I think it will be hard for people to take this game seriously until the EFF's web designers learn to correctly code special characters into their text. As I was going through the game I saw "nbsp;" all over the place! The best example of this was in the online retailer frame (go to it from the index, it's faster). The balloon that pops up when you click on the "privacy" button has a row of eleven "nbsp;"s that look like they're being used to position the "close" button on the right.
Having done a little (very little) Flash development, I'm pretty sure that you don't need to resort to playing that kind of trick to position things. And how hard is it to remember that codes for special characters start with an "&"?
I hope that this game was the result of someone's volunteer effort. I know that the EFF works on a very limited budget, so perhaps hiring high-quality web design talent wasn't a high priority. I just can't help but wonder, though, if the people who approved it were just staring at Carabella's jugs through the entire presentation...
"A man may write at anytime, if he will set himself doggedly to it...No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." -
Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1776
"Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?" -
Bill Gates, 1976
There must be a lot of blockheads out there. If the above quotes were true, then only blockheads would ever write music that they know will never get signed to a major label. Only blockheads would ever write books or essays that they didn't expect to get paid for publishing. And only blockheads would ever write software that they never intend to sell.
What Samuel Johnson, Bill Gates, and you don't seem to understand is that money is not what motivates authors, musicians, and other artists to perform their art. Many of the greatest music composers of all time were literally compulsive about their writing. I vaguely remember a story from my music appreciation classes (yes, I'm too lazy to look up the details;) about one composer who was fired from his (non-music-related) job because he used work time and materials to write several hundred variations on a theme given to him by his music instructor (the tutor told him that quantity was as important as quality). Another story was about a child prodigy (who later became a great composer) whose parents restricted him from writing or playing; they removed the restriction when he shattered a window - he was banging his fingers against it, pretending that it was a piano, and he was playing a piece that he had composed.
I won't argue that you have to have OCD to be an artist; I will, however, argue that artists are compelled to express their art because it is part of their nature. Lack of government sponsorship may have kept Mozart from creating as many works as he did, but it would not have stopped him from composing. Many of the greatest painters of all time were unrecognized and penniless their entire lives, yet their works are considered masterpieces. If they didn't do it for the money, then why did they?
I could go on now about how artists through time have lamented the moral dilemma of needing to be true to their art and also please their patrons, but I think I've jabbered enough. I assert that true artists take money for their work because they need money to be able to perform their art, and thier art is all that they have to sell. If they perform their art in order to become rich, then they truly are blockheads: they would have better luck as bankers.
Help me out here, because I don't see your experiment being conclusive. I've been led to believe that the determination of the direction of a sound had much more to do with the timing with which it reaches the ears than with the volume level. My hypothesis is that the subject in your experiment is still using the covered ear to determine the origin of the sound.
An experiment I saw on Mr Wizard's world supports the timing theory. It involves the subject putting a tube up to one of their ears and being really confused about the direction of sounds originating near their head - the increased path length to the ear with the tube changed the timing enough that the subject judged the sound to be coming from a location much nearer the unblocked ear.
A similar experiment (that I haven't seen performed) involved a pair of speakers used to simultaneously play a short tone (as close to a single wavelength as possible). When asked which direction the sound appeared to come from, the subject pointed in the direction of the closer speaker, even when the futher one was set to a higher volume.
Perhaps another experiment is in order - have the subject put an earplug in one ear and place a tube up to the same ear, and repeat your experiment. If the subject is still correct about the direction, then your hypotesis that one ear can determine direction will be supported; otherwise I'd assert that the subject in your experiment was still using the covered ear to determine the direction of the sound source.
ps-I'd also attribute the trouble identifying the direction of a siren in the city to the good reflectivity of the building surfaces - it's easy to catch spurious reflections, correctly interpret the direction of the reflected sound, and incorrectly assume that the sound originated along that path. I'm not convinced that adding white noise to the siren will help with that.
pps-before I get flamed about my experiment being centered around left-right awareness and the parent post discussing up-down, I'm aware of that. Give the tube a right-angle turn and point it up or down as you see fit; it's easy to do with either pvc or paper towel tubes and duct tape. Join me in ignoring the acoustical properties of either of those materials...;^) If you're lucky, after work I'll run this experiment myself and post the results, but don't hold your breath - family life can wreak havoc on an amateur experimenter's lab schedule.
The reason why the roadmap counts as being "just modified" is that there is a date for the 1.0 branch (April 09) and an ideal release date (15-Apr-2002) in the table further down the page. Neither of these were there yesterday; I've gotten compulsive about checking.
Anyone remember if the line in the table for 1.0 has always said RC1? I seem to remember it just saying 1.0...
... but they started out with buying out a bankrupt cable television service. As you would expect, AT&T (the only other cable provider for the area) threw a fit and complained about unfair competition. These complaints took the form of full length commercials on cable TV (their network, of course) telling people to go complain to city hall about how bad it is for the government to get involved in the private sector. I went to the meetings just to "attaboy" the council members. I seriously got flashbacks to the town meeting when I read that article, all the same points got made. The council members told AT&T where they could file their complaints (hint: not in the city office), and I went away happy.
