Maglev transportation has been something people have talked about for like 3 decades now and it still hasn't been fully realized in the way it's been portrayed. I doubt it ever really will be. I see it as akin to supersonic flight -- it's faster, but the costs of using it outweigh the benefits in most cases. If you had listened to some of the people around when the Concorde was introduced, all flights would be using this now. It's just not realistic.
I predict there will continue to be only a few, very specialized routes that utilize maglev. I would imagine there are less than 20 routes in the world where maglev truly makes sense.
I forget where I found this, but it's freakin' awesome and voices your and my concerns very well.
Dear Gerald Glaser, Executive Officer of the National Science Foundation,
We the people are upset at the so-called 'world of tomorrow' which still hasn't gotten here yet. We were promised a lot by cartoons and optimistically naive '50s scientists... Instead here we are driving gas-powered cars and masturbating with our hands like suckers. Well no more. My fellow taxpayers and I are planning a revolt if our demands for unrealistic scientific advancements are not satisfied.
The list is as follows; -Meal pills. How come we have to spend so much time eating and shitting? We should at least genetically engineer some 10-breasted chickens with skin like KFC's Extra Tasty Crispy recipe and small, colorful donkeys full of candy to bash at kids' birthday parties. -What about Spanish fly? GHB is for creeps (who likes having sex with people who are passed out?), but it seems OK to slip a girl a mickey if it makes her hot in the pants. Where are the flying cars? "Back to the Future II" promised us flying cars by 2015 - do you guys have a prototype yet, or are you still working on designing the spoiler and stuff? For that matter, how go the electric/hyrdogen cars? Are those almost done, because I don't want my grandkids riding around on rickshaws or bicycles. And it's a fucking travesty that we don't have hoverboards. They had them in Japan when I was in middle school, or at least that was the rumor. Where are the helpful robots? Robots could be washing our cars, frying our fries and exciting our genitals (without all the nagging). George Jetson had a conveyor belt of robot arms that brushed his teeth and clothed him, and if such a thing is possible in the cartoon future, it's possible now. We could give disabled people helpful robots instead of helper-monkeys that just screech and fling excrement. We could give the first robot servants to blacks as reparation for the years of slavery they endured. Robots fix everything. Why can't we control the weather? It would revolutionize sports and agriculture, since it would rain on farms and not baseball fields, and we could even assassinate dictators in other countries with tornadoes and hail and we wouldn't be responsible since it's an act of God. Supposedly Nike is already working on this, but it's high time that they invent a shoe that allows white people the ability to run fast, play better basketball and have the coordination to dance well. Word up. X-ray glasses that work like the ad says they do. I want to look at panties and stuff; I'm not interested in who has a metal hip or a weapon taped to their genitals.
Scientists are always missing the big picture. If our demands aren't met, we'll kick the NSF's ass with our space shoes on. Once they're invented, that is.
NetBSD's got my coffee maker on-lock, but it looks like my dishwasher will be safe for a little while longer. NetBSD should produce a full kitchen appliance set. I would buy it, just as long as I don't have to compile anything (recompiling your kernel on a blender takes surprisingly long).
Aren't the books spoilers enough? C'mon people, it's not like this is the new Star Wars, Star Trek or Matrix movie, these are movies made from books. The stories are already known, the only spoiler would be if Peter Jackson decided to change course and drastic alter the ending of the movie or something ridiculous like that.
When you have the vast majority of computer nerds/geeks arguing against making a system computerized then you should probably listen to them. When a group that is almost categorically in favor of a certain idea is convinced to argue against that idea, you know that you've stumbled upon a special circumstance that deserves some further consideration.
I've been doing serious photography for about 7 years now and honestly I think digital is the way to go. It costs more for a comparable camera, but you don't have to pay for film over and over again (and chemicals and paper if you're doing your own processing). Plus you have the pictures immediately, you don't have to wait for them to be processed or a bunch of time in the darkroom.
My desktop already has four dimensions! I can move all around the objects, documents, files, etc. on it and then there's a big "TIME" jog wheel next to my keyboard. Now if there were somebody that came out with a desktop that had more dimensions then I'd be impressed. I tend to get a little messed up with string theory.
What!?!?!? How did the parent get modded up so high? Are people that unaware of how hashes work?
