Yes, but most aren't so trivially easy to break and get away with; that's kinda the bigger issue here. I could rob a bank, or kill someone, but I'd probably get caught. But if their banks just left their money piled in bags in the alley, without anyone looking and where anyone could just grab a few wads of cash with virtually no chance of getting in trouble, I suspect everyone would be doing it. People's obedience of laws is linked rather directly to the perceived chance of getting caught and the penalty if that does happen.
Yep... it's exactly as useful as the No-Fly List. Which does its job admirably.
It's just that its job isn't what you think it is. The No-Fly List doesn't really have anything to do with keeping terrorists off of planes, because as you pointed out, even the most retarded Al Qaeda operative is probably going to think of using a false name. What it does do, is create a (arguably false) sense of security in the general populace, and make them think that their government is "doing something." This is its function, its raison d'être, just like most of the other post-9/11 government "security" measures.
This registry is exactly the same thing. Nobody in their right mind can possibly believe that it's actually going to do anything to save children; it's a trivial requirement, one that if you're already OK with doing something illegal (like propositioning children), you're not going to have any trouble avoiding. But it's going to make a nice talking point for a few politicos, and help to create that 'warm, fuzzy feeling' in the hearts of the voters who are too stupid to see through it -- which is basically most of them, I've come to believe.
When you see a government program that's failing horribly but yet still allowed to continue year after year, chances are it's not really failing; it's doing exactly what somebody wants it to do.
Right. And alt.writing.fiction.mysteries is going to put Stephen King out of business any day now.
There's a reason why professional photojournalists get paid for what they do, and it's not just because they have cameras. The only people who are going to feel threatened by a bunch of untrained people with cameraphones are the hacks.
It's like feeling threatened as a programmer because any kid can grab a copy of emacs and gcc and write the next Oracle. Just because anyone can, doesn't mean that training and talent aren't the most important parts of the equation.
VLC is a very significant piece of software, not just for Linux users (for whom its especially significant) but for anyone who watches a lot of movies or other media files.
This version introduces a number of new and long-requested features, beyond what the point-release number upgrade would lead you to believe.
In many ways, I'd say that a new release of VLC is probably more significant than the latest "marketing department" release of Quicktime Player or Windows Media Player.
While I appreciate the sentiment, there are still lots of valid reasons for wanting off-line storage in the form of DVDs.
Consider the cost. Hard drive space is, at best, around $0.25 per GB? Ignoring the cost of the infrastructure you'd need (servers, RAID cards, etc.) to keep them running, that's still about 4x the cost of decent DVD media. (If you follow TFA's recommendations and go with DVD+R, about 2x.)
I've been doing a lot of slide scanning recently, basically producing 3200 dpi x 64 bpp (64 because it's RGBi) TIFFs from slides. Each one is 100MB or so, and there are two per image (one is the raw scanner data, the other is color-corrected). It would be a waste to store all that on drives -- I'd need well over a TB RAID array -- it makes more sense to burn them to DVD and keep downrezzed, compressed versions in on-line storage. Actually, I keep two copies; one gets put with the slides and stored with them when they get reshelved, and the other copy gets put in my CD rack with other backups.
Could you do this with a remote server and rsync? Sure (and in fact, I do have a rsync setup for other documents); but it would be atrociously expensive, not to mention a colossal use of bandwidth. You'd need two very large RAID arrays, and all the interface cards they'd use, plus the server itself, plus electricity...those are all constant expenses. The rack of DVDs doesn't cost me anything (the opportunity cost of the floor space it requires is minimal). 'Scaling' a DVD-based offline storage system is similarly simple; you just add another DVD to the rack.
I would certainly never recommend that someone use a DVD-based system for storage of frequently-changing documents, but for large quantities of data there are still lots of applications where they are economically and logistically the best option.
I won't do business with Verizon anymore, period. They might have the best service area, but at least I don't feel like I'm supporting a company that actively wants to screw me.
This represents my feelings exactly. I switched from Verizon to T-Mobile a few years ago (and just got out by the skin of my teeth, too; Verizon tried to play the bogus cancellation-fee game with me) and have never looked back.
Verizon does have a good coverage area, but every time I did business with them I felt like I needed to check to see if they'd lifted my wallet when I wasn't looking. They're downright sleazy and take every possible opportunity to screw you. Their product just isn't worth that; T-Mobile isn't perfect, but it was a refreshing breath of fresh air.
A really fast 40G drive would be great to use as the filesystem root, plus swap space; your porn and other documents could all be kept on another (large, slow) drive. I've thought a lot about doing something like this right now using SCSI disks.