The city recently divested itself of the operational aspects of the cable service, but retained ownership of the wires. The company that bought the management contract pays rent to the city for the line space, and is required in their contract to allow ISPs to use the line also - they don't have exclusive access.
Eventually, the city will start running fiber optic cable throughout the city and will offer the same deal to new ISPs: rent bandwidth, and resell it to your customers. No exclusive contracts. AT&T (the only viable cable internet provider in the area as well) is no doubt throwing another tantrum, probably in cooperation with Qwest DSL (the only significant DSL sevice in the area, partnered with MSN internet, for your convenience). I'll proabably miss the City council meeting, though, since I cancelled my cable contract and AT&T won't get a chance to invite me to oppose them again.
I'd love it if every city in the country followed the examples of these cities, it's about time that internet became an expected utility, just like water, gas, and electricity.
After watching the trailer, I informed my wife that I'd never watch the movie, since it over-glorified the Eloi, and that the modern movie industry couldn't afford to make a movie that was true to the book.
My logic went like this: The Eloi were the "sheeple"; they are the descendants of the "consumers" that the movie industry is targeting the movie at. The Powers That Be (TM) in Hollywood know this (their descendants will be Morlocks), and (as shown in their trailer) will refuse to show the struggle that the Time Traveller had in coming to grips with the Future: he realised that his great-to-the-Nth grandchildren would be eating Eloi. He does save a girl's life, but he doesn't bring her back to the Present with him, as he could never love anyone so stupid and self-absorbed.
I then shocked my wife by asserting that I sympathized much more with the Morlocks, and would probably have a descent collection of recipies for cooking Eloi if I were living in that time. The book fit my idea of a post-"tech revolution" scenario quite well. I think I scared her off from reading the book (she somehow made it through High School without having it be assigned reading for a class).
In any case, the Eloi's ancestors will go and watch this movie, and won't be offended by it. Meanwhile, I'll sit in my Data Center and make sure their personal information is safe on the database...
I always thought that Rambus was even more annoying than the rest of the Lakers.
Wow, if I had mod points I wouldn't be sure whether to mod you up as funny or down as flamebait...
I've got a friend that would consider that accusation fighting words - he's been carrying Kurt's bubble gum card in his wallet for 15+ years and reveres him as a demigod.
Of course, I never watched him play a game (that I know of), and couldn't careless personally (I really hope that my firend doesn't read/. or he'll probably hunt me down).
I was getting ISOs for Debian the other day and noticed that there was a US Only version and an International version. I figured that the difference was probably due to US Crypto export laws, but was puzzled because the International version was larger.
A few minutes of poking around showed that the International version was the one with GnuPG etc, not the US Only! That's just poetic, if you ask me - everyone gets their crypto, and the people with the stupid law are the ones that get the inconvenience (remote mirrors, longer downloads, etc.). I'd be tickled if that becomes the start of a trend.
OK, how seriously can I take this article if the author makes statements like this:
"Thompson's chip was doing its work preternaturally well. But how? Out of 100 logic cells he had assigned to the task, only a third seemed to be critical to the circuit's work. In other words, the circuit was more efficient by a huge order of magnitude than a similar circuit designed by humans using known principles."
Last I checked, orders of magnitude were powers of 10, and.3 was not 1/10th of 1. Maybe "huge" orders of magnitude work differently... And if NASA buys "a HAL hypercomputer from Star Bridge Systems", then their claim that it "is no larger than a regular desktop machine, yet it's roughly 1,000 times faster than traditional commercial systems" has to be true, too.
I'm excited about this technology, I hope it gets faster, but this kind of coverage isn't what it needs. And I thought that Linux had bad advocates...
There may not be much difference in the minds of manufacturers between programming a chip to act like another chip (but slower) and using a poor quality Star Trek replicator to make a copy of it. You suddenly are capable of doing things with your hardware for free that you used to have to give them money (by buying *their* hardware) to be able to do.
I can see in the near future that this may become a big issue for chip manufacturers - between FPGAs which do emulation in hardware and companies like Transmeta that do the emulation in software, the risk gets larger as the technology gets better. How long will it be before the operators of file-sharing servers get sued by the CFAA (Chip Fabricators Association of America (fictitious organization, as if it weren't obvious)) because they are letting people swap source code for programmable microprocessors that works better than the original hardware?
How different is that from suing OpenCores.org for providing instructions for making a clone?
Are the instructions protected as free speech? Will source code implementations be similarly protected?
I know which way the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc. would like to see it go, but I also know that I don't want to live in a world where the inventor of the replicator will be sued for being an accessory to patent infringement.
I think it's time to write another letter to my congressmen...