A hash is a digest of a piece of data, as such there is more than one possible password for every password hash.
207 Billion hashes is a substantial portion of the possible hash values.
No offense meant to the parent poster, you can't know everything and I suppose this is more obscure than a lot of things, but I'm really really surprised this got modded up like it did.
As a senior citizen you're probably aware of the threat robots pose. Robots are everywhere and they eat old peoples' medicine for fuel. Well now there's a company that offers coverage against the unfortunate event of a robot attack: Old Glory Insurance.
Old Glory will cover you with no health check up or age consideration. You need to stay safe and that's harder and harder to do nowadays because robots may strike at any time. And when they grab you with those metal claws you can't break free, because they're made of metal and robots are strong. Now, for only for only four dollars a month you can achieve peace of mind in a world full of crime and robots, with Old Glory Insurance.
So don't cower under your afghan any longer, make a choice. Old Glory insurance, for when the metal ones come for you... and they will.
Basically what you have to do is avoid random ATMs and only use ones from banks you're familiar with. This can be hard in some places but in general it doesn't take a whole lot of effort and can potentially save you a lot of trouble later on. If your ATM card gets frauded you're largely fucked because the burden of proof relies mostly on you instead of the bank, unlike credit card fraud where the company has to be able to prove that YOU went on the spending spree and not the guy that stole it.
You see credit card fraud hyped up in the media all the time, but with almost every credit card you're liable for no more than $50, whereas ATM card fraud is always mentioned as a footnote when it can really screw up peoples' finances!
These double game re-releases (Galaga/Pacman, Centipede/Missle Command, Space Invaders/Qix) are really pretty lame, they always cost significantly more than buying the two original machines themselves! Granted they're marginally easier to maintain and take up half the space, but really, is that worth $1000+ to you? I would bet they get less in revenue as well -- if an arcade game costs 50 cents I'll usually only play 1-3 games, but when it's only a quarter I tend to pump at least a few bucks into it (if it's a good game like Galaga).
I always assumed that Bob and Alice were in a strictly distance relationship so I don't see how they would ever meet in a bar. I think the closest they would ever get to physically making love would be a double-encrypted phone sex conversation.
So yeah, my Alice and Bob joke is this: What did Alice and Bob believe is the most important thing to remember when having sex?
To always practice mathematically secure sex!
I was getting nervous that I might go an entire day without having the oppurtunity to read somebody's extended essay on the problems an evilness of SCO's case, now I won't have to worry about that anymore.
Listen people, we all know SCO's case is wholly ridiculous and that they clearly are doing it for the money (either from MS and Sun for defaming Linux or more likely from the hope that they'll get bought out) but that doesn't mean that it's insightful everytime you post a huge diatribe on SCO's problems. I mean really, if you were a karma whore or something you could just steal somebody else's rant from another SCO thread and get modded up to +5.
They scolded their programmers for leaving software files available without a password? Sure, they probably shouldn't be doing that, but really isn't the problem that their software was riddled with design and security problems? If Diebold can't even protect files and memos they don't want to get out then how can they be trusted to build a system that protects our votes!?
All the time in articles, books, etc. relating to open source and free software people mention Newton's assertion that science is based on other people's work and that it stands "on the shoulders of giants". It's interesting now that [b]science[/b], in this article, is making an analogy to free/open source software for the same reasons. Kind of the completion of a circle, eh?
Also, although I know very very little about "biotech", I like it just because it's one letter away from "BIOTCH".
Business related IMs, eh? I don't think I've ever seen such a thing.
Judging from the IM conversations I've had with most people outside of the geek world I think it would go something like this:
SexyJester2939: hey kewlPanda52: hi SexyJester2939: r u doing teh TPS report #s kewlPanda52: what r u talking abut? those arent due til fri SexyJester2939: THE #S 4 UR TEAM DOCS!!!!! TODAYY!!!!!! kewlPanda52: o i c kewlPanda52: ya I have the #s 4 that kewlPanda52: just a sex kewlPanda52: i mean sec lol SexyJester2939: k SexyJester2939: lol kewlPanda52: ok i mail them 2 u SexyJester2939: thx;) kewlPanda52: latez! SexyJester2939: cu l8r
There are already a number of posts on Slashdot talking about how this is a really bad idea. I disagree (with a big but). It would almost certainly be a Bad Idea (TM) if this were enacted and people tried to make it the main way of distributing torrents. However, I don't think the idea was meant to do that, I think it was more just to show that it could be done. It's akin to people who get put on the mainpage of Slashdot for hacking their Apple IIe's so that they have ethernet and then writing a simple graphical operating system for them so they can browse the web. Impractical and largely useless? Probably. Interesting and fun hack? Definitely.
