"Keep in mind that the bastards who attacked us last week were willing to (A) die and (B) train for years to be pilots."
This is one of the most important points. You can't fight this sort fanaticism. There is nothing you can do that is bad enough or hard enough to deter such people. They're willing to die, and going out fighting is the best possible way -- it makes them martyrs.
I will point out that they needed a LOT less money than everyone seems to think. It took me about $4500 to get my basic pilot's license. A copy of FlightSim was another $80 or so. The hardest part of flying a 737 is getting it on the ground in one piece. The second-hardest part is getting it in the air. Everything else is basically "point the nose where you want it to go".
I suspect a couple of them went to flight school to learn about things like transponders (which they shut off), basic radio navigation and the special radio codes used to notify the ground you've been hijacked without actually having to say it out loud.
You really didn't need radio navigation to find the WTC. From inland US, you could just go east until you reached the ocean, then turn left. The buildings were visible (if you were a couple miles up) from more than 30 miles away.
So that this isn't completely OT, see this article in The Register. It seems bin Laden isn't using any technology now, and the Feds have no idea where he even is. They still want those back doors in crypto, and they have to push now before people start thinking a bit.
Actually, the potatoes you are used to seeing (white to yellow) are the results of genetic "modification" done through cross-pollination and hybrid work. Purple is the color of many of the original wild potato strains. Some interesting links:
There is evidence that the potato was cultivated (i.e., selectively grown as opposed to collected from the wild) more than 4500 years ago. You will have a hard time finding any food in its original wild version, from potatoes to tomatoes to carrots to wheat to cows.
There's good and bad points to selective cultivation/breeding. The smell was "hybridded" out of roses, but they get long, straight stems, few thorns, single flowers on a stem, large buds that stay closed for a long time... just about everything that people want in cut flowers. We have nice, big heads of broccoli with lots of florets and few leaves.
I am not thrilled with GM foods, but not so much based on the "unnatural" aspect as from the lack of long-term safety studies and testing.
If you get your kicks walking through 2,000 acres looking for edible plants in their wild and natural/original state, more power to you. I have trouble looking for a few edible mushrooms on 2 acres, and there are few mushrooms that are as tasty (or as expensive) as the Steinpilz (boletus). I'll stick to supermarkets.
woof.
You wouldn't believe how serious a lot of people take potatoes. I found out once I started the Official French Fries Pages.
Maybe we can finally power a Beowulf cluster of these. (the potato-powered Web server, for those too lazy to click).
Personally, I'd like to cut up a cluster of these and fry them, then do a review on the Official French Fries Pages. And with neon green ketchup from Heinz, the page will certainly be memorable.
While bullet holes in the hydraulic system would certainly be a bad thing, a few holes punched through the skin very close to each other (go look up the firing rate of an Uzi) would be a much worse thing. Airplanes are pressurised. A single hole is a very bad thing. Go look up "explosive decompression" on Google. More than one hole basically acts as a much bigger hole with a diameter approximately the distance between the two farthest-spread little holes (within a reasonable distance). A big enough hole and you get a catastrophic failure (back to Google again).
Yes, I'm a pilot.
How many times do you have to point out that Franklin never said the quotation contstantly mangled here (the one about security and liberty)? Ludwig Thoma. Ludwig Thoma. Ludwig Thoma.
And so I don't get shot down for being off-topic, not a single one of the suggested and/or planned "security measures" would have made the slightest difference last Tuesday. I can make a weapon with a plastic spoon and an emory board or with a shoelace and the in-flight magsazine. The only way to have truly safe flights is to strap all passengers down like in slave ships, not that we're that far removed already. Lose your rights and gain NO security.
The false sense of security people are getting from all these knee-jerk actions is actually more dangerous than being scared and therefore attentive. People in the US are too busy waving their flags right now to remember the hundreds of thousands who fought and died for the rights they're now ready to simply give up. THAT is shitting on the memory of far more people.
woof.
perspective: 5,000 dead is the monthly toll on US highways.
The problem is that almost everyone gets the quote wrong and I've only ever once seen it properly attributed. It was not Jefferson or Franklin or Einstein or any of the other dozen names I've seen attached to it. The earliest reference to such a quote was from Ludwig Thoma. Franklin never even stole it for Poor Richard's Almanac (that anyone can definitively show).
The sad fact is that we will indeed lose freedom, not for security, but for the perception of security. All kinds of measures will be taken, laws enacted, procedures implemented. Getting on a plane will be a nightmare, but while everyone will be at least inconvenienced, no real prevention will occur.
People want action - they want something done. It doesn't matter if it helps or not. The perception is that anything is better than nothing. I had to go to Bethesda Naval Base today. Only one entrance was open, you had to show ID, another guard had a mirror-onna-stick to look under the cars, another guy was walking around with a shotgun. Looks good, seems secure. Except...
Except a shotgun is only useful within 50 yards at best, the mirror is useless because no one is hanging onto the undercarriage of a car (and you put explosives on the floorboards and in the trunk, not under the car), and although they demanded an ID from me as a passenger, they didn't actually look at it carefully, much less check it with NCIC.
