Are you trying to insinuate something? I am self-employed, when I spend time posting comments to Slashdot I'm robbing no one - unlike the Solitaire-playing Gen-X leeches the article is talking about. I was (and am) trying to make an important point about the absurdity of comparing honest hard-working Americans and dead weight.
*My* grandfather helped keep the Japanese from owning the whole Pacific Ocean-- but you don't see me ranting
Hello, Mr. Illogical Argument, but no one posted a story on Slashdot that attempts to equate what your Grandfather did with people attempting to drag down our economy by playing games at work.
The point is that you can't compare 1:1 the time spent by people working to their very limits on some of our greatest accomplishments with Gen-X slackers pissing away investor's money in the.com disaster. It's an insult.
Look, I'm sorry if I seem upset, it's just that this whole "comparison" between people who are considered America's heros and people who are doing their best to destroy the economy by cheating American business really pisses me off!.
Who pissed on my Wheaties? Probably someone who dragged a company into the ground playing Minesweeper at work. It takes the same destructive attitude.
I think when you measure man-hours, you have to measure the quality of the person. The Empire State building was built by 7 million man-hours put in by some of American's finest citizens and workers. Men died building that building. And don't even get me started on the Apollo project. To compare the work that these men did quantitatively with the the work of millions of unproductive Windows-bound office drones wasting their employers money goofing off at work is a disrespect to the qualitative difference between these groups of people.
My grandfather worked on the Apollo project; granted his role was small, he helped to turn down the radio stations operating in Apollo 13's band when it was operating under power due to difficulty. But without even his minor contribution men could have died. To compare the work of brave men in the same tally as lazy overpriveleged goof-offs is a damned insult.
I couldn't agree more. The good news in this article is that man can colonize; the bad news is that Man can Colonize.
Then again, if it's the Chinese that get their first, well, we know how what they did to the Three Rivers Gorge, goodbye extraterrestial life, hello New Gangzhou!
This possiblity terrifies me. Look at the population growth of the Chinese! We Americans claim to be a "superior" nation yet we can't even touch the population numbers the Chinese are putting out. How can we hope to compete in fields such as primary experimental medicine and foreign occupation without any excess population? The Chinese have neary 3 billion people to rival our puny half a billion. If this story is right, and we're ready to move into space, it's pretty obvious what the outcome will be: the Chinese will leap ahead of us due to their superior population growth and colonize the Galaxy first.
The students felt that "The KDE/GNOME choice confuses most newcomers to Linux."
This is listed by the author as a "clanger", or repeatedly offered mistruth. I wholehartedly agree with him. As an experienced Linux user, I feel that the KDE/GNOME choice does not confuse most newcomers to Linux, it confuses nearly all of them, as well as experienced users. What the students should have said was "the KDE/GNOME choice confuses everybody".
I'm so tired of having to decide which featureset I want to use today. For C++ development I use Kdevelop, because of the nice C++ features like picklists for virtual functions. However I can't stand KDE's tendency to map its' own colors onto my X applications, nor can I take it desktop switching mode, so for casual web browsing I restart in Gnome. This means that I've had to memorize two control panels, two ways of resizing Xterms (I hate both their Xterm replacements), two ways of virtual desktop switching, etc. If there's anything that's important about the desktop metaphor it is that the metaphor must be intuitive. The problem with choice is that it requires you to gain knowledge in order to make an informed decision. To gain knowledge you have to spend time learning. When I pick up a lab instrument I don't want to spend time learning how to use it's desktop; I don't freaking care how it works. I want to use the instrument.
The GNOME/KDE choice is annoying. Honestly I don't care which one goes away, I just wish one of them would.
many countries have poured $billions$ into it's development
I think what you meant to say was that many countries have poured billions of Rubles, Drachmas, and Yen into the ISS project. Believe it or not, the world does not revolve around you Americans, even in the financial world. We still have our own currencies, so far.
This does nothing to prevent DoS attacks. So if you anger your next-door neighbor, he will probably try to flood your network with crap. As a computer geek, I know this would make my life miserable.
