Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy,
possibly more than it contains. That energy comes
from fossil fuels.
No.
Our current industrial-ag model of crop
production consumes quite a lot of fossil fuels.
That does not mean the same thing as "growing
corn and converting it to ethanol requires fossil
fuels".
Producing ethanol requires nothing more than
the sun, some corn, and bacteria. Yes, you'll
notice that list includes an energy source, but
not "oil".
Using Ethanol as a fuel is mostly a way to
funnel money to Corn Belt farmers.
To that extent, I will agree with you, because
we do use an industrial-ag model of
crop production. We don't need to,
though.
so we should be expanding the pure object-oriented
paradigm to allow for a richer set of basic abstractions
It takes some fairly fancy code to translate even
pure C into something the CPU can use directly.
It takes another layer of fancy code to add on the idea
of "Objects".
Then another for the idea of a "Virtual Machine", which
regardless of how "clean" it ends up, still has to run on
a real machine.
So we should add yet another layer, to make code
even more abstracted from the actual underlying
hardware?
Ignoring the performance issues involved in such
seemingly-noble ideas, it also adds in one more layer
where conceptual designs take on a degree of ambiguity,
dependant on the translation to the next layer down to
make those abstractions more concrete. Each of those
layers introduces MORE, not less, potential for
serious-yet-difficult-to-track-down bugs.
Will MS's OO++ make the same choices as GOO++? If not,
problems will appear. Hell, we don't even have 100%
compatible VMs at the moment, yet we should move on
to the next level? Somehow, I have to doubt Ms. Livschitz
works in the "real" world. A true "Computer Scientist",
rather than a "Software Engineer".
In a perfect world, we'd speak to our computers
like they do on Star Trek, and the computer would
understand our intentions. We do not live in that
world (nor will we for quite a while). We live in
the world where CPUs do number crunching and nothing
but number crunching. They don't interpret,
they don't think, they don't "understand" our intent
with a given blob of code, unless that code falls into
the VERY narrow range of formal imperatives the CPU
understands.
Any code using "i" as a variable immediately
goes on the Wall of Shame.
Oh, give it a rest!
For a nice small loop, "i" works perfectly well, and
no one has a problem understanding what it does.
And just to shock you, for a small nested loop,
I often use "j", and occasionally <gasp!> even
"k"! Yet, oddly, I've had numerous people compliment
my code as both elegant and easily readably.
You can say all you want about readability, portability,
and maintainability of code using various "standards".
But I have yet to meet anyone who considers Hungarian
anything better than "effective but very ugly". When
even the most trivial "for()" statement ends up causing
a line to wrap past 80 cols, a notational system has
big problems.
Sort of. Some CDs have a form of copy
restriction on them. Bypassing them ==
automatic DMCA violation.
Copy restriction?
Ooooooooh! You mean "broken"! I get
it now.
No, you see, you've misunderstood... Phillips
owns the IP rights to the concept of a
"Compact Disc". By a company claiming that
they have produced such an object, they
provide a certain basic level of guarantee
that they have complied with Phillips'
specifications. How can we can "circumvent"
an access control mechanism on a CD, when no
such mechanism exists in the spec?
Why, if these "broken" CDs deliberately
violated the spec, well, that would count as
outright fraud to still call it a CD. So they
must simply have broken. Does the DMCA
also say that "in the event a product breaks,
you may not repair it"?
if the developers of B have never read the
source of A, or anything derived from A, it's
pretty sure that B will not look like A.
Except, in the realm of software, that just
doesn't apply. A "best way" often exists to
accomplish some simple task, and 20 good
developers would all independantly "discover"
that way. Even in more complicated code, you'll
see a large overlap of broader ideas, all arising
independantly
This makes one of my peeves about software
patents... Patents include the critiria of
non-obviousness. If 20 developers would all
come up with the same solution, that seems
like a pretty damned obvious technique, IMO.
Take the XOR'ed image patent, for example...
Even ignoring the idea of prior art (which IMO
existed), using XOR to put one image on top
of another such that you can later remove the
superimposed image cleanly (ie, a mouse cursor
over a background), even a moron would use XOR.
Yet, the USPTO still decided to grant that one.
So yes, very similar works do arise,
totally independant of each other, in the field
of software engineering. Unfortunately, considering
our legal system's pro-corporate bias, that will most
likely work against us. Rather than believing that
Billy G and Linus both came up with
printf("Hello World\n");, this source release
will quite likely suffice to convince the courts
that various open source projects "stole" such
trivial statements from Microsoft code.
Or to borrow a joke from the SCO threads, "Wow,
look at all of the i++; statements those
damned open source commies used, just like in SCO's
code!"
Horizontal scrolling to read in my humble
experience is annoying, too bad someone didn't
do a better job of formatting it.
