There is a new exploit every 2 weeks or so, or is it more often?
How many mail servers have to be taken down, viruses cleaned, etc. etc., every month, using how many people-hours of wasted time?
Thousands? Millions?
If they wanted to claim
that Windows is easier to use, or more compatible, or something, then I could disagree without laughing out loud, but cheaper and more secure?
In my mind I try to imagine just where we would be if we still only had large main frames. The power of the PC is truely amazing.
Hold on there for a minute. DEC VAXs had DECCALC
, email, chat, clusters, paint programs, EDT (like emacs) fortran, etc. etc. in 1979
Unfortunately, all the
hardware is probably dead now, and it was very expensive when new. On the other hand, the uptime was better than PCs, and there were no problems with users installing viruses, games, and other crapware at work. Users interfaced with the mainframe with VT100 or better terminals, and these terminals did support graphics so you could see your graph plotted, and it was possible to scan in pictures and display them on a terminal, sort of a pre-gif gif file.
Just because most people don't know the archaology of VAXes does't mean they didn't exist.
...is to be a teeny-tiny niche market, like the aero-plane (compare and contrast: Number of horses sold vs. number of auto-mobiles sold).
The Masses don't understand the auto-mobile, don't understand why anyone would want to use "gasoline" instead of hay (which is free), and aren't interested in listening to us motorists when we explain the very real benefits of the internal combustion engine.
Now, you might be right, but a lot of the predictions that a superior technology would be rejected have been wrong.
That does not mean you have a loose gas cap, it means that there is a leak somewhere either in the fuel supply system or in the vapor vent and return system.
You could have a pinhole in a rubber vapor vent line, or in a steel line. (or a loose clamp) It will leak so slowly that you will never find it.
The pressure sensor that tells the computer the gas tank is not pressureized could be intermitantly faulty as well. The algorithm for determining what pressure changes in the gas tank constitute a "loose gas cap" could be faulty (software error)
In short, you could have a tiny vapor leak *somewhere* (or a bad sensor), or nothing at all wrong.
Mainstream Windows viruses spread because of the idiocy of users. They open attachments, they download warez off Kazaa, and pretty much have no idea about security
Not this elitist, hoary old Chestnut again.
I am so tired of Windows apologists making this totally unfounded claim, over and over again, hoping the public will continue to buy it.
Let's get this straight:
Windows viruses exist because Microsoft decided long ago that they were going to co-mingle EXECUTABLE CODE with DATA!
Windows users have been trained for years to double click on DATA to launch the EXECUTABLE application which reads the DATA.
In a sane world, a user would have been taught to launch the APPLICATION first, and, afterword, used that APPLICATION to open a DATA file.
The God Damned DATA file would not "EXECUTE", it would just be read by the APPLICATION!!!!!
In addition, of course, automatic macros and scripts, if they existed in their current form at all, would have limited abilities which would prevent them from corrupting your DATA.
Was visit from the IRS when I failed to report
the value of bartered items recieved, which counts as income and must be reported.
I only got caught because I posted about my tax evasion on a public website, and then invited a lot of other people to also confess about any tax crimes they might have comitted.
Maybe this could be a regular thing, each week an Ask/. could discuss
some minor or major crime, and invite others to post confessions.
Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, what the hell were you thinking?
P.S. Yes, I take the IRS seriously, and I don't fark with them.
Well, you OBVIOUSLY have no idea what a POLICE STATE is really like.
I will educate you.
In a police state (and I speak from my personal experiences in Eastern Europe when it was under Soviet occupation) the police actually follow you around constantly. (you can recognize them by their shoes, normal citizens are not allowed into the special shops where these very shiny shoes can be purchased.) They tap your phone. They film you from video cameras installed on buildings. They regularly harass you trying to provoke a reaction. If you piss them off, they haul you away to a basement somewhere and
attach a power cord to your genetalia.
The people who do all this are not prosecuted in court for torture. They are awarded a medal of the Order of Lenin, with skull and bones cluster, and given a promotion.
