Cosmodrome is correct. It's just a name given by the Russians to their launch facilities. The Baikonur Cosmodrome is their oldest and most famous, their equivalent to our Kennedy Space Center.
Not only that, but ethernet data traffic can be read by someone else on the network, and wi-fi traffic can be monitored by someone even without wires.
In other news, experts have revealed that water is scarily wet, the sun is frighteningly hot, and occasionally rain terrifyingly falls from the sky. We'll interrupt your surfing with more news as it unfolds. Meanwhile, please continue to tremble in fear of the obvious.
There are plenty of reasons why dowsing might appear to work so often. The world is full of clues, to someone who knows how to read them. A dowser probably picks up on them subconsciously. And a scam artist may pick up on them consciously, but has no reason to be truthful to you as to how he knows.
So how do you find a water pipe, when you don't "know" where the water pipe is? Well, if you've worked in construction all your life, you will learn things about house construction and plumbing. The sewer pipe usually exits near the front of the building facing the street, often in a line perpendicular to the street from the vent stack on the roof. You know that sewer pipes are built with as few bends as possible, as bends cause constrictions and blockage. And the water pipe will frequently parallel the sewer pipe, because you know that plumbers rarely want to dig two trenches when they only have to dig one. So you drive up to the place, your brain picks up on the vent stack on the roof (but doesn't tell your conscious self,) and you start witching for the pipes. Your subconscious does the rest.
Or out in the middle of an open field. Digging a trench for a pipe disturbs the ground. When a trench is backfilled, a small hump of dirt remains, but gets flattened out over time as the dirt is compacted. Sometimes the hump remains high over time, and sometimes the dirt is washed away before it's settled, leaving a slight depression. Some humans can detect minuscule changes in slope with their feet, and again this could happen without the dowser realizing it. Or the ground cover can reveal the presence of a dug-and-refilled trench, with less mature plants over the trench, or a slight change in the density of plant growth because of the digging, or plants that grow slightly differently due to the change in soil makeup beneath. There could be a difference in that weeds may be more or less prevalent over the refilled trench. Your feet can feel all of these differences. Cuts in the treeline at a distance can give visual clues, too.
A good friend is a pilot who has flown pipeline inspection flights, and he says they're easy to follow, even without the little yellow signs. Ground cover and erosion patterns give them away, even under a field that I personally know has been tilled annually for at least 27 years since the pipeline was buried. If you doubt me, go check a google satellite map of any local pipeline you're familiar with -- you will find an unnaturally straight line cutting through fields, passing under roads, disturbing trees, brush, and altering creekbeds. Yet if you were walking across that field, you'd likely miss all those clues.
Dowsers may be attuned to the differences without being aware that they are. But there's no magic behind dowsing. Sensitivity, observational skills, and experience are the really simple explanations. There's not much reason to "dig around" for a paranormal answer when there are perfectly logical physical reasons.
My father in law showed me how he uses dowsing rods. He takes hefty copper wire (about 8 gauge or so,) cuts it into two pieces each about half a meter long, bends a right angle in each roughly in the middle, and then walks around with one held very loosely in each hand with the wires pointing forward as he walks. When he crosses a water pipe, or electrical wire, or whatever he's looking for, the wires in his hands swing together.
He believes this with all his heart.
So one day I had him do it over a stretch of ground we both knew to have some old pipes buried under it. And then I had him repeat it, blindfolded. He couldn't hit the same spot twice. Not even close. (The pipes were indeed buried roughly where he said they were when his eyes were open.)
I tried to explain to him that he was simply remembering where he had buried the pipes, and that it was his subconscious mind that was causing the wires to cross, but he really didn't want to hear that. He'd rather believe in dowsing.
We were also using both instant messaging and email in the late 1970s. This was on teletypes connected to a mainframe. It was great as a social device, but it really took all our concentration. Due to the nature of the hardware and connection, we never had multiple processes working simultaneously, at least from the user's perspective.
