No? The article says they destroyed one of their own satellites. They did blind a US satellite momentarily in the past, but that's far from destroying a US satellite.
I don't think it's too far-fetched. Indeed it fits quite nicely in the past trend of hard disk size growth.
My numbers aren't exact, but they shouldn't be too far from truth: I remember in year 1995 I was looking at 850MB-1GB hard disks being mainstream. Then, in year 2001 I was already looking at 100GB hard disks at the high end, and 40GB being mainstream.
So it took only 6 years for 850MB to become 40GB in the mainstream market. Now we're already having 750GB at the high end, I would be very surprised if we still can't buy a 37.5TB hard disk a decade later.
I did this once to a local ISP some six years ago and tried to report a trivial security hole "anonymously" from a cyber cafe. I don't want to disclose the details about that old security hole here (even though they've fixed their system long ago), but it was trivial in the sense that it was very easy to discover. The ISP called the police who got my identity from the cyber cafe easily. I got arrested.
I was lucky at that time that the cyber laws were not so strict by then and that I did not cause any financial damages. The police simply detained me for like 8 hours and dropped the charges. But still, as a kid (I was ~15 year-old by that time), that was an absolutely horrible experience.
You would not be as lucky as me if you were to try that now. Seriously, I don't want to see an honest computer scientist or a tinkerer get thrown to jail or even Guantanamo Bay (who know if that actually happens) for something as stupid as this. If the security hole is none of your business, just leave it alone!
It's actually pretty easy to look for related information on Google about these issues if you know what to look for. This kind of thing is very common in China, especially in southern China. The place "Longhua town" in question is located in Guangdong province ( Map of Longhua ) so it fits perfectly into the common scenario.
I'll do a little bit of summary for why it happens in China, and why women workers are involved:
i. While the Longhua town in the case is actually considered urban area in China (notice that it's called a 'town', and it is very near to the major cities Shenzhen and Hong Kong), the slave labours in question should be from rural areas of China (s.t. they are migrant workers). It is actually illegal for them to work in Longhua town under China's hukou system. Labour laws do not apply to them since they officially "don't exist". If these workers are busted by the police for some reason they will be sent back to where they came from, in the best case. Another major reason for these migrant workers, not mentioned in the article I provided, is the closedown of state owned enterprises in China. State owned enterprises is another major pain in the ass in China (state owned => corruption => inefficient and prone to go backrupt) which you can have a field day on Google.
ii. The reason why they go out to work in urban areas, risking to become slave labours, is becoz the economy of the rual areas cannot support them. The explosive economic growth in China has only benefited the urban areas, while farmers in the rural areas have seen little increase in their income. Inflation affects the rural areas anyway, and so they have to move out and find a living elsewhere. For former SOE workers, it is because their employer has been closed down by the government and so they have to look for jobs elsewhere.
iii. The reason why the workers we see are mostly women is because they are cheaper, and they are easier to exploit (they have a family to support back in their rural village). That has nothing to do with "better" human rights in China.
iv. Since the Longhua town in our case is considered urban area, the average wage there is actually far higher than the average income of a rural Chinese. If these were legitimate workers in Longhua they would have received much better salaries than USD $50/month. Compound that with 15hr/day working times they are definitely slave labours. So please don't cite the average income of a Chinese, compare to them and say they're actually better off.
I guess that's why they use electrons and positrons here - these particles are charged. Charged particles can be stored since we can exert a force on it via a magnetic field or an electric field. They can also be directed via the same mechanism. You'd better hope whatever hoding mechanism NASA uses don't break though, if a significant amount of those positrons leaks, it can be VERY deadly.
First off, this is true of *nix as well. Remember that lest step of installing new software, 'make install'? That one usually has to be done as a super-user, as it installs into common areas.
You can change the default/usr/local prefix by configure most of the time. If that doesn't work, you can always hack the Makefile such that the prefix points within your $HOME.
This could be the best thing since sliced bread if it's not a fraud. But a little searching in Google and Wikipedia gave me a bad feeling that this can be another cold fusion fiasco.
