From what I've read and understand (Astrophysics types PLEASE correct me):
If the part of the star that collapses into a singularity has any angular momentum when it collapses, then the singularity itself takes the form of a ring with a zero-dimension cross-section. The rate of spin and the diameter of the ring is determined by the mass of the singularity and the amount of angular momentum the singularity contains.
Therefore, there is not a point singularity to spin infinitely fast, but the ring singularity can be rotating at a fantastic clip depending on how much mass it contains.
Also, if I understand correctly, this spin is what's responsible for the gamma ray bursts. As matter is shredded by collapsing through the event horizon, some of its energy is released along the spin axis as cyclotron radiation.
Exactly what are you talking about that root gives you but admin doesn't?
The ability to kill 'required' services, for example. It can be done, but not as 'Administrator'. Also, you have to pull some tricks to make filesystem changes to files marked 'protected' by Windows... or that any 3rd party marks as 'protected'.
1. Kernel Mode Drivers - Once Linux actually gets drivers for something, support tends to be rock solid-- a fair bit better than XP. However, this is the one place BSD-type OSess really outshine Macro-Kernal OSes. Even though my home Windows and Linux PCs are far faster than my work Mac, sometimes I cry when trying to get odd hardware to work on them. Even if you have some crap pieces of hardware with a crap driver, you can axe the driver rather than the whole OS in OSX.
2. I'll accept the good/bad rationale. One of the really stupid things is all the indirection in the registry. Why must so many settings be hidden behind a cryptic GUID, for example?
3. DRM. This is sort-of-like the OE being part of the OS. It's not, but you'd think it was if you paid attention to MS. Windows Media Player series applies DRM to even user-specific content by default, like ripped CDs. The DRM and licenses get more restrictive with each new incarnation of DRM. I've helped more than one non-techie friend who ran into a 'Why can't I listen to my own CD'-type problem and simply couldn't figure out how to get around it.
These friends were quite happy to be introduced to MPC and VLC.
XP is not a bad OS when you tally up the features vs. problems. Saying that 'I can't believe people are willing to put up with the bugs' is about like saying 'I can't beleive people are willing to put up with compatibility issues' when discussing the Linux distro of your choice. They're not the same problem, but they're about the same order of magnitude.
Please don't mistake me for a Microsoft apologist, though. XP does have some serious flaws.
My take on the worst flaws of XP:
Kernelspace Hardware Drivers - A driver that locks up the system is BAD! I'd be willing to bet that every Windows XP user has at least one such driver on their system.
Cryptic Registry Settings - I've never quite gotten why it was determined that putting all your settings and configuration in one basket was deemed to be a good idea. I can't think of any positive justification whatsoever for this.
OS-level DRM - Bad for so many reasons.
Enabling executeable content by default in Outlook Express - The source of the vast majority of Windows Specific internet worms. This is not really an OS specific issue, but Microsoft is pretty keen on insisting the OE is an uninstallable part of the OS.
No real super-user - You can get 'SYSTEM' user access in Windows via illegitimate means. There is no mechanism for a machine administrator to get this without some sort of hack or workaround.
Crippled IP stack - There are a lot of features between the desktop and server distributions that are crippled to try to keep people from running servers with the desktop distros. Completely fucking pointless since the real money in server distros is not licensing fees, but the support contracts companies.
The first time I read the headline I was confused about what it meant. Was there some sort of position he turned down? Did he quit an important job?
I've always despised death euphamisms, though. Trying to tone the tragedy down doesn't make it any easier to deal with for friends, families, or looker-ons. It also takes away from the importance of the death itself.
He's dead. The man was killed in an auto accident. It's a sad, tragic ending, but it's the truth.
Wikipedia doesn't work like a regular encyclopedia. Stephen Colbert is making fun of us. The modern media hates us because we're not Encyclopedia Britanica.
Wikipedia is a wonderful thing. On top of being an incredible source for information, it's an excercise in damage control and chaos theory. Wikipedia works, not despite page defacers and fact monglers, but *because* of them. Without the constant controversy surrounding things like politicians changing their own wiki entries, innacurate or false information would tend to sit in the pool and stagnate.
Wikipedia is not a traditional encyclopedia. It's not meant to be one. It's not meant to work like one. Trying to treat it like one is foolish. Trying to base a traditional encyclopedia off of Wikipedia is foolish.
