Plus we've got the Big Dig, which despite its infamy for budget overruns, corruption, and defacement of the city landscape, is also home to some incredibly geeky marvels of engineering!
And, if you do manage to get here by September, you might be able to get on a Big Dig Tour, and see the tunnel and bridge close up before they let the cars on the southbound portion. It's a lot of fun - I just did one. Bring a camera and some high-speed film.
And, while you're in Boston, you can see America's First Subway, the T.
The MIT museum in Boston. I forget the exact location,
I don't - it's right outside my window:-)
265 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA
http://web.mit.edu/museum/
And while you're at it, come walk around the MIT campus. I hear tell there's also some kind of finishing school farther up Massachusetts Ave, but it's not really worth visiting.
$69.95 for some software that'll only be used once?
Yes. Well worth it too. I've used my copy hundreds of times to do restores, resize partitions when I ran out of space, etc. It's not _just_ for installing Linux.
Wow, I thought it was possible to install Linux for free.
It is. Go wipe your drive and install Linux. What's stopping you? Installing and running Linux is, and will always be, free. Making it work alongside Windows, without blowing data away, is another story.
Re:on second thought, pass the lead gloves please.
on
United Nuclear
·
· Score: 1
Are they the ones that say you can
hide from an H-Bomb by crouching under your school desk?
See, everyone loves to bring this up but no one stops to think about it. "Duck and cover" was never supposed to protect you from radiation. No one ever thought that you could "hide" from an H-bomb. People knew that radiation would penetrate most things, and that the only useful place to be that was potentially safe was deep underground. And, in fact, if your school had a fallout shelter, you went there instead of crouching under your desk.
"Duck and cover" was designed to prevent you from getting maimed or killed by shrapnel, flying glass, and the like. Yes, if you're too close to the blast, you lose anyway, however a large number of deaths in an atomic bomb blast result from shrapnel, burns (from the heat), the pressure wave, etc. Crouching under your desk will help minimize some of that damage to your vital organs (again, if you're far enough from the blast to not get vaporized)
The article is all well and good, and I'm glad to see that someone's finally doing objective, detailed studies of this, rather than banning devices indiscriminately.
However, I'd like to see some sort of official ruling stating exactly which devices can and can't be operated at certain points during the flight. Ideally, this would apply internationally, too (though I'm not sure how that would be regulated, since the FAA has little jurisdiction internationally). I find extremely frustrating when one airline says a device is ok, and another does not. For example, I brough my portable CD player on a flight (a 13 hour flight) and was told I could not use it, because it would interfere with the aircraft's systems. This was on a relatively new 747-400. This was rather annoying, since on the same type of aircraft, 6 months prior to this, a different airline specifically said portable CD players (and tape players, etc) were ok.
Ideally, the FCC, or UL, or some organization could put a little marking on the back of any electronic device to designate whether or not it is acceptable to use during flight. For example, it could be a letter system where "A" indicates that it may never be used (ie: tesla coil); "B" indicates it may be used at any time (digital watch/PDA), "C" indicate it may be used except during takeoff/landing (ie: walkman). Then, instead of having to explain to the stewardess that your PDA does not transmit any RF signals, they could simply look at the back, see the letter "C", and go on their way.
Inconsistency in general (security checkpoints (before the TSA), airline policies, etc) is one of the most frustrating things to me as an airline traveler, and a policy like this could help solve the problem of being able to use my Palm Pilot on one airline, but not other.
I travel a lot and would love a cheap international dialup account. No frills, just a connection. With yahoo, hotmail, VPN, web access to corporate email I do not
need webspace or an email account. Now, If I could find a way to bypass those annoying hotel sur-charges for phone calls.
You want iPass. Our company just signed up with them. It's pay as you go (so you don't waste money each month if you're not traveling). You do still get stuck with the hotel charges for local calls, but more and more hotels are using flat rates (ie: $0.25 per local call), and iPass has local access numbers almost everywhere. It beats fumbling with your dialer software and making it put pauses in the right place to dial your calling card number. The pay-as-you-go thing isn't bad, since the primary usage will be for checking e-mail, which, if your client is smart enough, you can do offline, with one call to send/receive all your queued messages. However, it's not designed to be your full-time ISP - it would cost too much - it's mainly for people traveling who have broadband at home, and need connectivity on the go.
