In actuality, Alan Turing said "If a person was unable to tell the difference between a conversation with a machine and a human, then the machine could reasonably be described as intelligent." This is a very basic description of the Turing test, which is a measure of the level of artificial intelligence of a computer system.
The Artificial Intelligence Enterprises located in Tel Aviv are working on a computer system, which they hope will be able to be mistaken for a 5-year-old child. They claim to have made a breakthrough. It is just a short step from a 5-year-old child to a thinking adult. In addition, you must consider mental illness and even the potential for envy, greed, rage, and hatred once you reach that plateau
It costs on average for a small ISP 1,500-2,000$ for a T1 (1.5mbs) Internet link. This is in addition to the 400-600$ for the local loop charges. It costs 12,000$ give or take for a partial T3 (45mbs). With broadband companies trying to give every residential customer between 350kbps and 1.5mbps of bandwidth for 39.95$ a month, the figures just do not add up. When you provide someone a service they will use it simply because they can. This means that the broadband companies must add additional bandwidth to handle the users that abuse the system. This increases costs and ensures that they can not afford to continue to offer the service. What is required in my opinion is legislation (waits for the boos and hisses to stop) to require the Regional Bell Operating companies to lower the over priced bandwidth costs to the Internet service companies. I do not mean just for the large corporations but also for the mom and pop ISP's in your neighborhood. If the bandwidth is available to the ISP's they can then turn around and make it available for their users.
Actually ZoneAlarm is an ok piece of software however Tiny Software's Tiny Personal Firewall is a much much better piece of software. The firewall in addition to allowing applications access to the net allow you to setup specific permit and deny rules based on localport, remote port, local address, remote address, application, protocol, and much more. I look at it as a much improved version consisting of a hypothetical merge of ZoneAlarm with Conseal PC firewall and like products. In addition Tiny Software's product is in use by the US Airforce on 500,000 desktop machines. Oh ya it's also free for personal use.
FEATURES AT A GLANCE
Multi-layer security protection (NDIS & TDI)
Since the DSE resides on each computer in the network, it communicates directly with the operating system and negotiates what applications are even allowed to transmit and/or receive data.
MD5 Signature Support
As the DSE mandates what applications can bind for communication, it can also check for an MD5 digital signature for permitted applications. This ensures that Trojan horse applications cannot gain access by using the name of a permitted application.
Stateful filtering based on SRC/DST IP address, port & application
The DSE maintains a record of all sent packets and can therefore compare incoming packets to the record table to determine if they were requested. Additionally, the DSE can restrict applications to certain ports or destination IP addresses.
Remote access to logs and statistics
The DSE contains a separate statistic view that displays all active sessions and includes the status, port, remote IP, application or service and the time associated with each session. Logs may be viewed from the statistics view or sent directly to a syslog server for analysis and reporting.
Suspicious activity monitoring and Intrusion detection
The Tiny DSE contains a highly configurable reporting mechanism that can report specific intrusion attempts, or any other type of communication deemed suspicious, to a syslog server or to the CMDS server through an SSL connection.
This is a non-starting solution as smaller ISP's operate on a very slim or even none profit margin. I know of some ISP's where the owners have had to take pay cuts to enable them to pay the bills with the slim profit margins that they have right now.
I can see one of two possible outcomes from this.
1. This plan is successful - This outcome is not likely, as the larger ISP's that are making a profit from a large user base are not going to want to cut into their profit margin. However lets consider that it is; you have the smaller ISP's and new ISP startups forced out of business and only the larger ISP's left. The result would be less competition and much higher prices. The net audience would grow at a much smaller rate. I do not know about you but I have enough to deal with paying my 80$ satellite bill each month and really do not want to add website content charges to that.
2. This plan isn't successful - Smaller ISP's still make little to no money. The Larger ISP's have competition and the prices stay down as the Internet audience grows. With this growth eventually, advertisers seeking these new audiences start to pay the content sites to host their Internet ads once more. Note the recent trend of content sites refusing to provide click though information.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
From the maps website i found the following interesting information.
How much does it cost?
In query mode, the cost is US$1,500 per year for sites with up to 1,000 users; each additional 500 users will be priced at US$750 per year.
Larger or overseas sites will probably prefer transfer mode, in which you transfer a copy of the DNS zone to your local nameserver. The cost for this is US$1,250 per year per nameserver, plus US$50 per 1,000 users -- around half a cent per user each month.
