I can't believe that Moby has the balls to come out and blame it's adience for copying his new album and goes on about some "pearl jam effect"...
When the bottom line is that Pearl Jam released crap albums after "Ten". Same goes with Moby, "18" is again crap compared to previous "Play". Blaming others and/or inventing theories will not change that.
Besides, tech oriented people that Moby's referring to are too small a group, even among Moby fans, to have any effect even if his "accusations" were accepted. "Play" sold millions and even if the whole tech oriented part of his fans bought "18" it wouldn't reach one tenth of what "Play" sold, just because the general audience (techies included) simply think "18" is shite.
<rant>Inspite of the fabulous album "Play" Moby being the religous moron he is may lack the ability to see things as they are...<rant>
One has to wonder who decided to mod that up. If the modee doesnt understand the post or even have a fucking clue about the stuff why mod it then... (you wont see me moderating business, economics or litigational stuff either)
Because that post is total crap. It's Planck and it's 10^-43 and Mandlebrot set is the converging set for a recursive complex equation (namely z z^2+c). Not that x=1/xi couldnt produce some fractal, but I'm not going to bother myself checking which that is because even this post is redundant, I'm posting this merely for the metamoderators.
Not to mention "guided by", "with chaotic consequences"...
Jar-Jar sure aint "UNIVERSALLY" reviled. Hasn't anyone seen the Simpsons episode where the comic store clerk goes to sleep with a life-sized Jar-Jar doll saying "Oh Jar-Jar, no one loves you but me...".
There is no need to toy around with the mail as-is. It's a little like IP packet, doesnt matter what's in it, but the essential thing is that it has a destination and source addresses and it travels in the net. No techinal solution will _ever_ overcome the fallacies with current emails, becuase the current email is as unrestrictive as IP packets.
Take spam for example. The problem will always be present theoretically when you want to receive mail also from people you've never received before and/or havent given your public crypto key for example. Another side of the aspect is when _we_ allow people to send source address spoofed spam.
The problems with email are people, as with almost every damn problem in the IT sector, it's always us. People bend towards stricker rulesets, to avoid abuse, which in many cases is not the way to go, let alone the solution to the root of the problem. Somebody here in./ said it really well once, he said that the best solution would be "Cheap plasma handguns and justice for us all"
Face scanning technology isn't innately evil. Like everything else, if we use it wisely, it can help. If we use it irresponsibly, it can hurt. No surprises there.
Ooops, what you (and many others apparently) seriously fail to see is that all these face scanners can produce is false sense of security. Knowing that every airport used such a device it would be pretty damn easy for any terrorists or other criminals to modify their face enough so that the face scanner would fail for them (false negative).
>>it seems to be bringing unsuspecting users machines to a crawl with full hard drives and clogging up the Fasttrack network with massive amounts of traffic
>i had this virus once, only i named it 'roommate'.
My coworker is experiencing similar symptoms on his box. I think he called it XP...
I would have thought that as the heat differential across the plates increased, their tunneling would also increase, acting as a break on the process and bringing about an equilibrium situation (temperature differential vs. potential differential.) Or is the mechanism for equilibrium simply black-body radiation across the gap, or similar?
Forgot to point out that it's quite easy to overcome the thermal potential because it's quite small (think of peltiers or thermo couples). But I'm guessing that the limiting effect comes from the fact that you cannot raise the electrical potential too much over the thermal potential because it would cause arcing. What I am curious is how are they gonna keep the plates so close by (we are talking about tunneling here, so they're gonna have to be pretty damn close) so nicely given the temperatue differences and thermal expansions, i.e. I see practical problems ahead.
Black-body radiation has no role in their device, radiation goes both ways, and that's something that has a "cooling effect" when ever the environment is cooler (i.e. radiates back less that it receives). Besides radiation does what it can without extra appliances anyway.
Dolphins did/do have a funny way of communicating with the human kind, eh. Double sommersault with a flip or something was "so long and thanks for all the fish", eh.
