I just tried it, and it worked as the grandparent said. I have both wmf and jpg files associated with the "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer", and it doesn't care that my wmf file has a.jpg extension.
My wireless router logged connection attempts at a rate of around one every 10 seconds when I was on a DSL line. I'm on cable now, and get fewer attempts - just every couple of minutes.
Not all of those attempts are trying to break in to Windows vulnerabilities, a lot were looking for other kinds of holes, or were looking for already-infected machines. But the attempt I see logged from one minute ago was attempting to get into the Windows RPC service, which an unpatched machine might have left open.
So I don't really think it's paranoia, and I do like being the only machine behind my router.
I'd say it's a bit higher in frequency than that high-pitched, sizzling whine that most people with decent hearing can hear when a CRT-based television is turned on in a quiet room.
I think that one's around 16 KHz. It's related to the sweep frequency of the electron beam. 30 fps times 525 lines = 15.75 KHz. (Those numbers aren't exactly right, as Wikipedia explains, but they're close enough.)
The possibility that extraterrestrials will take over SETI is pretty remote, but SETI is still a security risk. In decreasing level of probability, I'd say the risks are:
- someone could hack the server and send out malicious code with the next software update
- someone could hack the data stream and inject malicious data into it (assuming there really is such a thing as malicious data, which I find hard to believe).
- someone terrestrial could broadcast malicious data in such a way that the SETI telescopes pick it up and think that it's ET in origin.
- an ET could broadcast malicious data, after having picked up a copy of the SETI software and analyzing it.
- an ET could broadcast malicious data without knowing what the receiver is like (the worry describe in TFA).
The thing is, that holds true for any way you try to heat water by electricity, including microwave, not just "resistance-based" heating.
No, no, no, you don't understand. Heat from microwaves is *more efficient heat*. It's like the difference between LEDs and incandescent light bulbs. The LEDs output almost all their energy as light, whereas the incandescent bulbs output light, but they also waste a lot of energy output generating heat.
Water heaters are just the opposite. The resistance based ones are basically just big light bulbs. They heat the water, but they also output tremendous amounts of light, which is completely wasted. (You can't see the light because you don't use transparent pipes, do you?)
The microwave water heaters only output heat (and a little bit of interference with your Wifi network). That's why they're more efficient.
That article was written by Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa, who always has interesting things to say about IP law. See his website for more.
Fair use here in Canada though (not looking for a backing link, but I'm sure of this) does allow making of "backups" or alternate copies of something once you own a single copy.
"Fair use" is an American term. There's no such thing in most of the rest of the world, including Canada. The Copyright Act here gives you various specific rights to backup computer programs if you own the original and to make personal copies of audio recordings whether you own the original or not, but there's no general right to make a backup.
have some speakers around your ears broadcast what you said in translated form.
Well, if I was trying to think of the worst place to put speakers that produced a language I don't understand, "around my ears" would be pretty much the first choice.
Nuclear power plants have liability limitations because they know that what is liable in law courts, and with uneducated juries, is almost but not quite entirely not related to scientific fact.
That's complete nonsense.
- TMI cleanup costs have already more than doubled the liability limitations. Those are real costs, not the result of some bogus lawsuit.
- The insurance requirements for nuclear plants are high enough to make them attractive targets, if there were going to be bogus lawsuits. If I'm going to sue them for killing a bird, I'll be happy with a $300M payout.
also wondering, what do you consider sufficient insurance.
That's a pretty difficult question, but I'd think at least enough to comfortably cover a TMI-style meltdown would be needed, say $2B to $10B.
If the reactors are really as safe as claimed, obtaining insurance for this shouldn't cost 1/20 of the amount covered, it should be 1/1000 or less for facilities that can convince their insurers that they are not as dangerous as Chernobyl or TMI. (E.g. I pay less than 1/1000 for the liability insurance I carry on my house and my car, and I think it's more likely someone will claim on that than on a meltdown.) So why do they need legislation limiting their liability to $400M?
if you are talking about those who use the electricity, damn straight they should pay for clean up.