Umm... How big of a font do you use in your
browser?
A lot of people have complained about the
formatting, but I use an out-of-the-box Netscape
7.0, and it looks fine - Standard 80-column
plaintext, just like you'd get from an old
DOS text file, or anything from Project Gutenberg.
No long lines, no funky characters, no gaudy
color schemes...
Sure, making it a tad prettier wouldn't hurt,
but I don't know why everyone has complained about
it so far. Have people actually grown so used to
having pretty NP fonts, with a nice background and
internal hyperlinks, that they can't stand what
once-upon-a-time existed as the dominant form of
text on the PC?
...And certain key patents (even produced as a
"clean" implementation, you can still violate
patent) held by... Anyone? Right! Microsoft!
I can only imagine how much Bill enjoys watching
us put massive effort into producing an open
source alternative to.net... Because once
everything matures and the entire world uses
it (which we as a community actually
encourage by supporting it ourselves),
Bill can say "Aww, gee, you violated patent
#blah-blah-blah, I guess you'll have to either
pay me royalties, which I won't accept anyway,
or throw it all away".
And anyone that thinks we can just avoid MS's
key patents in this area has started to
believe the "MS sucks" hype too
literally. They may produce bug-ridden code,
but I have no doubt their lawyers have left
a legal minefield that will one day blow up
in all our faces. The very fact that they have
so far let us use their playground
suggests they have something up their sleeves.
Many parts of eastern NC were without power
for weeks. Both cell phones and land lines were
useless as well.
But that falls into the "no power, no interference"
category. Did they manage to bring up broadband
cable before even returning phone service? Somehow,
I suspect not. The same would apply to broadband
over power lines... In an emergency, you'll have a
phone back long before you have any source
of broadband connections restored.
Perhaps it would help if you gave me an example
where radioing from inside a blacked-out area
to somewhere not blacked out would occur, in
some non-redundant capacity (ie, "call for help"
seems pointless after a hurricane passes through,
since everyone knows you have problems). Okay,
"keeping in touch", but I for one would gladly
give up chatting with the neighbors for two weeks
if it means real competition to lower the cost of
broadband.
Additionally, I have another motive for wanting to
see BPL, which I suspect most people haven't
considered, though many geeks will feel similarly
once they hear it...
I can do without a land-line phone, and go cell-only.
I can do without cable - I watch about an hour of TV
per week, and what I do watch, I could buy the complete
season sets on DVD for far less than my current
cable bill; I can also get news and major network shows
(not that I watch any) from plain ol' broadcast TV.
I cannot, however, currently do without a connection
to the power grid, nor do I have any desire to lose
my fat internet pipe. With BPL, I can get rid of both
the land-line and cable TV, and have all the
services I need via power.
September 11, 2001 - Remember that? What the
hell do you think that not only myself, but
almost every other ham I know in the area where
doing?
Well, considering that only about half of the
local cell phone providers went down (and even
if no normal lines of communication existed, you
couldn't have done anything about the bodies
lying in two giant heaps of rubble)... I'd say you
did the same thing the rest of us did - Rubbernecked
by way of the news. You just used your preferred
medium of ham radio, rather than the TV or internet.
And hey, I'll admit, ham seems like a somewhat cool
hobby. But turning up a fast and reliable means of
communication, in favor of a slow and obsolete one...
Well, kinda defeats the whole purpose of "communication".
Remember to tell that to the guy holding the
radio the next time a disaster comes through
your town.
Yeah, sounds nice in theory.
And what disaster, of a scale requiring us to
go back to antiquated ham radio for communication,
would also fail to knock out power, thus removing
the source of potential interference?
Some people in previous/. stories on this
topic pointed out that the receiving end
might still have power. Sorry, but no, that
doesn't cut it... Unless we have a disaster on
a scale of hundreds of miles in diameter, no
one will go running off to find a ham to get
help, they'd just use their cell phone, or
failing that, drive to the next town. And,
assuming help exists, a disaster of that scale
would send FEMA scurrying anyway, so no need to
bother making contact.
"Gee, Steve, LA just dissapeared from the power
grid, all major broadcasting from the area has
stopped, and NOAA visible shows no sources of
light... Do you think we should check it out?"
"Nah... No hams, those true gods among men,
have radioed for help. The entire city probably
just decided to go to bed early, all at once."
so SF does not only affects you while you
browse, but also when you send an email. All
email with a mistyped.com or.net domain will
be send to verisign
Waitasec... Never thought of it from this angle
before, but doesn't that mean SF would tend to
cause Verisign to receive a lot of spam?
I mean, I get a thousand per day, and find it
nearly overwhelming (I've finally started just
using a whitelist, which I find unpleasant, but
a necessity). Imagine, every spammer just
randomly spewing out crap in the hopes of hitting
a valid account, 99% of which goes straight to
Verisign...