One of the biggest advantages of Linux that you never really hear about is the ease with which you can create a system that spans multiple disks, keeping frequently used (OS, libraries, swap) items on a fast drive and application data and documents on another one. It's a trivial matter of mounting the big drive at/usr (or partitioning it in half and mounting at/usr and/home, or whatever). While this is possible to do on MacOS, and I assume it's possible on Windows, it's obnoxious because those OSes are created with a single-drive-system approach in mind.
I think what we're going to see in the future is more specialization in terms of which technologies are picked for different uses. Right now, hard drives are "good enough" for lots of types of storage -- from occasionally-accessed data that could probably be moved to offline or nearline storage, to VM temp/swap files. As people and developers start demanding more performance out of systems, this compromise solution may start to look worse and worse. The upcoming hybrid (memory+platter) drives are only the beginning. I suspect that we're going to have to rethink the one-size-fits-all approach to storage, and thus make the speed/cost trade-offs independently for each type of data we need to store.
My GPS has a 'compass mode' as well, but it will only work if you're moving. In heavy treecover, where you can only find occasional places to get a satellite lock, that doesn't do you a lot of good. This leads to the 'walking in boxes' that I described, where within the area that you can get a good signal, you're left walking around and trying to have the machine give you a heading.
The time I got lost in the woods was back in the later 90s, and I had what passed at the time as a state-of-the-art GPS, a Magellan GPS300. (Basically gave you position and heading, no mapping.) While newer models might be somewhat better at retaining signal lock through trees, I still wouldn't want to trust it. A GPS is fundamentally not a compass; its job is to tell you where you are, and possibly where you've come from, not what direction you're facing. It's that last element that's rather critically important.
It seems the GPS manufacturers have caught on to this limitation and now many of the nicer Garmin units have an internal magnetic compass, but honestly I'd rather have a separate magnetic compass and a plain GPS than a combined unit. If your batteries die and you were counting on the machine for both, you're SOL. At least if they're separate, you still have your compass.
Given the option, I'd obviously prefer to have both a map and compass, and a GPS unit. Particularly since a good compass can improve the utility of a GPS even in non-emergency situations; most of the major manufacturers have models out now that are designed to work in conjunction with GPSes, and have scales on them for pinpointing your position on a USGS map, etc.
is there a simple way to get mappings from domains to IP address space--in bulk?
Erm, I don't know of a publicly-available list, but it seems like it would be pretty easy to generate one by just using DNS queries.
What you're asking for is pretty much the function of the DNS system, after all. You could easily write a script that took a list of domain names and resolved them to IP addresses -- you'd just want to make sure that your upstream DNS provider didn't block you for being abusive or for looking too much like a DDoS.
I think you are confusing Ultra-wideband and WiMax.
WiMax is like conventional 802.11 "WiFi," but optimized for higher data rates and much longer distances. It's like Wifi on 'roids, emphasis on coverage area and distance.
UWB is different; it's a very short-range protocol for 'desktop' use. Basically, as a way to get devices that are near each other anyway, to communicate with each other without wires. Think of it as Bluetooth on 'roids, but hopefully without all the obnoxiousness.
UWB would definitely not be good for creating point-to-point internet relays/backhaul, or any application that involved distances of more than a few feet. It uses way too much RF spectrum; the idea is that it transmits on a whole load of frequencies at once, but since the power is very low, it doesn't interfere with other things (too badly). This way you get ridiculous data rates, comparable to high-bandwidth wired protocols (so say UWB's promoters) but without having to have wires all over your desk. In a UWB-ed world, you wouldn't have to have a cable going from your scanner to your PC, because it could just pass the data wirelessly.
Here in America, most technologically advanced country in the world, we have transcended your silly electronic transfer systems. Instead, we write the amount of money we wish to send on little rectangular pieces of paper, which we then send to the person to whom we'd like to send the funds, who takes it to their bank, who forwards it back to the original person's bank, who transfers the funds electronically. It's quite state-of-the-art, I assure you.
Everyone is a potential murderer; you just need to know the right buttons to push, or right circumstances to put them in, to make them (allow them?) to kill.
That doesn't mean they're bad people. On the contrary, some of the nicest and most well-balanced people I know, would have zero compunction at all in blowing you away, if you in any way threatened or harmed their families. For that matter, neither would I; my obligation to protect my loved ones is far stronger than my obligation to not harm another human being that I don't know or particularly care about.
I have always found people who claim that they just could not kill, to be oddities. I'm torn between simply believing that they're deluding themselves about their own nature, or accepting that there are people who are just wired so fundamentally differently than everyone I know. I suspect there is a combination of both at work; while some people might actually be just incapable of killing someone else regardless of circumstances, a greater number of people would just like to believe that about themselves, but would probably pull the trigger in the right situation or with the right conditioning. Personally, I have always found realistic introspection to be more useful than wishful self-delusion; I have a pretty good idea of the circumstances under which I'd kill someone else. By beginning from the assumption or knowledge that you could end someone else's life, you can work backwards to the various triggers that would produce that end, and perhaps avoid the situations entirely (if any of the situations are avoidable).
