Ah, there is the epitome of sustainable government
taxation: tax things you want to destroy.
...Like "personal income" and "sales"?
Gotta agree, these guys certainly don't think very
much about the consequences of the laws they create.
But then, I have increasingly grown of the opinion that
ALL involuntary taxation needs to end, immediately. Not
that I expect that to happen, nor will I stop paying my
yearly extortion money to the government, but culturally,
we NEED to lose the mentality best summed up in the
"death and taxes" cliche. "We" don't need to pay taxes.
"They" need our money to use it on police and militaries
so they can enforce all the other BS laws that no
sane human would ever consider "good".
I'll gladly pay for roads, for schools, for libraries, for
social programs that benefit everyone (like truly
universal healthcare, not of this half-assed system
we have now). But when the single biggest chunk of my
income goes, involuntarily, to fighting a new holy war,
I have a problem with that. And for anyone who considers this
rant to have gone off-topic, consider - How would you
categorize the Christian Right's campaign against all
things fun, free, or Islamic?
Let's just not learn any fucking lessons at all
and switch right over to the next non-renewable,
environment-poluting, war-inspiring resource...
Whoah there! Go read some of my other posts on this subject...
You won't find many bigger proponents of renewable energy
sources than me. But people panicing at the thought of
running out of oil doesn't do any good, either, when most
people really can't make a difference, in the bigger
picture (though adopting the available conservation measures
already available certainly doesn't hurt).
Joe Sixpack, watching the talking blobs on TV tell him
the world will end tomorrow, won't react by running out
and developing the next great alternative fuel source.
He will, however, if scared enough, run out and
stockpile food and weapons and fuel, and take to murder
and rioting in the streets when that very hoarding causes
self-escalating artificial shortages.
Instead, the availability of another finite-term energy
source gives us exactly one benefit - Time. All the
people currently working on wind, tidal hydro, geothermal,
photovoltaic, biophotocatalytic Hydrogen, and perhaps
things we've never heard of, won't suddenly throw up their
hands in relief and go home. They'll keep working on their
pet alternative energy source, and some will eventually
become commericially (and more important, thermodynamically)
viable.
That won't happen if civilization collapses because the
domaesticated primates stampede themselves into a new
dark age out of imagined fears of impending doom.
I keep hearing this, but the details strike me as an
entirely different story...
Disney "bought" Pixar for stock. Steve Jobs owned
Pixar. Steve Jobs now owns more Disney stock than
anyone else. This would seem to mean that Steve
Jobs now "owns" Disney, no?
I mean, the rest of the stockholders could outvote
him collectively, but in general Jobs now more-or-less
controls the future of Disney.
So, considering that, would it sound more accurate to
say "Apple has Borgified both Disney and Pixar"?
The whole world will be oil free by 2020, because oil
will be too expensive to use as a fuel. Do not forget, the
peak is near.
Although we may not have passed peak production yet, if you
take price-to-extract and new reserve discovery rates into
consideration, we passed peak a few years ago.
However! I too used to worry about peak oil, until I learned
to stop worrying and love the methane hydrate ice.
You've probably heard of it, but don't realize just how much
the planet has... Seriously on the order of 20x the world's total
oil reserves, in terms of energy capacity.
On the down side, current estimates put the breakeven price
of extraction at around $90 per-barrel-equivalent. So it won't
let us keep driving cheap-fuel-sucking SUVs forever (Then
again, I consider that a good thing*), but we don't need
to worry about the global economy collapsing overnight due
to literally running out of gas.
* - I've said for years that as the single best thing the US
could do for the planet, tax the hell out of fuel oil (though
possibly not heating oil, but that gets into a regulatory
nightmare considering that you can use diesel and #2
interchangeably, sulfur emmissions aside) to put it at
over $10/gallon. Not only would the extra tax revenue
allow reducing other taxes, but people would have a
strong financial incentive to drive less, carpool more, and
buy more efficient vehicles.
I think this view of their "product" is totally naive.
Fair enough opinion...
But consider this: While adblocking software/plugins has
become increasingly common (and when IE7 comes out, I'd say
we can safely change that to "ubiquitous"), most of us
deliberately do not block Google's text ads.
Why?
The same reasoning applies. Because it doesn't annoy me. It
sits there on the side of the page, humbly minding its own
business and, if I really want, I can look over and
see what it has to offer me today.
But yes, I will concede as naive my view of GOOG's main
product as "www.google.com". As will all advertising
supported organizations, we the viewers count as their
real "product".
Though, the cheese tastes good and they don't zap us
very often.
Google's product development pipeline runs at such a fast
rate that it's very difficult for any company, Microsoft or
Yahoo! to catch up
Yeah, right, whatever. Although it sounds like a good excuse to
give to one's own unhappy shareholders, Google's success has
nothing to do with rapid "product development". Their core
product hasn't changed (other than cute logos and the necessary
shift from a 32bit limit a few years back) all that much, from
the perspective of the end-user, since inception.
Not to say that Google doesn't keep coming out with cool new
toys. But as much as they beat every clone to the punch with
GMail, with their desktop search widget, and the rest of their
toys - their core "product" still weighs in at 1.3k, fits on
a 640x480 monitor, and has a single significant input field.
So why has Google kept their market against a player
like Microsoft?
Because I don't need to wade through massive flash-hell to
do a search. Because the search results page doesn't take
great pains to obscure the content with the advertising.
Because they told the DOJ to go pound sand rather than
turn over my (and your) search histories. Because they
just do what they do well, and found a way to make a tidy
profit at that without annoying me. Because they
proudly know "what is the answer to life, the universe,
and everything?", when most companies would fire the
developer who put in such a "useless" feature.
"Focus on MegaReviews" - If I read two or three reviews
per movie I actually go see, and the review takes me half
as long to read as I would have wasted just going to see
the movie, then I may as well just go see the movie and
skip the reviews.
"Trumpet Your Own Credibility" - Because we all know
that nothing impresses us more than hearing someone brag...
"Aggregate Reviews on Your Own" - Hey, no fair, you guys suck
so we'll do the same thing!
"Crunch The Curve" - and we end up back to point #1.
Overall, I find it increasingly annoying when "content creators"
complain about the likes of Google, or "themed" linkers such as
Slashdot or Rotten or Fark, or even sites that merely summarize
numbers from other sites (as long as they give credit).
