I got a Yahoo email when they first came out, before Gmail was a thing. It makes a great honeypot email address for websites that need a legit email to work (FYI - My corresponding name is John Doe and I live at 123 Fuckoff St., Anywhere, Zimbabwe). I sure as hell don't bother logging in to open or read anything in there - I'm sure there is crap in there that would make Goatse look suitable for the cover of a mother's day card.
When (not if) Yahoo finally gasps its last and dies, I'll be sad for the whole two seconds it takes to set up a new throw away account.
I had a neighbor that could not stand the sight of a single leaf on his lawn or driveway. He'd patrol his yard three times a day with his leaf blower running until the last leaves fell off his oak trees. All the neighbors hated him because you couldn't complain about the noise, it was legal, etc.. People tried to convince him that a few leaves were not a problem - could not get through to him. We all really wanted to stuff his shirt with leaves, douse him in 2-stroke fuel mix, set him alight and fan the flames with the leaf blower.
He finally fucking died of a heart attack...while blowing leaves. Not a life well spent.
With a rake, he would have been the nice quiet old man next door who liked to exercise by working in his yard, and everybody would have some peace. With a leaf blower, he was the asshole/lunatic that everybody wanted to see dead. There are certain technologies like leaf blowers that seem to throw personality disorders into sharp contrast and are simply obnoxious. Nobody seems to think about noise pollution when designing and marketing (and buying) these things, they just assume everybody won't mind 2-strokes running all damned day. I don't know what the solution is, but it is getting harder and harder to find quiet in the world because of stuff like this.
Look up black soldier flies. They are common flies whose larvae are used for composting, and are very effective with all organics including meat wastes, usually much faster reduction than normal composting. The larvae themselves are protein rich and are great feed for chickens.
I have always said this is the way I want to be buried. No embalming and no coffin. Just bury me in dirt and let the bugs have at me. I have looked in to it and it's actually a very difficult thing to do in most places because it's illegal to be buried this way.
Nothing says you have to buy the shiny metal coffin from the funeral director.
Skip the embalming and just get buried in a coffin made out of cheap pine. The carbon in the wood would actually help you compost into reasonably good soil.
The specs needed for office and home computing have pretty much flat-lined, and 10 year old hardware (so long as it survives) is often more than adequate for the task, with exception for gaming.
For years Microsoft was able to ride the upgrade cycle as memory and CPU improvements moved closer and closer to satisfactory performance, and people had incentive to upgrade to better, faster hardware. Now, performance is less limited by memory and CPU as it is bandwidth. OEM OS sales plateaued, and Microsoft had to get far more aggressive and change its business model to a subscription model. If users don't upgrade, take control of the computer and force the upgrade. Computers are now turning into kiosks to the Microsoft mothership.
There's probably a "In Soviet Microsoft, OS upgrades YOU!" joke applicable here.
Canada has one of the best physical currency systems I've seen. No frigging pennies, transactions rounded to the nearest 5 cents. Means at *worst* you'll have a few pieces of useful silver jangling in your pocket vs a pile of worthless pennies.
Dollar coins are actually useful in Canada. You can put dollar coins in meters, snack and soda machines, etc. vs trying to fold and iron a mangled paper bill to appease the finicky reader. You can actually USE dollar coins there to buy things without getting looked at like a asshole. You can walk into a bar and slap some coins down and buy a beer.
The U.S. would do well if they could actually implement usage of $1 coins in automated kiosks. Very few people use dollar coins because you can't do anything with them here. Machines won't take them. Hell, people often won't take them, legal tender or not, because they aren't familiar with them and think they're getting a wooden nickel or something. If you could use them in machines, more people would use them, more people would see them and realize that they are legit, and then they could be used for lots of small transactions.
And, as a an aside, plastic currency is awesome. Run your wallet through the washer accidentally, or fall out of the kayak on your trip? No problem. In the U.S., you can hold a legally acceptable but worn paper $5 in your hand and be unable to purchase anything from an automated kiosk because somebody ran it through the washer at some point and the reader can't make it out. I'd imagine it is harder to counterfit a plastic bill as well.
This isn't rocket surgery. For a society based on the success of commerce I don't understand why the U.S. makes small transactions so awkward.
He then suggests in his opinion that if those nine servers are spread around the world such that one is in control of by different democratic governments, it would follow that all nine of those governments must then agree the message in question needs to be decrypted.
What if one of those "democratic governments" is the U.S.? Then it is just one government sending eight agents overseas, each with a $5 wrench, to "persuade" the other operators to "agree" that the message must be decrypted. They don't need to go to those governments, they just need to get the guy sitting at the terminal.
Yo dawg, I heard you like fear, so I got some fear to put on top of your fear next to your fear....