The 'Corporate Overlord IE Mandate' is not to be underrated.
I work in an office that settled on IE a long time ago... before Firefox and before free Opera. This was back when IE simply was the best browser because Netscape had stagnated, Mozilla wasn't even in beta, and Microsoft's anti-competitive tactics worked.
The workstation images still have IE as the only browser by default, and the majority of the office doesn't have the privalege of installing their own software due to all the stupid things users can get up to.
Anyone who really wants it gets Firefox, including non-tech users who mention to one of the admins that they'd like it. Most of the office, however, is far too busy with work to worry about which browser they have installed. IE works and is sufficiently secured by our NT admins to be useable and safe for the majority of our users, including geeks and the tech-saavy.
These are not stupid or uneducated people. They use Firefox at home. If they hit Slashdot from work, they're likely to be doing it via IE.
This is why the ultimate downhill slide after TNG ended. Berman and pals were catering to the fans who wanted to know exactly how phasers worked rather than the fans who wanted to see hot Riker/Picard action.
It occurs that we need to revisit the problem here.
Captchas are a way of trying to determine that there is a human at the keyboard rather than a bot. If we verify that we have a human doing the work here and not a computer then we can be assured that the service we're providing is not being harvested for nefarious means.
The problem with this is that human labor is cheap, especially if you find some way around the various sweatshop protections we have in the civilized world. How much do Chinese gold farmers make?
Perhaps the questions we ought to be asking in order to prevent harvesting are 'Does this client seem like it's not a bot?"
1. Has this client's IP address requested this service in the last 2 minutes?
2. Does this client appear to be a fully-fledged web browswer as opposed to a bot that understands http 1.1?
Number 1 is easy. Chuck out requests from IPs that have already made requests in the last few minutes. Fairly intelligent flooding ban algorithms are realtively common.
Number 2 is a little harder, but still straight-forward. Provide the client with a problem that must be solved in Javascript. The problem should be arranged so that the solution takes a few seconds or so to work out. The client has to send the correct answer back with the request for the service.
If both these are observed, it puts a little more strain on those trying to harvest services. The amount they can harvest is limited to the number of IPs they have per requests the server will allow. The client must also understand Javascript and be willing to spend the CPU cycles to work out the math problem hurdle.
The 'live user' who wants to request the service does so fairly easily, but the bot who wants to harvest the service suddenly finds himself up to the ears in bans and 100% cpu usage.
Anyway, this is just a suggestion. I'm convinced that trying to determine that the client is alive is simply the wrong direction. Instead we should be proactive and try to find solutions that hamper the bots.
I can't believe I just read that many stories talking about how easy it is to get hit with sexual harassment, and then nothing defending WHY we have laws and monitors for that sort of thing. You guys sound like the sort of guys who seriously think a lot of women lie about being raped.
I have no idea where you guys work, but I am having serious trouble believing any of those stories.
A lot of us work at places that are under federal scrutiny for one reason or another.
Yes, the laws are there for a reason. It's extremely unfortuneate that your girlfriend was treated so badly when she tried to report her situation. She definitely has grounds for a lawsuit on being so casually dismissed when making her claims.
However, I think that in the current political climate, this is the exception rather than the norm.
Many IT companies, including mine, have overzealous 'Zero Tolerance' policies towards sexual harassment. At some point, the accountants, hr staffers, and legal staffers have come to the consensus that it's simply better to practice a scorched earth policy than excercise any judgement or responsibility. The threat of lawsuit must be minimized at any cost, no matter how extreme or reactionary.
I can very honestly say that in my job, my employment would probably be over the same day that any female employee in the company made a claim of harassment. I would likely have no opportunity to explain things from my point of view or defend myself.
Luckily, most of the women I work with understand this as well. For the most part, they're all very careful not to place me or the other male employees in questionable situations.
People who like to imagine that women frequently lie about being raped or that they file false harassment complaints are exhibiting sexism... the same kind of quiet bigotry that holds that all women are basically dishonest or that all blacks are basically violent. It's stupid and backwards, but it is common.
However, women are people too, and people are inherently corrupt. False accusations do happen occasionally, and when these accusations take place, reputations are destroyed and lives are ruined. It comes from both men and women.
