The science is atrociously bad. Here's a full critique of its horror. The only thing frightening is that this is the same man who wrote "Jurassic Park" and "The Andromeda Strain." (Of course, it isn't that surprisingly bad if you've read "Sphere" or "Congo.")
The only nanotech babble that I seen that beats "Prey" is Michio Kaku's loony rant on how mankind "must escape the universe." Just skip straight to the bottom a read about nanobots that are "molecule sized" and capable of moving near the speed of light. This man is a physicist? Sheesh.
The author spins the last article into saying Limbaugh says all Americans feel disappointment in the low levels of fatalities in the war which Limbaugh doesn't do. Limbaugh was talking directly about the media and some liberals like yourself.
Welcome to your own personal world of spinsanity. You fail to recognize that claiming that the media and "liberals like [me]" would love to see more soldiers injured is spin and lies in and of itself. The person quoted is only saying that lowered casualty levels is not indicative of the war going better than previous wars thanks to advances in medical science. All he's saying is that the metric is different nowdays, and Rush is claiming that that means he is disappointed by less loss of life. That's spin and lies.
What better way for liberals to argue for the end a "wrong" war then to say we are losing too many lives?
There are many better ways to argue that it's a wrong war. One could argue that the entire pretext for the war was wrong. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There were none of the large facilities needed for building nuclear weapons in use since 1990 thanks to constant weapons inspections. The roving biological weapons trailers tip was a lie from an unreliable source held in a Turkish prison. Everyone but the CIA knew that the aluminum tubes were the wrong size and coated with a bad material for making centrifuges. Bush had a report from Ambassador Wilson (and another one from another source in the State Department) decrying the purchase of yellowcake from Niger as a ludicrous idea before he made his lie in the State of the Union address.
One could note that the supposed connections to al-Qaeda were a fantasy of the neo-cons. No evidence of support has ever been found, and Saddam (as a secular dictator up until 1990 and a lip-service Muslim ever after) had a justified wariness of dealing with an organization whose stated goal was to overthrow all corrupt Arab governments to create a unified theocratic Middle East. Subsequent intelligence after the war has confirmed that Saddam had no tieds to al-Qaeda.
One could argue that the war was poorly planned. Paul Wolfowitz claimed before the war that we would be welcomed by the Iraqis, that casualties would be miniscule, that there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, and that we would not have to pay for the recovery since the Iraqi oil ministry could be up and running in less than a year. On all of these counts, he was dead wrong. He publicly rebuked General Shinseki for suggesting that holding Iraq would take a force in the hundreds of thousands to achieve when today we have a force of over 150,000 in Iraq. Our troops suffered from the restructuring of the armed forces to be a light-weight fast-strike force under the plans that Donald Rumsfeld has been pushing since the 80s. These plans made us incredibly effective at taking the country and incredibly ill-suited to hold it. We have failed the Iraqi people in rebuilding their infrastructure thanks to poor logistics and naked graft and corruption. By the end of this year, we will have ladled out nearly $200 billion dollars of taxpayers money for a war that the White House claimed would pay for itself -- a war with no exit strategy.
From an international diplomacy standpoint it was wrong. We blew all the political capital we had as victims of September 11 which led many people to declare, "We are all Americans." Now we are internationally reviled for our lies, our belligerence, and our lack of respect for other nations. Instead of being loved and respected as soldiers of justice, we are known as bullies and torturers. The administration casually blew off the concerns of "Old Europe" to build a "Coallition of the Willing" with the full belief that after the war was over, other nations would gladly sign up to help rebuild what we knocked over. Instead, our allies have one by one turned their backs on us and walked out. Spain's government toppled over involvement in I
You seem to have a poor understanding of what prior art is. Don't feel bad; most people do. Prior art is a previously existing technology which has been publicly available at the time that an invention was made (either through published papers or through being sold in the marketplace). Prior art (much like patents) inherently involves a description of how to do something, not just the idea of doing it. The Matrix details nothing about exactly how it works, and the idea is nowhere near original to the Matrix anyway (with plenty of precedent in the sci-fi subgenre known as cyberpunk).
