Blasting OBL would at least be good for *public* morale and good PR. It might rattle up the cage a bit too. It is true that Pakistan is the main problem. My understanding is that the border is very difficult to control. Some accounts I've read indicated that taxi drivers were driving AQ guys out of Afghanistan for a few cents making the escape too easy. There are too many AQ in PK all horded up and safe - but the PK army and government is quite corrupt - save perhaps Musharraf's close allies within. It would be nice to have some carpet bombing activity in the area to eliminate the problem!
I don't want to start a political war here, so I'll leave the name(s) of the country(ies) involved and group(s) out. If you look at some of the footage after a bomb is set to have detonated in a certain part of a city - many are hundreds of kilometers apart - the *same* faces keep showing up within minutes of the event. I'm not implying that bombs don't go astray or hit the wrong target - but its just as easy to stage an explosion on your own people and blame the otherside for doing it, hence the same faces keep showing up.
OTOH, if you're trying to do some PR for your own side and you're loosing the war, don't think OBL and company won't think of having a meeting in a building with uninvolved women and children in the hopes they are not killed because the US is being the nice guy.
I just found it a shame that they had OBL in their sights from a Predator done and didn't blast him to bits before trying to get clearance from higher up. I'm pretty sure the trigger puller would not face court marshall or discharge. He/she would have more than enough support from higher up.
I'm using Vista right now on my desktop. I have my complaints about it, but I've been using it mostly for the changes to Windows Explorer. I think its nicer and easier to organize things. I don't wholeheartedly like it, but its not that bad either. Windows Server 2008 has received great reviews. If MS is willing to spend $300 million anyways and have stooped to the Mojave thing, why not just release a "Professional version" for desktop use? You'll have a newer operating system which already has the Service Pack improvements. You would just need to lower the licensing costs of to the same as Vista. Boom! No more Vista and here's a new OS - the product is practically already done.
Mr Gates: For $1 million I'll market the heck out of Vista. You can decide what to do with the leftovers.
If you have a lot of money the trophy wife ain't so bad - you can always buy a dog while in the relationship. You'll probably see the dog more and have more fun than with the wife who's travelling overseas and using your credit card.
This is pretty much industry standard in call-centers. I mentioned this to my managers that I was against coming in early to start computer, read e-mails and sit at my desk for 10 - 15 minutes before I get paid. Add it up over the year and you're looking at an extra $2000. They said no and basically implied that if I didn't I would lose my job. Some of the employees didn't agree with my position and didn't see what was wrong with it until they did the math.
Just to be clear. I've no problem doing the work or the overtime. Coming into work early is fine with me. But they never even offered - and would not even - boot the computers for the employees. In a sales position I made more than enough money that I didn't care. When it came to entry level work, where you don't work for much money and return a lot to the company - as with most call center jobs, its really taking advantage of the unfortunate.
Maybe he is working for the DHS, you insensitive clod!
Interesting point nonetheless. There is a difference between classroom and reality. In a psychology, medicine, chemistry, biology, criminology... whatever class at any level you are taught some pretty dangerous stuff. 99.99999% of students are sane, normal human beings that wont use the info. Its that small %age of students who will do something that are the concern. I don't think taking the class in-and-of itself is the catalyst to being a cyberterrorist. I would at least question the intentions of students that *already* know a few too many things in the class or get an A+ effortlessly for the course.
I was going to make a joke about buying a new CD to make the RIAA happy.
But, this brings a more interesting point. Many of the music masters (I would have to assume) are stored digitally but perhaps they are not kept indefinitely. Seems it would be cheaper long term to store than analog recordings. Why can't the music industry offer a replacement warranty? Pay $5 and get a new disc providing you send the original back or something. It wouldn't cost them that much to store it and, frankly, I can see some discs selling better many years later. Discs, casettes and records are all fairly easy to scratch. Its sad to think that these discs, with content we love so much and collect, can be ruined so easily and is often irreparable and because of the way the industry works irreplacable.
