I don't make a lot of long distance calls (practically none) but as of late I've been talking more and more locally. I don't have a land line and only use my cellphone, which chews up minutes.
It's to the point now that I have to either increase my cell phone minutes, or get some form of landline (POTS or VoIP). It's looking heavily like that option is going to be VoIP since there's so many other advantages (extreme portability, blocking services, etc). VoIP is a bit cheaper than POTS, and I like not having to worry about going over minutes, etc. I can also probbably decrease my cell phone plan as I'll be using it less.
Essentially for me unlimited local VoIP is a good comprompise between the more expensive, pain is the ass to get going POTS line (and around here, unreliable). I get a nice old fashioned physical phone line, so no worrying about keeping my cell phone charged all the time, or finding the cell phone, etc. Plus I keep my cell phone for what it was intended, communication while on the go.
If Badnarik and Cobb were invited to the debates, then people would know who they are and could hear them speak.
Perhaps. The fact that know one knows who these guys are when it's almost October says a lot though. It's not as if the debates are the only place you can get your name known, or your message out. I follow the presidential race fairly well, and I'd never heard of either of them until the "ask slashdot" questions came out last week. If these guys can't even show up on the radar, is the big problem that they aren't being included in a debate at the end of September?
The real problem as I see it is that the presidential race is some kind of gold standard for third parties and the only thing that matters in many peoples minds. Sorry, but parties just don't start off at the top. If you want to look at the health of 3rd parties look towards the smaller races. Hell, that yahoo wrestler Jesse Ventura won the governor of MN in 1998.
I've come to conclude that uptimes much greater than 100-200 days represent an admin who's really not doing his/her job.
It depends. If you have no one but a few trusted people with access to the box, kernel exploits aren't really a big problem as every one I've seen in the last few years has required shell access and/or physical access. If you're running a shell server for anyone with $20 a month that's one case where you'd want to reboot a lot, but otherwise keeping people from shell/physical is security job #1.
I still apply the kernel patches when I'm physically on site and it's convienent, but the risk of the machine not coming up do to an improperly patched kernel or some strange hardware problem is greater than a local kernel exploit. In other words, I don't lose sleep over not rebooting a machine that has a kernel update.
The key to method one is pinpointing the exact orbits of all the asteroids that possibly might hit us, and run computer simulations to find any that will hit us in the next hundred or thousand years. If you have that much warning the light reflection method would probbably work.
The source is available for djbdns and you can modify it to your hearts content. You just can't distribute the modified source without permission from the author. Is that a big problem for you?
I suppose it'd still be legal to distribute patches to djbdns (since he obviously can't control someone elses code). Why DJ Bernstein puts this bizzare restriction on the software I don't know, but there's an easy way around his restrictions.
I dunno, the best software I've seen has come out of derision of bad software. I don't think the creator of Postfix loved sendmail too much. Many people dislike BIND and have come out with arguably better alternatives.
The other extreme is just developers who hate the popular software just for the sake of hating popularity. That seems to be the case with DSpam over Spamassassin. I don't think that's the case here however. While CVS is reliable software and people know how to work around its flaws (and the creator of arch fully admits that) it is at the same time fairly flawed.
I'd tend to agree that CVS is klunky in the way he describes. I still use it of course since it gets the job done. I've not tried subversion at all, so I can't comment on how well that fixes the problems of CVS.
It's the price you pay for having a "premium" computer. You Mac guys seem to compare your computers to Cadillacs, so you have to pay the prices everyone pays for premium components.
Smaller, more specialized markets where people have already demonstrated they'll pay a lot more for the computer are going to be charged higher prices.
$200 is cheap? I find that to be the mid-range. $400 is the insane you-have-too-much-money-to-burn range. Maybe I'm not a super-elite gamer, but anything much over $200 is far to much to spend on a video card.
I'm still waiting for the whole market to just crash to the ground and the mid-range to low end to start catching up to the ultra-expensive high end. With only two serious 3D gaming companies making chips it's much easier for them to keep prices at the stratospheric level.
Mostly true, but different grades of plutonium have differing degrees of difficulty and yield for a nuclear weapon. Like uranium, the plutonium is not all one isotope. For a weapon you want a high amount of PU-239. From Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility:
These other isotopes create some difficulties for design and fabrication of nuclear weapons.
* First and most important, plutonium-240 has a high rate of spontaneous fission, meaning that the plutonium in the device will continually produce many background neutrons, which have the potential to reduce weapon yield by starting the chain reaction prematurely.
* Second, the isotope plutonium-238 decays relatively rapidly, thereby significantly increasing the rate of heat generation in the material.
