By definition, if it doesn't survive, no longer exists, then it didn't work, did it?
An excellent example of "artificial intelligence" is my pure-bred Golden Retriever. He's very, very smart. He's sweet, loving, and is amazingly responsive to voice tones, gestures, and the like. He knows exactly what I mean when I point, snap my fingers, even tilt my head towards the door. I could swear up and down that he understands what I say, many times, and definitely not because he always does what I want!
Yet, for all the human-ness about him, he's a dog. He barks, not talks, and has no fingers. But he comes from a long, long line of dogs, untold thousands of years in duration, that survived by better emulating human intelligence.
Why would/should we expect AI to be any different?
Assume for a moment that Kurzweil is right, that people will be mergeable with machines, that your mind can be dowloaded into a neural simulator and run - recreating you, thoughts, memories, etc. All of you.
So there you are, a process running on a computer, probably in some 3D game on steroids - eternal life! But if this copyright grab stands, and the software running the simulator is copyrighted, does that mean that your very thoughts are copyrighted, too?
If you assume a materialist definition of the world, that what we see is what is, and there's no spirit, no Valhalla, no flying spaghetti monster, then we humans are, in fact, a functioning material machine.
After years of buying nearly 100% AMD, I've decided to throw in the towel. See, I've bought ATI video cards for years because of their good prices and good driver support. (Catalyst) But that's changed, now. As of Linux Kernel 2.6.30, support for "older" cards (including my not-quite 3-year-old laptop with its mobile X14 video card) has been cancelled.
Fedora Core 10 is the last supported distro that will run on my laptop with good support for 3D. I can't say just how much this pisses me off. I can see dropping support after 5 years, but less than three just leaves a sore taste in my mouth. And of course, it's AMD that's making this decision. AMD, who I've been championing for years, going all the way back to the AMD K6/2.
Also, when was the last time you saw a laptop with "Microsoft" on the case? Microsoft *still* doesn't make their own laptops, they will *still* be selling laptops from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, etc.
Well, it was in this funky case, and the screen looked a bit odd for a computer, but it said "XBOX 360" on the outside....
Inflation isn't low. It is the official government numbers for inflation that are low. In recent years there has been a very big difference.
Care to cite source?
In many industries there is tremendous deflationary forces at work. Computers, for example, now sell at a median price of just $700, despite being among the fastest home computers every produced. Cars are also dirt cheap about now, and the temporary spike in home prices is clearly correcting itself. Gas prices have risen somewhat, from about $1.85/gal 10 years ago to $2.50 or so today. Around here, milk has been $1.75 / gallon forever.
Health care costs have risen.
Sure, there have been some fairly steep fluctuations, but when you really grind the numbers, you find that them "tainted gubbmint numberz" really aren't so horribly ofar off...
Hey guys! You know that software vendor, you know, the one that you send really, really REALLY big checks to every weeK? You know, for license fees?
Well guess what? They're taking all that money you are sending them, and using it to build a private chain store in order to cut you out of the equation! Really makes you feelg good about that six-figure WEEKLY check you send them, doesn't it?
This is probably the DUMBEST possible move that MS could make - after 30 years of selling only through 3rd parties, setting up a 'bricks & mortar' chain while trends are to go virtual, while simultaneously pissing off their huge, multi-billion dollar partners... stupidity at its finest!
You gotta love the Yahoo, if for no other reason than Zimbra. More than any other piece of software, it's the "Exchange Killer" that we've all wondered about. It matches, feature-for-feature, Exchange. It's (mostly) open-source. It runs fine on Linux. It works with Windows, Mac, Linux, KDE, Google Calendars/Email, and just about everything else, including my WinMo phone.
It's a god-send, it works nicely with basically no fuss or hassle, and it's owned by Yahoo.
Hey, if Yahoo goes belly up, I just hope they sell Zimbra to somebody who can take the good thing handed to them and DO SOMETHING with it!?!?
Because modern-day admins don't know how to restart a service?
