But it's not going to be long before people start using this for less than savory purposes.
You're right, and that's another reason why the geeks-for-geeks free wireless web won't work. You've got to be geeky enough to put all the firewalls and other protection in place, and configure them properly. Otherwise, the ISP will cut you off when you get 0wnXord. And even then, you'd still have to be willing to accept the small (but non-zero) risk of having to stand up in court and say "it wasn't me, Mr. Ashcroft!"
Submitter: He also claims '[their] market research indicates that, except for pop-ups, people really don't mind ads.'" CowboyNeil: This seems like the kind of thing that would keep me from using "free" wireless access, but I've a feeling I'm in the minority.
Actually, Mr. Cowboy, you just validated their business plan.
While the idea of free wireless Internet access is fun for the user, there's still the annoying fact that someone's paying for your bandwidth. Ideally, geeks like us would be more than happy to open their broadband connections to the world -- I would, if I could get broadband in rural east Texas.
Unfortunately, there aren't enough altruistic geeks per square mile to sustain that "business model". So someone has to pay the bill. Why not advertisers?
I run Opera, but I'm too cheap to pay for it. So I have a banner ad built into my browser. I even click it sometimes -- out of curiosity, or to send Opera some ad clicks. I'm willing to put up with advertising to get the product, and lucky for me, the model is working.
I hope ad-supported wireless access takes off. I wouldn't put my money in the companies, though... anyone remember Bluelight?
You've made some of the most thoughtful replies on the topic, so I'll answer this one:
What other things comprise a corporation? Do you know of a corporation that has turned over decision making responsibility to a non-human?
Here's one big difference: a person can be punished in a number of ways, when he or she commits a crime. These range from financial penalties, to loss of freedom for a varying length of time, to the ultimate penalty of death. For individuals whose motivation is less than altruistic, these punishments provide a needed deterrent to behavior that hurts the rest of society.
A corporation, on the other hand, can *only* be punished in one way: financially. You can put corporate officers in jail, but the corporation itself will continue to exist with the same rights and freedoms that it enjoyed before. There is no "6 to 10 years in prison" for a corporation. Even the ultimate penalty, bankruptcy, isn't a death sentence for a corporation. It's just another financial penalty -- witness Enron and MCI.
Even the notion of ethics influencing behavior breaks down at the corporate level. A person may naturally be a saint, or he may be a sinner kept in line only by the threat of punishment in the next life. A publicly held company, on the other hand, is the ultimate atheist: its god holds its stock, and will mete out punishment in this life. There is no concept of ethics, other than artifical constructs that outside entities (ie, governments) have built to constrain the company.
In short, humans can be punished according to their crime, corporations can not. Humans have a soul, corporations do not. It is therefore a fallacy to give an artificial construct like a corporation equal rights with a human being -- not because of what it does right, but because of what you can't do when it does wrong.
Sure, label them as "the RFID industry" to distance yourself, and dehumanize them.
"Dehumanize them"? Wal-Mart is a corporate entity. IBM is a corporate entity. They aren't human in the first place, therefore I *can't* de-humanize them.
The problem is when we *humanize* these megacorporations. Then, we are in danger of expecting them to behave in a humane way. The mom & pop store on the corner can be trusted exactly as much as its owner can be trusted. A shareholder-owned corporation can be trusted to do one thing and one thing only: attempt to make money for its shareholders. Remember when Wal-Mart used to be the "Made in the USA" company? When that quit being profitable, it quit being a slogan.
Distributors, who are people, will decide when, where, and how.
Distributors are people? If I can see one and talk to one, sure. Last time I was at Lowe's, I talked to an *employee* of a distributor. He would have no more control over RFID tags than I would. No, it's companies -- who are NOT people -- who will decide when, where, and how. And I don't like it.
I knew that privacy advocates were fans of Katherine Albrecht's CASPIAN project, but I had no idea that she had the RFID industry this scared.
"Katherine Albrecht has some sort of weird thing in her mind that helicopters might descend and follow you, I mean, how low are these things going to fly?" said Shearer. "I don't understand it basically. She has a particular view, that she's doing God's work and is going to protect us from the globalisation of retailing."
