A Wind generator went up north of a town called Elk River Minnesota, it's on the way to my cabin. I have to say it's about the coolest thing I've ever seen. Especailly because when you finally see it, it means that you've gotten through Elk River, the shittiest town in the whole state, perhaps the region.
The three blades on that thing are huge, and the shape of them indicates that they are an engineering marvel. I always look at the trees as I near the site of the generator. The trees don't have to be moving and that thing is still cranking away. Absolutely cool. In Minnesota, (I'm not sure if it's just in MN), if you run your power meter backwards you get payment from the power company. It gives people a real incentive to invest in this kind of thing. I with I had money to buy stock in this fuel cell company, it's going higher than $30.
But the whole point is that the really destructive ones don't survive. Killing the host quickly isn't an evolutionarily stable strategy to use anthropological terms. The previous poster is exactly right: the virii that make the news (I'm assuming the writers want fame, and then glory) are the ones that are fit to survive. There's a fine balance that the virus has to achieve - whether it's a biological virus or a computer virus. If it isn't in any way destructive or symptomatic, it won't get noticed no matter how much it spreads. If it's too destructive, it won't spread successfully. What we're looking at with Nimda and Code Red are the golden middle road - virii that spread and do damage.
On another note, from what I've had to deal with Nimda is plenty destructive. We've got a list of inoperable applications on multiple computers apparently because of nimda. It doesn't have to wipe out the whole harddrive on its own. Soon we'll do it ourselves, and it will have been an ultimate success.
You're probably going a little overboard. The U of MN has a deal with Coca-Cola that only Coke products are sold on campus. Student groups are then eligible for "Coke-grants" (that'll help with homework!). The other good thing is that a bottle of Coke costs $0.90 on campus, off campus its $1.25, but you have your choice between Pepsi, RC, Coke, and everything else.
A large part of the cost for the bottler is transporting the soda from the bottling facility to the vending machine. If Cocacola can make a slick deal to effectively double their sales (with perhaps a logarithmic growth curve in transport costs) they can afford to help out the U and its students in the process.
On top of that it cuts in half the number of vending machines on campus (at least). I'm pretty sure the U pays for the electricity on those things. That's a significant amount considering every one of those things is refrigerated, and the U of M Twincities is spread over three campuses, both sides of the Mississippi in Minneapolis, and in St. Paul. That's a lot of pop machines.
They're worried that well-meaning U.S. hackers may launch denial-of-service attacks or release worms or viruses aimed at disrupting terrorists
Question: How dumb do they think we are?
Answer: As dumb as they are.
Explanation: To combat terrorism the government is busy restricting every possible liberty they can get their hands on. In the end, it will only hurt good citizins and do nothing to the terrorists. Just as these feared attacks would.
I can see this leading to some kind of restrictions on software development tools. Of course, this would be as hard to enforce as the crypto backdoor, but that won't stop them from making a law. Imagine if it gets out that the algorithms are understandable by most pretty smart people, and all that needs to be done is put it into code and compile it, all they'll have to do is restrict or regulate access to compilers/interpreters, right?
I can see the Open Source Community becoming the scape goat of the week on this and some pretty awful stuff coming down from Ceasar restricting the right of people to write their own software. There's no reason why they couldn't make it illegal for anyone but licensed programmers/CSci students from having access to compilers. The "Sheeple" wouldn't care one bit. They don't even know what a compiler is. Then what -./configure, make, make install, becomes pretty hard to come by.
5. LIMITATION ON REVERSE ENGINEERING,
DECOMPILATION, AND DISASSEMBLY. You may
not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the
Product, except and only to the extent that it is expressly
permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this
limitation.
They want to cut back on "casual reverse-engineering"
If a cop wants to search your car, and you let him, your rights have not been violated, you have simply waived them. If the police are asking you for your video camera, and you don't want to give it up, say no, they can't take it lawfully. It hasn't sounded to me that any changes in the Government's powers are going to be too terrible. All I've heard is Ashcroft saying we need snoop warrents on people and not phones. As long as the authorization still is in the judicial branch and not the executive branch I think we're ok. The cops still need to demonstrate reasonable suspician to get a snoop warrent.
