Secondly: For a number like '48%' to have come about, we cannot be measuring a reduction from four to two major crimes - that would be a 50% reduction. This MUST have been taken over a vastly larger sample of incidents. We must conclude then that they are not talking about 'major' incidents such as the two described (a sexual attack in the toilets and a fight between two kids that erupted into a major street brawl). So what this fingerprinting exercise is all about is reducing MINOR incidents.
So let's call this what it is. It's not about cutting down on serious offences - it's about reducing MINOR offences by banning people from pubs who happen to have lost their tempers or done any of the usual things that drunk people tend to do.
One flaw in your logic. According to TFA, "minor" incidents are those involving fewer than 15 police officers responding. We're talking about a hell of a lot more than losing your temper.
I don't clean goop. Get him a new keyboard from your stock; throw away the goopy keyboard. I don't move furniture; I'll put the PC there and set it up; I'll even carry the monitor but I'm not a damn furniture mover. I don't pirate software; not for the business and I also won't let you make "just one" copy of the Photoshop CD. I won't install the wrong product just because our salesman has a relationship with the company that makes it. I say "no" on a regular basis.
I'm polite and I never raise my voice. I'm very good at my job; so far nobody has fired me for this shit. Someday someone might; I'll find another job.
I've saved my company easily $200,000 in the past year by preventing IT disasters. (It's my first year here, and we're a small company -- that's big money.) Yet what impresses the owner about me? Him and the accountant were going over numbers in Quickbooks, and every time they hit the tab button it would switch windows. "It's the control key and it's stuck" I tell them as I thwack the keyboard and fix the problem. And now I'm the big hero, the IT genius. The other stuff? He doesn't realize it's hard.
As far as respect? The marketing idiot treats me like a child. The janitor calls me "Patron." It's all about perspective, and not giving a shit helps.
Had a loft in downtown LA; parked my shitbox car in a "secured" place -- not that secure. Left the doors unlocked so people could check that there wasn't anything worth stealing without breaking in. Worked fine, until the morning I came out and found someone sleeping in the back seat. Even better news when I chased him away and discovered that he had poor bladder control -- half the back seat was soaked.
Just 'cause it seems like a really brilliant idea at the time, doesn't make it so.
About a year ago, I purchased a grey market tractor from a man who makes his living off of international trade. He has spent much time on foreign soils wheeling and dealing heavy equipment. He has a physique like a green beret, was raised on a farm, and yet has a law degree with a specialty in international law. I recognized him as an expert in international affairs. Someone in the trenches, not the ivory towers. And I started asking him about his experiences.
Amongst the more interesting things he stated was that given the current world situation, even before the whole deal with Iraq started, he had decided to stay home for a while. He might consider a trip to Canada, but would not go to Mexico without a few of his ex-Ranger body guards and would under no circumstance venture to South America.
It's possible that this person has special circumstances or a good reason to believe he will be targeted that make this level of security reasonable.
The other possibility is that he's just being a blowhard and doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. If you use common sense and take basic precautions you can travel safely throughout almost all of Central and South America unless you're the son of a millionaire, an arms trader, owe money to drug cartels, or have other special reasons to think you're a target.
I hate to see HP forced into competition with a company like Dell. Dell is the Walmart of computer hardware, it's cheap, it probably works okay for a while, but but eventually it's gonna crap the bed and you'll have to buy a new one.
The majority of my experience with Dell has been with server-level hardware, but I've also provided tech support to a few small offices running entirely on Dell desktops. I've found their products to be well-designed, and made with quality components. If something goes down they have replacement parts out within four hours consistently, and their tech support is excellent. (You get the odd complete idiot, as you do with any tech support, but the average is much higher than that of Dell's competitors. That's primarily in server hardware, but desktop hardware also seems to have good support.)
On a related note, I've found HP's tech support so poor that I've sworn never to buy another HP consumer-level printer.
I tell you one thing that could be left out of just about every distro review...the inevitable "For some reason, they included application XYZ instead of my personal favorite, application ZYX." If someone knows enough about Linux to realize that they prefer GAIM, or hate GAIM, then they probably know enough about Linux to install or remove whatever they desire.
