C'mon, I know you do it too: when I want to see if my Internet is working, I "ping www.google.com". I still find it surprising that it ICMP_ECHO_REPLYs my ICMP_ECHO_REQUESTs. Why? I find it surprising that you find it surprising!:)
A lot of sites disable ping because, years ago, The Ping of Death could crash a server by sending maliciously-crafted ping packets. The "Ping of Death" gained fame because any chump could create one from a totally generic Windows system using the broken ping that Microsoft was shipping at the time. The technique is applicable to any IP protocol, not just ICMP echo. You can make an SMTP of Death fairly trivially. Just fake up a datagram with a total length greater than 65,535 by abusing the fragment offset field of the IP header, and if the target system does not check total length for validity you can overflow memory and hose the system. If that didn't make sense to you, just remember the "Ping of Death" has NOTHING TO DO WITH PING - it's an IP vulnerability that used to exist for ALL protocols in the IP stacks of certain vendors (IBM, Sun, Cisco, etc.) and is now fixed.
And you can DOS a server by flooding it with pings. And you can do it more easily with practically any other type of packet. If you plan to block all traffic that can be used for DOS, you must block all traffic, period.
Ping is a service we all should provide to our internal networks from individual hosts, and to the Internet at large at the network edge. Configure your routers to respond to pings for your hosts instead of passing them through the firewalls. Ping is how people who need to test their ability to reach your hosts or site can do so. It is a simple tool that consumes a minimal amount of bandwidth to get the job done.
I'd be interested to know just how many pings Google receives, and replies to each day. They might tell you if you ask. If it ever gets out of hand they'll just respond with normal traffic shaping techniques.
And how many of those are maliciously encoded, only to be defeated by the ub3rh4x0r5 at Google. There's nothing dangerous about ping. Nothing... you can tell if a network is competently administered just by pinging it, my friend. I'd never hire anyone who had an unpingable net.
Hmmm... where's BadAnalogyGuy when you need him? OK, look, blocking ping is like saying that you've seen a guy killed by an Isuzu truck, so you think you can prevent all fatal accidents by banning Isuzu trucks from the highway. In reality, all you will do is prevent beer deliveries to my house, since my beer distributor uses Isuzus. This will make me hate you, just like people hate clueless firewall admins who block ICMP. Or wait, you saw a guy get bludgeoned to death with a hammer so you will ban all hammers while allowing people with large wrenches, razor knives and screwdrivers to pass without comment. That was pretty bad I think.
Since Troan left, the fit'n'finish of their main offering has really slipped - what's the point of shipping a broken mkbootdisk? Sure, you can't fit Red Hat on a 1.44 MB floppy any more, but other distros simply hacked the script to make bootable USB sticks while RH was still shipping a unuseable utility. Or what about PAM support in usermod/useradd etc.? First Red Hat closes the bugzilla ticket (that has dozens of people on it) with the explanation "shadow utils are not intended to work with PAM" and then a year later they ship a working PAMmed usermod? SUSe had LDAP-aware usermod/useradd more than a year before Red Hat said it was not going to ever happen. Then RH did it anyway. Or what about the way the installation process has disintegrated? Sure, there's a glitzy mouse GUI chipping away at user interface diversity (as though that's a desireable thing) but meanwhile the text installer's help system mostly disappeared and the categorization of packages completely fell apart.
I like Red Hat's business model, but they are charging a premium price for a product that is less and less premium-grade. I've been pumping money into them for a decade or more... but now I run Ubuntu on my home server, because it's just a better integrated solution.
Strong patents favor smaller companies/startups/open source/etc. Weak patents favor big business. A startup holding a patent can exclude others from the market or force them to increase their marginal cost of production. A large company can lower its marginal cost of production/distribution/etc to below that of a startup or small business if not forced to license or work around whatever competitive advantage the startup/small business gained through their invention. I suppose it might work that way if the large businesses weren't able to both write legislation and prevent fair enforcement of existing laws.
I used the link you mention to request that the image be removed because Google trespassed illegally on my property and they blew me off.
I used the same link to point out that they'd taken images of a minor child's bedroom and they reacted faster than a scalded cat.