All the "creators" get visitors BECAUSE of those aggregators.
The aggregators don't "steal" the content, and while they may
indirectly profit from it, the creators would do nothing but
bleed money to their IT overhead costs if sites like Google
didn't take us there.
Now, some big-name sites (like the NYT) may actually have
some right to complain, but even then, if I find a headline that
interests me through Google News, I'll follow it, and the NYT
can happily collect my fake registration info, same as if I went
directly to their site. Of course, they don't like the
fact that my visiting depends on them having something to
interest me, rather than needing to visit before I can make
that determination.
Most of the evidence <snip> that you yourself point out
That who pointed out? I didn't mention any of those. The
closest I touched on, gravity, pretty solidly demonstrates the lack of
a binary companion for Sol. The other two point out the glaring
absence of another massive radiating body in our immediate
region of space.
Key word there, radiating. This particular batch of crackpots seems
to forget that the RF spectrum extends beyond the visible, and we
have the tech to "see" outside the visible just fine and dandy. For
example, even though it doesn't come remotely close to "star" sized,
we would have discovered relatively-little ol' Jupiter even as far
out as this mythical "nemesis" as soon as we discovered radio
astronomy, because it broadcasts louder than a pirate Mexican-border
radio station on Meth. And based on its movement relative to
the fixed background of stars, we would know whether it orbited
Sol or just passed by.
ALL indicate there is something out there that we don't understand.
Science has a pretty good grasp on the physics-of-the-normal. Above
the quantum, and below black holes, we can calculate what "should"
happen with amazing precision. And those calculations, applied to
our solar system, do not come anywhere near the level of discrepancy
needed to just toss another entire star in the mix.
try to keep an open mind and at least hear all the arguments
before proclaiming the earth must be flat!
I will keep an open mind in those areas that science hasn't
completely explained yet. The Pioneer anomaly (which you
brought up), for example - We might well learn something new and cool
from that one... But any explanation (short of a cheesy overlooked
onboard cause) I'd more readily attribute to something exotic like
universal anisotropy or "missing" dimensions, than to something as mundane-yet-nearly-impossible having somehow overlooked the second
most massive object in our solar system.
I would encourage you to learn an important feature of
science - Reality doesn't offer itself up for debate. We can
argue about politics, about religion, about flavors of ice-cream,
and what-have-you in the "social" realm, without either of us
having it entirely right or wrong. We can even debate semantics,
such as whether or not Pluto counts as a "planet". But to the
extent that an objective "out there" may exist, we can't debate
whether or not we have two objects greather than 0.012 solar
masses in our local neighborhood of space.
Most annoying I find are the sites that turn away anything
that's not IE because they don't support 'Netscape' (I actually
use Firefox), even though their website would work perfectly
without any changes except removing that damn message.
I will agree completely with that sentiment. And might I suggest
the User Agent Switcher plugin? Works great on exactly such
sites. However...
"The web" does not exist as the mythical monolithic construct we all
seem to imagine it as, any more than the web equals "the internet".
You have literally hundreds of different programs all trying to squeeze
their presentation, which may include audio, video, 3d rendering, etc,
into a container originally designed for describing the presentation
of plaintext content. Those programs need to target some combination
of four or five major lines of web browser, running on at least three
major OSs, with an unknown set of available plugins and extensions
available for the viewer's combination. You have a target audience
that ranges from using slow dialup connections to 100Mb optical
lines, and in skill between needing to specify clicking once or twice,
to those who will reverse-engineer your delivery system to keep
a local copy of your content.
You may as well ask why Windows doesn't just
support Mac binaries natively (or vice-versa), since they clearly
turn away potential customers by not doing so. Why the PS3 won't run
XBox2 games. Why dogs can't produce offspring with cats.
Personally, I take the "all or almost-nothing" approach when
designing a web page... I make it work in modern browsers, and
include a text-only version (where possible). That way, anyone
bothering to stay reasonably up-to-date will see exactly what I
intended, while those running lynx over a slow dialup connection
can still read my message.
I'd put it closer to "Da Vinci Code" on the scale.
Unfair! To quote Jon Stewart ripping into Tucker Carlson,
"You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making
crank phone calls."
The DaVinci Code took a giant vat of fiction and added
a little spice to it. The "Nemesis theory" takes a massive
body of scientific evidence against the sun having a
twin, and ignores it. Like gravity (EVERYTHING in the solar
system orbits the center of gravity - Sol, the planets, everything).
Brightness (we "found" Proxima Centauri, a 0.123 solar mass red
dwarf 4.22LY away). Parallax (something that close would appear
to move against the background of "fixed" stars, when observed from
opposite sides of the Earth's orbit).
Now, in fairness, our solar system has a good bit of "missing" mass,
in the sense that we don't know about every little speck of dust
in our region of space. But trying to fix the numbers with one
massive blob at the edge of the heliopause just doesn't count as sound
science... When your dinner needs just a little more salt,
you don't try to pour your cup-o'-soup over a salt-lick very quickly
to achieve the desired adjustment in flavor.
Also in fairness... Maize and aloe. How do you get engravings of plants
not known about in Europe until 1496, in a building completed ten years
earlier? Now, it takes quite a leap to go from that to
speculation about Marie de la Mer, but it certainly leaves room
for new chapters in the cannonical body of fiction...
Since no one else bothered to give you, y'know, an answer, just
endless links to tools that might or might not help you...
Specifically for SSH tunnels (without dealing with SSL), you
basically have two choices: Manually authenticated, or pre-shared
RSA keys (which you should use even for manually authenticated
connections, but I'll leave that to your discretion)...
In the simplest case (manual authentication with no preshared key, and
between any platforms for which a build of the standard OpenSSH tools
exists), you just run:
And it works like magic... So for example, "ssh myname@mymailserver.org
-L 110:mymailserver.org:110" will let "myname" check his email via
a plain vanilla POP connection to localhost, which actually connects
to "mymailserver.org" over a nice-n'-secure SSH tunnel. I use
exactly that method to securely check my email on a BSD machine
on which I have SSH access to but no shell account (it has a
menu-driven UI).
For pre-shared keys, you just need to run "ssh-keygen" to create two
files, "identity" and "identity.pub". It will ask you for a password...
