A real gun at a plane. You've gotta give me a break. Did you read the article about the lazer featured here on Slashdot.
First, a real gun simply wouldn't have the range. The guns that would have the range would probably fall into the same catagory as fully automatic weapons which are all carfully registered by the governemnt.
If a gun does pierce a plane and sends it to the groud. The FAA can analyize whatever is left (casing that haven't melted, the blast pattern on the plane) and use it as evidence.
What evidence is left over from a lazer? Nothing. You heat up the fuel tanks on the wings, they catch fire (they probably won't explode as Diesel doesn't tend to explode unlike in the movie Die Hard), but it will still take the plane down.
Do I think citizens need to be able to own semi-automatic AR-15s? No, and I don't believe anyone should be allowed to posess a lazer as dangerous as this one without at least having a firearms permit and full background check (if at all!)
This is astatine. Why in a technological age when we have so much control over protocols that we degrade ourselves to securing rooms by physical means. It's as retarded as wearing a tinfoil hat.
Instead of blocking 802.11b/g frequencies with wall paint (along with cell-phones, radios and key-less car remotes) can't we use what's in place? You can design a router to restrict traffic based on hardware MAC address and design your DHCP servers to assign by MAC address. Create some scripts to synchronize your routing tables and DHCP configuration file with a single database, and you have a system to secure your wireless network.
You can also use the WEP encryption, and if you're still uneasy about that with all the recent white papers that mention how to break it, make all your intranet servers with private information only accessible to the wireless subnets using secure protocols (https, imaps, pop3s, etc.)
It's simpler, uses technology versus a metaphorical metal wall and cost a ton less.
The Cost of Movies and the Economy of Internet Bandwidth
Originally there was Napster and people shared music. The music industry put a stop to that, so then we got all the Gnutella clients (Bearshare, Kazza, Limewire, etc.) which broadcast searches and requests all around the Internet wasting insane amounts of bandwidth. Although new versions of the gnutella protocol minimize the wasted bandwidth, it's still pretty bad and now the industries are going after individual users who share media.
Bittorrent was never designed as a file sharing protocol, but websites like supronova.org helped pave the way for it. Bittorrent is efficient and semi-anonymous (you can never tell who the original uploaded is and you'd have to design systems to keep extensive logs in order to prosecute one person for sharing massive amounts of stuff).
Now with bittorrent sites being shut down, we're likely to see a combination of the two (i.e. distributing torrents and trackers via a gnutella style P2P network). In other words, the MPAA and RIAA are going to be responsible for people making more inefficient, bandwidth wasting protocols.
In light of all of this, think about where the money is going. Why the fuck should the movie industry care? Their actors get paid in the millions for a year or two of work. Acting is not work and to be honest, many of the actors at the playhouse at my university can do just as good a job as some of these big names. It's ridiculous how much they get paid for Acting!.
The movie industry are a bunch of money grubbing whores. We measure a movie's success in how much money it makes, however ticket prices keep going up! There's no way a modern movie can compete with the classics when movies were a dollar for new releases. I truly wish movie success rates were based on ticket sales and not on how much money they make.
Instead of shutting down sharing sites for poor college students who love movies, how about paying the actors a reasonable amount, distributing more money to the pre-production effects crews and camera-men and then reducing ticket prices back to $3 ~ $5.
I always use bob@bob.bob Since bob isn't a real TLD, it really shouldn't matter. A few websites actually verify TLDs, so for those I change the.bob to.com. Ocasionally I'll get a message saying bob@bob.bob is all ready taken and then I realize I've registered for the site before, but I just forgot my password.
Deordant. What is the deal with some nerds who take like four showers a day and still smell bad? They don't believe in deordant! Dude, no matter how much you shower, you still freakin need it.
For real! Who would make a better knight? A thin, nerdy guy who talks like Kermit the Frog, or a huge buff Swedish dude who could take on a horde of vicious penguins!
If Bill and Linnus ever got in a fight, my bets would be on Linnus kicking Bill's ass.
The Computer Scientist in me hopes they had lots of full and detailed documentation from the original Saturn V program, so if they do go at this again, at least they'll have all their predecessors notes to help them out.
