I hate to actually bring it up, but the only place GPA really matters is getting a scholarship and keeping it. What the actual number is at the end of your program rarely matters. What does matter is your "networking" with others to get yourself a job. I'd think that the facebook crowd could in theory have better work related networking going on. It depends on if you socialized with various recruiters or folks from your major a couple of years ahead of you. Both sets could put you slightly ahead of others.
What I had to laugh at is that this thing makes a 3.0-3.5 seem like the end of the world. I'd actually think that the bulk of the grades in college would fall into that range! 3.25 was the cut off GPA for the scholarship that I had.
"Hours spend studying" is a useless metric. Teachers want to see 5 hours of studying multiplied by the number of classes that you are taken for you to get an A or B. I can tell you there were times that I spent that much, but I rarely needed to spend more than 5 hours a week total studying in college. I made it out with a 3.5 at the end. I can't tell you how much Quake, Red Alert or just time wasting that I spent back then. I'd actually want this divided up into smaller slices, and to see if this is actually true. I recall many folks flunking out after a single semester of college. If you made it through 3 semesters with your scholarship, you were likely to make it through all 4 years of college.
Geez, for some reason....there seems to be an almost inherit distaste for anyone with any type of wealth in this country these days. You almost seem to feel some level of vitriol anytime someone mentions people who make over $100K/yr and can afford something slightly 'nicer' than the people living in the projects.
Are we at the beginning of a race to the bottom...where no one can have an advantage no matter how hard they try?
Nah, that's just us folks on slashdot. Those really rich folks have their own private facebook like place where they go and have to pay like $50 a month fee just to keep us off it. It all works out. We like to be snobbish on how they waste money when they could get some of those things for free/cheaper, and they look down on us for wasting all that time doing something ourselves rather than just paying someone else to do it for you. Everyone is happy as long as they can have someone else to frown upon.
I don't find this as evil/bad as most of slasdhdot does. Why? Because I make use of the Earned Income Tax Credit. Raise your hand if you make use of that or any other government handouts? Now, when you go to your tax person or use your tax software, do you try to find every means possible to reduce your taxes or get money back? Damn straight that's what we all do! How can I possibly complain because others try to do the same?
Does it make a damn bit of difference if they are an educational group, a religious group, a business group, or a nonprofit group? Nope.
This is just complaining. It's like complaining that the sun is bright, hot, and produces tons of energy. Yeap, and there ain't anything we can about it either.
Actually, I don't think that the paper industry will be "punished" or allow this thing to be reduced. Didn't you read the sentence that the entire paper industry was in trouble? Well, finding a nice federal tax income will help that problem. There is nothing more dangerous than allowing a government agency/law to be established. Once it is there; it'll only be expanded.
And to all those who say they are just creating an adult section, ask your self why children's books that try to discuss homosexuality delicately are delisted, but racy explicit romances is not.
Are you kidding? It's just a demographics thing. If the population were mainly homosexual, you'd see the reverse. It's just the normal, hey I want my kid to read/absorb only material that will make them like me thing. It's not really a big thing to me. I understand where it's coming from. I'm more amazed that slashdot seems to view it as end of the world crap when it actually happens. Another thing that you might want to think of is that all major religious books will hardly ever be banned/restricted other than categorized as religious. This is because the millions of folks that do buy that stuff would either complain or worse go some where else to buy it.
I'm sure that if you are willing to fill out a lengthy form of products/people/ideas that you dislike/hate then amazon and others would be thrilled to attempt to limit all that stuff from your search returns. That'd require actual work though. It would be easier just to through everything that has some one complain about it as adult and then give the adult section unlimited stuff. Heck, I think most politics, religion, and explicit sexual related material could be safely labeled adult and most wouldn't complain.
i know a guy who used to be a sniper and he said that he had to be extremely careful with communications devices for fear he could give up his position in the field. essentially the enemy could conceivably monitor for communications and determine general locations.
granted local police and the military are different. yet, couldnt a troublemaker get a hold of this information and use it to their advantage?
I work at a police agency. Police scanners don't work any more around here. Do you know why? Because that's the main reason that they went digital. O.k. it let them get more channels in, but also its all encrypted so anyone with a scanner can't just listen to it. It's ironic that all of it is recorded and can be released by FOIA, but you've got to pay through the nose for that. You can't just sit at home listening to the ole police scanner any more. Our agency is way behind the curve in this stuff. We only got it because it's become something so trivial Motorola just hands it out now.
In a military environment, I could see the opponent being able to detect EM transmissions to locate 'em. Do you think that the average SWAT sniper really needs to worry about that sort of threat? O.k. tech it would be possible, but it wouldn't be likely for them to ever run into. Most of the info transmitted would be utterly useless except through the vendor software solution that makes it all make some sort of sense. That is unless you are going against a HAM operator that can detect any EM transmissions. That guy might be able to locate your SWAT team, but come on what could he really do about it?
Does any one know if their are slight increases in rain fall around data centers?
This would be a valid question if they are spending a lot water in evaporation. They should know the exact amount that they lost. It's got to come down as rain somewhere. Is it possible to map it/predict it?
