The SETI detection tasks I wrote of are those used for the Phoenix system at present, and the Allen Telescope Array in future. The "SETI@home" project is a different, complementary effort run out of UC Berkeley (setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu). They search the entire sky while Phoenix at present is searching only the nearest 1000 sun-like stars, Phoenix however searches about 700 times as large a range of frequencies with about 100 times the sensitivity. With the the Allen Telescope Array we plan to expand our high-sensitivity "targeted search" to the nearest 100,000 stars (maybe a million in time). We also hoping someday to build a detector that watches the whole sky all the time for bright but transient signals.
Whether the client is open source or not, do you intend to use distributed computing to search for signals? Will this be totally seperate from seti@home, or will they be helping with the client side.
From what I can tell, seti@home has more computer power than they can use. Most samples are sent out and completed 3 times. While this is nice to confirm the results, the reason (I believe) they did this is simply because they have more people willing to compute than they can collect and split tapes for.
Your approach is a nice compliment to the seti@home program. I would be very interested in running client side programs if you did distributed computing on the few dozen boxes I control now.
On a standard workstation or on a PC, this doesn't strike me as useful: what good would it do, when I do have a boot floppy lying around?
I don't use floppies, and most of my computers don't have floppy drives. Many computers don't come with floppies anymore.
Even having a BIOS isn't that useful anymore:
It is if you want the OS to be able to talk to the hardware. Without the bios, it can't.
And the OS doesn't do better hardware detection in my experiences. Remember, the OS detects the hardware THRU the bios, by comparing it to a list of known hardware.
Yea, if you use only hardware that is older than the OS, then the OS is great at recognizing it. And I prefer to have more control over the resources. No OS, especially Windows, can anticipate all the crazy stuff I may be trying to do. Maybe I want to have 6 pci video cards or modems. (Yes, some of us do crazy stuff like that.) Windows doesn't handle that very well, even now. With a more sophisticated bios, i could debug and tweak the way it was seen by the OS.
Fair use is only under attack because people abuse it. If there was mass photocopying of newspapers, there might become a corporate-lobbying stink about it. (emphasis mine)
Not to quibble, but it costs less to buy the paper than to make a photo copy of all of it, hense the analogy is not valid.
One of the arguements (note: didn't say reasons) for "unfair use" such as piracy and bootlegging, is the unreasonable cost to purchase. This is a lame reason to steal. But its also lame to charge $16 for a CD with one decent song on it.
So Windows crashes, and you can't get it to come back up. No problem! You just boot up into your BIOS, send the built-in web-browser to support.microsoft.com, and then your set.
Dammit! And I'm using the new BORK edition BIOS....
BIOS stands for Basic Input Output System, and as for the idea of enahancing the BIOS kindof defeats the purpose of having a bare bones way of controling the hardware, however if it is implemented well, it could provide a good intermediate level between the BIOS and a full OS for low level diagnostics, but i don't see a need for web browsing.
Admittedly, I'm over my head here, but can't you have a complex BIOS that gets out of the way when the OS boots, or acts as a mini OS when the real OS wont load?
I mean most support for computers is online now, and its kinda hard to log in to "dell.com" if the damn thing won't boot.
Why can't the bios be both? for instance: IBM used to have a BASIC interpretor in bios (286 and pre), but it didnt get used unless the system didn't find an OS. It didn't get in the way.
Well I do. From Roe vs. Wade to forced busing, courts have been used to "pass" laws that congressmen have not had the guts to do for many years.
This has been going on for years and will not stop, as it is how our legal system is built.
But this isn't exactly how I read the Constitution. Like I said, I spent two years working for a law firm. I know all too well how our legal system works.
Yes, in theory we would love to sue spywear authors into oblivion. But I fear we are opening yet another can of worms.
I agree that companies that have access to your personal information should be held liable if they disclose the information, or are negligent in protecting that information (egghead.com comes to mind).
IAMAL, but more inportantly, judges are not congressmen, and I always have reservations when judges "create" law that legislators should have in the first place.
I can't swear that this is the case here, but with two years in the legal field, I still have trouble fully deciphering these rulings. (the fact that law can't be read by persons with average intellegence is yet a whole other subject).
quoted from the slashdotted http://www.mit.edu/~mkgray/head-explode.html
How To Tell If Your Head's About To Blow Up From the WEEKLY WORLD NEWS, May 24, 1994
MOSCOW -- Doctors are blaming a rare electrical imbalance in the brain for the bizarre death of a chess player whose head literally exploded in the middle of a championship game!