I have a few rock albums that are mainstream. Played it for a few friends and they all want to buy the discs. But you can't anymore. Disc was pressed in 2000. The band did really well and toured North America. Not on iTunes. I've requested to Apple for it to be in iTunes. Not on eBay not on Amazon. Nada. Nothing. I can only "lend" my CDs out so many times.
I rarely if ever use text messaging. But, on sheer principal, I canceled the text messaging service with Telus on my cell. I hope this is possible. The representative seemed shocked someone would do that. It sounded like there was some doubt it would be possible.
When I called, they offered to upgrade me to a higher package for an extra $3 a month. This is purely a cash grab. If 1/6 of their subscribers get higher text service it will be millions in the coffers.
What ticked me off more is that it took 10 minutes of talking on the phone to remove the service. Two minutes asking me why. Two minutes trying to sell me something. Six more tapping away at the computer. I hung up when the rep said it was done. They wanted to ask me more questions. They should put this stuff on-line. Telus only lets you *add* packages, not remove them on-line. I'm not going to renew when my plan's over.
I'd like to seem some stats on the entire project. Miles of cable, tons of metal, number of computers, data storage, etc. And I think the more interesting one: how many people were involved and what % of them are from each field 500 engineers, 200 physicist, 200 mathematicians (that sort of thing).
The one thing that occurs to me every time I see those pictures: I'd hate to see the CAD drawings for that project.
Even if this isn't the greatest engineering feat of "man" so far, its a genuine marvel to look at. The project started in 1995 - meaning some of the people working on the project have probably spend 1/2 their "working lives" making sure this is properly built.
I think it would be equally interesting to have a documentary of the project, interview with the scientists and interview after first few experiments are complete.
This - http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/01/1344232 (3D Printing for Everyone) is a great opportunity for the community to develop lunar spaceships. If they can make a Lego-kit with a working scale engine, remote control and propellant - I open-source develop the heck out of this thing!
You can fix it for rather cheap. Call up the local FBI office or if you want an upgrade the This Agency Does Not Exist. Tell them you need it repaired. It will be. And you'll receive additional "upgrades" at no extra cost!
Strange. Cuil really needs to provide substantive answers about their own company before I use them. Whatever they are feeding their employees its really not the right stuff.
The advantage that no one realized with Usenet was the fact that there are next to no ads. If there were any, a kill filter would take care of them. Was there SPAM? Sure. Was there a lot? Sure. My newsreader filtered them all out.
I also worked support for an ISP. I think in the time I was there, I only received one call about newsgroups. They just wanted the server name to connect.
I like it in the sense there was a bit of a community. The want and for sale ads were super-easy to go through. The Jobs newsgroups had a lot of jobs not posted on sites where you had to pay. People were also able to warn others - "Don't work for this company because..... ". I found it to be a lot better and faster to find information than any website.
Not surprising. Americans are always blaming us for everything. Now they're blaming us for a poor environmental record, preventing the advancement of man, being a magnet for comets - a problem the Americans know our government won't fix so they'll have to do something.
This story will surely convince the last bunch of skeptical Americans that we live in Igloos. My Core2Duo is overclocked to 10 GHz with "air" cooling. I have heat pipes on the CPU which are used to warming up my living space. Even though it might be a heat wave where you are, I know that shorts were not invented by a Canadian.
I haven't used LaTeX much except for one project - I compiled some of my writings into one document. About 200 pages I had to typeset. All text, no math. I used 2 column format. I think the hardest part I had was having proper pagebreaks and the bibliography. Then again, I probably wasn't doing it right. I couldn't see any other way to do this. I've tried OO and Word for large documents and its very difficult. PageMaker and Quark are much too complicated. I tried to toy around with Scientific Writer from Wolfram and found it a bit of a headache. Framemaker was sadly discontinued and it was really my next choice.
All said, it was a fairly painless process. I do wish a major upgrade would happen. Installing new fonts and packages is a major major pain. But it does the job and it does it well. At the least, all I have to do is strip out the code and I have a plain text version of all my work. Easy to restore or port to another format. Try that with any of the other programs!