If you hit return without typing a password, you'll have a passwordless
key pair (suitable for automatic tunnelling - note that as long as you
have absolute control the "identity" file, this still gives you as much
or arguably more (since it acts like a password no human would ever
guess) security than using a password via an interactive session).
You then add the identity.pub file to the authorized_keys file
(usually in ".ssh" off your home directory) on any machine you
want to connect to, and put the "identity" file
on your USB keychain drive or what-have-you. Then, you
can tell almost any SSH client to just use your "identity"
file to authenticate the connection. Piece of cake.
The biggest difficulty arises if you don't have a standard suite of
SSH tools available. For Windows, you have basically two (free) choices
(for SSH2) - PuTTY (which doesn't have a sshd, so limits you to
client-only) or the CygWin build of the OpenSSH tools. Those
both have their shortcomings (I personally consider PuTTY about
as friendly as a colonoscopy, and will still take it over anything
CygWin).
That leaves just one part of your question unanswered - tunneled web
browsing. All of the above works great to establish connections to
fixed destinations, but not so well if you want to dynamically specify
an endpoint (which unless you just want to keep reloading Slashdot
over and over, web browsing will require varying destinations).
Short answer - Make your fixed endpoint go to a proxy server, and tell
FireFox to use localhost (and whatever port you pick) as its proxy.
This sounds far more like a case of them trying to
rush the the product out.
I would tend to agree, except...
Apple managed to get the "hard" part (the actual content)
reasonably correct, while screwing up the container.
And what hellaciously complex container did they need
to get right? XML!!! Not exactly rocket surgery.
Thus, looking at this and calling it an honest mistake
takes a certain degree of suspention-of-disbelief. Like
a kid in a spelling bee getting "kroxyldiffific"
right, blowing it on "dog", then "coincidentally"
collecting a few hundred from the shady guy in the
back of the room.
If you want a monster (sized) machine, a full tower will readily
give you 2+8+10 bays into which you can properly mount a 3.5"
HDD, and probably provide adequate cooling capacity as well.
Not to sound too much like an advertisement, but if you want elegant
and realistic (18 drives???), the
Lian Li PC3077 provides 7 external 5.25" bays, which will
give you one CD/DVD drive, plus up to 8 3.5" HDDs with the
Lian Li EX-34A 3x5.25 to 4x3.5" mounting kit (personally I prefer the
Thermaltake A2309 iCage, which only gives you 1:1 (so 3 HDDs in 3 bays),
but has simply wonderful heat dissipation). About as close as
you'll get to a dedicated external RAID enclosure, but with decent cooling
(many RAID enclosures suck for heat, and eat drives like candy) and a
full PC inside the box.
Add 4 120GB 7200RPM SATA Drives (or what ever you can find
cheap, even 200GB drives are relativly cheap these days).
The current dollars-per-gig crossover has reached the 400GB level (some
posts actually suggested going with 80GB drives... while cheap per drive,
that would cost almost a third more than going with 400GBs on a per-GB
basis, not to mention only a fifth the total capacity in a given
enclosure); and if you plan to go with a hardware RAID, don't worry
too much about per-drive performance either... Go with the biggest
cheapest drives you can get. Any modern drive will perform admirably
in a RAID, and if you needed higher performance, you'd already know
you need a dedicated NAS that eats low-capacity high-price SCSI drives.
Install Linux, share your harddrive using Samba. Done.
Agree completely. I'd suggest sharing most of the drive RO, however,
with only a small portion RW. That way, any malware on connected
'doze machines can at worst wipe out the RW portion, with your
"real" archive safely unmodifiable.
Much like oh say a computer? Or maybe... a PocketPc? Or a Palm handheld?
While true, and as a geek I would even use a GP2X for more than gaming,
spare me the insult of playing dumb. They MARKET the thing for its
ability to run emulators, with a mention of "lots of native games" at
some vague point in the undefined future.
So yes, any PC can run MAME. Any modern handheld can run emulated original
GB and GG games. But Palms don't come with GBulator preinstalled, and Dell
doesn't sell boxes preconfigured with an X-Arcade pad and raving about how
well they run even those pesky CHD games at full frame rate.
in addition to the emulators there are a lot of nice homebrew game
Uh-huh... And most people run Snes9x for the wonderful collection of
Anthrox demos available.
Apple lets you play non-DRM MP3s on an iPod! Oh the humanity!
Sarcasm aside... Most people can realistically rip their legal CDs to
MP3s. Very few people know how to rip their SNES carts to a
playable ROM image, and even fewer have the (admittedly not all that
expensive) hardware needed to do so.
The original stats are not incorrect in the sense that they
do not represent the data.
True. They count as incorrect in that they duplicate
entries in the data.
if a kernel or major package vulnerability affects one distro, it
affects them all (mostly). Do we count a buffer overflow in an
abscure SCSI card driver once, or once per known distro using
that driver?
For a fair comparison, the recent WMF exploit affected all know versions
of Windows at least back to Win95. Do we therefore count it
24+ or so times (three versions of Win95, three of Win98, one NT3.5,
three of NT4, one(?) of ME, three of Win2K, five of XP, five
of Win2k3 (and that doesn't even count the major "Service Pack X
included" re-releases, but since US-CERT didn't include different
version of RedHat, I'll grant concede that point)?
A company released hardware that makes it easy and
convenient to run all your favorite emulated copyright
violations on portable hardware.
Does anyone really think they gave a damn about
the GPL as a philosophy rather than a means of getting
a cheap OS, for which a port of most emulators already
exists?
I want one of these toys too, but don't mistake
the manufacturer for "good guys" just because they chose
Linux.
First of all... Increasing voltage has a trivial, known
solution. Starting with DC makes it a bit harder, but
still a well-understood problem with a wide array of
solutions to choose from. Since none of the sources
of information on this company (and I looked into this
one before it hit Slashdot) mention either wattage or
ampereage, I have to suspect the real problem involves
not volts, but watts. Yes, magically increasing voltage
would increase watts via "W=V*A", but not if you do so
via a voltage conversion rather than a "real" increase
in output.
Second... An aluminum nail and a copper pipe, both embedded
in a slightly corrosive fluid... Hmm, where have I heard
something like this before? Oh yeah, the basic galvanic
battery. Sorry MagCap, the Babylonians beat you to the
punch on this one.