In a police state, there is no Slashdot, and people who speak out end up working in Uranium mines in Siberia.
Your inane hysteria does nothing to preseve the freedom we have in the USA. Instead, by your knee jerk reaction, you are exhibiting "Usefull Idiots" syndrome, and you are helping, not hindering, the people who wish to see the US and freedom destroyed.
Even better, the tire sizes are a mix of metric and
inch dimensions:
185 65 R 16
for example, is a tire 185 mm wide in the tread, fitting on a 16 inch rim, and the height of the sidewall is 0.65 times
the 185 mm tread width.
And I still do heat transfer calculations using Watts for power and
Cubic Feet per minute for air volume and Feet per minute for air velocity.
All calculations involving mass or weight, as well as the acceleration of gravity, I do in strict SI (metric units) or else my answer is always wrong by some
multiple of 32 feet/second^2. In the metric system, a kilogram of mass weighs 1 kilogram of weight in earths gravity. Not so simple with the
english system.
Yes. And what's worse, a
system
that would have improved
efficiency and been a drop-in replacement for R-12 (Freon)
was blocked from approval.
The drop-in substitution would have
saved hundreds of tons of equipment that was otherwise scrapped.
I am talking about refrigerants that are a mixture of Propane
and Butane. The thermodynamic properties of these mixtures
are better than that of Freon. The gases are very inexpensive and
relatively harmless to ingest, and can be disposed of by using them to
cook food.
Someone will doubtless joke that the fridge will go boom, but
of course sealed systems are normal, the amount of gas inside is
small, and designing spaces which don't go boom if there is a
leak is a well known art.
There is more risk of harm when you carry
a butane lighter in your pocket.
I've just fixed up your reply to the parent post to make it more clear
what you actually meant to say. HTH. HAND.
"Who says we are causing the Earth to heat up???"
The high priesthood of Global warming. You know, those people with letters
after their names, people who get lots of GRANT MONEY if they can
write fear mongering proposal papers.
These are in many cases people
who have spent their entire lives in the ivory towers of academia,
without ever having to venture outside to the real world where accountability
and having to show results lurk behind every tree and rock.
I know that you probably know more than all those High Priests combined
( smug snicker ), after all, their politics are superior to your obvious
knuckle dragging right wing Klan redneck national socialist leanings. (And by the way, did you know that your mom and dad will STILL be brothers and sisters
after the divorce?? Yuk Yuk Yuk)
You peasant. How dare you question the
gospel word of the self-appointed experts!!! You are here only to follow and
obey your cultural and intellectual superiors in academia!!!
Ductile means that when you exceed the yeild strenght of the material, the material flows plastically to give significant displacement before
it fractures. Think clay or silly putty.
Brittle means that when you exceed the yeild strenght, there is very little or no plastic deformantion before failure. Think ice.
Glass and mild steel both have similar yield strengths. Glass
failure is brittle, while the steel is ductile.
Yield and Ultimate strength of a material and ductility/brittlness are completely unrelated and independent of each other.
This sounds like another correlation vs. causality fallacy: is it not at least as likely that those who are willing to turn off their TV sets for a week are likely to be those who have already gotten sick of TV? Why the addiction implication?
I doubt it.. I think that some people finally realize that they have a serious problem, and decide to do something about it.
For me, that moment was when I realized that I could not rearrange the living room without making the TV difficult to see. Prior to this I had always been a TV zombie love slave.
Trying to rearrange that room with the TV constraint made me realize that my priorities were totally fucked up, and I unplugged and put away the TV.
You can look up my earlier post for more info about the Pavlovian conditioning effects.
Keep in mind, the TV content is freely broadcast. Someone else is paying for it. Now, what does this "someone else" getting from you that
is so important that they are willing to pay for the broadcast?
20 years back or so, people who said that cigaretts were bad for you were treated as humorless cranks and fools. My opinion is that the sedentary lifestyle that TV requieres creates a similar amount of harm to your health.
