Remember the Windows "NSA Key" flip a few years ago. You think Microsoft DIDN'T add a key for the NSA now?
I suspect that, if Microsoft had covertly added a key to Windows on behalf of the NSA - or any other government agency, for that matter - it would not have been labelled as _NSAKEY. Suffice to say, if the NSA had subverted the security of Windows (which no longer seems entirely unreasonable), they would have done so in a rather more subtle manner.
"Net Neutrality" isn't about paying more for more bandwidth from a service provider. It's about making people who aren't connected to your network pay for you to transfer data at normal speed through your network to your subscribers, who are themselves paying to use the bandwidth. It's like the post office offering to a business the option to pay an annual fee - or have all their mail delivered two weeks later than it should be.
It's a shame for sure, but I'm not surprised newer stuff won't work with ME. It's been many years since MS discounted the Win9x core (and thank god they did), and the newer versions of DirectX (which I'm guessing EA is basing their games on) aren't available for Win9X and ME. Really, everyone who's still using any Win9x product should either ditch it for Linux or update to Windows XP. It's such a horrible platform.:)
Actually, Windows 98/98SE/ME all support DirectX up to version 9.0c, as does Windows 2000. There is no conceivable reason why a game, for example Age of Empire III, should not run under Windows 2000, especially since it will if some configuration files are manually changed (I have managed to run the demo und 2000, with no noticable problems, see this), leading me to believe that this "feature" is just a way of forcing people to upgrade. Needless to say, this will be the first game of Ensemble Studios that I will not own, even if the PC I am using now has XP Pro installed.
Perhaps this vulnerability was a 'Feature' to get people to migrate away from Windows 2000?
Considering the fact that Microsoft has already released a patch for the hole, that would seem highly unlikely. As the old saying goes, never attribute to malice what can be better explained by incompetence, and that is evidently in no short supply at Redmond, given that the security hole managed to survive unnoticed for several years. Who knows what other security holes lurk deep in the Windows NT 5.x source code? Perhaps there is a buffer overflow somewhere in the TCP/IP stack... that would cetainly be interesting. Or better yet, a buffer overflow in the XP SP2 firewall...
If they transfered this money to say a Swiss bank account that didn't have any personal information attached to it - the police may never have caught a person. They might have been able to get to the account, and retrieve the money, butgettin a persons private info is much harder.
All Swiss banks have information attached to them. Try opening a bank account in Switzerland - you have to identify yourself first. Bank secrecy simply means that the bank may not disclose that information to anybody - even the government. Bank secrecy can be lifted in cases of criminal prosecution (which includes tax fraud, but not tax evasion, which is not a crime in Switzerland) but is otherwise sacrosanct. There are limitations, especially as pertaining to foreign nationals. But even if a foreign government demands information (the US government does, for example) on its nationals living abroad, no bank in Switzerland may yield this information without written permission from the affected person(s).
As for anonymous "numbered" bank accounts: They don't exist. They were abolished some time ago because of the problems that they caused.
S.R. Hadden: First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
No, no. You got the rule all mixed up. It is Why build one when can build a half that doesn't work properly, is nineteen years late and twenty years out of date and costs eight times as much as orginally planned?
FACT: If we leave the EU, all British trains will run on time. And the tickets will be free. And everyone will have a legrest.
FACT: If we leave the EU, all mail will be on time. And stamps will cost half as much. And they'll have the queen's head on them again.
FACT: If we leave the EU, Britons will pay 120% less taxes than today. Poor people will no longer need to pay taxes, and we will remove the tax burden from the middle class will ceasing to punish the rich for their productivity. And everyone will get three times as much social support money, we will increase pensions by 400% AND we will pay off the national debt.
FACT: If we leave the EU, we will triple the British literacy rate to almost 300%. There will be no more school violence, all the teachers will be paid well and the NUT will be banned. We will also ensure that students are no longer taught all those embarrassing things about puberty, either.
FACT: If we leave the EU, Britons won't need banks because they won't need to pay bills anymore. With all the money saved from the Great Satan in Brussels, every Briton will be able to have a private castle in Leeds and a fleet of luxury cars that would make Arnold Schwarzenegger envious.
I think it is you that knows nothing about radioactivity:
Rubidium 87 has a half-life of 47 billion (10^9) years (our soloar system is not yet 5 billion years old). Uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.5 Billion (10^9) years, Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 25.000 years. Half-life means that after some billion years, you still have half of your nuclear waste happily emitting radioactivity, while the other half has decayed to other, possibly also radioactive elements. After 7 times the half-life (7*47*10^9 years = 329*10^9 years), you still have round about 1 % of the original radioactive waste (2^-7 = 1/128 ~ 1%) and a lot of other radioactive products.
