this technology could become so painless that you do not even realize that you are receiving drugs. This becomes very scary.
Yup. Wonder if it can be miniturized to the point where drug injections can be made merely by shaking hands or patting backs. Or - if larger - since it can be done without touching the skin - by simply holding a briefcase or purse near the person with the injector concealed in it.
On the upside, this might quickly end the practice of politicians shaking hands. People of all sides would be competing to dose them, either to wake them up to reality, or provoke them to make displays like Bush did at the debate where he went spastic.
It could also be a way to disqualify opposing atheletes - just dope them a little with a performance enhancer that tests will catch. Meanwhile, they'll just feel especially fit.
many people had rightfully predicted far earlier that the internal contradictions within the soviet system would destroy it
I'd be curious to know who those "many people" were. By all reports none of them were in the CIA. Also, "internal contradictions" is the phrase my Trotskyite history professor used in the late 70s to support her prediction as to why capitalism wouldn't last another decade in Europe. Since use of that phrase flags the user as a Marxist, were there Marxists predicting the end of the Soviet Empire?
That the military buildup was intended to bankrupt the Soviet Empire was stated to the press by Reagan's first Ambassador to France, Evan Galbraith, in about 1981 as the buildup began. That the Soviets didn't keep up in the race as Reagan accelerated it doesn't prove it didn't contribute to their dissolution - if it was on their minds that they couldn't keep up at the time they moved towards dissolution, that's the issue.
Any attack on our call centers is an attack on America. We should be clear on that.
The Soviets gave us much more reason to be terrified than the Wahabis probably ever can. But they never directly attacked our interests. Why? Because we threatened total destruction of their homeland. What is the homeland of the Wahabis? A hint: Mecca is its capitol. What could make the Wahabis stop? A suggestion: A credible threat to totally destroy Mecca if they ever step over the line again.
Look, Moscow is an incredibly beautiful place deeply rooted in world history too. But why were we so much readier to take ultimate action against those who believed in the utopia of Marx, but unwilling to offer to same level of threat against those who believe in the heaven of Mohammed?
Both Marx and Mohammed are equally flawed branches of the same tree our own culture grows from. Both have had worldwide followers who, despite sometimes good motivations, individually, collectively brought repression and backwardness to large parts of the world, while threatening more enlightened and realistic regions.
We're not angels, and the followers of these two flawed ideologues aren't devils: the Russians weren't, and neither are the Islamists, on the whole. But threatening the Russians with total destruction, and meaning it, was integral to surviving their threat and ultimately (or at least temporarily) dissolving their global reach and the depth of repression in their homeland. Let's make the same threat to the Islamists. And let's let them know that, just as we were prepared to defend our interests across the world from the Russians, so too will any significant strike in any part of the world against our interests be the end of Mecca.
But... this is space opera. I like to read a few good space operas every year. But it's largely 1940's or earlier type stuff. Not even up to the best of Golden Age SciFi. A top-notch presentation of space opera, for sure. But space opera is not the top of the SciFi universe. The plot and characterization here doesn't come close to Heinlein, Zelazny, Dick, Robinson, Wolf, Gibson....
In many respects the sets give the feel of being in a World War II movie. Again, this is stuff I'll watch, gladly. But when will we finally have a SciFi series as brilliant as the best of the genre, and less wedded to the conventions of a military command structure somewhere, or even the conventions of those fleeing/fighting a military command structure somewhere? Like, wow, here we get both!?
New York City has lots of out-of-state cars regularly parked about. The police a couple of years ago publicly admitted they just didn't care. Having one old car in NYC insured costs twice as much as covering that same old car plus a newer one both with more coverage in Vermont.
Maria got Composer and Arranger of the Year Jazz Awards from the Jazz Journalists Association in 2004 - and it wasn't the first year she'd won awards from them.
The Space Needle in Seattle - once part of the Seattle Worlds Fair, is now privately owned and its image is trademarked by the Space Needle Corporation, for just about every class of goods to which it conceivably could be applied. So when you're up there on Queen Anne Hill taking your pics of downtown Seattle, you're violating their trademark.
