I honestly think that music pirates are all either 14-year-olds to whom stealing is "cool" and "rebellious", or people who want the various corporate middle-men's cuts to be zero as opposed to the artist. There is a huge difference between the two.
If a single electron "jumping the gap" is enough to change the electrochemical gradient to above the activation threshold of the neurons and cause depolarization, then you're absolutely right -- it would be inducing an electric current. One electron isn't a whole lot, however -- you'd need the combined effects of thousands of the things to produce enough of a change in the neuronal environment to really make a difference.
Windows Active Directory has group policies which will allow you to define the answers to several of those questions -- for instance, if you define a policy that machines must authenticate with the Domain Controller when unlocking the workstation, and have mandated (I think it is automatic, in fact) that you must enter a password when returning from sleep mode, then I imagine waking up, getting a password prompt, and if your login time is expired it shouldn't let you back in. Network applications that handle network disconnect/reconnect will be okay. Others will probably glitch.
Same on a domain -- just as you can login to a Windows PC in an Active Directory network in offline mode (authenticate using cached credentials and profiles) it would work just the same for sleep -- there are no problems there.
If you go to sleep on one domain and are plugged into another one, Windows will continue right along pretending it is connected to the old domain -- changing domains isn't an automatic process (you have to remove and re-join the new one), your computer will use cached policies and cached profiles and so forth. If you mean the fact that your DNS suffix and IP address may change, then in that case, it should be handled by the application just as any network disconnect/reconnect.
Waking up and having no slot on the server will likely trigger an error message in the application to the effect of "connection to the server lost." I would think, anyway. Any application that doesn't manage to keep track of its own connection status after it connects is so broken already...
Finally, many many many applications are able to track when a document opened in their window has been modified by an external source, and give you the option to reload the copy from the disk to ensure you're editing the most recent version.
I am not a sex offender, nor do I have inklings that would lead me to become one, but I also don't register my MySpace under my real name simply because I don't want people to be able to search for me.
It's not going to do any good to prevent people from registering under alternate e-mail addresses and psuedonyms to get on the site.
The libertarian in me also doesn't believe in sex-offender registries or blacklists such as this one -- the person most likely already went to prison and has a record that will follow them the rest of their life, why not give them a legitimate chance to actually be rehabilitated? Surely the stigmatization of being labeled and tracked the rest of their lives can't help them recover and not re-offend, after all. And if they do it again, well, lock them up for longer or forever.
I'm a long-time Windows fan (cue flames) but it's the honest truth. I get older and busier and have long-since dropped computers as a hobby, and use them exclusively to "get the job done" which means watching TV on my media center, burning CDs for use in my car, Word documents, and Internet browsing. I've never needed anything more than that.
I don't plan to upgrade to Windows Vista for a year or so, most likely...if ever. I'm gradually letting my "hobbiest" knowledge lapse since I am getting out of tech as a job in the near future, but remain computer literate. And my plan is: when I get a new PC, I'm going to (gasp) load a Linux distribution onto it.
People have convinced me that Linux is, at this point, reasonable enough to configure to work on common hardware without a lot of fuss. I'll dual-boot Windows XP, or use Wine, or something -- but Vista's DRM scares me just a little bit, and I am a historic *supporter* of DRM (cue flames again) for a variety of reasons.
I imagine that Vista may prompt Linux desktop adoption to a bit of a degree, as corporations and "power-users" (somewhere between Joe User and Joe Admin) decide "hey, I've heard this Linux thing works and is free" and go for it.
The problem is, in fact, the American education system as a whole -- but not the quality of the education received.
It's a well-known fact that some young adults just don't get along with their parents. It's insane and totally incorrect to think that the two parties have to like each other at all once the child has developed their own personality, and this does, in fact happen quite often.
The American education system is set up such that, unless you are EXTREMELY motivated and fairly bright to boot, you will never get a college education without massive financial help from parents.
