Nowadays, we look fifty years down the road with dread, anticipating polluted air, nighmarish crime, phenomenal urban and suburban congestion, overpopulation, famine, powerful and overbearing corporations, ubiquitous surveillance, and disastrous climatological changes.
Yeah, I was thinking about all that so I watched Soylent Green again a couple of weeks ago. I'm afraid that the movie could be almost as accurate predicting 2050 as this article's prediction of 2000. (I know the movie is set in 2020, but I doubt it'll be that bad by then.)
"Nobody has yet circumnavigated the moon in a rocket space ship, but the idea is not laughed down."
To me, this seems like the biggest miss. When this was originally written, we were only 19 years away from a landing.
... and 30 years further on, nobody has bothered to return. Weird.
Interesting the main reason you prefer kong is the main reasons Microsoft integerated IE into windows. Same look and feel; and better performance. May be they were right after all.
Yes, indeed they were right. After 18 years of using MS OSes (and 5 years of dabbling with test Linux installations), I switched all of my computers to Linux last week. KDE 2.1 and Konquerer were the enabling factor. These fine applications were written by some folks who finally "got it" on user interface.
A consistent look-and-feel is important to me because my brain seems to store only procedural data; it has a hard time saving random facts. I find it difficult to deal with a multitude of apps with arbitrary command interfaces.
(Now if they could only fix these butt-ugly fonts...:)
If this story is true, I'm sure that the activists were concerned more about the extinction of entire species of whales than about any individual whale.
The human race, on the other hand, is in no danger of extinction by hand grenades.
It's arguable whether a small number of people are indeed more important than a major animal species. The former is certainly more replaceable than the later.
Ruby lacks some key features. One example is inline data (multiline strings).
Ruby's string handling is inferior to Perl's in other ways, too. It's a nice language in many ways, but it's not really a replacement for Perl.
Try this:
a = <<EOT
hello
there
EOT
b = "
hi
again"
c = %q(one (more)
time)
puts a, b, c
Result:
hello
there
hi
again
one (more)
time
I agree strings need some work - especially polynomial performance with repeat appends. However, there are at least three ways to do multiline strings.
The Perl6 answer could be ... Ruby
on
Apocalypse 2
·
· Score: 5
Perl has been my favorite language for some time now, even with all its warts. I've been keeping tabs on Perl6 stuff and thinking about how Perl could be improved. I finally surfed over to the Ruby site to check it out, since I heard that it was an attempt at a "better" Perl.
After playing with it for a while, I think it could be my new favorite language. My Ruby programs usually come out even more concise than Perl, but just as clean looking as Python.
Ruby needs more library support and some optimization work (I usually get about 4X slower than Perl), but I think that is an extremely promising contender in this space.
Space probes use radioisotope thermal generators. These are not anything like a fission reactor. RTGs are horribly inefficient and filled with isotopes even more dangerous than normal nuclear fuel or waste. IIRC, it takes something like several ounces of an especially nasty plutonium isotope to generate just 1000 watts of electricity.
That's why certain alarmists were up in arms over the Cassini probe's earth flyby. (What if it were to crash? Better re-check those metric conversions.) You've got to take some risks in life to get ahead; one space probe is OK.
However, you'd have to give every citizen their own personal RTG to generate enough power to make a difference. Each one of those could probably contaminate a whole city if it were to break open. Each one will be too hot to touch for a hundred years or more. The whole USA only has enough isotopes to build a couple more of these right now.
Unfortunately, your example of Pioneer 10 proves nothing about nuclear power in general.
ATT and it's siblings spent decades and billions of $$$ building their networks.
They spent decades as a government-sponsored monopoly. Government regulators defined their business plans and set their revenues to ensure a reasonable profit. They were not taking any risks building this infrastructure. They didn't "earn" the value of these assets the way a real entrepreneur would.
In a way, these phone companies don't deserve to own or control their infrastructure any more than anybody else, since they were only acting as agents implementing a government directed phone system.
There are countless millions of people using Google every day, each with their own energy sucking computer.
Each one of these people saves lots of time using Google's lightning fast and accurate searches vs. other dog-slow search engines. They get their info fast then log off. Result: net energy savings.
Imagine, with a simple cron job I can ensure I'll always be patched up with the latest security updates.
Sounds great... until someone hacks the Debian mirror site and injects (let's make up a name here) "BackLinufice" into one of your security update patches. Game over.