No one else was hurt in the fatal explosion but four players and three officials at the Moscow Candidate Masters' Chess Championships were sprayed with blood and brain matter when Nikolai Titov's head suddenly blew apart. Experts say he suffered from a condition called Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis or HCE.
"He was deep in concentration with his eyes focused on the board," says Titov's opponent, Vladimir Dobrynin. "All of a sudden his hands flew to his temples and he screamed in pain. Everyone looked up from their games, startled by the noise. Then, as if someone had put a bomb in his cranium, his head popped like a firecracker."
Incredibly, Titiov's is not the first case in which a person's head has spontaneously exploded. Five people are known to have died of HCE in the last 25 years. The most recent death occurred just three years ago in 1991, when European psychic Barbara Nicole's skull burst. Miss Nicole's story was reported by newspapers worldwide, including WWN. "HCE is an extremely rare physical imbalance," said Dr. Anatoly Martinenko, famed neurologist and expert on the human brain who did the autopsy on the brilliant chess expert. "It is a condition in which the circuits of the brain become overloaded by the body's own electricity. The explosions happen during periods of intense mental activity when lots of current is surging through the brain. Victims are highly intelligent people with great powers of concentration. Both Miss Nicole and Mr. Titov were intense people who tended to keep those cerebral circuits overloaded. In a way it could be said they were literally too smart for their own good."
Although Dr. Martinenko says there are probably many undiagnosed cases, he hastens to add that very few people will die from HCE. "Most people who have it will never know. At this point, medical science still doesn't know much about HCE. And since fatalities are so rare it will probably be years before research money becomes available."
In the meantime, the doctor urges people to take it easy and not think too hard for long periods of time. "Take frequent relaxation breaks when you're doing things that take lots of mental focus," he recommends.
Although HCE is very rare, it can kill. Dr. Martinenko says knowing you have the condition can greatly improve your odds of surviving it. A "yes" answer to any three of the following seven questions could mean that you have HCE:
Does your head sometimes ache when you think too hard? (Head pain can indicate overloaded brain circuits.)
Do you ever hear a faint ringing or humming sound in your ears? (It could be the sound of electricity in the skull cavity.)
Do you sometimes find yourself unable to get a thought out of your head? (This is a possible sign of too much electrical activity in the cerebral cortex.)
Do you spend more than five hours a day reading, balancing your checkbook, or other thoughtful activity? (A common symptom of HCE is a tendency to over-use the brain.)
When you get angry or frustrated do you feel pressure in your temples? (Friends of people who died of HCE say the victims often complained of head pressure in times of strong emotion.)
Do you ever overeat on ice cream, doughnuts and other sweets? (A craving for sugar is typical of people with too much electrical pressure in the cranium.)
Do you tend to analyze yourself too much? (HCE sufferers are often introspective, "over-thinking" their lives.)
However, due to the advancements in nuclear technology since the last great Hydrogen bomb was built in the 1960s (You know that 60 Megaton one that the soviets made), I'm sure we could slap together a device that could kick out in excess of 800-1000 megatons by now, hence just enough to do what you are suggesting.
Slap together?
The US has not been seeking ways to build bigger and bigger nukes, in spite of what some think here. Once we discovered we already had enough to make the planet uninhabitable (70s) then bigger was irrelevent.
Because of the physics involved, its gets exponentially difficult to design bigger and bigger. Also, no way to test it on the planet. And no chance to make a 2nd one if the first one is a dud. Oh, and you are talking about a shitload of material to make that sucker. Even if you took all the material out of all the existing bombs to work with.
Oh, one last point: Do you want them to build or launch that sucker in your hometown? I could see all kinds of no bath taking fuckers protesting all day and all night (after all, they don't have jobs to go to). I'm sure Nancy Pelosi would have a hayday attempting to get congress to block construction before an environmental impact study was done.
Not to troll or anything, but frankly human beings have not interest in solving the problems of the world themselves. It always takes a disaster to knock some sense into us.
Very true. Case in point: Saddam and Islamic terrorists before 9-11.
I respect your convictions, but question the need for Hollywood-contrived heros to constantly affirm them. Do your convictions fail to hold up without such emotional support?
My convictions hold up well. Its just nice to see someone else with them.
Also, do you believe that the media's motives are truly to affirm your deep convictions? I question their sincerity, and believe there may be some ulterior motives.
McDonalds motivation is to make money too. But I still love their QP w/ cheese.
I also think such hero-worship oversimplifies reality.
No one said anything about worship. I can admire the qualities of a fictional or real hero without dropping to my knees in prayer.