So how much freedom are you (or realistically, is your mother or neighbour) willing to give up?
The mouse has been proven in usability labs to be faster than keyboard shortcuts.
Proven by whom? The Short Bus Study? If you type more than about 30wpm, there is no way that removing your hand from the keyboard to click once and then return it is faster than using a keyboard shortcut, unless you are referring to a poorly-designed interface which has (perhaps intentionally) set up bad tab stops.
As long as the interface is designed to allow full control without a mouse, about the only thing I can't do faster with a keybard is rating the AmIHotOrNot sites and their variants.
Poor design by the programmers and project managers does not change the physical reality that I can type faster than I can type a word, scroll, click, press a key, scroll, click, scroll, click, right-click, click, type one key, etc.
woof.
Where's the guy with the sig about the nipple being the only intuitive interface when you need him?
Netfix may be great if you're in the US, but between postage and customs, can't work well even in Canada. And with shipping, it's also no good for Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and any other US territory you care to mention.
Then there's the rest of the world, although the US movie industry has historically and routinely screwed the non-US audience over, from bad dubs to delayed releases to restrictions such as region codes AND languages -- most DVDs sold in Germany only run with the German subtitles on if you want the original English sound.
Of course, downloading 500MB can also be frightfully expensive in most of the world, and the quality is going to be questionable, as other posts pointed out. We probably would've heard about some new CODEC or format. A 700MB DIVX;) -- if done right -- gets me about 90 minutes at 640x360 (like... say... Fletch), and I ain't paying squat for some 320x180 RealPlayer version of any film.
woof.
Those who do cannot remember Santayana are condemned to misquote him.
It's only a part of the letter from the future.
on
Windows in 2020
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· Score: 2, Funny
The Times must've had to edit that letter to fit the ads in. They left out a few major events.
In 2005, Microsoft filed a complaint under the DMCA which accused all Linux users of circumvention for writing anything compatible with Windows XS on the grounds that the source code was seekrit and only illegal disassembly could have given them the ability to write a program that could function on it. Microsoft then managed to successfully prosecute RMS for contributory negligence after he continued screaming that it's not Linux but GNU/Linux and it was his idea to begin with. Stallman received a Gnine-year sentence, with time served if he'd promise no more recursive acronyms.
In 2007, The Supreme Court handed down the "Typesetters' Union v. LameWebDesign IPO" decision (commonly known as the "FontSanity" case) which upheld a lower court's ruling making the use of multiple mixed font sizes, colours and cases on one page illegal (based on community standards, just like the obscenity laws). Steve Gibson got a five-year stint at Leavenworth, where he spent his time pointing out that the bars on the windows were not really secure and that ALL THAT SPACE between them could be USED by ANYONE TO get OUT of JAIL!!!
And while the letter mentioned the Apple religion, it left out the Slackware fundamentalists' revolt of 2011, which targeted all distros containing installers and GUIs. Hundreds wree left helpless at the CLI and millions of files were lost as people helplessly typed in two-letter combinations in the hopes that something would happen.
I can get www.pakchooie.cn and host it over on pushershover.sl (sealand?). Probably. As long as I can convince the.cn authority that "pakchooie" is not some anti-Chinese phrase and that my domain won't be critical of China or show China in a bad light.
I can't recommend The Economist enough. Stories are good, timely, important, interesting, and it's damned hard to find enough bias to get pissed off about.
Phones also use 48V with 96V during ring. Didn't you ever accidentally touch the leads from the transformer on a modem card when the power was on? Sucks even more when that happens while a call is coming.
When we get mod points, we don't all sit reloading every thirty seconds like f1r5T p0sT biznatchiz. I check back every 30-45 minutes or so, sometimes reloading as soon as I've read every comment (score=0, nested) if it's a really hot or interesting topic.
It was a DAMNED funny post, and if I had points today, I'd've blown one on that... it was one of the best jokes I've seen in a long time here. +2 Funny, +2 Subtle, +3 read three times to make sure you got it, +2 COMPLETELY on-topic, blah blah pak chooie.
As it was, I got in here with 72 posts showing and your rant was under a +4 Funny post. Calm down. I'd mod more if I had more points (I'd start some modding down, as well), but I only gets five points of love to share maybe once every week or two.
I find that most people quit bitching about moderators when they 1) read the mods guidelines and 2) actually mod a couple times. Nothing sucks more on/. than having a perfect comment (informative/insightful) and having to post it AC because you don't want the points you gave to some other post to be lost. Except maybe Taco's spelling and some lame complaints about moderators.
This will probably be modded down -1 Offtopic (rightfully so), but it needed to be said. Bu-bye, karma.
Excuse me? Proven? No. The possibility has not been ruled out. There is no proof that there is life on Mars. Head on over to http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/ and see for yourself.
There is no proof that alien do not exist, either. You can't prove a negative condition. Science and statistics. Gotta love it.