The lawyer thing is actually a pretty serious detriment to male-female interactions at work.
Most IT houses these days have pretty strict sexual harassment rules. Even small computer centers have "Harassment Awareness" training of some kind. The idea that sexual harassment == being sued and/or fired is hammered in to IT workers to the extreme.
Worse, there are no end of horror stories about an innocent comment or action being construted as harassment by overzealous HR departments. How many times have we all heard the old saw about an unscrupulous woman pressing sexual harassment charges? It's mostly urban legend and closet sexism, but the idea is still there.
The net effect is that even very well-adjusted male IT personell are wary of offending a woman, should it result in loss of employment. They'll avoid conversations with women at work, not out of sexism, but out of a sense of personal safety.
The unfortuneate not-so-well-adjusted IT guys are TERRIFIED. The guys who had trouble talking to females in highschool and college suddenly find themselves under threat of legal action when they enter the workplace, as well as ordinary crushing rejection.
If a woman wants to interact with these guys, she's going to have to make the first move.
No, a woman shouldn't have to prove anything upon entering the workplace. Unfortuneately, the climate that's been created by an oversensitivity to sexual harassment means that a woman has a lot to prove. Sad, but true.
She's got to prove that she won't sue someone for a social mistake.
After RTFA, it occurs that this is mostly a research project. The goals (and downloadables) include libraries that allow PCs to mount a distributed encrypted filesystem and others.
In a business example where you know that you can ultimately control the sites where you're storing your partial data, this would be a very good thing.
For the single user attempting to secure his information by using the existing network, there are some downfalls. 6 of 1l slices of the data are needed to recontstruct the whole. Therefore if a party intent on obtaining secret data obtains the majority of the servers, he has the data.
Also, if a disaster wipes out the majority of the servers, leaving five or less of the eleven, the data is gone.
This is a very, very important concept for business storage, but I have to wonder if it scratches any geek itches not already soothed by Truecrypt and Par2.
I feel that free speech should be an absolute, even when it's harmful. To use the old saw I think that the damage of yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theatre is far less than the damage of allowing any kind of restrictions on free speech.
That being said, why berate Google, who's voluntarily filtering their own information, and not berate Cisco, who's designed and built a great deal of the routing equipment used by the PDRC government to filter and monitor internet traffic... the so called 'Great Firewall of China'?
I certainly don't care for Google's actions, but I think that Cisco's are just as heinous, if not worse than Yahoo's dissident incrimination.
This is really typical of Sony. For the last 30 years Sony has iterated this process over and over again.
1. Develop really nice content format. 2. Promote the hell out of new content format. 3. Artificially CRIPPLE THE FUCK out of new content format. 4. Wonder why people aren't buying new content format. 5. Abandon new content format.
See also: BetaMax, MiniDisc, MemoryStick, UDF, etc...
I should say this is really typical of Sony USA. Things like MiniDisc were really popular in Japan, but the restrictions imposed on the format came from pressures from Sony's U.S. media divisions.
Sony execs and marketing people refuse to learn from their mistakes, so they keep repeating them. They've been doing it over and over again for literally decades now.
As a matter of fact, unless HD-DVD manages to be as easy to uncripple as DVDs (and it appears that it will be), it too will be stillborn.
This behavior has saved my bacon more times than I care to count.
Boss: "So, why didn't you inform executive A that we were going to cut over the website this week."
Me: "I did, a few months ago, I think. I remember talking to her on the phone."
Boss: "She's swearing up and down that she's never heard anything about it."
Me: "Bullshit." (When said to your boss, you'd BETTER damn well be able to put your money where your mouth is.)
Boss: "This is a pretty big deal. It came up in the executive briefing. Do you have an email trail or anything?"
Me: "Yeah. Let me send you all the related emails. (*clickity-click*) There you go. Looks like we talked about it in May. I'm sorry she's bugging you about it."
Boss: "Don't worry about it. This is no longer our problem."
He was a good actor before he lost his mind that is...
WTF happened to Mel Gibson anyway? At what point did he become looney toons? Crackers? Around the Bend? Shortbussed? Start playing 52-pickup with an UNO deck?
Jeezus-H-Christ! Have you seen the guy? He looks like he's been hiding out with Osama and the WMDs.
