Gnaa indeed - though - going back around ~15 years, the German government telco became a private company - "Deutsche Telekom", and soon after proceeded to sue a company called "Deutsche Telekom" which had been making pneumatic delivery letter chutes for a long time before the telco went private...
In that case, the older and smaller company "lost" and had to change its name, on the basis that it would be too expensive for a company as large as the "new" "Deutsche Telekom" to change its name again -- BUT, the "new" Deutsche Telekom had to pay the smaller company for the whole name change operation (though, no extra payments for the lost name)...
Interesting that our German courts NOW speak against the large company - instead of following in the same footsteps and just forcing google to pay for all costs relating to the other 'gmail' changing its name...
I don't think there is a priority of 'smashing' the US economy; but it might be the end result, if the US try and stay out of it for too long - if the US doesn't care about the environment now, and climatologists will turn out to be right about the changes; then the US economy will have to play a huge game of catch-up with other economies which, by then, will have a big head-start on those issues (and probably be able to make a killing selling the necessary technology to the US...
What I do see, though, is that there are the usual inflammatory comments how the rest of the world is misguided...
The US, right now, is the biggest CO2 emitter among the industrialised nations (even 'per capita'; so it's not just that the US is the biggest one, just because it has a bigger population that Germany, France and the UK combined).
If the US do NOT join efforts to fight climate change, that is one thing - but there is the secondary problem that as long as the biggest polluter doesn't do anything about it, where's the incentive for the fast growing economies in China and India to do anything about it? (And - because those are relatively 'poor', their new manufacturing plants are even more polluting, than their US counterparts). As such, it might turn out, that if the US doesn't slowly begin to take action, that any reduction by the other western industrial nations is negated simply by growth from countries like China and India.
a) I didn't write anything about full scale terraforming (not even small scale)... We'd obviously have to live with whatever we find, and try and make sheltered regions of it habitable and self-sustainable.
b) I'm not trying to suggest to move everybody off this planet to another - my reference to risk management strategy was to sprawl out over multiple places, if possible. Fixing this planet is necessary if we are to stay here - but it's not a risk management issue to do so, as we would still keep all our eggs in one basket (Earth) if we "just" fixed this one, or "just" moved to a different ecosystem -- because in either situation, we'd only be in one planet.
c) "Tell them the truth, tell them the cost"... Yeah, I think many of us have repeatedly seen how well that works (Iraq just being the latest big example of "us" being told "the truth", and "the true cost". The only "truth" now seems to be that the "original truth" was a blatant lie, and that we don't have any idea about what the true cost will be in the end. With growing media influence, politicians are less and less interested in "doing the right thing", rather than doing whatever is necessary just trying to ensure they get re-elected... Being German, I can tell you some great stories about various governments telling us what to do just to get unemployment back down, each only paying minimal lip service to it (without measurable lasting success; and each of them afraid to really try something big to move, because big things cost a lot in the CURRENT legislative period, but will only pay off in FUTURE legislative period - i.e. nothing that will help the government to get re-elected for the next term.
As I pointed out, I think that the private enterprise will take over the exploration and move us to other worlds soon enough. Great! So why are you asking NASA to fund it instead? Private enterprise is less likely to be a pile of political pork like ISS has turned out, so I think letting them make the next move would be fantastic idea. Simple - to get things going.
If governments hadn't made a start on space programs (including Mir / ISS), I don't think that anyone would have taken up the challenge on the Ansari X-prize -- if it would even have come to pass.
India is now trying to get a space program "on the cheap" - compared to the kinds of budgets that were necessary for NASA initially (even if you factor in inflation over the past 40-50 years - their programs will be CHEAP). But, if noone had done "the initial testing" (the "proof of concept"), going to space would likely be something that would sound - pardon the pun - far to "astronomic" for any investor to fund (just imagine, would kind of money would have to be raised in the private sector - and without knowing the outcome, what the potential risk factor would be). You might say, "well, they might start off with something smaller, than going to the moon", which is true - but very unlikely, as there aren't too many "intermediate steps" that would make sense to fund on their own, if you didn't know whether it would have a reasonable chance of success.
The simple fact that now we KNOW, from previous flights and flight experiments, which things have worked, and which ones (more or less famously) didn't, have helped bootstrapping efforts like those of the Ansari X-Prize contestants, and possibly other firms.
Many projects nowadays simply are several orders of magnitude too large for someone to try and run out of the back of their bike shops. And for the space program specifically, the initial potential gains for private companies are fairly little - as long as we're only talking Earth orbit, we're primarily talking about space tourism - not some other tangible market.
But, apart from coming up with the funding and initial experimentation, the private sector isn't so much interested in doing research for the common good - that will have to be funded publicly, and I do think we have learnt quite a lot from variouso space programs - Hubble, robotic study probes teaching us more about our neighbouring planets, and with that more about how the solar system evolved (most of this being still on a "Theory" level, but with more and more data we can gather, we learn more about whether our theories are correct, or the data will give us pointers as to where our assumptions are wrong).
Also, the private sector has little interest in those things that might stimulate the minds of generations to come (like dreaming of being astronauts, or the scientists making space travel possible, after seeing the first astronauts coming back); as there is no measurable profit in it in the meantime. Nope, nowadays we have more focus on kids wanting to be on "America's next top model", "pop idol" or similar type of 'my 15 minutes of fame' shows that don't help the human race as such, apart from profiting the companies running the shows...