It's worse than that. Non-lethal weapons are more likely to be used because they are non-lethal (http://austin.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_ id=590) And because the repercussions are lower when non-lethal force is used in any crowd control situation, the police are that much more likely to use such force, and using as a defense "I was in fear for my safety and the safety of my fellow officers. It was just a beanbag/foam/pepper spray. At least I didn't kill him." And you can't really argue with that because there is a need to have police, a need to protect the police who protect you, and there is also an easily understood concept that when you have to make someone stop doing something bad, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to take his life -- worst case you Rochambeau.
Would I rather be shot by a beanbag or a bullet? Not a tough choice, that one. But the rules of engagement change with non-lethal weapons and the threshold for their use is lowered by virtue of the fact that they generally don't kill -- not intentionally, anyway. It becomes much easier to pull that trigger.
I could write a dissertation here, score a five, get some cool responses and maybe some E-Mail, but I don't have the time or resources. There's a lot of information about this; check out some of it. Google, teoma, even Yahoo.
Let me note that the military's use of non-lethal weapons has historically been to disarm/disable an enemy so that lethal force could then be used, from the days of catapulting rotting carcasses into the keep to the gas attacks of WWI.
This has happened before, when mathematicians realised they had been basing proofs on a couple assumptions which themselves had never been proven. You can read about it in Simon Singh's "Fermat's Last Theorem", an extremely readable and enjoyable look into both Fermat and mathematics in general.
A teacher, a physicist and a mathemetician are having drinks together in a Scottish pub when the teacher looks out the window and sees a white sheep. The teacher says, "There are white sheep in Scotland". The physicist looks out the window and declares, "There are sheep in Scotland; we have already detected and confirmed white ones." The mathematician says, "In Scotland there is at least one sheep, at least one side of which is hite."
No, I didn't pull that from Singh (it's there, though). It's an old mathematician's joke but it's true. The most anal Rainman you've ever seen is incredibly chaotic compared to mathematicians (at least when they're working on a proof or theorem).
woof.
"No ma. You don't have to worry about Code Red. Yes, I know CNN told you that you do. Ma, do you run a Web server? No, Netscape is a browser, not a server. Yes, there's a difference. You don't want to know. No, and the Internet didn't die last week, either..." -- my side of a phone call two nights ago.
When I say that I have a right to my works, I mean the following:
1) I created a document to be viewed in toto as I created it.
2) I provide particular information, often in a scholarly fashion, which contains links. Each of these links has a specific purpose, namely, to provide further bibliographic or internally-referential information.
3) Modification of this information distorts the meaning of the information I have presented.
Consider the case of a scholarly paper on something other than French Fries, be it cold fusion, a Higgs boson, Ununoctium, or even pulse rockets. In such an article (if it is indeed scholarly), I will provide links to examples and sources. If some company comes along and modifies my treatise to include other links to something other than that which I have referenced, there is a clear and serious detrimental effect to the validity of my document.
I get a lot of hate mail from Belgians as it is, and changes to my links may generate even more hate mail. Yeah, I'll get over it sooner or later, but the point is that my carefully researched (really) content has been altered, not by the end user, but by a third-party, for-profit company. And it seems there is little I can do about it, even though I could've sued the Washington Post for defamation and character assasination for misquoting me in print.
Consider Terry Pratchett and the Discworld series. The Colour of Magic was done in Germany by a particular publisher (see lspace.org), who modified a couple pages ino order to insert a soup advertisement into the text! Imagine reading a Stephen King novel like this: "Karen, almost frozen with fear, locked the door, but simply locking a door isn't good enough. When it comes to home security, you need ADT. ADT provides 24-hour protection at the push of a button. Or at the first sign of trouble. Unfortunately, Karen doesn't have ADT home security. What's she up to now? Well, Karen, staring out the peephole..."
Why do I have no say in this matter? The changes to my site and links are not being done directly by the user. I have no problem with fair use of my site; it's been quoted and misquoted around the world. I do have a problem with theft and hijacking, which my site has also been subject to. (A number of sites have copied -- verbatim -- the page, Twenty-two Things To Do With French Fries Besides Eat Them and I have crawled up their tightly-closed orifices to protect my creative works).
As I said, my comment was only partly meant in jest. I have serious problems with both sides of the question, even when I take both arguments to the extreme. At the extremes, I tend to favour the laissez-faire approach because I don't want RIAA telling me I can't make a killer mix CD with New Model Army, King's X and The Pogues, but somebody screwing with my content really bugs the shit out of me. You just have no idea of the sacrifices involved in keeping the OFFP going.
woof.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Maybe this is more suitable as a submission to "Ask Slashdot"...
I have a site -- The Official French Fries Pages -- which I've managed to keep alive since 1996,[1] although I really need to upload a few new pages.
Do I say, "Fine. Whatever. You wanna look at my page and links the wrong way, I don't care," and just let anarchy reign supreme? I mean, I'm a "Slashdotter", right? I've been here for a few years (although I couldn't be bothered to register for a while), and I'm certainly an "0ld sk3wl Internet-doofus" (since '86). This is just more crap that I can ignore, and anyway, we all hate frivolous lawsuits and copyright bullshit... unless it hits home.