Furthermore, even if it did matter, the version in the Matrix uses direct insertion of a probe into the brain, presumably to directly electrically stimulate it. This method uses sonic pulses (and probably can't actually be made to work with the necessary precision). There is more than enough difference in the design to matter for separate patentability.
Remember the story about Sony losing the lawsuit over the DualShock controller to Immersion? If you read the comments, you might've come across the fact that Nintendo doesn't have to worry about Immersion's patents. While Immersion patented attaching an unbalanced weight to a spinning motor for creating vibration in a controller, Nintendo patented building an unbalanced weight into a spinning motor to create vibration in a controller. This subtle difference is all that was needed to make these separate inventions.
No, if sonic stimulation could ever work, this is a good enough patent to place a land grab on it. It's a novel method of neural stimulation with no precedent that I'm aware, and even if there is, it's unlikely that anyone has tried to use it to enhance a game yet. This sounds pretty solid to me. It does open up the field for other patents about how to actually get sonic neural stimulation to work, but if it ever does, Sony has a claim to using it in a game.
If your going to compete with the likes of Rush, Hannity, and the right you need to deliver facts and keep the slant off. Do not copy unless your doing so out of sincere flattery for someone else's job well done. Lastly do not EVER go off on a tirade that borders on a political stump speech.
Sean Hannity quotes about the war in Kosovo that sound exactly like the sort of quotes about the War in Iraq that he criticises as Unamerican.
The Center for American Progress creates a list of on-air lies by Sean Hannity in response to being challenged someone to "defend and explain one example where I -- where I said something that was so false." (Points 5 & 13 are the weakest IMHO.)
Sean Hannity suggested early in the Abu Ghraib scandal that photos of the torture of prisoners were a DNC plot. (Note that this post tried to defend the infamous CBS memos before they were verified to be false.)
A developer employed by OSDN has worked on reverse engineering BitKeeper in his spare time. Because OSDN would not threaten the guys job over his spare time activities, McVoy claimed that OSDN is in violation of their license. As a result, he decides to punish the entire open source community by taking his ball and leaving. (This isn't a problem for him since most of his revenue comes from Windows developers according to a quote in the article.) Furthermore, he has said that OSDN cannot get free versions of BitKeeper anymore and must pay now because of their unwillingness to try to interfere in the personal life of a contractor (not even a direct employee).
This man has absolutely no respect for anything but his own bottom line. McVoy has several times come across as a ruthless authoritarian. He has threatened several times to do this sort of thing if anyone tried to provide any sort of compatibility or porting tools for getting software out of BitKeeper. Torvalds just put on his "I'm so apolitical" blinders, and now he's reaping what he has sown.
If by best, you mean most condescending, long-winded, repetitive, and self-righteous, I think you win. ...Not that the man doesn't have point this time, but I wish he could make it without being so insufferable about it.
I wonder if the industry will come out with a standard direct AC to case connection anytime - seems to me to be more efficient than cooling the whole freakin' room.
From the article:
Calibrated vectored cooling (CVC) is an example. CVC optimizes the path of cooled air flow through the system, allowing servers to use fewer fans and less power. It directly channels refrigerated air through the hottest parts of the server. IBM recently offered CVC for its xSeries and blades. CVC technology for blades had allowed IBM to launch the first Xeon-based blade product.
By what metric? If you choose power and cooling costs, then cooler servers wins. If you have servers that consume less power, you don't have to pay to cool them back down. It seems that cooler machines would be more efficient. Furthermore, targetted, specialized cooling solutions can be made more power efficient than general purpose room air-cooling solutions.
I think they're referring to the fact that genetics is nothing but a bunch of smarmy, self-absorbed in-jokes and structural noodling around that has nothing to do with good biology anymore. Representative genetics -- that is genetics that's actually about living things -- is seen as too commercialized and artless. Modern genetics is only done for the purpose of giving molecular biology grad students something to mentally masturbate about.