Customize the list of nouns, and you can even make
it sound relevant to your own business.
And, for reference, I did actually use that to
come up with an "Objective" line for my SO's resume
(though as a warning, she works in a field where
the resume counted as a formality - she could have
used "I want you to pay me to scratch my ass all day"
as her objective, and still gotten the job).
You'll find hundreds of thousands of files
of all kinds, especially media.
True... However, I do have a rather serious
problem with this case...
Usenet servers have a finite article retention
time, usually a week, almost never more than a
month (considering the volume of traffic that
goes over Usenet in a month, even a megacorp
like AOL would have to shy away from storing it
all for more than a few weeks).
So, let's think about a hypothetical time frame
for these events - Harlan's works get posted.
A few days later, he notices, and tweaks (that
man has more than one screw loose, and I say
that even as a fan of his work). A day or two
passes, and he decides to send a letter to
AOL.
Now, how much time elapsed before he decided
AOL had ignored him? A week? A month? Half
of a year?
By the time AOL could reasonably have taken
action (if they felt so inclined), the article
would already have expired from their servers.
So what, exactly, would he have them do? Go
back in time to delete the offending posts?
AOL probably doesn't care one way or the other,
and simply ignored him. But the end result comes
out the same, in the case of a Usenet post. The
post vanished after some reasonably short period
of time.
Actually, I had an LED bar in mind, rather than
an LCD (better visibility in the dark), but
same idea - More precise, costs about the same
as a 4-pack of batteries, instant response, and
WAY less kludgy.
Still, I have to admit, finding a use for
the testers on a dead battery has a fairly
high level of geeky coolness.
No, but the flipside of the "marketing" they
are pushing is that women can't do things with
computers that aren't "easy".
I think a lot of Slashdotters have read
more into this story than they should...
They deliberately choose a spokeswoman based on
pushing the "If she can do it, so can I" male
ego button. The reverse of that, which you
suggest they also pushed, does not hold true.
If the implicit sexism didn't exist, their
approach simply would not have worked.
In no way would insulting a guy's ego by
demonstrating that a woman can use Linux
increase their sexist ideas. If anything,
it demonstrates that yes, in fact, a woman
can use Linux, when they cannot (yet).
This patent covers the idea of a computer doing
something when you insert a CD (or floppy too?)
into it.
Yet, drives have signalled a media change since
the original IBM PCs. What possible use does that
have, if not to let the OS do something when it
detects that change? In this case, the very fact
that they can detect a media change and
do something, provides its own prior art.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. What next, a patent on "Use of
the CPUs Address lines to let memory know what
bits to serve up? Using a DAC to convert a
stream of bits into sound? I doubt anyone
thought to patent those yet, since they
seem glaringly obvious...
We don't need patent reform, we need
the USPTO abolished and replaced with ypewriter-wielding monkeys, who would do
a marginally better job.
Our tax dollars at work...
on
WiFi Free-For-All
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Who wants to bet this has some VERY tight
tie-ins with the TSA?
Sure, they'll give you free internet access
(since your tax dollars subsidize it anyway)...
But, you'd better not leave "disney.com";
Otherwise, expect the boys in blue to start
playing stinkfist with you...
So can the average isp, because most cannot
afford to setup their own isp
You make a lot of good points, and I largely
agree with you. Except on the part I quoted...
No, most of us cannot afford to set up our own
ISP (and what would that help, anyway, if the
higher-level providers censor as well? None
of us can become our own Sprintnet, thanks
to our leaders all but guaranteeing existing
cross-country links a permanant lock-in on the
market). We can, however, give a link to our
neighbors. Who can do the same, and on, and
on, and on. That might really suck for those
in very rural areas, but even in a very sparse
suburban area, would work just fine.
Having a few primary cross-country and
intercontinental backbones speeds up the
net quite a bit, by reducing the number of hops
it takes to get from NY to LA, for example. But
the underlying architecture of the internet
works just fine if we have a massively dispersed
"private" network (and in fact, as far as the
original fail-safe intention of the internet,
such a layout would work better, if
slower for long distances).
I fully believe that people don't already do
just that (connect to their neighbors) only
because they have a sense that they can
speak freely, and have some sense of anonymity,
on the internet. Take that away, and the
internet will turn into nothing more than a
"fast lane" that people use as an alternative
to their neighbornet when looking for content
that big brother wouldn't object to.
He had several inappropriate reviews that made
unfounded accusations and inappropriate untruthful
remarks such as calling him "Bipolar Paranoid
Schitzophrenic." These reviews should not have
been on the site.
Okay, let me get this straight...
The professor threatened to sue, even after
removal of the offensive posts, because someone
called him paranoid?