Or do I look at it like RIAA or MPAA: This is my goddamned IP. Them's my links and my lame DoubleClick ads (which have netted me at least $180 over 18 months). I'll sue you bastards for every penny my shyster can get!
Oh how ugly reality can be.
While the above was meant, at least in part, as sarcasm, I truly am unsure what to do. I could be tempted to join a class action to prevent the modified display of my site, not for the money but for the principle.
Do I not have a right to say what can and cannot be done with my creative works? And doesn't RIAA say the same thing?
"Morals suck, Beavis."
woof.
[1] Don't give me any shit about using FrontPage. I always demand HTTP 2.0 compliance and I got tired of writing six or more versions of each and every page so that any browser could see it. And if another standard came out, I had to rewrite all the pages with a version for those browsers, too. At least I edit the FP "code" and cut the actual size down about 60%. And you can still view the site in lynx!
Re:I've always wondered how they do that.
on
When A Cable Dies
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· Score: 3
That was informative? What you remember some IS guy telling you a while back? That ain't how it's done. The cable hits and lays on the bottom. In sections like the US-UK route, there is a ridge across the ocean and it's high enough that a trench can be pulled to offer more protection. Jeez! You only have to think about the weight of 3,000 km of cable that weighs about 4kg/m to figure out it ain't gonna work just hanging there, not even in water. And we're not even mentioning currents here.
In the James Burke series, "The Day The Universe Changed", one episode includes a part on how the ship which was first used to lay trans-Atlantic cable ended up doing that (hint: it wasn't built for that). Of course, you could also go here: http://www.oldcablehouse.com/cablestations/history.html. BTW, you can read James Burke "Connections" pieces at Scientific American (http://www.sciam.com or in the magazine each month.
woof.
Quit all the whining about moderation! Don't like how it works? Tough. I don't like your variable declarations, but I'm not pissing about them, am I? Oh wait, I just did.
I read somewhere that Germany is considering some kind of H1-B provision (I think it was Germany, anyway -- I haven't seen the article in a while).
Yeah, you read right, although it isn't quite as bad as an H1-B. The main reason we have the "Greencard"[sic] is because all the German programmers split to the US and UK to make better money for generally the same work. Of course, they usually come back home after a couple years because they miss a number of benefits and protections (like workers' protections, health insurance, 30 days' holiday instead of 10 [and usually none the first year in the US], good beer and a sensible government system not yet owned by corporations, to name a few).
Germany also put other restrictions on the Greencard, including proof of abilities and a minimum salary of DM 100,000 (around US$ 45,000 right now). They also don't give employers the rights of some god; the visa-holder here is not some sort of indentured servant. That's sociual democracy for ya.
Another more important difference here in the Reich is that the population is not sustainable. People are having a lot fewer babies and having them later. There simply ain't enough people, and this is a growing problem in most European countries.
I'm a Yank, but live here for a lot of reasons I won't go into. Paid my dues, did my time (USN, DOL, FERC), paid my taxes and Social Insecurity.
By the way: unlike private industry, the government believes in a training budget!
The US gov't provides little training outside the military, unless you lie on your application for a job and get it anyway. It used to be that you had to take a civil service exam and actually prove you knew basic things. Trying to get a simple GS-3 secretarial job? You needed to take a typing test. Not anymore, and not for some time. It's "discrimination". Really. If someone can bullshit his way through an interview and get the job being totally incompetent, the US generally can't fire him/her (also "discrimination": that's where the training comes in. I wish I was joking. Dad was a federal judge and dealt with this.
Oh yeah, I'm working for a YooEss company (but no visa through them, I'm permanent here on my own). The pay could be better, but we're "entitled" to training. We can only fly steerage (a.k.a. "ecomony") though; even managers don't get business class. Ppfththt.
woof.
Last year I had 41 paid days off, not including sick days.
CAIDA Released Slashdot-effect Post Mortem
Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday, July 30, @14:01PM
from the scalpel-video-camera dept.
BadDoggie writes "David Moore at CAIDA (The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) was monitoring his/8 network again after this story appeared in Slashdot. His findings are somewhat interesting and show just how swiftly Slashdotters across the world can take down a server." It was shier stoopidity of the Editurs and the bad luk of CAIDA that noone mirord the siet and grafiks. note: Chek the the grafs, these pikshirs really dew tell a 1000 word.
Already exists. The amazing NAP ZAPPER [sic]. First saw it on some lame Discovery Channel show a couple years ago. What worries me is that it's sold by a company which specialises in stun guns.
1) Father mode: "I know a short-cut"
2) Mother mode: "Slow down!"
3) Wife mode: "Let's just ask that guy there and where _______ is."
4) Mother-in-law mode: "He's trying to kill us! I know it! My husband, god rest his soul, knew how to drive and it wasn't like this! You kids these days don't think about anyone but yourselves."
5) Little sister mode 1: "The mall is thaaaaaaaaaaaaaat way!
6) Little sister mode 2: "Let me off at the corner. I'd just die if my friends saw me getting a ride with you!"