The better-known buildings in Manhattan also maintain rights to their images, so if you take a commercial shot with the Chrysler Building or Empire State in the background, or film a movie in front of them, you're supposed to pay. Don't know what the situation is if you're simply showing a long shot of the entire skyline though.
Since in all these cases the structures are prominent public facts, this all seems an incredible violation of the right of the public to all of the visual space present from public vantages.
Exactly. Normal people think when their computer slows down it's because "it has all this stuff on it" - as if every additional program they install should load it more and so slow it down even when the program's not running. After all, in the real world, loading more stuff in your vehicle really does slow it down (and there's no concept of "only when the stuff is running").
Or they think the computer's getting slower just because it's getting older, like people do.
How may boxen? Is this all servers, or workstations too? How much administrative time are you budgeting?
There's no perfect answer. And commercial support is often inferior to user community support - which is often best on the non-commercial distros. But, over the longer term, there are two big issues: How easily can you keep it current; and how well can you keep it current?
You can easily keep Debian current, but "current" for Debian lags way behind the actually-current versions of most programs. You can keep Red Hat current between minor distro versions, and reasonably close to current versions of programs, but upgrading between major distro versions is so painful you might as well reinstall (kind of like Windows that way). You can keep Gentoo very current in both senses (and well-optimized to your metal), but there's the overhead of compiling everything. Slackware, the last I looked, you can't keep current at all easily.
On the other hand if it's workstations and you want minimal admin time, consider doing hard-drive installs from Knoppix, and keeping the user's files off in some mounted partition so that when desired you can just re-install a current Knoppix. Knoppix is just a superset of Debian, and you can use the Debian upgrade method, too, on minor stuff. You can also roll your own Knoppix-derived distro, if you have a bunch of users who need to see the company's custom desktop. And it does great hardware detection, so you don't have to worry much about differences there.
Servers that matter that are outward facing, definitely not Debian - you'll get neither current features nor current security. Gentoo if you've got the admin time to support it, or Red Hat if your model is paid support because the boss insists.
I have a basic Dish PVR, a relative has a Tivo. The difference in used functionality comes down to two features. The Tivo usefully can skip recording if a show is not on that week; the Dish is stupid about that. The Dish can quickly skip commercials with its 30-seconds-forward and 10-seconds back buttons. The Tivo requires entering a secret code after every software upgrade to restore the (by default turned off) skip-forward function, and fiddling with the skip-foward and fast-forward/reverse buttonss to skip a block of commercials both makes a disgusting blooping noise and - more importantly - takes about twice as long to accomplish.
The Tivo has some other minor advantages. But since the main value of these things beyond recording is to skip commercials cleanly, quickly, efficiently, the Dish PVR wins. Have heard that NBC gave Tivo money to not have decent commercial-skipping capacity. It may be that taking this money has tainted their product, and that this will be their doom.
Whatever the details are, I'm sure it is just another good opportunity for the/. crowd to bitch about US President Bush.
Guess he just hates the Iranians' freedoms. The same as he hates the freedom of women to control their own bodies, the freedom of people in love to marry whatever their sexuality, the freedom from pain and wasting that pot can give cancer victims, the freedom of future generations from debts he can lead us in accumulating.... Yup, gotta admire his consistency and leadership in decisively acting against the freedoms he and his followers so righteously hate!
Why not be your own firm? Or start one? Find the location where you'd most like to live. Your choice is bound to be similar to other intelligent people such as yourself, who will be showing up in the next few years if they aren't a major factor there already. If there are several choices otherwise equal, take the most affordable place to live. That will be the one attracting more of the "creative economy" types, and so have the greater long-term upward potential. Buy a house. Settle in an make social connections, do some minor volunteer work, follow local politics.
Blue sky. Prototype some software concepts. Figure out who has money to invest in the area if you need that, demo, raise the funds. Recruit office staff locally when you need it, collaborating programmers over the Net when you need them.