Finally... Do trees particularly like having a few
thousand aluminum nails driven into them? Not making a
flakey "tree rights" argument, but rather, does using tree
sap as a battery electrolyte really count as sustainable,
or will it just kill the tree? Not to mention that both
aluminum and copper salts tend to have deleterious effects
on many organisms native to this planet.
In summary - Listen to the skeptics on this one. I'll
tolerate the zero-point folks before I'll let some MBA
try to sell me a massively overblown version of the
"potato clock".
I like how you equate endorsing the anti-child porn laws
with trolling.
So, have you stopped beating your wife yet?
You just don't seem to get it (but it appears you didn't mean
that as a troll, so I'll patiently elaborate on my issue with
what you wrote).
"Child" renderotica breaks US child porn laws, despite not
having a human "victim" to protect. Two 16YO lovers snapping
a few digital pics of themselves getting it on breaks US
child porn laws - Twice. A court-emancipated late-17YO posing
for tasteful nude photos in a college photography class breaks
US child porn laws. As of July 2005, nude pictures of young
looking but perfectly legal models can and have violated US child
porn laws. A video of a naked 4YO happily playing hopscotch,
which you would NEVER question as "porn" if in a family photo
album, magically turns into porn if in the posession of a
single middle-aged male, even if he bought it in a bag of
videos at a yard sale and didn't even know he had it. All
real cases, BTW.
So when you call that "sane", yes, I take issue with it. Personally,
I agree that when talking about explicit or otherwise-compromising
nude pics of children, you have a victim, and a good reason to call
such content illegal. But when you can run afoul of the law without
requiring anything you could even remotely twist into calling a
victim, you have nothing more than mindless adherence to the
fringes of a societal taboo.
As for the people looking at this stuff... Can you justify
a prison term and permanant "sexual predator" record merely for
looking at what amount to victimless cartoons? I'd call such
people "sick", but criminals?
In case you missed my tone, I meant more to draw parallels to
the problems of the US government, than to absolve the Chinese
government of their own. I did ramble a bit, though, so I
can understand your impression.
Hopefully I didn't miss your tone, just in case you
meant that tongue-in-cheek.:)
A government that would be brought down by mere public knowledge
of international criticism and ideals has no right to stand.
How many of your international phone calls/emails has the
NSA listened in on/read? How many of your library and credit card
transactions has the FBI demanded access to? How long will YOU
rot in a military prison with no charges ever filed?
Oh, right... Not allowed to know any of that. Good thing I have no
point, and just wanted to toss out a nonsequitur response. Carry
on, then.
Is it legal for the government to place filters in place
so that I can not find them?
We'll have to wait for the rather conservative USSC to decide on
Utah's most recent attempt to do exactly that, before we can say
"no".
Is it legal for the government to take down those site,
and arrest the owners?
Which differs how from China taking down sites and
arresting people who blog about any of a number of banned
subjects?
Oh, right... Because our hangups express the highest
degree of enlightenment possible, while China's come from
ignorance and greed. Silly me.
Is any of it due to government cencorship?
Yes, actually, three of those four shut down as a result
of GOVERNMENT intervention (and the fourth just from the
threat thereof), because someone, somewhere, might use
them to commit a victimless civil-penalties-only crime.
perfectly sane laws quite endorsed by the society.
Forgive me if I err, but that statement leads me to
strongly suspect you of trolling...
I don't think it's really fair for you to say something
like this unless you live in China and get along fine with
the suppression of websites.
Do you live in the US?
Can you legally visit child porn sites (or if certain people
have their way, ANY porn sites in the near future)?
Oh, but that breaks the law, you no doubt protest...
Well, guess who writes the law? The government.
And China has one of those as well, to write their
laws.
But perhaps you'd prefer a more "fair" comparison? Okay...
Can you go download Grokster? Visit I2Hub? LokiTorrent?
Run the original Napster client (successfully)?
All societies have taboos, and all societies believe that those
taboos protect either all of society or the target of the
taboo. Sometimes that holds true, and sometimes it does
not.
In the US, we believe in practically ANYTHING justified
by "for the kids". We believe corporate profit and domestic
security trump personal freedoms. We believe we have quite a
lot of rights that the courts regularly laugh out of court.
China believes certain religious, political, and economic philosophies
constitute a grave danger to their society. And actually, they
have that correct, in that at least on the political and economic
front, those banned ideas will eventually destroy their
existing government. But if you replace "democracy" with "theocracy",
"Falun Gong" with "Radical Islam", and "capitalism" with "socialism",
can Americans really claim themselves as so much more enlightened?
but i think that a user who gets a story posted to Slashdot should
be allowed to link their vanity domain. Thats part of the fun!
Perhaps as one of the SlashDeities you gave grown jaded to just
how much geek cred making the FP gets a person (even for a stupid
story or a dupe or a "Slashvertisement")...
When someone (legit) makes the Slashdot front page, it makes their
week. They can tell all their friends and coworkers. It almost
magically grants people a tiny bit of IRL-karma, at least among
fellow geeks. I know that probably sounds stupid, but just think
of it as a sort of 15-minutes-of-fame moment.
So the bonus link basically doesn't matter, except to those
who want to boost their pagerank or try to sneak a paid link or
banner-ad-hell on us. If I want people to go to my homepage or
blog or favorite-site-of-the-week, I can put that in my profile
or Slashdot journal. If I get a submission to the FP accepted,
that counts as its own reward.
However, keep in mind that some people using AMD processors these
days were the pathologically poor people of yesteryear who wanted to
save a buck at any cost.
I agreed with you right up to that...
In the "old days", AMD chips cost a LOT less than Intel (like
a third to half the price), for 80% of the performance. When
you can pay $150 or $400 for basically comparable chips, you
can't accuse someone of acting "pathologically poor" for going
with the AMD chip.
Recently, AMD has held a small but steady lead over Intel.
And they still sold for less, for comparably performing
chips... Not half the price, but more than 10% less.
And now... The Athlon 64 has a real competitor. I would tend to
call the FP just a tad biased (since another test found the
Presler inferior to the 4800, which one might expect the FX-60
to beat). And AMD charges a small premium for it. Not acting
as an apologist, just observing a trend... Personally, I think
AMD may have made a mistake in judgement there, because it
will push away some of their underdog-loving fans.
