To write some some kind of module for Apache to correct this. It wasn't hard to write a module, apparently, that e-mailed the sysadmin in question and said, hey, you're infected. Do something about it, Bozo!
What about a module that detected Nimda, Code Red, whatever attacks, then just attacked back? On attacking back, it uses the very same security holes (I think four of them) through which these worms propagate to issue a shutdown on the system and change the registry key for the startup text to say, "Hey, you're infected by Nimda, fix this now, download this."
Actually, rather than a shutdown, which may just restart some servers, it should issue a big fat SYSTEM HALT with a notice of infection. "Oh, yeah, we've changed your administrator password to XYZZY, too. A registry key has been added such that, if an attack is detected from your machine a second time, FORMATTING OF YOUR HARD DRIVE WILL OCCUR." Probably get someone's attention.
Yeah, this wouldn't be particularly legal, but it isn't as if Nimda logs what targets it is attacking. Just leave up a few boxes running this and the infection would drop dramatically.
A primer on Casimir Effect
on
The Casimir Effect
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· Score: 5, Informative
My Bachelor's in physics is a little rusty, but I did attend a small symposium on the Casimir Effect (C.E.) a couple of years ago.
Imagine a "vacuum" with two metallic (reflecting) plates in it, sitting near each other. The vacuum isn't pure. Photons could exist in it, momentarily, as governed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, wherein the energy of the photon is inversely proportional to the time it exists. Gamma rays would exist for a short period of time, radio waves much longer. Eventually, the Universe checks its books and corrects the accounting error, the photons go back to non-existence - conservation of mass-energy is upheld.
Here's where it gets weird. The photons kinda-sorta existed (virtually), so they kinda sorta could exert an influence. Whoa. Strange.
Next, only certain frequencies are allowed. The frequencies allowed to "kinda sorta exist" are modal, that is, they have to terminate with a node on one of the plates. So, clearly, you can't have gigantic radio waves between these two plates - radio waves are meters in length, they're too big to fit between the plates. You can have some blue photons, and all the gammas you can handle.
Meanwhile, on the OTHER side of the plate, you get all of the radio waves you want - you have an entire universe to stuff them in! And the blue photons, and all the gammas you can handle. So... there's just a few more potential electromagnetic waves (virtual photons) on the OUTSIDES of the plates than there are on the INSIDE of the two plates - this leads to a net push of the plates together.
But that's not all - the force experienced by those two plates depends on a lot of things. In the symposium in question, it was demonstrated that, with the right geometry (concentric shells, weird flower-like arrangements) that the Casimir effect can be repulsive.
In short, it isn't always 1/r^4, and it isn't always attractive.
Now, for those of you who would like a free lunch out of this effect, it's not going to happen. Why? 'cause you have to push the plates back apart to complete a full cycle for any "free energy" machine you would like to devise. It's like a waterfall - you only get that energy from something falling down ONCE.
No, it doesn't have anything to do with the Higgs boson. No, it doesn't come from some folded-up dimension. No, it doesn't have to do anything with gravity at small ranges. C.E. results entirely from QM + EM.
On an aside, correcting other bits of non-information in these posts: no, photons are not influenced by charge. No, photons do not constantly form electron-positron pairs - most photons do not have enough energy to form an electron-positron pair - do the math if you don't believe me. The refractivity of materials comes from something entirely different. Photons don't have a non-zero rest mass - they never "rest" (discussion of the Bose-Einstein condensate usually ignores that the information about the photon was stored) - and many experiments have placed upper limits on the proper mass of a photon as being no greater than 10^-50 grams.
As Feynman was quick to point out in his Six Not So Easy Pieces, only some of the properties are reversed: spin, charge, baryon (or lepton) number, and so forth. Other properties, such as mass, remain the same. Anti-matter does not mean anti-mass in the slightest. Antimatter will still fall in a gravitational field. F=ma still holds, not F=-ma.
As the mass is the same, the energy is the same. E=mc^2 is the baby version of a larger equation which also accounts for momentum. Anti-matter does not create "negative energy" of the kind needed to stabilize the throat of a wormhole.
As to the Casimir Effect, that's a whole 'nother ball of wax utterly unrelated to antimatter. The Casimir Effect is an odd side-effect of quantum mechanics coming up against surfaces made of conductors. The Casimir Effect is attractive for two plain boring plates of metal, but repulsive fo r two hemispherical shells. It's all dependent on the geometry of the conductors. It's also incredibly weak and will be useful only in the nano-realm, not for the "Hey, we need another neutron star in orbit over here" macroengineering required to even consider the unlikeliness of traversable wormholes.
Those alone are problematic. I believe Kip Thorne had some information on how they would require such things as, "Oh, yeah, you had to have a black hole there at the beginning of time" and "You need exotic [not anti] matter to keep it from collapsing" as well as "the throat is about the width of a proton."
Not to mention the annoying causality effects of a wormhole. With the proper usage, you could create a Closed Timelike Curve, go back, and prevent yourself from entering the wormhole. Instant paradox.
Antimatter isn't that exciting, I'm afraid, outside of Star Trek and investigating parity violation.
Maybe a rational approach, like... the more users, the less time they have to respond. When J. Random piece of software with 100 users has a bug, no big deal.
However, Apache is, according to Netcraft, still beating IIS, so their period of disclosure should be relatively short.
Once you start making exceptions, extensions, etc., it starts turning into tax law. "Well, we have to get them less time, since this software runs in hospitals," "It is freeware, maybe we should let them wait longer."
All I know is, I'd really like to see someone do a study, with control groups, etc., which shows if public disclosure hastens the progress of a patch, or allows for more hacks, or causes early but lousy patches.
It would be entertaining to take various hacks and decide how they got released, just to prove once and for all what effect this stuff REALLY has, rather than throwing out verbage on what the blackhats THINK will happen.
It seems like a pretty similiar situation. They don't want to be just dropped a message, they want it to be "discussed," which is a very gentle way of saying, "Let's talk about this." That implies that they'd like you to wait, etc. It's pretty close.
In any case, the "Security By Embarassment" crew should do what they do everywhere else - post it everywhere all at once.
At the risk of being called a troll, let me point out a couple of things.
1) Hypocrisy. Everyone screeches as loudly as possible because the big, closed source vendors like Sun and Microsoft want you to report security problems privately. Well, okay, let's look at Apache. Now, let's look at their policy regarding reporting security issues.
"We strongly encourage folks to report such problems to our private security mailing list first, before disclosing them in a public forum."
Sounds like the same thing as Sun or MS. Why aren't we bashing Apache?
2) The recent SNMP vulnerability. Wow, many eyes have gone over the SNMP code. Check out the CERT list of vendors on this puppy. Those many eyes should have been going over RedHat, over FreeBSD (okay, in their ports), over Netscape's products (too bad they don't tell you which ones). No word on the CERT site about SuSE, Mandrake, et al.
