go REVOKE select, insert, update, delete ON SecurityInfo FROM WebUser REVOKE select, insert, update, delete ON SessionInfo FROM WebUser go
CREATE PROCEDURE SetMyPassword ( @SessionCookie char(32) = NULL @OldPasswordHash char(32) = NULL, @NewPasswordHash char(32) = NULL, @Success bit OUTPUT ) AS UPDATE SecurityInfo SET PasswordHash = @NewPasswordHash WHERE UserName = (SELECT UserName FROM SessionInfo WHERE SessionCookie = @SessionCookie) AND PasswordHash = @OldPasswordHash
IF @@ROWCOUNT = 1 AND @@ERROR != 0 SELECT @Success = 1 ELSE SELECT @Success = 0 GO GRANT execute ON SetMyPassword TO WebUser
Using this code, a web user will only be able to update his own password, assuming the client code manages the SessionCookie securely. This is as it should be.
However, if we had given the webuser SELECT and UPDATE permission on the SecurityInfo table, and had this code fragment in a PHP script:
$dbq = $db->execute("UPDATE SecurityInfo SET PasswordHash=$NewHash WHERE UserName = (SELECT UserName FROM SessionInfo WHERE SessionCookie = $SessionCookie) AND PasswordHash=$OldHash");
This leaves us open to a SQL injection attack. If the user were able to set $OLDHASH to
"'bogushash'\nGO\nSELECT * FROM SecurityInfo\nGO\nSELECT * FROM SessionInfo"
due to a bug in the PHP script (or in PHP itself), they would now have complete control over the system. Not using stored procedures as an access control layer is asking to be hacked.
You need a TBC (time base corrector) if you want to do video capture from VHS with anything resembling decent (or even adequate) image quality. A TBC cleans up the synch signal in video; since macrovision works by messing with the synch, the TBC effectively removes it. It also improves video quality by compensating for the mechanical defects in the VCR and the media (variations in playback speed, stretching of the tape due to age or heat, etc).
Professional VCRs typically have a TBC built in; you can also get a standalone TBC. Either way, they're not particuarly cheap, but if you're going to be backing up a large VHS library, it's probably a good investment.
Dell's CompleteCare warranty is the best thing going -- it covers just about EVERYTHING except theft and intentional damage. Your cat barfed on the keyboard? They come to your house and fix it. Shoulder strap on your bag broke, dumping your laptop on the pavement? They come to your house and fix it. Zapped by a power surge? They come to your house and fix it.
Even a cheap laptop is a $1000+ investment; a good one is over $3000. You'd have to be a fool not to protect that investment, especially if you rely on it to make a living. That goes double if your're leasing it for the tax advantage -- 2 year lease + 1 year warranty = disaster waiting to happen.
Yeah, a 3 or 4 year warranty is expensive, but you are guaranteed to have a perfectly functioning laptop for the duration. That's worth it for a lot of people.
Got a cable modem or DSL line at home? Run sshd and squid on a linux box at home. Use ssh port forwarding to tunnel localhost:3128 on your work machine to squidbox:3128. Set your web browser to use localhost:3128 as it's proxy. No more filters, no more logging, no more worries (except shoulder surfing and browser cache/history).
Alternatively, you can run vnc-server on your home machine, forward it's ports to localhost at work, and do all your surfing on the vnc desktop.
Either way, it may not be fast, but it's secure. Strong crypto is your friend.
Find something that interests you and start hacking. Pick up a new programming language. Build a website for your family. Write some demo apps to showcase your skills and put up where pontential employers can take a look at them.
I'm on a contract that's winding down right now and I have about 3 hours of actual work to do in the next week and a half. I wasted a good bit of time on/. before I decided to make better use of my time and hack on some projects I've been meaning to do for a while but never had time.
Believe me, I understand the implications of the end of the oil age. As I said, it's an end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it type of event.
The only rational solution I can see is to buy a small farm which can be worked by hand / animal power and can be converted to a minimalist off-grid power system. I'm trying to figure out how much land I can buy before the shit hits the fan. Subsistance level farming isn't an appealing lifestyle, but it beats starving to death.
A large part of that money is used to pay the salaries needed to employ a few hundredthousand people. Those people spend, giving the money back to the economy
Nice summary of the naive view of economics used by right-wing activists. Unfortunately, that money isn't distributed very evenly -- a disproportionate amount of it goes into the pockets of ultra-wealthy individuals.
