The casinos don't care one way or the other about online gambling. Every major Casino would LOVE legalized internet gambling in this country. It's the perfect money maker for them. No labor costs (no dealers), no fringe costs (unless you can figure out how to comp drinks remotely), just sit down and feed us your money sucker! On top of that, you're not gambling with "partycasino-costa-rica-we-swear-we're-not-a-scam. net", you're gambling with "a name you know and trust."
But since they can't get around the moral majority in most states, and federal interstate commerce laws are still pretty restrictive about gambling (it's illegal to call vegas and put down a bet, hence no cell phones near the sports book.), the casinos are stuck. Several years ago Caesers Palance and another casino set up international-only only gambling sites. They raked in the cash, but were quickly shut down over questions about the legality of the overall operation.
So, given the alternative, the major casinos generally stay out of the "get tough on on-line gambling" laws. They're screwed at a federal level, state laws don't matter. Some of the podunk Indian casinos might toss some token resistance up for the reasons you mentioned. But the bottom line is, their customer base is primarily older people anyway. What do they care about online gambling? If anything they're just making themselves look "responsable."
Skill? Discipline? Tactics? Not really necessary when you can go into berserker mode.
Which is exactly why Boxing > UFC / K1. Granted, the level of skill has fallen so far in the heavyweight division (along with the rediculous number of belts and sanctioning bodies), Boxing is still much more interesting top me than OMG! THIS ONE GUY HIT THIS OTHER GUY AND THAN HE DID IT AGAIN AND AGAIN FTW!!!!!! Fewer rules don't really improve the quality of the fight. They just mean guys get knocked out more.
Then there's the true passion; the hockey fight where the unwritten rule is king...
1. Nasa increased quality control effort and spending in response to the Polar Lander failure and two orbiter failures.
while at the same time they could not afford to blow it again. They needed the PR from a successful mission. They they'd have predicted a year from the rovers and only gotten a few months, it would have been tagged by the media as another failure. 2. Wind has blown dust off of the solar panels. Many expected the dust to be probe-sticky and accumulate based on the Viking lander data.
Didn't matter. The martian blow job happened long after the mission's 90-day profile had ended. Even then, the effectiveness of the solar panels wasn't increased that much. But it gave NASA a nice excuse to remind us how far ahead of "expectations" the mission was. 3. Constructor contract payments were actually stipulated based on a 3-month survivle. It is not an arbitrary deadline.
"Don't worry, even if it only runs three months, you'll still get paid."
Not that $random_guy_on_slashdot memories matter for anything, But I've read articles from folks on the project and they've all said the same thing. The surivival rate is nice, but it's not unexpected. The overall plan was for the mision to run long, but to be prepared to call it a success if all they got was 90 days.
I am constantly astounded at just how well built and designed the rover must have been. AFAIR, it was only intended to run for a couple of months, yet it has now clocked up a couple of years, and now they are upgrading it's software to make it perform even better - that entire team is doing a fantastic job, and easily deserve whatever the US equivalent of an OBE is.
Here's the rub. Spirit and Opportunity were only expected to run a couple months. Intended is a whole other word. They were built with the idea that they could conceivably last this long but the mission profile (and all the press releases) were put together with the expectation that they'd last a couple months. It was the closest thing to a gaurenteed win NASA could do.
Think of it this way, if GM marketed the H2 as getting an "amazing 2 miles per gallon!" customers would brag about how their H2 actually gets five times that number, instead of complaining about only getting 10.
