The weather industry could either launch their own satellites, or NOAA could hold a closing-down auction and sell them to the highest bidder. Which leads me to wonder, how many slashdotters would chip in a few bucks for the privilege of group-buying a satellite for the express purpose of de-orbitting it onto a certain Senator's house??[1]
Seriously, though, would you want to trust the private sector to get severe weather warnings out in a timely manner?? OK, so maybe we shouldn't trust a government-run operation either, but at least we're not currently getting:
"Next, hurricanes heading for Florida and tornadoes tearing up the Heartland. But first, a few words from our sponsors..."
[1] Note: that wasn't a serious suggestion - if any more than three of us chipped in, we'd never agree on a target. There's so many choices - Redmond, SCO, certain Senators, Diebold, etc...:)
Actually, I think Section 2 B could be understood to say that NWS cannot provide Accuweather (or any other company in the weather industry) with data:
(b) COMPETITION WITH PRIVATE SECTOR- The National Weather Service shall not provide, or assist other entities in providing, a service or product that is or could be provided by the private sector
Weather satellites and radars could certainly be provided by the private sector, therefore NWS should not "assist other entities" by giving them data...
What we really need is for a nice friendly Senator to propose that NOAA recoup some of their expenses by billing the multibillion dollar private weather industry for the data feed.
Heh. I used to run Windows3.1 on a 200Mb disk, 16Mb memory, 486DX50 system. It's now an aquarium, thanks to BillG.
Does WinXP go out and install all the drivers it can find on the installation media, regardless of the hardware available?? If so, that probably explains the bloat. Or maybe it's because it's a company ghost image that supports a dozen different platforms... Either way, I don't care enough to trim it - there's a couple of Gb of free space on the WinXP partition, and the other partition they graciously provided was plenty big enough to carve into slices for the Linux install I generally use.
You really shouldn't judge this on the size of the source code.
No, actually - go ahead and judge stability by the size of the source code. Don't forget to do the same for Windows, too.
My work laptop has over 800Mb in \windows\system32 alone. I'd like to think that it's all dlls and stuff to directly support the OS, rather than random other crap dropped in there by applications, but I don't know. What I do know is that Windows historically is not particularly stable, and the source code for 800Mb of stuff has *got* to be bigger than 44Mb.
Yes, it's possible there's logs and other crap in system32, bloating it somewhat. But no, I not about to clean anything up - whenever I have to use Windows on it, it works OK. The rest of the time it runs Gentoo just fine.
Heh. My thoughts exactly. A few years back we were "blessed" with CA Unicenter and I don't think I've ever heard *anyone* here say anything nice about it. I mostly work with an alternative monitoring system that picks up everything Unicenter can't handle (because I'm writing the scripts for it), and now some PHBs are saying that it has to go away.
Possibly one of the least desirable outcomes of using Unicenter is that the monitoring guys now distrust *all* the monitoring tools.
Whichever part it is, if such a scan became common, I predict a sudden rise in sales of the Shine Job silver contact lenses as worn by Vin Diesel in The Chronicles of Riddick.
I once went to a lecture presented by Bill Joy, of Sun Microsystems, back in the 80's. He was talking about future generations of computers somehow being built with optics. He suggested that with femto-second clock speeds, there'd be a limit on the size of the optical computer, around 8 inches, I think he said. This was due, he said, to race conditions between photons traversing the diagonals, compared to those taking shorter paths. I'm not sure if he actually used the phrase "relativistic effect"...
Re:Preserve Hubble for the future
on
Hope for Hubble
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· Score: 1
Even if the electronics die, won't there be other parts that might be worth something in the future?? It costs $$$/kg to get stuff into orbit. Is HST's orbit decaying fast enough for it to be a hazard any time soon?? If not, just leave it up there. There may be a future need for the shell and other structural materials, even if the cameras, mirrors and electronics are busted.
Even if the orbit is decaying, couldn't the possible robotic mission to deorbit HST simply push it the other way, into a higher orbit??
I didn't actually have any $1 bills on hand to check when I wrote that. Now I do, and you're right - no security threads. I guess I just assumed that they would, as the embedded thread technology has been around since at least 1940, as that's when the Bank of England issued one pound notes with threads.
Maybe not the new, bang-up-to-date security features, but watermarking and opaque strips have been around for a very long time. A quick eyeball check should show them as present. Of course, maybe the cashier and store manager aren't smart enough to realise that those are not easy to reproduce. There's no mention of anyone calling a bank to verify that $2 bills might possibly be legal tender, either.