Even if we do accept rampant government spending as a positive economic driver, why does that money have to be spent specifically on weapons and weapons research? Of the DOD's ~400B budget, aproximatly 55% is spent on R&D (and less than 30% spent on personnel). That's over $200B being invested in thinking up new ways to blow things up.
Why is spending $200B on weapons research better for the economy than spending that same $200B on energy research? Why does building tanks create more jobs than building windmills? Why does an investment in more efficient bombs and missles benefit create more economic benefit than an investment in more efficent motors and generators?
Such a project probably relies on the few dozen smartest scientists
All the more reason why those scientists should be devoting their efforts to figuring out a way to elimiate our dependance on fossil fuels, instead of figuring out better ways of killing people. There's only so much scientific talent to go around -- it should be used on the most urgent problems, and finding a new way of meeting our energy requirements is a whole lot more urgent than anything else.
The prospect of the US developing low-yield nuclear weapons, which could ultimately fall into the wrong hands, should scare the hell out of you.
It does. Especially when you allow for the prospect that the US Government might actually be the wrong hands, the current administration being a prime example thereof.
But even still, 10+ years is not "real soon now". 10 years to a working prototype means at least 15-20 years to initial deployment. Granted, that's not a long time in the big scheme of things, but the question is, is that going to be soon enough?
We're running out of oil. This is a very bad thing -- end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it level badness. There's a lot of tin-foil-hattery surrounding oil reserve depletion, but the fact remains that oil is a finite resource which we are depleting at an alarming pace.
The question is not whether we are going to run out of oil, the question is WHEN it's going to happen. Pessimistic estimates say it could happen within the next 20 years. Optimistic estimates are around 100 years. Either way it's pretty damn scary. We need fusion power desperately, and we will need it soon. Fuel cells won't help. Fuel cells are just fancy batteries -- they store and transport energy, they don't produce it. Fuel cells require hydrogen which we have to produce either by electochemically stripping it from hydrocarbons or by electrolyzing water, both of which require a non-fuel-cell energy source. Unless we can cheaply mine the atmosphere of Jupiter for molecular hydrogen, fuel cells aren't going to be a replacement for oil without fusion power to drive electrolisys plants.
Likewise, bio-fuels like biodiesel and alcohol are losing propositions, because they take more energy to manufacture than they yeild. The same goes for photovoltaic cells. Hydroelectric, wind, and geothermal power are good, but require specific enviornmental features to work; the supply of which is even more finite than oil fields.
You still can't trust the hardware. A hardware-based keystroke logger would still capture every character you type, which is exactly what the article was talking about.
A partial solution would be to use an alternative input method besides the keyboard -- a virtual keyboard on the screen or a morse-code based method based on mouse clicks (or even a single key -- keystroke loggers can only tell you what key was pushed, not how long it was held down or how long it's been since the last keypress)
Fuel cell development is happening on a rapid scale
That's nice, but it doesn't help. Fuel cells are not a SOURCE of energy so much as they are a way of STORING and TRANSFORMING energy. Fuel cells require Hydrogen. The two main methods of producing hydrogen are electrochemically stripping it from fossil fuels (natural gas) or electolyzing it out of water.
Using fossil fuels to drive fuel cells is a good thing in the short term, because fuel cells are (at least potentially) dramatically more efficent than internal combustion engines at transforming chemical energy into electical energy. However, long term this does us no good, because the process is still dependant on fossil fuels. There is some hope here, as we could potentially genetically engineer bacteria to produce methane from biomass; however, a lot of work would be needed to do this and even then the net energy return isn't going to be very high.
Electrolisys is even worse -- how do you get the electricity in the first place? Either by burning fossil fuels or running a fission reactor, neither of which is sustainable long term. All electrolysis does is turn electricity into hydrogen, which the fuel cell turns back into less electricity. Used this way, a fuel cell is nothing but a fancy battery.
Likewise, current photovoltaic cells are also nothing more than fancy batteries -- it takes more energy to produce a PV cell than it will generate before it wears out. Biodiesel and alcohol fuels are also net losers (or at best, marginal producers) as it takes more energy to grow, harvest, process, and transport the fuel than that fuel produces. Fusion power is the only technology on the horizon that has the potential to produce substantially more energy than it consumes.
IMHO, if we don't have a working fusion generator in the next 30-50 years, civilization as we know it is screwed.
The only way the Amish-like lifestyle would happen if we had a global war destroying the lifestyle as we know it.