How does this waste water vapor effect the climate? Oh no, the world is doomed not because of carbon emissions, but because of water vapor exhaust from data centers!
True, cutting fiber at different parts in town would bring chaos, but why would you use a plan that requires such meticulous planning (and therefore a bigger chance to fail) when you could do it with easier means, just bomb one or two medium sized electricity outlets and along with the electricity network most communication systems will go down.
The stuff you describe would better fit a psychopath, but why would a psychopath purposely endanger the lifes of glass fiber technicians, unless of course they had a traumatic experience with one of them in their youth.
Nah, the only big planning is setting a date, and setting the devices. I'd think that it would be easy for any IT guy that was aware of how fiber is run to ID it and pick some of the easier places to cut it. True, actually killing the repair techs is just mean, but it isn't so much of instilling fear as in slowing down repair efforts. As a ruse of war, you are taken out the trained civilians that can actually repair the infrastructure that you just took out. O.k. if a foreign country planed to do this, it could cost only a few million, and instead of timers, have 'em hooked up to either single purpose cell phones, or some remote controlled device so that they just sit there waiting just in case your country is ever at war with the US. Delayed bombs and such aren't about killing lots of civilians, they are about killing trained techs that are able to repair the infrastructure. Say that you just added a month or two to the repair time. That would work fine.
Now as one of nut job terrorist plot, it would suck for widespread killing except unless you had some personal grudge against a few techs or the companies within that region. But think of the school shooting stuff. I a lot of that is being up set at the world and wanting to take out as many of those that were picking on the individual when they make their big shooting run. O.k. new personal rule don't piss off any nut jobs at work.
This is tedious work, requires careful attention to detail to properly polish the cut fiber ends and repatch them, and for large fiber bundles takes forever. You can start running data through a fiber once its two ends are repatched - you don't have to get the whole bundle back for that - but the whole process can take 24-48 hours depending on how many fibers are involved and how much space there is to work in the trench or down the manhole. In many cases, there's only enough space for 1 or maybe 2 people to be working at any given time, which makes the repairs take forever...
How long would it take to repair if a few lines were cut, and the manhole cover was rigged so that the person opening would set off a pipe bomb or grenade? O.k. What kinda of union hassles/strikes would happen if that happened once, twice, or a half dozen times?
That's something a more competent uni-bomber could do.
Now assume that the fiber-bomber has planned 4/1/2011 to bring down an entire state or metro area. He basically plants a pipe bomb with a timer for his black out date behind or on the lines coming into as many sections as he can find. Let's declare this a domestic terrorist that has used his two week vacation to do this and has only used house hold products found at walmart for supplies. Let's say he is willing to spend $2K on gas and his various supplies. How much of the internet could our fictional fiber-bomber physically take down and how long would it take to repair it?
That's the kinda of terrorist that gives government folks real nightmares. There is no way to stop that kinda of individual.
I can understand this. The RC is coded to handle upgrading from a Windows XP or Vista installation, it's not coded to handle upgrading from itself. A Win 7 beta installation's not going to match, it's going to have things already upgraded and other things upgraded to different versions from what the RC has. It's one of those situations that nobody who gets Windows 7 once it's released will ever have to deal with, and it doesn't make sense most of the time to have code in the release to handle a situation that can't happen. Except that it can happen if you happen to be part of the beta program, so you're warned loud and clear that the software isn't designed to do that so don't try it.
What about using the new stuff and telling it to repair the old version to get it to the new spec? Come on you know some one will be trying it. Heck, you know folks will fiddle with the repair feature and wonder if it's possible.
Katrina was only a surprise to the retards who decided it was a good idea to live between two rivers that flood all the fucking time. The rest of us were like "had to happen sooner or later".
Actually, Katrina could be used as an excellent example of what could happen to us if we don't take any precautions. Katrina could have been a nonevent if NO had spent a few million decades ago raising the height of their levies like engineers told them to. They knew if on action was taken a once in a 100 year event could damage the city. Well, the city didn't want to spend the money.
Well, Katrina and what NO should have done is far more obvious than the entire climate change thing. If we had engineers that fully understood the climate and pretty much said that in 500 years that we are going to have these sorts of climate events/changes every so often and that we should do something to prepare for it or it'll be Katrina on a larger scale, then we'd do something. Our climate scientists can't even reliably predict stuff 5-10 years out. Oh they can predict as well as you or I could on what the climate might be like. The problem is that that's not generally how things actually turn out.
It would be like asking con men and preachers if NO needs to build higher levies. Actually, that might have worked if the con men would have got a cut, or the labor was local from various religious groups.
Nah, facts have a true old school reactionary conservative bias. We just don't have many of those now a days. The truth is everyone understands that they want to take our our stuff to give to others. Conservatives just want enough power to defend themselves from that they, and to be truly sustainable so that they can ignore everyone else.
No-one gives a shit about warning signs dude. Disasters will be the call to action. So basically only when the weather is completely out of control will people start demanding action.. and by then there will likely be nothing we can do.
