Er, the problem with biometric identification is that (1) its not testing who you are, just that the digital input matches some value and (2) you can't change what its testing.
You can't change who you are. Thus, once the key is compromised, it stays compromised.
The parent poster writes: The master slave argument is bound to elicit pretty strong feeling in many subgroups, just because the majority of readers on slashdot are white males, does not mean that everyone shares the same ambivilence or distance from such issues as apartheid and racism.
First of all, thank you for judging me by the color of my skin. Unfortunately, since I am a white male, I will be unable to empathize properly with others.
Ne'ermind that 1) "white" Europeans were enslaved by other "white" Europeans and 2) "white" Europeans were enslaved by Arabs and blacks in Africa. [#insert why_dont_they_teach_history_in_schools_rant.txt]
Ne'ermind that slavery still takes place in the world, some of it happening against people who share the beliefs of my family. (Google for slavery in the Sudan, and Christianity, if you are curious -- a lot of it seems to be hype, but there is good evidence of slavery in the Sudan (along with several other spots in the world)).
I think its clear: I have white skin, thus I'm to dumb to realize the political sensitivity of the words "master" and "slave".
However, I am offended at you labeling my according to my skin color.
My old Pentium 133mhz computer had some problems. I took it to a repair shop, but they said it was too old to work on and that nobody knew windows 95 anymore. What should I do?
Find a better repair shop!
Seriously, cars in the late 70's had primitive computer systems[1] - when something fails, you go to a mechanic that knows how to fix it. The electronics are pretty durable, so even if the part can't be bought new, something ripped from a junked vehicle should work. (I saw another post that mentioned 3rd party control systems that can be made to work with a variety of vehicles, this could be another choice.)
As for diagnostic machines, the US vehicles from the time had the ability to ground a pin and read the codes from a blinking idiot light. The mechanic only needs to have the books to look up the trouble codes.
*sigh* Seriously, slashdot, this is a piss poor question. Learn a bit about cars, then ask intelligent questions.
[1] Primative computer systems, but still technically computer systems.
The parent poster writes
At last: No more cliff-wall learning 'curve.'
I tried Blender long ago, and was consistently frustrated by the unneccesarily obtuse and convoluted interface. Can't wait to see if they have made some real progress.
Now, since every Blender story had dozens of people who immediately said that "changing Blender's interface will make it useless!" whenever somebody brought up how difficult it was to use: are you sticking with your old version?
Nope. In fact, I'm so inspired that Blender made their interface user friendly, that I'm going to fix vi and Emacs, and finally Linux. (Yegads, a command line. How untuitive is that!)
The parent poster writes: The use of source packages would suggest that they contain fixes and workarounds for bugs present in the pure tarballs code or documented build processes.
If you are referring to the grandparent post, he was trying to configure Mozilla in some non-vanilla way.
I suggested that he should have grabbed the source RPMs and used that as a base to build a non-vanilla Mozilla RPM on.
Mozilla (like many popular projects) have a large variety of configurations and architectures it can work on - everything from OpenBSD to Microsoft Windows. Odds are that the default configuration will not be correct for the OS, libraries, and setup you want. Distributations exist (in part) to solve this problem, highly intelligent people with an in-depth knowledge of the target platform configure the raw source (occasionally adding patches as well) and build binaries for that distributation from the changed source. By grabbing the targetted source packages for your distribution (via src rpms or your distribution's equiv.), you are thus in command of a source that should cleanly compile on your platform.
Auto-config isn't perfect. It cannot replace a learned human being for making decisions.
As for patches, there are plenty of patches that exist that are either too specialized for the main tree, too experimental, or have been implimented into a later or developmental branch but not the main branch.
As for bugs, I do not know how Redhat's bug reporting system works. Debian's bug reporting system tries to submit fixes to the upstream (read: original) maintainer in order for the fixes to be merged with the mainstream source.