As for me... I've made the switch to Athlon 64s, primarily
for their power and heat edge over Intel, but also because
(at least until now) they do perform significantly
better, dollar-for-dollar. Very little chance I'll rush out
and buy an FX-60... This may very well drop the 4800 to a
price at which I will buy it, however.
Slashdot Mirror
Did DOS really change anything major from 3.3 to 6.22?
DOS 3.3 couldn't deal with HDDs bigger than 32MB (they actually added larger cluster support in DOS 4, but we all know how buggy that turned out).
And yes, that reason alone eventually forced me to upgrade to such a nasty, bloated, memory-hungry Microsoft piece-of-crap as DOS 6.22.
Ah, the good ol' days.
Ah, there is the epitome of sustainable government taxation: tax things you want to destroy.
...Like "personal income" and "sales"?
Gotta agree, these guys certainly don't think very much about the consequences of the laws they create.
But then, I have increasingly grown of the opinion that ALL involuntary taxation needs to end, immediately. Not that I expect that to happen, nor will I stop paying my yearly extortion money to the government, but culturally, we NEED to lose the mentality best summed up in the "death and taxes" cliche. "We" don't need to pay taxes. "They" need our money to use it on police and militaries so they can enforce all the other BS laws that no sane human would ever consider "good".
I'll gladly pay for roads, for schools, for libraries, for social programs that benefit everyone (like truly universal healthcare, not of this half-assed system we have now). But when the single biggest chunk of my income goes, involuntarily, to fighting a new holy war, I have a problem with that. And for anyone who considers this rant to have gone off-topic, consider - How would you categorize the Christian Right's campaign against all things fun, free, or Islamic?
Let's just not learn any fucking lessons at all and switch right over to the next non-renewable, environment-poluting, war-inspiring resource...
Whoah there! Go read some of my other posts on this subject... You won't find many bigger proponents of renewable energy sources than me. But people panicing at the thought of running out of oil doesn't do any good, either, when most people really can't make a difference, in the bigger picture (though adopting the available conservation measures already available certainly doesn't hurt).
Joe Sixpack, watching the talking blobs on TV tell him the world will end tomorrow, won't react by running out and developing the next great alternative fuel source. He will, however, if scared enough, run out and stockpile food and weapons and fuel, and take to murder and rioting in the streets when that very hoarding causes self-escalating artificial shortages.
Instead, the availability of another finite-term energy source gives us exactly one benefit - Time. All the people currently working on wind, tidal hydro, geothermal, photovoltaic, biophotocatalytic Hydrogen, and perhaps things we've never heard of, won't suddenly throw up their hands in relief and go home. They'll keep working on their pet alternative energy source, and some will eventually become commericially (and more important, thermodynamically) viable.
That won't happen if civilization collapses because the domaesticated primates stampede themselves into a new dark age out of imagined fears of impending doom.
Pixar has been sold to Disney.
I keep hearing this, but the details strike me as an entirely different story...
Disney "bought" Pixar for stock. Steve Jobs owned Pixar. Steve Jobs now owns more Disney stock than anyone else. This would seem to mean that Steve Jobs now "owns" Disney, no?
I mean, the rest of the stockholders could outvote him collectively, but in general Jobs now more-or-less controls the future of Disney.
So, considering that, would it sound more accurate to say "Apple has Borgified both Disney and Pixar"?
The whole world will be oil free by 2020, because oil will be too expensive to use as a fuel. Do not forget, the peak is near.
Although we may not have passed peak production yet, if you take price-to-extract and new reserve discovery rates into consideration, we passed peak a few years ago.
However! I too used to worry about peak oil, until I learned to stop worrying and love the methane hydrate ice.
You've probably heard of it, but don't realize just how much the planet has... Seriously on the order of 20x the world's total oil reserves, in terms of energy capacity.
On the down side, current estimates put the breakeven price of extraction at around $90 per-barrel-equivalent. So it won't let us keep driving cheap-fuel-sucking SUVs forever (Then again, I consider that a good thing*), but we don't need to worry about the global economy collapsing overnight due to literally running out of gas.
* - I've said for years that as the single best thing the US could do for the planet, tax the hell out of fuel oil (though possibly not heating oil, but that gets into a regulatory nightmare considering that you can use diesel and #2 interchangeably, sulfur emmissions aside) to put it at over $10/gallon. Not only would the extra tax revenue allow reducing other taxes, but people would have a strong financial incentive to drive less, carpool more, and buy more efficient vehicles.
I think this view of their "product" is totally naive.
Fair enough opinion...
But consider this: While adblocking software/plugins has become increasingly common (and when IE7 comes out, I'd say we can safely change that to "ubiquitous"), most of us deliberately do not block Google's text ads.
Why?
The same reasoning applies. Because it doesn't annoy me. It sits there on the side of the page, humbly minding its own business and, if I really want, I can look over and see what it has to offer me today.
But yes, I will concede as naive my view of GOOG's main product as "www.google.com". As will all advertising supported organizations, we the viewers count as their real "product".
Though, the cheese tastes good and they don't zap us very often.
Google's product development pipeline runs at such a fast rate that it's very difficult for any company, Microsoft or Yahoo! to catch up
Yeah, right, whatever. Although it sounds like a good excuse to give to one's own unhappy shareholders, Google's success has nothing to do with rapid "product development". Their core product hasn't changed (other than cute logos and the necessary shift from a 32bit limit a few years back) all that much, from the perspective of the end-user, since inception.
Not to say that Google doesn't keep coming out with cool new toys. But as much as they beat every clone to the punch with GMail, with their desktop search widget, and the rest of their toys - their core "product" still weighs in at 1.3k, fits on a 640x480 monitor, and has a single significant input field.
So why has Google kept their market against a player like Microsoft?
Because I don't need to wade through massive flash-hell to do a search. Because the search results page doesn't take great pains to obscure the content with the advertising. Because they told the DOJ to go pound sand rather than turn over my (and your) search histories. Because they just do what they do well, and found a way to make a tidy profit at that without annoying me. Because they proudly know "what is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?", when most companies would fire the developer who put in such a "useless" feature.
Because they "do no evil", put simply.
"Ditch The Scores" - Baby, bathwater.
"Focus on MegaReviews" - If I read two or three reviews per movie I actually go see, and the review takes me half as long to read as I would have wasted just going to see the movie, then I may as well just go see the movie and skip the reviews.
"Trumpet Your Own Credibility" - Because we all know that nothing impresses us more than hearing someone brag...
