At the University of Connecticut, ResNet officials actually keyed into rooms. Didn't unplug the machines from the router, didn't block the MAC address.
I'm aware that this is an awful problem, but how on earth does it justify keying into someone's room?
(I'm not kidding. dailycampus.com has the story in its 8/28 back issue. They don't take external links, though this will take you to a registration page. Also notice the article on 3/6/2003 where ResNet threatens to boot warez kiddies out of housing. Real nice fellas, these guys...)
FreeMED is actually being used in some applications---mostly small physician practices, but some mid-sized hospitals as well. That's a development copy right now, but you can mail the maintainer (unobfuscate email to use) for info about the stable release.
Sliding Doors. Really? The ones at Wal-Mart and Stop-n-Shop go "whoosh" when they open, and I don't even have to hit any buttons.
Jumpsuits. When was the last time you went to get your car repaired? Mechanics wear jumpsuits because they cover pretty much everything and can go over regular clothing, absorbing the grease, coolant, gasoline or whatever else sprays on them.
Designer drugs. Well, Ritalin is pretty much all we have for nootropics. "Fun!" is, unfortunately, not considered a good business case for a pharmeceutical company. Oh, and who could have predicted Viagra? But seriously, if you're looking for a clear tube with crystals in it that makes you zonk out, try crack.
Universal nudism. It's a subculture thing, but plenty of people do it. I think they call themselves "naturists" or somesuch.
Free sex. It's, again, a subculture thing, but it's hardly 'died'. Go find a swinger's (aka "the lifestyle") club. What's that? You're a single guy looking to get laid? Sorry chum, in this culture you're going to have to pay for sex.
Well, there's actually a power source where I live which is better than burning wood or hitching animals to something that rotates. It's called "falling water". Granted, I live in eastern New England, which is chock-full of steep, powerful rivers.
Funny story here. Some company which eventually became Connecticut Light and Power, then Northeast Utilities, bought pretty much every hydroelectric power station in the state. (The waterwheel used to run the mill; it would pretty much power the city if hooked to the grid.) They then disassembled all of these, removing or breaking the waterwheels, and made several central-generation nuclear boondoggles, which are currently costing the state a great deal of headache.
Oh, I know that hydro power doesn't work everywhere, but there's free power crashing down onto the rocks by the old mill, twenty-four hours a day, and not a damn thing is being done or will be done about it. Well, maybe the construction of another horrendously expensive nuke plant. Yay.
Well, science fiction tends to be a reflection and extrapolation (to some extent) of the society it comes from, right? So in the 1950s we had the "bait-n-switch", in that while John W Campbell was publishing Asimov and Heinlein stories about a bright future among the stars for humanity, Philip K Dick was exploring the dark underbelly, the paranoia, the looming threat of atomic war and a mutated post-atomic horror.
A lot of Vernor Vinge's work isn't particularly dark and depressing; I haven't read much else recent (still chugging down the classics) but I assure you that the 'cyberpunk' sensibilities that William Gibson brought forth may have been appropriate for the 1980s, but are hardly the be-all and end-all of where SF stands today.
Hell, James Tiptree Jr was a lot more depressing than... well, than anything else I can think of, and he started writing in the late 1960s.
Have you given a thought to this guy's work? The links are funky because he moved servers, but PhotoSeek indexes documents as well. Not sure if this is what you're after, but it does a variety of formats and such.
To stave off much greater disaster? Come on, why else do we hand out condoms to high school kids? We'd really prefer that they not go around spreading disease and farting out jam-faced sprogs, but we'll do our best to impede their progress nonetheless.
Likewise, we'd really prefer that our significant others don't betray us and steal everything we have, leaving us to sell our furniture and, finally, our bodies just to pay for dialup to read slashdot, but we'll do our best to make that possibility a little less likely.
Point is, the consequences of not having a pre-nup or condoms are grave enough to justify the cynicism.
The Abit NF-7 S supports Dolby Digital 5.1 channel audio along with optical or coax SPDIF output. It costs around a hundred and ten bucks. The future is now, baby!
Unfortunately, while Hollywood loves his short stories, they can't stomach the dark endings, so they're spruced up a la "Minorty Report". Seriously, do you think PKD would ever have had his mutants living a normal life in the remote Canadian forests, eh?
One of his favorite dark endings was humanity being supplanted by something clearly unthinking and as nonhuman as possible. See The Golden Man and The Father-Thing. Or even better, The Hanging Stranger. Yeah.
Believe me, when we see an ending like what PKD would have actually intended, Hollywood will have frozen over.
Those spineless nebbishes couldn't stomach his insane vision while he was alive; they water it down after his death.