Look what Katrina did to New Orleans - and think about what, say, global warming could do to us -- or the next meteor striking Earth (though, we don't see any at this moment which look likely to hit us in the next few hundred years, that does not mean that something along those lines MIGHT still happen)? Or - with us all being so interconnected through travelling, a new virus can spread around the globe in relatively little time - just remember when SARS broke out (which luckily wasn't all that easily communicable), but it did spread across countries in different parts of the world very, very quickly.
The more we spread out, the more we eliminate risks of some single incident wiping mankind off the map... (Yes, spreading out does have risks of its own, but in all for mankind to survive in the long run, I think sprawling out further and further can only be a good thing).
As long as we stay on one planet alone, we're pretty much "putting all eggs into one basket".
Furthermore, the more we get access to space, the less will we have to fight over ever more scarce resources on this planet. The oil reserves look comparatively fine right now, but it's a good question how long they will stay that way, looking at the current pace of economic growth in China and India - to just name the two largest players). Not that it's particularly likely we will find oil on a rock nearby (no plant growth -> no oil a few hundred millennia later) but there will certainly be other resources that WILL become more problematic for us to get our hands on.
Even continuing to fix it IS useful - if only to teach future space missions what kind of problems evolve over time. (i.e. for a lot of things you might be able to do a "quick and dirty" hack, if all you need it for is a day or two... For a space ship to be in space for months or even years, we do need to know more about the actual degradation of materials in the conditions out there...
But - even with the regular repairs, I would still think they're doing SOME research - even if that might not be quite is visible in the headlines as "read all about the latest power outage!"...
Why should that be a negative point, as long as ALL comparisons were made on the same machine?
While the potentially slower disk in a laptop might reduce the overall speed - the negative impact of the hardware should be equal on all three tested versions, since they all run on the same hardware.
The point of the comparison would be just as valid, if ALL tests were conducted on some old Pentium II box - as long as it's the same machine/identical machines in all three tests.
There might be another alternative - what about they hire him for the duration of the flight, say, as research for the company doing the rides -- they hire him for minimum wage for one day, and give him some special questionnaire to fill out after the flight. In this case, his ride would be work (gather information on the "end user experience")...
He might have to tax the minimum wage, but the company could completely write off the money spent to send him to space in the first place, as it's a work requirement. (i.e. treat the space ride as a "business trip")...
(oh - and yes, if he researches the 'experience' of the offered flights, it should well be possible for him to completely (and determinedly) "enjoy" the flight - so as to be in a better position to say what the company might want to improve for future customers...
But may I remind you of something? When your "big W" went to war in Iraq, despite Saddam claiming he had no weapons, and UN weapons inspectors not finding any - that little Korean dictator was openly threatening the US with his WMDs.
But - where did you end up going to war? Iraq...
It was your current "enlightened" (and I'm using that word in a VERY loose sense of the word here) leadership, which decided that revenge for the first gulf war was more important, than acting on actual problems. Political pundits here in Europe at the time commented on the one lesson to be learnt from this for every little third world dictator: Either get the bomb, or make sure you can make others believe in you having it - then the US won't touch you. But look weak, and they will come and invade you - no matter what the rest of the world has to say about it.
I, for one, believe this is right - by bombing down Iraq, not just did the invasion create the Quagmire there (because noone seemed to have planned what to do once the war was over), but it WILL have sent out the signals to other nations to get nuclear arms as quickly as possible, to make sure the US won't attack them. As such, NK will now have a list of potential buyers significantly longer than just AlQaeda or other terrorists.
In Hunt For The Red October, it was, at least, clear that they were looking at sounds. Also, looking at the issue there is that the people involved with the system should know whether they are even close to an area that could produce a volcano (volcanos basically only occur near fault-lines -- hearing volcano noises anywhere else will be sufficient in itself).
In Contact, the signal was preceeded / accompanied by a *very* simple and *very* strong signal - something designed to be picked up; and the signal went on for days.
If you look at the Seti project, there are some characteristics, which *we* think will be dead giveaways - but who tells you that this is the kind of signal, aliens might indeed by generating - we just assume an alien signal might have to look roughly like 'xyz', simply because that's the way ours look.
A TV signal is something very complex in nature - but if you look at the recurrent features of those signals (end of line / end of screen sync breaks), these could be all kinds of things. Parts of text - parts of sound, parts of concepts we don't consider right now.
In comparison, the gold plate on Voyager is relatively straightforward - no changes in colours, the same material all over, very regular, the only irregularity being the message imprinted in it. But - yes - obviously, the big difference between the signals is that voyager would take *very* long indeed to get to a place significantly far enough away from us - and it will only be at one place at a time, it's not like a broadcast going in all directions.
I'd be curious to know how they want to prepare any potential "viewers" for what's in the stream coming to them...
Even if they get a broadcast at a certain frequency - how intuitive will it be for an alien listener, that this broadcast will be audio/video in PAL, SECAM or NTSC coding?
Sounds pretty useless to me - about the same chance, as if they send a windows version of the Encyclopedia Britannica out for aliens to browse through...
In comparison, the gold plate on voyager is something more readily accessible - as an effort was made to keep the message simple.
Sure, there is a lot of buzz about Ajax - and right now, it does have its growing pains (fragmented browser support, more difficult to implement,...).
But I wouldn't go as far and discount it as useless because of it, or just saying "Thank god, we're not like that". If you go down that route, you'll go down a route that ignores the market.
