Quote: "ITER is a massive con trick, a licence to print money for the 'experts' involved in this disgraceful waste of millions of people's money. It's OUR money, stolen from us as 'taxes', to pay for a project which 99% of us do not want."
ITER is a Tokamak. There are 33 Tokamaks operating now, I think. (See the list.) Tokamaks are easy enough to build that enthusiasts have built them in their garages. None of them ever produced more energy than it required to run.
Is it logical to be skeptical about Tokamaks? Yes, that is a logically admissible view. So, the parent comment should not be modded down based on that.
I understand and agree. Every day, literally every day, I'm thankful for the
efforts of Andrew Carnegie, who funded about 3,000 libraries. Having a library began to be considered necessary for any self-respecting town.
There is a lot of preparation that could help. Have dry food. Have water for a few days. Be prepared to move out of the area for a few days until water and electricity are available again.
Unfortunately, those who predict an earthquake don't give much guidance for preparation. It would be useful to know, for example, what an earthquake is likely to do to a wooden house held together by nails.
The subduction zone is off the coast. How would an earthquake there affect Portland, Oregon, which is 80 miles inland?
What bridges would be destroyed in Portland? What buildings?
We need more information. It is useful to prepare.
I know you young'uns probably don't remember this, but back in my day we had
institutions called libraries. Libraries had these things called
books. You could get any book without paying anything. If the
book wasn't available at your local library, you could use inter-library loan.
That was free, also.
You could touch a book without smearing finger oil on a screen. There
was no DRM; no one implied you were a criminal if you read someone else's
book. If you wanted to have a copy of a page, you could photocopy it and write
on the photocopy, actually write, with real ink.
I know this will sound amazing, but you didn't have to have a
device to read a book! You could just read it. Books didn't have
batteries; there was nothing to charge; there was no battery to go bad and
carry back to Apple for an expensive replacement. You could read a book
outdoors; you didn't need to worry about the weak display of an Apple
LCD screen.
If you dropped a book, it would almost certainly not be damaged. There
was no quirky, limited operating system that had to be updated. There was no
file management. You just opened the book and started reading it.
There was no early adopter status, with people going around implying
they were socially superior to you because they had a device. You
didn't need to worry about new versions of a device that did a little more,
but just a little, because there would be an even newer version a few months
after that. Books never became obsolete because someone stopped supporting an
old file format.
You didn't need electric power to read a book. You didn't need to
worry about exploding batteries with their poisonous metals. There were no
charge cords, or waiting for re-charging.
There were so many books that thieves usually didn't steal them.
You didn't have to pay the huge Jeff Bezos tax or the huge Steve Jobs
tax; you didn't need to contribute to a billionaire only interested in having
more billions.
They apparently list is only what Microsoft calls "protocols". There is a list of the name of what is in every byte, but very little information information, that I was able to find, of how the file format works. There is therefore nothing "open" or documented. What is "open" is mostly just a list of the variable names given each byte in a binary file.
Other comments have missed the point. Amazon is transmitting and
storing information about what interests readers enough to highlight. That can
be very personal. It doesn't matter that the information that Amazon displays
is "aggregated".
For example, if someone highlights the name of a terrorist, that could
be a cause for police interest in that person. The information about what the
person highlighted is available to police investigation, or to any
surveillance department of the government, of which there are many in the
United States.
The information about what someone highlighted is also available to
anyone who has access to the database. That may be a large number of Amazon
employees, and even a large number of hackers, in the case of exploitation of
a vulnerability.
My understanding is that the copyright to any modification someone
makes to his or her copy of a book belongs to that person, even if it is just
highlighting. He or she may not be able to publish that modification without
permission from the copyright owner of the book, but the modification does
belong to the person who made the modification. Any sneaky, after the fact
change to Amazon's terms of use that gives Amazon rights to another person's
creation is moral fraud, even if it is not legally actionable fraud.
"GP's point is that there are real performance gains that they could be
making..."
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Every
recent update has included fixes for instability, and there are many more
sources of instability. THAT'S the performance gain needed most.
Somehow Firefox interacts with Windows XP with Service Pack 3 in such
a way that it crashes Windows. Anyone fixing the Firefox instabilities will
have bragging rights, and maybe job offers, because they will also discover
the cause of the instability in Windows.
In contrast, I have never known Firefox instabilities to crash Linux.
Linux just throws Firefox out of memory.
The instability in Firefox occurs especially when many windows and
tabs are open, and Windows XP is hibernated or put in standby several times.
Normally only people who do a lot of research have many windows and tabs open.
However, the instabilities are indications of coding errors that need to be
corrected. Also, those who do research should be served, also, and not just
because they may be vocal and influential.