7) Your driving teacher: "Hands at 10 & 2! Pay attention! This ain't worth a teacher's salary..."
Does anyone care to speculate on the lame jokes this thing might tell? [1] .
Will you be the first to hack your buddy's wheels to scream "COP!!!!" at 1:30a.m.?
woof.
[1] It won't be anything good like "What's the difference between a tire and 365 blowjobs? The tire is a Goodyear; 365 blowjobs is a very good year."
The TV commercials for Jurassic III take bits of the movie and not only re-arrange them out of sequence but out of context as well. The purpose of this, of course, is to make the movie seem more exiting than it really is.
...which is why I wish to Wotan they'd let the people who make trailers edit the whole damned film to begin with.
Did Michael Crichton have anything to do at all with this film, the third consecutive rape of what started off as a pretty good novel? I mean besides the "based on the book" credit.
woof.
Pity the Europeans who will get these films a few months later, badly overdubbed.
"And also, if the US Attorney's office insists on prosecuting Dmitry without a current complaint from Adobe, then we will continue protests directed at them rather than at Adobe."
Had Adobe not started this in the first place, the US Attorney's office wouldn't be involved. There'd have been no case.
I will not accept Adobe's attitude, which seems to be, "I only chucked a cigarette butt, I didn't cause any drought which dried out the forest and made it burn so easily."
If they drop their complaint but the US won't, Adobe will need to publicly apologise and actively support Dmitry's case. It won't be too hard to put a good spin on that anyway.
/me tries -- and fails -- to find anything in the UN charter requiring resident horses as a condition of sovereignty.
/me sends a E-Mail to Aitutaki telling them to get a few just in case.
By the way, the UK government already has declared Sealand is in UK waters and will remain so, sovereign or not, unless they redefine either the length of a mile or the definition that international waters lie outside a 12-mile boundary, except for that bit right over there, where six or seven miles ought to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of the most important points. You can't fight this sort fanaticism. There is nothing you can do that is bad enough or hard enough to deter such people. They're willing to die, and going out fighting is the best possible way -- it makes them martyrs.
I will point out that they needed a LOT less money than everyone seems to think. It took me about $4500 to get my basic pilot's license. A copy of FlightSim was another $80 or so. The hardest part of flying a 737 is getting it on the ground in one piece. The second-hardest part is getting it in the air. Everything else is basically "point the nose where you want it to go".
I suspect a couple of them went to flight school to learn about things like transponders (which they shut off), basic radio navigation and the special radio codes used to notify the ground you've been hijacked without actually having to say it out loud.
You really didn't need radio navigation to find the WTC. From inland US, you could just go east until you reached the ocean, then turn left. The buildings were visible (if you were a couple miles up) from more than 30 miles away.
So that this isn't completely OT, see this article in The Register. It seems bin Laden isn't using any technology now, and the Feds have no idea where he even is. They still want those back doors in crypto, and they have to push now before people start thinking a bit.
woof.
Can you find the stego'd message in this post?
The Potato Then & Now: History
History and Origin of the Potato
Indepthinfo's "Potato! - History"
There is evidence that the potato was cultivated (i.e., selectively grown as opposed to collected from the wild) more than 4500 years ago. You will have a hard time finding any food in its original wild version, from potatoes to tomatoes to carrots to wheat to cows.
There's good and bad points to selective cultivation/breeding. The smell was "hybridded" out of roses, but they get long, straight stems, few thorns, single flowers on a stem, large buds that stay closed for a long time... just about everything that people want in cut flowers. We have nice, big heads of broccoli with lots of florets and few leaves.
I am not thrilled with GM foods, but not so much based on the "unnatural" aspect as from the lack of long-term safety studies and testing.
If you get your kicks walking through 2,000 acres looking for edible plants in their wild and natural/original state, more power to you. I have trouble looking for a few edible mushrooms on 2 acres, and there are few mushrooms that are as tasty (or as expensive) as the Steinpilz (boletus). I'll stick to supermarkets.
woof.
You wouldn't believe how serious a lot of people take potatoes. I found out once I started the Official French Fries Pages.
Personally, I'd like to cut up a cluster of these and fry them, then do a review on the Official French Fries Pages. And with neon green ketchup from Heinz, the page will certainly be memorable.
woof.
Yes, I'm a pilot.
How many times do you have to point out that Franklin never said the quotation contstantly mangled here (the one about security and liberty)? Ludwig Thoma. Ludwig Thoma. Ludwig Thoma.
And so I don't get shot down for being off-topic, not a single one of the suggested and/or planned "security measures" would have made the slightest difference last Tuesday. I can make a weapon with a plastic spoon and an emory board or with a shoelace and the in-flight magsazine. The only way to have truly safe flights is to strap all passengers down like in slave ships, not that we're that far removed already. Lose your rights and gain NO security.
The false sense of security people are getting from all these knee-jerk actions is actually more dangerous than being scared and therefore attentive. People in the US are too busy waving their flags right now to remember the hundreds of thousands who fought and died for the rights they're now ready to simply give up. THAT is shitting on the memory of far more people.
woof.
perspective: 5,000 dead is the monthly toll on US highways.