Modern IM using asynchronous interruption (cell phones or separate clients) makes the current experience "different." I can choose to ignore my IM client much easier than I could when it was my only running application, synchronous in nature. The old client was much more like a conversation, one which you could end by disconnecting. Current clients are much more intrusive, and people expect more responsiveness out of you at all hours of the day.
Don't worry about the concrete blocks being "wasteful". Construction firms use them all the time as weights, counterweights and for stabilizing temporary construction work. I'm sure these were just some from their stock, and were not cast specifically for being "temporary rope bridge pillars".
The problem is that the amount of randomness from any of these sources is testably small.
A simple example would be something like one of the games we were all taught to program as kids. The first line was always something like 10 RANDOMIZE TIMER. Well, if you know the program was run at 8:19, the value of TIMER was likely somewhere between 29940 and 29999. It may be random enough for MONOPOLY.BAS, but it's not much of a challenge to try all 60 values. Entropically speaking, time of day is good enough for only a couple of bits, no more.
Let's say you had a message from DOMAIN\JOHN timestamped 2007-11-15 08:19:02, and you know I come in at about 8:00 every morning and turn on my computer. You can probably make some educated guesses about the values of GetLocalTime() and GetTickCount(). You know my user name. Process ids on Windows are sequentially assigned as of boot up, and probably wouldn't vary by more than a hundred, especially for a creature of habit. Memory and disk space are also likely to be in a similar range, so checking my desktop on another day might reveal some good guesses for those ranges.
All those values plus a few others are used by the Windows pseudo-random number generator, as revealed earlier this week. Sure, they mix in some harder-to-guess values, but who knows how easy or hard they might be to discover, especially with access to the hard drive? If you use only 32 bits of entropy to seed a cryptographic routine to emit 128 bytes of random numbers, that's still only 32 bits of guessing that needs to happen.
You obviously have two choices: sign it or don't. I'm guessing "don't" probably comes with the spectre of termination. But there are things you could try.
You could modify the agreement by striking out the "or within six months thereafter" clauses and sign it. There's a chance that it'll be sent only to a paper-stamper who is responsible for checking signatures off a list, and he might not see your modification. Of course it's more likely your boss is on the hook for collecting signatures, and he'll note your changes. You could try convincing him that the agreement is unfair, and that your changes are just.
You could try ignoring it. See if they follow through on their threats.
You could talk to your coworkers and organize yourselves to collectively say "we're not signing this." If an entire group said "no" you'd scare the crap out of management. Of course you'd likely all be labeled "troublemakers" or "union organizers" and be lined up for rapid replacement.
Or you could shut up and sign it. Unless you've got another job in your back pocket, the market's kind of thin these days.
Anytime that you know the format, or partial content of the original document (such as knowing it's XML and hence will have the same opening and closing tags, and presumably a DTD declaration) you make life much much easier for those attempting to crack it.
Two things: Kerckhoff's principle states that the security of a routine must come from only the secrecy of the key, not the secrecy of the algorithm and certainly not the secrecy of the original document. "Known plaintext" and "chosen plaintext" attacks are commonly used to attempt to break a key. The second thing to note is: "cracking" in the sense you're using it is applicable only to encryption, not hashing.
Regardless of what hashing routine you're using, the attacker always has the original plaintext document. That's the point of a hash: it's a tamper-evident mechanism that should prove the document hasn't been altered. So the reason secure hashes are needed is to make sure digital signatures are secure.
Think about how digital signatures work: I have a plaintext document to sign, so I calculate a hash of the document. I encrypt the hash with my RSA private key, and ship it with the plaintext document. To verify that I signed it, you calculate a hash of the document yourself. You then use my public RSA key to decrypt the signature, and out pops my original hash value. If the two are the same, you can trust that my private key was used to generate the signature.
The problem with a weak hash is if an attacker can replace my document with a document of his own design that yields the same hash value, he can put a copy of my signature on his document and claim I signed it. This is a "collision attack", and is exactly the nature of the breaks into SHA-1 the Chinese researchers discovered.
