1. "waste" means "not useful right now". That may not always be true, especially because some of this is only "waste" due to policy reasons. (Change the policy, and it's fuel.) 2. Lauching things into the sun is harder than you think. Yes, the sun has lots of gravity. But you'll be launching from EARTH, which is already in orbit of the sun. If you escape the Earth's gravity and don't counter the orbital speed of the planet, you'll just put the waste into a near-earth orbit. Yeah, that's a GREAT idea... 3. Our rate of success with rockets is not 100%. Some of those rockets are going to break up in the atmosphere... so instead of nice radioactives sitting in a mountain ("NOT IN MY BACKYARD!") you've got them raining down on you. Smart. 4. The price to launch that much material would be insane. We have a lot of radioactive waste, and we don't have cheap rockets. Launching this stuff into orbit would be impossible, we can't afford that. Launching it into the sun (much, much harder) is just unthinkable, financially speaking.
If you know about its flaws (Lousy SQL handling and register_globals foremost among them), it's fine. No real security problems. The problem (The reason it's got a reputation for bad security) is that many users don't know about these problems, so they don't write secure code. Stuff like:
$user=$_GET["u"]; $res=mysql_query("select data from users where userid=$user;");
(It's a SQL injection waiting to happen, what if I load this page with u="0;drop table users;"?) The rapid uptake of PHP among new programmers is probably a good deal of the reason for this. It got popular fast, and a lot of people picked it up without much or any previous programming experience, so they don't know to watch out for stuff like this.
So, as someone who has written websites in PHP, Perl, and Python (Current favorite): PHP is fine, but be careful. Make sure you know about good security practices. Get a good PHP book, try another language that does smarter DB handling (Perl and Python both do this in their standard DB libraries), or use a PHP library to help with it (I think PEAR has a DB wrapper that'd help)
Basic realities of modern computing are a threat to "online OSes". I don't want a (very) expensive dumb terminal running software never designed for creating "OSes".
Stop playing buzzword bingo with the headline, please.
The Web - HTML is a non-proprietary file format that was developed without regard for every last accessibility option in mind. Who was thinking of screen readers in 1981?
And that's complete and utter bullshit brought on by looking at too much flash. The web was designed as the PERFECT accessible format. The user specifies the fonts, the size, the colors, hell even the wrapping. Do you know how much that pisses off multimedia designer types? Hence the web we have now. HTML became PDF, and that wasn't enough so some idiot made an embeddable interactive movie plugin.
Every bit of accessibility, ruined. So yeah, the web is shit for accessibility NOW, but it was not designed like that.
As others have said, it's because NASA was very scared about the computer crashing and deciding to lower the landing gear while still in orbit. (Or simply too early in the descent) Which would be bad, because the landing gear can't be raised once lowered.
Now the obvious question is "Why didn't they just change it so they could re-raise the landing gear?" I suspect it's because the landing gear (which are located in the middle of heat shield, remember) aren't like plane landing gear. It's not "Open little door, lower wheels", it's probably more like "Fire charges to remove parts of the heat shield, deploy gear". Not a simple thing to undo.
Exactly. What did she do for that money? She had ancestors who created marketable characters. Well, great for her. You can use that fact to make small talk about yourself, but make your own damn money.
Actually, the mods have said the problem is IWF, the Internet Watch Foundation. They maintain a blocklist, and those ISPs just blindly block whatever is on the list./b/ (and other NSFW boards) got added incorrectly, and 4chan's admins haven't gotten around to filling a complaint yet.
So it's not that the ISPs are not listening, it's that: 1. They didn't decide to block/b/ on their own 2. And the people who did haven't been contacted yet.
Flash is a top priority? Ugh. That did more to turn me off of RMS than any amount of crazy ranting. Put me solidly in the "RMS is one crazy bitch" camp.
Exactly. I have, legally, all American network shows at minor difficulting (Just gotta set the time to record them) I have, illegally, nearly all american shows, movies, and bands, current and past available at just about no difficulty through the wonders of BitTorrent.