It's been a while since I really scrounged through the CASPIAN sites, but I don't recall reading anything about "helicopters might decend" (and Google seems to agree with me). And a large number of folks in this country think that "doing God's work" is a Good Thing, and would take offense at "God's work" being used as a negative epithet.
They even try to say she's "anti-retail". What the heck does that mean? If anything CASPIAN is pro-retail, trying to preserve the ability of non-registered human beings to buy staple goods at a fair price. What's anti-retail about that?
If the RFID industry thought Albrecht was on the fringe, they'd ignore her. When you see IBM's mouthpiece painting Albrecht as a rabid conspiracy theorist, you realize they know she's not on the fringe anymore. And they're scared.
The open question remains: if the chips are so innocuous, why is the RFID industry so scared of this lady?
You mean you missed the big honking Pepsi logo right in the middle of the iTunes home page that said "Redeem your free song here"?
I've seen the replies, and the moderators are punishing me as well, but I swear, when I go to the site, I don't see any Pepsi logo. There's a big link now that says "Download now", but I don't remember seeing it there two days ago. When I click on a song title, it attempts to redirect to a "itms://" link that, since I don't have iTunes' player installed, errors out.
Where is this Pepsi logo everyone's razzing me about? Is it getting blocked by my firewall, or something? Would that mean that my sysadmin is on Coke?
I collected iTunes numbers, more for the heck of it than anything else. But I figured I'd go ahead and use one when my daughter had trouble believing that someone -- she didn't know Who -- had recorded "Behind Blue Eyes" before Limp Bizkit.
So I took my number and went to iTunes.com. What a mess! What I was looking for was a place where I could enter my code and get a song. Instead, there was a confusing assortment of links like "Download", "Music Store", "Jukebox"... noplace that says "Enter your code here".
Now, I'm savvy enough to figure out that I'm going to have to download Apple's special player, run it, and *then* enter my code. But they didn't put the codes on the Slashdot homepage... they put them under the lips of Slurpee cups. If you want to appeal to Joe Slurpee, you need to learn from the "spank the monkey" advertisers: make it mind-numbingly simple.
Here's what I'd have done, if Apple had any interest in hiring an old VB hand. Put a textbox right in the middle of the itunes.com page. Put a big button next to it that says "Download song and player". Generate an install packet that's already got the free song code in it. If the installer sees that iTunes is already installed, just feed it the song code, otherwise install and download.
Joe Slurpee sees: enter code, push button, hear song.
I've got an eCard with Whoopi Goldberg's picture on it... how can that have become worthless?
I'll see your Whoopi eCard and raise you an authentic GroceryWorks.com "Punch-A-Bunch" magnet. It's a business-card sized magnet / punch card. No idea what you got when you accumulated 10 punches, though it has a picture of a $100 bill in the 10-spot. I'm also unsure how they were planning to punch a hole in the thing -- it's at least a half-millimeter thick.
I'll put it on eBay one of these days. Another artifact of the dot-com bust.
I was trying to figure out what the editors meant by this, so I'm guessing they're talking about file permissions?
4 7 7 = 100 111 111
Owner has read-only Group has read-write-execute World has read-write-execute
The implication is clear. RIAA doesn't have execute access to their own lawsuits, so they don't plan on actually following through. However, the World will probably Execute by deleting their files. If not, then the Group (ie the university or corporate network) will Execute the offending User.
I've probably shown how little I understand both this joke *and* *NIX file permissions, all in one post.
I've seen this already. Sliding windows across the text, with a "close" button that's the only thing I will ever click. When will these advertising bozos figure out that if I'm going to all that trouble to block their ads, then I'm not in their target market anyway?
Even the spammers are smart enough to figure that one out. I've received about a spam a month since I changed my domain registration email address from "domains@" to "domspam@". Before I changed over, I was receiving one or two dozen a day, even though most bounced when the account's purposely low quota filled up.
I guess popup blockers have become too easy to use. Now that my mother-in-law, queen of "click anything", can install it, the spamvertizers have to find another way to infiltrate her system.
I'm looking forward to a future release of Opera with "pop-in blocking" built in.