I would think, if the "safety of the Earth/mankind" is at risk.... Shouldn't they be putting their theory to work? I'd want to make sure that a nuke CAN divert the asteroid in practice than reading about an academic debate or reading that NASA administrators/management reiterate probably incorrectly that their plan of action is the right way (as always and as government organizations always do).
Shouldn't there be an International Body finding a solution. The US isn't the only country with nukes, the right group of scientists, etc. etc. that can find a possible solution to this problem.
After all, illegally distributing CDs from Space would be the equivalent of having 1,000,000,000 CD burners. Don't ask how I obtained this estimate. The RIAA doesn't know how it gets their either!
Why? Simply, its the ultimate backup to the getting hit by a bus. If you and the VP/President who are trusted password holders are hit by a bus, how will your company survive? I will not go outside. No bus will ever hit me.
Make your legacy count for something. Don't let your work go to waste. Hire me today!
I wholeheartedly agree. The gist of many of the other posts on this story is that the only ethical and moral answers to this problem are "A" "B" and "C". He chose "D" - none of the above. The problem with moral and ethical debates is that no matter what you think, the person making the desicion is going to make it on the basis of their morals and values. Unless, its illegal - but sometimes you don't have a legitimate choice.
Some are calling him disgrunteled, deranged, mentally ill here. I'm sure some of you are at the point of (or have been) burnout. 100+ hour weeks being the norm in IT. Its easy to make irrational desicions if you want to paint them as such under these conditions. Its also probably important to protect your hard work. Short-staffed and not taking much credit for the work and missing out on family time for a "stupid" network - who wouldn't lock someone out of ruining all your hard work? Assuming he did the work properly.
Its ironic too that many "ethical hackers" on Slashdot regularly say that if/when they find a bug, exploit in code or a website, they notify the admin before telling others so they can fix the problem. In this case, if the admin is right, I don't see why using same argument, that locking everyone out of the system except himself (only one person knows the password) isn't a bad idea until the *proper* staff and resources are available to fix the problem.
Surely the song "All I want for Christmas" is prior art. Does it count if a database makes reference *to* a wishlist. Surely, this song is stored in a database. If so, case solved! Next.
Disclaimer of sorts: I studied Computer Science at university. I was turned off by programming as I found it boring (C, C++, java). The product that comes about, I always find interesting. I've moved to more overall functional and easier to learn/use language for my personal use. I won't mention langauge... no flamewar.;) I think getting a former programmer-in-training as opposed to a site loaded with professionals might help.
I'd say let your son learn a language. I started with BASIC on the C64. It was fun and I was 8 yrs old at the time. If your son knows HTML, I good place to start might be PHP or Ruby. I think syntatically (as a now-nonprogrammer) its probably the easiest to learn.
IMHO, after about a year of programming, assuming he's not completely turned off, have him do some much more complicated tasks (within "reason"). Have him do it in C or C++ (given time to learn it). I'm serious about this. If he wants to continue to post-secondary education, better to find out if he REALLY wants to do programming, or if he's doing it 'cause dad does it. You or he can save having to plunk down a couple grand (or more) for one semester or one year of tuition. My dad is a doctor. I wasn't pressured to do it either. I thought I would be really interested in it as well. I wasn't.
Thanks! Now one less Chinese thing to buy. I was hooked on Reebox but inconsistencies and lower quality padding over last 2 years are hurting me (literally). So I'll try the domestic NB shoes. My knees are likely to say: Thank you!
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. Its the "Guns of the Patriots" that protect the doors. (Obvious Metal Gear reference)
Blasting OBL would at least be good for *public* morale and good PR. It might rattle up the cage a bit too. It is true that Pakistan is the main problem. My understanding is that the border is very difficult to control. Some accounts I've read indicated that taxi drivers were driving AQ guys out of Afghanistan for a few cents making the escape too easy. There are too many AQ in PK all horded up and safe - but the PK army and government is quite corrupt - save perhaps Musharraf's close allies within. It would be nice to have some carpet bombing activity in the area to eliminate the problem!
