When you asked the scientistic community in the hundreds of years ago if flight would be possible, they'd only laugh at you.
Coaches moving at high speeds without horses? Ridiculous!
Visiting other "planets"? With a special cannonball perhaps.
I'm not an expert in this area - as I suppose most of slashdot readers aren't - but unlike most I won't just call him a "Crackpot" based on some bias. He seems work to scientifically, though it sounds unlikely, if his protype really worked as he claimed he has shown some interesting results. Personally I won't touch relativity with a ten-foot-pole (not matter the speed of the pole or the frame of reference) - we love to pretend to live in a nice, orderly universe without relativity and quantum effects, but in reality those things happen all the time, they just have too small effects to be really noticed. But they exists, and if they are exploited correctly things might be done that are "impossible" for our normal world view.
Ok, maybe those guys were a bit naive to send personally indentifiable information of such delicate nature to a Craiglist entry.
BUT
they never assumed that somebody would just post it on the internet. He probably destroyed several marriages, cost a job or two and ruined the lives of several of the respondents. For what? I think he deserves whatever he's got coming to him - be it a lawsuit or a real good beating (probably some of both).
Just look at the facts, look at those Greeks, Egyptians and Romans - they are all dead now. I mean they used that stuff, and now they are dead.
So use it at your own risk - that "might attract babarian hordes" warning label is not there for nothing, ya know.
Has Earthlink learnt NOTHING from VeriSign's debacle?
Blatantly ignoring established policy (if a DNS-request does not resolve the response must be "DNS-request does not resolve" not "here it is"). Let's not forget all the privacy issues with hundreds of thousands of e-mails, normally being undeliverable because the sender made a typo in the adress, now end up in their inbox.
Hmmm... if I were to DDOS www.this-site-does-not-exist-but-earthlink-resolve s-it-anway.something would I act criminally? I mean, the site does not exist, and Earthlink just poaches its DNS adress...
First of all, this is only Phase 1 of 3.
Phase 1 in clinical trials is meant to make sure the drug in general is "safe" and to determine the maximum safe dosage.
Testing if the drug really works as expected, how effective it is etc. is done in Phases 2 and 3 with a much larger group, in double-blind experiments.
Still, before Phase 1 there were many other experiments - i.e. test with animals, computer simulations etc. - which must have shown some promise otherwise they wouldn't spend money on the human trials.
...the world famous comedian and one of the best actors there is.
Honestly, he has to be - he always makes me laugh with tears when he cracks one of his "how videogames [verb] the [noun]" jokes or when he retells the original classic "why videogames are root of all evil" one-liners.
Also, I really love the way he pretends to be the biggest, most bigoted dumbfuck on earth. I mean, this guy has pure talent - no one alive could be such an gigantic arsehole as he pretends to be.
Oh well, there was that guy who was arrested for taking pictures (using his phone-camera) of Cops arresting a drugdealer. Charges: Obstruction of justice (eh?) and trespassing (he was on his own doorstep), and yeah, there are witnesses that can confirm both.
Then we have that nice she-cop that decided to arrest two lost young women that asked another cop for directions (after only recieving rudeness as an answer from her) on charges of trespassing... on a public road.
And now we have a cop who arrest 12 year old kinds for climbing up a tree and breaking off a couple of small branches. Yeah, somebody should have told them that doing that in a public park is not OK, but arresting them, DNAing them? Next time they go for exitement they better start shoplifting, that has less severer "first offense" outcomes.
God bless America (and Great Britan) - they are on the best way to become a police state, wherer "to serve and protect" means "... the goverment and our own whims".
Well, here's the typical RIAA reaction to anything "new".
OMG! It drains our profits. Kill it! Sue it! Kill it!
The truth is that those who do not learn from past mistakes are doomed to repeat them - and are bound to become extinct once they have fallen too far behind.
When tape recorders emerged became popular they claimed it would destroy the music industry - after all, why would people buy music when they could just record it off radio and trade the tapes. Yeah.
It was repeated with television when the VCR emerged.
Same thing with copy-machines.
Cheap CD-burners.
And DVD-burners.
Each and every time one organisation or other claimed this would destory the world as they know it.
Suprisingly they still rack in money like there is no tomorrow (though there have been some decreases through market over-satuaration)
Now it is possible to record stuff from XM - and again the companies scream that their very livelyhood is taken away.
Personally I'd just ignore them, but sadly (and oddly, considering their self-claimed poor profits) they seem to have enough money to sway politicans to their views and cripple every new technology.
You can only play it on one PC - unlike the DVD which you can play wherever you want.
You cannot sell it after you have seen it - unlike the DVD which can, or give away as a gift, etc.