Let me move the original comment back a few decades and put in a slightly different context, and that will hopefully highlight what I mean:
'Which aspect of Graphical User Interfaces [do] we really want our Unix apps to have? The difficulty in developing Graphical User Interfaces [no UI builders] code? The difficulty in maintaining GUI code? The slowness of GUI code across the network? The resource-hungryness of GUIs?'
Surely, there was a time, when I thought real deep down X11 client programming was a pig - but if I had stayed with purely command line apps, I would have missed the market - or do you honestly believe you could find a mass market for a non-WYSIWIG command-line driven equivalent of Word or Excel?
If I compare, say, maps.google.com (AJAX) and streetmap.co.uk (non-AJAX); or gmail compared to some non-AJAX webmailers out there - google maps wins hands down in user friendlyness - and that's the bit that counts.
There will be sites/projects for which Ajax will not be the way to go (much like the way gcc doesn't have a built-in GUI), but for many functions with direct and interactive user-access - Ajax will be the way to go, until someone comes up with something even better.
This attack does not consist of masquerading as a trusted party...it consists of compromising said trusted party. Thus, this activity cannot accurately be referred to as 'phishing'.
I don't agree with that.
Yes - this requires hacking the trusted party's site. But what happens next?
A) The cracker breaks the internal databases and reads out all information from it. This clearly wouldn't be phishing. But - it's a very difficult thing; most DBs in those apps are locked down pretty well - and passwords etc. will be encrypted; whether you'd manage to decrypt them is another matter...
B) The cracker adds some pages of his own to the trusted party's website, and sends out phishing emails directing people to "his" portal there. This entry portal could ask for the standard username and password, try them on the "real" web-pages, and if successful, forward them to the cracker... This WOULD be phishing.
Of course, in the short term, it would (slightly) inconvenience the agriculture-heavy European economies (e.g. France) economies as well as the American economy, if the farming subsidies were eliminated.
On the other hand - at the same time, this would create new jobs, because if all of a sudden African farmers could start selling more and more of their own grain/... in Europe and the US, then that will create new needs there (e.g. agricultural machinery, for instance) as well as new wealth there (which would likely go into more "luxury" goods; many of which get produced IN those economies which would yield the subsidies), which in turn means that US and European manufacturing businesses would find new markets to sell to - and hence also require new people to work for them.
At the same time, while spending on subsidies will be saved, this frees up money, which could either result in lower taxation (which would make the whole economy more competitive again, because costs go down), or the money could be used to try and fix that runaway budget deficit...
But, yes, for at least a few years, the economy will take a hit. (while at the same time, depriving it of new potential markets for other workers than the subsidised farmers).
Can intra-office communication not be done via RTF?
It easily could - but that's beside the point. THe fact that you can run "virus-free" software on Windows does not preclude you from (inadvertently) running something virus-infected.
You may do all your company internal documents in RTF even in MS Office - but if one of the company secretaries opens up a document sent by an outside source (maybe a seemingly legitimate one), which DOES contain a virus, your system's security is still screwed. Your RTFs might not get infected - but who knows what else the virus might do (e.g. send all documents in your "recent documents" to the attacker -- good chance of snatching some more important documents there...
Living in the UK, I got a lot of the publicity the case caused pretty much immediately - and likely a lot more of it than people living further afield.
There are a few issues here:
I can only partly agree with the main story saying "The lessons are that $4000 is not worth risking your life over". There is always a question of risk. Of course, having gotten $4000 and finding your life in shatters isn't a great trade - but there was a fair chance that you get the $4000 without any problems whatsoever - the placebo group got their money for sitting around. Also, every year, loads of tests are carried out - with little or no inconvenience or temporary/permanent damage to the test subjects. Just like you could say, it's not worth the $4000, you could say it's not worth leaving your house in a thunderstorm - you might get killed by lightning, and no-one was offering you the $4000 to cross the road in a thunderstorm in the first place, did they?
Medical testing is there to establish that/whether drugs are safe. Would you have rather had not had any tests at all and the medication just sold on the market, making the consumer the guinea-pig? (and one who pays for the medication at that!)
Yes, Parexel screwed up big time with this - but let's wait for an independent review to find out whether and in how far they handled the case negligently. I hear people calling out there was negligence - but I have yet to see proof. Of course, with today's media, having caused this kind of havoc, it's "clear" the company is guilty. It might very well be they're guilty of negligence, but just like any other company and/or human being they have the right to be seen as innocent until proven guilty. This does not mean, though, that they should just sit back and say "you got your $4000, now bugger off.". IMHO they DO have the ethical responsibility for the people involved - they need the best treatment money can buy, and parexel certainly has the funds for it (even without risking much of their profits).
Take it from someone with a waaaaaaayyyyy lower UID as yours!;-)
But to your original point - I'm not too sure you can rule out future break-ins at all. It would only be REALLY stupid, if both breakins happened through the same setup fault.
But I don't think debian has a full time security admin who constantly and ACTIVELY monitors every debian.org box, like other big name companies might be able to afford to.
Secondly, the sheer multitude of packages, and frequent updates/upgrades of packages will make it fairly impossible to keep a machine 100% break-in proof.
Of course, I don't like break-ins - especially on servers of a distribution I'm actively using; but I think it's wrong to panic about it either.
More importantly - while I see the need to reinstall quickly, has anyone there found out HOW the break-in occured? Has the hole been located? (...and is it known how to fix this particular one, before the same guy just uses the same "back door" again?)
What would interest me more is how they would put bittorrent to use with DRM?