Modern genetics doesn't have to actually be about anything as long as it provokes a response, and teasing religious conservatives is seen as the highest form of the science. Just look at those embrionic stem cell researchers. You just know that they're using dead babies just to piss people off, right? Next thing you know, someone's going to get a hold of the Shroud of Turin and clone a half-goat, half-Jesus just to get a NIH grant... and our tax dollars go to pay for it!
You and the moderator that modded you up must be new around here. Every April Fools day on Slashdot for years has had nothing but silly articles of varying humor value. No, there will not be a serious article today unless something really, really important happens -- something on the scale of 9-11-2001.
Good. Now you've just justified lawyers taking a bigger cut of the victim's settlement to cover costs. I hope you still have that triumphant "I screwed someone who screws the little guy" feeling.
Yeah, because Google adding a prefetch tag to the results will help the ad-spammers...
I'm commenting on the very idea of the feature like the parent and not the fact that Google has taken advantage of it. Google's use of it is merely what brought my attention to its existence.
RTFA before you complain about it... Firefox only prefetches links when not downloading anything else. It will not slow down your browsing at all regardless of your connection speed.
RTFAQ yourself. Firefox will prefetch even when other programs are using the connection so long as Firefox is idle. (They do hope to fix this in the future.) This will not slow down browsing, but will slow down downloads via FTP, checking email, etc. At any rate, the fact that it only works when Firefox is idle makes no difference to my complaint about what this means for people who do not have unlimited internet access. It's downloading extra material (which they may have to pay for) without them needing to read it. These people (outside of the web-enabled phone market) are fortunately rare nowdays.
Likewise, I think it's a bad idea for you to have email because it can be used for spam. Just think about all the spammers who can use your email account to send out junkmail (presuming that you don't have a password on your account).
Now you're just being deliberately obtuse. Are you even familiar with the concept of web bugs in HTML email? I'll assume that you're not from your comment.
The basic idea is that a spammer wants to know whether or not an address that they send mail to is real or not. Fake addresses are a known waste of time and bandwidth to them. The best confirmation that you can get is if someone replies to spam from an account, but most people do not. However, there are other ways of getting a machine to acknowledge its existence. One current way is via web bugs. A web bug is an image (usually a transparent 1x1 pixel image) that is fetched via a URL that includes an ID string unique to the message. When you open said HTML email message to look at it, in the process of rending the message, you fetch that image and thus confirm your existence. This trick can be done with cookies too. However, if you have your client set to ignore all cookies and to never load images in HTML mail, you are completely safe from giving yourself away.
Previously, if you did this sort of trick with links in the message, it required the message recipient to manually click the link to uniquely identify the message and confirm their existence. Now, however, if you have prefetching turned on, even if you have images and cookies turned off, it is possible for a spammer to use this method to identify that you are real.
Of course, this is only a problem if Thunderbird enables this feature. Hopefully, they have thought this out and have not done so.
Forget the Feds, you're much more likely to get nailed by your IT department for this. I wonder if a user who was unaware of this feature and got fired thanks to links loaded by it could sue the Mozilla Foundation. I can just see some malicious little asshole putting hidden (via color) links in their webpages that download utterly offensive crap just to see if they can get someone fired. I especially expect this sort of thing from the same sort of Slashdot trolls who posted that infinite pop-up of gay porn thing in the Firefox Hacks story.
I also expect that this will be abused by unscrupulous websites who want to run up their ad revenue by having people preload a page full of ads. Many people have already expressed concerns for those who have slow connections or who do not have unlimited access. This could also be used by spammers to verify people who are smart enough to have web-bugs disabled via cookie and image blocking on emails but who don't know about preloading if the Thunderbird people enable this in email (which would be foolish beyond belief).
