I think we're going to succeed in pissing off the Macophiles in the crowd with this one. I like OS X as much as anyone, and its multipedia capabilities are utterly obscene, but for general apps most people don't need it.
To be fair, most people don't need the capabilities of any modern system. I'm going to get a 64-bit based laptop, and the only people I can think of who need such power are gamers, video/audio editors, and the highest of power users.
Linux based systems tend to hold the line on excess hardware bloat. You don't need to stay on an endless treadmill of forced hardware and sofware upgrades for support; a skilled tech can keep your setup running. Security is potentially higher, with proper configuration. And virii are pretty much a null threat.
Most office productivity can be handled with F/OSS analogues of Windows tools. Programs like OOo and FireFox, The Gimp and the myriad SQL databases do a great deal of work.
I agree. Most/.ers probably have multiple systems, especially older ones running a clone of Un*x. I know I don't throw away a systm until it disintegrates in my hands. (In my flat, I have three systems, two of which are mine and actually do work, on all the time. Electric bill's pretty high. Would be higher if I ever used my minitower's monitor. Would be lower if my bro knew how to TURN HIS OFF. )
Oddly enough, I was looking up the numbers, and we are getting there. I mean, a lot of us are using laptops, which run on an amp or two, rather than the 400 watt supplies to the minitower and an extra four amps for the display. You can get refrigerators that run on less than a half-amp per hour, and LCD and plasma displays absolutely sip the juice compared to a CRT.
Problem is, as every one of us drooling over an Alienware or Voodoo rig will attest, the energy-efficient models tend to cost more than the 'leaky' ones. A fluorescent bulb that uses 14 watts is brighter and ten times pricier than a 60-watt incandescent. (aside: any suggestions for good custom laptop makers? read and reply to my journal)
However, right now, this is still not viable as the best way to run a home. In conjuction with other alternative power sources, like wind (as a starter for a wind turbine, maybe?) or as a nighttime supplement for solar, perhaps. It could add to the power of a mini-hydro station. In those events, you could become a mini-power station and feed power back to the grid at a marginal profit.
Something I've never understood: SoCal is mainly arid, over-sunned desert. Why don't they just hook up solar cells for power, pump seawater from the Pacific, use the juice for electrolysis, and have both instant hydrogen and instant O2 for breathing? Help two problems at once!
Though many of us - myself included - would not mind a peek into the collective mindshare of the Evil One, one cannot look into the abysss and return unchanged.
Sorry. Debated last night with philosophy majors. They won, six shots to five black and tans.
To translate it bluntly: This is still copyrighted code, owned by Microsoft. Duping even their "badly-written routines" into an inocuous place may lead to an SCO-esque attack in the near future , claiming violations in certain filesystem and mounting routines, or possibly something involving Samba, or a myriad of other wincompatibility issues.
It feels like a tactic that may be conceived by some bright bulb in MS Legal to bring conflict to the competition, or at least stifle development past current kernels.
I am starting to get the shakes that I get in a poker game when my all-in bet is called when I have pocket kings. (Last time that happened, the opponent had A-J suited. He flopped aces-up. I swore loudly.)
I am not a lawyer. I play one online, and I'm studying for the patent bar, but I don't pretend to dish out legal advice. Still, if I go all-in, I have the goods.
I am about to say something highly flameworthy, followed up by something not.
The flamebait is here: I would not mind one of these laptops purely on aesthetics. I *want* a laptop that sticks out from the throngs without having to paper the backs with a ton of stickers. I *want* people to notice it when I flip it up and start to work, or play a DVD.
The serious bit: The specs are fairly good. It includes a 802.11g card, DVD+-RW drive, 60 GiB removable HD, 1/2 GB RAM, AMD XP-M 2500 processor, 15" screen, ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 with 128 MB video card, and include coordinated optical mice. Those are not trivial specifications. Granted, it ain't top of the line. I know some gamers that are drooling at the 3d potential of this machine, and for most other work this should be able to handle the load.
And, there are a few people converting these heathen laptops to the One TruePath, a little at a time (first link is painfully detailed hardware, second is travails of conversion)
Oh yeah, and the price should be mentioned: They are on par with 12" TiBooks.
At least _someone_ gets what I mean. I should've written 'software libre' to get around the confusion, but I had reasonably assumed that ppl would get the difference between free software and closed source.
In my little corner of the universe, it's a Venn diagram consisting of two circles, one representing the closed-source world, one representing software libre. The two don't intersect at ANY point. There is no overlap.
Reason I thought that it would work for the OSSers is because I thought I read back in the day an article essentially saying that this was specifically an anti-Microsoft lawsuit and that the people don't have a beef with other smaller targets. Once you cook an 800 lb gorilla, you typically don't need to eat a couple of guppies.