And I watch Japanese cartoon movies, British comedy television, and indie rock from a dozen countries. It won't ever be sold or shown here... The stuff I "pirate" you wouldn't sell me anyway, *AA!
That's why they're losing all this money. I have a large CD collection, and I've bought every Red Dwarf DVD you've bothered to release here. If it's quality material (and you release it in my "region"), I'll buy it. Sure, I'll probably download it first, but that's only because I've been burnt so many times before. Once I know the content is quality, I'll gladly pay for it. I won't submit to your "Pig in a poke" business model. (It's only used by people who can't live up to their marketing)
I never really saw the "danger" of this. Humanity isn't going to last forever, and this is about the best* ending we could hope for. We don't die through bombs or viruses or a big rock hitting the earth, we just stop having children... Because we're too busy having hot robot sex.
The last humans will die happy!
*Outside of "Jesus shows up and everyone goes to heaven" religious endings. But I'm not holding my breath for that, but sexbots... that's doable. (No pun intended)
No, I'm pretty sure it's the pseudoephedrine. I've tried half a dozen different allergy medications, and the only similar ingredient was pseudoephedrine. All made me too tired to do anything.
Pseudoephedrine? Are you mad? I sometimes take a med with that when my allergies are bad, and it makes me completely unable to code. Instant tiredness, and that great mental fogging that so many allergy medicines bring. I can't imagine anyone taking that for performance improvement!
Right. Nintendo never fails, they just make Great Games. No monocolor 3D consoles that make your eyes melt! No weird card-based GameBoy games! No insanely quickly degrading contacts on a silly VCR-like design!
Exactafuckingly. I'm a game designer. If I was doing this in the 80s, I would have had to have used assembly language, and I'd still be stuck on my first 2D game. Since I live in the future, I can write my games in an interpreted language in 1/100th the time. Sure, it's 100 times slower than the assembly version, but my computer is a thousand times faster.
The fact that there are so many open source, freeware, and commercial programs to choose from is a result of the relative easy of programming today. Yes, it's less efficient. But it's possible. I don't know about you, but I'll trade a dozen efficient programs that took years to make for a hundred slower programs that were made in a few months. (I say as I use firefox to access a web site running a perl-based CMS on open source web server software...)
Exactly! No one seems to get this. If we had machines to make things out of thin air, WE WOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO. The makers of Earl Grey tea would enforce their copyright and keep you from duplicating it.
If you want to see what a world with stuff-made-at-no-cost (or near zero cost, you've still got energy/bandwidth/etc), look at digital information. If I make an mp3 of my off key singings, I can effectively produce an infinite number of copies of it for just about no cost. Anyone can get their own copy for just about free... Just like your magical replicator!
Ten minutes after replicators were invented, there would by a p2p network sharing "pirated" objects. Twenty minutes after that, it would be illegal to copy your objects. There goes the replicator...
Parent have accepted that there is merit to movies. Video Games are still in the same area as comic books (Clearly aimed at kids, even if they have an adult market), so they had to be rated more strictly. (Because even though the average age for gamers is somewhere in the low 20s, games are for kids. Period.)
But can you actually select text? Block-select is an abomination. What, do they think we use CMD.exe for ascii art? I WOULD LIKE TO SELECT SEQUENTIAL TEXT PLEASE, MICROSOFT.
I think you've found the way patents can be used for good. Come up with a crap idea, patent it, and you prevent anyone from ever using that stupid idea again!/All for patents if it means we never get another Bush, McNuggets, or Seinfeld.
I've always thought that if we every meet an alien race, they'll find our sexuality the most hilarious thing ever. "They do WHAT? and draw pictures of... REALLY!?"
It just means that if you can't find stuff like this funny, you're too damn human:)
Slashdot Mirror
Like people who need to use non-tiny hard drives.
(Being able to access less than half of my new 300gb drive is FUN!)
1. "waste" means "not useful right now". That may not always be true, especially because some of this is only "waste" due to policy reasons. (Change the policy, and it's fuel.)
