Correct me if I'm wrong, aren't they rather hazardous to the "intended" recipients?
Exactly. And since we have in the past bombed Osama bin Laden's encampments and caves, and we are informed Pakistan that bin Laden has failing kidneys, and may in fact of died this winter if he was not able to get to a working dialysis machine, it may eventually be discovered that the US killed him years ago (following the Embassy bombings?) but that it just took hime years to die.
a supernova that hit hard enough to kill 40% of [Phytoplankton] would have killed many more land species, and I don't recall anything like that. Man, you must have some memory!
it may be that Australopithecus was evenly distributed all over Africa, but was generally smart enough to avoid the sudden burials that form most fossils.
I am not a Paleontologist (in fact I can't even spell it), but it seems to me that land species getting caught in circumstances conducive to producing fossils was the exception rather than the rule. And not only did conditions have to be just right to form fossils, but conditions from that point on had to be conducive to not eroding the fossils back into dust.
While we have substantial fossils going back to the Neanderthal era, I think the total number of sites where hominid specimens older than 1 millions years have been found can be counted on both hands.
So to make any inference as to whether or not any specific environmental event made a noticable change in the evolution of hominids that long ago, is anybody's guess. However, the earliest member of the genus Homo, Homo habilis did appear just about 2 million years ago. Though various Australopithecus species continued to exist in parallel with the Homo species for several hundred thousand years after that.
Per this BBC story 'war drivers' are using Pringle potato crisp(chip) tubes as directional antenna boosters to more easily spot open wireless access points.
this page actually does a head to head test of Pringles tubes, coffee cans, and soup cans. The site also provides instruction on how to build your very own "Cantenna".
For the clueless, this is a Monty Python and the Holy Grail take-off (I can't believe someone managed to get it posted before I did). Note, to be accurate, only two questions should be asked, since it was the second question that Gallahad stumbled.
BRIDGEKEEPER:What... is your quest? GALAHAD:I seek the Grail. BRIDGEKEEPER:What... is your favourite colour? GALAHAD:Blue. No, yel-- auuuuuuuugh!
Before the Matrix, Keanu did a movie called Chain Reaction where he plays a physicist that develops table top fusion based on acoustic cavitation. Since cheap, non hydrocarbon based power will bring down Oil conglomerates, and with them the corrupt government they support, the FBI tries to catch Reeves and suppress his findings.
BTW, Sonoluminescence (a form of acoustic cavitation) is the same effect behind Wint-o-Green lifesavers making 'sparks' when you crunch them. Luckily the temperatures of the lifesavers doesn't get anywhere near the temperature needed for nuclear fusion.
Levy's newest book Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age(*) helps demonstrate one of the key hypocrisis in the mind of the common SlashDotter (like I picture myself). Which is that while we respect (even worship) the ownership of data when it comes to privacy considerations, we abhor that very same ownership when it is expressed by others (like the RIAA & MPAA) in the form of copyrights. The very same poster can easily find himself posting in one thread that users need good encryption technology to protect their personal data; then later that same day argue that tools that break encryption in the form of DeCSS etc. are our God given right to own and use as we see fit to break the encryption of other people's data.
Before you flame me, I realize there is a distinction in that supposedly you paid for that DVD you only want to make a backup copy of. But if the seller of the DVD and law say that is not what you paid for, then why are you arguing with the seller? You should only be arguing with law.
So maybe that's the commonality of the two opinions, both advocate that the law should be changed in the consumer's favor. One to allow consumers access to strong encryption, one to to allow consumers the common law right of fair use to DVDs they have purchased.
* BTW, Why hasn't SlashDot reviewed Levy's new book yet? It's been out for two month's now.
Yes, it appears that several people are misinterpreting the questioning. He wants Computer resources for criminal forensics (stufy of blood spatters, bullet casings, fingerprints, etc. things you find on CSI or Crossing Jordan. You and other have identified information on Forensic Computing (HD recovery, decrypting passwords, etc.)
I lost most of my respect for/. when I was hit by the hard karma cap, well finally I see a real reason for karma to exist. Since the content that people are paying for is provided in large part by this 3% why not 'pay' them for their work. Every karma point earned could be worth 10/20/50 page views, whatever number works out to fairly compensate this cream of the crop for providing this quality content. You could also provide 5 page views for every mod point expended, and for each round of metamoderation performed.
