Yep, more overreaction. The people producing Mosiac are not idiots, they're not get rich quick merchants and they have actual experience producing software that is used to evaluate threads made to federal judges
I guess it is mostly criminals who makes threats to judges, right? (Or why else would they be in a courtroom...) So this program can predict criminals to some extent. Now, how can anyone believe it will work on schoolkids too? They are younger than the usual criminal and have a very different mindset from an adult. Teenagers are in the (usually slow) process of breaking free from their parents, and is naturally opposed to adults in general. They are also immature. This natural kid attitude may clash with a program made for criminals, because adults, unlike kids, aren't supposed to be opposed to society. Criminals however are unusually (for an adult) opposed to society, and quite a few are unusually immature as well. See the problem?
Before you start bashing MS about this, don't you think you should consider that a good 50% of Linux was designed in this manner?
Of course, but with linux, bad ideas tend to die from lack of support. There are surely 10 times as many linux "features" that never became mainstream because they were lousy and didn't catch on. It doesn't work this way with MS, they make their stuff and push it onto customers. The only alternative is a "no to all".
Junkbuster discards all cookies, except from those places I want them, such as slashdot. Most other places that require cookies aren't interesting enough, so they loose me. Junkbuster also kills those stupid banner ads.:-)
A simpler solution is to disable cookies in the browser. Netscape at least has a setting for that.
Anyone can look athletic, have "great ass/body/muscles/whatever!". Why would I want to? I look ok anyway.
Join a gym, use some of the machines. I couldn't possibly stand the boredom of a gym. If I wanted excercising I'd do it at home. No fancy machines is needed, that's just for posing. Wanna lift weights for free? Pick up some used bricks. That's boring and looks stupid? Same applies to "serious" weightlifting...
There's no excuse to say, "I'm a nerd, therefore I am going to be skinny and pale." In my opinion and experience, women want a man. Someone who acts like a man, can take care of her when she needs it, and that she knows will be there.
Good point about women, and athletic looks wasn't part of what you pointed out. It is unnecessary. All you need for getting a woman is some social skills (which you get from being social, not from a gym and certainly not from playing doom)
But the amazing thing about these frozen mammoths is that there must have been a fairly mild climate to produce enough veggies to keep them going. Then it got much colder so suddenly that they didn't rot or get eaten by scavengers - and stayed that way since.
No problem with that. It is well-known that the climate was milder. It certainly didn't change abruptly enough to freeze the mammoths in place though.
But the ice came, slowly. Glaciers grew a bit from year to year, although the land around them could still support a few mammoths. Now and then a mammoth tried to cross a stretch of ice. A few of them probably fell into cracks and got conserved.
The problem with creating an appliance PC is that people will tend to treat it like one. They'll turn it on when they want to use it (and not want to wait 5 min for startup).
A good argument for linux then - it boots way faster than windows. As for turning off - just teach them to use the "power off" menu choice instead of the button. Very simple. Or let cron run "sync" every minute or so to minimize damage.
Not MTV's fault for reporting what they thought was real
Reporters and editors should make a serious effort to check their sources. If they don't, then they are either sensationalist or too lazy to be taken seriously. One can then wonder about all the other news they report...
Computers themselves are just plain boring. ... And once you've broken into a system, what do you do? Transfer money from billg's account to yours?
A good movie cannot focus too much on the actual hacking. Keep it realistic - don't show too much of it to bore people. [Master hacker: "ah, a buffer overflow in their sendmail system! Lets show them!] A short piece of techno-babble for the uninitiated, ok for the geeks. No more necessary. Instead show us the effects and possibilities of hacking, such as:
Stealing information - this could be almost anything. (Classified databases, & documents)
Changing information, such as grades, deleting speeding tickets, faking email.
Bringing down stuff. No need for strange flashing screens - just see people despair when the stock exchange stops or all the traffic lights go red.
Dramatic stuff - such as messing with air traffic control systems. Plenty of room for consumer-friendly fireballs here...
An end user do care about the kernel stability. He may not know what that means, but he see that he don't have to reboot. Restarting netscape from a start menu is somuch faster than rebooting, even with the fast reboot linux offer.
And the end user don't have to delete lock files either - we can provide him with a netscape start script that goes
killall -9 netscape rm ~/.netscape/lock netscape
Real easy. Just click on "netscape" and it just starts - no matter what happened before. If netscape freeze - just click on the start thing and the frozen one disappears.
A frozen desktop is worse of course, but I have never seen those. Probably a went away with some older version of X?
When you receive a radio wave, you don't collapse that wave into a photonic particle (which is what the radio wave is, if it could be colWhen you receive a radio wave, you don't collapse that wave into a photonic particle (which is what the radio wave is, if it could be collapsed). For a QM probabalistic wave to collapse into a particle, you must do more than measure it's existance--you must measure it in such a way as to force a measurement of it as a particle.