Case in point, students at my University, even with 100% tuition scholarship and 100% of the maximum Stafford loans, are thousands of dollars short of the bare essentials required to attend class (tuition, housing, books). Add in things food (on-campus dining plan for the cheap, grocery store if you've got a bigger budget) and you've increased it by another almost $2500 a year. Want to ever socialize, ever? A few thousand more over the course of the year.
Students are left with several choices: work (a part-time job would cover the rest of housing and 2 meals a day with no socializing), or ask your parents to give you money.
For someone who can't ask their parents, and knows they can't afford college in the first place as a result -- why bother finishing high school? There are no skills actually produced in a high school classroom anymore, and students realize this.
On an MS DHCP server, just open up the management console for the server -- there's a listing of active leases which will tell you which addresses are in use, and the corresponding MAC and IPs.
An object in LEO tethered to the ground would fall back instantly with very dramatic effect. Only with the weight out at geosync would the force of gravity be counteracted by the force of the rotation.
The ISS orbits pretty rapidly -- it's never over the same part of the earth at the same point in time. It's impossible to tether to it as a result.
I would like very much to own one of these processors, and fully intend on buying one for my RetailEdge bundle motherboard.
I run real-time hard crypto on all of my disks (except my boot disk, this is a Windows system after all) and I'm not talking about that wimpy EFS either. I'm severely CPU-bottlenecked right now, with a dual-core processor.
Having quad cores, I'd use an affinity manager to force the encryption/decryption processes to bind only to the second physical CPU, giving the crypto (and maybe some other background processes like my media servers and so forth) their own dual-core infrastructure, but keeping it from needing to talk on the Northbridge too much. For the rest of the system, bind it only to the first 2 physical CPUs.
For these types of situations, letting the computer manage the resources itself isn't necessarily the best way to do it, especially when the scheduler and infrastructure weren't really designed with what you're doing in mind. A little human intuition (let's keep things from needing to talk over the northbridge too much in the first place!) goes a long way...
Even if this yielded no performance gains at all, I should certainly think that having two modules/4 processors would allow for more scaling of single-threaded applications at one time, anyway.
Assuming it can be implanted somewhere that won't cause a problem in my daily life, I don't have any issue with a subcutaneous dose of some time-release medication if it means infalliable no-effort birth control.
The most likely place -- loose skin under the armpits -- happens to be an uncomfortable place for me, however. I suppose there are a dozen other locations it could be slipped, as well.
That's the hormonally-based one, the new approach tested in rats binds a destructive enzyme to a hormone that naturally travels to the testes, keeping it from going rampant around your body and keeping sperm from attaching to the structures which maintain them before they end up inside your partner's body. Result being, sperm don't make it out alive.
As soon as the solution is released onto the market, I'll be on it -- whatever said solution is.
One of the fundamental tenants of social psychology, indeed any psychology, is that common sense isn't.
Just because "everyone knows" something doesn't necessarily make it true, thusly, just as in mathematics where a good mathematician has the ability to prove, from the ground up, the entire system of numbers -- social psychologists are attempting to prove, from the ground up, the mechanisms that underlie human behavior.
People never say things about studies being worthless or "common sense" in topics like physics or biology -- but as soon as psychology comes around, suddenly everyone is a quadruple Ph.D. -- especially on Slashdot.
If this is the same Dr. Sharif who is responsible for, among other things, the "Robber's Cave" experiment with sweeping ramifications for social psychology, he's about as far from a crackpot trying to jump on the bandwagon as one can get.
I tend to dismiss these sorts of studies as fearmongering and ignorant grandstanding, but I'll have to look up the full text of the study and do a bit more reading coming from someone who I know to be well respected in his field, and my field of study.
I own one, it has to be doing something since the collection grid fills up with lint and so forth every couple of weeks. I just tested the "no air flow" thing by putting a piece of tissue paper over the output and it blew around like their was air moving, so it seemed to be doing something.
Granted, it's not a great amount of air flow, but I've noticed an improvement in the indoor air quality of my room since installing the thing.
Yes, it is. She was ordered to allow her computer to be searched. At this point, it became illegal for her to modify the contents of the hard drive because it would be violating the court order. She then proceded to erase her hard drive, an illegal action, destroying the evidence against her. This is clearly illegal, and she was treated accordingly.