I conclude they are not afraid of accusations of trespass, but they *are* afraid of triggering the American hysterical revulsion for pedophilia. (A revulsion which I share, but without most of the hysteria.)
Incidentally, have you tried using that link? There's a character limit on the form that's pretty lame, which makes your.sig funny.
Solar cannot replace Coal. It's completely unsuitable for supplying base-load power because it only works half the time (at best). In my solar system, the sun shines all the time. But even if it didn't, we have these marvelous things called "energy storage systems" - some based on chemical reactions and some based on mass attraction.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons I was pissed off by their coming on my property and taking pictures through my windows.
Thieves don't normally have access to high-resolution cameras mounted on a vehicle and synced to the wheel speed, so this is a killer app for housebreakers.
There is a paved road, originally built in 1825 to service my property, that is (literally) ten feet from my house. The building was there before the road by about 50 years.
The county paves and maintains the road, in return for which previous owners of my house granted an easement for through travel.
I own the road. It is my property, and it is so marked on all county maps available on-line or off-line.
I have never granted permission for Google or anyone else to use my road for anything other than through travel. If they wish to pay me for some other use, or ask courteously for permission to use my road for their profit-making enterprise, that might be different. But using my road for anything but through travel is trespassing on my rights as a property owner.
I screamed about this to Google and they ignored me. So I pointed out that their camera pointed directly into the window of a minor child and that my state has very strong peeping tom laws. They have now blacked out the street view for my property. Yay the New America! Cowardice and the taint of pederasty trumps politesse, good citizenship and the rule of law!
"Mongoloid" which was coined becuase a racist thought it was devolved Asian genes sporadically coming back in "more evolved" Europeans. Are you sure about that? I thought it was because of the characteristic eyelid fold that looked distinctly Asian. You're both right. But I don't think Down was any more racist than most people of his generation. So-called "white" people (I'm sort of pinkish, myself) were for the most part extremely racist by modern standards, especially in England and the US. But we're getting better!
Down, who'd apparently never met a real live Mongol, thought that his "mongoloids" were literally the same as Asian Mongols based on the accepted descriptions of the time. I read his stuff a long time ago but I found it fascinating, really, especially the part about the chickens...
C'mon, you are talking about digital recording. It's not new, it's not especially cool, and it's not innovative to stick "pod" on words. You can't steal Steve Jobs' mojo by copying his marketing schtick, he'll have something new next year and all his slavering fan boys will just leave you alone and palely loitering.
Sure, you get a larger audience when you offer more formats - are you honestly surprised? How is this new? People have been offering a choice of formats since before the web was born, back in the ftp & gopher days. The more formats you support the more people can use your output. "Look, Martha, I can choose text or audio! How convenient!" After all - if you want to be heard by more ears, speak more languages.
Multiple format provisions are great. But "podcasting" is just another buzzword, wake me when something new happens.
[This post also available in Ogg Vorbis, WMV, and Quicktime audio]
Given that just about no one uses Middle English anymore, and that almost no one uses the term that way, the more current definition applies. This is just another example of the many words we use that effectively don't mean what they originally meant, just like the surname "Smith" doesn't mean you're a blacksmith. Um, the term "bellwether" is a modern term, used by sheep farmers, to refer to.... the bellwether of a flock. I've never seen a male bellwether, though, the sheep farmers I know both have female bellwethers. I don't know where that castrated ram thing comes from, perhaps that's antique. I am not personally a sheep herder, I just know some.
If you observe a flock of sheep for a couple of days you will understand that the rhetorical and rural meanings of the term are identical. A bellwether is the non-obvious leader of a flock; where the bellwether goes, the flock inevitably follows, although there is no visible organization and no chain of command. The bellwether does not do "command and control" and does not necessarily do any defense, (domestic sheep are notoriously bad at defense) that's not what being a bellwether is about. I think the other sheep have figured out that the bellwether makes better decisions than anyone else, perhaps from instinct or intelligence or just better sensory organs, and so they graze where the bellwether does simply because it pays off for them.