Kusanagi. Having a character named Motoko Kusanagi is about as realistic as being named "Jane Excalibur" (at least, Helen McCarthy says so), but it just rolls right off the tongue.
Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus Where the three-body problem is solved, Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K, And the cold virus never evolved.
(chorus)
We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high, Our ball bearings are perfectly round. Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed, And a kilogram weighs half a pound.
(chorus)
If we run out of space for our burgeoning race No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart, If we just find a big enough wrench.
(chorus)
I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space, And living up here is a bore. Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye 'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!
(chorus)
CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange, Where the space debris always collects, We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams: Solar power and zero-gee sex.
--Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song) (C) 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm
Whaddaya mean, since? Hell, Dogma would have been watchable if Smith hadn't gotten incredibly full of himself and decided to leap up and down, screaming "message!" every six and a half minutes. Note to all filmmakers: entertain first and foremost, scratch your pubic "message!" itch later.
And "Lord of the Rings" the movie was, I think, not penned by Tolkien. Yet there may be a strong resemblance. But hey, you probably think that's just a coincidence, because he's been dead almost... well, lots of years.
Yeah, but that was an unstable release. (2.1.something.) It's equivalent to an internal beta of Windows---why on earth would you run it on a production system? The unstable series are for testing, not for running on a system you're not willing to fry!
Sheesh, you'd think you hadn't heard of the ASSTR, the alt.sex.stories text repository! More text porn than you can shake your rotting grogan-choad at! (No, it's not actually related to alt.tasteless. I don't even think they say "choad" or "grogan" in there.)
Yes, I've actually sent a fractal to an old LaserJet with PostScript, and waited ten minutes for the page to pop out.
For normal usage, of course, you'd never run into any sorts of problems. But if you decided to be crazy about it...
More on-topic, there's a refurbished HP color laser on PriceWatch's "not exactly new" section for $650. I've seen them for moderately cheaper than that at the local computer chop shop---used, of course.
Color laser is faster and better than inkjet, and you won't go crazy refilling or replacing ink. It's worth the extra cash.
Yeah, the public worked right through that one, largely because NASA insisted that the astronauts had died instant, heroic deaths that were unavoidable, not that they'd slowly suffocated from the smoke in a fire that would have been prevented if NASA had taken seriously the problems with pure-oxygen atmosphere. As it was, Grissom, Chaffee and White had to die for the atmosphere to be changed to something less dangerous (I'm not sure exactly what they use, but it's much closer to our atmosphere here).
NASA has some damn smart people working there. NASA does really nice basic research. NASA sucks ass at applying it.
Look at the various inventions that fell out of the space program as little extras. Look at all the technology that was invented. That's what NASA does well.
Now look at the Shuttle, which didn't meet a single one of its design parameters---it's technically not even reusable, it's salvageable. Look at the criminally high cost of launching mass into LEO. Look at NASA's inability to really deliver on the applied end of things. That's what NASA can't do.
I suggest Kings of the High Frontier as required reading for anyone interested in learning how NASA has failed to deliver on its promise of space access due to its fetishization of research-heavy boondoggles. The book is fiction, but extensively researched. (The discussion on unpressurized spacesuits fell out of an off-the-cuff reference the author made.)
Leave it to the X-Prize competitors, and their successors. The Space Shuttle is at the very limit of complexity that's possible to construct, which is why NASA has been unable to replace it. (Did you know there are literally hundreds of "Criticality One" components in the shuttle, the failure of any one of which could cause the shuttle's destruction?)
Okay, this seems like a rant about the Shuttle. But it's really about NASA, and the way in which they do things. It's not an indictment against the people who work there; the scientists and engineers of NASA are without equal. Their efforts are being squandered. The future does not belong to NASA, and it hasn't since they cancelled Apollo.
Well... this model would have probably helped them more than the standard one. Pooling the settlement money that way and making the judge disappear would have sent a pretty strong message...
Lo and behold, technical literature. I can't believe no one ended up hearing about this. For a price-factor difference of five hundred, I can't see a reason that NASA wouldn't have gone with the skinsuit. Other than pork-barrel bureaucracy, that is...
Slashdot Mirror
At the University of Connecticut, ResNet officials actually keyed into rooms. Didn't unplug the machines from the router, didn't block the MAC address.
I'm aware that this is an awful problem, but how on earth does it justify keying into someone's room?
(I'm not kidding. dailycampus.com has the story in its 8/28 back issue. They don't take external links, though this will take you to a registration page. Also notice the article on 3/6/2003 where ResNet threatens to boot warez kiddies out of housing. Real nice fellas, these guys...)
