Goodbye, undear 18-year-old's celibacy. Farewell, for I have entered a new age in which I shall forever be gazing into my monitor with more tenderness than usual.
Then choose who you want to loose the next election and get thousands of Open Source advocates to send him/her letters asking for support.
If he so much as says three consecutive sentences supporting OSS, Micro$oft's billions may suddenly give advertising fronts the most prosperous election year on record.
And I gaurantee you that Microsoft has the monetary clout to put either major party into a majority of elected seats, or, come 2004, put a minor party's candidate for President in power.
Scary, isn't it? The possibility of a minor party becomming more powerful than any other, and supporting the RIAA/MPAA and Microsoft?
The way to make a difference is to get minor party candidates to support your side. Microsoft won't consider them a threat, and major campaign issues have historically had a tendancy to arise from minor party concerns.
Another good way to influence politics to support OSS is to convince as many interest groups as possible that widespread OSS usage is in their favor. I was actually planning on starting a project to do this. (Keep track of my website...I'll put up a page tomorrow.)
Then one might expect some brilliant alien mathemetition to perform computations with compressed data without uncompressing it. The only such situations I can think of off hand are special cases where the math just happens to simplify. Also known as "flukes."
I don't know if anyone's done a study on the limits of compression with a certain number of hard bits, but it seems to me that the data the Universe contains could actually be somewhere close to practical Infinity.
At that point, there'll be serious lobbying to give legal advantages to a human driver.
You'll see human-driver-only lanes and roads. If it gets bad enough, computer-drivers might have to wait longer at traffic lights, and recieve heavier fines for traffic violations.
That last will only be possible of you roll your own driving AI, which will be outlawed.
You have to realize that the "someone" you're referring to is the ISP, not the customer of the ISP.
Just because the ISP admin isn't completely competent doesn't mean I shouldn't get the email from my friends, who is almost certainly unaware of the ISP's system history.
I pay for the postal service with my taxes. Who says I'm not paying for the spammer's mail? The postage rate doesn't cover all of the costs.
In the online version, I'm paying for my connection, which one could measure in gigabytes. (Max transfer rate times time connected. Should work out to be quite a high number. You'd be shocked at how much of your money is "wasted.")
Even if he couldn't have the decency to change his business model so as not to spam, he could have used open relays.
I gaurantee you there are still some of those around.
Heck...with a collection of fast internet connections located around the world and a cluster of computers at each internet connection, I bet you could scan every IP on the Internet for open relays.
Here's the math:
2^32 addresses to start: 4,294,967,296 IPs Remove IPs starting with 192, 127, 10 and 255: 4227858432 IPs Remove IPs with 255 as their second segment: 4211343360 IPs Remove IPs with 255 as their third segment: 4211343104 Remove IPs with 255 as their fourth segment: 4211343103 Remove IPs used to perform scan: (Unknown. Depends if NAT is used, and how many internet connections are used.) Remove IPs owned (Unknown.)
So lets assume 4211343102 IPs.
Lets say I had the network to be able to scan 100000 IP addresses per second. That means it will take 42113.43102 seconds, or about 11 hours. Downgrading that to 1000 IPs per second makes it about 50 days.
It can be done...and I imagine it would be well worth the investment to someone.
Every time a new console is rumored to be in development, someone of high position always claims it will be a "(N) killer," where N is whatever the dominant (or unpopular) console system is.
I know this post won't make a dent in tradition, but it had to be said...
What scares me is the fact that I just installed LInux on a CD-romless laptop, and I'm still downloading software from Potato right now...over a 14.4Kbps modem. (I'm at school right now.)
Maybe I'll be able to afford that CDROM drive($89) and download the ISOs from school.
This process of package upgrading really grinds me.
(shameless request) Anyone know where I can get a decent CDROM drive for a ThinkPad 760-series laptop, for less than what Pricewatch says? Email me...
