I found this when I was actually searching for the version that I had heard; during jet engine testing it was debatable whether man could travel faster than sound.
That's a book about how the pyramids were a nuclear power weapon or some such gibberish. Still waiting for a real citation. I looked for a while and found nothing, I suspect it is just an urban myth.
Remember when it was impossible for the human body to sit in anything that accelerated as fast as 60mph?
No, I don't. Can you cite who is supposed to have said this and when? Sounds rather like an urban myth to me.
And even if there was someone who was foolish enough to have said that, so what? It's one thing to say something is fatal, a quite different thing to be impossible by the fundamental laws of physics.
In other news, TSA is looking in to claims that some inspectors were unfamiliar soap, shampoo and other personal hygiene products...,
Which is why they think that only a terrorist would carry them in his luggage.
Truly, Allah loves those who turn unto Him in repentance and loves those who purify themselves (by taking a bath and cleaning and washing thoroughly their private parts, bodies, for their prayers etc.).; (Al Baqarah 2:222)
Or maybe someone'd come out with an open-source CPU--by the time that they'd be able to implement such a thing, those desktop fabrication plants would probably be capable of wrangling silicon.
With Moore's Law, lots of devices, not just traditional "desktop" or Laptop" PCs are entering the picture. How many "gadgets" do we see here that run Linux? For instance, here I can buy a "Bittorrent router", a device that can download torrents and store them on its own hard disk. I'd bet it was running Linux. If Intel is persuaded to put DRM into the next generation of Pentiums, that is not the end of the game. Less powerful, but capable, chips are available that can handle going online, finding the media you want, and playing it for you. Wintel not required. The rest of the world will not want to encumber their devices with a DRM layer that will slow them down and refuse to work without **AA authorisation.
That's a good idea. The optical drive is the real portability killer
So don't take it. Anywhere you can find a post office, even in the fourth world, you will find a place you can burn some CDRs or DVDRs. You can buy bootleg DVDs of the latest Hollywood movies (not to mention porn and Adobe Photoshop) in the side streets (or often main streets) of any city with electricity. I would go with CDs or DVDs rather than various kinds of flash memory, for one thing they're less likely to be stolen from the mail than a reusable card. They're so cheap you can make multiple copies and send separately, RAID by snail mail.
Strawman: Nobody is blaming Stallman for the inane Slashdot article.
People are certainly using it as a pretext to rag on him, with the implication that he is just seeking publicity by trying to latch onto a bandwagon. Which is clearly not the case here.
perhaps that's an indication that there are 9 times more people who care about Stallman's stance on unfree drivers or his personal hygiene than what laptop he's endorsing
Yes. An indication of the shallowness of most of the posts, which was my point. Stallman is someone whose opinions on a new OS should be considered seriously.
Again, nobody is arguing otherwise.
I leave it to you to read some other posts here and see if you still think that. I was not referring just to the post I was replying to, apologies if that's how it seemed.
You can't blame Stallman, he was asked a question and he answered it. And he said he was going to BUY an OLPC and use it in preference to his ThinkPad, a pretty ringing endorsement. But 90% of the posts seem to be about either his comments on the "unfree" wifi driver, or his beard. Again, not his fault for the weird way he is reported.
Actually, in Hong Kong the last week there has been a huge "sex photo scandal". A male pop singer, Edison Chen, had a string of actress and pop star girl friends, and apparently had the habit of taking their photos in bed -- very explicit photos too, as became public knowledge when he took his laptop in for repair...
Here's a forum with the (NSFW) photos and some background.
And unlike, say, Britney or Paris, these girls had squeaky-clean teen-idol images did not benefit form the publicity. As for your question, the guys who leaked the photos have been charged and some arrested, though it's not really clear why these images are any worse than a billion others you can find online, except of course they involved celebrities.
Because he wants to get posted on Slashdot. Like every other "Ask Slashdot" topic, it's carefully crafted to create the greatest number of responses, and quite likely as fictional as a "Letter to Penthouse". So address the topic abstractly if you like, but don't think it's about a real person with a real problem.