How much you want to bet that it's one old hunk of code to do SNMP that has been ported from one platform to another over many years? Even if it isn't... wow, don't millions of eyes look at Linux? Some might look... few look very hard.
And I now proceed to duck and cover for the nuclear blast.
Once upon a time, on Slashdot, someone mentioned that they had heard of a particular acid that would great for wiping platters.
Just washing your platters over with H2SO4 might be effective at deletion, but the gov't can claim that you were not only destroying evidence, but doing it in a manner that might be hazardous to human life. (Hence, no bombs, thermite is probably a no-no)
The acid referenced was perfectly OK for human hands, but deadly to the oxide on the platters. Anybody know what acid that might be?
Another suggestion might be to use a heavy encryption that thoroughly seems to randomize the data. Just changing a few bits in the encrypted file, would, when decrypted, yield only gibberish. This way, if the Feds are busting down your door, just a sprinkling of randomness through your encrypted files would render them useless.
The design seems interesting, I wouldn't mind looking at the equations, but...
My main fear with such a design is that the very high rotation speed of the engine (I should look that up) would create a substantial angular momentum. Anyone who has tried to turn a gyro will tell you how strongly the gyro resists.
This has been a problem with "flywheel energy storage" vehicles as well. Even if you make the flywheel's angular momentum vector straight up and down, it's a problem when you try to go up and down hills, as changing the inclination of the car would also count as trying to change the angular momentum.
The solution is make two engines, smaller, each wobble plate rotating in the opposite direction, so that the angular momentums cancel and you can move the whole thing easily. Of course, you would need very high-stress reinforcements around the engines, otherwise they would twist themselves right out of your as you tried to turn.
Rumor has it that you can make a quad proc box using Pentium IIIs instead of Pentium III Xeon processors. Any truth to this, hardware fans? I haven't been able to find anything out about this, and I'd rather not spend the money on a Xeon when I could spend it on the humble PIII.
They had an article about rock-paper-scissors programs playing against each other. Rockbot was the "always play rock" program. It was beaten, and handily, by programs that analyzed the previous moves of its opponents. If your opponent always chooses rock, it's a good idea for you to pick scissors.
My suggestion was not to switch every time, but to analyze the past history of the candidates do see if they actually do what it is you think. Get it?
You're stuck in the paradigm where you can only vote. Aside from your ad hominem attack, let me suggest to you a shocking concept... you can do other things that influence the government besides voting.
Amazed? Confused? How is this thing possible?
Please read my earlier post. Suggestions for changing the government that don't include filling out a tiny piece of paper that will be ignored by your electoral college anyway include, but are not limited to:
Making an informational website about whatever issues you care about.
Throwing molotov cocktails. Just kidding. Kind of.
Protests, rallies, marches, and pamphlets.
Be a journalist of some kind, web or paper, and dig up information!
Write cogent articles on your issue of interest, with actual research.
Raise money and lobby, like any good corporation.
Yes, there's more to the world than just voting or not voting. There. Those are items where you don't vote, and yet manage to change things. The whole "vote, that's the only way to change things" mindset makes it VERY comfortable to politicians. They'd just love to have you sit on your duff for four years, get up, make a campaign contribution, and then vote for them.
I may complain all I like for the next two years. Three reasons:
Have you ever written a complaint letter to a company? Well, you probably aren't a voting stockholder. You complained anyway. Why? You gave them money. The US government gets somewhere around 30% of my income. That gives me the right to complain.
Freedom of speech.
I don't have to participate in an corrupt system to say, "hey, that's corrupt." If I see roaches crawling out of a restaurant by the bushel and dogpoop on the doormat, and the hideous stench of sewage and kale pours out of the door, I don't exactly have to go in there and work as a chef to know that something is wrong.
*pulls on the asbestos suit* Please save me the "change from within" rhetoric, we can all see how well it worked out for the hippies, who are driving around in their P.T. Landcruisers and worrying about their stock options. The Presidential election is designed to distract us from the real issues and to use up all of our energy focusing on which of Three Stooges (and I guess Ralphie won't make it) gets into office, leaving us exhausted and with the excuse NOT to get involved when stuff really matters. "Well, I voted for that guy, he'll vote the way I want (ha!), and I don't have to worry my head about being 'involved' anymore."
Voting Republican or Democrat once every four years is not unlike being one of those Baptists or Catholics (or any other religious denomination) who shows up at church on Sunday (or temple on Saturday) and doesn't spend any energy or time the rest of the week actually accomplishing good deeds or following the Eightfold Path (insert your favorite "walk the Earth" idea here).
These people you elect will make decisions you hate. If you don't believe me, tonight, before you go to bed, type up on your word processor of choice a list of the stuff your candidate has promised to do, and a list of stuff you fear that your anti-candidate won't. Give clear guidelines and definite goals. Print it out. Seal the envelope and mark "Open in 2004." Then ask yourself, if your candidate wins, and fails... what will you do?
Your party of choice is not some God who says, "Don't question me, you weren't here when I made the whales." Think. Do a feedback loop, if your party of choice doesn't work, try something else. Blindly voting your party (and especially a party who fails you), well, that's like always using "Rock" in rock-paper-scissors. I've seen the political ideas of the past degenerate into mere name-calling, each party tossing the equivalent of Molotov cocktails at one another over issues that most people don't even remember.
Your party candidates have not been clear about anything, and we can't exactly fire them if they don't do what we elected them to do. If you are going to vote, think, reason, and learn from the mistakes of the past. If money is involved, look at actual numbers. Examine facts, then compare them to past promises. Spend your energy where it counts. That may be at the local level. That may be as a journalist digging up some "Deep Throat" informer. It might be as a webmaster of an informational site! Don't think that voting is the only way, or even the best way, of using your energy. They'd love you to think that, but it is not true.
Inaction does mean something: This is not "Yoda doublespeak." Remember the phrase, "Wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire?" Responding to each and every stimulus applied to you just makes you a robot!
Not-voting doesn't carry much weight: I'm just going to disagree on this one. First off, my regular vote doesn't count -- it goes to the electoral college (another good reason not to vote!)
Every non vote DOES make them concerned: Politicians have begun to talk about this. Every time the elections roll around, everyone gets interested in the fact that the turnout gets lower and lower. Why do you think we suddenly have this great big interest (real or forced) in campaign finance reform? A lot of poeple not voting is starting to freak these guys out.
Rights: Sure, they are intangibles, etc., but if you are going to talk about someone's "duty" to vote, that's about as tangible as their "rights." Rights don't exist, only laws of physics, but, hey, this is the game we play. If I really didn't like them, I'd become a sociopath.
Let me bring up some more points:
If voting in this particular country/political system was so all-durned great, why does everything SUCK so much?