As for documentation, consider this example: The amount of documentation concerning the X windows system is huge. Compiling an app such as Mozilla for a certain X setup is not a trivial task. Should the Mozilla project's documentation include hundreds of pages of information on different X Windows, Microsoft Windows, etc? Documentation which is a chore to maintain and forever at risk of being outdated? Or should it explain the options in such a way that an expert can understand them, and allow that expert to configure it for the rest of us?
I built Mozilla from source on RedHat (because I wanted to add some features to the browser) and fonts were just horrible (wrong size, illegible, etc.)
Repeat after me: Going outside of the package manager is a bad idea.
Grab the src rpm's, compile those, install. Everything works okay? Good, now tweak the src rpm's code before compiling it again.
There are some that are talented enough to be able to grab any source, and compile it perfectly on any platform 100% of the time. For those of us who are not godlike, there is making small changes to the source.
I thought (but could be wrong) that hard drives
internally split up the platters for speed games - sort of an internal 'raid 0' approach.
It would make sense - modern hard drives already lie about their geometry. If a drive has 2 platters/4 heads, by doing an internal 'raid 0', that drive is now four times faster then the competition.
Perhaps a slashdotter with a bit of hard drive clue could tell us if that's the case.
Part of the uselessness called 'science' that they
teach in schools deals with electrical current and
magnetic fields.
IIRC, the strength of an electrical field is 1/(distance^2). If we have two distances, we
can calculate the drop in the magnetic field as
follows: (1/(d1^2)) / (1/(d2^2)) or, more simply:
d1^2 / d2^2. Therefore, the difference between
living directly under the power lines (assuming that the power lines are 50ft up in the air) and the difference between living a few houses away (say 200 ft) would be 2500/40000 or 5/80ths (about 6%). Living a few more houses away (say, 200 more ft) would result in a drop of 2500/160000 or about 1.5%
The point of all this math and science is that if power lines can cause cancer, it should be rather easy to detect - cancer rates would be high under the power lines, and fall off sharply.
I have never seen a study with this result, so its probably safe to assume that power lines do not cause cancer.
What it is: A method of encrypting a hard drive, and using a
USB key-drive device and passphrase to decrypt the hard drive at boot.
Why: To protect computers (especially laptops) from unauthorized
access to the hard disk. Bios passwords, login passwords, and the
above slashdot story do not prevent the hard drive from being removed
from the machine and the data read in another machine.
How it works: The laptop's drive is AES encrypted. At boot, the
computer needs the key drive with the passkey and the matching passphrase
to transparently decrypt the drive. It keeps a copy of the passkey and
passphrase in memory, so the USB drive may be removed after booting.
It only decrypts the files that it is using, so if power is lost at any
moment, all data will remain protected.
Why its cool: Its high quality encryption, OS tools, and protects
your laptop's files from being accessed if its stolen. What more do you need?
( IMHO, way more deserving of a slashdot story then a simple electronic
hack that can be bypassed by anyone with electronics knowledge. )
The Silicon Image SATA chip SII3112[1] is supported in the 2.4.21[2] kernel
and the 2.6.0-pre kernels.
[1] There might be other SATA controller chips, but out of a dozen
motherboards with onboard SATA and a few cheap SATA controller cards, they all
have this chip.
[2] You might need one of the non-vanilla patches. I *know* its in 2.4.21-ac.
2.4.22-vanilla has the SII3112 support.
The writer in the article mentions how diverse environments lead to security
breeches. He uses the example of a workplace where the door locks are all
different, preventing one master key. This is insecure because all of the
keys for the doors were on the same ring as the key for the safe.
Obviously, master keys must have a little known feature that prevents them
from being put on a keyring with any other key.
Rob Limo's "review" reads like a windows-to-linux spoof.
That being said, when I do use IE instead of Mozilla, I am surprised by
how many websites have popups and popunders. Sure, there are (free and
commercial) applications to stop it, but its still a PITA.
I find that one of the bigger weaknesses of windows is a bunch of third
party apps, of dubious quality, with no central packaging or review committee.
