ah yes the wonders of automation... I'm quite sure that open office.org allows any textfile you can import into it to be exported as a pdf... quite easy to break copyright laws and get stuff printed as a book that doesn't belong to you. at least at this CafePress company.
sure it's kinda the copyright holders fault for not putting it in a no printing allowed pdf, instead of distributing it as either a regular pdf, or as a text file, even if it was on a cd-rom printed in 1990 way before anyone had heard of this marvelous print on demand technology...
quite ironic that some early cd-rom encyclopedias could be imported in whole or in part in open office, then formatted and saved as a pdf, and printed 'on demand' with none the wiser...
you're forgetting one thing... publishers usually have very narrow topic margins, even a professional author can get fed up with the kinds of books a publisher wants to buy.. there are plenty of book topics that might have a large customer base (large enough to make money anyways) that no publisher would dare buy no matter how good the manuscript...
the majority of 'readers' are female, so book topics that appeal to men only get less play with editors, unless they know there are millions of men who might want the book even though men tend to read less than women... it's a bad stereotype but women read romances and men read the paper. it's true, it's a painful truth that living in small town America has proven to me when i found that the majority of the sci-fi/fantasy they carried in my local library were the ones women tend to read... they didn't even have much of the old sci-fi authors i remembered from my youth (when i lived in a city of over 100,000)
wouldn't having an ebook printed out be a violation of copyright? i mean remember we're in America here, ebooks don't give you the right to print them out, normally... much less get them PODed?
if amazon is letting people submit an ebook for POD then there is a problem there houston... it's a little different if it's a text file from project Gutenberg, and it's on the 'American' mirror, but not many textbooks are going to fall under anything but well copyrighted material.
mine doesn't use packet encryption by default, i just took a look to see, although it does by default use a different port than the original bt. I've used azureus for as long as i can remember...
Anon and CoS activity really isn't fundamentally what Anon was founded for, it was founded for griefers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griefer the thing is Anon took griefing from video games into real life. before we called people who did that pranksters but the term griefing is much better since some people are so malignant towards their fellow human being that every way of causing others pain and suffering is 'cool' and 'hip' to them.
so you can take your tinfoil hat off about CoS making Anon look bad, the people trying to show the evil of the CoS have mistakenly taken the name 'Anon' without understanding that these are the kind of people who never grew out of giving nerd wedgies, they're the kind of people who thought 'fight club' was a wussy movie... they're the kind of people who get a kick dying their dead grandmothers hair blue for the open casket...
they feed off of doing wrong for the sake of doing wrong, that's the mark of a true anon...
however the CoS may well be behind Anon's darker side getting press online... I had never heard of them until today...
headphones however are a leading cause of hearing loss. I had to stop using headphones because i was having ringing in my ears, and I'm only 30. worst of all i had only been using headphones exclusively for 2 years before the ringing in my ears problem made me have to give them up.
but technically if you put those two speakers exactly opposite of each ear, you can still get very good positional sound from 2 speakers, it's having both speakers in-front of the user, that causes the havoc with positional sound. so then they added rear speakers, but people were making the sound effects blazingly loud, so they added a fifth channel for voices, then people wanted more base so they added a subwoofer.
then people started adding more speakers to make things more complex.. like the 7.1 sound systems... and then movie theaters started considering 21.2 speaker setups with 21 speakers and 2 sub woofers...
less is more, we really don't need 5 speakers and a subwoofer to get decent sound, but it makes some companies money, so hey yeah lets say that's better...
the last creative product i bought was the awe 64 gold.
that was the single best sound card ever, but you know what, motherboard integrated sound controllers have been perhaps the most reliable and stable 'sound cards' since the fall of creative. true you have to pick your motherboard carefully to get digital or optical outputs/inputs... but sound cards in general have mucked up windows etc so much (no matter who made them) that i officially dropped the notion of using anything but integrated sound when processors over 1 ghz started to become practical. (for example the last 7 computers i built for anyone, and i have a very low volume of 'family' customers, all used integrated sound)
and my computers never crash, which shocks some people, but you know drivers are the number one cause of crashes, if you know that, then you can try to avoid products like the plague that cause crashes.
for instance my mom and sister wound up having the same computer i designed for them, and it used a cheap nvidia card, they didn't update their cards drivers ever, so one day, windows update decided their cards needed a driver update (this is not supposed to happen automatically, but it did) and then both their computer became very unstable the only way i was able to stabilize them was to go straight to nvidia and get the latest 'real' drivers for their cards, that fixed it right away.
some of the more sophisticate clients (like azureus) do make it simple to create, track and seed, but i have yet to see a way to automate this in with a web server, so that when someone uses say, a php based front end to manage a web server that it would automatically create a torrent and stuff...
however let me assure you there are plenty of people creating their own torrents on their own websites even without 'simple one click' interfaces.
like disneyland paris to test this thumb print out...
