The Earth has been around for billions of years and in the last several hundred million years, it's been hit by how many bodies large enough to threaten all life?
Well, zero, unless you count a couple of Hollywood movies notable more for their special effects than their accurate science.
But if you want to talk more realistic examples, consider the 1908 Tunguska impact. If that had occurred in a populated area, millions would have died. And nowadays, a disaster of that scale could mean economic disaster across the planet. That kind of impact is said to occur an average of 400 years apart. (And no, that does not mean we have 300 years to prepare. Google "gambler's fallacy.") An impact large enough to end human civilization is much less likely, but still frequent enough to care about.
Sigh. Like advocates of protective tariffs, you forget that the U.S. economy is part of a larger global economy. You would force U.S. producers to use higher-paid U.S. workers, meaning that American goods would be priced out of the marketplace. Not even American consumers world buy them.
The idea that everyone who doesn't like that the hypothetical country killed millions of people and does something about it automatically joins the "guerrilla army" stretches the concept quite far.
Classic false dilemma. There are other possibilities besides "everybody" and "nobody". And it doesn't take that many to launch a suicide attack or keep a conventional army running in circles.
True, but all their friends who are pissed at you for killing them.... But I covered that issue already.
Do you have any more mindless cliches you want to share? If so, please put them all in one post, so I can shoot then down more efficiently. This will be less work for both of us, and I can tell that avoiding unnecessary mental strain is a high priority with you.
Fighting spammers is like fighting against a guerilla army. Constant vigilance, swift response times, and, eventually, wholesale destruction of the people supporting the guerrillas will be necessary to win the war.
Is your use of "wholesale destruction" metaphorical, or do you really think guerilla warfare works that way? Because we tried that in Vietnam, and it didn't work. Which is why U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine got revised to exclude the myth that you can win a guerrilla war just by killing people. You also have to change the environment on the ground so that supporting your side instead of the guerrillas is a realistic option for the general population.
Now, if the war against malware is like a guerrilla war, then it's never going to be over. There will always be some place for the other side to run and hide. We can't order other countries to not host services we don't like, if only because we don't want them to do the same to us.
Fortunately, the analogy with guerrilla warfare only goes so far. The Internet is something people invented, not a foreign country with a complicated history and obscure customs. We can rework the thing so that the Bad Guys have a less friendly environment.
Neither of us are lawyers, so let's skip the usual ill-informed legal argument, and go to something we can actually verify: has somebody every been prosecuted for planting a rootkit or other backdoor in a system they had authorized access to? Cite me one example.
We used to be #1. We've kind of lost ground in recent years. Perhaps if we spent more on education, capital improvement, and R&D, and less on marketing and who's-got-the-highest-paid-CEO, we'd be doing better.
AT&T is a case in point. Remember their "You Will" ad campaign? They predicted lots of really cool new technologies, most of which have actually come to pass. But not one of them was implemented by AT&T, or any of its successors. They just blew every chance they had. Lots of money got spent, lots of executive left with solid-gold handshakes, but nothing actually got done. Sort of like America as a whole.
I have been a fone geek since my my first in the trunk 3 watt analog radio shack branded Car phone.
Was that the one the was essentially a two-way radio that only connected you to a phone operator? You do go back!
I never (before the N900) had one that would truly free me from a laptop.
That's a pretty subjective criterion. No palm-size device will every free most of us from a laptop. On the other hand, I've known people who claimed their Palm Vs did just that. OK, no networking. But upgrade to a Palm with a MMC slot (the V+ was the last Palm not to have one) and stick a bluetooth card in it...
The N900 IS the most advanced (mobile computer that also has cell and viop phone functions) of the decade.
If you want a truly hackable phone, yea, it's pretty important. Most consumers will give it a big yawn. And calling it a "computer" is pure marketspeak — I must own a dozen cheap gadgets that would qualify as a "computer" if you looked at them the right way.