The sad fact is that we will indeed lose freedom, not for security, but for the perception of security. All kinds of measures will be taken, laws enacted, procedures implemented. Getting on a plane will be a nightmare, but while everyone will be at least inconvenienced, no real prevention will occur.
People want action - they want something done. It doesn't matter if it helps or not. The perception is that anything is better than nothing. I had to go to Bethesda Naval Base today. Only one entrance was open, you had to show ID, another guard had a mirror-onna-stick to look under the cars, another guy was walking around with a shotgun. Looks good, seems secure. Except...
Except a shotgun is only useful within 50 yards at best, the mirror is useless because no one is hanging onto the undercarriage of a car (and you put explosives on the floorboards and in the trunk, not under the car), and although they demanded an ID from me as a passenger, they didn't actually look at it carefully, much less check it with NCIC.
So how much freedom are you (or realistically, is your mother or neighbour) willing to give up?
woof.
Proven by whom? The Short Bus Study? If you type more than about 30wpm, there is no way that removing your hand from the keyboard to click once and then return it is faster than using a keyboard shortcut, unless you are referring to a poorly-designed interface which has (perhaps intentionally) set up bad tab stops.
As long as the interface is designed to allow full control without a mouse, about the only thing I can't do faster with a keybard is rating the AmIHotOrNot sites and their variants.
Poor design by the programmers and project managers does not change the physical reality that I can type faster than I can type a word, scroll, click, press a key, scroll, click, scroll, click, right-click, click, type one key, etc.
woof.
Where's the guy with the sig about the nipple being the only intuitive interface when you need him?
Then there's the rest of the world, although the US movie industry has historically and routinely screwed the non-US audience over, from bad dubs to delayed releases to restrictions such as region codes AND languages -- most DVDs sold in Germany only run with the German subtitles on if you want the original English sound.
Of course, downloading 500MB can also be frightfully expensive in most of the world, and the quality is going to be questionable, as other posts pointed out. We probably would've heard about some new CODEC or format. A 700MB DIVX;) -- if done right -- gets me about 90 minutes at 640x360 (like... say... Fletch), and I ain't paying squat for some 320x180 RealPlayer version of any film.
woof.
Those who do cannot remember Santayana are condemned to misquote him.
In 2005, Microsoft filed a complaint under the DMCA which accused all Linux users of circumvention for writing anything compatible with Windows XS on the grounds that the source code was seekrit and only illegal disassembly could have given them the ability to write a program that could function on it. Microsoft then managed to successfully prosecute RMS for contributory negligence after he continued screaming that it's not Linux but GNU/Linux and it was his idea to begin with. Stallman received a Gnine-year sentence, with time served if he'd promise no more recursive acronyms.
In 2007, The Supreme Court handed down the "Typesetters' Union v. LameWebDesign IPO" decision (commonly known as the "FontSanity" case) which upheld a lower court's ruling making the use of multiple mixed font sizes, colours and cases on one page illegal (based on community standards, just like the obscenity laws). Steve Gibson got a five-year stint at Leavenworth, where he spent his time pointing out that the bars on the windows were not really secure and that ALL THAT SPACE between them could be USED by ANYONE TO get OUT of JAIL!!!
And while the letter mentioned the Apple religion, it left out the Slackware fundamentalists' revolt of 2011, which targeted all distros containing installers and GUIs. Hundreds wree left helpless at the CLI and millions of files were lost as people helplessly typed in two-letter combinations in the hopes that something would happen.
The future ain't pretty, people.
woof.
I can get www.pakchooie.cn and host it over on pushershover.sl (sealand?). Probably. As long as I can convince the .cn authority that "pakchooie" is not some anti-Chinese phrase and that my domain won't be critical of China or show China in a bad light.
I can't recommend The Economist enough. Stories are good, timely, important, interesting, and it's damned hard to find enough bias to get pissed off about.
woof.
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When we get mod points, we don't all sit reloading every thirty seconds like f1r5T p0sT biznatchiz. I check back every 30-45 minutes or so, sometimes reloading as soon as I've read every comment (score=0, nested) if it's a really hot or interesting topic.
It was a DAMNED funny post, and if I had points today, I'd've blown one on that... it was one of the best jokes I've seen in a long time here. +2 Funny, +2 Subtle, +3 read three times to make sure you got it, +2 COMPLETELY on-topic, blah blah pak chooie.
As it was, I got in here with 72 posts showing and your rant was under a +4 Funny post. Calm down. I'd mod more if I had more points (I'd start some modding down, as well), but I only gets five points of love to share maybe once every week or two.
I find that most people quit bitching about moderators when they 1) read the mods guidelines and 2) actually mod a couple times. Nothing sucks more on /. than having a perfect comment (informative/insightful) and having to post it AC because you don't want the points you gave to some other post to be lost. Except maybe Taco's spelling and some lame complaints about moderators.
This will probably be modded down -1 Offtopic (rightfully so), but it needed to be said. Bu-bye, karma.
woof.