It's nice to escape to black-and-white/good-and-evil hero-worship for a few hours, as long as people don't project that simplicity into their views of the real world. It then becomes too easy to accept what politicans, of both sides of the spectrum, try to make us believe.
I agree. I would take it one step farther and say that is can be HEALTHY to escape every now and then, as long as the individual can decern reality from fantasy. I have more faith that most people can do this.
I guess this is where the sysops wax poetic about the good old days;)
I ran a 2 line BBS for several years, and used several software packeages, from sbbs, rbbs, tbbs, and finally settled into ezycom, an aussie package. We offered Fidonet, and I had made HOMEMADE scsi cables (i was really broke back then) to daisy chain old 1x cd rom drives for files (3 of them) on a ibm 386/20 with 4mb of ram, 80mb hard drive, a 14.4k (when they were $275) and a 2400. (thank god for a 'borrowed' copy of Desqview;-)
That is what amazes me, we could tweak out the last few bytes of low ram, and used ram disks for overlay files, with just 4mb. I guess I miss that level of tweaking. While I get some of that with Linux, I certainly don't with Windows.
Running a BBS taught me to actually do something with a computer, and was the foundation for learning networking. I have thought about setting up a telnet bbs, and even installed and tested software, but I haven't had the heart to actually go online.
I don't understand this need for heros, if indeed it truly exists. Does anyone else find the thought that Americans are so frail and weak minded that we need heros to comfort/inspire/nurture/motivate/whatever us, to be somewhat pathetic?
Most find heroes inspiring. We look for the best qualities in our hereos that we hope to find in ourselves. Heroes remind us that the fight is worth fighting, and that in the end, generally, good does win over evil if the goal is worth sacrificing for.
Not everyone believes this. I do. I think the motivations behind every day heroes (doing the right thing) is stronger than the motivations behind the bad guys (self gain), in general.
To most persons, heroes don't represent any new ideals, rather, they affirm the deep convictions of those who admire them. This is not a bad thing in and of itself.
Wanting to watch virtual heroes defeat the bad guys doesn't make me weak as an American. It reinforces the American ideal that ordinary persons can do extraordinary things when they do it for the right reasons.
As a form of entertainment, I find this much more palatable and uplifting than "Faces of Death", "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or "Scream".
Sure they might get more push now but you have to remember how long it takes for the movie industry to go from buying the rights on a movie to lining up the off-screen talent that will pick the on-screen talent to writing the screenplay... even before shooting starts.
That was my point, there were plenty of projects on the side that "looked good, but not good enough" that now look good enough, and we are just seeing the fruits, 18 months later.
I am sure you are correct in saying that X-men opened up the door for more comic book hero movies, but the original post was about "heroes" in general, not just comic book heroes.
Oh, and your reference about it being "more economic than anything else". Isn't it always?
What is with the sudden onslaught of superhero movies?
Interesting point. In times of trouble (war, for instance) people need heroes. I have seen many news stories to this effect. Its a 'nurture' type need. For those of us in the US, a few more heroes would be a good thing, post 9-11.
In trying times, people don't want to see the bad guys win, and movie makers know that. I would imagine many projects where "good wins over evil" that were sitting on the sidelines pre 9-11 were given a second look, and we are just now beginning to see the fruits of this.
Name is kinda weird, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (sounds more like a Monte Python parody) but the trailer looked pretty damn good. A bit gothic, but good.
This will work for most senders, but it is entirely possible that the addresses sending mail are different to those which can receive mail.
Correct. We are one of those. We have our own mail server (rented rack in Dallas) but use Speakeasy SMTP servers (Our SDSL provider located in NY) for outgoing opt-in newsletters. We don't HAVE to do it this way, but for technical reasons, its faster and easier for us. And it doesn't count toward our bandwidth on the rack.
Another server we have, on another SDSL line was blacklisted because it was SDSL, effectively shuting down all mail services. The server has been up on that IP for years, and averaged 10 to 50 emails per day, so we surely were not spammers. Our SMTP server are not open relays. It was blacklisted purely because it was on SDSL ip ranges.
I could never see Google as giving higher rankings in searches, even for blogs...I've read over and over that one of their unshakeable, cast in stone ideals is not to taint search results with paid results.
I'm paying thousand$ per week to buy higher listings, sort of. Through Overture.com. Their sponsored matches are certainly "pay for higher ranking" even tho they are not mixed with regular results, they are more prominant.
I pay for higher rankings on every major search engine, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, etc. On most, I have to BID against others, and check it hourly or daily to make sure Im in the top 3.
SETI is quite different. It gets data from some misterious source, does some unknown analysis of it (in theory), draws pretty pictures, and sends processed data back. It could as well work on cracking encryption, and I bet nobody would notice.