Hmm. The cashier called a manager, who in turn called the cops, right?? According to TFA, the cop said it was standard practice to cuff the suspect until things could be sorted out. That part's understandable - the officer was looking out for himself, in case the suspect turned out to be violent. I'll bet he got patted down too, and any sharp objects taken from him.
The completely stupid part is that the manager didn't seem to have the initiative to call any local bank and ask the question, "Are $2 bills real??" OK, so they could still have been fakes, but at least there'd be a seed of doubt in the manager's apparently small mind...
And of course, a counterfeiter really would create bills that don't even look real... That's the part I don't understand - why anyone would even imagine that $2 bills are fake?? If you've got the equipment to make realistic-looking bills, why put $2 on them and risk almost certain discovery, when $5 (or even $1) would be just as easy and much less detectable??
Besides which, I'd be very surprised if the cashier is even *allowed* by store policy to call the police. Call a manager or store security, sure, but a lowly cashier involving the store in potentially costly callout of real cops?? I wouldn't think so, but then I've never had the misfortune of having to work at Best Buy.
The article doesn't say if the bills were returned to the guy or not. If they were, and if he kept them, they'd be prime material for the prosecution. Presumably $2 bills have all the usual anti-forgery protections, including the watermark and the opaque strip that could be checked in the store, as well as the micro-printing that needs a good magnifying glass to see.
a cop ought to at least know what currencies are legal.
Or at least be smart enough to call any random local bank and ask. Two minutes, tops, for the call, plus maybe a half-hour if the bank wanted to actually examine the bills. No need to drag the Secret Service into it unless the bank said "Fake!!"
He may or may not have a case for filing suit against Best Buy for: 1)wrongful arrest; 2)defamation of character; 3)slander; but you can pretty much guarantee that the local papers will have some fun with it, and Best Buy may see attorneys lining up to buy stuff with $2 bills, just to keep in practise - it's gotta be safer than chasing ambulances...
And the corporate laywers go to court and explain to the judge how nice they were in trying to resolve the situation amicably, but their attempts were met with scorn and derision and that clearly the offender has no intention of mitigating damages by ceasing to offend. And then they'd go on to ask for punitive damages.
That's because most of us recognise that this particular coder is a total dumbass for using copyrighted material and trademarks without permission. The paraphrase what everyone else has been saying, he'd have been somewhat safer if he'd designed his own board layout and come up with a different name for the game.
And in any case, even if he was forced to give over the e-scrabble domain name, he could register f-scrabble for his "how Hasbro screwed me over" site.
I always try to put the oldest age that will be accepted...
Which leads me to wonder just how many people actually put in real information?? I mean, I registered on Hotmail once, and gave a zipcode of 90210, which is at least 20,000 away from my *real* zipcode... That was a few years ago, when the first stories linking Hotmail and junk mail came out. The story I vaguely remember included a "researcher" registering an id that was supposedly a young female, and within about 30 minutes junk mail started to accumulate offering penis enlargement cream and other irrelevant services. My Hotmail address never scored much crap, though.
On the very small level, they were democratic, but the higher you got, the less democratic it became.
Isn't the whole US governed pretty much that way?? You can vote on any damn thing that comes up on a ballot, but a small group of like-minded people are mostly only going to affect the local fractional-penny sales tax, because that's not hardly worth the effort of rigging the vote, nor the (slight) danger of having the rigging mechanism exposed...
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, though, would you want to trust the private sector to get severe weather warnings out in a timely manner?? OK, so maybe we shouldn't trust a government-run operation either, but at least we're not currently getting:
[1] Note: that wasn't a serious suggestion - if any more than three of us chipped in, we'd never agree on a target. There's so many choices - Redmond, SCO, certain Senators, Diebold, etc... :)
Weather satellites and radars could certainly be provided by the private sector, therefore NWS should not "assist other entities" by giving them data...
What we really need is for a nice friendly Senator to propose that NOAA recoup some of their expenses by billing the multibillion dollar private weather industry for the data feed.
Does WinXP go out and install all the drivers it can find on the installation media, regardless of the hardware available?? If so, that probably explains the bloat. Or maybe it's because it's a company ghost image that supports a dozen different platforms... Either way, I don't care enough to trim it - there's a couple of Gb of free space on the WinXP partition, and the other partition they graciously provided was plenty big enough to carve into slices for the Linux install I generally use.
Paintball would work fairly well, I'd think. You could paint people black and blue without risking holing the hull.
No, actually - go ahead and judge stability by the size of the source code. Don't forget to do the same for Windows, too.
My work laptop has over 800Mb in \windows\system32 alone. I'd like to think that it's all dlls and stuff to directly support the OS, rather than random other crap dropped in there by applications, but I don't know. What I do know is that Windows historically is not particularly stable, and the source code for 800Mb of stuff has *got* to be bigger than 44Mb.
