Why does the fact that there's no 64-bit version of Windows available to the public change anything? 64-bit's big win will be in the server market, where it allows things like holding a database larger than 4GB in memory (without ugly hacks, anyway). Of course, with Free software, taking advantage of the expanded limits and other new features, like the extra registers in x86-64, is almost trivial - some features, like extra registers, can be utilized with just a recompile; other features, like the ability to use gobs more RAM, mean a small amount of rewriting code (if it hasn't been done already).
I see the coming 64-bit PC transition as a big win for Linux, as the community will almost certainly be able to get new versions of software, designed to take advantage of new features, out faster than a company like MS - there are a lot of knowledgable geeks out there that want to take full advantage of their hardware. While the lack of 64-bit Windows is certainly a disadvantage for desktop users and MS-only shops, it means nothing at all to those who use other OSes. If users want or need low-end and midrange 64-bit hardware, the fact that one of several OSes doesn't currently have a 64-bit version probably won't stop them from using an OS that does support 64-bit hardware.
That's because otherwise crapflooders would use it to extend the horizontal width to hideous porportions. Imagine a post with 20,000 s - not pretty. There are other methods to prevent expanding the page horizontally, too - the infamous insertion of spaces in long strings (which used to always break URLs). The never-ending battle between the editors and crapflooders is largely conducted in secret; it's nevertheless interesting to watch from the sidelines.
By the way, this thread is incredibly OT. I end it now, by invoking Godwin: Nazi Nazi Nazi. There.
While the security systems in many datacenters are probably excessive, physical security is there for three reasons:
First, it is possible for someone, particularly with some technical knowledge and a lot of malice, to do serious damage. All the IT folk on Slashdot probably have horror stories about just what someone whose technical knowledge consists of "I can start Windows, so I must know everything" can do to a major system. For a worse scenario, imagine what would happen if an IT tech, angry about his/her job going to India, came in with an Etherkiller and plugged it into various servers, routers, and other important equipment. One person, with unsupervised access and the right tools, could easily do thousands or millions of dollars worth of damage in 15 minutes or so. While this might not be a common scenario, the risk is great enough that it's a good idea to protect against it.
Second, there's legacy. If your datacenter was established back in the Dark Ages, it may well have been designed to house a timeshare system where one terminal had "root" powers. Obviously, in that case, physical access to the root console should be guarded as jealously as one would guard the root password to an important box today. Even if the system requiring this security is long gone from your datacenter, it's cheaper to leave the security equipment in place than to spend money to take it out.
Finally, the higher-ups like to see a machine room with security like a bank vault; after all, they have probably invested millions into the machines (or are considering doing so), and they want to feel protected. While it's true that the money that went to a 2-ton vault door for the server room probably would be better spent hiring another admin to help keep the system in good shape and make sure all the patches are up-to-date, the people with the money would rather have the feeling of totally impregnable security than admit to themselves that nothing is ever totally secure. After all, they can't appreciate a well-configured firewall, but a massive door with biometric authorization and a 12-digit access code feels secure to just about anyone.
How would either of those effects cause you to cool down? Vasoconstriction (which caffiene doesn't actually do much of) means you feel colder, because the skin gets colder at the expense of the body's core - the opposite is true of alcohol, which makes you feel warm, but is actually dangerous in very cold temperatures, since you're just moving heat from the core to the extremities.
As for the increase in metabolism, an increase in metabolism means you burn fuel faster. While this may mean that you run out of sugar/energy faster, as long as you still have a good quantity of sugar in your bloodstream, you will be kept fairly warm (assuming you're not naked in a blizzard). Finally, there's the effect of simply imbibing a hot liquid into more or less the center of the body - not something that will cool you down. Quite simply, the effects of coffee will warm you, not cool you.
In the article, the RIAA "enforcers" claim they don't try to create the idea that they're a police force. Why, then, would a victim say that, "They said they were police from the recording industry or something, and next time they'd take me away in handcuffs."?
It's pretty obvious what they're doing - essentially saying that they have the power to arrest and incarcerate private citizens - and they could end up in some serious legal hot water here. There are all sorts of laws against vigilantism and misrepresenting yourself as an officer of the law. I'd say that this could end up as an even bigger PR mistake than attacking grannies and little kids; there, they were (technically) on the right side of the law. Here, they're blatantly violating the law in order to get what they want. I hope they burn.