Under $my_distro_of_choice, I know that I can grab one of the $thousands of
prepackaged apps out there, install it, and odds are, no crucial shared
libraries are going to be 'updated' by an older version, no spyware will be
installed, and odds are that I won't have 20 new icons on my desktop, or
that everything will be borked in odd and mysterious ways. Under the
worst-case linux scenerio, I can purge my hard drive of all the files of a
troublesome app. That's the power of package management and quality
distributions.
I had a conversation in #debian on freenode about this very issue the
other night.
I forgot who I was talking to, but he made a very good point about
software raid controllers vs hardware raid controllers:
Before you shell out money on hardware RAID, try setting it up in software
and running some tests/benchmarks. Figure out how much CPU usage that
RAID 1, RAID 0+1, RAID 5, et cetera, array is using. Then think about
if its worth buying a hardware RAID controller card.
You need to buy the drives anyways, and to set up the RAID, you'll end up
reformatting the drives anyways. Other then some time, what do you have to
lose?
If you are going to be in an office environment and passing around
documents, its a good idea to check any file you receive for viruses before
passing it along.
You do realize that SUV's are not superior in snow, don't you?
The pros of an SUV are the increased weight (more traction). That's
it (Subaru's have 4 wheel drive, so that's not an argument). A SUV is
easier to get moving.
The cons of an SUV are the increased weight. While the weight leads
to more traction, it also requires more energy to slow down and stop.
That energy doesn't disappear into the aether, but gets absorbed in
the tire/road interface. Congrats, your SUV can be more likely to
slip. (Oh, and 4 wheel drive doesn't really help sliding).
I'm not arguing that every SUV is worst off in snow then every car.
I'm sure that there are *some* SUVs that are better off then the average
car. Not all of them though.
In my experience (in Northern Minnesota) a good pair of snow tires
will do wonders for a vehicle. Especially if the vehicle has skinny
little tires for cutting through the snow. The cheap tires that are
sold on sale in a set of 4 tend to be horrible.
I've owned several front wheel drive cars and have driven them in snow
without any major problems. (For example: 2 miles down a curvy road in
about 6" of new snow) I've driven two wheel drive trucks in the snow
without major problems either, but that was with weight in the back of
the truck, and being careful. 4x4's do have better traction once you
are stuck, but aren't great. Without positraction, a 4x4 only needs to
have 2 wheels spinning to be stuck, same as a 2 wheel drive vehicle with
positraction.:)
I predict that piracy will be one of the major factors in preserving
data from these times.
Case in point: Abandonware
There are a ton of games rotting away on 3 1/2" floppies. Many of these
games are not being sold anymore. Yet these games are easily found on
abandonware sites, and it seems that plenty of people have large
abandonware collections that they keep transferring from older hard drives
to newer hard drives.
Console/Arcade games have found a large niche in emulation - How many
arcade boards will still be working in 20 years? How many Intellivisions
have you seen lately?
There is also active trading in 80's and 90's TV shows. VHS tapes degrade
over time, but that doesn't stop people from finding an old tape that's in
good condition and capturing it to the computer. Quality might not be the
best, but the video is being preserved and outside of a few dedicated 80's
IRC channels, I don't know where I'd find some shows.
Although modern books (even with the acidity in the paper of the cheap pulps)
might end up lasting a lot longer, its also possible to find plenty of
books scanned in and converted to electronic formats.
Disclaimer:
I am not trying to justify piracy of newer products. Artists, coders, and
producers deserve to be paid.
"Say Columbus took the Apollo route to the New World. He starts off with
three ships. Along about the Canary Islands he sinks the first ship, just
throws it away, deliberately. And it's his biggest ship. Come [163] to the
Bahamas, he throws away the second ship. He reaches the New World... but
his third ship can't land there. He lowers a lifeboat, sinks his third
ship, and rows ashore. He picks up a few rocks on the beach and rows right
back out to sea, across the Atlantic... and at the Strait of Gibraltar he
sinks the lifeboat and swims back to Spain with an inner tube around his
shoulders.
"If that's what it took to cross the Atlantic, this part of the world would
still belong to the Seminoles."