Just the same as if, when faced with a discovery order, the CEO of a company had a shredding party then turned over a ream of blank paper and said "that's all I could find."
This doesn't set a wrong precedent at all -- the Court ordered that the Defendant turn over their hard drive for examination.
After the order was in place, the Defendant then elected to destroy the contents of their hard drive, meaning the prosecution would receive nothing of value in response to the order.
I think this sets a very good precedent -- if you thumb your nose at the legal process, you can expect to lose instantly. The entire system operates on the principle that both sides will respect the decisions of the court (verified by force in certain decisions) and if one party goes outside of that, bad things are to happen.
Computer science, as in the math-heavy discipline involving algorithm design and development, doesn't mean you're good at IT support related things.
Computer science as in writing code doesn't exist. The correct name for that field is computer application development, computer programming, or something of that nature. (Software engineering is not the same thing, either.)
Thusly, the fact that your CS professor, who is mostly a math guy, can't install a printer should neither count against him nor be surprising.
If WMP Vista is the only player licensed with the AACS or whatever encryption scheme is on HD sources, and the algorithm itself is more secure, I doubt VLC would be able to add the function. The problem is licensing the decryption keys...If you can't read the HD source, you can't display it after all.
They'd stop you from taking those things on a plane at the security checkpoint. Security is going to ask you about the xray-opaque cans and metal strips, get a lame excuse, and be told to either check them or throw them out, if they don't flat-out arrest you for trying to smuggle something.
I'd think a TSA screener is smart enough to know "if you don't know what it is, don't let it onboard" even if this means that a few legitimate things are denied clearance. There's no reason someone needs to bring Mg strips/filings and Fe + Al powder on a plane in the first place, and common sense dictates that.
I'd imagine the screeners are trained in that sort of thing as well.
The heat source is decaying radioactive waste, typically not something you want around people. They put them on spacecrafts because there's little danger of someone else getting hit by the radiation as the device operates. Putting them on the Earth would require extensive shielding, and turn every data center into a potential terrorist dirty bomb target.
I'd say that as soon as the kid is trustworthy enough to go places without the parents, they should be given a cell phone and allowed to do as such. Of course, for some individuals, this puts the age at 18 years old when they can legally get their own, but for most, it's around the driving age.
This has been expressed many times in this thread.
I'm of mixed opinion about fully-qualified vs. feature-limited phones for younger people who are using them, though. How many people is Joe Twelve going to be actually calling? Sure, he might call his friends who also have cell phones, but it's unlikely he'd make very much use of the gadget if he does have it. Additionally, every single cell phone I've seen (kid-marketed or not) does have the ability to restrict various settings. I had a Qualcomm Kyocera phone that had security options such as restrict outgoing calls to numbers in the address book only, disable adding new entries to the address book, and disable the window where the phone told you its own phone number so you couldn't give it to people and tell them to call you. My Nokia has something similar, I'm pretty sure, although I haven't looked.
These features allow you to easily cripple any phone and turn it into something akin to the LG Verizon MiGi device, except with the ability to, say, re-enable the blocked features if the owner is going away somewhere they need them. Out, for instance, with grandparents, or a friend or friend's family, where they might need to dial other people for a while.
It would also allow the phone to be "unlocked" as the kid got older or got more responsible, or both.
More and more people I know don't maintain landline service, or have that service in the sense that they have wires running out to their house but lines are so poor it's nearly never used. These people have cell phones as their only method of communication, and people tend to not like sharing with other people. I think it's perfectly acceptable to give a kid a feature-limited line on a family talk plan or something in these situations, at a very early age. For others, not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
I honestly think that music pirates are all either 14-year-olds to whom stealing is "cool" and "rebellious", or people who want the various corporate middle-men's cuts to be zero as opposed to the artist. There is a huge difference between the two.
If a single electron "jumping the gap" is enough to change the electrochemical gradient to above the activation threshold of the neurons and cause depolarization, then you're absolutely right -- it would be inducing an electric current. One electron isn't a whole lot, however -- you'd need the combined effects of thousands of the things to produce enough of a change in the neuronal environment to really make a difference.
