Houston already has access in libraries and schools, though the computers in the schools are generally not open to the public and those in the libraries are often crowded. However, the public library system insists that the computers in their libraries are to be used for research purposes only, and the librarians will enforce this policy when there's a queue. This makes me wonder if they talked to the mayor's office about this plan, because according to the Houston Chronicle all they're doing is installing software in those same crowded public libraries.
It's not quite so bad
on
Hotmail Hacked
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· Score: 4, Informative
You need to guess the message ID, a longish string based on a timestamp and another number. And once you do that, you still can't read other messages from that account unless you guess them separately. You could try brute-forcing the message IDs, of course, but then you're relying on a fast connection (I believe there are 60 possible message IDs per second, and you rarely know exactly when a message was processed anyway) and fast servers. Besides, after all this, you'll probably find that all the target account's real mail was automatically deleted to make room for WinXP.iso.bat, attached to a message asking for advice.
Why is there this very straight line right down the middle of the US where the east side is very bright, but the west side is very dark by comparison? I might understand if that was where the Rockies started, but to my knowlege it's not. Does anyone know what this line signifies?
That line is a bit west of the Mississippi River. The American conquest and subsequent resettlement of North America was a movement westward. At one point, a wave of settlers stopped just beyond the river, which is a major navigable thoroughfare even today. Too far west of the Mississippi, travel became much harder. Established settlements were few and far between. Food and other supplies were hard to obtain. The American Indians still had yet to be told that they had forfeited their lands, and did not wish to surrender their nomadic patterns of life. All in all, the West was not hostpitable to Americans until they reached the coast. If you look at a map of US states, you'll see that the Western ones tend to be large and often appear to have been created by bureaucrats. The dark area of the US really is comparatively unpopulated.
That's not the only problem. Look at the Korea Strait, between Japan and South Korea. As far as I know there are no oil rigs there to make that sort of light.
Also note that the London-like lights near Nigeria are actually in the Gulf of Guinea.
There are lights in the North Sea, though I can write those off to drilling.
Anyway, quite an interesting idea. Some cities are easy to pick out, as is (for example) the Lower Nile and the associated delta.
In response to another poster, the entire world is not included in this atlas. If you look closely at the big world thumbnail, you can discern the areas of the world that they've actually surveyed. Apparently they gave low priority to oceans, Siberia, and Canada.
Yes, or I could use anacron on my 802.11-equipped laptop. But I am not so confident that I want those "unstable" packages installed while I'm sleeping. My workstation is also my main web server.
Yes, that was sarcasm. And I don't fault you for wanting to monitor the installation of packages. However, I do fault you for running unstable on your workstation, and furthermore for running your primary web server on the same machine. Oh, and did you mention your primary web server is a laptop with wireless connectivity? I'm guessing reliability is assured through HP's throwing some money at it. Unless you're nostalgic for Windows uptimes or something, that is.
I'll tell you what I'm doing on my personal system. Every day, I type
apt-get update apt-get upgrade and my system is updated to the latest version of Debian.
There's a program called "cron" that you might want to use to automate this. To learn more about it, try "man cron". No need to be ashamed about this advice; I was a newbie once too. Hope this helps.
A laser sends out a cone of light, not a straight line. At the distances at which you normally use that laser pointer of yours, you don't notice this, but if you were sending a message to a different solar system you'd take this into account. (Either that or you'd have some explaining to do when your grant comes up for review.)
You'd also take into account the fact that your planet moves, if indeed it does in your frame of reference. There is no such thing as being stationary in space (i.e. there exists no absolute velocity, Mr. Michelson), and in any case an advanced alien civilization or a high school student would be smart enough to calculate the direction of a laser beam as a function of relative locations. Given reasonably precise astronomical tools (beyond what we have currently built AFAIK but IANAA) it shouldn't be hard to figure out from a reasonably distant solar system that the third planet around our star revolves through a certain orbit, and that our star is moving through the galaxy with a certain velocity relative to the alien body. Yes, that body might indeed rotate, but if the transmitter were actually on the surface it would be simple enough not to broadcast when the target body is beyond the horizon... or use multiple transmitters, or just launch the transmitter into orbit. If the aliens really were so dumb as to not figure that out, would we really want to communicate with them? They'd probably be OS zealots anyway, or maybe just wanting to sue Adobe for using their patented ROT13 encryption.