The faster a substance decays, the more energy it emits. Conversely, substances which only decay very slowly emit very little radiation. Thus U-238, with it half-life of 4.5 billion years is far less radioactive than, say, Carbon-14 with its half-life of approximately 5,730 years. There are, of course, different types of decay, and heavier atoms tend to decay producing alpha particles and gamma rays rather than the beta particles that are common in lighter elements. Even so, elements with half-lives measured in millions of years do not typically emit enough radiation to be a threat to humans or to nature. The intensively radioactive products tend to get rid of themselves, so it is the medium intensity materials, such as the infamous Sr-90, with half-lives measured in months to millenia, that are particularly dangerous. It is also worth noting that alpha, beta and gamma rays can not make materials radioactive - it is neutrons that do that - and that alpha particles, which are the least penetrative of the three primary radiative products of nuclear decay, are also the most strongly ionising, while gamma rays, the most penetrating, are the least ionising, given the fact that they consist of mere EM radiation rather than charged particles like alpha and beta rays.
Humans are exposed to ionising radiation every day, and have been during the entirety of history. For this reason we have a variety of genetic repair mechanisms. The mere presence of ionising radiation is not a matter of concern; under normal circumstances the most significant sources of such radiation are natural. It is only when the level of radioactivity overwhelms the body's natural defenses that radioactivity becomes a threat to human health.
This might seem a stupid question, but if the reaction emits neither heat nor gamma rays, how does it transfer heat to the surroundings? By lower frequency EM radiation? By proton/electron emission?
To a normal person, there is almost no difference between a diesel motor and a petrol motor. That doesn't mean they are the same thing, in fact, there are some fundamental differences between the two; for example: A petrol motor uses electrical ignition, while a diesel motor doesn't have any ignition at all, since the air is compressed enough to heat it beyond the flash point of diesel. Try putting some diesel in a petrol motor (or visa versa) and see what happens.
Just because somethings may seem superficially similiar to "average Joe" doesn't mean you can glue them together and expect them to work. GNOME and KDE are programmed in different languages (C vs C++, though each has bindings for the other) and use different toolkits - Gtk+ and Qt, respectively - as well as different object models - Bonobo vs KParts. Trying to merge them would achieve nothing, rather than a unified desktop you would get a third desktop standard, most likely partially or mostly incompatible with the existing ones to the same or a similiar extent that they are incompatible with each other.
The future doesn't lie in integration, it lies in interoperability. For example, it is very important that clipboard functionality between KDE and GNOME is harmonised, as this is likely to be one thing that normal users will notice. Also desirable is the adoption of a common sound server, such as JACK and some way to embed Bonobo components in KDE applications and KParts in GNOME applications.
You have your taxes taken out of your income?! I thought that Americans were generally against tax... and certainly against the goverment having access to private assets like that.
In Switzerland, only foreigners have a "Quellensteuer" (source tax), in which the tax is deducted from the person's salary by the employer. Swiss citizens, however, pay taxes just like an electricity or water bill. This eliminates the problem of refunding income tax to people from whom the goverment has taken too much money. Bank secrecy is the major reason for this system - the government doesn't actually know where your assets are held or how much you have. They don't have access to bank records except in criminal prosecutions. The information necessary for taxation is collected via a (rather long and complicated) income tax declaration form, which you have to fill out even if you're not employed.
There is also a small progressive tax on assets themselves (Vermogenssteuer), as well as a reclaimable 35% flat tax on interest and dividends over 50 Swiss Francs (Verrechnungssteuer) intended to discourage people from hiding their assets from the goverment, both of which are collected by banks and forwarded the the appropriate authority (cantonal or federal goverment). If you declare your assets, you get the 35% back.
"....If we could produce electric effects of the required quality, this whole planet and the conditions of existence on it could be transformed. The sun raises the water of the oceans and winds drive it to distant regions where it remains in state of most delicate balance. If it were in our power to upset it when and wherever desired, this mighty life-sustaining stream could be at will controlled. We could
irrigate arid deserts, create lakes and rivers and provide motive power in unlimited amount. This would be the most efficient way of harsening the sun to the uses of man......" ( Nikola Tesla, June 1919 ) (1)
(emphasis mine) Can someone explain exactly what Tesla means with this statement? Now I'm sure that he had a good reason for making such a claim but as it stands it is rather difficult to believe and makes the otherwise great inventor seem rather absurd. Does he seriously believe that precipitation and climate are driven by terrestrial electric currents or what?