I think most people on Slashdot will scoff at these proposals, but really is it all that different from movie ratings? I'd say that the violence/sexuality in a lot of the games they're considering putting legislation on is similar to the level in R rated movies.
I think this will end up being used in a similar way too, like how some parents decide that it's appropriate for their 12 year old to see a particular R rated movie, some parents will also choose to let their 12 year old play a game that they're restricted from buying. Also, this won't have a drastic effect on which games kids play anyways because right now even though kids can buy whatever game they want, their parents still wouldn't allow them to play it if they thought it was inapproriate.
I think the knee-jerk reaction to this is opposition because it seems to fall inline with the looney theories that anytime a kid hurts somebody it's because of a videogame or movie, but in reality the law's not so bad.
The fact that they're distributing it just as a binary is not in itself a GPL violation. The GPL doesn't require that you actually include the source code, but rather that you make the source code accessible without much hassle. So who knows, maybe if you called one of these companies asking for the source code they would send you a file or a CD or something with the source code on it! In that case they would be totally in-line with the GPL.
However, I would bet that that's not really the case and they don't make the source code available as easily as that. In that case there probably should be some complaining about it as they would be in violation of the GPL. Even if that were the case though, I doubt they would be opposed to changing their practices to make that code available, especially since (from what people have been saying) they don't seem to have modified the code very much.
I have to say that my favorite game is monopoly, and this is why (the following story is not for the faint of heart):
At summer camp when I was 12 we were playing monopoly in our cabin. This one kid, Jeff, was being a totally bad sport (accusing everybody of cheating, etc.) and just generally making the game less fun. About half-way through the game he says "I have to go to the bathroom" and gets up, grumbling about how people will probably steal his money or otherwise conspire against him. When he gets up everybody starts to smell what smells like the worst fart ever. Somebody makes a crack about this, "hawhaw, he probably said he has to go to the bathroom because he shit his pants". Then the kid lifts his leg to tie his shoe and out of the leg of his shorts, a mid-size turd plops on the ground. The rest of us all run out of the cabin yelling and screaming like 12 year olds do. After they cleaned it up there was a small circular space on the floor of the cabin that had been bleached so it was a little bit lighter than the rest of the floor.
So yeah, Monopoly's my favorite game because it reminds me funniness of the worst and most humiliating moment in somebody else's life.
Slashdot Mirror
Maglev transportation has been something people have talked about for like 3 decades now and it still hasn't been fully realized in the way it's been portrayed. I doubt it ever really will be. I see it as akin to supersonic flight -- it's faster, but the costs of using it outweigh the benefits in most cases. If you had listened to some of the people around when the Concorde was introduced, all flights would be using this now. It's just not realistic.
I predict there will continue to be only a few, very specialized routes that utilize maglev. I would imagine there are less than 20 routes in the world where maglev truly makes sense.
NetBSD's got my coffee maker on-lock, but it looks like my dishwasher will be safe for a little while longer. NetBSD should produce a full kitchen appliance set. I would buy it, just as long as I don't have to compile anything (recompiling your kernel on a blender takes surprisingly long).
"beware of spoilers"?!!??!
Aren't the books spoilers enough? C'mon people, it's not like this is the new Star Wars, Star Trek or Matrix movie, these are movies made from books. The stories are already known, the only spoiler would be if Peter Jackson decided to change course and drastic alter the ending of the movie or something ridiculous like that.
When you have the vast majority of computer nerds/geeks arguing against making a system computerized then you should probably listen to them. When a group that is almost categorically in favor of a certain idea is convinced to argue against that idea, you know that you've stumbled upon a special circumstance that deserves some further consideration.