Call me an optimist, but I have a strong feel in my right gut that Eolas will provide dual licensure for the patent, similar to Trolltech and Qt, where free software (BSD, GPL, Artistic license) gains free use and closed-source has to pay a "reasonable" fee.
Reason I think this is that (a) legally, it's a pain in the colon for lawyers to sue open sourcers; (b) it's horrible PR, just look at that company in Utah. Then again, lawyers tend to not give a flaming f--- about reasonable measures.
And to be clear, I hope to high heaven that they get as much of the $5 x 10^8 they can, because UC could _really_ use that cash to defray what the state's screwing them out of.
Star Trek: Alien species can communicate without even exchanging any sort of dictionary. All ships have exactly the same concept of "up" and "down." It is also assumed that there is an absolute time (even though it is not explicitly stated). The theory of relativity simply does not exist.
Babylon 5: Certain alien species, most notably the Pak'ma'ra and Vree (aliens who actually fly flying saucers and get sued for abduction of someone's ancestor), can't speak English at all and rely on sufficiently advanced translation devices. (You can still hear the original speech, though.) Because Earth is a big power, most aliens doing business on B5 speak English, occasionally broken (Drazi). All aliens, though, speak their own tongues and even the humans speak (or reference others speaking) foreign languages, most notably Russian, French, and Hebrew.
Star Wars: All ships have a maximum speed, which assumes a fixed frame of reference (motion is NOT relative). And I must admit that I like it this way. When playing Star Wars flight sims, if I had to deal with the "real" physics of acceleration (and near-limitless velocity), the game would not be as much fun to play.
B5: Ships take time to slow and turn, the notable exceptions being Minbari, Vorlon and Shadow vessels due to magneto-gravitational drives (stretch, but even they prefer slow turns to fast ones) and Starfuries, which have retrorockets at all the axial points and a pilot at the center, thus negating G-force impacts. (NASA said that the Starfury was the best design they could think of for a "space forklift".)
Also, B5 rotates for gravity. The best way to view the station is as a tower rather than on its side, since the right-hand-rule for rotating objects shows that they exert a force perpendicular to the spin, hence 'gravity'. However, it exerts a true gravity in the neighborhood of.2g because it is 250,000 metric tons of steel. (In a couple eps, the security chief suggests looking cclose to the station for a body, since it would not get far simply being sucked out.)
JMS also came up with a reasonable answer for the FTL question in hyperspace, which roughly translates theory-wise into a wormhole. Theory is it can be done, practice will take a while. (Of note, though, is that the "warp" idea where one distorts local spacetime to alter the local definition of a meter and a second to move ftl relative to normal space is also theoretically possible.)
Little details are also added, like the fact that little critters make it up to space (insects stuck with food), food gone bad (even alien food) tends to lead to sick humans, medicine can't fix every owie, and you have to board a ship to steal anything. And the asshole gene will survive for a long while.
Even the storage medium of choice, a data crystal, has been talked about here (a holographic storage system).
Of course that show stretches, but most everything he shows can reasonably be seen from at least bleeding edge R & D. Granted, an FTL phonecall and going to Mars in a few hours are still very far away, and a lot of the alien stuff is highly alien, but at least as far as humans go the show has a real good handle on things.
If you are in los Estados Unidos and have cable, you can see it on Sci-Fi channel at 9 AM. (Or, more accurately, you can tape it and watch it insead of Enterprise.;) If you can start tomorrow (15 Apr) do it. "Believers" is an episode which will kick you in the head.
Otherwise, probably your best bet is to look up The Lurker's Guide, and IIRC they have a guide to where it is elsewhere in the world.
What about.hack//SIGN? That's an amazing, geekish series they show at midnight eastern on Saturdays.
Essentially, this show takes place in an immersive Everquest-on-whale-steroids called "The World" and follows a PC (Player Character) named Tsukasa who can't log out. Granted, it loses something in the dubbing, but it still is quite kickass.
Guidelines for cyberattacks against FRIENDLY nations:
1. Do not attack from known US sites. (For example, hacking Britain from a dot-mil is a no-no.) 2. Only minor defacements permitted. (Minor is defined as "changing the official statements to support US policy".) 3. Play with foreign intelligence services. And please, TRY to win guys!
Policies for cyberattacks against NEUTRAL nations (e.g. Switzerland, Vatican City): To hell with them. They don't care.
Policies for cyberattacks against HOSTILE and ROGUE nations: 1. Bomb the telecommunications facilities, power plants, nuclear facilities, and chicken farms (can't be too careful). 2. Repeat until dead^H^H^H^Hsystem failure.
