Virgin is in the wrong here, and CC has nothing to do with it, obviously. The CC license only releases certain provisions of copyright, but doesn't touch the kind of legal restrictions that require people's consent to use their image.
And Creative Commons the organization doesn't license anything, which the article mistakes. They provide license texts that other people use of their own accord. In order to license anything, you need to own the copyright first... and CC obviously doesn't own the copyrights to all material released under Creative Commons licenses.
I've always made sure that my passwords contain a string of easily-typable letters consisting primarily of alternating-hand homerow keys, to complement the numbers, punctuation, and capitalization elsewhere in the password. Since you can tap out those letters so quickly without moving your hands around dramatically, it makes it much more difficult for anyone to eyeball your password.
I've seen countless stories about dedicated password-entry hardware, but none of them (with the minor example of insecure fingerprint scanners) have made an impression. Purpose-dedicated hardware rarely does.
What people (including all the analysts who were saying that the internet hype would catapult this movie to 100mil territory) are forgetting, is that internet memes are a double-edged sword. The link-of-the-week is just that... exciting for a short period, kinda fun for about a week after it peaks, and then quickly grows stale. SoaP followed the same rules and trendes as other internet mega-memes like All Your Base etc. The jokes are lame by now, and all the appreciation they garner is an eye roll.
If the movie had actually been released about 3 weeks ago when the meme was still fresh, I would expect that the internet effect would have been significantly greater.
I believe that the most important technology that we don't yet have is the creation of self-contained ecosystems, akin to what Biosphere 2 was attempting to create. A more general problem that we also have very little knowledge of is ecosystem engineering; that is, how to make a sustainable and habitable environment for humans and support organisms (crops, etc.) exist within an unlivable environment, such as other planets, the ocean floor, interplanetary space, and even remote areas of earth. By "sustainable" in this context I mean that it should be mostly self-sufficient and able to scavenge energy and resources from the local environment, without needing constant external resupply. Even "easy" terrestrial environments, like the Antarctic settlements, rely on frequent supply shimpments.
After Biosphere's relative failure, it seems that many scientists have lost heart in our technological ability to achieve these goals. This is in spite of the fact that self-contained ecosystems are nearly ubiquitous in popular science fiction, and that most, if not all, of the scientific principles at play are fully understood. There may not be immediate economic incentives to research this now, but there aren't economic reasons to be in space yet either. Both are necessary for human progress, and probably ultimately human survival.
If we are ever going to colonize other planets, build sea-floor settlements, or even try to repair the damage we've done to our own ecosystems... the technology for ecosystem engineering is a strong prerequisiste, and it's comparably not that hard or expensive, either. The Biosphere 2 cost "only" ~$150 million to develop and build, whereas the 2005 budget for the Space Shuttle program was $5 billion. Practical technology takes time time, trial, and error to perfect. So why have we let a single error dissuade us?
Oh, and we need to cure Lou Gehrig's too. Haha, sorry Stephen, just a little fun at your expense.
There's no need to be conflicted... The industry just needs to spend more effort punishing the real criminals (i.e. the big-time file sharers), and less time restricting who they perceive to be the enablers. I'm not saying, of course, that the punishments for file sharing should be increased... just that they should try to catch more of them.
The more effort you spend trying to make crime impossible, the harder the criminals will try to disprove you. And this time, the math works out in favor of the criminals. DRM is a deluded effort to make the crime impossible.
LiveVault also has products that backup off-site to tape. I used to work for them, they partner for Iron Mountain to store the data securely.
The point of this product is that with off-site backups, they can do the disk storage correctly, with whatever kind of data protection is available; remote mirrors, encryption, etc, etc, and the backups are available instantly instead of waiting for the tapes to be fished out of cold storage.
I'm getting a new roommate! We should get along well too; he's 3'6" tall (not intimidating), enjoys science and technology as I do, has a killer HDTV and stereo system, and is asexual, so I don't have to worry about him having sex on my couch. I just hope that he makes enough money as a cab driver, and whatever is making his skin that awful gray color isn't contagious.
I wonder if anyone will finally start listening to him?