And that's just it: if you simply look at the release of an alpha particle by itself, it should produce a uniform ionizing radiation "sphere" around the decaying atom. A cloud chamber does not inherently differentiate between a unform sphere of radiation (a wave) and a decay particle, so simply observing with a cloud chamber should not force the probability function to collapse.
As far as I know, you do collapse the radio waves when observing them. But your typical radio station transmits enough photons for all of us to use. They certainly don't transmit one photon at a time. Similarly, putting a kilogram of plutonium in the cload chamber will indeed show you a "ionizing sphere" around the lump, due to to huge amount of radioactivity.
What is most fascinating about this article is that Mr. Katz has absolutely missed the point: the very fact that Mr. Singer can publicly express his controversial, and in some quarters, unpopular opinions is proof that America is relatively free country.
Seems you missed the point. Mr. Singer is oppressed for his opinions - not by the government but by the masses. The guy needs guards. In a freer society, he wouldn't need guards. He might not get many friends - but no death threats either. There are countries where people needing guards just for publishing unpopular opinions is unheard of.
Is it truly freedom, when you expect to be (at least) socially blasted for expressing controversial ideas? I don't care about the legal structure, but about society. Sure, legally they can't touch you, but you become ostracized by your peers.
Freedom comes at a price. You are free to express unpopular ideas - and listeners are free to dislike you. Nobody has to be your friend.
What makes freedom is education, the knowledge that you should not be attacked for proffering a thought-out opinion,
A good point. With true freedom of speech, the Singer guy wouldn't need any guards. But papers could still write nasty articles about him, people could organize demonstrations and so on.
That's probally true, but most of them use Windows now with its, IMHO, much easier install program. And then there are the new gamers, who have very little idea what DOS is, and never really messed around with it.
The future: Gamers using linux, with easy install programs. The oldies remember windows which was just as easy, but the machine crashed now and then. A few gamers become linux hackers out of curiosity - none out of necessity.
Most people should worry about a) heart disease, b) lung cancer, and c) an auto accident, in roughly that order.
People worry less, because this won't destroy a nation, humanity or the earth. Unless everybody get a heart attack at the same time, and that probability is low. It is still bigger than the probability that an accelerator should destroy the universe though.
Making the black hole is trivial. For a big one - collect enough mass until it collapse. You'll need mass comparable to a really big star. Expensive.
For a smaller one, compress a smaller mass, such as a mountain or the moon. Maybe you can do it by detonating lots of H-bombs around the thing.
Store the black hole in space, in a very wide orbit. When you want to use it as a weapon, change its orbit so it goes very near earths surface (or through the upper layer) of whatever nation you want to hit. Use sufficient speed so it goes back into space where you collect it for future use. An appropriately sized black hole could do a lot of damage this way, without destroying earth compeltely. Be prepared for quakes though...
Of course an asteroid strike is a lot easier and does the same damage. Conventional stuff like smuggling H-bombs into all their cities is simpler still, it is even doable.
BTW anyone know the max resolution we could get with a human eye?
The human eye is far from ideal for this. We have about 3 degrees of high-resolution color vision. (That's why you move your eyes a lot when reading or otherwise looking at something) The rest of the eye is low-resolution greyscale, whose main function is to detect movements etc. so you can move your eyes and focus the good spot on interesting stuff.
A camera needs to be high-resolution all over, because you never know what part of the screen the viewers might take an interest in. The three degrees of good vision becomes a nasty limitation if someone else is deciding what to look at.
Use a third party's server without their permission (Again noone would complain if the post office refused to deliver letters without stamps). This one is different. The post office may refuse to deliver, but there is no punishment. A well-configured email server will also refuse to deliver some sorts of forged email.
Making email forging as illegal as other document forging would be useful though.
Of course. His inbox is probably 20 lines - so 20 messages "filled" it. Probably haven't grasped the concept of scrollbars completely. When deleting one of the 20 messages makes another appear: "Oh - more arrived just now!"
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, more overreaction. The people producing Mosiac are not idiots, they're not get rich quick merchants and they have actual experience producing software that is used to evaluate threads made to federal judges
I guess it is mostly criminals who makes threats to judges, right? (Or why else would they be in a courtroom...) So this program can predict criminals to some extent. Now, how can anyone believe it will work on schoolkids too? They are younger than the usual criminal and have a very different mindset from an adult. Teenagers are in the (usually slow) process of breaking free from their parents, and is naturally opposed to adults in general. They are also immature. This natural kid attitude may clash with a program made for criminals, because adults, unlike kids, aren't supposed to be opposed to society. Criminals however are unusually (for an adult) opposed to society, and quite a few are unusually immature as well. See the problem?