Don't get me wrong, the mars rovers are an amazing accomplishment and a feather in the cap of the "new" NASA. But somewhere along the line there was a choice that needed to be made; Either completly revamp the way NASA does business and eliminate the top-heavy "Office Space" culture of twenty managers for every one engineer OR build small & cheap to minimize failure while lowering the expectations for the missions being planned, ensuring an "artificially" high sucess rate. One of these choices is good for NASA long term. The other can be good in the short term if it help eliminate the problems that need to be addressed by the first solution. It can be a bad thing if NASA decides to stay the course and be happy with writing missions that have a lowered standard of success.
count me as part of the absolute smallest minority But i had very very few problems with ME. Of course, I never had to roll it out into a corp. environment (thank god) but at least it wasn't vulnerable to blaster and sasser. Also, I had great luck with Zip drives. I owned a parallel port 100 meg that's still working, and had a ton of zip disks that were a decent way to move files until CD-R's came down in price. Both products got a bad rep, but probably weren't as bad in practice as advertised.
On the other hand, the honorable mention list has some stuff that should have easily been top 25. The Hockey puck mouse? how many bong hits did those engineers do? That thing was useless for fine control. DivX? Way to almost spend yourself into bankruptcy Circuit City. WebTV? yes, let's confuse people even further. All three of those products were bad ideas from start to finish. At least ME and Zip drives had some sort of market. WebTV, Divx and the hockey puck were examples of the "they'll buy it because we say so" school of marketing.
Soliders name their rifles, Pilots paint nose art on the planes. Roman legions probably named their swords. You develop an attachment to the things that you rely on and that serve you well. You can't trust that your buddy won't get killed tomorrow, but you can trust the fact that your M-16 will work as advertised.
First and foremost, thanks for all of the responses! Lots of information and (so far) no suggestions that I just [freaking] google it. My faith in slashdot has been revived.
Second: cripes, I've finally developed computer user grammer. It passes spell check but not basic grammar.
Third: some clarifications. The reason we keep AV running is that is because it's the right thing to do. Firefox, T-bird, and the firewall keep most of the bad stuff out. OpenOffice will cut down the risks even further, but we've still got a couple of points of entry to worry about. One is laptops. Even though no one has admin except those who need it (me and the other members of the tech. group), users can still install some simple programs. It's only a matter of time before somebody gets a network aware worm and brings the machine on site. Another point of entry is USB drives. We're pushing people towards those instead of floppies for the sake of relieability. In order to balence safety with usability, we add the layer of protection offered by AV.
In addition, WSUS isn't always on the ball. Occasionally you get a machine that quits grabbing updates, or one that never showed up in the first place. It's nice that I can keep those machines somewhat better protected with an additional program. On top of all that, we're an all volunteer group, so AV software gives us an addition layer of "false sense of security." I know that I can count on the firewall, the patch server, AND AV to buy me 48 to 72 hours of safety should the crap hit the fan like it did with Sasser or Blaster. Anti-virus, like any single layer of protection, isn't infallable, but it damn sure helps.
Linux: We're doing that in some areas, but the whole site isn't an option right now. Most of our users are technophobes, usually retirees. Actually, recovering technophobes now:). We concern ourselves with WW2 Aircraft, Radial engines, things of that nature. Technology didn't play a big role for the masses pre-fire. We wanted to change that, but never had a good starting point. When the rebuild started, we had to get the organization up and running in some capacity *YESTERDAY*. We had the proverbial chance to "strike while the iron was hot" and there wasn't time to hem and haw about the possiblity of mass migration. Right now, the machine that sees the most use by our least technical users (the Museum docents) is a Fedora Core box. The logic being that it would be the hardest for them to break. So far that has proven true. But our users that had experience had it using windows so, in order to aid in our evolution from "a couple machines here and there connected by coax (yes, coax. at the end of 2004.) with no real network connection" to "50-ish machines, ethernet, on a domain, network storage, off site backup, and an honest to god professional grade network that I would be proud to show off, and that moves this organization from 1993 to 2006 and beyond" we sacrificed and opted to stick with windows. Linux keeps coming up, but it's going to be a slow move.
Thanks again for the responses. I've gotten exactly what I wanted, solid reading material for a few days and some worthwhile points to ponder.
Also, let's not forget -- let's NOT forget, Dude -- that keeping wildlife, an amphibious rodent, for uh, domestic, you know, within the city -- that aint legal either.
