1. It won't be either a hurricane or even a tropical depression when it hits the upper east coast next Tuesday according to the National Weather Service( http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at3+shtml/205618.shtml?5-daynl#contents )
2. Total Rainfall potential predicted by the NWS for the Pennsylvania , New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts areas is estimated to be - wait for it - a whopping 3 to 7 inches FOR THE ENTIRE FIVE DAYS through Wednesday. ( http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/qpf/zoom/Rainfall_Days_1-5.gif )
Didn't we go through this last year with the storm of the century that was supposed to flood New York but never really materialized and aren't we all a bit tired of the ridiculously overwrought news stories that get propagated all over the internet in order to drive page views?
When the NWS puts out a Frankenstorm warning then maybe it's time to get concerned but until then...
When I was in my 30's everyone told me that I wouldn't be getting jobs in my 40's.. I spoke to a lot of people at the time who were older and leaving the business because they could not get hired. At the time I thought such people just weren't keeping up with the times or were just B level people. Wrong. As I turned 45 and older I found less and less people willing to hire me.
The problem is not in your ability to learn new tech most likely - the problem will be that people will not want to hire you. Why is this? Several reasons:
1. You cost more. Even if you are willing to work the same wages you will be perceived as costing more.
2. Your medical insurance costs to the company will be higher. Even if you don't actually use that insurance the company will be charged higher rates if they have an older workforce.
3. You will be perceived as willing to work less. Maybe you have a family or heaven forbid - a life! Unlike a 22 year old who likely has neither of these things you will probably be less likely to work 60 - 70 hour weeks on a salary.
4. Your boss will likely be younger than you and knows less. Hence you will be perceived as a threat.
So welcome to the wonderful world of I.T.! Now go away:( Your best options for future career are to get out of development and into management or to start your own business. Me? Eventually I opted to get out of the field and am retraining as an RN.
Yes but consider that non-commercial IPs are almost always dynamic (surely the I.T. "genius" in Traynor's story would have told him this) and if you are going to confront your best friend's son over charges of heinous racism, threats of physical violence to himself and his wife, as well as terrorist packages sent to his door - all things that carry potentially long criminal sentences (especially in Europe) - would you REALLY do so over a dynamic I.P. or would you spend the extra week or two to confirm the link between IP address and physical address by a court order to the ISP?
Also are any of us seriously to believe that the father of the story-child's first reaction was to turn him over to the police? Just based on the word of his friend and NO other evidence (nothing from an ISP). Wouldn't you at least think maybe he would first get a lawyer for the kid maybe? It seems way too pat and easy - not to mention that the first thing the guy who has been terrorized for three years does to the kid is... give him cookies? What/. The ? F.? !!!
One more thing. Traynor doesn't want the kid to go to jail, he wants to give him a second chance right? So what does Traynor do? He spreads this story ALL over the internet for two weeks - which maybe would carry the risk of the kid getting outed all over the internet and his life ruined. Does any of this make sense?
Come on we both have seen this thing before - attention seekers spreading stories of their fake exploits all over the internet. This one carries the double viral-inducing quality of rage at the terrorist story-kid combined with marvel at Traynor's saint-like goodness in giving the kid a second chance. It's all too pat and none of it makes sense. It's fake and I sure that will be proven in the days and weeks to come but by then Traynor will already have his 15 minutes of fame.
Had you read the actual article you would have discovered that he did NOT get the alleged IP address from an embedded web link but solely from Facebook. Had you any actual technical background at all you would know that the IP address is only part of the problem - you then have to get the ISP to translate that IP address to a customer physical name and address and THAT takes a court order - especially in Europe where privacy protections are far greater than here in the states.
But then again I would expect a troll who uses both ageism and misogynism in his post to support a likely troll like Traynor.
Yeah... this is being pushed all over the web - likely by Traynor himself and it stinks of fakery.
1. Are we really to believe that Traynor and his wife get physicaly threatened for THREE years and Traynor does literally nothing about it? No restraining order after he finds out? He just decides to let it all go away.
2. Conveniently Traynor doesn't prosecute so there is no real record of this actually happening
3. How does Traynor's "genius" I.T. friend get an IP address from...Facebook (wtf??) ? And how does he use that without a court order issued to an ISP to track it to a physical address?