Actually, I think it is in the interest of society to exact revenge, if only by allowing the state to do it, we lessen the demand for individuals to do it themselves.
American society is fundamentally violent and vindictive. If the state didn't provide a good show of making the guilty miserable, it wouldn't take six months for our justice system to regress into a mess of blood feuds and lynch mobs. People would probably be begging to stay in prison, because they knew that their victim's family would be waiting for them outside the gates to start the real punishment.
The really odd thing I find about this article in general, is that I had always assumed -- and I don't think I was alone here -- that Aero was really Microsoft's response and attempt to leapfrog Aqua.
Every screenshot I've seen of Aero looks remarkably...Aqua-ish. Not in the details, but I can't help thinking that someone at Microsoft took a look at Aqua, and decided that it was probably time to overhaul Windows' interface as well; not to mention doing the same sort of graphics-card offloading that Apple did with Quartz Extreme.
I suppose claiming that Apple's "Illuminous" is a response to Microsoft's Aero, and Aero is itself at least partially response to Aqua, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's sort of the way of these things to respond to each other, back and forth, over and over.
While that might seem like a good solution on the surface, it doesn't work well in the grey areas where the authorities weren't acting in bad faith per se; the police officer might have thought that he was conducting a legal search, or had reasonable cause to enter, but on further review it was found that he didn't. There are a lot of situations I can think of, where the police officer shouldn't be punished, but the evidence found shouldn't be admissible either. The situation isn't always as cut-and-dried as some guy beating a confession out of somebody.
It's not necessary to do something that's deserving of punishment in order to invalidate the evidence. In fact, I think it's probably good that we have stricter standards for evidence admission than just "what isn't illegal."
But hey, if what the Finns have works for them, that's peachy by me. I've yet to see a criminal-justice system that I'd prefer, as a whole, to the one we have here in the U.S., and I've been looking for a while. Our system has its failures -- and some high-profiles ones at that -- but it works well most of the time, and I think its failure rate is well below the level of maximum acceptability.
You'd probably be better off with a $5 or $10 compass in addition to the paper road maps you probably already have, than a GPS.
Knowing that you're at 41.771312N 103.886719W is a whole lot less useful than knowing which direction to walk in to get to the nearest road or town. I made the mistake of going into the woods once with a GPS and without a compass, and I spent more time wandering around in boxes, trying to get the machine to tell me which direction I was heading, than I would have if I had just brought a compass and walked out to the nearest road.
GPS units are darned handy, don't get me wrong, but they're no replacement for the basics.
I once got into an argument with a theoretical physicist (who I really had no place arguing with, but he was kind enough to indulge me) over the relative utility of abstract theoretical investigation versus experimentalism. He brought up the laser as an example of a device which could have been invented much earlier, but wasn't because nobody would have predicted that it worked before the theory had been developed.
It would not have been impossible to construct a simple gas laser in the late 19th century -- Tesla was working with neon lamps in 1893 or so, helium had been isolated a decade before that, and it's not a terribly hard jump from there to a laser assuming you can make a semi-silvered mirror (not hard assuming you have a vacuum system) -- but nobody ever did. All the parts were there, ready to be put together, but it took more than a half-century for anyone to combine them with the requisite theory and actually produce a usable apparatus. And of course, the now far-more-common diode lasers are a completely different story.
So anyway, you are quite right that there are things around today which were in no way predictable 100 years ago. However, in order to appreciate the complexity of these devices, you have to know something about them. Where they are most amazing is in their subtlety; a 19th century person might look at a laser pointer and think they understand it (battery, light bulb, red lens, focusing lenses, right?) without realizing that the semiconductor laser inside represents more than 60 years of painstaking physics research. Not to mention the presence of the laser in such a mundane and inexpensive device; implying as it does the economies of scale and mass production that make it affordable.
Again though, you can't really blame someone from the past for this attitude; we have enough people from our own time who fail to appreciate things that they use every day, because to truly appreciate them requires a deeper understanding of their workings than most people have.
In reality, the security of the girlfriend system is hardware-based; it requires the presence of a specialized dongle.
Use Domains+Web Sites, instead of IPs?
on
Map of the Internet
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Although a map of the IP address space is probably more interesting and informative, something that was based on the distribution of domain names might be more appealing to a non-technical audience; perhaps something showing the relative size of various sites beneath each TLD, with some factor based on popularity and grouped by semantic distance and interlinking.