I can agree with the above reply -- I've tried out VPS's on cedant, jvds, and Linode -- Linode beats everything else hands down. Support is excellent, the web-based control panel is excellent (switch from Debian to RedHat or whatever in 2 minutes.)
"But what im curious about is why he says 'I definitely won't be moving back to Finland though.' Whats wrong with Finland?"
Long, cold, dark winters. The reality of which you can't really comprehend until you experience it. Finland has one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
Re:The first 15 posts on this are things you cant
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 1
I actually believe that African-Americans using "nigger" to refer to each other is a good thing. Why? By using this word themselves in a different context they are (intentionally or not) helping to neutralize an extremely emotionally charged word, slowly but surely. This is similar to the gay community's deliberately using the word "queer" to refer to themselves.
Actually, no. None of my gay friends mind me using the word "queer." "Nigger" is just as racially charged as ever. (Even, if you agree with the following distinction, among African-Americans.)
If one black guy calls another black guy "nigga" he's just being friendly. If he calls the other black guy "nigger" they're about to fight. Same if a white guy uses either variant.
Children below X years of age are not sexual beings, and have no sexual desires or impulses.
If you take X as 18 most would agree the statement is false. If you take X as 5 most would agree it is true. If you ARGUE for X as a low number you are a heretic.
In fact, anything involving children and sex is ripe grounds for heresy.
Most of the heresy posts I've seen so far are obvious -- there have been very few points made that are not made repeatedly by others outside Slashdot, from Rush Limbaugh to Ann Coulter to Robert Sheer. I have seen few truely heretical ideas listed in this discussion -- only unpopular ones. I'm much more curious about the unspoken assumptions we all agree on.
(And other than my poor attempt above, I'm coming up empty.)
I go to a cafe about 15 minutes from my house where I get free wireless Internet access. It's a single shared DSL, and it's not speeding fast, but I have cable-modem for that at home. I drive past about 10 places with pay-for-access WiFi on my way to this cafe. While I'm there, I always end up buying a bagel or muffin and a coffee or three. This is a business model that works. Charging for access doesn't work, and never will unless the cost is much lower than it is and the service signifcantly better than you can get from a free provider.
So I read the article, and it appears a bunch of routers are programmed to hit a particular IP address as a time server -- but are set up incorrectly and are swamping the server at that IP address.
So...why doesn't the university just change the DNS record of their timeservers so they point to a different IP, and just have nothing hooked up to the hardcoded IP? I assume there's a reason this wouldn't work -- else they would have done it, right? Am I just not understanding the scale of the problem?
Poker is not a card game, it's a people game (aka don't play the cards, play the people). It's all about bluffing and reading other people's bluffs. I'm baffled that people even bother playing poker on the internet. Even with webcams the game wouldn't be the same at all.
Poker is a money game. You can win money on the Internet.
"Since TheftGuard's also in the BIOS, even if you remove the hard drive, we can still track or disable the machine, or wipe the drive," he said. Another trick that can eradicate anti-theft software -- running FDISK to reformat the drive -- also is foiled by TheftGuard's place in the HPA section of the hard drive, which is immune to simple reformatting tools.
Last I checked, the BIOS was in a socket. What stops someone from swaping out the bios chip before turning on the box?
The Club is a device that locks onto your car or truck's steering wheel and prevents the wheel from being turned and thus the vehicle from being driven. There are several very effective ways of removing the Club without using a key, some of which can be done in less than a minute. Despite this, the Club is an effective anti-theft deterrent. Why? It's a huge improvement if you stop just the dumb crooks. Sure, a smart crook can get past it -- but there's a whole lot more dumb crooks than smart ones, so if it doesn't cost too much, the benefits far outweigh the costs.
I've been interested in building one of these for a while. It's a dome made of a concrete-foam sandwich that's sprayed one layer at a time onto an inflated form.
