The ultimate defense for humanity and all the rest of the life on this planet, of course, is to terraform and colonize Mars. That way, even if a planetary defense system fails and Earth gets pulverized, life lives on on the surface of Mars.
I think I can answer all of the people on here who are asking "Why didn't they go with a Roman name?". It's real simple: political correctness. After all, Roman names were given to the planets by a bunch of old, dead white men, and are a vestige of a conquering, warfaring civilization. This new Inuit name represents one of those poor, marginalized, powerless indigenous tribe types. It's like affirmative action for planets.
Personally I think we should have just stuck with the Roman names and kept a consistent system...but then again, I am a middle-class white male.;-P
As it turns out, I actually know the person who prototyped the MATRIX system very well -- it's my wife's aunt.
On one hand, this scares me a bit, because I know her work, and she's good -- which means that this system probably functions as intended.
On the other hand, I have the assurances that a) she's a decent person, who generally supports civil liberties and frowns on abuse of government powers; and b) she's explicitly said that there were several requests that the government made during the initial design phase that she explicitly ruled out -- she told the government they were going too far, and that she wouldn't be a part of what they wanted. They actually backed off, too from what I've been told.
Of course, I realize that I have very little credibility here as just another Slashdot poster...but for anyone inclined to believe, the good news is that *some* restraint was made in designing the MATRIX system.
Well, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, SMTP itself is the problem -- it's badly broken, security-wise, and needs to be fixed. It's going to be painful to move to a new mail standard, or to change SMTP so that it's not broken, but that's what needs to happen to stop spam. Thankfully, our friends the Russian Mafia and the ever-growing number of Windows zombie machines are making spam levels so great that, sometime soon, spam will represent such a large percentage of e-mail traffic that fixing SMTP will be necessary, not just something mail admins like myself wish for.
BTW, does anybody have a good figure on what percentage of all e-mail spam represents these days? I'm talking about *all* traffic, too, not just what ends up in peoples' Inboxes after all the filtering going on out there has done its job.
To reply more to your subject than your actual post, there were some interesting docs leaked by NASA that show that Hubble missions are actually more safe than ISS missions:
Document #1 Document #2
Just for the sake of fact clarification here, you guys might want to read my Mars FAQs. Note: this document was written for the Mars Society, with the blessing of Zubrin (though it has yet to be accepted as an official document yet). Even with that potential slant, though, everything contained within it is factual, and as we all know, Slashdot can be a little light on facts somtimes.;-)
As other people here have said...if your goal is to get to Mars, the Moon is a complete waste of time. The resources necessary to build a lunar-launching facility be enormously draining. More importantly, all the people who say "but it's so much easier to launch stuff from the Moon!" forget one key point: we're decades or more away from being able to build the necessary parts from scratch on the Moon. That means that, at some point, these parts will have to be launched from Earth to the Moon. Considering that the Delta-V required to get from Earth to the Moon and then from the Moon to Mars is greater than Earth to Mars, why should we stop by the Moon at all?
I attended a lecture by Dr. Robert Zubrin, widely known for his Mars Direct plan, this past Friday at the National Geographic Society HQ in Washington, DC, where he made the good point that we need research on artificial gravity for missions to Mars much more than we do research on zero-gravity. Basically, the reasoning is that on a 2.5 year Mars mission, 1.5 years would be in Mars gravity, and the transit time would likely be spent in a 1-G artificial environment, since zero-G deconditioning for a 6-month trip would leave astronauts in poor shape to do their research on Mars once they got there. Since acheiving an artificial 1-G environment is easy through the use of centripital force, I'm glad to see at least the first steps in this sort of research are being done.
I would think that, given that the landing site was selected for its hematite content, and given the extreme smoothness of the landscape (indicative of erosion of some sort, possibly water-related), this is the best chance yet we've had to discover evidence of former large quantities of water on Mars. Let's all keep our fingers crossed -- imagine what that'd mean for our understanding of the universe, and the chances of the NASA budget going up!
Not to mention, of course, our chances of getting free shrimp.;-)
But why let that stop us? I mean, we've all seen how successful protesters are at stopping a wide variety of activities, be they wars or nuclear-related scientific advances.;-)
Besides, if you think about the number of people who protest any given item, and turn them into a percentage of the population, you'll see that generally less than 1% of the people really have strongly felt opposition to that item.
