The voyager sats are some of our most successful missions, i'd challenge anyone to do better then their "out modded" systems.
The IRS seems to be pretty succesful: they still run their 1960s mainframes, yet they're still pinching everybody's money. That's one mission everybody would like to see fail...
Do they really think software these days isn't slow and bloated enough without the additional burden of context-switching, just to circumvent the licensing problems?
It is not okay to send things to people just because you think they need it. That includes instructions on how to avoid internet censorship, penis enlargement devices and democracy to middle-eastern countries.
Let's take an example: what if some chinese dude gets your email, and the chinese police raids his house because he's now on a dangerous dissidents list for having been in communication with, and detaining computer data from dangerous anti-censorship groups? Still think your kind email would be welcome?
In lots of societies, the rich reproduce faster than the poor.
That blanket statement simply isn't true. The fast majority of poor africans produce many more children than rich fat westerners. You might say it's a cultural thing, or maybe they need more children to tend the fields, but I knew a Medecin Sans Frontier doctor who worked there and had another explanation that sounds weird but kind of makes sense: when people are hungry, they compensate with sex.
Nothing funny, nothing insightful, just same news, different day.
Well, I hate to say, there was a time where Slashdot was really about "news for nerds, stuff that (doesn't) matter (all that much but we love it)". I guess the nerds have become working professionals, supporting families, concerned with their mortgages and 401Ks, because it's been literally years since Slashdot has stopped being funny, insightful or interesting. I mean sure, regularly there's the occasional good story, but it's nowhere near as often as what it used to be.
the focus may be shifting towards simple hacking tips like looking over someone's shoulder for their password, faking employment or just picking the locks to gain access to the building where machines are left on overnight.
It's not shifting at all. I've done my share of hacking when I was younger (ahem) and the weakest link was always the human link. It was much easier to con the secretary into giving a password than hacking the secretary's computer, and I suspect it's even more the case now with more solid computer systems. That's called social engineering and it will always work very well indeed, because much to my dismay, computer users get dumber and dumber as computer get more and more powerful.
As for lockpicking, it's not really a secret that no lock is safe. Look up "bump key" in your favorite search engine and you'll see what I mean.
Wow. I'm a law student, so I like to think I understand that people can and will sue over anything. But Wow. This is shameful.
As a law student, you do realize that stupid people filing stupid lawsuits are the ones who pay you clever lawyers' bills right? Unless of course you're studying law to become a judge or something (in which case congrats, but if you plan on becoming a lawyer after the bar, may you turn green in hue and die in a freak accident or something, do the world a favor, please, thank you very much in advance...).
Do we really need to land heavy stuff on Mars? "Something heavy" here means some spacecraft with human creature comfort (you know, a hull, life support systems, etc... in order to keep wetware inside alive). However, there is no need for manned flight to other planets anymore: probes do a much better job more easily, at a fraction of the cost, and a probe's survivability is much less of an issue.
Probes are an extension of humanity's collective intelligence, and they bring back to humanity at least as much data as a real, flesh and bone human. So why send humans at all? Of course, if we're talking about colonizing Mars for good, there's some terraforming to do, but heavy machinery isn't necessarily required for that either, and it's not going to start within our lifetime anyway, and the planet won't be ready for us in 200 years minimum anyway.
I say forget about hauling big stuff over to Mars. The only folks who care are prez Bush, for demagogic purposes, and people who think watching a Neil Armstrong type character utter some silly piece of wisdom when setting foot on a planet is the pinnacle of human space exploration. What we need is more research into nanotechnology, so probes get smaller and lighter, and educating people.
I'm sorry but this is a stupid argument that's been pulled out over and over by people who don't want to take responsabilities. You have lung cancer? Damn those tobacco lobbyists. You have obesity? Damn the junk food lobbyists...
Guess what: everybody knows tobacco is bad for you, and excess sugar is bad for you. Anybody who tells you "eat/drink/smoke this, it's safe" should trigger your bullshit alarm and make you wonder whom exactly this person is paid by. What's more, good common sense should tell you that levels of sugar and fat modern westerners consume can't be good for health. Just like inhaling smoke, it's just completely obvious that the human body wasn't designed for this. If you let lobbyists win over common sense, you deserve to be fat.