Perhaps I am not nearly as concerned that Berkeley is actually a front organization for Ashcroft and the rest of the "right wing conspiracy".
Also, SETI@home major users of the client include Sun, Ohio University, Intel and others, who have surely looked inside. If you go to SETI@home they explain in great detail what the program is doing.
Because Berkeley is so liberal and what I consider "anti-USA" I had considered NOT participating in SETI. In the end, I decided the science was more important than the politics.
Basically, I am saying that there is so much info out there, you would have to be paranoid to be worried that Berkeley is actually a front to have us decrypt stuff for the govt. I have done my homework (more than the moderator who modded this as a troll). I know what server it connects to, its not a mysterious source. (I have a firewall that only lets it connect on port 80 to one FQDN)
We may disagree on principal, which is fine. But don't be under any illusion that I have not done my homework. I trust seti because I feel I have good reason to trust them. More so than other distributed computing programs.
Oh, and Adobe Photoshop ALSO is for editing pictures. It tries to connect to mysterious servers all the time. Ask anyone who has it behind a firewall.
I don't follow - you do exactly like you say, and boot off a floppy and delete the entry in/etc/password.
I guess im just confused why debian would have it so you must use a password in init 1, when you CAN just go and delete the password off a floppy. I guess it IS a bit more secure that way, but a very small bit. Like i said, never used debian so that feature was new to me.
I dont know nothin either, all I know is if a program is running on my computer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I'd really like to have some insight as to what its doing.
So you don't use Windows then? Ever? You ever install RPMs or any binaries without reading the source? You compile your own kernel and read ALL the source code of a Linux distro before you install? If you DID read all the source, how many hours would it take? Are you qualified to find any security problems with it? I am guessing not since you say you don't know nothing.
No matter who you are, you are running binaries on your system that you don't have the source for, or have not read and analysed the source for.
To imply you don't want to run it soley because you can't see the source that you admit you wouldn't understand, qualifies you as a bonified troll.
My only concern would be making the client open source. My guess is that it being closed source has helped keep cheating under control. I'm not much of a programmer, so I can't swear as to the security of having it open source, but I would guess you arn't going to get 100 people wanting to help develop it, thus able to quickly fix security problems.
Those of you who don't think people would cheat, seti@home participants take it very seriously. VERY. Many people WOULD cheat if they could. To many, your 'score' is bragging rights. I'm just glad that I don't need to prove anything to anyone with my seti contributions.
Oh, and I'm in the top 99.601% percent with 6335 results, 9.069 years cpu time, and currently ranked 16957th place out of 4252029 and have been a participant for 3.682 years.:-)
And all my PC keyboards waste plastic on these little windows looking keys next to alt that seem to do nothing in linux.
They don't do much in windows either, except piss me off. I HATE playing a game, and hit one of the windows keys, and the damn thing swaps out. You swap back in, and the whole world is sideways. (that means your dead, to all you non-gamers)
I don't use the number pad keys personally. I use the arrows for gaming. I still use my old IBM keyboards without windows keys on most of my windows boxes. They are also just better keyboards. Way better.
I want a keyboard with no windows keys, and a removable keypad button set, making the keyboard narrower. I don't need more keys, I can remember all the combinations I need, I just want a smaller more comfortable keyboard.
Oh, and decent TACTILE feel. God I hate the mooshy feeling of most keyboards, including the Toshiba laptop Im typing on now. Thats the main reason I still salvage old IBM keyboards.
Not that easy. With Debian, at least, you will be asked for the root password. If the machine is set to boot from HD and a BIOS password is set you will have to open the case.
As to the BIOS password, yes, you would have to open the box, but (for instance) my Dell 1400sc has a hasp for a padlock, but it could easily be "snipped" and probably wouldn't be noticed immediately. I mean, how often do you inspect the back of your box? Bios passwords are like locks on a screen door;) They are best at stopping honest people.
I have never used Debian but assume you could still boot it off a floppy or bootable cd (any *nix) and just mount the hard drive partitions manually? (assuming bios allows an/or bios is compromised)
Another quick question: If you use Debian, and forget your root password, wtf do you do if you can't bypass it in init 1? I have only forgotten my root password on one test server ONCE. Once is usually enough to break you of that habit.
