I agree it was a joke, but in any case i don't believe that your government will request you to hack anything (leave that to the NSA). I think it will be much more the case that they'll simply ask you to be hardening your servers to resist attack. And if that leads to less Code Red in my box i'm all for it.
Sounds like a sensible suggestion. It would work well in most cases. But think also about what this alternative control means - If a terrorist wants to hijack a plane why not just go straight down to the control tower and hijack all planes at once by overriding their controls? Instead of a couple of terrorists taking over one plane, you have a lot more terrorists, but taking over a couple of hundred planes (maybe more).
I still don't think it's a terrible idea, if there's some practical system of controls and double checking in place. I can't think of any, though.
A natural corollary to this is that with mainstream perception being that Microsoft products are the best. To laymen this is a natural assumption: Microsoft is universally acknowledged to be a financial giant in the software industry: it has a monopoly; a company with a monopoly must make a damn good product for people to want it so much.
I work in an IT service industry and if we tell a customer that we'll be developing for them on a linux platform using open source tools they give us strange looks and raise questions of stability and security. As soon as we mention the word 'Microsoft' they're all smiles.
Until the person on the street recognises the value provided by open source tools they'll continue to struggle in popularity polls.
No, the megahertz myth is true! That is, if a clock speed of zero does turn out to be fastest, right?
I can see Steve Jobs gloating now - "Our processors don't even *have* a clock!"
Let's just hope that any martians up there aren't from mexico, don't have blindfolds and are all out of colourful sticks... otherwise NASA's going to be playing host to one hell of a party up there...
If you repeated the words 'gluon' and 'dark matter' to a child i'm sure it could learn to pronounce them and use them. They'd just be words to it, as you say. As for it tracking with a child it's same age i'm assuming that there is not a narrow band defining this rate, but rather a statistical probability.
Damn. They've got access to a whole bunch of spam... Luckily enough they'll be able to get a few credit cards (through another of the junk emails) to get into the site.
Next thing you know Apple will have a press release stating that it can connect an iMac to the internet in less than 5 minutes!
A hundred developers you say? hmmm...
on
IBM Wants Linux
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· Score: 1
I was recently at an IBM seminar where they were pitching themselves as the white knights - defenders of linux against the evil Microsoftian empire. Basically they said that they'd invested over a billion dollars in linux development, most of which is taking the form of their developers working within and building upon the open source application community for linux. Specifically they mentioned a research and development centre they'd set up in Canberra (i live in Australia. Canberra is our capital city) housing around a hundred developers.
Give it a couple of years and perhaps if this strategy proves fruitful we might see them helping to develop the OS itself. "Why?" you might say, "Why would IBM want to put itself out of business?". Well, they wouldn't be. Their core industry is hardware, and linux is not hardware. Many of the case studies given at this seminar were of large companies with fairly hefty computational requirements (supermarket chains, casinos, etc.) using a linux solution on IBM hardware. (FYI: the case studies were all European).
Well. I thought everyone already knew about global warming since it's been a top story here in Australia since the mid-eighties.
Ever seen an aerial photograph of L.A. on a warm day? Just looks like a big brown fart. And you think that pollution from automobiles and factories might have something to do with it? Really? Woah... you guys are good!
The US air-dropped leaflets telling citizens of Hiroshima to leave
I had no idea about the leaflets. That's an interesting point. Though it may seem that the japanese citizens were foolish to remain in Hiroshima think of it from their perspective: The country that your country is at war with drops flyers explaining that you should leave your home because they're going to drop a big bomb. It could easily be confused with empty propaganda.
I also appreciate the different circumstances surrounding the Hiroshima bombing, and this second hypothetical attack. Namely that one was to end a war, and that the other will start one. I expressed myself poorly and didn't mean to denounce one and not the other. I am suggesting that mass slaughter is bad, and that building this kind of NMD installation will serve to aggravate other countries.
So, because the idea was technically infeasible in the past, it must be impossible? What a ridiculous concept.