Since the tracking systems for karma, moderation, and M2 are already in place, I see the implementation of such a method of karmic payment as being relatively trivial. Certainly worth the affort instead of pissing off your unpaid staff by turing them into paying staff.
University will be discontinuing it and is referring folks to Google or other commercial services.
That seems reasonable to me. Google is fine for reading text groups, in fact I find it much better than using NNTP directly since often what I want to know is already in the groups FAQ, or might as well be as it gets asked so many times. If I have an obscure question, then I run the risk that the few people that might know the answer don't happen to read the group that day/week or it gets lost in the noise. Also, since I'm not posting, I'm not providing my email address to spammers. What Google needs to add is a posting facility for serious text based groups such as the comp.* hierarchy. They could put all the restriction on it they want, keeping posts to 500 characters, spam filters, pr0n filters, whatever, but buying Deja.com and profiting from the existence of USENET they must accept some responsibility to keep the medium alive.
I think the priority should be getting management to understand the importance of using standard protocols instead of proprietary ones.
Having a book like this one is great if you want to familiarize yourself with the standards and how to implement them on Linux, but the much harder task is getting Management, particularly at larger companies, to see the benefit of implementing a standards based VPN where the users can use any standards based client over any TCP/IP network.
Instead what I see is managers that want to buy a single product that comes with both the server and client applications, but then doesn't work or is hard to implement when the clients are trying to access the VPN from a cablemodem, DSL, or 802.11 connected machine, and don't (God forbid) want to use MSIE and Citrix on Windows to get onto the office network.
Or you can (try to) view in plain text via the Google archive here. Here's the Preface:
Preface This paper is an excerpt from a grant proposal that I submitted to NSF DMS at the beginning of October 2001.
The same techniques can be applied to other congruence-combination algorithms for factoring, discrete logarithms, class groups, etc. See [3] for a bibliography.
Priority dates. I realized on 13 September 2000 that special-purpose hardware would change the exponent in the cost of integer factorization. I announced the exponent reduction from 3 + o(1) to 2:5 + o(1) for real (two-dimensional) circuits in a seminar at Butler University on 23 March 2001, a rump-session presentation at Eurocrypt 2001 on 7 May 2001, and a talk at the Algorithms and Number Theory conference at Dagstuhl on 14 May 2001. I realized on 9 August 2001 that the sieving exponent could easily be reduced from 2:5 + o(1) to 2 + o(1).
you've just eliminated *all* scripting languages from the definition of software.
Actually, every file that relies on an algorhithm to perform some function including the OS, even wordprocessing documents if they use anything more sophisticated than plain ASCII text - since they consist of instrustions that are carried out by the processor either directly or through the use of one or more intermediary programs.
My question is, who are they not charging? Are they charging MS seperately for every single different application that comes with a default Windows install? Are they charging MS seperately for each compnent in MSOffice?
One way around the license might be to convert the spreadsheet to java applet and host it online (hopefully in another state) then sell it as a service rather than a program that gets installed on the user's PC. Since the transaction would cross state lines, the state would not have jurisdication to regulate or license your service. Even within the same state, it's likely they would have real problems proving that the online spreadsheet is software, and even if they did, they would have to show how they were enforcing the license on other webservices such as Hotmail.
The write-up says that team 'created' the antimatter atoms. I wouldn't use the term 'created' too lightly when discussing particle physics. To me 'creating' matter implies they at a minimum converted energy to matter, or to take the term very literally - devised their own mini-Big Bang.
What they really did was assemble them from anti-electrons and anti-protons
.
Invisible Aluminum means Invisible Planes!
on
Transparent Aluminium
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
Is anyone else thinking what I'm thinking. Yes you there, the one that collected DC Comics* as a kid and watched campy action adventure shows on TV in the 70's:
Now all we need is her golden lasso to get the bad guys to tell the truth and some magic bullet-deflecting bracelets and we'll be all set.
* Note: in my opinion this was one of the clear ways to distinguish a geek from a nerd in the 70's and early 80's. Geeks read Marvel books like X-Men and Spiderman, and nerds read DC books like Superman and Wonder Woman. Of course this whole distinction changed when the Dark Knight series came out. Being a devoted Frank Miller fan, that was enough for me to become at least publisher neutral when it came to comics
the brightness of the Earth would send it into safe mode instantly. As it is, HST can't look at the Sun or Moon, and Earth is much more reflective than the Moon.
True, but they could point it at the darkside of the planet, and if the President is any kind of authority, then we know for a fact that Osama is on the darkside.