Umm... Gee, Tweaky, you might want to lighten
up on the coffee. That "paranoid" idea sounds
all too appropriate... Most people would have
brushed it off as a crack by some waste of flesh
that couldn't pass the class, but no, Tweaky
here had to have a valuable internet resource
taken down.
I find it ironic that the "Choose a style"
menu at the top-right doesn't work in Safari,
but works fine in Mac IE, despite the fact that:
"We don't have to worry that its basic functions
are only going to work with Microsoft's, Apple's
or AOL's "platform""
Go to a command prompt.
Type "ping 66.35.250.151" (slashdot, as of an
nslookup just a few seconds ago). Do you get
a response?
Congratulations, the internet works for you,
regardless of platform.
The internet does not give
a damn if your favorite web-browser style
works or not. It doesn't care if you use
a broken MS Samba implementation. It doesn't
care if AIM works with MSIM. It doesn't care
if you can't make a passive connection to an
FTP site through your firewall (although that
does actually get a lot closer to the
nature of the internet than the previous
examples).
It doesn't care if you live in China and research
Falun Gong, whatever the hell that means (they
certainly make a big fuss about it, though). It
doesn't care if you look at kiddie porn. It
doesn't care if you troll slashdot (no, I don't
mean this as a troll, just giving an example).
The Internet routes packets from point A to
point B. Nothing more, nothing less.
Youd think after the what the BBC
published you would try and take this
case more calmly?
Some of us really don't give a damn about
politics. We do, however, appreciate a
good joke, and we do enjoy seeing justice
done when the legal system fails in its role.
Having Google's top link to "Litigious bastards"
point to SCO doesn't hurt anyone, and made for
a good laugh when I first saw that. You could
call the MyDoom worm a bit less harmless, but
y'know, despite Bruce P begging us all to behave,
I really don't give a shit. I egged on the worm,
and felt quite pleased when SCO had to change
the URL of their web site. Sadly, it appears in
hindsight that the worm's author used the SCO
attack as a ruse, but the end result remains
overall positive. SCO deserves it,
and much worse, for their current business
model."Litigious bastards" doesn't "call them
names", it makes a statement of fact.
Call it vigilanteism if you want, but
when a company can get away with obviously "wrong"
activities simply because they haven't broken any
existing laws, I for one consider it "justice"
that they have a fed-up mob come after them to
burn them at the stake.
So, behave? Hey, I won't start it. But
when a pedophile priest "mysteriously" suicides
in a crowded jail cell, we all know what
happened, and we all cheer it on. When a
father hunts down and brutally disembowels his
daughter's rapist, who got off on a techinicality,
no one cries for the dead scum. And when a worm
targets SCO, well, sometimes two wrongs does
make a right.
But, hey... Just my opinion. Feel free
to defend SCO's raping of our legal system. And
remember, even if they lose, they still got what
they wanted (time to sell their shares at a massively
inflated rate compared to their actual value). Justice?
No. We can at best hope to annoy them, since they've
already "gotten away" with the actual offense.
Not every MS user updates once a year, you idiots.
Assuming you didn't mean that as a joke...
The entire point of this article centers on the
very fact that no fix existed, despite MS knowing
about the problem for over six months.
So, even the most attentive network admin in
the world, applying every fix within an hour
of release, would not have had the ability to
remove this vulnerability from his systems.
Personally, I find it more interesting that MS
has the same problem that OpenSSH had, dating from
the same time period. Time for a few folks to start
comparing the relevant libraries for similarity...
Wouldn't that look just great for MS's PR,
getting caught not only in a copyright infringement,
but using that nasty GPL'd software they so hate...
Weren't the astronauts alive in both cases
of the shuttle exploding until they hit the
earth extremely quickly?
In the Challenger explosion, yes. The actual
"explosion" made a big fireball but packed little
destructive force. Other evidence, such as the
use of emergency oxygen masks, indicate that the
crew survived the initial blast.
For the Columbia, I haven't heard one way or the
other, but considering the ship actually broke
up (rather than just the fuel tank rupturing,
causing a fireball)... And then also considering
the lack of oxygen or a pressurized atmosphere...
Well, they most likely died rather quickly.
Isn't there a case for them having
parachutes or some other way of getting
out of their before that happens. Terminal
velocity and all that.
That might have applied to the challenger
crew, although I doubt they had time to figure
out what happened, go for the parachutes, properly
equip them, and find a way out of the ship.
Once you hit orbit, however, not even any point
in trying to escape. Even in a pressurized suit,
the lack of air means that a parachute will do
very little. The idea of "terminal velocity"
only applies when you have friction from air
resistance. Even with a suit and a parachute,
they would have burned up just like any other
object entering our atmosphere at a few thousand
mph.