You have to "share" you bandwith, so with a slow upload it can take hours or days to finish - instead of a quick drive to the next shop
You have to pay the same amount of money - for less product (see above)
WHY would I buy it then? If I want to be honest, I get more if I just skip all the hassle and buy the DVD, if I don't care, I'll still grab it from one of the countless torrent sites...
Mr. Gonzales also said that he is investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders.
While I applaud any efford to crack down on child pornography, I can't help feeling worried.
The EU Data Retention Law was meant to "aid in the fight against Terrorism" and now look what is happening.
Lobby groups managed to push e.g. Germany into considering allowing the Industry to tap into this datapool, simply by demanding it from the ISP and without the consent of a judge, to pursue software/music/movie piracy.
Ironically, if German law-enforcment agencies do wish to do the very same thing, they can do it only for "serious" crimes and only with the consent of the judge (as it should be).
I think I gonna file a suggestion that the German government asserts copyright over all child pornography and then they could take the online logs of the offenders (and anyone else they accuse) without judge-consent, claiming its protecting their copyright...
I think you misunderstood the purpose of this project.
They don't want to replace all those graphic displays with music, but they intend to use sound in addition to graphics.
If you rely purely on a graphics display you would have to hire someone who has to babysit the monitor, in case something odd starts to happen. He can't really work if he has to stop every 5 minutes and check the monitor (and there are probably "false feeling of safty" effects to be countered too, after all, checking the monitor for X weeks and nothing big popping up might make the person(s) realax too much)
With the music you don't have to check at the monitor all the time, you notice when the music changes (and can go check) but as long as it remains the same you can get some real work done.
I partially agree.
If your code is unstable in a way that memory leaks and segmentation faults are not only a "remote possibility" but a - even if only rarely - reoccuring event, then any safeguards you implement won't be overly sucessfull, unless you fix the code that causes the errors first. (Disclaimer: There is no perfect code. Even if there were no bugs in the code, the program has still the "remote possibility" to crash due to errors in the hardware / OS)
That said, garbage collection or not is a different discussion. Some say it is bad and breed lazy programmers, while others argue (I amongst them) that it is a terrific tool for designers, since it almost eliminates the occurance of memory leaks (unless you do some really bad programming) and it might even speed up your program
Well, to sum it up...
They only get the nominal 1$ as a yearly salary, and instead get paid in stock and stock options.
This means that they have strong faith in their company (if the stock crashes they'd lose alot of money compared to just having a ordinary 6-7 digit salary)
And regarding the sale of stock - its stock they already own, so they are taking nothing away from the company. Its like turning part of your coin or stamp collection back into cash. Well, its a tiny bit bigger than that but the principle is the same.;)
So Ma Bell wants to charge companies and people that deliver content to Bell's very own customers.
So let them. But don't pay. And inform the customers WHY they recieve such bad troughput when using their websites.
Imagine e.g. Google, doing a simple revers IP lookup to determine the provider and if it's Ma Bell, adding the following message to their search sites.
Dear Visitor,
We apologize for the possible slowness of our service.
However your provider BellSouth, has decided to demand "bandwith charges" from all major website transmitting data over their network (in addition to any subscription charges from you).
Google has declined to pay those additional charges, as this traffic - like searching via Google - should be (and with all other ISP is) covered with your subscription charge.
If you have any questions, please contact your local BellSouth service center.
Happy Googling!
Tens of thousands of unhappy customers calling BellSouth should make them do another reality check and stop demanding those ridiculous charges.
Google Earth is more of a "fun" program. Nice to toy around once in a while, but nothing I have always installed. Picasa is nifty. A free image editor is always nice. Google Pack Screensaver Don't really care about that one. I usually blank my screen. Google Desktop I don't use since I have "order in my chaos"(tm) and don't really like to things hooked into everything. Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer will be a godsend for all IE unsers, but I don't need it since I do Firefox.
Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar guess this will make Firefox's markedshare do another jump. Norton Antivirus 2005 Special Edition - personally I use AntiVirus Personal Editon, its free and quite good, but if I think about all the PCs without any up-to-date protection out there its a real godsend. Ad-Aware SE Personal 4236 programs found? If you have used IE, not used a virusscanner and/or have a "shiny, let's click it" PC user this thing will cleanse your system. Otherwise once every 3 months is sufficient. Adobe Reader 7 A no-brainer, one of the most portable formats around (let's see how Open Document spreads),.doc eat your heart out.
Why high Oil and Gas prices have a good side too
or
The best way to force people to change is making them wanting to change
First of all - I live in Europa, Germany.