If they want to make sure that only YOU can watch the movie, or - in case you burn it on DVD and give it away - track you down if you spread copies, they would need to make sure that you get YOUR personalised copy of it (either with a fixed end-of-validity: say, you order your copy at 4:38pm, and it times out 4:37 next day -- or imprinted with some signature so that they will know YOU copied the movie), how would that still work with a distributed protocol a la bittorrent?
I don't see how it could - client caching doesn't make any sense (because of time limits in viewing), and it doesn't make a sense downloading a single block for someone else, just so THEY can download quicker.
Or - they go and encrypt all movies exactly the same and give you a temporary key for the file to allow you to decrypt it for a short while -- but is there a format that would allow for changing keys? (WITHOUT the danger of someone finding a way to crack the thing without knowing a temporary key? In that case, ANYONE could download a movie and decrypt it permanently - couldn't they?)
Freescale has been producing the four-megabit Mram chips at an Arizona factory for two months to build up levels of stock.
It's not like they're saying "we WILL have something tangible", but rather "we HAVE something tangible".
On the other hand - sorry, I don't quite see how these will be in competition with hard-drives, if you see that they are working on 4(!) MEGAbit chips... To Freescale: Call me again when it's 4 GIGAbit chips...;-) I'm just not convinved I'd want a 1GB harddisk replacement made from 2048 of those chips...
I see those as small stepping stones, but not more, right now.
pine may have been geared at newbie users a long time ago - and it still does the job for newbies (though most newbies will probably not waste a second look at it, because it isn't "graphical" ("Yeah, man, Outlook *looks* sooo much better, so it has to be better!").
But, I would tend to think, pine has grown with its users - it might not be quite as powerful as mutt can be, but mutt, at first glance, seems to be about as useful as emacs without any lisp packages; i.e. it may be powerful, but only after loads of configuration...
pine to me has the advantage of being very efficient at what it does - pico isn't the greatest editor of all times (far from it), but it does the job well - and if I want a better editor in the odd editing sesssion, I call up the external editor (C-_) and use that for a particular email. Still, in most situations, using pico is perfectly adequate for editing an email - it's not that often I need regexp-search-and-replace, syntax highlighting or similar nonsense when writing an email message, after all.
I would say, pine is still very easy to learn for newbies, but at the same time, it's incredibly powerful in that it is very efficient (most commands are reachable by a single key, the way I can define multiple inboxes (use procmail to sort incoming mail into various folders and just skim through them automatically by hitting TAB to get to the next message,...).
I've tried other mail readers, but none for too long - even to me there are some shortcomings to pine, but none turn out quite as badly as shortcomings in other mail-readers I've tried...
The comparison is a bit slanted, if a someone robs your bank, you're not really inconvenienced, as the bank is insured - your money is safe.
This particular case is more like you depositing a copy of your house key with your neighbour (in case you should lose yours), and that KEY gets stolen. Your neighbour might tell you that the key is gone - and worse yet, that the key actually has a tag with your name and address attached to it. So, until you can go and change your locks, your home is basically compromised and it takes a lot of effort keeping it safe, until the locks are replaced.
With the stolen social security numbers, you can't switch your social security number easily, if at all? Is it possible at all to apply for a new social sec no in the US moving your data to the new one, but invalidating the old one?
In the example with your key getting stolen from a neighbour's property; of course, it's not really the neighbour's fault, if someone breaks into his house.
BUT - the neighbour might be liable, if gross negligence aided losing the key in the first place (i.e. putting up a sign with an arrow pointing to the key with all the data as to whose key it is, right outside on the front lawn - without any protective measure).
If an agency hands over your data to an outside contractor - they HAVE to put safeguards in place (check out the contractor's background/reputation, and *his* security measures), because they are handing away data that you *entrusted* to them. Just handing out blanket data, without properly protecting it (really good encryption, at the least, with the key being nowhere near the laptop during transport), is them breaking your trust.
And THAT is something that might make them very well liable for what happens.
(Needless to say - even those that will pay for free credit checks for a year, what's that to say, at all? THEY broke your trust by not safeguarding the data, and while they pay for the checks (for a limited time), they are not paying for your time following up the checks and/or the hassle in case something happens.)
My worst was about 18 years ago - the release of Carrier Command on the Atari ST; it kept me awake for just over 104 hours until I had finished it... (that included 3 breaks to go to school (with slowly degrading attention)...
That was when I was 17 - today, the occasional all-nighter might still be in - but they're rare....
I don't see anything wrong with a more or less shameless plug for another search engine here (as clearly opposed to shameless plugs for online shops and the like).
Think about it like this:
A search engine only makes money through advertising / sponsored links; not through your visit as such. (unlike online shops which need to sell something straight to you).
Running an "article" on slashdot is, if indeed issued by them, a brave thing - it will bring loads of traffic; and if the search engine isn't up to scratch, the feedback might be fairly destructive (and the bandwith costs for even running it might be fairly high).
On the other hand, encouraging a community that they weren't exposed to before will tell them more about what kind of searches they will encounter, and hopefully might help them to improve their search engine. (Besides - if a query for some free software might (not yet?) turn up useful results; does anyone have stats as to how many pages they have indexed so far?)
Another good search engine would definitely be a good thing. Following google taking the "lead", some of their search results have deteriorated quite a bit thanks to enough idiots doing "search engine optimisations" bringing up their own pages in favour of pages that might actually be more appropriate. So far, google is doing a fair job of keeping that down, but on some queries I found it getting worse.