I watch his "Rockin' New Years Eve" program every year, and I expect lots of other people do too. I had no idea he was into computer security as well, though.
Actually, one of my big disappointments with Transmeta chips is that they don't support SMP at all. Clustering is one thing, but SMP is better for many applications. Imagine a laptop with 4 CPUs, or a 1U blade with 8? An 8-way desktop machine would rule, especially in terms of responsiveness; MP3 player, web browser, window manager, filesharing, and word processor all could run on separate CPUs without ever having to interrupt each other.
I wonder if anyone will produce MP boards for these new AMD chips?
Not to mention the fact that Windows bundles their bugfixes in a few patches, whereas Linux fixes each problem separately. You could argue that the former option makes it easier for administrators, but with a proper Linux system, most patches will be applied automatically (or at least effortlessly). MS patches tend to require a system reboot, while security upgrades in Linux usually only require a restart of the program being patched. Besides, patching each bug individually allows for much faster response, and makes tracking easier.
Not for "real" rackmounted server rooms, but for commodity hardware running headless servers, etc. I think it would be really nice if some laptop maker could make a removable drive insert (so you could swap it in for the CD drive, for example) with a VGA port connected to the laptop LCD, and 2 USB ports corresponding to the keyboard and trackpad/trackpoint of the laptop. Of course, the normal computer part of the laptop would be disabled for all this.
Ah well, wishful thinking I suppose. There's no companies left who would innovate this much to give useful features to the select few who would use such a thing.
I think what the parent post was trying to say was that the "proper education" would be one besides our current system, that provides extra resources to smart and inventive people who want to experiment and learn on their own.
Yeah, you might be able to argue that struggling to make it on her own drove her (and people like her) to excel, but there are definitely many untested and experimental methods of education geared toward the very talented in hopes of boosting their potential.
Unfortunately, our current educational systems (public and most private schools included) are focused almost entirely on raising the lower bound of aptitude, rather than pay any attention on the best and brightest.
Before 911, would you think terrorists would hijack airplanes with box cutters and fly them into buildings? No, that's not what anyone thought terrorists did; they were supposed to jump on the airplane with AK47s and demand the release of prisoners or something. You can't rely on your preformed concept of terrorism to judge what they'll do in the future
Not every terrorist is suicidal. I'm not saying this was a likely situation; terrorist attacks seldom are. However, the government is right to develop contingency plans for whatever awful situation they could think up. What if terrorists get their hands on a GPS-guided missile? They have contingency plans for damn near everything, from the scary to the ridiculous.
In reality, this is (or at least should be) a kind of a last-resort effort for when it would be of more help than hindrance to citizens and emergency service personell. For example, say they find out that a GPS-guided boat with a nuclear bomb is cruising into NY. Makes sense to shut off the GPS now, doesn't it.
Even so, it would be better if they could misdirect individual GPS receivers at will, by coordinating the satellites to send misleading information to just one receiver. This would be very technologically difficult, if not impossible, given the way GPS works. Still, imagine if they could steer that boat out into the middle of the ocean, where they could intercept it and find clues as to who made it.
Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this?
on
Embedded Gentoo?
·
· Score: 1
Oops, something went wrong with the link. The FlashLinux site is here. Linux 2.6, X.Org, full Gnome 2.8, OpenOffice.org, XChat, Firefox, Evolution 2, Gaim, etc., all crammed onto a 256MB USB drive, with >50MB to spare for personal files.
So yeah, you can use Gentoo to build pretty slender distros.
Re:So why is Gentoo the right choice for this?
on
Embedded Gentoo?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
There's nothing about Gentoo that says you have to compile stuff from scratch. And with embedded devices, it's all going to come pre-loaded anyway. Apparently, Gentoo is very good for building specific, shrunken-down distributions, like the recently-released FlashLinux project. Gentoo lets them optimize the packages very easily, to shring down binaries, etc. This is a pretty big concern with embedded devices.
I don't think anyone would really suggest compiling anything big on your PDA.