There is no proof that alien do not exist, either. You can't prove a negative condition. Science and statistics. Gotta love it.
woof.
Would I rather be shot by a beanbag or a bullet? Not a tough choice, that one. But the rules of engagement change with non-lethal weapons and the threshold for their use is lowered by virtue of the fact that they generally don't kill -- not intentionally, anyway. It becomes much easier to pull that trigger.
I could write a dissertation here, score a five, get some cool responses and maybe some E-Mail, but I don't have the time or resources. There's a lot of information about this; check out some of it. Google, teoma, even Yahoo.
Let me note that the military's use of non-lethal weapons has historically been to disarm/disable an enemy so that lethal force could then be used, from the days of catapulting rotting carcasses into the keep to the gas attacks of WWI.
woof
A teacher, a physicist and a mathemetician are having drinks together in a Scottish pub when the teacher looks out the window and sees a white sheep. The teacher says, "There are white sheep in Scotland". The physicist looks out the window and declares, "There are sheep in Scotland; we have already detected and confirmed white ones." The mathematician says, "In Scotland there is at least one sheep, at least one side of which is hite."
No, I didn't pull that from Singh (it's there, though). It's an old mathematician's joke but it's true. The most anal Rainman you've ever seen is incredibly chaotic compared to mathematicians (at least when they're working on a proof or theorem).
woof.
"No ma. You don't have to worry about Code Red. Yes, I know CNN told you that you do. Ma, do you run a Web server? No, Netscape is a browser, not a server. Yes, there's a difference. You don't want to know. No, and the Internet didn't die last week, either..." -- my side of a phone call two nights ago.
When I say that I have a right to my works, I mean the following:
1) I created a document to be viewed in toto as I created it.
2) I provide particular information, often in a scholarly fashion, which contains links. Each of these links has a specific purpose, namely, to provide further bibliographic or internally-referential information.
3) Modification of this information distorts the meaning of the information I have presented.
Consider the case of a scholarly paper on something other than French Fries, be it cold fusion, a Higgs boson, Ununoctium, or even pulse rockets. In such an article (if it is indeed scholarly), I will provide links to examples and sources. If some company comes along and modifies my treatise to include other links to something other than that which I have referenced, there is a clear and serious detrimental effect to the validity of my document.
I get a lot of hate mail from Belgians as it is, and changes to my links may generate even more hate mail. Yeah, I'll get over it sooner or later, but the point is that my carefully researched (really) content has been altered, not by the end user, but by a third-party, for-profit company. And it seems there is little I can do about it, even though I could've sued the Washington Post for defamation and character assasination for misquoting me in print.
Consider Terry Pratchett and the Discworld series. The Colour of Magic was done in Germany by a particular publisher (see lspace.org), who modified a couple pages ino order to insert a soup advertisement into the text! Imagine reading a Stephen King novel like this: "Karen, almost frozen with fear, locked the door, but simply locking a door isn't good enough. When it comes to home security, you need ADT. ADT provides 24-hour protection at the push of a button. Or at the first sign of trouble. Unfortunately, Karen doesn't have ADT home security. What's she up to now? Well, Karen, staring out the peephole..."
Why do I have no say in this matter? The changes to my site and links are not being done directly by the user. I have no problem with fair use of my site; it's been quoted and misquoted around the world. I do have a problem with theft and hijacking, which my site has also been subject to. (A number of sites have copied -- verbatim -- the page, Twenty-two Things To Do With French Fries Besides Eat Them and I have crawled up their tightly-closed orifices to protect my creative works).
As I said, my comment was only partly meant in jest. I have serious problems with both sides of the question, even when I take both arguments to the extreme. At the extremes, I tend to favour the laissez-faire approach because I don't want RIAA telling me I can't make a killer mix CD with New Model Army, King's X and The Pogues, but somebody screwing with my content really bugs the shit out of me. You just have no idea of the sacrifices involved in keeping the OFFP going.
woof.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I have a site -- The Official French Fries Pages -- which I've managed to keep alive since 1996,[1] although I really need to upload a few new pages.
Do I say, "Fine. Whatever. You wanna look at my page and links the wrong way, I don't care," and just let anarchy reign supreme? I mean, I'm a "Slashdotter", right? I've been here for a few years (although I couldn't be bothered to register for a while), and I'm certainly an "0ld sk3wl Internet-doofus" (since '86). This is just more crap that I can ignore, and anyway, we all hate frivolous lawsuits and copyright bullshit... unless it hits home.
Or do I look at it like RIAA or MPAA: This is my goddamned IP . Them's my links and my lame DoubleClick ads (which have netted me at least $180 over 18 months). I'll sue you bastards for every penny my shyster can get!
Oh how ugly reality can be.
While the above was meant, at least in part, as sarcasm, I truly am unsure what to do. I could be tempted to join a class action to prevent the modified display of my site, not for the money but for the principle.
Do I not have a right to say what can and cannot be done with my creative works? And doesn't RIAA say the same thing?
"Morals suck, Beavis."
