Movies are generally considered "a director's medium". The director has a lot more leeway to get scripts re-written, etc. Directors are even known to throw the script away and start over.
Seriously... Taking "drugs" sold by scumbag spammers is about as stupid as believing that you really, truly will get that $USD 20 MILLION by sending a few thousand dollars to the son of the late Emperor Bokassa to help him smuggle his father's ill-gotten millions out of the country.
The basic reasoning boils down to the fact that the school officials will take little if any flack for over reacting in the name of safety, but they will lose their jobs and be raked through the mud if they fail to react to an "obvious" threat.
That's the problem right there. There needs to be massive amounts of flack, public raking over the coals, and loss of employment, for school officials who commit such blatant acts of total abject brainlessness.
Stupidity should be a disqualification for any position in the education system.
That's the key right there -- cosmic rays have been observed with several million times the maximum energy the LHC is capable of hitting. (Don't use SI prefixes or exponentials with the people who are worried about the LHC. They aren't going to understand them.)
Another option for free antivirus on Windows is Windows Security Essentials from Microsoft. It seems to be a decent enough anti-virus, and it is pretty light-weight. It doesn't noticeably slow down my Acer Aspire One. Full scans are pretty slow, but you don't do those often, and/or set them to run in the dead of night.
I don't tend to get viruses, so I haven't really tested its efficacy, other than that it did find some ancient viruses in the Norton quarantine from the saved C: drive of a previous computer.
Next time you reformat and do all the re-install to get their computer back to where they can use it, ghost the drive, and save the image onto a CD or DVD or USB external hard drive that you take with you.
(I'm sure there are open-source programs that do what Ghost does.)
Then, next time, it'll be quick and easy to put the machine back to "usable initial state".
On my wife's computer, I deleted all the Internet Exposure icons, installed Firefox, and told her "Firefox is how you browse the web." IE is still there hidden under the "Programs" folder, but she'd have to go looking for it. I don't think she knows there is any such thing as IE. She uses Thunderbird for email. (Outbreak Express is, of course, right out. I don't think I even left a copy of that thing anywhere on the PC.)
I emphasized to her that she should never open an email that she doesn't know who sent it to her.
I really liked PasswordSafe, and if I didn't use a Mac part of the time, that's what I'd still be using.
I'm currently using KeePass, and... I do not like it very much. It doesn't have a built-in way to merge the latest keys from multiple key files, which to me is a huge, glaring flaw.
And after using it for a while... I just don't trust the security-consciousness of the KeePass developers as much as I do Bruce Schneier. For one thing, when you export the password database to plain clear text, passwordsafe prints a "warning warning danger danger do you really want to do this" type message. KeePass... just does it, with no warning. True, in itself, that's no big deal (Just don't do that!) but it make me worry about what other bad practices might be embedded in it.
I'm unhappy enough with KeePass that I'm going back to PasswordSafe, and if I need it on the Mac, I'll just run it under Fusion. I regret moving everything over to KeePass.
Password Gorilla looks interesting (I hadn't heard of it before reading the comments here) but it doesn't seem to have been updated in almost 4 years. Password Safe development continues.
Maybe this will apply some pressure on Garmin and/or TomTom to not gouge quite so heavily for updated maps. (It's in the neighborhood of $70 to upgrade your maps the last time I looked, which makes one question whether to update the maps or just buy a newer, perhaps more feature-laden, device. Which is likely the reason for the gouge.)
I've heard various descriptions of what the location technology in these phones is -- Recently, a fairly knowledgeable person said that "assisted GPS" meant it used cell phones to get the ephemeris data to greatly speed up GPS start-up time, and was real GPS from there. If it's receiving the GPS signals, though, there's no reason in principle why it couldn't get the ephemeris data the old-fashioned way, from the satellites, if you were out of cell phone range.
That wouldn't help with the maps when you're out of cell phone range, though, unless they provide some way to pre-download them, at least for an area you're intending to visit.
Niven used teleportation, but the problem, and the solution he came up with in the story, have a counterpart in the real world.
At a con where Niven was the GoH, a phone company employee was in the audience, and said that when there's a disaster, phone lines often get jammed. The phone company's policy is, when when this happens, to start blocking incoming calls and allow only outgoing. The theory is to make it easier for people inside the affected area to contact someone outside; people calling from outside aren't necessarily going to be able to contact who they're worried about in the affected area, and a lot of them are likely voyeurs who don't have any real business calling in and taking up a connection that needs to be available for someone to find out the status of family members.
SF, at its best, does things like this. It requires an author who actually things about problems and how to solve them.