Yes, it's possible there's logs and other crap in system32, bloating it somewhat. But no, I not about to clean anything up - whenever I have to use Windows on it, it works OK. The rest of the time it runs Gentoo just fine.
Possibly one of the least desirable outcomes of using Unicenter is that the monitoring guys now distrust *all* the monitoring tools.
Whichever part it is, if such a scan became common, I predict a sudden rise in sales of the Shine Job silver contact lenses as worn by Vin Diesel in The Chronicles of Riddick.
I once went to a lecture presented by Bill Joy, of Sun Microsystems, back in the 80's. He was talking about future generations of computers somehow being built with optics. He suggested that with femto-second clock speeds, there'd be a limit on the size of the optical computer, around 8 inches, I think he said. This was due, he said, to race conditions between photons traversing the diagonals, compared to those taking shorter paths. I'm not sure if he actually used the phrase "relativistic effect"...
Even if the orbit is decaying, couldn't the possible robotic mission to deorbit HST simply push it the other way, into a higher orbit??
I didn't actually have any $1 bills on hand to check when I wrote that. Now I do, and you're right - no security threads. I guess I just assumed that they would, as the embedded thread technology has been around since at least 1940, as that's when the Bank of England issued one pound notes with threads.
Maybe not the new, bang-up-to-date security features, but watermarking and opaque strips have been around for a very long time. A quick eyeball check should show them as present. Of course, maybe the cashier and store manager aren't smart enough to realise that those are not easy to reproduce. There's no mention of anyone calling a bank to verify that $2 bills might possibly be legal tender, either.
The completely stupid part is that the manager didn't seem to have the initiative to call any local bank and ask the question, "Are $2 bills real??" OK, so they could still have been fakes, but at least there'd be a seed of doubt in the manager's apparently small mind...
And of course, a counterfeiter really would create bills that don't even look real... That's the part I don't understand - why anyone would even imagine that $2 bills are fake?? If you've got the equipment to make realistic-looking bills, why put $2 on them and risk almost certain discovery, when $5 (or even $1) would be just as easy and much less detectable??
The bank doesn't print them, but they do supply them. And a call to any random bank should have confirmed that the $2 bills are legal.
Besides which, I'd be very surprised if the cashier is even *allowed* by store policy to call the police. Call a manager or store security, sure, but a lowly cashier involving the store in potentially costly callout of real cops?? I wouldn't think so, but then I've never had the misfortune of having to work at Best Buy.
The article doesn't say if the bills were returned to the guy or not. If they were, and if he kept them, they'd be prime material for the prosecution. Presumably $2 bills have all the usual anti-forgery protections, including the watermark and the opaque strip that could be checked in the store, as well as the micro-printing that needs a good magnifying glass to see.
Or at least be smart enough to call any random local bank and ask. Two minutes, tops, for the call, plus maybe a half-hour if the bank wanted to actually examine the bills. No need to drag the Secret Service into it unless the bank said "Fake!!"
He may or may not have a case for filing suit against Best Buy for: 1)wrongful arrest; 2)defamation of character; 3)slander; but you can pretty much guarantee that the local papers will have some fun with it, and Best Buy may see attorneys lining up to buy stuff with $2 bills, just to keep in practise - it's gotta be safer than chasing ambulances...
And the corporate laywers go to court and explain to the judge how nice they were in trying to resolve the situation amicably, but their attempts were met with scorn and derision and that clearly the offender has no intention of mitigating damages by ceasing to offend. And then they'd go on to ask for punitive damages.
That's because most of us recognise that this particular coder is a total dumbass for using copyrighted material and trademarks without permission. The paraphrase what everyone else has been saying, he'd have been somewhat safer if he'd designed his own board layout and come up with a different name for the game.
And in any case, even if he was forced to give over the e-scrabble domain name, he could register f-scrabble for his "how Hasbro screwed me over" site.
Profit will depend on how large a fraction of Jared's e-scrabble players decide to avoid Hasbro's e-scrabble.
you really think that the "average man on the street" even knows who makes Scrabble??
Which leads me to wonder just how many people actually put in real information?? I mean, I registered on Hotmail once, and gave a zipcode of 90210, which is at least 20,000 away from my *real* zipcode... That was a few years ago, when the first stories linking Hotmail and junk mail came out. The story I vaguely remember included a "researcher" registering an id that was supposedly a young female, and within about 30 minutes junk mail started to accumulate offering penis enlargement cream and other irrelevant services. My Hotmail address never scored much crap, though.