And a site like Encyclopedia Dramatica would never take it down. ED will claim that they're immune from liability forever under CDA 230, and the anonymous poster will never be found. It's a wierd situation where a bad act can go completely unpunished, even if the webhost knows that there's a problem.
Well, it's annoying, but who would take anything on ED seriously? There is so much crap there about any person you can think of that it has zero credibility. It's like graffiti in a public toilet, you'd rather it wasn't there, but anyone who believes it is an idiot.
But I know that my ISP has no signed contract with me that allows them to put other customer's needs before mine. Make no mistake whether big business or home user they are both customers and should be treated equally.
Good luck with that.
A year ago some cables running south of Taiwan were cut by an earthquake. In Hong Kong the immediate effect was to slow down access. But a few hours later, they had reconfigured it so that domestic users, like myself, working at home, got ZERO connectivity, as they gave almost all the capacity to their business clients. I couldn't even check my email, on Yahoo, for a week. And you know that businesses were just sending the same bloated powerpoint files and videos to each other.
IMHO, they should give a minimum connectivity to everyone so you can use email, the most vital of all services. But when they have their big customers screaming at them about how slow their service is, they'll cheerfully cut off home users completely, knowing most have no alternative.
If what was blocked was a URL that contained his home IP address, then yes, that sounds more than reasonable to me.
Perhaps. But the really annoying thing is that many ISPs will just bounce such an email, with a generic, uninformative mesage "could not send" or the like, leaving the user with no fucking clue as to the problem. Or worse, just silently dropping the message, leaving you to find out days later that your email did not get through.
I have a client who has the habit of sending me emails with the subject "Status", when he wants to know progress on a job. I reply to that and my ISP bounces it, telling me that my email is "infected with Netsky". Netsky and similar viruses have a list of standard subjects thay use, and my ISP had the brilliant idea of blocking them from being sent. It took me hours to work out what was going on. Fucking morons. Meanwhile they do nothing to stop virus laden spam coming into my inbox.
Generally, if you don't care which candidate wins, there's no point in voting. That's the usual case in US elections, and it is both rational and democratic.
If you truly don't care, you can just put a blank ballot in the box. The thing is that knowing that you have to turn up, most people will then make the effort to think about the issues. And it stops large organised groups of zealots, who are good at organising their followers, to getting representation far beyond their proportion of population. (Such as gun nuts and evangelicals in the US.) It keeps the government more representative of the population as a whole, which is what "democracy" is supposed to be about.
Fortunately most Australians care about their country enough to turn up once every three years.
Yeah, Australia and East Germany.
How can you take pride in the fact that half your country can't be bothered to turn up and vote? It's thanks to that attitude that not just you, but the whole damn world, has had to put up with GWB.
Re:Delhi would probably be too expensive ...
on
Yahoo CAPTCHA Hacked
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· Score: 1
You can find a much more profitable use for such a workforce than "clicking for porn".
I mentioned Delhi because a local webforum I moderate was being spammed, manually, by someone whose IP resolves to Delhi. They copy posts from old Yahoo forums vaguely related to our forum topic, and add their spam links. So SEO must pay well enough to finance this.
So if I don't support any of the candidates for Position A, I'm disenfranchised when I do want to vote for Position B?
No, because they will be on separate ballots. So you can spoil the one you don't care about. Though for the senate when several seats are being filled you do have to choose several candidates.
I certainly don't think getting 95% of the population to participate in democratic elections is desirable, either as a means or as an end, and I find the use of force to do so repugnant.
Yes, the US system where 50% of the population is effectively disenfranchised is so much more democratic. And "use of force"? If you choose not to participate you can turn up and put in a blank ballot, or just let your voting registration lapse, or at worst pay $20. Fortunately most Australians care about their country enough to turn up once every three years.
Well if you're in a country that throws people into jail for not voting and you honestly don't like any of the candidates, of course you're going to submit a blank ballot. Do you at least correctly handle the ballot if someone only votes on some of the seats?
The "correct" way to handle an incomplete ballot is to reject it. But for those with short attention spans you can just tick one box to indicate you want to follow a party ticket.