Actually it's worked for us already. We have disasters all the freaking time. We've got floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, mud slides, earth quakes, and thunder storms. Our electrical grid is just starting to not be a joke. I mean this in the US. Be realistic it has spot failures all the time that we are constantly fixing. The same goes for our roads and other infrastructure.
Katrina was bad because it happened real quick. If the effects of Katrina were spread out over a 20-50 year period, do you think that NO wouldn't have been able to adapt by itself? The doom says like to panic people, but the truth isn't that in one magic day in the future that water levels will drastically change. It's more like over a 20-50 year period slight changes in coastal sea level might happen. (And that's actually extremely short time wise for most of what I've read.) Don't you think that we'd be able to gently/calmly change stuff within that sort of time frame? Heck, in that sort of time frame, we might just be able to raise coastal sea walls around our major cities so that we don't have to relocate them.
I'd agree that we won't be doing anything until it is more obvious that something really needs to be done. It'll be decades (more like a century or two) before anything is really more obvious one way or another.
The global temperature hasn't risen in about 8 years (in fact, it has slightly gone down). So what's to fix?
Your entire modern life style since the issue isn't climate change per se. That's just an excuse that a few groups are using to give the government a thin mandate to completely change your way of life to how they believe that life should be.
You will keep on hearing about the dangers of climate change dooming all of us until the government is given widespread powers to just change things base on the whims of a few. Once that happens, you won't be hearing about any climate change stuff for awhile. You'd hear about anti-environment protesters rioting/protesting the reduction in their lifestyle for the good of Mother Earth. These heretics need extreme measures taken against them...
I hate this mother earth religion that's hiding in plan sight.
This religiosity in climate-change politics fascinates me - it's why I like the Michael Crichton essays/speeches on the topic even though he says "climate change is fake!" and it's pretty much Not Fake. More recently, I've seen stuff in that same Libertarian magazine comparing the current climate-change political scene to "denigrating HIV treatment and blocking condom distribution in order to discourage promiscuity. [It] is every bit as callous and irresponsible."
The reason that people can easily hate and deny most climate change crap is because it is taught as near a religion. I've actually got to admire them for being as successful with it as they have been. It's like trying to deny that the secular parts of the ten commandments are good general laws to live by. I mean the whole stealing, not killing folks, and honoring your parents bit. If they had stuck with just the secular portions of it or any of the top religions commandment list, then you'd find most folks just can't argue that its a bad idea to teach it to kids. The same applies to the entire mother earth recycling, reduce, reuse mantra. It's not that recycling, reduce, reusing are bad things. It's that the way they are taught with the whole mother Earth thing is far more blatant than the groups that just wanted the ten commandments posted up with their religious slant on it and it seems to be embraced where the ten commandments has been fought against. I find that fascinating.
This reminds me of several Niven books. He did a pretty good job of exploring were society would go if we developed this tech. Basically you'd have the criminal element murdering folks to extend others lives. That's actually not the bad part. We've got existing laws dealing with kidnapping and murder.
What's the really bad news? Having about a hundred years or so of just about every crime having the death penalty so those that need/want organs can get them from criminals. Worse case, you get caught by those speeding or red light cameras and then you've got to report to become parts for some richer/more law abiding citizen.
Those that complain that the death penalty is immoral would be singing a different tune if they could double or triple their own lifespan by using spare parts obtained from criminals. That's basically what would drive having the death penalty for every little crime under the sun. The demand for parts will mean that something like that would happen. Imagine all those in prison now for various drug or sex offenses were all used for spare parts. I could easily see that slipped in.
I'm not really afraid of the evil bad guys kidnapping me and killing me. I'm afraid of the government being forced to make most laws have the death penalty by their own citizens and there being little to nothing that you can do to get out of being declared some else's spare parts.
The systems I work on are typically airgapped, but there is a constant push from users for some access to the internet. A user might need to access meteorological information, and the simplest way is to go online to get the data. Another user might need to refer to work instructions on the corporate intranet, but the intranet gets you to the internet anyway. Like it or not, the internet is working its way into many types of work and many people are starting to expect it to be available.
Still sounds kinda of lazy to me. Where my dad works, their are two guys whose primary machines are pretty much always going to be stand alone boxes. These are the engineers boxes that store all the CAM stuff that has all their essential stuff on how to actually run their business. If those two guys need internet or something, they are more likely to get a laptop or a netbook just for that purpose. They know that their boxes will never be plugged up to the net.
You know what. They've never been downed any internet viruses or what not. They've got 5 various backups of that stuff. Now if the place where my dad works can do that level of common sense protection, then you'd think that the folks that run our essential infrastructure would be smart enough to do the same.
Half of slashdot would play it because "they" called it tasteless. But who the fuck are they anyway? And for the 'toosoon' crowd, why is time supposed to be the magic ingredient that heals these wounds? Why is it okay to make video games about Viet Nam, just because we didn't paint lines on it? Or for those who say that's not okay, but movies are; what's the difference there?
I'm talking about those that call it tasteless here, but will still end up playing it. Come on you know them. Heck, back in college the average person that liked FPS games would play it just to see.