The backdoors to encryption software are another host of problems altogether. I hope, and I'm going to write some letters about this, our lawmakers will see what a silly effort this would be. I don't think the big-money special interests would allow it either, because it would be a major threat to lots of transactions that happen electronically. Like someone said earlier, all it would take is for one willing person to get this backdoor and whoosh! bank accounts start clearing all over the country.
The worst scenario is if Feinstien gets in on it and has her butt buddies over at MS write the software. We can pretty much count on it working for about 3 hours before someone cracks it and we're all running to the bank.
That's a nice thought, but in my town Clear Channel owns more than half of the high power radio stations, AMFM owning the rest. The lines are blurred when there's that kind of market dominance - especially when most people aren't even aware of it. I understand their motivation here - but the amount of control they have over the distribution of culture really bothers me.
I think that'll only be the beginning of words that will be banned from use on the air by Clear Channel. Soon things will not be "amazing," but rather "double interesting," or for more emphasis, "double double interesting." News will not be "shocking," but rather "double arousing." I think you get my drift.
Do you think the terrorists had a problem with American Culture? It's nice that we're doing away with it, so we don't make anyone angry.
I agree completely that there is nothing stopping these people from writing their own encryption software. It seems that they had to come to the United States for their flight training. I don't think the same would be true for Mathematics or Computer Science - and the open nature of academia would make it nearly impossible to keep anyone with half a brain from writing good encryption software.
My only worry is that this open nature of academia, and perhaps more likely open source software, will come under attack after this tragedy. Let's hope the misinformation doesn't run too rampant.
You fools, your level of dissonance is staggering. It appears the victim blaming has begun, let us not forget that it is the terrorists that did the bad thing, not the passengers, not the government. It's human nature to try to come up with a reason why the people hurt deserved what happened to them. The did not deserve what happened to them. A terrible thing happened. Accept it, many innocent people were hurt. The did nothing to deserve it and all reasonable precautions had been taken to keep this kind of thing from happening. It's easy to say that by not allowing armed people on airplanes we were "just waiting for this to happen." But is isn't our fault. We can't protect ourselves against everything. We just can't.
I don't know how big I am on hyper-national security, but I do think it plays a role. The best way to avoid terrorism is to stop being an asshole country, but until that happens, the NSA is going to have to continue to do what it does.
I think it's funny, though, that as the agency that is supposed to be the best and brightest begins to fall behind the curve, Congress is writing laws criminalizing the act of decryption, pushing underground a very important segment of our intellectual community. The fact that the DMCA seeks to imprison people who are clever enough to break encryption means our ability to do this when it's important is going to be diminished. I'm not saying the Dmitry is the only hope for US national security, but the precedence that his case is setting paints a bleak picture for the United States. This country will fail if it continues on this course.
"Pornographic smut anywhere is undesirable, but in the local library where our children visit, is intolerable."
All other forms of smut are just fine, in fact, we encourage non-pornographic forms of smut. Ok, sorry.
But not to waste your time, I'll add my.02, whatever they may be worth in this filtered society. What good do we think we're doing with all this filtering? Do we really think our kids will be better off if we disallow some forms of thoughts, or various undesirable themes of thought? Last time I checked, it was pretty damn impossible to keep 14 year old boys from thinking about naked women all the time. I can understand how it's gross if people are in the library all the time looking at pr0n, but can't the librarian get the gist (no pun intended) of it and call the cops? What if part of one person's job was to casually walk past the computers and make sure they were being used constructively?
Ok, I know that's impossible. It raises all sorts of ethical questions blah blah blah. Including, "Is/. constructive use of a computer?"