I went to a DHS conference in Boston a few years after 9/11, and it was a wall-to-wall exhibition of all the crazy ways the bad guys were going to get us. Grid attacks, bus attacks, backflushing municipal hydrants with poisoned water, poisoning drinking water supplies, spraying anthrax on the lettuce in the supermarket. 99% of it were "weaknesses" conjured up by security researchers to get some money from the golden spigot labeled DHS.
The DHS basically put the brakes on this and started demanding solutions, not a laundry list of insane attack vectors.
The upshot is, any reasonably complex distribution system will have security vulnerabilities, dependent on the definition of "vulnerability". Some "vulnerabilities" are highly improbable, difficult to exploit, and only cause temporary or low-level disruption. Other vulnerabilities are obvious, easy to exploit, and will take down society. Without getting hysterical about it, the sensible thing to do is to make the vulnerabilities hard to exploit i.e. get infrastructure control systems airgapped and off the fucking Internet (duh). Make the system fault tolerant - if they do blow up something, have a means to contain it.
Can we do this and get on with our lives, please? These vulnerabilities have been talked about for decades, we know what the solutions are, but no one wants to pay for it. Industry and government are staring at each other expecting the other to pick up the tab. If that is the situation nothing will get done, ever. Critical infrastructure needs to be nationalized so it is clear who is in charge of maintenance and security. Industry won't pay unless it hits their bottom line.
Running tech employees into the ground is not a sound or sustainable strategy for remaining competitive in the world. Unions could at least help ensure that practice stops.
It is sustainable if there is enough cheap labor around. Hence the corporate push for STEM and HB1 visas.
Unionizing might just make that practice stop, but basically will guarantee that you get fired and offshored.
For collective bargaining to be effective, the work delivered must be hard to replace.
It's great that they are doing this, trying to diversify learning styles and measuring their import, but for some subjects this is next to impossible to do. Engineering subjects aren't terribly amenable to this. These courses boil down to "Can student do calculation X to accomplish Y?" An essay describing the process is not useful. True/false or multiple choice grading are poor options if an instructor really wants to diagnose why the students were unable to get the result. In these classes, the student must do the work out and illustrate the steps in the process.
The founding principles of the United States were intended to prevent the government from encroaching on our freedoms.
When we voluntarily allow the government to encroach on our freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism, we are handing victory to the terrorists (and to the government, which is also a terrorist organization as it also gains power by fostering fear).
I hope within the next few generations, when we collectively realize that we threw away our freedoms, that we can summon the same courage to fight and sacrifice as our forefathers to get them back.
Well, if 39 million people were outed on when Ashley Madison got hacked, it stands to reason that there are about 39 million others that are now interested in using Ashley Madison and don't really care if their spouses know they are on it. PROFIT!!
Finding useful technical information on the internet is like sifting through horse shit looking for pony.
The search engines all assume that you meant 'Beiber' when you typed in 'Becquerel'. They all deliver results of what they think you want, vs. what you actually asked for. Often you're steered toward pay sites. A lot of information controlled by technical journals is behind paywalls.
If you actually find anything related to what interests you, you'll often find that 1) it is all copied from Wikipedia, and 2) it's wrong at worst or, at best, is insufficiently detailed to assist you. If the information exists in a fundamentals textbook, I already have that. If I'm searching for information, I'm looking for more than the fundamentals.
Nothing beats a good dead-tree technical reference that has stood the test of time. A well-thumbed CRC Handbook sits on my desk, and it had served me a hell of a lot better than the whole of the internet. If the Internet imploded tomorrow, the only thing I would mourn would be the loss of email. The rest of it is utter crap. "Information Highway" it is not.
Slashdot Mirror
I got a Yahoo email when they first came out, before Gmail was a thing. It makes a great honeypot email address for websites that need a legit email to work (FYI - My corresponding name is John Doe and I live at 123 Fuckoff St., Anywhere, Zimbabwe). I sure as hell don't bother logging in to open or read anything in there - I'm sure there is crap in there that would make Goatse look suitable for the cover of a mother's day card. When (not if) Yahoo finally gasps its last and dies, I'll be sad for the whole two seconds it takes to set up a new throw away account.
I had a neighbor that could not stand the sight of a single leaf on his lawn or driveway. He'd patrol his yard three times a day with his leaf blower running until the last leaves fell off his oak trees. All the neighbors hated him because you couldn't complain about the noise, it was legal, etc.. People tried to convince him that a few leaves were not a problem - could not get through to him. We all really wanted to stuff his shirt with leaves, douse him in 2-stroke fuel mix, set him alight and fan the flames with the leaf blower.
He finally fucking died of a heart attack...while blowing leaves. Not a life well spent.