I can't recall if disney's biometrics use just the thumb or the whole hand.. but i know people who get the year long pass have to use biometrics to get into disneyland... this is to cut down on fraud of say a person renting or selling the pass to other people, so obviously disneyland was the first place I'd even seen biometrics in public.
very cool, using this technology people can sell their biometric fake palms along with the pass to use the year round pass with other people... (although i think disney has a photo as well as the biometrics) oh well. photos can be faked as well;)
I realize this is slashdot, so for those who didn't read TFA the contest was to in a 30 minute attack slot, read the contents of a specific file, in a specific folder. each day different exploits could be tested, but only popular software that is normally installed counted.
day one were pure network attacks nobody got in on day one. day 2 was email and url based attacks. only the mac got won on day 2. on day 3 you could add non default but popular software from a list (couldn't find the list anywhere on the net, sigh) and adobe flash was vulnerable, so the vista machine got taken.
Ubuntu held up for all 3 days, but because only popular and default software could be added, this could bring a false sense of security. there are many ways to 'design' a supposedly open source software package on say, sourceforge.net but to have a compromised binary that was made with slightly altered source code... to get a trojan on a linux system. repositories tend to be fairly well monitored, but there have been times where applications that are trojans have gotten into widely used repositories. as far as i can tell, sourceforge has no real method for testing if software contains trojans or not, so it's purely up to the community that uses sourceforge to report bad software, etc. i imagine that freshmeat is the same, and many many linux users use sourceforge or freshmeat to find specific linux applications they need or want...
maybe there aren't enough linux users yet to make this a huge issue, but with Microsoft's brand image going south (kinda the way IBMs did in the 90s) linux is sure to be finding more and more people who would rather deal with OSS than with bill gates.
well, firefox updating the day before a hacking contest would indeed make the ubuntu platform (the only one where firefox is default) the most secure, but one would think that if firefox is going to play that way, that Microsoft would release any patches they had in development the day before too, to be on the same playing field.
the fact that apple got cracked first, and presumably in a safari exploit shows that apple does not have the kind of security resources of either firefox (supported by aol, and google) or Microsoft can bring to a competition. Since the Microsoft vista system was taken out by an adobe vulnerability, and I often hear of adobe products having security holes, they might be in the same kind of boat as apple when it comes to releasing security patches.
one satellite provider includes dial-up capabilities in the box..
"SkyWay USA employs unique hybrid technology to maximize service and minimize cost. Research shows that most people using the internet generally have small upload requirements such as sending email or simple clicks while browsing web pages. SkyWay USA utilizes your phone line to send these small packets of data to the internet at regular dial-up speeds."
and countless tivo boxes use dialup, although tivo would like to migrate people over to tivo broadband.
albeit these are not exactly in the PC anymore, one of the nice things about national dialup (pre hot spot internet access etc) was that a laptop could go just about anywhere and dial up the internet, from anywhere with a national dial up provider.... now with laptops, you're running whatever speed the wi-fi access point lets you use.
GSM sucks, it was built to allow digital data transfer by PHONES not by computers, the new wireless auction results will allow some truly designed to offer high speed data for the masses over wireless, as well as allow phone companies to build in calea compliance mode for phones the government has wiretapped.
the reason why current phones can't send 'full quality audio' is there simply wasn't the bandwidth to do this and phones weren't designed to both compress a call, and send 'full quality audio' at the same time, being totally transparent to the end user (which for a court ordered wiretap is the normal mode, only the judge and the cops know who is being wiretapped, at the time of tapping)
full quality audio is required to get 'background conversations' I'm kinda surprised that they didn't tie in some sort of requirement for the phone companies to send still photos of where the phone user is at the time the call takes place too (since most phones have a camera in them too, and calea was so broad in what it required in the first place) although if they had, undoubtedly the informed criminal would just get some white out and apply it to the lens of the camera (or otherwise block the lens)
well, LEDs were invented in the 1960s, so perhaps your dismal world view is the more likely one, but at least in the Christmas light arena LEDs are picking up steam, although there are some pretty awful horror stories about LED Christmas lights, at least one (flicker) can be rectified by building your own full wave bridge rectifier with $5 in parts from Radio Shack and Home Depot... just use google to get the plans and then head over to radio shack to get the parts..