That's exactly what I'm asking for. Right now the owners don't pay, so the users don't pay. If there's a bad accident like TMI, it's *future* users or unrelated taxpayers who will pay. If the owners were required to carry sufficient insurance, then current users would pay for it.
I'd think $300M worth of insurance (which the operators are required to have) would be a big enough target for that sort of fraudulent/erroneous claim. It's just not big enough to cover the real risks.
Barring another chernobyl (which is impossible with western reactors due to the negative void coefficient and containment structures), what damage could be done to a large area that a utility would be liable for?
Yes, an accident like Chernobyl is probably impossible, but nevertheless, the Three Mile Island cleanup has cost roughly a billion dollars so far, and will cost a couple of hundred million more when the other reactor there is shut down and the whole facility is decommissioned. This wasn't paid for by the owner or the owner's insurers, it was mainly paid for by the ratepayers in that region. Under the Price-Anderson Act in the US, and similar legislation in other countries, the owner's liability is limited.
If owners of reactors were required to carry sufficient insurance to cover an accident like that, then electric rates would be higher and profits would be lower, but the cost of the electricity they produce would better reflect the reality of the danger they pose.
This thread started with a claim that nuclear plants are safer than coal, and that is probably true during normal operation, but coal fired plants don't have catastrophic accidents that cost so much to clean up. Coal plant operators should be required to clean up their emissions, but nuclear plant operators should be required to clean up after their accidents.
Nobody was hurt at Three Mile Island, but the cleanup has cost about $1B so far, with another $200M expected. Those are real costs, not just "asinine damages", and they weren't paid by the reactor's owner.
It is a solvable problem and quite frankly people just need to realize it's less dangerous to live near a nuclear reactor or permant nuclear waste facility than it is to live near a coal powerplant or coal mining facility.
Why is it then that the owners of nuclear facilities don't have to fully insure them, and they need laws limiting their liability?
When you double click them, you're talking to Explorer (the shell). The shell treats shortcuts a lot like symlinks (but with extra bells and whistles, e.g. you've got the possibility of adding command line arguments to executables, changing directories, etc.).
Write a program in a non-Cygwin compiler, and try to use the shortcut. It will just see it as a little file.
The article is complete crap. Mars gets close roughly every 14 years or so, and this year is not particularly exceptional. It was closer than it will be this year in 2001, 1988, 1986, 1973, 1971, etc.
You can use the ancient Ephem program (available everywhere) to find stuff like this.
This doesn't surprise me. Any time someone is criticized on Slashdot, even when the criticism is entirely baseless (the article summary is precisely the opposite of the truth about what is in the article), someone will chime in with "I've always said those folks were idiots/crooks/whatever".
So, now you've been told that the article summary is wrong, and the position of the Greens is the opposite of what it says, please say, "Hey, the Greens got it right for once!"
The console is Unicode.. it's deliberately downgrading itself just to be annoying. Makes multilingual stuff on NT really hard.
I think the colour choices were made just to be annoying, too. The idea was that they wanted users who were just trying out Win95 to realize that it was way better looking than DOS. Probably most of them have switched by now, so they can relax the ugliness a bit.
I think you are less confused than Hemos and sydney-computer-support. C'mon, the headline for the linked article is "Open source in government: A delusional cheer from the Greens". The Greens *support* the contract. The article writer doesn't.
It's a pretty badly written article, but that much of it should be clear.
Slashdot Mirror
The prediction was about cell phones, not WiFi, as the FA and the second sentence of the quote make clear.
I just tried it, and it worked as the grandparent said. I have both wmf and jpg files associated with the "Windows Picture and Fax Viewer", and it doesn't care that my wmf file has a .jpg extension.