#1 - a lot of the software in question can NOT be purchased new any more, so its not like MS is missing out on a Win95 sale - there's plenty of legitimate uses for old Win9x OS, esp if you have a machine that has limited RAM or CPU (ie my toshiba libretto, a P75 with 16MB). IE no loss. So why spend the $
Microsoft's biggest competition comes from its own obsolete software. They're not worried that they're losing the profits from a win9x sale, they're worried that you're choosing to use a copy of YAOS (for values of YAOS != M$OS.current_version), thus depriving them of a sale of WinXP. If they can reduce the supply of all obsolete versions of their software, then it's more likely that joe user will pay to license the current version.
Oh, and I'm sure that Intel would agree with them that since you can't legally get a copy of win95 anymore that it's time to upgrade your hardware as well...
Re:what type of security they're NOT teaching
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· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, the DOD isn't in the business of teaching people how to be spies. Instead, they concentrate on creating a system where inadvertent security compromise is unlikely. Once the system is in place, they then train personnel on a system of best practices designed to both reduce information security risk and make it obvious when the procedures aren't followed. For example, I'm curious how the USAF member in question got the information out of the facility - those systems aren't supposed to have any removable media besides the hard disk (so it can be locked in the safe). That means no floppies, no zip drives, no CDRs, nothing. It would not surprise me if the facility he removed the information from were given a security audit in the near future.
It wouldn't surprise me either if the people he worked with were getting lazy about security - the periodic lectures on how to tell if one of your cow-orkers is spying generally get greeted with groans beforehand, snores during, and blank looks afterwards. It's laziness like that that allows security compromises to occur in the first place.
I heard a story once about someone who managed to get access to a DOD secure network. After he got busted they asked him how he had done it, and he anwered that he waited for someone to get lazy about procedure and do something not allowed by the "best practices" policies. He was convinced that if policy hadn't been broken that there would have been no way to get access.
And I complain about stupid users on _MY_ network...
Having read both Steve's article and the antioffline rebuttal, I think that anioffline has missed Steve's point. One 1337 H4x0r's Linux box does not a DDoS attack make. Sure there have been raw-socket attacks available from H4x0r-owned and -cracked Linux and other *nix platforms, but not in large number. There are far more windows boxes open to hacking, and there always have been. They haven't been attractive targets, though, because once you have them, they're pretty much useless compared to a good *nix box.
Now that there will be loads of WinXP boxes around to hack with capabilities similar to a real workstation or server running a Unix variant, the types of DDoS attacks that could be done with cracked *nix boxes can be done with the magnitude usually associated with zombie Win* boxen.
To beat the dead horse some more, Steve's not worried about script kiddies launching attacks from their own machines, he's worried about them infecting large numbers of WinXP boxen with various tojans, turing the trojan-infected boxen into a pool of ready-and-waiting attack zobmies, and launching hard-to-filter attacks using the raw sockets.
I can see why he's worried, and I'm taking a wait-and-see approach to it: wait a LONG time before adopting any of the *XP titles from Micro$oft, and seeing if the Net really does melt down after *XP's release. That way I can guarantee that I'm not contributing to the problem and, well, if the Net melts down, I can't stop it on my own anyway.
Well, I missed the SciAm article, but Discover had a recent article on the subject as well. In it Newton's laws were brought to full force, and the conclusion was that wings indeed generate lift by pushing air down. They even have a neat picture of a Cessna leaving "a deep trough in the clouds beneath it, proof that it stays aloft by pushing air down. (photo courtesy of Cessna Aircraft Company)"
They suggest, though, that the answer involves more than just the "kite" effect that some responses to your post suggest. Here's an excerpt with their explanation:
To understand lift you need only Newton's three laws and something called the Coanda effect. The Coanda effect is just the tendency of air or any even slightly viscous fluid to stick to a surface it is flowing over, and thus to follow the surface as it bends. As air follows the upper surface of a wing, it gets bent downward -- because the surface is curved but also because the leading edge is tilted up (especially when ascending) at what is called the angle of attack. The air that is bent downward pulls on the air above it, distending it and creating a low-pressure zone.
To bend the air downward, the wing has to exert a force on it (that's Newton's first law). That action inevitably elicits an equal and opposite reaction (Newton's third law). By means of the low-pressure zone above the wing and the higher pressure below it, the air exerts an upward force on the wing: That's lift. The size of the force is equal to the mass of air the wing has diverted downward multiplied by the acceleration of that air (Newton's second law)."
The article was scanty on technical details, but pointed out some intereting facts that go in the face of Conventional Wisdom (TM) on the subject. For example, CW holds that for some reason the air travelling over the top of the wing takes the same amount of time to reach the back as the air passing under; the author calls this the "principle of equal transit times" and rapidly debunks it. It turns out that the air pasing over the top of the wing actually reaches the trailing edge faster than the air on the bottom.
If you don't mind, I'd appreciate it if you posted the link to the SciAm article - I wasn't able to find it on their online archive. Thanks, and enjoy!
Considering that my need for a desktop comes from an overriding desire for expandability using cheap parts, I would never buy one of these. From the JPEGs on the site it looks like they think the big win for desktops is the higher elevation of the monitor/bigger angle between monitor and keyboard. Never mind that it's still not a full sized keyboard - it's just the same keyboard detached from the laptop and placed on the desk. And it's still using that horrific touchpad as a mouse. Don't get me started.