China has a huge population of workers approaching retirement age. They face the same "bubble" problem we do here in the US, where a huge boomer population threatens to bankrupt Social Security as they age. China is attempting to become as rich as it can before the numbers of elders to be cared for expands past the workers' ability to pay for the care of the aged. I believe this is behind much of the economic opening of China. And a chip capacity like this can act like a great wealth-builder for China.
Second, much has been made of the primitive, slow speed of the Dragon CPU. Yeah, it seems (from what we can tell) pretty crappy. But it's a first effort that didn't cost the government too much money. They're not going to throw billions at something untried. They're gonna do a test first, and see if they get this far -- then throw money at it if it's successful.
The chip's speed will increase quickly, and not just because the Chinese will throw money at it. I suspect it's a lot easier to entice a Western-trained Chinese tech grad to return home if you have something concrete to point to -- a working program the grad can join, rather than a pioneering program that might fail.
Will the Chinese exceed what Intel or AMD can do? They may. Or they may continuously play catchup to the Western chip giants. I'm only sure the Chinese won't be a joke for long.
Working OTP encryption requires the random numbers to be truely random, a computer programm can't do that. You need a source of randomness in the computer like the user or a special hardware random generator. The user isn't a solution for random numbers for OTP because you need a lot of random numbers and the user will have to type or move his mouse for a very long time until he has produced enough random numbers for a OTP encryption of a short file.
Your conclusions are correct (this system is crap) but some of your points are not. (I'm being nit-picking.) The problem with OTPs isn't generating the bits (at least for short messages). For a OTP, you need only as many bits as are in the message. For a 256-byte e-mail (256 letters) you need only 256 bytes worth of truely random data. The problem gets worse because you can not (or at least, should never) reuse a one-time pad. Still for small messages, this isn't the biggest burden. The biggest burden for any size OTP is that you need a secure way of getting the same OTP to both ends of a conversation. You can't do it electronically -- if you have a secure method of communicating electronically, what do you need the OTP for? Use the secure method! Pretty much you're limited to physically handing someone the OTP -- which is why OTPs have traditionally been limited to governments who don't mind sending folks around the world with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists.
The cans actually weigh more when the coffee was been drunk then when unopened (due to the heating element inside now being solid) which makes it hard to work out whether there is another dribble left in there after all.
Seems that a new branch of physics might be based on this...
Lately I've figured out how to fight them, Video tape and submision to the local police enforcement. It's been working, I no longer have people drag racing on my street as much. ( we have a park in the center and there are a ton of kids playing )
Actually, one of the biggest problems is that people are no longer able to take responsibility for their actions because the government (read:well intentioned liberals) try to outlaw things that might lead to a crime! Such as your drag-racing example. Did any of the people you video taped harm anybody? Did they hit the kids? Or do you just think they might hit the kids?
With all due respect, this is a load of crap. You could use the same logic to argue against drunk driving laws. Put people in jail only if they're driving drunk and they actually hit someone. If they're loaded and they drive home safely, what's the problem? Drunk driving and drag racing in populated areas (during the day no less, from what I can infer from the previous post) are both highly hazardous activities that indeed should be regulated. Don't believe me? Check out this (slightly overdramatic) story on drag racing:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/725241.asp?0si=-&cp1=1
Re:Is everquest productive, in an economic sense?
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EverQuest and the UN
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Example: Joe spends 3 hours building an imaginary sword in the game, and then sells it to Tom for 2$. Tom feels that he has gotten a fair trade, because he values the three hours saved more than the two dollars spent. And Tom now has a valuable tool in the game. But it's an imaginary game! Jake, the person who runs the game, could just have easily given Tom a sword with no effort required. Or a million swords. Why should Tom pay Joe for effort that isn't really required? So from society's perspective, it seems like the 2$ has been spent uselessly. Money has been moved around, but society as a whole isn't any wealthier or more efficient.
But because Jake does NOT produce a million swords, the currency has value, and can even be converted into dollars. It's the fact that these things are scarce and people want them that gives them this value. I would agree with you that the value is horribly inflated -- I certainly wouldn't buy this crap on ebay -- but that's just me. Obviously it is valuable to some people.