For the lazy who don't read links, here's my digest:
This kind of fusion is, according to what the researchers claimed, a side effect of another not well-understood phenonmenon called
sonoluminescence. By passing ultrasonic sound waves into a water body with tiny gas bubbles, researchers observed the bubbles emit EM waves of frequencies well beyond the UV range, which, according to black body radiation theory, indicate a very high temperature (>10,000K) inside the bubble.
The picture gets interesting when you can get the temperature inside the bubble to well beyond the million, or tens of million degrees range, and when you fill the tiny bubble with fusable material (like deuterium). If you succeed in doing that, you get a fusion reactor without all those monster lasers and magnets - a tabletop fusion reactor.
All the daydreaming apart, there are only a handful of researchers buying this idea. There's one researcher Rusi P. Taleyarkhan claiming to have achieved bubble fusion, a similar experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory had failed to confirm his resutls.
Don't help your friends over spyware problems
on
Given Up to Spyware?
·
· Score: 1
Yes, I know there's the do good instinct in many of our hearts, but helping your computer unsavvy friends over spyware problems is only making the spyware problem worse.
Why? Simple. By helping them in case their computers get out of control, you're telling them that whenever things get out of control, there's this geeky guy who'd come over and eliminate all problems, FOR FREE. That, in turn, decreases their fear of spywares, and gives them incentive to install more spywares, since these "problems" cost nothing to eliminate.
And that's even bad for yourself. Consider the time wasted on your behalve, you could have used that time in much more productive activities. Cleaning spywares for friends don't even improve friendship or give you a better status among friends - frankly, being a hardcore computer geek is what the society belittles. The computer geek steoreotype in people's minds is someone who have no life and no friends. By cleaning spyware for your friends, for free or maybe for a lunch, whatever, just makes you look even more desperate.
I know I'm sounding very cruel. But come on, it's THEIR problem installing the spywares THEMSELVES, it's THEIR STUPIDITY being exploited. What's the point in interfering their business and in turn, making yourself the ultimate exploited person? There's really no point.
So the next time your friend calls you moaning about non-stop pop up boxes and super slow response, say you're busy and decline politely.
What's even more staggering are some of the Slashdot users who obviously have little-to-no clue but pretend to know everything. These people give off knee-jerk reactions without even reading the article once. No evidence or even logic is needed, scientific reports must be wrong here.
One of the funniest replies I've read in this thread claimed that researchers cannot get funding unless they shout "Doomsday is coming". Not even the most imaginary hypothetical example is cited - the report is simply made up by some liberal asshole. And that's even modded insightful. And then for each and every such knee-jerk reactions you get another opposite knee-jerk that Bush and co. are to blame for global warming.
Reading Slashdot on such topics makes you think the world is really only divided into two kinds of persons - the coporate man/politicians and the crazy gaians. Every scientist has a conspiracy in mind, every environmental research is biased and meaningless. If someone is thinking about starting a business I'd suggest selling tinfoil hats here, the Slashdot crowd simply cannot resist it.
You see... even the computer characters in HL2 are acting better than him as Neo. He feels more "computerized" (in a lame way, not the cool, deadly Agent Smith way) than some of the NPCs in HL2.
I've finished the story. The storyline was just the usual sci-fi stuff and it's not that spectacular. What I think that made HL2 stands out from other games is the characters. Valve has done an excellent job here. The characters in the game express emotions, have their own agendas, are all useful in the story. These all makes you feel the characters are indeed living persons instead of a pile of polygons that tells you stuff and let you proceed (like, "Marine, get to the Alpha Labs and meet team Bravo, ASAP!! Over!!").
So, IMHO, the realism of HL2 is not just the physics. Physics is something dead and cold, even in motion, and it's only half of it. It's the living realism that matters, the people. *** SPOILER AHEAD!!! DON'T READ IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED THE GAME!!! ***
In Ravenholm for example, there was the mad man who fought zombies day in day out. At beginning you thought he's mad and he's going to kill you. Soon you realize that he actually helps you (a lot), despite his demonic laughter. And finally, when you leaves, you feel sorry for him becoz he insists on "freeing" his zombiefied fellows.