Slashdot Mirror
The SETI detection tasks I wrote of are those used for the Phoenix system at present, and the Allen Telescope Array in future. The "SETI@home" project is a different, complementary effort run out of UC Berkeley (setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu). They search the entire sky while Phoenix at present is searching only the nearest 1000 sun-like stars, Phoenix however searches about 700 times as large a range of frequencies with about 100 times the sensitivity. With the the Allen Telescope Array we plan to expand our high-sensitivity "targeted search" to the nearest 100,000 stars (maybe a million in time). We also hoping someday to build a detector that watches the whole sky all the time for bright but transient signals.
Whether the client is open source or not, do you intend to use distributed computing to search for signals? Will this be totally seperate from seti@home, or will they be helping with the client side.
From what I can tell, seti@home has more computer power than they can use. Most samples are sent out and completed 3 times. While this is nice to confirm the results, the reason (I believe) they did this is simply because they have more people willing to compute than they can collect and split tapes for.
Your approach is a nice compliment to the seti@home program. I would be very interested in running client side programs if you did distributed computing on the few dozen boxes I control now.
On a standard workstation or on a PC, this doesn't strike me as useful: what good would it do, when I do have a boot floppy lying around?
I don't use floppies, and most of my computers don't have floppy drives. Many computers don't come with floppies anymore.
Even having a BIOS isn't that useful anymore:
It is if you want the OS to be able to talk to the hardware. Without the bios, it can't.
And the OS doesn't do better hardware detection in my experiences. Remember, the OS detects the hardware THRU the bios, by comparing it to a list of known hardware.
Yea, if you use only hardware that is older than the OS, then the OS is great at recognizing it. And I prefer to have more control over the resources. No OS, especially Windows, can anticipate all the crazy stuff I may be trying to do. Maybe I want to have 6 pci video cards or modems. (Yes, some of us do crazy stuff like that.) Windows doesn't handle that very well, even now. With a more sophisticated bios, i could debug and tweak the way it was seen by the OS.
Fair use is only under attack because people abuse it. If there was mass photocopying of newspapers, there might become a corporate-lobbying stink about it. (emphasis mine)
Not to quibble, but it costs less to buy the paper than to make a photo copy of all of it, hense the analogy is not valid.
One of the arguements (note: didn't say reasons) for "unfair use" such as piracy and bootlegging, is the unreasonable cost to purchase. This is a lame reason to steal. But its also lame to charge $16 for a CD with one decent song on it.
Reminds me of a sig i used briefly:
I love Metalica, I have all their MP3s
So Windows crashes, and you can't get it to come back up. No problem! You just boot up into your BIOS, send the built-in web-browser to support.microsoft.com, and then your set.
Dammit! And I'm using the new BORK edition BIOS....
BIOS stands for Basic Input Output System, and as for the idea of enahancing the BIOS kindof defeats the purpose of having a bare bones way of controling the hardware, however if it is implemented well, it could provide a good intermediate level between the BIOS and a full OS for low level diagnostics, but i don't see a need for web browsing.
Admittedly, I'm over my head here, but can't you have a complex BIOS that gets out of the way when the OS boots, or acts as a mini OS when the real OS wont load?
I mean most support for computers is online now, and its kinda hard to log in to "dell.com" if the damn thing won't boot.
Why can't the bios be both? for instance: IBM used to have a BASIC interpretor in bios (286 and pre), but it didnt get used unless the system didn't find an OS. It didn't get in the way.
I wouldn't worry about it.
Well I do. From Roe vs. Wade to forced busing, courts have been used to "pass" laws that congressmen have not had the guts to do for many years.
This has been going on for years and will not stop, as it is how our legal system is built.
But this isn't exactly how I read the Constitution. Like I said, I spent two years working for a law firm. I know all too well how our legal system works.
Yes, in theory we would love to sue spywear authors into oblivion. But I fear we are opening yet another can of worms.
I agree that companies that have access to your personal information should be held liable if they disclose the information, or are negligent in protecting that information (egghead.com comes to mind).
IAMAL, but more inportantly, judges are not congressmen, and I always have reservations when judges "create" law that legislators should have in the first place.
I can't swear that this is the case here, but with two years in the legal field, I still have trouble fully deciphering these rulings. (the fact that law can't be read by persons with average intellegence is yet a whole other subject).
quoted from the slashdotted http://www.mit.edu/~mkgray/head-explode.html
How To Tell If Your Head's About To Blow Up
From the WEEKLY WORLD NEWS, May 24, 1994
MOSCOW -- Doctors are blaming a rare electrical imbalance in the brain for the bizarre death of a chess player whose head literally exploded in the middle of a championship game!
No one else was hurt in the fatal explosion but four players and three officials at the Moscow Candidate Masters' Chess Championships were sprayed with blood and brain matter when Nikolai Titov's head suddenly blew apart. Experts say he suffered from a condition called Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis or HCE.