Re: Linux-friendly: They will help a "nixer get on the network. The modems are straight, no PPPoE. They have Linux-specific setup guides. They even have an rpmfind server.
My package is 1.5 down, 384 up, with two statics, a shell, and 56k nationwide dialup for when/if i'm away from home for about $90.
I moved into a new apartment recently, and before I did anything I checked out DSL. Speakeasy.net may not have been the cheapest option, but they provided multiple statics and no real restrictions on use (a one gb news cap gratis, no running authoritative dns servers, etc, read the link.)
When I called them up before I had my phone line installed, I asked them the money question, and the answer made me go with them.
THEY ARE LINUX FRIENDLY.
I've been satisfied with their service, which I've had for the past four months. As far as dealing with the baby bells: the only bad thing is that you have to stick with one for basic phone service. As long as you don't dial much and don't tack on extra "services", it's cheap (around $13-16 a month). Anti-Tech.. err.. SBC hasn't given me any grief over it. And the speeds are fast and fairly reliable.
I have had no problems. I have no complaints. I mean, 1.5/384 and clueful tech support. What's not to like?
While I would like to think this, the fact is, is that most people did not care because it was the Jews. Was this an effect of propaganda or just a reflection of institutionalized anti-semitism I do not know, probably a bit of both.
Most people cared only about one thing: the hunger in their bellies, which they (rightly) blamed on the Versailles treaty. The treaty forced reparations that bankrupted the country. In that environment - high unemployment, insane inflation, food shortages - the fascist pledges of food and work were appetizing. The strings attached may not have been important to Dieter and Katerine Publische, when the much more important issue of living was at stake.
These statements are at least based on history. Psychology isn't my strong suit. However, in light of Rememberance Day, I felt I should clarify what I meant, and make things clearer.
Oh yeah, here we go, hate whitey.... please cite specific examples where under identical circumstances a black defendent recieved the death penalty and a white defendent got a slap on the wrist.
Quotes from ACLU: * The race of the victim is often a decisive factor in capital sentencing decisions. Almost all death sentences in this country - 81 percent - involve white victims. 174 black people have been executed for killing a white person, but only 12 white people have been executed for killing a black person. * There is a double standard for rich and poor. The quality of legal representation is a better predictor of whether or not someone will be sentenced to death than the facts of the crime. The quality of legal representation depends on whether or not you can hire a lawyer. Almost all people on death row could not afford to hire a qualified attorney.
Stats from the USDOJ, so you don't say I'm biased: * From 1988-1994, out of 52 defendants in capital cases in the federal courts, 39 (75%) were black, and 34 of those received death out of 47 total death recommendations. * From 1995-2000, out of 682 capital cases, 324 (48%) went to blacks, and 71 (of 159) of those received death.
So, I made a mistake. Blacks killing whites will get death about 15 times more frequently than whites killing blacks.
There's something most people on the west of the Atlantic forget:
The First Amendment ends at the Rio Grande, halfway thru the Great Lakes, twelve miles out the Pacifc, Atlantic, or Gulf, the St Lawrence... in other words, at the border.
No other nation in the world has such an imperative protecting the right of those within to speak their minds.
Also, remember this little thing that happened in the 30's and 40's in Western Europe, where this ponce painter with a Charlie Chaplain-style moustache and an Italian with an aristocratic fetish took over and killed Those Who Were Different? Most of the people just went along with it, because speak up and you're dead. These anti-hate-speech laws are there because EVERYONE NOW ALIVE IN EUROPE knows how little it takes to get to that state. In both cases, the persons responcible were elected in troubled times.
Now in Europe, there is an increasing problem of immigration from the former Communist nations, Africa, and the MidEast. There are parties that oppose immingration, such as the former LPF in the Netherlands which won the election, but now has dissolved since the death of their leader, Pim Fortune (correct my spell if i'm wrong nl), an openly gay professor. This anti-immigrationist view is becoming popular, with high unempoyment and the immigrants as a great target with no political clout.
There are groups in the US that aren't too afraid to show themselves. Klansmen, Neo-Nazies, Aryans of all types. In Europe, such societies are fairly uncommon. But some of their views are in danger of emerging from slumber.
Before you talk about "intelligence against ignorance", in the US there are people who belive in Creation Science, a pseudoscience (because of it's basis on an infallible work; in science all is right until proven wrong, and infallible works cannot be proved or disproved) in which some Director comes up with a blueprint or a bad head cold - whatever - and voila, all is made; hate groups are sufficiently common that Muslims and Jews have had not too uncommon times of fear for their safety (after 11 Sep for the Muslims, 4 Jul 01(?) in Chicago for the Jews, after a shooting spree in a highly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood); police brutality and discrimination in justice for those of color (most of those on death row are blacks, and a black man killing a white is 10 times more likely to get life than a white killing a black).