Look, anyone who is going to DoS you who has access to your power lines will probably DoS you by shorting the electricity and taking out your power! You're already at risk! Flee!
* 40 bit WEP didn't work. 128 bit WEP was broken soon after it was introduced. Apparently more bits doesn't help
Well, obviously we should just stop trying then.
Maybe people just need to get off their asses and run Cat5e through their houses
Cat5e isn't going to save you for a second from the FBI you're so terrified of, bub. It's not STORM shielded, and the FBI has STORM equipment that can detect RF emissions (as low as a nanowatt in frequency!) from a van parked outside of your house. Your attempt at security through obscurity... has failed!
Your needless paranoia is pure rubbish. If you really want to be secure, run OpenBSD, the secure operating system that Linux hopes to be someday.
Speaking of which, you have to wonder what Tolkien would have said about the recent criticism of the LoTR movie that it is a way for Americans to act out racist tendencies in a politically correct way. Given current events, this might be a very satisfying and even cathartic outlet for such feelings, but it is no replacement for introspection.
All in all the whole "Tolkien as a web-saavy ghost" schtick was pretty funny, and definitely worth the link.
You know, three years ago when the U.S. was economically prosperous and business was booming, we could afford to attack our best corporate performers with regulation. But right now, our economy sucks. People are being laid off all over the place.
Now is not the time to stifle the natural monopolies. Face it. It's inefficient to run more than one line to every house in America so that the consumer can decide which jack to plug their phone into. Phones lines, electric lines, gas lines - these all dictate a natural monopoly. Verizon is just one of them.
Sure, there's some confusion right now because more & more new things are coming into your house over that twisted pair of copper. It may take people a long time to accept that soon a single company will own everything that comes through that wire - your long distance & local calls, your videoconferencing, television, 3-d imaging, the news, the weather, your Operating System patches, your personal documents and consumer profile - but the consumer has shown a remarkable ability to adjust.
But this is what Quake is to Windows - the killer app that softens you up to a dangerous technology. Personally, the idea that my cell phone, and therefore my cell phone company, can log my path through life 24 hours a day and sell it to the highest bidder as part of my "Customer Revenue Package" freaks the hell out of me. The idea of 22 year old overpaid consultants from Andersen sitting around a table discussing who would want to buy my whereabouts even more.
Next month, we will explore the workings of a Turing Machine and follow Alan into the war effort. We will see how a single man's true genius can turn the tide of war, and we will shake our heads in disbelief at a hero's humiliation and eventual death. Stay tuned.
It's kind of sad that Slashdot linked to the first part of this series rather than waiting for it to finish. The true depth of Turing's story lies in what happened during the war. If you've never read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, now is an excellent time to start; Stephenson's fictional Turing is an excellent read.
Many who have studied Turing's life believe that this book by Hodges is the definitive work of a man who was arguably a casualty of his lifestyle. Turing's answers to the three Great Questions of Mathematics - Completeness - Is Mathematics complete? Could every question be proven or disproven? Consistency - Does Mathematics always give the same answer? - and Decidability - did a chain of logic exist to prove or disprove any assertion - well, all of these were overshadowed by the fact that as a homosexual he defied God's Will - but all in all his contributions to Mathematics are staggering.
The lasting pervasiveness of this man's work - (who doesn't know what a "Turing Test" is?) - is a living testament to his genius. It's funny that on the same day we discuss the Nobel Prize we discuss the man most obviously deprived of it.
I'm so excited about Annan winning the money. It always amazes me how much money the Nobel is: a million dollars! Take a look at last year's winners, Arafat and Rabin. Together, they shared the Nobel Prize for Peace in the Middle East. Admittedly, each of them only pocketed half a million apiece, but that's still some serious dough.
And Annan's work has been every bit as effective as theirs! The Nobel comittee has done a great job picking the best representatives of peacemaking in the world.
I hope Arafat still has some of his money, so he can use it to build a house which is impervious to helicopter-mounted missiles. It isn't always easy being a Leader of Peace. But you know what they say: one step forward, one step back, but the Path to Peace is still on track!