So let's see... I keep all of the disadvantages of a laptop - proprietary design, expensive parts, and lack of expandabilty - and add several new opportunities for mechanical failure? I don't think so. I'll reccommend it to my CEO - his friends might be impressed.
It is nice to spread $8.00 for two weeks of food, but you wouldn't want to do that once you are out of college.
</i></p>
<p>I don't know about that; my wife and I find that it's a fun challenge to feed our family of four nutritiously on less than $0.50/meal. It require time spent looking for good deals on bulk ingredients and cooking from scratch, but it's not that hard. Besides, my homemade sauces taste better on pasta than anything I've bought in a can. Lately we just can't bring ourselves to go to any fast food joints because it's hard to get a decent meal there for less than $10.00 (family of four, remember).</p>
<p>My point is that while I don't <i>need</i> to budget my money so closely, it's fun being able to invest $300+ per month toward retirement, donate to worthy charities, and not worry about bills. Watching my finances and budgeting frugally I'm able to keep a few hundred dollars more a year for myself than I would otherwise. I guess it all depends on how you define living comfortably and where you put your priorities, I just have things I'd rather spend money on than food.</p>
Somehow I can't imagine a judge dropping a $1B fine on someone over this. Wouldn't you have to convince him (the judge) that this would be an equitable and just punishment? In any case, the last thing I'd want would be a fine imposed for GPL violation; I can just imagine some large software producer or another deciding that it's more cost effective to rip off GPL code and pay the fine than to code it themselves. Then where would we be?
It seems to me that the GPL imposes its own punishment on the offender: release the code to the entire project. An ambitious judge might require that the offending company also release unrelated code under the GPL as part of the punishment. Let the punishment fit the crime...
Hear, hear! One of my favorite web sites lately is The Blockhead Journal, whose banner sports a wonderfully incorrect quote:
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Samuel Johnson 1776
From their "What We Are About" page, they speak of the journalist's dream: "buying a weekly paper in a small market, where they could be editor, publisher, reporter, ad salesman, accountant, layout man and janitor. There was a hope of getting back to the work of being a newspaper man, putting out a paper, with no thought of getting rich or being famous. They looked forward to something that is often hard to find in the big city: the joy of journalism. . . In this modern age, the journalist's oldest dream is within reach, thanks to the World Wide Web." (emphasis added)
Courtney Love tells us that singers/songwriters write/perform music because they love the music, the editors of the Blockhead Journal tell us they write news because they love telling stories. May I hazzard a guess that this is the case for all aspiring artists, regardless of their medium? IMHO, the perfect world would be one where artists who deserve to be paid can be, and those who demand to be paid can be ignored. Maybe someday...
I think this is what bugged me most about it; they apparently switched the casting for the old witch and Jessica. Jessica is supposed to be very young looking and VERY sexy; she came across as rather plain at best. The witch (Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam) was supposed to look old, even ancient; however, despite her grey hair she was more attractive than Jessica (not saying much). What's up with that? I can't imagine that they were so hard up for actresses that they would cast someone who didn't match the physical profile. Even so, haven't they ever heard of makeup? A lot of plainness can be made for with the right techniques.
I think this is what bugged me most about it; they apparently switched the casting for the old witch and Jessica. Jessica is supposed to be very young looking and VERY sexy; she came across as rather plain at best. The witch (Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam) was supposed to look old, even ancient; despite her grey hair she was more attractive than Jessica (not saying much). What's up with that? I can't imagine that they were so hard up for actresses that they would cast someone who didn't match the physical profile. Even so, haven't they ever heard of makeup? A lot of plainness can be made for with the right techniques.
Jon's Hellmouth series stands as one of the most important things that have ever appeared on Slashdot.
Does this strike anyone else as strange? Evidently, yes, since articles 2
and 16
were already submitted with pretty much the same topic, but were immediately modded down to 0 [flamebait|troll]. Maybe a more nicely-worded version will be taken better.
*sigh* and I thought I cared too much about my Karma to do something like this...
...and when the Citizens looked to the sky, they saw the giant vector-graphics in the sky.
They knew everything would be allright, Nerd-Boy was being called to the Commisioner's Office.
Who do you mean, Torg? Somehow having him come to the rescue doesn't instill in me the feeling of peace that you suggest...
As long as you're going for "security-through-obscurity", learn to touch-type on the Dvorak keyset as well. I have a friend who has his system set to use Dvorak by default and no-one can use it who only knows qwerty. He didn't even need to change caps on his (still standard) keyboard, and claims that he gets better words-per-minute than he had before he learned Dvorak.
Heads Up Display like the one on that IBM commercial (please let it be at least 640x480x16 bits...)