One, I hate it when/. refuses a post just to use it from someone else later. Besides, my copy was much better than this.
Two: This is pure bullshit. IBM does something similar in San Fran with the "peace love Linux" logos and gets hurt for over $100,000 in fines. They did it in Chicago and they got assesed an $18,000 fine to the person who actually laid chalk on concrete and community service.
Why the hell did they only hit them up with a $50 fine? For a multibillion dollar corporation, headed by the world's richest man, this is lunacy. Per ad would have been better; a whopping huge fine would've been best.
Maybe Mayor Rich^H^H^H^HBloomberg didn't want to rock the boat and piss off a potential contributor.... then again, IIRC he _did_ run in '01 out of his pocket....
Gotta love this "security" claim. George Carlin had this right in '99, when he said that Americans (and British, and most other peoples) are willing to trade their convenience and their rights for 'security'.
Let's get this straight. They want IE, a browser *notorious* for the ability to be modified remotely without consent. Like the fucking Xupiter DLL I still haven't excised from my mom's system.. I had to re-install Windows to fix it. (I know that's the generic repair method. )
Contrast Mozilla, where you can prevent pop-ups, pop-unders, mindow resizing, or any other surreptitious content from getting through.
Hell, what about w3m, for God's sake!? That's my fav browser.. fast as hell and dog-ugly. Reminds me of myself.;)
It should be noted, though, that there what are known as "Good Samaritan" laws, named after the biblical parable, in most states that will protect one who is acting in good faith to administer emergency care.
If you are a doctor and see a guy suffering a heart attack, helping him won't expose you to liability because of this concept. If you act in good faith to save his life, and he still dies despite your care, you aren't at fault.
It depends on the state in which you are in, though I believe most have such a statute. The AMA should have such a list....
However, I believe precedent in almost every state will protect a giver of first aid from any legal exposure if aid is given.
IANALBIP1OL. Talk to a lawyer if you have any questions, because I ain't one and this is not given as legal advice. (Now I gotta cover my ass from legal exposure;)
For example: There are currently 600,000 lawsuits involving asbestos - alone - in the legal system. Older doctors are retiring sooner because they can't afford malpractice insurance.
The very threat of litigation is enough to shut most people up, especially when you have SLAPP suits (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) and when your organization has the obvious ability to win a DSW.
Don't count out distributed.net completely. They do have other projects, like the Optimal Goulomb Ruler project and the various blitz project which pop up now and then for other encryption technologies.
And IMHO, alien hunting is a waste of time, since we still don't really have a clue as to how they would communicate. I mean, if they are as advanced as we are, then that means that they would be at least hundreds of lightyears away from us (by consensus opinion) and therefore: their radio sigs would also be hundreds of years old and wouldn;t give us enough insight to them anyway. Besides, how do we know which freqs to check? How do we know that they don't allocate spectrum EXACTLY like we do?
I'm just going to go back to the Mersenne project for now. They have a huge check waiting for the next person to find a Mersenne prime.
The 11a protocol doesn't necessarily help the cell/wireless phone people. Their phones can operate in low tolerance conditions (after all, the human voice operates in 4000 Hz of spectrum, tops).
The FCC rules solely dictate the following:
1. The frequencies that are available for unrestricted use; 2. The maximum peak power that you can put out onto thsoe frequencies; 3. These unlicensed devices must not created and must accept harmful interference.
The 802.11a specification merely defines the radio frequencies used, the format of the transmission, and the procedures for downgrading and upgrading the given bandwidth.
Besides that, protocol development is expensive and/or time-consuming (and really overkill for a damned phone), and the wall problem is inherent to the frequency and power requirements. The only ways around the wall problem are either breaking the FCC rules or spending lots of money on multiple base stations or on enhanced protocol development.
Here's an exercise which should help clear this up.
Name everything you can think of that interferes with 2.4 GHz band.
Here goes... Wireless phones, microwave ovens, satellite TV, wireless broadband, medical equipment, cell phones.. There's a huge list because the frequency mixes high enough bandwidth and fairly good range at low power.
Now, let's try 5 GHz.
Short list, huh.
Not much is there yet because there's the wall problem. With computers and the 11a ability to down-negotiate bandwidth, it can be tolerated and handled. Not much else can do that.
..especially when you can use them to their fullest.
Other advantages of the 5 MHz frequency are that the same antenna you use for 2.4 can be used at almost double gain (as long as you're careful), since the wavelength is almost half as long you can use the same antenna. The thoroughput kills 11b by a factor of 5 to 1 at max.