Oooh! Oooh! I think I can get this one! Either of these should work:
# service named restart; #/etc/rc.d/init.d/named restart;
But... if you have a properly designed network, why the **** wouldn't you reboot your name server? Given that there are minimally TWO of them registered for your domain name, that the DNS protocol is designed to seamlessly fail over in the event of a failure, rebooting the name server will have no discernible effect for any end user, but will provide assurance that all libraries and settings have taken full effect, as the O/S vendor intended.
I have 4 name servers, and move them around as needed to ensure low-latency, redundant connections. Fault tolerance is most important. Any server or network can go down and still result in my ability to change DNS and publish globally on short notice in the event of a severe outage. A single nameserver being down for the ~ 1-2 minutes it takes to reboot is a non-issue.
Downtime: 0
Peace Of Mind: 1
You tell me, (ahem) ninja super-admin-who-knows-how-to-(re)start-a-service?
Connection speed is almost always rated in Mbps - but that's only half the equation. What about latency?
I have a cellular wireless card that works well enough to enable the 'digital nomad' lifestyle mentioned earlier today, but to say that it's a joy to have latency that bounces between 150ms and 1500ms is taking sarcasm to its extreme.
More than the bandwidth, I want to know if the sub-50 ms ping times I see on a DSL or other 'land line' are going to be likely? Seems lame that transmitting a packetized radio signal for about 2 miles introduces more latency than the other 3,000 miles over fiber optics.
Was once the day whe a notice like this would kick off a flurry of migrationn plans, compiler scripting, compiling, and restarting servers in the dead of night. (and bonuses to match!)
But now?
# yum -y update && shutdown - r now
Sometimes I pine for the 'good old days'. A little. (ok, hardly at all)
I don't see how they are analogous in this sense. In particular, if you are trying to understand botnet behavior, you need infected botnet systems. Is there a way to make Wine vulnerable to the infections that frequently hit Windows systems?
WINE is an implementation of the Win32 API. Since the *target* of WINE is to emulate Windows, then in order to be successful, it must implement the bugs as well. So the better WINE is, the better it runs *ALL* Windows software - including the viruses and malware!
I would assume (ass + u + me) that they've done enough unit testing on the particular botnet software in question to determine its compatibility with WINE, and so long as this compatibility is sufficient, then this could be a very useful test environment. It's the botnet being studied, not Windows itself!
Another example: Windows 2000. I build data management software. I test with Windows 2000. Not because Win2000 is an example of the latest greatest from MS, but because it costs me nothing extra and runs nicely in a VM. Since the only O/S features I care about are those that are already present in Win2000, it creates a very useful test environment despite lacking many pieces present in later OS versions.
The article summary is kind of lame - it's hard to argue that Facebook is anything work-related except in very light doses. But the main idea is completely real, and reflects my lifestyle, at least part of the time!
I have a laptop and a 3G wireless card. I usually work 'at work' but when I travel for business or pleasure, I pretty much always have them with me and I work almost as well at the local Starbucks, airport, hotel lobby, McDonald's, or living room as at the office. SSH, DAV/SSL, and OpenVPN are your friends, here!
I took a 1-week 'work-ation' this spring and went to Yosemite Park. I still put in work days, but rather than sit in the office, I was in a folding chair with power providedg by an inverter in the car.
BTW: I'm typing this on my WinMo phone in a restaurant over lunch. I routinely answer email and schedule from the phone, too. Thanks to Zimbra, I can coordinate my schedule with the office staff, too. 'Digital Nomad' isn't a buzz word, it's how my life works!
Having just had to deal with a string of bad 1 TB+ size Seagate drives going bad (100% failure rate in 6 months, baby!) and switching to WD with good results, I have to say that I hope WD keeps up their good name.
I tend to find that none of the manufacturers are consistently better or worse than the others. Seagate has a good line of firmware, and for a year or two their drives are excellent and reliable. They they go sour and it's a good idea to switch to somebody else for a while. They go off and on, back and forth. For the past few years I've steered towards Seagate. Now, I'm a WD fan. I've loved Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, Quantum, Fujitsu, Conner, and Micropolis. (remember them?)