Whether the state prosecutes you itself or whether it allows others to prosecute you is little comfort when discussing whether or not it is fundamentally your right to do something. "Congress shall make no laws" also covers setting up the civil law structure that allows for such cases to be prosecuted. However, the Supreme Court has long ruled that slander, libel, fraud, disclosure of trade secrets, disclosure of state secrets, incitement to violence, etc. are not protected under the otherwise straightforward statement in the First Amendment.
Whoops. That is correct. Windows 3.0 had virtual memory support in 1990. Of course, so did Apple's System 7 released in the same year, and so did every server OS at the time. Most of the still living non-PC systems at the time had had virtual memory since they were first created decades ago.
My point still remains. It's not like MS invented virtual memory or paging memory to disk, but the article treats the subject as if they did.
I never had nightmares, but I did have very powerful dreams back when tried 5-HTP for sleep. I can definitely see that.
Also, I may have to take back my sneering at the effectiveness of what I thought was a low dose. Apparently, estimates for how much melatonin is produced by the body naturally vary from.1-.3 mg, so.5 mg is not trivial like I thought it was.
(Okay, I know that with the name MSFanBoi you have to be trolling, but I have to respond. I have no choice. Really. It's like some sort of Manchurian candidate directive or something.)
Where does it say MS invented this?
The solution they came up with was to use some space on the hard disk as extra RAM. Although the hard disk is much slower than RAM, it is also much cheaper and users always have a lot more hard disk space than RAM. So, Windows was designed to create this pseudo-RAM or in Microsoft's terms - Virtual Memory, to make up for the shortfall in RAM when running memory-intensive programs."
It's implied in the phrase "they came up with" and in saying that the term Virtual Memory is one of "Microsoft's terms." They didn't come up with it. It was a concept widely used in computing since 1959. Everything used virtual memory by the time MS included it in Windows 95 -- even the Macintosh. The concept and the word are ancient, but the article presents it like it's some sort of wonderful innovation invented and named by geniuses at Microsoft.
It's the kind of statements only an MS fanboy or someone else equally uninformed about the history of computing could make.
If you're having melatonin dependent sleep problems, your problem is bad "sleep hygene," especially with respect to light exposure. This is a common problem for programmers thanks to them staying up too late staring at a brightly lit computer screen. The best way to fix this is not through becoming dependent on supplementation of what your body naturally produces anyway. It's turning off the lights at night and turning on strong lighting during the day.
Get yourself a light box. They're easy to find on Google. Every morning at 7-8 AM, drag yourself out of bed (with help if you can get it) and shine one of these things at your face for 30 minutes for about a month. Combine that with dimming the lights around the house and not messing the with computer or the TV after 9:00 PM, and you'll fix your schedule.
I have a friend who gets to sleep on something like 500 micrograms.
Also known as the placebo effect.
Seriously, at this point it is the act of taking melatonin that gets your friend into the mindset for sleep, I'll bet. It's probably the conditioned response that does it more than a dose that small.
Well, that would be harmless. Now if it gave itself both executable and readable permissions, you might have something that could execute.
Nitpicking aside, all of that is possible under UNIX. Users can chmod and execute their own files after all, and a program that exploited a browser to download this file would run as the user that ran the browser. The question is only whether or not the browser itself has the functionality to do this via scripting or if it can be injected with an exploit that can call fchmod() and fork() itself. You just can only run in the current user's permissions level -- unless the downloaded program takes advantage of a privilege escalation exploit.
In essence, the question is only about how weak and over-featured your browser is and whether your OS is hardened against any attacks that might come once the file is downloaded. This is just as doable on UNIX as it is on Windows. Most UNIX rootkits do this by exploiting system services that listen for incoming connections, but it's just as possible to do it with a browser that goes out and fetches malicious data.
I'm single because I'm poor*. What's the point of falling in love when you cannot afford to feed yourself, nevermind a loved one or children?
Not that I honestly think that money should have anything to do with love, but...
Two incomes. One roof, one mortgage, one set of utility bills, shared insurance benefit discounts, tax rewards, better credit, etc. There are a lot of savings that can be had when married. Find someone who doesn't care that you're poor and who will work with you to help you both make something of each other. Kids can come later when you're ready.