Who knows if a weird face with a pick axe has something to do with colling based on quatum tunneling...:)
IANAP, but I'm sure someone here is: doesn't vibration at the atomic scale in some crystalline medium also act like a particle? Can these guys also tunnel across gaps, or is their weird quantum nature restricted to the single medium they're expressed in? If they could tunnel, I would have thought that as the heat differential across the plates increased, their tunneling would also increase, acting as a break on the process and bringing about an equilibrium situation (temperature differential vs. potential differential.) Or is the mechanism for equilibrium simply black-body radiation across the gap, or similar?
(I was a physicist) Vibrations if atoms in a solid indeed behave like particles. They're called phononss. Them aswell as the electrons are basically responsible of the heat conduction in solids. Only electrons and other electric particles can tunnel. Phonons are very much like particles but they do need the medium (i.e. the solid) to travel in, where as electrons are not bound by medium.
What I see happening with this system of theirs is a lot of excess heat that has to be taken away once it's on the other side.
People cooling their pcs should remember that their problems are actually quite practical. They have few hundred watts coming out their chasis and that has to dealt with, no matter the actual cooling device next to the cpu. The problem _is_ the CPU producing shit loads.
There are uses for highpower cooling although most physicists these days disregard the problem and use liquid nitrogen or even liquid helium. It simply kills the heat and releases just some gas that isn't harmfull. One can then produce it somewhere else where exess heat is no longer a problem.
This reminds me of a screenshot my coworker took which I keep printed on my office wall. There's a yes/no dialog box asking to reboot Solaris after installing some software on it (cant remember what it was, but still).
There's also my coworker's hilarious comment beneath it : "WINOLARIS ???"
In the most recent issue of Dr. Dobb's it says that 2.96 is only marginally superior to 2.95.3
Marginally superior, well yes, but when that marginal holds bugfixes, I'm ok with it.
2.95.3 is for the kernel (and bloody good for that, too) and 3.x is where we'll be (and yes, it will be fantastic), but right now the 2.96 feels right.
But why fork another version of GCC? Why should we need to support an extra compiler version (amongst all the other OS and compiler versions we support) because you continue to use a proprietary compiler version?
Why not really? 2.95.3 is buggy when it comes to C++. Neither does the 2.96 support C++ like 3.xs do, but atleast it's not that buggy. It's a big hop from 2.9x to any 3.x, and as I see it having an intermediate compiler is not that bad at all, sort of a bugfix release of 2.95 if you will.
Actually at my work I've been forced to back port code to avoid some of the C++ flaws present in 2.95.3. (Actually nevermind that, but the countless hours I've spent with gdb hunting them down and finally accepting them as compiler errors was the bitching thing. Over the years I have learned that the flaw is always between the keyboard and the chair (speaking about real operating systems here:)). It can be quite annoying when it's not.)
(and yes, I admit that at the time RH first shipped 2.96 it wasnt pretty, but they've come a long way since)
(ii) you do not distribute additional software intended to supersede any component(s) of the Redistributables (unless otherwise specified in the applicable README file),
Like Bero said, the above would appear to state that because RedHat ships gcj they cannot ship JDK.
Nonetheless, I totally agree with you on Sun most likely being willing to allow RedHat to ship JDK.
BTW: I am not sure but if I recall correctly SuSE Linux ships with a Sun JDK.
May be so, I'm not a SuSE user, but in that case I'm guessing SuSE doesnt ship gcj, Jikes nor Kaffe...
Some say it's possible to use up2date for upgrading by tweaking/etc/redhat-release to the new value, thus tricking up2date in the next run to upgrade the whole distro. I haven't tried it myself.
I've upgraded an abundance of boxes that way, although no tweaking necessary. I've just fetched the redhat-release.noarch.rpm from some ftp site and the let up2date take over.
There have been minor issues here and there, which have forced me to download and upgrade some of the new rpms manually, but it's been really nonissue. I've done this since 7.0beta and as soon as the up2date is open for non subscribers loads of boxes here will go from "Enigma" or "Skipjack" (7.3beta) to "Valhalla".
That way you'll avoid letting their installer do it's trickery. I've had few pretty fscked-up experiences with the cd upgrades.