That would be a hell of an accomplishment by the Seminoles, considering that
the Seminoles did not exist as a tribe or nation before the arrival of the
Europeans. Seminole comes from the Spanish 'cimarron', which meant
'runaway slave'. They were a mixture of Creek and other Indians, Runaway
slaves, and whites.
The first and second Seminole wars were fought not because whites in the
United States wanted the Everglades, but because whites wanted to eliminate
a place for slaves to run away to.
Paraphrased from _Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me_, by James W. Loewen.
Joe Smith, Millionaire, might not have time to download music from the p2p
nets, and his children might have plenty of money to buy CDs, but what
happens when the kids want a song that is playing on the radio but not
released yet?
There was an Outer Limits episode about this awhile
back.
A scientist goes insane, holds up a bunch of hostages, and its revealed that he's discovered the
ability to easily create high-yeild weapons, on par with nuclear bombs.
What's worse is that all of scientific progress is heading to the point that even if he dies, chances are excellent that one or more researchers will find the exact same technique. [Basically, it was the solution to Fermi's paradox - any civilization will progress to a point where it will easily destroy itself.]
At the end of the episode, after the scientist is dead, there is a scene in a university, where a professor is handing out a test. One question is
'Prove that cold fusion is wrong'. A student starts to work on the problem, ends up scribbling frantically, then jumps out of his chair, leaving the room with his test paper to the dismay of the professor.
I've thought about the usefulness of laptops during classes, and the
best way that I've seen to make them useful would be to set up a tiny
direction microphone pointed at the lecturer, set up a small webcam, and
record.
Years ago, when my mother went back to school, she did a similiar setup with
a cassette recorder. Works well for review, if your professor does not rely
on blackboard diagrams. Else, an audio/video recorder is the way to go.
Then again, it would only take one person to do this and just share his
`notes' to the rest of the class.
Next on Slashdot: Lawsuits over recorded lectures.
I don't want to imply that the model of the modem
indicates the quality of the modem.
I did my research on the particular model
(USR 2976/5610 internal hardware PCI) and saw plenty of good reviews. I was specifically looking for an internal hardware modem, due to ease of setup under linux (its just another serial port) and to minimize any extra wires and keep my two motherboard serial ports free.
If I was going to buy another modem today, I
would look for a brandname hardware modem (internal or external) with good reviews on a variety of forums and usenet. Perhaps that would
be a USR modem, perhaps it would not be. I would not buy the glorified sound cards that are called a software modem ever again.
The more I work with computers, the more I realize that stable, quality hardware is important. I will wait until that new piece of hardware makes the rounds a few times, and see if other people have problems with it. I will make sure that $X part is supported with mainstream drivers under linux and windows. I will check the reviews and see what the experts recommend -- and `expert' isn't some kid on an overclocking watercooling website. I will avoid noname cheap crap.
It seems that a lot of slashdotters, when talking about dialup, complain about
the connection quality.
Currently, with a run-of-the-mill local ISP, I tend to stay online for days
at a time without a problem. With my previous ISP, I also had connections
that lasted for days.
Now, I realize that 2 ISPs aren't a comprehensive data set, but I had a
rather illuminating experience about a year ago.
After about a year without using my old ISA 56k modem, I found that it
no longer worked. Since I wanted to switch everything over from a windows
server to a linux server anyways, I ordered a new USR PCI Hardware modem
online for a reasonable price (about $50 with S&H)
Being internet deprived, and wanting a backup anyways, I went over to a
local computer store and bought the cheapest winmodem I could find - a
no-name brand based on an intel chipset.
With the no-name winmodem, my connection quality was horrible - random
disconnects, frequent `I seem to be sending but not receiving' connection
problems, etc.
When my USR hardware modem arrived, I stuck it into an old pentium,
set up NAT, and noticed that my connection greatly improved.
What I was blaming on my ISP seems to have been the fault of a cheap,
crappy modem.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, the problem with biometric identification is that (1) its not testing who you are, just that the digital input matches some value and (2) you can't change what its testing.