Now suppose that within, say, 30 ly of Earth has picked up on our radio transmissions and has used some simple triangulation to figure out that our planet is the source of these transmissions. If they wanted to make contact with us, they could send us a message encoded in a laser beam. Yes, they might have to do some simple math, but I think they could do it. And that beam, if it exists, could be visible today.
Why don't we have different levels of information for each category? Then I could get info-level messages about failures, and only warning-level messages about credits. And also I'd like to customize these messages for each category: for example, I only want warning-level messages about failures in the filesystem category. And perhaps I'd like only critical-level messages about successes in the boot-message-printing category, to prevent me from getting a notification about a successful notification (thus crashing at boot because some poor driver wanted to tell me that its programmers have big egos). Or alternatively the kernel would be smart enough to check the boot-message-printing options (configured through LILO perhaps? there's lots of unused space in my MBR) to make sure that it won't get stuck in a successful-message loop. Maybe for ease of maintenance we could get ESR to write this in Python, and then compile a small Python interpreter into the portion of the kernel code that gets loaded first...
Yes, this all sounds very good, Mr. Gates. True innovation. We'll implement it at once, sir.
Isn't that what driving licenses are for? I'm suggesting a similar thing for the net. You wouldn't let your 5 year old son drive a car, why let him online? Both are dangerous in their own ways.
Perhaps a better analogy would be a library or a sidewalk. I wouldn't let a 5 year old son read any book or cross the street alone, but it's not all or nothing.
What have AOLers ever added to the net? Even if they're not all hackers and script-kiddies, they're certainly a drain on bandwidth. Remember how the net was ten years ago?
Yeah, I remember. It was small, and hard to find information unless it related to Unix or particle physics. AOL users have added a tremendous amount of content. While it's possible that the content contributed by the average AOL user is not as high as the average non-AOL user, the net ten years ago isn't something I'd prefer to return to.
If you were in a restaurant and someone starting kicking tables over, they'd get thrown out. Same principle. Besides, prevention is always better than a cure, and it is prevention that I'm in favour of.
Script kiddies do get kicked off. However, the Internet is not a restaurant. A restaurant has a single owner or manager on location at all times. The net is more like a public square. If someone's committing a crime, they'll be removed, but if someone isn't contributing anything to the public discussion, no one advocates that they be forced out. (Nor must you be 18 to be seated at a restaurant, or participate in the public square.)
Your post is such nonsense that I hardly know where to begin.
So what is to be done? Maybe it's time to restrict who has access to the net. Since services like AOL and CompuServe made it easy for Joe Sixpack and his family to get online we've seen an exponential growth in website defacings, DDoS's and general abusive behaviour. If people were not allowed to access the net unless they fit certain criteria we could reclaim it from the scipt-kiddies.
<sarcasm>So what is to be done? Maybe it's time to restrict who has access to the roads. Since companies like Ford made it easy for Joe Sixpack and his family to get online we've seen an exponential growth in stoplight-running, wrecks and general abusive behaviour. If people were not allowed to access the roads unless they fit certain criteria we could reclaim it from the infidels.</sarcasm>
You're confusing causation and correlation. It's also happened since (a) script kiddie tools became widely available, (b) users with significant home bandwidth have become common, (c) non-web media have given attention to, and to an extent glorified, 31337 behavior, and (d) 17" monitors became popular. You further make the insiduous claim that average AOL users are script kiddies; this is a cheap, elitist attack that doesn't in the least help your argument: AOL users aren't anonymous.
What criteria would be appropriate is the next question. Well firstly we need some kind of age limit - 16 or 18 would seem appropriate since there is a lot of offenisve material out there that we don't want our kids seeing. It would also restrict the net to people mature enough to take responsiblity for their own actions, which can only be a good thing.
<sarcasm>Right! What we also need to do is restrict libraries to adults 18 years of age or older. We don't want our kids to read about bomb-making until they reach the age of 18 and are magically wise. There's so much offensive material in the library, after all.</sarcasm>
Secondly there should be some kind of examination process to weed out those people who aren't desirable. This should allow us to ensure that people know to be polite and would also allow us to teach people things like "don't open every attachment you receive in the mail" which would make everybody's life better.
<sarcasm>Another great idea! Let's create some powerful organization to kick impolite people (by their judgment) off thenet. Also this organization, which everyone would gladly accept, would be empowered to remove inferior users. All the nations of the world would unite behind a plan to make the Internet available only to the master race.</sarcasm>
Seriously, why are you so intent on kicking off users? It's childish and vindictive behavior. It's neither practical, nor IMHO desirable in a free society.