Note: I'm not a lawyer. If you need one, get one licensed in your jurisidiction; if you've been hassled by these assholes, you definately need a lawyer. As far as I can tell, this would be a slam-dunk case for a first year law student, let alone an experienced litigator.
The only reason product placement in games is really effective at this time is because it's unusual. For example, I remember that Intel, Nvidia and Powerade had ads in Enter the Matrix because there was a big media blitz about it, and I'm not really used to being confronted with advertisements in game.
However, this effect can only decline - once in-game advertising becomes standard, people will probably train themselves to bypass it; the same thing happened with Web advertisments: I remember thinking the first banners I saw were kind of weird, but now they're pervasive, I hardly notice them. Studies have even shown that users have trained themselves to bypass ads of common dimension and placement (like a banner at the top of a page). I doubt you could even tell me (without looking) what the current advertisment on your Slashdot page is for.
While product placement in games can be appropriate and add to the "realism factor," like having stadium ads in a sports game, the actual effect of these ads will diminish as they're added to more and more games.
If you read the article, it says that the technique is only useful when the object's position is already well known. After all, it's just a little dot. Even assuming the Beagle didn't break up completely into pieces smaller than the resolution of the camera (even with the new technique), it would be pretty much impossible to find; the area to be searched is basically the whole of Mars. I'm sure that NASA would look for Beagle, were it possible to use this technique to do so.
Another really heinous thing going on (mostly in manufacturing, but more and more in IT) is that in many situations, companies that outsource to other countries can get tax breaks, because they're "exporting" software.
For example, a theoretical "shell" company (which has all its executives and its official buisiness in the US, and all its "real work" elsewhere, in Ethnikstan) could nevertheless get tax breaks for exporting goods if they sold to anyone other than the US; despite the fact that all their workers are supporting the Ethnikstanian economy rather than the US's.
The tax laws are structured so that a company registered in the US gets a tax break for selling to any non-US company (since they're selling American goods overseas and thus bringing foreign money into the US). But this means that if you develop software in India, and sell right back to India, you still get large tax breaks and corporate welfare for "bringing money into the US" or "supporting American workers," despite the fact that all the money is going straight to Indian workers (and Italian sports cars for the executives).
The tax laws in this area need to be fixed now. Of course, the current crop of politicians won't do anything; this is really good for the companies who are lining their pockets. The country needs real change, real soon. Of course, that's not about to happen, what with the brain-dead American voting populace and the fact that any politican, regardless of party, seems to be willing to bend over for corporate interests these days in return for a buck.
Of course, that particular point isn't much, cryptographically. Ever since frequency analysis came into use, historical cryptographers used "nulls" in their codes - random meaningless characters which would hopefully cause trouble to frequency analysts. It may be that the manuscript's code contains keywords that the decoder should ignore (all repitions of a word, for instance), or instruct the decoder to perform a certain action (say, 3 repititions means to skip the next three words).
On the other hand, this certainly could be a hoax. After all, the author was familiar with cryptographic methods and was paid an enormous amount of money for the manuscript. The real truth could certainly be either hoax or reality - there simply aren't enough facts available to decide right now, despite the huge amount of work put into the manuscript by many talented amateur cryptographers.
The problem with spam isn't that it's annoying. The problem is that spammers steal. How? They steal mailservers' bandwidth and resources - remember, on the Internet, the sender and reciever both pay for data. Thus, if a popular ISP/webmail site recieves 25% legitimate traffic and 75% spam (not uncommon for a big ISP or site like Hotmail), the spammers are making them pay 3 times what they would pay for only legitimate email.
Worse, spammers who use open relays or virus/malware-infected PCs as mailservers (most US-based spammers do) are stealing from both ends - they take the bandwidth of the person with the open relay or PC. Finally, they impact endusers who pay by the minute (most USians don't, but most of Europe does) - it can be difficult for a machine to filter spam based only on the headers, and to do "proper" Bayesian, you need to download everything, h3R|3@L \/IA6RA or not.
There is precedent for banning user-pays advertising completely (for example, you can't spam faxes; the user pays in paper and ink). Normal web ads, on the other hand, are "legitimate" not because they don't annoy, but because they don't steal. After all, you choose to view their advertising along with their content. Annoyance doesn't enter into it - it's legality that matters here.