I guess slashdot is not the best place to learn about animal husbandry. Cue sheep jokes now!
Bellwethers are not necessarily male, or neutered, and they aren't used to find other sheep (that is something that could work, but not because a neutered ram "ineffectually tries to mate with ewes". Where'd you hear that?). Bellwethers are frequently older females.
A bellwether is like that kid in grade school that everybody copied - there wasn't anything special about him, he wasn't taller or smarter or anything, he was just "cooler" than anybody else, and if he wore a purple cummerbund to school everybody else was doing it within the week. People don't create bellwethers (through castration or any other process) instead they learn how to identify them. It's not obvious who the rest of the sheep are following, because the bellwether is not waving a flag and marching at the head of a line, in fact the bellwether is usually right smack in the middle of the flock.
You put the bell on the bellwether because all the other sheep follow it around. If you are moving the sheep and the leader tries to sneak off you need to be able to pick that leader out of the crowd. If you want to put the sheep on a truck you put the bellwether there first and the rest will not panic when you drive them in.
For your next assignment you can look up "judas goat".
Although I agree that publishing an address of 127.0.0.1 would be far more considerate and equally simple, you shouldn't propagate the myth that RBLs "block email". They don't. That's a false statement that is used by spammers and other criminals to justify attacking advisory services such as RBLs. Sometimes judges fall for this tactic and we all suffer when criminals and spammers get judges on their side.
Except in extreme cases (like Comcast's cable network) only mail administrators and their systems block email, although they can choose to use RBLs to advise them of what to block. If a person chooses poorly from the many people and organizations that offer advice, that is a MAIL ADMINISTRATOR FAILING AT HIS OR HER JOB. If a site chooses not to have a mail administrator yet allows outside blacklists to be used (to reject, rather than as part of a weighting scheme a'la SpamAssassin) then that site has FAILED. It's not the RBL's fault. You wouldn't blame Sony if I rigged up an Aibo to drive my car and it drove through your house, you'd blame me for being a moron, and sites that have unadministrated mailservers have made a similarly stupid decision.
We're supposedly computer geeks around here. We shouldn't propagate myths like "RBLs block emails" or "it's OK to have a mailserver with no postmaster". The RFCs require a postmaster. Postmasters choose how to filter mail.
SxS binding fixes that problem, for almost a decade now. Vista and vs2005/8 now force SxS down developer throats, whether you like it or not. DLL hell is virtually over.
And we all know what "virtually" means.
Call me when DLL hell is canonically over, my employers have several hundred apps we'll want to update.
Have you noticed the way dependencies have been growing absurdly in all the gnome-based linux distros? You might have to load bluetooth and palmpilot apps in order to make a server point to your enterprise LDAP directory... sure, that makes sense.
elrous0 wrote:
Noble intentions do not excuse incompetence. Poor kids would be better served by someone with not-so-noble intentions that could actually deliver. An incompetent paladin is not the best man to have in your party, no matter how good his farts smell. Thanks for providing a good example of the "mean spiritedness" that the previous poster referred to.
I (and all but one of my friends) got our OLPC laptops before Xmas without any delay or problems. My children (8 & 11) have been hacking at them ever since Xmas morning. My sample indicates that the OLPC project does a decent job of delivery - certainly better than most first-time-events in the field of international aid. Why are you criticizing, did somebody deliver your OLPC XO to an underserved child living in a ger in Mongolia instead of to your 1st world luxury condo?* You do realize the target children come first, right? What's your beef - and if you haven't got one, why do you feel the need to characterize OLPC as "incompetent"?
* I thought about saying "your parents' basement" but that would have been, well, mean-spirited.;)
Unless they put a lot of [heavy] steel stiffening in, the ship will flex at the attachment point rather than lift the bow. Ships aren't rigid. Depends on the ship.