Who will be required to implement and use the AES?
The AES is now an approved encryption algorithm that can be used by U.S. government organizations to protect sensitive, unclassified information.
...
Commercial and other non-federal organizations are invited-but not required-to adopt and implement the AES and NIST's other cryptographic standards.
If I read this correctly, terrorist cells qualify as "other organizations". I couldn't find any mention of export limitations, civilian key strength limitations, or bans on use by criminal organizations.
The previous miniseries suffered from the problem that they kept forgetting that Dune was a desert; hopefully enough fans can remind them of that fact that it might not be such a problem this time.
I agree; factual inaccuracies are the Plague of the Dune spinoffs. I hope, at least, that they get the design of the Weirding Modules directly from the book this time. The implementation in the movie was... well... let's just say "sub optimal at best" to keep from starting a flame war.
My fear is they will attempt to change the landscape of Herbert's vision: new "houses", new races, new rules. Much like Enterprise has created a bunch of super-evil aliens never seen in the future (complete with a Time Travelling version of Wesley Crusher), I could see the sequel inventing things that wouldn't jibe with the original "Universe" at all.
As valuable as a list of good games is, let me tack on a note about a game not to buy your child this Christmas season.
Don't buy your kids "WinBack: Covert Operation". A young child recently shot his brother to death after playing this game on his computer and attempting to re-enact the game.
Personally, I'm rather fond of Half-Life, but my daughter doesn't seem to enjoy it.
Human cloning? Far from being the "Attack of the Clones", nothing is more misunderstood than medicinal human cloning. Please, don't confuse the goals of The Human Cloning Foundation, the federation of misanthropes bent on finding a country willing to host their young Frankenstein adventures, with Medicinal Human Cloning.
The idea behind Medicinal Human Cloning (MHC) is to clone human cells at the cellular level, before cell differentiation. Cell differentiation occurs 2 weeks into the life of an embryo, when all the cells in the embryo stop being homogenous and, all at once, establish their own identities. Some become hand cells, some feet cells, some brain cells, some blood cells. This "magic" event is the point at which human life begins. MHC is the process of cloning human cells before this event.
The point of being able to harvest unlimited quantities of undifferentiated human cells is that these cells can become any cell in the body; they are "undecided", yet genetically matched to the recipient. The applications here are as numerous as you can imagine: tissue replacement, skin replacement for burn victims, manufactured organs custom-matched to the recipient. This is the promise we are debating; the lives of millions who could be saved by this procedure, from burn victims to heart attack victims.
This advance promises to revolutionize medicine. Not just technically, but from a societal perspective as well. If we understand anything about MHC, it is that it will be prohibitively expensive to apply to an entire population. An order of magnitude costlier than even heart transplantation, we are dealing with sums of millions of dollars per regenerated organ. And unlike transplantation, this technique will be able to prolong the life of anyone, indefinitely. As a society, we will soon be in the position of deciding the lifespan(s) of each of our citizens. Not because we control death; not euthenasia, but because we control life.
We've already seen this paradigm emerge with the "list" for heart transplants. The pathetic attempt at a "meritocracy" for deciding who receives a new heart has been a total failure, as evidenced by the case of David Crosby. The system is weighted in favor of the rich, against the poor. Will this paradigm dominate the field of Medicinal Human Cloning? Will only the rich live forever? Will money become the force of life? Not if we can help it. We will need to act decisively as events are set in motion.
We must establish a true meritocracy for the Immortality Revolution ushered in by advances in Medicinal Human Cloning. Like the Slashdot Moderation system, we could create a system of random "Moderators", if you will, who are picked secretly and randomly and given the ability to tag their fellow citizens as deserving or undeserving of the scarce asset of Organ Regeneration, financed by the state. You could rate your neighbor (-1 Stupid) for abusing his spouse, or your coworker (+1 Insightful) for fixing your printer connection. Those with the highest scores would receive the greatest medical benefit: Immortality.