All have had their good runs and bad runs. Some of the bad runs killed the company. (eg: IBM's Desk-star "death-star" line)
With Certificate issues, Firefox makes me jump through so many hoops that all my focus is on getting through the hoops, rather than evaluating security. I've never understood how the 'get certificate' button is supposed to make me safer. It seems to just add more steps in an effort to force me to pay attention to the process, but IMO fails to actually provide a security benefit.
I have this problem - as a certificate holder. See, I hold a "wildcard certificate", eg: "*.mydomain.com" and had to pay a few good bux to get it. But it doesn't work for sub-subdomains. EG: "foo.mydomain.com" works fine, but "bar.foo.mydomain.com" doesn't. This is retarded - I'm the authoritative domain controller, *.mydomain.com should work fine, but it doesn't.
Unfortunately, there's not sufficient cost/benefits analysis to get certificates for *all* my subdomains. (There are thousands of them)
So I have a choice:
1) Don't use encryption. (bad)
2) Train my users to click through the certificate warnings. (also bad)
3) Implment some kind of sub-directory system partitioning with fancy load-balancer parsing, breaking the DNS ideal of using subdomains to divide load and systems that scale.
No matter what I do, there is no good combination of standards compliance, best practices, and cost. I would propose that the spec for wildcard certificates should allow for sub-subdomains, or that there be certificates that do. EG: "%.mydomain.com" or something like that.
Another weird artifcat is that when using a wildcard certificate, the root domain is not matched. EG: certificate for *.mydomain.com won't work for mydomain.com (no sub-domain)
Both of these states may have technical justifications, but just don't match expectations all that well: who is going to expect www.mydomain.com to be a different website than mydomain.com?
Why don't large trucks have brakes installed on the trailers to prevent jack-knifing? They could be hydraulic and/or compressed-air driven, and with a 12-volt circuit could even have ABS brakes.
I can see why they'd want to use lasers - how else are you going to focus the energy sufficiently from a distance of 1 or more kilometres?
But why would they use lasers and PV cells when masers could be used instead? Highly directional radio antennas should be both simpler to build and waaaaayyyy more efficient, IMHO, and masers aren't any less efficient than lasers...
California spent a pile of money to develop their own data center in the Department of Education. A ton. And the result is less than impressive, with uptimes that approach 95%, and constant notices of downtime, often unexpected, due not only to the occasional software glitch (which happens, even to Google) but also to network issues. (Routers going down, unstable/bad performing connections, etc.)
Given the amount of money spent, the result is just... disappointing. And yet, just a few miles away, there are private hosting facilities with many times the capacity necessary for the state to host all their stuff with 5-nines uptime, with excellent performance levels, demonstrated over 5 years, at rock-bottom prices. Seriously, it isn't until you get to the "enterprise level" hosting that you discover just how *cheap* top-notch hosting is - it's a perverse, inverted marketplace, where the better the quality, the lower the price.
The State of California could have probably saved anywhere from ten to a hundred million dollars by simply renting the (highly qualified!) IT services of a local facility in Sacramento rather than trying to do it in-house. And this is the lesson that I've taken from this and many other situations: Focus on your core competence. Find out what you do best, and do that, because that's best, and outsource anything else you can to save money.
This is where Dell is about to be marginalized, because what they did best is produce decent quality machines cheap and fast, and they've been outsourcing their core competence, meaning that they no longer produce decent quality machines cheap and fast - for many of their lines, they are nothing more than a sticker on the machine. This will work for a while, but once you give away what you do best, you are a leach on the marketplace and eventually, you'll get cut out.
Dude, the guy is asking his question on Slashdot. The odds that he knows any women or has the guts to talk to them if he does are slim to none. ... which further underscores the original point - to be successful, you have to make your idea relatively popular in the target audience. If you are so socially backward that you can't confidently discuss your idea with a chix, you really should just go take a Dale Carnegie communication course or something.
In any event, people who are convinced that they have to worry about their ideas being stolen off the street have an unrealistic expectation of the value of the idea.
