The kids use it to figure out what everyone is doing on Fri night, and plan their social lives. Knowing where your friends are at any time when you're planning to meet up with them is a good thing.
I'm getting old too. I use twitter... just barely, and only for work.
There were no telephones in my classrooms growing up. There was one in the main office, one in the principal's office obviously, and a few pay phones here and there.
And back in the day, we also didn't have school shootings. If this were ever legalized, I can see more kids dying as a result of no one except the principal being able to call 911. Any guesses who the shooters will target first in that scenario?
Because the OP probably had a lingering kernel update anyway. They come out with enough regularity that, despite having been current on my boxes sometime in the last two weeks, I found another one after returning from vacation this weekend. It wasn't critical and not worth taking the time for immediate action on.
Still, I'm not that brave. I like to examine yum a little more closely.
Nobody likes hurricanes. They cause massive destruction and they kill people. But they are part of nature.
There's that Love & Rockets quote.... "You can't go against nature, because when you do... that's part of nature too".
There's a degree of semantic truth there that shouldn't be forgotten, but I don't think that gives us a license to do whatever we want. We have these great big brains that are designed to predict consequences (among other things). The potential negative consequences you mention definitely have merit and need to be considered long and hard. This is a road that, once embarked upon, may be much much longer than we though - i.e. we start screwing with the weather and are forced into taking every more extremes to right the damage we've wrought - I think that Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice is an excellent metaphor for the general type of plight that modern man is likely to find himself in:
...The Sorcerer's Apprentice tells the story of Goethe's famous poem, which is a story of wizard's meek assistant who attempts to work some of the magical feats of his master, before he knows how to properly control them. Mickey plays the role of the apprentice, who causes a broom to come to "life" and perform his chore (fetching water from the well and pouring into a stone basin in the wizard's laboratory). Mickey directs the broom in his chore but falls asleep and dreams that he is a powerful wizard controlling the mighty seas and starry skies; awakening to find that the basin is overflowing and the broom is still filling it up. After trying repeatedly to halt the broom, Mickey panics, grabs an axe and chops the broom to pieces. Yet each piece comes to life, forms a totally new entire broom, and all of the brooms resume the chore of filling the basin, causing a monstrous flood. Mickey races to the wizard's spellbook looking for a counter-spell, but to no avail. After nearly drowning in a giant whirlpool, Mickey is rescued by the wizard, who magically halts the flood and causes the brooms to vanish. Angrily, he surveys the damage wrought by his apprentice (giving what Disney animators termed "The Dirty Disney Look"; the one raised eyebrow was an oft-repeated stare of disapproval from their boss). The apprentice sheepishly defers to his master and returns to his work. The wizard displays the tiniest hint of a smile, secretly delighting in the humor of the situation... before sharply rapping his assistant on the behind with the now-inanimate broom, and sending him scurrying from the room.
Open DNS recursion is it's own form of evil. I'm waiting for the day that Level3 locks those down to their own networks, and hundreds of our customers call us to complain "the Internet is broken" (it seems almost everyone knows those IPs and many choose to use them, despite the fact that our own DNS service is anycast and will always remain Redirect-free because we don't treat it as a potential revenue source, but a vital part of Internet infrastructure that ought to be inviolate).
We drop all IP traffic directed to our anycast IPs at our borders. You can't even ping them. query-source is not a listen-on address so it is impossible to get any type of response from our named. I predict most other ISPs being forced to do something similar. The poisoning threats are also ever on the horizon and this is another prudent safeguard.
Chilled water is a utility that is provided by our local power company in the downtown area of Denver.
There are two basic models for cooling a datacenter: chilled water or refrigerant.
The water supplied to our Lieberts is normally 39F.
However, a few times over the years we've had outages. Once the power company accidentally shut the feed off to our building (a sensor malfunctioned and believed it received a signal from monitoring equipment in our building requesting a shutdown). Another time a pump failed, and then the backup pump too.