still a quick google about energy efficient leds bring up numerous websites either selling high efficiency led bulbs or articles mentioning companies promising to deliver energy efficient led lighting to the home.
one such article claims that a 5.8 watt lamp will deliver the equivalence of a '60 watt bulb' worth of lighting http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/eco-friendly/led-efficient-lighting-461128 if this company isn't all hype, then they've already gotten an led to 140/lumen per watt (or else they're shaving lumens and it's really less bright than a 60 watt bulb)
we won't have long to wait to find if the company is real "Hunter said he hopes to debut the brighter and more efficient lamps by the end of 2008. The first buyers will likely be wholesale distributors, followed by consumers off store shelves by 2009."
although i do know there are plenty of people out there making claims and promises that are unrealistic (just check my sig) with the hopes of fooling people into investing money in fraudulent ventures, also, not all vendors of LEDs are equal there are things that can be done to manufacture higher quality leds, and processes that can be used to discard/recycle bad bulbs before the customer ever sees them, but not every company out there Cares if they sell a quality product or not. in fact most are just after profit, who cares about anything else. the same problem comes about when buying blank DVDs there are about 3 companies that only sell top grade media (world wide) and there are about 40 companies that sell class anywhere from class 1 to class 4 media, and you can't tell by the packaging what you're going to get either. the companies that themselves produce class 1 media, and buy from a company Known To sell Class 4 media, drive me nuts, class 4 is worthless except to scare birds away or as a coaster, and i unfortunately ended ended my 'winning streak' with tdk lately by getting just one of those class 4 bundles... luckily i bought from new egg, so they let me get a different brand, and there i scored with class 2 or class 1 media. but honestly now I'm considering only buying from the 2-3 companies that only sell class 1 or class 2 media and never buy from the discount companies.
hackers haven't stolen the code for vista yet, just wait until they get part of all of vista's source code, they'll have dozens of undisclosed vulnerabilities that can be accessed inside software already running in vista.
on the plus side, this means that vista at the moment is the only version of windows hackers aren't ready to crack with just a url or an e-mail(using only the default software on vista).
if they had had an xp machine, it would have gotten cracked most likely on the first day (when they could only use network attacks)
I must be lucky, I've never had graphic drivers cause an OS crash. i remember the days of windows 95, crashing all the time, reinstalling every so often to try to maintain some form of stability etc... but with windows 98/xp (haven't had a vista machine yet) i rarely if ever had crashes, and the majority of the problems I've had are from viruses that auto append code to the BIOS to create security holes in protected machines. right now while trying to recover my 1tb or so of data, i managed to get that BIOS virus code installed again, and now my computer needs to be powered off after every restart.... worst of all that system you can only update the BIOS over the internet, sigh... but as far as i can tell the BIOS code doesn't automatically infect windows it just causes numerous problems on boot up until the BIOS is reflashed. (I've got about 40 gigs of files archived on a Linux drive, of me taking things step by step using diff, etc, to figure out which files are being changed, and even with the 'infected' BIOS files on the hd that the virus normally uses aren't being created so far)
worst of all i have yet to find an av tool besides 'g-mail' that can detect this virus. yahoo's Norton can't detect it, I've tried 5 of the dozens of free to try or free av programs... still no dice, none of them can detect the virus even in a benign zipfile i made in Linux... sigh its garbage like this that makes me wish i could make every system file as immutable in windows as they can be made in Linux...
this is the annoying thing so many Linux newbies thing that rm -rf ~ is the 'worst' thing a Linux browser exploit can do.
No the worst thing a Linux browser exploit can do, is install apache+php+php uploader application in ~ one that you know, now loads every time the browser is loaded. after all it was the browser that got hacked...
combine it with some sort of dynamic dns app and the machine can have it's own host name that changes every time it's ip address changes... or instead of a web server, they could just install an irc bot, that loads every time the browser is loaded, thats a little less noticeable... and negates the need for a dynamic dns, it just needs to auto connect to an irc server.
unless you've specifically modified your home directory so that it can't contain programs, they can always infect your home directory with mal-ware.