4. After the very first drop off of a message and ashes at his doorstep Traynor NEVER puts up a cam so he never sees the OTHER TWO drop offs of messages on his doorstep? W.T.F.??! He lets at least two chances go by and NEVER goes to the police and files a report we can verify. Bogus/. has seen a LOT of Munchausen's by Internet over the years - from sad cancer tales that never were to stories of little children dying of diseases who never did and now this. It has fake written all over it and I SO wish someone would look closely at Traynor and get to the bottom of this.
Before you do anything at all consider this web page: http://mukto-mona.net/debunk/harun_yahya/index.htm
which states that Adnan Oktar (aka Harun Yahya) and his followers have a history of using both extortion and violence against anyone who interferes in their criminal enterprises. With that said perhaps your best bet would be to pursue another DCMA process with YouTube along with proof that you own the media as another commenter suggested.
Some follow up: This man is a both a criminal (drugs and racketeering) and apparently very much a nutcase who lives in Turkey - a self described Muslim creationist extremist. Even if you get the youtube things taken down and his.COM websit shut down he will simply put up more websites .
Consider carefully the consequences of getting involved with a criminal and nutcase living in a Muslim country who likely has followers in America as well. Your best bet may be to simply edit the Wikipedia page regarding your legal issues with him.
His PUBLICLY AVAILABLE registration information for his website, http://harunyahya.com, is as follows:
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact: Publication, Global ms7uh6j58c5@networksolutionsprivateregistration.com Global Publication ATTN HARUNYAHYA.COM care of Network Solutions PO Box 459 Drums, PA 18222 US 570-708-8780
Record expires on 23-Jan-2022. Record created on 23-Jan-2000. Bulk whois optout: N Database last updated on 23-Sep-2012 14:42:05 EDT.
Both the address and phone number are fake (they apparently are the address and phone of Network Solutions itself. However you CAN sue Network soultions in small claims since they are now attached to his company. Sue them in small claims for damages and ask alternatively that they hand over all the information that they have on the person. Attempt to take over his website via court order in small claims (it's an asset).
There is also a Wikipedia page about the guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Oktar
Also: Some states allow injunctive relief (court order for youtube to take down the site) in small claims court and some do not. If your state does then file and ask that the site be taken down in addition to other damages.
By this time you have realized that 98% of Slashdot posters don't know a damn thing about the issue that you need to resolve (... the cloud?.... Really ??? ) and are just flinging buzzwords (monkeys... poo... ) or asking questions that you won;t know the answer to in hopes that this will get then off the hook in actually answering your question. . Short and sweet - you want database mirroring with automatic fallover. You can set up a second SQL server on a separate machine (cost less than $500 for the machine) to be the mirror and if your primary machine fails then you are still golden. Here is an article that tells gives you an idea as to how to do this in MS SQL '08 :
Yes, you should hire a **competent** DB consultant to do this for you. Yes it will cost you another $800 - $1000 do have a **competent** consultant do this for you (figure 8- 12 hours work at 80 bucks an hour) - you will lose far more than that the very first time your database fails and/or you attempt to do it yourself and blow away your database because you made a mistake (you do have backups , of course.... right ??? ).
You can try to do it yourself but I do not recommend it as it's risky.
I've been doing DB work for 25 years - feel free to send me a Slashdot message should you desire to use my services.
>Another way of thinking about it: Would you be fine with $EVIL_EMPIRE deploying missile defense in Cuba, Mexico, and Canada?
Absofragginlutely!
If they are non-nuclear anti-missle defense than put those things **everywhere** as far as I am concerned. The less capability ANY country has for successfully launching a nuclear ICBM the better ! That goes for Russia, China, the freaking U S of A and everyone else.
I would reinstate my mod points for your comment alone but you're already at 5. Personally I think that/. jumped the shard with the virtually unusable and certainly unstable "web 2.0" Ajackass interface but you make an excellent point.
I'm a long time/. user but for the last 2 or 3 years I glance at the site maybe one or twice a week at best and simply don't comment anymore. The articles have become vapid, the user comments little better than Reddit, and now this... Yeah, that's why I always log into/. - to get more business fucking intelligence. Good luck with that.
The risk, for this asteroid as has been pointed out before is negligible. Anyone who follows http://www.spaceweather.com/ knows 2 or 3 times a year some small piece of rock comes between the earth and moon. Furthermore a few 10 MT nukes can easily either vaporize or at the very least break up into many small pieced a 150 foot chunk of rock. The technology to deliver such a device millions of miles out has been already proven by the recent asteroid and comet intercept probes. A single MIRV, attached to an appropriate launch vehicle could easily put from 10 to 30 nukes each containing half a megaton or more into the path of something like this. My guess is that you could create the launch vehicle for something like this in a year or so if the incentive were appropriate enough.