So what happens in these situations? The same water now recirculates over and over through the A/C unit. That 39F water heats up VERY quickly and the entire unit turns into one giant heater. The first thing we have to do when chilled water goes out is turn the A/Cs off. The blowing hot air only makes things worse.
Fun times, especially since these type of things always fail at 3am.
We shouldn't be rewarding bad behavior with aid. Rewarding bad behavior only encourages it. Israel needs to be punished for its crimes against the US by losing its aid. The time has long since passed.
And #2 is Israel. It's time to cut off all aid to them. They seem to think we're their enemy, so I cannot fathom why we keep giving them billions of dollars every year.
You should get the bandwidth you pay for, regardless of what actually travels over it.
It is time for an end to flat-rate pricing then. As long as my neighborhood hogs are actually paying their fair share, and my provider uses that revenue to increase our infrastructure so that I don't suffer his piggishness then everything would work out.
Not to mention that Foxit doesn't require downloading huge updates (requiring a reboot to install) every other week.
I actually had a new windows install at work yesterday and replaced Acrobat with Foxit. You even have to reboot to uninstall that crapware. WTH? It's not like it's loading a damn driver, is it?
I cursed Adobe the whole time the machine was rebooting. Fuck them. I will go to lengths to ensure I never spend a single dime on any product of theirs.
In addition to what the other posters have said about the illegality of the practice, in this case it is more important to hire the most qualified candidates for these jobs.
I'd also consider myself fairly libertarian. Always believed in Thomas Paine's credo That government is best which governs least.
And actually, I'd even go as far as Thoreau some days:
I heartily accept the motto "That government is best which governs least" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe "That government is best which governs not at all" and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
- For 30 years, the Danes consistently rank themselves happier than the people of any other nation.
- The Danes interviewed credited this to a couple of factors:
1) The have low expectations
2) They have a universal safety net. Health care, education, child care, elder care etc., all taken care of by the State. So they often think of themselves as more "content" than "happy".
3) They have a homogeneous population and very, very low crime rate (no guns! I'm a gun owner, but I'd probably be willing to trade that right to live in a more civil society, assuming that I could trust the government to remain civil towards me).
The tradeoff is 50% income tax!
But I haven't been able to get beyond this for a while now. If socialism is the horrible evil that most Libertarians will tell you it is, then how is it that the happiest country in the world is a socialist country?
I'm not saying we could switch to socialism in the US and be happier. I don't think its that easy. But I do believe that if socialism were really the great evil we're told it is, the Danes wouldn't be self-reporting as the happiest people in the world.
Obviously, there's a lot to be said in the implementation of any particular governmental and economic structure....
Gmail is still known the world over as Google's identity, and outside of Germany this changes nothing.
Inside of Germany, I imagine this company has pissed off a lot of people, who might have been potential customers.
If I learned tomorrow that I had inherited the intellectual property rights to a new kind of Soda, and that my ancestors had a claim on the name "Pepsi" I wouldn't be such a jackass as to try to sell my soda as Pepsi. That's only going to cause confusion and end badly for me.
No, being a reasonable person, I'd hire a lawyer, and have a sitdown with the folks at Pepsi about buying out my rights. Since this scenario involves an unexpected windfall, I wouldn't even be terribly insistent on anything more than a one-time payout that would let me live the rest of my life comfortably. That is, I wouldn't push for the maximum dollar value I thought I could get, just "enough".
My Comcast (Motorola) DVR threw constant HDCP warnings when turned on, despite the fact that I had nothing but an HDMI cable between the DVR and my TV set.
After the third consecutive week of being screwed out of watching South Park live (and paying over $150/month just for the television services) I returned the damn thing, and I now use Torrent to get ALL my TV content. When I find a decent ISP I'll be canceling the Comcast Internet too.
I was more than happy to pay for the service. But when their copy protection continuously fucked me over (despite other markets getting firmware updates to fix this known problem more than a year prior) I decided to stop rewarding bad behavior.
Why not? It costs money to provide disks, power, cooling etc. to host email doesn't it?