While this probably isn't much of an issue for a digital signature on a Word document claiming that I invented a better mousetrap, automated signature validation is critical to SSL security and digitally signed code. If I create a certificate that has my own public key on it and put microsoft.com in the name field, and stick a copy of a legitimate Verisign signature on the certificate, I could fool any computer system into believing that Microsoft has granted approval to use my key.
It's my very slightly green side showing. SETI@home is a huge waste of electricity. And when I say huge, I mean really really big. I'm not worried about the cost: people should be free to donate whatever kind of money they want. But this isn't about donating money, it's about burning coal to generate electricity to do the work.
I figured out the cost for running distributed.net several years ago, and it was amazing. The difference between my computer sitting idle and my computer running the CPU at 100% is 60 watt-hours, or 1,440 extra watts per day. Scaling that number up to the amount of work I was able to perform in an hour, dividing out the amount of work that had to be done in order to crack one of the distributed.net challenge keys, turned into an ungodly amount of wasted power.
So how much has been donated to SETI@home? According to BOINC stats, 19,593,239,480 BOINC credits have been granted as of a few days ago. Since one credit represents the computations performed in 1/100th of a day on a reference machine, we can ballpark that 195,932,394 CPU days have been donated. As I said, my computer uses 1,440 watts per day under load, but let's assume it's only half as efficient as the average or reference machine; so that's about 720 watts per day. Times the credits, that's 141,071,323,680 watts (141 gigawatts.) According to the DoE, one pound of coal generates 926 watt-hours of electricity. So they've burned 152,344,842 pounds (76,000 tons) of coal, or 760 standard 100-ton cars -- that's almost seven 115-car trains of coal.
Put another way, that's 182,400 tons of CO2 that was pumped into the atmosphere on behalf of SETI. (Take that, Kyoto Protocol!) On the Chicago Climate Exchange, that'd cost you $364,000 in carbon credits. And that's just the BOINC figures, and not inclusive of the energy burned by SETI@home clients prior to the advent of BOINC.
Do you still wish to maintain that all the energy and waste and pollution is worth it, for a potential incidental invention? At least set your machine to folding@home, or the WCG, or some project that will produce results that might help the human race in tangible ways. You can still dream about E.T., just don't kill my planet looking for him.
Yes, but as you point out the research on grid computing has moved far beyond SETI now. The ground is broken.
WCG is a much better use of resources than SETI, simply because the human benefits are tangible. Even if SETI were to pick up alien signals from a thousand light years away, what could we do with that information? It's not like we could communicate with them! The most we could hope for would be to pick up the alien equivalent of "I Love Lucy", or the presidential race between Glaaxnar and Veemuur (I know, the mods always mark you "-1, troll" every time you mention Veemuur, but I'm making a point, dammit!) Sure, it'd be the stuff of movies, novels, and late night TV shows, it'd spark the imagination in new directions, it might even generate new religions or alienate old ones. But it's not going to cure cancer, or show us how to build a spaceship anymore than their viewing of Star Trek reruns would help them (Galaxy Quest was fiction, people.)
We don't keep using Marconi's original transmitter because it was noisy and inefficient compared to modern radios. SETI has shown how to make a volunteer-run computing grid viable, and WCG has carried that to the next level. Let's say thanks to SETI, pay our respects, and move on to more valuable use of our energy.
My ability to fix or not fix the product is beside the point. The original design is that of "destroy and discard", with a fake feel-good recycling aspect so they can print green recycling arrows on the box (and remain RoHS compliant.) But it's primarily designed to be wasteful, so the average user will spend another $100 on a replacement.
I think the Battery Directive should be expanded to require all batteries (rechargeable or not) to be end-user replaceable whenever possible, with exceptions only for physical safety -- never simply for engineering, manufacturing or marketing convenience. If they're concerned about water (as a toothbrush maker should be), then the battery replacement kit could contain a tube of silicone sealant and new o-rings -- making a tube leak-proof is actually a solved problem many people call "plumbing".
Could you please write a coherent statement that distinguishes between "a [concrete covered] barren gray wasteland that resembles an asteroid-pocked version of Houston, Texas" and "Houston, Texas"? 'Cause I'm having trouble telling the two apart.