E.g., so you'd end up with something that had big regions for the major TLDs, and then within them you'd have semantically related regions (sites that are related based on keywords or link to each other heavily). The base unit could be sites, and their size would be proportional to their number of publicly-accessible pages times a 'popularity factor.' Maybe you could extract some of the popularity information from Google (not that they'd probably like you hitting them with a lot of scripted searches).
I think it would be neat, particularly if you ended up with something that showed such locales as the Spamblog Ghetto, Fortress Corporate America, and, of course, the Porn District.
That's a sad tale; the noble Connecticut Nauga, hunted to near-extinction purely for its hyde...
Don't believe me? Just read the official Naugahyde History page. (Those people have too much free time on their hands.)
Can't lead when you're hell-bent on following.
on
Vista the End of An Era?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
But, let's set aside the fact that Linux is an excellent gaming platform for the majority of people who just like a simple game every now and again. Even if Linux had a perfect port of every single bloated, big-budget, proprietary computer game out there, we still won't see widespread desktop Linux adoption on home desktops in rich countries. People in rich countries can afford Windows, and they see no compelling reason to switch away. Linux won't provide a compelling reason for most users to switch. They'll switch to Mac before they switch to Linux.
Ding ding ding! Seriously, you should get a prize or something.
You can't replace Windows with Linux, when a lot of Linux development seems to be centered around making Linux as much like Windows as possible. As bloated and generally inelegant as Windows is, most people just don't have a very compelling reason to switch away from it. And cost isn't a big factor, since most people don't 'see' the cost of Windows in any direct fashion anyway. (And the people who do see the cost directly -- principally barebones builders -- can just pirate it and always will.)
As long as Linux is trying to 'catch up' to Windows, it can't ever surpass it and provide any convincing reasons for people to switch.
Apple, over the past 5+ years, has done a good job of giving users reasons to switch to their platform, and they didn't do it by trying to emulate the market leader. They picked a few things that they thought they could do better (multimedia, "digital hub" functions, ease of use) and concentrated their effort there. When you use a Mac, you know you're using a Mac -- they don't attempt to 'out-Windows' Windows, and that's what I see a lot of Linux distros trying to do. (Look at KDE's default skin and tell me that's not the out-of-wedlock child of Windows 98 and XP.) The Mac OS, love it or hate it, makes a stand and seems proud to not be Windows-y; many Linux distros seem embarrassed and suffering an identity crisis by comparison.
I'll end with one small anecdote: the most consistently impressive way I've found to show Linux to Windows diehards, is to show them a MythTV/Knoppmyth box. Why is it so impressive? Because it's something that their Windows PC just can't do (admittedly, I suppose MCE+SnapStream is close, but most people have never heard of it). You're not going to win admiration and envy by showing a Linux machine running OpenOffice and editing a spreadsheet; acting proud of that just makes Linux look like a joke. (Again, it's somewhat cool that it's all free, but not that impressive to most people.) But when you show a Linux machine doing something that most people's Windows desktops are just never going to do, and suddenly it looks a lot more interesting. And at that point, you can just drop in "oh yeah, it does all that Office-type stuff, too."
The opening sentence contains an improper double-negative. It should read: "I think maybe you're not giving those folks back in centuries past enough credit."
(Why is it I never notice these things in Preview?)
[T]he telephone is a nuisance as well as a convenience and a blessing without which, it seems now, life would be almost impossible and business quite so. When we ourselves "call up," of course it is all right, but when others do it the rightness is often rather deeply veiled, and we resent not a few of the demands upon our time. And yet everybody "answers the 'phone," interrupting almost any occupation to do it. How will it be when we're told, not that somebody's "on the wire," but that somebody's "on the air," and we are exposed to answer calls from any part of the atmosphere?
That statement was made an easy 80-90 years before cellphones became ubiquitous, but yet easily foresaw the convergence of two distinct and at the time emerging technologies (the telephone, just reaching critical mass at the time, and radio, relatively new).
So anyway, a bright person a century ago would probably have believed, given sufficient explanations, most of the technology we have today. Cellphones are just radios plus telephones; televisions just small movie screens; automobiles are significantly faster but still easily recognizable for what they are. It is only when you start to drill down into the underlying technology and infrastructure that enables modern devices that they truly would astound someone living a century ago.
The "futurists" of the late 19th and early 20th century predicted many of the technological developments of the past 100 years remarkably well (obviously not in detail, but conceptually in many cases they were right on). You would have to go back further than that, to eras when people were not used to continuous change -- where it was not expected that the world one grew up in would be different than the world one's children would inherit -- in order to find people who would be unable to conceive of our current state.