(And no, signed patches shouldn't give you much more comfort than signed ActiveX controls.)
Rumor has it that this is ready for market now, at a surprisingly affordable cost of 1 cent per gigabyte. The only hangup seems to be problems with implementing the new CPRM copy-protection scheme on this medium. There seem to be fundamental issues with CPRM in holograms that are expected to take 8 to 10 years of further research to address.
I had a close call a couple of weeks ago with a 3-1/2" floppy disk.
Strangely enough, I've never had a problem with any of my 3 Zip drives. However, for over a decade I've been amazed at the poor the reliability of floppy disks. In my experience (on dozens of computers), a full 1.44 MB copy fails about 5% of the time. This is on a technology that has had 25 years to work out the bugs. This is total bullshit.
I avoid sneaker netting when possible, but sometimes you have to use a removable disk. I was using a floppy a couple of weeks ago because in my (justifiable) paranoia, I set Zone Alarm to make it nearly impossible to share files between the machines in question. Yet again, the files that were supposedly placed on the floppy by machine A were unreadable on machine B. I'm normally a calm person, but this time, I cracked.
Without even realizing what I was doing, I yanked the disk out and physically ripped it in half with my bare hands. I was surprised that it was so easy to rip the hard plastic shell. The scary part is, that stainless steel sliding cover got twisted and popped off, exposing its sharp corners. It cut a nasty gash in my wrist, right over the vein. I was pretty lucky that it didn't cut deeper.
Zip disks may suck too, but I think Iomega is to be commended for creating a removable disk that appears to be constructed too sturdily to pose such a safety hazard.
Ooh, ooh... That Smith and Wesson I bought at Wal-Mart is really going to take out that helicopter gunship hovering overhead firing 3000 uranium slugs per minute at me......NOT.
You need to play some Quake and see why the players go for the bigger weapons . Then notice that in the real world, you don't have the bigger weapons.
So, at first glance, it looks alot like OLE/COM. It must be an attempt to repeat all of the mistakes of Microsoft's history (including IUnknown and reference counting - yuck).
We'll know that they've acheived greatness when we see the first GNU/Melissa and GNU/ILOVEYOU outbreaks. Or a security hole in the embedded HTML e-mail previewer:-).
(Well, actually, I suspect that this thing can't be quite as bad as MS's wad of kludges.)
Before we get too excited, someone ought to check to find out if it doesn't take more than one gallon of petroleum to produce one gallon of food oil with today's agricultural technology. IIRC, it takes more energy than you'd think to fertilize, irrigate and harvest crops.
Most current (non-UK) security cameras are just recording onto tape loops that are independently owned (and probably not even watched). No big problem.
There is a huge difference between the current collection of random cameras and a coherent surveillance system monitored in real time. People say that you're in public anyway, so what's the problem? Well, the problem is, you're never followed from place to place by anyone in the real world. If you did notice someone following you, you'd start to freak out. (This is used to great effect in thousands of movie scenes.) With a global police-run camera system, you're always being followed. The correlation of the independent cameras multiplies their power by orders of magnitude.
This is the exact same reason why people hate Doubleclick so much. It's no big deal if a few websites hand me random cookies. But if an organization uses a system of correlated cookies to track me everywhere I go on the web, then it becomes a big problem.
Do not underestimate the amplification of power enabled by a correlation system.
It can simply be pushed one way: Away from the sun, and then affected by gravitation of other objects. The angle of the sail to the sun just can't have any effect that I can fathom. Maybe I'm wrong.
You are wrong. If you weren't, there would be no way to hit a billiard ball in a direction different from the cue ball.
Using this system, we won't have to fret over ballots with dimpled, pregnant or hanging chads. Just put the ballot in the scanner to reveal its secret ID, look up the person who punched it, call them on the phone, and ask them what they intended.
Microsoft likes to play the high roller. They "bet the company" at each new stage: switching from DOS to Windows; creating and dominating with IE; fighting the Gov't instead of settling; and now, the.NET initiative.
But I don't think that any of these gambles is as large as one they've been involved in for quite some time. That gamble is shipping software into a monopolized market without extensive security auditing. They've created a monoculture of OSs and applications that has become a prime target for attacks from all over the world.