"He was deep in concentration with his eyes focused on the board," says Titov's opponent, Vladimir Dobrynin. "All of a sudden his hands flew to his temples and he screamed in pain. Everyone looked up from their games, startled by the noise. Then, as if someone had put a bomb in his cranium, his head popped like a firecracker."
Incredibly, Titiov's is not the first case in which a person's head has spontaneously exploded. Five people are known to have died of HCE in the last 25 years. The most recent death occurred just three years ago in 1991, when European psychic Barbara Nicole's skull burst. Miss Nicole's story was reported by newspapers worldwide, including WWN. "HCE is an extremely rare physical imbalance," said Dr. Anatoly Martinenko, famed neurologist and expert on the human brain who did the autopsy on the brilliant chess expert. "It is a condition in which the circuits of the brain become overloaded by the body's own electricity. The explosions happen during periods of intense mental activity when lots of current is surging through the brain. Victims are highly intelligent people with great powers of concentration. Both Miss Nicole and Mr. Titov were intense people who tended to keep those cerebral circuits overloaded. In a way it could be said they were literally too smart for their own good."
Although Dr. Martinenko says there are probably many undiagnosed cases, he hastens to add that very few people will die from HCE. "Most people who have it will never know. At this point, medical science still doesn't know much about HCE. And since fatalities are so rare it will probably be years before research money becomes available."
In the meantime, the doctor urges people to take it easy and not think too hard for long periods of time. "Take frequent relaxation breaks when you're doing things that take lots of mental focus," he recommends.
Although HCE is very rare, it can kill. Dr. Martinenko says knowing you have the condition can greatly improve your odds of surviving it. A "yes" answer to any three of the following seven questions could mean that you have HCE:
Does your head sometimes ache when you think too hard? (Head pain can indicate overloaded brain circuits.)
Do you ever hear a faint ringing or humming sound in your ears? (It could be the sound of electricity in the skull cavity.)
Do you sometimes find yourself unable to get a thought out of your head? (This is a possible sign of too much electrical activity in the cerebral cortex.)
Do you spend more than five hours a day reading, balancing your checkbook, or other thoughtful activity? (A common symptom of HCE is a tendency to over-use the brain.)
When you get angry or frustrated do you feel pressure in your temples? (Friends of people who died of HCE say the victims often complained of head pressure in times of strong emotion.)
Do you ever overeat on ice cream, doughnuts and other sweets? (A craving for sugar is typical of people with too much electrical pressure in the cranium.)
Do you tend to analyze yourself too much? (HCE sufferers are often introspective, "over-thinking" their lives.)
However, due to the advancements in nuclear technology since the last great Hydrogen bomb was built in the 1960s (You know that 60 Megaton one that the soviets made), I'm sure we could slap together a device that could kick out in excess of 800-1000 megatons by now, hence just enough to do what you are suggesting.
Slap together?
The US has not been seeking ways to build bigger and bigger nukes, in spite of what some think here. Once we discovered we already had enough to make the planet uninhabitable (70s) then bigger was irrelevent.
Because of the physics involved, its gets exponentially difficult to design bigger and bigger. Also, no way to test it on the planet. And no chance to make a 2nd one if the first one is a dud. Oh, and you are talking about a shitload of material to make that sucker. Even if you took all the material out of all the existing bombs to work with.
Oh, one last point: Do you want them to build or launch that sucker in your hometown? I could see all kinds of no bath taking fuckers protesting all day and all night (after all, they don't have jobs to go to). I'm sure Nancy Pelosi would have a hayday attempting to get congress to block construction before an environmental impact study was done.
(no pun on impact intended)
Not to troll or anything, but frankly human beings have not interest in solving the problems of the world themselves. It always takes a disaster to knock some sense into us.
Very true. Case in point: Saddam and Islamic terrorists before 9-11.
I respect your convictions, but question the need for Hollywood-contrived heros to constantly affirm them. Do your convictions fail to hold up without such emotional support?
My convictions hold up well. Its just nice to see someone else with them.
Also, do you believe that the media's motives are truly to affirm your deep convictions? I question their sincerity, and believe there may be some ulterior motives.
McDonalds motivation is to make money too. But I still love their QP w/ cheese.
I also think such hero-worship oversimplifies reality.
No one said anything about worship. I can admire the qualities of a fictional or real hero without dropping to my knees in prayer.
It's nice to escape to black-and-white/good-and-evil hero-worship for a few hours, as long as people don't project that simplicity into their views of the real world. It then becomes too easy to accept what politicans, of both sides of the spectrum, try to make us believe.