... for the record and for those of you that dont trust those cd upgrades: You'll go far (and also get the "Valhalla" name:)) by merely downloading the redhat-release noarch.rpm somewhere and let up2date -u take over. I've been upgrading one these boxes here since up2date first appeared all the way to 7.2 beta by updating the redhat-release rpm first and then letting the up2date -u do the rest.
It's not always all that pretty, atleast with 7.1beta there were some problems and some of the packages had to be manually updated before up2date could be allowed to take over.
Nonetheless the point is that I'm not keen on upgrading a fully running box from cds, besides you'll loose all the information about which files had to be moved/renamed/created-as-new.
I know some./configure && make && make install fans piss on all these rpms, but RedHat has indeed put a lot of effort into producing a well functional dependency tree and they're nearly there. You still can build an embedded box with their set (given that practical bare minimum lies somewhere around 90 rpms installed), but a full distrinbution upgrade by a mere 'rpm -F rh-latest/*.rpm' after a few mandatory rpm -uhv first is close to what it should be.
You are right in a sense that you can "easily" set your own experiment which proves eatrh rotation (although I would go rather which biger pendulim than man-sized and repeat the "church pendulum " experiment. He cerpainly ment swirl convention in the atmosprhere as this is wrongly as a anologous to the "wrong" sink swirl.
Naturally he went for the atmospheric effect of the Coriolis Effect, but a few metre pendulum made heavy enough will show C effect, no doubt.
Here you are wrong: the influence of the wind is certainly much higher than the effect
Certainly it it, BUT the effect is taken into account in long range cannon aiming, just as the wind and other atmospheric efects (humidity, rain etc). Ranges with 10 miles and more the C effect is well present even for linear motion. You do the math. We are talking about metres here. You'd be supprised how accurate shoreline cannons are these days. (I'm not saying their accyracy is less than a metre, but because the coriolis effect is the easiest to take out it's usually done) Over here in the 60dgr nother latitude, the C effect is just about v * w (a_coriolis = 2 v x w, and with sin 60 being 0.5). Naturally angular velocity of earth is freakishly slow, but for example 10 km shot with 300m/s velocity it gives you an acceleration of 2cm/s^2, and for a 30 second flight it results in almost 10 metre deviation, which is right there in the same magnitude as the accuracy.
Well Adobe, for 2.8m, you've impeded the progress of software development, created enemies, and left your customers with a bad taste in their mouths. And you know what? I bet a lot of people will feel a lot less bad about pirating your software after this. I hope it was worth it.
Dead on. I know a lot of people that are happy using Adobe's software, but I'm wondering how long people will put up with Adobe's legal department. It simply cannot be beneficial to get news coverage for patent cases about stuff like palet tabs. People are already sick and tired of software giants suing over stuff they shouldnt own in the first place just because they're huge and can afford to the ludicrous legal fees.
I guess someone has to say this, it was also Adobe that started the Sklyarov bullshit.
Coriolis-effect-causes-water-to-swirl-in-the-toile t myth that you find in so many physics textbooks (the Coriolis effect only works on planetary scales).
I know this is offtopic, but "planetary scales" ? Please... I certainly hope no one quotes you on that one. Man-sized pendulum is just a one example with what one can easily detect the coriolis effect. Long range cannons are another thing where the coriolis effect is also taken into account and there are many many others.
Just because the bath tub doesnt show the coriolis effect you shouldnt jump the gun and start talking about "planetary scales".
I hate to admit but you do have some point in there. People surfing channels during commercial breaks is hardly a threat, but devices that automate that is another thing.
My point is that I doubt that./ would put up with ad blocking software becoming widley spread and de facto standard for slashdot readers.
The removable memory cards inside the devices could be used to bring in software that looks for vulnerabilities on a company's internal network. The innocent-looking devices could also be used to smuggle out confidential or sensitive information.
... and we're soon expecting also FBI to realize that even floppy disks can be used for similar purposes.
Even innocent looking floppy disks (i.e. the kind that doesnt have "Warning, contains Virus and/or other malicious code!" printed on it) may soon be concidered a threat to the company security.