>Not true. The utility of a 63GPa material with the density in the 3000-2000kg/m3 department is so ridiculously awesome that its is indistinguishable >from magic compared to today's materials
Know anyone who has a single pound on hand of that magical (mythical ) 63 GPa material of which you speak (let alone the megapounds that will be needed for a space elevator?)
1. The fact that we don't have the necessary structural materials yet to actually make a space elevator.
2. Neither Japan nor any Japanese company has the financial solvency to undertake such an effort
2. No no wants to spend a week in an elevator even if it means you get to go into orbit. Christ I can barely make it to the 15th floor without some jackass farting. A whole week. Don't think so.
Every so often some company in need of cashflow creates some nonsensical grandiose concept in the hopes of securing ignorant investor funding (See Moller flying cars). And such companies usually have spent the bulk of the cash on P.R. - hence the slashdot article.
One of Reddit's most egregious offenders with regard to child porn is a despicable 50 something old man named ViolentAcrez who created many of the child porn sites on Reddit (as well as racist and anti-Semite subreddits as well). ViolentAcrez is SURPRISE! close friends with the admins of Reddit and had been modding Reddit child porn sites for four years prior to their removal today.
The SA forums leave much to be desired but they have done a great service in exposing the hypocrisy and outright vileness of the Reddit admins in permitting these sorts of things to occur. There is simply NO PLACE for child porn on Reddit or anywhere else and no excuse. The fact that the REddit admins were and contiue to be great friend with a pedophile and generally rotten person doesn't mean they get to look away from this. This all happenned because the Reddit admins REFUSED TO ACT when presented time and again with what their friends were doing with their site.
"I am receiving emails that do not belong to me. What should I do?"
When I joined Slashdot many years ago it was a cutting edge forum of interesting news with interesting comments - very techie. Now this makes the front page.
Actually no. Power is very clear that he never filed a police report because "he did not have the time" - his words. His primary work machine was stolen along with his birth certificate, his Canadian Health card (both of which can be sold and/or used for identity theft) and a sum of money that was reported to be a thousand dollars. Yet Power didn't have the time to go to to the police? Hmmmmmm.
It was only 3 days after the theft , while Power was in the middle of his Twitter/Prey drama online did he claim to have contacted the New Your Police from his Canadian home 800 km away. Not surprisingly the police said there was little they could do aside from take a report. All this is from Power's own reports.
He lost all that and never "had time" to make a police report. Does that sound a bit strange to you? It does to me.
The "justice" that you described took place three days after the theft when Power "suddenly remembered" that he had installed Prey. Does it make sense to you that he would forget that for three days? The woman who recovered the laptop ("Purple Sarong Girl") remains a mystery as all reference to her was abruptly removed by Power and Reese a couple hours after this drama unfolded.
So no police report. No person who actually recovered the laptop. The only two people who verify this story remain Sean Power and Nick Reese, two SEO marketing men.
I've been seeing this story all over the web the past few days. Some people have brought out some very interesting points that seem to have got lost in the promotion of this story:
The author happens to be a Canadian SEO marketing person who published a few books on SEO techniques with O'Reilly
The author's completely random twitter contact,Nick Reese, who helped him turns out to be also an SEO marketing person. Interesting coincidence there.
The author claims to have lost his Canadian health card, his birth certificate and a significant sum of money along with the laptop that were all in his laptop bag yet he never reports this to the police at the time of the theft. Only several days afterwards in a twitter post does he claim to have contacted the police. Does this make sense?
A young woman that the author describes as "Purple Sarong Girl" was the one who actually recovered the laptop as twittered by Nick Reese. Yet both Power and Reese refuse to release Sarong Lady's name even though she was the one who actually recovered the laptop. Sarong Lady remains an unsolved mystery.
The author says he installed Prey but "completely forgot about it" untill several days after the "theft" after which he twitters about the Prey screen shots that re remembered to look at. If you installed Prey and your laptop was stolen do you think you would have forgotten about your primary recovery system for 3 days after the theft?
So a LOT of questions remain here as this story continues to be pushed out to all major tech sites around the world. Really good SEO technique wouldn't you say. In my mind the question remains whether Sean Power really had a theft here or is just demonstrating his use of marketing technique ("hey - look what we did for Prey in just a week !" ). It is probably very hard to determine one way or another but this story fails the "Does this make sense" test in so many ways that I have to question it's legitimacy.