Imagine a world where we never lost an Einstein, never killed a Bohr. Where great leaders like George Bush could advise us forever; where people like Noam Chomsky were but a temporary nuisance. This is the promise of cloning: not reproducing the husks of people but giving the gift of life to the greatest among us.
For the first time, hackers can kill. Considering the number of people who use their cell phones while driving, a random "crash" (what a terrible pun) while trying to send email or view stock quotes while driving should be enough to push a few drivers "over the edge".
The good news is that if terrorists intend to use such "crash" attempts to crash cars or other vehicles, we at least have new legislation to stop them.
Anyone who thinks "Magic Lantern", the FBI's Grandiose excuse for a keystroke logger, should have a virus template is not familiar with what a computer virus actually is. For the faint of wit, I'll break out the definition:
A program or piece of code that is loaded onto your computer without your knowledge and runs against your wishes. Viruses can also replicate themselves. All computer viruses are manmade. A simple virus that can make a copy of itself over and over again is relatively easy to produce. Even such a simple virus is dangerous because it will quickly use all available memory and bring the system to a halt. An even more dangerous type of virus is one capable of transmitting itself across networks and bypassing security systems.
Some people distinguish between general viruses and worms. A worm is a special type of virus that can replicate itself and use memory, but cannot attach itself to other programs.
First of all, Magic Lantern does not replicate. Second of all, it is not malicious. Magic Lantern is not designed to break the law but to enforce it. If McAfee made a "Law Enforcement Tool Scanner", then we could attack them for not doing their job. Since they make a virus scanner, and we're not talking about a virus, the whole conversation is silly.
Why don't people bother looking up the definition of a word before posting a story about it??!?
Scientists are so fascinated with the possibility that they can that they never stop to think if they should.
Traffic Deaths due to Cell Phone Drivers continue to rise, as the total dead begins to approach the figure posted by Mohammed Atta. And still we have hands-free device laws in exactly zero states.
Enter Handspring with a slick, convenient cellphone integrated with a PDA. A live wire for streaming Internet content, beamed directly to the driver's seat of the person pushing a Chevy Suburban down the freeway ahead of you in rush hour traffic. A cell phone which requires two hands to operate in PDA mode is now in the hands of the millions of American drivers who refuse to stop pinning a cell phone to their ear while driving.
Please understand that I'm not attempting to bash the technology. I only wish that companies like Handspring would consider the impact of their actions before unleashing something like this on innocent commuters. Anyone with a rush hour commute knows that people irresponsible enough to weave through traffic talking on a cell phone exist and are numerous. And they will buy this phone, take both hands off the wheel, and practice "Graffiti" at 60 miles per hour.
Does anyone know how hard it would be to make a cell phone deactivate itself if it starts moving faster than 40 miles per hour? Could you perhaps triangulate the three nearest PCS towers?
A hub built into a wall switch! That's amazing! At the rate things are going, someone is going to invent a network card that doesn't even NEED cables, and this thing will be obsolete! Maybe it could use RADIO WAVES!
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Is the possession of MacOS X v10.1 or its installer illegal because it can be used to violate its own copyright?
This kind of "circular geek logic" astounds me. It is like a Mobius Strip - circular, but one sided.
Of course Mac OS X cannot violate the DMCA. The anti-circumvention portion of the DMCA requires that the software be designed specifically to be a circumvention device that will break protection for copyrighted works. Mac OS X is software that is designed specifically to Operate Your Computer.
Attempts to twist the law in this manner only make the anti-DMCA cause look stupid. Only digital crowbars like DeCSS & Dmitri's software violate the DMCA. The way to win the argument for the DMCA is to convince the people of America that it should be legal to write software to steal from companies - not accuse Apple of being "crackers".
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, we're posting comments on /.
Are you trying to insinuate something? I am self-employed, when I spend time posting comments to Slashdot I'm robbing no one - unlike the Solitaire-playing Gen-X leeches the article is talking about. I was (and am) trying to make an important point about the absurdity of comparing honest hard-working Americans and dead weight.