Today Fuel prices have reached 1.43 Euro / liter, this is about 7.9$ / gallon. Yes, driving is EXPENSIVE here.
In the last few years, cars with a high efficiency have become very high in demand - of course, when fuel is expensive, people want cars that use little fuel.
And the same thing is going to happen to the USA.
People will look at the prices, look into their purses and the next car they buy won't be a 15 miles per gallon SUV, but perhaps a 30 / 35 miles per gallon car. Or they might grab one of the ultra fuel-efficient cars (many of them are from Germany - guess why...) like the VW Lupo - 78 miles per gallon (Diesel) - well, truth to be told, it ain't a beauty, you've got no real storage space, and acceleration isn't, but if you want fuel economy, there you go.
And this is the positive side of the high prices - there will be a demand for fuel-efficient cars, thus the industry will build them, and people will buy and drive them. And overall, less Oil will be used, causing less pollution and conserving it for more important uses
Oh, well, at least it was a tainted victory.
And the old card that tainted it was the Shadow Dragon.
And he used Gozoku Sensei.
Rich and Shawn from the story team will have a field day with this, I'm sure;)
Yesterday's article said that most MEP would probably vote NO - but the vote was only done today.
Thus, there existed the chance that they might get a change of heart etc. and vote YES instead...
We already had prematurely celebrated the Patent Directive dead once already - when Sweden etc. said it wanted to move it from a A-point to a B-point, but then was basically ignored by the Council during the meeting - and the Directive was passed to the EP for second reading.
NOW we can say that the Directive, in its current form, is dead.
Odd...
Last time they were asked about it they said: "We can stop controlling the DNS servers anytime we want to - we just don't want to stop right now."
So Bittorent is the source of all evil for MPAA now?
Because it was used to distribute Episode 3?
Why not blame the internet? Without it there would be MUCH less piracy.
[cynism]Or even better blame the George Lucas - if he hadn't made Episode 3 it could not have been pirated [/cynism]
Reality to MPAA - get a grip!
Well, there have been reports that some hash algrorithms are prone to "collisons" i.e. it is possible to find, with some effort, files that produce the same hash value and having the same size despite having different content.
The easy solution:
Use a safer Hash function.
Slashdot Mirror
When you asked the scientistic community in the hundreds of years ago if flight would be possible, they'd only laugh at you.
Coaches moving at high speeds without horses? Ridiculous!
Visiting other "planets"? With a special cannonball perhaps.
I'm not an expert in this area - as I suppose most of slashdot readers aren't - but unlike most I won't just call him a "Crackpot" based on some bias. He seems work to scientifically, though it sounds unlikely, if his protype really worked as he claimed he has shown some interesting results. Personally I won't touch relativity with a ten-foot-pole (not matter the speed of the pole or the frame of reference) - we love to pretend to live in a nice, orderly universe without relativity and quantum effects, but in reality those things happen all the time, they just have too small effects to be really noticed. But they exists, and if they are exploited correctly things might be done that are "impossible" for our normal world view.
Ok, maybe those guys were a bit naive to send personally indentifiable information of such delicate nature to a Craiglist entry.
BUT
they never assumed that somebody would just post it on the internet. He probably destroyed several marriages, cost a job or two and ruined the lives of several of the respondents. For what? I think he deserves whatever he's got coming to him - be it a lawsuit or a real good beating (probably some of both).
Just look at the facts, look at those Greeks, Egyptians and Romans - they are all dead now. I mean they used that stuff, and now they are dead.
So use it at your own risk - that "might attract babarian hordes" warning label is not there for nothing, ya know.
Has Earthlink learnt NOTHING from VeriSign's debacle?e s-it-anway.something would I act criminally? I mean, the site does not exist, and Earthlink just poaches its DNS adress...
Blatantly ignoring established policy (if a DNS-request does not resolve the response must be "DNS-request does not resolve" not "here it is"). Let's not forget all the privacy issues with hundreds of thousands of e-mails, normally being undeliverable because the sender made a typo in the adress, now end up in their inbox.
Hmmm... if I were to DDOS www.this-site-does-not-exist-but-earthlink-resolv
First of all, this is only Phase 1 of 3.
Phase 1 in clinical trials is meant to make sure the drug in general is "safe" and to determine the maximum safe dosage.
Testing if the drug really works as expected, how effective it is etc. is done in Phases 2 and 3 with a much larger group, in double-blind experiments.
Still, before Phase 1 there were many other experiments - i.e. test with animals, computer simulations etc. - which must have shown some promise otherwise they wouldn't spend money on the human trials.
...the world famous comedian and one of the best actors there is.