I'm afraid it might just come to that. When the oil runs out, modern farming goes kaput. Without modern farming, you don't have enough food to feed everyone. Not a pretty picture. No matter how you cut it, a lot of people are going to die when the oil runs out, either by starvation or by killing each other over what little food there is.
Microsoft licensing the APIs is irrelvant to Samba -- all the samba work is based on specifications which were either released publicly or which were independently reverse-engineered.
As long as Samba continues to base itself on untainted specifications, Microsoft can't do jack.
The power requirements for a manned spacecraft are very different than the ones for an unmanned craft.
An unmanned craft can use something like a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) as it's primary power source. For a manned craft, a big RTG would need a lot more shielding than it would need in an unmanned craft. Also, a manned craft needs water and oxygen. If it was using an RTG, a spacecraft would have to carry tanks of water and oxygen as purely parasitic mass. Fuel cells use oxygen and produce water as a by-product. This gets triple use out of mass they have to carry anyway, which is a huge win.
Slashdot Mirror
So that's the source of that high-pitched whine I heard this morning. He must be topping 10,000 RPM.
That magic disclaimer is in just about every job description I've ever seen. So, yes, it is in your job description, and if you don't do it, it constitutes gross negligence making you ineligible for unemployment.
Crashlander could serve as the basis for a series centered around Beowulf Schaffer, but it would probably devolve into a Star Trek / SG-1 style planet-of-the-week show. The Man/Kzin Wars also has promise as the basis for a TV series (maybe set on a Belt asteroid base along the lines of B5 or DS9).
There should be some kind of warning lable to let you know to swallow your drink before you read this stuff :-)
Grow up, learn to read, and get your head out of your ass.
What would be really cool is to be able to make a playlist, so you could (for example) have Han shoot first but still have the enhanced Battle of Yavin sequence. That would really exploit the power of the DVD format and make it worth getting.
There are multi-format TBCs that handle PAL and SECAM as well as NTCS and the various HD formats. Of course they tend to be on the high side of a grand.
Since we were working on a Federal contract, and since she had neglected to give the IRS the taxes she withheld from our checks, the FBI and IRS got involved. They tracked her to the Cayman Islands or some similar place with liberal banking laws and no extradition treaty, so even though they knew right where she was they couldn't do squat.
I generally don't condone violence against women, but I'd make an exception in that bitch's case. Of course I'd give her ex husband and kids first crack at her.
For people who've never worked with a real database, stored procedures work kind of like SUID programs in Unix: they run with their OWNER's permissions instead of the calling user's permissions. This allows you to let a user manipulate a table in a very controlled manner. For example, in this (contrived) Transact-SQL example:
Using this code, a web user will only be able to update his own password, assuming the client code manages the SessionCookie securely. This is as it should be.However, if we had given the webuser SELECT and UPDATE permission on the SecurityInfo table, and had this code fragment in a PHP script:
This leaves us open to a SQL injection attack. If the user were able to set $OLDHASH to due to a bug in the PHP script (or in PHP itself), they would now have complete control over the system. Not using stored procedures as an access control layer is asking to be hacked.Professional VCRs typically have a TBC built in; you can also get a standalone TBC. Either way, they're not particuarly cheap, but if you're going to be backing up a large VHS library, it's probably a good investment.
See the ArsTechnica Guide to Capturing, Cleaning, & Compressing Video and the sci.electronics.repair Macrovision FAQ for more info.
Even a cheap laptop is a $1000+ investment; a good one is over $3000. You'd have to be a fool not to protect that investment, especially if you rely on it to make a living. That goes double if your're leasing it for the tax advantage -- 2 year lease + 1 year warranty = disaster waiting to happen.
Yeah, a 3 or 4 year warranty is expensive, but you are guaranteed to have a perfectly functioning laptop for the duration. That's worth it for a lot of people.
Subliminal == bullshit in any context.
Alternatively, you can run vnc-server on your home machine, forward it's ports to localhost at work, and do all your surfing on the vnc desktop.
Either way, it may not be fast, but it's secure. Strong crypto is your friend.
Find something that interests you and start hacking. Pick up a new programming language. Build a website for your family. Write some demo apps to showcase your skills and put up where pontential employers can take a look at them.
I'm on a contract that's winding down right now and I have about 3 hours of actual work to do in the next week and a half. I wasted a good bit of time on /. before I decided to make better use of my time and hack on some projects I've been meaning to do for a while but never had time.
Hell, I always just used them as archery or pellet gun targets.