Cynicism is vastly overrated. If people did not want to be better than they are they would not have invented gods in order to have something better to which to aspire.
People do want to be better. Most of us, myself included, just don't know how to properly do it.
>>Berners-Lee asked how can we 'make use of the web so it connects people together and breaks down barriers more than it builds them up.'
It's a fascinating question. I would go as far as to say it is the quintessential question of the modern internet. I have been on discussion forums for well over 25 years (think Compuserve) . I have seen what makes forums work and what destroys them.
Observation #1. Human beings are not particularly well equipped to participate in a group discussion without visual cues. Letters work well for one on one communication where the participants are known to each other but in a group setting communications, more often than not, break down when we can only "best guess" as to what someone actually meant. Not everyone writes well. Communicating our thoughts and feelings through the written word is, for the vast majority of us, a learned skill and the vast majority of us have no real training in such communications.
Observation #2. In a group forum the number of people who are divisive outnumber the people who tend to bring discussions together by more than five to one and likely much closer to ten to one. Divisive people are merely interested in promoting their own point of view for their own reasons. Inclusive people wish to contribute to the discussion and possibly expand or change their own viewpoints.
Observation 3. One bad apple in a discussion forum can ruin it for hundreds of others. The worst of the worst that participate in discussion forums are those that are far too connected to the forums. I other words , the most prolific contributors are most likely to be the most disruptive. Possible reasons for this are that the more prolific participants have little other activity or concerns outside of life on their forums of choice. Bad behaviors that would normally be socially moderated by sharp glances or visual cues by group participants in real life are given unlimited free reign in time delayed written forums.
Observation 4. Since 2006 or so, paid astroturfers having no other purpose than to promote a corporation's or individual's message have become a significant detriment to online forums.
What can be done about this? Suggestion 1. Create a web of trust among posters. A given poster is assigned a score in some manner that indicates whether their history of posts have been useful or not. Obviously this can be gamed. The challenge would be to create a system that where gaming the score is next to impossible.
Suggestion 2. Make a posting ID valuable in some manner so that creating disruption within a discussion is not cost effective to the poster. Consider Metafilter where there is a five dollar entry to contributing discussion. Look at that forum and compare it to any other public forum that you have seen. Spamming and astroturfing and generally bad behavior has a cost associated with it in that forum. It appears to work.
Suggestion 3. Decrease anonymity. I realize that here necessary reasons for anonymity (Iran, Libya) . More often than not, there are no such reasons. People as a rule behave better when they know that they will be held accountable for their words and actions. If a person can be identified then their overall history and worth to a community over the years can be better evaluated. This has ties in with suggestion 1.
Obviously all my observations and suggestions can be and likely will be:) argued but this is what I have experienced and the conclusions that I have arrived at through a quarter century of online forum participation.
I have been a T-Mobile customer for 5 years now. I've been using cells since 94 or 95 or so. I have been on a dozen or more cell companies and by far and away T-Mobile has the best customer service I have ever seen. When the iphone came out I jailbroke it and used it on T-Mo for the last 2 1/2 years. I refused to go ATT because of the higher (much) price for service and data PLUS the god awful customer service so I sucked it up and went with the lower EVDO data speeds on the iPhone under t-Mo. ATT may not be the grand Satan of automated phone Hell but they are definitely one of the bigger demons.
Just this month I left T-Mo and went with the Verizon iphone. ATT wants a $500 for me to hook up with them. Neither T-Mo nor verizon require any deposit at all from me.
This consolidation - *****just like every consolidation that has ever happened in the last 30 years **** will result in higher prices, worse service and loss of jobs.
ATT is the very worst and the only reason many people tend to choose them is because they have no other choice. Now they will have even fewer.
I am seeing NO - ZERO stories showing up when I log in . When I am logged out the stories appear. Using OS X 10.6 and firefox 3.6.10. Turned off adblock and TACO - same result.
Great new design folks but I don't know if the "no content" concept will last.
Slashdot Mirror
1. It won't be either a hurricane or even a tropical depression when it hits the upper east coast next Tuesday according to the National Weather Service( http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at3+shtml/205618.shtml?5-daynl#contents )
...