As much power as my current home computer (not hard - AMD K6 233, 64 MB RAM, 20 GB HDD)
Integrated cell phone & pager
Wireless internet (through the phone, ISDN so I can talk while I surf)
Runs my choice of operating system
Small enough to not attract excessive attention
disclaimer - State of the art is fine; high resolution, more processing power, and higher bandwidth can be upgrades later. If I want to get all that, I've got my computer at work;)
location.replace() - Please!
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These "frame breaking" scripts have been around for at least the last three years (that's when they became popular, anyway), but most of them cause problems for the poor web surfer. If you simply assign a new value to the location attibute it effectively disables the "back" button on the browser. This is because it creates a new element in the history array, so if you try to go back where you came from, it still remembers the last page you put in the frame and executes its javascript again - sending you forward to the "unframed" state.
Use the location.replace(URL) method instead; it replaces the current history entry, essectially forgetting that you were ever there. The back button still works, and everyone is happy. Unless, of course, they actually wanted to go back to slashd0t.0rg...
Slashdot Mirror
I think it will be hard for people to take this game seriously until the EFF's web designers learn to correctly code special characters into their text. As I was going through the game I saw "nbsp;" all over the place! The best example of this was in the online retailer frame (go to it from the index, it's faster). The balloon that pops up when you click on the "privacy" button has a row of eleven "nbsp;"s that look like they're being used to position the "close" button on the right.
Having done a little (very little) Flash development, I'm pretty sure that you don't need to resort to playing that kind of trick to position things. And how hard is it to remember that codes for special characters start with an "&"?
I hope that this game was the result of someone's volunteer effort. I know that the EFF works on a very limited budget, so perhaps hiring high-quality web design talent wasn't a high priority. I just can't help but wonder, though, if the people who approved it were just staring at Carabella's jugs through the entire presentation...
There must be a lot of blockheads out there. If the above quotes were true, then only blockheads would ever write music that they know will never get signed to a major label. Only blockheads would ever write books or essays that they didn't expect to get paid for publishing. And only blockheads would ever write software that they never intend to sell.
What Samuel Johnson, Bill Gates, and you don't seem to understand is that money is not what motivates authors, musicians, and other artists to perform their art. Many of the greatest music composers of all time were literally compulsive about their writing. I vaguely remember a story from my music appreciation classes (yes, I'm too lazy to look up the details ;) about one composer who was fired from his (non-music-related) job because he used work time and materials to write several hundred variations on a theme given to him by his music instructor (the tutor told him that quantity was as important as quality). Another story was about a child prodigy (who later became a great composer) whose parents restricted him from writing or playing; they removed the restriction when he shattered a window - he was banging his fingers against it, pretending that it was a piano, and he was playing a piece that he had composed.
I won't argue that you have to have OCD to be an artist; I will, however, argue that artists are compelled to express their art because it is part of their nature. Lack of government sponsorship may have kept Mozart from creating as many works as he did, but it would not have stopped him from composing. Many of the greatest painters of all time were unrecognized and penniless their entire lives, yet their works are considered masterpieces. If they didn't do it for the money, then why did they?
I could go on now about how artists through time have lamented the moral dilemma of needing to be true to their art and also please their patrons, but I think I've jabbered enough. I assert that true artists take money for their work because they need money to be able to perform their art, and thier art is all that they have to sell. If they perform their art in order to become rich, then they truly are blockheads: they would have better luck as bankers.
Help me out here, because I don't see your experiment being conclusive. I've been led to believe that the determination of the direction of a sound had much more to do with the timing with which it reaches the ears than with the volume level. My hypothesis is that the subject in your experiment is still using the covered ear to determine the origin of the sound.
;^) If you're lucky, after work I'll run this experiment myself and post the results, but don't hold your breath - family life can wreak havoc on an amateur experimenter's lab schedule.
An experiment I saw on Mr Wizard's world supports the timing theory. It involves the subject putting a tube up to one of their ears and being really confused about the direction of sounds originating near their head - the increased path length to the ear with the tube changed the timing enough that the subject judged the sound to be coming from a location much nearer the unblocked ear.
A similar experiment (that I haven't seen performed) involved a pair of speakers used to simultaneously play a short tone (as close to a single wavelength as possible). When asked which direction the sound appeared to come from, the subject pointed in the direction of the closer speaker, even when the futher one was set to a higher volume.
Perhaps another experiment is in order - have the subject put an earplug in one ear and place a tube up to the same ear, and repeat your experiment. If the subject is still correct about the direction, then your hypotesis that one ear can determine direction will be supported; otherwise I'd assert that the subject in your experiment was still using the covered ear to determine the direction of the sound source.
ps-I'd also attribute the trouble identifying the direction of a siren in the city to the good reflectivity of the building surfaces - it's easy to catch spurious reflections, correctly interpret the direction of the reflected sound, and incorrectly assume that the sound originated along that path. I'm not convinced that adding white noise to the siren will help with that.
pps-before I get flamed about my experiment being centered around left-right awareness and the parent post discussing up-down, I'm aware of that. Give the tube a right-angle turn and point it up or down as you see fit; it's easy to do with either pvc or paper towel tubes and duct tape. Join me in ignoring the acoustical properties of either of those materials...