Atleast I was told that Schroedinger was extremely worried about the state of the cat. The was some confusion wether it was still alive or not. FBI gave no comments...:)
NVIDIA Does provide nice linux drivers, I have, unlike other never had any problem, they release newer version and each generation (for the most part) they get better what more can you ask....
Sources for the kernel module, period. They could keep their userspace part of the driver as closed as they'd want, but the part that gets loaded to the kernel space should, without questions nor excuses, be open source. Doesnt have to GPL, but open, so that kernel developers can see what it does and take action into stabilizing it.
There just simply aren't any excuses for keeping their driver binary-only. The only ones that I can come up with is either, terribly hacked-kludged-bastardized hebrew code that would only give them bad name OR fucked-up management that fails to see the benefits in opening up the code.
I'd bet for the later, being the common case in almost every company is most likely the cause of our distress.
The current situation is that kernel developers cannot do anything about it. When a kernel that's running with the NVidia module acts weird, the only party that can do anything is NVidia and quite frankly it isn't enough.
So basically, if you are against (restricted, needs a warrent etc) tapping of your e-mails, you should be against the (warrented) search of properties and the (warrrented) tapping of phones.
You are sadly mistaken there, or actually you're stating the obvious in a wrong context. Carnivore is _NOT_ analogous to phone tapping. An analogy would be such phone tapping where _all_ calls (and without warrants) would be recorded somewhere "safe" or atleast triggering on unwarranted recording by merely saying "my brother is such a terrorist" over the phone.
So, you see, the problem here which gets people so anxious is that Carnivore et al is about unwarranted monitoring. Little like having a surveillance camera in your living room and hoping that only feds would access the tapes and with proper warrants.
Naturally the feds should have warrants and such _when_ they actually start digging through and/or using the material, but many, like myself, are reluctant to believe that such information would not find it's way to the wrong hands...
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe that Moby has the balls to come out and blame it's adience for copying his new album and goes on about some "pearl jam effect"...
When the bottom line is that Pearl Jam released crap albums after "Ten". Same goes with Moby, "18" is again crap compared to previous "Play". Blaming others and/or inventing theories will not change that.
Besides, tech oriented people that Moby's referring to are too small a group, even among Moby fans, to have any effect even if his "accusations" were accepted. "Play" sold millions and even if the whole tech oriented part of his fans bought "18" it wouldn't reach one tenth of what "Play" sold, just because the general audience (techies included) simply think "18" is shite.
<rant>Inspite of the fabulous album "Play" Moby being the religous moron he is may lack the ability to see things as they are...<rant>
One has to wonder who decided to mod that up. If the modee doesnt understand the post or even have a fucking clue about the stuff why mod it then... (you wont see me moderating business, economics or litigational stuff either)
Because that post is total crap. It's Planck and it's 10^-43 and Mandlebrot set is the converging set for a recursive complex equation (namely z z^2+c). Not that x=1/xi couldnt produce some fractal, but I'm not going to bother myself checking which that is because even this post is redundant, I'm posting this merely for the metamoderators.
Not to mention "guided by", "with chaotic consequences"...
Jar-Jar sure aint "UNIVERSALLY" reviled. .
Hasn't anyone seen the Simpsons episode where the comic store clerk goes to sleep with a life-sized Jar-Jar doll saying "Oh Jar-Jar, no one loves you but me..."
Groening couldn't have been more correct there...
There is no need to toy around with the mail as-is. It's a little like IP packet, doesnt matter what's in it, but the essential thing is that it has a destination and source addresses and it travels in the net. No techinal solution will _ever_ overcome the fallacies with current emails, becuase the current email is as unrestrictive as IP packets.
./ said it really well once, he said that the best solution would be "Cheap plasma handguns and justice for us all"
Take spam for example. The problem will always be present theoretically when you want to receive mail also from people you've never received before and/or havent given your public crypto key for example. Another side of the aspect is when _we_ allow people to send source address spoofed spam.
The problems with email are people, as with almost every damn problem in the IT sector, it's always us. People bend towards stricker rulesets, to avoid abuse, which in many cases is not the way to go, let alone the solution to the root of the problem. Somebody here in
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon [stumbleupon.com]
Have you actually read their license? I suggest you do and reconcider it's use. The idea is great, but...