A consumer item that really made me mad in this regard was a Sonicare rechargeable toothbrush. Once the battery stopped holding a charge long enough to brush my teeth, I decided to replace it. Looking at the manual I found very clear detailed instructions on how to twist or cut off the rubber seals, break the plastic carrier, and pull out the plastic-bound rechargeable cell module for recycling. The entire process is specifically designed to destroy a working product, preventing the end user from replacing a weak battery and forcing them to purchase a new machine.
Yet they tout these recycling instructions as if we were all somehow being "green" by throwing our useful products away in two pieces instead of one.
This opposed to the "wack of cash" that Target received to dump HD ala Sony?
Really? I find that hard to believe, Max. While I loathe Sony, I don't think they can buy the whole market that easily. And they'd have to pay off a lot more companies than Target: Best Buy, WalM*rt, Dixons, etc.
About 30 seconds of surfing tells me that if Target received cash from Sony to dump HD-DVD, then it was money poorly spent by Sony: Target.com carries two HD-DVD players for $299 and $249 (a Toshiba and a 'Venturer'?) and they offer 218 HD-DVD titles, while they carry only one Sony Blu-Ray player for $499, and 237 Blu-Ray titles. (Apparently that player is marked to the people who don't want to spend $499 for a PS3.)
According to the descriptions, they do not carry any of the three dedicated players in stock at their stores, only on line. The PS3 is for sale in the stores, of course, as is the XBox add-on HD-DVD drive, and many HD movies in both formats.
You might want to check your tinfoil hat. Apparently it's failing to block irrational Sony fanboi conspiracies.
It's my form of protest. Why feed the troll that's become slashdot?
My view (different from yours, quite obviously) is that if I'm going to spend my time here, I'm going to participate fully. If I thought it was too troll-infested, republican-infested, democrat-infested, Microsoft-infested, SCO-infested, or even Apple-infested, then I'd quit reading. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of each, but none of these groups has risen to dominate discussion to the point of driving me away. It obviously has enough appeal to keep me coming back, so I figure it's worth my time to participate, and worth my money to subscribe.
I don't understand why you wouldn't submit interesting stories.
the site has lost value
? This site has value because of interesting stories, where I define interesting as relevant, nerdy, and possibly controversial. I'm not saying just any old pro-Microsoft story would fly -- there are thousands of fanboi sites who would host it, and it's pretty much not on-topic for this forum -- but even M.S. can do something slashdottingly worthy once in a while.
Please, submit them. It's not like you'd be spanked for it.
Oh, and I have to agree with you about the trolls, too -- they injected a lot of humor, and certainly helped build the site to what it is today. I come back for the memes as much as anything. (Hot grits, anyone?) And the trolls certainly were never on the same par as casino or link spam. I always mentally considered them right on the edge of the discussion threshold, somewhere above the "Me too!"s and just below the people I disagreed with. But moderators have never really agreed with me anyway.
And if you ever find a way back from never-mod-again land, please drop me a line! It's been five frakkin' years, Slashdot. Grow up.
I don't encourage other people to install AdBlock and especially not to subscribe to other people's blocking lists, and I'd encourage you not to either.
The reason is simple: the more AdBlock is adopted, the more incentive advertisers will have to find ways to defeat it.
This happened to us with spam filters. Years ago, spammers were lazy and stupid. I was able to block almost all spam using regexps. Once regexp-based spam-blocking products became used by ISPs, however, spammers had to find new ways to defeat them. They used alternate spellings, alternate Unicode encodings, well-formed forged headers, embedded images with literary quotes for message bodies, etc. They became almost impossible to block using the simple tools, and the more complex tools (Bayesian filters) are now throwing away ham with the spam.
If you help "spread AdBlock" you're hastening its demise as a useful tool for the rest of us. Be selfish. Enjoy the benefits of ad blocking for as long as possible.
really only useful in a limited sense. Assuming whoever steals it hooks it in to the campus network or doesn't know how to spoof it.