I received a reprint of a very good article
on the subject from a primary researcher, Umar
Mohideen, which can be downloaded here It's
math intensive, not pop sci hype.
Ah, many thanks!
I have read what publically-available info I could
find on-line about this, but have yet to read any
original pubs from researchers in the field.
I will have to wait for a time when I can
properly digest it to comment, though.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy, possibly more than it contains. That energy comes from fossil fuels.
No.
Our current industrial-ag model of crop production consumes quite a lot of fossil fuels. That does not mean the same thing as "growing corn and converting it to ethanol requires fossil fuels".
Producing ethanol requires nothing more than the sun, some corn, and bacteria. Yes, you'll notice that list includes an energy source, but not "oil".
Using Ethanol as a fuel is mostly a way to funnel money to Corn Belt farmers.
To that extent, I will agree with you, because we do use an industrial-ag model of crop production. We don't need to, though.
so we should be expanding the pure object-oriented paradigm to allow for a richer set of basic abstractions
It takes some fairly fancy code to translate even pure C into something the CPU can use directly.
It takes another layer of fancy code to add on the idea of "Objects".
Then another for the idea of a "Virtual Machine", which regardless of how "clean" it ends up, still has to run on a real machine.
So we should add yet another layer, to make code even more abstracted from the actual underlying hardware?
Ignoring the performance issues involved in such seemingly-noble ideas, it also adds in one more layer where conceptual designs take on a degree of ambiguity, dependant on the translation to the next layer down to make those abstractions more concrete. Each of those layers introduces MORE, not less, potential for serious-yet-difficult-to-track-down bugs.
Will MS's OO++ make the same choices as GOO++? If not, problems will appear. Hell, we don't even have 100% compatible VMs at the moment, yet we should move on to the next level? Somehow, I have to doubt Ms. Livschitz works in the "real" world. A true "Computer Scientist", rather than a "Software Engineer".
In a perfect world, we'd speak to our computers like they do on Star Trek, and the computer would understand our intentions. We do not live in that world (nor will we for quite a while). We live in the world where CPUs do number crunching and nothing but number crunching. They don't interpret, they don't think, they don't "understand" our intent with a given blob of code, unless that code falls into the VERY narrow range of formal imperatives the CPU understands.
Any code using "i" as a variable immediately goes on the Wall of Shame.
Oh, give it a rest!
For a nice small loop, "i" works perfectly well, and no one has a problem understanding what it does. And just to shock you, for a small nested loop, I often use "j", and occasionally <gasp!> even "k"! Yet, oddly, I've had numerous people compliment my code as both elegant and easily readably.
You can say all you want about readability, portability, and maintainability of code using various "standards". But I have yet to meet anyone who considers Hungarian anything better than "effective but very ugly". When even the most trivial "for()" statement ends up causing a line to wrap past 80 cols, a notational system has big problems.
Sort of. Some CDs have a form of copy restriction on them. Bypassing them == automatic DMCA violation.
Copy restriction?
Ooooooooh! You mean "broken"! I get it now.
No, you see, you've misunderstood... Phillips owns the IP rights to the concept of a "Compact Disc". By a company claiming that they have produced such an object, they provide a certain basic level of guarantee that they have complied with Phillips' specifications. How can we can "circumvent" an access control mechanism on a CD, when no such mechanism exists in the spec?
Why, if these "broken" CDs deliberately violated the spec, well, that would count as outright fraud to still call it a CD. So they must simply have broken. Does the DMCA also say that "in the event a product breaks, you may not repair it"?
if the developers of B have never read the source of A, or anything derived from A, it's pretty sure that B will not look like A.
Except, in the realm of software, that just doesn't apply. A "best way" often exists to accomplish some simple task, and 20 good developers would all independantly "discover" that way. Even in more complicated code, you'll see a large overlap of broader ideas, all arising independantly
This makes one of my peeves about software patents... Patents include the critiria of non-obviousness. If 20 developers would all come up with the same solution, that seems like a pretty damned obvious technique, IMO.
Take the XOR'ed image patent, for example... Even ignoring the idea of prior art (which IMO existed), using XOR to put one image on top of another such that you can later remove the superimposed image cleanly (ie, a mouse cursor over a background), even a moron would use XOR. Yet, the USPTO still decided to grant that one.
So yes, very similar works do arise, totally independant of each other, in the field of software engineering. Unfortunately, considering our legal system's pro-corporate bias, that will most likely work against us. Rather than believing that Billy G and Linus both came up with printf("Hello World\n");, this source release will quite likely suffice to convince the courts that various open source projects "stole" such trivial statements from Microsoft code.
Or to borrow a joke from the SCO threads, "Wow, look at all of the i++; statements those damned open source commies used, just like in SCO's code!"
Horizontal scrolling to read in my humble experience is annoying, too bad someone didn't do a better job of formatting it.