I haven't tested Firefox with Windows 7 yet, but will do that in the
next month.
Another valuable performance fix would be to allow multiple instances
of Firefox, so that a crash in one instance does not affect the others.
Google's Chrome is designed that way.
Please don't give excuses. Crashes need to be fixed. Much of the
reason for the popularity of Firefox is the availability of extensions.
Logically, Mozilla cannot simultaneously recommend extensions that crash
Firefox and blame the extensions for crashing Firefox.
You are assuming a random distribution. You are assuming there are no unknown quirks or bias in the way the experiment was run. You are also assuming there was no dishonesty.
The difference between taking the drug and not taking it is tiny, according to the stated results of the experiment.
Quote: "The big story here is that this is the first proof of principle..." Translation: The big story is NOT that this drug works well.
Note that the U.S. government is very weak in regulating drug companies. For example, the fine in this case was trivial compared to the profits: Drug Makers to Pay Fine of $81 Million.
GPG is also reliable, reputable, fast, free, open source, and works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
What we need is a list of things PGP can do that the free, open source GPG can't do. Is there anything? If GPG can do everything PGP can do, then there is no reason to pay a lot of money for a closed-source alternative.
It would be difficult to trust closed-source encryption software, especially from a company that so many people who have commented here have said they have found unreliable.
At the time, as is true now, Motorola was badly managed. Apple moved away from Motorola CPUs. Quote:"Motorola had promised Apple to deliver parts with speed up to 500 MHz, but yields proved too low initially."
Companies don't want to depend on Motorola because Motorola does not seem dependable, in my opinion.
Intel's 8086 CPU, Intel's first 16-bit processor, was possibly much worse than any of those mentioned because it affected all of us. Intel chose to continue the quirkiness of the 8008 rather than abandon it.
Just before the time of the introduction of the 8086 I knew a chief of technology of a high-tech company who was waiting for the 8086 as though it were a combination of Christmas, his birthday, and the birth of his child. He would start every conversation by telling everyone Intel's release date for the 8086.
The day of its release, he was miserably unhappy. Intel chose to continue an architecture that made assembly language programming and debugging of high-level languages more difficult.
Wikipedia says about the 8086: "Marketed as source compatible, the 8086 was designed so that assembly language for the 8008, 8080, or 8085 could be automatically converted into equivalent (sub-optimal) 8086 source code, with little or no hand-editing. The programming model and instruction set was (loosely) based on the 8080 in order to make this possible. However, the 8086 design was expanded to support full 16-bit processing, instead of the fairly basic 16-bit capabilities of the 8080/8085."
The problem was that the quirkiness has been extended to the 32-bit processors of today. The Wikipedia article says, "The legacy of the 8086 is enduring in the basic instruction set of today's personal computers and servers..."
And, "Programming over 64 KB boundaries involved adjusting segment registers... and was therefore fairly awkward (and remained so until the 80386)."
Everyone on the planet who used or were affected by computers then suffered because the debugging was much more complicated than if Intel had chosen to make the operation of the 8086 simpler.
"Such relatively simple and low-power 8086-compatible processors in CMOS are still used in embedded systems."
Obviously, I don't have the time to look through Google's 313,000 results for truecrypt vulnerability.
I was unable to find any links to vulnerabilities in TrueCrypt in that list! Here is a typical item from the Google search:
UW Computer Security Research and Course Blog Security Review...
Feb 10, 2008... TrueCrypt is a disk encryption system intended to solve the problem of people....
alexmeng on Current events: Adobe Reader Vulnerability...
cubist.cs.washington.edu/Security/.../security-review-truecrypt/ - Cached - Similar
As you can see, that link is to a vulnerability in Adobe Reader, not TrueCrypt.
Slashdot Mirror
Good comment. I laughed.
Free Fusion Reactors: Just look up into the night sky and choose any star. There are plenty for everyone.
The problem is getting the energy back.
"I'm really hoping that separating the tabs will help with memory leaks."
Agreed. Somehow Firefox not only leaks memory, but corrupts Windows XP SP3 when it begins to need virtual memory.
Quote: "ITER is a massive con trick, a licence to print money for the 'experts' involved in this disgraceful waste of millions of people's money. It's OUR money, stolen from us as 'taxes', to pay for a project which 99% of us do not want."
ITER is a Tokamak. There are 33 Tokamaks operating now, I think. (See the list.) Tokamaks are easy enough to build that enthusiasts have built them in their garages. None of them ever produced more energy than it required to run.
Is it logical to be skeptical about Tokamaks? Yes, that is a logically admissible view. So, the parent comment should not be modded down based on that.