In my own very limited experience, the Fyrdraca and Gyrfalcon are extremely flexible, being clinker-built viking ships. The Surprise and Serenity are completely rigid for all practical purposes and can be lifted entirely into the air from their tow points without any damage. Doug Humphrey's Badtz Maru is a steel-hulled ex-NATO warship, and has limited flexibility as well as tremendous weight. I do not believe the Badtz will flex significantly if subjected to any reasonable propulsive impetus regardless of direction of force. I doubt it could be damaged by being dragged upwards from its tow point by any force a propulsive kite could possibly generate without snapping the kite's line. Remember the strength of the line will inevitably be severely limited by the weight restrictions on that line (unless you've invented sinclair monofilament).
yes, but history seems to indicate that any "solution" that requires people to change their behavior for no immediate personal benefit will fail dismally. Strongly agree! Which is why nuclear power is currently unsafe. It's not the science, it's the people. History seems to indicate that people will form corporations that will cut corners and use money to prevent oversight by political and social mechanisms; these corporations will gain control of energy production, and will then cut costs continuously until an accident occurs. This is the way people behave, historically. If you are lucky the accident is a TMI and not a Cherynobl... I've got no problem with nuclear power, I have issues with Homer and Monty running the plants.
and as far as i see it, nuclear is our best option while we perfect wind/solar/geothermal/fusion/whatever. Methane (aka "natural gas") is probably better. We already have a huge technology base and there's a clear path forward to using it more cleanly and eventually in a carbon-neutral fashion. People are easily convinced to replace their electric storage water heaters with on-demand gas heaters, because the payback is usually about two years, then it's increased beer money.
nuclear is not a permanent solution, but nothing is. even solar will only work for a few billion years and fission will work for a century or so, and even longer if we look to thorium and use integral fast reactors to burn the existing waste we have building up. Hopefully, before the sun burns up we will have the means to travel elsewhere. We will almost certainly have other problems to deal with!
For example, given the premise, 'all fish live underwater' and 'all mackerel are fish', my wife will conclude, not that 'all mackerel live underwater', but that 'if she buys kippers it will not rain', or that 'trout live in trees', or even that 'I do not love her any more.'
Explain to me why it is better to remain ignorant than to perform experiments. Your example is not inspiring. How would YOU measure the energy, given that all other methods appear to have returned wrong values, and your claim that doing tethered satellite experimentation is "the stupidest idea in the history of mankind"?
We already knew scientific research does not guarantee return on investment. What's your point, other than proving how smart you are? You failed that already, with your pythonesque leap of illogic that implies I recommended using incomplete research as a basis for building infrastructure.
There's no reasonable expectation of privacy of anything that can be viewed from a public street. My experience in court (as a witness, only) in the US state of Virginia was that the "reasonable" in this statement refers to the legal concept of the "reasonable man". It was a jury trial so the judge explained rather precisely what the law said was a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in Virginia.
The fictious Reasonable Man does not have access to machines that would allow him to see through walls, nor does he have any reasonable expectation that someone would want to look through his walls for harmless reasons. Thus, I do not believe the police are allowed to use the blimp that sees through walls without a warrant or probable cause (in the United States, that is). Your neighbors can't build magnifying devices that let them peek through tiny cracks in your shower wall and publish your pictures on the Internet, either.
Similarly, the Reasonable Man does not track the doings of Google like an obsessive technophile slashdotter, and thus has no reasonable expectation that someone's going to take high-quality images through his windows using brand-new technology. He has a "reasonable expectation of privacy" if he is naked in the upstairs bedroom next to a busy road, even if the window shade is occasionally blowing open, because he can't be expected to reasonably anticipate incredibly expensive imaging efforts that will capture his likeness for magnification and public display.
As I understand it, when you apply any sort of Reasonable Man test, the jury gets to look at the facts of the individual case and decide what "reasonable" meant at the time the incident occurred. Since Google has done ZERO prior notification to homeowners the jury may very well rule that they have no right to peer through people's windows with instruments that are much more sensitive than the naked eye. For the jury, it might come down to the difference between taking a picture of someone's house and focusing a web-connected telescope on someone's bedroom window... most likely, it will depend on local community standards and the particular images involved.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest." -- Robert Heinlein, "Life-Line" (1939)
I may be stupid, but you sure don't understand anything about the tethered satellite experiments.