As you know, it's not like all the brilliant software has already been invented.
Panix at least used to have a lot of users with jobs like "NY Times reporter" and "Wall Street technology analyst." This story needs to be amplified to the point where there's a total restructuring of the domain registration system, one which removes Network Solutions entirely from the business. Can we assume that Panix users will be doing their part to play this up in the mainstream media capital of America?
Burning wood, it seems, has two good qualities then: (1) increases the particulates in the atmosphere to keep things cooler, while (2) only releases carbon dioxide that was already in the current (as compared to fossile) carbon cycle, thus not producing any net increase (as long as it's not burning wood from a forest that will never grow back).
Meanwhile, on the plus side, this news portends significant savings in the funds currently used to maintain the US muclear arsenal. No need for nukes when the world can be reduced to a glassy dessert without them.
I'm one of a number of people - obviously not most but enough - who have been reporting problems with seg faults on the Firefox bugzilla for months. So far the only response - after none at all for months and the reports piling up - has been a suggestion from one of the main developers that we go and learn how to debug their code ourselves, along with unconcealed contempt that we haven't already developed the skills to do that. This was from someone closely involved with the NY Times add buy, at that. They've got droids who would rather win through advertising than by quality-control on their coding. What other organizations does this remind you of?
Mind you, I'm running it anyway. But crashing several times a week in a 1.0 release of anything (this on Linux), especially when built on the venerable Mozilla base, and when they consider it Times-add ready.... Kinda sad.
You must have some of these guys in your pocket to really have a chance.
Yeah, like when you're overbudget and need to make some free phone calls or pick up some new electronics gear with a stolen credit card, or need to blackmail a celebrity with their compromising photos.
The method in the first post here is currently effective against both - which are PITA DoS attacks, even if phpBB is patched or updated, unless blocked by this or a similar method.
6 hours+. Plenty of time to evacuate a lot of people.
A lot, yes. Most, no. Consider New York City. Eight million residents, and millions more day workers. Roads which come to a stop and trains which totally fill just getting the day workers out each evening. People will try to retreat to high buildings and hope the foundations hold (probable, most are attached to bedrock) - but in the outer boroughs homes are mostly just a few stories. Will these folks be welcomed in the skyscrapers even if they get there? Plus, all of Long Island will be trying to evacuate over the same bridges used by the city.
As your brain cells mutate, and turn into screaming monsters, you might want to check the ingredients of your shampoo and conditioner. A certain common ingredient may help quite that noise. Yes, there could be a reason so many young brains seem already so disconnected: most shampoos contain a chemical that inhibits growth of dendrites and axons. But who needs to depend on such primitive intercellular communications land lines when we've got... cell phones?
Have you checked the breakdown of the precent of malpractice insurance that goes to lawyers, against the amount the insurance companies merely pocket? People get mad at the doctors, and get mad at the lawyers (I mostly avoid dealings with both myself), but how do the insurance firms avoid anyone noticing how incredibly much money goes to them - not just for malpractice, but for medical insurance itself. If you eliminated the insurance companies from the racket, it would cut something like 30% off our medical costs.
As for the suits against doctors, the majority of suits are against just a few doctors in any state. The states where the medical association actually disciplines doctors they get complaints against end up with much lower malpractice insurance, because there's less malpractice, because in medicine as in most professions it's about 10% of the people who make 90% of the screwups. So what malpractice insurance gives doctors is the freedom from having to discipline their own. Start yanking licenses from the idiots, and the problem goes away. But of course the insurance firms don't want the problem to go away. They make money coming (medical insurance) and going (malpractice insurance).
Slashdot Mirror
this technology could become so painless that you do not even realize that you are receiving drugs. This becomes very scary.
Yup. Wonder if it can be miniturized to the point where drug injections can be made merely by shaking hands or patting backs. Or - if larger - since it can be done without touching the skin - by simply holding a briefcase or purse near the person with the injector concealed in it.