Heck, doom was only acceptable because you were going around shooting demons and such. Wolfenstein was because you were shooting evil nazis. Would those games be the same if you were going around shooting bunnies, puppies, or petting zoo animals? If wolf3D had you shoot Nazi youth folks that were under 12 rather than adult nazis, would it have been popular? I'm guessing that we all know the answer to those questions. That's the reason most FPS have really evil looking bad things coming at you that excite your fear/ "kill it!" instinct.
Imagine an alien first encounter FPS game where the goal was peaceful first contact with various aliens, but the aliens that get displayed/pop out of the shuttle craft are from your average FPS shooters and you start off as an armed guard. Don't you think most of us would fail that as we blast away at every alien that triggers our danger/kill it/run instinct?
I discovered that, even though I slept at night, I wouldn't get any rest. I would wake up just as tired as when I went to bed. There was a simple reason for this, that evening cup of coffee. If you want to cut back on your caffeine intake, I have one piece of advice:
Don't drink any caffeine for at least four hours before bedtime
Blinks. Didn't your parents teach you that? That was one of the looser rules around my house. Never really understood it until later in life, but heck cutting out all forms of caffeine from about after lunch or so does help you get to sleep so it's vague rule about my house. Actually, the rule is even easier to enforce if you just don't buy any drinks with caffeine in it. Depend on milk, tea, water, or orange juice and you won't be missing all those soft drinks. Remember decaf tea!
You, sir, are a member of the Caffeine Underacheivers Club of the World. Until you can regularly consume an average of three or four pots of coffee in day (30 to 40 cups) without experiencing caffeine intoxication, you have no idea what how "nasty" withdrawal can get.
I'm at that point, I admit it. Withdrawal, for me, starts after about eight hours without caffeine. I get a serious headache, quickly followed by nausea and a general flu-like feeling. Left unattended, it's damn-near incapacitating. Fortunately, a single cup of coffee vanquishes all symptoms within 30 minutes.
Heck, compared to you, I don't even ingest caffeine. O.k. my lunch 16 oz soft drink. If I drank nearly as much of anything as you do, I'd spend half the day in the bath room. Heck, I only drink maybe 4-5 cups of liquid a day tops.
The left won't play because they don't support the war. The right won't play because they don't want to glamorize American soldiers getting shot at.
Everyone else won't play because it's tasteless.
Um, there kids on both sides. Heck if it is really historically accurate, I could actually see it be used to teach. I haven't played FPS games in awhile, but I'm sure 1/2 of/. would play it even if they called it tasteless here.
Heck, if this was really good, I could see the military paying for it just for a training aid. Historically, the hardest part of military training is getting your average civilian where they will kill other humans on command. So in that respect, this game series could have an extremely long life span if it can take your average civilian and get them to mentally accept performing these acts.
For a short while people were willing to forgo Windows for the form factor and price of a netbook. Then Moore's law ticked over and Microsoft was able to enter that market - same price for the machine but with the specs that XP needs. Next iteration they'll be selling units with Vista on them. The only way to keep Microsoft out is to race to the bottom and there's no economic incentive for the hardware manufacturers to do that.
Um, toys. It doesn't even have to be kids toys. Netbooks are about the price of a next gen gaming system. Just wait until they drop down to the price of a video game, or even better a used or classics video game. MS will be slightly pissed that laptops of that price range will exist, and that they'll have to keep on selling XP to support that lowest tier.
The thing is once you can produce and sell a modern laptop for about $40-50 what other toys will they wind up in? Heck, think McDonalds toys. I can't even envision the day that netbooks would be so cheap that they'd be given away as a McDonald's toy. It could happen though.
It sounds like the guy kinda went about it the wrong way. He should have just had a note or a webpage up with his current data and predictions with chance of an event happening on any given day. Folks would treat it sort of like a weather forecast.
Heck, when it comes to weather, we like to look at the live radar maps and make our own decisions. Hey it's going to be raining for the next hour or two...;) We aren't quiet there for earthquakes, yet.
Honestly, this seems like Google-bashing for its own sake. Who else is making a serious effort to get a hold of these orphan books and put them out there? Last I checked, absolutely no one.
If the choice is a monopoly over the digitized copy of these books, or letting them fade into obscurity un-digitized, do we really want to choose option B?
Um, just because those that own the patents or what not don't want to produce a product doesn't mean you or I have the right to copy it of. Yes Option B. It would be like you or I deciding to make a clone of any major auto that isn't produced any more, but we just like. It doesn't work that way. You and I don't own the rights for that. Just because you or I would love to have all this on google, doesn't give google the right to proclaim it all theirs because they just couldn't find out the owners or the owners haven't spoken up. Hey, the owners don't even have to speak up as long as the work is under copyright. It should be up to google to verify that each one of these things has its copyrights run out... If they can't find out that, then their default should be not to scan it. I know sad we lose stuff, but that is the safest legal thing to do.
What am I talking about? This is slashdot every thing google does is by default good. Google go ahead and copy everything and don't bother paying anyone anything for it because you are google and everything that you do is great and wonderful.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to actually bring it up, but the only place GPA really matters is getting a scholarship and keeping it. What the actual number is at the end of your program rarely matters. What does matter is your "networking" with others to get yourself a job. I'd think that the facebook crowd could in theory have better work related networking going on. It depends on if you socialized with various recruiters or folks from your major a couple of years ahead of you. Both sets could put you slightly ahead of others.
