If you want to understand a lot about how sleep works and how to deal with various sleeping problems, read The Promise of Sleep by W. C. DeMent. This is a really excellent book.
See the
Free World License -- denounced by RMS, even though he approves of its goals! But unfortunately it's a click-through license, which RMS prefers to avoid.
Garn's in-flight contribution to research was experiments on throwing up in weightlessness.
He was flown into space because he was on the Senate appropriations committee that funds NASA. So Garn got a space flight for the exact same reason as Tito: money. At least in Tito's case, it was his own money, not the public's.
it's poor security. I worked for a company that auto-forwarded email after I left. Even though I'd been removed from the company's internal mailing lists, for years I still occasionally got pieces of internal email (bug reports about the product I'd worked on, etc). In principle this was confidential company information that I could have misused if I'd been a bad guy. In practice the company eventually went bust on its own, and that's how the mail stopped.
The branch of math that deals in proofs at the lowest level is called mathematical logic. The metamath stuff is very cool, but only if you're already a math geek. It's inappropriate to recommend it to someone at the math level the slashdot header was pitched at (i.e. someone who has trouble with proofs).
Non-mathemeticians wanting to learn something about mathematical logic--enough to understand the Big Daddy of logic theorems (the Godel incompleteness theorem) should read either "Godel's Proof" by Nagel and Newman, or (maybe more in the hacker spirit) "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
I'm surprised more sites don't use mod_gzip (available through modules.apache.org. Most browsers currently in use can uncompress gzip'd content before rendering it. Since html compresses very well, unless your site is mostly graphics, mod_gzip can often reduce your overall bandwidth by 50% or more, at the cost of some cpu cycles.
This site doesn't address the specific media protection question, but has very good advice about backup in general: The Tao of Backup. There's a sales pitch way at the end, but it's quite nonobnoxious. The author is Ross Williams who is one of the good guys.
As for media protection, as several people suggested, rent a safe deposit at a bank (or several boxes at geographically separated banks). You get heavily fire protected vault space for a fairly low annual rent.
If you're using tape media, you should also periodically try reading your backup tapes on a different drive than the one you wrote them on, to make sure they interoperate. Drives can get out of alignment and will keep working with their own tapes but stop interoperating with other drives.
If there's a mechanism for signing rpm's (like there is for deb's) then that helps a little, if you have the public keys already to make sure nobody has messed with the rpm's you've downloaded.
The big distros (Red Hat, Debian, etc.) should make some effort to get their key fingerprints widely publicized so people can check signatures easily.
for best security. Keeping your secret key on a floppy disc is better than nothing, but doesn't protect you from someone modifying your PGP executable over the network, or downloading a keyboard sniffer to your PC.
The simplest thing to do is run PGP on a computer with no network connection at all. A junky old MSDOS laptop is fine for this. If someone emails you an encrypted message, put it on a floppy disc, move it to your PGP-equipped computer, decrypt it, compose and encrypt an answer, and use the floppy to transfer back the encrypted answer.
I've been wondering that very question for a while, since Clinton signed the digital signature law last year. A digital signature in the US is now binding just like a paper signature, with some very narrow exceptions, like you can't electronically sign a request to get your utilities turned off. I didn't see an exception about the documents you have to sign for getting married, so I wondered how long it would be before two people got married in an AOL chat room without ever physically meeting each other (to be clear: I do not think that's a good idea).
Anyway, the digital signature law would seem to clear up one obstacle. Some (all?) US states require a blood test (for syphilis) before you can get a marriage license, and that seems hard to do over the net. Plus your fiancee's country may not have a digital signature law corresponding to ours. Anyway you don't find out whether it works til you try it--you'll be a pioneer.
The stuff on the e-dinar web site including the examiner cgi, a lot of the text, and the shopping cart system appears to be taken verbatim from the e-gold web site. It's either run by the same people as e-gold or in conjunction with them, or else it's a rip-off or parody. I wonder what the relationship is.
You can think of E-gold as a mutual fund, maybe even usefully, just as you can think of a horse as a car with legs instead of wheels. That doesn't mean it is one.
E-gold is a metals storage service and a payment system. It is not a mutual fund. It deals in metal, not securities (shares or obligations of companies).
Gold-age could not pocket your money without your finding out right away. Gold-age's business was buying and selling gold. They were an E-gold customer which means they stored gold in E-gold's vaults. Then if you bought gold from them on your credit card,
they delivered the gold to you by spending
from their E-gold account into yours. That
meant you now owned that amount of the gold E-gold Ltd. was storing. You would know that Gold-Age had actually transferred the gold to you because you can check your holdings in real time at E-gold's web site. They consolidated small trades from random customers into larger trades with E-gold Ltd.