Finally, i think it's narrow minded of you to assume me so stupid as to think that because we fail to do something once we should never try again. Of course that's a ridiculous concept. I was merely refuting the earlier point made by the person i was replying to:
What would be much more realistic is to use an interceptor with a very small, clean nuclear warhead. If you only have to get within 200 metres, things get a lot easier.
What's being talked about is a skyburst of 2 nuclear warheads. Now, i don't care how clean one happens to be. While it might stop a large number of immediate casualties it doesn't really matter if you render that region inarable for the next 10,000 years.
...consider that the Chinese military has publically discussed plans to neutron bomb Taiwan. How's that for fucking horrific? Do you want another holocaust?
I agree with you on several of your latter points, but i'm afraid i must denounce you as historically blind in this particular statement. America has used exactly these tactics to attain its current position - namely mass slaughter of japanese civilians without warning. Two cities were gutted. Why were those millions killed?
It's amazing that a nation threatening to exercise those same methods is then labeled a monster. Hypocrisy in action.
Some people here claim that a National Missile Defense (NMD) is technically infeasible...What would be much more realistic is to use an interceptor with a very small, clean nuclear warhead.
Also, they've been trying for a couple of decades now for something that will take out hostile missiles, surpise attack or otherwise. I hate to break it to you, but these people are most likely a lot smarter than either of us and have probably put this idea to the test. The fact that a working missile shield isn't yet up and running attests to the inadequacy of this simple strategy.
This election isn't going to affect just America either, as with most other country's national elections. The result of the US presidential carries ramifications all over the globe.
Personally, I think Bush has proved himself quite a paradox. Alternately oafish and brilliant. Mostly oafish towards the beginning of his campaign, now he seems to be getting into the swing of things. He's reported to be a smart man, and yet wasn't aware that there were European troops deployed in Bosnia. I suppose foreign affairs isn't his long suit, but i digress.
As an Australian I generally support Republicans (given that Gore was talking about a closed market economy while Bush was backing free trade my motives should be obvious). There are some policies that Bush is backing though that seem ludicrously shallow in their strategy.
One that i point out here is the deployment of the Nuclear Defense Shield. I realise that it might seem sensible to defend yourself against one of these. They're not nice. But this shield involves putting emplacements all over the world in order to work. One of these emplacements is going to be on Australian soil. Does it protect Australia? No. Does it suddenly shoot us into the Top Ten Targets for Terrorism? Yes.
I acknowledge that our government has obviously played a part in this deal. I'm not trying to make out that we're a victim at all. I'm pointing out though, that the new government's plan will be putting relatively peaceable and defenseless nations on the front line to save their own skin. Pretty un-American, right?
The stupid part is that this defensive net hasn't even been proved effective and it's going ahead costing billions of dollars and shaking the still-unsturdy Balance of Power. It is a short-sighted and ill thought out policy that treats the symptom rather than the cause.
I think Katz is right when he says that Bush is infatuated with Defense Technology spending...
How easily can the worldwide dataflow be arrested in a country as populous and geographically diffuse as China?
Scarily it's very easy. The Chinese government has an incredibly powerful tool at its disposal - fear. Censorship thankfully doesn't work well in countries that have free speech, even where censorship is generally agreed upon (eg. underage children can't see certain films) because the punishments are very light or non-existent for non-enforcement.
In china censorship carries such heavy punishments as lifetime imprisonment etc. that people don't want to break the laws, or even be accomplices.
Hence ISPs and Internet cafes will all help the government in it's massive task. Meanwhile private citizens find it very difficult to get residential internet connections if they are not of a certain minimum class (ex-pats, or business people).
The task of censoring the internet may not be as impossible as you'd like to think, especially when dealing with a society as different from ours as theirs is.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree it was a joke, but in any case i don't believe that your government will request you to hack anything (leave that to the NSA). I think it will be much more the case that they'll simply ask you to be hardening your servers to resist attack. And if that leads to less Code Red in my box i'm all for it.
just serves to remind us that government is not a person, but a beareucracy - no loyalty.