Educational institutions, non-profits, and members of selected ISP trade associatons may (at our sole discretion) be eligible for discounts; please contact us with a proposal.
I can see charging ISP's on a per user basis for the query mode lookups. However, the charges per user for zone transfer makes no sense as the MAPS service bears no additional load or bandwidth charges from the extra users as the zones are stored on the ISP's name servers locally.
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When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
You can easily bypass any of the filters napster has put in place. On a web page, list the songs and randomly generated or sequentially generated numbers such as M01020. Then compresses the music with a compression program such as winzip, arj, pkarc or one of the other compression formats. Next you take and rename the file to name.mp3. Now once you do that simply login to napster. Their software will not see a matching title, artist, or song signature since it is in compressed form. Thus, there is no method, which anyone can promise to be 100% successful in blocking all copyrighted material.
I am not a music pirate. Nor do I suggest or encourage anyone to use this method. However, what I have used napster in the past for was to recover music I have legally purchased in the past but I have since damaged and/or lost the media for.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
It will take a number of the following measures to limit and reduce the number of attacks EFNet
faces.
Hostmask mirroringthat would at the irc server level protect you from hostile users out there, making it virtually impossible for them to gain your IP address via IRC.
Nickserv/Chanserv allows you to reserve your own nickname and reserve your own channels for personal use.
Invisible hub servers, these invisble hubs means it is possible for one or two servers to be taken down but it will be individual servers on instead of entire branches
By implementing these features you will see the irc wars lessen and eventually die out for the most part. The nick and channel services would protect the channels reguardless of the warbots and denial of service attacks. The masked ip's would mean you could not attack other users of the network unless they did something stupid like accept a dcc connection. EFNet may have the invisible hubs already however the rest of the possible solutions they do not have and seriously need to consider.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
As the game publishing companies have discovered a long ago any security system can be cracked given enough time. It is time Microsoft learned this fact as well. No amounts of law suits can put the genie back into the bottle once it is released which the MPAA has learned the hard way and at extreme cost. If any portion of the system is located on the users system, it will be able to be hacked. While I do not agree with software piracy, I also do not believe in copy protection whose sole purpose is to complicate the situation for the end users that buy software and expect specific uses from it.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
Anyone who could play in the Quantum Leap series and pull it off with a credible character is a very good actor. I personally will be there and give the new Trek every possible chance. We didn't like TNG when it came out however for most of us the series eventually grew on us. So basically don't totally slam on this series till you have seen the first several episodes
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
The problem currently with manned access to space is simply that in the United States NASA is a monopoly. They have no interest in allowing anyone but NASA to provide access to space. If they did then this would risk NASA's congressional funding. Lets hope if successful this would lead to the break up of NASA's monopoly and by doing so open space to the masses!
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
I had to sit and think about this article for a bit before I could write a coherent response. The world is becoming a more interconnected and complex place at the same time we are each becoming more remote from each other. The risks from a change of this nature can sometimes outweigh the benefits offered by it. The problem with interconnecting medical devices to the Internet is that you are not placing a generic computer system with an IP address at risk to hackers. It is also not just that you are also providing a layer of complexity to these vital devices, which increases their possibility of the failure.
My problem with them is of a more social nature. I would much prefer that my doctor sits in front of me and looks at me the person rather than an impersonal serial number. Already our society is one that is slowly but surely cutting the individual from the societal whole. Do we need, do we want this process to extend to our medical care? Sure it is possible that these changes will save some lives. These changes may make it possible for a doctor to diagnose and prescribe treatment before the person in a life threatening condition can reach the hospital. However, unless it is life threatening I personally will take the trip to the doctor's office even with the additional wait.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
As it currently stands at this moment, the public no longer has any rights relating to content they purchase or own. The content companies have all the legal rights and legal protection. When it comes to content, they all but own the judicial system. They definitely own the Legislative branch of the American government.
As citizens and consumers, we must strive to change to the system. Write letters to your congressmen and congresswomen and send them via postal mail. Do not send the letters via email as many congressmen ignore email all together. You can also call and encourage your friends to call as well.