I should mention that my mother is a volunteer firefighter, so she'll probably insist I get one. I'd personally like it, as it's a great way to find me if I get lost on the road, or if I need directions to a certain place. (or both)
It still continues transmitting, which provides evidence of where it was when it was discarded. This can have an effect in trials where proximity to the crime is important.
If the b*st*rd decides to discard it after traveling a distance, then there's still the possibility that someone will notice that Jonny moving down the freeway at freeway speeds.
Of course, if the (can't think of a foul enough word) is relatively intelligent, he'll think to wrap it in tin foil or some other RF shielding.
perhapse one could nail together a few layers of 4'x8' sheets of OSB (For those who don't know, OSB is a common wood material for making house flooring.), put it on top of the laptop, and drive over it.
That'll focus the weight of the entire car on the laptop, not just the weight under one tire.
I'd get one, and give my loved ones access to the information it provides. This makes a great way for them to find me if I got in a car accident, or to give me directions home if I'm just plain lost.
It's been said before, but the more vocal slashdotters have a nasty tendancy to assume anything that can give out information about them is bad. I say it's not a problem as long as you can control where that information goes.
I suggest you simply read the service contract carefully to see that only people you authorize can have access to the information.
Slashdot Mirror
A female Linux user?
Goodbye, undear 18-year-old's celibacy. Farewell, for I have entered a new age in which I shall forever be gazing into my monitor with more tenderness than usual.
Erm...
Did I say that out loud?
Then choose who you want to loose the next election and get thousands of Open Source advocates to send him/her letters asking for support.
If he so much as says three consecutive sentences supporting OSS, Micro$oft's billions may suddenly give advertising fronts the most prosperous election year on record.
And I gaurantee you that Microsoft has the monetary clout to put either major party into a majority of elected seats, or, come 2004, put a minor party's candidate for President in power.
Scary, isn't it? The possibility of a minor party becomming more powerful than any other, and supporting the RIAA/MPAA and Microsoft?
The way to make a difference is to get minor party candidates to support your side. Microsoft won't consider them a threat, and major campaign issues have historically had a tendancy to arise from minor party concerns.
Another good way to influence politics to support OSS is to convince as many interest groups as possible that widespread OSS usage is in their favor. I was actually planning on starting a project to do this. (Keep track of my website...I'll put up a page tomorrow.)
Then one might expect some brilliant alien mathemetition to perform computations with compressed data without uncompressing it. The only such situations I can think of off hand are special cases where the math just happens to simplify. Also known as "flukes."
I don't know if anyone's done a study on the limits of compression with a certain number of hard bits, but it seems to me that the data the Universe contains could actually be somewhere close to practical Infinity.
At that point, there'll be serious lobbying to give legal advantages to a human driver.
You'll see human-driver-only lanes and roads. If it gets bad enough, computer-drivers might have to wait longer at traffic lights, and recieve heavier fines for traffic violations.
That last will only be possible of you roll your own driving AI, which will be outlawed.
The interesting part will be whether US courts rule that the EU courts have jurisdiction in these cases.
You have to realize that the "someone" you're referring to is the ISP, not the customer of the ISP.
Just because the ISP admin isn't completely competent doesn't mean I shouldn't get the email from my friends, who is almost certainly unaware of the ISP's system history.
I pay for the postal service with my taxes. Who says I'm not paying for the spammer's mail? The postage rate doesn't cover all of the costs.
In the online version, I'm paying for my connection, which one could measure in gigabytes. (Max transfer rate times time connected. Should work out to be quite a high number. You'd be shocked at how much of your money is "wasted.")
Even if he couldn't have the decency to change his business model so as not to spam, he could have used open relays.
I gaurantee you there are still some of those around.
Heck...with a collection of fast internet connections located around the world and a cluster of computers at each internet connection, I bet you could scan every IP on the Internet for open relays.