I agree totally. My fatehr works for TVA Nuclear and they are very safe. What happened Chernobyl can't happen in the US, nor could it at that time. In the US, no one man can remove all the rod from a ractor tank, and even if he were able to, they are buit in mechnical and computer failsafes that will keep the reactor from melting down.
As far as the waste, what isn't but underground in the destert is kept on site. That's right. Most necular waste is stored at the plant. Most if it is actually reusable, if it wasn't for the damn necular arms treaty which bans the process of refining and reusing it.
Most of the toxic waste doesn't come from the process or after it, but before it. Uranium is mined using direct water injection, which can cause spillage in brining the raw ore to the surface.
SumDog
Re:Um, what about the Military Shuttle Fleet?
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 1
I like your explination. I wish it wasn't so, being the nerd that I am and my hopes for the space program, but I'd have to agree. It scares me that people think Bush has done a good job. I really hope we out number those people come election time.
Here is a better question: should windows update even be run through a browser? No! Windows Update should be a completely standalone program. It has no business even being done through a web browser.
Let's look at the other operating systems. Redhat uses rpm/yum/up2date which are all command line with a couple of gtk front-ends you don't need to use. Debain used apt. Gentoo uses emerge/portage. Not sure about OSX, but I'm willing to be that it's update tool isn't connected to Safari.
Binding the update tool to the web browser seems to be one of those ploys Microsoft started years back to try to prove IE was essential to their operating system and couldn't be removed. Bad design dictated by bad politics. Here is a better question: should windows update even be run through a browser? No! Windows Update should be a completely standalone program. It has no business even being done through a web browser.
Re:Now if only a galeon 1.2.x worked with it....
on
Mozilla 1.6 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Have you tried a recent release of 1.3.x? It's gottan a whole lot better and has most of the functionality of the old gtk1 galeon browser.
The cost of producing chips is pretty expensive. If I have a surplus of 9000 chips and they're really the same as the 9200 in the given laptops, might as well use the surplus. Relabeling is most costly that you assume. If you're lucky, you might be able to get away with flash upgrading the BIOS on all the video cards to say their 9200s. Even then, you still have to pay someone to go through all those cards/laptops and preform the flash. Worst case secenero is that the chips aren't flash upgradable.
Why are people complaining anyway? They're getting the same damn performance.
I'd really have to agree with Ben on this one. Crypto-sigs are a bad idea. The SMTP protocol is pretty old and was designed originally to be simple. This is back when simple was simple, not like SOAP which is nothing but simple.
The internet provides a means of being anonymous. This is really improtant in countries without any freedom of press/speach laws.
Beides the privacy and tracking factory, the other big problem is retrofitting old SMTP servers. Releasing a new SMTP standard/RFC would take time to adapt, would need to be backwards compatiable until the old protocol is phased out, etc. With all the spam problems, it would probably be better to move on to a new protocol.
SMTP and spam are both here to stay, but have you ever though of the benefits of spam? AI and pattern recognition technology has advanced quite a bit in an attempt to make more intellegent spam filters. It's created two big industries, the one that makes millions off sending spam and the other that makes millions off blocking it. It wouldn't be so bad really, if it wasn't for the fact that spam wastes bandwidth and most ISPs drop over 60% incomming mail as spam.
True, but it is still kinda anonymous. Everyone who downloads is an uploader as well. After you have enough seeds, it's impossible to really tell who the original distributer was.
If everyone used Mozilla, people would design stupid search bars and plugins for mozilla instead and we'd have all the same problems. The popular browsers/operating systems that everyone uses are the ones that are always targeted.
I aggree totally. The SMTP protocol is bad enough as it is. Adding a recall function would cause serious security issues. You could start recalling other peoples email. It'd be as bad as a crappy spam filter, like the one my university uses, that drops legit mail from family members.
In real life, if you say something, you've said it and can't take it back. Same should go with email.
The spam program my university drops a lot of non-spam incoming mail. A lot of home users really don't understand how to setup a simple spam-filter much less a firewall (which is why in WinXP service pack 2, it comes on by default). However, firewalls shouldn't be a solution for poorly written software.
As far as spam is concerned, companies wouldn't send out spam if they weren't making money. There was an older slashdot article about the return rates on spam. It's pretty small, but it's there, and SPAM doesn't cost a damn thing.