OpenBSD now has encryped swap space. The keys are randomly generated by the kernel and stored only in memory, so nothing in swap is accessible after a reboot. The same could be done (might be already) for other files (e.g. an O_CRYPT). Secure deletion is easy: fopen, flock, fstat (|| fseek, ftell, fseek), { fwrite, fseek } (until satisfied), unlink, flock, fclose. Relatively portable, too. It's a shame the GNU rm(1) doesn't have this option; perhaps I'll see if they're interested in the possibility.
Posting to a thread doesn't indicate any position related to the topic of the thread. If you say, "All Microsoft products suck," and someone else says, "Visual Basic doesn't suck," and I correct them, "It's been scientifically proven to suck," I don't necessarily agree with your comment.
...annoying microcoulombs. If there's one metric unit I can't stand, it's the C. In fact, the prefix should be removed entirely, because you need to use the HTML character entity µ, which timothy doesn't seem to know about.
Sometimes when they ask me to "tell a friend!" about something or other, I'll tell the postmaster, and give mailer-daemon as my address. Lonely postmasters like getting mail from their mailer-daemons.
I assume you must have replied to the wrong comment, because what I wrote had nothing to do with laws or punishment. I was simply trying to show that there's a difference between talking to someone in the car and talking to someone who isn't in the car. Personally, I think there are enough existing unenforced traffic laws (e.g. speed limits) that there's no need for new ones.
Radios can be ignored. Children (and adults) can be aware of when the driver is concentrating on driving and will stop talking temporarily. Small children are always a problem, because they're too immature to understand that driving at 100 km/hr is not made any easier by a child's boredom or hunger.
My greatest fear is that the genome will be modified to create more zealots for/.. Imagine a race of superhumans capable of posting "Foo should be GPLd" messages as fast as today's trained apes are posting "First Post" messages. There'll be license jokes, insensitive "treat AOL users like dirt" jokes, Microsoft jokes, bad trolls moderated up as funny, good trolls moderated down as flamebait, and flamebait moderated up as insightful. It'll be July 2000 all over again! We must take action to prevent this!
POST is not evil. GET with huge form data (files,/. comments, etc.) is. I think what you're trying to say is that using POST when GET would suffice (e.g. navigation) is evil.
In Win32/IE, shift-click to open a link in a new window.
In any case, IE users should be familiar with the security zones scheme. Not great, but better than nothing. Any site evil enough to try braindead marketeering schemes like that can be put in the Restricted zone, which you can configure to turn off all scripting.
If you had bothered to read more of the site, you would have noticed that those results are all submitted by vendors with interests in getting good numbers. If Sun wants to enter a Sparc/Solaris combo, they can do that. If Apple for some reason decided it was in the HTTP server business (which it isn't (yet?) by any stretch of the imagination), it can run the test suite and submit the results.
Dell, like every OEM licensee of Windows, doesn't enjoy paying MS money on every machine it sells. Knowing that many of them will run Linux anyway, they offer to install it, coincidentally saving them the cost of Windows. Since they sell the box for the same cost either way, they're making more profit with Linux.
So why not make sure Linux wins a benchmark in an area where they know Linux is popular already? Fudged numbers and fudged hardware aside (we'll assume they were honest), it would certainly seem a logical thing for them to do. As is evident from the results page, they blew away the competition with TUX 1.0. I've been unable to find any information on this (please enlighten), but it appears that it's a kernel patch, because the options are set with the kernel interface. Is this the khttpd that was discussed after the Mindcraft fiasco?
In any case, if it's in kernelspace, it's most likely not a full-featured HTTP server like Apache, Zeus, IIS. So it can spit out static pages as fast as you'd possibly need. Big deal. Fireworks accelerate faster than space shuttles, but you wouldn't create dynamic content with fireworks. (Erm... where was I?)
My point is, Dell has proven that a specially designed static page server is faster than servers with more features. That doesn't really tell us anything we didn't know. It doesn't demonstrate that one OS is better than another, nor does it make deployment decisions any easier (except for fools).
The vast majority of money that musicianss receive now is through live performances and merchandise sales. The only reason they're stuck with the RIAA is that it's hard to go on tour when no one's heard your music. If the RIAA's role in marketing music is removed, they no longer exist. Remember, even without copyright protection, the RIAA has inertia on its side. All the record companies and middlemen aren't going to disappear overnight; they'll be replaced gradually by whatever successful model emerges.