So yes, Gold-age was a broker, but it was a metals broker, not a securities broker. Securities brokers have to be licensed, to make sure they follow the regulations about misrepresenting the prospects of companies they sell shares of and stuff like that ("XYZ Corp. is just an email spam joint now, but they're working on a secret deal to take over Microsoft next week!"). IANAL but I've never heard that metal brokers have to be licensed. It's hard to misrepresent the prospects of an ounce of gold.
E-gold Ltd's attitudes about money and banking are a little bit eccentric, but they're legit and have been known in the electronic payments crowd for quite a while. Their web site is quite informative. Please check it out before making unfounded assumptions about what they do.
If you're a colo provider, instead of having to host a separate box for each customer, you could have fewer boxes each with a bunch of these cards inside. Each customer would have full root access to his card, get to run the OS of his choice and so forth. Of course it could be set up so the cards can take over the PCI bus of the host workstation and start messing with other cards and physical i/o devices. It all depends on how the cards are set up. It seems worth looking into. At a lot of colo places, rack space is more expensive than the hardware installed in it.
I'm running IE 5.5 under w2000. I installed the
patch and I can no longer download PDF files from my SSL-secured server. I can still download them through the non-SSL port. Can someone else try this?
The numbers in the e-gold database are connected
to real pieces of gold that they (claim to) have stored in actual vaults.
This kind of gold trading has gone on for longer
than most currency systems. 500 years ago if you owned a few kg of gold, storing it at your house would have been crazy. So you'd normally buy the gold from a goldsmith but leave the physical metal in the goldsmith's vault, and he'd give you a piece of paper saying you owned it. At that point if you wanted to sell the gold to someone, it was enough to just sell them the paper, so they could use it to claim the gold from the goldsmith. The e-gold website is pretty informative about this.
E-gold by the way was trying to be more of a general web payment system than a way to really stash big quantities of money. Later systems like PayPal operated with normal bank accounts and credit cards and fit better into conventional expectations, so e-gold became sort of silly.
It was illegal in the US to own gold bullion from 1933 til 1974. So it's not completely an urban
legend. But you're free to buy gold in the US now. Typing keywords like "legal gold bullion 1933 roosevelt nixon" into Google will find you a lot of references.
Yes I must have confused the 9 minute figure with some other disaster. After 9 minutes the shuttle would be most of the way to orbit. The Challenger accident is discussed in detail in Richard Feymnan's memoir "What do you care what other people think?".
Sorry for the error.
Glenn at least had once been a real astronaut.
NASA sent Sen. Jake Garn up on the Shuttle for the exact same reason the Russians want to send Tito to the ISS: Garn was on the Senate committee that controlled NASA's budget, and NASA wanted to get its hands on the cash. So Garn got taken aboard as a mission specialist where he participated in Scientific Experiments on (no joke) zero-g vomiting.
Not very long after Garn's flight, they sent up Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, who 9 minutes after takeoff got blown up into a million little smithereens along with the other astronauts and the Shuttle she was launched on.
and doesn't stop some obnoxious attacks.
It's good to be able to browse pages and decide to save them to a file, and that means the browser has to be able to write to the file system. It's also good to be able to upload files, and to get to a certificate store (for SSL). Trusted mobile code (signed applets and plugins) are also a worthwhile thing, if people weren't so sloppy about deciding when to trust them. For example, it's good to be able to look at pdf files by having the browser run Acrobat. Even browser cookies are a good thing, though browsers should by default not accept profiling cookies.
On the other hand, running the browser in a jail does nothing to stop MITM attacks against web sites (do you really look at the SSL certificate every time you fill in a form?),
So how do we know it's not really from last week's hax0r???
Why can't Microsoft have signed this with a cert from its own CA, like it did with the patch for the the root store that fixed the compromised Verisign cert?
It's also funny that they tell you to run the IE patch by clicking it and choosing "run from current location", which can run code without checking signatures at all (though for this particular download, it lets you check the sig). That's probably how a lot of viruses and malicious code get spread in the first place.
I won't run any realmedia spyware even on my windows box. But you can stream mpeg-1 files from an ordinary web server. I believe Mozilla can show them through mpegplay on GNU/Linux.
tape drive cheap, TAPE expensive
on
DVDs On DAT?