If "Jake" (the guy who runs Everquest in your example) were to give away a million swords (or something else of value in that universe) then the Everquest currency would become inflated to the point where it was worthless. You could watch this by seeing how the prices paid on ebay for these things would go down.
These things have value because they are not freely available and because people want them. This is no more an example of a flaw in capitalism or economics than the beanie baby frenzy was. (Of course, I didn't buy any of that crap either.)
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly: For a number like '48%' to have come about, we cannot be measuring a reduction from four to two major crimes - that would be a 50% reduction. This MUST have been taken over a vastly larger sample of incidents. We must conclude then that they are not talking about 'major' incidents such as the two described (a sexual attack in the toilets and a fight between two kids that erupted into a major street brawl). So what this fingerprinting exercise is all about is reducing MINOR incidents.
So let's call this what it is. It's not about cutting down on serious offences - it's about reducing MINOR offences by banning people from pubs who happen to have lost their tempers or done any of the usual things that drunk people tend to do.
One flaw in your logic. According to TFA, "minor" incidents are those involving fewer than 15 police officers responding. We're talking about a hell of a lot more than losing your temper.
I don't think you're doing the sex right.
I don't clean goop. Get him a new keyboard from your stock; throw away the goopy keyboard. I don't move furniture; I'll put the PC there and set it up; I'll even carry the monitor but I'm not a damn furniture mover. I don't pirate software; not for the business and I also won't let you make "just one" copy of the Photoshop CD. I won't install the wrong product just because our salesman has a relationship with the company that makes it. I say "no" on a regular basis.
I'm polite and I never raise my voice. I'm very good at my job; so far nobody has fired me for this shit. Someday someone might; I'll find another job.
I've saved my company easily $200,000 in the past year by preventing IT disasters. (It's my first year here, and we're a small company -- that's big money.) Yet what impresses the owner about me? Him and the accountant were going over numbers in Quickbooks, and every time they hit the tab button it would switch windows. "It's the control key and it's stuck" I tell them as I thwack the keyboard and fix the problem. And now I'm the big hero, the IT genius. The other stuff? He doesn't realize it's hard.
As far as respect? The marketing idiot treats me like a child. The janitor calls me "Patron." It's all about perspective, and not giving a shit helps.
Reminds me of the brilliant thing I did once...
Had a loft in downtown LA; parked my shitbox car in a "secured" place -- not that secure. Left the doors unlocked so people could check that there wasn't anything worth stealing without breaking in. Worked fine, until the morning I came out and found someone sleeping in the back seat. Even better news when I chased him away and discovered that he had poor bladder control -- half the back seat was soaked.
Just 'cause it seems like a really brilliant idea at the time, doesn't make it so.
Except you're required to file a police report. Are you willing to file an incorrect police report to get your laptop replaced?
Yes.
Amongst the more interesting things he stated was that given the current world situation, even before the whole deal with Iraq started, he had decided to stay home for a while. He might consider a trip to Canada, but would not go to Mexico without a few of his ex-Ranger body guards and would under no circumstance venture to South America.
It's possible that this person has special circumstances or a good reason to believe he will be targeted that make this level of security reasonable.
The other possibility is that he's just being a blowhard and doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. If you use common sense and take basic precautions you can travel safely throughout almost all of Central and South America unless you're the son of a millionaire, an arms trader, owe money to drug cartels, or have other special reasons to think you're a target.
I hate to see HP forced into competition with a company like Dell. Dell is the Walmart of computer hardware, it's cheap, it probably works okay for a while, but but eventually it's gonna crap the bed and you'll have to buy a new one.
The majority of my experience with Dell has been with server-level hardware, but I've also provided tech support to a few small offices running entirely on Dell desktops. I've found their products to be well-designed, and made with quality components. If something goes down they have replacement parts out within four hours consistently, and their tech support is excellent. (You get the odd complete idiot, as you do with any tech support, but the average is much higher than that of Dell's competitors. That's primarily in server hardware, but desktop hardware also seems to have good support.)
On a related note, I've found HP's tech support so poor that I've sworn never to buy another HP consumer-level printer.