So for an effective short term solution change these rules so that any operator who believes that it's a scam can (after some procedures have been followed) terminate the call.
So I'm surprised nobody's suggested that the operators simply tell the obvious scammers to go take a flying leap. What's the scammer going to do, report them? "Hello, my name is, um, let's call me John, and the TTY operator won't let me purchase the diamonds I so desperately need to acquire. By the way, can I have your checking account number so I can transfer my dead uncle's estate to a Swiss account?"
But one former MCI relay operator said blocking internet addresses will only be a temporary obstacle for abusers of the Internet-relay system. That's because the scam artists can continuously find alternative Internet-protocol addresses...
I think every popular web-based service dealt with this issue years ago, including Slashdot. I guess nobody involved in setting up the TTY relay services ever ran a message board?
"Obviously it's had the effect of cutting down these calls, but they're going to find new hosts and call back anyway... It's always going to be a cat-and-mouse game."
Or to put it in the Slash vernacular, a troll-and-moderator game.
Grodevant would prefer a system in which legitimate users register in advance to gain access to the system.
Again, Slashdot provides an example of a solution. Sometimes, you need to be anonymous. But creeps and crooks are among those who prefer anonymity. So you simply flag the calls: "You have a call from a registered TTY user" vs. "You have a call from an Anonymous Coward".
I can see why the telcos didn't put these protections in place from the beginning, though... preying on the disabled is about as low as you can get. The companies simply didn't realize that these bastards have to look up to even see "as low as you can get".
We plop kids in front of TVs and now we let them run around amusement parks alone?
What do you think kids were doing before TV? Sitting in the living room watching the cat, while Dad read the newspaper and Mom (in tasteful, frilly dress, of course) cooked dinner?
I was a kid in the '70s, and my friend and I went out to the "forest" (really just an overgrown bluff) and tried to melt crayolas over a pile of matches. When we were in second grade. And we did similar things, none of which were under the watchful eyes of our parents -- though I suspect other parents were watching, back in the days before everyone moved their driveways to the back of the house and put up 10-foot-tall privacy fences.
Taking away the TV is only part of the solution to the problem you've almost uncovered. The other part of giving childhood back to our kids is to let them *have* their childhood. That means we have to let go, sometimes -- something that's harder to do, now that all the neighbors have their blinds drawn out of paranoid fear of the "unknown".
Now that we've moved out to the country, with eight acres of land and neighbors that keep an eye out, God only knows what my second grader and his friends are getting into. But I think my boy will be the better for it.
Because you don't "just do" an EVA. Putting on a suit and going outside the station requires a lot of planning.
Obviously, I have no clue of what's involved... but why *do* the EVA's require so much planning? What you've described is the current situation, where every step an [astro|cosmo]naut takes is meticulously planned. And it makes sense on the Shuttle missions, where you only have a week to get everything done.
But these guys have months. And sure, we want them to be working on science all the time... but at this point, I've given up on any good science getting done. I say rip up the schedules, find a day when the sun position is favorable, and go out and do stuff.
If NASA were in charge of Columbus' missions to the New World, he'd have never gotten 10 miles from Spain. Every "mission" to the top of the mast would involve detailed planning, and no turn of the rudder could be accomplished without a complete structural analysis.
Of course, in those days, sailors were desperate to leave and lucky if they got home, too. But isn't there some middle ground between reckless endangerment and hopeless overengineering?
I'm usually one to jump on the Stop Global Warming bandwagon, but the pretty picture in the BBC article sure does seem to indicate a large range of probablities between the "best case" and "worst case" scenarios.
In the "worst case", the entirity of the British Isles are inundated.
In the "best case", everything but the coastline becomes a desert.
While this looks like very good science, it's not going to be very useful as a basis for public policy. Science is all about showing all possible outcomes, in hopes of divining the truth. Public policy tends towards simple, overly general statements like "Global Warming will flood London" or "There is no threat from Global Warming". To the frustration of many, I'm sure, this report seems to support both positions.
On a technical note, when I hit the Executive Summary page before the Slashdot story went live, around 11am CDT, it said "This document has been accessed 361 times." A refresh a few minutes later bumped it up to 369, so it's a real-time counter. It'll be interesting to see how the Slashdot effect changes that number, and whether the counter survives the Local Warming of their web server.