[before anyone regards this as "slanted"/"biased" in favour of the company - I'm not working for them, and this article is the first mention I've heard of them; and, yes, their search results could definitely do with some tuning...]
Sometimes I just wonder what's happening there - at two times did I apply for jobs with them (once in Zurich, Switzerland, while still living there; and once late last year for a job here in London where I am living now). In both cases, my CV seemed a good match for the positions I applied for. In Zurich, at the time of the application I only got an automated response saying something like "thanks for applying; we'll only be back in touch if we might be remotely interested in you" (nothing further). Here in London, I did get a second email a couple of weeks after applying telling me that I hadn't been successful.
So - either, they do not fully explain the kind of skills they're looking for (and hence remove any chance of people having a clue whether they might fit the role they're trying to hire for), or they don't really have much of a problem hiring and can afford to be *really* picky (e.g. "Ah, too bad, you would have been the perfect candidate, but we were looking for someone with experience of J2SDK 1.4.2_07; you only have 1.4.2_06)...
In any case, I've got a job now, so right now I'm not interested in working for them either...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Gnaa indeed - though - going back around ~15 years, the German government telco became a private company - "Deutsche Telekom", and soon after proceeded to sue a company called "Deutsche Telekom" which had been making pneumatic delivery letter chutes for a long time before the telco went private...
In that case, the older and smaller company "lost" and had to change its name, on the basis that it would be too expensive for a company as large as the "new" "Deutsche Telekom" to change its name again -- BUT, the "new" Deutsche Telekom had to pay the smaller company for the whole name change operation (though, no extra payments for the lost name)...
Interesting that our German courts NOW speak against the large company - instead of following in the same footsteps and just forcing google to pay for all costs relating to the other 'gmail' changing its name...
I don't think there is a priority of 'smashing' the US economy; but it might be the end result, if the US try and stay out of it for too long - if the US doesn't care about the environment now, and climatologists will turn out to be right about the changes; then the US economy will have to play a huge game of catch-up with other economies which, by then, will have a big head-start on those issues (and probably be able to make a killing selling the necessary technology to the US...
What I do see, though, is that there are the usual inflammatory comments how the rest of the world is misguided...
The US, right now, is the biggest CO2 emitter among the industrialised nations (even 'per capita'; so it's not just that the US is the biggest one, just because it has a bigger population that Germany, France and the UK combined).
If the US do NOT join efforts to fight climate change, that is one thing - but there is the secondary problem that as long as the biggest polluter doesn't do anything about it, where's the incentive for the fast growing economies in China and India to do anything about it? (And - because those are relatively 'poor', their new manufacturing plants are even more polluting, than their US counterparts). As such, it might turn out, that if the US doesn't slowly begin to take action, that any reduction by the other western industrial nations is negated simply by growth from countries like China and India.
A couple of points on what you wrote:
a) I didn't write anything about full scale terraforming (not even small scale)... We'd obviously have to live with whatever we find, and try and make sheltered regions of it habitable and self-sustainable.
b) I'm not trying to suggest to move everybody off this planet to another - my reference to risk management strategy was to sprawl out over multiple places, if possible. Fixing this planet is necessary if we are to stay here - but it's not a risk management issue to do so, as we would still keep all our eggs in one basket (Earth) if we "just" fixed this one, or "just" moved to a different ecosystem -- because in either situation, we'd only be in one planet.
c) "Tell them the truth, tell them the cost"... Yeah, I think many of us have repeatedly seen how well that works (Iraq just being the latest big example of "us" being told "the truth", and "the true cost". The only "truth" now seems to be that the "original truth" was a blatant lie, and that we don't have any idea about what the true cost will be in the end. With growing media influence, politicians are less and less interested in "doing the right thing", rather than doing whatever is necessary just trying to ensure they get re-elected... Being German, I can tell you some great stories about various governments telling us what to do just to get unemployment back down, each only paying minimal lip service to it (without measurable lasting success; and each of them afraid to really try something big to move, because big things cost a lot in the CURRENT legislative period, but will only pay off in FUTURE legislative period - i.e. nothing that will help the government to get re-elected for the next term.
If governments hadn't made a start on space programs (including Mir / ISS), I don't think that anyone would have taken up the challenge on the Ansari X-prize -- if it would even have come to pass.
India is now trying to get a space program "on the cheap" - compared to the kinds of budgets that were necessary for NASA initially (even if you factor in inflation over the past 40-50 years - their programs will be CHEAP).
But, if noone had done "the initial testing" (the "proof of concept"), going to space would likely be something that would sound - pardon the pun - far to "astronomic" for any investor to fund (just imagine, would kind of money would have to be raised in the private sector - and without knowing the outcome, what the potential risk factor would be). You might say, "well, they might start off with something smaller, than going to the moon", which is true - but very unlikely, as there aren't too many "intermediate steps" that would make sense to fund on their own, if you didn't know whether it would have a reasonable chance of success.
The simple fact that now we KNOW, from previous flights and flight experiments, which things have worked, and which ones (more or less famously) didn't, have helped bootstrapping efforts like those of the Ansari X-Prize contestants, and possibly other firms.
Many projects nowadays simply are several orders of magnitude too large for someone to try and run out of the back of their bike shops. And for the space program specifically, the initial potential gains for private companies are fairly little - as long as we're only talking Earth orbit, we're primarily talking about space tourism - not some other tangible market.