Which is not to trash the N900. It's pretty damn sexy. I'd run out right now and buy one if $400 wasn't such a nasty dent in my budget.
I really do not understand why I am not seeing more about it.
Shouldn't be hard to understand. Most people equate "smart phone" with "iPhone". (This is the product that took "app" from programmer slang to household word.) If you're a serious geek you're maybe into Android (mainly because Google is perceived as less fascist to developers and users than Apple). WebOS trails behind, and the older platforms (Windows Mobile, PalmOS, Symbian) still have some following.
Even to the smallest of these, Maemo is tiny upstart. So far it's only been the basis for 3 devices, only one of which is a phone. Nokia's going to have to push this platform very hard if it's going to gain any traction. And from what I can see, Maemo is the poor stepbrother to Symbian in Nokia's product strategy.
That's how established businesses kill new technologies, even when it's clear that those new technologies are what the company needs to adapt and grow. Folks loyal to the old technologies starve the new guys of resources (marketing, R&D, sales priorities) because they're in control. I speak from experience here, having worked in the x64 server branch of Sun.
I have chatted with many N900 users that after a month or so, are still finding new things.
Which is why I want one. But I'm not going to plunk down that much cash until I know this platform has a future. So far, I've seen little to convince me it does.
Then again, the Great Recession might end next month and I'll go back to having too much disposable cash....
But if the alternative is paying per-mile charges for a T1, it makes sense if it's enough bandwidth for your application.
And assuming you have to serve the application onsite. I can't imagine a situation in which colo or cloud computing wouldn't be just as effective, more scalable, and cheaper.
I'm not counting powershell as a command line. I suppose you could use it that way, but using it requires too much.NET knowledge to make it suitable for basic interaction.
Back in the 30s, lots of guys had toothbrush mustaches. My grandfather had one. Der Fuhrer made them unfashionable, along with racism.
My family used to have this big photo of him hanging in the front entry. Once somebody asked me why we had a picture of Hitler. Which was sort of funny, because the photo was his official portrait as the head of a Jewish fraternal organization.
n the mid-90s, we got BRI (ISDN, 2*64 kbps in most of the world, 2*56 kbps in the US). Which pretty much ended the modem era, except for in the US and UK, where 56 kbps POTS modems reigned supreme until well after the millennium.
When the U.S operating companies started rolling out ISDN, I thought all my connection issues were history. But OCs still thought of themselves as regulated monopolies (they still do, really) and got the FCC to set high per-minute rates for ISDN usage — which pretty much destroyed any chance of ISDN being widely adopted. So we were stuck with the damn modems until DSL allowed us to sidestep the federal tariffs. And we still haven't caught up.
I might be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure that US ISDN also had 64 kbps data ports. The 56 kbps limit was imposed on modems because the FCC experts thought that analog connections needed a safety margin to prevent crosstalk.
I agree that their behavior is unacceptable. But as long as you're using their facility, they can force you to do anything they want. There's no technical fix here. You need to either cave in or find another facility.
OK, I stand corrected on the robots. Though "robot" is probably the wrong word.
I have no insight, but a glance at the map shows that it is smack in the middle of a bunch of area population centers - kind of the center of mass of Wichita, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Springfield.
Did you miss the part about workers not being able to handle the 2-hour commute from Tulsa? According to Google Maps, Wichita and Springfield are 3 hours, and OC is 4. They may be in a part of the country with a lot of population centers, but they're not close to a single one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
The Earth has been around for billions of years and in the last several hundred million years, it's been hit by how many bodies large enough to threaten all life?
Well, zero, unless you count a couple of Hollywood movies notable more for their special effects than their accurate science.
But if you want to talk more realistic examples, consider the 1908 Tunguska impact. If that had occurred in a populated area, millions would have died. And nowadays, a disaster of that scale could mean economic disaster across the planet. That kind of impact is said to occur an average of 400 years apart. (And no, that does not mean we have 300 years to prepare. Google "gambler's fallacy.") An impact large enough to end human civilization is much less likely, but still frequent enough to care about.