·
· Score: 1
You can buy a 20 GB tape drive for $500 or so (type "dds-4" into ebay's search box) but the tapes will run you at least $20 each, and that's also scrounging them on ebay. If you buy them from dealers they're much more.
You could also look at an Ecrix
drive, about $500 through the LUG deal, which stores 33 GB on an 8mm cartridge costing $65 or so (ouch). I've heard of people punching holes in hi-8 video editing tape (Sony HMEAD E6-120, about $13 per tape at B&H Photo) and getting good results with that. The 120 minute video tape holds about 20 GB since it's shorter than the Ecrix tape. Still, this is kludgy and maybe flaky. Basically all tape media are overpriced right now. CD-R is a lot cheaper, but the capacity is too low to really dub video in style.
It's probably best to just wait for recordable DVD to get cheaper.
Recordable DVD is available now, but costs
a lot. Consumer products are coming though,
and within a year or so it will be like CD-R.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to understand a lot about how sleep works and how to deal with various sleeping problems, read The Promise of Sleep by W. C. DeMent. This is a really excellent book.
See the Free World License -- denounced by RMS, even though he approves of its goals! But unfortunately it's a click-through license, which RMS prefers to avoid.
Garn's in-flight contribution to research was experiments on throwing up in weightlessness. He was flown into space because he was on the Senate appropriations committee that funds NASA. So Garn got a space flight for the exact same reason as Tito: money. At least in Tito's case, it was his own money, not the public's.
it's poor security. I worked for a company that auto-forwarded email after I left. Even though I'd been removed from the company's internal mailing lists, for years I still occasionally got pieces of internal email (bug reports about the product I'd worked on, etc). In principle this was confidential company information that I could have misused if I'd been a bad guy. In practice the company eventually went bust on its own, and that's how the mail stopped.
Using TeX. And around any math department you can find TeX typesetters who charge a heck of a lot less than $60/page.
The branch of math that deals in proofs at the lowest level is called mathematical logic. The metamath stuff is very cool, but only if you're already a math geek. It's inappropriate to recommend it to someone at the math level the slashdot header was pitched at (i.e. someone who has trouble with proofs). Non-mathemeticians wanting to learn something about mathematical logic--enough to understand the Big Daddy of logic theorems (the Godel incompleteness theorem) should read either "Godel's Proof" by Nagel and Newman, or (maybe more in the hacker spirit) "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
I'm surprised more sites don't use mod_gzip (available through modules.apache.org. Most browsers currently in use can uncompress gzip'd content before rendering it. Since html compresses very well, unless your site is mostly graphics, mod_gzip can often reduce your overall bandwidth by 50% or more, at the cost of some cpu cycles.
The advertising leaflet for Verizon prepaid cell phones in California specifically say there's no age restriction.
As for media protection, as several people suggested, rent a safe deposit at a bank (or several boxes at geographically separated banks). You get heavily fire protected vault space for a fairly low annual rent.
If you're using tape media, you should also periodically try reading your backup tapes on a different drive than the one you wrote them on, to make sure they interoperate. Drives can get out of alignment and will keep working with their own tapes but stop interoperating with other drives.
If there's a mechanism for signing rpm's (like there is for deb's) then that helps a little, if you have the public keys already to make sure nobody has messed with the rpm's you've downloaded. The big distros (Red Hat, Debian, etc.) should make some effort to get their key fingerprints widely publicized so people can check signatures easily.
The simplest thing to do is run PGP on a computer with no network connection at all. A junky old MSDOS laptop is fine for this. If someone emails you an encrypted message, put it on a floppy disc, move it to your PGP-equipped computer, decrypt it, compose and encrypt an answer, and use the floppy to transfer back the encrypted answer.
and it's been around for many years. A cool technology but not exactly news. Type "dataglyph" into Google to find out more.
Anyway, the digital signature law would seem to clear up one obstacle. Some (all?) US states require a blood test (for syphilis) before you can get a marriage license, and that seems hard to do over the net. Plus your fiancee's country may not have a digital signature law corresponding to ours. Anyway you don't find out whether it works til you try it--you'll be a pioneer.
The stuff on the e-dinar web site including the examiner cgi, a lot of the text, and the shopping cart system appears to be taken verbatim from the e-gold web site. It's either run by the same people as e-gold or in conjunction with them, or else it's a rip-off or parody. I wonder what the relationship is.
E-gold is a metals storage service and a payment system. It is not a mutual fund. It deals in metal, not securities (shares or obligations of companies).