"at the moment" is the key phrase in the comment title. Safari is quickly catching up to Mozilla (for the browser part only, obviously Safari doesn't have a mail client). It's certainly much faster than Mozilla on OS X (Jaguar). Yeah, there's lots of stuff Mozilla has that Safari doesn't, but Safari's been out in non-beta form for several weeks at the most, and in beta form for less than a year. Mozilla has been around for quite some time. I wouldn't be surprised if Safari catches up to Mozilla very soon.
The signal that causes the phone to ring is ~90VAC. With older phones - the big Bakelite ones you got from The Phone Company(TM) - it was possible to hook the tip and ring lines up to 110VAC and make the phone ring. I did this several times when doing sound for a theater production. Another amusing thing is to hook them up through a dimmer switch. As you turn up the dimmer, you can make the speed of the ringing vary. It's worth noting this only works for phones that have actual bells in them.
But, I digress. Anyway, the ring signal is ~90VAC, so I'd imagine that if the power cord for the laptop somehow got shorted to the phone jack, that would cause the phone to ring.
If you don't know what a gigabyte is, it's hard to know how large of a hard drive you need.
That won't necessarily help you, because companies can't agree on what a gigabyte is. If you take the word at face value, it should be one billion bytes. However, most geeks know that it's 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30), or 1024MB. And companies use both interpretations when advertising their product. And then there are the instruction manuals which claim that 1GB = 1000MB, which just makes things worse.
The problem is that the terms are just plain wrong. Yes, I know as well as the next person that 1KB = 1024 bytes, but really "kilo-" means 1000. You can debate this all you like, and talk about the "binary prefixes" where kilo = 2^10, and mega = 2^20, but sorry, the Greeks were here long before the geeks, so they get to decide:-)
Of course, I'm not naive enough to think that these broken terms will change, however if you want to blame someone for the public's confusion about units of data capacity, go blame the lazy geek who decided "enh, 1024 is close enough to 1000, I'll just use kilo- for the prefix."
OK, we've had our conspiracy theory jokes, and enough has been said about microwaving the RFID tags.
Now, if you're actually upset about this, take 5 minutes and drop them an e-mail, or better yet, send them a letter (like, on real paper). Or call them. There's several feedback addresses and mailing addresses. That's what I'm going to do. Don't think "oh, 50 other people are writing, I don't need to", because those 50 other people are thinking the same thing.
Politicians don't read slashdot. Hundreds of +1, Insightful posts don't mean anything in the long run, but if a politician receives several hundred letters telling him why this is a bad idea, he might just give it a second thought. Heck, call your local news program if you want. If it's a slow day, (or if it's FOX News) I bet they might be interested...
I'm not justifying the newspaper's stance, but consider this: How much of your spam is porn (or, "stuff kids don't need to see", to include the Viagra, russian brides, and breast enlargement stuff)? In my case, quite a bit. In fact, now that the mini-RC car and Iraqi playing card crazes have died down, I'd say about 70% of the spam I receive is of an adult nature. And of that 70%, at least 50% has a subject line that gives no indication of this (ie: "Missed you last Tuesday", "Fred gave me your e-mail"). And if I had kids, you can be damn sure I'd be upset about it.
Now, if I were a parent, I'm clueful enough to know that a e-mail from "Candi", with the subject line "Forgot your IM?", and pictures of naked chicks attached does not mean that my kid has been soliciting sex online. But a lot of folks don't understand that. So the situation described in the article is not that far-fetched. (Again, I'm not justifying it.)