Disadvantages... At 5 MHz, walls are a factor. Objects start to interefere more. So on a campsite, 11a will be amazing. In an office, you'll need repeaters. Hardware costs more right now, on par with what 11b cost at first.. then again, you can get 11b cards right now for under $50.. even Orinocos for under $60.
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I think we're going to succeed in pissing off the Macophiles in the crowd with this one. I like OS X as much as anyone, and its multipedia capabilities are utterly obscene, but for general apps most people don't need it.
To be fair, most people don't need the capabilities of any modern system. I'm going to get a 64-bit based laptop, and the only people I can think of who need such power are gamers, video/audio editors, and the highest of power users.
Linux based systems tend to hold the line on excess hardware bloat. You don't need to stay on an endless treadmill of forced hardware and sofware upgrades for support; a skilled tech can keep your setup running. Security is potentially higher, with proper configuration. And virii are pretty much a null threat.
Most office productivity can be handled with F/OSS analogues of Windows tools. Programs like OOo and FireFox, The Gimp and the myriad SQL databases do a great deal of work.
I agree. Most /.ers probably have multiple systems, especially older ones running a clone of Un*x. I know I don't throw away a systm until it disintegrates in my hands. (In my flat, I have three systems, two of which are mine and actually do work, on all the time. Electric bill's pretty high. Would be higher if I ever used my minitower's monitor. Would be lower if my bro knew how to TURN HIS OFF. )
Oddly enough, I was looking up the numbers, and we are getting there. I mean, a lot of us are using laptops, which run on an amp or two, rather than the 400 watt supplies to the minitower and an extra four amps for the display. You can get refrigerators that run on less than a half-amp per hour, and LCD and plasma displays absolutely sip the juice compared to a CRT.
Problem is, as every one of us drooling over an Alienware or Voodoo rig will attest, the energy-efficient models tend to cost more than the 'leaky' ones. A fluorescent bulb that uses 14 watts is brighter and ten times pricier than a 60-watt incandescent. (aside: any suggestions for good custom laptop makers? read and reply to my journal)
However, right now, this is still not viable as the best way to run a home. In conjuction with other alternative power sources, like wind (as a starter for a wind turbine, maybe?) or as a nighttime supplement for solar, perhaps. It could add to the power of a mini-hydro station. In those events, you could become a mini-power station and feed power back to the grid at a marginal profit.
Something I've never understood: SoCal is mainly arid, over-sunned desert. Why don't they just hook up solar cells for power, pump seawater from the Pacific, use the juice for electrolysis, and have both instant hydrogen and instant O2 for breathing? Help two problems at once!
This is not a trivial problem.
Though many of us - myself included - would not mind a peek into the collective mindshare of the Evil One, one cannot look into the abysss and return unchanged.
Sorry. Debated last night with philosophy majors. They won, six shots to five black and tans.
To translate it bluntly: This is still copyrighted code, owned by Microsoft. Duping even their "badly-written routines" into an inocuous place may lead to an SCO-esque attack in the near future , claiming violations in certain filesystem and mounting routines, or possibly something involving Samba, or a myriad of other wincompatibility issues.
It feels like a tactic that may be conceived by some bright bulb in MS Legal to bring conflict to the competition, or at least stifle development past current kernels.
I am starting to get the shakes that I get in a poker game when my all-in bet is called when I have pocket kings. (Last time that happened, the opponent had A-J suited. He flopped aces-up. I swore loudly.)
I am not a lawyer. I play one online, and I'm studying for the patent bar, but I don't pretend to dish out legal advice. Still, if I go all-in, I have the goods.
I am about to say something highly flameworthy, followed up by something not.
The flamebait is here: I would not mind one of these laptops purely on aesthetics. I *want* a laptop that sticks out from the throngs without having to paper the backs with a ton of stickers. I *want* people to notice it when I flip it up and start to work, or play a DVD.
The serious bit: The specs are fairly good. It includes a 802.11g card, DVD+-RW drive, 60 GiB removable HD, 1/2 GB RAM, AMD XP-M 2500 processor, 15" screen, ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 with 128 MB video card, and include coordinated optical mice. Those are not trivial specifications. Granted, it ain't top of the line. I know some gamers that are drooling at the 3d potential of this machine, and for most other work this should be able to handle the load.
And, there are a few people converting these heathen laptops to the One True Path, a little at a time (first link is painfully detailed hardware, second is travails of conversion)
Oh yeah, and the price should be mentioned: They are on par with 12" TiBooks.
Framing this thread would well exceed the $100 budget.
Even if one omits the trolls.
At least _someone_ gets what I mean. I should've written 'software libre' to get around the confusion, but I had reasonably assumed that ppl would get the difference between free software and closed source.