I believe 99% of the problems with email relate to its undervaluation and "freeness". Start charging every person a nickel for each email submitted from their IP address, and suddenly Joe Sixpack has a vested financial interest in cleaning the shit off his computer or throwing it in the trash (and which he chooses is irrelevant as long as it stops the crap).
I don't understand why anyone would ever think that email should be free. Spam volumes are increasing at nearly 100% / year. Who is supposed to pay for disk, processor, memory, cooling etc to match the demand?
I've got similiar experiences - been playing since 2005? (Crimson Skies on the original platform) and the service has been very good over the years. I just picked up CoD4 and haven't had a chance to try it on Live yet, but Halo3 has been fine across a variety of game types including the new map packs.
I also downloaded and watched a couple high-def movies on the service over the holidays without any issues.
Spammers from forging the valid domain that the source IP would be originating if it were legitimate mail? Now we'd have to verify not just domains but individual addresses in the database, and that would simply cause the spammers to turn around and use the compromised user's own address (at which point, the blowback will hopefully indicate something is wrong at the least)
It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
This is meaningless doublespeak that won't last. A minor is a "person under the age of eighteen years". How does a prosecutor prove that a cartoon or CGI image is under 18? It is not a person - since it does not exist it cannot have an age to be measured against a statutory definition.
If the person depicted doesn't exist no crime has been committed.
"Three fourths of the planet is water and of the land area, man occupies only a small portion."
We may be small, but we have big tools. Our technology allows us to extract and consume billions of tons of oiland coal each year. Is it any real surprise that means we've released almost 300 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere in the industrial era. You don't need to be an atmospheric scientist to see the trouble we are causing. The atmosphere traps some of the sun's heat and we are effectively putting more insulation into a system where the energy input cannot be readily decreased (a broken thermostat)... There are going to be big effects when you add more energy to a (relatively) closed system. The earth will eventually find a new equilibrium, but I doubt it will be very accomodating to us when it does.
So maybe we are creating the next environment for something better than us. Or maybe we'll get some giant dragonflies again:
According to recently developed geochemical models, oxygen levels are believed to have climbed to a maximum of 35 percent and then dropped to a low of 15 percent during a 120-million-year period that ended in a mass extinction at the end of the Permian. Such a jump in oxygen would have had dramatic biological consequences by enhancing diffusion-dependent processes such as respiration, allowing insects such as dragonflies, centipedes, scorpions and spiders to grow to very large sizes. Fossil records indicate, for example, that one species of dragonfly had a wing span of 2 1/2 feet.
My money is on a coming panic at the effects of climate change that leads to an attempt to rectify by seeding the oceans with iron filings to feed the plankton and speed the process of breaking down the CO2. This could lead to another elevation in O2 that starts a planetwide fire and forces life back into the oceans again.
I think the fever metaphor is right on - sometimes fever kills the patient. It is the body's own immune response that creates the real problem. Perhaps life is, on some level, programmed to evolve little monkeys who get good at shooting down the occasional catastrophic meteor impacts (the reason we are so inclined to war, with the star wars missile defense type projects being a sort of holy grail for life's long-term success). Perhaps the earth's 'immune response' is normal in the evolution of a life-bearing planet, and unfortunately in some cases, fatal.
N.B. While I consider myself pagan and have no discomfort with being called a tree-hugging dirt worshipping hippy, at this time I don't necessarily believe in an individual sentience per-se in the earth as Goddess, or even as a single organism. But I am willing to believe that this process happens over and over and over again on many different worlds and that creates the basic protein structures that will tend to evolve in certain ways.
The pathologist Lewis Thomas wrote in response to the Gaia hypothesis that he could not see the earth as a living organism, but he could imagine it as a single cell. And then on our immune systems he said:
In real life, however, even in our worst circums
Re:Wrong - the government *is* concerned
on
Forecasting Doomsday
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I agree that the mere presence of the pentagon study by itself isn't cause for concern.