"Aggregate Reviews on Your Own" - Hey, no fair, you guys suck so we'll do the same thing!
"Crunch The Curve" - and we end up back to point #1.
Overall, I find it increasingly annoying when "content creators" complain about the likes of Google, or "themed" linkers such as Slashdot or Rotten or Fark, or even sites that merely summarize numbers from other sites (as long as they give credit).
All the "creators" get visitors BECAUSE of those aggregators. The aggregators don't "steal" the content, and while they may indirectly profit from it, the creators would do nothing but bleed money to their IT overhead costs if sites like Google didn't take us there.
Now, some big-name sites (like the NYT) may actually have some right to complain, but even then, if I find a headline that interests me through Google News, I'll follow it, and the NYT can happily collect my fake registration info, same as if I went directly to their site. Of course, they don't like the fact that my visiting depends on them having something to interest me, rather than needing to visit before I can make that determination.
Most of the evidence <snip> that you yourself point out
That who pointed out? I didn't mention any of those. The closest I touched on, gravity, pretty solidly demonstrates the lack of a binary companion for Sol. The other two point out the glaring absence of another massive radiating body in our immediate region of space.
Key word there, radiating. This particular batch of crackpots seems to forget that the RF spectrum extends beyond the visible, and we have the tech to "see" outside the visible just fine and dandy. For example, even though it doesn't come remotely close to "star" sized, we would have discovered relatively-little ol' Jupiter even as far out as this mythical "nemesis" as soon as we discovered radio astronomy, because it broadcasts louder than a pirate Mexican-border radio station on Meth. And based on its movement relative to the fixed background of stars, we would know whether it orbited Sol or just passed by.
ALL indicate there is something out there that we don't understand.
Science has a pretty good grasp on the physics-of-the-normal. Above the quantum, and below black holes, we can calculate what "should" happen with amazing precision. And those calculations, applied to our solar system, do not come anywhere near the level of discrepancy needed to just toss another entire star in the mix.
try to keep an open mind and at least hear all the arguments before proclaiming the earth must be flat!
I will keep an open mind in those areas that science hasn't completely explained yet. The Pioneer anomaly (which you brought up), for example - We might well learn something new and cool from that one... But any explanation (short of a cheesy overlooked onboard cause) I'd more readily attribute to something exotic like universal anisotropy or "missing" dimensions, than to something as mundane-yet-nearly-impossible having somehow overlooked the second most massive object in our solar system.
I would encourage you to learn an important feature of science - Reality doesn't offer itself up for debate. We can argue about politics, about religion, about flavors of ice-cream, and what-have-you in the "social" realm, without either of us having it entirely right or wrong. We can even debate semantics, such as whether or not Pluto counts as a "planet". But to the extent that an objective "out there" may exist, we can't debate whether or not we have two objects greather than 0.012 solar masses in our local neighborhood of space.
Most annoying I find are the sites that turn away anything that's not IE because they don't support 'Netscape' (I actually use Firefox), even though their website would work perfectly without any changes except removing that damn message.
I will agree completely with that sentiment. And might I suggest the User Agent Switcher plugin? Works great on exactly such sites. However...
"The web" does not exist as the mythical monolithic construct we all seem to imagine it as, any more than the web equals "the internet".
You have literally hundreds of different programs all trying to squeeze their presentation, which may include audio, video, 3d rendering, etc, into a container originally designed for describing the presentation of plaintext content. Those programs need to target some combination of four or five major lines of web browser, running on at least three major OSs, with an unknown set of available plugins and extensions available for the viewer's combination. You have a target audience that ranges from using slow dialup connections to 100Mb optical lines, and in skill between needing to specify clicking once or twice, to those who will reverse-engineer your delivery system to keep a local copy of your content.
You may as well ask why Windows doesn't just support Mac binaries natively (or vice-versa), since they clearly turn away potential customers by not doing so. Why the PS3 won't run XBox2 games. Why dogs can't produce offspring with cats.
Personally, I take the "all or almost-nothing" approach when designing a web page... I make it work in modern browsers, and include a text-only version (where possible). That way, anyone bothering to stay reasonably up-to-date will see exactly what I intended, while those running lynx over a slow dialup connection can still read my message.
I'd put it closer to "Da Vinci Code" on the scale.
Unfair! To quote Jon Stewart ripping into Tucker Carlson, "You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls."
The DaVinci Code took a giant vat of fiction and added a little spice to it. The "Nemesis theory" takes a massive body of scientific evidence against the sun having a twin, and ignores it. Like gravity (EVERYTHING in the solar system orbits the center of gravity - Sol, the planets, everything). Brightness (we "found" Proxima Centauri, a 0.123 solar mass red dwarf 4.22LY away). Parallax (something that close would appear to move against the background of "fixed" stars, when observed from opposite sides of the Earth's orbit).
Now, in fairness, our solar system has a good bit of "missing" mass, in the sense that we don't know about every little speck of dust in our region of space. But trying to fix the numbers with one massive blob at the edge of the heliopause just doesn't count as sound science... When your dinner needs just a little more salt, you don't try to pour your cup-o'-soup over a salt-lick very quickly to achieve the desired adjustment in flavor.
Also in fairness... Maize and aloe. How do you get engravings of plants not known about in Europe until 1496, in a building completed ten years earlier? Now, it takes quite a leap to go from that to speculation about Marie de la Mer, but it certainly leaves room for new chapters in the cannonical body of fiction...
Since no one else bothered to give you, y'know, an answer, just endless links to tools that might or might not help you...
Specifically for SSH tunnels (without dealing with SSL), you basically have two choices: Manually authenticated, or pre-shared RSA keys (which you should use even for manually authenticated connections, but I'll leave that to your discretion)...
In the simplest case (manual authentication with no preshared key, and between any platforms for which a build of the standard OpenSSH tools exists), you just run:
ssh username@remotehost.foo.com -L localport:destination.bar.com:destinationport
And it works like magic... So for example, "ssh myname@mymailserver.org -L 110:mymailserver.org:110" will let "myname" check his email via a plain vanilla POP connection to localhost, which actually connects to "mymailserver.org" over a nice-n'-secure SSH tunnel. I use exactly that method to securely check my email on a BSD machine on which I have SSH access to but no shell account (it has a menu-driven UI).