Slashdot Mirror
Houston already has access in libraries and schools, though the computers in the schools are generally not open to the public and those in the libraries are often crowded. However, the public library system insists that the computers in their libraries are to be used for research purposes only, and the librarians will enforce this policy when there's a queue. This makes me wonder if they talked to the mayor's office about this plan, because according to the Houston Chronicle all they're doing is installing software in those same crowded public libraries.
You need to guess the message ID, a longish string based on a timestamp and another number. And once you do that, you still can't read other messages from that account unless you guess them separately. You could try brute-forcing the message IDs, of course, but then you're relying on a fast connection (I believe there are 60 possible message IDs per second, and you rarely know exactly when a message was processed anyway) and fast servers. Besides, after all this, you'll probably find that all the target account's real mail was automatically deleted to make room for WinXP.iso.bat, attached to a message asking for advice.
Also note that the London-like lights near Nigeria are actually in the Gulf of Guinea.
There are lights in the North Sea, though I can write those off to drilling.
Anyway, quite an interesting idea. Some cities are easy to pick out, as is (for example) the Lower Nile and the associated delta.
In response to another poster, the entire world is not included in this atlas. If you look closely at the big world thumbnail, you can discern the areas of the world that they've actually surveyed. Apparently they gave low priority to oceans, Siberia, and Canada.
--
There's a program called "cron" that you might want to use to automate this. To learn more about it, try "man cron". No need to be ashamed about this advice; I was a newbie once too. Hope this helps.
--
A laser sends out a cone of light, not a straight line. At the distances at which you normally use that laser pointer of yours, you don't notice this, but if you were sending a message to a different solar system you'd take this into account. (Either that or you'd have some explaining to do when your grant comes up for review.)
You'd also take into account the fact that your planet moves, if indeed it does in your frame of reference. There is no such thing as being stationary in space (i.e. there exists no absolute velocity, Mr. Michelson), and in any case an advanced alien civilization or a high school student would be smart enough to calculate the direction of a laser beam as a function of relative locations. Given reasonably precise astronomical tools (beyond what we have currently built AFAIK but IANAA) it shouldn't be hard to figure out from a reasonably distant solar system that the third planet around our star revolves through a certain orbit, and that our star is moving through the galaxy with a certain velocity relative to the alien body. Yes, that body might indeed rotate, but if the transmitter were actually on the surface it would be simple enough not to broadcast when the target body is beyond the horizon... or use multiple transmitters, or just launch the transmitter into orbit. If the aliens really were so dumb as to not figure that out, would we really want to communicate with them? They'd probably be OS zealots anyway, or maybe just wanting to sue Adobe for using their patented ROT13 encryption.
Now suppose that within, say, 30 ly of Earth has picked up on our radio transmissions and has used some simple triangulation to figure out that our planet is the source of these transmissions. If they wanted to make contact with us, they could send us a message encoded in a laser beam. Yes, they might have to do some simple math, but I think they could do it. And that beam, if it exists, could be visible today.
--
Why don't we have different levels of information for each category? Then I could get info-level messages about failures, and only warning-level messages about credits. And also I'd like to customize these messages for each category: for example, I only want warning-level messages about failures in the filesystem category. And perhaps I'd like only critical-level messages about successes in the boot-message-printing category, to prevent me from getting a notification about a successful notification (thus crashing at boot because some poor driver wanted to tell me that its programmers have big egos). Or alternatively the kernel would be smart enough to check the boot-message-printing options (configured through LILO perhaps? there's lots of unused space in my MBR) to make sure that it won't get stuck in a successful-message loop. Maybe for ease of maintenance we could get ESR to write this in Python, and then compile a small Python interpreter into the portion of the kernel code that gets loaded first...
Yes, this all sounds very good, Mr. Gates. True innovation. We'll implement it at once, sir.
--
--
You're confusing causation and correlation. It's also happened since (a) script kiddie tools became widely available, (b) users with significant home bandwidth have become common, (c) non-web media have given attention to, and to an extent glorified, 31337 behavior, and (d) 17" monitors became popular. You further make the insiduous claim that average AOL users are script kiddies; this is a cheap, elitist attack that doesn't in the least help your argument: AOL users aren't anonymous.
<sarcasm>Right! What we also need to do is restrict libraries to adults 18 years of age or older. We don't want our kids to read about bomb-making until they reach the age of 18 and are magically wise. There's so much offensive material in the library, after all.</sarcasm> <sarcasm>Another great idea! Let's create some powerful organization to kick impolite people (by their judgment) off thenet. Also this organization, which everyone would gladly accept, would be empowered to remove inferior users. All the nations of the world would unite behind a plan to make the Internet available only to the master race.</sarcasm>Seriously, why are you so intent on kicking off users? It's childish and vindictive behavior. It's neither practical, nor IMHO desirable in a free society.