It's true that the 1st amendment doesn't protect libel. However, this might not be libel. Libel is stating untrue and defamatory facts about someone. If the columnist says that GTA is "worse than child molestation," that's his opinion, and he can scream that from his soapbox all he wants. However, if he says that "GTA is a child-molestation simulator, where you earn points for raping little kids," that is libel - you could show in court that there isn't any simulated molestation in GTA, and that is definately defamitory; it's libel and Rockstar can sue.
The only possible issue here is where the column says that GTA inspired killers in Tennessee - however, the columnist (probably worried about libel himself), simply says it was "linked," which could hold up in court. After all, if the killers ever played GTA, even once, a link (although tenuous) does exist.
Simply put, while these statements are definately objectionable, they are not libel and are carefully crafted to skirt the edges of the libel laws (and since this paper is part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. media empire, good taste was never a factor). Is the writer an asshole? Yes, of course. Is it libel? Unfortunately, probably not.
Remember, kids, I'm no lawyer. If you do need a lawyer, talk to one licensed in your jurisdiction, not some idiot you met here on Slashdot.
Well, the TOS says that you can only transfer a music file to two other computers, but can transfer all you want to portable music players. So, is a laptop a PC or a portable music player? I could certainly see someone using a laptop as a music player - on a plane, for instance.
Another interesting question: what about dedicated music players based around PC hardware? A friend of mine has made a briefcase-sized MP3 player that hooks into his truck's sound system; it uses Winamp and Win98. I'm looking into something similar for my car using Linux. Does a device like that count as a portable audio player?
I'd imagine that most people would consider a laptop to be a PC first, and an audio player second. Also, most people would probably think that the car audio system was OK. There, the dividing line seems to be the system builder's intended use. However, what would happen if I took two identical laptops, and used one as a PC (loaded office apps, games and such onto it) and set the other one up as a car audio player? Is one "acceptable" and the other "unacceptable?" Why? These aren't easy questions, and it's important to define the boundaries of acceptable/legal use.
Yes, but the poster specified why those won't work: they only do romaji input and output (romaji is one of several Japanese character sets; it's a way to roughly express Japanese words in the Roman alphabet). Needless to say, the input systems for hirigana and katakana (the alphabets you probably associate with "Japanese") are much more complex and require more than a simple modification of a translator designed for two languages that use what is more or less the same alphabet (English, Spanish, German, French, etc.).
As for my recommendation: you probably aren't going to find a decent dedicated dictionary outside of Japan, and even then it'll probably be expensive. However, as numerous other people have pointed out, there are good programs available for PDAs. A Palm Zire is about a hundred bucks, and there are certainly dictionaries available on the Net (although I don't know anything about their quality). For example, a quick Google turns up this, which looks like a decent app that takes hirigana, katakana and kanji, as well as English, input.
No, it's not stiched, but it's not digital either. That looks like a scanned medium-format (negative size about 6x6 cm) film image. Needless to say, medium-format film can provide lots of resolution - you could probably blow up a good medium-format photo onto a wall and get great detail. The theroretical maximum of medium-format is roughly the same as the image in the article, full size - roughly 1 billion pixels of data (zoom in any farther, and you're looking at film grain, not the recorded image). The interesting thing about the linked article is showing how it's possible to take pictures with incredible resolution, without breaking the bank on a medium-format camera, good lenses, and your own darkroom. All it takes is a good digicam and a willingness to spend hours and hours in PanoramaTools and Photoshop, getting things just right.
First, all a site like debian.org can do against attackers is secure against all known attacks. While going through kernel code line-by-line and looking for subtle vulnerabilities is a good idea, it would take up so many resources that it's not feasible for anyone but a major company or government who doesn't plan on changing kernels for a while anyway. While the security obviously isn't perfect (if it were, the attacker wouldn't ever have compromised a low-level account), one can assume that the security is good against known exploits, as we aren't presented with gaping anii weekly on debian.org visits, courtesy of whatever script kiddies r00ted the box last.
As for the "Far out shit," I was simply trying to pre-empt the inevitable "Microsoft did it!!!" and "SCO hates Linux, they did it!" responses. While both might have something to gain by attacking Linux's credibility, I pointed out that both would lose more than they gained, and thus it's not likely that they did this. I strongly doubt that some sort of anti-Linux conspiracy exists. I simply brought it up as one (remote) possibility.