As Dirty Harry said, do you feel lucky?
Sigh. Like advocates of protective tariffs, you forget that the U.S. economy is part of a larger global economy. You would force U.S. producers to use higher-paid U.S. workers, meaning that American goods would be priced out of the marketplace. Not even American consumers world buy them.
I'm advocating that we stop forcing 1st world US citizens to compete with 3rd world citizens.
How?
Extending VIM with these capabilities is a mortal sin
Then the worst sinners are the vim maintainers themselves. Even with just the default config, vim is full of IDE features.
The idea that everyone who doesn't like that the hypothetical country killed millions of people and does something about it automatically joins the "guerrilla army" stretches the concept quite far.
Classic false dilemma. There are other possibilities besides "everybody" and "nobody". And it doesn't take that many to launch a suicide attack or keep a conventional army running in circles.
I think a higher cost of goods is an acceptable side effect of everyone having a job, and things being made in America.
Basically, you're advocating that we protect U.S. jobs by locking out foreign competition. That's been tried, and the results were not pleasant.
True, but all their friends who are pissed at you for killing them.... But I covered that issue already.
Do you have any more mindless cliches you want to share? If so, please put them all in one post, so I can shoot then down more efficiently. This will be less work for both of us, and I can tell that avoiding unnecessary mental strain is a high priority with you.
No it doesn't. Can you think of a better recruiting tool for a terrorist movement than the deaths of millions of people?
Fighting spammers is like fighting against a guerilla army. Constant vigilance, swift response times, and, eventually, wholesale destruction of the people supporting the guerrillas will be necessary to win the war.
Is your use of "wholesale destruction" metaphorical, or do you really think guerilla warfare works that way? Because we tried that in Vietnam, and it didn't work. Which is why U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine got revised to exclude the myth that you can win a guerrilla war just by killing people. You also have to change the environment on the ground so that supporting your side instead of the guerrillas is a realistic option for the general population.
Now, if the war against malware is like a guerrilla war, then it's never going to be over. There will always be some place for the other side to run and hide. We can't order other countries to not host services we don't like, if only because we don't want them to do the same to us.
Fortunately, the analogy with guerrilla warfare only goes so far. The Internet is something people invented, not a foreign country with a complicated history and obscure customs. We can rework the thing so that the Bad Guys have a less friendly environment.
OK, you're right, I was wrong. Never mind.
Neither of us are lawyers, so let's skip the usual ill-informed legal argument, and go to something we can actually verify: has somebody every been prosecuted for planting a rootkit or other backdoor in a system they had authorized access to? Cite me one example.
Frank Sinatra will never buy one.
We used to be #1. We've kind of lost ground in recent years. Perhaps if we spent more on education, capital improvement, and R&D, and less on marketing and who's-got-the-highest-paid-CEO, we'd be doing better.
AT&T is a case in point. Remember their "You Will" ad campaign? They predicted lots of really cool new technologies, most of which have actually come to pass. But not one of them was implemented by AT&T, or any of its successors. They just blew every chance they had. Lots of money got spent, lots of executive left with solid-gold handshakes, but nothing actually got done. Sort of like America as a whole.
I have been a fone geek since my my first in the trunk 3 watt analog radio shack branded Car phone.
Was that the one the was essentially a two-way radio that only connected you to a phone operator? You do go back!
I never (before the N900) had one that would truly free me from a laptop.
That's a pretty subjective criterion. No palm-size device will every free most of us from a laptop. On the other hand, I've known people who claimed their Palm Vs did just that. OK, no networking. But upgrade to a Palm with a MMC slot (the V+ was the last Palm not to have one) and stick a bluetooth card in it...
The N900 IS the most advanced (mobile computer that also has cell and viop phone functions) of the decade.
If you want a truly hackable phone, yea, it's pretty important. Most consumers will give it a big yawn. And calling it a "computer" is pure marketspeak — I must own a dozen cheap gadgets that would qualify as a "computer" if you looked at them the right way.