On a related note, I think "adult" (porn) spam will get worse before it gets better. Why? Because I'm willing to bet it's the product that gets the highest response rate. Mortgages/loans? Even Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel knows that you get a loan from a bank, not from joe@spammer.com, who advertises with the professional subject line "Reduce your rate by 5pct ashdjkas zhgyaia qhuiehi". Pyrmaid Schemes? OK, grandma who just got a new e-mail account and gets screwed by Publisher's Clearing House anyway might participate, but not that many other people. The other products? Who's going to by a mini-RC car from some guy online, when you can get them cheaper at the local toy store? How many people are clamoring for the "Banned CD" from the guy who "is contributing to the moral decay of society"? With the exception of the adult goods & services, everything else can be purchased at a brick & mortar store. The viagra and other stuff lends itself to the faceless environment of the Internet, and before too long, I think you'll see that it will be the only thing they're selling.
Is it possible that most people don't give a shit about encrypting their e-mail because the contents of their e-mail are so inane and you can't trust the intervening
steps?
It's not the e-mail that's the problem. It's the fact that your password is sent unencrypted (with a few notable exceptions). And, a large portion of the time, I'd bet your password for the POP3 server is the same as that for a shell account with that ISP. Or FTP access to your web publishing directories. Or, if you're really stupid, it's the same as your online banking password.
My ass. This is the opposite of the Turning Test, and has so little to do with it that it shouldn't have even been mentioned. Just some dumb ass reporter trying to appear erudite.
Uhh.....
This has plenty to do with the Turing test, as we talk about it today. True, Turing's original test was designed to see whether a computer has intelligence. However, "Turing Test", as used today, refers to being able to differentiate a computer (or other artificial intelligence) from a human being. (Traditionally, it is described as a person, connected by terminal to two other entities, one of whom is person, the other is a computer. The first person has to determine which is which.)
As such, this has plenty to do with the Turing Test. Your are correct that it is the "opposite" of how we usually think about, in that the computer has to determine whether the person on the other end is a human or not (as opposed to a human telling whether or not it's a computer), but it certainly has plenty to do with it.
Technology is still the best hope for killing spam.
See, I keep hearing this. Along with cries of "SMTP is old and outdated, we need something better". And really, that's just passing the buck.
Sure, SMTP is old. And it may very well be outdated. But you can't claim that replacing SMTP is the only way to solve the spam problem. SMTP is not the problem - Poorly implemented SMTP installations are the problem. Open relays are the problem. Poke through your inbox and see how much of your spam goes through open relays. Just imagine how much spam (if any) you'd receive if there were no open relays anywhere in the world. I think it would be at least 10% of the amount we receive today.
Sure, an ideal solution would be no spam at all. But really, I think, if all open relays were gone, it might just push spammers into the red. Their miniscule response rates will disappear once they find that there's no way to contact all these people without a) using their ISP's mail server, which will get them cut off after the first try; or b) exposing their true identity, which will get their genitalia cut off after the first try.
Does SMTP need to be replaced? Perhaps. It's old, sure, but so is TCP/IP. So is Ethernet. But claiming that replacing SMTP is the only way to solve the spam problem is wrong.
But are things like iTunes store the future, or is it streaming?
That's not a useful comparison. That's like saying "Is Stop & Shop (a supermarket, for those of you outside the northeast) the future, or is it farmstands on the side of the road?".
They serve two different markets. Streaming is totally different from purchasing a song and burning it to CD. Also, I believe MP3.com did not cost money. So if you're talking in the short term, yes, for-profit business are the future compared to those losing money. However, comparing free streaming to the iTunes music store is like apples and oranges.
Going about it the way they are would be like leaving the door to my house or car wide open and then getting mad when someone comes in and looks around.
Uh, that is trespassing. You should get mad if someone does that. (well, I don't know about the car, but it certainly applies to the house). There's a difference between trespassing and breaking-and-entering. Even if there's no fences or locks or doors, it's still trespassing.
A better analogy would be you putting a fence around your yard, with a big sign that says no trespassing, and then getting upset when the mailman opens your gate, walks up to your front door, and puts a letter in the mail slot. That's what Intel was trying to argue, and rightly, they were told to get bent. Now, if it's not the mailman, but Alan Ralsky walking up your path with a 55 gallon drum full of penis enlargment pills, then that will (hopefully) be a different story.
...whats the problem? Other than sheer annoyance that is.