Yocam maintains that Microsoft is luring personnel away with huge signing bonuses, some in excess of $1 million. "They have the audacity to send limos to Borland's headquarters to take Borland employees out to lunch. I mean, this has got to stop."
Ah, the good old days. Million-dollar signing bonuses. Limos for job prospects. Corvettes for hot programmers fresh out of college. Penthouse suites with the company logo in genuine Italian marble.
The most facinating tidbit from the NASA article is the absoutely beyond perfect Niobium-coated Quartz spheres at the heart of the ultra-precise gyroscopes.
A quick Google found this link with more cool details, including:
* The 1.5-inch diameter rotors are within 40 atomic layers (0.3 millionths of an inch) of a perfect sphere.
* "Electrical sphericity" must be held to parts in ten million.
* Each rotor spins inside a quartz housing with clearances to the rotor of barely one thousandth of an inch.
* To lift the rotor on earth takes 1,000V. In space, only a fraction of a volt is needed.
* In 1,000 years the gyroscope should barely lose 1% of its starting speed.
* To isolate the gyroscope from the Earth's magnetic field, it will be shrouded in four layers of lead balloons, plus an outer shield of iron.
Plus these cool facts (and a ton more), there are steampunk-styled drawings of the manufacturing process.
Seems like NASA could make some money selling the rejects (you know there are plenty) as the ultimate shooters!
You: all of you slashdotters 'helpfully' suggesting that he circumvent his company's firewall are quite possibly writing this poor guy a pink slip. he'd be getting one from me if he was my employee and we found out - that is abuse of company resources.
Me: If you'd give your employee a pink slip for reading non-work-related material, what the heck are you doing here?
You: No, if they were CIRCUMVENTING THE FIREWALL.
I see your point, in part. They tightened up the firewall at my work after the "I Love You" generation of viruses showed how an infected laptop was as good as a direct pathway to the outside. I can't even FTP to some servers (Cobalt, in particular) because they want to communicate back on an unapproved port. Since what I want to do with FTP is non-work-related, I've had to quit using the fat pipe to update my Dixie Chicks site.:(
But say I did find a way around the firewall that allowed me to access an otherwise unavailable resource -- in this case, an FTP server. I hope you'd advise a good talking-to before the pink slip -- even though that doesn't make nearly as good an argument-starter on Slashdot.:)
all of you slashdotters 'helpfully' suggesting that he circumvent his company's firewall are quite possibly writing this poor guy a pink slip. he'd be getting one from me if he was my employee and we found out - that is abuse of company resources.
If you'd give your employee a pink slip for reading non-work-related material, what the heck are you doing here?
(And if you're my boss... I was just looking up some coding tips, honest!)
Not really... microlensing causes an increase in the brightness of the star, not a change in the apperent position.
I'm no expert, but the gory details page notes that the microlensing event does cause a change in the apparent position (see this pic). In fact, you're seeing two distorted copies of the star.
It's just that in this case, there's not enough distance between the distorted images, so they show up as a single, brighter dot where there used to be a single, duller dot.
The AC's exaggerated angular distance can be attributed to the limitations of ASCII art. I can't find a character with an angle that small, although this is a pretty good approximation: ||
No, they just support the idea of couching your disgust in more creative terms. "Gee, that stupid idea is great" is lame. "Gee, now I can get a free car with my lighter" makes you think a bit before you get it.
"Troll" can sometimes be defined as an attempt at +1 Funny that shoots... and misses.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's not going to be long before people start using this for less than savory purposes.
You're right, and that's another reason why the geeks-for-geeks free wireless web won't work. You've got to be geeky enough to put all the firewalls and other protection in place, and configure them properly. Otherwise, the ISP will cut you off when you get 0wnXord. And even then, you'd still have to be willing to accept the small (but non-zero) risk of having to stand up in court and say "it wasn't me, Mr. Ashcroft!"
Submitter: He also claims '[their] market research indicates that, except for pop-ups, people really don't mind ads.'"
CowboyNeil: This seems like the kind of thing that would keep me from using "free" wireless access, but I've a feeling I'm in the minority.