In my little corner of the universe, it's a Venn diagram consisting of two circles, one representing the closed-source world, one representing software libre. The two don't intersect at ANY point. There is no overlap.
Reason I thought that it would work for the OSSers is because I thought I read back in the day an article essentially saying that this was specifically an anti-Microsoft lawsuit and that the people don't have a beef with other smaller targets. Once you cook an 800 lb gorilla, you typically don't need to eat a couple of guppies.
At least for a while.
Call me an optimist, but I have a strong feel in my right gut that Eolas will provide dual licensure for the patent, similar to Trolltech and Qt, where free software (BSD, GPL, Artistic license) gains free use and closed-source has to pay a "reasonable" fee.
Reason I think this is that (a) legally, it's a pain in the colon for lawyers to sue open sourcers; (b) it's horrible PR, just look at that company in Utah. Then again, lawyers tend to not give a flaming f--- about reasonable measures.
And to be clear, I hope to high heaven that they get as much of the $5 x 10^8 they can, because UC could _really_ use that cash to defray what the state's screwing them out of.
just don't mod me down, please.
Babylon 5: Certain alien species, most notably the Pak'ma'ra and Vree (aliens who actually fly flying saucers and get sued for abduction of someone's ancestor), can't speak English at all and rely on sufficiently advanced translation devices. (You can still hear the original speech, though.) Because Earth is a big power, most aliens doing business on B5 speak English, occasionally broken (Drazi). All aliens, though, speak their own tongues and even the humans speak (or reference others speaking) foreign languages, most notably Russian, French, and Hebrew.
B5: Ships take time to slow and turn, the notable exceptions being Minbari, Vorlon and Shadow vessels due to magneto-gravitational drives (stretch, but even they prefer slow turns to fast ones) and Starfuries, which have retrorockets at all the axial points and a pilot at the center, thus negating G-force impacts. (NASA said that the Starfury was the best design they could think of for a "space forklift".)
Also, B5 rotates for gravity. The best way to view the station is as a tower rather than on its side, since the right-hand-rule for rotating objects shows that they exert a force perpendicular to the spin, hence 'gravity'. However, it exerts a true gravity in the neighborhood of
JMS also came up with a reasonable answer for the FTL question in hyperspace, which roughly translates theory-wise into a wormhole. Theory is it can be done, practice will take a while. (Of note, though, is that the "warp" idea where one distorts local spacetime to alter the local definition of a meter and a second to move ftl relative to normal space is also theoretically possible.)
Little details are also added, like the fact that little critters make it up to space (insects stuck with food), food gone bad (even alien food) tends to lead to sick humans, medicine can't fix every owie, and you have to board a ship to steal anything. And the asshole gene will survive for a long while.
Even the storage medium of choice, a data crystal, has been talked about here (a holographic storage system).
Of course that show stretches, but most everything he shows can reasonably be seen from at least bleeding edge R & D. Granted, an FTL phonecall and going to Mars in a few hours are still very far away, and a lot of the alien stuff is highly alien, but at least as far as humans go the show has a real good handle on things.
If you are in los Estados Unidos and have cable, you can see it on Sci-Fi channel at 9 AM. (Or, more accurately, you can tape it and watch it insead of Enterprise. ;) If you can start tomorrow (15 Apr) do it. "Believers" is an episode which will kick you in the head.
Otherwise, probably your best bet is to look up The Lurker's Guide, and IIRC they have a guide to where it is elsewhere in the world.
What about .hack//SIGN? That's an amazing, geekish series they show at midnight eastern on Saturdays.
Essentially, this show takes place in an immersive Everquest-on-whale-steroids called "The World" and follows a PC (Player Character) named Tsukasa who can't log out. Granted, it loses something in the dubbing, but it still is quite kickass.
..at least on the upside, they won't be copy-protected... ...on the downside, though, they'll run $50 and be poor acoustically....
(ed's note: This proposal is an alpha draft. )
Guidelines for cyberattacks against FRIENDLY nations:
1. Do not attack from known US sites. (For example, hacking Britain from a dot-mil is a no-no.)
2. Only minor defacements permitted. (Minor is defined as "changing the official statements to support US policy".)
3. Play with foreign intelligence services. And please, TRY to win guys!
Policies for cyberattacks against NEUTRAL nations (e.g. Switzerland, Vatican City):
To hell with them. They don't care.
Policies for cyberattacks against HOSTILE and ROGUE nations:
1. Bomb the telecommunications facilities, power plants, nuclear facilities, and chicken farms (can't be too careful).
2. Repeat until dead^H^H^H^Hsystem failure.
Re: Linux-friendly: They will help a "nixer get on the network. The modems are straight, no PPPoE. They have Linux-specific setup guides. They even have an rpmfind server.