Next consumers have to stop buying the rights abusive products from the content companies. It would take less than a month for a boycott by millions of people in order to force the content companies into changing their ways. Sadly, we can talk as much as we like about the problem here on Slashdot however, the odds of any meaningful changes resulting from it are just about zero.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
I wish to point out unless they have the DVD disc manually inserted into a DVD player by a MPAA representative that each form of copy protection they try will not work in the long run. One reason is that you can simply make a bit by bit copy of the DVD disc thus bypassing the copy protection. The software industry learned this lesson the hard way back in the days of Police Quest and Leisure suit Larry so I am sure the movie industry will learn it at some point as well. By doing a bit by bit copy of the DVD disc you have the keys the watermarks and a fully playable disc. Watermarks and CSS will not prevent this form of attack and the bulk video pirates are probably already using the attack that I described to mass-produce illegal copies of DVD disks. This will solely prevent the home user of the disc they purchased from being able to make a copy of the DVD disc for legally allowed fair use such as an archival copy. An archival copy is very useful on those G rated movies you bought you kids for their birthday or Christmas.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
The question is not that the batteries have the potential to catch on fire. This is a known fact. The question is who at Dell and Panasonic knew, when they knew it, and if there was any attempt at covering it up by either company. The second question begs to be How did these defective batterys get past both Panasonic's and Dell's Quality assurance teams. It does not seem reasonably possible that no one at either company knew about the problem until one happened to catch on fire...
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
I dislike spam however I really and truely hate the following types of spam or Spammers.
The spammer who thinks it is funny to try and send email to every name@your domain that's in the humongous book of baby names.
The spammer who sends the email that says "Here is the information you requested".
The spammer who continues to send to the same email address every six hours although they get a User unknown message.
The Spammers who put click here to remove then when you do sells your email address as verified to all the other Spammers.
Finally The spammer who will not take a hint when they see "Reject: 553 go spam someone else" on every email they send to your mail server
I will point out however that to seriously cut the amount of spam your mail servers see as a whole nothing beats mail-abuse.org..... The DUL blocks 33% of spam. The RBL blocks roughly 5% and using the RSS blocks 50% of the monthly spam. All three are well worth the time to install and use.
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When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
This one falls squarely under fair use as you are at the most using just a few seconds on the song not the entire song. Now if the recording industry wishes to create specific ring tones then they would have a rightful ownership of the ring tone.
I for one am waiting for the inevitable backlash that will make corporations, evil empires, bad laws, and politicians turn and run. I for one will welcome it when it does come.
The copyright system started out as a way to encourage production of intellectual property by making sure the person or people who "Created" it were paid for their creation. The recording industry is a promotional system and not a content creator. In plain, English the RIAA is a leech on the musical creation system. They exist to make themselves the most money possible screw the consumer and screw the artist.
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When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
Old tech lasts longer for one reason and one reason only. The engineers designed it to last. Corporations do not make money off hardware that lasts 29+ years. They make money when the same hardware has to be purchased repeatedly every couple of years. How would you like to have an automobile with 5 million miles on the odometer and several million miles remaining? Could this be done? Of course, it could however the automobile makers would not be nearly as "Profitable" as they are with the current disposable product manufacturing system.
Do I see any change on this in the future? I do not see it as very likely. Unless it pays them for it to last for a long period, they will build in a short duration life. Yes I truly believe they program products with a built in time bomb to cause it to stop functioning after a defined period. Is this right? Not on your life.
How can you change this? I no longer think that it is possible to change it. You are trained to buy the same defective products repeatedly. Engineers are trained to design it to break down by reflex. So we are stuck in the proverbial rut.
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When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
The recording and other content companies will form a system, which uses a real time black hole list. The content black hole(TM)would block all Internet traffic to the offending site. Once this is established, the recording and other companies will then sue small ISPs first then significantly larger ISPs under the theory that the ISP's are not using the "best methods" of preventing copyright infringement. They will state that the ISP's in fact are encouraging infringement and thus should be liable for doing so.
With the current judicial system, such a system would probably pass muster by the courts. This sadly should not be the case. ISP's should be entitled to common carrier status. This would mean that the ISPs are not liable for traffic passing over internet links owned by them. As it stands now the framework that the DMCA and other content provider love-in legislation has provided leaves ISP's in the position of enforcement police.
Write your congressmen and women and encourage them to take a close look at the current situation. The Slashdot and other online activist are good at talking online however it is the voices of the content industries, which are the loudest to our government.