Windows Active Directory has group policies which will allow you to define the answers to several of those questions -- for instance, if you define a policy that machines must authenticate with the Domain Controller when unlocking the workstation, and have mandated (I think it is automatic, in fact) that you must enter a password when returning from sleep mode, then I imagine waking up, getting a password prompt, and if your login time is expired it shouldn't let you back in. Network applications that handle network disconnect/reconnect will be okay. Others will probably glitch.
Same on a domain -- just as you can login to a Windows PC in an Active Directory network in offline mode (authenticate using cached credentials and profiles) it would work just the same for sleep -- there are no problems there.
If you go to sleep on one domain and are plugged into another one, Windows will continue right along pretending it is connected to the old domain -- changing domains isn't an automatic process (you have to remove and re-join the new one), your computer will use cached policies and cached profiles and so forth. If you mean the fact that your DNS suffix and IP address may change, then in that case, it should be handled by the application just as any network disconnect/reconnect.
Waking up and having no slot on the server will likely trigger an error message in the application to the effect of "connection to the server lost." I would think, anyway. Any application that doesn't manage to keep track of its own connection status after it connects is so broken already...
Finally, many many many applications are able to track when a document opened in their window has been modified by an external source, and give you the option to reload the copy from the disk to ensure you're editing the most recent version.
I am not a sex offender, nor do I have inklings that would lead me to become one, but I also don't register my MySpace under my real name simply because I don't want people to be able to search for me.
It's not going to do any good to prevent people from registering under alternate e-mail addresses and psuedonyms to get on the site.
The libertarian in me also doesn't believe in sex-offender registries or blacklists such as this one -- the person most likely already went to prison and has a record that will follow them the rest of their life, why not give them a legitimate chance to actually be rehabilitated? Surely the stigmatization of being labeled and tracked the rest of their lives can't help them recover and not re-offend, after all. And if they do it again, well, lock them up for longer or forever.
I'm a long-time Windows fan (cue flames) but it's the honest truth. I get older and busier and have long-since dropped computers as a hobby, and use them exclusively to "get the job done" which means watching TV on my media center, burning CDs for use in my car, Word documents, and Internet browsing. I've never needed anything more than that.
I don't plan to upgrade to Windows Vista for a year or so, most likely...if ever. I'm gradually letting my "hobbiest" knowledge lapse since I am getting out of tech as a job in the near future, but remain computer literate. And my plan is: when I get a new PC, I'm going to (gasp) load a Linux distribution onto it.
People have convinced me that Linux is, at this point, reasonable enough to configure to work on common hardware without a lot of fuss. I'll dual-boot Windows XP, or use Wine, or something -- but Vista's DRM scares me just a little bit, and I am a historic *supporter* of DRM (cue flames again) for a variety of reasons.
I imagine that Vista may prompt Linux desktop adoption to a bit of a degree, as corporations and "power-users" (somewhere between Joe User and Joe Admin) decide "hey, I've heard this Linux thing works and is free" and go for it.
That's my plan, anyway.
The problem is, in fact, the American education system as a whole -- but not the quality of the education received.
It's a well-known fact that some young adults just don't get along with their parents. It's insane and totally incorrect to think that the two parties have to like each other at all once the child has developed their own personality, and this does, in fact happen quite often.
The American education system is set up such that, unless you are EXTREMELY motivated and fairly bright to boot, you will never get a college education without massive financial help from parents.
Case in point, students at my University, even with 100% tuition scholarship and 100% of the maximum Stafford loans, are thousands of dollars short of the bare essentials required to attend class (tuition, housing, books). Add in things food (on-campus dining plan for the cheap, grocery store if you've got a bigger budget) and you've increased it by another almost $2500 a year. Want to ever socialize, ever? A few thousand more over the course of the year.
Students are left with several choices: work (a part-time job would cover the rest of housing and 2 meals a day with no socializing), or ask your parents to give you money.