Slashdot Mirror
The science is atrociously bad. Here's a full critique of its horror. The only thing frightening is that this is the same man who wrote "Jurassic Park" and "The Andromeda Strain." (Of course, it isn't that surprisingly bad if you've read "Sphere" or "Congo.")
The only nanotech babble that I seen that beats "Prey" is Michio Kaku's loony rant on how mankind "must escape the universe." Just skip straight to the bottom a read about nanobots that are "molecule sized" and capable of moving near the speed of light. This man is a physicist? Sheesh.
It causes cancer.
The author spins the last article into saying Limbaugh says all Americans feel disappointment in the low levels of fatalities in the war which Limbaugh doesn't do. Limbaugh was talking directly about the media and some liberals like yourself.
Welcome to your own personal world of spinsanity. You fail to recognize that claiming that the media and "liberals like [me]" would love to see more soldiers injured is spin and lies in and of itself. The person quoted is only saying that lowered casualty levels is not indicative of the war going better than previous wars thanks to advances in medical science. All he's saying is that the metric is different nowdays, and Rush is claiming that that means he is disappointed by less loss of life. That's spin and lies.
What better way for liberals to argue for the end a "wrong" war then to say we are losing too many lives?
There are many better ways to argue that it's a wrong war. One could argue that the entire pretext for the war was wrong. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There were none of the large facilities needed for building nuclear weapons in use since 1990 thanks to constant weapons inspections. The roving biological weapons trailers tip was a lie from an unreliable source held in a Turkish prison. Everyone but the CIA knew that the aluminum tubes were the wrong size and coated with a bad material for making centrifuges. Bush had a report from Ambassador Wilson (and another one from another source in the State Department) decrying the purchase of yellowcake from Niger as a ludicrous idea before he made his lie in the State of the Union address.
One could note that the supposed connections to al-Qaeda were a fantasy of the neo-cons. No evidence of support has ever been found, and Saddam (as a secular dictator up until 1990 and a lip-service Muslim ever after) had a justified wariness of dealing with an organization whose stated goal was to overthrow all corrupt Arab governments to create a unified theocratic Middle East. Subsequent intelligence after the war has confirmed that Saddam had no tieds to al-Qaeda.
One could argue that the war was poorly planned. Paul Wolfowitz claimed before the war that we would be welcomed by the Iraqis, that casualties would be miniscule, that there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, and that we would not have to pay for the recovery since the Iraqi oil ministry could be up and running in less than a year. On all of these counts, he was dead wrong. He publicly rebuked General Shinseki for suggesting that holding Iraq would take a force in the hundreds of thousands to achieve when today we have a force of over 150,000 in Iraq. Our troops suffered from the restructuring of the armed forces to be a light-weight fast-strike force under the plans that Donald Rumsfeld has been pushing since the 80s. These plans made us incredibly effective at taking the country and incredibly ill-suited to hold it. We have failed the Iraqi people in rebuilding their infrastructure thanks to poor logistics and naked graft and corruption. By the end of this year, we will have ladled out nearly $200 billion dollars of taxpayers money for a war that the White House claimed would pay for itself -- a war with no exit strategy.
From an international diplomacy standpoint it was wrong. We blew all the political capital we had as victims of September 11 which led many people to declare, "We are all Americans." Now we are internationally reviled for our lies, our belligerence, and our lack of respect for other nations. Instead of being loved and respected as soldiers of justice, we are known as bullies and torturers. The administration casually blew off the concerns of "Old Europe" to build a "Coallition of the Willing" with the full belief that after the war was over, other nations would gladly sign up to help rebuild what we knocked over. Instead, our allies have one by one turned their backs on us and walked out. Spain's government toppled over involvement in I
You seem to have a poor understanding of what prior art is. Don't feel bad; most people do. Prior art is a previously existing technology which has been publicly available at the time that an invention was made (either through published papers or through being sold in the marketplace). Prior art (much like patents) inherently involves a description of how to do something, not just the idea of doing it. The Matrix details nothing about exactly how it works, and the idea is nowhere near original to the Matrix anyway (with plenty of precedent in the sci-fi subgenre known as cyberpunk).