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When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run:P
"Certain operational, debriefing material has been edited from the Expedition One ship's log. This material has been identified as "Redacted." This material is considered an integral and critically important element of the on-going, deliberative decisional process NASA is undertaking related to long-duration International Space Station missions. This process must include necessary give-and-take communications about all aspects of crew and station performance. To be effective, these communications require absolute candor in discussion that would not be available if parties to the exchange, including intended recipients on the ground and future crewmembers, thought the material might be released to the public."
Does anyone else after reading these logs believe that crap? The only material that seems to be missing is the personal comments about the station crewmembers. I agree candor is important but so is the ability of the public to decide for them selves if the station and crew is worth the massive amounts of money that our governments are spending on it. I am not asking for or expecting a soap opera however if something was serious enough to require removal from the logs it makes me wonder why. I would like to know if the US and Russian crewmembers get along. How well they work together and some information about their day not just about the mechanical problems that were encountered.
"Approx 0930--Put the CDMK analyzer out and measured CO2 levels for a while in the SM. CDMK put on panel 449 for now. Readings were steady at 0.38 (we think this is percent). Turned the CDMK off to save the batteries, but ready for more readings when requested."
The Mars global observer team must have thought something similar when conducting their measurements. Does Nasa have something against verification.
"We were configuring SSC2 to run a CD when it decided to lock up. After repeated attempts to restart, Shep and Sergi went through a long attempt to extract files from the SSC's hard drive before reloading the SSC software. Used the startup disk in the onboard software suite, but could not find a particular file while hunting around with DOS. This would have been much easier with some bootable media (CDROM?) that could run Windows. (Or if Shep was not indoctrinated by that other operating system). We may need an emergency boot capibility again After 5+ attempts, finallygot the hard drive to take an image off the ghost CD. One of the Autoloader floppies went down but SSC 2 is now running normally. (3+ hours troubleshooting)."
(Or if Shep was not indoctrinated by that other operating system).
What I want to know is first what is that "Other operating system"
Second is it just me or is it scary they trust a 3.5" floppy to be reliable.
I think the problem is that the patent office rather than just allowing the patenting of actual inventions as was intended now allows the patenting of schemes or ideas. One Californian even patented the thought process
The idea of granting protection for copyrighted material is a good one however the current implementations have all been bad. I seriously doubt that they can be modified enough to protect individual rights Vs the Studios and the rights of the artists. The Studios supported the DMCA because it insured that they would not be taken out of the process at any time in the near future. It also makes them money. Anyone who seriously believes that the studios are trying to protect the artists rights with the DMCA needs to visit a shrink most promptly.
The only solution to this situation is for a new system to be developed. An open source development process would be perfect for systems of this type in my opinion. We all know that if the DMCA is struck down the MPAA would start the next day pushing for it to be replaced with a new and possibly worse system. How would you protect the disparate rights of the Studios, the Artist, and the public? Remember the system while granting fair use would have to prevent or make duplication of the media harder.
The primary issues facing Undernet, Dalnet and EFNet is that they give the script kiddies all the information they need to launch savage DDOS attacks. The IRC networks give out to any interested party the IP addresses of the servers, the IP addresses of the hubs, and finally they give out the IP addresses of the end users. When you provide the keys in a manner such as this, expect someone to try them in the lock.
The first step to resolving this is IP mirroring. Unless you are an irc operator, you see your own IP address on each server and each user on the network. This removes the first bit the user needs for a massive disruption of the network. Ircops need to be able to see the hostmask in order to protect the servers from the misdeeds of users.
The next step in protecting your irc network is to have no publicly listed server connecting to any other publicly listed server. All hubs should be ircop only. This makes it so that the hubs the all-important links to the edge of your network are hidden from public and from the hackers view.
Now in order to make the task more difficult simply give out only one hostname that all users will use in order to connect. Each server would be required to take users if the resources are available for them. Local users to a server would of course have priority. The single hostname may not totally protect your network however it will ensure the hackers have to work a bit harder to get the information on the server they are using to connect. No offense to any serious hackers out there is intended however script kiddies are by and by lazy creatures.
These measures will not protect the average user who accepts CTCP chats or DCC's however those who do not should have total immunity from the script kiddies.
In order to provide channel operators with a modicum of control in their channels have a bot that can see host masks and accepts ban commands via private messages giving the users nick. The bot would only allow the ban if the user issuing the command is a channel operator in the channel they are requesting the ban for.