2. Total Rainfall potential predicted by the NWS for the Pennsylvania , New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts areas is estimated to be - wait for it - a whopping 3 to 7 inches FOR THE ENTIRE FIVE DAYS through Wednesday. ( http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/qpf/zoom/Rainfall_Days_1-5.gif )
Didn't we go through this last year with the storm of the century that was supposed to flood New York but never really materialized and aren't we all a bit tired of the ridiculously overwrought news stories that get propagated all over the internet in order to drive page views?
When the NWS puts out a Frankenstorm warning then maybe it's time to get concerned but until then
When I was in my 30's everyone told me that I wouldn't be getting jobs in my 40's.. I spoke to a lot of people at the time who were older and leaving the business because they could not get hired. At the time I thought such people just weren't keeping up with the times or were just B level people. Wrong. As I turned 45 and older I found less and less people willing to hire me.
:(
The problem is not in your ability to learn new tech most likely - the problem will be that people will not want to hire you. Why is this? Several reasons:
1. You cost more. Even if you are willing to work the same wages you will be perceived as costing more.
2. Your medical insurance costs to the company will be higher. Even if you don't actually use that insurance the company will be charged higher rates if they have an older workforce.
3. You will be perceived as willing to work less. Maybe you have a family or heaven forbid - a life! Unlike a 22 year old who likely has neither of these things you will probably be less likely to work 60 - 70 hour weeks on a salary.
4. Your boss will likely be younger than you and knows less. Hence you will be perceived as a threat.
So welcome to the wonderful world of I.T.! Now go away
Your best options for future career are to get out of development and into management or to start your own business.
Me? Eventually I opted to get out of the field and am retraining as an RN.
Yes but consider that non-commercial IPs are almost always dynamic (surely the I.T. "genius" in Traynor's story would have told him this) and if you are going to confront your best friend's son over charges of heinous racism, threats of physical violence to himself and his wife, as well as terrorist packages sent to his door - all things that carry potentially long criminal sentences (especially in Europe) - would you REALLY do so over a dynamic I.P. or would you spend the extra week or two to confirm the link between IP address and physical address by a court order to the ISP?
... give him cookies? What/. The ? F.? !!!
Also are any of us seriously to believe that the father of the story-child's first reaction was to turn him over to the police? Just based on the word of his friend and NO other evidence (nothing from an ISP). Wouldn't you at least think maybe he would first get a lawyer for the kid maybe? It seems way too pat and easy - not to mention that the first thing the guy who has been terrorized for three years does to the kid is
One more thing. Traynor doesn't want the kid to go to jail, he wants to give him a second chance right? So what does Traynor do? He spreads this story ALL over the internet for two weeks - which maybe would carry the risk of the kid getting outed all over the internet and his life ruined. Does any of this make sense?
Come on we both have seen this thing before - attention seekers spreading stories of their fake exploits all over the internet. This one carries the double viral-inducing quality of rage at the terrorist story-kid combined with marvel at Traynor's saint-like goodness in giving the kid a second chance. It's all too pat and none of it makes sense. It's fake and I sure that will be proven in the days and weeks to come but by then Traynor will already have his 15 minutes of fame.
Had you read the actual article you would have discovered that he did NOT get the alleged IP address from an embedded web link but solely from Facebook. Had you any actual technical background at all you would know that the IP address is only part of the problem - you then have to get the ISP to translate that IP address to a customer physical name and address and THAT takes a court order - especially in Europe where privacy protections are far greater than here in the states.
But then again I would expect a troll who uses both ageism and misogynism in his post to support a likely troll like Traynor.
Yeah ... this is being pushed all over the web - likely by Traynor himself and it stinks of fakery.
...Facebook (wtf??) ? And how does he use that without a court order issued to an ISP to track it to a physical address?
/. has seen a LOT of Munchausen's by Internet over the years - from sad cancer tales that never were to stories of little children dying of diseases who never did and now this. It has fake written all over it and I SO wish someone would look closely at Traynor and get to the bottom of this.
1. Are we really to believe that Traynor and his wife get physicaly threatened for THREE years and Traynor does literally nothing about it? No restraining order after he finds out? He just decides to let it all go away.