And then there is Dr. Mossman. I can never forget her acting in Nova Prospekt - if this is a movie I guess she'd be nominated for this year's best female actor;). At first you think she's just another friendly female scientist who's fond of you. Then it turned out she's a spy. And being a spy, she lies and tries to obtain trust from you. She did exactly that she lied even when it's risking her life! I can never forget the scene where, after her spy identity was revealed, she was forced to teleport Dr. Vance out of Nova Prospekt by you and Alyx. She pretended to cooperate until the final moment, when she jumped onto the teleport personally with Dr. Vance, disrupting the teleportation process and potentially sending both of them dead - "I'm sorry, but that's the ONLY choice!". I screamed to the top of my lung "FUCK YOU!!!!!!" when I heard that. That's one line in an FPS that I won't forget for quite some time.
There are a lot more interesting people in the game of course. All I can say, the acting in the game (or... the movie?;^) ) was really impressive, for an FPS experience at least. It made you care about the people there and feel the environment is living. I've long missed that feeling since Fallout 1 and 2.
Firefox's automatic update is good for the individual. But for IT departments, they'd want to test the patches before releasing them and they'd want to centralize the patching process. I think it's well known what happens if we let the non-computer savvy users choose whether to update or not themselves, or forcing them to take on untested patches;^) (even the Linux kernel had problematic updates, remember 2.4.11?). So depending on Firefox's automatic update would likely make a mess sooner or later.
I don't know what you mean by "third party automatic package updates for Windows", but the third option is obviously nonsense. Converting to Linux is not a trivial undertaking for a company.
Slashdot Mirror
No? The article says they destroyed one of their own satellites. They did blind a US satellite momentarily in the past, but that's far from destroying a US satellite.
I don't think it's too far-fetched. Indeed it fits quite nicely in the past trend of hard disk size growth.
My numbers aren't exact, but they shouldn't be too far from truth:
I remember in year 1995 I was looking at 850MB-1GB hard disks being mainstream.
Then, in year 2001 I was already looking at 100GB hard disks at the high end, and 40GB being mainstream.
So it took only 6 years for 850MB to become 40GB in the mainstream market.
Now we're already having 750GB at the high end, I would be very surprised if we still can't buy a 37.5TB hard disk a decade later.
I did this once to a local ISP some six years ago and tried to report a trivial security hole "anonymously" from a cyber cafe. I don't want to disclose the details about that old security hole here (even though they've fixed their system long ago), but it was trivial in the sense that it was very easy to discover. The ISP called the police who got my identity from the cyber cafe easily. I got arrested.
I was lucky at that time that the cyber laws were not so strict by then and that I did not cause any financial damages. The police simply detained me for like 8 hours and dropped the charges. But still, as a kid (I was ~15 year-old by that time), that was an absolutely horrible experience.
You would not be as lucky as me if you were to try that now. Seriously, I don't want to see an honest computer scientist or a tinkerer get thrown to jail or even Guantanamo Bay (who know if that actually happens) for something as stupid as this. If the security hole is none of your business, just leave it alone!
Like, Google Earth for Linux, it uses OpenGL
Then you'll get a time estimate greater than the expected lifetime of Earth...
The battery used with notebook computers can be very dangerous if the charger circuit malfunctions...
Here are some videoes I read about here just a month ago, and these are just small lithium batteries
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
It's actually pretty easy to look for related information on Google about these issues if you know what to look for. This kind of thing is very common in China, especially in southern China. The place "Longhua town" in question is located in Guangdong province ( Map of Longhua ) so it fits perfectly into the common scenario.
. html
The keyword you should look for about this kind of issue are "migrant workers", especially women migrant workers, in China of coz. For example, this one: http://www.chinabusinessreview.com/public/0205/ye
I'll do a little bit of summary for why it happens in China, and why women workers are involved:
i. While the Longhua town in the case is actually considered urban area in China (notice that it's called a 'town', and it is very near to the major cities Shenzhen and Hong Kong), the slave labours in question should be from rural areas of China (s.t. they are migrant workers). It is actually illegal for them to work in Longhua town under China's hukou system. Labour laws do not apply to them since they officially "don't exist". If these workers are busted by the police for some reason they will be sent back to where they came from, in the best case. Another major reason for these migrant workers, not mentioned in the article I provided, is the closedown of state owned enterprises in China. State owned enterprises is another major pain in the ass in China (state owned => corruption => inefficient and prone to go backrupt) which you can have a field day on Google.