You could also get smart and use channel services. Channel services while it might rile some of the ircops who see channel ownership as a bad thing. However a private ownership of a channel once created and registered tends to make sure that there is no point in attempting to split servers from the network in order to try to take control of a channel. If you do not like ownership of channels simply, decide on a very short-term idle channel deletion. If a channel is popular enough to have people online 24x7 then they have the right to decide who controls their community.
Slashdot Mirror
In actuality, Alan Turing said "If a person was unable to tell the difference between a conversation with a machine and a human, then the machine could reasonably be described as intelligent." This is a very basic description of the Turing test, which is a measure of the level of artificial intelligence of a computer system.
The Artificial Intelligence Enterprises located in Tel Aviv are working on a computer system, which they hope will be able to be mistaken for a 5-year-old child. They claim to have made a breakthrough. It is just a short step from a 5-year-old child to a thinking adult. In addition, you must consider mental illness and even the potential for envy, greed, rage, and hatred once you reach that plateau
You can find more AI news at The Mining Co AI pages
It costs on average for a small ISP 1,500-2,000$ for a T1 (1.5mbs) Internet link. This is in addition to the 400-600$ for the local loop charges. It costs 12,000$ give or take for a partial T3 (45mbs). With broadband companies trying to give every residential customer between 350kbps and 1.5mbps of bandwidth for 39.95$ a month, the figures just do not add up. When you provide someone a service they will use it simply because they can. This means that the broadband companies must add additional bandwidth to handle the users that abuse the system. This increases costs and ensures that they can not afford to continue to offer the service. What is required in my opinion is legislation (waits for the boos and hisses to stop) to require the Regional Bell Operating companies to lower the over priced bandwidth costs to the Internet service companies. I do not mean just for the large corporations but also for the mom and pop ISP's in your neighborhood. If the bandwidth is available to the ISP's they can then turn around and make it available for their users.
Actually ZoneAlarm is an ok piece of software however Tiny Software's Tiny Personal Firewall is a much much better piece of software. The firewall in addition to allowing applications access to the net allow you to setup specific permit and deny rules based on localport, remote port, local address, remote address, application, protocol, and much more. I look at it as a much improved version consisting of a hypothetical merge of ZoneAlarm with Conseal PC firewall and like products. In addition Tiny Software's product is in use by the US Airforce on 500,000 desktop machines. Oh ya it's also free for personal use.
FEATURES AT A GLANCE
Multi-layer security protection (NDIS & TDI) Since the DSE resides on each computer in the network, it communicates directly with the operating system and negotiates what applications are even allowed to transmit and/or receive data.
MD5 Signature Support As the DSE mandates what applications can bind for communication, it can also check for an MD5 digital signature for permitted applications. This ensures that Trojan horse applications cannot gain access by using the name of a permitted application.
Stateful filtering based on SRC/DST IP address, port & application The DSE maintains a record of all sent packets and can therefore compare incoming packets to the record table to determine if they were requested. Additionally, the DSE can restrict applications to certain ports or destination IP addresses.
Remote access to logs and statistics The DSE contains a separate statistic view that displays all active sessions and includes the status, port, remote IP, application or service and the time associated with each session. Logs may be viewed from the statistics view or sent directly to a syslog server for analysis and reporting.
Suspicious activity monitoring and Intrusion detection The Tiny DSE contains a highly configurable reporting mechanism that can report specific intrusion attempts, or any other type of communication deemed suspicious, to a syslog server or to the CMDS server through an SSL connection.
Well grab your seat!!!! They already have single person TV's and I really really really want one :P
:P
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
I can see one of two possible outcomes from this.
2. This plan isn't successful - Smaller ISP's still make little to no money. The Larger ISP's have competition and the prices stay down as the Internet audience grows. With this growth eventually, advertisers seeking these new audiences start to pay the content sites to host their Internet ads once more. Note the recent trend of content sites refusing to provide click though information.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
From the maps website i found the following interesting information. How much does it cost? In query mode, the cost is US$1,500 per year for sites with up to 1,000 users; each additional 500 users will be priced at US$750 per year.
:P
Larger or overseas sites will probably prefer transfer mode, in which you transfer a copy of the DNS zone to your local nameserver. The cost for this is US$1,250 per year per nameserver, plus US$50 per 1,000 users -- around half a cent per user each month.
Educational institutions, non-profits, and members of selected ISP trade associatons may (at our sole discretion) be eligible for discounts; please contact us with a proposal.