The reason why the roadmap counts as being "just modified" is that there is a date for the 1.0 branch (April 09) and an ideal release date (15-Apr-2002) in the table further down the page. Neither of these were there yesterday; I've gotten compulsive about checking.
Anyone remember if the line in the table for 1.0 has always said RC1? I seem to remember it just saying 1.0...
... but they started out with buying out a bankrupt cable television service. As you would expect, AT&T (the only other cable provider for the area) threw a fit and complained about unfair competition. These complaints took the form of full length commercials on cable TV (their network, of course) telling people to go complain to city hall about how bad it is for the government to get involved in the private sector. I went to the meetings just to "attaboy" the council members. I seriously got flashbacks to the town meeting when I read that article, all the same points got made. The council members told AT&T where they could file their complaints (hint: not in the city office), and I went away happy.
The city recently divested itself of the operational aspects of the cable service, but retained ownership of the wires. The company that bought the management contract pays rent to the city for the line space, and is required in their contract to allow ISPs to use the line also - they don't have exclusive access.
Eventually, the city will start running fiber optic cable throughout the city and will offer the same deal to new ISPs: rent bandwidth, and resell it to your customers. No exclusive contracts. AT&T (the only viable cable internet provider in the area as well) is no doubt throwing another tantrum, probably in cooperation with Qwest DSL (the only significant DSL sevice in the area, partnered with MSN internet, for your convenience). I'll proabably miss the City council meeting, though, since I cancelled my cable contract and AT&T won't get a chance to invite me to oppose them again.
I'd love it if every city in the country followed the examples of these cities, it's about time that internet became an expected utility, just like water, gas, and electricity.
Oh, this is Provo, Utah, in case anyone cares.
After watching the trailer, I informed my wife that I'd never watch the movie, since it over-glorified the Eloi, and that the modern movie industry couldn't afford to make a movie that was true to the book.
My logic went like this:
The Eloi were the "sheeple"; they are the descendants of the "consumers" that the movie industry is targeting the movie at. The Powers That Be (TM) in Hollywood know this (their descendants will be Morlocks), and (as shown in their trailer) will refuse to show the struggle that the Time Traveller had in coming to grips with the Future: he realised that his great-to-the-Nth grandchildren would be eating Eloi. He does save a girl's life, but he doesn't bring her back to the Present with him, as he could never love anyone so stupid and self-absorbed.
I then shocked my wife by asserting that I sympathized much more with the Morlocks, and would probably have a descent collection of recipies for cooking Eloi if I were living in that time. The book fit my idea of a post-"tech revolution" scenario quite well. I think I scared her off from reading the book (she somehow made it through High School without having it be assigned reading for a class).
In any case, the Eloi's ancestors will go and watch this movie, and won't be offended by it. Meanwhile, I'll sit in my Data Center and make sure their personal information is safe on the database...
Wow, if I had mod points I wouldn't be sure whether to mod you up as funny or down as flamebait...
I've got a friend that would consider that accusation fighting words - he's been carrying Kurt's bubble gum card in his wallet for 15+ years and reveres him as a demigod.
Of course, I never watched him play a game (that I know of), and couldn't careless personally (I really hope that my firend doesn't read /. or he'll probably hunt me down).
What is the world coming to...
I was getting ISOs for Debian the other day and noticed that there was a US Only version and an International version. I figured that the difference was probably due to US Crypto export laws, but was puzzled because the International version was larger.
A few minutes of poking around showed that the International version was the one with GnuPG etc, not the US Only! That's just poetic, if you ask me - everyone gets their crypto, and the people with the stupid law are the ones that get the inconvenience (remote mirrors, longer downloads, etc.). I'd be tickled if that becomes the start of a trend.
OK, how seriously can I take this article if the author makes statements like this:
.3 was not 1/10th of 1. Maybe "huge" orders of magnitude work differently... And if NASA buys "a HAL hypercomputer from Star Bridge Systems", then their claim that it "is no larger than a regular desktop machine, yet it's roughly 1,000 times faster than traditional commercial systems" has to be true, too.
"Thompson's chip was doing its work preternaturally well. But how? Out of 100 logic cells he had assigned to the task, only a third seemed to be critical to the circuit's work. In other words, the circuit was more efficient by a huge order of magnitude than a similar circuit designed by humans using known principles."
Last I checked, orders of magnitude were powers of 10, and
I'm excited about this technology, I hope it gets faster, but this kind of coverage isn't what it needs. And I thought that Linux had bad advocates...
There may not be much difference in the minds of manufacturers between programming a chip to act like another chip (but slower) and using a poor quality Star Trek replicator to make a copy of it. You suddenly are capable of doing things with your hardware for free that you used to have to give them money (by buying *their* hardware) to be able to do.
I can see in the near future that this may become a big issue for chip manufacturers - between FPGAs which do emulation in hardware and companies like Transmeta that do the emulation in software, the risk gets larger as the technology gets better. How long will it be before the operators of file-sharing servers get sued by the CFAA (Chip Fabricators Association of America (fictitious organization, as if it weren't obvious)) because they are letting people swap source code for programmable microprocessors that works better than the original hardware?