My package is 1.5 down, 384 up, with two statics, a shell, and 56k nationwide dialup for when/if i'm away from home for about $90.
Of course, YMMV.
I moved into a new apartment recently, and before I did anything I checked out DSL. Speakeasy.net may not have been the cheapest option, but they provided multiple statics and no real restrictions on use (a one gb news cap gratis, no running authoritative dns servers, etc, read the link.)
When I called them up before I had my phone line installed, I asked them the money question, and the answer made me go with them.
THEY ARE LINUX FRIENDLY.
I've been satisfied with their service, which I've had for the past four months. As far as dealing with the baby bells: the only bad thing is that you have to stick with one for basic phone service. As long as you don't dial much and don't tack on extra "services", it's cheap (around $13-16 a month). Anti-Tech.. err.. SBC hasn't given me any grief over it. And the speeds are fast and fairly reliable.
I have had no problems. I have no complaints. I mean, 1.5/384 and clueful tech support. What's not to like?
Most people cared only about one thing: the hunger in their bellies, which they (rightly) blamed on the Versailles treaty. The treaty forced reparations that bankrupted the country. In that environment - high unemployment, insane inflation, food shortages - the fascist pledges of food and work were appetizing. The strings attached may not have been important to Dieter and Katerine Publische, when the much more important issue of living was at stake.
These statements are at least based on history. Psychology isn't my strong suit. However, in light of Rememberance Day, I felt I should clarify what I meant, and make things clearer.
Quotes from ACLU:
* The race of the victim is often a decisive factor in capital sentencing decisions. Almost all death sentences in this country - 81 percent - involve white victims. 174 black people have been executed for killing a white person, but only 12 white people have been executed for killing a black person.
* There is a double standard for rich and poor. The quality of legal representation is a better predictor of whether or not someone will be sentenced to death than the facts of the crime. The quality of legal representation depends on whether or not you can hire a lawyer. Almost all people on death row could not afford to hire a qualified attorney.
Stats from the USDOJ, so you don't say I'm biased:
* From 1988-1994, out of 52 defendants in capital cases in the federal courts, 39 (75%) were black, and 34 of those received death out of 47 total death recommendations.
* From 1995-2000, out of 682 capital cases, 324 (48%) went to blacks, and 71 (of 159) of those received death.
So, I made a mistake. Blacks killing whites will get death about 15 times more frequently than whites killing blacks.
There's something most people on the west of the Atlantic forget:
The First Amendment ends at the Rio Grande, halfway thru the Great Lakes, twelve miles out the Pacifc, Atlantic, or Gulf, the St Lawrence... in other words, at the border.
No other nation in the world has such an imperative protecting the right of those within to speak their minds.
Also, remember this little thing that happened in the 30's and 40's in Western Europe, where this ponce painter with a Charlie Chaplain-style moustache and an Italian with an aristocratic fetish took over and killed Those Who Were Different? Most of the people just went along with it, because speak up and you're dead. These anti-hate-speech laws are there because EVERYONE NOW ALIVE IN EUROPE knows how little it takes to get to that state. In both cases, the persons responcible were elected in troubled times.
Now in Europe, there is an increasing problem of immigration from the former Communist nations, Africa, and the MidEast. There are parties that oppose immingration, such as the former LPF in the Netherlands which won the election, but now has dissolved since the death of their leader, Pim Fortune (correct my spell if i'm wrong nl), an openly gay professor. This anti-immigrationist view is becoming popular, with high unempoyment and the immigrants as a great target with no political clout.
There are groups in the US that aren't too afraid to show themselves. Klansmen, Neo-Nazies, Aryans of all types. In Europe, such societies are fairly uncommon. But some of their views are in danger of emerging from slumber.
Before you talk about "intelligence against ignorance", in the US there are people who belive in Creation Science, a pseudoscience (because of it's basis on an infallible work; in science all is right until proven wrong, and infallible works cannot be proved or disproved) in which some Director comes up with a blueprint or a bad head cold - whatever - and voila, all is made; hate groups are sufficiently common that Muslims and Jews have had not too uncommon times of fear for their safety (after 11 Sep for the Muslims, 4 Jul 01(?) in Chicago for the Jews, after a shooting spree in a highly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood); police brutality and discrimination in justice for those of color (most of those on death row are blacks, and a black man killing a white is 10 times more likely to get life than a white killing a black).
spewer of truth, opinion, and lies
d.valued
One, I hate it when /. refuses a post just to use it from someone else later. Besides, my copy was much better than this.
Two: This is pure bullshit. IBM does something similar in San Fran with the "peace love Linux" logos and gets hurt for over $100,000 in fines. They did it in Chicago and they got assesed an $18,000 fine to the person who actually laid chalk on concrete and community service.