The main reason "old" people have problems with strength and mobility
are that they spent a lot of their younger lives sitting on the lazy-boy
with a scotch and a cigarette, watching Johnny Carson before he became Jay Leno.
When they did go out, it was in a Cadillac to
go to a steakhouse and consume 1.5 Kg of beef and 3 scotches.
The windows in the Cadillac were electric, so that the owners did not even get the exercise available by rolling them up.
Now, you can get away with the beef and the scotch, but when you combine that with a sedentary lifestyle, you will not have enough strength to move around when you are 65.
In developing countries, of course, people are still outside with a plow behind a pair of horses planting potatoes, and tend to be physically vigorous till they fall dead of a stroke, or die in their sleep due to heart stoppage.
The obvious point of all this is that if you stop using your body to it's full potential, you will soon lose the ability to get your ass off the toilet and wipe it.
I think humans are the only animal that does not run or exercise for the sheer fun of it: Horses run, Dogs run, dolphins swim, hell, even sloths hold on to trees with their tails.. But humans are sitting in front of the TV with a scotch.
The result is intuitively predictable by inspection:)
I've fixed up some content and spelling problems with your post. I'm sure the following is what you meant to say.
Public Shared Spaces.
What part of public is so hard to understand? You have no more right to annoy many people around you by spewing into your little plastic box, then you do to urinate on someones shoes because the bathroom you need "right now" is somewhere else.
This is incredibly self centered, and blatantly disregards other people who also have a right to peace and quiet, not to mention dry shoes.
Let's look at the good sides of jamming.
Public places like fairs would use jammers to provide people with a more mellow, quieter, stress-free experience, hotels would use them to enable you and your friends to have a relaxed, intimate chat without some buffoon bellowing in the background, and on and on.
Don't forget that emergency services use public spaces extensively to get to accident scenes, most of which are caused by people who TALK instead of DRIVING. Many emergency radio systems, arguable most, are incompatible with each other. Thats why any intelligently run municipality will have standardized on one radio system, so that different services can communicate.
Also, radio is a BROADCAST medium, which means that all emergency personnel can listen at the same time to central commands. Cell phones are useless in a big emergency, because panicked citizens will overwhelm the cell phone network.
Public shared spaces are also used by personal like plumbers, system admins, fire fighters, and medical staff. You know that nice doctor that helps out during a baby's delivery? They have a very stressful job, and it helps them a lot when
there is a little more peace and quiet in their day. Several doctors are always on duty at a hospital, and pagers can easily summon more if needed.
Now I understand that some selfish people feel that their immediate want is more important
then sharing a peaceful public space with other citizens, just as in the bad old days a few people would pollute the environment the rest of us live in with toxins because it was public. So the better question is, when did some people get so self-centered that they feel free to pollute the commons with their asinine bellowing?
Slashdot Mirror
There is a new exploit every 2 weeks or so, or is it more often?
How many mail servers have to be taken down, viruses cleaned, etc. etc., every month, using how many people-hours of wasted time?
Thousands? Millions?
If they wanted to claim that Windows is easier to use, or more compatible, or something, then I could disagree without laughing out loud, but cheaper and more secure?
Give me a farking break!
As Instapundit said:
In 1992 the FCC fined Infinity Broadcasting $600,000 after Stern discussed masturbating to a picture of Aunt Jemima. Is that better or worse than asking a Nigerian woman if she eats monkeys, or hosting a discussion of whether, when you have sex with a black woman, it smells like watermelons? I guess you can argue that point, but I'd be a lot more impressed with Stern's defenders if they'd quote these comments verbatim in the process of defending him.
The adulteration of orange juice: In 1990 an employee of Sun Up Foods, an orange juice processor, told the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that the company had set up secret rooms in its facilities to hold tanks of liquid beet sugar, a common adulterant of orange juice.
Why would anyone use rabbit shit in coffee? Chicory is the standard item used to dilute or adulterate coffee.