I agree. I would take it one step farther and say that is can be HEALTHY to escape every now and then, as long as the individual can decern reality from fantasy. I have more faith that most people can do this.
EUians hate to have America take the lead on everything so I imagine France will try to create an EUian consortium to do their own version.
;)
"Bonjour, you cheese eating, surrender monkeys"
With Belgium and Germany, and call it the World Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (WDIIPP), right?
I guess this is where the sysops wax poetic about the good old days ;)
;-)
I ran a 2 line BBS for several years, and used several software packeages, from sbbs, rbbs, tbbs, and finally settled into ezycom, an aussie package. We offered Fidonet, and I had made HOMEMADE scsi cables (i was really broke back then) to daisy chain old 1x cd rom drives for files (3 of them) on a ibm 386/20 with 4mb of ram, 80mb hard drive, a 14.4k (when they were $275) and a 2400. (thank god for a 'borrowed' copy of Desqview
That is what amazes me, we could tweak out the last few bytes of low ram, and used ram disks for overlay files, with just 4mb. I guess I miss that level of tweaking. While I get some of that with Linux, I certainly don't with Windows.
Running a BBS taught me to actually do something with a computer, and was the foundation for learning networking. I have thought about setting up a telnet bbs, and even installed and tested software, but I haven't had the heart to actually go online.
I guess you can't go back.
I don't understand this need for heros, if indeed it truly exists. Does anyone else find the thought that Americans are so frail and weak minded that we need heros to comfort/inspire/nurture/motivate/whatever us, to be somewhat pathetic?
Most find heroes inspiring. We look for the best qualities in our hereos that we hope to find in ourselves. Heroes remind us that the fight is worth fighting, and that in the end, generally, good does win over evil if the goal is worth sacrificing for.
Not everyone believes this. I do. I think the motivations behind every day heroes (doing the right thing) is stronger than the motivations behind the bad guys (self gain), in general.
To most persons, heroes don't represent any new ideals, rather, they affirm the deep convictions of those who admire them. This is not a bad thing in and of itself.
Wanting to watch virtual heroes defeat the bad guys doesn't make me weak as an American. It reinforces the American ideal that ordinary persons can do extraordinary things when they do it for the right reasons.
As a form of entertainment, I find this much more palatable and uplifting than "Faces of Death", "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or "Scream".
Sure they might get more push now but you have to remember how long it takes for the movie industry to go from buying the rights on a movie to lining up the off-screen talent that will pick the on-screen talent to writing the screenplay... even before shooting starts.
That was my point, there were plenty of projects on the side that "looked good, but not good enough" that now look good enough, and we are just seeing the fruits, 18 months later.
I am sure you are correct in saying that X-men opened up the door for more comic book hero movies, but the original post was about "heroes" in general, not just comic book heroes.
Oh, and your reference about it being "more economic than anything else". Isn't it always?
What is with the sudden onslaught of superhero movies?
Interesting point. In times of trouble (war, for instance) people need heroes. I have seen many news stories to this effect. Its a 'nurture' type need. For those of us in the US, a few more heroes would be a good thing, post 9-11.
In trying times, people don't want to see the bad guys win, and movie makers know that. I would imagine many projects where "good wins over evil" that were sitting on the sidelines pre 9-11 were given a second look, and we are just now beginning to see the fruits of this.
Name is kinda weird, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (sounds more like a Monte Python parody) but the trailer looked pretty damn good. A bit gothic, but good.
This will work for most senders, but it is entirely possible that the addresses sending mail are different to those which can receive mail.
Correct. We are one of those. We have our own mail server (rented rack in Dallas) but use Speakeasy SMTP servers (Our SDSL provider located in NY) for outgoing opt-in newsletters. We don't HAVE to do it this way, but for technical reasons, its faster and easier for us. And it doesn't count toward our bandwidth on the rack.
Another server we have, on another SDSL line was blacklisted because it was SDSL, effectively shuting down all mail services. The server has been up on that IP for years, and averaged 10 to 50 emails per day, so we surely were not spammers. Our SMTP server are not open relays. It was blacklisted purely because it was on SDSL ip ranges.
I could never see Google as giving higher rankings in searches, even for blogs...I've read over and over that one of their unshakeable, cast in stone ideals is not to taint search results with paid results.
I'm paying thousand$ per week to buy higher listings, sort of. Through Overture.com. Their sponsored matches are certainly "pay for higher ranking" even tho they are not mixed with regular results, they are more prominant.
I pay for higher rankings on every major search engine, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, etc. On most, I have to BID against others, and check it hourly or daily to make sure Im in the top 3.