But, apart from coming up with the funding and initial experimentation, the private sector isn't so much interested in doing research for the common good - that will have to be funded publicly, and I do think we have learnt quite a lot from variouso space programs - Hubble, robotic study probes teaching us more about our neighbouring planets, and with that more about how the solar system evolved (most of this being still on a "Theory" level, but with more and more data we can gather, we learn more about whether our theories are correct, or the data will give us pointers as to where our assumptions are wrong).
Also, the private sector has little interest in those things that might stimulate the minds of generations to come (like dreaming of being astronauts, or the scientists making space travel possible, after seeing the first astronauts coming back); as there is no measurable profit in it in the meantime. Nope, nowadays we have more focus on kids wanting to be on "America's next top model", "pop idol" or similar type of 'my 15 minutes of fame' shows that don't help the human race as such, apart from profiting the companies running the shows...
Really, why? Call it risk management...
Look what Katrina did to New Orleans - and think about what, say, global warming could do to us -- or the next meteor striking Earth (though, we don't see any at this moment which look likely to hit us in the next few hundred years, that does not mean that something along those lines MIGHT still happen)?
Or - with us all being so interconnected through travelling, a new virus can spread around the globe in relatively little time - just remember when SARS broke out (which luckily wasn't all that easily communicable), but it did spread across countries in different parts of the world very, very quickly.
The more we spread out, the more we eliminate risks of some single incident wiping mankind off the map... (Yes, spreading out does have risks of its own, but in all for mankind to survive in the long run, I think sprawling out further and further can only be a good thing).
As long as we stay on one planet alone, we're pretty much "putting all eggs into one basket".
Furthermore, the more we get access to space, the less will we have to fight over ever more scarce resources on this planet. The oil reserves look comparatively fine right now, but it's a good question how long they will stay that way, looking at the current pace of economic growth in China and India - to just name the two largest players). Not that it's particularly likely we will find oil on a rock nearby (no plant growth -> no oil a few hundred millennia later) but there will certainly be other resources that WILL become more problematic for us to get our hands on.
Even continuing to fix it IS useful - if only to teach future space missions what kind of problems evolve over time. (i.e. for a lot of things you might be able to do a "quick and dirty" hack, if all you need it for is a day or two... For a space ship to be in space for months or even years, we do need to know more about the actual degradation of materials in the conditions out there...
But - even with the regular repairs, I would still think they're doing SOME research - even if that might not be quite is visible in the headlines as "read all about the latest power outage!"...
Why should that be a negative point, as long as ALL comparisons were made on the same machine?
While the potentially slower disk in a laptop might reduce the overall speed - the negative impact of the hardware should be equal on all three tested versions, since they all run on the same hardware.
The point of the comparison would be just as valid, if ALL tests were conducted on some old Pentium II box - as long as it's the same machine/identical machines in all three tests.
There might be another alternative - what about they hire him for the duration of the flight, say, as research for the company doing the rides -- they hire him for minimum wage for one day, and give him some special questionnaire to fill out after the flight. In this case, his ride would be work (gather information on the "end user experience")...
He might have to tax the minimum wage, but the company could completely write off the money spent to send him to space in the first place, as it's a work requirement. (i.e. treat the space ride as a "business trip")...
(oh - and yes, if he researches the 'experience' of the offered flights, it should well be possible for him to completely (and determinedly) "enjoy" the flight - so as to be in a better position to say what the company might want to improve for future customers...
Shouldn't that be possible?
Twisted little thought, that...
But may I remind you of something? When your "big W" went to war in Iraq, despite Saddam claiming he had no weapons, and UN weapons inspectors not finding any - that little Korean dictator was openly threatening the US with his WMDs.
But - where did you end up going to war? Iraq...
It was your current "enlightened" (and I'm using that word in a VERY loose sense of the word here) leadership, which decided that revenge for the first gulf war was more important, than acting on actual problems. Political pundits here in Europe at the time commented on the one lesson to be learnt from this for every little third world dictator: Either get the bomb, or make sure you can make others believe in you having it - then the US won't touch you. But look weak, and they will come and invade you - no matter what the rest of the world has to say about it.
I, for one, believe this is right - by bombing down Iraq, not just did the invasion create the Quagmire there (because noone seemed to have planned what to do once the war was over), but it WILL have sent out the signals to other nations to get nuclear arms as quickly as possible, to make sure the US won't attack them. As such, NK will now have a list of potential buyers significantly longer than just AlQaeda or other terrorists.
Well, yes and no...
In Hunt For The Red October, it was, at least, clear that they were looking at sounds. Also, looking at the issue there is that the people involved with the system should know whether they are even close to an area that could produce a volcano (volcanos basically only occur near fault-lines -- hearing volcano noises anywhere else will be sufficient in itself).
In Contact, the signal was preceeded / accompanied by a *very* simple and *very* strong signal - something designed to be picked up; and the signal went on for days.
If you look at the Seti project, there are some characteristics, which *we* think will be dead giveaways - but who tells you that this is the kind of signal, aliens might indeed by generating - we just assume an alien signal might have to look roughly like 'xyz', simply because that's the way ours look.
A TV signal is something very complex in nature - but if you look at the recurrent features of those signals (end of line / end of screen sync breaks), these could be all kinds of things. Parts of text - parts of sound, parts of concepts we don't consider right now.
In comparison, the gold plate on Voyager is relatively straightforward - no changes in colours, the same material all over, very regular, the only irregularity being the message imprinted in it. But - yes - obviously, the big difference between the signals is that voyager would take *very* long indeed to get to a place significantly far enough away from us - and it will only be at one place at a time, it's not like a broadcast going in all directions.