That's precisely the problem. The "it doesn't cost you anything" argument is just the same as the "just hit delete" argument that e-mail spammers give. Annoyance shouldn't be permitted simply because it's free. It doesn't cost you anything to receive crank phone calls on your land line. But that's still illegal.
Are people
having a huge problem with SMS spam yet, or is this sort of action more pre-emptive?
Who cares? It's still a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it seems that in today's society we often have to wait until something is already a serious problem before doing anything about it. Yay Australia for taking this step.
Sounds like it's time to send in the federal investigators.
Right, because federal investigators have a great track record of setting software companies straight and preventing them from screwing the consumers. Just look at how they punished Microsoft for the anti-trust violations.
What? They didn't?
Oh, well, uh, just look at all the evidence they managed to obtain against Enron before it was shredded and....
Um, this virus does not require the IE hole to spread. Having the IE hole certainly helps it to spread, but patching the hole won't kill the spread of this virus. All it requires is a client that is stupid about downloading and executing attachments. Or a user that does the same thing. I know of at least 3 people who use Eudora who got infected by this.
Slashdot Mirror
And, if you do manage to get here by September, you might be able to get on a Big Dig Tour, and see the tunnel and bridge close up before they let the cars on the southbound portion. It's a lot of fun - I just did one. Bring a camera and some high-speed film.
And, while you're in Boston, you can see America's First Subway, the T.
I don't - it's right outside my window :-)
265 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA
http://web.mit.edu/museum/
And while you're at it, come walk around the MIT campus. I hear tell there's also some kind of finishing school farther up Massachusetts Ave, but it's not really worth visiting.
Yes. Well worth it too. I've used my copy hundreds of times to do restores, resize partitions when I ran out of space, etc. It's not _just_ for installing Linux.
Wow, I thought it was possible to install Linux for free.
It is. Go wipe your drive and install Linux. What's stopping you? Installing and running Linux is, and will always be, free. Making it work alongside Windows, without blowing data away, is another story.
See, everyone loves to bring this up but no one stops to think about it. "Duck and cover" was never supposed to protect you from radiation. No one ever thought that you could "hide" from an H-bomb. People knew that radiation would penetrate most things, and that the only useful place to be that was potentially safe was deep underground. And, in fact, if your school had a fallout shelter, you went there instead of crouching under your desk.
"Duck and cover" was designed to prevent you from getting maimed or killed by shrapnel, flying glass, and the like. Yes, if you're too close to the blast, you lose anyway, however a large number of deaths in an atomic bomb blast result from shrapnel, burns (from the heat), the pressure wave, etc. Crouching under your desk will help minimize some of that damage to your vital organs (again, if you're far enough from the blast to not get vaporized)
However, I'd like to see some sort of official ruling stating exactly which devices can and can't be operated at certain points during the flight. Ideally, this would apply internationally, too (though I'm not sure how that would be regulated, since the FAA has little jurisdiction internationally). I find extremely frustrating when one airline says a device is ok, and another does not. For example, I brough my portable CD player on a flight (a 13 hour flight) and was told I could not use it, because it would interfere with the aircraft's systems. This was on a relatively new 747-400. This was rather annoying, since on the same type of aircraft, 6 months prior to this, a different airline specifically said portable CD players (and tape players, etc) were ok.
Ideally, the FCC, or UL, or some organization could put a little marking on the back of any electronic device to designate whether or not it is acceptable to use during flight. For example, it could be a letter system where "A" indicates that it may never be used (ie: tesla coil); "B" indicates it may be used at any time (digital watch/PDA), "C" indicate it may be used except during takeoff/landing (ie: walkman). Then, instead of having to explain to the stewardess that your PDA does not transmit any RF signals, they could simply look at the back, see the letter "C", and go on their way.
Inconsistency in general (security checkpoints (before the TSA), airline policies, etc) is one of the most frustrating things to me as an airline traveler, and a policy like this could help solve the problem of being able to use my Palm Pilot on one airline, but not other.