OTOH since without a combo root escalation all you have to do is 'ls -a ~' to detect said mal-ware its easy to see if you've been hacked...
and this whole concept of where firefox 4 is supposed to be going, just makes it worse, firefox 4 might as well call itself 'ie 5' because if they really do make it so hyper integrated it will become the next best rootkit installer since ie5.
of course it impairs the game, now for $40 (or whatever the cost is) you can gather up all the gold and items you can ever want and make high level characters to sell on e-bay and now the people with no lives who play 16 hours a day aren't making a living selling accounts and items on ebay... because the people with the bot can do it 24 hours a day, on each computer the hook up to the net, without having to check the computers except maybe a couple times a week...
it was my understanding that henry ford opted to use petroleum over a 'design that would have used peanut oil' much like our modern diesel engines... while it may be true that the model t could run on corn fuel, remember that at that time they could easily use coal or wood to make the corn ethanol, today we're using natural gas to make corn ethanol, and that resource won't last forever...
cheap energy won't die completely for another hundred years, but cheap oil is already coming to an end... the most likely situation is that we will find ways of turning vast tracks of land into genuine cheap biofuels... the roman empire collapsed when they couldn't grow enough wheat to feed everyone even with slavery and large armies... the question is if the 'modern' world can survive when all our energy has to come from plants, and animals, and the associated costs related to growing enough plants and animals.
it's questionable if humans can manage to maintain large empires the likes of the modern world with 'expensive' bio-energy. after all we can't even stop India from turning into a desert from the mass deforestation going on there.
75% of India is undergoing desertification similar to what privative man did to the middle-east with plows and wheat.
sad really... brazil from all the deforestation well, the amazon river is down 100 feet in places... and rain forests around the world (except in costa rica, which has a healthy tourism industry) are being felled for farms, for fuel, or purely for greed for the hardwoods and softwoods they can grow there. and the farms don't replace the lost precipitation those rain forests used to reciprocate with, while allowing the ground to absorb more of the rain because of the foliage of an old growth or even a new growth forest.
humans would probably turn the whole world to desert if they could, and cutting down all the forests is a good first start for that happening, as is evidenced by india's desertification.
the best security ideas came around in the 60s and 70s they haven't changed much..
so basically the most secure browsing environment possible is a fully hardened linux from scratch where the browser is being run by a limited user, who can't sudo or su, and where much of the filesystem is made immutable with chattr (chflags for bsd/apple users trying to make a hardened bsd or apple setup),
then hackers no matter how good will just give up on your system, and thank god that microsoft is too retarded to adopt a file system/user configuration setup that would make it easy for people to run as limited users, and hard even if that person is retarded to overwrite vital system files.
lets say spikrosoft is using tumblers in their locks, but capple is using a security system designed decades ago, when instead of everyone having their own home people lived all together in a single building per family, and so, the users of capple can't modify certain system files at all, whereas spikrosoft has no way to make a file immutable to 'administrators' now by default capple systems aren't set up with the maximum level of security of having every OS file set immutable, but a technically advanced user can do this in 2 minutes, and when updates need to change those files they can make the files temporarily writable, but not every user of that computer can do this, only the technically advanced user of the system.
furthermore you can make it even easier so that certain users can install programs but only if they have disk quota, and only in their home directory... meaning that normal users can't even touch system files, even if their browser gets hacked/hijacked by some insecure site...
of course, since capple and 'linux' have the same basic capabilities, and one is free, and one ships with hardware, that may cost more, than the hardware one could use to run linux etc etc etc...
but frankly, there are somethings that really only get done for windows, mac has dvd ripping tools, but most mac users complain about them (on message boards etc) haven't tried dvd ripping in linux, because i can't get dvd burning to work so there is no point if the latter doesn't work(some say it's just my hardware).
but whatever, in general I've noticed that Linux software is often buggier, expects certain things to be done in certain orders rather than fixing the existing bugs etc... and in general it is less reliable as a media playback device than open source software on windows... (noticeable the audio and video not playing in sync, on dvds (with no encryption)) although linux players have no problem with xvid/divx format files, just with dvds...
well the point is you can really genuinely lock down a apple machine, but windows even the horrible vista one that needs 3 gigs of ram and a dual core cpu, you still can't lock things down as tight as you can on an apple or linux machine.
In well accepted physics, there is a nongravitational black hole analog whose formation and evaporation is currently observed at RHIC.
It sounds like the world's largest super collider already observes the creation and evaporation of black holes. the question is will the hadron collider create stable black holes? not likely, they're not dealing with enough mass.