Grizzly and Polar bears mating. Well that's just farking wonderful. Grizzly's are known for a horrible disposition. Polar bears are known for hunting down and killing whatever they come across. (they don't actually "hunt humans" they just see us for what we are. fuzzless, slow moving bags of fatty meat.)
That settles it. We're doomed. We can only hope that they don't somehow pick up the cunning of one of the really scary-smart members of the animal kingdom like the Octopus or a Dolphin. At least now we've got time to start building our defenses.
Granted, Concorde was a noisy beast especially on take off and I believe there was a regulation preventing them from going supersonic over land but it was a superb feat of engineering (the only commercial aircraft to have an afterburner) especially considering that they were designed to fly for 15-20 years and ended up doing almost double that (with extensive maintenance).
The regulations regarding supersonic flight over populated areas weren't concorde specific. Breaking the speed of sound over land will get you greeted by several members of the the No Fun League (otherwise known as the FAA) who will politely (ha!) remind you about how difficult they can make your life as a pilot. The rules regarding supersonic flight started taking shape around the time the Air Force started getting aircraft that could break the speed of sound into their regular inventory. (Apparently the novelty of man's most recent achievement in flight wore off quickly)
Boeing was behind, but it became very apparent that the SST or Concorde were only going to make the Trans-atlantic run, period. There simply weren't any other places where it could be flown without bothering the general public. Think about it; people who choose to buy houses that are near the airport do nothing but complain about the noise and raise hell when there's any talk of expansion. Think of what kind of NIMBY-ism would have erupted from people 250 miles from the nearest airport who, by a stroke of luck, happened to live near the area where all of the SST's would be going supersonic. I know 50 random sonic booms a day, every day would make me into a *really* happy camper. (ok, so the airplane buff in me would) So Boeing opted to stick with the "whole lot of people, just not quite as fast" track that aviation has been on since the early 50's. It also didn't help when the government teet that they'd been suckling to R & D money dried up.
Maybe the technology has reached a point in terms of fuel efficiency where it might be more cost effective to build an SST, but you're still not going to be able to put enough meat in the seat to keep the bean counters happy.
I wonder how this will appear in WSUS. Critical update? Update Rollup? I've got a couple HP's on site and I've got everything set to auto-install criticals & security updates, everything else is admin-approve.
MS may make buggy insecure software, but at least WSUS lets you keep decent tabs on how insecure your boxes are.
Explain to me the difference between "lobbying" and "calling my senator / congression represenative to voice my opinion."
Yeah, I know, you spend a crap load of money on a professional organization to speak for you instead of spending fifty bucks on a hooker to blow your state rep and that's "lobbying." But that's the downside of represenative leadership. Money talks, bullshit walks.
Unless you want every issue brought before a national referendum (yeah, that'd go over great in a country where 40% registered voter turnout would be considered "massive"), then we're kind of stuck with what we've got. We can make the "cash for votes" a little more difficult, but it will never go away. It was a problem in rome, it's a problem today, and it'll probably exist in any future form of government.
Greed is human nature, Power breeds corruption, and corruption increases greed. Sorry.
Since no one else has bothered, I guess I get to be the bubble burster / troll answerer
The site's a fake. The girl does not do radioactive motorcycle trips into the heart of the chernobyl, and many of the pictures on the site are stock photos from other sources. Sorry.
Robbery, not theft. Theft is "fuck, my laptop is gone." Robbery is "Fuck you, gimme your laptop." Subtle difference.
This is a case of "correlation does not equal causation." Wifi hotspots make it easier to work outside, away from the (as far as being robbed by a passerby / homeless guy / crackhead is concerned) safe confines of your office. Greater opportunity for crime tends to equal more crime. Of course, this is San Francisco we're talking about. 70 laptops getting jacked is probably the social equivilent of the Manson family & Son of Sam in their minds.