Does anyone really think that participating in the big sideshow, the Presidential election, where we've only got two choices, is going to bring us a change? If you don't think it is going to bring a change, why lend your faith to it?
Every vote you cast for a system you don't believe in is not only participation in a system you think is (evil, ineffective, corrupt: pick one or more), but a pat on the back of all of those politicians you hate. They think you approve of them!
The electoral college. 'nuff said.
This is something of a rant, I'll admit. I just frequently believe that the Presidential election is nothing more than a distraction from the real moving and shaking in the government. I think that everyone's just happy with us wasting time bickering about a President (whose powers are certainly overshadowed by that of Congress) instead of looking at where the action is. There's this great science fiction story I keep thinking about. A group of aliens lands on Earth, claims that there's another group that's Evil. We throw in with them and help. Then the new group comes in, wins for a bit, says, "No, no. They deceived you. We're the good guys." We throw in with them. We go back and forth between one camp or another while the planet is ripped to shreds.
That's what the two-party system reminds me of, a situation where we would have been better off NOT getting involved. I think the Republicans and Democrats (as politicians) simply feed off our attention and energy. Why not starve them for a change? Do you really think that, if we elect any of them, they'll work hard to change the system that got them there?
I will always have the right to complain. Three reasons:
Freedom of speech: That's right, baby. The right to open my mouth, as long as I am not shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Complaints fall under it. You might not like it, but, hey, too bad.
Breaking out of the box: Who says I have to vote? Who says that my not voting isn't an action in and of itself? Vote for A, who will keep the system as it is, or vote for B, who will do the same thing is what you are putting forth, and I'm having none of it. Sure, short-term, we might get jerks into office... but we have had way too much short-term thinking. Long-term, non-voting will cause concern and reform.
Money: We've all written complaint letters to one corporation or another. We didn't elect their boardmembers in most of those cases. Why do we have the right to complain if we aren't voting shareholders? Answer... we paid money. Well, about 30% of my income goes to the USA. I'm a paying customer of the USA, and I have the right to complain on that basis alone.
Don't use the tiresome "you don't have the right to complain" refrain as a way to suck people into a non-working system. Every non-vote makes politicians concerned. Every vote makes the politicos say, "Gee, someone voted for me! They like me! I must be doing something right."
These people are not Jesus. Get over this "you are either with me or you are against me" attitude. Inaction is an action in itself, a way out of the box, and it is starting to be an effective one.
Nobody is probably reading this, but, yeah, NTFS has had some changes. I think Service Pack 4 did something new, and Windows 2000 has a newer implementation of NTFS called NTFS 5.0, I believe. If you let W2k "touch" a NTFS partition from a NT 4 box, by, say, dropping the drive in a W2k box, it can screw things up.
I disagree.
"The freedom to speak out is a basic human right..." only in some countries. It's not even entirely a basic human right in the US, much less, say, China, or Serbia.
"If you take away my internet acces I lose that right as I am being censored."
If that were true, then:
Newspapers would be required to run your editorials, on anything and everything... that's speech there. Many of them do, but it is not a requirement. Try taking up 50% of a newspaper with editorials to find out.
Everyone who wanted a spot on the radio would get it... speech again. (Public service announcements don't count, some radio stations do require a minimum of time be given to "alternative viewpoints," although one radio station successfully managed to fight off a spot by the Ku Klux Klan recently.
Television stations would have to air any spot you produced. And I'm not talking about cable access shows ala Wayne's World.
And so forth. The internet is a communications medium, and, if you want that "no-cost-ness" (since we have about five meanings for "free" here on Slashdot), you must logically apply it to the other existing media.
Also, before the internet existed, were you being censored then? I don't think so. But you didn't have access. Freedom of speech covers your right to talk, not necessarily your right to be heard or on whose dime you can do it, or the method of transmission.
Yes, our founding fathers spoke freely via pamphlets. The difference is, they paid for those pamphlets themselves. They did not tell someone else, "Hey, you have to subsidize my free speech."
Also, cloaking free bandwidth in the name of free speech... well, sure, I'm certain that some people out there are speaking out for our rights. I'd also be willing to lay odds that over 95% of that network traffic would still be Napster, porn downloads, Quake 3 arena, people reading CNN, people ordering shiny pots and pans. Saying the Internet must be free so it can carry speech without restrictions is a bit like saying cars should be free because you might use them to take someone to the hospital.
The Internet isn't a stronghold for free speech now, look at the libel suits that have been posted on Slashdot, PETA taking away that guy's domain name, etc.. And it has nothing to do with corporations and everything to do with a world of finite resources. There simply is not enough bandwidth to give everyone a free OC48. Period. It's physics, not economics. The restriction of physics creates the economics via scarcity, but this is not an artificial creation.
If you, as suggested, managed to implement higher corporate taxes, what do you think will happen? Corporations raise their prices. The cost gets passed on to the consumer, and, again, you are paying for it. This happens, time and again.
The resources are limited. There's no way around this. We can make more bandwidth available, but it still costs. It will come out of your pocket.
Would I like it to be free? Sure. I'd love everything to cost nothing. That doesn't have anything to do with how it will finally work out.
Let's listen to some of his brilliant logic on why we should not have metering.
"Users love low flat rates". Gee, what a shock. People like free almost anything but herpes. Of course they want it for free. I'd like my car to cost $50, too. So what?
"...nearly all users pay flat rates regardless of their usage..." Not exactly. Dialup has an absolute bandwidth limit, there is only so much I can download over a 56k per month. ISDN has a higher limit, cable higher still, DSL, T1, T3, and up to OC48 (I suppose something exists beyond that). The rate I pay per month determines a ceiling on my usage.
"...metering would fly in the face of hundreds of years of history..." like metered mail (or stamps), pay by minute for long-distance telephone calls, and that is in the communications arena alone. We still have metered gas, electricity, and so on. Sounds like history is on the metering.
I don't even know where he was going with this content thing. It doesn't appear to be relevant. Maybe I'm wrong.
"Price discrimination..." way to coin a phrase that will automatically bias you against metering! Maybe he should have just used "Nazi Price Fixing" and been a little less subtle.
"...residential telephone users can get flat rate plans with free local calls..." Said flat rate varies wildly. How much you want to bet that if everyone got on the phone and began babbling 24/7, our "flat rates" would suddenly undergo an upwards shift?
"...one can add extra fiber capacity without limit..." conveniently ignoring the cost of the fiber, installation, repeaters, etc. That money has to come from somewhere. Until Slashdot posts a nice biotech story on trees engineered to grow fiberop, I won't be holding my breath on adding fiber for free.
"...When necessary, ISPs can discourage camping via monthly caps, limits on session length, or limits on peak time usage..." Oh, I see. So, instead of having the amount of time you spend on the net affecting the cost, you're going to use the cost limit the amount of time you have. Sounds a lot like metering to me.