It wasn't scientology, because he seems to be pretty devoutly christian. Did he start talking to God and God started talking back or something?
Mel, seriously, it's time to get on some anti-psychotics. They've got some good ones now that don't hardly mess with your sex-drive at all.
Remember that humans don't see a pixel-per-pixel representation of the world. We see a tight spot of color and detail in the center of our retina (Fovea? Bio-types please correct me) surrounded by blurry shapes and lines. Around the edges, in peripheral we don't even see color, just luminance.
Proof? Take a bright LED lamp and move it into your peripheral vision. What color is it, not from memory, but just from looking at it?
The Fovea-area of the retina is more densely packed cells and blood vessels. It has more cones -- Chroma-type cells -- than rods.
This indistinct image is inverted and processed into a whole by the brain, which carefully processes different shapes, lines, movement, flickering, and what-not to produce what you THINK you see. The brain fills in any given pieces of the image that don't have enough detail, frequently from memory.
This is why optical illusions work. You deceive the biological mechanisms that process the image into producing bad data by giving them a skewed sample of the image.
Also, neural mechanisms are asynchronous and really can't be mesured in a k/s rate. You perceive a flicker of motion one second and then a spot of color the next. This is assembled into a ball that you turn to face-- to get a better image-- and then catch. Your brain has a lot of built-in firmware to do image manipulation, built you have to 'learn' the software necessary to do pattern matching and response over your lifetime.
You only get a few bits worth of information for the first few milliseconds that you're recognizing the ball, and then many megabytes worth the last few second.
Another thing... as sensitive and immersive as vision is, your ears probably have much, much more data input. They have vastly more dynamic range. Most people don't even notice themselves filling in visual information with audio information, but it does happen.
For example, you hear a person's voice, and you *think* you see their face.
Close your eyes when talking to someone, especially when in a group. Note how easy it is to visualize faces just from hearing voices.
I'm not denying that the brain has massive throughput from the senses, but you really shouldn't try to measure it in digital terms. It's all analogue.
The real crime here is that Smed and Lucas are so busy screwing the dead horse they've created of the game experience that they're unwilling to realize that all the 'image upgrades' in the world won't magically add fun back into the game.
SWG was a heap and a half when it shipped. It's less than half a heap now that all the depth has been artificially amputated.
This is typical of SOE, but I really did expect better from Lucasarts.
Not only can God run on Linux, but Linux can run on God. This creates a sort of Deus ex Virtual Machina where You have have Linux running on God running on Linux running on God running on Linux, and so on.
God also releases both His sources and binaries in a variety of formats. You've got Adam and Eve, the Immaculate Conception, and Holy Communion. Not only are you made in His image, but you've also got His DNA.
Being insured against lawsuits is the single quickest way to get sued.
That said, I'm-a thinkin' about sending these fellers $19 for merely the piece of paper. I doubt a Sweedish firm would be a lot of help for Americans sent to Guantanamo and summarily tortured for their file sharing offenses, but I'd certainly like to see such a business model be proven worth-while.
This kind of protection boils down to "We'll insure you against racketeering." Right now, I'd love to have that here in the U.S.. I try to keep my nose clean, but I had a friend get reamed not too long ago for many thousands of dollars because he was caught with a card writer during the whole Dish Network fiasco.
He even wanted to fight it, but his lawyer advised him that the settlement would be cheaper in the long run. Defacto tyrrany by lawsuit is a growing norm. I'd *LOVE* to be a facless $19 statistic in some anti-tyrrany organization's counter.
What he *should* have done was create a blacklist of IPs known to belong to DirectTV and any business partners they may have had.
It occurs that after an initial setup using existing 'No *PAA blacklists' the process could have been automated fairly easily by scanning his web logs for uncool IPs.
Slashdot Mirror
(Angular Momentum Conservation + Relativity) = migraine headache
From what I've read and understand (Astrophysics types PLEASE correct me):
If the part of the star that collapses into a singularity has any angular momentum when it collapses, then the singularity itself takes the form of a ring with a zero-dimension cross-section. The rate of spin and the diameter of the ring is determined by the mass of the singularity and the amount of angular momentum the singularity contains.