And I don't think anyone has been thrown in jail for not voting. It's a small fine, $20 or so. I think that getting 95% of the population to participate in democratic elections is well worth the imposition.
Re:I thought those things were already broken
on
Yahoo CAPTCHA Hacked
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· Score: 1
No idea where I first read this, but I too remembering reading something very similar to the "solve the captcha for porn" idea.
It was suggested a few years ago. I've never seen any evidence of it being put into practice. I think it would be simpler to pay some computer sweatshop in Delhi to do this for a few cents each. I can find as more free porn than have any desire to see without any problem, so it's hard to see why users would bother. The site would very soon be common knowledge and interested parties could sign up and see whose captchas were being attacked, and then various attacks could be made on the server, or poison their solutions -- one can imagine a robot signing up for this to give wrong captchas. Would you have to solve a captcha to prove you were human enough to solve captchas?
Getting back to the error getting corrected at the polling place... I saw this on several occasions having grown up in a neighborhood with a lot of seniors. When you have trembling hands, mistakes can be made
I worked as a poll clerk a few years (decades....) ago. Any elderly people who had a problem marking their ballot could ask for help. They would be allowed to take someone into the booth to help them, a friend, family, or even a the poll clerks might help, though thay were not striclty supposed to. In any case, if they made a mistake they could just ask for a new ballot.
No, they should be notified of their error immediately and be allowed to correct it. You are wholly wrong here.
With old-fashioned paper votes, you never got feedback if you fucked up. I worked as a poll clerk in a few elections in Australia. The "spoiled votes", invalid for whatever reason, were 1 or 2%. Many of these were obviously deliberate -- no numbers or ticks at all. Only a very small number looked like real errors. And these were on quite complex senate voting forms with 50 or more candidates.
Anyone who might have a problem filling out a form, because of visual or physical disability, can ask for help. Voting clerks aren't supposed to do this, but if asked they usually will help you fill out the form. Or bring a relative or friend.
My personal opinion is if someone can't work out how to put ticks in boxes correctly, tough. Take it seriously or stay home.
Would you trust a site that pretends to have scientific information on, say, nuclear power, if it also contained ads for greenpeace and a tinfoil-hat vendor?
That's reversed the statement. I was replying to a post saying they would trust the ads because of the site they were on. You're stating you should judge a site by their ads.
My point is that most people understand that ads are just selling in-between space, they're not editorial. While you hope that a site or publication will vet the ads they run, all it tells you is how much attention they pay to their ads. Perhaps they are more concerned with their editorial content and leave the ads to an agency. Especially with online ads with rotating banners, you really have no idea what will be shown from day to day. If something is particularly obnoxious, like perhaps this one, they will do something.
And actually I do see a lot of freaky ads as you mention, Google Adsense picks up on the words on a page and sometimes delivers ads completely opposed to the editorial. I just sigh and ignore them.
why can't we go back to the days when film-makers would have an enormous penchant for factual accuracy?
When was that ever true? Except for a few biopics (Thomas Edison, Marie Cure) the science has always been wrong, and in those cases the history was usually dubious. It didn't start with movies. Shakespeare's "historical" plays have little relation to what any scholar would call history.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a book about how the pyramids were a nuclear power weapon or some such gibberish. Still waiting for a real citation. I looked for a while and found nothing, I suspect it is just an urban myth.
No, I don't. Can you cite who is supposed to have said this and when? Sounds rather like an urban myth to me.
And even if there was someone who was foolish enough to have said that, so what? It's one thing to say something is fatal, a quite different thing to be impossible by the fundamental laws of physics.
Which is why they think that only a terrorist would carry them in his luggage.
With Moore's Law, lots of devices, not just traditional "desktop" or Laptop" PCs are entering the picture. How many "gadgets" do we see here that run Linux? For instance, here I can buy a "Bittorrent router", a device that can download torrents and store them on its own hard disk. I'd bet it was running Linux. If Intel is persuaded to put DRM into the next generation of Pentiums, that is not the end of the game. Less powerful, but capable, chips are available that can handle going online, finding the media you want, and playing it for you. Wintel not required. The rest of the world will not want to encumber their devices with a DRM layer that will slow them down and refuse to work without **AA authorisation.