What I had to laugh at is that this thing makes a 3.0-3.5 seem like the end of the world. I'd actually think that the bulk of the grades in college would fall into that range! 3.25 was the cut off GPA for the scholarship that I had.
"Hours spend studying" is a useless metric. Teachers want to see 5 hours of studying multiplied by the number of classes that you are taken for you to get an A or B. I can tell you there were times that I spent that much, but I rarely needed to spend more than 5 hours a week total studying in college. I made it out with a 3.5 at the end. I can't tell you how much Quake, Red Alert or just time wasting that I spent back then. I'd actually want this divided up into smaller slices, and to see if this is actually true. I recall many folks flunking out after a single semester of college. If you made it through 3 semesters with your scholarship, you were likely to make it through all 4 years of college.
So what's next? Are we going to have a ratings tax for movies? If it's PG-13 add a $5 tax, if it's R add a $10 tax on to it?
Geez, for some reason....there seems to be an almost inherit distaste for anyone with any type of wealth in this country these days. You almost seem to feel some level of vitriol anytime someone mentions people who make over $100K/yr and can afford something slightly 'nicer' than the people living in the projects.
Are we at the beginning of a race to the bottom...where no one can have an advantage no matter how hard they try?
Nah, that's just us folks on slashdot. Those really rich folks have their own private facebook like place where they go and have to pay like $50 a month fee just to keep us off it. It all works out. We like to be snobbish on how they waste money when they could get some of those things for free/cheaper, and they look down on us for wasting all that time doing something ourselves rather than just paying someone else to do it for you. Everyone is happy as long as they can have someone else to frown upon.
I don't find this as evil/bad as most of slasdhdot does. Why? Because I make use of the Earned Income Tax Credit. Raise your hand if you make use of that or any other government handouts? Now, when you go to your tax person or use your tax software, do you try to find every means possible to reduce your taxes or get money back? Damn straight that's what we all do! How can I possibly complain because others try to do the same?
Does it make a damn bit of difference if they are an educational group, a religious group, a business group, or a nonprofit group? Nope.
This is just complaining. It's like complaining that the sun is bright, hot, and produces tons of energy. Yeap, and there ain't anything we can about it either.
Actually, I don't think that the paper industry will be "punished" or allow this thing to be reduced. Didn't you read the sentence that the entire paper industry was in trouble? Well, finding a nice federal tax income will help that problem. There is nothing more dangerous than allowing a government agency/law to be established. Once it is there; it'll only be expanded.
And to all those who say they are just creating an adult section, ask your self why children's books that try to discuss homosexuality delicately are delisted, but racy explicit romances is not.
Are you kidding? It's just a demographics thing. If the population were mainly homosexual, you'd see the reverse. It's just the normal, hey I want my kid to read/absorb only material that will make them like me thing. It's not really a big thing to me. I understand where it's coming from. I'm more amazed that slashdot seems to view it as end of the world crap when it actually happens. Another thing that you might want to think of is that all major religious books will hardly ever be banned/restricted other than categorized as religious. This is because the millions of folks that do buy that stuff would either complain or worse go some where else to buy it.
I'm sure that if you are willing to fill out a lengthy form of products/people/ideas that you dislike/hate then amazon and others would be thrilled to attempt to limit all that stuff from your search returns. That'd require actual work though. It would be easier just to through everything that has some one complain about it as adult and then give the adult section unlimited stuff. Heck, I think most politics, religion, and explicit sexual related material could be safely labeled adult and most wouldn't complain.
couldnt this go horribly wrong?
i know a guy who used to be a sniper and he said that he had to be extremely careful with communications devices for fear he could give up his position in the field. essentially the enemy could conceivably monitor for communications and determine general locations.
granted local police and the military are different. yet, couldnt a troublemaker get a hold of this information and use it to their advantage?
I work at a police agency. Police scanners don't work any more around here. Do you know why? Because that's the main reason that they went digital. O.k. it let them get more channels in, but also its all encrypted so anyone with a scanner can't just listen to it. It's ironic that all of it is recorded and can be released by FOIA, but you've got to pay through the nose for that. You can't just sit at home listening to the ole police scanner any more. Our agency is way behind the curve in this stuff. We only got it because it's become something so trivial Motorola just hands it out now.
In a military environment, I could see the opponent being able to detect EM transmissions to locate 'em. Do you think that the average SWAT sniper really needs to worry about that sort of threat? O.k. tech it would be possible, but it wouldn't be likely for them to ever run into. Most of the info transmitted would be utterly useless except through the vendor software solution that makes it all make some sort of sense. That is unless you are going against a HAM operator that can detect any EM transmissions. That guy might be able to locate your SWAT team, but come on what could he really do about it?
Does any one know if their are slight increases in rain fall around data centers?
This would be a valid question if they are spending a lot water in evaporation. They should know the exact amount that they lost. It's got to come down as rain somewhere. Is it possible to map it/predict it?