Actually, Mr. Cowboy, you just validated their business plan.
While the idea of free wireless Internet access is fun for the user, there's still the annoying fact that someone's paying for your bandwidth. Ideally, geeks like us would be more than happy to open their broadband connections to the world -- I would, if I could get broadband in rural east Texas.
Unfortunately, there aren't enough altruistic geeks per square mile to sustain that "business model". So someone has to pay the bill. Why not advertisers?
I run Opera, but I'm too cheap to pay for it. So I have a banner ad built into my browser. I even click it sometimes -- out of curiosity, or to send Opera some ad clicks. I'm willing to put up with advertising to get the product, and lucky for me, the model is working.
I hope ad-supported wireless access takes off. I wouldn't put my money in the companies, though... anyone remember Bluelight?
(Sorry, hit the wrong key on previous reply)
You've made some of the most thoughtful replies on the topic, so I'll answer this one:
What other things comprise a corporation? Do you know of a corporation that has turned over decision making responsibility to a non-human?
Here's one big difference: a person can be punished in a number of ways, when he or she commits a crime. These range from financial penalties, to loss of freedom for a varying length of time, to the ultimate penalty of death. For individuals whose motivation is less than altruistic, these punishments provide a needed deterrent to behavior that hurts the rest of society.
A corporation, on the other hand, can *only* be punished in one way: financially. You can put corporate officers in jail, but the corporation itself will continue to exist with the same rights and freedoms that it enjoyed before. There is no "6 to 10 years in prison" for a corporation. Even the ultimate penalty, bankruptcy, isn't a death sentence for a corporation. It's just another financial penalty -- witness Enron and MCI.
Even the notion of ethics influencing behavior breaks down at the corporate level. A person may naturally be a saint, or he may be a sinner kept in line only by the threat of punishment in the next life. A publicly held company, on the other hand, is the ultimate atheist: its god holds its stock, and will mete out punishment in this life. There is no concept of ethics, other than artifical constructs that outside entities (ie, governments) have built to constrain the company.
In short, humans can be punished according to their crime, corporations can not. Humans have a soul, corporations do not. It is therefore a fallacy to give an artificial construct like a corporation equal rights with a human being -- not because of what it does right, but because of what you can't do when it does wrong.
You've made some of the most thoughtful replies on the topic, so I'll answer this one:
What other things comprise a corporation? Do you know of a corporation that has turned over decision making responsibility to a non-human?
Here's one big difference: a person can be punished in a number of ways, when he or she commits a
At first, I thought you were joking.
Sure, label them as "the RFID industry" to distance yourself, and dehumanize them.
"Dehumanize them"? Wal-Mart is a corporate entity. IBM is a corporate entity. They aren't human in the first place, therefore I *can't* de-humanize them.
The problem is when we *humanize* these megacorporations. Then, we are in danger of expecting them to behave in a humane way. The mom & pop store on the corner can be trusted exactly as much as its owner can be trusted. A shareholder-owned corporation can be trusted to do one thing and one thing only: attempt to make money for its shareholders. Remember when Wal-Mart used to be the "Made in the USA" company? When that quit being profitable, it quit being a slogan.
Distributors, who are people, will decide when, where, and how.
Distributors are people? If I can see one and talk to one, sure. Last time I was at Lowe's, I talked to an *employee* of a distributor. He would have no more control over RFID tags than I would. No, it's companies -- who are NOT people -- who will decide when, where, and how. And I don't like it.
I knew that privacy advocates were fans of Katherine Albrecht's CASPIAN project, but I had no idea that she had the RFID industry this scared.
"Katherine Albrecht has some sort of weird thing in her mind that helicopters might descend and follow you, I mean, how low are these things going to fly?" said Shearer. "I don't understand it basically. She has a particular view, that she's doing God's work and is going to protect us from the globalisation of retailing."
It's been a while since I really scrounged through the CASPIAN sites, but I don't recall reading anything about "helicopters might decend" (and Google seems to agree with me). And a large number of folks in this country think that "doing God's work" is a Good Thing, and would take offense at "God's work" being used as a negative epithet.