For pre-shared keys, you just need to run "ssh-keygen" to create two files, "identity" and "identity.pub". It will ask you for a password... If you hit return without typing a password, you'll have a passwordless key pair (suitable for automatic tunnelling - note that as long as you have absolute control the "identity" file, this still gives you as much or arguably more (since it acts like a password no human would ever guess) security than using a password via an interactive session). You then add the identity.pub file to the authorized_keys file (usually in ".ssh" off your home directory) on any machine you want to connect to, and put the "identity" file on your USB keychain drive or what-have-you. Then, you can tell almost any SSH client to just use your "identity" file to authenticate the connection. Piece of cake.
The biggest difficulty arises if you don't have a standard suite of SSH tools available. For Windows, you have basically two (free) choices (for SSH2) - PuTTY (which doesn't have a sshd, so limits you to client-only) or the CygWin build of the OpenSSH tools. Those both have their shortcomings (I personally consider PuTTY about as friendly as a colonoscopy, and will still take it over anything CygWin).
That leaves just one part of your question unanswered - tunneled web browsing. All of the above works great to establish connections to fixed destinations, but not so well if you want to dynamically specify an endpoint (which unless you just want to keep reloading Slashdot over and over, web browsing will require varying destinations).
Short answer - Make your fixed endpoint go to a proxy server, and tell FireFox to use localhost (and whatever port you pick) as its proxy.
This sounds far more like a case of them trying to rush the the product out.
I would tend to agree, except...
Apple managed to get the "hard" part (the actual content) reasonably correct, while screwing up the container.
And what hellaciously complex container did they need to get right? XML!!! Not exactly rocket surgery.
Thus, looking at this and calling it an honest mistake takes a certain degree of suspention-of-disbelief. Like a kid in a spelling bee getting "kroxyldiffific" right, blowing it on "dog", then "coincidentally" collecting a few hundred from the shady guy in the back of the room.
On to solutions. Buy yourself a big case
If you want a monster (sized) machine, a full tower will readily give you 2+8+10 bays into which you can properly mount a 3.5" HDD, and probably provide adequate cooling capacity as well.
Not to sound too much like an advertisement, but if you want elegant and realistic (18 drives???), the Lian Li PC3077 provides 7 external 5.25" bays, which will give you one CD/DVD drive, plus up to 8 3.5" HDDs with the Lian Li EX-34A 3x5.25 to 4x3.5" mounting kit (personally I prefer the Thermaltake A2309 iCage, which only gives you 1:1 (so 3 HDDs in 3 bays), but has simply wonderful heat dissipation). About as close as you'll get to a dedicated external RAID enclosure, but with decent cooling (many RAID enclosures suck for heat, and eat drives like candy) and a full PC inside the box.
Add 4 120GB 7200RPM SATA Drives (or what ever you can find cheap, even 200GB drives are relativly cheap these days).
The current dollars-per-gig crossover has reached the 400GB level (some posts actually suggested going with 80GB drives... while cheap per drive, that would cost almost a third more than going with 400GBs on a per-GB basis, not to mention only a fifth the total capacity in a given enclosure); and if you plan to go with a hardware RAID, don't worry too much about per-drive performance either... Go with the biggest cheapest drives you can get. Any modern drive will perform admirably in a RAID, and if you needed higher performance, you'd already know you need a dedicated NAS that eats low-capacity high-price SCSI drives.
Install Linux, share your harddrive using Samba. Done.
Agree completely. I'd suggest sharing most of the drive RO, however, with only a small portion RW. That way, any malware on connected 'doze machines can at worst wipe out the RW portion, with your "real" archive safely unmodifiable.
Much like oh say a computer? Or maybe... a PocketPc? Or a Palm handheld?
While true, and as a geek I would even use a GP2X for more than gaming, spare me the insult of playing dumb. They MARKET the thing for its ability to run emulators, with a mention of "lots of native games" at some vague point in the undefined future.
So yes, any PC can run MAME. Any modern handheld can run emulated original GB and GG games. But Palms don't come with GBulator preinstalled, and Dell doesn't sell boxes preconfigured with an X-Arcade pad and raving about how well they run even those pesky CHD games at full frame rate.
in addition to the emulators there are a lot of nice homebrew game
Uh-huh... And most people run Snes9x for the wonderful collection of Anthrox demos available.
Apple lets you play non-DRM MP3s on an iPod! Oh the humanity!
Sarcasm aside... Most people can realistically rip their legal CDs to MP3s. Very few people know how to rip their SNES carts to a playable ROM image, and even fewer have the (admittedly not all that expensive) hardware needed to do so.
The original stats are not incorrect in the sense that they do not represent the data.
True. They count as incorrect in that they duplicate entries in the data.
if a kernel or major package vulnerability affects one distro, it affects them all (mostly). Do we count a buffer overflow in an abscure SCSI card driver once, or once per known distro using that driver?
For a fair comparison, the recent WMF exploit affected all know versions of Windows at least back to Win95. Do we therefore count it 24+ or so times (three versions of Win95, three of Win98, one NT3.5, three of NT4, one(?) of ME, three of Win2K, five of XP, five of Win2k3 (and that doesn't even count the major "Service Pack X included" re-releases, but since US-CERT didn't include different version of RedHat, I'll grant concede that point)?
Seriously, no trolling or flamebait here...
A company released hardware that makes it easy and convenient to run all your favorite emulated copyright violations on portable hardware.
Does anyone really think they gave a damn about the GPL as a philosophy rather than a means of getting a cheap OS, for which a port of most emulators already exists?
I want one of these toys too, but don't mistake the manufacturer for "good guys" just because they chose Linux.
First of all... Increasing voltage has a trivial, known solution. Starting with DC makes it a bit harder, but still a well-understood problem with a wide array of solutions to choose from. Since none of the sources of information on this company (and I looked into this one before it hit Slashdot) mention either wattage or ampereage, I have to suspect the real problem involves not volts, but watts. Yes, magically increasing voltage would increase watts via "W=V*A", but not if you do so via a voltage conversion rather than a "real" increase in output.
Second... An aluminum nail and a copper pipe, both embedded in a slightly corrosive fluid... Hmm, where have I heard something like this before? Oh yeah, the basic galvanic battery. Sorry MagCap, the Babylonians beat you to the punch on this one.