* Third, the isotope americium-241 (which results from the 14-year half-life decay of plutonium-241 and hence builds up in reactor-grade plutonium over time) emits highly penetrating gamma rays, increasing the radioactive exposure of any personnel handling the material.
The end effect is a lower yield because of the potential for PU-240 to cause pre-ignition. It's still a nuclear weapon with horrific consequences of course.
There is nothing wrong with being anti energy comsumption.
There's a difference between being anti energy consumption, and being against wastefullness. You sound like you're the latter. Anyone truly anti-energy consumption would just kill themselves and all life since it takes energy consumption to live (or so says the laws of thermodynamics).
Tire pressure recommendations are not just for comfort, they are for safety. For example, a car with underinflated tires is less able to quickly change lanes in an emergency.
We're not talking about pressure recommendations, we're talking about varying your tire pressure. Obviously tires not inflated to the recommended pressure are a problem.
I still stand by my conclusion that the vast majority of people have no need to change tire inflation. Unless you're towing a trailer, or carrying around 500 pounds of lead in your trunk the load on your car doesn't change much. The vast majority of people simply don't do that.
For you off roaders, sure. But being someone that doesn't drive off road (and my car wasn't designed for it) I have no need to change tire inflation from what's listed on my drivers side door.
No, they are points for everyone. The vast majority of people aren't computer enthusiasts and want nothing to do with performing security updates or installing anti-virus software. Being in the majority doesn't mean that someone is right.
Those are more analogous to changing oil. Adjusting tire pressure for better traction in snow is more like defragging your hard drive. Not necessary, and only something people who are into computers would really do. It doesn't say anything about varying the tire pressure in my car manual, or any car manual I've read. It says nothing about it in the Haynes Repair manual for my car. I'm lead to the conclusion that this in an un-necessary step much like defragging a hard drive.
God knows that people in the 21st century wouldn't want to add air to compensate for heavier loads or towing. People in the 21st century wouldn't want to adjust tire pressure to acount for differences in weight between two vehicles that use the same size tires.
Huh? I've never towed anything with my car, and as for "heavier loads" I guess that means 4 people in the car instead of just me. I inflate my tires to the recommended pressure for my car and everything seems fine.
As for compensating for different vehicle weights, That could be solved by adjusting the solid tire for weight. How many people want to trade tires between vehicles (or even have two vehicles with the same tire size)? Modern people in the 21st century won't want to reduce air pressure for traction in the snow.
I've never done this, though I live in a climate where snow is common in the winter. I've never heard anyone even recommend doing this, so I don't think it's very commonplace.
The points you bring up are for the car enthusiast. The vast majority of people aren't car enthusiasts and want nothing to do with adjusting tire pressure for different conditions.
I guess it's because they've never understood the various problem spaces to begin with and see the world in a web-centric sort of way.
No, we just hate legacy crap that exists for no other reason than no one wants to bite the bullet and develop something new in a non-crappy language like COBOL. Corporations are famous for short sightedness and continue to do things like maintain old COBOL programs for years and years where it'd probbably be cheaper in the long run to re-write the whole thing in an easier to maintain object oriented language that doesn't require rare, exepesive COBOL programmers.
And once again, you've missed the point. If you'll recall we're discussing a software author commiting an act of vandalism. In relation to that we're talking about the repercussions that could occur when a legitmate license holder uses a publically available serial number.
Putting it all together, does a software developer have a right to destroy data when a legitimate licensee uses the wrong serial number? I'd say that'd a big no, and any "so don't do it" is immaterial. The TOS aren't a magical warrant to let you do anything you want and get away scot-free. You'll get sued up the ass if you put this kind of logic bomb in your software and were a large enough company. Eventually you'd wrongfully delete the wrong persons valueable data.
As someone else pointed out, I guess you forgot about the Korean war which created this whole North/South Korea thing.
You are right about one thing though, Korea isn't going to attack the US. That would be quick suicide. You're mostly wrong about the motive for developing the weapons though. For the most part developing nuclear weapons is a bargaining chip. N. Korea used it before to get help building a nuclear reactor to help solve the daily brownouts/blackouts that N. Korea is subject too. They're a poor, crappy country because of their communist economy and they can't afford to build enough power generation. The US backed out of the deal when George Bush came into office, leading to the current nuclear development program in N. Korea
The fear from this whole thing isn't that N. Korea is going to attack the US, it's more that it has the potential to destabalize the region. Crazy, poor, desperate countries having nuclear weapons tends to make nearby countries (like Japan, South Korea, and possibly China) very nervous. The US is very friendly with S. Korea and Japan, so it's quite a big problem.