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[1] Don't give me any shit about using FrontPage. I always demand HTTP 2.0 compliance and I got tired of writing six or more versions of each and every page so that any browser could see it. And if another standard came out, I had to rewrite all the pages with a version for those browsers, too. At least I edit the FP "code" and cut the actual size down about 60%. And you can still view the site in lynx!
Try http://innovations.copper.org/1998april/cable_evol ution.htm. Or search Google for "underwater cable".
In the James Burke series, "The Day The Universe Changed", one episode includes a part on how the ship which was first used to lay trans-Atlantic cable ended up doing that (hint: it wasn't built for that). Of course, you could also go here: http://www.oldcablehouse.com/cablestations/history .html. BTW, you can read James Burke "Connections" pieces at Scientific American (http://www.sciam.com or in the magazine each month.
woof.
Quit all the whining about moderation! Don't like how it works? Tough. I don't like your variable declarations, but I'm not pissing about them, am I? Oh wait, I just did.
Yeah, you read right, although it isn't quite as bad as an H1-B. The main reason we have the "Greencard"[sic] is because all the German programmers split to the US and UK to make better money for generally the same work. Of course, they usually come back home after a couple years because they miss a number of benefits and protections (like workers' protections, health insurance, 30 days' holiday instead of 10 [and usually none the first year in the US], good beer and a sensible government system not yet owned by corporations, to name a few).
Germany also put other restrictions on the Greencard, including proof of abilities and a minimum salary of DM 100,000 (around US$ 45,000 right now). They also don't give employers the rights of some god; the visa-holder here is not some sort of indentured servant. That's sociual democracy for ya.
Another more important difference here in the Reich is that the population is not sustainable. People are having a lot fewer babies and having them later. There simply ain't enough people, and this is a growing problem in most European countries.
I'm a Yank, but live here for a lot of reasons I won't go into. Paid my dues, did my time (USN, DOL, FERC), paid my taxes and Social Insecurity.
By the way: unlike private industry, the government believes in a training budget!
The US gov't provides little training outside the military, unless you lie on your application for a job and get it anyway. It used to be that you had to take a civil service exam and actually prove you knew basic things. Trying to get a simple GS-3 secretarial job? You needed to take a typing test. Not anymore, and not for some time. It's "discrimination". Really. If someone can bullshit his way through an interview and get the job being totally incompetent, the US generally can't fire him/her (also "discrimination": that's where the training comes in. I wish I was joking. Dad was a federal judge and dealt with this.
Oh yeah, I'm working for a YooEss company (but no visa through them, I'm permanent here on my own). The pay could be better, but we're "entitled" to training. We can only fly steerage (a.k.a. "ecomony") though; even managers don't get business class. Ppfththt.
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Last year I had 41 paid days off, not including sick days.
Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday, July 30, @14:01PM
from the scalpel-video-camera dept.
BadDoggie writes "David Moore at CAIDA (The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) was monitoring his /8 network again after this story appeared in Slashdot. His findings are somewhat interesting and show just how swiftly Slashdotters across the world can take down a server." It was shier stoopidity of the Editurs and the bad luk of CAIDA that noone mirord the siet and grafiks. note: Chek the the grafs, these pikshirs really dew tell a 1000 word.
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2) Mother mode: "Slow down!"
3) Wife mode: "Let's just ask that guy there and where _______ is."
4) Mother-in-law mode: "He's trying to kill us! I know it! My husband, god rest his soul, knew how to drive and it wasn't like this! You kids these days don't think about anyone but yourselves."
5) Little sister mode 1: "The mall is thaaaaaaaaaaaaaat way!
6) Little sister mode 2: "Let me off at the corner. I'd just die if my friends saw me getting a ride with you!"
7) Your driving teacher: "Hands at 10 & 2! Pay attention! This ain't worth a teacher's salary..."
Does anyone care to speculate on the lame jokes this thing might tell? [1] .
Will you be the first to hack your buddy's wheels to scream "COP!!!!" at 1:30a.m.?
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[1] It won't be anything good like "What's the difference between a tire and 365 blowjobs? The tire is a Goodyear; 365 blowjobs is a very good year."
Did Michael Crichton have anything to do at all with this film, the third consecutive rape of what started off as a pretty good novel? I mean besides the "based on the book" credit.
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Pity the Europeans who will get these films a few months later, badly overdubbed.
Sorry. It had to be said.
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All your BASIC are belong to us -- Gates & Co.
Had Adobe not started this in the first place, the US Attorney's office wouldn't be involved. There'd have been no case.
I will not accept Adobe's attitude, which seems to be, "I only chucked a cigarette butt, I didn't cause any drought which dried out the forest and made it burn so easily."
If they drop their complaint but the US won't, Adobe will need to publicly apologise and actively support Dmitry's case. It won't be too hard to put a good spin on that anyway.
woof.
By the way, the UK government already has declared Sealand is in UK waters and will remain so, sovereign or not, unless they redefine either the length of a mile or the definition that international waters lie outside a 12-mile boundary, except for that bit right over there, where six or seven miles ought to do it.
woof.