Face scanning technology isn't innately evil. Like everything else, if we use it wisely, it can help. If we use it irresponsibly, it can hurt. No surprises there.
Ooops, what you (and many others apparently) seriously fail to see is that all these face scanners can produce is false sense of security. Knowing that every airport used such a device it would be pretty damn easy for any terrorists or other criminals to modify their face enough so that the face scanner would fail for them (false negative).
>>it seems to be bringing unsuspecting users machines to a crawl with full hard drives and clogging up the Fasttrack network with massive amounts of traffic
>i had this virus once, only i named it 'roommate'.
My coworker is experiencing similar symptoms on his box. I think he called it XP...
I would have thought that as the heat differential across the plates increased, their tunneling would also increase, acting as a break on the process and bringing about an equilibrium situation (temperature differential vs. potential differential.) Or is the mechanism for equilibrium simply black-body radiation across the gap, or similar?
Forgot to point out that it's quite easy to overcome the thermal potential because it's quite small (think of peltiers or thermo couples). But I'm guessing that the limiting effect comes from the fact that you cannot raise the electrical potential too much over the thermal potential because it would cause arcing. What I am curious is how are they gonna keep the plates so close by (we are talking about tunneling here, so they're gonna have to be pretty damn close) so nicely given the temperatue differences and thermal expansions, i.e. I see practical problems ahead.
Black-body radiation has no role in their device, radiation goes both ways, and that's something that has a "cooling effect" when ever the environment is cooler (i.e. radiates back less that it receives). Besides radiation does what it can without extra appliances anyway.
Dolphins did/do have a funny way of communicating with the human kind, eh. Double sommersault with a flip or something was "so long and thanks for all the fish", eh.
:)
Who knows if a weird face with a pick axe has something to do with colling based on quatum tunneling...
IANAP, but I'm sure someone here is: doesn't vibration at the atomic scale in some crystalline medium also act like a particle? Can these guys also tunnel across gaps, or is their weird quantum nature restricted to the single medium they're expressed in? If they could tunnel, I would have thought that as the heat differential across the plates increased, their tunneling would also increase, acting as a break on the process and bringing about an equilibrium situation (temperature differential vs. potential differential.) Or is the mechanism for equilibrium simply black-body radiation across the gap, or similar?
(I was a physicist)
Vibrations if atoms in a solid indeed behave like particles. They're called phononss. Them aswell as the electrons are basically responsible of the heat conduction in solids. Only electrons and other electric particles can tunnel. Phonons are very much like particles but they do need the medium (i.e. the solid) to travel in, where as electrons are not bound by medium.
What I see happening with this system of theirs is a lot of excess heat that has to be taken away once it's on the other side.
People cooling their pcs should remember that their problems are actually quite practical. They have few hundred watts coming out their chasis and that has to dealt with, no matter the actual cooling device next to the cpu. The problem _is_ the CPU producing shit loads.
There are uses for highpower cooling although most physicists these days disregard the problem and use liquid nitrogen or even liquid helium. It simply kills the heat and releases just some gas that isn't harmfull. One can then produce it somewhere else where exess heat is no longer a problem.
This reminds me of a screenshot my coworker took which I keep printed on my office wall. There's a yes/no dialog box asking to reboot Solaris after installing some software on it (cant remember what it was, but still).
There's also my coworker's hilarious comment beneath it : "WINOLARIS ???"
In the most recent issue of Dr. Dobb's it says that 2.96 is only marginally superior to 2.95.3
Marginally superior, well yes, but when that marginal holds bugfixes, I'm ok with it.
2.95.3 is for the kernel (and bloody good for that, too) and 3.x is where we'll be (and yes, it will be fantastic), but right now the 2.96 feels right.
But why fork another version of GCC? Why should we need to support an extra compiler version (amongst all the other OS and compiler versions we support) because you continue to use a proprietary compiler version?
:)). It can be quite annoying when it's not.)