Honestly, he has to be - he always makes me laugh with tears when he cracks one of his "how videogames [verb] the [noun]" jokes or when he retells the original classic "why videogames are root of all evil" one-liners.
Also, I really love the way he pretends to be the biggest, most bigoted dumbfuck on earth. I mean, this guy has pure talent - no one alive could be such an gigantic arsehole as he pretends to be.
Oh well, there was that guy who was arrested for taking pictures (using his phone-camera) of Cops arresting a drugdealer. Charges: Obstruction of justice (eh?) and trespassing (he was on his own doorstep), and yeah, there are witnesses that can confirm both. Then we have that nice she-cop that decided to arrest two lost young women that asked another cop for directions (after only recieving rudeness as an answer from her) on charges of trespassing... on a public road. And now we have a cop who arrest 12 year old kinds for climbing up a tree and breaking off a couple of small branches. Yeah, somebody should have told them that doing that in a public park is not OK, but arresting them, DNAing them? Next time they go for exitement they better start shoplifting, that has less severer "first offense" outcomes. God bless America (and Great Britan) - they are on the best way to become a police state, wherer "to serve and protect" means "... the goverment and our own whims".
Well, here's the typical RIAA reaction to anything "new".
OMG! It drains our profits. Kill it! Sue it! Kill it!
The truth is that those who do not learn from past mistakes are doomed to repeat them - and are bound to become extinct once they have fallen too far behind.
When tape recorders emerged became popular they claimed it would destroy the music industry - after all, why would people buy music when they could just record it off radio and trade the tapes. Yeah.
It was repeated with television when the VCR emerged.
Same thing with copy-machines.
Cheap CD-burners.
And DVD-burners.
Each and every time one organisation or other claimed this would destory the world as they know it.
Suprisingly they still rack in money like there is no tomorrow (though there have been some decreases through market over-satuaration)
Now it is possible to record stuff from XM - and again the companies scream that their very livelyhood is taken away.
Personally I'd just ignore them, but sadly (and oddly, considering their self-claimed poor profits) they seem to have enough money to sway politicans to their views and cripple every new technology.
You can only play it on one PC - unlike the DVD which you can play wherever you want.
You cannot sell it after you have seen it - unlike the DVD which can, or give away as a gift, etc.
You have to "share" you bandwith, so with a slow upload it can take hours or days to finish - instead of a quick drive to the next shop
You have to pay the same amount of money - for less product (see above)
WHY would I buy it then? If I want to be honest, I get more if I just skip all the hassle and buy the DVD, if I don't care, I'll still grab it from one of the countless torrent sites...
Mr. Gonzales also said that he is investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders.
While I applaud any efford to crack down on child pornography, I can't help feeling worried.
The EU Data Retention Law was meant to "aid in the fight against Terrorism" and now look what is happening.
Lobby groups managed to push e.g. Germany into considering allowing the Industry to tap into this datapool, simply by demanding it from the ISP and without the consent of a judge, to pursue software/music/movie piracy.
Ironically, if German law-enforcment agencies do wish to do the very same thing, they can do it only for "serious" crimes and only with the consent of the judge (as it should be).
I think I gonna file a suggestion that the German government asserts copyright over all child pornography and then they could take the online logs of the offenders (and anyone else they accuse) without judge-consent, claiming its protecting their copyright...
I think you misunderstood the purpose of this project.
They don't want to replace all those graphic displays with music, but they intend to use sound in addition to graphics.
If you rely purely on a graphics display you would have to hire someone who has to babysit the monitor, in case something odd starts to happen. He can't really work if he has to stop every 5 minutes and check the monitor (and there are probably "false feeling of safty" effects to be countered too, after all, checking the monitor for X weeks and nothing big popping up might make the person(s) realax too much)
With the music you don't have to check at the monitor all the time, you notice when the music changes (and can go check) but as long as it remains the same you can get some real work done.
I partially agree.
If your code is unstable in a way that memory leaks and segmentation faults are not only a "remote possibility" but a - even if only rarely - reoccuring event, then any safeguards you implement won't be overly sucessfull, unless you fix the code that causes the errors first. (Disclaimer: There is no perfect code. Even if there were no bugs in the code, the program has still the "remote possibility" to crash due to errors in the hardware / OS)
That said, garbage collection or not is a different discussion. Some say it is bad and breed lazy programmers, while others argue (I amongst them) that it is a terrific tool for designers, since it almost eliminates the occurance of memory leaks (unless you do some really bad programming) and it might even speed up your program
Well, to sum it up... ;)
They only get the nominal 1$ as a yearly salary, and instead get paid in stock and stock options.