Having number portability would be a *huge* boon to VoIP. I was signed on with Vonage for a year, and intended to make it my primary phone when I signed up...but the fact that at the time I couldn't get a number with a local area code (and this in the Washington, DC area, too, not some tiny town in South Dakota) killed that in a hurry.
Of course, a larger part of the problem for VoIP solutions is that most of them are now being sold as an add-on to your existing telco service, something that's great for free long distance. With long distance costs falling like they are, though, unless VoIP providers can start acting as CLECs -- in other words, you buy their service, your phone needs are taken care of completely -- I doubt if many VoIP companies will survive. Though I'm not sure how this will happen as long as you have to provide a phone number before you can get broadband hooked up...
Several people here have already mentioned that the demographics involved -- stupid spammers, stupid customers, and the millions of e-mails it takes to get a reasonable response rate -- are what keeps spam moving. To that end, I wonder why we haven't seen a lot more study of those demographics? I mean, I know many such studies have been done, but they seem to pale in comparison to the number of studies of technical ways to defeat spam.
Since I think more such studies would be a good idea, I've just opened up all of my spam to anyone who wants to analyze it. With 17,169 pieces so far and many more to come, I figure it's statistically significant. I'll be doing statistics of my own soon.
I posted this on deadly.org last year, and it got enough hits that I think the Slashdot community would enjoy it: a picture of my black cat "causing" bad magic.:-)
After reading about this in the Washington Post, where they noted that only e-mail providers or government entities could bring suit, I decided to look up the actuall bill to see if I, as a private e-mail administrator, could bring an action against someone under this bill. The text in question, however, said only "A provider of Internet access service adversely affected" could bring action. So I wrote my Senators to find out if they meant this to be only those who provide actual ISP service, or if people like me who run private e-mail servers could bring complaints. Should be interesting to find out what they say.
"The sanctity of the vote can't be compromised nor can the integrity of the system be compromised"
Doesn't that line make you feel worried. At least they could say,"we have the best security and experience." But no, "the integrity of the system [can't] be compromised."
Maybe I've had my tinfoil hat off for too long...but I actually construed this as the goal they were working towards, i.e. "We want to make sure that the sanctity of the vote can't be compromised". IMHO, that's a worthy goal to shoot for, and if that's their stated objective instead of a claim they're making about an as-yet-unbuilt system, good for them.
For whatever reason, Slashdot stripped the trailing / on the link of a mirror I posted, so people aren't getting the site. Please try this link instead.
PS, for whoever modded my other link as a Troll...I wasn't trying to be mean when I said the mirror looked better than posts of the text, I just meant it had the graphics too.
I went ahead and put up a mirror of this poor Slashdotted site. I'm not sure if I've got it all but it looks nicer than just the text people have posted. Hopefully my machine's up to the task.:-)
First of all, welcome to Slashdot, where prejudices are as regular as the sunrise (or moreso). If you want a prejudice-free environment, go elsewhere.
As to the security of OpenBSD (and I suppose everyone should take my comment with a grain of salt, since I run it on my servers), show me another OS with privilege separation, practically no suid programs, a chroot()'ed Apache, integrated ProPolice support, etc., ad nauseum. For heaven's sake, with 3.4 they're switching i386 from a.out to ELF -- forcing all of us i386 users to install from scratch -- simply because it's harder to crack. Show me any other OS that will go to such extremes for security, and maybe I'll quit glorifying OpenBSD.
For once, we have an issue where blindly hating MS and wanting them to lose every case that goes against them is a bad idea.
After all, as the original poster said, this could be a very bad thing for browsers in general if MS loses this suit. I, for one, am hoping that their ridiculous legal team/budget win this time, because it means F/OSS and other browsers won't have to put up with this crap themselves.
So, in a statment I never thought I'd make anywhere, lease of all on/. -- GO MS!!
I'm sure this won't get modded up high enough to ever be seen, but it's just come over me what SCO must really stand for: they're Smoking Crack, Obviously. Now we just need to get the DEA on them, since the SEC won't do the job.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
The ultimate defense for humanity and all the rest of the life on this planet, of course, is to terraform and colonize Mars. That way, even if a planetary defense system fails and Earth gets pulverized, life lives on on the surface of Mars.