This is why I don't think people will ever have cars that totally drive themselves or computers that decide when your nukes launch. It's not that they don't have the potential to do these jobs, it's just that there's always the feeling that human error is more reliable than computer error.
But every "computer error" is in reality a human error. It was a human that built and programmed the computer and if it doesn't work as expected it is the human's fault for not forseeing and eliminating that error. Computers do not and can not do anything that they are not instructed to do - either the program is wrong, the input is wrong or the hardware is faulty.
Like, say one atom of carbon and four of hydrogen?
It's called methane. Using it does not involve zero emissions, since it is pumped out of the ground, and all other ways of creating it are just too expensive.
Re:Good riddance, Clueless & Witless...
on
C&W Bails Out
·
· Score: 1
1 7 ms 8 ms 6 ms *.*.*.*
2 9 ms 10 ms 10 ms gig-15-0.blxOTF001.cablecom.net
3 27 ms 13 ms 9 ms pos-1-0.blxZHT001.cablecom.net
4 28 ms 7 ms 7 ms zar1-so-2-2-0.Zurichzuh.cw.net
5 11 ms 8 ms 12 ms ycr1-ge-3-3-0.Zurichzuh.cw.net
6 18 ms 24 ms 15 ms bcr1-so-0-2-0.Frankfurt.cw.net
7 186 ms 179 ms 186 ms dcr2-loopback.SantaClara.cw.net
8 186 ms 209 ms 186 ms bhr2-pos-0-0.SantaClarasc3.cw.net
9 186 ms 186 ms 186 ms csr1-ve240.SantaClarasc3.cw.net
10 179 ms 181 ms 180 ms google-exodus.exodus.net
11 187 ms 187 ms 185 ms 216.239.48.126
12 187 ms 187 ms 192 ms 216.239.48.242
13 187 ms 183 ms 186 ms www.google.com
Google is apparently itself a customer of C&W. Incidentally, so is Slashdot:
1 8 ms 7 ms 7 ms *.*.*.*
2 14 ms 15 ms 20 ms gig-15-0.blxOTF001.cablecom.net
3 8 ms 8 ms 9 ms pos-1-0.blxZHT001.cablecom.net
4 7 ms 8 ms 11 ms zar1-so-2-2-0.Zurichzuh.cw.net
5 10 ms 7 ms 9 ms ycr1-ge-3-3-0.Zurichzuh.cw.net
6 15 ms 14 ms 14 ms bcr1-so-0-2-0.Frankfurt.cw.net
7 186 ms 181 ms 191 ms dcr2-loopback.SantaClara.cw.net
8 187 ms 188 ms 188 ms bhr1-pos-0-0.SantaClarasc8.cw.net
9 189 ms 186 ms 186 ms csr2-ve243.SantaClarasc8.cw.net
10 183 ms 183 ms 181 ms 66.35.210.202
Nothing is stopping them from launching a satellite with a nuclear weapon on board. It could be quite useful as an EMP generator, if the bomb is big enough.
Considering that both Titan and Atlas rockets were originally developed as ICBMs to carry multiple megaton thermonuclear weapons, yes, I do think that their payload COULD be a lot more dangerous than a Tomahawk.
Umm, you forgot one thing: Ignition. Unless your engine is a diesel engine, a failure of the electrical system will make it stall too.
And having your headlight fail at night CAN be a disaster if it causes you to go off the road and into a tree at 80+ km/h. Headlights aren't just for generously warning other drivers of potential hazards of the legal kind further up the road, you know.
100 megaton warheads? There are no warheads that big, nor were there ever any. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated [by the Soviet Union] had a yield of 58 megatons, and was much too big for delivery with an ICBM. Most of the regular ICBMs have a warhead in the 1 MT range, while those with MIRVs (multiple warheads), such as Minuteman III and Peacekeeper have warheads in the multiple hundered kiloton range. Still, a one MT bomb is extremely destructive, not the kind of thing you want to land near your place of residence and/or employment, unless it's a reinforced concrete bunker hundereds of meters beneath the Earth's surface. But if you live in a concrete bunker, then you probably have more serious problems than a nuclear attack.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember the Windows "NSA Key" flip a few years ago. You think Microsoft DIDN'T add a key for the NSA now?