On the upside, this might quickly end the practice of politicians shaking hands. People of all sides would be competing to dose them, either to wake them up to reality, or provoke them to make displays like Bush did at the debate where he went spastic.
It could also be a way to disqualify opposing atheletes - just dope them a little with a performance enhancer that tests will catch. Meanwhile, they'll just feel especially fit.
many people had rightfully predicted far earlier that the internal contradictions within the soviet system would destroy it
I'd be curious to know who those "many people" were. By all reports none of them were in the CIA. Also, "internal contradictions" is the phrase my Trotskyite history professor used in the late 70s to support her prediction as to why capitalism wouldn't last another decade in Europe. Since use of that phrase flags the user as a Marxist, were there Marxists predicting the end of the Soviet Empire?
That the military buildup was intended to bankrupt the Soviet Empire was stated to the press by Reagan's first Ambassador to France, Evan Galbraith, in about 1981 as the buildup began. That the Soviets didn't keep up in the race as Reagan accelerated it doesn't prove it didn't contribute to their dissolution - if it was on their minds that they couldn't keep up at the time they moved towards dissolution, that's the issue.
Any attack on our call centers is an attack on America. We should be clear on that.
The Soviets gave us much more reason to be terrified than the Wahabis probably ever can. But they never directly attacked our interests. Why? Because we threatened total destruction of their homeland. What is the homeland of the Wahabis? A hint: Mecca is its capitol. What could make the Wahabis stop? A suggestion: A credible threat to totally destroy Mecca if they ever step over the line again.
Look, Moscow is an incredibly beautiful place deeply rooted in world history too. But why were we so much readier to take ultimate action against those who believed in the utopia of Marx, but unwilling to offer to same level of threat against those who believe in the heaven of Mohammed?
Both Marx and Mohammed are equally flawed branches of the same tree our own culture grows from. Both have had worldwide followers who, despite sometimes good motivations, individually, collectively brought repression and backwardness to large parts of the world, while threatening more enlightened and realistic regions.
We're not angels, and the followers of these two flawed ideologues aren't devils: the Russians weren't, and neither are the Islamists, on the whole. But threatening the Russians with total destruction, and meaning it, was integral to surviving their threat and ultimately (or at least temporarily) dissolving their global reach and the depth of repression in their homeland. Let's make the same threat to the Islamists. And let's let them know that, just as we were prepared to defend our interests across the world from the Russians, so too will any significant strike in any part of the world against our interests be the end of Mecca.
But ... this is space opera. I like to read a few good space operas every year. But it's largely 1940's or earlier type stuff. Not even up to the best of Golden Age SciFi. A top-notch presentation of space opera, for sure. But space opera is not the top of the SciFi universe. The plot and characterization here doesn't come close to Heinlein, Zelazny, Dick, Robinson, Wolf, Gibson....
In many respects the sets give the feel of being in a World War II movie. Again, this is stuff I'll watch, gladly. But when will we finally have a SciFi series as brilliant as the best of the genre, and less wedded to the conventions of a military command structure somewhere, or even the conventions of those fleeing/fighting a military command structure somewhere? Like, wow, here we get both!?
New York City has lots of out-of-state cars regularly parked about. The police a couple of years ago publicly admitted they just didn't care. Having one old car in NYC insured costs twice as much as covering that same old car plus a newer one both with more coverage in Vermont.
Maria got Composer and Arranger of the Year Jazz Awards from the Jazz Journalists Association in 2004 - and it wasn't the first year she'd won awards from them.
The Space Needle in Seattle - once part of the Seattle Worlds Fair, is now privately owned and its image is trademarked by the Space Needle Corporation, for just about every class of goods to which it conceivably could be applied. So when you're up there on Queen Anne Hill taking your pics of downtown Seattle, you're violating their trademark.
The better-known buildings in Manhattan also maintain rights to their images, so if you take a commercial shot with the Chrysler Building or Empire State in the background, or film a movie in front of them, you're supposed to pay. Don't know what the situation is if you're simply showing a long shot of the entire skyline though.