You can't change who you are. Thus, once the key is compromised, it stays compromised.
The parent poster writes:
Every species reacts to chemicals in different ways.
And then he goes on to talk about chocolate as an example.
Here's a better example, IMHO: Spiders on Caffiene and Other Drugs
The parent poster writes:
The master slave argument is bound to elicit pretty strong feeling in many subgroups, just because the majority of readers on slashdot are white males, does not mean that everyone shares the same ambivilence or distance from such issues as apartheid and racism.
First of all, thank you for judging me by the color of my skin. Unfortunately, since I am a white male, I will be unable to empathize properly with others.
Ne'ermind that 1) "white" Europeans were enslaved by other "white" Europeans and 2) "white" Europeans were enslaved by Arabs and blacks in Africa. [#insert why_dont_they_teach_history_in_schools_rant.txt]
Ne'ermind that slavery still takes place in the world, some of it happening against people who share the beliefs of my family. (Google for slavery in the Sudan, and Christianity, if you are curious -- a lot of it seems to be hype, but there is good evidence of slavery in the Sudan (along with several other spots in the world)).
I think its clear: I have white skin, thus I'm to dumb to realize the political sensitivity of the words "master" and "slave".
However, I am offended at you labeling my according to my skin color.
Dear Slashdot...
My old Pentium 133mhz computer had some problems. I took it to a repair shop, but they said it was too old to work on and that nobody knew windows 95 anymore. What should I do?
Find a better repair shop!
Seriously, cars in the late 70's had primitive computer systems[1] - when something fails, you go to a mechanic that knows how to fix it. The electronics are pretty durable, so even if the part can't be bought new, something ripped from a junked vehicle should work. (I saw another post that mentioned 3rd party control systems that can be made to work with a variety of vehicles, this could be another choice.)
As for diagnostic machines, the US vehicles from the time had the ability to ground a pin and read the codes from a blinking idiot light. The mechanic only needs to have the books to look up the trouble codes.
*sigh* Seriously, slashdot, this is a piss poor question. Learn a bit about cars, then ask intelligent questions.
[1] Primative computer systems, but still technically computer systems.
You forgot the one biggie:
-Frank Herbert's estate called. They want the character of Muad'dib back.
The parent poster writes
At last: No more cliff-wall learning 'curve.'
I tried Blender long ago, and was consistently frustrated by the unneccesarily obtuse and convoluted interface. Can't wait to see if they have made some real progress.
Now, since every Blender story had dozens of people who immediately said that "changing Blender's interface will make it useless!" whenever somebody brought up how difficult it was to use: are you sticking with your old version?
Nope. In fact, I'm so inspired that Blender made their interface user friendly, that I'm going to fix vi and Emacs, and finally Linux. (Yegads, a command line. How untuitive is that!)
The parent poster writes:
The use of source packages would suggest that they contain fixes and workarounds for bugs present in the pure tarballs code or documented build processes.
If you are referring to the grandparent post, he was trying to configure Mozilla in some non-vanilla way.
I suggested that he should have grabbed the source RPMs and used that as a base to build a non-vanilla Mozilla RPM on.
Mozilla (like many popular projects) have a large variety of configurations and architectures it can work on - everything from OpenBSD to Microsoft Windows. Odds are that the default configuration will not be correct for the OS, libraries, and setup you want. Distributations exist (in part) to solve this problem, highly intelligent people with an in-depth knowledge of the target platform configure the raw source (occasionally adding patches as well) and build binaries for that distributation from the changed source. By grabbing the targetted source packages for your distribution (via src rpms or your distribution's equiv.), you are thus in command of a source that should cleanly compile on your platform.
Auto-config isn't perfect. It cannot replace a learned human being for making decisions.
As for patches, there are plenty of patches that exist that are either too specialized for the main tree, too experimental, or have been implimented into a later or developmental branch but not the main branch.
As for bugs, I do not know how Redhat's bug reporting system works. Debian's bug reporting system tries to submit fixes to the upstream (read: original) maintainer in order for the fixes to be merged with the mainstream source.