I wasn't only talking about tracking *geographically*. If you are talking about 110 records per person, that could quite conceivably quality for "many times over". Not that having a new computer with 5 TB of storage is expensive - I put together a cheap-ish computer and 10 TB of data for less than $2,000. That will double in a year or so, and again a year after that.
I've been listening "in 10 years we'll have X awesome technology", but time come and go and nothing has changed, so, i'll be expecting this artificial brain so i could drive my flying car(you know, that 3D driving thingie) to arrive at the entrance of the spacial elevator so i could bang some lunar chicks.
Not everything predicted has come true, to be sure. But think about it: you are leaving a post on a computer located hundreds or thousands of miles away, along with hundreds of other people, and I, hundreds or thousands of miles away, am replying. Neither of us pays much at all for this service, which is nearly ubiquitous.
You can casually watch television shows on demand, on your phone. Which, BTW, is roughly analogous to the pocket communicators on the original series of "Star Trek", except that they couldn't watch shows or take video/pictures or blog or play solitaire on them.
There is sufficient storage in your computer to track every single man, woman, and child on earth, many times over. The price of photovoltaic solar cells has followed a consistent, exponential drop in price (half price every 5-ish years) and is now close to parity with coal.
Cars are many, many, many times safer than they used to be - most accidents now result in basically no significant injuries, even when the car is totalled, thanks to crumple zones. Flat panel TVs are commonplace, with resolutions that rival photographic paper. Flexbile, folding displays are available, if (still) expensive.
I'm not sure what kind of changes you would expect, but these are just a few of the awesome technologies that I've seen unfold in my 30-something years. I mean, what do you want?!?!
"Human rights" aren't terribly well grounded, theoretically; but to the degree that they are, mental complexity seems to be a vital factor(given that we don't generally execute retarded people, it isn't the only one, but it is a big one). Being made of meat isn't obviously a salient factor, nor is being born to human parents.
Our all-seeing, all-wise, all-knowing creator has forseen this, having created the stars in the heavens, and the children on the earth, and the trees in the mountains, and the birds of the air. He hath forseen this, and so hath written: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me!". There's your answer. It's somewhere between the "Thou shalt kill people who work on Sundays" part, and the "Hey neighbors, don't mess with my buddies here, have at my virgin daughters..." part, if I remember correctly...
I have every confidence that, armed with this wisdom bestowed upon us by an angry, merciful, wise, and loving god as this, we shall have no trouble at all dealing with the ethical dilemmas brought upon us by the singularity.
If you download your brain into a robot and turn it on, then take an axe to it, are you killing yourself? If not, would the robotic copy of you that was seeing the axe come down agree with you?
One only wonders how long it will be until every spreadsheet process becomes "business critical" to override restrictions such as this.
When the business involved has to pay a larger and larger bill, that which is considered "critical" is increasingly analyzed as the bottom line gets thinner and thinner. When margins are fat, daily $4 lattes are "critical" to staff morale. Conversely, when times are really tight, staff morale is critical at "well, you ain't fired yet, is yeh?".
I'm surprised the slashbots aren't on that list. They have the power to take a website offline in mere moments thanks to the power wielded by their evil overlord, CmdrTaco. He simply posts a link to the site he wants removed from the net on the front of his homepage, and the site goes offline.
Thus invoking what has been described as the greatest paradox of all time: Slashdot can remove sites from the Internet by merely posting them, yet it's quite demonstrable that none of the slashbots ever RTFA.
So where are these mysterious article readers, and where do they come from? I'm waiting for a Scientific Expose on Nova...
FYI: I've received 104 submissions. So far, all of them have been blank, except for the following. Guess how many are legit?
Inigo Montoya (you killed my father) anonimous coward. Sherlock Holmes biggus dickus efwaef aefaefa Benjamin Niggers J K x d Robert Sprocket Bob Dole abc def
Slashdot Mirror
The 'next generation' will be defined by software and services, not hardware.
Translation:
The bean-counters upstairs told me they weren't going to throw another NN Billion dollars at hardware that hasn't yet made a return on investment.