The general vibe I get off of that city is that if a man gets shot to death on the SF city hall steps, the papers will read "Violent murder takes place in Oakland", and if the Pope visits Oakland, the same papers will read "Pope Visits San Francisco suburb."
None of those are really "new" countries. Just a redrawing of borders, a change in regieme, or a grant of autonomy.
It's all but impossible to to create a "new" country and expect to be recognized or have any legal authority. Take sealand for example. They have no legal standing as a country and exist only because the Brits treat the "king" like the nutjob that he is. Eventually he'll die, go broke, ot the place will become uninhabitable. Problem solved. At most he's accomplished a revisit of a few of the laws regarding international waters and salvage law.
(International maritime law equates sealand with an abandonded shipwreck, any "formal" recognition is nothing more than courtesy. They're not a nation, they're not sovereign.)
On the contrary, linux tends to add to the old hardware / drivers problem. You run into stuff that was only intended to run on windows, and that very few people would have tried to boot linux on, so implimenting support was never a huge priority. They became machines that were (as far as linux was concerned) an evolutionary dead end.
Funny, New systems are coming with 350 and 400 watt Power supplies, but my old PII has a 250. Yep, curse those old inefficient machines!
It really depends on what they're doing with the machines. If they're running it as a diskless thin cluster then, yeah, newer chips draw less power. But each node is probably drawing less than a hundred watts (max) in the first place.
The biggest problem you can run into with older machines is the lack of support for things that make building a cluster easy. The two biggest things I ran into were:
-Wake On LAN support is huge, so that rules out the old machines with the clicky power switch. -Trying to do anything with less than 32 megs of RAM is a PITA.
On top of that older machines don't always have a NIC, so you're stuck scrounging for parts. Plus who knows what kind of cryptic Acer-Packard Bell-eMachines crap hardware you're going to get via donations (so building a boot image can be a pain), so you're opening youself up to tracking down odd bits of unsupported yet essential hardware drivers (PCI Controllers stand out.)
Clustering gets way easier when you can stick to at least the same general system brand (e.g. Dell) or even better, identical systems.
The easiest way to cure the "low quality" of The Simpsons is this: Have fox announce that production on new episodes is officially over, and that the simpsons timeslot will be filled with Simpsons reruns. Then, just keep making new episodes and slipping them into the rotation. BAM! Instant positive reviews about "how great the simpsons used to be."
I gave up on watching new episodes of the series years ago. There just wasn't much consistently good stuff to keep me interested. But I'll sit through a re-run without changing the channel. Every once in a while I see a great episode and at the end realize "Hey, that came out in '03, man that wasn't a bad episode."
It's not that the simpsons is deader than dead. It's not Saturday Night Live, a show where the writers/cast are out of touch, unfunny, and putting out a painfully awful show. It's that the current crop of writers can't match the expectations of the audience. We the viewers desperatly want the show to be funny. We want to laugh out loud at something sharp and witty. But it's just not there anymore. The fire's out, and we both just need to move on.
Heck we're so desperate that we worship a knock-off show like "Family Guy" (which is fantastic in it's own right, but would not exist without the Simpson's) even when they run show after show of ripped Simpsons plots (which were in turn rips of various Movies, TV shows, plays, popular culture, etc.)
Most (or many) universities make you sign away your rights to a patent for something you created on "university" time with university funds and equipment. It's one of the many political battlegrounds on campus in higher education these days. "How do you define what was done on whose time?" "Just because I work for the university doesn't mean that everything I do belongs to the uni", etc. etc.
I would wager that Stanford would be on the high ground if it came down to a legal battle.
Slashdot Mirror
Nitrogen is flammable when combined with air. In an oxygen rich environment, I'd imagine it's even more dangerous.
Wrong.
. net", you're gambling with "a name you know and trust."