I think I can answer all of the people on here who are asking "Why didn't they go with a Roman name?". It's real simple: political correctness. After all, Roman names were given to the planets by a bunch of old, dead white men, and are a vestige of a conquering, warfaring civilization. This new Inuit name represents one of those poor, marginalized, powerless indigenous tribe types. It's like affirmative action for planets.
;-P
Personally I think we should have just stuck with the Roman names and kept a consistent system...but then again, I am a middle-class white male.
As it turns out, I actually know the person who prototyped the MATRIX system very well -- it's my wife's aunt.
On one hand, this scares me a bit, because I know her work, and she's good -- which means that this system probably functions as intended.
On the other hand, I have the assurances that a) she's a decent person, who generally supports civil liberties and frowns on abuse of government powers; and b) she's explicitly said that there were several requests that the government made during the initial design phase that she explicitly ruled out -- she told the government they were going too far, and that she wouldn't be a part of what they wanted. They actually backed off, too from what I've been told.
Of course, I realize that I have very little credibility here as just another Slashdot poster...but for anyone inclined to believe, the good news is that *some* restraint was made in designing the MATRIX system.
Well, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, SMTP itself is the problem -- it's badly broken, security-wise, and needs to be fixed. It's going to be painful to move to a new mail standard, or to change SMTP so that it's not broken, but that's what needs to happen to stop spam. Thankfully, our friends the Russian Mafia and the ever-growing number of Windows zombie machines are making spam levels so great that, sometime soon, spam will represent such a large percentage of e-mail traffic that fixing SMTP will be necessary, not just something mail admins like myself wish for.
BTW, does anybody have a good figure on what percentage of all e-mail spam represents these days? I'm talking about *all* traffic, too, not just what ends up in peoples' Inboxes after all the filtering going on out there has done its job.
To reply more to your subject than your actual post, there were some interesting docs leaked by NASA that show that Hubble missions are actually more safe than ISS missions:
Document #1
Document #2
Definitely worth a read.
Especially because, after all, Windows vulnerabilities result from MS patches, and there's no such thing as a hole that's not already been patched. ;-)
Just for the sake of fact clarification here, you guys might want to read my Mars FAQs. Note: this document was written for the Mars Society, with the blessing of Zubrin (though it has yet to be accepted as an official document yet). Even with that potential slant, though, everything contained within it is factual, and as we all know, Slashdot can be a little light on facts somtimes. ;-)
As other people here have said...if your goal is to get to Mars, the Moon is a complete waste of time. The resources necessary to build a lunar-launching facility be enormously draining. More importantly, all the people who say "but it's so much easier to launch stuff from the Moon!" forget one key point: we're decades or more away from being able to build the necessary parts from scratch on the Moon. That means that, at some point, these parts will have to be launched from Earth to the Moon. Considering that the Delta-V required to get from Earth to the Moon and then from the Moon to Mars is greater than Earth to Mars, why should we stop by the Moon at all?
I attended a lecture by Dr. Robert Zubrin, widely known for his Mars Direct plan, this past Friday at the National Geographic Society HQ in Washington, DC, where he made the good point that we need research on artificial gravity for missions to Mars much more than we do research on zero-gravity. Basically, the reasoning is that on a 2.5 year Mars mission, 1.5 years would be in Mars gravity, and the transit time would likely be spent in a 1-G artificial environment, since zero-G deconditioning for a 6-month trip would leave astronauts in poor shape to do their research on Mars once they got there. Since acheiving an artificial 1-G environment is easy through the use of centripital force, I'm glad to see at least the first steps in this sort of research are being done.
I would think that, given that the landing site was selected for its hematite content, and given the extreme smoothness of the landscape (indicative of erosion of some sort, possibly water-related), this is the best chance yet we've had to discover evidence of former large quantities of water on Mars. Let's all keep our fingers crossed -- imagine what that'd mean for our understanding of the universe, and the chances of the NASA budget going up!
;-)
Not to mention, of course, our chances of getting free shrimp.