"...As retail users move to DSL and cable connections, where each user pays for their dedicated connection, the pricing is invariably flat rate..." for now. It's a new technology. Examine the history of the catalytic meter in electrical service here. Once we have discovered the carrying capacity, you don't think this will change?
Aside from the huge problems above, this guy fails to look at what drives economies: limited resources. The world has limited resources. I cannot convert the entire bulk of the Earth into fiber optics. Electricity costs to make. We simply cannot take the current backbone, give everyone an OC48, and have them load up as much as they like. We will run out of our finite resource, the backbone (which is more like a backweb, I guess, given the multiple spines). All of these things cost. Adding new capacity costs. Lines can be saturated. It's just like bread... it costs to make, and only so many can use it before it is all gone. Money is an abstract method by which we allocate our finite physical resources. Just because we would like a free meal doesn't mean that the universe is obliged to give us one.
I realize I should be addressing this Andrew Odlyzko, instead of the reviewer of the article, but, geez. I feel like a troll now.
...but your opinion sounds a lot like, "It isn't that I want to help the musicians, it's that I really hate the RIAA."
If you aren't paying for music, you aren't helping the musicians, period. "The RIAA is screwing them, so I might as well do the same" doesn't put a dime in a musician's pocket. At least when I buy a CD, I have a general feeling that some of the money makes its way back to the musician.
"...I feel that music, like other forms of art and all forms of information, should be free..." and I am going on the assumption here that you mean "without cost to the consumer."
I wonder what you do for a living, and I would like to know how you would feel if some stranger came in and said, "I think what you do should be free. We've set up a system, and your boss agrees. No more paychecks for you."
People work. Pay them for it. Until food, shelter, clothing, and the lower end of the hierachy of needs are free, don't start devaluing what a lot of us are making a living at. I just did a webpage. I made a few dollars. I make webpages for a living. Maybe you would like it that I made no money at all? Perhaps we should all work in factories, at fast foot joints, and barbershops, places where we have a tangible good or service to produce. Yeah, let's go back to that system where wealth was even more unevenly distributed and you had to be born to a family that owned a factory to have a decent lifestyle. Let's go work in those coal mines, because, gosh darn it, this information shouldn't cost anybody anything.
Honest, I am NOT trying to troll, it's just that... greed masquerading as "we know what is best for you" communism gets to me.
It's a sad truth of the world that most of our future freedoms, rights, and lives will be determined how these people are treated. They are the canaries in the coalmine.
For example, let's look at the ever popular "castrate them" approach (aside from the fact that many people convicted of rape didn't do it, NPR had a lovely special on guys who were released when they did DNA tests on ten year old samples and came out with someone else's semen). As soon as it becomes okay to snip a sex offender, you have to wonder where else you can apply it. Maybe lobotomies for other kinds of offenders. Hey, let's cut off the hands of thieves.
Not too far from me, a sex offender was murdered due to the very public registration system here. Now, if you believe that he should die for being a sex offender, fine, lobby to make it a capital punishment. Otherwise, don't take the passive-aggressive approach and have the "citizens" do it for you.
Hey, let's put those Digital Angel implants (early Slashdot article) in them, so we can track them! And, again, who else do we track?
Sex offenders, child molesters, et al, well, they make very convenient villians. Most people find it difficult not to despise someone like that. However, as soon as it becomes "alright" to do whatever punishment, abuse, tracking, whatever to them, it opens the doors for everyone else.
Again, canaries in a coalmine. Watch your sex offenders, because the lives they lead now will be the life you will lead in fifteen years.
No. We most certainly do not want this segregation.
Not to violate a famous law in debate (Godwin's Law, anyone know?), but the first thing the Nazis did was just ask the Jews to "register." And this has been the case time and again, probably before Herod (yet another guy who found a nefarious purpose for a list).
"Just register your adult site with us. That's all we are asking. Then we can filter out the kids."
Registration provides a convenient blacklist, hitlist, or deadpool when it comes down for the forces of Moral Majority or whomever. It makes a nice list for sudden IRS "audits." Registration is of no benefit to the people or companies registering.
Also, what constitutes "adult"? Would an art site which has nude sculpture have to go there? Just parts of the art site? How about a frank discussion of homosexuality? Birth control? What about plain old blasphemy? It isn't porn, but I'm betting that the Moral Majority would love to see Satanists (or Bhuddists, or Muslims) restricted to that TLD. Or I guess we could put it on.notgod.
No, the solution is not "segregation and registration." The solution is parents sitting down and getting involved with their kids. Parenting is a hands-on application is one of the last things we would want to automate. We cannot child-proof the world, file down all of the sharp edges, round off all of the corners, and pad all hard surfaces, not without losing what is important.
Interestingly, if I remember my history, Hancock was a President... just not of the United States of America. He was the first to sign the Declaration, but I don't recall him having much of a hand in the writing.
No, wait, I kid you not. He was supposed to be some kind of head of a temporary government until the US of A got on its feet... but never showed up for the job.
I remember reading that and finding it highly amusing. Our first President just... decided not to show up.
You don't get YY males. If you engineered an embryo with YY and only YY for its sex chromosomes, it would be dead before gestation is complete.
The "YY" males you are thinking of are "supermales," who have a XYY configuration, one extra sex chromosome, bringing their total to 47, not unlike Kleinfelter's Syndrome (XXY males, tall, sterile, high voices) or Trisomy 21 (extra 21st chromosome, aka "Down's Syndrome," we all know how that goes).
Basically, you need a X chromosome to live. The Y is quite short, but you have to have some of the basic info on a X chromosome, which is why males are so suspectible to various sex-linked disorders, like hemophilia and color-blindness... males only have one copy of the gene, no backups, like females have. (Although the male-Y, female-X varies from species to species). You can have XO genotypes, that is, just an X chromosome, nothing else. That is called Weber's syndrome, if I remember correctly, and they tend to be slightly retarded, have internal malformations, a shorter lifespan, and peculiar, shield-like chests.
Anyway, the XYY thing was roundly critiqued. It was a British study, if I recall, and showed that some prison populations had a higher percentage of XYY inmates. If I remember, the study was seriously flawed. This guy is just mouthing off.
However, it would be easy to tell. Just take a nice epithelial scraping from the inside of this guy's mouth and do a karotyping on it, after staining the chromosomes. I'm sure you'll find one in metaphase where they've all lined up nicely...
It sounds like someone just wants an excuse for his bad temper.
Not to sound the "me, too!" horn, and I know this is somewhat offtopic, but what the hell has been happening to EFNet?
I have heard of DoS attacks on the servers, but is there any truth to the rumor? If they are such susptained and intense attacks, can't this sort of thing be tracked? Why is EFNet being hit, and not Undernet or DALNet?