Since in all these cases the structures are prominent public facts, this all seems an incredible violation of the right of the public to all of the visual space present from public vantages.
And if the computer "breaks" or slows down
Exactly. Normal people think when their computer slows down it's because "it has all this stuff on it" - as if every additional program they install should load it more and so slow it down even when the program's not running. After all, in the real world, loading more stuff in your vehicle really does slow it down (and there's no concept of "only when the stuff is running").
Or they think the computer's getting slower just because it's getting older, like people do.
Ever looked at www.haarp.net? This project has kept conspiracy theorists busy for over a decade.
Many Webmaster have simply told the msn robot to skip their sites. It is the most aggressively obnoxious legitimate bot every seen.
And that means there's a good portion of the Web that will not be indexed by it - ever.
How may boxen? Is this all servers, or workstations too? How much administrative time are you budgeting?
There's no perfect answer. And commercial support is often inferior to user community support - which is often best on the non-commercial distros. But, over the longer term, there are two big issues: How easily can you keep it current; and how well can you keep it current?
You can easily keep Debian current, but "current" for Debian lags way behind the actually-current versions of most programs. You can keep Red Hat current between minor distro versions, and reasonably close to current versions of programs, but upgrading between major distro versions is so painful you might as well reinstall (kind of like Windows that way). You can keep Gentoo very current in both senses (and well-optimized to your metal), but there's the overhead of compiling everything. Slackware, the last I looked, you can't keep current at all easily.
On the other hand if it's workstations and you want minimal admin time, consider doing hard-drive installs from Knoppix, and keeping the user's files off in some mounted partition so that when desired you can just re-install a current Knoppix. Knoppix is just a superset of Debian, and you can use the Debian upgrade method, too, on minor stuff. You can also roll your own Knoppix-derived distro, if you have a bunch of users who need to see the company's custom desktop. And it does great hardware detection, so you don't have to worry much about differences there.
Servers that matter that are outward facing, definitely not Debian - you'll get neither current features nor current security. Gentoo if you've got the admin time to support it, or Red Hat if your model is paid support because the boss insists.
I have a basic Dish PVR, a relative has a Tivo. The difference in used functionality comes down to two features. The Tivo usefully can skip recording if a show is not on that week; the Dish is stupid about that. The Dish can quickly skip commercials with its 30-seconds-forward and 10-seconds back buttons. The Tivo requires entering a secret code after every software upgrade to restore the (by default turned off) skip-forward function, and fiddling with the skip-foward and fast-forward/reverse buttonss to skip a block of commercials both makes a disgusting blooping noise and - more importantly - takes about twice as long to accomplish.
The Tivo has some other minor advantages. But since the main value of these things beyond recording is to skip commercials cleanly, quickly, efficiently, the Dish PVR wins. Have heard that NBC gave Tivo money to not have decent commercial-skipping capacity. It may be that taking this money has tainted their product, and that this will be their doom.
Firefox 1.0 on Linux (Gentoo) has the problem real bad for me. Glad to hear there's a fix in the works.
Whatever the details are, I'm sure it is just another good opportunity for the /. crowd to bitch about US President Bush.
Guess he just hates the Iranians' freedoms. The same as he hates the freedom of women to control their own bodies, the freedom of people in love to marry whatever their sexuality, the freedom from pain and wasting that pot can give cancer victims, the freedom of future generations from debts he can lead us in accumulating.... Yup, gotta admire his consistency and leadership in decisively acting against the freedoms he and his followers so righteously hate!
Why not be your own firm? Or start one? Find the location where you'd most like to live. Your choice is bound to be similar to other intelligent people such as yourself, who will be showing up in the next few years if they aren't a major factor there already. If there are several choices otherwise equal, take the most affordable place to live. That will be the one attracting more of the "creative economy" types, and so have the greater long-term upward potential. Buy a house. Settle in an make social connections, do some minor volunteer work, follow local politics.
Blue sky. Prototype some software concepts. Figure out who has money to invest in the area if you need that, demo, raise the funds. Recruit office staff locally when you need it, collaborating programmers over the Net when you need them.