Re:More taxpayers cash flushed down the lavatory
on
Hubble Getting an Upgrade
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually the entire NASA Budget for the last two years has been just under $15B with a full $15B budgeted for FY2003.
If you we take the US Census Bureau as an authority then the current US Population is about 286.5 Million.
$15,000,000,000 / 286,500,000 = $52.36, or almost exactly $1/week per American.
Plus, I find these statistics of cost per American pretty irrelevant, since the poorest 20% of Americans don't pay income tax and therefore are contributing nothing to run NASA. On the other hand, the Bush tax cuts passed last year by repealing the inheritance tax gave Bill Gates a $30B tax cut, enough to pay NASA's whole budget for two straight years!
But I assume that Speakeasy only billed you for services you actually received. The same may not be true for PacBell.
The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) said Thursday that it has opened an investigation into charges that SBC Pacific Bell--owned by SBC Communications--overbilled customers for DSL (digital subscriber line) and other services. The commission is also looking at whether SBC Pacific Bell underreported complaints regarding "cramming," the practice of putting false charges on customers' bills that are unrelated to actual telephone use.
Doesn't this tell you that we in other countries are getting soaked
Umm, compared to other countries, we in the US are not getting soaked. The reason is that in most European countries you still pay per minute charges for connected via dial-up modem. So $40 - $50 month is what you can expect to pay for a reasonable amount of connect time via dial-up. (you wonder why mobile phones are big in Europe, its because POTS phone service is more expensive than mobile service). Even in the US, when you add up all the charges for having second dedicated phone line plus the standard $20/month ISP charge, you're paying very little premium for the extra bandwidth of DSL or cable.
I pay $39.95/month for Verizon DSL in the DC area. Because I signed up early on, I still keep my static IP. No concerns about NAT so far, so I run a small LAN at home. Other than a 1 to 10,000 port sweep originating from Argentina, my firewall logs haven't picked up any sign of script kiddies trying to get onto my system.
Digital cable with cable modem service is supposed to be coming to my neighborhood soon, but since I have had no downtime that I can recall in over six months, I doubt I will switch unless the price for cable was less than $30/month.
If I remember correctly, microsoft has played this game illegally before with alleged grass roots campaigns (having people who dont even exist sending letters to their representatives)
Well, they did actually exist, its just that sometimes they were already dead at the time they sent the letters.
I really hope these new responses are put online in a form that can be easily converted to text (often the courts put these online only as scanned images). It seems that there is enough talent among SlashDot readers to determine if there is any MS astroturf interspersed with the grassroots.
Practically every lobbyist does this to some extent, but the less dishonest ones do it by providing sample text that actual humans voluntarily choose to cut and paste into their letters. Not forging mail from the deceased.
I like the pic at the bottom of the page showing how you can flip one screen around facing away from you so that two people sitting at a table facing each other both get a screen.
With a multi-tasking OS, one user could use the mouse and the other the keyboard and work on seperate tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a native Zsh port for win32 that works very nicely
You can read more about it here. You can get it by FTP from ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/amol/zsh But you will need a gzip decompressor.
Correct me if I'm wrong, aren't they rather hazardous to the "intended" recipients?
Exactly. And since we have in the past bombed Osama bin Laden's encampments and caves, and we are informed Pakistan that bin Laden has failing kidneys, and may in fact of died this winter if he was not able to get to a working dialysis machine, it may eventually be discovered that the US killed him years ago (following the Embassy bombings?) but that it just took hime years to die.
a supernova that hit hard enough to kill 40% of [Phytoplankton] would have killed many more land species, and I don't recall anything like that.
Man, you must have some memory!
it may be that Australopithecus was evenly distributed all over Africa, but was generally smart enough to avoid the sudden burials that form most fossils.
I am not a Paleontologist (in fact I can't even spell it), but it seems to me that land species getting caught in circumstances conducive to producing fossils was the exception rather than the rule. And not only did conditions have to be just right to form fossils, but conditions from that point on had to be conducive to not eroding the fossils back into dust.
While we have substantial fossils going back to the Neanderthal era, I think the total number of sites where hominid specimens older than 1 millions years have been found can be counted on both hands.
So to make any inference as to whether or not any specific environmental event made a noticable change in the evolution of hominids that long ago, is anybody's guess. However, the earliest member of the genus Homo, Homo habilis did appear just about 2 million years ago. Though various Australopithecus species continued to exist in parallel with the Homo species for several hundred thousand years after that.