We can contemplate the Ford Pinto without much further comment.
How about a little Alfatoxin in your peanut butter!
Need a chest X-Ray or a really fast sun tan?
Or maybe you want to take a trip in Sir Geoffrey de Havilland's Comet?
And if you still think that you can consume or use products or services without paying close attention, I have a bridge to sell you.
Proving, as always, that when arms are outlawed, only outlaws will have arms.
In the US, of course, the outcomes tend to be very very different
It is seriously sad to see the people of a great nation like England reduced to being prey for goblins.
Line in
or
Mic in
8 ohm or 30 ohm resistors(whatever the impedance of a headphone speaker is), wire, plugs, solder, and knowledge are far too common to ban.
Hold on there for a minute. DEC VAXs had DECCALC , email, chat, clusters, paint programs, EDT (like emacs) fortran, etc. etc. in 1979
Unfortunately, all the hardware is probably dead now, and it was very expensive when new. On the other hand, the uptime was better than PCs, and there were no problems with users installing viruses, games, and other crapware at work. Users interfaced with the mainframe with VT100 or better terminals, and these terminals did support graphics so you could see your graph plotted, and it was possible to scan in pictures and display them on a terminal, sort of a pre-gif gif file.
Just because most people don't know the archaology of VAXes does't mean they didn't exist.
The Masses don't understand the auto-mobile, don't understand why anyone would want to use "gasoline" instead of hay (which is free), and aren't interested in listening to us motorists when we explain the very real benefits of the internal combustion engine.
Now, you might be right, but a lot of the predictions that a superior technology would be rejected have been wrong.
That does not mean you have a loose gas cap, it means that there is a leak somewhere either in the fuel supply system or in the vapor vent and return system.
You could have a pinhole in a rubber vapor vent line, or in a steel line. (or a loose clamp) It will leak so slowly that you will never find it.
The pressure sensor that tells the computer the gas tank is not pressureized could be intermitantly faulty as well. The algorithm for determining what pressure changes in the gas tank constitute a "loose gas cap" could be faulty (software error)
In short, you could have a tiny vapor leak *somewhere* (or a bad sensor), or nothing at all wrong.
Loose gas cap is just a kiss-off trouble code.
You can run a diesel car on home heating oil too, but you are evadeing the fuel tax.
The per gallon Federal Motor Fuel Excise Tax is 18.4 cents on gasoline, 13.6 cents on LPG, 24.4 cents on diesel fuel, 13.0 cents on gasohol, 19.4 cents on aviation gas, and 4.4 cents on jet fuel. These monies go to the Federal Highway Trust Fund.
The by-state fuel tax averages 22 cents a gallon for gasoline, I am too lazy to find a diesel link.
Google for federal fuel tax and state fuel tax for more info.
Here is one of many links for the actual prices of fuels, before the tax.
I use the VT52 as a footstool.
Now look at this listing of states by crime rate. Vermont is safest at #1, righthand column.
QED.
Not this elitist, hoary old Chestnut again.
I am so tired of Windows apologists making this totally unfounded claim, over and over again, hoping the public will continue to buy it.
Let's get this straight:
Windows viruses exist because Microsoft decided long ago that they were going to co-mingle EXECUTABLE CODE with DATA!
Windows users have been trained for years to double click on DATA to launch the EXECUTABLE application which reads the DATA.
In a sane world, a user would have been taught to launch the APPLICATION first, and, afterword, used that APPLICATION to open a DATA file.
The God Damned DATA file would not "EXECUTE", it would just be read by the APPLICATION!!!!!
In addition, of course, automatic macros and scripts, if they existed in their current form at all, would have limited abilities which would prevent them from corrupting your DATA.
Why is this so hard to understand???
If your modem activity light is on all the time.
If your network activity box (on your gnome pop up tool bar) is showing traffic even when you are not deliberately doing any network activity.
If your other network traffic monitors are showing activity when you are not doing any traffic.