How does this waste water vapor effect the climate? Oh no, the world is doomed not because of carbon emissions, but because of water vapor exhaust from data centers!
True, cutting fiber at different parts in town would bring chaos, but why would you use a plan that requires such meticulous planning (and therefore a bigger chance to fail) when you could do it with easier means, just bomb one or two medium sized electricity outlets and along with the electricity network most communication systems will go down.
The stuff you describe would better fit a psychopath, but why would a psychopath purposely endanger the lifes of glass fiber technicians, unless of course they had a traumatic experience with one of them in their youth.
Nah, the only big planning is setting a date, and setting the devices. I'd think that it would be easy for any IT guy that was aware of how fiber is run to ID it and pick some of the easier places to cut it. True, actually killing the repair techs is just mean, but it isn't so much of instilling fear as in slowing down repair efforts. As a ruse of war, you are taken out the trained civilians that can actually repair the infrastructure that you just took out. O.k. if a foreign country planed to do this, it could cost only a few million, and instead of timers, have 'em hooked up to either single purpose cell phones, or some remote controlled device so that they just sit there waiting just in case your country is ever at war with the US. Delayed bombs and such aren't about killing lots of civilians, they are about killing trained techs that are able to repair the infrastructure. Say that you just added a month or two to the repair time. That would work fine.
Now as one of nut job terrorist plot, it would suck for widespread killing except unless you had some personal grudge against a few techs or the companies within that region. But think of the school shooting stuff. I a lot of that is being up set at the world and wanting to take out as many of those that were picking on the individual when they make their big shooting run. O.k. new personal rule don't piss off any nut jobs at work.
This is tedious work, requires careful attention to detail to properly polish the cut fiber ends and repatch them, and for large fiber bundles takes forever. You can start running data through a fiber once its two ends are repatched - you don't have to get the whole bundle back for that - but the whole process can take 24-48 hours depending on how many fibers are involved and how much space there is to work in the trench or down the manhole. In many cases, there's only enough space for 1 or maybe 2 people to be working at any given time, which makes the repairs take forever...
How long would it take to repair if a few lines were cut, and the manhole cover was rigged so that the person opening would set off a pipe bomb or grenade? O.k. What kinda of union hassles/strikes would happen if that happened once, twice, or a half dozen times?
That's something a more competent uni-bomber could do.
Now assume that the fiber-bomber has planned 4/1/2011 to bring down an entire state or metro area. He basically plants a pipe bomb with a timer for his black out date behind or on the lines coming into as many sections as he can find. Let's declare this a domestic terrorist that has used his two week vacation to do this and has only used house hold products found at walmart for supplies. Let's say he is willing to spend $2K on gas and his various supplies. How much of the internet could our fictional fiber-bomber physically take down and how long would it take to repair it?
That's the kinda of terrorist that gives government folks real nightmares. There is no way to stop that kinda of individual.
I can understand this. The RC is coded to handle upgrading from a Windows XP or Vista installation, it's not coded to handle upgrading from itself. A Win 7 beta installation's not going to match, it's going to have things already upgraded and other things upgraded to different versions from what the RC has. It's one of those situations that nobody who gets Windows 7 once it's released will ever have to deal with, and it doesn't make sense most of the time to have code in the release to handle a situation that can't happen. Except that it can happen if you happen to be part of the beta program, so you're warned loud and clear that the software isn't designed to do that so don't try it.
What about using the new stuff and telling it to repair the old version to get it to the new spec? Come on you know some one will be trying it. Heck, you know folks will fiddle with the repair feature and wonder if it's possible.
Katrina was only a surprise to the retards who decided it was a good idea to live between two rivers that flood all the fucking time. The rest of us were like "had to happen sooner or later".
Actually, Katrina could be used as an excellent example of what could happen to us if we don't take any precautions. Katrina could have been a nonevent if NO had spent a few million decades ago raising the height of their levies like engineers told them to. They knew if on action was taken a once in a 100 year event could damage the city. Well, the city didn't want to spend the money.
Well, Katrina and what NO should have done is far more obvious than the entire climate change thing. If we had engineers that fully understood the climate and pretty much said that in 500 years that we are going to have these sorts of climate events/changes every so often and that we should do something to prepare for it or it'll be Katrina on a larger scale, then we'd do something. Our climate scientists can't even reliably predict stuff 5-10 years out. Oh they can predict as well as you or I could on what the climate might be like. The problem is that that's not generally how things actually turn out.
It would be like asking con men and preachers if NO needs to build higher levies. Actually, that might have worked if the con men would have got a cut, or the labor was local from various religious groups.
Facts do have a liberal bias.
Nah, facts have a true old school reactionary conservative bias. We just don't have many of those now a days.
The truth is everyone understands that they want to take our our stuff to give to others. Conservatives just want enough power to defend themselves from that they, and to be truly sustainable so that they can ignore everyone else.
No-one gives a shit about warning signs dude. Disasters will be the call to action. So basically only when the weather is completely out of control will people start demanding action.. and by then there will likely be nothing we can do.