Which is still really useful in practice. Thieves are generally both stupid and lazy, they're usually criminals of opportunity who will take only an easy-to-steal unlocked device if they think nobody's looking, and (don't know how|won't bother) to cover their tracks. A fairly large fraction of these thefts are likely to be resolved quickly, and in a university environment expulsion is a pretty good tactic to help reduce repeat offenders.
Of course you can't count on MAC addresses to solve every single laptop theft, but if you can recover more than about 3% of them you're still doing better than the police.
The fix to that is to gain the support of security initiatives from the CEO himself. It may take a pair of big brass ones to ask the CEO to wear a cheap plastic tethered ID card, but if he has any brains at all he'll understand why it's required of him. When the CEO himself has to badge in, the guards know they have the right to stop absolutely everyone who doesn't.
And the principle of "Monkey See, Monkey Do" ensures all the sycophants will fall in line quickly.
The wiring's definitely not at fault in my case, nor is the internet traffic. I made sure that the cable modem was on the first splitter as the cable entered the house, and I used a good quality high-bandwidth splitter provided by the cable guy. The other side of the splitter terminates in a powered amplifier. My download speeds are consistently excellent, and the modem usually reports 7mbps connections.
And the house's bandwidth isn't an issue dealing with my current problem, as all the rest of the equipment was unplugged during the calls I was testing. My house is set up so the Vonage-provided router is the first device connected to the cable modem, and the POTS wires come from it. I've contacted Vonage and they've identified the line as a business fax line (it shows up on my router's status, and I assume that's a QoS related setting.) So with as-good-as-I-can-make-them conditions, we get mostly-OK voice, and lousy fax performance. Everybody's done everything they can, and still we have some numbers we can't successfully fax to.
And if I start up Azureus, well, forget the voice too.
Slashdot Mirror
Cosmodrome is correct. It's just a name given by the Russians to their launch facilities. The Baikonur Cosmodrome is their oldest and most famous, their equivalent to our Kennedy Space Center.
In other news, experts have revealed that water is scarily wet, the sun is frighteningly hot, and occasionally rain terrifyingly falls from the sky. We'll interrupt your surfing with more news as it unfolds. Meanwhile, please continue to tremble in fear of the obvious.
It sounds like you were way more than knee-deep long before you actually put the shovel into the ground... :-)
So how do you find a water pipe, when you don't "know" where the water pipe is? Well, if you've worked in construction all your life, you will learn things about house construction and plumbing. The sewer pipe usually exits near the front of the building facing the street, often in a line perpendicular to the street from the vent stack on the roof. You know that sewer pipes are built with as few bends as possible, as bends cause constrictions and blockage. And the water pipe will frequently parallel the sewer pipe, because you know that plumbers rarely want to dig two trenches when they only have to dig one. So you drive up to the place, your brain picks up on the vent stack on the roof (but doesn't tell your conscious self,) and you start witching for the pipes. Your subconscious does the rest.
Or out in the middle of an open field. Digging a trench for a pipe disturbs the ground. When a trench is backfilled, a small hump of dirt remains, but gets flattened out over time as the dirt is compacted. Sometimes the hump remains high over time, and sometimes the dirt is washed away before it's settled, leaving a slight depression. Some humans can detect minuscule changes in slope with their feet, and again this could happen without the dowser realizing it. Or the ground cover can reveal the presence of a dug-and-refilled trench, with less mature plants over the trench, or a slight change in the density of plant growth because of the digging, or plants that grow slightly differently due to the change in soil makeup beneath. There could be a difference in that weeds may be more or less prevalent over the refilled trench. Your feet can feel all of these differences. Cuts in the treeline at a distance can give visual clues, too.
A good friend is a pilot who has flown pipeline inspection flights, and he says they're easy to follow, even without the little yellow signs. Ground cover and erosion patterns give them away, even under a field that I personally know has been tilled annually for at least 27 years since the pipeline was buried. If you doubt me, go check a google satellite map of any local pipeline you're familiar with -- you will find an unnaturally straight line cutting through fields, passing under roads, disturbing trees, brush, and altering creekbeds. Yet if you were walking across that field, you'd likely miss all those clues.