Those experiments simply indicate that we can turn rocket fuel into electricity in a rather inefficient way. Making electricity with orbital space tethers induces a drag force on those tethers. That uses up some of the orbital kinetic energy of the tether and host spacecraft. How did that orbital kinetic energy get there? Oh yeah, someone had to burn humongous amounts of rocket fuel to get it. No, bonehead, we already knew that. (Although it's not clear that you understand that there's no air in space). What the experiments showed is that our calculations of the amount of energy that would be generated by such an experiment were completely wrong, at least according to everyone involved in the experimentation. Which means that our space scientists do not understand the energy dynamics of our local system as well as they thought, which is grounds for further experimentation. Which is what I said, originally - that we need to do more research and find a better answer than digging up limited resources from the ground.
Making electricity with orbital tethers is like making ice water by putting ice in the microwave -- interesting but not efficient. Since when is research supposed to be predictably efficient? Are you on crack? You always learn something if your experiment fails to conform to any predicted outcome; at the very least you learn that you did't know how to do the experiment. Interesting results are exactly what research is for.
If you find my post insulting perhaps you should be more polite. I'm OK with either level of discourse myself.
Yes, you are right, but you haven't invalidated my point (or Tesla's, for that matter).
We didn't start the sun burning nor can we stop it, so humans are not burning fuel if we capture some of the power that the sun so profligately flings at us. Furthermore, we needn't worry (yet) about finding fuel after the death of the sun since we are (at the moment) incapable of surviving such an event. We should be able to prevent such events, or move to another stellar neighborhood, by the time we are capable of surviving a solar apocalypse. I'm told we've got 5 billion years or so to get ready before the sun comes off the main sequence.
Similarly, if you look at the amount of energy that was returned in the tethered satellite experiments (which was different from what anyone claimed it would be, showing that our understanding of these things is weak and we need more research) you can see that we really don't have to worry about hurting the Earth's rotation or magnetic fields any time soon, because natural events will dwarf our efforts... most likely for the next several millenia at least.
Nonetheless, despite all that, you are still correct in what you've said; only life itself reverses entropy, and only in a very limited sense.
"burn" is synonymous with "combustion" or a chemical reaction in which heat and gas is given off. Nuclear fission is definitely not a chemical reaction, but a nuclear reaction. It is not in any way the same as "burning fuel." It uses a fuel, and creates some products, but it is not a chemical reaction. Thus, the author actually used very exact language, you just need a better vocabulary. I disagree. Read my post again and look up the meaning of the words "clean" and "metaphorically". My beef was with the juxtaposition of inexact language with exact language. You can burn things 100% cleanly, you can burn dirty magazines, and you can burn your ass on a metaphor.
Technically no source of energy is inexhaustible. When fuel consumption is no longer economically viable, we will move on to other modes of energy production (solar power seems reasonable enough). What's so bad about using fuel that is plentiful and available to us if it is cheaper and easier than building solar panels and geothermal plants everywhere? Mining alone generally produces enough environmental degradation that we shouldn't do it unless there's a cost imposed on the mine owners to compensate the rest of the planet for the pollution. Once you get to burning the fuel, where your car sends carcinogens into my children's lungs with no compensatory penalty to you (my grandfather and uncle died of lung cancer, pretty horribly and at great expense) your economic argument completely falls apart. You aren't controlling for externalities like public health or crime.
It's unnecessary and, frankly, idiotic to arbitrarily decide that we shouldn't use nuclear power simply because it has a finite fuel source. That's one of the very same fallacies that prevents people from embracing nuclear fusion. Again, I disagree. I certainly may be an idiot, but you are shortsighted and my argument is not arbitrary. You are settling for the good instead of reaching for the best in every part of your argument.
Slashdot Mirror
I still find it surprising that it ICMP_ECHO_REPLYs my ICMP_ECHO_REQUESTs. Why? I find it surprising that you find it surprising!