It'll be a shame if a bunch of pinheads bring EFNet down. These packet monkeys have an attack no more brilliant than stuffing newspaper into toilets and flushing until everything floods.
The Hubble Constant (whether it be anything from Sandage's 50 to that French guy's 100) does not say that the expansion is accelerating. Far from it.
It's basically the expansion of a balloon. If galaxies, stars, us, were just flat little blobs on the surface of the balloon, and you blew up the balloon, a spot halfway around the balloon from you would apppear to be moving away very quickly, spots nearby you wouldn't move much at all.
That is not an acceleration of the expansion. If the expansion were accelerating, Hubble's constant wouldn't be a constant, it would be getting larger.
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What about a module that detected Nimda, Code Red, whatever attacks, then just attacked back? On attacking back, it uses the very same security holes (I think four of them) through which these worms propagate to issue a shutdown on the system and change the registry key for the startup text to say, "Hey, you're infected by Nimda, fix this now, download this."
Actually, rather than a shutdown, which may just restart some servers, it should issue a big fat SYSTEM HALT with a notice of infection. "Oh, yeah, we've changed your administrator password to XYZZY, too. A registry key has been added such that, if an attack is detected from your machine a second time, FORMATTING OF YOUR HARD DRIVE WILL OCCUR." Probably get someone's attention.
Yeah, this wouldn't be particularly legal, but it isn't as if Nimda logs what targets it is attacking. Just leave up a few boxes running this and the infection would drop dramatically.
Imagine a "vacuum" with two metallic (reflecting) plates in it, sitting near each other. The vacuum isn't pure. Photons could exist in it, momentarily, as governed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, wherein the energy of the photon is inversely proportional to the time it exists. Gamma rays would exist for a short period of time, radio waves much longer. Eventually, the Universe checks its books and corrects the accounting error, the photons go back to non-existence - conservation of mass-energy is upheld.
Here's where it gets weird. The photons kinda-sorta existed (virtually), so they kinda sorta could exert an influence. Whoa. Strange.
Next, only certain frequencies are allowed. The frequencies allowed to "kinda sorta exist" are modal, that is, they have to terminate with a node on one of the plates. So, clearly, you can't have gigantic radio waves between these two plates - radio waves are meters in length, they're too big to fit between the plates. You can have some blue photons, and all the gammas you can handle.
Meanwhile, on the OTHER side of the plate, you get all of the radio waves you want - you have an entire universe to stuff them in! And the blue photons, and all the gammas you can handle. So ... there's just a few more potential electromagnetic waves (virtual photons) on the OUTSIDES of the plates than there are on the INSIDE of the two plates - this leads to a net push of the plates together.
But that's not all - the force experienced by those two plates depends on a lot of things. In the symposium in question, it was demonstrated that, with the right geometry (concentric shells, weird flower-like arrangements) that the Casimir effect can be repulsive.
In short, it isn't always 1/r^4, and it isn't always attractive.
Now, for those of you who would like a free lunch out of this effect, it's not going to happen. Why? 'cause you have to push the plates back apart to complete a full cycle for any "free energy" machine you would like to devise. It's like a waterfall - you only get that energy from something falling down ONCE.
No, it doesn't have anything to do with the Higgs boson. No, it doesn't come from some folded-up dimension. No, it doesn't have to do anything with gravity at small ranges. C.E. results entirely from QM + EM.
On an aside, correcting other bits of non-information in these posts: no, photons are not influenced by charge. No, photons do not constantly form electron-positron pairs - most photons do not have enough energy to form an electron-positron pair - do the math if you don't believe me. The refractivity of materials comes from something entirely different. Photons don't have a non-zero rest mass - they never "rest" (discussion of the Bose-Einstein condensate usually ignores that the information about the photon was stored) - and many experiments have placed upper limits on the proper mass of a photon as being no greater than 10^-50 grams.
As Feynman was quick to point out in his Six Not So Easy Pieces, only some of the properties are reversed: spin, charge, baryon (or lepton) number, and so forth. Other properties, such as mass, remain the same. Anti-matter does not mean anti-mass in the slightest. Antimatter will still fall in a gravitational field. F=ma still holds, not F=-ma.
As the mass is the same, the energy is the same. E=mc^2 is the baby version of a larger equation which also accounts for momentum. Anti-matter does not create "negative energy" of the kind needed to stabilize the throat of a wormhole.
As to the Casimir Effect, that's a whole 'nother ball of wax utterly unrelated to antimatter. The Casimir Effect is an odd side-effect of quantum mechanics coming up against surfaces made of conductors. The Casimir Effect is attractive for two plain boring plates of metal, but repulsive fo r two hemispherical shells. It's all dependent on the geometry of the conductors. It's also incredibly weak and will be useful only in the nano-realm, not for the "Hey, we need another neutron star in orbit over here" macroengineering required to even consider the unlikeliness of traversable wormholes.
Those alone are problematic. I believe Kip Thorne had some information on how they would require such things as, "Oh, yeah, you had to have a black hole there at the beginning of time" and "You need exotic [not anti] matter to keep it from collapsing" as well as "the throat is about the width of a proton."
Not to mention the annoying causality effects of a wormhole. With the proper usage, you could create a Closed Timelike Curve, go back, and prevent yourself from entering the wormhole. Instant paradox.
Antimatter isn't that exciting, I'm afraid, outside of Star Trek and investigating parity violation.
Maybe a rational approach, like ... the more users, the less time they have to respond. When J. Random piece of software with 100 users has a bug, no big deal.
However, Apache is, according to Netcraft, still beating IIS, so their period of disclosure should be relatively short.
Once you start making exceptions, extensions, etc., it starts turning into tax law. "Well, we have to get them less time, since this software runs in hospitals," "It is freeware, maybe we should let them wait longer."
All I know is, I'd really like to see someone do a study, with control groups, etc., which shows if public disclosure hastens the progress of a patch, or allows for more hacks, or causes early but lousy patches.
It would be entertaining to take various hacks and decide how they got released, just to prove once and for all what effect this stuff REALLY has, rather than throwing out verbage on what the blackhats THINK will happen.
It seems like a pretty similiar situation. They don't want to be just dropped a message, they want it to be "discussed," which is a very gentle way of saying, "Let's talk about this." That implies that they'd like you to wait, etc. It's pretty close.
In any case, the "Security By Embarassment" crew should do what they do everywhere else - post it everywhere all at once.
"We strongly encourage folks to report such problems to our private security mailing list first, before disclosing them in a public forum."
Let's not bash Microsoft too much, if Apache is doing the same thing.
1) Hypocrisy. Everyone screeches as loudly as possible because the big, closed source vendors like Sun and Microsoft want you to report security problems privately. Well, okay, let's look at Apache. Now, let's look at their policy regarding reporting security issues.