Do you fear that "they" will hear what you have expressed using your rights of free speech? If so, then this story should be no more or less alarming than if they said "The CIA is reading our newspapers and maybe even the posters on telephone poles!" The fact that somebody might hear you shouldn't concern you.
Or, do you fear that you will be arrested based on what you say; that your freedom of speech will be infringed? I believe that is a legitimate concern, but it is tangential issue to the CIA monitoring chatrooms. We only have cause to complain if they use the information they gather illicitly.
You currently have the right to walk out into the street and say whatever you want about the president. Nobody can (is supposed to) stop you, unless you're disturbing the peace. Maybe the CIA heard; who cares. That's the way freedom of speech is supposed to work.
That's not my point. Talking on IRC is not a private conversation, and everybody knows that anyone can be listening and/or logging. You never need a warrant to, say, listen to a protester give a speech in public, which is also an example of non-private conversation.
I don't see how people can be upset about monitoring chatrooms, unless they were actually doing something questionable with that data. As most of IRC is a completely public network by design, there is no expectation of privacy. And it's also well-known that your IP address is exposed to all those on the server.
IM conversations are a different matter, though. There, the network is private, run by a company, and the expectation is that the conversations are private as well. It might very well be illegal for AOL (and other IM networks) to be monitoring individual IM sessions.
I'm not sure how the/. article could vary so far from the content of the bbc article, but the part about flashing is practically an afterthought, one sentence about it at the very end. "The government also considered the use of a default flash, but plans were abandoned after concerns from manufacturers."
When are lawmakers going to learn that it's the action that should be legislated, not the capability? You don't fine people who own sports cars because the are capable of speeding.
Wow, maybe in the movie we'll finally learn the secret about who set up all those "monster closets" with touchplate sensors scattered liberally about the mars base. That's the one loose end in the intricate web-like Doom plot that hasn't been tied...
You can't encode the difference between paper-white and sun-white, can you? Like an image that's 1/2 normal monitor white, and 1/2 glaring light that hurts your eyes?
Slashdot Mirror
Virgin is in the wrong here, and CC has nothing to do with it, obviously. The CC license only releases certain provisions of copyright, but doesn't touch the kind of legal restrictions that require people's consent to use their image.
And Creative Commons the organization doesn't license anything, which the article mistakes. They provide license texts that other people use of their own accord. In order to license anything, you need to own the copyright first... and CC obviously doesn't own the copyrights to all material released under Creative Commons licenses.
What good is this? Are they going to put a vending/arcade machine in the movie theater lobby that dispenses individual tic-tacs?
Every Play Wins A Prize!
I've always made sure that my passwords contain a string of easily-typable letters consisting primarily of alternating-hand homerow keys, to complement the numbers, punctuation, and capitalization elsewhere in the password. Since you can tap out those letters so quickly without moving your hands around dramatically, it makes it much more difficult for anyone to eyeball your password.
I've seen countless stories about dedicated password-entry hardware, but none of them (with the minor example of insecure fingerprint scanners) have made an impression. Purpose-dedicated hardware rarely does.
What people (including all the analysts who were saying that the internet hype would catapult this movie to 100mil territory) are forgetting, is that internet memes are a double-edged sword. The link-of-the-week is just that... exciting for a short period, kinda fun for about a week after it peaks, and then quickly grows stale. SoaP followed the same rules and trendes as other internet mega-memes like All Your Base etc. The jokes are lame by now, and all the appreciation they garner is an eye roll.
If the movie had actually been released about 3 weeks ago when the meme was still fresh, I would expect that the internet effect would have been significantly greater.
I believe that the most important technology that we don't yet have is the creation of self-contained ecosystems, akin to what Biosphere 2 was attempting to create. A more general problem that we also have very little knowledge of is ecosystem engineering; that is, how to make a sustainable and habitable environment for humans and support organisms (crops, etc.) exist within an unlivable environment, such as other planets, the ocean floor, interplanetary space, and even remote areas of earth. By "sustainable" in this context I mean that it should be mostly self-sufficient and able to scavenge energy and resources from the local environment, without needing constant external resupply. Even "easy" terrestrial environments, like the Antarctic settlements, rely on frequent supply shimpments.