According to this website, seismic detection of nuclear explosions isn't always possible, and detection father than 1500 kilometers from the test site.... is strongly dependent on ray path; and at distances several thousand kilometers from the NTS test site, the ability of stations and networks to detect small tests varies significantly.
In other words it's just not as simple as looking at a couple USGS websites and noticing no earthquakes.
Indeed. Anyone old enough will also remember that we only found out about Chernobyl after 2 days when radiation set off detectors of nuclear plant workers in Sweden. Even then I'm not sure how long it took for anyone to figure out it was a nuclear reactor explosion in Russia.
Yah, but don't only underground tests produce seismic activity? Since this explosion produced a mushroom cloud it wouldn't appear to be below ground.
Also, as far as I can tell seismic activity from sept 11 was only detected in the NE US. USGS monitoring is obviously a lot father away from North Korea than the monitoring devices in the US were from NYC.
China is "allowed" nukes because no one has any hope of stopping them. You can't stop a country with a billion people from aquiring nuclear weapons, simple as that. As far as Mexico and Canada are concerned, Canada could quite easily make nuclear weapons if it ever felt the need to. They mine and sell fuel for nuclear reactors, and have many "candu" reactors which were designed by canadians.
The US of course wouldn't fight either of them because there's too many economic ties between us. It's be like shooting yourself in the foot.
In any case neither country is ever very likely to develop nuclear weapons because it serves little purpose. Trade relations are good with the US, and the security of both countries in in the interests of the US.
There's another possibility though. It's not the countries surrounding north korea (China and South Korea) want to play up a mushroom cloud. China is VERY closed lipped about anything, and South Korea is still technically at war with North Korea (it's still a cease fire with a DMZ between the two countries). Given that, it might be a little hard to confirm when there's likely no pictures, and anyone with satelites isn't talking right away.
That's actually quite easy and as someone else pointed out any third grader can do it. Take two electrodes and connect them to a low voltage source (a car battery is plenty). Put the electrodes in water and add some salt. Hydrogen will be generated at the - electrode, and oxygen will be generated at the + electrode. To collect the gasses put a test tube around each electrode.
As far as making sure there's no hydrogen on the oxygen side, seperate the two electrodes and water with some kind of electrical conductor (stainless steal will prevent corrosion).
The harder part is doing it without gravity. One way to do this would be to just create an artificial gravity by spinning the water, or the entire apparatus.
Obviously this isn't a reliable system intended for a space station, but the general principles involved are very very simple. There's really no reason it should take 4 or 6 years to develop a new system to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't make a lot of long distance calls (practically none) but as of late I've been talking more and more locally. I don't have a land line and only use my cellphone, which chews up minutes.
It's to the point now that I have to either increase my cell phone minutes, or get some form of landline (POTS or VoIP). It's looking heavily like that option is going to be VoIP since there's so many other advantages (extreme portability, blocking services, etc). VoIP is a bit cheaper than POTS, and I like not having to worry about going over minutes, etc. I can also probbably decrease my cell phone plan as I'll be using it less.
Essentially for me unlimited local VoIP is a good comprompise between the more expensive, pain is the ass to get going POTS line (and around here, unreliable). I get a nice old fashioned physical phone line, so no worrying about keeping my cell phone charged all the time, or finding the cell phone, etc. Plus I keep my cell phone for what it was intended, communication while on the go.
for the first 6 months, $34.99 thereafter. Thanks slashdot submitter for that fully objective and accurate portrayal of pricing.
I think people who pretend to be friends while disagreeing on basic philosophies of life, the universe, and everything
There's more to life than politics and basic philosphies of life. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you can chill out a bit.
If Badnarik and Cobb were invited to the debates, then people would know who they are and could hear them speak.
Perhaps. The fact that know one knows who these guys are when it's almost October says a lot though. It's not as if the debates are the only place you can get your name known, or your message out. I follow the presidential race fairly well, and I'd never heard of either of them until the "ask slashdot" questions came out last week. If these guys can't even show up on the radar, is the big problem that they aren't being included in a debate at the end of September?
The real problem as I see it is that the presidential race is some kind of gold standard for third parties and the only thing that matters in many peoples minds. Sorry, but parties just don't start off at the top. If you want to look at the health of 3rd parties look towards the smaller races. Hell, that yahoo wrestler Jesse Ventura won the governor of MN in 1998.
I've come to conclude that uptimes much greater than 100-200 days represent an admin who's really not doing his/her job.
It depends. If you have no one but a few trusted people with access to the box, kernel exploits aren't really a big problem as every one I've seen in the last few years has required shell access and/or physical access. If you're running a shell server for anyone with $20 a month that's one case where you'd want to reboot a lot, but otherwise keeping people from shell/physical is security job #1.