To be perfectly honest, I think many a person from the early 20th century would be a little disappointed if they were suddenly transported forward to the current day. Although many things have changed, a great many other things have not or are at least recognizable equivalents of devices or activities present 100 years ago. Someone who expected the rate of progress seen during the period from 1800 to 1900 to continue and increase, might find life in 2000 startlingly familiar (and sadly devoid of flying cars).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but most aren't so trivially easy to break and get away with; that's kinda the bigger issue here. I could rob a bank, or kill someone, but I'd probably get caught. But if their banks just left their money piled in bags in the alley, without anyone looking and where anyone could just grab a few wads of cash with virtually no chance of getting in trouble, I suspect everyone would be doing it. People's obedience of laws is linked rather directly to the perceived chance of getting caught and the penalty if that does happen.
Creating unenforceable laws is just stupid.
About as useful as the No-Fly list.
... it's exactly as useful as the No-Fly List. Which does its job admirably.
Yep
It's just that its job isn't what you think it is. The No-Fly List doesn't really have anything to do with keeping terrorists off of planes, because as you pointed out, even the most retarded Al Qaeda operative is probably going to think of using a false name. What it does do, is create a (arguably false) sense of security in the general populace, and make them think that their government is "doing something." This is its function, its raison d'être, just like most of the other post-9/11 government "security" measures.
This registry is exactly the same thing. Nobody in their right mind can possibly believe that it's actually going to do anything to save children; it's a trivial requirement, one that if you're already OK with doing something illegal (like propositioning children), you're not going to have any trouble avoiding. But it's going to make a nice talking point for a few politicos, and help to create that 'warm, fuzzy feeling' in the hearts of the voters who are too stupid to see through it -- which is basically most of them, I've come to believe.
When you see a government program that's failing horribly but yet still allowed to continue year after year, chances are it's not really failing; it's doing exactly what somebody wants it to do.
Right. And alt.writing.fiction.mysteries is going to put Stephen King out of business any day now.
There's a reason why professional photojournalists get paid for what they do, and it's not just because they have cameras. The only people who are going to feel threatened by a bunch of untrained people with cameraphones are the hacks.
It's like feeling threatened as a programmer because any kid can grab a copy of emacs and gcc and write the next Oracle. Just because anyone can, doesn't mean that training and talent aren't the most important parts of the equation.
VLC is a very significant piece of software, not just for Linux users (for whom its especially significant) but for anyone who watches a lot of movies or other media files.
This version introduces a number of new and long-requested features, beyond what the point-release number upgrade would lead you to believe.
In many ways, I'd say that a new release of VLC is probably more significant than the latest "marketing department" release of Quicktime Player or Windows Media Player.
While I appreciate the sentiment, there are still lots of valid reasons for wanting off-line storage in the form of DVDs.
Consider the cost. Hard drive space is, at best, around $0.25 per GB? Ignoring the cost of the infrastructure you'd need (servers, RAID cards, etc.) to keep them running, that's still about 4x the cost of decent DVD media. (If you follow TFA's recommendations and go with DVD+R, about 2x.)
I've been doing a lot of slide scanning recently, basically producing 3200 dpi x 64 bpp (64 because it's RGBi) TIFFs from slides. Each one is 100MB or so, and there are two per image (one is the raw scanner data, the other is color-corrected). It would be a waste to store all that on drives -- I'd need well over a TB RAID array -- it makes more sense to burn them to DVD and keep downrezzed, compressed versions in on-line storage. Actually, I keep two copies; one gets put with the slides and stored with them when they get reshelved, and the other copy gets put in my CD rack with other backups.
Could you do this with a remote server and rsync? Sure (and in fact, I do have a rsync setup for other documents); but it would be atrociously expensive, not to mention a colossal use of bandwidth. You'd need two very large RAID arrays, and all the interface cards they'd use, plus the server itself, plus electricity...those are all constant expenses. The rack of DVDs doesn't cost me anything (the opportunity cost of the floor space it requires is minimal). 'Scaling' a DVD-based offline storage system is similarly simple; you just add another DVD to the rack.
I would certainly never recommend that someone use a DVD-based system for storage of frequently-changing documents, but for large quantities of data there are still lots of applications where they are economically and logistically the best option.
I won't do business with Verizon anymore, period. They might have the best service area, but at least I don't feel like I'm supporting a company that actively wants to screw me.
This represents my feelings exactly. I switched from Verizon to T-Mobile a few years ago (and just got out by the skin of my teeth, too; Verizon tried to play the bogus cancellation-fee game with me) and have never looked back.
Verizon does have a good coverage area, but every time I did business with them I felt like I needed to check to see if they'd lifted my wallet when I wasn't looking. They're downright sleazy and take every possible opportunity to screw you. Their product just isn't worth that; T-Mobile isn't perfect, but it was a refreshing breath of fresh air.