Slashdot Mirror
ah yes the wonders of automation... I'm quite sure that open office.org allows any textfile you can import into it to be exported as a pdf... quite easy to break copyright laws and get stuff printed as a book that doesn't belong to you. at least at this CafePress company.
sure it's kinda the copyright holders fault for not putting it in a no printing allowed pdf, instead of distributing it as either a regular pdf, or as a text file, even if it was on a cd-rom printed in 1990 way before anyone had heard of this marvelous print on demand technology...
quite ironic that some early cd-rom encyclopedias could be imported in whole or in part in open office, then formatted and saved as a pdf, and printed 'on demand' with none the wiser...
you're forgetting one thing... publishers usually have very narrow topic margins, even a professional author can get fed up with the kinds of books a publisher wants to buy.. there are plenty of book topics that might have a large customer base (large enough to make money anyways) that no publisher would dare buy no matter how good the manuscript...
the majority of 'readers' are female, so book topics that appeal to men only get less play with editors, unless they know there are millions of men who might want the book even though men tend to read less than women... it's a bad stereotype but women read romances and men read the paper. it's true, it's a painful truth that living in small town America has proven to me when i found that the majority of the sci-fi/fantasy they carried in my local library were the ones women tend to read... they didn't even have much of the old sci-fi authors i remembered from my youth (when i lived in a city of over 100,000)
wouldn't having an ebook printed out be a violation of copyright? i mean remember we're in America here, ebooks don't give you the right to print them out, normally... much less get them PODed?
if amazon is letting people submit an ebook for POD then there is a problem there houston... it's a little different if it's a text file from project Gutenberg, and it's on the 'American' mirror, but not many textbooks are going to fall under anything but well copyrighted material.
mine doesn't use packet encryption by default, i just took a look to see, although it does by default use a different port than the original bt. I've used azureus for as long as i can remember...
and i never came across an isp who packet shaped their network to make bt dling slow.
and in that time I've had 4 isps, because of moving...
really sad to see a legitimate use of bt (other than dling Linux etc) being mangled by bass akwards isps...
Anon and CoS activity really isn't fundamentally what Anon was founded for, it was founded for griefers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griefer the thing is Anon took griefing from video games into real life. before we called people who did that pranksters but the term griefing is much better since some people are so malignant towards their fellow human being that every way of causing others pain and suffering is 'cool' and 'hip' to them.
so you can take your tinfoil hat off about CoS making Anon look bad, the people trying to show the evil of the CoS have mistakenly taken the name 'Anon' without understanding that these are the kind of people who never grew out of giving nerd wedgies, they're the kind of people who thought 'fight club' was a wussy movie... they're the kind of people who get a kick dying their dead grandmothers hair blue for the open casket...
they feed off of doing wrong for the sake of doing wrong, that's the mark of a true anon...
however the CoS may well be behind Anon's darker side getting press online... I had never heard of them until today...
headphones however are a leading cause of hearing loss. I had to stop using headphones because i was having ringing in my ears, and I'm only 30. worst of all i had only been using headphones exclusively for 2 years before the ringing in my ears problem made me have to give them up.
but technically if you put those two speakers exactly opposite of each ear, you can still get very good positional sound from 2 speakers, it's having both speakers in-front of the user, that causes the havoc with positional sound. so then they added rear speakers, but people were making the sound effects blazingly loud, so they added a fifth channel for voices, then people wanted more base so they added a subwoofer.
then people started adding more speakers to make things more complex.. like the 7.1 sound systems... and then movie theaters started considering 21.2 speaker setups with 21 speakers and 2 sub woofers...
less is more, we really don't need 5 speakers and a subwoofer to get decent sound, but it makes some companies money, so hey yeah lets say that's better...
the last creative product i bought was the awe 64 gold.
that was the single best sound card ever, but you know what, motherboard integrated sound controllers have been perhaps the most reliable and stable 'sound cards' since the fall of creative. true you have to pick your motherboard carefully to get digital or optical outputs/inputs... but sound cards in general have mucked up windows etc so much (no matter who made them) that i officially dropped the notion of using anything but integrated sound when processors over 1 ghz started to become practical. (for example the last 7 computers i built for anyone, and i have a very low volume of 'family' customers, all used integrated sound)
and my computers never crash, which shocks some people, but you know drivers are the number one cause of crashes, if you know that, then you can try to avoid products like the plague that cause crashes.
for instance my mom and sister wound up having the same computer i designed for them, and it used a cheap nvidia card, they didn't update their cards drivers ever, so one day, windows update decided their cards needed a driver update (this is not supposed to happen automatically, but it did) and then both their computer became very unstable the only way i was able to stabilize them was to go straight to nvidia and get the latest 'real' drivers for their cards, that fixed it right away.
some of the more sophisticate clients (like azureus) do make it simple to create, track and seed, but i have yet to see a way to automate this in with a web server, so that when someone uses say, a php based front end to manage a web server that it would automatically create a torrent and stuff...
however let me assure you there are plenty of people creating their own torrents on their own websites even without 'simple one click' interfaces.
like disneyland paris to test this thumb print out...