The only rational solution I can see is to buy a small farm which can be worked by hand / animal power and can be converted to a minimalist off-grid power system. I'm trying to figure out how much land I can buy before the shit hits the fan. Subsistance level farming isn't an appealing lifestyle, but it beats starving to death.
Even if we do accept rampant government spending as a positive economic driver, why does that money have to be spent specifically on weapons and weapons research? Of the DOD's ~400B budget, aproximatly 55% is spent on R&D (and less than 30% spent on personnel). That's over $200B being invested in thinking up new ways to blow things up.
Why is spending $200B on weapons research better for the economy than spending that same $200B on energy research? Why does building tanks create more jobs than building windmills? Why does an investment in more efficient bombs and missles benefit create more economic benefit than an investment in more efficent motors and generators?
All the more reason why those scientists should be devoting their efforts to figuring out a way to elimiate our dependance on fossil fuels, instead of figuring out better ways of killing people. There's only so much scientific talent to go around -- it should be used on the most urgent problems, and finding a new way of meeting our energy requirements is a whole lot more urgent than anything else.We're running out of oil. This is a very bad thing -- end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it level badness. There's a lot of tin-foil-hattery surrounding oil reserve depletion, but the fact remains that oil is a finite resource which we are depleting at an alarming pace.
The question is not whether we are going to run out of oil, the question is WHEN it's going to happen. Pessimistic estimates say it could happen within the next 20 years. Optimistic estimates are around 100 years. Either way it's pretty damn scary. We need fusion power desperately, and we will need it soon. Fuel cells won't help. Fuel cells are just fancy batteries -- they store and transport energy, they don't produce it. Fuel cells require hydrogen which we have to produce either by electochemically stripping it from hydrocarbons or by electrolyzing water, both of which require a non-fuel-cell energy source. Unless we can cheaply mine the atmosphere of Jupiter for molecular hydrogen, fuel cells aren't going to be a replacement for oil without fusion power to drive electrolisys plants.
Likewise, bio-fuels like biodiesel and alcohol are losing propositions, because they take more energy to manufacture than they yeild. The same goes for photovoltaic cells. Hydroelectric, wind, and geothermal power are good, but require specific enviornmental features to work; the supply of which is even more finite than oil fields.
A partial solution would be to use an alternative input method besides the keyboard -- a virtual keyboard on the screen or a morse-code based method based on mouse clicks (or even a single key -- keystroke loggers can only tell you what key was pushed, not how long it was held down or how long it's been since the last keypress)
Using fossil fuels to drive fuel cells is a good thing in the short term, because fuel cells are (at least potentially) dramatically more efficent than internal combustion engines at transforming chemical energy into electical energy. However, long term this does us no good, because the process is still dependant on fossil fuels. There is some hope here, as we could potentially genetically engineer bacteria to produce methane from biomass; however, a lot of work would be needed to do this and even then the net energy return isn't going to be very high.
Electrolisys is even worse -- how do you get the electricity in the first place? Either by burning fossil fuels or running a fission reactor, neither of which is sustainable long term. All electrolysis does is turn electricity into hydrogen, which the fuel cell turns back into less electricity. Used this way, a fuel cell is nothing but a fancy battery.
Likewise, current photovoltaic cells are also nothing more than fancy batteries -- it takes more energy to produce a PV cell than it will generate before it wears out. Biodiesel and alcohol fuels are also net losers (or at best, marginal producers) as it takes more energy to grow, harvest, process, and transport the fuel than that fuel produces. Fusion power is the only technology on the horizon that has the potential to produce substantially more energy than it consumes.
IMHO, if we don't have a working fusion generator in the next 30-50 years, civilization as we know it is screwed.
I'm afraid it might just come to that. When the oil runs out, modern farming goes kaput. Without modern farming, you don't have enough food to feed everyone. Not a pretty picture. No matter how you cut it, a lot of people are going to die when the oil runs out, either by starvation or by killing each other over what little food there is.As long as Samba continues to base itself on untainted specifications, Microsoft can't do jack.
An unmanned craft can use something like a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) as it's primary power source. For a manned craft, a big RTG would need a lot more shielding than it would need in an unmanned craft. Also, a manned craft needs water and oxygen. If it was using an RTG, a spacecraft would have to carry tanks of water and oxygen as purely parasitic mass. Fuel cells use oxygen and produce water as a by-product. This gets triple use out of mass they have to carry anyway, which is a huge win.