Furthermore, even if it did matter, the version in the Matrix uses direct insertion of a probe into the brain, presumably to directly electrically stimulate it. This method uses sonic pulses (and probably can't actually be made to work with the necessary precision). There is more than enough difference in the design to matter for separate patentability.
Remember the story about Sony losing the lawsuit over the DualShock controller to Immersion? If you read the comments, you might've come across the fact that Nintendo doesn't have to worry about Immersion's patents. While Immersion patented attaching an unbalanced weight to a spinning motor for creating vibration in a controller, Nintendo patented building an unbalanced weight into a spinning motor to create vibration in a controller. This subtle difference is all that was needed to make these separate inventions.
No, if sonic stimulation could ever work, this is a good enough patent to place a land grab on it. It's a novel method of neural stimulation with no precedent that I'm aware, and even if there is, it's unlikely that anyone has tried to use it to enhance a game yet. This sounds pretty solid to me. It does open up the field for other patents about how to actually get sonic neural stimulation to work, but if it ever does, Sony has a claim to using it in a game.
If your going to compete with the likes of Rush, Hannity, and the right you need to deliver facts and keep the slant off. Do not copy unless your doing so out of sincere flattery for someone else's job well done. Lastly do not EVER go off on a tirade that borders on a political stump speech.
Sean Hannity quotes about the war in Kosovo that sound exactly like the sort of quotes about the War in Iraq that he criticises as Unamerican.
The Center for American Progress creates a list of on-air lies by Sean Hannity in response to being challenged someone to "defend and explain one example where I -- where I said something that was so false." (Points 5 & 13 are the weakest IMHO.)
Sean Hannity suggested early in the Abu Ghraib scandal that photos of the torture of prisoners were a DNC plot. (Note that this post tried to defend the infamous CBS memos before they were verified to be false.)
Rush Limbaugh defends Abu Ghraib torturers as boys performing harmless pranks and blowing off steam.
Limbaugh spins an article about advances in medical technology as disappointment in the low levels of fatalities in the war by the anti-war camp to our troops while in Iraq.
I'm not surprised. Consider his actions.
A developer employed by OSDN has worked on reverse engineering BitKeeper in his spare time. Because OSDN would not threaten the guys job over his spare time activities, McVoy claimed that OSDN is in violation of their license. As a result, he decides to punish the entire open source community by taking his ball and leaving. (This isn't a problem for him since most of his revenue comes from Windows developers according to a quote in the article.) Furthermore, he has said that OSDN cannot get free versions of BitKeeper anymore and must pay now because of their unwillingness to try to interfere in the personal life of a contractor (not even a direct employee).
This man has absolutely no respect for anything but his own bottom line. McVoy has several times come across as a ruthless authoritarian. He has threatened several times to do this sort of thing if anyone tried to provide any sort of compatibility or porting tools for getting software out of BitKeeper. Torvalds just put on his "I'm so apolitical" blinders, and now he's reaping what he has sown.
If by best, you mean most condescending, long-winded, repetitive, and self-righteous, I think you win.
...Not that the man doesn't have point this time, but I wish he could make it without being so insufferable about it.
From the article:
By what metric? If you choose power and cooling costs, then cooler servers wins. If you have servers that consume less power, you don't have to pay to cool them back down. It seems that cooler machines would be more efficient. Furthermore, targetted, specialized cooling solutions can be made more power efficient than general purpose room air-cooling solutions.
I think they're referring to the fact that genetics is nothing but a bunch of smarmy, self-absorbed in-jokes and structural noodling around that has nothing to do with good biology anymore. Representative genetics -- that is genetics that's actually about living things -- is seen as too commercialized and artless. Modern genetics is only done for the purpose of giving molecular biology grad students something to mentally masturbate about.