I haven't kept up with what academia has done with these sorts of courses in the 30-odd years since I was in school, but back then, when there was such a course, the selections were all of a particular type... gloomy, technophobic, pessimistic, depressing... and often written with no concern for plausible science. Heinlein, Niven, Asimov, Poul Anderson, Gordon Dickson... all these writers were UnPersons, as far as the academic crowd of the day was concerned.
So, in spite of my initial "A course on SF? Cool!" enthusiasm, after looking at the reading list, I left, brushing the dust from my feet as I went.
Eh. I've never been big on aliases. I've used my real name since BBS days, even on a popular local one (Stuart ][) just about everyone else used a pseudonym. Same on Usenet.
Yeah, search on my name, and I'm the top hit. (A guy who runs a woodworking school is pretty high on the list, too.)
True -- a house needs fresh air exchange.
This goal is in conflict with energy efficiency, but can be worked around with counterflow heat exchangers.
Of course, the fans to pull the air through the counterflow heat exchangers take energy, so there goes some of your energy efficiency.
How is Postini doing with false positives these days?
We had them at a medium-sized company I used to work for a few years ago, and it was a huge help, but some of the marketing people had a terrible time getting email from some sources they wanted that Postini was deciding was "blatant spam", and dropping without putting it in the quarantine.
Yeah, none of that email was anything that I would want, or probably you either, but the marketroids thought it was pretty important.
Some of the other providers have better efficacy these days. I'd name names, but plugging the company I work for now would probably be considered spamming.
Unfortunately, good mail gets caught in gmail's spam trap. Its false positive rate would be utterly unacceptable, except addresses on your contact list get through, and you can set "if it matches this pattern, never spam trap" filters, which help with some mailing lists I'm on that often trip Gmail's spam filter, but still, just today there were two legit emails in the trap that I'd really hate to have missed.
Why they were trapped, I have no idea; they did not look at all 'spammy'.
So I still have to look at the contents of the spam trap regularly looking for legit email that was improperly blocked, which means the spam continues to be a horrible nuisance.
I much prefer the trap at a small ISP I use. Spam in the trap is sorted by spam score, so I don't have to look at all the spam, just the lower-scored stuff. The reason Gmail can't do this is obvious, alas. (Well, they could, but it would be providing way too much information to the enemy.)
I have a simple metric to determine whether someone pushing "global warming panic" is really serious about CO2 emissions:
Do they favor nuclear power?
It is flatly impossible for someone to be serious about reducing CO2 and oppose nuclear power. They can assert their seriousness all they like, and they can, indeed, be quite convinced they are right, and be quite emotionally attached to the proposition.
Seriousness, however, means that one takes the effort to be informed.
So, yea, the broadcast flag is alive and well, and used pretty much by all the service broadcasters (Comcast, Verizon FIOS, Time Warner, Dish, etc.).
I know this is not true for Dish. I have a Dish DVR, and a DVD recorder. I have often recorded programs to DVD, and I have never seen any "you are not allowed to record this" message. Ever.
Breeder reactors expand that to over a thousand years proven reserves.
That's not counting thorium.
As long as we're talking about things that don't exist you should have at least mentioned fusion as hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe.
What "things that don't exist"? Breeder reactors? Do you think that breeder reactors don't exist? Or thorium reactors?
Both of these exist (at least as a pilot plant in the case of thorium) and how to make them work is fairly well understood. It's just a matter of doing it.
This is far different from the case of fusion reactors (which, I agree, if it can be done, it would definitely be the way to go long-term.) A lot of money has been poured into making fusion work for decades, and we still don't have much of a clue how to make a fusion plant that will produce enough power to sustain a reaction, much less produce useful power.
My favorite long-term solution is solar power satellites and beam the power back with microwaves -- mostly because doing that requires building the capability to establish a large industrial infrastructure in space, which is a good thing for its own sake.
Also, people conveniently forget how much radioactives, heavy metals, and other nasty stuff is allowed to enter the atmosphere from conventional power plants.
They also forget how much enters the atmosphere from entirely natural processes - radon, cosmic rays, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
More 419 spams.
Freeman Dyson is none of those things, and he's expressed skepticism about the whole climate change panic.
How do you refute him, when none of your ad-hominims apply to him? Or do you just come up with another ad-hominim?
Movies are generally considered "a director's medium". The director has a lot more leeway to get scripts re-written, etc. Directors are even known to throw the script away and start over.
It's not clear to me how this poor, abused, downtrodden, starving 419er's BMW contributed to feeding his starving family.