My wireless router logged connection attempts at a rate of around one every 10 seconds when I was on a DSL line. I'm on cable now, and get fewer attempts - just every couple of minutes.
Not all of those attempts are trying to break in to Windows vulnerabilities, a lot were looking for other kinds of holes, or were looking for already-infected machines. But the attempt I see logged from one minute ago was attempting to get into the Windows RPC service, which an unpatched machine might have left open.
So I don't really think it's paranoia, and I do like being the only machine behind my router.
I'd say it's a bit higher in frequency than that high-pitched, sizzling whine that most people with decent hearing can hear when a CRT-based television is turned on in a quiet room.
I think that one's around 16 KHz. It's related to the sweep frequency of the electron beam. 30 fps times 525 lines = 15.75 KHz. (Those numbers aren't exactly right, as Wikipedia explains, but they're close enough.)
The possibility that extraterrestrials will take over SETI is pretty remote, but SETI is still a security risk. In decreasing level of probability, I'd say the risks are:
- someone could hack the server and send out malicious code with the next software update
- someone could hack the data stream and inject malicious data into it (assuming there really is such a thing as malicious data, which I find hard to believe).
- someone terrestrial could broadcast malicious data in such a way that the SETI telescopes pick it up and think that it's ET in origin.
- an ET could broadcast malicious data, after having picked up a copy of the SETI software and analyzing it.
- an ET could broadcast malicious data without knowing what the receiver is like (the worry describe in TFA).
The thing is, that holds true for any way you try to heat water by electricity, including microwave, not just "resistance-based" heating.
No, no, no, you don't understand. Heat from microwaves is *more efficient heat*. It's like the difference between LEDs and incandescent light bulbs. The LEDs output almost all their energy as light, whereas the incandescent bulbs output light, but they also waste a lot of energy output generating heat.
Water heaters are just the opposite. The resistance based ones are basically just big light bulbs. They heat the water, but they also output tremendous amounts of light, which is completely wasted. (You can't see the light because you don't use transparent pipes, do you?)
The microwave water heaters only output heat (and a little bit of interference with your Wifi network). That's why they're more efficient.
I just love seeing that "Texas Sues Sony BMG over Rootkit" headline, and don't want it to scroll off :-).
That article was written by Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa, who always has interesting things to say about IP law. See his website for more.
Fair use here in Canada though (not looking for a backing link, but I'm sure of this) does allow making of "backups" or alternate copies of something once you own a single copy.
"Fair use" is an American term. There's no such thing in most of the rest of the world, including Canada. The Copyright Act here gives you various specific rights to backup computer programs if you own the original and to make personal copies of audio recordings whether you own the original or not, but there's no general right to make a backup.
have some speakers around your ears broadcast what you said in translated form.
Well, if I was trying to think of the worst place to put speakers that produced a language I don't understand, "around my ears" would be pretty much the first choice.
Nuclear power plants have liability limitations because they know that
what is liable in law courts, and with uneducated juries, is almost
but not quite entirely not related to scientific fact.
That's complete nonsense.
- TMI cleanup costs have already more than doubled the liability limitations. Those are real costs, not the result of some bogus lawsuit.
- The insurance requirements for nuclear plants are high enough to make them attractive targets, if there were going to be bogus lawsuits. If I'm going to sue them for killing a bird, I'll be happy with a $300M payout.
also wondering, what do you consider sufficient insurance.
That's a pretty difficult question, but I'd think at least enough to comfortably cover a TMI-style meltdown would be needed, say $2B to $10B.
If the reactors are really as safe as claimed, obtaining insurance for this shouldn't cost 1/20 of the amount covered, it should be 1/1000 or less for facilities that can convince their insurers that they are not as dangerous as Chernobyl or TMI. (E.g. I pay less than 1/1000 for the liability insurance I carry on my house and my car, and I think it's more likely someone will claim on that than on a meltdown.) So why do they need legislation limiting their liability to $400M?
if you are talking about those who use the electricity, damn straight they should pay for clean up.