The casinos don't care one way or the other about online gambling. Every major Casino would LOVE legalized internet gambling in this country. It's the perfect money maker for them. No labor costs (no dealers), no fringe costs (unless you can figure out how to comp drinks remotely), just sit down and feed us your money sucker! On top of that, you're not gambling with "partycasino-costa-rica-we-swear-we're-not-a-scam
But since they can't get around the moral majority in most states, and federal interstate commerce laws are still pretty restrictive about gambling (it's illegal to call vegas and put down a bet, hence no cell phones near the sports book.), the casinos are stuck. Several years ago Caesers Palance and another casino set up international-only only gambling sites. They raked in the cash, but were quickly shut down over questions about the legality of the overall operation.
So, given the alternative, the major casinos generally stay out of the "get tough on on-line gambling" laws. They're screwed at a federal level, state laws don't matter. Some of the podunk Indian casinos might toss some token resistance up for the reasons you mentioned. But the bottom line is, their customer base is primarily older people anyway. What do they care about online gambling? If anything they're just making themselves look "responsable."
So in your own words; try again.
Oh look, the fark.com "I wor for the.....You think you know..." gag/troll has made it's way over to slashdot. How original.
Skill? Discipline? Tactics? Not really necessary when you can go into berserker mode.
Which is exactly why Boxing > UFC / K1. Granted, the level of skill has fallen so far in the heavyweight division (along with the rediculous number of belts and sanctioning bodies), Boxing is still much more interesting top me than OMG! THIS ONE GUY HIT THIS OTHER GUY AND THAN HE DID IT AGAIN AND AGAIN FTW!!!!!! Fewer rules don't really improve the quality of the fight. They just mean guys get knocked out more.
Then there's the true passion; the hockey fight where the unwritten rule is king...
Hogwash. It is a combination of factors:
1. Nasa increased quality control effort and spending in response to the Polar Lander failure and two orbiter failures.
while at the same time they could not afford to blow it again. They needed the PR from a successful mission. They they'd have predicted a year from the rovers and only gotten a few months, it would have been tagged by the media as another failure.
2. Wind has blown dust off of the solar panels. Many expected the dust to be probe-sticky and accumulate based on the Viking lander data.
Didn't matter. The martian blow job happened long after the mission's 90-day profile had ended. Even then, the effectiveness of the solar panels wasn't increased that much. But it gave NASA a nice excuse to remind us how far ahead of "expectations" the mission was.
3. Constructor contract payments were actually stipulated based on a 3-month survivle. It is not an arbitrary deadline.
"Don't worry, even if it only runs three months, you'll still get paid."
Not that $random_guy_on_slashdot memories matter for anything, But I've read articles from folks on the project and they've all said the same thing. The surivival rate is nice, but it's not unexpected. The overall plan was for the mision to run long, but to be prepared to call it a success if all they got was 90 days.
I am constantly astounded at just how well built and designed the rover must have been. AFAIR, it was only intended to run for a couple of months, yet it has now clocked up a couple of years, and now they are upgrading it's software to make it perform even better - that entire team is doing a fantastic job, and easily deserve whatever the US equivalent of an OBE is.
Here's the rub. Spirit and Opportunity were only expected to run a couple months. Intended is a whole other word. They were built with the idea that they could conceivably last this long but the mission profile (and all the press releases) were put together with the expectation that they'd last a couple months. It was the closest thing to a gaurenteed win NASA could do.
Think of it this way, if GM marketed the H2 as getting an "amazing 2 miles per gallon!" customers would brag about how their H2 actually gets five times that number, instead of complaining about only getting 10.