Finally, to respond to your accusations against Linux's security - Linux itself has quite good security, particularly if it's used with something like the SELinux patches. Hell, Windows' security isn't that bad either, if you only consider the number of core system exploits - of course, the length of time from when a vulnerability is discovered to when a patch is issued is quite long, bringing its security level down quite a bit. Linus and his kernel hackers are not responsible for insecure defaults in many Linux distributions, and neither MS nor Linus are responsible for sysadmins clueless enough to leave the defaults in place. Remember, the burden of security rests at least as much on the sysadmin's shoulders as on the designer's.
To me, this attack and the recent attempt to insert an exploit into the Linux kernel seem like possible evidence of a disturbing trend: skilled attacks against high-profile Linux sites (you can't get much higher-profile than kernel.org or debian.org). I'm pretty sure that these systems were secured against all known local root exploits; if they weren't, this probably would have happened long ago.
So, what's going on here? Are these simply two unrelated attacks? Is it an attempt by an immature highschooler with some cracking talent to boast to his friends "LOL 1 hax0rred debian.org!?" Is it an attempt by some sort of anti-Linux commandoes to undermine Linux's public image? I almost suspect the latter, but the prime suspect there is Microsoft, who have far too much to lose by going that route and plenty of money for traditional FUD that will make it into "traditional" news channels better anyway. SCO might be crazy enough to do it, but they probably wouldn't want to divert resources away from spewing lawsuits at everyone in existence.
From what I understand of the cracker community, Linux is held in fairly high regard (although I admit I don't try to keep up on the latest in the cracker community). You'd think that black-hats, who tend to be rather immature, when armed with a brand new exploit, would attack a site seen by the general public and post goatse.cx images on the front page, rather than subtly changing Debian packages. So, who's behind all this?
I recently watched Armstrong Homes do a good deal of the work on a Habitat for Humanity house in about 5 days, as a demo for some big corporate customers (and a huge tax writeoff;). They brought in modular walls with siding and windows already installed, put them in place, put the trusses on top, and had the home framed, roofed and sided in a week. While the rest of the home does take a while (they use "conventional" contractors, or, in our case, volunteers for stuff like electrical, plumbing, heating and drywall) everything worked out incredibly well.
The build quality was uniformly excellent - everything was both square and true to the plans. The bottom line? "Manufactured" homes aren't just for trailer parks anymore. Having worked on both prefab and stick-frame construction, I can say with confidence that prefab materials can be easier to work with and save a good deal of money. While they may not be perfect for every application, I strongly suggest that you check out what prefab options are available to you.
The current "boo-hoo" over blacklists can be mostly summed up by one word: SPEWS.
They operate on the "nuclear bomb" method: list spammers, plus anyone using a "spam-friendly" mailserver (a definition that can be stretched to cover almost anyone) or anyone who is simply "suspicious." Oh, and you might also be listed if your new IP block was once used by a spammer. Don't worry, though. You can just wait a few weeks and lose massive amounts of buisiness because many customers can't recieve email from you and have no idea why - they just think you aren't responding. Or you can go onto NANAE and post a delist request, which will get you nothing but "Whiner! Eat your SPEWS, it's good for you!"
To be sure, a large portion of the problem comes from ISPs implementing SPEWS incorrectly - silently dropping all IPs listed, not just tagging level 2 and dropping only level 1 (confirmed spammers), and the spammers have created this problem themselves. However, SPEWS' "list 'em all, let God sort 'em out" approach is irresponsible, particularly when they know that ISPs are applying the filtering with a wide brush.
I would imagine that there are some people who have bought into SCO for its past growth (just look at a 6 month or 1 year chart; it's grown from around $3/share to roughly $17/share). Also, people who don't understand just how Free software works might honestly think that SCO's lawsuit has a chance; of course, if SCO were to actually win their lawsuit, their share price would skyrocket and anyone who bought in early would be rich.
However, there is simply no way to spin this into a good thing, even to those with little knowledge about Free software and the circumstances of SCO's IP battle. I think that many people who have bought into SCO really believe that there is a case in this lawsuit.
There is simply no way to make SCO's current strategy look good - this strategy, no matter how you spin it, is sending money down the drain when SCO needs to spend money on development - OpenServer is ridiculously behind the times, and if SCO wants anyone to actually use it, they need to put some money into it. After all, even a billion dollars in lawsuit money will run out eventually, and SCO will need some products to sell.
How exactly would customers moving from Linux to other non-SCO OSes help SCO at all? If I were a SCO stockholder, I would want to have some answers from Darl & company, fast. I hope that this serves as a wakeup call to those who still think that SCO has potential. While non-technical folks who don't understand the IP issues behind the lawsuit might be guiled into believing SCO's party line, I don't see how anyone can spin this as a good decision.