Therefore, there is not a point singularity to spin infinitely fast, but the ring singularity can be rotating at a fantastic clip depending on how much mass it contains.
Also, if I understand correctly, this spin is what's responsible for the gamma ray bursts. As matter is shredded by collapsing through the event horizon, some of its energy is released along the spin axis as cyclotron radiation.
Again, AP types please correct me on the details.
The ability to kill 'required' services, for example. It can be done, but not as 'Administrator'. Also, you have to pull some tricks to make filesystem changes to files marked 'protected' by Windows... or that any 3rd party marks as 'protected'.
1. Kernel Mode Drivers - Once Linux actually gets drivers for something, support tends to be rock solid-- a fair bit better than XP. However, this is the one place BSD-type OSess really outshine Macro-Kernal OSes. Even though my home Windows and Linux PCs are far faster than my work Mac, sometimes I cry when trying to get odd hardware to work on them. Even if you have some crap pieces of hardware with a crap driver, you can axe the driver rather than the whole OS in OSX.
2. I'll accept the good/bad rationale. One of the really stupid things is all the indirection in the registry. Why must so many settings be hidden behind a cryptic GUID, for example?
3. DRM. This is sort-of-like the OE being part of the OS. It's not, but you'd think it was if you paid attention to MS. Windows Media Player series applies DRM to even user-specific content by default, like ripped CDs. The DRM and licenses get more restrictive with each new incarnation of DRM. I've helped more than one non-techie friend who ran into a 'Why can't I listen to my own CD'-type problem and simply couldn't figure out how to get around it.
These friends were quite happy to be introduced to MPC and VLC.
XP is not a bad OS when you tally up the features vs. problems. Saying that 'I can't believe people are willing to put up with the bugs' is about like saying 'I can't beleive people are willing to put up with compatibility issues' when discussing the Linux distro of your choice. They're not the same problem, but they're about the same order of magnitude.
Please don't mistake me for a Microsoft apologist, though. XP does have some serious flaws.
My take on the worst flaws of XP:
Kernelspace Hardware Drivers - A driver that locks up the system is BAD! I'd be willing to bet that every Windows XP user has at least one such driver on their system.
Cryptic Registry Settings - I've never quite gotten why it was determined that putting all your settings and configuration in one basket was deemed to be a good idea. I can't think of any positive justification whatsoever for this.
OS-level DRM - Bad for so many reasons.
Enabling executeable content by default in Outlook Express - The source of the vast majority of Windows Specific internet worms. This is not really an OS specific issue, but Microsoft is pretty keen on insisting the OE is an uninstallable part of the OS.
No real super-user - You can get 'SYSTEM' user access in Windows via illegitimate means. There is no mechanism for a machine administrator to get this without some sort of hack or workaround.
Crippled IP stack - There are a lot of features between the desktop and server distributions that are crippled to try to keep people from running servers with the desktop distros. Completely fucking pointless since the real money in server distros is not licensing fees, but the support contracts companies.
The first time I read the headline I was confused about what it meant. Was there some sort of position he turned down? Did he quit an important job?
I've always despised death euphamisms, though. Trying to tone the tragedy down doesn't make it any easier to deal with for friends, families, or looker-ons. It also takes away from the importance of the death itself.
He's dead. The man was killed in an auto accident. It's a sad, tragic ending, but it's the truth.
Wikipedia doesn't work like a regular encyclopedia. Stephen Colbert is making fun of us. The modern media hates us because we're not Encyclopedia Britanica.
Wikipedia is a wonderful thing. On top of being an incredible source for information, it's an excercise in damage control and chaos theory. Wikipedia works, not despite page defacers and fact monglers, but *because* of them. Without the constant controversy surrounding things like politicians changing their own wiki entries, innacurate or false information would tend to sit in the pool and stagnate.
Wikipedia is not a traditional encyclopedia. It's not meant to be one. It's not meant to work like one. Trying to treat it like one is foolish. Trying to base a traditional encyclopedia off of Wikipedia is foolish.
The 'Corporate Overlord IE Mandate' is not to be underrated.
I work in an office that settled on IE a long time ago... before Firefox and before free Opera. This was back when IE simply was the best browser because Netscape had stagnated, Mozilla wasn't even in beta, and Microsoft's anti-competitive tactics worked.