By definition, if it doesn't survive, no longer exists, then it didn't work, did it?
An excellent example of "artificial intelligence" is my pure-bred Golden Retriever. He's very, very smart. He's sweet, loving, and is amazingly responsive to voice tones, gestures, and the like. He knows exactly what I mean when I point, snap my fingers, even tilt my head towards the door. I could swear up and down that he understands what I say, many times, and definitely not because he always does what I want!
Yet, for all the human-ness about him, he's a dog. He barks, not talks, and has no fingers. But he comes from a long, long line of dogs, untold thousands of years in duration, that survived by better emulating human intelligence.
Why would/should we expect AI to be any different?
Assume for a moment that Kurzweil is right, that people will be mergeable with machines, that your mind can be dowloaded into a neural simulator and run - recreating you, thoughts, memories, etc. All of you.
So there you are, a process running on a computer, probably in some 3D game on steroids - eternal life! But if this copyright grab stands, and the software running the simulator is copyrighted, does that mean that your very thoughts are copyrighted, too?
If you assume a materialist definition of the world, that what we see is what is, and there's no spirit, no Valhalla, no flying spaghetti monster, then we humans are, in fact, a functioning material machine.
Thought police, indeed.
After years of buying nearly 100% AMD, I've decided to throw in the towel. See, I've bought ATI video cards for years because of their good prices and good driver support. (Catalyst) But that's changed, now. As of Linux Kernel 2.6.30, support for "older" cards (including my not-quite 3-year-old laptop with its mobile X14 video card) has been cancelled.
Fedora Core 10 is the last supported distro that will run on my laptop with good support for 3D. I can't say just how much this pisses me off. I can see dropping support after 5 years, but less than three just leaves a sore taste in my mouth. And of course, it's AMD that's making this decision. AMD, who I've been championing for years, going all the way back to the AMD K6/2.
I feel a bit... betrayed.
Also, when was the last time you saw a laptop with "Microsoft" on the case? Microsoft *still* doesn't make their own laptops, they will *still* be selling laptops from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, etc.
Well, it was in this funky case, and the screen looked a bit odd for a computer, but it said "XBOX 360" on the outside....
Inflation isn't low. It is the official government numbers for inflation that are low. In recent years there has been a very big difference.
Care to cite source?
In many industries there is tremendous deflationary forces at work. Computers, for example, now sell at a median price of just $700, despite being among the fastest home computers every produced. Cars are also dirt cheap about now, and the temporary spike in home prices is clearly correcting itself. Gas prices have risen somewhat, from about $1.85/gal 10 years ago to $2.50 or so today. Around here, milk has been $1.75 / gallon forever.
Health care costs have risen.
Sure, there have been some fairly steep fluctuations, but when you really grind the numbers, you find that them "tainted gubbmint numberz" really aren't so horribly ofar off...
Hey guys! You know that software vendor, you know, the one that you send really, really REALLY big checks to every weeK? You know, for license fees?
Well guess what? They're taking all that money you are sending them, and using it to build a private chain store in order to cut you out of the equation! Really makes you feelg good about that six-figure WEEKLY check you send them, doesn't it?
This is probably the DUMBEST possible move that MS could make - after 30 years of selling only through 3rd parties, setting up a 'bricks & mortar' chain while trends are to go virtual, while simultaneously pissing off their huge, multi-billion dollar partners... stupidity at its finest!
You gotta love the Yahoo, if for no other reason than Zimbra. More than any other piece of software, it's the "Exchange Killer" that we've all wondered about. It matches, feature-for-feature, Exchange. It's (mostly) open-source. It runs fine on Linux. It works with Windows, Mac, Linux, KDE, Google Calendars/Email, and just about everything else, including my WinMo phone.
It's a god-send, it works nicely with basically no fuss or hassle, and it's owned by Yahoo.
Hey, if Yahoo goes belly up, I just hope they sell Zimbra to somebody who can take the good thing handed to them and DO SOMETHING with it!?!?
Because modern-day admins don't know how to restart a service?