Umm... How big of a font do you use in your browser?
A lot of people have complained about the formatting, but I use an out-of-the-box Netscape 7.0, and it looks fine - Standard 80-column plaintext, just like you'd get from an old DOS text file, or anything from Project Gutenberg. No long lines, no funky characters, no gaudy color schemes...
Sure, making it a tad prettier wouldn't hurt, but I don't know why everyone has complained about it so far. Have people actually grown so used to having pretty NP fonts, with a nice background and internal hyperlinks, that they can't stand what once-upon-a-time existed as the dominant form of text on the PC?
Mono is based on the ECMA 334 and 355 standards
...And certain key patents (even produced as a
"clean" implementation, you can still violate
patent) held by... Anyone? Right! Microsoft!
.net... Because once
everything matures and the entire world uses
it (which we as a community actually
encourage by supporting it ourselves),
Bill can say "Aww, gee, you violated patent
#blah-blah-blah, I guess you'll have to either
pay me royalties, which I won't accept anyway,
or throw it all away".
I can only imagine how much Bill enjoys watching us put massive effort into producing an open source alternative to
And anyone that thinks we can just avoid MS's key patents in this area has started to believe the "MS sucks" hype too literally. They may produce bug-ridden code, but I have no doubt their lawyers have left a legal minefield that will one day blow up in all our faces. The very fact that they have so far let us use their playground suggests they have something up their sleeves.
Many parts of eastern NC were without power for weeks. Both cell phones and land lines were useless as well.
But that falls into the "no power, no interference" category. Did they manage to bring up broadband cable before even returning phone service? Somehow, I suspect not. The same would apply to broadband over power lines... In an emergency, you'll have a phone back long before you have any source of broadband connections restored.
Perhaps it would help if you gave me an example where radioing from inside a blacked-out area to somewhere not blacked out would occur, in some non-redundant capacity (ie, "call for help" seems pointless after a hurricane passes through, since everyone knows you have problems). Okay, "keeping in touch", but I for one would gladly give up chatting with the neighbors for two weeks if it means real competition to lower the cost of broadband.
Additionally, I have another motive for wanting to see BPL, which I suspect most people haven't considered, though many geeks will feel similarly once they hear it...
I can do without a land-line phone, and go cell-only. I can do without cable - I watch about an hour of TV per week, and what I do watch, I could buy the complete season sets on DVD for far less than my current cable bill; I can also get news and major network shows (not that I watch any) from plain ol' broadcast TV. I cannot, however, currently do without a connection to the power grid, nor do I have any desire to lose my fat internet pipe. With BPL, I can get rid of both the land-line and cable TV, and have all the services I need via power.
September 11, 2001 - Remember that? What the hell do you think that not only myself, but almost every other ham I know in the area where doing?
Well, considering that only about half of the local cell phone providers went down (and even if no normal lines of communication existed, you couldn't have done anything about the bodies lying in two giant heaps of rubble)... I'd say you did the same thing the rest of us did - Rubbernecked by way of the news. You just used your preferred medium of ham radio, rather than the TV or internet.
And hey, I'll admit, ham seems like a somewhat cool hobby. But turning up a fast and reliable means of communication, in favor of a slow and obsolete one... Well, kinda defeats the whole purpose of "communication".
Remember to tell that to the guy holding the radio the next time a disaster comes through your town.
/. stories on this
topic pointed out that the receiving end
might still have power. Sorry, but no, that
doesn't cut it... Unless we have a disaster on
a scale of hundreds of miles in diameter, no
one will go running off to find a ham to get
help, they'd just use their cell phone, or
failing that, drive to the next town. And,
assuming help exists, a disaster of that scale
would send FEMA scurrying anyway, so no need to
bother making contact.
Yeah, sounds nice in theory.
And what disaster, of a scale requiring us to go back to antiquated ham radio for communication, would also fail to knock out power, thus removing the source of potential interference?
Some people in previous
"Gee, Steve, LA just dissapeared from the power grid, all major broadcasting from the area has stopped, and NOAA visible shows no sources of light... Do you think we should check it out?"
"Nah... No hams, those true gods among men, have radioed for help. The entire city probably just decided to go to bed early, all at once."
so SF does not only affects you while you browse, but also when you send an email. All email with a mistyped .com or .net domain will
be send to verisign
Waitasec... Never thought of it from this angle before, but doesn't that mean SF would tend to cause Verisign to receive a lot of spam?
I mean, I get a thousand per day, and find it nearly overwhelming (I've finally started just using a whitelist, which I find unpleasant, but a necessity). Imagine, every spammer just randomly spewing out crap in the hopes of hitting a valid account, 99% of which goes straight to Verisign...