Ping is a service we all should provide to our internal networks from individual hosts, and to the Internet at large at the network edge. Configure your routers to respond to pings for your hosts instead of passing them through the firewalls. Ping is how people who need to test their ability to reach your hosts or site can do so. It is a simple tool that consumes a minimal amount of bandwidth to get the job done. I'd be interested to know just how many pings Google receives, and replies to each day. They might tell you if you ask. If it ever gets out of hand they'll just respond with normal traffic shaping techniques. And how many of those are maliciously encoded, only to be defeated by the ub3rh4x0r5 at Google. There's nothing dangerous about ping. Nothing... you can tell if a network is competently administered just by pinging it, my friend. I'd never hire anyone who had an unpingable net.
Hmmm... where's BadAnalogyGuy when you need him? OK, look, blocking ping is like saying that you've seen a guy killed by an Isuzu truck, so you think you can prevent all fatal accidents by banning Isuzu trucks from the highway. In reality, all you will do is prevent beer deliveries to my house, since my beer distributor uses Isuzus. This will make me hate you, just like people hate clueless firewall admins who block ICMP. Or wait, you saw a guy get bludgeoned to death with a hammer so you will ban all hammers while allowing people with large wrenches, razor knives and screwdrivers to pass without comment. That was pretty bad I think.
Well, they've really stopped leading the pack.
Since Troan left, the fit'n'finish of their main offering has really slipped - what's the point of shipping a broken mkbootdisk? Sure, you can't fit Red Hat on a 1.44 MB floppy any more, but other distros simply hacked the script to make bootable USB sticks while RH was still shipping a unuseable utility. Or what about PAM support in usermod/useradd etc.? First Red Hat closes the bugzilla ticket (that has dozens of people on it) with the explanation "shadow utils are not intended to work with PAM" and then a year later they ship a working PAMmed usermod? SUSe had LDAP-aware usermod/useradd more than a year before Red Hat said it was not going to ever happen. Then RH did it anyway. Or what about the way the installation process has disintegrated? Sure, there's a glitzy mouse GUI chipping away at user interface diversity (as though that's a desireable thing) but meanwhile the text installer's help system mostly disappeared and the categorization of packages completely fell apart.
I like Red Hat's business model, but they are charging a premium price for a product that is less and less premium-grade. I've been pumping money into them for a decade or more... but now I run Ubuntu on my home server, because it's just a better integrated solution.
Let me restate, since you didn't get it.
.sig funny.
I used the link you mention to request that the image be removed because Google trespassed illegally on my property and they blew me off.
I used the same link to point out that they'd taken images of a minor child's bedroom and they reacted faster than a scalded cat.
I conclude they are not afraid of accusations of trespass, but they *are* afraid of triggering the American hysterical revulsion for pedophilia. (A revulsion which I share, but without most of the hysteria.)
Incidentally, have you tried using that link? There's a character limit on the form that's pretty lame, which makes your
Yeah, that's one of the reasons I was pissed off by their coming on my property and taking pictures through my windows.
Thieves don't normally have access to high-resolution cameras mounted on a vehicle and synced to the wheel speed, so this is a killer app for housebreakers.
There is a paved road, originally built in 1825 to service my property, that is (literally) ten feet from my house. The building was there before the road by about 50 years.
The county paves and maintains the road, in return for which previous owners of my house granted an easement for through travel.
I own the road. It is my property, and it is so marked on all county maps available on-line or off-line.
I have never granted permission for Google or anyone else to use my road for anything other than through travel. If they wish to pay me for some other use, or ask courteously for permission to use my road for their profit-making enterprise, that might be different. But using my road for anything but through travel is trespassing on my rights as a property owner.
I screamed about this to Google and they ignored me. So I pointed out that their camera pointed directly into the window of a minor child and that my state has very strong peeping tom laws. They have now blacked out the street view for my property. Yay the New America! Cowardice and the taint of pederasty trumps politesse, good citizenship and the rule of law!
Down, who'd apparently never met a real live Mongol, thought that his "mongoloids" were literally the same as Asian Mongols based on the accepted descriptions of the time. I read his stuff a long time ago but I found it fascinating, really, especially the part about the chickens...
C'mon, you are talking about digital recording. It's not new, it's not especially cool, and it's not innovative to stick "pod" on words. You can't steal Steve Jobs' mojo by copying his marketing schtick, he'll have something new next year and all his slavering fan boys will just leave you alone and palely loitering.