They even try to say she's "anti-retail". What the heck does that mean? If anything CASPIAN is pro-retail, trying to preserve the ability of non-registered human beings to buy staple goods at a fair price. What's anti-retail about that?
If the RFID industry thought Albrecht was on the fringe, they'd ignore her. When you see IBM's mouthpiece painting Albrecht as a rabid conspiracy theorist, you realize they know she's not on the fringe anymore. And they're scared.
The open question remains: if the chips are so innocuous, why is the RFID industry so scared of this lady?
What do you think? [xpda.com] 1970s Pr0n stars or computer salesmen? You be the judge!
OMG, I think you're right. Look at the size of his hard di$k! That's got to be at least 12 inches!
(Now let's see, where's the "post anonymously" box... oops!)
You mean you missed the big honking Pepsi logo right in the middle of the iTunes home page that said "Redeem your free song here"?
I've seen the replies, and the moderators are punishing me as well, but I swear, when I go to the site, I don't see any Pepsi logo. There's a big link now that says "Download now", but I don't remember seeing it there two days ago. When I click on a song title, it attempts to redirect to a "itms://" link that, since I don't have iTunes' player installed, errors out.
Where is this Pepsi logo everyone's razzing me about? Is it getting blocked by my firewall, or something? Would that mean that my sysadmin is on Coke?
I collected iTunes numbers, more for the heck of it than anything else. But I figured I'd go ahead and use one when my daughter had trouble believing that someone -- she didn't know Who -- had recorded "Behind Blue Eyes" before Limp Bizkit.
So I took my number and went to iTunes.com. What a mess! What I was looking for was a place where I could enter my code and get a song. Instead, there was a confusing assortment of links like "Download", "Music Store", "Jukebox"... noplace that says "Enter your code here".
Now, I'm savvy enough to figure out that I'm going to have to download Apple's special player, run it, and *then* enter my code. But they didn't put the codes on the Slashdot homepage... they put them under the lips of Slurpee cups. If you want to appeal to Joe Slurpee, you need to learn from the "spank the monkey" advertisers: make it mind-numbingly simple.
Here's what I'd have done, if Apple had any interest in hiring an old VB hand. Put a textbox right in the middle of the itunes.com page. Put a big button next to it that says "Download song and player". Generate an install packet that's already got the free song code in it. If the installer sees that iTunes is already installed, just feed it the song code, otherwise install and download.
Joe Slurpee sees: enter code, push button, hear song.
So... anyone want my leftover iTunes codes?
I for one wish our von Neumann successors the very best of luck in their explorations.
No, no, no, it's "I for one welcome our..."
Aw, nevermind.
I've got an eCard with Whoopi Goldberg's picture on it... how can that have become worthless?
I'll see your Whoopi eCard and raise you an authentic GroceryWorks.com "Punch-A-Bunch" magnet. It's a business-card sized magnet / punch card. No idea what you got when you accumulated 10 punches, though it has a picture of a $100 bill in the 10-spot. I'm also unsure how they were planning to punch a hole in the thing -- it's at least a half-millimeter thick.
I'll put it on eBay one of these days. Another artifact of the dot-com bust.
from the hey-it's-a-nice-number dept.
I was trying to figure out what the editors meant by this, so I'm guessing they're talking about file permissions?
4 7 7 = 100 111 111
Owner has read-only
Group has read-write-execute
World has read-write-execute
The implication is clear. RIAA doesn't have execute access to their own lawsuits, so they don't plan on actually following through. However, the World will probably Execute by deleting their files. If not, then the Group (ie the university or corporate network) will Execute the offending User.
I've probably shown how little I understand both this joke *and* *NIX file permissions, all in one post.
I've seen this already. Sliding windows across the text, with a "close" button that's the only thing I will ever click. When will these advertising bozos figure out that if I'm going to all that trouble to block their ads, then I'm not in their target market anyway?
Even the spammers are smart enough to figure that one out. I've received about a spam a month since I changed my domain registration email address from "domains@" to "domspam@". Before I changed over, I was receiving one or two dozen a day, even though most bounced when the account's purposely low quota filled up.