Before you start bashing MS about this, don't you think you should consider that a good 50% of Linux was designed in this manner?
Of course, but with linux, bad ideas tend to die from lack of support. There are surely 10 times as many linux "features" that never became mainstream because they were lousy and didn't catch on. It doesn't work this way with MS, they make their stuff and push it onto customers. The only alternative is a "no to all".
I can see in the near future:
:-)
FIRST EVER WEB SERVER RUN ON A MOUSE!!!
Easy enough. Take one of those webserver-in-a-matchbox things and put it inside a serial mouse.
Junkbuster discards all cookies, except from those places I want them, such as slashdot. Most other places that require cookies aren't interesting enough, so they loose me. Junkbuster also kills those stupid banner ads. :-)
A simpler solution is to disable cookies in the browser. Netscape at least has a setting for that.
I was wondering if anyone has ever heard of someone dying from Lego injuries?
There may have been strangulation incidents with small children inhaling pieces. I haven't heard about any specific incident though.
Anyone can look athletic, have "great ass/body/muscles/whatever!".
Why would I want to? I look ok anyway.
Join a gym, use some of the machines.
I couldn't possibly stand the boredom of a gym. If I wanted excercising I'd do it at home. No fancy machines is needed, that's just for posing. Wanna lift weights for free? Pick up some used bricks. That's boring and looks stupid? Same applies to "serious" weightlifting...
There's no excuse to say, "I'm a nerd, therefore I am going to be skinny and pale." In my opinion and experience, women want a man. Someone who acts like a man, can take care of her when she needs it, and that she knows will be there.
Good point about women, and athletic looks wasn't part of what you pointed out. It is unnecessary. All you need for getting a woman is some social skills (which you get from being social, not from a gym and certainly not from playing doom)
AM sidebands with a second channel, thereby allowing stereo reception, but this has never happened.
Why bother with improving AM, when FM is better anyway? Simply reallocate the AM band for FM use and get one kind of radio for everything.
This hack just gives the wrong IP address for some domains. And it won't stop ads stored on the same server as the pages you are vieweing.
Consider junkbuster. It can lock out domains and subdomains, as well as sub-directories on each server.
But the amazing thing about these frozen
mammoths is that there must have been a fairly
mild climate to produce enough veggies to keep
them going. Then it got much colder so suddenly
that they didn't rot or get eaten by scavengers
- and stayed that way since.
No problem with that. It is well-known that the climate was milder. It certainly didn't change abruptly enough to freeze the mammoths in place though.
But the ice came, slowly. Glaciers grew a bit from year to year, although the land around them could still support a few mammoths. Now and then a mammoth tried to cross a stretch of ice. A few of them probably fell into cracks and got conserved.
The problem with creating an appliance PC is that people will tend to treat it like one. They'll turn it on when they want to use it (and not want to wait 5 min for startup).
A good argument for linux then - it boots way faster than windows. As for turning off - just teach them to use the "power off" menu choice instead of the button. Very simple. Or let cron run "sync" every minute or so to minimize damage.
Not MTV's fault for reporting what they thought was real
Reporters and editors should make a serious effort to check their sources. If they don't, then they are either sensationalist or too lazy to be taken seriously. One can then wonder about all the other news they report...
Computers themselves are just plain boring.
...
And once you've broken into a system, what do you do? Transfer money from billg's account to yours?
A good movie cannot focus too much on the actual hacking. Keep it realistic - don't show too much of it to bore people. [Master hacker: "ah, a buffer overflow in their sendmail system! Lets show them!] A short piece of techno-babble for the uninitiated, ok for the geeks. No more necessary. Instead show us the effects and possibilities of hacking, such as:
Stealing information - this could be almost anything. (Classified databases, & documents)
Changing information, such as grades, deleting speeding tickets, faking email.
Bringing down stuff. No need for strange flashing screens - just see people despair when the stock exchange stops or all the traffic lights go red.
Dramatic stuff - such as messing with air traffic control systems. Plenty of room for consumer-friendly fireballs here...
An end user do care about the kernel stability. He may not know what that means, but he see that he don't have to reboot. Restarting netscape from a start menu is somuch faster than rebooting, even with the fast reboot linux offer.
And the end user don't have to delete lock files either - we can provide him with a netscape start script that goes
killall -9 netscape
rm ~/.netscape/lock
netscape
Real easy. Just click on "netscape" and it just starts - no matter what happened before. If netscape freeze - just click on the start thing and the frozen one disappears.
A frozen desktop is worse of course, but I have never seen those. Probably a went away with some older version of X?
When you receive a radio wave, you don't collapse that wave into a photonic particle (which is what the radio wave is, if it could be colWhen you receive a radio wave, you don't collapse that wave into a photonic particle (which is what the radio wave is, if it could be collapsed). For a QM probabalistic wave to collapse into a particle, you must do more than measure it's existance--you must measure it in such a way as to force a measurement of it as a particle.