Oooh! Oooh! I think I can get this one! Either of these should work:
# service named restart; /etc/rc.d/init.d/named restart;
#
But... if you have a properly designed network, why the **** wouldn't you reboot your name server? Given that there are minimally TWO of them registered for your domain name, that the DNS protocol is designed to seamlessly fail over in the event of a failure, rebooting the name server will have no discernible effect for any end user, but will provide assurance that all libraries and settings have taken full effect, as the O/S vendor intended.
I have 4 name servers, and move them around as needed to ensure low-latency, redundant connections. Fault tolerance is most important. Any server or network can go down and still result in my ability to change DNS and publish globally on short notice in the event of a severe outage. A single nameserver being down for the ~ 1-2 minutes it takes to reboot is a non-issue.
Downtime: 0
Peace Of Mind: 1
You tell me, (ahem) ninja super-admin-who-knows-how-to-(re)start-a-service?
Connection speed is almost always rated in Mbps - but that's only half the equation. What about latency?
I have a cellular wireless card that works well enough to enable the 'digital nomad' lifestyle mentioned earlier today, but to say that it's a joy to have latency that bounces between 150ms and 1500ms is taking sarcasm to its extreme.
More than the bandwidth, I want to know if the sub-50 ms ping times I see on a DSL or other 'land line' are going to be likely? Seems lame that transmitting a packetized radio signal for about 2 miles introduces more latency than the other 3,000 miles over fiber optics.
Was once the day whe a notice like this would kick off a flurry of migrationn plans, compiler scripting, compiling, and restarting servers in the dead of night. (and bonuses to match!)
But now?
# yum -y update && shutdown - r now
Sometimes I pine for the 'good old days'. A little. (ok, hardly at all)
I don't see how they are analogous in this sense. In particular, if you are trying to understand botnet behavior, you need infected botnet systems. Is there a way to make Wine vulnerable to the infections that frequently hit Windows systems?
WINE is an implementation of the Win32 API. Since the *target* of WINE is to emulate Windows, then in order to be successful, it must implement the bugs as well. So the better WINE is, the better it runs *ALL* Windows software - including the viruses and malware!
I would assume (ass + u + me) that they've done enough unit testing on the particular botnet software in question to determine its compatibility with WINE, and so long as this compatibility is sufficient, then this could be a very useful test environment. It's the botnet being studied, not Windows itself!
Another example: Windows 2000. I build data management software. I test with Windows 2000. Not because Win2000 is an example of the latest greatest from MS, but because it costs me nothing extra and runs nicely in a VM. Since the only O/S features I care about are those that are already present in Win2000, it creates a very useful test environment despite lacking many pieces present in later OS versions.
The article summary is kind of lame - it's hard to argue that Facebook is anything work-related except in very light doses. But the main idea is completely real, and reflects my lifestyle, at least part of the time!
I have a laptop and a 3G wireless card. I usually work 'at work' but when I travel for business or pleasure, I pretty much always have them with me and I work almost as well at the local Starbucks, airport, hotel lobby, McDonald's, or living room as at the office. SSH, DAV/SSL, and OpenVPN are your friends, here!
I took a 1-week 'work-ation' this spring and went to Yosemite Park. I still put in work days, but rather than sit in the office, I was in a folding chair with power providedg by an inverter in the car.
BTW: I'm typing this on my WinMo phone in a restaurant over lunch. I routinely answer email and schedule from the phone, too. Thanks to Zimbra, I can coordinate my schedule with the office staff, too. 'Digital Nomad' isn't a buzz word, it's how my life works!
Having just had to deal with a string of bad 1 TB+ size Seagate drives going bad (100% failure rate in 6 months, baby!) and switching to WD with good results, I have to say that I hope WD keeps up their good name.
I tend to find that none of the manufacturers are consistently better or worse than the others. Seagate has a good line of firmware, and for a year or two their drives are excellent and reliable. They they go sour and it's a good idea to switch to somebody else for a while. They go off and on, back and forth. For the past few years I've steered towards Seagate. Now, I'm a WD fan. I've loved Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, Quantum, Fujitsu, Conner, and Micropolis. (remember them?)