--
use constant foo => "bar\n";
print foo; # or foo() under strict 'subs'
--
OpenBSD now has encryped swap space. The keys are randomly generated by the kernel and stored only in memory, so nothing in swap is accessible after a reboot. The same could be done (might be already) for other files (e.g. an O_CRYPT). Secure deletion is easy: fopen, flock, fstat (|| fseek, ftell, fseek), { fwrite, fseek } (until satisfied), unlink, flock, fclose. Relatively portable, too. It's a shame the GNU rm(1) doesn't have this option; perhaps I'll see if they're interested in the possibility.
Or maybe I should just petition the city council?
Posting to a thread doesn't indicate any position related to the topic of the thread. If you say, "All Microsoft products suck," and someone else says, "Visual Basic doesn't suck," and I correct them, "It's been scientifically proven to suck," I don't necessarily agree with your comment.
...annoying microcoulombs. If there's one metric unit I can't stand, it's the C. In fact, the prefix should be removed entirely, because you need to use the HTML character entity µ, which timothy doesn't seem to know about.
MAILER-DAEMON@example.com
Sometimes when they ask me to "tell a friend!" about something or other, I'll tell the postmaster, and give mailer-daemon as my address. Lonely postmasters like getting mail from their mailer-daemons.
I assume you must have replied to the wrong comment, because what I wrote had nothing to do with laws or punishment. I was simply trying to show that there's a difference between talking to someone in the car and talking to someone who isn't in the car. Personally, I think there are enough existing unenforced traffic laws (e.g. speed limits) that there's no need for new ones.
Point taken. Still, you could build big heat sinks more easily.
Radios can be ignored. Children (and adults) can be aware of when the driver is concentrating on driving and will stop talking temporarily. Small children are always a problem, because they're too immature to understand that driving at 100 km/hr is not made any easier by a child's boredom or hunger.
My greatest fear is that the genome will be modified to create more zealots for /.. Imagine a race of superhumans capable of posting "Foo should be GPLd" messages as fast as today's trained apes are posting "First Post" messages. There'll be license jokes, insensitive "treat AOL users like dirt" jokes, Microsoft jokes, bad trolls moderated up as funny, good trolls moderated down as flamebait, and flamebait moderated up as insightful. It'll be July 2000 all over again! We must take action to prevent this!
POST is not evil. GET with huge form data (files, /. comments, etc.) is. I think what you're trying to say is that using POST when GET would suffice (e.g. navigation) is evil.
In any case, IE users should be familiar with the security zones scheme. Not great, but better than nothing. Any site evil enough to try braindead marketeering schemes like that can be put in the Restricted zone, which you can configure to turn off all scripting.
If you had bothered to read more of the site, you would have noticed that those results are all submitted by vendors with interests in getting good numbers. If Sun wants to enter a Sparc/Solaris combo, they can do that. If Apple for some reason decided it was in the HTTP server business (which it isn't (yet?) by any stretch of the imagination), it can run the test suite and submit the results.
So why not make sure Linux wins a benchmark in an area where they know Linux is popular already? Fudged numbers and fudged hardware aside (we'll assume they were honest), it would certainly seem a logical thing for them to do. As is evident from the results page, they blew away the competition with TUX 1.0. I've been unable to find any information on this (please enlighten), but it appears that it's a kernel patch, because the options are set with the kernel interface. Is this the khttpd that was discussed after the Mindcraft fiasco?
In any case, if it's in kernelspace, it's most likely not a full-featured HTTP server like Apache, Zeus, IIS. So it can spit out static pages as fast as you'd possibly need. Big deal. Fireworks accelerate faster than space shuttles, but you wouldn't create dynamic content with fireworks. (Erm... where was I?)
My point is, Dell has proven that a specially designed static page server is faster than servers with more features. That doesn't really tell us anything we didn't know. It doesn't demonstrate that one OS is better than another, nor does it make deployment decisions any easier (except for fools).
The vast majority of money that musicianss receive now is through live performances and merchandise sales. The only reason they're stuck with the RIAA is that it's hard to go on tour when no one's heard your music. If the RIAA's role in marketing music is removed, they no longer exist. Remember, even without copyright protection, the RIAA has inertia on its side. All the record companies and middlemen aren't going to disappear overnight; they'll be replaced gradually by whatever successful model emerges.