"We strongly encourage folks to report such problems to our private security mailing list first, before disclosing them in a public forum."
Sounds like the same thing as Sun or MS. Why aren't we bashing Apache?
2) The recent SNMP vulnerability. Wow, many eyes have gone over the SNMP code. Check out the CERT list of vendors on this puppy. Those many eyes should have been going over RedHat, over FreeBSD (okay, in their ports), over Netscape's products (too bad they don't tell you which ones). No word on the CERT site about SuSE, Mandrake, et al.
How much you want to bet that it's one old hunk of code to do SNMP that has been ported from one platform to another over many years? Even if it isn't ... wow, don't millions of eyes look at Linux? Some might look ... few look very hard.
And I now proceed to duck and cover for the nuclear blast.
Just washing your platters over with H2SO4 might be effective at deletion, but the gov't can claim that you were not only destroying evidence, but doing it in a manner that might be hazardous to human life. (Hence, no bombs, thermite is probably a no-no)
The acid referenced was perfectly OK for human hands, but deadly to the oxide on the platters. Anybody know what acid that might be?
Another suggestion might be to use a heavy encryption that thoroughly seems to randomize the data. Just changing a few bits in the encrypted file, would, when decrypted, yield only gibberish. This way, if the Feds are busting down your door, just a sprinkling of randomness through your encrypted files would render them useless.
My main fear with such a design is that the very high rotation speed of the engine (I should look that up) would create a substantial angular momentum. Anyone who has tried to turn a gyro will tell you how strongly the gyro resists.
This has been a problem with "flywheel energy storage" vehicles as well. Even if you make the flywheel's angular momentum vector straight up and down, it's a problem when you try to go up and down hills, as changing the inclination of the car would also count as trying to change the angular momentum.
The solution is make two engines, smaller, each wobble plate rotating in the opposite direction, so that the angular momentums cancel and you can move the whole thing easily. Of course, you would need very high-stress reinforcements around the engines, otherwise they would twist themselves right out of your as you tried to turn.
Rumor has it that you can make a quad proc box using Pentium IIIs instead of Pentium III Xeon processors. Any truth to this, hardware fans? I haven't been able to find anything out about this, and I'd rather not spend the money on a Xeon when I could spend it on the humble PIII.
They had an article about rock-paper-scissors programs playing against each other. Rockbot was the "always play rock" program. It was beaten, and handily, by programs that analyzed the previous moves of its opponents. If your opponent always chooses rock, it's a good idea for you to pick scissors.
My suggestion was not to switch every time, but to analyze the past history of the candidates do see if they actually do what it is you think. Get it?
Amazed? Confused? How is this thing possible?
Please read my earlier post. Suggestions for changing the government that don't include filling out a tiny piece of paper that will be ignored by your electoral college anyway include, but are not limited to:
- Making an informational website about whatever issues you care about.
- Throwing molotov cocktails. Just kidding. Kind of.
- Protests, rallies, marches, and pamphlets.
- Be a journalist of some kind, web or paper, and dig up information!
- Write cogent articles on your issue of interest, with actual research.
- Raise money and lobby, like any good corporation.
Yes, there's more to the world than just voting or not voting. There. Those are items where you don't vote, and yet manage to change things. The whole "vote, that's the only way to change things" mindset makes it VERY comfortable to politicians. They'd just love to have you sit on your duff for four years, get up, make a campaign contribution, and then vote for them.- Have you ever written a complaint letter to a company? Well, you probably aren't a voting stockholder. You complained anyway. Why? You gave them money. The US government gets somewhere around 30% of my income. That gives me the right to complain.
- Freedom of speech.
- I don't have to participate in an corrupt system to say, "hey, that's corrupt." If I see roaches crawling out of a restaurant by the bushel and dogpoop on the doormat, and the hideous stench of sewage and kale pours out of the door, I don't exactly have to go in there and work as a chef to know that something is wrong.
*pulls on the asbestos suit* Please save me the "change from within" rhetoric, we can all see how well it worked out for the hippies, who are driving around in their P.T. Landcruisers and worrying about their stock options. The Presidential election is designed to distract us from the real issues and to use up all of our energy focusing on which of Three Stooges (and I guess Ralphie won't make it) gets into office, leaving us exhausted and with the excuse NOT to get involved when stuff really matters. "Well, I voted for that guy, he'll vote the way I want (ha!), and I don't have to worry my head about being 'involved' anymore."Voting Republican or Democrat once every four years is not unlike being one of those Baptists or Catholics (or any other religious denomination) who shows up at church on Sunday (or temple on Saturday) and doesn't spend any energy or time the rest of the week actually accomplishing good deeds or following the Eightfold Path (insert your favorite "walk the Earth" idea here).
These people you elect will make decisions you hate. If you don't believe me, tonight, before you go to bed, type up on your word processor of choice a list of the stuff your candidate has promised to do, and a list of stuff you fear that your anti-candidate won't. Give clear guidelines and definite goals. Print it out. Seal the envelope and mark "Open in 2004." Then ask yourself, if your candidate wins, and fails ... what will you do?
Your party of choice is not some God who says, "Don't question me, you weren't here when I made the whales." Think. Do a feedback loop, if your party of choice doesn't work, try something else. Blindly voting your party (and especially a party who fails you), well, that's like always using "Rock" in rock-paper-scissors. I've seen the political ideas of the past degenerate into mere name-calling, each party tossing the equivalent of Molotov cocktails at one another over issues that most people don't even remember.
Your party candidates have not been clear about anything, and we can't exactly fire them if they don't do what we elected them to do. If you are going to vote, think, reason, and learn from the mistakes of the past. If money is involved, look at actual numbers. Examine facts, then compare them to past promises. Spend your energy where it counts. That may be at the local level. That may be as a journalist digging up some "Deep Throat" informer. It might be as a webmaster of an informational site! Don't think that voting is the only way, or even the best way, of using your energy. They'd love you to think that, but it is not true.
- Inaction does mean something: This is not "Yoda doublespeak." Remember the phrase, "Wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire?" Responding to each and every stimulus applied to you just makes you a robot!
- Not-voting doesn't carry much weight: I'm just going to disagree on this one. First off, my regular vote doesn't count -- it goes to the electoral college (another good reason not to vote!)
- Every non vote DOES make them concerned: Politicians have begun to talk about this. Every time the elections roll around, everyone gets interested in the fact that the turnout gets lower and lower. Why do you think we suddenly have this great big interest (real or forced) in campaign finance reform? A lot of poeple not voting is starting to freak these guys out.
- Rights: Sure, they are intangibles, etc., but if you are going to talk about someone's "duty" to vote, that's about as tangible as their "rights." Rights don't exist, only laws of physics, but, hey, this is the game we play. If I really didn't like them, I'd become a sociopath.