All have had their good runs and bad runs. Some of the bad runs killed the company. (eg: IBM's Desk-star "death-star" line)
Go WD!
With Certificate issues, Firefox makes me jump through so many hoops that all my focus is on getting through the hoops, rather than evaluating security. I've never understood how the 'get certificate' button is supposed to make me safer. It seems to just add more steps in an effort to force me to pay attention to the process, but IMO fails to actually provide a security benefit.
I have this problem - as a certificate holder. See, I hold a "wildcard certificate", eg: "*.mydomain.com" and had to pay a few good bux to get it. But it doesn't work for sub-subdomains. EG: "foo.mydomain.com" works fine, but "bar.foo.mydomain.com" doesn't. This is retarded - I'm the authoritative domain controller, *.mydomain.com should work fine, but it doesn't.
Unfortunately, there's not sufficient cost/benefits analysis to get certificates for *all* my subdomains. (There are thousands of them)
So I have a choice:
1) Don't use encryption. (bad)
2) Train my users to click through the certificate warnings. (also bad)
3) Implment some kind of sub-directory system partitioning with fancy load-balancer parsing, breaking the DNS ideal of using subdomains to divide load and systems that scale.
No matter what I do, there is no good combination of standards compliance, best practices, and cost. I would propose that the spec for wildcard certificates should allow for sub-subdomains, or that there be certificates that do. EG: "%.mydomain.com" or something like that.
Another weird artifcat is that when using a wildcard certificate, the root domain is not matched. EG: certificate for *.mydomain.com won't work for mydomain.com (no sub-domain)
Both of these states may have technical justifications, but just don't match expectations all that well: who is going to expect www.mydomain.com to be a different website than mydomain.com?
Why don't large trucks have brakes installed on the trailers to prevent jack-knifing? They could be hydraulic and/or compressed-air driven, and with a 12-volt circuit could even have ABS brakes.
Anybody who knows care to comment?
I can see why they'd want to use lasers - how else are you going to focus the energy sufficiently from a distance of 1 or more kilometres?
But why would they use lasers and PV cells when masers could be used instead? Highly directional radio antennas should be both simpler to build and waaaaayyyy more efficient, IMHO, and masers aren't any less efficient than lasers...
California spent a pile of money to develop their own data center in the Department of Education. A ton. And the result is less than impressive, with uptimes that approach 95%, and constant notices of downtime, often unexpected, due not only to the occasional software glitch (which happens, even to Google) but also to network issues. (Routers going down, unstable/bad performing connections, etc.)
Given the amount of money spent, the result is just... disappointing. And yet, just a few miles away, there are private hosting facilities with many times the capacity necessary for the state to host all their stuff with 5-nines uptime, with excellent performance levels, demonstrated over 5 years, at rock-bottom prices. Seriously, it isn't until you get to the "enterprise level" hosting that you discover just how *cheap* top-notch hosting is - it's a perverse, inverted marketplace, where the better the quality, the lower the price.
The State of California could have probably saved anywhere from ten to a hundred million dollars by simply renting the (highly qualified!) IT services of a local facility in Sacramento rather than trying to do it in-house. And this is the lesson that I've taken from this and many other situations: Focus on your core competence. Find out what you do best, and do that, because that's best, and outsource anything else you can to save money.
This is where Dell is about to be marginalized, because what they did best is produce decent quality machines cheap and fast, and they've been outsourcing their core competence, meaning that they no longer produce decent quality machines cheap and fast - for many of their lines, they are nothing more than a sticker on the machine. This will work for a while, but once you give away what you do best, you are a leach on the marketplace and eventually, you'll get cut out.
Doing what you do best is best.
Dude, the guy is asking his question on Slashdot. The odds that he knows any women or has the guts to talk to them if he does are slim to none. ... which further underscores the original point - to be successful, you have to make your idea relatively popular in the target audience. If you are so socially backward that you can't confidently discuss your idea with a chix, you really should just go take a Dale Carnegie communication course or something.