SETI is quite different. It gets data from some misterious source, does some unknown analysis of it (in theory), draws pretty pictures, and sends processed data back. It could as well work on cracking encryption, and I bet nobody would notice.
Perhaps I am not nearly as concerned that Berkeley is actually a front organization for Ashcroft and the rest of the "right wing conspiracy".
But seriously, I consider the source. It is sponsored by a university known for protesting against every military action, located in a town that was one of the first to pass a resolution against the current war.
Also, SETI@home major users of the client include Sun, Ohio University, Intel and others, who have surely looked inside. If you go to SETI@home they explain in great detail what the program is doing.
Because Berkeley is so liberal and what I consider "anti-USA" I had considered NOT participating in SETI. In the end, I decided the science was more important than the politics.
Basically, I am saying that there is so much info out there, you would have to be paranoid to be worried that Berkeley is actually a front to have us decrypt stuff for the govt. I have done my homework (more than the moderator who modded this as a troll). I know what server it connects to, its not a mysterious source. (I have a firewall that only lets it connect on port 80 to one FQDN)
We may disagree on principal, which is fine. But don't be under any illusion that I have not done my homework. I trust seti because I feel I have good reason to trust them. More so than other distributed computing programs.
Oh, and Adobe Photoshop ALSO is for editing pictures. It tries to connect to mysterious servers all the time. Ask anyone who has it behind a firewall.
I don't follow - you do exactly like you say, and boot off a floppy and delete the entry in /etc/password.
I guess im just confused why debian would have it so you must use a password in init 1, when you CAN just go and delete the password off a floppy. I guess it IS a bit more secure that way, but a very small bit. Like i said, never used debian so that feature was new to me.
I dont know nothin either, all I know is if a program is running on my computer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I'd really like to have some insight as to what its doing.
So you don't use Windows then? Ever? You ever install RPMs or any binaries without reading the source? You compile your own kernel and read ALL the source code of a Linux distro before you install? If you DID read all the source, how many hours would it take? Are you qualified to find any security problems with it? I am guessing not since you say you don't know nothing.
No matter who you are, you are running binaries on your system that you don't have the source
for, or have not read and analysed the source for.
To imply you don't want to run it soley because you can't see the source that you admit you wouldn't understand, qualifies you as a bonified troll.
My only concern would be making the client open source. My guess is that it being closed source has helped keep cheating under control. I'm not much of a programmer, so I can't swear as to the security of having it open source, but I would guess you arn't going to get 100 people wanting to help develop it, thus able to quickly fix security problems.
:-)
Those of you who don't think people would cheat, seti@home participants take it very seriously. VERY. Many people WOULD cheat if they could. To many, your 'score' is bragging rights. I'm just glad that I don't need to prove anything to anyone with my seti contributions.
Oh, and I'm in the top 99.601% percent with 6335 results, 9.069 years cpu time, and currently ranked 16957th place out of 4252029 and have been a participant for 3.682 years.
And all my PC keyboards waste plastic on these little windows looking keys next to alt that seem to do nothing in linux.
They don't do much in windows either, except piss me off. I HATE playing a game, and hit one of the windows keys, and the damn thing swaps out. You swap back in, and the whole world is sideways. (that means your dead, to all you non-gamers)
I don't use the number pad keys personally. I use the arrows for gaming. I still use my old IBM keyboards without windows keys on most of my windows boxes. They are also just better keyboards. Way better.
I want a keyboard with no windows keys, and a removable keypad button set, making the keyboard narrower. I don't need more keys, I can remember all the combinations I need, I just want a smaller more comfortable keyboard.
Oh, and decent TACTILE feel. God I hate the mooshy feeling of most keyboards, including the Toshiba laptop Im typing on now. Thats the main reason I still salvage old IBM keyboards.
Not that easy. With Debian, at least, you will be asked for the root password. If the machine is set to boot from HD and a BIOS password is set you will have to open the case.
;) They are best at stopping honest people.
As to the BIOS password, yes, you would have to open the box, but (for instance) my Dell 1400sc has a hasp for a padlock, but it could easily be "snipped" and probably wouldn't be noticed immediately. I mean, how often do you inspect the back of your box? Bios passwords are like locks on a screen door
I have never used Debian but assume you could still boot it off a floppy or bootable cd (any *nix) and just mount the hard drive partitions manually? (assuming bios allows an/or bios is compromised)
Another quick question: If you use Debian, and forget your root password, wtf do you do if you can't bypass it in init 1? I have only forgotten my root password on one test server ONCE. Once is usually enough to break you of that habit.