What is cause for concern are the number of critical tipping points we seem to be hitting. Specifically:
Loss of polar sea ice changes albedo - warming sea waters melt ice faster, as the surface of the earth in that region changes from reflective white to darker colors more heat is retained, in turn melting more ice.
Global warming to speed up as carbon levels show sharp rise - this is BIG news. Why? Because there's no corresponding relative increase from human emissions or other known sources. The implications are that we've tipped a balance with CO2 and triggered a feedback loop. Even if we ceased all industrial activity today, the natural source might continue until the planet is again uninhabitable for oxygen-breathers.
It's not that things might get a bit warmer (or colder), or that a "few people" in low-lying areas might have to move (actually, it's 53% of the U.S. population according to the census). What's really scary is that we are changing the atmosphere on a scale that may not recover for thousands of years if ever, and which has no guarantees of being suitable for higher life.
Wrong - the government *is* concerned
on
Forecasting Doomsday
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You wrote: The world is ending on one end while the U.S. government isn't too concerned with it at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
You are in fact just getting old.
The kids use it to figure out what everyone is doing on Fri night, and plan their social lives. Knowing where your friends are at any time when you're planning to meet up with them is a good thing.
I'm getting old too. I use twitter... just barely, and only for work.
There were no telephones in my classrooms growing up. There was one in the main office, one in the principal's office obviously, and a few pay phones here and there.
And back in the day, we also didn't have school shootings. If this were ever legalized, I can see more kids dying as a result of no one except the principal being able to call 911. Any guesses who the shooters will target first in that scenario?
Story needs a 'thinkofthechildren' tag.
Because the OP probably had a lingering kernel update anyway. They come out with enough regularity that, despite having been current on my boxes sometime in the last two weeks, I found another one after returning from vacation this weekend. It wasn't critical and not worth taking the time for immediate action on. Still, I'm not that brave. I like to examine yum a little more closely.
Nobody likes hurricanes. They cause massive destruction and they kill people. But they are part of nature.
There's that Love & Rockets quote.... "You can't go against nature, because when you do... that's part of nature too".
There's a degree of semantic truth there that shouldn't be forgotten, but I don't think that gives us a license to do whatever we want. We have these great big brains that are designed to predict consequences (among other things). The potential negative consequences you mention definitely have merit and need to be considered long and hard. This is a road that, once embarked upon, may be much much longer than we though - i.e. we start screwing with the weather and are forced into taking every more extremes to right the damage we've wrought - I think that Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice is an excellent metaphor for the general type of plight that modern man is likely to find himself in:
Google "DNS recursive amplification" to see what I mean about the evils of open resolvers. Hell, even closing down recursion doesn't stop the madness since root hint amplification is being abused too.
We drop all IP traffic directed to our anycast IPs at our borders. You can't even ping them. query-source is not a listen-on address so it is impossible to get any type of response from our named. I predict most other ISPs being forced to do something similar. The poisoning threats are also ever on the horizon and this is another prudent safeguard.
So what happens if said predecessor gets hit by a bus, has a heart attack or a stroke and can no longer tell you the passwords?
Boot single user and reset them?
Yes, I realize that doesn't scale, but it works fine in a lot of small environments.
AT&T Offers $100k reward for capture of vandals.
Chilled water is a utility that is provided by our local power company in the downtown area of Denver.
There are two basic models for cooling a datacenter: chilled water or refrigerant.
The water supplied to our Lieberts is normally 39F.
However, a few times over the years we've had outages. Once the power company accidentally shut the feed off to our building (a sensor malfunctioned and believed it received a signal from monitoring equipment in our building requesting a shutdown). Another time a pump failed, and then the backup pump too.
So what happens in these situations? The same water now recirculates over and over through the A/C unit. That 39F water heats up VERY quickly and the entire unit turns into one giant heater. The first thing we have to do when chilled water goes out is turn the A/Cs off. The blowing hot air only makes things worse.
Fun times, especially since these type of things always fail at 3am.
If they are our friend, then please explain why they keep getting caught spying on us? That's not something friends normally do to each other.