The workstation images still have IE as the only browser by default, and the majority of the office doesn't have the privalege of installing their own software due to all the stupid things users can get up to.
Anyone who really wants it gets Firefox, including non-tech users who mention to one of the admins that they'd like it. Most of the office, however, is far too busy with work to worry about which browser they have installed. IE works and is sufficiently secured by our NT admins to be useable and safe for the majority of our users, including geeks and the tech-saavy.
These are not stupid or uneducated people. They use Firefox at home. If they hit Slashdot from work, they're likely to be doing it via IE.
TFA mentions wireless via natural gas pipes.
My guess is that the system depends on the pipes to act as waveguides and rectifiers. Pity those who don't have metal pipes.
Supes would never notice the good Doctor dicking around with his history.
And the Doctor wouldn't... unless he had a good reason, but could always regenerate and go back in time to bust Jor-el's chops.
Love story with a sci-fi twist.
This is why the ultimate downhill slide after TNG ended. Berman and pals were catering to the fans who wanted to know exactly how phasers worked rather than the fans who wanted to see hot Riker/Picard action.
It occurs that we need to revisit the problem here.
Captchas are a way of trying to determine that there is a human at the keyboard rather than a bot. If we verify that we have a human doing the work here and not a computer then we can be assured that the service we're providing is not being harvested for nefarious means.
The problem with this is that human labor is cheap, especially if you find some way around the various sweatshop protections we have in the civilized world. How much do Chinese gold farmers make?
Perhaps the questions we ought to be asking in order to prevent harvesting are 'Does this client seem like it's not a bot?"
1. Has this client's IP address requested this service in the last 2 minutes?
2. Does this client appear to be a fully-fledged web browswer as opposed to a bot that understands http 1.1?
Number 1 is easy. Chuck out requests from IPs that have already made requests in the last few minutes. Fairly intelligent flooding ban algorithms are realtively common.
Number 2 is a little harder, but still straight-forward. Provide the client with a problem that must be solved in Javascript. The problem should be arranged so that the solution takes a few seconds or so to work out. The client has to send the correct answer back with the request for the service.
If both these are observed, it puts a little more strain on those trying to harvest services. The amount they can harvest is limited to the number of IPs they have per requests the server will allow. The client must also understand Javascript and be willing to spend the CPU cycles to work out the math problem hurdle.
The 'live user' who wants to request the service does so fairly easily, but the bot who wants to harvest the service suddenly finds himself up to the ears in bans and 100% cpu usage.
Anyway, this is just a suggestion. I'm convinced that trying to determine that the client is alive is simply the wrong direction. Instead we should be proactive and try to find solutions that hamper the bots.
I can't believe I just read that many stories talking about how easy it is to get hit with sexual harassment, and then nothing defending WHY we have laws and monitors for that sort of thing. You guys sound like the sort of guys who seriously think a lot of women lie about being raped.
I have no idea where you guys work, but I am having serious trouble believing any of those stories.
A lot of us work at places that are under federal scrutiny for one reason or another.
Yes, the laws are there for a reason. It's extremely unfortuneate that your girlfriend was treated so badly when she tried to report her situation. She definitely has grounds for a lawsuit on being so casually dismissed when making her claims.
However, I think that in the current political climate, this is the exception rather than the norm.
Many IT companies, including mine, have overzealous 'Zero Tolerance' policies towards sexual harassment. At some point, the accountants, hr staffers, and legal staffers have come to the consensus that it's simply better to practice a scorched earth policy than excercise any judgement or responsibility. The threat of lawsuit must be minimized at any cost, no matter how extreme or reactionary.
I can very honestly say that in my job, my employment would probably be over the same day that any female employee in the company made a claim of harassment. I would likely have no opportunity to explain things from my point of view or defend myself.
Luckily, most of the women I work with understand this as well. For the most part, they're all very careful not to place me or the other male employees in questionable situations.
People who like to imagine that women frequently lie about being raped or that they file false harassment complaints are exhibiting sexism... the same kind of quiet bigotry that holds that all women are basically dishonest or that all blacks are basically violent. It's stupid and backwards, but it is common.
However, women are people too, and people are inherently corrupt. False accusations do happen occasionally, and when these accusations take place, reputations are destroyed and lives are ruined. It comes from both men and women.