The fact that people even suggest taxing email to stop spammers is ludicrous. It shows the ignorance of people and their total lack of understanding of the Internet and the email protocol.
The biggest reason we've lost the spam war is people not only look at, but buy stuff advertised by spam. As long as these people exist and contribute to our gene pool, or we keep using SMTP, we're gonna have spam.
It's sad how much bandwidth is wasted to both spam and politics. The system administrator at my university once told me that 70% of inbound email was being dropped as SPAM.
Another problem is politics. Napster back in the day didn't waste a whole lot of bandwidth since it used centralized servers. However, since they got shot down, people have moved to protocols like Gnutella which, although provide decentralization, are a horrible waste of bandwidth.
Now with the RIAA suing people, tacking them via Gnutella, programmers are trying to develop other protocols which attempt to preserve IP anonymity. Bitttorrent is actually one of the few new technologies that does an excellent job of this, however it's being used more as P2P software, something it really wasn't designed do it.
And before all you people start blaming Microsoft, remember it was the open computer community that didn't add security to SMTP as well as the mess that is the DNS protocol.
As far as "saving" the Internet is concerned, yes the commercialization of it has killed a lot of it's research usages, however the advent of things like weblogs and independent news sites (like slashdot) have helped add a level of depth and global community. The cost: lots of wasted bandwith from spam and lots of security issues.
Hopefully the Internet2 will have a better chance of utilizing bandwidth with it's QoS protocols, returning the Internet to what it was designed for: a high speed network between universities and government agencies from which to conduct research and relay information.
Being a college student at Tennessee Tech in the small ass town of Cookeville, we have nothing better to do (we being myself and other Computer Science and Engineering majors) than to find interesting ways of destroying old dead equipment.
For some reason, computer equipment is in a continual state of dieing in Cookeville. This past semester I lost a 4GB hard drive, and 8GB hard drive, a dual processor motherboard (Pentium II) and a single processor Pentium board, just to name a few. Coleman, a fellow computer science major, has lost a 200Mhz Sun Station, a 21 inch monitor (red color tube went out) and a wide host of other equipment.
We're not sure if it's just the bad power grid in Cookeville (I'm going more for the electric gremlin theory), but there is only one thing which can be done when equipment dies at the most inconvenient times: destruction fest.
We place all the equipment out on a lawn and then begin to pummel them with everything from baseball bats and crowbars to bricks and rocks. The stress relief of hitting a monitor can not be described in words. It's really great when you imagine a professors head instead of the monitor.
Afterwords we just throw all the equipment in a dumpster.
First I'd like to say I set my Slashdot settings to "newest first" so I don't suffer the effects of "slashdot time" and miss out on great well though out threads like this one.
The screen writer of Matrix Reloaded uses a lot of symbols from our history (and if you've seen the movie, you'll hear how the robots used pieces of our history to make the Matrix more realistic to the people trapped inside). Hence you get names like Nebuchanesor (forgive the spelling, I don't have a Bible handy, but the name's in the book of Daniel) for a ship and a name like Zion for a city.
The movie doesn't portray anything remotly relating to Jewidism or Christanity, it just uses names we're familiar with to give it a "religious effect."
I didn't enjoy the movie as much as the first one, but it was still decent and it's sad a goverment would ban it and move it underground to the world of DivX and crappy screeners just becasue of the author's choice of names.
Often we overlook the fact that we have a huge amount of freedom in the states. Most democratic countries of the world don't even have Freedom of Speech laws, much less have it as a part of their constitution.
Sounds like a good set of ideas. The only thing I'm concerned about is that most employers who value you will give you a chance to "resign" before they "fire" you. I always assumed it was better for everyone if you chose to resign and you'd keep your good recomendation. I've also heard about laws in certain states (such as Tennessee) which state that an employer can never give you a "bad" reference. They can either give you a good reference or no reference at all. That may just be an urban legond. Checking with a lawyer is also a very wise move.
I never did make it though Star Control 2, but I hav e to say Star Control 3 was an awesome game. All the talk about the precursors at the end and the short speach by the creator in the credits really makes you think.
Slashdot Mirror
A real gun at a plane. You've gotta give me a break. Did you read the article about the lazer featured here on Slashdot.