[...] other identification cards include a digital photograph and a bar code that can be scanned by electronic readers.
Wow! a *barcode* and a *digital photo*? these have *got* to be the most unfalsifiable digital features. This is scary secure!
Seriously though, even if NH legislators were pro Real-ID (which apparently they aren't on moral grounds, thankfully), they had to oppose it just because it's so technologically retarded that it would bring exactly no added security whatsoever.
Re:If your looking for logic in coding conventions
on
Are 80 Columns Enough?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, and the 80 column line length convention derives directly from the hardware arrangement I explain above.
My point is that, contrary to what you seem to think, conventions don't just happen at random, there used to be a perfectly valid logic behind them, even if they seem to be lost to computer users nowadays.
But then what do you do? photo editing? Excel sheets?
Really, one of the only areas where this 80-column thing still seems to matter is programming, simply because many many companies have a policy that says code should be 80-col formatted, and because there's a humongous pile of legacy code accumulated during that past 4 decades that is formatted that way, and because programmers just kind of like it because it allows having multiple files up in several text editors side by side, which is nicer than having to click to bring a window up each time you want to peek at some code.
Aside from programmers, I don't see who would want 80 colums though...
Re:If your looking for logic in coding conventions
on
Are 80 Columns Enough?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, there is a logic in the 80 columns and 25 lines display: it so happens that 80x25 = 2000, which is just under 2048. That means with those 2K of video RAM (way expensive back then), you could use 2000 to display caracters, and use the remaining 48 bytes to store general display flags and statuses, or do whatever you like (I used to use that area in MDA video cards to store things back in my, ahem, virus-writing days...)
not because virus writers are clever, but because A/V companies are always very careful not to make too successful products, otherwise they'd kill the golden goose.
Obviously you can't change the battery yourself, but from those pictures it looks like even Apple couldn't change it. That can't be so, can it?
You know, I have the feeling people who buy high-tech, flashy gadgetry such as the iPhone aren't likely to invest in it for the long term, with a value-for-money approach to buying and owning the product. The battery will probably last long enough for the owner to have another "oh shiny!" purchasing moment and relegate his iPhone to the bottom of some drawer...
despite Linux' vendors' holier-than-thou attitude with regard to F/OSS vs. proprietary and software patents, business takes precedence. In other words, RH, Novell and Mandriva and all the other companies trying to make a buck selling Linux would happily go to bed with the devil if it earned them more money, and that their self-professed interest in the happiness of the community is just a facade to avoid alienating their source of income. RH probably rejected any deal with Microsoft because they didn't want to ruin their image, not because MS' deal was necessarily bad for them.
Ray Barnholt points out that PopCap is a funny company to be making that claim. Several of that group's most popular games are in turn tweaks or imitations of little-known Japanese puzzle titles from the 90s.
So what? Microsoft has been making the same sort of statements for the get go (that people are stealing their works yada-yada) while at the same time copying/stealing/buying work from others, to the point that most of their product lines was never developped in-house. People are used to Microsoft, why not from other companies ? The old saying "you shouldn't criticize someone's body odor if you didn't shower yourself" somehow never seems to apply to companies...
from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon
Nothing like an experiment to verify theories. And indeed, a quick trip to the DMV or the social security office confirms that it does seem to take an infinite amount of time for any event to occur, and that the clock seems to stop locally.
Slashdot Mirror
The voyager sats are some of our most successful missions, i'd challenge anyone to do better then their "out modded" systems.
The IRS seems to be pretty succesful: they still run their 1960s mainframes, yet they're still pinching everybody's money. That's one mission everybody would like to see fail...
Legalese dictates engineering choices?
Do they really think software these days isn't slow and bloated enough without the additional burden of context-switching, just to circumvent the licensing problems?
I equally despise Microsoft and RMS these days...
It is not okay to send things to people just because you think they need it. That includes instructions on how to avoid internet censorship, penis enlargement devices and democracy to middle-eastern countries.