Actually it's worked for us already. We have disasters all the freaking time. We've got floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, mud slides, earth quakes, and thunder storms. Our electrical grid is just starting to not be a joke. I mean this in the US. Be realistic it has spot failures all the time that we are constantly fixing. The same goes for our roads and other infrastructure.
Katrina was bad because it happened real quick. If the effects of Katrina were spread out over a 20-50 year period, do you think that NO wouldn't have been able to adapt by itself? The doom says like to panic people, but the truth isn't that in one magic day in the future that water levels will drastically change. It's more like over a 20-50 year period slight changes in coastal sea level might happen. (And that's actually extremely short time wise for most of what I've read.) Don't you think that we'd be able to gently/calmly change stuff within that sort of time frame? Heck, in that sort of time frame, we might just be able to raise coastal sea walls around our major cities so that we don't have to relocate them.
I'd agree that we won't be doing anything until it is more obvious that something really needs to be done. It'll be decades (more like a century or two) before anything is really more obvious one way or another.
The global temperature hasn't risen in about 8 years (in fact, it has slightly gone down). So what's to fix?
Your entire modern life style since the issue isn't climate change per se. That's just an excuse that a few groups are using to give the government a thin mandate to completely change your way of life to how they believe that life should be.
You will keep on hearing about the dangers of climate change dooming all of us until the government is given widespread powers to just change things base on the whims of a few. Once that happens, you won't be hearing about any climate change stuff for awhile. You'd hear about anti-environment protesters rioting/protesting the reduction in their lifestyle for the good of Mother Earth. These heretics need extreme measures taken against them...
I hate this mother earth religion that's hiding in plan sight.
This religiosity in climate-change politics fascinates me - it's why I like the Michael Crichton essays/speeches on the topic even though he says "climate change is fake!" and it's pretty much Not Fake. More recently, I've seen stuff in that same Libertarian magazine comparing the current climate-change political scene to "denigrating HIV treatment and blocking condom distribution in order to discourage promiscuity. [It] is every bit as callous and irresponsible."
The reason that people can easily hate and deny most climate change crap is because it is taught as near a religion. I've actually got to admire them for being as successful with it as they have been. It's like trying to deny that the secular parts of the ten commandments are good general laws to live by. I mean the whole stealing, not killing folks, and honoring your parents bit. If they had stuck with just the secular portions of it or any of the top religions commandment list, then you'd find most folks just can't argue that its a bad idea to teach it to kids. The same applies to the entire mother earth recycling, reduce, reuse mantra. It's not that recycling, reduce, reusing are bad things. It's that the way they are taught with the whole mother Earth thing is far more blatant than the groups that just wanted the ten commandments posted up with their religious slant on it and it seems to be embraced where the ten commandments has been fought against. I find that fascinating.
This reminds me of several Niven books. He did a pretty good job of exploring were society would go if we developed this tech. Basically you'd have the criminal element murdering folks to extend others lives. That's actually not the bad part. We've got existing laws dealing with kidnapping and murder.
What's the really bad news? Having about a hundred years or so of just about every crime having the death penalty so those that need/want organs can get them from criminals. Worse case, you get caught by those speeding or red light cameras and then you've got to report to become parts for some richer/more law abiding citizen.
Those that complain that the death penalty is immoral would be singing a different tune if they could double or triple their own lifespan by using spare parts obtained from criminals. That's basically what would drive having the death penalty for every little crime under the sun. The demand for parts will mean that something like that would happen. Imagine all those in prison now for various drug or sex offenses were all used for spare parts. I could easily see that slipped in.
I'm not really afraid of the evil bad guys kidnapping me and killing me. I'm afraid of the government being forced to make most laws have the death penalty by their own citizens and there being little to nothing that you can do to get out of being declared some else's spare parts.
The systems I work on are typically airgapped, but there is a constant push from users for some access to the internet. A user might need to access meteorological information, and the simplest way is to go online to get the data. Another user might need to refer to work instructions on the corporate intranet, but the intranet gets you to the internet anyway. Like it or not, the internet is working its way into many types of work and many people are starting to expect it to be available.
Still sounds kinda of lazy to me. Where my dad works, their are two guys whose primary machines are pretty much always going to be stand alone boxes. These are the engineers boxes that store all the CAM stuff that has all their essential stuff on how to actually run their business. If those two guys need internet or something, they are more likely to get a laptop or a netbook just for that purpose. They know that their boxes will never be plugged up to the net.
You know what. They've never been downed any internet viruses or what not. They've got 5 various backups of that stuff. Now if the place where my dad works can do that level of common sense protection, then you'd think that the folks that run our essential infrastructure would be smart enough to do the same.
Half of slashdot would play it because "they" called it tasteless. But who the fuck are they anyway? And for the 'toosoon' crowd, why is time supposed to be the magic ingredient that heals these wounds? Why is it okay to make video games about Viet Nam, just because we didn't paint lines on it? Or for those who say that's not okay, but movies are; what's the difference there?
I'm talking about those that call it tasteless here, but will still end up playing it. Come on you know them. Heck, back in college the average person that liked FPS games would play it just to see.