And that's just it: if you simply look at the release of an alpha particle by itself, it should produce a uniform ionizing radiation "sphere" around the decaying atom. A cloud chamber does not inherently differentiate between a unform sphere of radiation (a wave) and a decay particle, so simply observing with a cloud chamber should not force the probability function to collapse.
As far as I know, you do collapse the radio waves when observing them. But your typical radio station transmits enough photons for all of us to use. They certainly don't transmit one photon at a time. Similarly, putting a kilogram of plutonium in the cload chamber will indeed show you a "ionizing sphere" around the lump, due to to huge amount of radioactivity.
I am indeed running gpm, but I'm rather hesitant to kill it, since I use it quite a bit.
/dev/gpmdata.
Run it in repeater mode then (gpm -R) and have X get mouse input from
This way gpm runs all the time. Working as usual on the consoles, forwarding mouse output to X whenever you switch to the GUI.
What is most fascinating about this article is that Mr. Katz has absolutely missed the point: the very fact that Mr. Singer can publicly express his controversial, and in some quarters, unpopular opinions is proof that America is relatively free country.
Seems you missed the point. Mr. Singer is oppressed for his opinions - not by the government but by the masses. The guy needs guards. In a freer society, he wouldn't need guards. He might not get many friends - but no death threats either. There are countries where people needing guards just for publishing unpopular opinions is unheard of.
Is it truly freedom, when you expect to be (at least) socially blasted for expressing controversial ideas? I don't care about the legal structure, but about society. Sure, legally they can't touch you, but you become ostracized by your peers.
Freedom comes at a price. You are free to express unpopular ideas - and listeners are free to dislike you. Nobody has to be your friend.
What makes freedom is education, the knowledge that you should not be attacked for proffering a thought-out opinion,
A good point. With true freedom of speech, the Singer guy wouldn't need any guards. But papers could still write nasty articles about him, people could organize demonstrations and so on.
That's probally true, but most of them use Windows now with its, IMHO, much easier install program. And then there are the new gamers, who have very little idea what DOS is, and never really messed around with it.
The future:
Gamers using linux, with easy install programs. The oldies remember windows which was just as easy, but the machine crashed now and then. A few gamers become linux hackers out of curiosity - none out of necessity.
There is not enough context to map 'blah.txt' to an actual file on disk, thats basically why.
Seems to me that a convention using the CWD of the foreground process on that terminal might be a useful default directory for "blah.txt"
all the really expenisve bits (i.e. used for cooling) can go into the vehicle, and the track can be just turned off and on in time.
That might work for a train, but you don't want to carry heavy cooling equipment into space where it isn't needed...
Most people should worry about a) heart disease, b) lung cancer, and c) an auto accident, in roughly that order.
People worry less, because this won't destroy a nation, humanity or the earth. Unless everybody get a heart attack at the same time, and that probability is low. It is still bigger than the probability that an accelerator should destroy the universe though.
Making the black hole is trivial. For a big one - collect enough mass until it collapse. You'll need mass comparable to a really big star. Expensive.
For a smaller one, compress a smaller mass, such as a mountain or the moon. Maybe you can do it by detonating lots of H-bombs around the thing.
Store the black hole in space, in a very wide orbit. When you want to use it as a weapon, change its orbit so it goes very near earths surface (or through the upper layer) of whatever nation you want to hit. Use sufficient speed so it goes back into space where you collect it for future use. An appropriately sized black hole could do a lot of damage this way, without destroying earth compeltely. Be prepared for quakes though...
Of course an asteroid strike is a lot easier and does the same damage. Conventional stuff like smuggling H-bombs into all their cities is simpler still, it is even doable.
BTW anyone know the max resolution we could get with a human eye?
The human eye is far from ideal for this. We have about 3 degrees of high-resolution color vision. (That's why you move your eyes a lot when reading or otherwise looking at something)
The rest of the eye is low-resolution greyscale, whose main function is to detect movements etc. so you can move your eyes and focus the good spot on interesting stuff.
A camera needs to be high-resolution all over, because you never know what part of the screen the viewers might take an interest in. The three degrees of good vision becomes a nasty limitation if someone else is deciding what to look at.
Use a third party's server without their permission (Again noone would complain if the post office refused to deliver letters without stamps).
This one is different. The post office may refuse to deliver, but there is no punishment. A well-configured email server will also refuse to deliver some sorts of forged email.
Making email forging as illegal as other document forging would be useful though.
I have 20 e-mails. It totally filled up my in-box
Of course. His inbox is probably 20 lines - so 20 messages "filled" it. Probably haven't grasped the concept of scrollbars completely. When deleting one of the 20 messages makes another appear: "Oh - more arrived just now!"