Dowsers may be attuned to the differences without being aware that they are. But there's no magic behind dowsing. Sensitivity, observational skills, and experience are the really simple explanations. There's not much reason to "dig around" for a paranormal answer when there are perfectly logical physical reasons.
Q: What's the difference between a hifi salesman and a used car salesman?
A: The used car salesman knows when he's lying.
He believes this with all his heart.
So one day I had him do it over a stretch of ground we both knew to have some old pipes buried under it. And then I had him repeat it, blindfolded. He couldn't hit the same spot twice. Not even close. (The pipes were indeed buried roughly where he said they were when his eyes were open.)
I tried to explain to him that he was simply remembering where he had buried the pipes, and that it was his subconscious mind that was causing the wires to cross, but he really didn't want to hear that. He'd rather believe in dowsing.
Modern IM using asynchronous interruption (cell phones or separate clients) makes the current experience "different." I can choose to ignore my IM client much easier than I could when it was my only running application, synchronous in nature. The old client was much more like a conversation, one which you could end by disconnecting. Current clients are much more intrusive, and people expect more responsiveness out of you at all hours of the day.
Don't worry about the concrete blocks being "wasteful". Construction firms use them all the time as weights, counterweights and for stabilizing temporary construction work. I'm sure these were just some from their stock, and were not cast specifically for being "temporary rope bridge pillars".
Don't be silly. Their technology wasn't that advanced. They fired Incan midgets from mangonels, not trebuchets.
A simple example would be something like one of the games we were all taught to program as kids. The first line was always something like 10 RANDOMIZE TIMER. Well, if you know the program was run at 8:19, the value of TIMER was likely somewhere between 29940 and 29999. It may be random enough for MONOPOLY.BAS, but it's not much of a challenge to try all 60 values. Entropically speaking, time of day is good enough for only a couple of bits, no more.
Let's say you had a message from DOMAIN\JOHN timestamped 2007-11-15 08:19:02, and you know I come in at about 8:00 every morning and turn on my computer. You can probably make some educated guesses about the values of GetLocalTime() and GetTickCount(). You know my user name. Process ids on Windows are sequentially assigned as of boot up, and probably wouldn't vary by more than a hundred, especially for a creature of habit. Memory and disk space are also likely to be in a similar range, so checking my desktop on another day might reveal some good guesses for those ranges.
All those values plus a few others are used by the Windows pseudo-random number generator, as revealed earlier this week. Sure, they mix in some harder-to-guess values, but who knows how easy or hard they might be to discover, especially with access to the hard drive? If you use only 32 bits of entropy to seed a cryptographic routine to emit 128 bytes of random numbers, that's still only 32 bits of guessing that needs to happen.
You could modify the agreement by striking out the "or within six months thereafter" clauses and sign it. There's a chance that it'll be sent only to a paper-stamper who is responsible for checking signatures off a list, and he might not see your modification. Of course it's more likely your boss is on the hook for collecting signatures, and he'll note your changes. You could try convincing him that the agreement is unfair, and that your changes are just.
You could try ignoring it. See if they follow through on their threats.
You could talk to your coworkers and organize yourselves to collectively say "we're not signing this." If an entire group said "no" you'd scare the crap out of management. Of course you'd likely all be labeled "troublemakers" or "union organizers" and be lined up for rapid replacement.
Or you could shut up and sign it. Unless you've got another job in your back pocket, the market's kind of thin these days.
Guess that makes 21 then.
Two things: Kerckhoff's principle states that the security of a routine must come from only the secrecy of the key, not the secrecy of the algorithm and certainly not the secrecy of the original document. "Known plaintext" and "chosen plaintext" attacks are commonly used to attempt to break a key. The second thing to note is: "cracking" in the sense you're using it is applicable only to encryption, not hashing.