Good call. I just tried it and found out the hard way that it doesn't work well with the Ximian stuff. Now Evolution doesn't look right - so I removed the package aaf package - and Evolution is going really slow. I'd suggest that people hold off on this one, and as the man says, wait until it's part of the base. Unless of course you like to screw around with stuff, then go for it!
Hey, I'm an editor at boycottxp.com, we got hit hard there but we're back up now and we should stay that way. It might be a little slow at first but keep checking back as the traffic levels off. We're excited to hear what you have to say.
It isn't that big, nor is it all that impressive. You guys should see the butter heads they have at the Fair - all of the royal court, lead by "Princess Kay of the Milky Way." [the-land.com]
I know I'm a goon for saying this, but it's a pretty cool sight. I'm disappointed because there seems to be less and less of a family farming feel to the fair every year.
It isn't that big, nor is it all that impressive. You guys should see the butter heads they have at the Fair - all of the royal court, lead by "Princess Kay of the Milky Way."
I know I'm a goon for saying this, but it's a pretty cool sight. I'm disappointed because there seems to be less and less of a family farming feel to the fair every year.
I know, how's about we all pick up and move to Canada. Let the US rot in hell as systems crash and there aren't any computer people to fix them. This law is complete BS, I can barely stand to even think about the United States Government right now, let alone the hundreds of dollars taken from my paycheck for taxes every two weeks...
Instead of soldering the chip to the motherboard, just fasten it with a piece of play-doh. Or better yet, an eraser - they're made of rubber so the static electricity can't pass through them - problem solved!
Was is Doris Day in Shawshank or someone else? I don't think it was Doris Day, she wasn't as much of a sex-object as she was a sweetheart type. Maybe I'm wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I wanted to find out about making zuccini cupcakes, but all I got was pr0n! waaaa!
A Wind generator went up north of a town called Elk River Minnesota, it's on the way to my cabin. I have to say it's about the coolest thing I've ever seen. Especailly because when you finally see it, it means that you've gotten through Elk River, the shittiest town in the whole state, perhaps the region.
The three blades on that thing are huge, and the shape of them indicates that they are an engineering marvel. I always look at the trees as I near the site of the generator. The trees don't have to be moving and that thing is still cranking away. Absolutely cool. In Minnesota, (I'm not sure if it's just in MN), if you run your power meter backwards you get payment from the power company. It gives people a real incentive to invest in this kind of thing. I with I had money to buy stock in this fuel cell company, it's going higher than $30.
But the whole point is that the really destructive ones don't survive. Killing the host quickly isn't an evolutionarily stable strategy to use anthropological terms. The previous poster is exactly right: the virii that make the news (I'm assuming the writers want fame, and then glory) are the ones that are fit to survive. There's a fine balance that the virus has to achieve - whether it's a biological virus or a computer virus. If it isn't in any way destructive or symptomatic, it won't get noticed no matter how much it spreads. If it's too destructive, it won't spread successfully. What we're looking at with Nimda and Code Red are the golden middle road - virii that spread and do damage.
On another note, from what I've had to deal with Nimda is plenty destructive. We've got a list of inoperable applications on multiple computers apparently because of nimda. It doesn't have to wipe out the whole harddrive on its own. Soon we'll do it ourselves, and it will have been an ultimate success.
You're probably going a little overboard. The U of MN has a deal with Coca-Cola that only Coke products are sold on campus. Student groups are then eligible for "Coke-grants" (that'll help with homework!). The other good thing is that a bottle of Coke costs $0.90 on campus, off campus its $1.25, but you have your choice between Pepsi, RC, Coke, and everything else.
A large part of the cost for the bottler is transporting the soda from the bottling facility to the vending machine. If Cocacola can make a slick deal to effectively double their sales (with perhaps a logarithmic growth curve in transport costs) they can afford to help out the U and its students in the process.
On top of that it cuts in half the number of vending machines on campus (at least). I'm pretty sure the U pays for the electricity on those things. That's a significant amount considering every one of those things is refrigerated, and the U of M Twincities is spread over three campuses, both sides of the Mississippi in Minneapolis, and in St. Paul. That's a lot of pop machines.