Modern genetics doesn't have to actually be about anything as long as it provokes a response, and teasing religious conservatives is seen as the highest form of the science. Just look at those embrionic stem cell researchers. You just know that they're using dead babies just to piss people off, right? Next thing you know, someone's going to get a hold of the Shroud of Turin and clone a half-goat, half-Jesus just to get a NIH grant... and our tax dollars go to pay for it!
At least we both still have access to our kid. It could have turned out a hell of a lot worse. Forgive her, forgive myself and move on, eh?
Well put.
You and the moderator that modded you up must be new around here. Every April Fools day on Slashdot for years has had nothing but silly articles of varying humor value. No, there will not be a serious article today unless something really, really important happens -- something on the scale of 9-11-2001.
Relax, get a sense of humor, and quit whining.
Neat (sorta). You learn something new every day.
Good. Now you've just justified lawyers taking a bigger cut of the victim's settlement to cover costs.
I hope you still have that triumphant "I screwed someone who screws the little guy" feeling.
Yeah, because Google adding a prefetch tag to the results will help the ad-spammers...
I'm commenting on the very idea of the feature like the parent and not the fact that Google has taken advantage of it. Google's use of it is merely what brought my attention to its existence.
RTFA before you complain about it... Firefox only prefetches links when not downloading anything else. It will not slow down your browsing at all regardless of your connection speed.
RTFAQ yourself. Firefox will prefetch even when other programs are using the connection so long as Firefox is idle. (They do hope to fix this in the future.) This will not slow down browsing, but will slow down downloads via FTP, checking email, etc. At any rate, the fact that it only works when Firefox is idle makes no difference to my complaint about what this means for people who do not have unlimited internet access. It's downloading extra material (which they may have to pay for) without them needing to read it. These people (outside of the web-enabled phone market) are fortunately rare nowdays.
Likewise, I think it's a bad idea for you to have email because it can be used for spam. Just think about all the spammers who can use your email account to send out junkmail (presuming that you don't have a password on your account).
Now you're just being deliberately obtuse. Are you even familiar with the concept of web bugs in HTML email? I'll assume that you're not from your comment.
The basic idea is that a spammer wants to know whether or not an address that they send mail to is real or not. Fake addresses are a known waste of time and bandwidth to them. The best confirmation that you can get is if someone replies to spam from an account, but most people do not. However, there are other ways of getting a machine to acknowledge its existence. One current way is via web bugs. A web bug is an image (usually a transparent 1x1 pixel image) that is fetched via a URL that includes an ID string unique to the message. When you open said HTML email message to look at it, in the process of rending the message, you fetch that image and thus confirm your existence. This trick can be done with cookies too. However, if you have your client set to ignore all cookies and to never load images in HTML mail, you are completely safe from giving yourself away.
Previously, if you did this sort of trick with links in the message, it required the message recipient to manually click the link to uniquely identify the message and confirm their existence. Now, however, if you have prefetching turned on, even if you have images and cookies turned off, it is possible for a spammer to use this method to identify that you are real.
Of course, this is only a problem if Thunderbird enables this feature. Hopefully, they have thought this out and have not done so.
Forget the Feds, you're much more likely to get nailed by your IT department for this. I wonder if a user who was unaware of this feature and got fired thanks to links loaded by it could sue the Mozilla Foundation. I can just see some malicious little asshole putting hidden (via color) links in their webpages that download utterly offensive crap just to see if they can get someone fired. I especially expect this sort of thing from the same sort of Slashdot trolls who posted that infinite pop-up of gay porn thing in the Firefox Hacks story.
I also expect that this will be abused by unscrupulous websites who want to run up their ad revenue by having people preload a page full of ads. Many people have already expressed concerns for those who have slow connections or who do not have unlimited access. This could also be used by spammers to verify people who are smart enough to have web-bugs disabled via cookie and image blocking on emails but who don't know about preloading if the Thunderbird people enable this in email (which would be foolish beyond belief).