Heh. Hope they like "vl@gr@".
and it seems you have that special sauce investors are looking for down perfectly.
Pah... Save a few bucks and just use the Dilbert mission statement generator
Customize the list of nouns, and you can even make it sound relevant to your own business.
And, for reference, I did actually use that to come up with an "Objective" line for my SO's resume (though as a warning, she works in a field where the resume counted as a formality - she could have used "I want you to pay me to scratch my ass all day" as her objective, and still gotten the job).
You'll find hundreds of thousands of files of all kinds, especially media.
True... However, I do have a rather serious problem with this case...
Usenet servers have a finite article retention time, usually a week, almost never more than a month (considering the volume of traffic that goes over Usenet in a month, even a megacorp like AOL would have to shy away from storing it all for more than a few weeks).
So, let's think about a hypothetical time frame for these events - Harlan's works get posted. A few days later, he notices, and tweaks (that man has more than one screw loose, and I say that even as a fan of his work). A day or two passes, and he decides to send a letter to AOL.
Now, how much time elapsed before he decided AOL had ignored him? A week? A month? Half of a year?
By the time AOL could reasonably have taken action (if they felt so inclined), the article would already have expired from their servers. So what, exactly, would he have them do? Go back in time to delete the offending posts?
AOL probably doesn't care one way or the other, and simply ignored him. But the end result comes out the same, in the case of a Usenet post. The post vanished after some reasonably short period of time.
take 3 minutes to hook up a $3.00 16X2 lcd
Damn, you beat me to it...
Actually, I had an LED bar in mind, rather than an LCD (better visibility in the dark), but same idea - More precise, costs about the same as a 4-pack of batteries, instant response, and WAY less kludgy.
Still, I have to admit, finding a use for the testers on a dead battery has a fairly high level of geeky coolness.
No, but the flipside of the "marketing" they are pushing is that women can't do things with computers that aren't "easy".
I think a lot of Slashdotters have read more into this story than they should...
They deliberately choose a spokeswoman based on pushing the "If she can do it, so can I" male ego button. The reverse of that, which you suggest they also pushed, does not hold true. If the implicit sexism didn't exist, their approach simply would not have worked.
In no way would insulting a guy's ego by demonstrating that a woman can use Linux increase their sexist ideas. If anything, it demonstrates that yes, in fact, a woman can use Linux, when they cannot (yet).
This patent covers the idea of a computer doing something when you insert a CD (or floppy too?) into it.
Yet, drives have signalled a media change since the original IBM PCs. What possible use does that have, if not to let the OS do something when it detects that change? In this case, the very fact that they can detect a media change and do something, provides its own prior art.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. What next, a patent on "Use of the CPUs Address lines to let memory know what bits to serve up? Using a DAC to convert a stream of bits into sound? I doubt anyone thought to patent those yet, since they seem glaringly obvious...
We don't need patent reform, we need the USPTO abolished and replaced with ypewriter-wielding monkeys, who would do a marginally better job.
Who wants to bet this has some VERY tight tie-ins with the TSA?
Sure, they'll give you free internet access (since your tax dollars subsidize it anyway)... But, you'd better not leave "disney.com"; Otherwise, expect the boys in blue to start playing stinkfist with you...
So can the average isp, because most cannot afford to setup their own isp
You make a lot of good points, and I largely agree with you. Except on the part I quoted...
No, most of us cannot afford to set up our own ISP (and what would that help, anyway, if the higher-level providers censor as well? None of us can become our own Sprintnet, thanks to our leaders all but guaranteeing existing cross-country links a permanant lock-in on the market). We can, however, give a link to our neighbors. Who can do the same, and on, and on, and on. That might really suck for those in very rural areas, but even in a very sparse suburban area, would work just fine.
Having a few primary cross-country and intercontinental backbones speeds up the net quite a bit, by reducing the number of hops it takes to get from NY to LA, for example. But the underlying architecture of the internet works just fine if we have a massively dispersed "private" network (and in fact, as far as the original fail-safe intention of the internet, such a layout would work better, if slower for long distances).
I fully believe that people don't already do just that (connect to their neighbors) only because they have a sense that they can speak freely, and have some sense of anonymity, on the internet. Take that away, and the internet will turn into nothing more than a "fast lane" that people use as an alternative to their neighbornet when looking for content that big brother wouldn't object to.
He had several inappropriate reviews that made unfounded accusations and inappropriate untruthful remarks such as calling him "Bipolar Paranoid Schitzophrenic." These reviews should not have been on the site.
Okay, let me get this straight...
The professor threatened to sue, even after removal of the offensive posts, because someone called him paranoid?
Umm... Gee, Tweaky, you might want to lighten up on the coffee. That "paranoid" idea sounds all too appropriate... Most people would have brushed it off as a crack by some waste of flesh that couldn't pass the class, but no, Tweaky here had to have a valuable internet resource taken down.