Why the hell did they only hit them up with a $50 fine? For a multibillion dollar corporation, headed by the world's richest man, this is lunacy. Per ad would have been better; a whopping huge fine would've been best.
Maybe Mayor Rich^H^H^H^HBloomberg didn't want to rock the boat and piss off a potential contributor.... then again, IIRC he _did_ run in '01 out of his pocket....
Gotta love this "security" claim. George Carlin had this right in '99, when he said that Americans (and British, and most other peoples) are willing to trade their convenience and their rights for 'security'.
;)
Let's get this straight. They want IE, a browser *notorious* for the ability to be modified remotely without consent. Like the fucking Xupiter DLL I still haven't excised from my mom's system.. I had to re-install Windows to fix it. (I know that's the generic repair method. )
Contrast Mozilla, where you can prevent pop-ups, pop-unders, mindow resizing, or any other surreptitious content from getting through.
Hell, what about w3m, for God's sake!? That's my fav browser.. fast as hell and dog-ugly. Reminds me of myself.
It should be noted, though, that there what are known as "Good Samaritan" laws, named after the biblical parable, in most states that will protect one who is acting in good faith to administer emergency care.
;)
If you are a doctor and see a guy suffering a heart attack, helping him won't expose you to liability because of this concept. If you act in good faith to save his life, and he still dies despite your care, you aren't at fault.
It depends on the state in which you are in, though I believe most have such a statute. The AMA should have such a list....
However, I believe precedent in almost every state will protect a giver of first aid from any legal exposure if aid is given.
IANALBIP1OL. Talk to a lawyer if you have any questions, because I ain't one and this is not given as legal advice. (Now I gotta cover my ass from legal exposure
It's insane how litigeous America is nowadays.
For example: There are currently 600,000 lawsuits involving asbestos - alone - in the legal system. Older doctors are retiring sooner because they can't afford malpractice insurance.
The very threat of litigation is enough to shut most people up, especially when you have SLAPP suits (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) and when your organization has the obvious ability to win a DSW.
Don't count out distributed.net completely. They do have other projects, like the Optimal Goulomb Ruler project and the various blitz project which pop up now and then for other encryption technologies.
And IMHO, alien hunting is a waste of time, since we still don't really have a clue as to how they would communicate. I mean, if they are as advanced as we are, then that means that they would be at least hundreds of lightyears away from us (by consensus opinion) and therefore: their radio sigs would also be hundreds of years old and wouldn;t give us enough insight to them anyway. Besides, how do we know which freqs to check? How do we know that they don't allocate spectrum EXACTLY like we do?
I'm just going to go back to the Mersenne project for now. They have a huge check waiting for the next person to find a Mersenne prime.
Besides that: There's always RC5-72....
Good job picking it up. I didn't catch that little gaff until AFTER I clicked 'submit'.
The 11a protocol doesn't necessarily help the cell/wireless phone people. Their phones can operate in low tolerance conditions (after all, the human voice operates in 4000 Hz of spectrum, tops).
The FCC rules solely dictate the following:
1. The frequencies that are available for unrestricted use;
2. The maximum peak power that you can put out onto thsoe frequencies;
3. These unlicensed devices must not created and must accept harmful interference.
The 802.11a specification merely defines the radio frequencies used, the format of the transmission, and the procedures for downgrading and upgrading the given bandwidth.
Besides that, protocol development is expensive and/or time-consuming (and really overkill for a damned phone), and the wall problem is inherent to the frequency and power requirements. The only ways around the wall problem are either breaking the FCC rules or spending lots of money on multiple base stations or on enhanced protocol development.
Here's an exercise which should help clear this up.
Name everything you can think of that interferes with 2.4 GHz band.
Here goes... Wireless phones, microwave ovens, satellite TV, wireless broadband, medical equipment, cell phones.. There's a huge list because the frequency mixes high enough bandwidth and fairly good range at low power.
Now, let's try 5 GHz.
Short list, huh.
Not much is there yet because there's the wall problem. With computers and the 11a ability to down-negotiate bandwidth, it can be tolerated and handled. Not much else can do that.
..especially when you can use them to their fullest.
Other advantages of the 5 MHz frequency are that the same antenna you use for 2.4 can be used at almost double gain (as long as you're careful), since the wavelength is almost half as long you can use the same antenna. The thoroughput kills 11b by a factor of 5 to 1 at max.
Disadvantages... At 5 MHz, walls are a factor. Objects start to interefere more. So on a campsite, 11a will be amazing. In an office, you'll need repeaters. Hardware costs more right now, on par with what 11b cost at first.. then again, you can get 11b cards right now for under $50.. even Orinocos for under $60.