And I'm not paranoid in the least - Israel has admitted to their spying.
And yet it continues happening, year after year.
We shouldn't be rewarding bad behavior with aid. Rewarding bad behavior only encourages it. Israel needs to be punished for its crimes against the US by losing its aid. The time has long since passed.
And #2 is Israel. It's time to cut off all aid to them.
They seem to think we're their enemy, so I cannot fathom why we keep giving them billions of dollars every year.
You should get the bandwidth you pay for, regardless of what actually travels over it.
It is time for an end to flat-rate pricing then. As long as my neighborhood hogs are actually paying their fair share, and my provider uses that revenue to increase our infrastructure so that I don't suffer his piggishness then everything would work out.
Not to mention that Foxit doesn't require downloading huge updates (requiring a reboot to install) every other week.
I actually had a new windows install at work yesterday and replaced Acrobat with Foxit. You even have to reboot to uninstall that crapware. WTH? It's not like it's loading a damn driver, is it?
I cursed Adobe the whole time the machine was rebooting. Fuck them. I will go to lengths to ensure I never spend a single dime on any product of theirs.
In addition to what the other posters have said about the illegality of the practice, in this case it is more important to hire the most qualified candidates for these jobs.
Interesting.
I'd also consider myself fairly libertarian. Always believed in Thomas Paine's credo That government is best which governs least.
And actually, I'd even go as far as Thoreau some days:
I heartily accept the motto "That government is best which governs least" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe "That government is best which governs not at all" and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
But recently I was watching a report on 60 minutes about the happiness of the Danish people (I abhor TV generally, but the GF had it on and couldn't help overhear).
The points that stuck with me:
- For 30 years, the Danes consistently rank themselves happier than the people of any other nation.
- The Danes interviewed credited this to a couple of factors:
1) The have low expectations
2) They have a universal safety net. Health care, education, child care, elder care etc., all taken care of by the State. So they often think of themselves as more "content" than "happy".
3) They have a homogeneous population and very, very low crime rate (no guns! I'm a gun owner, but I'd probably be willing to trade that right to live in a more civil society, assuming that I could trust the government to remain civil towards me).
The tradeoff is 50% income tax!
But I haven't been able to get beyond this for a while now. If socialism is the horrible evil that most Libertarians will tell you it is, then how is it that the happiest country in the world is a socialist country?
I'm not saying we could switch to socialism in the US and be happier. I don't think its that easy. But I do believe that if socialism were really the great evil we're told it is, the Danes wouldn't be self-reporting as the happiest people in the world.
Obviously, there's a lot to be said in the implementation of any particular governmental and economic structure....
The problem as I see it is the victor's.
Gmail is still known the world over as Google's identity, and outside of Germany this changes nothing.
Inside of Germany, I imagine this company has pissed off a lot of people, who might have been potential customers.
If I learned tomorrow that I had inherited the intellectual property rights to a new kind of Soda, and that my ancestors had a claim on the name "Pepsi" I wouldn't be such a jackass as to try to sell my soda as Pepsi. That's only going to cause confusion and end badly for me.
No, being a reasonable person, I'd hire a lawyer, and have a sitdown with the folks at Pepsi about buying out my rights. Since this scenario involves an unexpected windfall, I wouldn't even be terribly insistent on anything more than a one-time payout that would let me live the rest of my life comfortably. That is, I wouldn't push for the maximum dollar value I thought I could get, just "enough".
My Comcast (Motorola) DVR threw constant HDCP warnings when turned on, despite the fact that I had nothing but an HDMI cable between the DVR and my TV set.
After the third consecutive week of being screwed out of watching South Park live (and paying over $150/month just for the television services) I returned the damn thing, and I now use Torrent to get ALL my TV content. When I find a decent ISP I'll be canceling the Comcast Internet too.
I was more than happy to pay for the service. But when their copy protection continuously fucked me over (despite other markets getting firmware updates to fix this known problem more than a year prior) I decided to stop rewarding bad behavior.