2. Conveniently Traynor doesn't prosecute so there is no real record of this actually happening
3. How does Traynor's "genius" I.T. friend get an IP address from
4. After the very first drop off of a message and ashes at his doorstep Traynor NEVER puts up a cam so he never sees the OTHER TWO drop offs of messages on his doorstep? W.T.F.??! He lets at least two chances go by and NEVER goes to the police and files a report we can verify. Bogus
Before you do anything at all consider this web page:
http://mukto-mona.net/debunk/harun_yahya/index.htm
which states that Adnan Oktar (aka Harun Yahya) and his followers have a history of using both extortion and violence against anyone who interferes in their criminal enterprises. With that said perhaps your best bet would be to pursue another DCMA process with YouTube along with proof that you own the media as another commenter suggested.
Some follow up: .COM websit shut down he will simply put up more websites .
This man is a both a criminal (drugs and racketeering) and apparently very much a nutcase who lives in Turkey - a self described Muslim creationist extremist. Even if you get the youtube things taken down and his
Consider carefully the consequences of getting involved with a criminal and nutcase living in a Muslim country who likely has followers in America as well.
Your best bet may be to simply edit the Wikipedia page regarding your legal issues with him.
His PUBLICLY AVAILABLE registration information for his website, http://harunyahya.com, is as follows:
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Publication, Global ms7uh6j58c5@networksolutionsprivateregistration.com
Global Publication
ATTN HARUNYAHYA.COM
care of Network Solutions
PO Box 459
Drums, PA 18222
US
570-708-8780
Record expires on 23-Jan-2022.
Record created on 23-Jan-2000.
Bulk whois optout: N
Database last updated on 23-Sep-2012 14:42:05 EDT.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.P03.DYNECT.NET
NS2.P03.DYNECT.NET
NS3.P03.DYNECT.NET
NS4.P03.DYNECT.NET
Both the address and phone number are fake (they apparently are the address and phone of Network Solutions itself. However you CAN sue Network soultions in small claims since they are now attached to his company. Sue them in small claims for damages and ask alternatively that they hand over all the information that they have on the person. Attempt to take over his website via court order in small claims (it's an asset).
There is also a Wikipedia page about the guy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Oktar
Also: Some states allow injunctive relief (court order for youtube to take down the site) in small claims court and some do not. If your state does then file and ask that the site be taken down in addition to other damages.
Paid posters apparently have no shame :(
By this time you have realized that 98% of Slashdot posters don't know a damn thing about the issue that you need to resolve (... the cloud? .... Really ??? ) and are just flinging buzzwords (monkeys... poo ... ) or asking questions that you won;t know the answer to in hopes that this will get then off the hook in actually answering your question.
.
Short and sweet - you want database mirroring with automatic fallover. You can set up a second SQL server on a separate machine (cost less than $500 for the machine) to be the mirror and if your primary machine fails then you are still golden. Here is an article that tells gives you an idea as to how to do this in MS SQL '08 :
http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/article.php/3828341/Database-Mirroring-in-SQL-Server-2008.htm
Yes, you should hire a **competent** DB consultant to do this for you. Yes it will cost you another $800 - $1000 do have a **competent** consultant do this for you (figure 8- 12 hours work at 80 bucks an hour) - you will lose far more than that the very first time your database fails and/or you attempt to do it yourself and blow away your database because you made a mistake (you do have backups , of course.... right ??? ).
You can try to do it yourself but I do not recommend it as it's risky.
I've been doing DB work for 25 years - feel free to send me a Slashdot message should you desire to use my services.
>Another way of thinking about it: Would you be fine with $EVIL_EMPIRE deploying missile defense in Cuba, Mexico, and Canada?
Absofragginlutely!
If they are non-nuclear anti-missle defense than put those things **everywhere** as far as I am concerned. The less capability ANY country has for successfully launching a nuclear ICBM the better ! That goes for Russia, China, the freaking U S of A and everyone else.
No nukes is good nukes.
I would reinstate my mod points for your comment alone but you're already at 5. /. jumped the shard with the virtually unusable and certainly unstable "web 2.0" Ajackass interface but you make an excellent point.
/. user but for the last 2 or 3 years I glance at the site maybe one or twice a week at best and simply don't comment anymore. The articles have become vapid, the user comments little better than Reddit, and now this ... Yeah, that's why I always log into /. - to get more business fucking intelligence. Good luck with that.
Personally I think that
I'm a long time
>So Slashdot is turning into a blog site?
Teh stupid still hurts.
Who knew?