As for documentation, consider this example: The amount of documentation concerning the X windows system is huge. Compiling an app such as Mozilla for a certain X setup is not a trivial task. Should the Mozilla project's documentation include hundreds of pages of information on different X Windows, Microsoft Windows, etc? Documentation which is a chore to maintain and forever at risk of being outdated? Or should it explain the options in such a way that an expert can understand them, and allow that expert to configure it for the rest of us?
Just my $.02
I built Mozilla from source on RedHat (because I wanted to add some features to the browser) and fonts were just horrible (wrong size, illegible, etc.)
Repeat after me: Going outside of the package manager is a bad idea.
Grab the src rpm's, compile those, install. Everything works okay? Good, now tweak the src rpm's code before compiling it again.
There are some that are talented enough to be able to grab any source, and compile it perfectly on any platform 100% of the time. For those of us who are not godlike, there is making small changes to the source.
Just my $.02
I thought (but could be wrong) that hard drives internally split up the platters for speed games - sort of an internal 'raid 0' approach.
It would make sense - modern hard drives already lie about their geometry. If a drive has 2 platters/4 heads, by doing an internal 'raid 0', that drive is now four times faster then the competition.
Perhaps a slashdotter with a bit of hard drive clue could tell us if that's the case.
Part of the uselessness called 'science' that they teach in schools deals with electrical current and magnetic fields.
IIRC, the strength of an electrical field is 1/(distance^2). If we have two distances, we can calculate the drop in the magnetic field as follows: (1/(d1^2)) / (1/(d2^2)) or, more simply: d1^2 / d2^2. Therefore, the difference between living directly under the power lines (assuming that the power lines are 50ft up in the air) and the difference between living a few houses away (say 200 ft) would be 2500/40000 or 5/80ths (about 6%). Living a few more houses away (say, 200 more ft) would result in a drop of 2500/160000 or about 1.5%
The point of all this math and science is that if power lines can cause cancer, it should be rather easy to detect - cancer rates would be high under the power lines, and fall off sharply.
I have never seen a study with this result, so its probably safe to assume that power lines do not cause cancer.
Linux Disc Encryption Howto
What it is: A method of encrypting a hard drive, and using a USB key-drive device and passphrase to decrypt the hard drive at boot.
Why: To protect computers (especially laptops) from unauthorized access to the hard disk. Bios passwords, login passwords, and the above slashdot story do not prevent the hard drive from being removed from the machine and the data read in another machine.
How it works: The laptop's drive is AES encrypted. At boot, the computer needs the key drive with the passkey and the matching passphrase to transparently decrypt the drive. It keeps a copy of the passkey and passphrase in memory, so the USB drive may be removed after booting. It only decrypts the files that it is using, so if power is lost at any moment, all data will remain protected.
Why its cool: Its high quality encryption, OS tools, and protects your laptop's files from being accessed if its stolen. What more do you need?
( IMHO, way more deserving of a slashdot story then a simple electronic hack that can be bypassed by anyone with electronics knowledge. )
The Silicon Image SATA chip SII3112[1] is supported in the 2.4.21[2] kernel and the 2.6.0-pre kernels.
[1] There might be other SATA controller chips, but out of a dozen motherboards with onboard SATA and a few cheap SATA controller cards, they all have this chip.
[2] You might need one of the non-vanilla patches. I *know* its in 2.4.21-ac. 2.4.22-vanilla has the SII3112 support.
The writer in the article mentions how diverse environments lead to security breeches. He uses the example of a workplace where the door locks are all different, preventing one master key. This is insecure because all of the keys for the doors were on the same ring as the key for the safe.
Obviously, master keys must have a little known feature that prevents them from being put on a keyring with any other key.
*Sigh*
Rob Limo's "review" reads like a windows-to-linux spoof.
That being said, when I do use IE instead of Mozilla, I am surprised by how many websites have popups and popunders. Sure, there are (free and commercial) applications to stop it, but its still a PITA.