--grendel drago
FreeMED is actually being used in some applications---mostly small physician practices, but some mid-sized hospitals as well. That's a development copy right now, but you can mail the maintainer (unobfuscate email to use) for info about the stable release.
--grendel drago
Sliding Doors. Really? The ones at Wal-Mart and Stop-n-Shop go "whoosh" when they open, and I don't even have to hit any buttons.
Jumpsuits. When was the last time you went to get your car repaired? Mechanics wear jumpsuits because they cover pretty much everything and can go over regular clothing, absorbing the grease, coolant, gasoline or whatever else sprays on them.
Designer drugs. Well, Ritalin is pretty much all we have for nootropics. "Fun!" is, unfortunately, not considered a good business case for a pharmeceutical company. Oh, and who could have predicted Viagra? But seriously, if you're looking for a clear tube with crystals in it that makes you zonk out, try crack.
Universal nudism. It's a subculture thing, but plenty of people do it. I think they call themselves "naturists" or somesuch.
Free sex. It's, again, a subculture thing, but it's hardly 'died'. Go find a swinger's (aka "the lifestyle") club. What's that? You're a single guy looking to get laid? Sorry chum, in this culture you're going to have to pay for sex.
--grendel drago
Well, there's actually a power source where I live which is better than burning wood or hitching animals to something that rotates. It's called "falling water". Granted, I live in eastern New England, which is chock-full of steep, powerful rivers.
Funny story here. Some company which eventually became Connecticut Light and Power, then Northeast Utilities, bought pretty much every hydroelectric power station in the state. (The waterwheel used to run the mill; it would pretty much power the city if hooked to the grid.) They then disassembled all of these, removing or breaking the waterwheels, and made several central-generation nuclear boondoggles, which are currently costing the state a great deal of headache.
Oh, I know that hydro power doesn't work everywhere, but there's free power crashing down onto the rocks by the old mill, twenty-four hours a day, and not a damn thing is being done or will be done about it. Well, maybe the construction of another horrendously expensive nuke plant. Yay.
--grendel drago
Well, science fiction tends to be a reflection and extrapolation (to some extent) of the society it comes from, right? So in the 1950s we had the "bait-n-switch", in that while John W Campbell was publishing Asimov and Heinlein stories about a bright future among the stars for humanity, Philip K Dick was exploring the dark underbelly, the paranoia, the looming threat of atomic war and a mutated post-atomic horror.
A lot of Vernor Vinge's work isn't particularly dark and depressing; I haven't read much else recent (still chugging down the classics) but I assure you that the 'cyberpunk' sensibilities that William Gibson brought forth may have been appropriate for the 1980s, but are hardly the be-all and end-all of where SF stands today.
Hell, James Tiptree Jr was a lot more depressing than... well, than anything else I can think of, and he started writing in the late 1960s.
--grendel drago
Have you given a thought to this guy's work? The links are funky because he moved servers, but PhotoSeek indexes documents as well. Not sure if this is what you're after, but it does a variety of formats and such.
--grendel drago
To stave off much greater disaster? Come on, why else do we hand out condoms to high school kids? We'd really prefer that they not go around spreading disease and farting out jam-faced sprogs, but we'll do our best to impede their progress nonetheless.
Likewise, we'd really prefer that our significant others don't betray us and steal everything we have, leaving us to sell our furniture and, finally, our bodies just to pay for dialup to read slashdot, but we'll do our best to make that possibility a little less likely.
Point is, the consequences of not having a pre-nup or condoms are grave enough to justify the cynicism.
--grendel drago
21 here, and fully in agreement. Preach on, brother.
--grendel drago
onboard (on MB) audio with Dolby whatever
Dig it.
The Abit NF-7 S supports Dolby Digital 5.1 channel audio along with optical or coax SPDIF output. It costs around a hundred and ten bucks. The future is now, baby!
--grendel drago
Unfortunately, while Hollywood loves his short stories, they can't stomach the dark endings, so they're spruced up a la "Minorty Report". Seriously, do you think PKD would ever have had his mutants living a normal life in the remote Canadian forests, eh?
One of his favorite dark endings was humanity being supplanted by something clearly unthinking and as nonhuman as possible. See The Golden Man and The Father-Thing. Or even better, The Hanging Stranger. Yeah.
Believe me, when we see an ending like what PKD would have actually intended, Hollywood will have frozen over.
Those spineless nebbishes couldn't stomach his insane vision while he was alive; they water it down after his death.
--grendel drago
Kusanagi. Having a character named Motoko Kusanagi is about as realistic as being named "Jane Excalibur" (at least, Helen McCarthy says so), but it just rolls right off the tongue.