With a rake, he would have been the nice quiet old man next door who liked to exercise by working in his yard, and everybody would have some peace. With a leaf blower, he was the asshole/lunatic that everybody wanted to see dead. There are certain technologies like leaf blowers that seem to throw personality disorders into sharp contrast and are simply obnoxious. Nobody seems to think about noise pollution when designing and marketing (and buying) these things, they just assume everybody won't mind 2-strokes running all damned day. I don't know what the solution is, but it is getting harder and harder to find quiet in the world because of stuff like this.
Reminds me of the scene in the movie Better Off Dead:
"Aww, what to we have here? Looks like somebody threw out a perfectly good white boy."
Look up black soldier flies. They are common flies whose larvae are used for composting, and are very effective with all organics including meat wastes, usually much faster reduction than normal composting. The larvae themselves are protein rich and are great feed for chickens.
I have always said this is the way I want to be buried. No embalming and no coffin. Just bury me in dirt and let the bugs have at me. I have looked in to it and it's actually a very difficult thing to do in most places because it's illegal to be buried this way.
Nothing says you have to buy the shiny metal coffin from the funeral director.
Skip the embalming and just get buried in a coffin made out of cheap pine. The carbon in the wood would actually help you compost into reasonably good soil.
The specs needed for office and home computing have pretty much flat-lined, and 10 year old hardware (so long as it survives) is often more than adequate for the task, with exception for gaming.
For years Microsoft was able to ride the upgrade cycle as memory and CPU improvements moved closer and closer to satisfactory performance, and people had incentive to upgrade to better, faster hardware. Now, performance is less limited by memory and CPU as it is bandwidth. OEM OS sales plateaued, and Microsoft had to get far more aggressive and change its business model to a subscription model. If users don't upgrade, take control of the computer and force the upgrade. Computers are now turning into kiosks to the Microsoft mothership.
There's probably a "In Soviet Microsoft, OS upgrades YOU!" joke applicable here.
No way in hell am I allowing any of MS's greasy tentacles onto any Linux box. I went to Linux to get away from their butt-rape business model.
I've always slept in a tree branch, and my father before me, and never did I feel the need for a cave.
A tree branch? LUXURY!
My family swims in tidal estuaries and makes occasional holiday excursions out onto the mudflats for a bit of air.
Canada has one of the best physical currency systems I've seen. No frigging pennies, transactions rounded to the nearest 5 cents. Means at *worst* you'll have a few pieces of useful silver jangling in your pocket vs a pile of worthless pennies.
Dollar coins are actually useful in Canada. You can put dollar coins in meters, snack and soda machines, etc. vs trying to fold and iron a mangled paper bill to appease the finicky reader. You can actually USE dollar coins there to buy things without getting looked at like a asshole. You can walk into a bar and slap some coins down and buy a beer.
The U.S. would do well if they could actually implement usage of $1 coins in automated kiosks. Very few people use dollar coins because you can't do anything with them here. Machines won't take them. Hell, people often won't take them, legal tender or not, because they aren't familiar with them and think they're getting a wooden nickel or something. If you could use them in machines, more people would use them, more people would see them and realize that they are legit, and then they could be used for lots of small transactions.
And, as a an aside, plastic currency is awesome. Run your wallet through the washer accidentally, or fall out of the kayak on your trip? No problem. In the U.S., you can hold a legally acceptable but worn paper $5 in your hand and be unable to purchase anything from an automated kiosk because somebody ran it through the washer at some point and the reader can't make it out. I'd imagine it is harder to counterfit a plastic bill as well.
This isn't rocket surgery. For a society based on the success of commerce I don't understand why the U.S. makes small transactions so awkward.
No, no, no! It's "aquatic apes".
Sea Monkeys?
Isn't this a euphemism for profiling? We're just automating stereotypes.
Threat Score (sum of all that apply):
Dark Skin +100
Speaks language other than English or Arabic + 500
Speaks Arabic +1000
Wears funny hat or turban +700
Likes big screen TVs +100
etc...
The State of NJ flogged the dolphin.
Welcome to Slashdot! You came to the right place for that.
That's a good one. And I'm sure Elon Musk is going to be launching rockets and flying them back to land softly on a pad for reuse.
Oh, wait...
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) magical ( )vigilante
approach to minimizing global warming by expanding nuclear power. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(X) People are afraid of nuclear power, because nuclear.
(X) Anthropocentric Global Warming (AGW) itself is argued not to exist.
(X) There are cheaper, more established alternative energy technologies such as wind and solar.
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) People's irrational fear of nuclear power.
(X) People's lack of science literacy.
(X) People's devotional belief for/against AGW.
(X) Costs.
(X) NIMBY attitudes.
(X) Politics (general).