I tell you one thing that could be left out of just about every distro review...the inevitable "For some reason, they included application XYZ instead of my personal favorite, application ZYX." If someone knows enough about Linux to realize that they prefer GAIM, or hate GAIM, then they probably know enough about Linux to install or remove whatever they desire.
Ouch!
I can agree with the above reply -- I've tried out VPS's on cedant, jvds, and Linode -- Linode beats everything else hands down. Support is excellent, the web-based control panel is excellent (switch from Debian to RedHat or whatever in 2 minutes.)
Highly recommended.
"But what im curious about is why he says 'I definitely won't be moving back to Finland though.' Whats wrong with Finland?"
Long, cold, dark winters. The reality of which you can't really comprehend until you experience it. Finland has one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
I actually believe that African-Americans using "nigger" to refer to each other is a good thing. Why? By using this word themselves in a different context they are (intentionally or not) helping to neutralize an extremely emotionally charged word, slowly but surely. This is similar to the gay community's deliberately using the word "queer" to refer to themselves.
Actually, no. None of my gay friends mind me using the word "queer." "Nigger" is just as racially charged as ever. (Even, if you agree with the following distinction, among African-Americans.)
If one black guy calls another black guy "nigga" he's just being friendly. If he calls the other black guy "nigger" they're about to fight. Same if a white guy uses either variant.
Wisdom so accepted that none may question it:
Children below X years of age are not sexual beings, and have no sexual desires or impulses.
If you take X as 18 most would agree the statement is false. If you take X as 5 most would agree it is true. If you ARGUE for X as a low number you are a heretic.
In fact, anything involving children and sex is ripe grounds for heresy.
Most of the heresy posts I've seen so far are obvious -- there have been very few points made that are not made repeatedly by others outside Slashdot, from Rush Limbaugh to Ann Coulter to Robert Sheer. I have seen few truely heretical ideas listed in this discussion -- only unpopular ones. I'm much more curious about the unspoken assumptions we all agree on.
(And other than my poor attempt above, I'm coming up empty.)
I go to a cafe about 15 minutes from my house where I get free wireless Internet access. It's a single shared DSL, and it's not speeding fast, but I have cable-modem for that at home. I drive past about 10 places with pay-for-access WiFi on my way to this cafe. While I'm there, I always end up buying a bagel or muffin and a coffee or three. This is a business model that works. Charging for access doesn't work, and never will unless the cost is much lower than it is and the service signifcantly better than you can get from a free provider.
So I read the article, and it appears a bunch of routers are programmed to hit a particular IP address as a time server -- but are set up incorrectly and are swamping the server at that IP address.
So...why doesn't the university just change the DNS record of their timeservers so they point to a different IP, and just have nothing hooked up to the hardcoded IP? I assume there's a reason this wouldn't work -- else they would have done it, right? Am I just not understanding the scale of the problem?
schof
Poker is not a card game, it's a people game (aka don't play the cards, play the people). It's all about bluffing and reading other people's bluffs. I'm baffled that people even bother playing poker on the internet. Even with webcams the game wouldn't be the same at all.
Poker is a money game. You can win money on the Internet.
The Club is a device that locks onto your car or truck's steering wheel and prevents the wheel from being turned and thus the vehicle from being driven. There are several very effective ways of removing the Club without using a key, some of which can be done in less than a minute. Despite this, the Club is an effective anti-theft deterrent. Why? It's a huge improvement if you stop just the dumb crooks. Sure, a smart crook can get past it -- but there's a whole lot more dumb crooks than smart ones, so if it doesn't cost too much, the benefits far outweigh the costs.
I've been interested in building one of these for a while. It's a dome made of a concrete-foam sandwich that's sprayed one layer at a time onto an inflated form.
http://www.monolithicdome.com/thedome/index.html
The houses are extremely strong and durable and stand up to earthquakes, wildfires, and hurricanes quite well.
Unfortunately, most dome homes I've seen are quite ugly, but there are a few that look good to my eyes.