The lawyer thing is actually a pretty serious detriment to male-female interactions at work.
Most IT houses these days have pretty strict sexual harassment rules. Even small computer centers have "Harassment Awareness" training of some kind. The idea that sexual harassment == being sued and/or fired is hammered in to IT workers to the extreme.
Worse, there are no end of horror stories about an innocent comment or action being construted as harassment by overzealous HR departments. How many times have we all heard the old saw about an unscrupulous woman pressing sexual harassment charges? It's mostly urban legend and closet sexism, but the idea is still there.
The net effect is that even very well-adjusted male IT personell are wary of offending a woman, should it result in loss of employment. They'll avoid conversations with women at work, not out of sexism, but out of a sense of personal safety.
The unfortuneate not-so-well-adjusted IT guys are TERRIFIED. The guys who had trouble talking to females in highschool and college suddenly find themselves under threat of legal action when they enter the workplace, as well as ordinary crushing rejection.
If a woman wants to interact with these guys, she's going to have to make the first move.
No, a woman shouldn't have to prove anything upon entering the workplace. Unfortuneately, the climate that's been created by an oversensitivity to sexual harassment means that a woman has a lot to prove. Sad, but true.
She's got to prove that she won't sue someone for a social mistake.
After RTFA, it occurs that this is mostly a research project. The goals (and downloadables) include libraries that allow PCs to mount a distributed encrypted filesystem and others.
In a business example where you know that you can ultimately control the sites where you're storing your partial data, this would be a very good thing.
For the single user attempting to secure his information by using the existing network, there are some downfalls. 6 of 1l slices of the data are needed to recontstruct the whole. Therefore if a party intent on obtaining secret data obtains the majority of the servers, he has the data.
Also, if a disaster wipes out the majority of the servers, leaving five or less of the eleven, the data is gone.
This is a very, very important concept for business storage, but I have to wonder if it scratches any geek itches not already soothed by Truecrypt and Par2.
I feel that free speech should be an absolute, even when it's harmful. To use the old saw I think that the damage of yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theatre is far less than the damage of allowing any kind of restrictions on free speech.
That being said, why berate Google, who's voluntarily filtering their own information, and not berate Cisco, who's designed and built a great deal of the routing equipment used by the PDRC government to filter and monitor internet traffic... the so called 'Great Firewall of China'?
I certainly don't care for Google's actions, but I think that Cisco's are just as heinous, if not worse than Yahoo's dissident incrimination.
That's kinda given for Sony, so I didn't bother.
"Hmm... Earthquake today."
"ITS TEH PIRATS THEYS IN OUR BASE STEALIN OUR DVDS"
This is really typical of Sony. For the last 30 years Sony has iterated this process over and over again.
1. Develop really nice content format.
2. Promote the hell out of new content format.
3. Artificially CRIPPLE THE FUCK out of new content format.
4. Wonder why people aren't buying new content format.
5. Abandon new content format.
See also: BetaMax, MiniDisc, MemoryStick, UDF, etc...
I should say this is really typical of Sony USA. Things like MiniDisc were really popular in Japan, but the restrictions imposed on the format came from pressures from Sony's U.S. media divisions.
Sony execs and marketing people refuse to learn from their mistakes, so they keep repeating them. They've been doing it over and over again for literally decades now.
As a matter of fact, unless HD-DVD manages to be as easy to uncripple as DVDs (and it appears that it will be), it too will be stillborn.
This behavior has saved my bacon more times than I care to count.
Boss: "So, why didn't you inform executive A that we were going to cut over the website this week."
Me: "I did, a few months ago, I think. I remember talking to her on the phone."
Boss: "She's swearing up and down that she's never heard anything about it."
Me: "Bullshit." (When said to your boss, you'd BETTER damn well be able to put your money where your mouth is.)
Boss: "This is a pretty big deal. It came up in the executive briefing. Do you have an email trail or anything?"
Me: "Yeah. Let me send you all the related emails. (*clickity-click*) There you go. Looks like we talked about it in May. I'm sorry she's bugging you about it."
Boss: "Don't worry about it. This is no longer our problem."
We've come a long way from the 'walled garden' model, haven't we, AOL?