I find that one of the bigger weaknesses of windows is a bunch of third party apps, of dubious quality, with no central packaging or review committee. Under $my_distro_of_choice, I know that I can grab one of the $thousands of prepackaged apps out there, install it, and odds are, no crucial shared libraries are going to be 'updated' by an older version, no spyware will be installed, and odds are that I won't have 20 new icons on my desktop, or that everything will be borked in odd and mysterious ways. Under the worst-case linux scenerio, I can purge my hard drive of all the files of a troublesome app. That's the power of package management and quality distributions.
I had a conversation in #debian on freenode about this very issue the other night.
I forgot who I was talking to, but he made a very good point about software raid controllers vs hardware raid controllers:
Before you shell out money on hardware RAID, try setting it up in software and running some tests/benchmarks. Figure out how much CPU usage that RAID 1, RAID 0+1, RAID 5, et cetera, array is using. Then think about if its worth buying a hardware RAID controller card.
You need to buy the drives anyways, and to set up the RAID, you'll end up reformatting the drives anyways. Other then some time, what do you have to lose?
Of course, if you used telnetd-ssl, you might be correct. :)
[ Caveat: Haven't been following the security problems with telnetd-ssl ]
You do realize that SUV's are not superior in snow, don't you?
The pros of an SUV are the increased weight (more traction). That's it (Subaru's have 4 wheel drive, so that's not an argument). A SUV is easier to get moving.
The cons of an SUV are the increased weight. While the weight leads to more traction, it also requires more energy to slow down and stop. That energy doesn't disappear into the aether, but gets absorbed in the tire/road interface. Congrats, your SUV can be more likely to slip. (Oh, and 4 wheel drive doesn't really help sliding).
I'm not arguing that every SUV is worst off in snow then every car. I'm sure that there are *some* SUVs that are better off then the average car. Not all of them though.
In my experience (in Northern Minnesota) a good pair of snow tires will do wonders for a vehicle. Especially if the vehicle has skinny little tires for cutting through the snow. The cheap tires that are sold on sale in a set of 4 tend to be horrible.
I've owned several front wheel drive cars and have driven them in snow without any major problems. (For example: 2 miles down a curvy road in about 6" of new snow) I've driven two wheel drive trucks in the snow without major problems either, but that was with weight in the back of the truck, and being careful. 4x4's do have better traction once you are stuck, but aren't great. Without positraction, a 4x4 only needs to have 2 wheels spinning to be stuck, same as a 2 wheel drive vehicle with positraction. :)
I predict that piracy will be one of the major factors in preserving data from these times.
Case in point: Abandonware
There are a ton of games rotting away on 3 1/2" floppies. Many of these games are not being sold anymore. Yet these games are easily found on abandonware sites, and it seems that plenty of people have large abandonware collections that they keep transferring from older hard drives to newer hard drives.
Console/Arcade games have found a large niche in emulation - How many arcade boards will still be working in 20 years? How many Intellivisions have you seen lately?
There is also active trading in 80's and 90's TV shows. VHS tapes degrade over time, but that doesn't stop people from finding an old tape that's in good condition and capturing it to the computer. Quality might not be the best, but the video is being preserved and outside of a few dedicated 80's IRC channels, I don't know where I'd find some shows.
Although modern books (even with the acidity in the paper of the cheap pulps) might end up lasting a lot longer, its also possible to find plenty of books scanned in and converted to electronic formats.
Disclaimer:
I am not trying to justify piracy of newer products. Artists, coders, and producers deserve to be paid.
The parent poster wrote:
"Say Columbus took the Apollo route to the New World. He starts off with three ships. Along about the Canary Islands he sinks the first ship, just throws it away, deliberately. And it's his biggest ship. Come [163] to the Bahamas, he throws away the second ship. He reaches the New World ... but
his third ship can't land there. He lowers a lifeboat, sinks his third
ship, and rows ashore. He picks up a few rocks on the beach and rows right
back out to sea, across the Atlantic ... and at the Strait of Gibraltar he
sinks the lifeboat and swims back to Spain with an inner tube around his
shoulders.