As you know, it's not like all the brilliant software has already been invented.
Registrations are year-to-year, so:
Registrar: DOTSTER
Domain Name: PANIX.COM
Created on: 22-APR-91
Expires on: 23-APR-06
Last Updated on: 16-JAN-05
It could only lapse in April - and it sure as hell didn't lapse in April of 2004 and stay working for this long!
Panix at least used to have a lot of users with jobs like "NY Times reporter" and "Wall Street technology analyst." This story needs to be amplified to the point where there's a total restructuring of the domain registration system, one which removes Network Solutions entirely from the business. Can we assume that Panix users will be doing their part to play this up in the mainstream media capital of America?
Burning wood, it seems, has two good qualities then: (1) increases the particulates in the atmosphere to keep things cooler, while (2) only releases carbon dioxide that was already in the current (as compared to fossile) carbon cycle, thus not producing any net increase (as long as it's not burning wood from a forest that will never grow back).
Meanwhile, on the plus side, this news portends significant savings in the funds currently used to maintain the US muclear arsenal. No need for nukes when the world can be reduced to a glassy dessert without them.
I'm one of a number of people - obviously not most but enough - who have been reporting problems with seg faults on the Firefox bugzilla for months. So far the only response - after none at all for months and the reports piling up - has been a suggestion from one of the main developers that we go and learn how to debug their code ourselves, along with unconcealed contempt that we haven't already developed the skills to do that. This was from someone closely involved with the NY Times add buy, at that. They've got droids who would rather win through advertising than by quality-control on their coding. What other organizations does this remind you of?
Mind you, I'm running it anyway. But crashing several times a week in a 1.0 release of anything (this on Linux), especially when built on the venerable Mozilla base, and when they consider it Times-add ready.... Kinda sad.
You must have some of these guys in your pocket to really have a chance.
Yeah, like when you're overbudget and need to make some free phone calls or pick up some new electronics gear with a stolen credit card, or need to blackmail a celebrity with their compromising photos.
There must be some way that your divulging this offends the PATRIOT Act.
The method in the first post here is currently effective against both - which are PITA DoS attacks, even if phpBB is patched or updated, unless blocked by this or a similar method.
6 hours+. Plenty of time to evacuate a lot of people.
A lot, yes. Most, no. Consider New York City. Eight million residents, and millions more day workers. Roads which come to a stop and trains which totally fill just getting the day workers out each evening. People will try to retreat to high buildings and hope the foundations hold (probable, most are attached to bedrock) - but in the outer boroughs homes are mostly just a few stories. Will these folks be welcomed in the skyscrapers even if they get there? Plus, all of Long Island will be trying to evacuate over the same bridges used by the city.
As your brain cells mutate, and turn into screaming monsters, you might want to check the ingredients of your shampoo and conditioner. A certain common ingredient may help quite that noise. Yes, there could be a reason so many young brains seem already so disconnected: most shampoos contain a chemical that inhibits growth of dendrites and axons. But who needs to depend on such primitive intercellular communications land lines when we've got ... cell phones?
Have you checked the breakdown of the precent of malpractice insurance that goes to lawyers, against the amount the insurance companies merely pocket? People get mad at the doctors, and get mad at the lawyers (I mostly avoid dealings with both myself), but how do the insurance firms avoid anyone noticing how incredibly much money goes to them - not just for malpractice, but for medical insurance itself. If you eliminated the insurance companies from the racket, it would cut something like 30% off our medical costs.
As for the suits against doctors, the majority of suits are against just a few doctors in any state. The states where the medical association actually disciplines doctors they get complaints against end up with much lower malpractice insurance, because there's less malpractice, because in medicine as in most professions it's about 10% of the people who make 90% of the screwups. So what malpractice insurance gives doctors is the freedom from having to discipline their own. Start yanking licenses from the idiots, and the problem goes away. But of course the insurance firms don't want the problem to go away. They make money coming (medical insurance) and going (malpractice insurance).
It's a protection racket.