But why let that stop us? I mean, we've all seen how successful protesters are at stopping a wide variety of activities, be they wars or nuclear-related scientific advances. ;-)
Besides, if you think about the number of people who protest any given item, and turn them into a percentage of the population, you'll see that generally less than 1% of the people really have strongly felt opposition to that item.
Having number portability would be a *huge* boon to VoIP. I was signed on with Vonage for a year, and intended to make it my primary phone when I signed up...but the fact that at the time I couldn't get a number with a local area code (and this in the Washington, DC area, too, not some tiny town in South Dakota) killed that in a hurry.
Of course, a larger part of the problem for VoIP solutions is that most of them are now being sold as an add-on to your existing telco service, something that's great for free long distance. With long distance costs falling like they are, though, unless VoIP providers can start acting as CLECs -- in other words, you buy their service, your phone needs are taken care of completely -- I doubt if many VoIP companies will survive. Though I'm not sure how this will happen as long as you have to provide a phone number before you can get broadband hooked up...
Several people here have already mentioned that the demographics involved -- stupid spammers, stupid customers, and the millions of e-mails it takes to get a reasonable response rate -- are what keeps spam moving. To that end, I wonder why we haven't seen a lot more study of those demographics? I mean, I know many such studies have been done, but they seem to pale in comparison to the number of studies of technical ways to defeat spam.
Since I think more such studies would be a good idea, I've just opened up all of my spam to anyone who wants to analyze it. With 17,169 pieces so far and many more to come, I figure it's statistically significant. I'll be doing statistics of my own soon.
I posted this on deadly.org last year, and it got enough hits that I think the Slashdot community would enjoy it: a picture of my black cat "causing" bad magic. :-)
After reading about this in the Washington Post, where they noted that only e-mail providers or government entities could bring suit, I decided to look up the actuall bill to see if I, as a private e-mail administrator, could bring an action against someone under this bill. The text in question, however, said only "A provider of Internet access service adversely affected" could bring action. So I wrote my Senators to find out if they meant this to be only those who provide actual ISP service, or if people like me who run private e-mail servers could bring complaints. Should be interesting to find out what they say.
For whatever reason, Slashdot stripped the trailing / on the link of a mirror I posted, so people aren't getting the site. Please try this link instead.
PS, for whoever modded my other link as a Troll...I wasn't trying to be mean when I said the mirror looked better than posts of the text, I just meant it had the graphics too.
I went ahead and put up a mirror of this poor Slashdotted site. I'm not sure if I've got it all but it looks nicer than just the text people have posted. Hopefully my machine's up to the task. :-)
I was unaware of that. Thanks for the updated links.
Everyone, mod this guy up so the proper links are visible!
In case anyone's interested, the actual text of the bill that was just passed is here.
First of all, welcome to Slashdot, where prejudices are as regular as the sunrise (or moreso). If you want a prejudice-free environment, go elsewhere.
As to the security of OpenBSD (and I suppose everyone should take my comment with a grain of salt, since I run it on my servers), show me another OS with privilege separation, practically no suid programs, a chroot()'ed Apache, integrated ProPolice support, etc., ad nauseum. For heaven's sake, with 3.4 they're switching i386 from a.out to ELF -- forcing all of us i386 users to install from scratch -- simply because it's harder to crack. Show me any other OS that will go to such extremes for security, and maybe I'll quit glorifying OpenBSD.
For once, we have an issue where blindly hating MS and wanting them to lose every case that goes against them is a bad idea.
/. -- GO MS!!
After all, as the original poster said, this could be a very bad thing for browsers in general if MS loses this suit. I, for one, am hoping that their ridiculous legal team/budget win this time, because it means F/OSS and other browsers won't have to put up with this crap themselves.
So, in a statment I never thought I'd make anywhere, lease of all on
Hmmm, maybe they're not Smoking Crack, Obviously as I suggested yesterday...instead, they're Spoiled Children, Obviously. :-)
I'm sure this won't get modded up high enough to ever be seen, but it's just come over me what SCO must really stand for: they're Smoking Crack, Obviously. Now we just need to get the DEA on them, since the SEC won't do the job. ;-)
Well, 5endmA1l *does* sux0r...but you already knew that, apparently. ;-)