They're worried that well-meaning U.S. hackers may launch denial-of-service attacks or release worms or viruses aimed at disrupting terrorists
Question: How dumb do they think we are?
Answer: As dumb as they are.
Explanation: To combat terrorism the government is busy restricting every possible liberty they can get their hands on. In the end, it will only hurt good citizins and do nothing to the terrorists. Just as these feared attacks would.
Of course you wouldn't. And that'll work just fine until they start drafting everybody. I'm glad I live close to Canada.
I can see this leading to some kind of restrictions on software development tools. Of course, this would be as hard to enforce as the crypto backdoor, but that won't stop them from making a law. Imagine if it gets out that the algorithms are understandable by most pretty smart people, and all that needs to be done is put it into code and compile it, all they'll have to do is restrict or regulate access to compilers/interpreters, right?
I can see the Open Source Community becoming the scape goat of the week on this and some pretty awful stuff coming down from Ceasar restricting the right of people to write their own software. There's no reason why they couldn't make it illegal for anyone but licensed programmers/CSci students from having access to compilers. The "Sheeple" wouldn't care one bit. They don't even know what a compiler is. Then what - ./configure, make, make install, becomes pretty hard to come by.
5. LIMITATION ON REVERSE ENGINEERING, DECOMPILATION, AND DISASSEMBLY. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Product, except and only to the extent that it is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation.
They want to cut back on "casual reverse-engineering"
If a cop wants to search your car, and you let him, your rights have not been violated, you have simply waived them. If the police are asking you for your video camera, and you don't want to give it up, say no, they can't take it lawfully. It hasn't sounded to me that any changes in the Government's powers are going to be too terrible. All I've heard is Ashcroft saying we need snoop warrents on people and not phones. As long as the authorization still is in the judicial branch and not the executive branch I think we're ok. The cops still need to demonstrate reasonable suspician to get a snoop warrent.
The backdoors to encryption software are another host of problems altogether. I hope, and I'm going to write some letters about this, our lawmakers will see what a silly effort this would be. I don't think the big-money special interests would allow it either, because it would be a major threat to lots of transactions that happen electronically. Like someone said earlier, all it would take is for one willing person to get this backdoor and whoosh! bank accounts start clearing all over the country.
The worst scenario is if Feinstien gets in on it and has her butt buddies over at MS write the software. We can pretty much count on it working for about 3 hours before someone cracks it and we're all running to the bank.
The terrorists will have won then.
That's a nice thought, but in my town Clear Channel owns more than half of the high power radio stations, AMFM owning the rest. The lines are blurred when there's that kind of market dominance - especially when most people aren't even aware of it. I understand their motivation here - but the amount of control they have over the distribution of culture really bothers me.
I think that'll only be the beginning of words that will be banned from use on the air by Clear Channel. Soon things will not be "amazing," but rather "double interesting," or for more emphasis, "double double interesting." News will not be "shocking," but rather "double arousing." I think you get my drift.
Do you think the terrorists had a problem with American Culture? It's nice that we're doing away with it, so we don't make anyone angry.
I agree completely that there is nothing stopping these people from writing their own encryption software. It seems that they had to come to the United States for their flight training. I don't think the same would be true for Mathematics or Computer Science - and the open nature of academia would make it nearly impossible to keep anyone with half a brain from writing good encryption software.
My only worry is that this open nature of academia, and perhaps more likely open source software, will come under attack after this tragedy. Let's hope the misinformation doesn't run too rampant.
You fools, your level of dissonance is staggering. It appears the victim blaming has begun, let us not forget that it is the terrorists that did the bad thing, not the passengers, not the government. It's human nature to try to come up with a reason why the people hurt deserved what happened to them. The did not deserve what happened to them. A terrible thing happened. Accept it, many innocent people were hurt. The did nothing to deserve it and all reasonable precautions had been taken to keep this kind of thing from happening. It's easy to say that by not allowing armed people on airplanes we were "just waiting for this to happen." But is isn't our fault. We can't protect ourselves against everything. We just can't.