The risk, for this asteroid as has been pointed out before is negligible. Anyone who follows http://www.spaceweather.com/ knows 2 or 3 times a year some small piece of rock comes between the earth and moon. Furthermore a few 10 MT nukes can easily either vaporize or at the very least break up into many small pieced a 150 foot chunk of rock. The technology to deliver such a device millions of miles out has been already proven by the recent asteroid and comet intercept probes. A single MIRV, attached to an appropriate launch vehicle could easily put from 10 to 30 nukes each containing half a megaton or more into the path of something like this. My guess is that you could create the launch vehicle for something like this in a year or so if the incentive were appropriate enough.
>Not true. The utility of a 63GPa material with the density in the 3000-2000kg/m3 department is so ridiculously awesome that its is indistinguishable
>from magic compared to today's materials
Know anyone who has a single pound on hand of that magical (mythical ) 63 GPa material of which you speak (let alone the megapounds that will be needed for a space elevator?)
No? Not a single pound?
Didn't think so.
1. The fact that we don't have the necessary structural materials yet to actually make a space elevator.
2. Neither Japan nor any Japanese company has the financial solvency to undertake such an effort
2. No no wants to spend a week in an elevator even if it means you get to go into orbit. Christ I can barely make it to the 15th floor without some jackass farting. A whole week. Don't think so.
Every so often some company in need of cashflow creates some nonsensical grandiose concept in the hopes of securing ignorant investor funding (See Moller flying cars). And such companies usually have spent the bulk of the cash on P.R. - hence the slashdot article.
It's bullshit. It's always bullshit.
One of Reddit's most egregious offenders with regard to child porn is a despicable 50 something old man named ViolentAcrez who created many of the child porn sites on Reddit (as well as racist and anti-Semite subreddits as well). ViolentAcrez is SURPRISE! close friends with the admins of Reddit and had been modding Reddit child porn sites for four years prior to their removal today.
The SA forums leave much to be desired but they have done a great service in exposing the hypocrisy and outright vileness of the Reddit admins in permitting these sorts of things to occur. There is simply NO PLACE for child porn on Reddit or anywhere else and no excuse. The fact that the REddit admins were and contiue to be great friend with a pedophile and generally rotten person doesn't mean they get to look away from this. This all happenned because the Reddit admins REFUSED TO ACT when presented time and again with what their friends were doing with their site.
"I am receiving emails that do not belong to me. What should I do?"
When I joined Slashdot many years ago it was a cutting edge forum of interesting news with interesting comments - very techie.
Now this makes the front page.
Oh... and the new ajax anti-user interface {sigh}
Actually no. Power is very clear that he never filed a police report because "he did not have the time" - his words. His primary work machine was stolen along with his birth certificate, his Canadian Health card (both of which can be sold and/or used for identity theft) and a sum of money that was reported to be a thousand dollars. Yet Power didn't have the time to go to to the police? Hmmmmmm.
It was only 3 days after the theft , while Power was in the middle of his Twitter/Prey drama online did he claim to have contacted the New Your Police from his Canadian home 800 km away. Not surprisingly the police said there was little they could do aside from take a report. All this is from Power's own reports.
He lost all that and never "had time" to make a police report. Does that sound a bit strange to you? It does to me.
The "justice" that you described took place three days after the theft when Power "suddenly remembered" that he had installed Prey. Does it make sense to you that he would forget that for three days? The woman who recovered the laptop ("Purple Sarong Girl") remains a mystery as all reference to her was abruptly removed by Power and Reese a couple hours after this drama unfolded.
So no police report. No person who actually recovered the laptop. The only two people who verify this story remain Sean Power and Nick Reese, two SEO marketing men.
I've been seeing this story all over the web the past few days. Some people have brought out some very interesting points that seem to have got lost in the promotion of this story:
The author happens to be a Canadian SEO marketing person who published a few books on SEO techniques with O'Reilly
The author's completely random twitter contact,Nick Reese, who helped him turns out to be also an SEO marketing person. Interesting coincidence there.
The author claims to have lost his Canadian health card, his birth certificate and a significant sum of money along with the laptop that were all in his laptop bag yet he never reports this to the police at the time of the theft. Only several days afterwards in a twitter post does he claim to have contacted the police. Does this make sense?
A young woman that the author describes as "Purple Sarong Girl" was the one who actually recovered the laptop as twittered by Nick Reese. Yet both Power and Reese refuse to release Sarong Lady's name even though she was the one who actually recovered the laptop. Sarong Lady remains an unsolved mystery.
The author says he installed Prey but "completely forgot about it" untill several days after the "theft" after which he twitters about the Prey screen shots that re remembered to look at. If you installed Prey and your laptop was stolen do you think you would have forgotten about your primary recovery system for 3 days after the theft?