As if riding a motorcycle wasn't dangerous enough, soon somebody's going to be watching a TV show in their helmet while riding around.
I've been doing serious photography for about 7 years now and honestly I think digital is the way to go. It costs more for a comparable camera, but you don't have to pay for film over and over again (and chemicals and paper if you're doing your own processing). Plus you have the pictures immediately, you don't have to wait for them to be processed or a bunch of time in the darkroom.
My desktop already has four dimensions! I can move all around the objects, documents, files, etc. on it and then there's a big "TIME" jog wheel next to my keyboard. Now if there were somebody that came out with a desktop that had more dimensions then I'd be impressed. I tend to get a little messed up with string theory.
What!?!?!? How did the parent get modded up so high? Are people that unaware of how hashes work?
A hash is a digest of a piece of data, as such there is more than one possible password for every password hash.
207 Billion hashes is a substantial portion of the possible hash values.
No offense meant to the parent poster, you can't know everything and I suppose this is more obscure than a lot of things, but I'm really really surprised this got modded up like it did.
This article reminds me of the need, now more than ever, for insurance plans that cover robot attacks such as the Old Glory Robot Insurance plan.
See the video here
As a senior citizen you're probably aware of the threat robots pose. Robots are everywhere and they eat old peoples' medicine for fuel. Well now there's a company that offers coverage against the unfortunate event of a robot attack: Old Glory Insurance. Old Glory will cover you with no health check up or age consideration. You need to stay safe and that's harder and harder to do nowadays because robots may strike at any time. And when they grab you with those metal claws you can't break free, because they're made of metal and robots are strong. Now, for only for only four dollars a month you can achieve peace of mind in a world full of crime and robots, with Old Glory Insurance. So don't cower under your afghan any longer, make a choice. Old Glory insurance, for when the metal ones come for you... and they will.
Basically what you have to do is avoid random ATMs and only use ones from banks you're familiar with. This can be hard in some places but in general it doesn't take a whole lot of effort and can potentially save you a lot of trouble later on. If your ATM card gets frauded you're largely fucked because the burden of proof relies mostly on you instead of the bank, unlike credit card fraud where the company has to be able to prove that YOU went on the spending spree and not the guy that stole it.
You see credit card fraud hyped up in the media all the time, but with almost every credit card you're liable for no more than $50, whereas ATM card fraud is always mentioned as a footnote when it can really screw up peoples' finances!
These double game re-releases (Galaga/Pacman, Centipede/Missle Command, Space Invaders/Qix) are really pretty lame, they always cost significantly more than buying the two original machines themselves! Granted they're marginally easier to maintain and take up half the space, but really, is that worth $1000+ to you? I would bet they get less in revenue as well -- if an arcade game costs 50 cents I'll usually only play 1-3 games, but when it's only a quarter I tend to pump at least a few bucks into it (if it's a good game like Galaga).
I always assumed that Bob and Alice were in a strictly distance relationship so I don't see how they would ever meet in a bar. I think the closest they would ever get to physically making love would be a double-encrypted phone sex conversation.
So yeah, my Alice and Bob joke is this:
What did Alice and Bob believe is the most important thing to remember when having sex? To always practice mathematically secure sex!
I was getting nervous that I might go an entire day without having the oppurtunity to read somebody's extended essay on the problems an evilness of SCO's case, now I won't have to worry about that anymore.
Listen people, we all know SCO's case is wholly ridiculous and that they clearly are doing it for the money (either from MS and Sun for defaming Linux or more likely from the hope that they'll get bought out) but that doesn't mean that it's insightful everytime you post a huge diatribe on SCO's problems. I mean really, if you were a karma whore or something you could just steal somebody else's rant from another SCO thread and get modded up to +5.
Students at Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin will simultaneously break the world record for sleeping in class.
They scolded their programmers for leaving software files available without a password? Sure, they probably shouldn't be doing that, but really isn't the problem that their software was riddled with design and security problems? If Diebold can't even protect files and memos they don't want to get out then how can they be trusted to build a system that protects our votes!?
PUN CONTEST!
Rustlers, Chaps their hide, branding and steer clear.
Are there anymore? Anybody who can think of another pun gets a "Talking about computer hardware made my mother board" t-shirt!