This means that they have strong faith in their company (if the stock crashes they'd lose alot of money compared to just having a ordinary 6-7 digit salary)
And regarding the sale of stock - its stock they already own, so they are taking nothing away from the company. Its like turning part of your coin or stamp collection back into cash. Well, its a tiny bit bigger than that but the principle is the same.
So Ma Bell wants to charge companies and people that deliver content to Bell's very own customers.
So let them. But don't pay. And inform the customers WHY they recieve such bad troughput when using their websites.
Imagine e.g. Google, doing a simple revers IP lookup to determine the provider and if it's Ma Bell, adding the following message to their search sites.
Dear Visitor,
We apologize for the possible slowness of our service.
However your provider BellSouth, has decided to demand "bandwith charges" from all major website transmitting data over their network (in addition to any subscription charges from you).
Google has declined to pay those additional charges, as this traffic - like searching via Google - should be (and with all other ISP is) covered with your subscription charge.
If you have any questions, please contact your local BellSouth service center.
Happy Googling!
Tens of thousands of unhappy customers calling BellSouth should make them do another reality check and stop demanding those ridiculous charges.
Google Earth is more of a "fun" program. Nice to toy around once in a while, but nothing I have always installed.
.doc eat your heart out.
Picasa is nifty. A free image editor is always nice.
Google Pack Screensaver Don't really care about that one. I usually blank my screen.
Google Desktop I don't use since I have "order in my chaos"(tm) and don't really like to things hooked into everything.
Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer will be a godsend for all IE unsers, but I don't need it since I do Firefox.
Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar guess this will make Firefox's markedshare do another jump.
Norton Antivirus 2005 Special Edition - personally I use AntiVirus Personal Editon, its free and quite good, but if I think about all the PCs without any up-to-date protection out there its a real godsend.
Ad-Aware SE Personal 4236 programs found? If you have used IE, not used a virusscanner and/or have a "shiny, let's click it" PC user this thing will cleanse your system. Otherwise once every 3 months is sufficient.
Adobe Reader 7 A no-brainer, one of the most portable formats around (let's see how Open Document spreads),
Why high Oil and Gas prices have a good side too
or
The best way to force people to change is making them wanting to change
First of all - I live in Europa, Germany.
Today Fuel prices have reached 1.43 Euro / liter, this is about 7.9$ / gallon. Yes, driving is EXPENSIVE here.
In the last few years, cars with a high efficiency have become very high in demand - of course, when fuel is expensive, people want cars that use little fuel.
And the same thing is going to happen to the USA.
People will look at the prices, look into their purses and the next car they buy won't be a 15 miles per gallon SUV, but perhaps a 30 / 35 miles per gallon car. Or they might grab one of the ultra fuel-efficient cars (many of them are from Germany - guess why...) like the VW Lupo - 78 miles per gallon (Diesel) - well, truth to be told, it ain't a beauty, you've got no real storage space, and acceleration isn't, but if you want fuel economy, there you go.
And this is the positive side of the high prices - there will be a demand for fuel-efficient cars, thus the industry will build them, and people will buy and drive them. And overall, less Oil will be used, causing less pollution and conserving it for more important uses
Oh, well, at least it was a tainted victory. ;)
And the old card that tainted it was the Shadow Dragon.
And he used Gozoku Sensei.
Rich and Shawn from the story team will have a field day with this, I'm sure
(no text)
Yesterday's article said that most MEP would probably vote NO - but the vote was only done today.
Thus, there existed the chance that they might get a change of heart etc. and vote YES instead...
We already had prematurely celebrated the Patent Directive dead once already - when Sweden etc. said it wanted to move it from a A-point to a B-point, but then was basically ignored by the Council during the meeting - and the Directive was passed to the EP for second reading.
NOW we can say that the Directive, in its current form, is dead.
Odd...
Last time they were asked about it they said:
"We can stop controlling the DNS servers anytime we want to - we just don't want to stop right now."
As seen yesterday...5 0&tid=103&tid=95
;)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/01/06182
Damn, I really hate re-runs.
So Bittorent is the source of all evil for MPAA now?
Because it was used to distribute Episode 3?
Why not blame the internet? Without it there would be MUCH less piracy.
[cynism]Or even better blame the George Lucas - if he hadn't made Episode 3 it could not have been pirated [/cynism]
Reality to MPAA - get a grip!
Hehe, yup, its one of the great lines HEX produced.
I can really reccommend Terry Pratchett's books to everyone.
And the best:
You cracked SHA-1. Oh well, time to switch to SHA-256
Well, there have been reports that some hash algrorithms are prone to "collisons" i.e. it is possible to find, with some effort, files that produce the same hash value and having the same size despite having different content.
The easy solution:
Use a safer Hash function.