I suspect that, if Microsoft had covertly added a key to Windows on behalf of the NSA - or any other government agency, for that matter - it would not have been labelled as _NSAKEY. Suffice to say, if the NSA had subverted the security of Windows (which no longer seems entirely unreasonable), they would have done so in a rather more subtle manner.
The Wikipedia article provides more information on the issue.
"Net Neutrality" isn't about paying more for more bandwidth from a service provider. It's about making people who aren't connected to your network pay for you to transfer data at normal speed through your network to your subscribers, who are themselves paying to use the bandwidth. It's like the post office offering to a business the option to pay an annual fee - or have all their mail delivered two weeks later than it should be.
Actually, Windows 98/98SE/ME all support DirectX up to version 9.0c, as does Windows 2000. There is no conceivable reason why a game, for example Age of Empire III, should not run under Windows 2000, especially since it will if some configuration files are manually changed (I have managed to run the demo und 2000, with no noticable problems, see this), leading me to believe that this "feature" is just a way of forcing people to upgrade. Needless to say, this will be the first game of Ensemble Studios that I will not own, even if the PC I am using now has XP Pro installed.
Yeah, my first Apple only had one core, too...
All Swiss banks have information attached to them. Try opening a bank account in Switzerland - you have to identify yourself first. Bank secrecy simply means that the bank may not disclose that information to anybody - even the government. Bank secrecy can be lifted in cases of criminal prosecution (which includes tax fraud, but not tax evasion, which is not a crime in Switzerland) but is otherwise sacrosanct. There are limitations, especially as pertaining to foreign nationals. But even if a foreign government demands information (the US government does, for example) on its nationals living abroad, no bank in Switzerland may yield this information without written permission from the affected person(s).
As for anonymous "numbered" bank accounts: They don't exist. They were abolished some time ago because of the problems that they caused.
Thank you. This is the kind of stuff that I read
FACT: If we leave the EU, all British trains will run on time. And the tickets will be free. And everyone will have a legrest.
FACT: If we leave the EU, all mail will be on time. And stamps will cost half as much. And they'll have the queen's head on them again.
FACT: If we leave the EU, Britons will pay 120% less taxes than today. Poor people will no longer need to pay taxes, and we will remove the tax burden from the middle class will ceasing to punish the rich for their productivity. And everyone will get three times as much social support money, we will increase pensions by 400% AND we will pay off the national debt.
FACT: If we leave the EU, we will triple the British literacy rate to almost 300%. There will be no more school violence, all the teachers will be paid well and the NUT will be banned. We will also ensure that students are no longer taught all those embarrassing things about puberty, either.
FACT: If we leave the EU, Britons won't need banks because they won't need to pay bills anymore. With all the money saved from the Great Satan in Brussels, every Briton will be able to have a private castle in Leeds and a fleet of luxury cars that would make Arnold Schwarzenegger envious.
The faster a substance decays, the more energy it emits. Conversely, substances which only decay very slowly emit very little radiation. Thus U-238, with it half-life of 4.5 billion years is far less radioactive than, say, Carbon-14 with its half-life of approximately 5,730 years. There are, of course, different types of decay, and heavier atoms tend to decay producing alpha particles and gamma rays rather than the beta particles that are common in lighter elements. Even so, elements with half-lives measured in millions of years do not typically emit enough radiation to be a threat to humans or to nature. The intensively radioactive products tend to get rid of themselves, so it is the medium intensity materials, such as the infamous Sr-90, with half-lives measured in months to millenia, that are particularly dangerous. It is also worth noting that alpha, beta and gamma rays can not make materials radioactive - it is neutrons that do that - and that alpha particles, which are the least penetrative of the three primary radiative products of nuclear decay, are also the most strongly ionising, while gamma rays, the most penetrating, are the least ionising, given the fact that they consist of mere EM radiation rather than charged particles like alpha and beta rays.
Humans are exposed to ionising radiation every day, and have been during the entirety of history. For this reason we have a variety of genetic repair mechanisms. The mere presence of ionising radiation is not a matter of concern; under normal circumstances the most significant sources of such radiation are natural. It is only when the level of radioactivity overwhelms the body's natural defenses that radioactivity becomes a threat to human health.
This might seem a stupid question, but if the reaction emits neither heat nor gamma rays, how does it transfer heat to the surroundings? By lower frequency EM radiation? By proton/electron emission?
You almost had me there, for a second.
But, alas, no. Slashdot is not going all touchy-feely, as I had feared.
My eyes are so sensitive that they can detect half a photon.