Sounds like a sensible suggestion. It would work well in most cases. But think also about what this alternative control means - If a terrorist wants to hijack a plane why not just go straight down to the control tower and hijack all planes at once by overriding their controls? Instead of a couple of terrorists taking over one plane, you have a lot more terrorists, but taking over a couple of hundred planes (maybe more).
I still don't think it's a terrible idea, if there's some practical system of controls and double checking in place. I can't think of any, though.
A natural corollary to this is that with mainstream perception being that Microsoft products are the best. To laymen this is a natural assumption: Microsoft is universally acknowledged to be a financial giant in the software industry: it has a monopoly; a company with a monopoly must make a damn good product for people to want it so much.
I work in an IT service industry and if we tell a customer that we'll be developing for them on a linux platform using open source tools they give us strange looks and raise questions of stability and security. As soon as we mention the word 'Microsoft' they're all smiles.
Until the person on the street recognises the value provided by open source tools they'll continue to struggle in popularity polls.
No, the megahertz myth is true! That is, if a clock speed of zero does turn out to be fastest, right?
I can see Steve Jobs gloating now - "Our processors don't even *have* a clock!"
Let's just hope that any martians up there aren't from mexico, don't have blindfolds and are all out of colourful sticks... otherwise NASA's going to be playing host to one hell of a party up there...
If you repeated the words 'gluon' and 'dark matter' to a child i'm sure it could learn to pronounce them and use them. They'd just be words to it, as you say. As for it tracking with a child it's same age i'm assuming that there is not a narrow band defining this rate, but rather a statistical probability.
Damn. They've got access to a whole bunch of spam... Luckily enough they'll be able to get a few credit cards (through another of the junk emails) to get into the site.
Next thing you know Apple will have a press release stating that it can connect an iMac to the internet in less than 5 minutes!
I was recently at an IBM seminar where they were pitching themselves as the white knights - defenders of linux against the evil Microsoftian empire. Basically they said that they'd invested over a billion dollars in linux development, most of which is taking the form of their developers working within and building upon the open source application community for linux. Specifically they mentioned a research and development centre they'd set up in Canberra (i live in Australia. Canberra is our capital city) housing around a hundred developers.
Give it a couple of years and perhaps if this strategy proves fruitful we might see them helping to develop the OS itself. "Why?" you might say, "Why would IBM want to put itself out of business?". Well, they wouldn't be. Their core industry is hardware, and linux is not hardware. Many of the case studies given at this seminar were of large companies with fairly hefty computational requirements (supermarket chains, casinos, etc.) using a linux solution on IBM hardware. (FYI: the case studies were all European).
Well. I thought everyone already knew about global warming since it's been a top story here in Australia since the mid-eighties. Ever seen an aerial photograph of L.A. on a warm day? Just looks like a big brown fart. And you think that pollution from automobiles and factories might have something to do with it? Really? Woah... you guys are good!
15:38EST 03/08/2009 Black Box Transcript of Flight QF7845, SYD - LAX
...End Transcript...
Pilot: Man, i shouldn't have eaten that chilli!
Copilot: Tell me about it.
Pilot: <*cough*>
Copilot: Mayday! Mayday!
The US air-dropped leaflets telling citizens of Hiroshima to leave
I had no idea about the leaflets. That's an interesting point. Though it may seem that the japanese citizens were foolish to remain in Hiroshima think of it from their perspective: The country that your country is at war with drops flyers explaining that you should leave your home because they're going to drop a big bomb. It could easily be confused with empty propaganda.
I also appreciate the different circumstances surrounding the Hiroshima bombing, and this second hypothetical attack. Namely that one was to end a war, and that the other will start one. I expressed myself poorly and didn't mean to denounce one and not the other. I am suggesting that mass slaughter is bad, and that building this kind of NMD installation will serve to aggravate other countries.