You want iPass. Our company just signed up with them. It's pay as you go (so you don't waste money each month if you're not traveling). You do still get stuck with the hotel charges for local calls, but more and more hotels are using flat rates (ie: $0.25 per local call), and iPass has local access numbers almost everywhere. It beats fumbling with your dialer software and making it put pauses in the right place to dial your calling card number. The pay-as-you-go thing isn't bad, since the primary usage will be for checking e-mail, which, if your client is smart enough, you can do offline, with one call to send/receive all your queued messages. However, it's not designed to be your full-time ISP - it would cost too much - it's mainly for people traveling who have broadband at home, and need connectivity on the go.
That sounds like a CowboyNeal poll option.
What OS should a Segway robot run?
Where's the light-cycle racing program?
"at the moment" is the key phrase in the comment title. Safari is quickly catching up to Mozilla (for the browser part only, obviously Safari doesn't have a mail client). It's certainly much faster than Mozilla on OS X (Jaguar). Yeah, there's lots of stuff Mozilla has that Safari doesn't, but Safari's been out in non-beta form for several weeks at the most, and in beta form for less than a year. Mozilla has been around for quite some time. I wouldn't be surprised if Safari catches up to Mozilla very soon.
But, I digress. Anyway, the ring signal is ~90VAC, so I'd imagine that if the power cord for the laptop somehow got shorted to the phone jack, that would cause the phone to ring.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/07/09/beamed.ba rcodes.ap/index.html
One of the choice quotes from the National Grocer's Association:
"You do give up a bit of privacy but the benefit could be that you live"
That won't necessarily help you, because companies can't agree on what a gigabyte is. If you take the word at face value, it should be one billion bytes. However, most geeks know that it's 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30), or 1024MB. And companies use both interpretations when advertising their product. And then there are the instruction manuals which claim that 1GB = 1000MB, which just makes things worse.
The problem is that the terms are just plain wrong. Yes, I know as well as the next person that 1KB = 1024 bytes, but really "kilo-" means 1000. You can debate this all you like, and talk about the "binary prefixes" where kilo = 2^10, and mega = 2^20, but sorry, the Greeks were here long before the geeks, so they get to decide :-)
Of course, I'm not naive enough to think that these broken terms will change, however if you want to blame someone for the public's confusion about units of data capacity, go blame the lazy geek who decided "enh, 1024 is close enough to 1000, I'll just use kilo- for the prefix."
Now, if you're actually upset about this, take 5 minutes and drop them an e-mail, or better yet, send them a letter (like, on real paper). Or call them. There's several feedback addresses and mailing addresses. That's what I'm going to do. Don't think "oh, 50 other people are writing, I don't need to", because those 50 other people are thinking the same thing.
Politicians don't read slashdot. Hundreds of +1, Insightful posts don't mean anything in the long run, but if a politician receives several hundred letters telling him why this is a bad idea, he might just give it a second thought. Heck, call your local news program if you want. If it's a slow day, (or if it's FOX News) I bet they might be interested...
Now, if I were a parent, I'm clueful enough to know that a e-mail from "Candi", with the subject line "Forgot your IM?", and pictures of naked chicks attached does not mean that my kid has been soliciting sex online. But a lot of folks don't understand that. So the situation described in the article is not that far-fetched. (Again, I'm not justifying it.)
On a related note, I think "adult" (porn) spam will get worse before it gets better. Why? Because I'm willing to bet it's the product that gets the highest response rate. Mortgages/loans? Even Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel knows that you get a loan from a bank, not from joe@spammer.com, who advertises with the professional subject line "Reduce your rate by 5pct ashdjkas zhgyaia qhuiehi". Pyrmaid Schemes? OK, grandma who just got a new e-mail account and gets screwed by Publisher's Clearing House anyway might participate, but not that many other people. The other products? Who's going to by a mini-RC car from some guy online, when you can get them cheaper at the local toy store? How many people are clamoring for the "Banned CD" from the guy who "is contributing to the moral decay of society"? With the exception of the adult goods & services, everything else can be purchased at a brick & mortar store. The viagra and other stuff lends itself to the faceless environment of the Internet, and before too long, I think you'll see that it will be the only thing they're selling.