Finally... Do trees particularly like having a few thousand aluminum nails driven into them? Not making a flakey "tree rights" argument, but rather, does using tree sap as a battery electrolyte really count as sustainable, or will it just kill the tree? Not to mention that both aluminum and copper salts tend to have deleterious effects on many organisms native to this planet.
In summary - Listen to the skeptics on this one. I'll tolerate the zero-point folks before I'll let some MBA try to sell me a massively overblown version of the "potato clock".
I like how you equate endorsing the anti-child porn laws with trolling.
So, have you stopped beating your wife yet?
You just don't seem to get it (but it appears you didn't mean that as a troll, so I'll patiently elaborate on my issue with what you wrote).
"Child" renderotica breaks US child porn laws, despite not having a human "victim" to protect. Two 16YO lovers snapping a few digital pics of themselves getting it on breaks US child porn laws - Twice. A court-emancipated late-17YO posing for tasteful nude photos in a college photography class breaks US child porn laws. As of July 2005, nude pictures of young looking but perfectly legal models can and have violated US child porn laws. A video of a naked 4YO happily playing hopscotch, which you would NEVER question as "porn" if in a family photo album, magically turns into porn if in the posession of a single middle-aged male, even if he bought it in a bag of videos at a yard sale and didn't even know he had it. All real cases, BTW.
So when you call that "sane", yes, I take issue with it. Personally, I agree that when talking about explicit or otherwise-compromising nude pics of children, you have a victim, and a good reason to call such content illegal. But when you can run afoul of the law without requiring anything you could even remotely twist into calling a victim, you have nothing more than mindless adherence to the fringes of a societal taboo.
As for the people looking at this stuff... Can you justify a prison term and permanant "sexual predator" record merely for looking at what amount to victimless cartoons? I'd call such people "sick", but criminals?
Who the hell are you to defend such a practice?
:)
In case you missed my tone, I meant more to draw parallels to the problems of the US government, than to absolve the Chinese government of their own. I did ramble a bit, though, so I can understand your impression.
Hopefully I didn't miss your tone, just in case you meant that tongue-in-cheek.
A government that would be brought down by mere public knowledge of international criticism and ideals has no right to stand.
How many of your international phone calls/emails has the NSA listened in on/read? How many of your library and credit card transactions has the FBI demanded access to? How long will YOU rot in a military prison with no charges ever filed?
Oh, right... Not allowed to know any of that. Good thing I have no point, and just wanted to toss out a nonsequitur response. Carry on, then.
Is it legal for the government to place filters in place so that I can not find them?
We'll have to wait for the rather conservative USSC to decide on Utah's most recent attempt to do exactly that, before we can say "no".
Is it legal for the government to take down those site, and arrest the owners?
Which differs how from China taking down sites and arresting people who blog about any of a number of banned subjects?
Oh, right... Because our hangups express the highest degree of enlightenment possible, while China's come from ignorance and greed. Silly me.
Is any of it due to government cencorship?
Yes, actually, three of those four shut down as a result of GOVERNMENT intervention (and the fourth just from the threat thereof), because someone, somewhere, might use them to commit a victimless civil-penalties-only crime.
perfectly sane laws quite endorsed by the society.
Forgive me if I err, but that statement leads me to strongly suspect you of trolling...
I don't think it's really fair for you to say something like this unless you live in China and get along fine with the suppression of websites.
Do you live in the US?
Can you legally visit child porn sites (or if certain people have their way, ANY porn sites in the near future)?
Oh, but that breaks the law, you no doubt protest... Well, guess who writes the law? The government. And China has one of those as well, to write their laws.
But perhaps you'd prefer a more "fair" comparison? Okay...
Can you go download Grokster? Visit I2Hub? LokiTorrent? Run the original Napster client (successfully)?
All societies have taboos, and all societies believe that those taboos protect either all of society or the target of the taboo. Sometimes that holds true, and sometimes it does not.
In the US, we believe in practically ANYTHING justified by "for the kids". We believe corporate profit and domestic security trump personal freedoms. We believe we have quite a lot of rights that the courts regularly laugh out of court.
China believes certain religious, political, and economic philosophies constitute a grave danger to their society. And actually, they have that correct, in that at least on the political and economic front, those banned ideas will eventually destroy their existing government. But if you replace "democracy" with "theocracy", "Falun Gong" with "Radical Islam", and "capitalism" with "socialism", can Americans really claim themselves as so much more enlightened?
but i think that a user who gets a story posted to Slashdot should be allowed to link their vanity domain. Thats part of the fun!
Perhaps as one of the SlashDeities you gave grown jaded to just how much geek cred making the FP gets a person (even for a stupid story or a dupe or a "Slashvertisement")...
When someone (legit) makes the Slashdot front page, it makes their week. They can tell all their friends and coworkers. It almost magically grants people a tiny bit of IRL-karma, at least among fellow geeks. I know that probably sounds stupid, but just think of it as a sort of 15-minutes-of-fame moment.
So the bonus link basically doesn't matter, except to those who want to boost their pagerank or try to sneak a paid link or banner-ad-hell on us. If I want people to go to my homepage or blog or favorite-site-of-the-week, I can put that in my profile or Slashdot journal. If I get a submission to the FP accepted, that counts as its own reward.
However, keep in mind that some people using AMD processors these days were the pathologically poor people of yesteryear who wanted to save a buck at any cost.
I agreed with you right up to that...
In the "old days", AMD chips cost a LOT less than Intel (like a third to half the price), for 80% of the performance. When you can pay $150 or $400 for basically comparable chips, you can't accuse someone of acting "pathologically poor" for going with the AMD chip.
Recently, AMD has held a small but steady lead over Intel. And they still sold for less, for comparably performing chips... Not half the price, but more than 10% less.
And now... The Athlon 64 has a real competitor. I would tend to call the FP just a tad biased (since another test found the Presler inferior to the 4800, which one might expect the FX-60 to beat). And AMD charges a small premium for it. Not acting as an apologist, just observing a trend... Personally, I think AMD may have made a mistake in judgement there, because it will push away some of their underdog-loving fans.
As for me... I've made the switch to Athlon 64s, primarily for their power and heat edge over Intel, but also because (at least until now) they do perform significantly better, dollar-for-dollar. Very little chance I'll rush out and buy an FX-60... This may very well drop the 4800 to a price at which I will buy it, however.