Why not really? 2.95.3 is buggy when it comes to C++. Neither does the 2.96 support C++ like 3.xs do, but atleast it's not that buggy. It's a big hop from 2.9x to any 3.x, and as I see it having an intermediate compiler is not that bad at all, sort of a bugfix release of 2.95 if you will.
Actually at my work I've been forced to back port code to avoid some of the C++ flaws present in 2.95.3. (Actually nevermind that, but the countless hours I've spent with gdb hunting them down and finally accepting them as compiler errors was the bitching thing. Over the years I have learned that the flaw is always between the keyboard and the chair (speaking about real operating systems here
(and yes, I admit that at the time RH first shipped 2.96 it wasnt pretty, but they've come a long way since)
(ii) you do not distribute additional software intended to supersede any component(s) of the Redistributables (unless otherwise specified in the applicable README file),
Like Bero said, the above would appear to state that because RedHat ships gcj they cannot ship JDK.
Nonetheless, I totally agree with you on Sun most likely being willing to allow RedHat to ship JDK.
BTW: I am not sure but if I recall correctly SuSE Linux ships with a Sun JDK.
May be so, I'm not a SuSE user, but in that case I'm guessing SuSE doesnt ship gcj, Jikes nor Kaffe...
Some say it's possible to use up2date for upgrading by tweaking /etc/redhat-release to the new value, thus tricking up2date in the next run to upgrade the whole distro. I haven't tried it myself.
.noarch.rpm from some ftp site and the let up2date take over.
I've upgraded an abundance of boxes that way, although no tweaking necessary. I've just fetched the redhat-release
There have been minor issues here and there, which have forced me to download and upgrade some of the new rpms manually, but it's been really nonissue. I've done this since 7.0beta and as soon as the up2date is open for non subscribers loads of boxes here will go from "Enigma" or "Skipjack" (7.3beta) to "Valhalla".
That way you'll avoid letting their installer do it's trickery. I've had few pretty fscked-up experiences with the cd upgrades.
... for the record and for those of you that dont trust those cd upgrades: You'll go far (and also get the "Valhalla" name :)) by merely downloading the redhat-release noarch.rpm somewhere and let up2date -u take over. I've been upgrading one these boxes here since up2date first appeared all the way to 7.2 beta by updating the redhat-release rpm first and then letting the up2date -u do the rest.
./configure && make && make install fans piss on all these rpms, but RedHat has indeed put a lot of effort into producing a well functional dependency tree and they're nearly there. You still can build an embedded box with their set (given that practical bare minimum lies somewhere around 90 rpms installed), but a full distrinbution upgrade by a mere 'rpm -F rh-latest/*.rpm' after a few mandatory rpm -uhv first is close to what it should be.
It's not always all that pretty, atleast with 7.1beta there were some problems and some of the packages had to be manually updated before up2date could be allowed to take over.
Nonetheless the point is that I'm not keen on upgrading a fully running box from cds, besides you'll loose all the information about which files had to be moved/renamed/created-as-new.
I know some
It seems that if you have RH7.2 and you have run up2date weekly you have everything except for Moz, kde3, Evolution, and some gnome collab app.
That's not entirely true...
The 7.2 is aka "Enigma" where as the 7.3 is a lot cooler "Valhalla". If that's not a reason to upgrade then nothing is.
(I'm still sad that I had to update away from the "Guinness")
still offtopic, but...
You are right in a sense that you can "easily" set your own experiment which proves eatrh rotation (although I would go rather which biger pendulim than man-sized and repeat the "church pendulum " experiment. He cerpainly ment swirl convention in the atmosprhere as this is wrongly as a anologous to the "wrong" sink swirl.
Naturally he went for the atmospheric effect of the Coriolis Effect, but a few metre pendulum made heavy enough will show C effect, no doubt.