Let me bring up some more points:- If voting in this particular country/political system was so all-durned great, why does everything SUCK so much?
- Does anyone really think that participating in the big sideshow, the Presidential election, where we've only got two choices, is going to bring us a change? If you don't think it is going to bring a change, why lend your faith to it?
- Every vote you cast for a system you don't believe in is not only participation in a system you think is (evil, ineffective, corrupt: pick one or more), but a pat on the back of all of those politicians you hate. They think you approve of them!
- The electoral college. 'nuff said.
This is something of a rant, I'll admit. I just frequently believe that the Presidential election is nothing more than a distraction from the real moving and shaking in the government. I think that everyone's just happy with us wasting time bickering about a President (whose powers are certainly overshadowed by that of Congress) instead of looking at where the action is. There's this great science fiction story I keep thinking about. A group of aliens lands on Earth, claims that there's another group that's Evil. We throw in with them and help. Then the new group comes in, wins for a bit, says, "No, no. They deceived you. We're the good guys." We throw in with them. We go back and forth between one camp or another while the planet is ripped to shreds.That's what the two-party system reminds me of, a situation where we would have been better off NOT getting involved. I think the Republicans and Democrats (as politicians) simply feed off our attention and energy. Why not starve them for a change? Do you really think that, if we elect any of them, they'll work hard to change the system that got them there?
Okay, I'm putting on my asbestos undies now.
- Freedom of speech: That's right, baby. The right to open my mouth, as long as I am not shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Complaints fall under it. You might not like it, but, hey, too bad.
- Breaking out of the box: Who says I have to vote? Who says that my not voting isn't an action in and of itself? Vote for A, who will keep the system as it is, or vote for B, who will do the same thing is what you are putting forth, and I'm having none of it. Sure, short-term, we might get jerks into office
... but we have had way too much short-term thinking. Long-term, non-voting will cause concern and reform.
- Money: We've all written complaint letters to one corporation or another. We didn't elect their boardmembers in most of those cases. Why do we have the right to complain if we aren't voting shareholders? Answer
... we paid money. Well, about 30% of my income goes to the USA. I'm a paying customer of the USA, and I have the right to complain on that basis alone.
Don't use the tiresome "you don't have the right to complain" refrain as a way to suck people into a non-working system. Every non-vote makes politicians concerned. Every vote makes the politicos say, "Gee, someone voted for me! They like me! I must be doing something right."These people are not Jesus. Get over this "you are either with me or you are against me" attitude. Inaction is an action in itself, a way out of the box, and it is starting to be an effective one.
Don't vote early, don't vote often.
Nobody is probably reading this, but, yeah, NTFS has had some changes. I think Service Pack 4 did something new, and Windows 2000 has a newer implementation of NTFS called NTFS 5.0, I believe. If you let W2k "touch" a NTFS partition from a NT 4 box, by, say, dropping the drive in a W2k box, it can screw things up.
"If you take away my internet acces I lose that right as I am being censored."
If that were true, then:
- Newspapers would be required to run your editorials, on anything and everything
... that's speech there. Many of them do, but it is not a requirement. Try taking up 50% of a newspaper with editorials to find out.
- Everyone who wanted a spot on the radio would get it
... speech again. (Public service announcements don't count, some radio stations do require a minimum of time be given to "alternative viewpoints," although one radio station successfully managed to fight off a spot by the Ku Klux Klan recently.
- Television stations would have to air any spot you produced. And I'm not talking about cable access shows ala Wayne's World.
And so forth. The internet is a communications medium, and, if you want that "no-cost-ness" (since we have about five meanings for "free" here on Slashdot), you must logically apply it to the other existing media.Also, before the internet existed, were you being censored then? I don't think so. But you didn't have access. Freedom of speech covers your right to talk, not necessarily your right to be heard or on whose dime you can do it, or the method of transmission.
Yes, our founding fathers spoke freely via pamphlets. The difference is, they paid for those pamphlets themselves. They did not tell someone else, "Hey, you have to subsidize my free speech."
Also, cloaking free bandwidth in the name of free speech ... well, sure, I'm certain that some people out there are speaking out for our rights. I'd also be willing to lay odds that over 95% of that network traffic would still be Napster, porn downloads, Quake 3 arena, people reading CNN, people ordering shiny pots and pans. Saying the Internet must be free so it can carry speech without restrictions is a bit like saying cars should be free because you might use them to take someone to the hospital.
The Internet isn't a stronghold for free speech now, look at the libel suits that have been posted on Slashdot, PETA taking away that guy's domain name, etc.. And it has nothing to do with corporations and everything to do with a world of finite resources. There simply is not enough bandwidth to give everyone a free OC48. Period. It's physics, not economics. The restriction of physics creates the economics via scarcity, but this is not an artificial creation.
If you, as suggested, managed to implement higher corporate taxes, what do you think will happen? Corporations raise their prices. The cost gets passed on to the consumer, and, again, you are paying for it. This happens, time and again.
The resources are limited. There's no way around this. We can make more bandwidth available, but it still costs. It will come out of your pocket.
Would I like it to be free? Sure. I'd love everything to cost nothing. That doesn't have anything to do with how it will finally work out.
"Users love low flat rates". Gee, what a shock. People like free almost anything but herpes. Of course they want it for free. I'd like my car to cost $50, too. So what?
"...nearly all users pay flat rates regardless of their usage..." Not exactly. Dialup has an absolute bandwidth limit, there is only so much I can download over a 56k per month. ISDN has a higher limit, cable higher still, DSL, T1, T3, and up to OC48 (I suppose something exists beyond that). The rate I pay per month determines a ceiling on my usage.
"...metering would fly in the face of hundreds of years of history..." like metered mail (or stamps), pay by minute for long-distance telephone calls, and that is in the communications arena alone. We still have metered gas, electricity, and so on. Sounds like history is on the metering.
I don't even know where he was going with this content thing. It doesn't appear to be relevant. Maybe I'm wrong.
"Price discrimination..." way to coin a phrase that will automatically bias you against metering! Maybe he should have just used "Nazi Price Fixing" and been a little less subtle.
"...residential telephone users can get flat rate plans with free local calls..." Said flat rate varies wildly. How much you want to bet that if everyone got on the phone and began babbling 24/7, our "flat rates" would suddenly undergo an upwards shift?
"...one can add extra fiber capacity without limit..." conveniently ignoring the cost of the fiber, installation, repeaters, etc. That money has to come from somewhere. Until Slashdot posts a nice biotech story on trees engineered to grow fiberop, I won't be holding my breath on adding fiber for free.
"...When necessary, ISPs can discourage camping via monthly caps, limits on session length, or limits on peak time usage..." Oh, I see. So, instead of having the amount of time you spend on the net affecting the cost, you're going to use the cost limit the amount of time you have. Sounds a lot like metering to me.