I'd be curious to know how they want to prepare any potential "viewers" for what's in the stream coming to them...
Even if they get a broadcast at a certain frequency - how intuitive will it be for an alien listener, that this broadcast will be audio/video in PAL, SECAM or NTSC coding?
Sounds pretty useless to me - about the same chance, as if they send a windows version of the Encyclopedia Britannica out for aliens to browse through...
In comparison, the gold plate on voyager is something more readily accessible - as an effort was made to keep the message simple.
But I wouldn't go as far and discount it as useless because of it, or just saying "Thank god, we're not like that". If you go down that route, you'll go down a route that ignores the market.
Let me move the original comment back a few decades and put in a slightly different context, and that will hopefully highlight what I mean:
Surely, there was a time, when I thought real deep down X11 client programming was a pig - but if I had stayed with purely command line apps, I would have missed the market - or do you honestly believe you could find a mass market for a non-WYSIWIG command-line driven equivalent of Word or Excel?
If I compare, say, maps.google.com (AJAX) and streetmap.co.uk (non-AJAX); or gmail compared to some non-AJAX webmailers out there - google maps wins hands down in user friendlyness - and that's the bit that counts.
There will be sites/projects for which Ajax will not be the way to go (much like the way gcc doesn't have a built-in GUI), but for many functions with direct and interactive user-access - Ajax will be the way to go, until someone comes up with something even better.
I don't agree with that.
Yes - this requires hacking the trusted party's site.
But what happens next?
A) The cracker breaks the internal databases and reads out all information from it. This clearly wouldn't be phishing. But - it's a very difficult thing; most DBs in those apps are locked down pretty well - and passwords etc. will be encrypted; whether you'd manage to decrypt them is another matter...
B) The cracker adds some pages of his own to the trusted party's website, and sends out phishing emails directing people to "his" portal there. This entry portal could ask for the standard username and password, try them on the "real" web-pages, and if successful, forward them to the cracker... This WOULD be phishing.
I'm not sure you're quite getting the point.
Of course, in the short term, it would (slightly) inconvenience the agriculture-heavy European economies (e.g. France) economies as well as the American economy, if the farming subsidies were eliminated.
On the other hand - at the same time, this would create new jobs, because if all of a sudden African farmers could start selling more and more of their own grain/... in Europe and the US, then that will create new needs there (e.g. agricultural machinery, for instance) as well as new wealth there (which would likely go into more "luxury" goods; many of which get produced IN those economies which would yield the subsidies), which in turn means that US and European manufacturing businesses would find new markets to sell to - and hence also require new people to work for them.
At the same time, while spending on subsidies will be saved, this frees up money, which could either result in lower taxation (which would make the whole economy more competitive again, because costs go down), or the money could be used to try and fix that runaway budget deficit...
But, yes, for at least a few years, the economy will take a hit. (while at the same time, depriving it of new potential markets for other workers than the subsidised farmers).
Can intra-office communication not be done via RTF?
It easily could - but that's beside the point. THe fact that you can run "virus-free" software on Windows does not preclude you from (inadvertently) running something virus-infected.
You may do all your company internal documents in RTF even in MS Office - but if one of the company secretaries opens up a document sent by an outside source (maybe a seemingly legitimate one), which DOES contain a virus, your system's security is still screwed. Your RTFs might not get infected - but who knows what else the virus might do (e.g. send all documents in your "recent documents" to the attacker -- good chance of snatching some more important documents there...
There are a few issues here:
Oh boy... Low UIDs hardly instill authority!
;-)
Take it from someone with a waaaaaaayyyyy lower UID as yours!
But to your original point - I'm not too sure you can rule out future break-ins at all. It would only be REALLY stupid, if both breakins happened through the same setup fault.
But I don't think debian has a full time security admin who constantly and ACTIVELY monitors every debian.org box, like other big name companies might be able to afford to.
Secondly, the sheer multitude of packages, and frequent updates/upgrades of packages will make it fairly impossible to keep a machine 100% break-in proof.
Of course, I don't like break-ins - especially on servers of a distribution I'm actively using; but I think it's wrong to panic about it either.
More importantly - while I see the need to reinstall quickly, has anyone there found out HOW the break-in occured? Has the hole been located? (...and is it known how to fix this particular one, before the same guy just uses the same "back door" again?)
What would interest me more is how they would put bittorrent to use with DRM?
If they want to make sure that only YOU can watch the movie, or - in case you burn it on DVD and give it away - track you down if you spread copies, they would need to make sure that you get YOUR personalised copy of it (either with a fixed end-of-validity: say, you order your copy at 4:38pm, and it times out 4:37 next day -- or imprinted with some signature so that they will know YOU copied the movie), how would that still work with a distributed protocol a la bittorrent?
I don't see how it could - client caching doesn't make any sense (because of time limits in viewing), and it doesn't make a sense downloading a single block for someone else, just so THEY can download quicker.
Or - they go and encrypt all movies exactly the same and give you a temporary key for the file to allow you to decrypt it for a short while -- but is there a format that would allow for changing keys? (WITHOUT the danger of someone finding a way to crack the thing without knowing a temporary key? In that case, ANYONE could download a movie and decrypt it permanently - couldn't they?)
It's not like they're saying "we WILL have something tangible", but rather "we HAVE something tangible".
On the other hand - sorry, I don't quite see how these will be in competition with hard-drives, if you see that they are working on 4(!) MEGAbit chips... To Freescale: Call me again when it's 4 GIGAbit chips...