A really fast 40G drive would be great to use as the filesystem root, plus swap space; your porn and other documents could all be kept on another (large, slow) drive. I've thought a lot about doing something like this right now using SCSI disks.
/usr (or partitioning it in half and mounting at /usr and /home, or whatever). While this is possible to do on MacOS, and I assume it's possible on Windows, it's obnoxious because those OSes are created with a single-drive-system approach in mind.
One of the biggest advantages of Linux that you never really hear about is the ease with which you can create a system that spans multiple disks, keeping frequently used (OS, libraries, swap) items on a fast drive and application data and documents on another one. It's a trivial matter of mounting the big drive at
I think what we're going to see in the future is more specialization in terms of which technologies are picked for different uses. Right now, hard drives are "good enough" for lots of types of storage -- from occasionally-accessed data that could probably be moved to offline or nearline storage, to VM temp/swap files. As people and developers start demanding more performance out of systems, this compromise solution may start to look worse and worse. The upcoming hybrid (memory+platter) drives are only the beginning. I suspect that we're going to have to rethink the one-size-fits-all approach to storage, and thus make the speed/cost trade-offs independently for each type of data we need to store.
My GPS has a 'compass mode' as well, but it will only work if you're moving. In heavy treecover, where you can only find occasional places to get a satellite lock, that doesn't do you a lot of good. This leads to the 'walking in boxes' that I described, where within the area that you can get a good signal, you're left walking around and trying to have the machine give you a heading.
The time I got lost in the woods was back in the later 90s, and I had what passed at the time as a state-of-the-art GPS, a Magellan GPS300. (Basically gave you position and heading, no mapping.) While newer models might be somewhat better at retaining signal lock through trees, I still wouldn't want to trust it. A GPS is fundamentally not a compass; its job is to tell you where you are, and possibly where you've come from, not what direction you're facing. It's that last element that's rather critically important.
It seems the GPS manufacturers have caught on to this limitation and now many of the nicer Garmin units have an internal magnetic compass, but honestly I'd rather have a separate magnetic compass and a plain GPS than a combined unit. If your batteries die and you were counting on the machine for both, you're SOL. At least if they're separate, you still have your compass.
Given the option, I'd obviously prefer to have both a map and compass, and a GPS unit. Particularly since a good compass can improve the utility of a GPS even in non-emergency situations; most of the major manufacturers have models out now that are designed to work in conjunction with GPSes, and have scales on them for pinpointing your position on a USGS map, etc.
is there a simple way to get mappings from domains to IP address space--in bulk?
Erm, I don't know of a publicly-available list, but it seems like it would be pretty easy to generate one by just using DNS queries.
What you're asking for is pretty much the function of the DNS system, after all. You could easily write a script that took a list of domain names and resolved them to IP addresses -- you'd just want to make sure that your upstream DNS provider didn't block you for being abusive or for looking too much like a DDoS.
How are they gonna call something even wider?
Ludicrouslywideband?
I think you are confusing Ultra-wideband and WiMax.
c ationsk
WiMax is like conventional 802.11 "WiFi," but optimized for higher data rates and much longer distances. It's like Wifi on 'roids, emphasis on coverage area and distance.
UWB is different; it's a very short-range protocol for 'desktop' use. Basically, as a way to get devices that are near each other anyway, to communicate with each other without wires. Think of it as Bluetooth on 'roids, but hopefully without all the obnoxiousness.
UWB would definitely not be good for creating point-to-point internet relays/backhaul, or any application that involved distances of more than a few feet. It uses way too much RF spectrum; the idea is that it transmits on a whole load of frequencies at once, but since the power is very low, it doesn't interfere with other things (too badly). This way you get ridiculous data rates, comparable to high-bandwidth wired protocols (so say UWB's promoters) but without having to have wires all over your desk. In a UWB-ed world, you wouldn't have to have a cable going from your scanner to your PC, because it could just pass the data wirelessly.
You might be interested in reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband#Appli
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_area_networ
Here in America, most technologically advanced country in the world, we have transcended your silly electronic transfer systems. Instead, we write the amount of money we wish to send on little rectangular pieces of paper, which we then send to the person to whom we'd like to send the funds, who takes it to their bank, who forwards it back to the original person's bank, who transfers the funds electronically. It's quite state-of-the-art, I assure you.
Eating, sleeping and going to the gym is not exactly living hell.
That's what all the anal rape is for.
Everyone is a potential murderer; you just need to know the right buttons to push, or right circumstances to put them in, to make them (allow them?) to kill.
That doesn't mean they're bad people. On the contrary, some of the nicest and most well-balanced people I know, would have zero compunction at all in blowing you away, if you in any way threatened or harmed their families. For that matter, neither would I; my obligation to protect my loved ones is far stronger than my obligation to not harm another human being that I don't know or particularly care about.