Please keep your Flamebait to yourself.
*My* grandfather helped keep the Japanese from owning the whole Pacific Ocean-- but you don't see me ranting
.com disaster. It's an insult.
Hello, Mr. Illogical Argument, but no one posted a story on Slashdot that attempts to equate what your Grandfather did with people attempting to drag down our economy by playing games at work.
The point is that you can't compare 1:1 the time spent by people working to their very limits on some of our greatest accomplishments with Gen-X slackers pissing away investor's money in the
Lighten Up! Geez, who pissed on your wheaties?
Look, I'm sorry if I seem upset, it's just that this whole "comparison" between people who are considered America's heros and people who are doing their best to destroy the economy by cheating American business really pisses me off!.
Who pissed on my Wheaties? Probably someone who dragged a company into the ground playing Minesweeper at work. It takes the same destructive attitude.
I think when you measure man-hours, you have to measure the quality of the person. The Empire State building was built by 7 million man-hours put in by some of American's finest citizens and workers. Men died building that building. And don't even get me started on the Apollo project. To compare the work that these men did quantitatively with the the work of millions of unproductive Windows-bound office drones wasting their employers money goofing off at work is a disrespect to the qualitative difference between these groups of people.
My grandfather worked on the Apollo project; granted his role was small, he helped to turn down the radio stations operating in Apollo 13's band when it was operating under power due to difficulty. But without even his minor contribution men could have died. To compare the work of brave men in the same tally as lazy overpriveleged goof-offs is a damned insult.
Sorry if I come of as irate; it's because I am.
I couldn't agree more. The good news in this article is that man can colonize; the bad news is that Man can Colonize.
Then again, if it's the Chinese that get their first, well, we know how what they did to the Three Rivers Gorge, goodbye extraterrestial life, hello New Gangzhou!
This possiblity terrifies me. Look at the population growth of the Chinese! We Americans claim to be a "superior" nation yet we can't even touch the population numbers the Chinese are putting out. How can we hope to compete in fields such as primary experimental medicine and foreign occupation without any excess population? The Chinese have neary 3 billion people to rival our puny half a billion. If this story is right, and we're ready to move into space, it's pretty obvious what the outcome will be: the Chinese will leap ahead of us due to their superior population growth and colonize the Galaxy first.
My question is: what's their secret?
The students felt that "The KDE/GNOME choice confuses most newcomers to Linux."
This is listed by the author as a "clanger", or repeatedly offered mistruth. I wholehartedly agree with him. As an experienced Linux user, I feel that the KDE/GNOME choice does not confuse most newcomers to Linux, it confuses nearly all of them, as well as experienced users. What the students should have said was "the KDE/GNOME choice confuses everybody".
I'm so tired of having to decide which featureset I want to use today. For C++ development I use Kdevelop, because of the nice C++ features like picklists for virtual functions. However I can't stand KDE's tendency to map its' own colors onto my X applications, nor can I take it desktop switching mode, so for casual web browsing I restart in Gnome. This means that I've had to memorize two control panels, two ways of resizing Xterms (I hate both their Xterm replacements), two ways of virtual desktop switching, etc. If there's anything that's important about the desktop metaphor it is that the metaphor must be intuitive. The problem with choice is that it requires you to gain knowledge in order to make an informed decision. To gain knowledge you have to spend time learning. When I pick up a lab instrument I don't want to spend time learning how to use it's desktop; I don't freaking care how it works. I want to use the instrument.
The GNOME/KDE choice is annoying. Honestly I don't care which one goes away, I just wish one of them would.
many countries have poured $billions$ into it's development
I think what you meant to say was that many countries have poured billions of Rubles, Drachmas, and Yen into the ISS project. Believe it or not, the world does not revolve around you Americans, even in the financial world. We still have our own currencies, so far.
Here's to hoping the ISS makes it,
EPD.
This does nothing to prevent DoS attacks. So if you anger your next-door neighbor, he will probably try to flood your network with crap. As a computer geek, I know this would make my life miserable.