First, a real gun simply wouldn't have the range. The guns that would have the range would probably fall into the same catagory as fully automatic weapons which are all carfully registered by the governemnt.
If a gun does pierce a plane and sends it to the groud. The FAA can analyize whatever is left (casing that haven't melted, the blast pattern on the plane) and use it as evidence.
What evidence is left over from a lazer? Nothing. You heat up the fuel tanks on the wings, they catch fire (they probably won't explode as Diesel doesn't tend to explode unlike in the movie Die Hard), but it will still take the plane down.
Do I think citizens need to be able to own semi-automatic AR-15s? No, and I don't believe anyone should be allowed to posess a lazer as dangerous as this one without at least having a firearms permit and full background check (if at all!)
This is astatine. Why in a technological age when we have so much control over protocols that we degrade ourselves to securing rooms by physical means. It's as retarded as wearing a tinfoil hat.
Instead of blocking 802.11b/g frequencies with wall paint (along with cell-phones, radios and key-less car remotes) can't we use what's in place? You can design a router to restrict traffic based on hardware MAC address and design your DHCP servers to assign by MAC address. Create some scripts to synchronize your routing tables and DHCP configuration file with a single database, and you have a system to secure your wireless network.
You can also use the WEP encryption, and if you're still uneasy about that with all the recent white papers that mention how to break it, make all your intranet servers with private information only accessible to the wireless subnets using secure protocols (https, imaps, pop3s, etc.)
It's simpler, uses technology versus a metaphorical metal wall and cost a ton less.
Originally there was Napster and people shared music. The music industry put a stop to that, so then we got all the Gnutella clients (Bearshare, Kazza, Limewire, etc.) which broadcast searches and requests all around the Internet wasting insane amounts of bandwidth. Although new versions of the gnutella protocol minimize the wasted bandwidth, it's still pretty bad and now the industries are going after individual users who share media.
Bittorrent was never designed as a file sharing protocol, but websites like supronova.org helped pave the way for it. Bittorrent is efficient and semi-anonymous (you can never tell who the original uploaded is and you'd have to design systems to keep extensive logs in order to prosecute one person for sharing massive amounts of stuff).
Now with bittorrent sites being shut down, we're likely to see a combination of the two (i.e. distributing torrents and trackers via a gnutella style P2P network). In other words, the MPAA and RIAA are going to be responsible for people making more inefficient, bandwidth wasting protocols.
In light of all of this, think about where the money is going. Why the fuck should the movie industry care? Their actors get paid in the millions for a year or two of work. Acting is not work and to be honest, many of the actors at the playhouse at my university can do just as good a job as some of these big names. It's ridiculous how much they get paid for Acting!.
The movie industry are a bunch of money grubbing whores. We measure a movie's success in how much money it makes, however ticket prices keep going up! There's no way a modern movie can compete with the classics when movies were a dollar for new releases. I truly wish movie success rates were based on ticket sales and not on how much money they make.
Instead of shutting down sharing sites for poor college students who love movies, how about paying the actors a reasonable amount, distributing more money to the pre-production effects crews and camera-men and then reducing ticket prices back to $3 ~ $5.
it's you're (you are) not your
I always use bob@bob.bob Since bob isn't a real TLD, it really shouldn't matter. A few websites actually verify TLDs, so for those I change the .bob to .com. Ocasionally I'll get a message saying bob@bob.bob is all ready taken and then I realize I've registered for the site before, but I just forgot my password.
-SumDog
Deordant. What is the deal with some nerds who take like four showers a day and still smell bad? They don't believe in deordant! Dude, no matter how much you shower, you still freakin need it.
SumDog
For real! Who would make a better knight? A thin, nerdy guy who talks like Kermit the Frog, or a huge buff Swedish dude who could take on a horde of vicious penguins!
If Bill and Linnus ever got in a fight, my bets would be on Linnus kicking Bill's ass.
Sumit
The Computer Scientist in me hopes they had lots of full and detailed documentation from the original Saturn V program, so if they do go at this again, at least they'll have all their predecessors notes to help them out.
I agree totally. My fatehr works for TVA Nuclear and they are very safe. What happened Chernobyl can't happen in the US, nor could it at that time. In the US, no one man can remove all the rod from a ractor tank, and even if he were able to, they are buit in mechnical and computer failsafes that will keep the reactor from melting down.