"If that's what it took to cross the Atlantic, this part of the world would still belong to the Seminoles."
That would be a hell of an accomplishment by the Seminoles, considering that the Seminoles did not exist as a tribe or nation before the arrival of the Europeans. Seminole comes from the Spanish 'cimarron', which meant 'runaway slave'. They were a mixture of Creek and other Indians, Runaway slaves, and whites.
The first and second Seminole wars were fought not because whites in the United States wanted the Everglades, but because whites wanted to eliminate a place for slaves to run away to.
Paraphrased from _Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me_, by James W. Loewen.
Joe Smith, Millionaire, might not have time to download music from the p2p nets, and his children might have plenty of money to buy CDs, but what happens when the kids want a song that is playing on the radio but not released yet?
There was an Outer Limits episode about this awhile back.
A scientist goes insane, holds up a bunch of hostages, and its revealed that he's discovered the ability to easily create high-yeild weapons, on par with nuclear bombs.
What's worse is that all of scientific progress is heading to the point that even if he dies, chances are excellent that one or more researchers will find the exact same technique. [Basically, it was the solution to Fermi's paradox - any civilization will progress to a point where it will easily destroy itself.]
At the end of the episode, after the scientist is dead, there is a scene in a university, where a professor is handing out a test. One question is 'Prove that cold fusion is wrong'. A student starts to work on the problem, ends up scribbling frantically, then jumps out of his chair, leaving the room with his test paper to the dismay of the professor.
I've thought about the usefulness of laptops during classes, and the best way that I've seen to make them useful would be to set up a tiny direction microphone pointed at the lecturer, set up a small webcam, and record.
Years ago, when my mother went back to school, she did a similiar setup with a cassette recorder. Works well for review, if your professor does not rely on blackboard diagrams. Else, an audio/video recorder is the way to go.
Then again, it would only take one person to do this and just share his `notes' to the rest of the class.
Next on Slashdot: Lawsuits over recorded lectures.
I don't want to imply that the model of the modem indicates the quality of the modem.
I did my research on the particular model (USR 2976/5610 internal hardware PCI) and saw plenty of good reviews. I was specifically looking for an internal hardware modem, due to ease of setup under linux (its just another serial port) and to minimize any extra wires and keep my two motherboard serial ports free.
If I was going to buy another modem today, I would look for a brandname hardware modem (internal or external) with good reviews on a variety of forums and usenet. Perhaps that would be a USR modem, perhaps it would not be. I would not buy the glorified sound cards that are called a software modem ever again.
The more I work with computers, the more I realize that stable, quality hardware is important. I will wait until that new piece of hardware makes the rounds a few times, and see if other people have problems with it. I will make sure that $X part is supported with mainstream drivers under linux and windows. I will check the reviews and see what the experts recommend -- and `expert' isn't some kid on an overclocking watercooling website. I will avoid noname cheap crap.
It seems that a lot of slashdotters, when talking about dialup, complain about the connection quality.
Currently, with a run-of-the-mill local ISP, I tend to stay online for days at a time without a problem. With my previous ISP, I also had connections that lasted for days.
Now, I realize that 2 ISPs aren't a comprehensive data set, but I had a rather illuminating experience about a year ago.
After about a year without using my old ISA 56k modem, I found that it no longer worked. Since I wanted to switch everything over from a windows server to a linux server anyways, I ordered a new USR PCI Hardware modem online for a reasonable price (about $50 with S&H)
Being internet deprived, and wanting a backup anyways, I went over to a local computer store and bought the cheapest winmodem I could find - a no-name brand based on an intel chipset.
With the no-name winmodem, my connection quality was horrible - random disconnects, frequent `I seem to be sending but not receiving' connection problems, etc.
When my USR hardware modem arrived, I stuck it into an old pentium, set up NAT, and noticed that my connection greatly improved.
What I was blaming on my ISP seems to have been the fault of a cheap, crappy modem.