So a LOT of questions remain here as this story continues to be pushed out to all major tech sites around the world. Really good SEO technique wouldn't you say. In my mind the question remains whether Sean Power really had a theft here or is just demonstrating his use of marketing technique ("hey - look what we did for Prey in just a week !" ). It is probably very hard to determine one way or another but this story fails the "Does this make sense" test in so many ways that I have to question it's legitimacy.
>>People don't want to be improved.
Cynicism is vastly overrated.
If people did not want to be better than they are they would not have invented gods in order to have something better to which to aspire.
People do want to be better. Most of us, myself included, just don't know how to properly do it.
>>Berners-Lee asked how can we 'make use of the web so it connects people together and breaks down barriers more than it builds them up.'
:) argued but this is what I have experienced and the conclusions that I have arrived at through a quarter century of online forum participation.
It's a fascinating question. I would go as far as to say it is the quintessential question of the modern internet. I have been on discussion forums for well over 25 years (think Compuserve) . I have seen what makes forums work and what destroys them.
Observation #1. Human beings are not particularly well equipped to participate in a group discussion without visual cues. Letters work well for one on one communication where the participants are known to each other but in a group setting communications, more often than not, break down when we can only "best guess" as to what someone actually meant. Not everyone writes well. Communicating our thoughts and feelings through the written word is, for the vast majority of us, a learned skill and the vast majority of us have no real training in such communications.
Observation #2. In a group forum the number of people who are divisive outnumber the people who tend to bring discussions together by more than five to one and likely much closer to ten to one. Divisive people are merely interested in promoting their own point of view for their own reasons. Inclusive people wish to contribute to the discussion and possibly expand or change their own viewpoints.
Observation 3. One bad apple in a discussion forum can ruin it for hundreds of others. The worst of the worst that participate in discussion forums are those that are far too connected to the forums. I other words , the most prolific contributors are most likely to be the most disruptive. Possible reasons for this are that the more prolific participants have little other activity or concerns outside of life on their forums of choice. Bad behaviors that would normally be socially moderated by sharp glances or visual cues by group participants in real life are given unlimited free reign in time delayed written forums.
Observation 4. Since 2006 or so, paid astroturfers having no other purpose than to promote a corporation's or individual's message have become a significant detriment to online forums.
What can be done about this?
Suggestion 1. Create a web of trust among posters. A given poster is assigned a score in some manner that indicates whether their history of posts have been useful or not. Obviously this can be gamed. The challenge would be to create a system that where gaming the score is next to impossible.
Suggestion 2. Make a posting ID valuable in some manner so that creating disruption within a discussion is not cost effective to the poster. Consider Metafilter where there is a five dollar entry to contributing discussion. Look at that forum and compare it to any other public forum that you have seen. Spamming and astroturfing and generally bad behavior has a cost associated with it in that forum. It appears to work.
Suggestion 3. Decrease anonymity. I realize that here necessary reasons for anonymity (Iran, Libya) . More often than not, there are no such reasons. People as a rule behave better when they know that they will be held accountable for their words and actions. If a person can be identified then their overall history and worth to a community over the years can be better evaluated. This has ties in with suggestion 1.
Obviously all my observations and suggestions can be and likely will be
I have been a T-Mobile customer for 5 years now. I've been using cells since 94 or 95 or so. I have been on a dozen or more cell companies and by far and away T-Mobile has the best customer service I have ever seen. When the iphone came out I jailbroke it and used it on T-Mo for the last 2 1/2 years. I refused to go ATT because of the higher (much) price for service and data PLUS the god awful customer service so I sucked it up and went with the lower EVDO data speeds on the iPhone under t-Mo. ATT may not be the grand Satan of automated phone Hell but they are definitely one of the bigger demons.
Just this month I left T-Mo and went with the Verizon iphone. ATT wants a $500 for me to hook up with them. Neither T-Mo nor verizon require any deposit at all from me.
This consolidation - *****just like every consolidation that has ever happened in the last 30 years **** will result in higher prices, worse service and loss of jobs.
ATT is the very worst and the only reason many people tend to choose them is because they have no other choice. Now they will have even fewer.
and less whitespace.
I am seeing NO - ZERO stories showing up when I log in . When I am logged out the stories appear. Using OS X 10.6 and firefox 3.6.10. Turned off adblock and TACO - same result.
Great new design folks but I don't know if the "no content" concept will last.