;)
I can't recall if disney's biometrics use just the thumb or the whole hand.. but i know people who get the year long pass have to use biometrics to get into disneyland... this is to cut down on fraud of say a person renting or selling the pass to other people, so obviously disneyland was the first place I'd even seen biometrics in public.
very cool, using this technology people can sell their biometric fake palms along with the pass to use the year round pass with other people... (although i think disney has a photo as well as the biometrics) oh well. photos can be faked as well
I realize this is slashdot, so for those who didn't read TFA the contest was to in a 30 minute attack slot, read the contents of a specific file, in a specific folder. each day different exploits could be tested, but only popular software that is normally installed counted.
day one were pure network attacks nobody got in on day one. day 2 was email and url based attacks. only the mac got won on day 2. on day 3 you could add non default but popular software from a list (couldn't find the list anywhere on the net, sigh) and adobe flash was vulnerable, so the vista machine got taken.
Ubuntu held up for all 3 days, but because only popular and default software could be added, this could bring a false sense of security. there are many ways to 'design' a supposedly open source software package on say, sourceforge.net but to have a compromised binary that was made with slightly altered source code... to get a trojan on a linux system. repositories tend to be fairly well monitored, but there have been times where applications that are trojans have gotten into widely used repositories. as far as i can tell, sourceforge has no real method for testing if software contains trojans or not, so it's purely up to the community that uses sourceforge to report bad software, etc. i imagine that freshmeat is the same, and many many linux users use sourceforge or freshmeat to find specific linux applications they need or want...
maybe there aren't enough linux users yet to make this a huge issue, but with Microsoft's brand image going south (kinda the way IBMs did in the 90s) linux is sure to be finding more and more people who would rather deal with OSS than with bill gates.
well, firefox updating the day before a hacking contest would indeed make the ubuntu platform (the only one where firefox is default) the most secure, but one would think that if firefox is going to play that way, that Microsoft would release any patches they had in development the day before too, to be on the same playing field.
the fact that apple got cracked first, and presumably in a safari exploit shows that apple does not have the kind of security resources of either firefox (supported by aol, and google) or Microsoft can bring to a competition. Since the Microsoft vista system was taken out by an adobe vulnerability, and I often hear of adobe products having security holes, they might be in the same kind of boat as apple when it comes to releasing security patches.
one satellite provider includes dial-up capabilities in the box..
"SkyWay USA employs unique hybrid technology to maximize service and minimize cost. Research shows that most people using the internet generally have small upload requirements such as sending email or simple clicks while browsing web pages. SkyWay USA utilizes your phone line to send these small packets of data to the internet at regular dial-up speeds."
and countless tivo boxes use dialup, although tivo would like to migrate people over to tivo broadband.
albeit these are not exactly in the PC anymore, one of the nice things about national dialup (pre hot spot internet access etc) was that a laptop could go just about anywhere and dial up the internet, from anywhere with a national dial up provider.... now with laptops, you're running whatever speed the wi-fi access point lets you use.
GSM sucks, it was built to allow digital data transfer by PHONES not by computers, the new wireless auction results will allow some truly designed to offer high speed data for the masses over wireless, as well as allow phone companies to build in calea compliance mode for phones the government has wiretapped.
the reason why current phones can't send 'full quality audio' is there simply wasn't the bandwidth to do this and phones weren't designed to both compress a call, and send 'full quality audio' at the same time, being totally transparent to the end user (which for a court ordered wiretap is the normal mode, only the judge and the cops know who is being wiretapped, at the time of tapping)
full quality audio is required to get 'background conversations' I'm kinda surprised that they didn't tie in some sort of requirement for the phone companies to send still photos of where the phone user is at the time the call takes place too (since most phones have a camera in them too, and calea was so broad in what it required in the first place) although if they had, undoubtedly the informed criminal would just get some white out and apply it to the lens of the camera (or otherwise block the lens)
well, LEDs were invented in the 1960s, so perhaps your dismal world view is the more likely one, but at least in the Christmas light arena LEDs are picking up steam, although there are some pretty awful horror stories about LED Christmas lights, at least one (flicker) can be rectified by building your own full wave bridge rectifier with $5 in parts from Radio Shack and Home Depot... just use google to get the plans and then head over to radio shack to get the parts..