To a normal person, there is almost no difference between a diesel motor and a petrol motor. That doesn't mean they are the same thing, in fact, there are some fundamental differences between the two; for example: A petrol motor uses electrical ignition, while a diesel motor doesn't have any ignition at all, since the air is compressed enough to heat it beyond the flash point of diesel. Try putting some diesel in a petrol motor (or visa versa) and see what happens.
Just because somethings may seem superficially similiar to "average Joe" doesn't mean you can glue them together and expect them to work. GNOME and KDE are programmed in different languages (C vs C++, though each has bindings for the other) and use different toolkits - Gtk+ and Qt, respectively - as well as different object models - Bonobo vs KParts. Trying to merge them would achieve nothing, rather than a unified desktop you would get a third desktop standard, most likely partially or mostly incompatible with the existing ones to the same or a similiar extent that they are incompatible with each other.
The future doesn't lie in integration, it lies in interoperability. For example, it is very important that clipboard functionality between KDE and GNOME is harmonised, as this is likely to be one thing that normal users will notice. Also desirable is the adoption of a common sound server, such as JACK and some way to embed Bonobo components in KDE applications and KParts in GNOME applications.
It has been integrated into the kernel and will be available in 2.6.2. Source (search for "forcedeth").
You have your taxes taken out of your income?! I thought that Americans were generally against tax... and certainly against the goverment having access to private assets like that.
In Switzerland, only foreigners have a "Quellensteuer" (source tax), in which the tax is deducted from the person's salary by the employer. Swiss citizens, however, pay taxes just like an electricity or water bill. This eliminates the problem of refunding income tax to people from whom the goverment has taken too much money. Bank secrecy is the major reason for this system - the government doesn't actually know where your assets are held or how much you have. They don't have access to bank records except in criminal prosecutions. The information necessary for taxation is collected via a (rather long and complicated) income tax declaration form, which you have to fill out even if you're not employed.
There is also a small progressive tax on assets themselves (Vermogenssteuer), as well as a reclaimable 35% flat tax on interest and dividends over 50 Swiss Francs (Verrechnungssteuer) intended to discourage people from hiding their assets from the goverment, both of which are collected by banks and forwarded the the appropriate authority (cantonal or federal goverment). If you declare your assets, you get the 35% back.
(emphasis mine)
Can someone explain exactly what Tesla means with this statement? Now I'm sure that he had a good reason for making such a claim but as it stands it is rather difficult to believe and makes the otherwise great inventor seem rather absurd. Does he seriously believe that precipitation and climate are driven by terrestrial electric currents or what?
But every "computer error" is in reality a human error. It was a human that built and programmed the computer and if it doesn't work as expected it is the human's fault for not forseeing and eliminating that error. Computers do not and can not do anything that they are not instructed to do - either the program is wrong, the input is wrong or the hardware is faulty.
No, especially not considering that the song "Happy Birthday" is also copyrighted.
Yes, this is for real. There are sources listed in the linked article.
Like, say one atom of carbon and four of hydrogen?
It's called methane. Using it does not involve zero emissions, since it is pumped out of the ground, and all other ways of creating it are just too expensive.
Google is apparently itself a customer of C&W. Incidentally, so is Slashdot:
Nothing is stopping them from launching a satellite with a nuclear weapon on board. It could be quite useful as an EMP generator, if the bomb is big enough.
Considering that both Titan and Atlas rockets were originally developed as ICBMs to carry multiple megaton thermonuclear weapons, yes, I do think that their payload COULD be a lot more dangerous than a Tomahawk.
Umm, you forgot one thing: Ignition. Unless your engine is a diesel engine, a failure of the electrical system will make it stall too.
And having your headlight fail at night CAN be a disaster if it causes you to go off the road and into a tree at 80+ km/h. Headlights aren't just for generously warning other drivers of potential hazards of the legal kind further up the road, you know.
100 megaton warheads? There are no warheads that big, nor were there ever any. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated [by the Soviet Union] had a yield of 58 megatons, and was much too big for delivery with an ICBM. Most of the regular ICBMs have a warhead in the 1 MT range, while those with MIRVs (multiple warheads), such as Minuteman III and Peacekeeper have warheads in the multiple hundered kiloton range. Still, a one MT bomb is extremely destructive, not the kind of thing you want to land near your place of residence and/or employment, unless it's a reinforced concrete bunker hundereds of meters beneath the Earth's surface. But if you live in a concrete bunker, then you probably have more serious problems than a nuclear attack.