2. Lauching things into the sun is harder than you think. Yes, the sun has lots of gravity. But you'll be launching from EARTH, which is already in orbit of the sun. If you escape the Earth's gravity and don't counter the orbital speed of the planet, you'll just put the waste into a near-earth orbit. Yeah, that's a GREAT idea...
3. Our rate of success with rockets is not 100%. Some of those rockets are going to break up in the atmosphere... so instead of nice radioactives sitting in a mountain ("NOT IN MY BACKYARD!") you've got them raining down on you. Smart.
4. The price to launch that much material would be insane. We have a lot of radioactive waste, and we don't have cheap rockets. Launching this stuff into orbit would be impossible, we can't afford that.
Launching it into the sun (much, much harder) is just unthinkable, financially speaking.
If you know about its flaws (Lousy SQL handling and register_globals foremost among them), it's fine. No real security problems.
The problem (The reason it's got a reputation for bad security) is that many users don't know about these problems, so they don't write secure code. Stuff like:
$user=$_GET["u"];
$res=mysql_query("select data from users where userid=$user;");
(It's a SQL injection waiting to happen, what if I load this page with u="0;drop table users;"?)
The rapid uptake of PHP among new programmers is probably a good deal of the reason for this. It got popular fast, and a lot of people picked it up without much or any previous programming experience, so they don't know to watch out for stuff like this.
So, as someone who has written websites in PHP, Perl, and Python (Current favorite):
PHP is fine, but be careful. Make sure you know about good security practices. Get a good PHP book, try another language that does smarter DB handling (Perl and Python both do this in their standard DB libraries), or use a PHP library to help with it (I think PEAR has a DB wrapper that'd help)
It's not officially weird until there is an iPod vibrator.
And there should be an iPod vibrator. Japan, get your head in the game!
Basic realities of modern computing are a threat to "online OSes".
I don't want a (very) expensive dumb terminal running software never designed for creating "OSes".
Stop playing buzzword bingo with the headline, please.
Obscure? on SLASHDOT?
That's like considering Judas to be "a little obscure" on a bible-chat site.
And that's complete and utter bullshit brought on by looking at too much flash.
The web was designed as the PERFECT accessible format. The user specifies the fonts, the size, the colors, hell even the wrapping.
Do you know how much that pisses off multimedia designer types? Hence the web we have now. HTML became PDF, and that wasn't enough so some idiot made an embeddable interactive movie plugin.
Every bit of accessibility, ruined. So yeah, the web is shit for accessibility NOW, but it was not designed like that.
As others have said, it's because NASA was very scared about the computer crashing and deciding to lower the landing gear while still in orbit. (Or simply too early in the descent)
Which would be bad, because the landing gear can't be raised once lowered.
Now the obvious question is "Why didn't they just change it so they could re-raise the landing gear?"
I suspect it's because the landing gear (which are located in the middle of heat shield, remember) aren't like plane landing gear. It's not "Open little door, lower wheels", it's probably more like "Fire charges to remove parts of the heat shield, deploy gear". Not a simple thing to undo.
Flash games.
Solitaire.
Minesweeper.
Exactly. What did she do for that money?
She had ancestors who created marketable characters. Well, great for her.
You can use that fact to make small talk about yourself, but make your own damn money.
Actually, the mods have said the problem is IWF, the Internet Watch Foundation. They maintain a blocklist, and those ISPs just blindly block whatever is on the list. /b/ (and other NSFW boards) got added incorrectly, and 4chan's admins haven't gotten around to filling a complaint yet.
/b/ on their own
So it's not that the ISPs are not listening, it's that:
1. They didn't decide to block
2. And the people who did haven't been contacted yet.
Flash is a top priority?
Ugh. That did more to turn me off of RMS than any amount of crazy ranting.
Put me solidly in the "RMS is one crazy bitch" camp.
Exactly. I have, legally, all American network shows at minor difficulting (Just gotta set the time to record them)
I have, illegally, nearly all american shows, movies, and bands, current and past available at just about no difficulty through the wonders of BitTorrent.