Why not? It costs money to provide disks, power, cooling etc. to host email doesn't it?
I believe 99% of the problems with email relate to its undervaluation and "freeness". Start charging every person a nickel for each email submitted from their IP address, and suddenly Joe Sixpack has a vested financial interest in cleaning the shit off his computer or throwing it in the trash (and which he chooses is irrelevant as long as it stops the crap).
I don't understand why anyone would ever think that email should be free. Spam volumes are increasing at nearly 100% / year. Who is supposed to pay for disk, processor, memory, cooling etc to match the demand?
Last I looked it seems like the republicans are the ones stealing the elections.
I've got similiar experiences - been playing since 2005? (Crimson Skies on the original platform) and the service has been very good over the years. I just picked up CoD4 and haven't had a chance to try it on Live yet, but Halo3 has been fine across a variety of game types including the new map packs.
I also downloaded and watched a couple high-def movies on the service over the holidays without any issues.
Spammers from forging the valid domain that the source IP would be originating if it were legitimate mail? Now we'd have to verify not just domains but individual addresses in the database, and that would simply cause the spammers to turn around and use the compromised user's own address (at which point, the blowback will hopefully indicate something is wrong at the least)
It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
This is meaningless doublespeak that won't last. A minor is a "person under the age of eighteen years". How does a prosecutor prove that a cartoon or CGI image is under 18? It is not a person - since it does not exist it cannot have an age to be measured against a statutory definition.
If the person depicted doesn't exist no crime has been committed.
The movie Quills is relevant here....
We may be small, but we have big tools. Our technology allows us to extract and consume billions of tons of oiland coal each year. Is it any real surprise that means we've released almost 300 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere in the industrial era. You don't need to be an atmospheric scientist to see the trouble we are causing. The atmosphere traps some of the sun's heat and we are effectively putting more insulation into a system where the energy input cannot be readily decreased (a broken thermostat)... There are going to be big effects when you add more energy to a (relatively) closed system. The earth will eventually find a new equilibrium, but I doubt it will be very accomodating to us when it does.
I'm a pessimist, but I also take a very long term view. After all, the first anaerobic bacteria created the atmosphere we breathe - and this would have been a pollution crisis in their world if they could have recognized the evidence and understood the ramifications of it.
So maybe we are creating the next environment for something better than us. Or maybe we'll get some giant dragonflies again:
My money is on a coming panic at the effects of climate change that leads to an attempt to rectify by seeding the oceans with iron filings to feed the plankton and speed the process of breaking down the CO2. This could lead to another elevation in O2 that starts a planetwide fire and forces life back into the oceans again.
I think the fever metaphor is right on - sometimes fever kills the patient. It is the body's own immune response that creates the real problem. Perhaps life is, on some level, programmed to evolve little monkeys who get good at shooting down the occasional catastrophic meteor impacts (the reason we are so inclined to war, with the star wars missile defense type projects being a sort of holy grail for life's long-term success). Perhaps the earth's 'immune response' is normal in the evolution of a life-bearing planet, and unfortunately in some cases, fatal.
N.B. While I consider myself pagan and have no discomfort with being called a tree-hugging dirt worshipping hippy, at this time I don't necessarily believe in an individual sentience per-se in the earth as Goddess, or even as a single organism. But I am willing to believe that this process happens over and over and over again on many different worlds and that creates the basic protein structures that will tend to evolve in certain ways.
The pathologist Lewis Thomas wrote in response to the Gaia hypothesis that he could not see the earth as a living organism, but he could imagine it as a single cell. And then on our immune systems he said:
What is cause for concern are the number of critical tipping points we seem to be hitting. Specifically:
It's not that things might get a bit warmer (or colder), or that a "few people" in low-lying areas might have to move (actually, it's 53% of the U.S. population according to the census). What's really scary is that we are changing the atmosphere on a scale that may not recover for thousands of years if ever, and which has no guarantees of being suitable for higher life.
The pentagon commissioned this study entitled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security
I weep for our children