I don't want to start a political war here, so I'll leave the name(s) of the country(ies) involved and group(s) out. If you look at some of the footage after a bomb is set to have detonated in a certain part of a city - many are hundreds of kilometers apart - the *same* faces keep showing up within minutes of the event. I'm not implying that bombs don't go astray or hit the wrong target - but its just as easy to stage an explosion on your own people and blame the otherside for doing it, hence the same faces keep showing up.
OTOH, if you're trying to do some PR for your own side and you're loosing the war, don't think OBL and company won't think of having a meeting in a building with uninvolved women and children in the hopes they are not killed because the US is being the nice guy.
I just found it a shame that they had OBL in their sights from a Predator done and didn't blast him to bits before trying to get clearance from higher up. I'm pretty sure the trigger puller would not face court marshall or discharge. He/she would have more than enough support from higher up.
I'm using Vista right now on my desktop. I have my complaints about it, but I've been using it mostly for the changes to Windows Explorer. I think its nicer and easier to organize things. I don't wholeheartedly like it, but its not that bad either. Windows Server 2008 has received great reviews. If MS is willing to spend $300 million anyways and have stooped to the Mojave thing, why not just release a "Professional version" for desktop use? You'll have a newer operating system which already has the Service Pack improvements. You would just need to lower the licensing costs of to the same as Vista. Boom! No more Vista and here's a new OS - the product is practically already done.
Mr Gates: For $1 million I'll market the heck out of Vista. You can decide what to do with the leftovers.
If you have a lot of money the trophy wife ain't so bad - you can always buy a dog while in the relationship. You'll probably see the dog more and have more fun than with the wife who's travelling overseas and using your credit card.
This is pretty much industry standard in call-centers. I mentioned this to my managers that I was against coming in early to start computer, read e-mails and sit at my desk for 10 - 15 minutes before I get paid. Add it up over the year and you're looking at an extra $2000. They said no and basically implied that if I didn't I would lose my job. Some of the employees didn't agree with my position and didn't see what was wrong with it until they did the math.
Just to be clear. I've no problem doing the work or the overtime. Coming into work early is fine with me. But they never even offered - and would not even - boot the computers for the employees. In a sales position I made more than enough money that I didn't care. When it came to entry level work, where you don't work for much money and return a lot to the company - as with most call center jobs, its really taking advantage of the unfortunate.
Thanks pal. I'm a cow and red kidney bean farmer. I feed my cows the beans. This comment is going to put me out of business! ;)
Maybe he is working for the DHS, you insensitive clod!
Interesting point nonetheless. There is a difference between classroom and reality. In a psychology, medicine, chemistry, biology, criminology ... whatever class at any level you are taught some pretty dangerous stuff. 99.99999% of students are sane, normal human beings that wont use the info. Its that small %age of students who will do something that are the concern. I don't think taking the class in-and-of itself is the catalyst to being a cyberterrorist. I would at least question the intentions of students that *already* know a few too many things in the class or get an A+ effortlessly for the course.
I was going to make a joke about buying a new CD to make the RIAA happy.
But, this brings a more interesting point. Many of the music masters (I would have to assume) are stored digitally but perhaps they are not kept indefinitely. Seems it would be cheaper long term to store than analog recordings. Why can't the music industry offer a replacement warranty? Pay $5 and get a new disc providing you send the original back or something. It wouldn't cost them that much to store it and, frankly, I can see some discs selling better many years later. Discs, casettes and records are all fairly easy to scratch. Its sad to think that these discs, with content we love so much and collect, can be ruined so easily and is often irreparable and because of the way the industry works irreplacable.
I have a few rock albums that are mainstream. Played it for a few friends and they all want to buy the discs. But you can't anymore. Disc was pressed in 2000. The band did really well and toured North America. Not on iTunes. I've requested to Apple for it to be in iTunes. Not on eBay not on Amazon. Nada. Nothing. I can only "lend" my CDs out so many times.