Don't get me wrong, the mars rovers are an amazing accomplishment and a feather in the cap of the "new" NASA. But somewhere along the line there was a choice that needed to be made; Either completly revamp the way NASA does business and eliminate the top-heavy "Office Space" culture of twenty managers for every one engineer OR build small & cheap to minimize failure while lowering the expectations for the missions being planned, ensuring an "artificially" high sucess rate. One of these choices is good for NASA long term. The other can be good in the short term if it help eliminate the problems that need to be addressed by the first solution. It can be a bad thing if NASA decides to stay the course and be happy with writing missions that have a lowered standard of success.
count me as part of the absolute smallest minority But i had very very few problems with ME. Of course, I never had to roll it out into a corp. environment (thank god) but at least it wasn't vulnerable to blaster and sasser. Also, I had great luck with Zip drives. I owned a parallel port 100 meg that's still working, and had a ton of zip disks that were a decent way to move files until CD-R's came down in price. Both products got a bad rep, but probably weren't as bad in practice as advertised.
On the other hand, the honorable mention list has some stuff that should have easily been top 25. The Hockey puck mouse? how many bong hits did those engineers do? That thing was useless for fine control. DivX? Way to almost spend yourself into bankruptcy Circuit City. WebTV? yes, let's confuse people even further. All three of those products were bad ideas from start to finish. At least ME and Zip drives had some sort of market. WebTV, Divx and the hockey puck were examples of the "they'll buy it because we say so" school of marketing.
Soliders name their rifles, Pilots paint nose art on the planes. Roman legions probably named their swords. You develop an attachment to the things that you rely on and that serve you well. You can't trust that your buddy won't get killed tomorrow, but you can trust the fact that your M-16 will work as advertised.
First and foremost, thanks for all of the responses! Lots of information and (so far) no suggestions that I just [freaking] google it. My faith in slashdot has been revived.
:). We concern ourselves with WW2 Aircraft, Radial engines, things of that nature. Technology didn't play a big role for the masses pre-fire. We wanted to change that, but never had a good starting point. When the rebuild started, we had to get the organization up and running in some capacity *YESTERDAY*. We had the proverbial chance to "strike while the iron was hot" and there wasn't time to hem and haw about the possiblity of mass migration. Right now, the machine that sees the most use by our least technical users (the Museum docents) is a Fedora Core box. The logic being that it would be the hardest for them to break. So far that has proven true. But our users that had experience had it using windows so, in order to aid in our evolution from "a couple machines here and there connected by coax (yes, coax. at the end of 2004.) with no real network connection" to "50-ish machines, ethernet, on a domain, network storage, off site backup, and an honest to god professional grade network that I would be proud to show off, and that moves this organization from 1993 to 2006 and beyond" we sacrificed and opted to stick with windows. Linux keeps coming up, but it's going to be a slow move.
Second: cripes, I've finally developed computer user grammer. It passes spell check but not basic grammar.
Third: some clarifications. The reason we keep AV running is that is because it's the right thing to do. Firefox, T-bird, and the firewall keep most of the bad stuff out. OpenOffice will cut down the risks even further, but we've still got a couple of points of entry to worry about. One is laptops. Even though no one has admin except those who need it (me and the other members of the tech. group), users can still install some simple programs. It's only a matter of time before somebody gets a network aware worm and brings the machine on site. Another point of entry is USB drives. We're pushing people towards those instead of floppies for the sake of relieability. In order to balence safety with usability, we add the layer of protection offered by AV.
In addition, WSUS isn't always on the ball. Occasionally you get a machine that quits grabbing updates, or one that never showed up in the first place. It's nice that I can keep those machines somewhat better protected with an additional program. On top of all that, we're an all volunteer group, so AV software gives us an addition layer of "false sense of security." I know that I can count on the firewall, the patch server, AND AV to buy me 48 to 72 hours of safety should the crap hit the fan like it did with Sasser or Blaster. Anti-virus, like any single layer of protection, isn't infallable, but it damn sure helps.
Linux: We're doing that in some areas, but the whole site isn't an option right now. Most of our users are technophobes, usually retirees. Actually, recovering technophobes now
Thanks again for the responses. I've gotten exactly what I wanted, solid reading material for a few days and some worthwhile points to ponder.
We've dealt with them on several purchases already, and they've been a god-send.
short and sweet answer: an exploit that does not have have a patch available to correct the flaw.