A few things I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere:
China has a huge population of workers approaching retirement age. They face the same "bubble" problem we do here in the US, where a huge boomer population threatens to bankrupt Social Security as they age. China is attempting to become as rich as it can before the numbers of elders to be cared for expands past the workers' ability to pay for the care of the aged. I believe this is behind much of the economic opening of China. And a chip capacity like this can act like a great wealth-builder for China.
Second, much has been made of the primitive, slow speed of the Dragon CPU. Yeah, it seems (from what we can tell) pretty crappy. But it's a first effort that didn't cost the government too much money. They're not going to throw billions at something untried. They're gonna do a test first, and see if they get this far -- then throw money at it if it's successful.
The chip's speed will increase quickly, and not just because the Chinese will throw money at it. I suspect it's a lot easier to entice a Western-trained Chinese tech grad to return home if you have something concrete to point to -- a working program the grad can join, rather than a pioneering program that might fail.
Will the Chinese exceed what Intel or AMD can do? They may. Or they may continuously play catchup to the Western chip giants. I'm only sure the Chinese won't be a joke for long.
Is the poster just dissatisified with existing software: or pissed because he wants to be computing star Trek style and never will?
Why has this not been modded up? This is a link to a review of existing voice-recognition software on PDAs.
Working OTP encryption requires the random numbers to be truely random, a computer programm can't do that. You need a source of randomness in the computer like the user or a special hardware random generator. The user isn't a solution for random numbers for OTP because you need a lot of random numbers and the user will have to type or move his mouse for a very long time until he has produced enough random numbers for a OTP encryption of a short file.
Your conclusions are correct (this system is crap) but some of your points are not. (I'm being nit-picking.) The problem with OTPs isn't generating the bits (at least for short messages). For a OTP, you need only as many bits as are in the message. For a 256-byte e-mail (256 letters) you need only 256 bytes worth of truely random data. The problem gets worse because you can not (or at least, should never) reuse a one-time pad. Still for small messages, this isn't the biggest burden. The biggest burden for any size OTP is that you need a secure way of getting the same OTP to both ends of a conversation. You can't do it electronically -- if you have a secure method of communicating electronically, what do you need the OTP for? Use the secure method! Pretty much you're limited to physically handing someone the OTP -- which is why OTPs have traditionally been limited to governments who don't mind sending folks around the world with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists.
The cans actually weigh more when the coffee was been drunk then when unopened (due to the heating element inside now being solid) which makes it hard to work out whether there is another dribble left in there after all.
Seems that a new branch of physics might be based on this...
With all due respect, this is a load of crap. You could use the same logic to argue against drunk driving laws. Put people in jail only if they're driving drunk and they actually hit someone. If they're loaded and they drive home safely, what's the problem? Drunk driving and drag racing in populated areas (during the day no less, from what I can infer from the previous post) are both highly hazardous activities that indeed should be regulated. Don't believe me? Check out this (slightly overdramatic) story on drag racing:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/725241.asp?0si=-&cp1=
Example: Joe spends 3 hours building an imaginary sword in the game, and then sells it to Tom for 2$. Tom feels that he has gotten a fair trade, because he values the three hours saved more than the two dollars spent. And Tom now has a valuable tool in the game. But it's an imaginary game! Jake, the person who runs the game, could just have easily given Tom a sword with no effort required. Or a million swords. Why should Tom pay Joe for effort that isn't really required? So from society's perspective, it seems like the 2$ has been spent uselessly. Money has been moved around, but society as a whole isn't any wealthier or more efficient.
But because Jake does NOT produce a million swords, the currency has value, and can even be converted into dollars. It's the fact that these things are scarce and people want them that gives them this value. I would agree with you that the value is horribly inflated -- I certainly wouldn't buy this crap on ebay -- but that's just me. Obviously it is valuable to some people.
If "Jake" (the guy who runs Everquest in your example) were to give away a million swords (or something else of value in that universe) then the Everquest currency would become inflated to the point where it was worthless. You could watch this by seeing how the prices paid on ebay for these things would go down.
These things have value because they are not freely available and because people want them. This is no more an example of a flaw in capitalism or economics than the beanie baby frenzy was. (Of course, I didn't buy any of that crap either.)