I rarely if ever use text messaging. But, on sheer principal, I canceled the text messaging service with Telus on my cell. I hope this is possible. The representative seemed shocked someone would do that. It sounded like there was some doubt it would be possible.
When I called, they offered to upgrade me to a higher package for an extra $3 a month. This is purely a cash grab. If 1/6 of their subscribers get higher text service it will be millions in the coffers.
What ticked me off more is that it took 10 minutes of talking on the phone to remove the service. Two minutes asking me why. Two minutes trying to sell me something. Six more tapping away at the computer. I hung up when the rep said it was done. They wanted to ask me more questions. They should put this stuff on-line. Telus only lets you *add* packages, not remove them on-line. I'm not going to renew when my plan's over.
I'd like to seem some stats on the entire project. Miles of cable, tons of metal, number of computers, data storage, etc. And I think the more interesting one: how many people were involved and what % of them are from each field 500 engineers, 200 physicist, 200 mathematicians (that sort of thing).
The one thing that occurs to me every time I see those pictures: I'd hate to see the CAD drawings for that project.
Even if this isn't the greatest engineering feat of "man" so far, its a genuine marvel to look at. The project started in 1995 - meaning some of the people working on the project have probably spend 1/2 their "working lives" making sure this is properly built.
I think it would be equally interesting to have a documentary of the project, interview with the scientists and interview after first few experiments are complete.
This - http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/01/1344232 (3D Printing for Everyone) is a great opportunity for the community to develop lunar spaceships. If they can make a Lego-kit with a working scale engine, remote control and propellant - I open-source develop the heck out of this thing!
Anyone else?
You can fix it for rather cheap. Call up the local FBI office or if you want an upgrade the This Agency Does Not Exist. Tell them you need it repaired. It will be. And you'll receive additional "upgrades" at no extra cost!
Given the nature of this topic, please give me a -5 Troll. Make my day!
In the posting, it mentions "How long will $25 million VC funding last at this rate?".
Now, I was about to call the PR/Media Rep for Cuil to provide some answers. But after digging around on their website http://www.cuil.com/search?q=how+long+will+%2425+million+VC+funding+last+at+this+rate they really aren't providing any answers. Really. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
When I went on Google, http://www.google.ca/search?q=how+long+will+%2425+million+VC+funding+last+at+this+rate&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
they weren't able to provide me with an answer about Cuil. But they provided me with 96,000 possible answers.
Strange. Cuil really needs to provide substantive answers about their own company before I use them. Whatever they are feeding their employees its really not the right stuff.
The advantage that no one realized with Usenet was the fact that there are next to no ads. If there were any, a kill filter would take care of them. Was there SPAM? Sure. Was there a lot? Sure. My newsreader filtered them all out.
I also worked support for an ISP. I think in the time I was there, I only received one call about newsgroups. They just wanted the server name to connect.
I like it in the sense there was a bit of a community. The want and for sale ads were super-easy to go through. The Jobs newsgroups had a lot of jobs not posted on sites where you had to pay. People were also able to warn others - "Don't work for this company because. .... ". I found it to be a lot better and faster to find information than any website.
Not surprising. Americans are always blaming us for everything. Now they're blaming us for a poor environmental record, preventing the advancement of man, being a magnet for comets - a problem the Americans know our government won't fix so they'll have to do something.
This story will surely convince the last bunch of skeptical Americans that we live in Igloos. My Core2Duo is overclocked to 10 GHz with "air" cooling. I have heat pipes on the CPU which are used to warming up my living space. Even though it might be a heat wave where you are, I know that shorts were not invented by a Canadian.
Great country, eh? We're great story-tellers too!
I haven't used LaTeX much except for one project - I compiled some of my writings into one document. About 200 pages I had to typeset. All text, no math. I used 2 column format. I think the hardest part I had was having proper pagebreaks and the bibliography. Then again, I probably wasn't doing it right. I couldn't see any other way to do this. I've tried OO and Word for large documents and its very difficult. PageMaker and Quark are much too complicated. I tried to toy around with Scientific Writer from Wolfram and found it a bit of a headache. Framemaker was sadly discontinued and it was really my next choice.