I still apply the kernel patches when I'm physically on site and it's convienent, but the risk of the machine not coming up do to an improperly patched kernel or some strange hardware problem is greater than a local kernel exploit. In other words, I don't lose sleep over not rebooting a machine that has a kernel update.
The key to method one is pinpointing the exact orbits of all the asteroids that possibly might hit us, and run computer simulations to find any that will hit us in the next hundred or thousand years. If you have that much warning the light reflection method would probbably work.
The source is available for djbdns and you can modify it to your hearts content. You just can't distribute the modified source without permission from the author. Is that a big problem for you?
I suppose it'd still be legal to distribute patches to djbdns (since he obviously can't control someone elses code). Why DJ Bernstein puts this bizzare restriction on the software I don't know, but there's an easy way around his restrictions.
I dunno, the best software I've seen has come out of derision of bad software. I don't think the creator of Postfix loved sendmail too much. Many people dislike BIND and have come out with arguably better alternatives.
The other extreme is just developers who hate the popular software just for the sake of hating popularity. That seems to be the case with DSpam over Spamassassin. I don't think that's the case here however. While CVS is reliable software and people know how to work around its flaws (and the creator of arch fully admits that) it is at the same time fairly flawed.
I'd tend to agree that CVS is klunky in the way he describes. I still use it of course since it gets the job done. I've not tried subversion at all, so I can't comment on how well that fixes the problems of CVS.
It's the price you pay for having a "premium" computer. You Mac guys seem to compare your computers to Cadillacs, so you have to pay the prices everyone pays for premium components.
Smaller, more specialized markets where people have already demonstrated they'll pay a lot more for the computer are going to be charged higher prices.
$200 is cheap? I find that to be the mid-range. $400 is the insane you-have-too-much-money-to-burn range. Maybe I'm not a super-elite gamer, but anything much over $200 is far to much to spend on a video card.
I'm still waiting for the whole market to just crash to the ground and the mid-range to low end to start catching up to the ultra-expensive high end. With only two serious 3D gaming companies making chips it's much easier for them to keep prices at the stratospheric level.
The end effect is a lower yield because of the potential for PU-240 to cause pre-ignition. It's still a nuclear weapon with horrific consequences of course.
There is nothing wrong with being anti energy comsumption.
There's a difference between being anti energy consumption, and being against wastefullness. You sound like you're the latter. Anyone truly anti-energy consumption would just kill themselves and all life since it takes energy consumption to live (or so says the laws of thermodynamics).
Tire pressure recommendations are not just for comfort, they are for safety. For example, a car with underinflated tires is less able to quickly change lanes in an emergency.
We're not talking about pressure recommendations, we're talking about varying your tire pressure. Obviously tires not inflated to the recommended pressure are a problem.
I still stand by my conclusion that the vast majority of people have no need to change tire inflation. Unless you're towing a trailer, or carrying around 500 pounds of lead in your trunk the load on your car doesn't change much. The vast majority of people simply don't do that.
For you off roaders, sure. But being someone that doesn't drive off road (and my car wasn't designed for it) I have no need to change tire inflation from what's listed on my drivers side door.
Salon did an article on him a few years ago. He's a little nutty, but interesting to say the least:
No, they are points for everyone. The vast majority of people aren't computer enthusiasts and want nothing to do with performing security updates or installing anti-virus software. Being in the majority doesn't mean that someone is right.
Those are more analogous to changing oil. Adjusting tire pressure for better traction in snow is more like defragging your hard drive. Not necessary, and only something people who are into computers would really do. It doesn't say anything about varying the tire pressure in my car manual, or any car manual I've read. It says nothing about it in the Haynes Repair manual for my car. I'm lead to the conclusion that this in an un-necessary step much like defragging a hard drive.
God knows that people in the 21st century wouldn't want to add air to compensate for heavier loads or towing. People in the 21st century wouldn't want to adjust tire pressure to acount for differences in weight between two vehicles that use the same size tires.
Huh? I've never towed anything with my car, and as for "heavier loads" I guess that means 4 people in the car instead of just me. I inflate my tires to the recommended pressure for my car and everything seems fine.
As for compensating for different vehicle weights, That could be solved by adjusting the solid tire for weight. How many people want to trade tires between vehicles (or even have two vehicles with the same tire size)?
Modern people in the 21st century won't want to reduce air pressure for traction in the snow.
I've never done this, though I live in a climate where snow is common in the winter. I've never heard anyone even recommend doing this, so I don't think it's very commonplace.