Here's the math:
2^32 addresses to start: 4,294,967,296 IPs
Remove IPs starting with 192, 127, 10 and 255: 4227858432 IPs
Remove IPs with 255 as their second segment: 4211343360 IPs
Remove IPs with 255 as their third segment: 4211343104
Remove IPs with 255 as their fourth segment: 4211343103
Remove IPs used to perform scan: (Unknown. Depends if NAT is used, and how many internet connections are used.)
Remove IPs owned (Unknown.)
So lets assume 4211343102 IPs.
Lets say I had the network to be able to scan 100000 IP addresses per second. That means it will take 42113.43102 seconds, or about 11 hours. Downgrading that to 1000 IPs per second makes it about 50 days.
It can be done...and I imagine it would be well worth the investment to someone.
Ever play MechWarrior 2 well?
:)
Neither did I.
Imagine Linux support for these...
Dear God.
Suddenly I'm looking forward to Linux support over a parallel port, or maybe home-built analog-to-digital apparatus.
Imagine vehicles in a Quake mod.
Whoah...there enough were spoonerisms-almost therin to spin head make my.
:)
Cool.
Yep...but I found that putting a piece of thin rubber under the edge of the button helped a lot.
Hey...what true geek wouldn't control is world-conquering device with a keyboard and a shell?
Thinking of "if the server was up"...Was it around long enough for a Google mirror? Could someone post that link?
I know there's an SI(metric) character for the unit modifier "micro"...Is that covered in Unicode?
Hats off to the first person who grabs THAT domain combination. (I hope it's another OSS junkie)
Every time a new console is rumored to be in development, someone of high position always claims it will be a "(N) killer," where N is whatever the dominant (or unpopular) console system is.
I know this post won't make a dent in tradition, but it had to be said...
Adding more developers is a long-term investment, not a short-term, and it takes a smart manager to know when that long-term investment is worth it.
If you don't want to spend time fixing someone else's bug, use an alternative software package. That's the beauty of the Open Source system.
Heck, potato has an alternative to dpkg, and several additional apt-get methods.
You could use vim, vi, nedit, gedit, ae, emacs, and more for your text editor.
There are several alternatives to LILO, if you don't like it.
That's why a package can depend on "ctags" when there's no package named "ctags," only different packages that require that service.
Bugfixes ARE a form of additional functionality.
We could all use a patch that would keep us from getting stuck in Quake1 floors...
Moral of the story: Maybe you'll appreciate the lack of the bug.
What scares me is the fact that I just installed LInux on a CD-romless laptop, and I'm still downloading software from Potato right now...over a 14.4Kbps modem. (I'm at school right now.)
Maybe I'll be able to afford that CDROM drive($89) and download the ISOs from school.
This process of package upgrading really grinds me.
(shameless request) Anyone know where I can get a decent CDROM drive for a ThinkPad 760-series laptop, for less than what Pricewatch says? Email me...
I should mention that my mother is a volunteer firefighter, so she'll probably insist I get one. I'd personally like it, as it's a great way to find me if I get lost on the road, or if I need directions to a certain place. (or both)
Not quite useless, that is.
It still continues transmitting, which provides evidence of where it was when it was discarded. This can have an effect in trials where proximity to the crime is important.
If the b*st*rd decides to discard it after traveling a distance, then there's still the possibility that someone will notice that Jonny moving down the freeway at freeway speeds.
Of course, if the (can't think of a foul enough word) is relatively intelligent, he'll think to wrap it in tin foil or some other RF shielding.
perhapse one could nail together a few layers of 4'x8' sheets of OSB (For those who don't know, OSB is a common wood material for making house flooring.), put it on top of the laptop, and drive over it.
That'll focus the weight of the entire car on the laptop, not just the weight under one tire.
I'd get one, and give my loved ones access to the information it provides. This makes a great way for them to find me if I got in a car accident, or to give me directions home if I'm just plain lost.
It's been said before, but the more vocal slashdotters have a nasty tendancy to assume anything that can give out information about them is bad. I say it's not a problem as long as you can control where that information goes.
I suggest you simply read the service contract carefully to see that only people you authorize can have access to the information.