The risk is that someone would combine the technology behind ILOVEYOU, a hole like the latest IE bug, a subtle and automatic propagation method and a destructive payload. Since a single version of an MS DLL might be installed on 30% of all of the computers on the Internet, you could easily imagine that 10% of all of the computers on the Internet could fall to a single super-worm in a matter of hours. If this worm were to destroy all of the information on those computers, the devastation would be mind-boggling.
If these events came to pass, the repercussions could spell the end of the company as we know it. At the very least they'd be tied up in congressional hearings and lawsuits for years. Yet, they seem to go on with business-as-usual, blithely ignoring the potential disasters they are enabling. In fact, the.NET technologies will only multiply the odds of this scenario.
Given how paranoid they are about competitive and regulatory threats, it's strange that they haven't responded to this bigger threat.
Does anyone know if the fix the IEEE is working on will be flashable onto current cards, or is it a silicon change?
Also, the original reports made it seem like an attack would be "hard" to do and would require alot of traffic to analyze. Is a current installation with low traffic usage vulnerable to real-world haX0rs today?
It's really annoying to run NT with lesser priveleges and do any real work.
If there's a simple way to do the equivalent of su, it's not widely known. The alternative is to log off and come back as an administrator. Once your back you're king. Why leave?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I was thinking about all that so I watched Soylent Green again a couple of weeks ago. I'm afraid that the movie could be almost as accurate predicting 2050 as this article's prediction of 2000. (I know the movie is set in 2020, but I doubt it'll be that bad by then.)
I'll take the partially full pair, thank you.
Wait a minute... I found some spare change in my couch. Forget what I just said.
Yes, indeed they were right. After 18 years of using MS OSes (and 5 years of dabbling with test Linux installations), I switched all of my computers to Linux last week. KDE 2.1 and Konquerer were the enabling factor. These fine applications were written by some folks who finally "got it" on user interface.
A consistent look-and-feel is important to me because my brain seems to store only procedural data; it has a hard time saving random facts. I find it difficult to deal with a multitude of apps with arbitrary command interfaces.
(Now if they could only fix these butt-ugly fonts... :)
If this story is true, I'm sure that the activists were concerned more about the extinction of entire species of whales than about any individual whale.
The human race, on the other hand, is in no danger of extinction by hand grenades.
It's arguable whether a small number of people are indeed more important than a major animal species. The former is certainly more replaceable than the later.
However, they're not so dumb that they smoke cigarettes.
(And to the wales' credit, beaches don't have warning labels from the Surgeon General.)
Try this:
a = <<EOT
hello
there
EOT
b = "
hi
again"
c = %q(one (more)
time)
puts a, b, c
Result:
hello
there
hi
again
one (more)
time
I agree strings need some work - especially polynomial performance with repeat appends. However, there are at least three ways to do multiline strings.
After playing with it for a while, I think it could be my new favorite language. My Ruby programs usually come out even more concise than Perl, but just as clean looking as Python.
Ruby needs more library support and some optimization work (I usually get about 4X slower than Perl), but I think that is an extremely promising contender in this space.
Steps involved:
- Registering driver: run PULSMOD.COM
- Hooking Interrupt: CLI; [play whole sound file]; STI
- Stopping playback in progress: Activate the hardware non-maskable interrupt via your aftermarket debugger board
That's it. It seems like DOS enabled a much simpler and more elegant PC speaker hack.That's why certain alarmists were up in arms over the Cassini probe's earth flyby. (What if it were to crash? Better re-check those metric conversions.) You've got to take some risks in life to get ahead; one space probe is OK.
However, you'd have to give every citizen their own personal RTG to generate enough power to make a difference. Each one of those could probably contaminate a whole city if it were to break open. Each one will be too hot to touch for a hundred years or more. The whole USA only has enough isotopes to build a couple more of these right now.
Unfortunately, your example of Pioneer 10 proves nothing about nuclear power in general.
They spent decades as a government-sponsored monopoly. Government regulators defined their business plans and set their revenues to ensure a reasonable profit. They were not taking any risks building this infrastructure. They didn't "earn" the value of these assets the way a real entrepreneur would.
In a way, these phone companies don't deserve to own or control their infrastructure any more than anybody else, since they were only acting as agents implementing a government directed phone system.
Each one of these people saves lots of time using Google's lightning fast and accurate searches vs. other dog-slow search engines. They get their info fast then log off. Result: net energy savings.
Sounds great ... until someone hacks the Debian mirror site and injects (let's make up a name here) "BackLinufice" into one of your security update patches. Game over.