Look, anyone who is going to DoS you who has access to your power lines will probably DoS you by shorting the electricity and taking out your power! You're already at risk! Flee!
* 40 bit WEP didn't work. 128 bit WEP was broken soon after it was introduced. Apparently more bits doesn't help
Well, obviously we should just stop trying then.
Maybe people just need to get off their asses and run Cat5e through their houses
Cat5e isn't going to save you for a second from the FBI you're so terrified of, bub. It's not STORM shielded, and the FBI has STORM equipment that can detect RF emissions (as low as a nanowatt in frequency!) from a van parked outside of your house. Your attempt at security through obscurity... has failed!
Your needless paranoia is pure rubbish. If you really want to be secure, run OpenBSD, the secure operating system that Linux hopes to be someday.
Speaking of which, you have to wonder what Tolkien would have said about the recent criticism of the LoTR movie that it is a way for Americans to act out racist tendencies in a politically correct way. Given current events, this might be a very satisfying and even cathartic outlet for such feelings, but it is no replacement for introspection.
All in all the whole "Tolkien as a web-saavy ghost" schtick was pretty funny, and definitely worth the link.
You know, three years ago when the U.S. was economically prosperous and business was booming, we could afford to attack our best corporate performers with regulation. But right now, our economy sucks. People are being laid off all over the place.
Now is not the time to stifle the natural monopolies. Face it. It's inefficient to run more than one line to every house in America so that the consumer can decide which jack to plug their phone into. Phones lines, electric lines, gas lines - these all dictate a natural monopoly. Verizon is just one of them.
Sure, there's some confusion right now because more & more new things are coming into your house over that twisted pair of copper. It may take people a long time to accept that soon a single company will own everything that comes through that wire - your long distance & local calls, your videoconferencing, television, 3-d imaging, the news, the weather, your Operating System patches, your personal documents and consumer profile - but the consumer has shown a remarkable ability to adjust.
Seriously, relax and go with the flow.
But this is what Quake is to Windows - the killer app that softens you up to a dangerous technology. Personally, the idea that my cell phone, and therefore my cell phone company, can log my path through life 24 hours a day and sell it to the highest bidder as part of my "Customer Revenue Package" freaks the hell out of me. The idea of 22 year old overpaid consultants from Andersen sitting around a table discussing who would want to buy my whereabouts even more.
Thanks but no thanks.
Next month, we will explore the workings of a Turing Machine and follow Alan into the war effort. We will see how a single man's true genius can turn the tide of war, and we will shake our heads in disbelief at a hero's humiliation and eventual death. Stay tuned.
It's kind of sad that Slashdot linked to the first part of this series rather than waiting for it to finish. The true depth of Turing's story lies in what happened during the war. If you've never read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, now is an excellent time to start; Stephenson's fictional Turing is an excellent read.
Many who have studied Turing's life believe that this book by Hodges is the definitive work of a man who was arguably a casualty of his lifestyle. Turing's answers to the three Great Questions of Mathematics - Completeness - Is Mathematics complete? Could every question be proven or disproven? Consistency - Does Mathematics always give the same answer? - and Decidability - did a chain of logic exist to prove or disprove any assertion - well, all of these were overshadowed by the fact that as a homosexual he defied God's Will - but all in all his contributions to Mathematics are staggering.
The lasting pervasiveness of this man's work - (who doesn't know what a "Turing Test" is?) - is a living testament to his genius. It's funny that on the same day we discuss the Nobel Prize we discuss the man most obviously deprived of it.
I'm so excited about Annan winning the money. It always amazes me how much money the Nobel is: a million dollars! Take a look at last year's winners, Arafat and Rabin. Together, they shared the Nobel Prize for Peace in the Middle East. Admittedly, each of them only pocketed half a million apiece, but that's still some serious dough.
And Annan's work has been every bit as effective as theirs! The Nobel comittee has done a great job picking the best representatives of peacemaking in the world.
I hope Arafat still has some of his money, so he can use it to build a house which is impervious to helicopter-mounted missiles. It isn't always easy being a Leader of Peace. But you know what they say: one step forward, one step back, but the Path to Peace is still on track!