Which is not to trash the N900. It's pretty damn sexy. I'd run out right now and buy one if $400 wasn't such a nasty dent in my budget.
I really do not understand why I am not seeing more about it.
Shouldn't be hard to understand. Most people equate "smart phone" with "iPhone". (This is the product that took "app" from programmer slang to household word.) If you're a serious geek you're maybe into Android (mainly because Google is perceived as less fascist to developers and users than Apple). WebOS trails behind, and the older platforms (Windows Mobile, PalmOS, Symbian) still have some following.
Even to the smallest of these, Maemo is tiny upstart. So far it's only been the basis for 3 devices, only one of which is a phone. Nokia's going to have to push this platform very hard if it's going to gain any traction. And from what I can see, Maemo is the poor stepbrother to Symbian in Nokia's product strategy.
That's how established businesses kill new technologies, even when it's clear that those new technologies are what the company needs to adapt and grow. Folks loyal to the old technologies starve the new guys of resources (marketing, R&D, sales priorities) because they're in control. I speak from experience here, having worked in the x64 server branch of Sun.
I have chatted with many N900 users that after a month or so, are still finding new things.
Which is why I want one. But I'm not going to plunk down that much cash until I know this platform has a future. So far, I've seen little to convince me it does.
Then again, the Great Recession might end next month and I'll go back to having too much disposable cash....
But if the alternative is paying per-mile charges for a T1, it makes sense if it's enough bandwidth for your application.
And assuming you have to serve the application onsite. I can't imagine a situation in which colo or cloud computing wouldn't be just as effective, more scalable, and cheaper.
I'm not counting powershell as a command line. I suppose you could use it that way, but using it requires too much .NET knowledge to make it suitable for basic interaction.
And installing a rootkit is not, in itself, illegal. Probably should be, but there you are.
Setting the setuid bit is illegal?
Now that we've upgraded more or less all the legacy switches in the USA and sold them to Mexico it's no longer a problem :)
Kewl! So now I can get a full 128K out of a technology that only costs twice as much as my 1M DSL! ;)
Being a grammar nazi doesn't make you an expert on Hitler!
Back in the 30s, lots of guys had toothbrush mustaches. My grandfather had one. Der Fuhrer made them unfashionable, along with racism.
My family used to have this big photo of him hanging in the front entry. Once somebody asked me why we had a picture of Hitler. Which was sort of funny, because the photo was his official portrait as the head of a Jewish fraternal organization.
n the mid-90s, we got BRI (ISDN, 2*64 kbps in most of the world, 2*56 kbps in the US). Which pretty much ended the modem era, except for in the US and UK, where 56 kbps POTS modems reigned supreme until well after the millennium.
When the U.S operating companies started rolling out ISDN, I thought all my connection issues were history. But OCs still thought of themselves as regulated monopolies (they still do, really) and got the FCC to set high per-minute rates for ISDN usage — which pretty much destroyed any chance of ISDN being widely adopted. So we were stuck with the damn modems until DSL allowed us to sidestep the federal tariffs. And we still haven't caught up.
I might be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure that US ISDN also had 64 kbps data ports. The 56 kbps limit was imposed on modems because the FCC experts thought that analog connections needed a safety margin to prevent crosstalk.
If you can hack getting off work at that hour, good for you. I never could.
I agree that their behavior is unacceptable. But as long as you're using their facility, they can force you to do anything they want. There's no technical fix here. You need to either cave in or find another facility.
OK, I stand corrected on the robots. Though "robot" is probably the wrong word.
I have no insight, but a glance at the map shows that it is smack in the middle of a bunch of area population centers - kind of the center of mass of Wichita, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Springfield.
Did you miss the part about workers not being able to handle the 2-hour commute from Tulsa? According to Google Maps, Wichita and Springfield are 3 hours, and OC is 4. They may be in a part of the country with a lot of population centers, but they're not close to a single one of them.