Per this BBC story 'war drivers' are using Pringle potato crisp(chip) tubes as directional antenna boosters to more easily spot open wireless access points.
this page actually does a head to head test of Pringles tubes, coffee cans, and soup cans. The site also provides instruction on how to build your very own "Cantenna".
Yes, the same. Here are some links ala Google:
NPR has done two stories on this in the last couple the months. The first was a piece specifically about the 1935 audio recording. And the second talks about this latest attempt to locate any surviving members of the species.
Before the Matrix, Keanu did a movie called Chain Reaction where he plays a physicist that develops table top fusion based on acoustic cavitation. Since cheap, non hydrocarbon based power will bring down Oil conglomerates, and with them the corrupt government they support, the FBI tries to catch Reeves and suppress his findings.
BTW, Sonoluminescence (a form of acoustic cavitation) is the same effect behind Wint-o-Green lifesavers making 'sparks' when you crunch them. Luckily the temperatures of the lifesavers doesn't get anywhere near the temperature needed for nuclear fusion.
Before you flame me, I realize there is a distinction in that supposedly you paid for that DVD you only want to make a backup copy of. But if the seller of the DVD and law say that is not what you paid for, then why are you arguing with the seller? You should only be arguing with law.
So maybe that's the commonality of the two opinions, both advocate that the law should be changed in the consumer's favor. One to allow consumers access to strong encryption, one to to allow consumers the common law right of fair use to DVDs they have purchased.
* BTW, Why hasn't SlashDot reviewed Levy's new book yet? It's been out for two month's now.
Yes, it appears that several people are misinterpreting the questioning. He wants Computer resources for criminal forensics (stufy of blood spatters, bullet casings, fingerprints, etc. things you find on CSI or Crossing Jordan. You and other have identified information on Forensic Computing (HD recovery, decrypting passwords, etc.)
What he is looking is sites like: SPEX Forensic Light Sources and AFIS/APIS, Imaging Forensics,Interpol's Forensics Info page, or Zeno's Forensic Forum (this last site has a bunch of links to explore further).
Of course, to get to these you also have to avoid all the sites that relate to Forensics, the scientific term given to debate team.
Genius, If I had mod points they would be yours.
/. when I was hit by the hard karma cap, well finally I see a real reason for karma to exist. Since the content that people are paying for is provided in large part by this 3% why not 'pay' them for their work. Every karma point earned could be worth 10/20/50 page views, whatever number works out to fairly compensate this cream of the crop for providing this quality content. You could also provide 5 page views for every mod point expended, and for each round of metamoderation performed.
I lost most of my respect for
Since the tracking systems for karma, moderation, and M2 are already in place, I see the implementation of such a method of karmic payment as being relatively trivial. Certainly worth the affort instead of pissing off your unpaid staff by turing them into paying staff.
University will be discontinuing it and is referring folks to Google or other commercial services.
That seems reasonable to me. Google is fine for reading text groups, in fact I find it much better than using NNTP directly since often what I want to know is already in the groups FAQ, or might as well be as it gets asked so many times. If I have an obscure question, then I run the risk that the few people that might know the answer don't happen to read the group that day/week or it gets lost in the noise. Also, since I'm not posting, I'm not providing my email address to spammers.
What Google needs to add is a posting facility for serious text based groups such as the comp.* hierarchy. They could put all the restriction on it they want, keeping posts to 500 characters, spam filters, pr0n filters, whatever, but buying Deja.com and profiting from the existence of USENET they must accept some responsibility to keep the medium alive.
I think the priority should be getting management to understand the importance of using standard protocols instead of proprietary ones.
Having a book like this one is great if you want to familiarize yourself with the standards and how to implement them on Linux, but the much harder task is getting Management, particularly at larger companies, to see the benefit of implementing a standards based VPN where the users can use any standards based client over any TCP/IP network.
Instead what I see is managers that want to buy a single product that comes with both the server and client applications, but then doesn't work or is hard to implement when the clients are trying to access the VPN from a cablemodem, DSL, or 802.11 connected machine, and don't (God forbid) want to use MSIE and Citrix on Windows to get onto the office network.
Handy link for those who can't handle the PS files, but unfortunately its just as Slashdotted as the PS version.
Here's a link to a very unformatted plain text version thanks to Google's archive which one can assume will suffer only minimally under the SlashDote effect.
you've just eliminated *all* scripting languages from the definition of software.