still a quick google about energy efficient leds bring up numerous websites either selling high efficiency led bulbs or articles mentioning companies promising to deliver energy efficient led lighting to the home.
one such article claims that a 5.8 watt lamp will deliver the equivalence of a '60 watt bulb' worth of lighting
http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/eco-friendly/led-efficient-lighting-461128
if this company isn't all hype, then they've already gotten an led to 140/lumen per watt (or else they're shaving lumens and it's really less bright than a 60 watt bulb)
we won't have long to wait to find if the company is real "Hunter said he hopes to debut the brighter and more efficient lamps by the end of 2008. The first buyers will likely be wholesale distributors, followed by consumers off store shelves by 2009."
although i do know there are plenty of people out there making claims and promises that are unrealistic (just check my sig) with the hopes of fooling people into investing money in fraudulent ventures, also, not all vendors of LEDs are equal there are things that can be done to manufacture higher quality leds, and processes that can be used to discard/recycle bad bulbs before the customer ever sees them, but not every company out there Cares if they sell a quality product or not. in fact most are just after profit, who cares about anything else. the same problem comes about when buying blank DVDs there are about 3 companies that only sell top grade media (world wide) and there are about 40 companies that sell class anywhere from class 1 to class 4 media, and you can't tell by the packaging what you're going to get either. the companies that themselves produce class 1 media, and buy from a company Known To sell Class 4 media, drive me nuts, class 4 is worthless except to scare birds away or as a coaster, and i unfortunately ended ended my 'winning streak' with tdk lately by getting just one of those class 4 bundles... luckily i bought from new egg, so they let me get a different brand, and there i scored with class 2 or class 1 media. but honestly now I'm considering only buying from the 2-3 companies that only sell class 1 or class 2 media and never buy from the discount companies.
hackers haven't stolen the code for vista yet, just wait until they get part of all of vista's source code, they'll have dozens of undisclosed vulnerabilities that can be accessed inside software already running in vista.
on the plus side, this means that vista at the moment is the only version of windows hackers aren't ready to crack with just a url or an e-mail(using only the default software on vista).
if they had had an xp machine, it would have gotten cracked most likely on the first day (when they could only use network attacks)
"In theory it's pretty easy to built a bridge..."
tell that to the people who built the i 35-w bridge in Minnesota.
oh wait that bridge already collapsed, to little to late...
I must be lucky, I've never had graphic drivers cause an OS crash. i remember the days of windows 95, crashing all the time, reinstalling every so often to try to maintain some form of stability etc... but with windows 98/xp (haven't had a vista machine yet) i rarely if ever had crashes, and the majority of the problems I've had are from viruses that auto append code to the BIOS to create security holes in protected machines. right now while trying to recover my 1tb or so of data, i managed to get that BIOS virus code installed again, and now my computer needs to be powered off after every restart.... worst of all that system you can only update the BIOS over the internet, sigh... but as far as i can tell the BIOS code doesn't automatically infect windows it just causes numerous problems on boot up until the BIOS is reflashed. (I've got about 40 gigs of files archived on a Linux drive, of me taking things step by step using diff, etc, to figure out which files are being changed, and even with the 'infected' BIOS files on the hd that the virus normally uses aren't being created so far)
worst of all i have yet to find an av tool besides 'g-mail' that can detect this virus. yahoo's Norton can't detect it, I've tried 5 of the dozens of free to try or free av programs... still no dice, none of them can detect the virus even in a benign zipfile i made in Linux... sigh its garbage like this that makes me wish i could make every system file as immutable in windows as they can be made in Linux...
just a quick question here... what does civ 2 have that freeciv.org doesn't have?
or are you referring to one of the 'numerous civ 2 clones' like the hasbro one, SMAC, or maybe civ:ctp?
this is the annoying thing so many Linux newbies thing that rm -rf ~ is the 'worst' thing a Linux browser exploit can do.
No the worst thing a Linux browser exploit can do, is install apache+php+php uploader application in ~
one that you know, now loads every time the browser is loaded. after all it was the browser that got hacked...
combine it with some sort of dynamic dns app and the machine can have it's own host name that changes every time it's ip address changes... or instead of a web server, they could just install an irc bot, that loads every time the browser is loaded, thats a little less noticeable... and negates the need for a dynamic dns, it just needs to auto connect to an irc server.
unless you've specifically modified your home directory so that it can't contain programs, they can always infect your home directory with mal-ware.