How different is that from suing OpenCores.org for providing instructions for making a clone?
Are the instructions protected as free speech? Will source code implementations be similarly protected?
I know which way the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc. would like to see it go, but I also know that I don't want to live in a world where the inventor of the replicator will be sued for being an accessory to patent infringement.
I think it's time to write another letter to my congressmen...
Microsoft's biggest competition comes from its own obsolete software. They're not worried that they're losing the profits from a win9x sale, they're worried that you're choosing to use a copy of YAOS (for values of YAOS != M$OS.current_version), thus depriving them of a sale of WinXP. If they can reduce the supply of all obsolete versions of their software, then it's more likely that joe user will pay to license the current version.
Oh, and I'm sure that Intel would agree with them that since you can't legally get a copy of win95 anymore that it's time to upgrade your hardware as well...
Actually, the DOD isn't in the business of teaching people how to be spies. Instead, they concentrate on creating a system where inadvertent security compromise is unlikely. Once the system is in place, they then train personnel on a system of best practices designed to both reduce information security risk and make it obvious when the procedures aren't followed. For example, I'm curious how the USAF member in question got the information out of the facility - those systems aren't supposed to have any removable media besides the hard disk (so it can be locked in the safe). That means no floppies, no zip drives, no CDRs, nothing. It would not surprise me if the facility he removed the information from were given a security audit in the near future.
It wouldn't surprise me either if the people he worked with were getting lazy about security - the periodic lectures on how to tell if one of your cow-orkers is spying generally get greeted with groans beforehand, snores during, and blank looks afterwards. It's laziness like that that allows security compromises to occur in the first place.
I heard a story once about someone who managed to get access to a DOD secure network. After he got busted they asked him how he had done it, and he anwered that he waited for someone to get lazy about procedure and do something not allowed by the "best practices" policies. He was convinced that if policy hadn't been broken that there would have been no way to get access.
And I complain about stupid users on _MY_ network...
Having read both Steve's article and the antioffline rebuttal, I think that anioffline has missed Steve's point. One 1337 H4x0r's Linux box does not a DDoS attack make. Sure there have been raw-socket attacks available from H4x0r-owned and -cracked Linux and other *nix platforms, but not in large number. There are far more windows boxes open to hacking, and there always have been. They haven't been attractive targets, though, because once you have them, they're pretty much useless compared to a good *nix box.
Now that there will be loads of WinXP boxes around to hack with capabilities similar to a real workstation or server running a Unix variant, the types of DDoS attacks that could be done with cracked *nix boxes can be done with the magnitude usually associated with zombie Win* boxen.
To beat the dead horse some more, Steve's not worried about script kiddies launching attacks from their own machines, he's worried about them infecting large numbers of WinXP boxen with various tojans, turing the trojan-infected boxen into a pool of ready-and-waiting attack zobmies, and launching hard-to-filter attacks using the raw sockets.
I can see why he's worried, and I'm taking a wait-and-see approach to it: wait a LONG time before adopting any of the *XP titles from Micro$oft, and seeing if the Net really does melt down after *XP's release. That way I can guarantee that I'm not contributing to the problem and, well, if the Net melts down, I can't stop it on my own anyway.
Well, I missed the SciAm article, but Discover had a recent article on the subject as well. In it Newton's laws were brought to full force, and the conclusion was that wings indeed generate lift by pushing air down. They even have a neat picture of a Cessna leaving "a deep trough in the clouds beneath it, proof that it stays aloft by pushing air down. (photo courtesy of Cessna Aircraft Company)"
They suggest, though, that the answer involves more than just the "kite" effect that some responses to your post suggest. Here's an excerpt with their explanation:
The article was scanty on technical details, but pointed out some intereting facts that go in the face of Conventional Wisdom (TM) on the subject. For example, CW holds that for some reason the air travelling over the top of the wing takes the same amount of time to reach the back as the air passing under; the author calls this the "principle of equal transit times" and rapidly debunks it. It turns out that the air pasing over the top of the wing actually reaches the trailing edge faster than the air on the bottom.
If you don't mind, I'd appreciate it if you posted the link to the SciAm article - I wasn't able to find it on their online archive. Thanks, and enjoy!
Considering that my need for a desktop comes from an overriding desire for expandability using cheap parts, I would never buy one of these. From the JPEGs on the site it looks like they think the big win for desktops is the higher elevation of the monitor/bigger angle between monitor and keyboard. Never mind that it's still not a full sized keyboard - it's just the same keyboard detached from the laptop and placed on the desk. And it's still using that horrific touchpad as a mouse. Don't get me started.
So let's see... I keep all of the disadvantages of a laptop - proprietary design, expensive parts, and lack of expandabilty - and add several new opportunities for mechanical failure? I don't think so. I'll reccommend it to my CEO - his friends might be impressed.