On the other hand, maybe he's just a crook.
Think of it as evolution in action?
Seriously... Taking "drugs" sold by scumbag spammers is about as stupid as believing that you really, truly will get that $USD 20 MILLION by sending a few thousand dollars to the son of the late Emperor Bokassa to help him smuggle his father's ill-gotten millions out of the country.
That's the problem right there. There needs to be massive amounts of flack, public raking over the coals, and loss of employment, for school officials who commit such blatant acts of total abject brainlessness.
Stupidity should be a disqualification for any position in the education system.
That's the key right there -- cosmic rays have been observed with several million times the maximum energy the LHC is capable of hitting. (Don't use SI prefixes or exponentials with the people who are worried about the LHC. They aren't going to understand them.)
> Denialism
Godwin's law; the AGW True Believers have lost the argument, since they are the ones who started calling anyone who disagrees with them Nazis.
Nobody is unclear on where the epithet "denialism" comes from.
Ha ha, funny guy.
They've set up some webcams so you can watch what's going on at the LHC for yourself.
http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html
Another option for free antivirus on Windows is Windows Security Essentials from Microsoft. It seems to be a decent enough anti-virus, and it is pretty light-weight. It doesn't noticeably slow down my Acer Aspire One. Full scans are pretty slow, but you don't do those often, and/or set them to run in the dead of night.
I don't tend to get viruses, so I haven't really tested its efficacy, other than that it did find some ancient viruses in the Norton quarantine from the saved C: drive of a previous computer.
Next time you reformat and do all the re-install to get their computer back to where they can use it, ghost the drive, and save the image onto a CD or DVD or USB external hard drive that you take with you.
(I'm sure there are open-source programs that do what Ghost does.)
Then, next time, it'll be quick and easy to put the machine back to "usable initial state".
On my wife's computer, I deleted all the Internet Exposure icons, installed Firefox, and told her "Firefox is how you browse the web." IE is still there hidden under the "Programs" folder, but she'd have to go looking for it. I don't think she knows there is any such thing as IE. She uses Thunderbird for email. (Outbreak Express is, of course, right out. I don't think I even left a copy of that thing anywhere on the PC.)
I emphasized to her that she should never open an email that she doesn't know who sent it to her.
She hasn't had a problem with viruses.
I really liked PasswordSafe, and if I didn't use a Mac part of the time, that's what I'd still be using.
I'm currently using KeePass, and ... I do not like it very much. It doesn't have a built-in way to merge the latest keys from multiple key files, which to me is a huge, glaring flaw.
And after using it for a while ... I just don't trust the security-consciousness of the KeePass developers as much as I do Bruce Schneier. For one thing, when you export the password database to plain clear text, passwordsafe prints a "warning warning danger danger do you really want to do this" type message. KeePass ... just does it, with no warning. True, in itself, that's no big deal (Just don't do that!) but it make me worry about what other bad practices might be embedded in it.
I'm unhappy enough with KeePass that I'm going back to PasswordSafe, and if I need it on the Mac, I'll just run it under Fusion. I regret moving everything over to KeePass.
Password Gorilla looks interesting (I hadn't heard of it before reading the comments here) but it doesn't seem to have been updated in almost 4 years. Password Safe development continues.
Maybe this will apply some pressure on Garmin and/or TomTom to not gouge quite so heavily for updated maps. (It's in the neighborhood of $70 to upgrade your maps the last time I looked, which makes one question whether to update the maps or just buy a newer, perhaps more feature-laden, device. Which is likely the reason for the gouge.)
I've heard various descriptions of what the location technology in these phones is -- Recently, a fairly knowledgeable person said that "assisted GPS" meant it used cell phones to get the ephemeris data to greatly speed up GPS start-up time, and was real GPS from there. If it's receiving the GPS signals, though, there's no reason in principle why it couldn't get the ephemeris data the old-fashioned way, from the satellites, if you were out of cell phone range.
That wouldn't help with the maps when you're out of cell phone range, though, unless they provide some way to pre-download them, at least for an area you're intending to visit.
You should be able to tell by looking at the Received: headers whether it really came from Google Groups or not.
Ah, Niven's "Flash Crowd"...
Niven used teleportation, but the problem, and the solution he came up with in the story, have a counterpart in the real world.
At a con where Niven was the GoH, a phone company employee was in the audience, and said that when there's a disaster, phone lines often get jammed. The phone company's policy is, when when this happens, to start blocking incoming calls and allow only outgoing. The theory is to make it easier for people inside the affected area to contact someone outside; people calling from outside aren't necessarily going to be able to contact who they're worried about in the affected area, and a lot of them are likely voyeurs who don't have any real business calling in and taking up a connection that needs to be available for someone to find out the status of family members.