I can see charging ISP's on a per user basis for the query mode lookups. However, the charges per user for zone transfer makes no sense as the MAPS service bears no additional load or bandwidth charges from the extra users as the zones are stored on the ISP's name servers locally.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
You can easily bypass any of the filters napster has put in place. On a web page, list the songs and randomly generated or sequentially generated numbers such as M01020. Then compresses the music with a compression program such as winzip, arj, pkarc or one of the other compression formats. Next you take and rename the file to name.mp3. Now once you do that simply login to napster. Their software will not see a matching title, artist, or song signature since it is in compressed form. Thus, there is no method, which anyone can promise to be 100% successful in blocking all copyrighted material.
:P
I am not a music pirate. Nor do I suggest or encourage anyone to use this method. However, what I have used napster in the past for was to recover music I have legally purchased in the past but I have since damaged and/or lost the media for.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
It will take a number of the following measures to limit and reduce the number of attacks EFNet faces.
:P
Hostmask mirroringthat would at the irc server level protect you from hostile users out there, making it virtually impossible for them to gain your IP address via IRC.
Nickserv/Chanserv allows you to reserve your own nickname and reserve your own channels for personal use.
Invisible hub servers, these invisble hubs means it is possible for one or two servers to be taken down but it will be individual servers on instead of entire branches
By implementing these features you will see the irc wars lessen and eventually die out for the most part. The nick and channel services would protect the channels reguardless of the warbots and denial of service attacks. The masked ip's would mean you could not attack other users of the network unless they did something stupid like accept a dcc connection. EFNet may have the invisible hubs already however the rest of the possible solutions they do not have and seriously need to consider.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
As the game publishing companies have discovered a long ago any security system can be cracked given enough time. It is time Microsoft learned this fact as well. No amounts of law suits can put the genie back into the bottle once it is released which the MPAA has learned the hard way and at extreme cost. If any portion of the system is located on the users system, it will be able to be hacked. While I do not agree with software piracy, I also do not believe in copy protection whose sole purpose is to complicate the situation for the end users that buy software and expect specific uses from it.
:P
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
Anyone who could play in the Quantum Leap series and pull it off with a credible character is a very good actor. I personally will be there and give the new Trek every possible chance. We didn't like TNG when it came out however for most of us the series eventually grew on us. So basically don't totally slam on this series till you have seen the first several episodes
:P
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
The problem currently with manned access to space is simply that in the United States NASA is a monopoly. They have no interest in allowing anyone but NASA to provide access to space. If they did then this would risk NASA's congressional funding. Lets hope if successful this would lead to the break up of NASA's monopoly and by doing so open space to the masses!
:P
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
I had to sit and think about this article for a bit before I could write a coherent response. The world is becoming a more interconnected and complex place at the same time we are each becoming more remote from each other. The risks from a change of this nature can sometimes outweigh the benefits offered by it. The problem with interconnecting medical devices to the Internet is that you are not placing a generic computer system with an IP address at risk to hackers. It is also not just that you are also providing a layer of complexity to these vital devices, which increases their possibility of the failure.
:P
My problem with them is of a more social nature. I would much prefer that my doctor sits in front of me and looks at me the person rather than an impersonal serial number. Already our society is one that is slowly but surely cutting the individual from the societal whole. Do we need, do we want this process to extend to our medical care? Sure it is possible that these changes will save some lives. These changes may make it possible for a doctor to diagnose and prescribe treatment before the person in a life threatening condition can reach the hospital. However, unless it is life threatening I personally will take the trip to the doctor's office even with the additional wait.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
As it currently stands at this moment, the public no longer has any rights relating to content they purchase or own. The content companies have all the legal rights and legal protection. When it comes to content, they all but own the judicial system. They definitely own the Legislative branch of the American government.
:P
As citizens and consumers, we must strive to change to the system. Write letters to your congressmen and congresswomen and send them via postal mail. Do not send the letters via email as many congressmen ignore email all together. You can also call and encourage your friends to call as well.
Next consumers have to stop buying the rights abusive products from the content companies. It would take less than a month for a boycott by millions of people in order to force the content companies into changing their ways. Sadly, we can talk as much as we like about the problem here on Slashdot however, the odds of any meaningful changes resulting from it are just about zero.