OTOH since without a combo root escalation all you have to do is 'ls -a ~' to detect said mal-ware its easy to see if you've been hacked...
and this whole concept of where firefox 4 is supposed to be going, just makes it worse, firefox 4 might as well call itself 'ie 5' because if they really do make it so hyper integrated it will become the next best rootkit installer since ie5.
of course it impairs the game, now for $40 (or whatever the cost is) you can gather up all the gold and items you can ever want and make high level characters to sell on e-bay and now the people with no lives who play 16 hours a day aren't making a living selling accounts and items on ebay... because the people with the bot can do it 24 hours a day, on each computer the hook up to the net, without having to check the computers except maybe a couple times a week...
it was my understanding that henry ford opted to use petroleum over a 'design that would have used peanut oil' much like our modern diesel engines... while it may be true that the model t could run on corn fuel, remember that at that time they could easily use coal or wood to make the corn ethanol, today we're using natural gas to make corn ethanol, and that resource won't last forever...
cheap energy won't die completely for another hundred years, but cheap oil is already coming to an end... the most likely situation is that we will find ways of turning vast tracks of land into genuine cheap biofuels... the roman empire collapsed when they couldn't grow enough wheat to feed everyone even with slavery and large armies... the question is if the 'modern' world can survive when all our energy has to come from plants, and animals, and the associated costs related to growing enough plants and animals.
it's questionable if humans can manage to maintain large empires the likes of the modern world with 'expensive' bio-energy. after all we can't even stop India from turning into a desert from the mass deforestation going on there.
75% of India is undergoing desertification similar to what privative man did to the middle-east with plows and wheat.
sad really... brazil from all the deforestation well, the amazon river is down 100 feet in places... and rain forests around the world (except in costa rica, which has a healthy tourism industry) are being felled for farms, for fuel, or purely for greed for the hardwoods and softwoods they can grow there. and the farms don't replace the lost precipitation those rain forests used to reciprocate with, while allowing the ground to absorb more of the rain because of the foliage of an old growth or even a new growth forest.
humans would probably turn the whole world to desert if they could, and cutting down all the forests is a good first start for that happening, as is evidenced by india's desertification.
the best security ideas came around in the 60s and 70s they haven't changed much..
so basically the most secure browsing environment possible is a fully hardened linux from scratch where the browser is being run by a limited user, who can't sudo or su, and where much of the filesystem is made immutable with chattr (chflags for bsd/apple users trying to make a hardened bsd or apple setup),
then hackers no matter how good will just give up on your system, and thank god that microsoft is too retarded to adopt a file system/user configuration setup that would make it easy for people to run as limited users, and hard even if that person is retarded to overwrite vital system files.
lets take things a bit further...
lets say spikrosoft is using tumblers in their locks, but capple is using a security system designed decades ago, when instead of everyone having their own home people lived all together in a single building per family, and so, the users of capple can't modify certain system files at all, whereas spikrosoft has no way to make a file immutable to 'administrators' now by default capple systems aren't set up with the maximum level of security of having every OS file set immutable, but a technically advanced user can do this in 2 minutes, and when updates need to change those files they can make the files temporarily writable, but not every user of that computer can do this, only the technically advanced user of the system.
furthermore you can make it even easier so that certain users can install programs but only if they have disk quota, and only in their home directory... meaning that normal users can't even touch system files, even if their browser gets hacked/hijacked by some insecure site...
of course, since capple and 'linux' have the same basic capabilities, and one is free, and one ships with hardware, that may cost more, than the hardware one could use to run linux etc etc etc...
but frankly, there are somethings that really only get done for windows, mac has dvd ripping tools, but most mac users complain about them (on message boards etc) haven't tried dvd ripping in linux, because i can't get dvd burning to work so there is no point if the latter doesn't work(some say it's just my hardware).
but whatever, in general I've noticed that Linux software is often buggier, expects certain things to be done in certain orders rather than fixing the existing bugs etc... and in general it is less reliable as a media playback device than open source software on windows... (noticeable the audio and video not playing in sync, on dvds (with no encryption)) although linux players have no problem with xvid/divx format files, just with dvds...
well the point is you can really genuinely lock down a apple machine, but windows even the horrible vista one that needs 3 gigs of ram and a dual core cpu, you still can't lock things down as tight as you can on an apple or linux machine.
In well accepted physics, there is a nongravitational black hole analog whose formation and evaporation is currently observed at RHIC.
It sounds like the world's largest super collider already observes the creation and evaporation of black holes. the question is will the hadron collider create stable black holes? not likely, they're not dealing with enough mass.
no the wording thing was in the summary they used the wording of 'as much hydrogen as the center of jupiter' center, not core.