Heck, doom was only acceptable because you were going around shooting demons and such. Wolfenstein was because you were shooting evil nazis. Would those games be the same if you were going around shooting bunnies, puppies, or petting zoo animals? If wolf3D had you shoot Nazi youth folks that were under 12 rather than adult nazis, would it have been popular? I'm guessing that we all know the answer to those questions. That's the reason most FPS have really evil looking bad things coming at you that excite your fear/ "kill it!" instinct.
Imagine an alien first encounter FPS game where the goal was peaceful first contact with various aliens, but the aliens that get displayed/pop out of the shuttle craft are from your average FPS shooters and you start off as an armed guard. Don't you think most of us would fail that as we blast away at every alien that triggers our danger/kill it/run instinct?
I discovered that, even though I slept at night, I wouldn't get any rest. I would wake up just as tired as when I went to bed. There was a simple reason for this, that evening cup of coffee. If you want to cut back on your caffeine intake, I have one piece of advice:
Don't drink any caffeine for at least four hours before bedtime
Blinks. Didn't your parents teach you that? That was one of the looser rules around my house. Never really understood it until later in life, but heck cutting out all forms of caffeine from about after lunch or so does help you get to sleep so it's vague rule about my house. Actually, the rule is even easier to enforce if you just don't buy any drinks with caffeine in it. Depend on milk, tea, water, or orange juice and you won't be missing all those soft drinks. Remember decaf tea!
You, sir, are a member of the Caffeine Underacheivers Club of the World. Until you can regularly consume an average of three or four pots of coffee in day (30 to 40 cups) without experiencing caffeine intoxication, you have no idea what how "nasty" withdrawal can get.
I'm at that point, I admit it. Withdrawal, for me, starts after about eight hours without caffeine. I get a serious headache, quickly followed by nausea and a general flu-like feeling. Left unattended, it's damn-near incapacitating. Fortunately, a single cup of coffee vanquishes all symptoms within 30 minutes.
Heck, compared to you, I don't even ingest caffeine. O.k. my lunch 16 oz soft drink. If I drank nearly as much of anything as you do, I'd spend half the day in the bath room. Heck, I only drink maybe 4-5 cups of liquid a day tops.
The left won't play because they don't support the war.
The right won't play because they don't want to glamorize American soldiers getting shot at.
Everyone else won't play because it's tasteless.
Um, there kids on both sides. Heck if it is really historically accurate, I could actually see it be used to teach. I haven't played FPS games in awhile, but I'm sure 1/2 of /. would play it even if they called it tasteless here.
Heck, if this was really good, I could see the military paying for it just for a training aid. Historically, the hardest part of military training is getting your average civilian where they will kill other humans on command. So in that respect, this game series could have an extremely long life span if it can take your average civilian and get them to mentally accept performing these acts.
For a short while people were willing to forgo Windows for the form factor and price of a netbook. Then Moore's law ticked over and Microsoft was able to enter that market - same price for the machine but with the specs that XP needs. Next iteration they'll be selling units with Vista on them. The only way to keep Microsoft out is to race to the bottom and there's no economic incentive for the hardware manufacturers to do that.
Um, toys. It doesn't even have to be kids toys. Netbooks are about the price of a next gen gaming system. Just wait until they drop down to the price of a video game, or even better a used or classics video game. MS will be slightly pissed that laptops of that price range will exist, and that they'll have to keep on selling XP to support that lowest tier.
The thing is once you can produce and sell a modern laptop for about $40-50 what other toys will they wind up in? Heck, think McDonalds toys. I can't even envision the day that netbooks would be so cheap that they'd be given away as a McDonald's toy. It could happen though.
It sounds like the guy kinda went about it the wrong way. He should have just had a note or a webpage up with his current data and predictions with chance of an event happening on any given day. Folks would treat it sort of like a weather forecast.
Heck, when it comes to weather, we like to look at the live radar maps and make our own decisions. Hey it's going to be raining for the next hour or two... ;) We aren't quiet there for earthquakes, yet.
Hmm, sounds like someone may be going out of business shortly.
Honestly, this seems like Google-bashing for its own sake. Who else is making a serious effort to get a hold of these orphan books and put them out there? Last I checked, absolutely no one.
If the choice is a monopoly over the digitized copy of these books, or letting them fade into obscurity un-digitized, do we really want to choose option B?
Um, just because those that own the patents or what not don't want to produce a product doesn't mean you or I have the right to copy it of. Yes Option B. It would be like you or I deciding to make a clone of any major auto that isn't produced any more, but we just like. It doesn't work that way. You and I don't own the rights for that. Just because you or I would love to have all this on google, doesn't give google the right to proclaim it all theirs because they just couldn't find out the owners or the owners haven't spoken up. Hey, the owners don't even have to speak up as long as the work is under copyright. It should be up to google to verify that each one of these things has its copyrights run out... If they can't find out that, then their default should be not to scan it. I know sad we lose stuff, but that is the safest legal thing to do.
What am I talking about? This is slashdot every thing google does is by default good. Google go ahead and copy everything and don't bother paying anyone anything for it because you are google and everything that you do is great and wonderful.