I guess popup blockers have become too easy to use. Now that my mother-in-law, queen of "click anything", can install it, the spamvertizers have to find another way to infiltrate her system.
I'm looking forward to a future release of Opera with "pop-in blocking" built in.
Foo: I have a Veyron you insensitive clod!
Bar: Modding your 1982 Pinto doesn't count.
Man, and I thought overclocking your brain was pushing the limit!
So for an effective short term solution change these rules so that any operator who believes that it's a scam can (after some procedures have been followed) terminate the call.
Here on Slashdot, there's a strong "screw the rules" bent, as evidenced by the latest copy-protection crack.
So I'm surprised nobody's suggested that the operators simply tell the obvious scammers to go take a flying leap. What's the scammer going to do, report them? "Hello, my name is, um, let's call me John, and the TTY operator won't let me purchase the diamonds I so desperately need to acquire. By the way, can I have your checking account number so I can transfer my dead uncle's estate to a Swiss account?"
But one former MCI relay operator said blocking internet addresses will only be a temporary obstacle for abusers of the Internet-relay system. That's because the scam artists can continuously find alternative Internet-protocol addresses...
I think every popular web-based service dealt with this issue years ago, including Slashdot. I guess nobody involved in setting up the TTY relay services ever ran a message board?
"Obviously it's had the effect of cutting down these calls, but they're going to find new hosts and call back anyway... It's always going to be a cat-and-mouse game."
Or to put it in the Slash vernacular, a troll-and-moderator game.
Grodevant would prefer a system in which legitimate users register in advance to gain access to the system.
Again, Slashdot provides an example of a solution. Sometimes, you need to be anonymous. But creeps and crooks are among those who prefer anonymity. So you simply flag the calls: "You have a call from a registered TTY user" vs. "You have a call from an Anonymous Coward".
I can see why the telcos didn't put these protections in place from the beginning, though... preying on the disabled is about as low as you can get. The companies simply didn't realize that these bastards have to look up to even see "as low as you can get".
We plop kids in front of TVs and now we let them run around amusement parks alone?
What do you think kids were doing before TV? Sitting in the living room watching the cat, while Dad read the newspaper and Mom (in tasteful, frilly dress, of course) cooked dinner?
I was a kid in the '70s, and my friend and I went out to the "forest" (really just an overgrown bluff) and tried to melt crayolas over a pile of matches. When we were in second grade. And we did similar things, none of which were under the watchful eyes of our parents -- though I suspect other parents were watching, back in the days before everyone moved their driveways to the back of the house and put up 10-foot-tall privacy fences.
Taking away the TV is only part of the solution to the problem you've almost uncovered. The other part of giving childhood back to our kids is to let them *have* their childhood. That means we have to let go, sometimes -- something that's harder to do, now that all the neighbors have their blinds drawn out of paranoid fear of the "unknown".
Now that we've moved out to the country, with eight acres of land and neighbors that keep an eye out, God only knows what my second grader and his friends are getting into. But I think my boy will be the better for it.
Because you don't "just do" an EVA. Putting on a suit and going outside the station requires a lot of planning.
Obviously, I have no clue of what's involved... but why *do* the EVA's require so much planning? What you've described is the current situation, where every step an [astro|cosmo]naut takes is meticulously planned. And it makes sense on the Shuttle missions, where you only have a week to get everything done.
But these guys have months. And sure, we want them to be working on science all the time... but at this point, I've given up on any good science getting done. I say rip up the schedules, find a day when the sun position is favorable, and go out and do stuff.
If NASA were in charge of Columbus' missions to the New World, he'd have never gotten 10 miles from Spain. Every "mission" to the top of the mast would involve detailed planning, and no turn of the rudder could be accomplished without a complete structural analysis.
Of course, in those days, sailors were desperate to leave and lucky if they got home, too. But isn't there some middle ground between reckless endangerment and hopeless overengineering?
I'm usually one to jump on the Stop Global Warming bandwagon, but the pretty picture in the BBC article sure does seem to indicate a large range of probablities between the "best case" and "worst case" scenarios.
In the "worst case", the entirity of the British Isles are inundated.
In the "best case", everything but the coastline becomes a desert.