After Biosphere's relative failure, it seems that many scientists have lost heart in our technological ability to achieve these goals. This is in spite of the fact that self-contained ecosystems are nearly ubiquitous in popular science fiction, and that most, if not all, of the scientific principles at play are fully understood. There may not be immediate economic incentives to research this now, but there aren't economic reasons to be in space yet either. Both are necessary for human progress, and probably ultimately human survival.
If we are ever going to colonize other planets, build sea-floor settlements, or even try to repair the damage we've done to our own ecosystems... the technology for ecosystem engineering is a strong prerequisiste, and it's comparably not that hard or expensive, either. The Biosphere 2 cost "only" ~$150 million to develop and build, whereas the 2005 budget for the Space Shuttle program was $5 billion. Practical technology takes time time, trial, and error to perfect. So why have we let a single error dissuade us?
Oh, and we need to cure Lou Gehrig's too. Haha, sorry Stephen, just a little fun at your expense.
There's no need to be conflicted... The industry just needs to spend more effort punishing the real criminals (i.e. the big-time file sharers), and less time restricting who they perceive to be the enablers. I'm not saying, of course, that the punishments for file sharing should be increased... just that they should try to catch more of them.
The more effort you spend trying to make crime impossible, the harder the criminals will try to disprove you. And this time, the math works out in favor of the criminals. DRM is a deluded effort to make the crime impossible.
All right! only 2000 more to go before we have...
Seven Thousand Macedonian Linux Desktops in Full Battle Array!
Warning: mysql_pconnect(): Too many connections in /home/www/php/functions/executequery.php on line 21
How blissfully ironic!
LiveVault also has products that backup off-site to tape. I used to work for them, they partner for Iron Mountain to store the data securely.
The point of this product is that with off-site backups, they can do the disk storage correctly, with whatever kind of data protection is available; remote mirrors, encryption, etc, etc, and the backups are available instantly instead of waiting for the tapes to be fished out of cold storage.
I'm getting a new roommate! We should get along well too; he's 3'6" tall (not intimidating), enjoys science and technology as I do, has a killer HDTV and stereo system, and is asexual, so I don't have to worry about him having sex on my couch. I just hope that he makes enough money as a cab driver, and whatever is making his skin that awful gray color isn't contagious.
I watch his "Rockin' New Years Eve" program every year, and I expect lots of other people do too. I had no idea he was into computer security as well, though.
Actually, one of my big disappointments with Transmeta chips is that they don't support SMP at all. Clustering is one thing, but SMP is better for many applications. Imagine a laptop with 4 CPUs, or a 1U blade with 8? An 8-way desktop machine would rule, especially in terms of responsiveness; MP3 player, web browser, window manager, filesharing, and word processor all could run on separate CPUs without ever having to interrupt each other.
I wonder if anyone will produce MP boards for these new AMD chips?
Not to mention the fact that Windows bundles their bugfixes in a few patches, whereas Linux fixes each problem separately. You could argue that the former option makes it easier for administrators, but with a proper Linux system, most patches will be applied automatically (or at least effortlessly). MS patches tend to require a system reboot, while security upgrades in Linux usually only require a restart of the program being patched. Besides, patching each bug individually allows for much faster response, and makes tracking easier.
Not for "real" rackmounted server rooms, but for commodity hardware running headless servers, etc. I think it would be really nice if some laptop maker could make a removable drive insert (so you could swap it in for the CD drive, for example) with a VGA port connected to the laptop LCD, and 2 USB ports corresponding to the keyboard and trackpad/trackpoint of the laptop. Of course, the normal computer part of the laptop would be disabled for all this.
Ah well, wishful thinking I suppose. There's no companies left who would innovate this much to give useful features to the select few who would use such a thing.
I think what the parent post was trying to say was that the "proper education" would be one besides our current system, that provides extra resources to smart and inventive people who want to experiment and learn on their own.
Yeah, you might be able to argue that struggling to make it on her own drove her (and people like her) to excel, but there are definitely many untested and experimental methods of education geared toward the very talented in hopes of boosting their potential.