I just think this concept is a horrible idea.
Whether the state prosecutes you itself or whether it allows others to prosecute you is little comfort when discussing whether or not it is fundamentally your right to do something. "Congress shall make no laws" also covers setting up the civil law structure that allows for such cases to be prosecuted. However, the Supreme Court has long ruled that slander, libel, fraud, disclosure of trade secrets, disclosure of state secrets, incitement to violence, etc. are not protected under the otherwise straightforward statement in the First Amendment.
Whoops. That is correct. Windows 3.0 had virtual memory support in 1990. Of course, so did Apple's System 7 released in the same year, and so did every server OS at the time. Most of the still living non-PC systems at the time had had virtual memory since they were first created decades ago.
My point still remains. It's not like MS invented virtual memory or paging memory to disk, but the article treats the subject as if they did.
I never had nightmares, but I did have very powerful dreams back when tried 5-HTP for sleep. I can definitely see that.
.1-.3 mg, so .5 mg is not trivial like I thought it was.
Also, I may have to take back my sneering at the effectiveness of what I thought was a low dose. Apparently, estimates for how much melatonin is produced by the body naturally vary from
Where does it say MS invented this?
It's implied in the phrase "they came up with" and in saying that the term Virtual Memory is one of "Microsoft's terms." They didn't come up with it. It was a concept widely used in computing since 1959. Everything used virtual memory by the time MS included it in Windows 95 -- even the Macintosh. The concept and the word are ancient, but the article presents it like it's some sort of wonderful innovation invented and named by geniuses at Microsoft.
It's the kind of statements only an MS fanboy or someone else equally uninformed about the history of computing could make.
And your wife gives you so much crap when you hit the snooze button on them!
If you're having melatonin dependent sleep problems, your problem is bad "sleep hygene," especially with respect to light exposure. This is a common problem for programmers thanks to them staying up too late staring at a brightly lit computer screen. The best way to fix this is not through becoming dependent on supplementation of what your body naturally produces anyway. It's turning off the lights at night and turning on strong lighting during the day.
Get yourself a light box. They're easy to find on Google. Every morning at 7-8 AM, drag yourself out of bed (with help if you can get it) and shine one of these things at your face for 30 minutes for about a month. Combine that with dimming the lights around the house and not messing the with computer or the TV after 9:00 PM, and you'll fix your schedule.
I have a friend who gets to sleep on something like 500 micrograms.
Also known as the placebo effect.
Seriously, at this point it is the act of taking melatonin that gets your friend into the mindset for sleep, I'll bet. It's probably the conditioned response that does it more than a dose that small.
2) chmod itself ---x--x--x
Well, that would be harmless. Now if it gave itself both executable and readable permissions, you might have something that could execute.
Nitpicking aside, all of that is possible under UNIX. Users can chmod and execute their own files after all, and a program that exploited a browser to download this file would run as the user that ran the browser. The question is only whether or not the browser itself has the functionality to do this via scripting or if it can be injected with an exploit that can call fchmod() and fork() itself. You just can only run in the current user's permissions level -- unless the downloaded program takes advantage of a privilege escalation exploit.
In essence, the question is only about how weak and over-featured your browser is and whether your OS is hardened against any attacks that might come once the file is downloaded. This is just as doable on UNIX as it is on Windows. Most UNIX rootkits do this by exploiting system services that listen for incoming connections, but it's just as possible to do it with a browser that goes out and fetches malicious data.
I'm single because I'm poor*. What's the point of falling in love when you cannot afford to feed yourself, nevermind a loved one or children?
Not that I honestly think that money should have anything to do with love, but...
Two incomes. One roof, one mortgage, one set of utility bills, shared insurance benefit discounts, tax rewards, better credit, etc. There are a lot of savings that can be had when married. Find someone who doesn't care that you're poor and who will work with you to help you both make something of each other. Kids can come later when you're ready.