Regardless of what hashing routine you're using, the attacker always has the original plaintext document. That's the point of a hash: it's a tamper-evident mechanism that should prove the document hasn't been altered. So the reason secure hashes are needed is to make sure digital signatures are secure.
Think about how digital signatures work: I have a plaintext document to sign, so I calculate a hash of the document. I encrypt the hash with my RSA private key, and ship it with the plaintext document. To verify that I signed it, you calculate a hash of the document yourself. You then use my public RSA key to decrypt the signature, and out pops my original hash value. If the two are the same, you can trust that my private key was used to generate the signature.
The problem with a weak hash is if an attacker can replace my document with a document of his own design that yields the same hash value, he can put a copy of my signature on his document and claim I signed it. This is a "collision attack", and is exactly the nature of the breaks into SHA-1 the Chinese researchers discovered.
While this probably isn't much of an issue for a digital signature on a Word document claiming that I invented a better mousetrap, automated signature validation is critical to SSL security and digitally signed code. If I create a certificate that has my own public key on it and put microsoft.com in the name field, and stick a copy of a legitimate Verisign signature on the certificate, I could fool any computer system into believing that Microsoft has granted approval to use my key.
I figured out the cost for running distributed.net several years ago, and it was amazing. The difference between my computer sitting idle and my computer running the CPU at 100% is 60 watt-hours, or 1,440 extra watts per day. Scaling that number up to the amount of work I was able to perform in an hour, dividing out the amount of work that had to be done in order to crack one of the distributed.net challenge keys, turned into an ungodly amount of wasted power.
So how much has been donated to SETI@home? According to BOINC stats, 19,593,239,480 BOINC credits have been granted as of a few days ago. Since one credit represents the computations performed in 1/100th of a day on a reference machine, we can ballpark that 195,932,394 CPU days have been donated. As I said, my computer uses 1,440 watts per day under load, but let's assume it's only half as efficient as the average or reference machine; so that's about 720 watts per day. Times the credits, that's 141,071,323,680 watts (141 gigawatts.) According to the DoE, one pound of coal generates 926 watt-hours of electricity. So they've burned 152,344,842 pounds (76,000 tons) of coal, or 760 standard 100-ton cars -- that's almost seven 115-car trains of coal.
Put another way, that's 182,400 tons of CO2 that was pumped into the atmosphere on behalf of SETI. (Take that, Kyoto Protocol!) On the Chicago Climate Exchange, that'd cost you $364,000 in carbon credits. And that's just the BOINC figures, and not inclusive of the energy burned by SETI@home clients prior to the advent of BOINC.
Do you still wish to maintain that all the energy and waste and pollution is worth it, for a potential incidental invention? At least set your machine to folding@home, or the WCG, or some project that will produce results that might help the human race in tangible ways. You can still dream about E.T., just don't kill my planet looking for him.
WCG is a much better use of resources than SETI, simply because the human benefits are tangible. Even if SETI were to pick up alien signals from a thousand light years away, what could we do with that information? It's not like we could communicate with them! The most we could hope for would be to pick up the alien equivalent of "I Love Lucy", or the presidential race between Glaaxnar and Veemuur (I know, the mods always mark you "-1, troll" every time you mention Veemuur, but I'm making a point, dammit!) Sure, it'd be the stuff of movies, novels, and late night TV shows, it'd spark the imagination in new directions, it might even generate new religions or alienate old ones. But it's not going to cure cancer, or show us how to build a spaceship anymore than their viewing of Star Trek reruns would help them (Galaxy Quest was fiction, people.)
We don't keep using Marconi's original transmitter because it was noisy and inefficient compared to modern radios. SETI has shown how to make a volunteer-run computing grid viable, and WCG has carried that to the next level. Let's say thanks to SETI, pay our respects, and move on to more valuable use of our energy.
My ability to fix or not fix the product is beside the point. The original design is that of "destroy and discard", with a fake feel-good recycling aspect so they can print green recycling arrows on the box (and remain RoHS compliant.) But it's primarily designed to be wasteful, so the average user will spend another $100 on a replacement.