My understanding is that Perl2Exe is just a wrapper for the interpreted code. If there is an error, the error message will contain all of your code.
I understand and agree. Every day, literally every day, I'm thankful for the efforts of Andrew Carnegie, who funded about 3,000 libraries. Having a library began to be considered necessary for any self-respecting town.
There is a lot of preparation that could help. Have dry food. Have water for a few days. Be prepared to move out of the area for a few days until water and electricity are available again.
Unfortunately, those who predict an earthquake don't give much guidance for preparation. It would be useful to know, for example, what an earthquake is likely to do to a wooden house held together by nails.
The subduction zone is off the coast. How would an earthquake there affect Portland, Oregon, which is 80 miles inland?
What bridges would be destroyed in Portland? What buildings?
We need more information. It is useful to prepare.
I know you young'uns probably don't remember this, but back in my day we had institutions called libraries. Libraries had these things called books. You could get any book without paying anything. If the book wasn't available at your local library, you could use inter-library loan. That was free, also.
You could touch a book without smearing finger oil on a screen. There was no DRM; no one implied you were a criminal if you read someone else's book. If you wanted to have a copy of a page, you could photocopy it and write on the photocopy, actually write, with real ink.
I know this will sound amazing, but you didn't have to have a device to read a book! You could just read it. Books didn't have batteries; there was nothing to charge; there was no battery to go bad and carry back to Apple for an expensive replacement. You could read a book outdoors; you didn't need to worry about the weak display of an Apple LCD screen.
If you dropped a book, it would almost certainly not be damaged. There was no quirky, limited operating system that had to be updated. There was no file management. You just opened the book and started reading it.
There was no early adopter status, with people going around implying they were socially superior to you because they had a device. You didn't need to worry about new versions of a device that did a little more, but just a little, because there would be an even newer version a few months after that. Books never became obsolete because someone stopped supporting an old file format.
You didn't need electric power to read a book. You didn't need to worry about exploding batteries with their poisonous metals. There were no charge cords, or waiting for re-charging.
There were so many books that thieves usually didn't steal them.
You didn't have to pay the huge Jeff Bezos tax or the huge Steve Jobs tax; you didn't need to contribute to a billionaire only interested in having more billions.
Microsoft's first product was Basic for CP/M.
Interesting comment.
Quote: Microsoft purchased 86-DOS, allegedly for $50,000. It was an improvement of the CP/M operating system.
A mention of this story is now 14th on the first Google page, Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 1:10 PM PST.
I downloaded those files: "Click here to download a zip file with all of the PDF files." from this page: Microsoft Office File Formats Introduction. There are hundreds of megabytes of files.
They apparently list is only what Microsoft calls "protocols". There is a list of the name of what is in every byte, but very little information information, that I was able to find, of how the file format works. There is therefore nothing "open" or documented. What is "open" is mostly just a list of the variable names given each byte in a binary file.
Right now automatic transmissions make a huge amount of money for auto dealerships and other auto repair companies.
Thanks for the suggestion: Vacuum Places Improved. Soon I'll be trying it with Windows 7 64-bit.
Article: "Vacuum Places Improved" Speeds Up Firefox with a Click of Your Mouse
Article partly about "out-of-control memory use" in Firefox: Five Features We Want to See in Firefox.
I should have said "garage" experimenters.
Note that experimenters have built Tokamaks and achieved fusion. Fusion is easy. Getting more power out than is put in is difficult.
That's a job for 4chan.
Other comments have missed the point. Amazon is transmitting and storing information about what interests readers enough to highlight. That can be very personal. It doesn't matter that the information that Amazon displays is "aggregated".
For example, if someone highlights the name of a terrorist, that could be a cause for police interest in that person. The information about what the person highlighted is available to police investigation, or to any surveillance department of the government, of which there are many in the United States.
The information about what someone highlighted is also available to anyone who has access to the database. That may be a large number of Amazon employees, and even a large number of hackers, in the case of exploitation of a vulnerability.
My understanding is that the copyright to any modification someone makes to his or her copy of a book belongs to that person, even if it is just highlighting. He or she may not be able to publish that modification without permission from the copyright owner of the book, but the modification does belong to the person who made the modification. Any sneaky, after the fact change to Amazon's terms of use that gives Amazon rights to another person's creation is moral fraud, even if it is not legally actionable fraud.
One solution is to get books at the library.
"GP's point is that there are real performance gains that they could be making..."
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Every recent update has included fixes for instability, and there are many more sources of instability. THAT'S the performance gain needed most.
Somehow Firefox interacts with Windows XP with Service Pack 3 in such a way that it crashes Windows. Anyone fixing the Firefox instabilities will have bragging rights, and maybe job offers, because they will also discover the cause of the instability in Windows.