--grendel drago
This one?
Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,
And the cold virus never evolved.
(chorus)
We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound.
(chorus)
If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch
When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart,
If we just find a big enough wrench.
(chorus)
I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space,
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye
'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!
(chorus)
CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.
--Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song)
(C) 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm
You can't be serious. Where did you hear that?
--grendel drago
Whaddaya mean, since? Hell, Dogma would have been watchable if Smith hadn't gotten incredibly full of himself and decided to leap up and down, screaming "message!" every six and a half minutes. Note to all filmmakers: entertain first and foremost, scratch your pubic "message!" itch later.
--grendel drago
And "Lord of the Rings" the movie was, I think, not penned by Tolkien. Yet there may be a strong resemblance. But hey, you probably think that's just a coincidence, because he's been dead almost... well, lots of years.
--grendel drago
Yeah, but that was an unstable release. (2.1.something.) It's equivalent to an internal beta of Windows---why on earth would you run it on a production system? The unstable series are for testing, not for running on a system you're not willing to fry!
--grendel drago
Sheesh, you'd think you hadn't heard of the ASSTR, the alt.sex.stories text repository! More text porn than you can shake your rotting grogan-choad at! (No, it's not actually related to alt.tasteless. I don't even think they say "choad" or "grogan" in there.)
--grendel drago
Ah, so the DoD must be secretly staffed by slash/shonen ai-loving women. I get it now.
--grendel drago
Well, it'd be slow if you decided to send a raytracer or some fractals or even the Mandelbrot set itself to the printer.
Yes, I've actually sent a fractal to an old LaserJet with PostScript, and waited ten minutes for the page to pop out.
For normal usage, of course, you'd never run into any sorts of problems. But if you decided to be crazy about it...
More on-topic, there's a refurbished HP color laser on PriceWatch's "not exactly new" section for $650. I've seen them for moderately cheaper than that at the local computer chop shop---used, of course.
Color laser is faster and better than inkjet, and you won't go crazy refilling or replacing ink. It's worth the extra cash.
--grendel drago
Sheesh. You people are so frickin' lazy...
--grendel drago
Yeah, the public worked right through that one, largely because NASA insisted that the astronauts had died instant, heroic deaths that were unavoidable, not that they'd slowly suffocated from the smoke in a fire that would have been prevented if NASA had taken seriously the problems with pure-oxygen atmosphere. As it was, Grissom, Chaffee and White had to die for the atmosphere to be changed to something less dangerous (I'm not sure exactly what they use, but it's much closer to our atmosphere here).
--grendel drago
NASA has some damn smart people working there. NASA does really nice basic research. NASA sucks ass at applying it.
Look at the various inventions that fell out of the space program as little extras. Look at all the technology that was invented. That's what NASA does well.
Now look at the Shuttle, which didn't meet a single one of its design parameters---it's technically not even reusable, it's salvageable. Look at the criminally high cost of launching mass into LEO. Look at NASA's inability to really deliver on the applied end of things. That's what NASA can't do.
I suggest Kings of the High Frontier as required reading for anyone interested in learning how NASA has failed to deliver on its promise of space access due to its fetishization of research-heavy boondoggles. The book is fiction, but extensively researched. (The discussion on unpressurized spacesuits fell out of an off-the-cuff reference the author made.)
Leave it to the X-Prize competitors, and their successors. The Space Shuttle is at the very limit of complexity that's possible to construct, which is why NASA has been unable to replace it. (Did you know there are literally hundreds of "Criticality One" components in the shuttle, the failure of any one of which could cause the shuttle's destruction?)
Okay, this seems like a rant about the Shuttle. But it's really about NASA, and the way in which they do things. It's not an indictment against the people who work there; the scientists and engineers of NASA are without equal. Their efforts are being squandered. The future does not belong to NASA, and it hasn't since they cancelled Apollo.
--grendel drago
Well... this model would have probably helped them more than the standard one. Pooling the settlement money that way and making the judge disappear would have sent a pretty strong message...
--grendel drago
Lo and behold, technical literature. I can't believe no one ended up hearing about this. For a price-factor difference of five hundred, I can't see a reason that NASA wouldn't have gone with the skinsuit. Other than pork-barrel bureaucracy, that is...
--grendel drago
Thanks!
The device (Google HTML cache of a whitepaper in DOC format) was in fact designed and tested, but NASA junked it. Bastards.
And yes, heat is boiled off by evaporating water, both in the NASA suit and the SAS. Seems wasteful, but apparently it works.
Thanks again---I'm amazed that this was actually invented.
--grendel drago