"Oh, yes Winston Churchill, tell me I've been a very naughty boy......"
Hmm, somehow that's not a feature I'm interested in.
Also, let's not forget -- let's NOT forget, Dude -- that keeping wildlife, an amphibious rodent, for uh, domestic, you know, within the city -- that aint legal either.
Grizzly and Polar bears mating. Well that's just farking wonderful. Grizzly's are known for a horrible disposition. Polar bears are known for hunting down and killing whatever they come across. (they don't actually "hunt humans" they just see us for what we are. fuzzless, slow moving bags of fatty meat.)
That settles it. We're doomed. We can only hope that they don't somehow pick up the cunning of one of the really scary-smart members of the animal kingdom like the Octopus or a Dolphin. At least now we've got time to start building our defenses.
Granted, Concorde was a noisy beast especially on take off and I believe there was a regulation preventing them from going supersonic over land but it was a superb feat of engineering (the only commercial aircraft to have an afterburner) especially considering that they were designed to fly for 15-20 years and ended up doing almost double that (with extensive maintenance).
The regulations regarding supersonic flight over populated areas weren't concorde specific. Breaking the speed of sound over land will get you greeted by several members of the the No Fun League (otherwise known as the FAA) who will politely (ha!) remind you about how difficult they can make your life as a pilot. The rules regarding supersonic flight started taking shape around the time the Air Force started getting aircraft that could break the speed of sound into their regular inventory. (Apparently the novelty of man's most recent achievement in flight wore off quickly)
Boeing was behind, but it became very apparent that the SST or Concorde were only going to make the Trans-atlantic run, period. There simply weren't any other places where it could be flown without bothering the general public. Think about it; people who choose to buy houses that are near the airport do nothing but complain about the noise and raise hell when there's any talk of expansion. Think of what kind of NIMBY-ism would have erupted from people 250 miles from the nearest airport who, by a stroke of luck, happened to live near the area where all of the SST's would be going supersonic. I know 50 random sonic booms a day, every day would make me into a *really* happy camper. (ok, so the airplane buff in me would) So Boeing opted to stick with the "whole lot of people, just not quite as fast" track that aviation has been on since the early 50's. It also didn't help when the government teet that they'd been suckling to R & D money dried up.
Maybe the technology has reached a point in terms of fuel efficiency where it might be more cost effective to build an SST, but you're still not going to be able to put enough meat in the seat to keep the bean counters happy.
I wonder how this will appear in WSUS. Critical update? Update Rollup? I've got a couple HP's on site and I've got everything set to auto-install criticals & security updates, everything else is admin-approve.
MS may make buggy insecure software, but at least WSUS lets you keep decent tabs on how insecure your boxes are.
Explain to me the difference between "lobbying" and "calling my senator / congression represenative to voice my opinion."
Yeah, I know, you spend a crap load of money on a professional organization to speak for you instead of spending fifty bucks on a hooker to blow your state rep and that's "lobbying." But that's the downside of represenative leadership. Money talks, bullshit walks.
Unless you want every issue brought before a national referendum (yeah, that'd go over great in a country where 40% registered voter turnout would be considered "massive"), then we're kind of stuck with what we've got. We can make the "cash for votes" a little more difficult, but it will never go away. It was a problem in rome, it's a problem today, and it'll probably exist in any future form of government.
Greed is human nature, Power breeds corruption, and corruption increases greed. Sorry.
Since no one else has bothered, I guess I get to be the bubble burster / troll answerer
The site's a fake. The girl does not do radioactive motorcycle trips into the heart of the chernobyl, and many of the pictures on the site are stock photos from other sources. Sorry.
Robbery, not theft. Theft is "fuck, my laptop is gone." Robbery is "Fuck you, gimme your laptop." Subtle difference.