Your modem activity light is, I suppose, the most foolproof method.
You can always wire up a bell which rings when the modem activity light goes on, so you will have an idea of what is going on.
Salivation optional.
;)
I only got caught because I posted about my tax evasion on a public website, and then invited a lot of other people to also confess about any tax crimes they might have comitted.
Maybe this could be a regular thing, each week an Ask /. could discuss
some minor or major crime, and invite others to post confessions.
Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, what the hell were you thinking?
P.S. Yes, I take the IRS seriously, and I don't fark with them.
I will educate you.
In a police state (and I speak from my personal experiences in Eastern Europe when it was under Soviet occupation) the police actually follow you around constantly. (you can recognize them by their shoes, normal citizens are not allowed into the special shops where these very shiny shoes can be purchased.) They tap your phone. They film you from video cameras installed on buildings. They regularly harass you trying to provoke a reaction. If you piss them off, they haul you away to a basement somewhere and attach a power cord to your genetalia.
The people who do all this are not prosecuted in court for torture. They are awarded a medal of the Order of Lenin, with skull and bones cluster, and given a promotion.
In a police state, there is no Slashdot, and people who speak out end up working in Uranium mines in Siberia.
Your inane hysteria does nothing to preseve the freedom we have in the USA. Instead, by your knee jerk reaction, you are exhibiting "Usefull Idiots" syndrome, and you are helping, not hindering, the people who wish to see the US and freedom destroyed.
Half of 34 and 7/8 is
17 and 7/16
you just double the bottom of the fraction to cut it in half.
And if your example had been 35 and 7/8, then the answer is 17 plus 1/2 plus 7/16..
Seems easier to me than figuring out half of 885.825 mm, which is what your example comes to.
185 65 R 16
for example, is a tire 185 mm wide in the tread, fitting on a 16 inch rim, and the height of the sidewall is 0.65 times the 185 mm tread width.
And I still do heat transfer calculations using Watts for power and Cubic Feet per minute for air volume and Feet per minute for air velocity.
All calculations involving mass or weight, as well as the acceleration of gravity, I do in strict SI (metric units) or else my answer is always wrong by some multiple of 32 feet/second^2. In the metric system, a kilogram of mass weighs 1 kilogram of weight in earths gravity. Not so simple with the english system.
Reading and writing are infinitely more important, because they underpin everything, including critical thinking
And with no basis in math and science, what are these people going to use for their "Critical Thinking?"
Their inner feelings about Oprah and Fluffy Bunnies? The things they are told by Big Media? The Enquirer?
Where is the foundation on which their thoughts are built?
Of course, if your intention is to breed more Consumer sheep, then you are on the right track...
I think you mean that refrigration is 1300 %..
That's what the EER means on an air conditioner..
The machine with an EER of 13 moves 13 times as much heat as it uses in electricity.
The drop-in substitution would have saved hundreds of tons of equipment that was otherwise scrapped.
I am talking about refrigerants that are a mixture of Propane and Butane. The thermodynamic properties of these mixtures are better than that of Freon. The gases are very inexpensive and relatively harmless to ingest, and can be disposed of by using them to cook food.
Someone will doubtless joke that the fridge will go boom, but of course sealed systems are normal, the amount of gas inside is small, and designing spaces which don't go boom if there is a leak is a well known art.
There is more risk of harm when you carry a butane lighter in your pocket.
"Who says we are causing the Earth to heat up???"
The high priesthood of Global warming. You know, those people with letters after their names, people who get lots of GRANT MONEY if they can write fear mongering proposal papers.
These are in many cases people who have spent their entire lives in the ivory towers of academia, without ever having to venture outside to the real world where accountability and having to show results lurk behind every tree and rock.
I know that you probably know more than all those High Priests combined ( smug snicker ), after all, their politics are superior to your obvious knuckle dragging right wing Klan redneck national socialist leanings. (And by the way, did you know that your mom and dad will STILL be brothers and sisters after the divorce?? Yuk Yuk Yuk)
You peasant. How dare you question the gospel word of the self-appointed experts!!! You are here only to follow and obey your cultural and intellectual superiors in academia!!!