For someone who can't ask their parents, and knows they can't afford college in the first place as a result -- why bother finishing high school? There are no skills actually produced in a high school classroom anymore, and students realize this.
On an MS DHCP server, just open up the management console for the server -- there's a listing of active leases which will tell you which addresses are in use, and the corresponding MAC and IPs.
I'm not familiar with BIND.
An object in LEO tethered to the ground would fall back instantly with very dramatic effect. Only with the weight out at geosync would the force of gravity be counteracted by the force of the rotation.
The ISS orbits pretty rapidly -- it's never over the same part of the earth at the same point in time. It's impossible to tether to it as a result.
It's more a product of my being really bored one afternoon, then reading about TrueCrypt.
Who needs porn when I hvae a girlfriend, anyway?
I would like very much to own one of these processors, and fully intend on buying one for my RetailEdge bundle motherboard.
I run real-time hard crypto on all of my disks (except my boot disk, this is a Windows system after all) and I'm not talking about that wimpy EFS either. I'm severely CPU-bottlenecked right now, with a dual-core processor.
Having quad cores, I'd use an affinity manager to force the encryption/decryption processes to bind only to the second physical CPU, giving the crypto (and maybe some other background processes like my media servers and so forth) their own dual-core infrastructure, but keeping it from needing to talk on the Northbridge too much. For the rest of the system, bind it only to the first 2 physical CPUs.
For these types of situations, letting the computer manage the resources itself isn't necessarily the best way to do it, especially when the scheduler and infrastructure weren't really designed with what you're doing in mind. A little human intuition (let's keep things from needing to talk over the northbridge too much in the first place!) goes a long way...
Even if this yielded no performance gains at all, I should certainly think that having two modules/4 processors would allow for more scaling of single-threaded applications at one time, anyway.
Assuming it can be implanted somewhere that won't cause a problem in my daily life, I don't have any issue with a subcutaneous dose of some time-release medication if it means infalliable no-effort birth control.
The most likely place -- loose skin under the armpits -- happens to be an uncomfortable place for me, however. I suppose there are a dozen other locations it could be slipped, as well.
That's the hormonally-based one, the new approach tested in rats binds a destructive enzyme to a hormone that naturally travels to the testes, keeping it from going rampant around your body and keeping sperm from attaching to the structures which maintain them before they end up inside your partner's body. Result being, sperm don't make it out alive.
As soon as the solution is released onto the market, I'll be on it -- whatever said solution is.
Agreed - I played Silent Hill in the dark with a friend of mine from start to finish, and it was amazing.
The movie was okay, but the games are so much better.
One of the fundamental tenants of social psychology, indeed any psychology, is that common sense isn't.
Just because "everyone knows" something doesn't necessarily make it true, thusly, just as in mathematics where a good mathematician has the ability to prove, from the ground up, the entire system of numbers -- social psychologists are attempting to prove, from the ground up, the mechanisms that underlie human behavior.
People never say things about studies being worthless or "common sense" in topics like physics or biology -- but as soon as psychology comes around, suddenly everyone is a quadruple Ph.D. -- especially on Slashdot.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/ 118/4/e1061
Read the thing before you dismiss it, the authors are very well known and respected researchers.
If this is the same Dr. Sharif who is responsible for, among other things, the "Robber's Cave" experiment with sweeping ramifications for social psychology, he's about as far from a crackpot trying to jump on the bandwagon as one can get.
I tend to dismiss these sorts of studies as fearmongering and ignorant grandstanding, but I'll have to look up the full text of the study and do a bit more reading coming from someone who I know to be well respected in his field, and my field of study.
I own one, it has to be doing something since the collection grid fills up with lint and so forth every couple of weeks. I just tested the "no air flow" thing by putting a piece of tissue paper over the output and it blew around like their was air moving, so it seemed to be doing something.
Granted, it's not a great amount of air flow, but I've noticed an improvement in the indoor air quality of my room since installing the thing.
Yes, it is. She was ordered to allow her computer to be searched. At this point, it became illegal for her to modify the contents of the hard drive because it would be violating the court order. She then proceded to erase her hard drive, an illegal action, destroying the evidence against her. This is clearly illegal, and she was treated accordingly.