(And no, signed patches shouldn't give you much more comfort than signed ActiveX controls.)
Rumor has it that this is ready for market now, at a surprisingly affordable cost of 1 cent per gigabyte. The only hangup seems to be problems with implementing the new CPRM copy-protection scheme on this medium. There seem to be fundamental issues with CPRM in holograms that are expected to take 8 to 10 years of further research to address.
Strangely enough, I've never had a problem with any of my 3 Zip drives. However, for over a decade I've been amazed at the poor the reliability of floppy disks. In my experience (on dozens of computers), a full 1.44 MB copy fails about 5% of the time. This is on a technology that has had 25 years to work out the bugs. This is total bullshit.
I avoid sneaker netting when possible, but sometimes you have to use a removable disk. I was using a floppy a couple of weeks ago because in my (justifiable) paranoia, I set Zone Alarm to make it nearly impossible to share files between the machines in question. Yet again, the files that were supposedly placed on the floppy by machine A were unreadable on machine B. I'm normally a calm person, but this time, I cracked.
Without even realizing what I was doing, I yanked the disk out and physically ripped it in half with my bare hands. I was surprised that it was so easy to rip the hard plastic shell. The scary part is, that stainless steel sliding cover got twisted and popped off, exposing its sharp corners. It cut a nasty gash in my wrist, right over the vein. I was pretty lucky that it didn't cut deeper.
Zip disks may suck too, but I think Iomega is to be commended for creating a removable disk that appears to be constructed too sturdily to pose such a safety hazard.
You need to play some Quake and see why the players go for the bigger weapons . Then notice that in the real world, you don't have the bigger weapons.
We'll know that they've acheived greatness when we see the first GNU/Melissa and GNU/ILOVEYOU outbreaks. Or a security hole in the embedded HTML e-mail previewer :-).
(Well, actually, I suspect that this thing can't be quite as bad as MS's wad of kludges.)
Before we get too excited, someone ought to check to find out if it doesn't take more than one gallon of petroleum to produce one gallon of food oil with today's agricultural technology. IIRC, it takes more energy than you'd think to fertilize, irrigate and harvest crops.
There is a huge difference between the current collection of random cameras and a coherent surveillance system monitored in real time. People say that you're in public anyway, so what's the problem? Well, the problem is, you're never followed from place to place by anyone in the real world. If you did notice someone following you, you'd start to freak out. (This is used to great effect in thousands of movie scenes.) With a global police-run camera system, you're always being followed. The correlation of the independent cameras multiplies their power by orders of magnitude.
This is the exact same reason why people hate Doubleclick so much. It's no big deal if a few websites hand me random cookies. But if an organization uses a system of correlated cookies to track me everywhere I go on the web, then it becomes a big problem.
Do not underestimate the amplification of power enabled by a correlation system.
You are wrong. If you weren't, there would be no way to hit a billiard ball in a direction different from the cue ball.
Sun's photons => cue ball.
Sail => billiard ball.
Using this system, we won't have to fret over ballots with dimpled, pregnant or hanging chads. Just put the ballot in the scanner to reveal its secret ID, look up the person who punched it, call them on the phone, and ask them what they intended.
But I don't think that any of these gambles is as large as one they've been involved in for quite some time. That gamble is shipping software into a monopolized market without extensive security auditing. They've created a monoculture of OSs and applications that has become a prime target for attacks from all over the world.
The risk is that someone would combine the technology behind ILOVEYOU, a hole like the latest IE bug, a subtle and automatic propagation method and a destructive payload. Since a single version of an MS DLL might be installed on 30% of all of the computers on the Internet, you could easily imagine that 10% of all of the computers on the Internet could fall to a single super-worm in a matter of hours. If this worm were to destroy all of the information on those computers, the devastation would be mind-boggling.
If these events came to pass, the repercussions could spell the end of the company as we know it. At the very least they'd be tied up in congressional hearings and lawsuits for years. Yet, they seem to go on with business-as-usual, blithely ignoring the potential disasters they are enabling. In fact, the .NET technologies will only multiply the odds of this scenario.
Given how paranoid they are about competitive and regulatory threats, it's strange that they haven't responded to this bigger threat.
Also, the original reports made it seem like an attack would be "hard" to do and would require alot of traffic to analyze. Is a current installation with low traffic usage vulnerable to real-world haX0rs today?