I think the Battery Directive should be expanded to require all batteries (rechargeable or not) to be end-user replaceable whenever possible, with exceptions only for physical safety -- never simply for engineering, manufacturing or marketing convenience. If they're concerned about water (as a toothbrush maker should be), then the battery replacement kit could contain a tube of silicone sealant and new o-rings -- making a tube leak-proof is actually a solved problem many people call "plumbing".
Could you please write a coherent statement that distinguishes between "a [concrete covered] barren gray wasteland that resembles an asteroid-pocked version of Houston, Texas" and "Houston, Texas"? 'Cause I'm having trouble telling the two apart.
Yet they tout these recycling instructions as if we were all somehow being "green" by throwing our useful products away in two pieces instead of one.
Really? I find that hard to believe, Max. While I loathe Sony, I don't think they can buy the whole market that easily. And they'd have to pay off a lot more companies than Target: Best Buy, WalM*rt, Dixons, etc.
About 30 seconds of surfing tells me that if Target received cash from Sony to dump HD-DVD, then it was money poorly spent by Sony: Target.com carries two HD-DVD players for $299 and $249 (a Toshiba and a 'Venturer'?) and they offer 218 HD-DVD titles, while they carry only one Sony Blu-Ray player for $499, and 237 Blu-Ray titles. (Apparently that player is marked to the people who don't want to spend $499 for a PS3.)
According to the descriptions, they do not carry any of the three dedicated players in stock at their stores, only on line. The PS3 is for sale in the stores, of course, as is the XBox add-on HD-DVD drive, and many HD movies in both formats.
You might want to check your tinfoil hat. Apparently it's failing to block irrational Sony fanboi conspiracies.
Please, submit them. It's not like you'd be spanked for it.
Oh, and I have to agree with you about the trolls, too -- they injected a lot of humor, and certainly helped build the site to what it is today. I come back for the memes as much as anything. (Hot grits, anyone?) And the trolls certainly were never on the same par as casino or link spam. I always mentally considered them right on the edge of the discussion threshold, somewhere above the "Me too!"s and just below the people I disagreed with. But moderators have never really agreed with me anyway.
And if you ever find a way back from never-mod-again land, please drop me a line! It's been five frakkin' years, Slashdot. Grow up.
The reason is simple: the more AdBlock is adopted, the more incentive advertisers will have to find ways to defeat it.
This happened to us with spam filters. Years ago, spammers were lazy and stupid. I was able to block almost all spam using regexps. Once regexp-based spam-blocking products became used by ISPs, however, spammers had to find new ways to defeat them. They used alternate spellings, alternate Unicode encodings, well-formed forged headers, embedded images with literary quotes for message bodies, etc. They became almost impossible to block using the simple tools, and the more complex tools (Bayesian filters) are now throwing away ham with the spam.
If you help "spread AdBlock" you're hastening its demise as a useful tool for the rest of us. Be selfish. Enjoy the benefits of ad blocking for as long as possible.
Which is still really useful in practice. Thieves are generally both stupid and lazy, they're usually criminals of opportunity who will take only an easy-to-steal unlocked device if they think nobody's looking, and (don't know how|won't bother) to cover their tracks. A fairly large fraction of these thefts are likely to be resolved quickly, and in a university environment expulsion is a pretty good tactic to help reduce repeat offenders.
Of course you can't count on MAC addresses to solve every single laptop theft, but if you can recover more than about 3% of them you're still doing better than the police.
And the principle of "Monkey See, Monkey Do" ensures all the sycophants will fall in line quickly.
And the house's bandwidth isn't an issue dealing with my current problem, as all the rest of the equipment was unplugged during the calls I was testing. My house is set up so the Vonage-provided router is the first device connected to the cable modem, and the POTS wires come from it. I've contacted Vonage and they've identified the line as a business fax line (it shows up on my router's status, and I assume that's a QoS related setting.) So with as-good-as-I-can-make-them conditions, we get mostly-OK voice, and lousy fax performance. Everybody's done everything they can, and still we have some numbers we can't successfully fax to.
And if I start up Azureus, well, forget the voice too.