If I had any money in SCO, I would want to take it out now, or be on the phone to my lawyer, looking into some sort of minority-shareholder lawsuit against the company for wasting shareholders' money by paying them to switch to a competitor's product. There is simply no financial benefit for SCO in having users switch from Linux to Windows, Solaris, or anything but a SCO product. Unless SCO has some sort of plan to move into the Windows services market (that they've kept under wraps all this time), they shouldn't be paying for people to move to Windows. It's almost enough to make me believe the SCO-Microsoft conspiracy theories.
One thing that bothered me when reading through the descriptions of what this "router" does that nobody seems to have mentioned yet: what if some 31337 hax0r manages to crack Belkin's ad server? It wouldn't be difficult to change the page to exploit an IE bug and slip a Trojan onto unsuspecting users' machines - bingo, every new Belkin customer (and all those who haven't turned off the "feature") becomes a DDoS zombie, spam mailserver, or something else unpleasant.
Belkin hasn't just abused customers' trust and falsely advertised this piece of trash as a router, they have also opened up security holes for no other reason than advertising censorware. This behavior isn't just wrong, it's despicable.
Linux's software RAID is, indeed, excellent. However, I like to run RAID 5 when I can (because it offers a good balance between safety and performance), and software RAID 5 is simply not an option on an older system - any time you need to read or write anything, watch your CPU usage spike. In fact, I have played around with software RAID 5; on an old dual Pentium system, it was actually slower than RAID 1.
My solution? I went on Ebay and bought two identical SCSI RAID cards (they're pulls from old Compaq servers; model number SMART-2P). I get good performance and Linux support, and I have enough equipment to survive a loss of any one component (RAID card, drive, or even cable). While software RAID is a good solution in some cases, hardware RAID cards are a good option if you can find them cheap (again, look on Ebay, but be sure that you have two that are set up identically, so if you lose one you can be up and running with the other, and then burn those suckers in).
Based upon the question posted, I was imagining something along the lines of RAID 5 implemented across the network with multiple computers; complete with hot swap/hot spare capability, array rebuilding on-the-fly, and other "real RAID" features. Needless to say, this system would need to sync constantly for error-checking/correction and would require input from at least 2 systems before it could act on any data.
Basic software drive mirroring is fine (and something I've looked into for my own home network), but there simply isn't enough bandwidth or a low enough latency for a RAID 5 system to work across consumer-level networking technology (even if you count Gigabit Ethernet as "consumer-level").
First off, you aren't going to be able to use this like a real RAID array (a drive can die and you keep on working). The latency and bandwidth of any network that could be reasonably implemented in your home is going to prevent your system from acting like a real RAID array.
Instead of trying to implement a shoestring SAN, go the simple route: throw up a Linux box running Samba for your "backup server;" it doesn't need much horsepower, just fairly fast drives and a network connection. Then schedule copies of your documents and home directories (using a cron-type tool on Linux and XCOPY called by the Task Scheduler on Windows, you should be able to hack something together that copies only changed files) every night at midnight, or some other time when you aren't using your computers. Although you might lose a bit of work if the system goes down, you won't ever lose more than 24 hours' worth.
If you have more money to blow, then I would suggest that you invest in an honest-to-dog hardware RAID card and some good drives and put them into a server, then do everything across the network (put the/home tree and My Documents folders on the server). You can of course mount the/home directory in Linux via NFS or smbmount, and Group Policy in Windows 2K/XP will allow you to change the location of the My Documents folder to whatever you choose. You might be able to do the same via the System Policy Editor on 9x; it's been a while and I can't find the information after a brief Google.
To sum up:
Don't blow millions on a SAN for your house.
Cheap route: cron jobs/Windows task scheduler to copy important folders across the network every night
More expensive route: invest in a server with real RAID, then mount your important directories from that.
I don't know how they did it, but here's one solution:
Get some self-adhesive paper and glass etching compound. Put the paper over the glass and laser it, giving you a template for the etching compound. Trowel that on, then wait 5 minutes, rinse it off, and peel off the mask. Hey presto, you've got precisely etched glass.
Of course, if you wanted a fine pattern, you might have trouble with the mask ripping, but that could probably be solved with a cardboard or plastic mask (especially good if you plan to crank out more than one of the same design).