Unfortunately, our current educational systems (public and most private schools included) are focused almost entirely on raising the lower bound of aptitude, rather than pay any attention on the best and brightest.
Before 911, would you think terrorists would hijack airplanes with box cutters and fly them into buildings? No, that's not what anyone thought terrorists did; they were supposed to jump on the airplane with AK47s and demand the release of prisoners or something. You can't rely on your preformed concept of terrorism to judge what they'll do in the future
Not every terrorist is suicidal. I'm not saying this was a likely situation; terrorist attacks seldom are. However, the government is right to develop contingency plans for whatever awful situation they could think up. What if terrorists get their hands on a GPS-guided missile? They have contingency plans for damn near everything, from the scary to the ridiculous.
In reality, this is (or at least should be) a kind of a last-resort effort for when it would be of more help than hindrance to citizens and emergency service personell. For example, say they find out that a GPS-guided boat with a nuclear bomb is cruising into NY. Makes sense to shut off the GPS now, doesn't it.
Even so, it would be better if they could misdirect individual GPS receivers at will, by coordinating the satellites to send misleading information to just one receiver. This would be very technologically difficult, if not impossible, given the way GPS works. Still, imagine if they could steer that boat out into the middle of the ocean, where they could intercept it and find clues as to who made it.
Oops, something went wrong with the link. The FlashLinux site is here. Linux 2.6, X.Org, full Gnome 2.8, OpenOffice.org, XChat, Firefox, Evolution 2, Gaim, etc., all crammed onto a 256MB USB drive, with >50MB to spare for personal files.
So yeah, you can use Gentoo to build pretty slender distros.
There's nothing about Gentoo that says you have to compile stuff from scratch. And with embedded devices, it's all going to come pre-loaded anyway. Apparently, Gentoo is very good for building specific, shrunken-down distributions, like the recently-released FlashLinux project. Gentoo lets them optimize the packages very easily, to shring down binaries, etc. This is a pretty big concern with embedded devices.
I don't think anyone would really suggest compiling anything big on your PDA.
What is it that you fear?
Do you fear that "they" will hear what you have expressed using your rights of free speech? If so, then this story should be no more or less alarming than if they said "The CIA is reading our newspapers and maybe even the posters on telephone poles!" The fact that somebody might hear you shouldn't concern you.
Or, do you fear that you will be arrested based on what you say; that your freedom of speech will be infringed? I believe that is a legitimate concern, but it is tangential issue to the CIA monitoring chatrooms. We only have cause to complain if they use the information they gather illicitly.
You currently have the right to walk out into the street and say whatever you want about the president. Nobody can (is supposed to) stop you, unless you're disturbing the peace. Maybe the CIA heard; who cares. That's the way freedom of speech is supposed to work.
That's not my point. Talking on IRC is not a private conversation, and everybody knows that anyone can be listening and/or logging. You never need a warrant to, say, listen to a protester give a speech in public, which is also an example of non-private conversation.
I don't see how people can be upset about monitoring chatrooms, unless they were actually doing something questionable with that data. As most of IRC is a completely public network by design, there is no expectation of privacy. And it's also well-known that your IP address is exposed to all those on the server.
IM conversations are a different matter, though. There, the network is private, run by a company, and the expectation is that the conversations are private as well. It might very well be illegal for AOL (and other IM networks) to be monitoring individual IM sessions.
I'm not sure how the /. article could vary so far from the content of the bbc article, but the part about flashing is practically an afterthought, one sentence about it at the very end. "The government also considered the use of a default flash, but plans were abandoned after concerns from manufacturers."
When are lawmakers going to learn that it's the action that should be legislated, not the capability? You don't fine people who own sports cars because the are capable of speeding.
Wow, maybe in the movie we'll finally learn the secret about who set up all those "monster closets" with touchplate sensors scattered liberally about the mars base. That's the one loose end in the intricate web-like Doom plot that hasn't been tied...
You can't encode the difference between paper-white and sun-white, can you? Like an image that's 1/2 normal monitor white, and 1/2 glaring light that hurts your eyes?