All said, it was a fairly painless process. I do wish a major upgrade would happen. Installing new fonts and packages is a major major pain. But it does the job and it does it well. At the least, all I have to do is strip out the code and I have a plain text version of all my work. Easy to restore or port to another format. Try that with any of the other programs!
I would think, if the "safety of the Earth/mankind" is at risk .... Shouldn't they be putting their theory to work? I'd want to make sure that a nuke CAN divert the asteroid in practice than reading about an academic debate or reading that NASA administrators/management reiterate probably incorrectly that their plan of action is the right way (as always and as government organizations always do).
Shouldn't there be an International Body finding a solution. The US isn't the only country with nukes, the right group of scientists, etc. etc. that can find a possible solution to this problem.
After all, illegally distributing CDs from Space would be the equivalent of having 1,000,000,000 CD burners. Don't ask how I obtained this estimate. The RIAA doesn't know how it gets their either!
I elect to become the Lord of the Passwords.
Lord of the Passwords! ??? Profit. Definitely.
Why? To enhance my resume and make me rich.
Why? Simply, its the ultimate backup to the getting hit by a bus. If you and the VP/President who are trusted password holders are hit by a bus, how will your company survive? I will not go outside. No bus will ever hit me.
Make your legacy count for something. Don't let your work go to waste. Hire me today!
I wholeheartedly agree. The gist of many of the other posts on this story is that the only ethical and moral answers to this problem are "A" "B" and "C". He chose "D" - none of the above. The problem with moral and ethical debates is that no matter what you think, the person making the desicion is going to make it on the basis of their morals and values. Unless, its illegal - but sometimes you don't have a legitimate choice.
Some are calling him disgrunteled, deranged, mentally ill here. I'm sure some of you are at the point of (or have been) burnout. 100+ hour weeks being the norm in IT. Its easy to make irrational desicions if you want to paint them as such under these conditions. Its also probably important to protect your hard work. Short-staffed and not taking much credit for the work and missing out on family time for a "stupid" network - who wouldn't lock someone out of ruining all your hard work? Assuming he did the work properly.
Its ironic too that many "ethical hackers" on Slashdot regularly say that if/when they find a bug, exploit in code or a website, they notify the admin before telling others so they can fix the problem. In this case, if the admin is right, I don't see why using same argument, that locking everyone out of the system except himself (only one person knows the password) isn't a bad idea until the *proper* staff and resources are available to fix the problem.
Surely the song "All I want for Christmas" is prior art. Does it count if a database makes reference *to* a wishlist. Surely, this song is stored in a database. If so, case solved! Next.
Disclaimer of sorts: I studied Computer Science at university. I was turned off by programming as I found it boring (C, C++, java). The product that comes about, I always find interesting. I've moved to more overall functional and easier to learn/use language for my personal use. I won't mention langauge ... no flamewar. ;) I think getting a former programmer-in-training as opposed to a site loaded with professionals might help.
I'd say let your son learn a language. I started with BASIC on the C64. It was fun and I was 8 yrs old at the time. If your son knows HTML, I good place to start might be PHP or Ruby. I think syntatically (as a now-nonprogrammer) its probably the easiest to learn.
IMHO, after about a year of programming, assuming he's not completely turned off, have him do some much more complicated tasks (within "reason"). Have him do it in C or C++ (given time to learn it). I'm serious about this. If he wants to continue to post-secondary education, better to find out if he REALLY wants to do programming, or if he's doing it 'cause dad does it. You or he can save having to plunk down a couple grand (or more) for one semester or one year of tuition. My dad is a doctor. I wasn't pressured to do it either. I thought I would be really interested in it as well. I wasn't.
Thanks! Now one less Chinese thing to buy. I was hooked on Reebox but inconsistencies and lower quality padding over last 2 years are hurting me (literally). So I'll try the domestic NB shoes. My knees are likely to say: Thank you!