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When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
I wish to point out unless they have the DVD disc manually inserted into a DVD player by a MPAA representative that each form of copy protection they try will not work in the long run. One reason is that you can simply make a bit by bit copy of the DVD disc thus bypassing the copy protection. The software industry learned this lesson the hard way back in the days of Police Quest and Leisure suit Larry so I am sure the movie industry will learn it at some point as well. By doing a bit by bit copy of the DVD disc you have the keys the watermarks and a fully playable disc. Watermarks and CSS will not prevent this form of attack and the bulk video pirates are probably already using the attack that I described to mass-produce illegal copies of DVD disks. This will solely prevent the home user of the disc they purchased from being able to make a copy of the DVD disc for legally allowed fair use such as an archival copy. An archival copy is very useful on those G rated movies you bought you kids for their birthday or Christmas.
:P
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When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
The question is not that the batteries have the potential to catch on fire. This is a known fact. The question is who at Dell and Panasonic knew, when they knew it, and if there was any attempt at covering it up by either company. The second question begs to be How did these defective batterys get past both Panasonic's and Dell's Quality assurance teams. It does not seem reasonably possible that no one at either company knew about the problem until one happened to catch on fire...
:P
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When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
I will point out however that to seriously cut the amount of spam your mail servers see as a whole nothing beats mail-abuse.org..... The DUL blocks 33% of spam. The RBL blocks roughly 5% and using the RSS blocks 50% of the monthly spam. All three are well worth the time to install and use.
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When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
This one falls squarely under fair use as you are at the most using just a few seconds on the song not the entire song. Now if the recording industry wishes to create specific ring tones then they would have a rightful ownership of the ring tone.
:P
I for one am waiting for the inevitable backlash that will make corporations, evil empires, bad laws, and politicians turn and run. I for one will welcome it when it does come.
The copyright system started out as a way to encourage production of intellectual property by making sure the person or people who "Created" it were paid for their creation. The recording industry is a promotional system and not a content creator. In plain, English the RIAA is a leech on the musical creation system. They exist to make themselves the most money possible screw the consumer and screw the artist.
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When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
Old tech lasts longer for one reason and one reason only. The engineers designed it to last. Corporations do not make money off hardware that lasts 29+ years. They make money when the same hardware has to be purchased repeatedly every couple of years. How would you like to have an automobile with 5 million miles on the odometer and several million miles remaining? Could this be done? Of course, it could however the automobile makers would not be nearly as "Profitable" as they are with the current disposable product manufacturing system.
:P
Do I see any change on this in the future? I do not see it as very likely. Unless it pays them for it to last for a long period, they will build in a short duration life. Yes I truly believe they program products with a built in time bomb to cause it to stop functioning after a defined period. Is this right? Not on your life.
How can you change this? I no longer think that it is possible to change it. You are trained to buy the same defective products repeatedly. Engineers are trained to design it to break down by reflex. So we are stuck in the proverbial rut.
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When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
The recording and other content companies will form a system, which uses a real time black hole list. The content black hole(TM)would block all Internet traffic to the offending site. Once this is established, the recording and other companies will then sue small ISPs first then significantly larger ISPs under the theory that the ISP's are not using the "best methods" of preventing copyright infringement. They will state that the ISP's in fact are encouraging infringement and thus should be liable for doing so. With the current judicial system, such a system would probably pass muster by the courts. This sadly should not be the case. ISP's should be entitled to common carrier status. This would mean that the ISPs are not liable for traffic passing over internet links owned by them. As it stands now the framework that the DMCA and other content provider love-in legislation has provided leaves ISP's in the position of enforcement police. Write your congressmen and women and encourage them to take a close look at the current situation. The Slashdot and other online activist are good at talking online however it is the voices of the content industries, which are the loudest to our government.
:P
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When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
"Certain operational, debriefing material has been edited from the Expedition One ship's log. This material has been identified as "Redacted." This material is considered an integral and critically important element of the on-going, deliberative decisional process NASA is undertaking related to long-duration International Space Station missions. This process must include necessary give-and-take communications about all aspects of crew and station performance. To be effective, these communications require absolute candor in discussion that would not be available if parties to the exchange, including intended recipients on the ground and future crewmembers, thought the material might be released to the public."