So don't take it. Anywhere you can find a post office, even in the fourth world, you will find a place you can burn some CDRs or DVDRs. You can buy bootleg DVDs of the latest Hollywood movies (not to mention porn and Adobe Photoshop) in the side streets (or often main streets) of any city with electricity. I would go with CDs or DVDs rather than various kinds of flash memory, for one thing they're less likely to be stolen from the mail than a reusable card. They're so cheap you can make multiple copies and send separately, RAID by snail mail.
People are certainly using it as a pretext to rag on him, with the implication that he is just seeking publicity by trying to latch onto a bandwagon. Which is clearly not the case here.
perhaps that's an indication that there are 9 times more people who care about Stallman's stance on unfree drivers or his personal hygiene than what laptop he's endorsing
Yes. An indication of the shallowness of most of the posts, which was my point. Stallman is someone whose opinions on a new OS should be considered seriously.
Again, nobody is arguing otherwise.
I leave it to you to read some other posts here and see if you still think that. I was not referring just to the post I was replying to, apologies if that's how it seemed.
You can't blame Stallman, he was asked a question and he answered it. And he said he was going to BUY an OLPC and use it in preference to his ThinkPad, a pretty ringing endorsement. But 90% of the posts seem to be about either his comments on the "unfree" wifi driver, or his beard. Again, not his fault for the weird way he is reported.
Actually, in Hong Kong the last week there has been a huge "sex photo scandal". A male pop singer, Edison Chen, had a string of actress and pop star girl friends, and apparently had the habit of taking their photos in bed -- very explicit photos too, as became public knowledge when he took his laptop in for repair...
Here's a forum with the (NSFW) photos and some background.
And unlike, say, Britney or Paris, these girls had squeaky-clean teen-idol images did not benefit form the publicity. As for your question, the guys who leaked the photos have been charged and some arrested, though it's not really clear why these images are any worse than a billion others you can find online, except of course they involved celebrities.
Because he wants to get posted on Slashdot. Like every other "Ask Slashdot" topic, it's carefully crafted to create the greatest number of responses, and quite likely as fictional as a "Letter to Penthouse". So address the topic abstractly if you like, but don't think it's about a real person with a real problem.
Well, it's annoying, but who would take anything on ED seriously? There is so much crap there about any person you can think of that it has zero credibility. It's like graffiti in a public toilet, you'd rather it wasn't there, but anyone who believes it is an idiot.
Good luck with that.
A year ago some cables running south of Taiwan were cut by an earthquake. In Hong Kong the immediate effect was to slow down access. But a few hours later, they had reconfigured it so that domestic users, like myself, working at home, got ZERO connectivity, as they gave almost all the capacity to their business clients. I couldn't even check my email, on Yahoo, for a week. And you know that businesses were just sending the same bloated powerpoint files and videos to each other.
IMHO, they should give a minimum connectivity to everyone so you can use email, the most vital of all services. But when they have their big customers screaming at them about how slow their service is, they'll cheerfully cut off home users completely, knowing most have no alternative.
Perhaps. But the really annoying thing is that many ISPs will just bounce such an email, with a generic, uninformative mesage "could not send" or the like, leaving the user with no fucking clue as to the problem. Or worse, just silently dropping the message, leaving you to find out days later that your email did not get through.
I have a client who has the habit of sending me emails with the subject "Status", when he wants to know progress on a job. I reply to that and my ISP bounces it, telling me that my email is "infected with Netsky". Netsky and similar viruses have a list of standard subjects thay use, and my ISP had the brilliant idea of blocking them from being sent. It took me hours to work out what was going on. Fucking morons. Meanwhile they do nothing to stop virus laden spam coming into my inbox.