As far as the waste, what isn't but underground in the destert is kept on site. That's right. Most necular waste is stored at the plant. Most if it is actually reusable, if it wasn't for the damn necular arms treaty which bans the process of refining and reusing it.
Most of the toxic waste doesn't come from the process or after it, but before it. Uranium is mined using direct water injection, which can cause spillage in brining the raw ore to the surface.
SumDog
I like your explination. I wish it wasn't so, being the nerd that I am and my hopes for the space program, but I'd have to agree. It scares me that people think Bush has done a good job. I really hope we out number those people come election time.
Sumit
Here is a better question: should windows update even be run through a browser? No! Windows Update should be a completely standalone program. It has no business even being done through a web browser.
Let's look at the other operating systems. Redhat uses rpm/yum/up2date which are all command line with a couple of gtk front-ends you don't need to use. Debain used apt. Gentoo uses emerge/portage. Not sure about OSX, but I'm willing to be that it's update tool isn't connected to Safari.
Binding the update tool to the web browser seems to be one of those ploys Microsoft started years back to try to prove IE was essential to their operating system and couldn't be removed. Bad design dictated by bad politics. Here is a better question: should windows update even be run through a browser? No! Windows Update should be a completely standalone program. It has no business even being done through a web browser.
Have you tried a recent release of 1.3.x? It's gottan a whole lot better and has most of the functionality of the old gtk1 galeon browser.
SumDog
BSD does not contain glibc. BSD contains the bsd version of libc, and I might add that it is much much smaller than the GNU version.
SumDog
The cost of producing chips is pretty expensive. If I have a surplus of 9000 chips and they're really the same as the 9200 in the given laptops, might as well use the surplus. Relabeling is most costly that you assume. If you're lucky, you might be able to get away with flash upgrading the BIOS on all the video cards to say their 9200s. Even then, you still have to pay someone to go through all those cards/laptops and preform the flash. Worst case secenero is that the chips aren't flash upgradable.
Why are people complaining anyway? They're getting the same damn performance.
Sumdog
I'd really have to agree with Ben on this one. Crypto-sigs are a bad idea. The SMTP protocol is pretty old and was designed originally to be simple. This is back when simple was simple, not like SOAP which is nothing but simple.
The internet provides a means of being anonymous. This is really improtant in countries without any freedom of press/speach laws.
Beides the privacy and tracking factory, the other big problem is retrofitting old SMTP servers. Releasing a new SMTP standard/RFC would take time to adapt, would need to be backwards compatiable until the old protocol is phased out, etc. With all the spam problems, it would probably be better to move on to a new protocol.
SMTP and spam are both here to stay, but have you ever though of the benefits of spam? AI and pattern recognition technology has advanced quite a bit in an attempt to make more intellegent spam filters. It's created two big industries, the one that makes millions off sending spam and the other that makes millions off blocking it. It wouldn't be so bad really, if it wasn't for the fact that spam wastes bandwidth and most ISPs drop over 60% incomming mail as spam.
SumDog
True, but it is still kinda anonymous. Everyone who downloads is an uploader as well. After you have enough seeds, it's impossible to really tell who the original distributer was.
If everyone used Mozilla, people would design stupid search bars and plugins for mozilla instead and we'd have all the same problems. The popular browsers/operating systems that everyone uses are the ones that are always targeted.
SumDog
I aggree totally. The SMTP protocol is bad enough as it is. Adding a recall function would cause serious security issues. You could start recalling other peoples email. It'd be as bad as a crappy spam filter, like the one my university uses, that drops legit mail from family members.
In real life, if you say something, you've said it and can't take it back. Same should go with email.
SumDog
The spam program my university drops a lot of non-spam incoming mail. A lot of home users really don't understand how to setup a simple spam-filter much less a firewall (which is why in WinXP service pack 2, it comes on by default). However, firewalls shouldn't be a solution for poorly written software.
As far as spam is concerned, companies wouldn't send out spam if they weren't making money. There was an older slashdot article about the return rates on spam. It's pretty small, but it's there, and SPAM doesn't cost a damn thing.