Sure, you get a larger audience when you offer more formats - are you honestly surprised? How is this new? People have been offering a choice of formats since before the web was born, back in the ftp & gopher days. The more formats you support the more people can use your output. "Look, Martha, I can choose text or audio! How convenient!" After all - if you want to be heard by more ears, speak more languages.
Multiple format provisions are great. But "podcasting" is just another buzzword, wake me when something new happens.
[This post also available in Ogg Vorbis, WMV, and Quicktime audio]
and I thought it was unusual that I know people that breed sheep... you're a "Renaissance man", my friend!
If you observe a flock of sheep for a couple of days you will understand that the rhetorical and rural meanings of the term are identical. A bellwether is the non-obvious leader of a flock; where the bellwether goes, the flock inevitably follows, although there is no visible organization and no chain of command. The bellwether does not do "command and control" and does not necessarily do any defense, (domestic sheep are notoriously bad at defense) that's not what being a bellwether is about. I think the other sheep have figured out that the bellwether makes better decisions than anyone else, perhaps from instinct or intelligence or just better sensory organs, and so they graze where the bellwether does simply because it pays off for them.
I guess slashdot is not the best place to learn about animal husbandry. Cue sheep jokes now!
Bellwethers are not necessarily male, or neutered, and they aren't used to find other sheep (that is something that could work, but not because a neutered ram "ineffectually tries to mate with ewes". Where'd you hear that?). Bellwethers are frequently older females.
A bellwether is like that kid in grade school that everybody copied - there wasn't anything special about him, he wasn't taller or smarter or anything, he was just "cooler" than anybody else, and if he wore a purple cummerbund to school everybody else was doing it within the week. People don't create bellwethers (through castration or any other process) instead they learn how to identify them. It's not obvious who the rest of the sheep are following, because the bellwether is not waving a flag and marching at the head of a line, in fact the bellwether is usually right smack in the middle of the flock.
You put the bell on the bellwether because all the other sheep follow it around. If you are moving the sheep and the leader tries to sneak off you need to be able to pick that leader out of the crowd. If you want to put the sheep on a truck you put the bellwether there first and the rest will not panic when you drive them in.
For your next assignment you can look up "judas goat".
Well, I guess measured discourse can't be expected from someone who endorses the holocaust!
Although I agree that publishing an address of 127.0.0.1 would be far more considerate and equally simple, you shouldn't propagate the myth that RBLs "block email". They don't. That's a false statement that is used by spammers and other criminals to justify attacking advisory services such as RBLs. Sometimes judges fall for this tactic and we all suffer when criminals and spammers get judges on their side.
Except in extreme cases (like Comcast's cable network) only mail administrators and their systems block email, although they can choose to use RBLs to advise them of what to block. If a person chooses poorly from the many people and organizations that offer advice, that is a MAIL ADMINISTRATOR FAILING AT HIS OR HER JOB. If a site chooses not to have a mail administrator yet allows outside blacklists to be used (to reject, rather than as part of a weighting scheme a'la SpamAssassin) then that site has FAILED. It's not the RBL's fault. You wouldn't blame Sony if I rigged up an Aibo to drive my car and it drove through your house, you'd blame me for being a moron, and sites that have unadministrated mailservers have made a similarly stupid decision.
We're supposedly computer geeks around here. We shouldn't propagate myths like "RBLs block emails" or "it's OK to have a mailserver with no postmaster". The RFCs require a postmaster. Postmasters choose how to filter mail.
Call me when DLL hell is canonically over, my employers have several hundred apps we'll want to update.
Have you noticed the way dependencies have been growing absurdly in all the gnome-based linux distros? You might have to load bluetooth and palmpilot apps in order to make a server point to your enterprise LDAP directory... sure, that makes sense.
I (and all but one of my friends) got our OLPC laptops before Xmas without any delay or problems. My children (8 & 11) have been hacking at them ever since Xmas morning. My sample indicates that the OLPC project does a decent job of delivery - certainly better than most first-time-events in the field of international aid. Why are you criticizing, did somebody deliver your OLPC XO to an underserved child living in a ger in Mongolia instead of to your 1st world luxury condo?* You do realize the target children come first, right? What's your beef - and if you haven't got one, why do you feel the need to characterize OLPC as "incompetent"?