Just the same as if, when faced with a discovery order, the CEO of a company had a shredding party then turned over a ream of blank paper and said "that's all I could find."
This doesn't set a wrong precedent at all -- the Court ordered that the Defendant turn over their hard drive for examination.
After the order was in place, the Defendant then elected to destroy the contents of their hard drive, meaning the prosecution would receive nothing of value in response to the order.
I think this sets a very good precedent -- if you thumb your nose at the legal process, you can expect to lose instantly. The entire system operates on the principle that both sides will respect the decisions of the court (verified by force in certain decisions) and if one party goes outside of that, bad things are to happen.
Computer science, as in the math-heavy discipline involving algorithm design and development, doesn't mean you're good at IT support related things.
Computer science as in writing code doesn't exist. The correct name for that field is computer application development, computer programming, or something of that nature. (Software engineering is not the same thing, either.)
Thusly, the fact that your CS professor, who is mostly a math guy, can't install a printer should neither count against him nor be surprising.
If WMP Vista is the only player licensed with the AACS or whatever encryption scheme is on HD sources, and the algorithm itself is more secure, I doubt VLC would be able to add the function. The problem is licensing the decryption keys...If you can't read the HD source, you can't display it after all.
They'd stop you from taking those things on a plane at the security checkpoint. Security is going to ask you about the xray-opaque cans and metal strips, get a lame excuse, and be told to either check them or throw them out, if they don't flat-out arrest you for trying to smuggle something.
I'd think a TSA screener is smart enough to know "if you don't know what it is, don't let it onboard" even if this means that a few legitimate things are denied clearance. There's no reason someone needs to bring Mg strips/filings and Fe + Al powder on a plane in the first place, and common sense dictates that.
I'd imagine the screeners are trained in that sort of thing as well.
Well, I guess that's something, seeing how far we can do and what happens when we get past our solar system.
They should really send some more, newer, faster probes out to hopefully cover that distance in less time with more available power.
The heat source is decaying radioactive waste, typically not something you want around people. They put them on spacecrafts because there's little danger of someone else getting hit by the radiation as the device operates. Putting them on the Earth would require extensive shielding, and turn every data center into a potential terrorist dirty bomb target.
Is Voyager 1 providing any useful information any more, besides the becon signal and trajectory information? Wasn't there a Voyager 2?
I'm curious what's failed on the probe so far. After 30 years, something has to have died.
I'd say that as soon as the kid is trustworthy enough to go places without the parents, they should be given a cell phone and allowed to do as such. Of course, for some individuals, this puts the age at 18 years old when they can legally get their own, but for most, it's around the driving age.
This has been expressed many times in this thread.
I'm of mixed opinion about fully-qualified vs. feature-limited phones for younger people who are using them, though. How many people is Joe Twelve going to be actually calling? Sure, he might call his friends who also have cell phones, but it's unlikely he'd make very much use of the gadget if he does have it. Additionally, every single cell phone I've seen (kid-marketed or not) does have the ability to restrict various settings. I had a Qualcomm Kyocera phone that had security options such as restrict outgoing calls to numbers in the address book only, disable adding new entries to the address book, and disable the window where the phone told you its own phone number so you couldn't give it to people and tell them to call you. My Nokia has something similar, I'm pretty sure, although I haven't looked.
These features allow you to easily cripple any phone and turn it into something akin to the LG Verizon MiGi device, except with the ability to, say, re-enable the blocked features if the owner is going away somewhere they need them. Out, for instance, with grandparents, or a friend or friend's family, where they might need to dial other people for a while.
It would also allow the phone to be "unlocked" as the kid got older or got more responsible, or both.
More and more people I know don't maintain landline service, or have that service in the sense that they have wires running out to their house but lines are so poor it's nearly never used. These people have cell phones as their only method of communication, and people tend to not like sharing with other people. I think it's perfectly acceptable to give a kid a feature-limited line on a family talk plan or something in these situations, at a very early age. For others, not so much.