Let's take an example: what if some chinese dude gets your email, and the chinese police raids his house because he's now on a dangerous dissidents list for having been in communication with, and detaining computer data from dangerous anti-censorship groups? Still think your kind email would be welcome?
Is it OK to send unsolicited e-mail to users [...]
No.
In lots of societies, the rich reproduce faster than the poor.
That blanket statement simply isn't true. The fast majority of poor africans produce many more children than rich fat westerners. You might say it's a cultural thing, or maybe they need more children to tend the fields, but I knew a Medecin Sans Frontier doctor who worked there and had another explanation that sounds weird but kind of makes sense: when people are hungry, they compensate with sex.
Nothing funny, nothing insightful, just same news, different day.
Well, I hate to say, there was a time where Slashdot was really about "news for nerds, stuff that (doesn't) matter (all that much but we love it)". I guess the nerds have become working professionals, supporting families, concerned with their mortgages and 401Ks, because it's been literally years since Slashdot has stopped being funny, insightful or interesting. I mean sure, regularly there's the occasional good story, but it's nowhere near as often as what it used to be.
the focus may be shifting towards simple hacking tips like looking over someone's shoulder for their password, faking employment or just picking the locks to gain access to the building where machines are left on overnight.
It's not shifting at all. I've done my share of hacking when I was younger (ahem) and the weakest link was always the human link. It was much easier to con the secretary into giving a password than hacking the secretary's computer, and I suspect it's even more the case now with more solid computer systems. That's called social engineering and it will always work very well indeed, because much to my dismay, computer users get dumber and dumber as computer get more and more powerful.
As for lockpicking, it's not really a secret that no lock is safe. Look up "bump key" in your favorite search engine and you'll see what I mean.
Trust the government to leech off anything remotely successful. I guess they need the money to feed the national debt monster...
The company has made a point to note that Blu-ray was totally worth it
Gee that's a surprise, I really thought they'd come out and say "you know what? we really sucked pond water from the bottom when we chose Blu-Ray"...
The interview with the site promises 'big things' for the format in the future.
I'm not buying a PS/3 until they support minidisc. I've heard for the past 15 years that there are big things coming for that format too.
Wow. I'm a law student, so I like to think I understand that people can and will sue over anything. But Wow. This is shameful.
As a law student, you do realize that stupid people filing stupid lawsuits are the ones who pay you clever lawyers' bills right? Unless of course you're studying law to become a judge or something (in which case congrats, but if you plan on becoming a lawyer after the bar, may you turn green in hue and die in a freak accident or something, do the world a favor, please, thank you very much in advance...).
Dude, this is Slashdot. The proper message is:
All your base are belong to us
You are on the way to destruction
What you say!
Some care to elaborate on the difference between hitting the ground at mach 4 and hitting the ground at mach 1?
Hitting the ground mach 3 slower.
Do we really need to land heavy stuff on Mars? "Something heavy" here means some spacecraft with human creature comfort (you know, a hull, life support systems, etc... in order to keep wetware inside alive). However, there is no need for manned flight to other planets anymore: probes do a much better job more easily, at a fraction of the cost, and a probe's survivability is much less of an issue.
Probes are an extension of humanity's collective intelligence, and they bring back to humanity at least as much data as a real, flesh and bone human. So why send humans at all? Of course, if we're talking about colonizing Mars for good, there's some terraforming to do, but heavy machinery isn't necessarily required for that either, and it's not going to start within our lifetime anyway, and the planet won't be ready for us in 200 years minimum anyway.
I say forget about hauling big stuff over to Mars. The only folks who care are prez Bush, for demagogic purposes, and people who think watching a Neil Armstrong type character utter some silly piece of wisdom when setting foot on a planet is the pinnacle of human space exploration. What we need is more research into nanotechnology, so probes get smaller and lighter, and educating people.
the scary legalese dialogs you have to click through [CC] to install codecs for common multimedia formats.
apt-get install w32codecs
Wow that was super scary. I'm so glad it's over...