It is nice to spread $8.00 for two weeks of food, but you wouldn't want to do that once you are out of college.
</i></p>
<p>I don't know about that; my wife and I find that it's a fun challenge to feed our family of four nutritiously on less than $0.50/meal. It require time spent looking for good deals on bulk ingredients and cooking from scratch, but it's not that hard. Besides, my homemade sauces taste better on pasta than anything I've bought in a can. Lately we just can't bring ourselves to go to any fast food joints because it's hard to get a decent meal there for less than $10.00 (family of four, remember).</p>
<p>My point is that while I don't <i>need</i> to budget my money so closely, it's fun being able to invest $300+ per month toward retirement, donate to worthy charities, and not worry about bills. Watching my finances and budgeting frugally I'm able to keep a few hundred dollars more a year for myself than I would otherwise. I guess it all depends on how you define living comfortably and where you put your priorities, I just have things I'd rather spend money on than food.</p>
Somehow I can't imagine a judge dropping a $1B fine on someone over this. Wouldn't you have to convince him (the judge) that this would be an equitable and just punishment? In any case, the last thing I'd want would be a fine imposed for GPL violation; I can just imagine some large software producer or another deciding that it's more cost effective to rip off GPL code and pay the fine than to code it themselves. Then where would we be?
It seems to me that the GPL imposes its own punishment on the offender: release the code to the entire project. An ambitious judge might require that the offending company also release unrelated code under the GPL as part of the punishment. Let the punishment fit the crime...
Hear, hear! One of my favorite web sites lately is The Blockhead Journal, whose banner sports a wonderfully incorrect quote:
From their "What We Are About" page, they speak of the journalist's dream: "buying a weekly paper in a small market, where they could be editor, publisher, reporter, ad salesman, accountant, layout man and janitor. There was a hope of getting back to the work of being a newspaper man, putting out a paper, with no thought of getting rich or being famous. They looked forward to something that is often hard to find in the big city: the joy of journalism. . . In this modern age, the journalist's oldest dream is within reach, thanks to the World Wide Web." (emphasis added)
Courtney Love tells us that singers/songwriters write/perform music because they love the music, the editors of the Blockhead Journal tell us they write news because they love telling stories. May I hazzard a guess that this is the case for all aspiring artists, regardless of their medium? IMHO, the perfect world would be one where artists who deserve to be paid can be, and those who demand to be paid can be ignored. Maybe someday...
I think this is what bugged me most about it; they apparently switched the casting for the old witch and Jessica. Jessica is supposed to be very young looking and VERY sexy; she came across as rather plain at best. The witch (Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam) was supposed to look old, even ancient; however, despite her grey hair she was more attractive than Jessica (not saying much). What's up with that? I can't imagine that they were so hard up for actresses that they would cast someone who didn't match the physical profile. Even so, haven't they ever heard of makeup? A lot of plainness can be made for with the right techniques.
Oh, well, whatever.
</rant>
I think this is what bugged me most about it; they apparently switched the casting for the old witch and Jessica. Jessica is supposed to be very young looking and VERY sexy; she came across as rather plain at best. The witch (Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam) was supposed to look old, even ancient; despite her grey hair she was more attractive than Jessica (not saying much). What's up with that? I can't imagine that they were so hard up for actresses that they would cast someone who didn't match the physical profile. Even so, haven't they ever heard of makeup? A lot of plainness can be made for with the right techniques.
Oh, well, whatever.
Let's see, quoting from the article... [snip]
Posted by JonKatz...
Jon's Hellmouth series stands as one of the most important things that have ever appeared on Slashdot.
Does this strike anyone else as strange?
Evidently, yes, since articles 2 and 16 were already submitted with pretty much the same topic, but were immediately modded down to 0 [flamebait|troll]. Maybe a more nicely-worded version will be taken better.
*sigh* and I thought I cared too much about my Karma to do something like this...
Who do you mean, Torg? Somehow having him come to the rescue doesn't instill in me the feeling of peace that you suggest...
As long as you're going for "security-through-obscurity", learn to touch-type on the Dvorak keyset as well. I have a friend who has his system set to use Dvorak by default and no-one can use it who only knows qwerty. He didn't even need to change caps on his (still standard) keyboard, and claims that he gets better words-per-minute than he had before he learned Dvorak.
disclaimer - State of the art is fine; high resolution, more processing power, and higher bandwidth can be upgrades later. If I want to get all that, I've got my computer at work ;)
These "frame breaking" scripts have been around for at least the last three years (that's when they became popular, anyway), but most of them cause problems for the poor web surfer. If you simply assign a new value to the location attibute it effectively disables the "back" button on the browser. This is because it creates a new element in the history array, so if you try to go back where you came from, it still remembers the last page you put in the frame and executes its javascript again - sending you forward to the "unframed" state.
Use the location.replace(URL) method instead; it replaces the current history entry, essectially forgetting that you were ever there. The back button still works, and everyone is happy. Unless, of course, they actually wanted to go back to slashd0t.0rg...