In any event, people who are convinced that they have to worry about their ideas being stolen off the street have an unrealistic expectation of the value of the idea.
I wasn't only talking about tracking *geographically*. If you are talking about 110 records per person, that could quite conceivably quality for "many times over". Not that having a new computer with 5 TB of storage is expensive - I put together a cheap-ish computer and 10 TB of data for less than $2,000. That will double in a year or so, and again a year after that.
I've been listening "in 10 years we'll have X awesome technology", but time come and go and nothing has changed, so, i'll be expecting this artificial brain so i could drive my flying car(you know, that 3D driving thingie) to arrive at the entrance of the spacial elevator so i could bang some lunar chicks.
Not everything predicted has come true, to be sure. But think about it: you are leaving a post on a computer located hundreds or thousands of miles away, along with hundreds of other people, and I, hundreds or thousands of miles away, am replying. Neither of us pays much at all for this service, which is nearly ubiquitous.
You can casually watch television shows on demand, on your phone. Which, BTW, is roughly analogous to the pocket communicators on the original series of "Star Trek", except that they couldn't watch shows or take video/pictures or blog or play solitaire on them.
There is sufficient storage in your computer to track every single man, woman, and child on earth, many times over. The price of photovoltaic solar cells has followed a consistent, exponential drop in price (half price every 5-ish years) and is now close to parity with coal.
Cars are many, many, many times safer than they used to be - most accidents now result in basically no significant injuries, even when the car is totalled, thanks to crumple zones. Flat panel TVs are commonplace, with resolutions that rival photographic paper. Flexbile, folding displays are available, if (still) expensive.
I'm not sure what kind of changes you would expect, but these are just a few of the awesome technologies that I've seen unfold in my 30-something years. I mean, what do you want?!?!
"Human rights" aren't terribly well grounded, theoretically; but to the degree that they are, mental complexity seems to be a vital factor(given that we don't generally execute retarded people, it isn't the only one, but it is a big one). Being made of meat isn't obviously a salient factor, nor is being born to human parents.
Our all-seeing, all-wise, all-knowing creator has forseen this, having created the stars in the heavens, and the children on the earth, and the trees in the mountains, and the birds of the air. He hath forseen this, and so hath written: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me!". There's your answer. It's somewhere between the "Thou shalt kill people who work on Sundays" part, and the "Hey neighbors, don't mess with my buddies here, have at my virgin daughters..." part, if I remember correctly...
I have every confidence that, armed with this wisdom bestowed upon us by an angry, merciful, wise, and loving god as this, we shall have no trouble at all dealing with the ethical dilemmas brought upon us by the singularity.
If you download your brain into a robot and turn it on, then take an axe to it, are you killing yourself? If not, would the robotic copy of you that was seeing the axe come down agree with you?
One only wonders how long it will be until every spreadsheet process becomes "business critical" to override restrictions such as this.
When the business involved has to pay a larger and larger bill, that which is considered "critical" is increasingly analyzed as the bottom line gets thinner and thinner. When margins are fat, daily $4 lattes are "critical" to staff morale. Conversely, when times are really tight, staff morale is critical at "well, you ain't fired yet, is yeh?".
I'm surprised the slashbots aren't on that list. They have the power to take a website offline in mere moments thanks to the power wielded by their evil overlord, CmdrTaco. He simply posts a link to the site he wants removed from the net on the front of his homepage, and the site goes offline.
Thus invoking what has been described as the greatest paradox of all time: Slashdot can remove sites from the Internet by merely posting them, yet it's quite demonstrable that none of the slashbots ever RTFA.
So where are these mysterious article readers, and where do they come from? I'm waiting for a Scientific Expose on Nova...
FYI: I've received 104 submissions. So far, all of them have been blank, except for the following. Guess how many are legit?
Inigo Montoya (you killed my father)
anonimous coward.
Sherlock Holmes
biggus dickus
efwaef aefaefa
Benjamin Niggers
J K
x d
Robert Sprocket
Bob Dole
abc def