SF, at its best, does things like this. It requires an author who actually things about problems and how to solve them.
I haven't kept up with what academia has done with these sorts of courses in the 30-odd years since I was in school, but back then, when there was such a course, the selections were all of a particular type... gloomy, technophobic, pessimistic, depressing ... and often written with no concern for plausible science. Heinlein, Niven, Asimov, Poul Anderson, Gordon Dickson... all these writers were UnPersons, as far as the academic crowd of the day was concerned.
So, in spite of my initial "A course on SF? Cool!" enthusiasm, after looking at the reading list, I left, brushing the dust from my feet as I went.
Eh. I've never been big on aliases. I've used my real name since BBS days, even on a popular local one (Stuart ][) just about everyone else used a pseudonym. Same on Usenet. Yeah, search on my name, and I'm the top hit. (A guy who runs a woodworking school is pretty high on the list, too.)
Florida... Yeah. Great place for windmills. Leaving out the, lightning strikes will weld the bearings solid a couple of times each summer.
True -- a house needs fresh air exchange. This goal is in conflict with energy efficiency, but can be worked around with counterflow heat exchangers. Of course, the fans to pull the air through the counterflow heat exchangers take energy, so there goes some of your energy efficiency.
(insert obligatory "My hovercraft is full of eels" translation)
How is Postini doing with false positives these days?
We had them at a medium-sized company I used to work for a few years ago, and it was a huge help, but some of the marketing people had a terrible time getting email from some sources they wanted that Postini was deciding was "blatant spam", and dropping without putting it in the quarantine.
Yeah, none of that email was anything that I would want, or probably you either, but the marketroids thought it was pretty important.
Some of the other providers have better efficacy these days. I'd name names, but plugging the company I work for now would probably be considered spamming.
Spam rarely gets through gmail. A little does.
Unfortunately, good mail gets caught in gmail's spam trap. Its false positive rate would be utterly unacceptable, except addresses on your contact list get through, and you can set "if it matches this pattern, never spam trap" filters, which help with some mailing lists I'm on that often trip Gmail's spam filter, but still, just today there were two legit emails in the trap that I'd really hate to have missed.
Why they were trapped, I have no idea; they did not look at all 'spammy'.
So I still have to look at the contents of the spam trap regularly looking for legit email that was improperly blocked, which means the spam continues to be a horrible nuisance.
I much prefer the trap at a small ISP I use. Spam in the trap is sorted by spam score, so I don't have to look at all the spam, just the lower-scored stuff. The reason Gmail can't do this is obvious, alas. (Well, they could, but it would be providing way too much information to the enemy.)
I have a simple metric to determine whether someone pushing "global warming panic" is really serious about CO2 emissions:
Do they favor nuclear power?
It is flatly impossible for someone to be serious about reducing CO2 and oppose nuclear power. They can assert their seriousness all they like, and they can, indeed, be quite convinced they are right, and be quite emotionally attached to the proposition.
Seriousness, however, means that one takes the effort to be informed.
So, yea, the broadcast flag is alive and well, and used pretty much by all the service broadcasters (Comcast, Verizon FIOS, Time Warner, Dish, etc.).
I know this is not true for Dish. I have a Dish DVR, and a DVD recorder. I have often recorded programs to DVD, and I have never seen any "you are not allowed to record this" message. Ever.
Breeder reactors expand that to over a thousand years proven reserves. That's not counting thorium.
As long as we're talking about things that don't exist you should have at least mentioned fusion as hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe.
What "things that don't exist"? Breeder reactors? Do you think that breeder reactors don't exist? Or thorium reactors?
Both of these exist (at least as a pilot plant in the case of thorium) and how to make them work is fairly well understood. It's just a matter of doing it.
This is far different from the case of fusion reactors (which, I agree, if it can be done, it would definitely be the way to go long-term.) A lot of money has been poured into making fusion work for decades, and we still don't have much of a clue how to make a fusion plant that will produce enough power to sustain a reaction, much less produce useful power.
My favorite long-term solution is solar power satellites and beam the power back with microwaves -- mostly because doing that requires building the capability to establish a large industrial infrastructure in space, which is a good thing for its own sake.
Also, people conveniently forget how much radioactives, heavy metals, and other nasty stuff is allowed to enter the atmosphere from conventional power plants.
They also forget how much enters the atmosphere from entirely natural processes - radon, cosmic rays, etc.