In contrast, I have never known Firefox instabilities to crash Linux. Linux just throws Firefox out of memory.
The instability in Firefox occurs especially when many windows and tabs are open, and Windows XP is hibernated or put in standby several times. Normally only people who do a lot of research have many windows and tabs open. However, the instabilities are indications of coding errors that need to be corrected. Also, those who do research should be served, also, and not just because they may be vocal and influential.
I haven't tested Firefox with Windows 7 yet, but will do that in the next month.
Another valuable performance fix would be to allow multiple instances of Firefox, so that a crash in one instance does not affect the others. Google's Chrome is designed that way.
Please don't give excuses. Crashes need to be fixed. Much of the reason for the popularity of Firefox is the availability of extensions. Logically, Mozilla cannot simultaneously recommend extensions that crash Firefox and blame the extensions for crashing Firefox.
Firefox crashes.
Crash Statistics.
Crash Reporting.
You are assuming a random distribution. You are assuming there are no unknown quirks or bias in the way the experiment was run. You are also assuming there was no dishonesty.
The difference between taking the drug and not taking it is tiny, according to the stated results of the experiment.
Quote: "The big story here is that this is the first proof of principle..." Translation: The big story is NOT that this drug works well.
Note that the U.S. government is very weak in regulating drug companies. For example, the fine in this case was trivial compared to the profits: Drug Makers to Pay Fine of $81 Million.
GPG is also reliable, reputable, fast, free, open source, and works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
What we need is a list of things PGP can do that the free, open source GPG can't do. Is there anything? If GPG can do everything PGP can do, then there is no reason to pay a lot of money for a closed-source alternative.
For example, here is the GPG manual: web-of-trust.
It would be difficult to trust closed-source encryption software, especially from a company that so many people who have commented here have said they have found unreliable.
TrueCrypt is reliable, reputable, fast, free, open source, and works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
The TrueCrypt documentation is very good, but not perfect.
TrueCrypt can encrypt a file that contains other files (a drive letter) or encrypt an entire partition, even the boot partition.
No one I know has any connection with TrueCrypt. We are just happy users.
At the time, as is true now, Motorola was badly managed. Apple moved away from Motorola CPUs. Quote: "Motorola had promised Apple to deliver parts with speed up to 500 MHz, but yields proved too low initially."
Companies don't want to depend on Motorola because Motorola does not seem dependable, in my opinion.
There were no manuals before the announcement date.
Intel's 8086 CPU, Intel's first 16-bit processor, was possibly much worse than any of those mentioned because it affected all of us. Intel chose to continue the quirkiness of the 8008 rather than abandon it.
... and was therefore fairly awkward (and remained so until the 80386)."
Just before the time of the introduction of the 8086 I knew a chief of technology of a high-tech company who was waiting for the 8086 as though it were a combination of Christmas, his birthday, and the birth of his child. He would start every conversation by telling everyone Intel's release date for the 8086.
The day of its release, he was miserably unhappy. Intel chose to continue an architecture that made assembly language programming and debugging of high-level languages more difficult.
Wikipedia says about the 8086: "Marketed as source compatible, the 8086 was designed so that assembly language for the 8008, 8080, or 8085 could be automatically converted into equivalent (sub-optimal) 8086 source code, with little or no hand-editing. The programming model and instruction set was (loosely) based on the 8080 in order to make this possible. However, the 8086 design was expanded to support full 16-bit processing, instead of the fairly basic 16-bit capabilities of the 8080/8085."
The problem was that the quirkiness has been extended to the 32-bit processors of today. The Wikipedia article says, "The legacy of the 8086 is enduring in the basic instruction set of today's personal computers and servers..."
And, "Programming over 64 KB boundaries involved adjusting segment registers
Everyone on the planet who used or were affected by computers then suffered because the debugging was much more complicated than if Intel had chosen to make the operation of the 8086 simpler.
"Such relatively simple and low-power 8086-compatible processors in CMOS are still used in embedded systems."
Can you show vulnerabilities in TrueCrypt?
...
... TrueCrypt is a disk encryption system intended to solve the problem of people ....
Obviously, I don't have the time to look through Google's 313,000 results for truecrypt vulnerability.
I was unable to find any links to vulnerabilities in TrueCrypt in that list! Here is a typical item from the Google search:
UW Computer Security Research and Course Blog Security Review
Feb 10, 2008
alexmeng on Current events: Adobe Reader Vulnerability...
cubist.cs.washington.edu/Security/.../security-review-truecrypt/ - Cached - Similar
As you can see, that link is to a vulnerability in Adobe Reader, not TrueCrypt.
The question is if GoDaddy is trustworthy.