I think he was hoping that we would forget that this has been posted before. Then it would be fresh and hilarious, once again.
Who will be required to implement and use the AES?
The AES is now an approved encryption algorithm that can be used by U.S. government organizations to protect sensitive, unclassified information.
...
Commercial and other non-federal organizations are invited-but not required-to adopt and implement the AES and NIST's other cryptographic standards.
If I read this correctly, terrorist cells qualify as "other organizations". I couldn't find any mention of export limitations, civilian key strength limitations, or bans on use by criminal organizations.
What have we done?
What would the Slashdot team do in Space that they couldn't do here on earth?
Learn to spell?
The previous miniseries suffered from the problem that they kept forgetting that Dune was a desert; hopefully enough fans can remind them of that fact that it might not be such a problem this time.
I agree; factual inaccuracies are the Plague of the Dune spinoffs. I hope, at least, that they get the design of the Weirding Modules directly from the book this time. The implementation in the movie was... well... let's just say "sub optimal at best" to keep from starting a flame war.
My fear is they will attempt to change the landscape of Herbert's vision: new "houses", new races, new rules. Much like Enterprise has created a bunch of super-evil aliens never seen in the future (complete with a Time Travelling version of Wesley Crusher), I could see the sequel inventing things that wouldn't jibe with the original "Universe" at all.
Oh well, guess we'll just have to wait and see.
As valuable as a list of good games is, let me tack on a note about a game not to buy your child this Christmas season.
Don't buy your kids "WinBack: Covert Operation". A young child recently shot his brother to death after playing this game on his computer and attempting to re-enact the game.
Personally, I'm rather fond of Half-Life, but my daughter doesn't seem to enjoy it.
Human cloning? Far from being the "Attack of the Clones", nothing is more misunderstood than medicinal human cloning. Please, don't confuse the goals of The Human Cloning Foundation, the federation of misanthropes bent on finding a country willing to host their young Frankenstein adventures, with Medicinal Human Cloning.
The idea behind Medicinal Human Cloning (MHC) is to clone human cells at the cellular level, before cell differentiation. Cell differentiation occurs 2 weeks into the life of an embryo, when all the cells in the embryo stop being homogenous and, all at once, establish their own identities. Some become hand cells, some feet cells, some brain cells, some blood cells. This "magic" event is the point at which human life begins. MHC is the process of cloning human cells before this event.
The point of being able to harvest unlimited quantities of undifferentiated human cells is that these cells can become any cell in the body; they are "undecided", yet genetically matched to the recipient. The applications here are as numerous as you can imagine: tissue replacement, skin replacement for burn victims, manufactured organs custom-matched to the recipient. This is the promise we are debating; the lives of millions who could be saved by this procedure, from burn victims to heart attack victims.
This advance promises to revolutionize medicine. Not just technically, but from a societal perspective as well. If we understand anything about MHC, it is that it will be prohibitively expensive to apply to an entire population. An order of magnitude costlier than even heart transplantation, we are dealing with sums of millions of dollars per regenerated organ. And unlike transplantation, this technique will be able to prolong the life of anyone, indefinitely. As a society, we will soon be in the position of deciding the lifespan(s) of each of our citizens. Not because we control death; not euthenasia, but because we control life.
We've already seen this paradigm emerge with the "list" for heart transplants. The pathetic attempt at a "meritocracy" for deciding who receives a new heart has been a total failure, as evidenced by the case of David Crosby. The system is weighted in favor of the rich, against the poor. Will this paradigm dominate the field of Medicinal Human Cloning? Will only the rich live forever? Will money become the force of life? Not if we can help it. We will need to act decisively as events are set in motion.
We must establish a true meritocracy for the Immortality Revolution ushered in by advances in Medicinal Human Cloning. Like the Slashdot Moderation system, we could create a system of random "Moderators", if you will, who are picked secretly and randomly and given the ability to tag their fellow citizens as deserving or undeserving of the scarce asset of Organ Regeneration, financed by the state. You could rate your neighbor (-1 Stupid) for abusing his spouse, or your coworker (+1 Insightful) for fixing your printer connection. Those with the highest scores would receive the greatest medical benefit: Immortality.