* I thought about saying "your parents' basement" but that would have been, well, mean-spirited.
In my own very limited experience, the Fyrdraca and Gyrfalcon are extremely flexible, being clinker-built viking ships. The Surprise and Serenity are completely rigid for all practical purposes and can be lifted entirely into the air from their tow points without any damage. Doug Humphrey's Badtz Maru is a steel-hulled ex-NATO warship, and has limited flexibility as well as tremendous weight. I do not believe the Badtz will flex significantly if subjected to any reasonable propulsive impetus regardless of direction of force. I doubt it could be damaged by being dragged upwards from its tow point by any force a propulsive kite could possibly generate without snapping the kite's line. Remember the strength of the line will inevitably be severely limited by the weight restrictions on that line (unless you've invented sinclair monofilament).
For example, given the premise, 'all fish live underwater' and 'all mackerel are fish', my wife will conclude, not that 'all mackerel live underwater', but that 'if she buys kippers it will not rain', or that 'trout live in trees', or even that 'I do not love her any more.'
Explain to me why it is better to remain ignorant than to perform experiments. Your example is not inspiring. How would YOU measure the energy, given that all other methods appear to have returned wrong values, and your claim that doing tethered satellite experimentation is "the stupidest idea in the history of mankind"?
We already knew scientific research does not guarantee return on investment. What's your point, other than proving how smart you are? You failed that already, with your pythonesque leap of illogic that implies I recommended using incomplete research as a basis for building infrastructure.
The fictious Reasonable Man does not have access to machines that would allow him to see through walls, nor does he have any reasonable expectation that someone would want to look through his walls for harmless reasons. Thus, I do not believe the police are allowed to use the blimp that sees through walls without a warrant or probable cause (in the United States, that is). Your neighbors can't build magnifying devices that let them peek through tiny cracks in your shower wall and publish your pictures on the Internet, either.
Similarly, the Reasonable Man does not track the doings of Google like an obsessive technophile slashdotter, and thus has no reasonable expectation that someone's going to take high-quality images through his windows using brand-new technology. He has a "reasonable expectation of privacy" if he is naked in the upstairs bedroom next to a busy road, even if the window shade is occasionally blowing open, because he can't be expected to reasonably anticipate incredibly expensive imaging efforts that will capture his likeness for magnification and public display.
As I understand it, when you apply any sort of Reasonable Man test, the jury gets to look at the facts of the individual case and decide what "reasonable" meant at the time the incident occurred. Since Google has done ZERO prior notification to homeowners the jury may very well rule that they have no right to peer through people's windows with instruments that are much more sensitive than the naked eye. For the jury, it might come down to the difference between taking a picture of someone's house and focusing a web-connected telescope on someone's bedroom window... most likely, it will depend on local community standards and the particular images involved.
Here's another one I like:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest." -- Robert Heinlein, "Life-Line" (1939)
If you find my post insulting perhaps you should be more polite. I'm OK with either level of discourse myself.
Yes, you are right, but you haven't invalidated my point (or Tesla's, for that matter).
We didn't start the sun burning nor can we stop it, so humans are not burning fuel if we capture some of the power that the sun so profligately flings at us. Furthermore, we needn't worry (yet) about finding fuel after the death of the sun since we are (at the moment) incapable of surviving such an event. We should be able to prevent such events, or move to another stellar neighborhood, by the time we are capable of surviving a solar apocalypse. I'm told we've got 5 billion years or so to get ready before the sun comes off the main sequence.
Similarly, if you look at the amount of energy that was returned in the tethered satellite experiments (which was different from what anyone claimed it would be, showing that our understanding of these things is weak and we need more research) you can see that we really don't have to worry about hurting the Earth's rotation or magnetic fields any time soon, because natural events will dwarf our efforts... most likely for the next several millenia at least.
Nonetheless, despite all that, you are still correct in what you've said; only life itself reverses entropy, and only in a very limited sense.