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I see the coming 64-bit PC transition as a big win for Linux, as the community will almost certainly be able to get new versions of software, designed to take advantage of new features, out faster than a company like MS - there are a lot of knowledgable geeks out there that want to take full advantage of their hardware. While the lack of 64-bit Windows is certainly a disadvantage for desktop users and MS-only shops, it means nothing at all to those who use other OSes. If users want or need low-end and midrange 64-bit hardware, the fact that one of several OSes doesn't currently have a 64-bit version probably won't stop them from using an OS that does support 64-bit hardware.
By the way, this thread is incredibly OT. I end it now, by invoking Godwin: Nazi Nazi Nazi. There.
As for the increase in metabolism, an increase in metabolism means you burn fuel faster. While this may mean that you run out of sugar/energy faster, as long as you still have a good quantity of sugar in your bloodstream, you will be kept fairly warm (assuming you're not naked in a blizzard). Finally, there's the effect of simply imbibing a hot liquid into more or less the center of the body - not something that will cool you down. Quite simply, the effects of coffee will warm you, not cool you.
It's pretty obvious what they're doing - essentially saying that they have the power to arrest and incarcerate private citizens - and they could end up in some serious legal hot water here. There are all sorts of laws against vigilantism and misrepresenting yourself as an officer of the law. I'd say that this could end up as an even bigger PR mistake than attacking grannies and little kids; there, they were (technically) on the right side of the law. Here, they're blatantly violating the law in order to get what they want. I hope they burn.
Note: I'm not a lawyer. If you need one, get one licensed in your jurisidiction; if you've been hassled by these assholes, you definately need a lawyer. As far as I can tell, this would be a slam-dunk case for a first year law student, let alone an experienced litigator.
However, this effect can only decline - once in-game advertising becomes standard, people will probably train themselves to bypass it; the same thing happened with Web advertisments: I remember thinking the first banners I saw were kind of weird, but now they're pervasive, I hardly notice them. Studies have even shown that users have trained themselves to bypass ads of common dimension and placement (like a banner at the top of a page). I doubt you could even tell me (without looking) what the current advertisment on your Slashdot page is for.
While product placement in games can be appropriate and add to the "realism factor," like having stadium ads in a sports game, the actual effect of these ads will diminish as they're added to more and more games.
If you read the article, it says that the technique is only useful when the object's position is already well known. After all, it's just a little dot. Even assuming the Beagle didn't break up completely into pieces smaller than the resolution of the camera (even with the new technique), it would be pretty much impossible to find; the area to be searched is basically the whole of Mars. I'm sure that NASA would look for Beagle, were it possible to use this technique to do so.
For example, a theoretical "shell" company (which has all its executives and its official buisiness in the US, and all its "real work" elsewhere, in Ethnikstan) could nevertheless get tax breaks for exporting goods if they sold to anyone other than the US; despite the fact that all their workers are supporting the Ethnikstanian economy rather than the US's.
The tax laws are structured so that a company registered in the US gets a tax break for selling to any non-US company (since they're selling American goods overseas and thus bringing foreign money into the US). But this means that if you develop software in India, and sell right back to India, you still get large tax breaks and corporate welfare for "bringing money into the US" or "supporting American workers," despite the fact that all the money is going straight to Indian workers (and Italian sports cars for the executives).
The tax laws in this area need to be fixed now. Of course, the current crop of politicians won't do anything; this is really good for the companies who are lining their pockets. The country needs real change, real soon. Of course, that's not about to happen, what with the brain-dead American voting populace and the fact that any politican, regardless of party, seems to be willing to bend over for corporate interests these days in return for a buck.
On the other hand, this certainly could be a hoax. After all, the author was familiar with cryptographic methods and was paid an enormous amount of money for the manuscript. The real truth could certainly be either hoax or reality - there simply aren't enough facts available to decide right now, despite the huge amount of work put into the manuscript by many talented amateur cryptographers.
Worse, spammers who use open relays or virus/malware-infected PCs as mailservers (most US-based spammers do) are stealing from both ends - they take the bandwidth of the person with the open relay or PC. Finally, they impact endusers who pay by the minute (most USians don't, but most of Europe does) - it can be difficult for a machine to filter spam based only on the headers, and to do "proper" Bayesian, you need to download everything, h3R|3@L \/IA6RA or not.
There is precedent for banning user-pays advertising completely (for example, you can't spam faxes; the user pays in paper and ink). Normal web ads, on the other hand, are "legitimate" not because they don't annoy, but because they don't steal. After all, you choose to view their advertising along with their content. Annoyance doesn't enter into it - it's legality that matters here.