ii. The reason why they go out to work in urban areas, risking to become slave labours, is becoz the economy of the rual areas cannot support them. The explosive economic growth in China has only benefited the urban areas, while farmers in the rural areas have seen little increase in their income. Inflation affects the rural areas anyway, and so they have to move out and find a living elsewhere. For former SOE workers, it is because their employer has been closed down by the government and so they have to look for jobs elsewhere.
iii. The reason why the workers we see are mostly women is because they are cheaper, and they are easier to exploit (they have a family to support back in their rural village). That has nothing to do with "better" human rights in China.
iv. Since the Longhua town in our case is considered urban area, the average wage there is actually far higher than the average income of a rural Chinese. If these were legitimate workers in Longhua they would have received much better salaries than USD $50/month. Compound that with 15hr/day working times they are definitely slave labours. So please don't cite the average income of a Chinese, compare to them and say they're actually better off.
Just hold [Ctrl] and scroll the mouse wheel to change the font size on Firefox.
If that doesn't work then use the View -> Text Size options from the menu bar.
This problem has nothing to do "correctness" - the general font size is your personal preference.
The spoof is funny so people talk about it :)
Could it be any simplier?
I'd prefer a premature (or even better, instant) death rather than keep working 80hr per week for the rest of my life.
I guess that's why they use electrons and positrons here - these particles are charged. Charged particles can be stored since we can exert a force on it via a magnetic field or an electric field. They can also be directed via the same mechanism. You'd better hope whatever hoding mechanism NASA uses don't break though, if a significant amount of those positrons leaks, it can be VERY deadly.
You can change the default
The photo accompanying the article is not the acoustic fusion reactor they're selling.
oh, someone has already posted that before me, sorry for the dupe.
This could be the best thing since sliced bread if it's not a fraud. But a little searching in Google and Wikipedia gave me a bad feeling that this can be another cold fusion fiasco.
Bubble Fusion
For the lazy who don't read links, here's my digest:
This kind of fusion is, according to what the researchers claimed, a side effect of another not well-understood phenonmenon called sonoluminescence. By passing ultrasonic sound waves into a water body with tiny gas bubbles, researchers observed the bubbles emit EM waves of frequencies well beyond the UV range, which, according to black body radiation theory, indicate a very high temperature (>10,000K) inside the bubble.
The picture gets interesting when you can get the temperature inside the bubble to well beyond the million, or tens of million degrees range, and when you fill the tiny bubble with fusable material (like deuterium). If you succeed in doing that, you get a fusion reactor without all those monster lasers and magnets - a tabletop fusion reactor.
All the daydreaming apart, there are only a handful of researchers buying this idea. There's one researcher Rusi P. Taleyarkhan claiming to have achieved bubble fusion, a similar experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory had failed to confirm his resutls.
Next:
Slashdot sues Google over the term "geek"
Score: -1, it hurt my balls!!!!!111oneone
Yes, I know there's the do good instinct in many of our hearts, but helping your computer unsavvy friends over spyware problems is only making the spyware problem worse.
Why? Simple. By helping them in case their computers get out of control, you're telling them that whenever things get out of control, there's this geeky guy who'd come over and eliminate all problems, FOR FREE. That, in turn, decreases their fear of spywares, and gives them incentive to install more spywares, since these "problems" cost nothing to eliminate.
And that's even bad for yourself. Consider the time wasted on your behalve, you could have used that time in much more productive activities. Cleaning spywares for friends don't even improve friendship or give you a better status among friends - frankly, being a hardcore computer geek is what the society belittles. The computer geek steoreotype in people's minds is someone who have no life and no friends. By cleaning spyware for your friends, for free or maybe for a lunch, whatever, just makes you look even more desperate.
I know I'm sounding very cruel. But come on, it's THEIR problem installing the spywares THEMSELVES, it's THEIR STUPIDITY being exploited. What's the point in interfering their business and in turn, making yourself the ultimate exploited person? There's really no point.