I see those as small stepping stones, but not more, right now.
pine may have been geared at newbie users a long time ago - and it still does the job for newbies (though most newbies will probably not waste a second look at it, because it isn't "graphical" ("Yeah, man, Outlook *looks* sooo much better, so it has to be better!").
...).
But, I would tend to think, pine has grown with its users - it might not be quite as powerful as mutt can be, but mutt, at first glance, seems to be about as useful as emacs without any lisp packages; i.e. it may be powerful, but only after loads of configuration...
pine to me has the advantage of being very efficient at what it does - pico isn't the greatest editor of all times (far from it), but it does the job well - and if I want a better editor in the odd editing sesssion, I call up the external editor (C-_) and use that for a particular email. Still, in most situations, using pico is perfectly adequate for editing an email - it's not that often I need regexp-search-and-replace, syntax highlighting or similar nonsense when writing an email message, after all.
I would say, pine is still very easy to learn for newbies, but at the same time, it's incredibly powerful in that it is very efficient (most commands are reachable by a single key, the way I can define multiple inboxes (use procmail to sort incoming mail into various folders and just skim through them automatically by hitting TAB to get to the next message,
I've tried other mail readers, but none for too long - even to me there are some shortcomings to pine, but none turn out quite as badly as shortcomings in other mail-readers I've tried...
The comparison is a bit slanted, if a someone robs your bank, you're not really inconvenienced, as the bank is insured - your money is safe.
This particular case is more like you depositing a copy of your house key with your neighbour (in case you should lose yours), and that KEY gets stolen. Your neighbour might tell you that the key is gone - and worse yet, that the key actually has a tag with your name and address attached to it. So, until you can go and change your locks, your home is basically compromised and it takes a lot of effort keeping it safe, until the locks are replaced.
With the stolen social security numbers, you can't switch your social security number easily, if at all? Is it possible at all to apply for a new social sec no in the US moving your data to the new one, but invalidating the old one?
In the example with your key getting stolen from a neighbour's property; of course, it's not really the neighbour's fault, if someone breaks into his house.
BUT - the neighbour might be liable, if gross negligence aided losing the key in the first place (i.e. putting up a sign with an arrow pointing to the key with all the data as to whose key it is, right outside on the front lawn - without any protective measure).
If an agency hands over your data to an outside contractor - they HAVE to put safeguards in place (check out the contractor's background/reputation, and *his* security measures), because they are handing away data that you *entrusted* to them. Just handing out blanket data, without properly protecting it (really good encryption, at the least, with the key being nowhere near the laptop during transport), is them breaking your trust.
And THAT is something that might make them very well liable for what happens.
(Needless to say - even those that will pay for free credit checks for a year, what's that to say, at all? THEY broke your trust by not safeguarding the data, and while they pay for the checks (for a limited time), they are not paying for your time following up the checks and/or the hassle in case something happens.)
These planets wouldn't be in the formation of a Kemplerer Rosette?
To any Pierson's Puppeteer: I'm over here! (though, I do not know how much pure luck was involved in my birth...)
(for those, who still don't get it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld
)
My worst was about 18 years ago - the release of Carrier Command on the Atari ST; it kept me awake for just over 104 hours until I had finished it... (that included 3 breaks to go to school (with slowly degrading attention)...
That was when I was 17 - today, the occasional all-nighter might still be in - but they're rare....
I don't see anything wrong with a more or less shameless plug for another search engine here (as clearly opposed to shameless plugs for online shops and the like).
Think about it like this:
A search engine only makes money through advertising / sponsored links; not through your visit as such. (unlike online shops which need to sell something straight to you).
Running an "article" on slashdot is, if indeed issued by them, a brave thing - it will bring loads of traffic; and if the search engine isn't up to scratch, the feedback might be fairly destructive (and the bandwith costs for even running it might be fairly high).
On the other hand, encouraging a community that they weren't exposed to before will tell them more about what kind of searches they will encounter, and hopefully might help them to improve their search engine. (Besides - if a query for some free software might (not yet?) turn up useful results; does anyone have stats as to how many pages they have indexed so far?)
Another good search engine would definitely be a good thing. Following google taking the "lead", some of their search results have deteriorated quite a bit thanks to enough idiots doing "search engine optimisations" bringing up their own pages in favour of pages that might actually be more appropriate. So far, google is doing a fair job of keeping that down, but on some queries I found it getting worse.
[before anyone regards this as "slanted"/"biased" in favour of the company - I'm not working for them, and this article is the first mention I've heard of them; and, yes, their search results could definitely do with some tuning...]
Sometimes I just wonder what's happening there - at two times did I apply for jobs with them (once in Zurich, Switzerland, while still living there; and once late last year for a job here in London where I am living now). In both cases, my CV seemed a good match for the positions I applied for. In Zurich, at the time of the application I only got an automated response saying something like "thanks for applying; we'll only be back in touch if we might be remotely interested in you" (nothing further). Here in London, I did get a second email a couple of weeks after applying telling me that I hadn't been successful.
;-)
So - either, they do not fully explain the kind of skills they're looking for (and hence remove any chance of people having a clue whether they might fit the role they're trying to hire for), or they don't really have much of a problem hiring and can afford to be *really* picky (e.g. "Ah, too bad, you would have been the perfect candidate, but we were looking for someone with experience of J2SDK 1.4.2_07; you only have 1.4.2_06)...
In any case, I've got a job now, so right now I'm not interested in working for them either...