I don't know how big I am on hyper-national security, but I do think it plays a role. The best way to avoid terrorism is to stop being an asshole country, but until that happens, the NSA is going to have to continue to do what it does.
I think it's funny, though, that as the agency that is supposed to be the best and brightest begins to fall behind the curve, Congress is writing laws criminalizing the act of decryption, pushing underground a very important segment of our intellectual community. The fact that the DMCA seeks to imprison people who are clever enough to break encryption means our ability to do this when it's important is going to be diminished. I'm not saying the Dmitry is the only hope for US national security, but the precedence that his case is setting paints a bleak picture for the United States. This country will fail if it continues on this course.
"Pornographic smut anywhere is undesirable, but in the local library where our children visit, is intolerable."
All other forms of smut are just fine, in fact, we encourage non-pornographic forms of smut. Ok, sorry.
But not to waste your time, I'll add my .02, whatever they may be worth in this filtered society. What good do we think we're doing with all this filtering? Do we really think our kids will be better off if we disallow some forms of thoughts, or various undesirable themes of thought? Last time I checked, it was pretty damn impossible to keep 14 year old boys from thinking about naked women all the time. I can understand how it's gross if people are in the library all the time looking at pr0n, but can't the librarian get the gist (no pun intended) of it and call the cops? What if part of one person's job was to casually walk past the computers and make sure they were being used constructively?
Ok, I know that's impossible. It raises all sorts of ethical questions blah blah blah. Including, "Is /. constructive use of a computer?"
These questions will plague us.
Good call. I just tried it and found out the hard way that it doesn't work well with the Ximian stuff. Now Evolution doesn't look right - so I removed the package aaf package - and Evolution is going really slow. I'd suggest that people hold off on this one, and as the man says, wait until it's part of the base. Unless of course you like to screw around with stuff, then go for it!
Hey, I'm an editor at boycottxp.com, we got hit hard there but we're back up now and we should stay that way. It might be a little slow at first but keep checking back as the traffic levels off. We're excited to hear what you have to say.
It isn't that big, nor is it all that impressive. You guys should see the butter heads they have at the Fair - all of the royal court, lead by "Princess Kay of the Milky Way." [the-land.com]
I know I'm a goon for saying this, but it's a pretty cool sight. I'm disappointed because there seems to be less and less of a family farming feel to the fair every year.
"No other case has gotten this amount of attention," said Matthew Jacobs, a spokesman for the United States attorney for Northern California.
Not even the OJ Simpson case? Right!!!
If this guy is with the prosecutor maybe Dmitry will be ok after all.
It isn't that big, nor is it all that impressive. You guys should see the butter heads they have at the Fair - all of the royal court, lead by "Princess Kay of the Milky Way."
I know I'm a goon for saying this, but it's a pretty cool sight. I'm disappointed because there seems to be less and less of a family farming feel to the fair every year.
I hope he has the day off on Monday - someone should sponser him and he could do this 5 times a week!
I know, how's about we all pick up and move to Canada. Let the US rot in hell as systems crash and there aren't any computer people to fix them. This law is complete BS, I can barely stand to even think about the United States Government right now, let alone the hundreds of dollars taken from my paycheck for taxes every two weeks...
Instead of soldering the chip to the motherboard, just fasten it with a piece of play-doh. Or better yet, an eraser - they're made of rubber so the static electricity can't pass through them - problem solved!
I'm buying a decent desktop today, and with this news, I'm going to go buy a couple of games for it this weekend.
It's what I can do for what sounds like a great company.
Was is Doris Day in Shawshank or someone else? I don't think it was Doris Day, she wasn't as much of a sex-object as she was a sweetheart type. Maybe I'm wrong.