Here you are wrong: the influence of the wind is certainly much higher than the effect
Certainly it it, BUT the effect is taken into account in long range cannon aiming, just as the wind and other atmospheric efects (humidity, rain etc). Ranges with 10 miles and more the C effect is well present even for linear motion. You do the math. We are talking about metres here. You'd be supprised how accurate shoreline cannons are these days. (I'm not saying their accyracy is less than a metre, but because the coriolis effect is the easiest to take out it's usually done) Over here in the 60dgr nother latitude, the C effect is just about v * w (a_coriolis = 2 v x w, and with sin 60 being 0.5). Naturally angular velocity of earth is freakishly slow, but for example 10 km shot with 300m/s velocity it gives you an acceleration of 2cm/s^2, and for a 30 second flight it results in almost 10 metre deviation, which is right there in the same magnitude as the accuracy.
Well Adobe, for 2.8m, you've impeded the progress of software development, created enemies, and left your customers with a bad taste in their mouths. And you know what? I bet a lot of people will feel a lot less bad about pirating your software after this. I hope it was worth it.
Dead on. I know a lot of people that are happy using Adobe's software, but I'm wondering how long people will put up with Adobe's legal department. It simply cannot be beneficial to get news coverage for patent cases about stuff like palet tabs. People are already sick and tired of software giants suing over stuff they shouldnt own in the first place just because they're huge and can afford to the ludicrous legal fees.
I guess someone has to say this, it was also Adobe that started the Sklyarov bullshit.
Coriolis-effect-causes-water-to-swirl-in-the-toile t myth that you find in so many physics textbooks (the Coriolis effect only works on planetary scales).
I know this is offtopic, but "planetary scales" ? Please... I certainly hope no one quotes you on that one. Man-sized pendulum is just a one example with what one can easily detect the coriolis effect. Long range cannons are another thing where the coriolis effect is also taken into account and there are many many others.
Just because the bath tub doesnt show the coriolis effect you shouldnt jump the gun and start talking about "planetary scales".
I hate to admit but you do have some point in there. People surfing channels during commercial breaks is hardly a threat, but devices that automate that is another thing.
./ would put up with ad blocking software becoming widley spread and de facto standard for slashdot readers.
My point is that I doubt that
The removable memory cards inside the devices could be used to bring in software that looks for vulnerabilities on a company's internal network. The innocent-looking devices could also be used to smuggle out confidential or sensitive information.
... and we're soon expecting also FBI to realize that even floppy disks can be used for similar purposes.
Even innocent looking floppy disks (i.e. the kind that doesnt have "Warning, contains Virus and/or other malicious code!" printed on it) may soon be concidered a threat to the company security.
Atleast I was told that Schroedinger was extremely worried about the state of the cat. The was some confusion wether it was still alive or not. FBI gave no comments... :)
NVIDIA Does provide nice linux drivers, I have, unlike other never had any problem, they release newer version and each generation (for the most part) they get better what more can you ask....
Sources for the kernel module, period. They could keep their userspace part of the driver as closed as they'd want, but the part that gets loaded to the kernel space should, without questions nor excuses, be open source. Doesnt have to GPL, but open, so that kernel developers can see what it does and take action into stabilizing it.
There just simply aren't any excuses for keeping their driver binary-only. The only ones that I can come up with is either, terribly hacked-kludged-bastardized hebrew code that would only give them bad name OR fucked-up management that fails to see the benefits in opening up the code.
I'd bet for the later, being the common case in almost every company is most likely the cause of our distress.
The current situation is that kernel developers cannot do anything about it. When a kernel that's running with the NVidia module acts weird, the only party that can do anything is NVidia and quite frankly it isn't enough.
So basically, if you are against (restricted, needs a warrent etc) tapping of your e-mails, you should be against the (warrented) search of properties and the (warrrented) tapping of phones.
You are sadly mistaken there, or actually you're stating the obvious in a wrong context. Carnivore is _NOT_ analogous to phone tapping. An analogy would be such phone tapping where _all_ calls (and without warrants) would be recorded somewhere "safe" or atleast triggering on unwarranted recording by merely saying "my brother is such a terrorist" over the phone.
So, you see, the problem here which gets people so anxious is that Carnivore et al is about unwarranted monitoring. Little like having a surveillance camera in your living room and hoping that only feds would access the tapes and with proper warrants.
Naturally the feds should have warrants and such _when_ they actually start digging through and/or using the material, but many, like myself, are reluctant to believe that such information would not find it's way to the wrong hands...