Imagine a world where we never lost an Einstein, never killed a Bohr. Where great leaders like George Bush could advise us forever; where people like Noam Chomsky were but a temporary nuisance. This is the promise of cloning: not reproducing the husks of people but giving the gift of life to the greatest among us.
We must act swiftly when the time comes.
For the first time, hackers can kill. Considering the number of people who use their cell phones while driving, a random "crash" (what a terrible pun) while trying to send email or view stock quotes while driving should be enough to push a few drivers "over the edge".
The good news is that if terrorists intend to use such "crash" attempts to crash cars or other vehicles, we at least have new legislation to stop them.
Anyone who thinks "Magic Lantern", the FBI's Grandiose excuse for a keystroke logger, should have a virus template is not familiar with what a computer virus actually is. For the faint of wit, I'll break out the definition:
A program or piece of code that is loaded onto your computer without your knowledge and runs against your wishes. Viruses can also replicate themselves. All computer viruses are manmade. A simple virus that can make a copy of itself over and over again is relatively easy to produce. Even such a simple virus is dangerous because it will quickly use all available memory and bring the system to a halt. An even more dangerous type of virus is one capable of transmitting itself across networks and bypassing security systems.
Some people distinguish between general viruses and worms. A worm is a special type of virus that can replicate itself and use memory, but cannot attach itself to other programs.
First of all, Magic Lantern does not replicate. Second of all, it is not malicious. Magic Lantern is not designed to break the law but to enforce it. If McAfee made a "Law Enforcement Tool Scanner", then we could attack them for not doing their job. Since they make a virus scanner, and we're not talking about a virus, the whole conversation is silly.
Why don't people bother looking up the definition of a word before posting a story about it??!?
Scientists are so fascinated with the possibility that they can that they never stop to think if they should.
Traffic Deaths due to Cell Phone Drivers continue to rise, as the total dead begins to approach the figure posted by Mohammed Atta. And still we have hands-free device laws in exactly zero states.
Enter Handspring with a slick, convenient cellphone integrated with a PDA. A live wire for streaming Internet content, beamed directly to the driver's seat of the person pushing a Chevy Suburban down the freeway ahead of you in rush hour traffic. A cell phone which requires two hands to operate in PDA mode is now in the hands of the millions of American drivers who refuse to stop pinning a cell phone to their ear while driving.
Please understand that I'm not attempting to bash the technology. I only wish that companies like Handspring would consider the impact of their actions before unleashing something like this on innocent commuters. Anyone with a rush hour commute knows that people irresponsible enough to weave through traffic talking on a cell phone exist and are numerous. And they will buy this phone, take both hands off the wheel, and practice "Graffiti" at 60 miles per hour.
Does anyone know how hard it would be to make a cell phone deactivate itself if it starts moving faster than 40 miles per hour? Could you perhaps triangulate the three nearest PCS towers?
A hub built into a wall switch! That's amazing! At the rate things are going, someone is going to invent a network card that doesn't even NEED cables, and this thing will be obsolete! Maybe it could use RADIO WAVES!
*BSD is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Is the possession of MacOS X v10.1 or its installer illegal because it can be used to violate its own copyright?
This kind of "circular geek logic" astounds me. It is like a Mobius Strip - circular, but one sided.
Of course Mac OS X cannot violate the DMCA. The anti-circumvention portion of the DMCA requires that the software be designed specifically to be a circumvention device that will break protection for copyrighted works. Mac OS X is software that is designed specifically to Operate Your Computer.
Attempts to twist the law in this manner only make the anti-DMCA cause look stupid. Only digital crowbars like DeCSS & Dmitri's software violate the DMCA. The way to win the argument for the DMCA is to convince the people of America that it should be legal to write software to steal from companies - not accuse Apple of being "crackers".