Actually, every file that relies on an algorhithm to perform some function including the OS, even wordprocessing documents if they use anything more sophisticated than plain ASCII text - since they consist of instrustions that are carried out by the processor either directly or through the use of one or more intermediary programs.
My question is, who are they not charging? Are they charging MS seperately for every single different application that comes with a default Windows install? Are they charging MS seperately for each compnent in MSOffice?
One way around the license might be to convert the spreadsheet to java applet and host it online (hopefully in another state) then sell it as a service rather than a program that gets installed on the user's PC. Since the transaction would cross state lines, the state would not have jurisdication to regulate or license your service. Even within the same state, it's likely they would have real problems proving that the online spreadsheet is software, and even if they did, they would have to show how they were enforcing the license on other webservices such as Hotmail.
The write-up says that team 'created' the antimatter atoms. I wouldn't use the term 'created' too lightly when discussing particle physics. To me 'creating' matter implies they at a minimum converted energy to matter, or to take the term very literally - devised their own mini-Big Bang.
What they really did was assemble them from anti-electrons and anti-protons
.
* Note: in my opinion this was one of the clear ways to distinguish a geek from a nerd in the 70's and early 80's. Geeks read Marvel books like X-Men and Spiderman, and nerds read DC books like Superman and Wonder Woman. Of course this whole distinction changed when the Dark Knight series came out. Being a devoted Frank Miller fan, that was enough for me to become at least publisher neutral when it came to comics
the brightness of the Earth would send it into safe mode instantly. As it is, HST can't look at the Sun or Moon, and Earth is much more reflective than the Moon.
True, but they could point it at the darkside of the planet, and if the President is any kind of authority, then we know for a fact that Osama is on the darkside.
Actually the entire NASA Budget for the last two years has been just under $15B with a full $15B budgeted for FY2003.
If you we take the US Census Bureau as an authority then the current US Population is about 286.5 Million.
$15,000,000,000 / 286,500,000 = $52.36, or almost exactly $1/week per American.
Plus, I find these statistics of cost per American pretty irrelevant, since the poorest 20% of Americans don't pay income tax and therefore are contributing nothing to run NASA. On the other hand, the Bush tax cuts passed last year by repealing the inheritance tax gave Bill Gates a $30B tax cut, enough to pay NASA's whole budget for two straight years!
But I assume that Speakeasy only billed you for services you actually received. The same may not be true for PacBell.
Doesn't this tell you that we in other countries are getting soaked
Umm, compared to other countries, we in the US are not getting soaked. The reason is that in most European countries you still pay per minute charges for connected via dial-up modem. So $40 - $50 month is what you can expect to pay for a reasonable amount of connect time via dial-up. (you wonder why mobile phones are big in Europe, its because POTS phone service is more expensive than mobile service). Even in the US, when you add up all the charges for having second dedicated phone line plus the standard $20/month ISP charge, you're paying very little premium for the extra bandwidth of DSL or cable.
I pay $39.95/month for Verizon DSL in the DC area. Because I signed up early on, I still keep my static IP. No concerns about NAT so far, so I run a small LAN at home. Other than a 1 to 10,000 port sweep originating from Argentina, my firewall logs haven't picked up any sign of script kiddies trying to get onto my system.
Digital cable with cable modem service is supposed to be coming to my neighborhood soon, but since I have had no downtime that I can recall in over six months, I doubt I will switch unless the price for cable was less than $30/month.
If I remember correctly, microsoft has played this game illegally before with alleged grass roots campaigns (having people who dont even exist sending letters to their representatives)
Well, they did actually exist, its just that sometimes they were already dead at the time they sent the letters.
I really hope these new responses are put online in a form that can be easily converted to text (often the courts put these online only as scanned images). It seems that there is enough talent among SlashDot readers to determine if there is any MS astroturf interspersed with the grassroots.
Practically every lobbyist does this to some extent, but the less dishonest ones do it by providing sample text that actual humans voluntarily choose to cut and paste into their letters. Not forging mail from the deceased.
After performing the supernova,
So are you implying that the supernova is like the Bossa Nova? The Dance of Love?
The link in the story was already slashdotted so I found some pics on Panasonic's Japanese homepage
I like the pic at the bottom of the page showing how you can flip one screen around facing away from you so that two people sitting at a table facing each other both get a screen.
With a multi-tasking OS, one user could use the mouse and the other the keyboard and work on seperate tasks.