Does anyone else after reading these logs believe that crap? The only material that seems to be missing is the personal comments about the station crewmembers. I agree candor is important but so is the ability of the public to decide for them selves if the station and crew is worth the massive amounts of money that our governments are spending on it. I am not asking for or expecting a soap opera however if something was serious enough to require removal from the logs it makes me wonder why. I would like to know if the US and Russian crewmembers get along. How well they work together and some information about their day not just about the mechanical problems that were encountered.
"Approx 0930--Put the CDMK analyzer out and measured CO2 levels for a while in the SM. CDMK put on panel 449 for now. Readings were steady at 0.38 (we think this is percent). Turned the CDMK off to save the batteries, but ready for more readings when requested."
The Mars global observer team must have thought something similar when conducting their measurements. Does Nasa have something against verification.
"We were configuring SSC2 to run a CD when it decided to lock up. After repeated attempts to restart, Shep and Sergi went through a long attempt to extract files from the SSC's hard drive before reloading the SSC software. Used the startup disk in the onboard software suite, but could not find a particular file while hunting around with DOS. This would have been much easier with some bootable media (CDROM?) that could run Windows. (Or if Shep was not indoctrinated by that other operating system). We may need an emergency boot capibility again After 5+ attempts, finallygot the hard drive to take an image off the ghost CD. One of the Autoloader floppies went down but SSC 2 is now running normally. (3+ hours troubleshooting)."
(Or if Shep was not indoctrinated by that other operating system).
What I want to know is first what is that "Other operating system"
Second is it just me or is it scary they trust a 3.5" floppy to be reliable.
I think the problem is that the patent office rather than just allowing the patenting of actual inventions as was intended now allows the patenting of schemes or ideas. One Californian even patented the thought process
The idea of granting protection for copyrighted material is a good one however the current implementations have all been bad. I seriously doubt that they can be modified enough to protect individual rights Vs the Studios and the rights of the artists. The Studios supported the DMCA because it insured that they would not be taken out of the process at any time in the near future. It also makes them money. Anyone who seriously believes that the studios are trying to protect the artists rights with the DMCA needs to visit a shrink most promptly. The only solution to this situation is for a new system to be developed. An open source development process would be perfect for systems of this type in my opinion. We all know that if the DMCA is struck down the MPAA would start the next day pushing for it to be replaced with a new and possibly worse system. How would you protect the disparate rights of the Studios, the Artist, and the public? Remember the system while granting fair use would have to prevent or make duplication of the media harder.
The primary issues facing Undernet, Dalnet and EFNet is that they give the script kiddies all the information they need to launch savage DDOS attacks. The IRC networks give out to any interested party the IP addresses of the servers, the IP addresses of the hubs, and finally they give out the IP addresses of the end users. When you provide the keys in a manner such as this, expect someone to try them in the lock.
The first step to resolving this is IP mirroring. Unless you are an irc operator, you see your own IP address on each server and each user on the network. This removes the first bit the user needs for a massive disruption of the network. Ircops need to be able to see the hostmask in order to protect the servers from the misdeeds of users.
The next step in protecting your irc network is to have no publicly listed server connecting to any other publicly listed server. All hubs should be ircop only. This makes it so that the hubs the all-important links to the edge of your network are hidden from public and from the hackers view.
Now in order to make the task more difficult simply give out only one hostname that all users will use in order to connect. Each server would be required to take users if the resources are available for them. Local users to a server would of course have priority. The single hostname may not totally protect your network however it will ensure the hackers have to work a bit harder to get the information on the server they are using to connect. No offense to any serious hackers out there is intended however script kiddies are by and by lazy creatures.
These measures will not protect the average user who accepts CTCP chats or DCC's however those who do not should have total immunity from the script kiddies.
In order to provide channel operators with a modicum of control in their channels have a bot that can see host masks and accepts ban commands via private messages giving the users nick. The bot would only allow the ban if the user issuing the command is a channel operator in the channel they are requesting the ban for.
You could also get smart and use channel services. Channel services while it might rile some of the ircops who see channel ownership as a bad thing. However a private ownership of a channel once created and registered tends to make sure that there is no point in attempting to split servers from the network in order to try to take control of a channel. If you do not like ownership of channels simply, decide on a very short-term idle channel deletion. If a channel is popular enough to have people online 24x7 then they have the right to decide who controls their community.
Many IRC networks and services packages implement these security-improving provisions already. You can look at Stratics IRC Network which while small has a very effective implementation . Stratics IRC is a gaming related network offering these features.