I have always found people who claim that they just could not kill, to be oddities. I'm torn between simply believing that they're deluding themselves about their own nature, or accepting that there are people who are just wired so fundamentally differently than everyone I know. I suspect there is a combination of both at work; while some people might actually be just incapable of killing someone else regardless of circumstances, a greater number of people would just like to believe that about themselves, but would probably pull the trigger in the right situation or with the right conditioning. Personally, I have always found realistic introspection to be more useful than wishful self-delusion; I have a pretty good idea of the circumstances under which I'd kill someone else. By beginning from the assumption or knowledge that you could end someone else's life, you can work backwards to the various triggers that would produce that end, and perhaps avoid the situations entirely (if any of the situations are avoidable).
Actually, I think it is in the interest of society to exact revenge, if only by allowing the state to do it, we lessen the demand for individuals to do it themselves.
American society is fundamentally violent and vindictive. If the state didn't provide a good show of making the guilty miserable, it wouldn't take six months for our justice system to regress into a mess of blood feuds and lynch mobs. People would probably be begging to stay in prison, because they knew that their victim's family would be waiting for them outside the gates to start the real punishment.
The really odd thing I find about this article in general, is that I had always assumed -- and I don't think I was alone here -- that Aero was really Microsoft's response and attempt to leapfrog Aqua.
Every screenshot I've seen of Aero looks remarkably...Aqua-ish. Not in the details, but I can't help thinking that someone at Microsoft took a look at Aqua, and decided that it was probably time to overhaul Windows' interface as well; not to mention doing the same sort of graphics-card offloading that Apple did with Quartz Extreme.
I suppose claiming that Apple's "Illuminous" is a response to Microsoft's Aero, and Aero is itself at least partially response to Aqua, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's sort of the way of these things to respond to each other, back and forth, over and over.
While that might seem like a good solution on the surface, it doesn't work well in the grey areas where the authorities weren't acting in bad faith per se; the police officer might have thought that he was conducting a legal search, or had reasonable cause to enter, but on further review it was found that he didn't. There are a lot of situations I can think of, where the police officer shouldn't be punished, but the evidence found shouldn't be admissible either. The situation isn't always as cut-and-dried as some guy beating a confession out of somebody.
It's not necessary to do something that's deserving of punishment in order to invalidate the evidence. In fact, I think it's probably good that we have stricter standards for evidence admission than just "what isn't illegal."
But hey, if what the Finns have works for them, that's peachy by me. I've yet to see a criminal-justice system that I'd prefer, as a whole, to the one we have here in the U.S., and I've been looking for a while. Our system has its failures -- and some high-profiles ones at that -- but it works well most of the time, and I think its failure rate is well below the level of maximum acceptability.
You'd probably be better off with a $5 or $10 compass in addition to the paper road maps you probably already have, than a GPS.
Knowing that you're at 41.771312N 103.886719W is a whole lot less useful than knowing which direction to walk in to get to the nearest road or town. I made the mistake of going into the woods once with a GPS and without a compass, and I spent more time wandering around in boxes, trying to get the machine to tell me which direction I was heading, than I would have if I had just brought a compass and walked out to the nearest road.
GPS units are darned handy, don't get me wrong, but they're no replacement for the basics.
It's interesting that you bring up the laser.
I once got into an argument with a theoretical physicist (who I really had no place arguing with, but he was kind enough to indulge me) over the relative utility of abstract theoretical investigation versus experimentalism. He brought up the laser as an example of a device which could have been invented much earlier, but wasn't because nobody would have predicted that it worked before the theory had been developed.
It would not have been impossible to construct a simple gas laser in the late 19th century -- Tesla was working with neon lamps in 1893 or so, helium had been isolated a decade before that, and it's not a terribly hard jump from there to a laser assuming you can make a semi-silvered mirror (not hard assuming you have a vacuum system) -- but nobody ever did. All the parts were there, ready to be put together, but it took more than a half-century for anyone to combine them with the requisite theory and actually produce a usable apparatus. And of course, the now far-more-common diode lasers are a completely different story.
So anyway, you are quite right that there are things around today which were in no way predictable 100 years ago. However, in order to appreciate the complexity of these devices, you have to know something about them. Where they are most amazing is in their subtlety; a 19th century person might look at a laser pointer and think they understand it (battery, light bulb, red lens, focusing lenses, right?) without realizing that the semiconductor laser inside represents more than 60 years of painstaking physics research. Not to mention the presence of the laser in such a mundane and inexpensive device; implying as it does the economies of scale and mass production that make it affordable.