So the next time your friend calls you moaning about non-stop pop up boxes and super slow response, say you're busy and decline politely.
But you can definitely write it on a wall ;-)
* bzzzzzz... *
SCO faces a bleak future blah blah blah
* zzzzt... *
What's even more staggering are some of the Slashdot users who obviously have little-to-no clue but pretend to know everything. These people give off knee-jerk reactions without even reading the article once. No evidence or even logic is needed, scientific reports must be wrong here.
One of the funniest replies I've read in this thread claimed that researchers cannot get funding unless they shout "Doomsday is coming". Not even the most imaginary hypothetical example is cited - the report is simply made up by some liberal asshole. And that's even modded insightful. And then for each and every such knee-jerk reactions you get another opposite knee-jerk that Bush and co. are to blame for global warming.
Reading Slashdot on such topics makes you think the world is really only divided into two kinds of persons - the coporate man/politicians and the crazy gaians. Every scientist has a conspiracy in mind, every environmental research is biased and meaningless. If someone is thinking about starting a business I'd suggest selling tinfoil hats here, the Slashdot crowd simply cannot resist it.
You see... even the computer characters in HL2 are acting better than him as Neo. He feels more "computerized" (in a lame way, not the cool, deadly Agent Smith way) than some of the NPCs in HL2.
I've finished the story. The storyline was just the usual sci-fi stuff and it's not that spectacular. What I think that made HL2 stands out from other games is the characters. Valve has done an excellent job here. The characters in the game express emotions, have their own agendas, are all useful in the story. These all makes you feel the characters are indeed living persons instead of a pile of polygons that tells you stuff and let you proceed (like, "Marine, get to the Alpha Labs and meet team Bravo, ASAP!! Over!!").
;). At first you think she's just another friendly female scientist who's fond of you. Then it turned out she's a spy. And being a spy, she lies and tries to obtain trust from you. She did exactly that she lied even when it's risking her life! I can never forget the scene where, after her spy identity was revealed, she was forced to teleport Dr. Vance out of Nova Prospekt by you and Alyx. She pretended to cooperate until the final moment, when she jumped onto the teleport personally with Dr. Vance, disrupting the teleportation process and potentially sending both of them dead - "I'm sorry, but that's the ONLY choice!". I screamed to the top of my lung "FUCK YOU!!!!!!" when I heard that. That's one line in an FPS that I won't forget for quite some time.
;^) ) was really impressive, for an FPS experience at least. It made you care about the people there and feel the environment is living. I've long missed that feeling since Fallout 1 and 2.
So, IMHO, the realism of HL2 is not just the physics. Physics is something dead and cold, even in motion, and it's only half of it. It's the living realism that matters, the people. *** SPOILER AHEAD!!! DON'T READ IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED THE GAME!!! ***
In Ravenholm for example, there was the mad man who fought zombies day in day out. At beginning you thought he's mad and he's going to kill you. Soon you realize that he actually helps you (a lot), despite his demonic laughter. And finally, when you leaves, you feel sorry for him becoz he insists on "freeing" his zombiefied fellows.
And then there is Dr. Mossman. I can never forget her acting in Nova Prospekt - if this is a movie I guess she'd be nominated for this year's best female actor
There are a lot more interesting people in the game of course. All I can say, the acting in the game (or... the movie?
wow, never guessed I'd loss my karma bonus like that. The mods have voted, I'd better shut up :o
Firefox's automatic update is good for the individual. But for IT departments, they'd want to test the patches before releasing them and they'd want to centralize the patching process. I think it's well known what happens if we let the non-computer savvy users choose whether to update or not themselves, or forcing them to take on untested patches ;^) (even the Linux kernel had problematic updates, remember 2.4.11?). So depending on Firefox's automatic update would likely make a mess sooner or later.
I don't know what you mean by "third party automatic package updates for Windows", but the third option is obviously nonsense. Converting to Linux is not a trivial undertaking for a company.
I think that idiotic admin is irrelevent here. I think the problem that the parent mentioned is real, and it ought to be solved.