And I watch Japanese cartoon movies, British comedy television, and indie rock from a dozen countries. It won't ever be sold or shown here...
The stuff I "pirate" you wouldn't sell me anyway, *AA!
That's why they're losing all this money. I have a large CD collection, and I've bought every Red Dwarf DVD you've bothered to release here. If it's quality material (and you release it in my "region"), I'll buy it. Sure, I'll probably download it first, but that's only because I've been burnt so many times before.
Once I know the content is quality, I'll gladly pay for it. I won't submit to your "Pig in a poke" business model. (It's only used by people who can't live up to their marketing)
I never really saw the "danger" of this. Humanity isn't going to last forever, and this is about the best* ending we could hope for. We don't die through bombs or viruses or a big rock hitting the earth, we just stop having children...
Because we're too busy having hot robot sex.
The last humans will die happy!
*Outside of "Jesus shows up and everyone goes to heaven" religious endings. But I'm not holding my breath for that, but sexbots... that's doable. (No pun intended)
No, I'm pretty sure it's the pseudoephedrine. I've tried half a dozen different allergy medications, and the only similar ingredient was pseudoephedrine. All made me too tired to do anything.
Pseudoephedrine? Are you mad? I sometimes take a med with that when my allergies are bad, and it makes me completely unable to code.
Instant tiredness, and that great mental fogging that so many allergy medicines bring. I can't imagine anyone taking that for performance improvement!
Right. Nintendo never fails, they just make Great Games.
No monocolor 3D consoles that make your eyes melt!
No weird card-based GameBoy games!
No insanely quickly degrading contacts on a silly VCR-like design!
I have a right to not sneeze at your cat!
Especially while online! I don't want to have to clean my monitor...
You sir, win the internets.
Now where are mod points when I need them?
Exactafuckingly. I'm a game designer. If I was doing this in the 80s, I would have had to have used assembly language, and I'd still be stuck on my first 2D game.
Since I live in the future, I can write my games in an interpreted language in 1/100th the time.
Sure, it's 100 times slower than the assembly version, but my computer is a thousand times faster.
The fact that there are so many open source, freeware, and commercial programs to choose from is a result of the relative easy of programming today. Yes, it's less efficient. But it's possible.
I don't know about you, but I'll trade a dozen efficient programs that took years to make for a hundred slower programs that were made in a few months. (I say as I use firefox to access a web site running a perl-based CMS on open source web server software...)
Exactly! No one seems to get this.
If we had machines to make things out of thin air, WE WOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO.
The makers of Earl Grey tea would enforce their copyright and keep you from duplicating it.
If you want to see what a world with stuff-made-at-no-cost (or near zero cost, you've still got energy/bandwidth/etc), look at digital information. If I make an mp3 of my off key singings, I can effectively produce an infinite number of copies of it for just about no cost. Anyone can get their own copy for just about free... Just like your magical replicator!
Ten minutes after replicators were invented, there would by a p2p network sharing "pirated" objects. Twenty minutes after that, it would be illegal to copy your objects. There goes the replicator...
Parent have accepted that there is merit to movies.
Video Games are still in the same area as comic books (Clearly aimed at kids, even if they have an adult market), so they had to be rated more strictly. (Because even though the average age for gamers is somewhere in the low 20s, games are for kids. Period.)
But can you actually select text?
Block-select is an abomination. What, do they think we use CMD.exe for ascii art? I WOULD LIKE TO SELECT SEQUENTIAL TEXT PLEASE, MICROSOFT.
I think you've found the way patents can be used for good. Come up with a crap idea, patent it, and you prevent anyone from ever using that stupid idea again! /All for patents if it means we never get another Bush, McNuggets, or Seinfeld.
I've always thought that if we every meet an alien race, they'll find our sexuality the most hilarious thing ever. "They do WHAT? and draw pictures of ... REALLY!?"
:)
It just means that if you can't find stuff like this funny, you're too damn human