Again though, you can't really blame someone from the past for this attitude; we have enough people from our own time who fail to appreciate things that they use every day, because to truly appreciate them requires a deeper understanding of their workings than most people have.
In reality, the security of the girlfriend system is hardware-based; it requires the presence of a specialized dongle.
Although a map of the IP address space is probably more interesting and informative, something that was based on the distribution of domain names might be more appealing to a non-technical audience; perhaps something showing the relative size of various sites beneath each TLD, with some factor based on popularity and grouped by semantic distance and interlinking.
E.g., so you'd end up with something that had big regions for the major TLDs, and then within them you'd have semantically related regions (sites that are related based on keywords or link to each other heavily). The base unit could be sites, and their size would be proportional to their number of publicly-accessible pages times a 'popularity factor.' Maybe you could extract some of the popularity information from Google (not that they'd probably like you hitting them with a lot of scripted searches).
I think it would be neat, particularly if you ended up with something that showed such locales as the Spamblog Ghetto, Fortress Corporate America, and, of course, the Porn District.
That's a sad tale; the noble Connecticut Nauga, hunted to near-extinction purely for its hyde...
Don't believe me? Just read the official Naugahyde History page. (Those people have too much free time on their hands.)
But, let's set aside the fact that Linux is an excellent gaming platform for the majority of people who just like a simple game every now and again. Even if Linux had a perfect port of every single bloated, big-budget, proprietary computer game out there, we still won't see widespread desktop Linux adoption on home desktops in rich countries. People in rich countries can afford Windows, and they see no compelling reason to switch away. Linux won't provide a compelling reason for most users to switch. They'll switch to Mac before they switch to Linux.
Ding ding ding! Seriously, you should get a prize or something.
You can't replace Windows with Linux, when a lot of Linux development seems to be centered around making Linux as much like Windows as possible. As bloated and generally inelegant as Windows is, most people just don't have a very compelling reason to switch away from it. And cost isn't a big factor, since most people don't 'see' the cost of Windows in any direct fashion anyway. (And the people who do see the cost directly -- principally barebones builders -- can just pirate it and always will.)
As long as Linux is trying to 'catch up' to Windows, it can't ever surpass it and provide any convincing reasons for people to switch.
Apple, over the past 5+ years, has done a good job of giving users reasons to switch to their platform, and they didn't do it by trying to emulate the market leader. They picked a few things that they thought they could do better (multimedia, "digital hub" functions, ease of use) and concentrated their effort there. When you use a Mac, you know you're using a Mac -- they don't attempt to 'out-Windows' Windows, and that's what I see a lot of Linux distros trying to do. (Look at KDE's default skin and tell me that's not the out-of-wedlock child of Windows 98 and XP.) The Mac OS, love it or hate it, makes a stand and seems proud to not be Windows-y; many Linux distros seem embarrassed and suffering an identity crisis by comparison.
I'll end with one small anecdote: the most consistently impressive way I've found to show Linux to Windows diehards, is to show them a MythTV/Knoppmyth box. Why is it so impressive? Because it's something that their Windows PC just can't do (admittedly, I suppose MCE+SnapStream is close, but most people have never heard of it). You're not going to win admiration and envy by showing a Linux machine running OpenOffice and editing a spreadsheet; acting proud of that just makes Linux look like a joke. (Again, it's somewhat cool that it's all free, but not that impressive to most people.) But when you show a Linux machine doing something that most people's Windows desktops are just never going to do, and suddenly it looks a lot more interesting. And at that point, you can just drop in "oh yeah, it does all that Office-type stuff, too."
The opening sentence contains an improper double-negative. It should read: "I think maybe you're not giving those folks back in centuries past enough credit."
(Why is it I never notice these things in Preview?)
So anyway, a bright person a century ago would probably have believed, given sufficient explanations, most of the technology we have today. Cellphones are just radios plus telephones; televisions just small movie screens; automobiles are significantly faster but still easily recognizable for what they are. It is only when you start to drill down into the underlying technology and infrastructure that enables modern devices that they truly would astound someone living a century ago.
The "futurists" of the late 19th and early 20th century predicted many of the technological developments of the past 100 years remarkably well (obviously not in detail, but conceptually in many cases they were right on). You would have to go back further than that, to eras when people were not used to continuous change -- where it was not expected that the world one grew up in would be different than the world one's children would inherit -- in order to find people who would be unable to conceive of our current state.
To be perfectly honest, I think many a person from the early 20th century would be a little disappointed if they were suddenly transported forward to the current day. Although many things have changed, a great many other things have not or are at least recognizable equivalents of devices or activities present 100 years ago. Someone who expected the rate of progress seen during the period from 1800 to 1900 to continue and increase, might find life in 2000 startlingly familiar (and sadly devoid of flying cars).