(X) Donald Trump.
(X) Terrorists.
(X) Asshats (other).
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical.
(X) It requires cooperation and agreement between too many conflicting groups.
(X) It requires deliberate, informed decision making from people and politicians.
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
He then suggests in his opinion that if those nine servers are spread around the world such that one is in control of by different democratic governments, it would follow that all nine of those governments must then agree the message in question needs to be decrypted.
What if one of those "democratic governments" is the U.S.? Then it is just one government sending eight agents overseas, each with a $5 wrench, to "persuade" the other operators to "agree" that the message must be decrypted. They don't need to go to those governments, they just need to get the guy sitting at the terminal.
Yo dawg, I heard you like fear, so I got some fear to put on top of your fear next to your fear....
I went to a DHS conference in Boston a few years after 9/11, and it was a wall-to-wall exhibition of all the crazy ways the bad guys were going to get us. Grid attacks, bus attacks, backflushing municipal hydrants with poisoned water, poisoning drinking water supplies, spraying anthrax on the lettuce in the supermarket. 99% of it were "weaknesses" conjured up by security researchers to get some money from the golden spigot labeled DHS.
The DHS basically put the brakes on this and started demanding solutions, not a laundry list of insane attack vectors.
The upshot is, any reasonably complex distribution system will have security vulnerabilities, dependent on the definition of "vulnerability". Some "vulnerabilities" are highly improbable, difficult to exploit, and only cause temporary or low-level disruption. Other vulnerabilities are obvious, easy to exploit, and will take down society. Without getting hysterical about it, the sensible thing to do is to make the vulnerabilities hard to exploit i.e. get infrastructure control systems airgapped and off the fucking Internet (duh). Make the system fault tolerant - if they do blow up something, have a means to contain it.
Can we do this and get on with our lives, please? These vulnerabilities have been talked about for decades, we know what the solutions are, but no one wants to pay for it. Industry and government are staring at each other expecting the other to pick up the tab. If that is the situation nothing will get done, ever. Critical infrastructure needs to be nationalized so it is clear who is in charge of maintenance and security. Industry won't pay unless it hits their bottom line.
Running tech employees into the ground is not a sound or sustainable strategy for remaining competitive in the world. Unions could at least help ensure that practice stops.
It is sustainable if there is enough cheap labor around. Hence the corporate push for STEM and HB1 visas.
Unionizing might just make that practice stop, but basically will guarantee that you get fired and offshored.
For collective bargaining to be effective, the work delivered must be hard to replace.
It's great that they are doing this, trying to diversify learning styles and measuring their import, but for some subjects this is next to impossible to do. Engineering subjects aren't terribly amenable to this. These courses boil down to "Can student do calculation X to accomplish Y?" An essay describing the process is not useful. True/false or multiple choice grading are poor options if an instructor really wants to diagnose why the students were unable to get the result. In these classes, the student must do the work out and illustrate the steps in the process.
The founding principles of the United States were intended to prevent the government from encroaching on our freedoms.
When we voluntarily allow the government to encroach on our freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism, we are handing victory to the terrorists (and to the government, which is also a terrorist organization as it also gains power by fostering fear).
I hope within the next few generations, when we collectively realize that we threw away our freedoms, that we can summon the same courage to fight and sacrifice as our forefathers to get them back.
There...I said it.
First time that "Is this planet earth" is a legitimate question and it is answered incorrectly.
Aliens: "Excuse me, is this planet Earth?"
Old Lady: "You again! Bugger off!" *CLICK*
Aliens: "Hang up on me, will you? Power up the demolition beam!"
Well, if 39 million people were outed on when Ashley Madison got hacked, it stands to reason that there are about 39 million others that are now interested in using Ashley Madison and don't really care if their spouses know they are on it. PROFIT!!
I'm an Irate Erection Engineer!
Finding useful technical information on the internet is like sifting through horse shit looking for pony.
The search engines all assume that you meant 'Beiber' when you typed in 'Becquerel'. They all deliver results of what they think you want, vs. what you actually asked for. Often you're steered toward pay sites. A lot of information controlled by technical journals is behind paywalls.
If you actually find anything related to what interests you, you'll often find that 1) it is all copied from Wikipedia, and 2) it's wrong at worst or, at best, is insufficiently detailed to assist you. If the information exists in a fundamentals textbook, I already have that. If I'm searching for information, I'm looking for more than the fundamentals.
Nothing beats a good dead-tree technical reference that has stood the test of time. A well-thumbed CRC Handbook sits on my desk, and it had served me a hell of a lot better than the whole of the internet. If the Internet imploded tomorrow, the only thing I would mourn would be the loss of email. The rest of it is utter crap. "Information Highway" it is not.