Yes... we think you've had a good run, but perhaps it's time to take a rest, hmm? You've been working really hard.
Just lay down here and have some delicious kool-aid.
He was a good actor before he lost his mind that is...
WTF happened to Mel Gibson anyway? At what point did he become looney toons? Crackers? Around the Bend? Shortbussed? Start playing 52-pickup with an UNO deck?
Jeezus-H-Christ! Have you seen the guy? He looks like he's been hiding out with Osama and the WMDs.
It wasn't scientology, because he seems to be pretty devoutly christian. Did he start talking to God and God started talking back or something?
Mel, seriously, it's time to get on some anti-psychotics. They've got some good ones now that don't hardly mess with your sex-drive at all.
Your numbers are probably a bit high.
Remember that humans don't see a pixel-per-pixel representation of the world. We see a tight spot of color and detail in the center of our retina (Fovea? Bio-types please correct me) surrounded by blurry shapes and lines. Around the edges, in peripheral we don't even see color, just luminance.
Proof? Take a bright LED lamp and move it into your peripheral vision. What color is it, not from memory, but just from looking at it?
The Fovea-area of the retina is more densely packed cells and blood vessels. It has more cones -- Chroma-type cells -- than rods.
This indistinct image is inverted and processed into a whole by the brain, which carefully processes different shapes, lines, movement, flickering, and what-not to produce what you THINK you see. The brain fills in any given pieces of the image that don't have enough detail, frequently from memory.
This is why optical illusions work. You deceive the biological mechanisms that process the image into producing bad data by giving them a skewed sample of the image.
Also, neural mechanisms are asynchronous and really can't be mesured in a k/s rate. You perceive a flicker of motion one second and then a spot of color the next. This is assembled into a ball that you turn to face-- to get a better image-- and then catch. Your brain has a lot of built-in firmware to do image manipulation, built you have to 'learn' the software necessary to do pattern matching and response over your lifetime.
You only get a few bits worth of information for the first few milliseconds that you're recognizing the ball, and then many megabytes worth the last few second.
Another thing... as sensitive and immersive as vision is, your ears probably have much, much more data input. They have vastly more dynamic range. Most people don't even notice themselves filling in visual information with audio information, but it does happen.
For example, you hear a person's voice, and you *think* you see their face.
Close your eyes when talking to someone, especially when in a group. Note how easy it is to visualize faces just from hearing voices.
I'm not denying that the brain has massive throughput from the senses, but you really shouldn't try to measure it in digital terms. It's all analogue.
The real crime here is that Smed and Lucas are so busy screwing the dead horse they've created of the game experience that they're unwilling to realize that all the 'image upgrades' in the world won't magically add fun back into the game.
SWG was a heap and a half when it shipped. It's less than half a heap now that all the depth has been artificially amputated.
This is typical of SOE, but I really did expect better from Lucasarts.
If God is omnipotent, can he run on Linux?
Not only can God run on Linux, but Linux can run on God. This creates a sort of Deus ex Virtual Machina where You have have Linux running on God running on Linux running on God running on Linux, and so on.
God also releases both His sources and binaries in a variety of formats. You've got Adam and Eve, the Immaculate Conception, and Holy Communion. Not only are you made in His image, but you've also got His DNA.
Being insured against lawsuits is the single quickest way to get sued.
That said, I'm-a thinkin' about sending these fellers $19 for merely the piece of paper. I doubt a Sweedish firm would be a lot of help for Americans sent to Guantanamo and summarily tortured for their file sharing offenses, but I'd certainly like to see such a business model be proven worth-while.
This kind of protection boils down to "We'll insure you against racketeering." Right now, I'd love to have that here in the U.S.. I try to keep my nose clean, but I had a friend get reamed not too long ago for many thousands of dollars because he was caught with a card writer during the whole Dish Network fiasco.
He even wanted to fight it, but his lawyer advised him that the settlement would be cheaper in the long run. Defacto tyrrany by lawsuit is a growing norm. I'd *LOVE* to be a facless $19 statistic in some anti-tyrrany organization's counter.
What he *should* have done was create a blacklist of IPs known to belong to DirectTV and any business partners they may have had.
It occurs that after an initial setup using existing 'No *PAA blacklists' the process could have been automated fairly easily by scanning his web logs for uncool IPs.