While this looks like very good science, it's not going to be very useful as a basis for public policy. Science is all about showing all possible outcomes, in hopes of divining the truth. Public policy tends towards simple, overly general statements like "Global Warming will flood London" or "There is no threat from Global Warming". To the frustration of many, I'm sure, this report seems to support both positions.
On a technical note, when I hit the Executive Summary page before the Slashdot story went live, around 11am CDT, it said "This document has been accessed 361 times." A refresh a few minutes later bumped it up to 369, so it's a real-time counter. It'll be interesting to see how the Slashdot effect changes that number, and whether the counter survives the Local Warming of their web server.
From the C|Net article, dateline May 7, 1997:
Yocam maintains that Microsoft is luring personnel away with huge signing bonuses, some in excess of $1 million. "They have the audacity to send limos to Borland's headquarters to take Borland employees out to lunch. I mean, this has got to stop."
Ah, the good old days. Million-dollar signing bonuses. Limos for job prospects. Corvettes for hot programmers fresh out of college. Penthouse suites with the company logo in genuine Italian marble.
Why did it ever have to end?
Oh, wait, don't answer that...
The most facinating tidbit from the NASA article is the absoutely beyond perfect Niobium-coated Quartz spheres at the heart of the ultra-precise gyroscopes.
A quick Google found this link with more cool details, including:
* The 1.5-inch diameter rotors are within 40 atomic layers (0.3 millionths of an inch) of a perfect sphere.
* "Electrical sphericity" must be held to parts in ten million.
* Each rotor spins inside a quartz housing with clearances to the rotor of barely one thousandth of an inch.
* To lift the rotor on earth takes 1,000V. In space, only a fraction of a volt is needed.
* In 1,000 years the gyroscope should barely lose 1% of its starting speed.
* To isolate the gyroscope from the Earth's magnetic field, it will be shrouded in four layers of lead balloons, plus an outer shield of iron.
Plus these cool facts (and a ton more), there are steampunk-styled drawings of the manufacturing process.
Seems like NASA could make some money selling the rejects (you know there are plenty) as the ultimate shooters!
You: all of you slashdotters 'helpfully' suggesting that he circumvent his company's firewall are quite possibly writing this poor guy a pink slip. he'd be getting one from me if he was my employee and we found out - that is abuse of company resources.
:(
:)
Me: If you'd give your employee a pink slip for reading non-work-related material, what the heck are you doing here?
You: No, if they were CIRCUMVENTING THE FIREWALL.
I see your point, in part. They tightened up the firewall at my work after the "I Love You" generation of viruses showed how an infected laptop was as good as a direct pathway to the outside. I can't even FTP to some servers (Cobalt, in particular) because they want to communicate back on an unapproved port. Since what I want to do with FTP is non-work-related, I've had to quit using the fat pipe to update my Dixie Chicks site.
But say I did find a way around the firewall that allowed me to access an otherwise unavailable resource -- in this case, an FTP server. I hope you'd advise a good talking-to before the pink slip -- even though that doesn't make nearly as good an argument-starter on Slashdot.
all of you slashdotters 'helpfully' suggesting that he circumvent his company's firewall are quite possibly writing this poor guy a pink slip. he'd be getting one from me if he was my employee and we found out - that is abuse of company resources.
If you'd give your employee a pink slip for reading non-work-related material, what the heck are you doing here?
(And if you're my boss... I was just looking up some coding tips, honest!)
Not really... microlensing causes an increase in the brightness of the star, not a change in the apperent position.
I'm no expert, but the gory details page notes that the microlensing event does cause a change in the apparent position (see this pic). In fact, you're seeing two distorted copies of the star.
It's just that in this case, there's not enough distance between the distorted images, so they show up as a single, brighter dot where there used to be a single, duller dot.
The AC's exaggerated angular distance can be attributed to the limitations of ASCII art. I can't find a character with an angle that small, although this is a pretty good approximation: ||
No, they just support the idea of couching your disgust in more creative terms. "Gee, that stupid idea is great" is lame. "Gee, now I can get a free car with my lighter" makes you think a bit before you get it.
"Troll" can sometimes be defined as an attempt at +1 Funny that shoots... and misses.