If you truly don't care, you can just put a blank ballot in the box. The thing is that knowing that you have to turn up, most people will then make the effort to think about the issues. And it stops large organised groups of zealots, who are good at organising their followers, to getting representation far beyond their proportion of population. (Such as gun nuts and evangelicals in the US.) It keeps the government more representative of the population as a whole, which is what "democracy" is supposed to be about.
Yeah, Australia and East Germany.
How can you take pride in the fact that half your country can't be bothered to turn up and vote? It's thanks to that attitude that not just you, but the whole damn world, has had to put up with GWB.
I mentioned Delhi because a local webforum I moderate was being spammed, manually, by someone whose IP resolves to Delhi. They copy posts from old Yahoo forums vaguely related to our forum topic, and add their spam links. So SEO must pay well enough to finance this.
No, because they will be on separate ballots. So you can spoil the one you don't care about. Though for the senate when several seats are being filled you do have to choose several candidates.
I certainly don't think getting 95% of the population to participate in democratic elections is desirable, either as a means or as an end, and I find the use of force to do so repugnant.
Yes, the US system where 50% of the population is effectively disenfranchised is so much more democratic. And "use of force"? If you choose not to participate you can turn up and put in a blank ballot, or just let your voting registration lapse, or at worst pay $20. Fortunately most Australians care about their country enough to turn up once every three years.
The "correct" way to handle an incomplete ballot is to reject it. But for those with short attention spans you can just tick one box to indicate you want to follow a party ticket.
And I don't think anyone has been thrown in jail for not voting. It's a small fine, $20 or so. I think that getting 95% of the population to participate in democratic elections is well worth the imposition.
It was suggested a few years ago. I've never seen any evidence of it being put into practice. I think it would be simpler to pay some computer sweatshop in Delhi to do this for a few cents each. I can find as more free porn than have any desire to see without any problem, so it's hard to see why users would bother. The site would very soon be common knowledge and interested parties could sign up and see whose captchas were being attacked, and then various attacks could be made on the server, or poison their solutions -- one can imagine a robot signing up for this to give wrong captchas. Would you have to solve a captcha to prove you were human enough to solve captchas?
I worked as a poll clerk a few years (decades....) ago. Any elderly people who had a problem marking their ballot could ask for help. They would be allowed to take someone into the booth to help them, a friend, family, or even a the poll clerks might help, though thay were not striclty supposed to. In any case, if they made a mistake they could just ask for a new ballot.
With old-fashioned paper votes, you never got feedback if you fucked up. I worked as a poll clerk in a few elections in Australia. The "spoiled votes", invalid for whatever reason, were 1 or 2%. Many of these were obviously deliberate -- no numbers or ticks at all. Only a very small number looked like real errors. And these were on quite complex senate voting forms with 50 or more candidates.
Anyone who might have a problem filling out a form, because of visual or physical disability, can ask for help. Voting clerks aren't supposed to do this, but if asked they usually will help you fill out the form. Or bring a relative or friend.
My personal opinion is if someone can't work out how to put ticks in boxes correctly, tough. Take it seriously or stay home.
How do you answer a call, let alone make one, without using a hand? Tongue?
That's reversed the statement. I was replying to a post saying they would trust the ads because of the site they were on. You're stating you should judge a site by their ads.
My point is that most people understand that ads are just selling in-between space, they're not editorial. While you hope that a site or publication will vet the ads they run, all it tells you is how much attention they pay to their ads. Perhaps they are more concerned with their editorial content and leave the ads to an agency. Especially with online ads with rotating banners, you really have no idea what will be shown from day to day. If something is particularly obnoxious, like perhaps this one, they will do something.
And actually I do see a lot of freaky ads as you mention, Google Adsense picks up on the words on a page and sometimes delivers ads completely opposed to the editorial. I just sigh and ignore them.
So have you noticed the Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Really, who does not know the difference between an advertisement and an endorsement? You're not that dumb, why assume everyone else is.
When was that ever true? Except for a few biopics (Thomas Edison, Marie Cure) the science has always been wrong, and in those cases the history was usually dubious. It didn't start with movies. Shakespeare's "historical" plays have little relation to what any scholar would call history.