This is a case of "correlation does not equal causation." Wifi hotspots make it easier to work outside, away from the (as far as being robbed by a passerby / homeless guy / crackhead is concerned) safe confines of your office. Greater opportunity for crime tends to equal more crime. Of course, this is San Francisco we're talking about. 70 laptops getting jacked is probably the social equivilent of the Manson family & Son of Sam in their minds.
The general vibe I get off of that city is that if a man gets shot to death on the SF city hall steps, the papers will read "Violent murder takes place in Oakland", and if the Pope visits Oakland, the same papers will read "Pope Visits San Francisco suburb."
(it's an Ypsi - Ann Arbor relationship)
None of those are really "new" countries. Just a redrawing of borders, a change in regieme, or a grant of autonomy.
It's all but impossible to to create a "new" country and expect to be recognized or have any legal authority. Take sealand for example. They have no legal standing as a country and exist only because the Brits treat the "king" like the nutjob that he is. Eventually he'll die, go broke, ot the place will become uninhabitable. Problem solved. At most he's accomplished a revisit of a few of the laws regarding international waters and salvage law.
(International maritime law equates sealand with an abandonded shipwreck, any "formal" recognition is nothing more than courtesy. They're not a nation, they're not sovereign.)
On the contrary, linux tends to add to the old hardware / drivers problem. You run into stuff that was only intended to run on windows, and that very few people would have tried to boot linux on, so implimenting support was never a huge priority. They became machines that were (as far as linux was concerned) an evolutionary dead end.
Funny, New systems are coming with 350 and 400 watt Power supplies, but my old PII has a 250. Yep, curse those old inefficient machines!
It really depends on what they're doing with the machines. If they're running it as a diskless thin cluster then, yeah, newer chips draw less power. But each node is probably drawing less than a hundred watts (max) in the first place.
The biggest problem you can run into with older machines is the lack of support for things that make building a cluster easy. The two biggest things I ran into were:
-Wake On LAN support is huge, so that rules out the old machines with the clicky power switch.
-Trying to do anything with less than 32 megs of RAM is a PITA.
On top of that older machines don't always have a NIC, so you're stuck scrounging for parts. Plus who knows what kind of cryptic Acer-Packard Bell-eMachines crap hardware you're going to get via donations (so building a boot image can be a pain), so you're opening youself up to tracking down odd bits of unsupported yet essential hardware drivers (PCI Controllers stand out.)
Clustering gets way easier when you can stick to at least the same general system brand (e.g. Dell) or even better, identical systems.
The easiest way to cure the "low quality" of The Simpsons is this: Have fox announce that production on new episodes is officially over, and that the simpsons timeslot will be filled with Simpsons reruns. Then, just keep making new episodes and slipping them into the rotation. BAM! Instant positive reviews about "how great the simpsons used to be."
I gave up on watching new episodes of the series years ago. There just wasn't much consistently good stuff to keep me interested. But I'll sit through a re-run without changing the channel. Every once in a while I see a great episode and at the end realize "Hey, that came out in '03, man that wasn't a bad episode."
It's not that the simpsons is deader than dead. It's not Saturday Night Live, a show where the writers/cast are out of touch, unfunny, and putting out a painfully awful show. It's that the current crop of writers can't match the expectations of the audience. We the viewers desperatly want the show to be funny. We want to laugh out loud at something sharp and witty. But it's just not there anymore. The fire's out, and we both just need to move on.
Heck we're so desperate that we worship a knock-off show like "Family Guy" (which is fantastic in it's own right, but would not exist without the Simpson's) even when they run show after show of ripped Simpsons plots (which were in turn rips of various Movies, TV shows, plays, popular culture, etc.)
Most (or many) universities make you sign away your rights to a patent for something you created on "university" time with university funds and equipment. It's one of the many political battlegrounds on campus in higher education these days. "How do you define what was done on whose time?" "Just because I work for the university doesn't mean that everything I do belongs to the uni", etc. etc.
I would wager that Stanford would be on the high ground if it came down to a legal battle.