I'm sorry but this is a stupid argument that's been pulled out over and over by people who don't want to take responsabilities. You have lung cancer? Damn those tobacco lobbyists. You have obesity? Damn the junk food lobbyists...
Guess what: everybody knows tobacco is bad for you, and excess sugar is bad for you. Anybody who tells you "eat/drink/smoke this, it's safe" should trigger your bullshit alarm and make you wonder whom exactly this person is paid by. What's more, good common sense should tell you that levels of sugar and fat modern westerners consume can't be good for health. Just like inhaling smoke, it's just completely obvious that the human body wasn't designed for this. If you let lobbyists win over common sense, you deserve to be fat.
If so many states now oppose Real ID, how is it that it passed into law in the first place?
Indeed, a sensible question about how this country is run. I think it's fair to assume you're not American right?
[...] other identification cards include a digital photograph and a bar code that can be scanned by electronic readers.
Wow! a *barcode* and a *digital photo*? these have *got* to be the most unfalsifiable digital features. This is scary secure!
Seriously though, even if NH legislators were pro Real-ID (which apparently they aren't on moral grounds, thankfully), they had to oppose it just because it's so technologically retarded that it would bring exactly no added security whatsoever.
Yes, and the 80 column line length convention derives directly from the hardware arrangement I explain above.
My point is that, contrary to what you seem to think, conventions don't just happen at random, there used to be a perfectly valid logic behind them, even if they seem to be lost to computer users nowadays.
I sure as fuck don't use 80 columns in my work.
But then what do you do? photo editing? Excel sheets?
Really, one of the only areas where this 80-column thing still seems to matter is programming, simply because many many companies have a policy that says code should be 80-col formatted, and because there's a humongous pile of legacy code accumulated during that past 4 decades that is formatted that way, and because programmers just kind of like it because it allows having multiple files up in several text editors side by side, which is nicer than having to click to bring a window up each time you want to peek at some code.
Aside from programmers, I don't see who would want 80 colums though...
Actually, there is a logic in the 80 columns and 25 lines display: it so happens that 80x25 = 2000, which is just under 2048. That means with those 2K of video RAM (way expensive back then), you could use 2000 to display caracters, and use the remaining 48 bytes to store general display flags and statuses, or do whatever you like (I used to use that area in MDA video cards to store things back in my, ahem, virus-writing days...)
So in short, 80x25 optimizes memory usage.
not because virus writers are clever, but because A/V companies are always very careful not to make too successful products, otherwise they'd kill the golden goose.
Obviously you can't change the battery yourself, but from those pictures it looks like even Apple couldn't change it. That can't be so, can it?
You know, I have the feeling people who buy high-tech, flashy gadgetry such as the iPhone aren't likely to invest in it for the long term, with a value-for-money approach to buying and owning the product. The battery will probably last long enough for the owner to have another "oh shiny!" purchasing moment and relegate his iPhone to the bottom of some drawer...
despite Linux' vendors' holier-than-thou attitude with regard to F/OSS vs. proprietary and software patents, business takes precedence. In other words, RH, Novell and Mandriva and all the other companies trying to make a buck selling Linux would happily go to bed with the devil if it earned them more money, and that their self-professed interest in the happiness of the community is just a facade to avoid alienating their source of income. RH probably rejected any deal with Microsoft because they didn't want to ruin their image, not because MS' deal was necessarily bad for them.
Ray Barnholt points out that PopCap is a funny company to be making that claim. Several of that group's most popular games are in turn tweaks or imitations of little-known Japanese puzzle titles from the 90s.
So what? Microsoft has been making the same sort of statements for the get go (that people are stealing their works yada-yada) while at the same time copying/stealing/buying work from others, to the point that most of their product lines was never developped in-house. People are used to Microsoft, why not from other companies ? The old saying "you shouldn't criticize someone's body odor if you didn't shower yourself" somehow never seems to apply to companies...
from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon
Nothing like an experiment to verify theories. And indeed, a quick trip to the DMV or the social security office confirms that it does seem to take an infinite amount of time for any event to occur, and that the clock seems to stop locally.
See? no need for black holes.