If that doesn't count as paranoid...
I'm having trouble getting the internet working under MacOS 9.
;-)
Well, the internet does have some standards, you know...
I find it ironic that the "Choose a style" menu at the top-right doesn't work in Safari, but works fine in Mac IE, despite the fact that: "We don't have to worry that its basic functions are only going to work with Microsoft's, Apple's or AOL's "platform""
Go to a command prompt.
Type "ping 66.35.250.151" (slashdot, as of an nslookup just a few seconds ago). Do you get a response?
Congratulations, the internet works for you, regardless of platform.
The internet does not give a damn if your favorite web-browser style works or not. It doesn't care if you use a broken MS Samba implementation. It doesn't care if AIM works with MSIM. It doesn't care if you can't make a passive connection to an FTP site through your firewall (although that does actually get a lot closer to the nature of the internet than the previous examples).
It doesn't care if you live in China and research Falun Gong, whatever the hell that means (they certainly make a big fuss about it, though). It doesn't care if you look at kiddie porn. It doesn't care if you troll slashdot (no, I don't mean this as a troll, just giving an example).
The Internet routes packets from point A to point B. Nothing more, nothing less.
Youd think after the what the BBC published you would try and take this case more calmly?
Some of us really don't give a damn about politics. We do, however, appreciate a good joke, and we do enjoy seeing justice done when the legal system fails in its role.
Having Google's top link to "Litigious bastards" point to SCO doesn't hurt anyone, and made for a good laugh when I first saw that. You could call the MyDoom worm a bit less harmless, but y'know, despite Bruce P begging us all to behave, I really don't give a shit. I egged on the worm, and felt quite pleased when SCO had to change the URL of their web site. Sadly, it appears in hindsight that the worm's author used the SCO attack as a ruse, but the end result remains overall positive. SCO deserves it, and much worse, for their current business model."Litigious bastards" doesn't "call them names", it makes a statement of fact.
Call it vigilanteism if you want, but when a company can get away with obviously "wrong" activities simply because they haven't broken any existing laws, I for one consider it "justice" that they have a fed-up mob come after them to burn them at the stake.
So, behave? Hey, I won't start it. But when a pedophile priest "mysteriously" suicides in a crowded jail cell, we all know what happened, and we all cheer it on. When a father hunts down and brutally disembowels his daughter's rapist, who got off on a techinicality, no one cries for the dead scum. And when a worm targets SCO, well, sometimes two wrongs does make a right.
But, hey... Just my opinion. Feel free to defend SCO's raping of our legal system. And remember, even if they lose, they still got what they wanted (time to sell their shares at a massively inflated rate compared to their actual value). Justice? No. We can at best hope to annoy them, since they've already "gotten away" with the actual offense.
Not every MS user updates once a year, you idiots.
Assuming you didn't mean that as a joke...
The entire point of this article centers on the very fact that no fix existed, despite MS knowing about the problem for over six months.
So, even the most attentive network admin in the world, applying every fix within an hour of release, would not have had the ability to remove this vulnerability from his systems.
Personally, I find it more interesting that MS has the same problem that OpenSSH had, dating from the same time period. Time for a few folks to start comparing the relevant libraries for similarity... Wouldn't that look just great for MS's PR, getting caught not only in a copyright infringement, but using that nasty GPL'd software they so hate...
Weren't the astronauts alive in both cases of the shuttle exploding until they hit the earth extremely quickly?
In the Challenger explosion, yes. The actual "explosion" made a big fireball but packed little destructive force. Other evidence, such as the use of emergency oxygen masks, indicate that the crew survived the initial blast.
For the Columbia, I haven't heard one way or the other, but considering the ship actually broke up (rather than just the fuel tank rupturing, causing a fireball)... And then also considering the lack of oxygen or a pressurized atmosphere... Well, they most likely died rather quickly.
Isn't there a case for them having parachutes or some other way of getting out of their before that happens. Terminal velocity and all that.
That might have applied to the challenger crew, although I doubt they had time to figure out what happened, go for the parachutes, properly equip them, and find a way out of the ship.
Once you hit orbit, however, not even any point in trying to escape. Even in a pressurized suit, the lack of air means that a parachute will do very little. The idea of "terminal velocity" only applies when you have friction from air resistance. Even with a suit and a parachute, they would have burned up just like any other object entering our atmosphere at a few thousand mph.
I received a reprint of a very good article on the subject from a primary researcher, Umar Mohideen, which can be downloaded here It's math intensive, not pop sci hype.
:-)
Ah, many thanks!
I have read what publically-available info I could find on-line about this, but have yet to read any original pubs from researchers in the field.
I will have to wait for a time when I can properly digest it to comment, though.