The only possible issue here is where the column says that GTA inspired killers in Tennessee - however, the columnist (probably worried about libel himself), simply says it was "linked," which could hold up in court. After all, if the killers ever played GTA, even once, a link (although tenuous) does exist.
Simply put, while these statements are definately objectionable, they are not libel and are carefully crafted to skirt the edges of the libel laws (and since this paper is part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. media empire, good taste was never a factor). Is the writer an asshole? Yes, of course. Is it libel? Unfortunately, probably not.
Remember, kids, I'm no lawyer. If you do need a lawyer, talk to one licensed in your jurisdiction, not some idiot you met here on Slashdot.
Another interesting question: what about dedicated music players based around PC hardware? A friend of mine has made a briefcase-sized MP3 player that hooks into his truck's sound system; it uses Winamp and Win98. I'm looking into something similar for my car using Linux. Does a device like that count as a portable audio player?
I'd imagine that most people would consider a laptop to be a PC first, and an audio player second. Also, most people would probably think that the car audio system was OK. There, the dividing line seems to be the system builder's intended use. However, what would happen if I took two identical laptops, and used one as a PC (loaded office apps, games and such onto it) and set the other one up as a car audio player? Is one "acceptable" and the other "unacceptable?" Why? These aren't easy questions, and it's important to define the boundaries of acceptable/legal use.
As for my recommendation: you probably aren't going to find a decent dedicated dictionary outside of Japan, and even then it'll probably be expensive. However, as numerous other people have pointed out, there are good programs available for PDAs. A Palm Zire is about a hundred bucks, and there are certainly dictionaries available on the Net (although I don't know anything about their quality). For example, a quick Google turns up this, which looks like a decent app that takes hirigana, katakana and kanji, as well as English, input.
No, it's not stiched, but it's not digital either. That looks like a scanned medium-format (negative size about 6x6 cm) film image. Needless to say, medium-format film can provide lots of resolution - you could probably blow up a good medium-format photo onto a wall and get great detail. The theroretical maximum of medium-format is roughly the same as the image in the article, full size - roughly 1 billion pixels of data (zoom in any farther, and you're looking at film grain, not the recorded image). The interesting thing about the linked article is showing how it's possible to take pictures with incredible resolution, without breaking the bank on a medium-format camera, good lenses, and your own darkroom. All it takes is a good digicam and a willingness to spend hours and hours in PanoramaTools and Photoshop, getting things just right.
As for the "Far out shit," I was simply trying to pre-empt the inevitable "Microsoft did it!!!" and "SCO hates Linux, they did it!" responses. While both might have something to gain by attacking Linux's credibility, I pointed out that both would lose more than they gained, and thus it's not likely that they did this. I strongly doubt that some sort of anti-Linux conspiracy exists. I simply brought it up as one (remote) possibility.
Finally, to respond to your accusations against Linux's security - Linux itself has quite good security, particularly if it's used with something like the SELinux patches. Hell, Windows' security isn't that bad either, if you only consider the number of core system exploits - of course, the length of time from when a vulnerability is discovered to when a patch is issued is quite long, bringing its security level down quite a bit. Linus and his kernel hackers are not responsible for insecure defaults in many Linux distributions, and neither MS nor Linus are responsible for sysadmins clueless enough to leave the defaults in place. Remember, the burden of security rests at least as much on the sysadmin's shoulders as on the designer's.
So, what's going on here? Are these simply two unrelated attacks? Is it an attempt by an immature highschooler with some cracking talent to boast to his friends "LOL 1 hax0rred debian.org!?" Is it an attempt by some sort of anti-Linux commandoes to undermine Linux's public image? I almost suspect the latter, but the prime suspect there is Microsoft, who have far too much to lose by going that route and plenty of money for traditional FUD that will make it into "traditional" news channels better anyway. SCO might be crazy enough to do it, but they probably wouldn't want to divert resources away from spewing lawsuits at everyone in existence.
From what I understand of the cracker community, Linux is held in fairly high regard (although I admit I don't try to keep up on the latest in the cracker community). You'd think that black-hats, who tend to be rather immature, when armed with a brand new exploit, would attack a site seen by the general public and post goatse.cx images on the front page, rather than subtly changing Debian packages. So, who's behind all this?