All the time in articles, books, etc. relating to open source and free software people mention Newton's assertion that science is based on other people's work and that it stands "on the shoulders of giants". It's interesting now that [b]science[/b], in this article, is making an analogy to free/open source software for the same reasons. Kind of the completion of a circle, eh?
Also, although I know very very little about "biotech", I like it just because it's one letter away from "BIOTCH".
Business related IMs, eh? I don't think I've ever seen such a thing.
;)
Judging from the IM conversations I've had with most people outside of the geek world I think it would go something like this:
SexyJester2939: hey
kewlPanda52: hi
SexyJester2939: r u doing teh TPS report #s
kewlPanda52: what r u talking abut? those arent due til fri
SexyJester2939: THE #S 4 UR TEAM DOCS!!!!! TODAYY!!!!!!
kewlPanda52: o i c
kewlPanda52: ya I have the #s 4 that
kewlPanda52: just a sex
kewlPanda52: i mean sec lol
SexyJester2939: k
SexyJester2939: lol
kewlPanda52: ok i mail them 2 u
SexyJester2939: thx
kewlPanda52: latez!
SexyJester2939: cu l8r
There are already a number of posts on Slashdot talking about how this is a really bad idea. I disagree (with a big but). It would almost certainly be a Bad Idea (TM) if this were enacted and people tried to make it the main way of distributing torrents. However, I don't think the idea was meant to do that, I think it was more just to show that it could be done. It's akin to people who get put on the mainpage of Slashdot for hacking their Apple IIe's so that they have ethernet and then writing a simple graphical operating system for them so they can browse the web. Impractical and largely useless? Probably. Interesting and fun hack? Definitely.
I think most people on Slashdot will scoff at these proposals, but really is it all that different from movie ratings? I'd say that the violence/sexuality in a lot of the games they're considering putting legislation on is similar to the level in R rated movies.
I think this will end up being used in a similar way too, like how some parents decide that it's appropriate for their 12 year old to see a particular R rated movie, some parents will also choose to let their 12 year old play a game that they're restricted from buying. Also, this won't have a drastic effect on which games kids play anyways because right now even though kids can buy whatever game they want, their parents still wouldn't allow them to play it if they thought it was inapproriate.
I think the knee-jerk reaction to this is opposition because it seems to fall inline with the looney theories that anytime a kid hurts somebody it's because of a videogame or movie, but in reality the law's not so bad.
The fact that they're distributing it just as a binary is not in itself a GPL violation. The GPL doesn't require that you actually include the source code, but rather that you make the source code accessible without much hassle. So who knows, maybe if you called one of these companies asking for the source code they would send you a file or a CD or something with the source code on it! In that case they would be totally in-line with the GPL.
However, I would bet that that's not really the case and they don't make the source code available as easily as that. In that case there probably should be some complaining about it as they would be in violation of the GPL. Even if that were the case though, I doubt they would be opposed to changing their practices to make that code available, especially since (from what people have been saying) they don't seem to have modified the code very much.
A friend of my brother's recently found this one in OSX: Link to his blog entry about it
Not SO bad, but could be bad, and it's considerably more dangerous for known Unix nerds.
Virtual Round Table + Billy the singing Big Mouth Bass video conferencing = Family fun and memories you can cherish for years to come!
I have to say that my favorite game is monopoly, and this is why (the following story is not for the faint of heart):
At summer camp when I was 12 we were playing monopoly in our cabin. This one kid, Jeff, was being a totally bad sport (accusing everybody of cheating, etc.) and just generally making the game less fun. About half-way through the game he says "I have to go to the bathroom" and gets up, grumbling about how people will probably steal his money or otherwise conspire against him. When he gets up everybody starts to smell what smells like the worst fart ever. Somebody makes a crack about this, "hawhaw, he probably said he has to go to the bathroom because he shit his pants". Then the kid lifts his leg to tie his shoe and out of the leg of his shorts, a mid-size turd plops on the ground. The rest of us all run out of the cabin yelling and screaming like 12 year olds do. After they cleaned it up there was a small circular space on the floor of the cabin that had been bleached so it was a little bit lighter than the rest of the floor.
So yeah, Monopoly's my favorite game because it reminds me funniness of the worst and most humiliating moment in somebody else's life.