"...As retail users move to DSL and cable connections, where each user pays for their dedicated connection, the pricing is invariably flat rate..." for now. It's a new technology. Examine the history of the catalytic meter in electrical service here. Once we have discovered the carrying capacity, you don't think this will change?
Aside from the huge problems above, this guy fails to look at what drives economies: limited resources. The world has limited resources. I cannot convert the entire bulk of the Earth into fiber optics. Electricity costs to make. We simply cannot take the current backbone, give everyone an OC48, and have them load up as much as they like. We will run out of our finite resource, the backbone (which is more like a backweb, I guess, given the multiple spines). All of these things cost. Adding new capacity costs. Lines can be saturated. It's just like bread ... it costs to make, and only so many can use it before it is all gone. Money is an abstract method by which we allocate our finite physical resources. Just because we would like a free meal doesn't mean that the universe is obliged to give us one.
I realize I should be addressing this Andrew Odlyzko, instead of the reviewer of the article, but, geez. I feel like a troll now.
If you aren't paying for music, you aren't helping the musicians, period. "The RIAA is screwing them, so I might as well do the same" doesn't put a dime in a musician's pocket. At least when I buy a CD, I have a general feeling that some of the money makes its way back to the musician.
"...I feel that music, like other forms of art and all forms of information, should be free..." and I am going on the assumption here that you mean "without cost to the consumer."
I wonder what you do for a living, and I would like to know how you would feel if some stranger came in and said, "I think what you do should be free. We've set up a system, and your boss agrees. No more paychecks for you."
People work. Pay them for it. Until food, shelter, clothing, and the lower end of the hierachy of needs are free, don't start devaluing what a lot of us are making a living at. I just did a webpage. I made a few dollars. I make webpages for a living. Maybe you would like it that I made no money at all? Perhaps we should all work in factories, at fast foot joints, and barbershops, places where we have a tangible good or service to produce. Yeah, let's go back to that system where wealth was even more unevenly distributed and you had to be born to a family that owned a factory to have a decent lifestyle. Let's go work in those coal mines, because, gosh darn it, this information shouldn't cost anybody anything.
Honest, I am NOT trying to troll, it's just that ... greed masquerading as "we know what is best for you" communism gets to me.
It's a sad truth of the world that most of our future freedoms, rights, and lives will be determined how these people are treated. They are the canaries in the coalmine.
For example, let's look at the ever popular "castrate them" approach (aside from the fact that many people convicted of rape didn't do it, NPR had a lovely special on guys who were released when they did DNA tests on ten year old samples and came out with someone else's semen). As soon as it becomes okay to snip a sex offender, you have to wonder where else you can apply it. Maybe lobotomies for other kinds of offenders. Hey, let's cut off the hands of thieves.
Not too far from me, a sex offender was murdered due to the very public registration system here. Now, if you believe that he should die for being a sex offender, fine, lobby to make it a capital punishment. Otherwise, don't take the passive-aggressive approach and have the "citizens" do it for you.
Hey, let's put those Digital Angel implants (early Slashdot article) in them, so we can track them! And, again, who else do we track?
Sex offenders, child molesters, et al, well, they make very convenient villians. Most people find it difficult not to despise someone like that. However, as soon as it becomes "alright" to do whatever punishment, abuse, tracking, whatever to them, it opens the doors for everyone else.
Again, canaries in a coalmine. Watch your sex offenders, because the lives they lead now will be the life you will lead in fifteen years.
Not to violate a famous law in debate (Godwin's Law, anyone know?), but the first thing the Nazis did was just ask the Jews to "register." And this has been the case time and again, probably before Herod (yet another guy who found a nefarious purpose for a list).
"Just register your adult site with us. That's all we are asking. Then we can filter out the kids."
Registration provides a convenient blacklist, hitlist, or deadpool when it comes down for the forces of Moral Majority or whomever. It makes a nice list for sudden IRS "audits." Registration is of no benefit to the people or companies registering.
Also, what constitutes "adult"? Would an art site which has nude sculpture have to go there? Just parts of the art site? How about a frank discussion of homosexuality? Birth control? What about plain old blasphemy? It isn't porn, but I'm betting that the Moral Majority would love to see Satanists (or Bhuddists, or Muslims) restricted to that TLD. Or I guess we could put it on .notgod.
No, the solution is not "segregation and registration." The solution is parents sitting down and getting involved with their kids. Parenting is a hands-on application is one of the last things we would want to automate. We cannot child-proof the world, file down all of the sharp edges, round off all of the corners, and pad all hard surfaces, not without losing what is important.
No, wait, I kid you not. He was supposed to be some kind of head of a temporary government until the US of A got on its feet ... but never showed up for the job.
I remember reading that and finding it highly amusing. Our first President just ... decided not to show up.
The "YY" males you are thinking of are "supermales," who have a XYY configuration, one extra sex chromosome, bringing their total to 47, not unlike Kleinfelter's Syndrome (XXY males, tall, sterile, high voices) or Trisomy 21 (extra 21st chromosome, aka "Down's Syndrome," we all know how that goes).
Basically, you need a X chromosome to live. The Y is quite short, but you have to have some of the basic info on a X chromosome, which is why males are so suspectible to various sex-linked disorders, like hemophilia and color-blindness ... males only have one copy of the gene, no backups, like females have. (Although the male-Y, female-X varies from species to species). You can have XO genotypes, that is, just an X chromosome, nothing else. That is called Weber's syndrome, if I remember correctly, and they tend to be slightly retarded, have internal malformations, a shorter lifespan, and peculiar, shield-like chests.
Anyway, the XYY thing was roundly critiqued. It was a British study, if I recall, and showed that some prison populations had a higher percentage of XYY inmates. If I remember, the study was seriously flawed. This guy is just mouthing off. However, it would be easy to tell. Just take a nice epithelial scraping from the inside of this guy's mouth and do a karotyping on it, after staining the chromosomes. I'm sure you'll find one in metaphase where they've all lined up nicely ...
It sounds like someone just wants an excuse for his bad temper.
I have heard of DoS attacks on the servers, but is there any truth to the rumor? If they are such susptained and intense attacks, can't this sort of thing be tracked? Why is EFNet being hit, and not Undernet or DALNet?
It'll be a shame if a bunch of pinheads bring EFNet down. These packet monkeys have an attack no more brilliant than stuffing newspaper into toilets and flushing until everything floods.
It's basically the expansion of a balloon. If galaxies, stars, us, were just flat little blobs on the surface of the balloon, and you blew up the balloon, a spot halfway around the balloon from you would apppear to be moving away very quickly, spots nearby you wouldn't move much at all.
That is not an acceleration of the expansion. If the expansion were accelerating, Hubble's constant wouldn't be a constant, it would be getting larger.