The points you bring up are for the car enthusiast. The vast majority of people aren't car enthusiasts and want nothing to do with adjusting tire pressure for different conditions.
I guess it's because they've never understood the various problem spaces to begin with and see the world in a web-centric sort of way.
No, we just hate legacy crap that exists for no other reason than no one wants to bite the bullet and develop something new in a non-crappy language like COBOL. Corporations are famous for short sightedness and continue to do things like maintain old COBOL programs for years and years where it'd probbably be cheaper in the long run to re-write the whole thing in an easier to maintain object oriented language that doesn't require rare, exepesive COBOL programmers.
And once again, you've missed the point. If you'll recall we're discussing a software author commiting an act of vandalism. In relation to that we're talking about the repercussions that could occur when a legitmate license holder uses a publically available serial number.
Putting it all together, does a software developer have a right to destroy data when a legitimate licensee uses the wrong serial number? I'd say that'd a big no, and any "so don't do it" is immaterial. The TOS aren't a magical warrant to let you do anything you want and get away scot-free. You'll get sued up the ass if you put this kind of logic bomb in your software and were a large enough company. Eventually you'd wrongfully delete the wrong persons valueable data.
As someone else pointed out, I guess you forgot about the Korean war which created this whole North/South Korea thing.
You are right about one thing though, Korea isn't going to attack the US. That would be quick suicide. You're mostly wrong about the motive for developing the weapons though. For the most part developing nuclear weapons is a bargaining chip. N. Korea used it before to get help building a nuclear reactor to help solve the daily brownouts/blackouts that N. Korea is subject too. They're a poor, crappy country because of their communist economy and they can't afford to build enough power generation. The US backed out of the deal when George Bush came into office, leading to the current nuclear development program in N. Korea
The fear from this whole thing isn't that N. Korea is going to attack the US, it's more that it has the potential to destabalize the region. Crazy, poor, desperate countries having nuclear weapons tends to make nearby countries (like Japan, South Korea, and possibly China) very nervous. The US is very friendly with S. Korea and Japan, so it's quite a big problem.
According to this website, seismic detection of nuclear explosions isn't always possible, and detection father than 1500 kilometers from the test site....
is strongly dependent on ray path; and at distances several thousand kilometers from the NTS test site, the ability of stations and networks to detect small tests varies significantly.
In other words it's just not as simple as looking at a couple USGS websites and noticing no earthquakes.
Indeed. Anyone old enough will also remember that we only found out about Chernobyl after 2 days when radiation set off detectors of nuclear plant workers in Sweden. Even then I'm not sure how long it took for anyone to figure out it was a nuclear reactor explosion in Russia.
Yah, but don't only underground tests produce seismic activity? Since this explosion produced a mushroom cloud it wouldn't appear to be below ground.
Also, as far as I can tell seismic activity from sept 11 was only detected in the NE US. USGS monitoring is obviously a lot father away from North Korea than the monitoring devices in the US were from NYC.
China is "allowed" nukes because no one has any hope of stopping them. You can't stop a country with a billion people from aquiring nuclear weapons, simple as that. As far as Mexico and Canada are concerned, Canada could quite easily make nuclear weapons if it ever felt the need to. They mine and sell fuel for nuclear reactors, and have many "candu" reactors which were designed by canadians.
The US of course wouldn't fight either of them because there's too many economic ties between us. It's be like shooting yourself in the foot.
In any case neither country is ever very likely to develop nuclear weapons because it serves little purpose. Trade relations are good with the US, and the security of both countries in in the interests of the US.
There's another possibility though. It's not the countries surrounding north korea (China and South Korea) want to play up a mushroom cloud. China is VERY closed lipped about anything, and South Korea is still technically at war with North Korea (it's still a cease fire with a DMZ between the two countries). Given that, it might be a little hard to confirm when there's likely no pictures, and anyone with satelites isn't talking right away.
That's actually quite easy and as someone else pointed out any third grader can do it. Take two electrodes and connect them to a low voltage source (a car battery is plenty). Put the electrodes in water and add some salt. Hydrogen will be generated at the - electrode, and oxygen will be generated at the + electrode. To collect the gasses put a test tube around each electrode.
As far as making sure there's no hydrogen on the oxygen side, seperate the two electrodes and water with some kind of electrical conductor (stainless steal will prevent corrosion).
The harder part is doing it without gravity. One way to do this would be to just create an artificial gravity by spinning the water, or the entire apparatus.
Obviously this isn't a reliable system intended for a space station, but the general principles involved are very very simple. There's really no reason it should take 4 or 6 years to develop a new system to do this.