Gold-age could not pocket your money without your finding out right away. Gold-age's business was buying and selling gold. They were an E-gold customer which means they stored gold in E-gold's vaults. Then if you bought gold from them on your credit card, they delivered the gold to you by spending from their E-gold account into yours. That meant you now owned that amount of the gold E-gold Ltd. was storing. You would know that Gold-Age had actually transferred the gold to you because you can check your holdings in real time at E-gold's web site. They consolidated small trades from random customers into larger trades with E-gold Ltd.
So yes, Gold-age was a broker, but it was a metals broker, not a securities broker. Securities brokers have to be licensed, to make sure they follow the regulations about misrepresenting the prospects of companies they sell shares of and stuff like that ("XYZ Corp. is just an email spam joint now, but they're working on a secret deal to take over Microsoft next week!"). IANAL but I've never heard that metal brokers have to be licensed. It's hard to misrepresent the prospects of an ounce of gold.
E-gold Ltd's attitudes about money and banking are a little bit eccentric, but they're legit and have been known in the electronic payments crowd for quite a while. Their web site is quite informative. Please check it out before making unfounded assumptions about what they do.
If you're a colo provider, instead of having to host a separate box for each customer, you could have fewer boxes each with a bunch of these cards inside. Each customer would have full root access to his card, get to run the OS of his choice and so forth. Of course it could be set up so the cards can take over the PCI bus of the host workstation and start messing with other cards and physical i/o devices. It all depends on how the cards are set up. It seems worth looking into. At a lot of colo places, rack space is more expensive than the hardware installed in it.
I'm running IE 5.5 under w2000. I installed the patch and I can no longer download PDF files from my SSL-secured server. I can still download them through the non-SSL port. Can someone else try this?
The numbers in the e-gold database are connected to real pieces of gold that they (claim to) have stored in actual vaults.
This kind of gold trading has gone on for longer than most currency systems. 500 years ago if you owned a few kg of gold, storing it at your house would have been crazy. So you'd normally buy the gold from a goldsmith but leave the physical metal in the goldsmith's vault, and he'd give you a piece of paper saying you owned it. At that point if you wanted to sell the gold to someone, it was enough to just sell them the paper, so they could use it to claim the gold from the goldsmith. The e-gold website is pretty informative about this.
E-gold by the way was trying to be more of a general web payment system than a way to really stash big quantities of money. Later systems like PayPal operated with normal bank accounts and credit cards and fit better into conventional expectations, so e-gold became sort of silly.
It was illegal in the US to own gold bullion from 1933 til 1974. So it's not completely an urban legend. But you're free to buy gold in the US now. Typing keywords like "legal gold bullion 1933 roosevelt nixon" into Google will find you a lot of references.
Yes I must have confused the 9 minute figure with some other disaster. After 9 minutes the shuttle would be most of the way to orbit. The Challenger accident is discussed in detail in Richard Feymnan's memoir "What do you care what other people think?". Sorry for the error.
Not very long after Garn's flight, they sent up Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, who 9 minutes after takeoff got blown up into a million little smithereens along with the other astronauts and the Shuttle she was launched on.
On the other hand, running the browser in a jail does nothing to stop MITM attacks against web sites (do you really look at the SSL certificate every time you fill in a form?),
Why can't Microsoft have signed this with a cert from its own CA, like it did with the patch for the the root store that fixed the compromised Verisign cert?
Really careful users should make sure to install the Verisign patch before installing the IE patch.
It's also funny that they tell you to run the IE patch by clicking it and choosing "run from current location", which can run code without checking signatures at all (though for this particular download, it lets you check the sig). That's probably how a lot of viruses and malicious code get spread in the first place.
I won't run any realmedia spyware even on my windows box. But you can stream mpeg-1 files from an ordinary web server. I believe Mozilla can show them through mpegplay on GNU/Linux.
You could also look at an Ecrix drive, about $500 through the LUG deal, which stores 33 GB on an 8mm cartridge costing $65 or so (ouch). I've heard of people punching holes in hi-8 video editing tape (Sony HMEAD E6-120, about $13 per tape at B&H Photo) and getting good results with that. The 120 minute video tape holds about 20 GB since it's shorter than the Ecrix tape. Still, this is kludgy and maybe flaky. Basically all tape media are overpriced right now. CD-R is a lot cheaper, but the capacity is too low to really dub video in style.
It's probably best to just wait for recordable DVD to get cheaper. Recordable DVD is available now, but costs a lot. Consumer products are coming though, and within a year or so it will be like CD-R.
Finally, there's good old analog videotape...