The fact that people even suggest taxing email to stop spammers is ludicrous. It shows the ignorance of people and their total lack of understanding of the Internet and the email protocol.
The biggest reason we've lost the spam war is people not only look at, but buy stuff advertised by spam. As long as these people exist and contribute to our gene pool, or we keep using SMTP, we're gonna have spam.
Sumdog
It's sad how much bandwidth is wasted to both spam and politics. The system administrator at my university once told me that 70% of inbound email was being dropped as SPAM.
Another problem is politics. Napster back in the day didn't waste a whole lot of bandwidth since it used centralized servers. However, since they got shot down, people have moved to protocols like Gnutella which, although provide decentralization, are a horrible waste of bandwidth.
Now with the RIAA suing people, tacking them via Gnutella, programmers are trying to develop other protocols which attempt to preserve IP anonymity. Bitttorrent is actually one of the few new technologies that does an excellent job of this, however it's being used more as P2P software, something it really wasn't designed do it.
And before all you people start blaming Microsoft, remember it was the open computer community that didn't add security to SMTP as well as the mess that is the DNS protocol.
As far as "saving" the Internet is concerned, yes the commercialization of it has killed a lot of it's research usages, however the advent of things like weblogs and independent news sites (like slashdot) have helped add a level of depth and global community. The cost: lots of wasted bandwith from spam and lots of security issues.
Hopefully the Internet2 will have a better chance of utilizing bandwidth with it's QoS protocols, returning the Internet to what it was designed for: a high speed network between universities and government agencies from which to conduct research and relay information.
SumDog
Being a college student at Tennessee Tech in the small ass town of Cookeville, we have nothing better to do (we being myself and other Computer Science and Engineering majors) than to find interesting ways of destroying old dead equipment.
For some reason, computer equipment is in a continual state of dieing in Cookeville. This past semester I lost a 4GB hard drive, and 8GB hard drive, a dual processor motherboard (Pentium II) and a single processor Pentium board, just to name a few. Coleman, a fellow computer science major, has lost a 200Mhz Sun Station, a 21 inch monitor (red color tube went out) and a wide host of other equipment.
We're not sure if it's just the bad power grid in Cookeville (I'm going more for the electric gremlin theory), but there is only one thing which can be done when equipment dies at the most inconvenient times: destruction fest.
We place all the equipment out on a lawn and then begin to pummel them with everything from baseball bats and crowbars to bricks and rocks. The stress relief of hitting a monitor can not be described in words. It's really great when you imagine a professors head instead of the monitor.
Afterwords we just throw all the equipment in a dumpster.
Sumit
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the royalty for mp3 technology trivial, cosing companies like 3 cents per hardware device a company makes?
SumDog
First I'd like to say I set my Slashdot settings to "newest first" so I don't suffer the effects of "slashdot time" and miss out on great well though out threads like this one.
The screen writer of Matrix Reloaded uses a lot of symbols from our history (and if you've seen the movie, you'll hear how the robots used pieces of our history to make the Matrix more realistic to the people trapped inside). Hence you get names like Nebuchanesor (forgive the spelling, I don't have a Bible handy, but the name's in the book of Daniel) for a ship and a name like Zion for a city.
The movie doesn't portray anything remotly relating to Jewidism or Christanity, it just uses names we're familiar with to give it a "religious effect."
I didn't enjoy the movie as much as the first one, but it was still decent and it's sad a goverment would ban it and move it underground to the world of DivX and crappy screeners just becasue of the author's choice of names.
Often we overlook the fact that we have a huge amount of freedom in the states. Most democratic countries of the world don't even have Freedom of Speech laws, much less have it as a part of their constitution.
SumDog
Sounds like a good set of ideas. The only thing I'm concerned about is that most employers who value you will give you a chance to "resign" before they "fire" you. I always assumed it was better for everyone if you chose to resign and you'd keep your good recomendation. I've also heard about laws in certain states (such as Tennessee) which state that an employer can never give you a "bad" reference. They can either give you a good reference or no reference at all. That may just be an urban legond. Checking with a lawyer is also a very wise move.
Sumit
I never did make it though Star Control 2, but I hav e to say Star Control 3 was an awesome game. All the talk about the precursors at the end and the short speach by the creator in the credits really makes you think.
--Sumdog http://journal.sumdog.com