The build quality was uniformly excellent - everything was both square and true to the plans. The bottom line? "Manufactured" homes aren't just for trailer parks anymore. Having worked on both prefab and stick-frame construction, I can say with confidence that prefab materials can be easier to work with and save a good deal of money. While they may not be perfect for every application, I strongly suggest that you check out what prefab options are available to you.
They operate on the "nuclear bomb" method: list spammers, plus anyone using a "spam-friendly" mailserver (a definition that can be stretched to cover almost anyone) or anyone who is simply "suspicious." Oh, and you might also be listed if your new IP block was once used by a spammer. Don't worry, though. You can just wait a few weeks and lose massive amounts of buisiness because many customers can't recieve email from you and have no idea why - they just think you aren't responding. Or you can go onto NANAE and post a delist request, which will get you nothing but "Whiner! Eat your SPEWS, it's good for you!"
To be sure, a large portion of the problem comes from ISPs implementing SPEWS incorrectly - silently dropping all IPs listed, not just tagging level 2 and dropping only level 1 (confirmed spammers), and the spammers have created this problem themselves. However, SPEWS' "list 'em all, let God sort 'em out" approach is irresponsible, particularly when they know that ISPs are applying the filtering with a wide brush.
However, there is simply no way to spin this into a good thing, even to those with little knowledge about Free software and the circumstances of SCO's IP battle. I think that many people who have bought into SCO really believe that there is a case in this lawsuit.
There is simply no way to make SCO's current strategy look good - this strategy, no matter how you spin it, is sending money down the drain when SCO needs to spend money on development - OpenServer is ridiculously behind the times, and if SCO wants anyone to actually use it, they need to put some money into it. After all, even a billion dollars in lawsuit money will run out eventually, and SCO will need some products to sell.
If I had any money in SCO, I would want to take it out now, or be on the phone to my lawyer, looking into some sort of minority-shareholder lawsuit against the company for wasting shareholders' money by paying them to switch to a competitor's product. There is simply no financial benefit for SCO in having users switch from Linux to Windows, Solaris, or anything but a SCO product. Unless SCO has some sort of plan to move into the Windows services market (that they've kept under wraps all this time), they shouldn't be paying for people to move to Windows. It's almost enough to make me believe the SCO-Microsoft conspiracy theories.
Belkin hasn't just abused customers' trust and falsely advertised this piece of trash as a router, they have also opened up security holes for no other reason than advertising censorware. This behavior isn't just wrong, it's despicable.
My solution? I went on Ebay and bought two identical SCSI RAID cards (they're pulls from old Compaq servers; model number SMART-2P). I get good performance and Linux support, and I have enough equipment to survive a loss of any one component (RAID card, drive, or even cable). While software RAID is a good solution in some cases, hardware RAID cards are a good option if you can find them cheap (again, look on Ebay, but be sure that you have two that are set up identically, so if you lose one you can be up and running with the other, and then burn those suckers in).
Basic software drive mirroring is fine (and something I've looked into for my own home network), but there simply isn't enough bandwidth or a low enough latency for a RAID 5 system to work across consumer-level networking technology (even if you count Gigabit Ethernet as "consumer-level").
Instead of trying to implement a shoestring SAN, go the simple route: throw up a Linux box running Samba for your "backup server;" it doesn't need much horsepower, just fairly fast drives and a network connection. Then schedule copies of your documents and home directories (using a cron-type tool on Linux and XCOPY called by the Task Scheduler on Windows, you should be able to hack something together that copies only changed files) every night at midnight, or some other time when you aren't using your computers. Although you might lose a bit of work if the system goes down, you won't ever lose more than 24 hours' worth.
If you have more money to blow, then I would suggest that you invest in an honest-to-dog hardware RAID card and some good drives and put them into a server, then do everything across the network (put the /home tree and My Documents folders on the server). You can of course mount the /home directory in Linux via NFS or smbmount, and Group Policy in Windows 2K/XP will allow you to change the location of the My Documents folder to whatever you choose. You might be able to do the same via the System Policy Editor on 9x; it's been a while and I can't find the information after a brief Google.
To sum up:
Get some self-adhesive paper and glass etching compound. Put the paper over the glass and laser it, giving you a template for the etching compound. Trowel that on, then wait 5 minutes, rinse it off, and peel off the mask. Hey presto, you've got precisely etched glass.
Of course, if you wanted a fine pattern, you might have trouble with the mask ripping, but that could probably be solved with a cardboard or plastic mask (especially good if you plan to crank out more than one of the same design).