It's not the e-mail that's the problem. It's the fact that your password is sent unencrypted (with a few notable exceptions). And, a large portion of the time, I'd bet your password for the POP3 server is the same as that for a shell account with that ISP. Or FTP access to your web publishing directories. Or, if you're really stupid, it's the same as your online banking password.
Uhh.....
This has plenty to do with the Turing test, as we talk about it today. True, Turing's original test was designed to see whether a computer has intelligence. However, "Turing Test", as used today, refers to being able to differentiate a computer (or other artificial intelligence) from a human being. (Traditionally, it is described as a person, connected by terminal to two other entities, one of whom is person, the other is a computer. The first person has to determine which is which.)
As such, this has plenty to do with the Turing Test. Your are correct that it is the "opposite" of how we usually think about, in that the computer has to determine whether the person on the other end is a human or not (as opposed to a human telling whether or not it's a computer), but it certainly has plenty to do with it.
See, I keep hearing this. Along with cries of "SMTP is old and outdated, we need something better". And really, that's just passing the buck.
Sure, SMTP is old. And it may very well be outdated. But you can't claim that replacing SMTP is the only way to solve the spam problem. SMTP is not the problem - Poorly implemented SMTP installations are the problem. Open relays are the problem. Poke through your inbox and see how much of your spam goes through open relays. Just imagine how much spam (if any) you'd receive if there were no open relays anywhere in the world. I think it would be at least 10% of the amount we receive today.
Sure, an ideal solution would be no spam at all. But really, I think, if all open relays were gone, it might just push spammers into the red. Their miniscule response rates will disappear once they find that there's no way to contact all these people without a) using their ISP's mail server, which will get them cut off after the first try; or b) exposing their true identity, which will get their genitalia cut off after the first try.
Does SMTP need to be replaced? Perhaps. It's old, sure, but so is TCP/IP. So is Ethernet. But claiming that replacing SMTP is the only way to solve the spam problem is wrong.
That's not a useful comparison. That's like saying "Is Stop & Shop (a supermarket, for those of you outside the northeast) the future, or is it farmstands on the side of the road?".
They serve two different markets. Streaming is totally different from purchasing a song and burning it to CD. Also, I believe MP3.com did not cost money. So if you're talking in the short term, yes, for-profit business are the future compared to those losing money. However, comparing free streaming to the iTunes music store is like apples and oranges.
Uh, that is trespassing. You should get mad if someone does that. (well, I don't know about the car, but it certainly applies to the house). There's a difference between trespassing and breaking-and-entering. Even if there's no fences or locks or doors, it's still trespassing.
A better analogy would be you putting a fence around your yard, with a big sign that says no trespassing, and then getting upset when the mailman opens your gate, walks up to your front door, and puts a letter in the mail slot. That's what Intel was trying to argue, and rightly, they were told to get bent. Now, if it's not the mailman, but Alan Ralsky walking up your path with a 55 gallon drum full of penis enlargment pills, then that will (hopefully) be a different story.
Donbot: "File not found".
Clamps and Joey Mouspad shoot the robot full of holes.
Donbot: "Let that be a lesson to ya."
Robot: "Thank you Donbot".
That's precisely the problem. The "it doesn't cost you anything" argument is just the same as the "just hit delete" argument that e-mail spammers give. Annoyance shouldn't be permitted simply because it's free. It doesn't cost you anything to receive crank phone calls on your land line. But that's still illegal.
Who cares? It's still a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it seems that in today's society we often have to wait until something is already a serious problem before doing anything about it. Yay Australia for taking this step.
You know, like movies. As in "it's a UNIX system - I know this", when actually referring to something that bears no resemblance to UNIX.
Right, because federal investigators have a great track record of setting software companies straight and preventing them from screwing the consumers. Just look at how they punished Microsoft for the anti-trust violations.
What? They didn't?
Oh, well, uh, just look at all the evidence they managed to obtain against Enron before it was shredded and....
Oh, really? Oh, uh, hrm....
Um, this virus does not require the IE hole to spread. Having the IE hole certainly helps it to spread, but patching the hole won't kill the spread of this virus. All it requires is a client that is stupid about downloading and executing attachments. Or a user that does the same thing. I know of at least 3 people who use Eudora who got infected by this.