No such thing.
Ductile means that when you exceed the yeild strenght of the material, the material flows plastically to give significant displacement before it fractures. Think clay or silly putty.
Brittle means that when you exceed the yeild strenght, there is very little or no plastic deformantion before failure. Think ice.
Glass and mild steel both have similar yield strengths. Glass failure is brittle, while the steel is ductile.
Yield and Ultimate strength of a material and ductility/brittlness are completely unrelated and independent of each other.
I doubt it.. I think that some people finally realize that they have a serious problem, and decide to do something about it.
For me, that moment was when I realized that I could not rearrange the living room without making the TV difficult to see. Prior to this I had always been a TV zombie love slave.
Trying to rearrange that room with the TV constraint made me realize that my priorities were totally fucked up, and I unplugged and put away the TV.
You can look up my earlier post for more info about the Pavlovian conditioning effects.
Keep in mind, the TV content is freely broadcast. Someone else is paying for it. Now, what does this "someone else" getting from you that is so important that they are willing to pay for the broadcast?
20 years back or so, people who said that cigaretts were bad for you were treated as humorless cranks and fools. My opinion is that the sedentary lifestyle that TV requieres creates a similar amount of harm to your health.
When they did go out, it was in a Cadillac to go to a steakhouse and consume 1.5 Kg of beef and 3 scotches.
The windows in the Cadillac were electric, so that the owners did not even get the exercise available by rolling them up.
Now, you can get away with the beef and the scotch, but when you combine that with a sedentary lifestyle, you will not have enough strength to move around when you are 65.
In developing countries, of course, people are still outside with a plow behind a pair of horses planting potatoes, and tend to be physically vigorous till they fall dead of a stroke, or die in their sleep due to heart stoppage.
The obvious point of all this is that if you stop using your body to it's full potential, you will soon lose the ability to get your ass off the toilet and wipe it.
I think humans are the only animal that does not run or exercise for the sheer fun of it: Horses run, Dogs run, dolphins swim, hell, even sloths hold on to trees with their tails.. But humans are sitting in front of the TV with a scotch.
The result is intuitively predictable by inspection :)
Public Shared Spaces.
What part of public is so hard to understand? You have no more right to annoy many people around you by spewing into your little plastic box, then you do to urinate on someones shoes because the bathroom you need "right now" is somewhere else.
This is incredibly self centered, and blatantly disregards other people who also have a right to peace and quiet, not to mention dry shoes.
Let's look at the good sides of jamming.
Public places like fairs would use jammers to provide people with a more mellow, quieter, stress-free experience, hotels would use them to enable you and your friends to have a relaxed, intimate chat without some buffoon bellowing in the background, and on and on.
Don't forget that emergency services use public spaces extensively to get to accident scenes, most of which are caused by people who TALK instead of DRIVING. Many emergency radio systems, arguable most, are incompatible with each other. Thats why any intelligently run municipality will have standardized on one radio system, so that different services can communicate.
Also, radio is a BROADCAST medium, which means that all emergency personnel can listen at the same time to central commands. Cell phones are useless in a big emergency, because panicked citizens will overwhelm the cell phone network.
Public shared spaces are also used by personal like plumbers, system admins, fire fighters, and medical staff. You know that nice doctor that helps out during a baby's delivery? They have a very stressful job, and it helps them a lot when there is a little more peace and quiet in their day. Several doctors are always on duty at a hospital, and pagers can easily summon more if needed.
Now I understand that some selfish people feel that their immediate want is more important then sharing a peaceful public space with other citizens, just as in the bad old days a few people would pollute the environment the rest of us live in with toxins because it was public. So the better question is, when did some people get so self-centered that they feel free to pollute the commons with their asinine bellowing?
And why do the rest of us tolerate it?