So, because the idea was technically infeasible in the past, it must be impossible? What a ridiculous concept. Finally, i think it's narrow minded of you to assume me so stupid as to think that because we fail to do something once we should never try again. Of course that's a ridiculous concept. I was merely refuting the earlier point made by the person i was replying to:
What would be much more realistic is to use an interceptor with a very small, clean nuclear warhead. If you only have to get within 200 metres, things get a lot easier.
What's being talked about is a skyburst of 2 nuclear warheads. Now, i don't care how clean one happens to be. While it might stop a large number of immediate casualties it doesn't really matter if you render that region inarable for the next 10,000 years.
...consider that the Chinese military has publically discussed plans to neutron bomb Taiwan. How's that for fucking horrific? Do you want another holocaust?
I agree with you on several of your latter points, but i'm afraid i must denounce you as historically blind in this particular statement. America has used exactly these tactics to attain its current position - namely mass slaughter of japanese civilians without warning. Two cities were gutted. Why were those millions killed?
It's amazing that a nation threatening to exercise those same methods is then labeled a monster. Hypocrisy in action.
Some people here claim that a National Missile Defense (NMD) is technically infeasible...What would be much more realistic is to use an interceptor with a very small, clean nuclear warhead.
Also, they've been trying for a couple of decades now for something that will take out hostile missiles, surpise attack or otherwise. I hate to break it to you, but these people are most likely a lot smarter than either of us and have probably put this idea to the test. The fact that a working missile shield isn't yet up and running attests to the inadequacy of this simple strategy.
This election isn't going to affect just America either, as with most other country's national elections. The result of the US presidential carries ramifications all over the globe.
Personally, I think Bush has proved himself quite a paradox. Alternately oafish and brilliant. Mostly oafish towards the beginning of his campaign, now he seems to be getting into the swing of things. He's reported to be a smart man, and yet wasn't aware that there were European troops deployed in Bosnia. I suppose foreign affairs isn't his long suit, but i digress.
As an Australian I generally support Republicans (given that Gore was talking about a closed market economy while Bush was backing free trade my motives should be obvious). There are some policies that Bush is backing though that seem ludicrously shallow in their strategy.
One that i point out here is the deployment of the Nuclear Defense Shield. I realise that it might seem sensible to defend yourself against one of these. They're not nice. But this shield involves putting emplacements all over the world in order to work. One of these emplacements is going to be on Australian soil. Does it protect Australia? No. Does it suddenly shoot us into the Top Ten Targets for Terrorism? Yes.
I acknowledge that our government has obviously played a part in this deal. I'm not trying to make out that we're a victim at all. I'm pointing out though, that the new government's plan will be putting relatively peaceable and defenseless nations on the front line to save their own skin. Pretty un-American, right?
The stupid part is that this defensive net hasn't even been proved effective and it's going ahead costing billions of dollars and shaking the still-unsturdy Balance of Power. It is a short-sighted and ill thought out policy that treats the symptom rather than the cause.
I think Katz is right when he says that Bush is infatuated with Defense Technology spending...
"And now for something completely [similar]"
How easily can the worldwide dataflow be arrested in a country as populous and geographically diffuse as China? Scarily it's very easy. The Chinese government has an incredibly powerful tool at its disposal - fear. Censorship thankfully doesn't work well in countries that have free speech, even where censorship is generally agreed upon (eg. underage children can't see certain films) because the punishments are very light or non-existent for non-enforcement. In china censorship carries such heavy punishments as lifetime imprisonment etc. that people don't want to break the laws, or even be accomplices. Hence ISPs and Internet cafes will all help the government in it's massive task. Meanwhile private citizens find it very difficult to get residential internet connections if they are not of a certain minimum class (ex-pats, or business people). The task of censoring the internet may not be as impossible as you'd like to think, especially when dealing with a society as different from ours as theirs is.