That's exactly what I'm asking for. Right now the owners don't pay, so the users don't pay. If there's a bad accident like TMI, it's *future* users or unrelated taxpayers who will pay. If the owners were required to carry sufficient insurance, then current users would pay for it.
I'd think $300M worth of insurance (which the operators are required to have) would be a big enough target for that sort of fraudulent/erroneous claim. It's just not big enough to cover the real risks.
Barring another chernobyl (which is impossible with western reactors due to the negative void coefficient and containment structures), what damage could be done to a large area that a utility would be liable for?
Yes, an accident like Chernobyl is probably impossible, but nevertheless, the Three Mile Island cleanup has cost roughly a billion dollars so far, and will cost a couple of hundred million more when the other reactor there is shut down and the whole facility is decommissioned. This wasn't paid for by the owner or the owner's insurers, it was mainly paid for by the ratepayers in that region. Under the Price-Anderson Act in the US, and similar legislation in other countries, the owner's liability is limited.
If owners of reactors were required to carry sufficient insurance to cover an accident like that, then electric rates would be higher and profits would be lower, but the cost of the electricity they produce would better reflect the reality of the danger they pose.
This thread started with a claim that nuclear plants are safer than coal, and that is probably true during normal operation, but coal fired plants don't have catastrophic accidents that cost so much to clean up. Coal plant operators should be required to clean up their emissions, but nuclear plant operators should be required to clean up after their accidents.
Nobody was hurt at Three Mile Island, but the cleanup has cost about $1B so far, with
another $200M expected. Those are real costs, not just "asinine damages", and they weren't paid by the reactor's owner.
today, no such limits are necissary.
The Price-Anderson Act that limits the liability of nuclear operators to around $400M per plant was last renewed in 2002. What's changed since then?
are coal powerplants and mines insured for damage caused to the people living next to them?
Their owners are liable for that damage, so it would be a good idea to insure against a claim.
It is a solvable problem and quite frankly people just need to realize it's less dangerous to live near a nuclear reactor or permant nuclear waste facility than it is to live near a coal powerplant or coal mining facility.
Why is it then that the owners of nuclear facilities don't have to fully insure them, and they need laws limiting their liability?
When you double click them, you're talking to Explorer (the shell). The shell treats shortcuts a lot like symlinks (but with extra bells and whistles, e.g. you've got the possibility of adding command line arguments to executables, changing directories, etc.).
Write a program in a non-Cygwin compiler, and try to use the shortcut. It will just see it as a little file.
Those are just shortcuts. Windows programs see them as little files of no particular importance. Only the shell and Cygwin interpret them specially.
The article is complete crap. Mars gets close roughly every 14 years or so, and this year is not particularly exceptional. It was closer than it will be this year in 2001, 1988, 1986, 1973, 1971, etc.
You can use the ancient Ephem program (available everywhere) to find stuff like this.
This doesn't surprise me. Any time someone is criticized on Slashdot, even when the criticism is entirely baseless (the article summary is precisely the opposite of the truth about what is in the article), someone will chime in with "I've always said those folks were idiots/crooks/whatever".
So, now you've been told that the article summary is wrong, and the position of the Greens is the opposite of what it says, please say, "Hey, the Greens got it right for once!"
The console is Unicode.. it's deliberately downgrading itself just to be annoying. Makes multilingual stuff on NT really hard.
I think the colour choices were made just to be annoying, too. The idea was that they wanted users who were just trying out Win95 to realize that it was way better looking than DOS. Probably most of them have switched by now, so they can relax the ugliness a bit.
I think you are less confused than Hemos and sydney-computer-support. C'mon, the headline for the linked article is "Open source in government: A delusional cheer from the Greens". The Greens *support* the contract. The article writer doesn't.
It's a pretty badly written article, but that much of it should be clear.