It will almost certainly raise the quality of the online comments (real names, people who care enough to pay) which in turn may build one of the few worthwhile community forums around a news site.
But no-one will ever know about it unless they pay to view the site. And that's even less likely now that no-one links to the Times anymore.
And yes, the Times is 'just a rag' these days; Murdoch has pretty much destroyed the repuation that was built up 'over hundreds of years'.
Because cars are not driven by computer, any driver that is remotely conscious of his surroundings would be able to spot the difficulty with trying to utilize paths that are clearly not intended for anyone to utilize.
But people who don't know what they're doing are probably the most likely to rely on a sat-nav and not question it when it tells them to do something stupid.
It's not like you're going to make a bigger bomb than the US has. You're just going to get some dumb-ass to blow his hand off.
If said dumb-ass is an aspiring suicide bomber, that would sound like a win all around.
I would have thought that unless there was an immediate threat, the FBI would have much preferred to monitor the blog and find out who was posting and reading so they could arrest the bad guys, rather than shutting it down and letting them know they've been rumbled.
Well, yeah, technically you're right - an asteroid causing the extinction of the human species would cost nothing at all, so the cost of trying to defend against it would certainly be vastly higher. Good thinking!
Exactly: in the real world the odds of such an impact are minute over forseeable human timescales, so spending trillions of dollars to 'defend' against it would be insane. Even the odds of losing a city in that time are tiny, so spending billions would probably be a waste too.
But the 'true believes' demand we should spend vast amounts of money now to try to stop something that's unlikely to occur in the next few million years. And probably own shares in 'Asteroid Stoppers, Inc'.
If you're looking at a global warming analogy, you'd probably be better to look at the numerous calls for 'global asteroid defence' against a threat which would almost certainly cost vastly less than the cost of trying to defend against it.
The scary part of this is that even if current planners have no intention of ever fighting a war against the U.S. history has shown that when military and political leaders believe that they are in a position to win such a war they often choose to wage it even if a rational analysis says that it is a bad idea (see World War I).
The Germans would easily have captured France in WWI if they'd been rational; it was the irrational changes to their highly rational war plan that led to disaster on the Western Front. IMHO the Chinese military seem far more rational than the US military at this time... they have a clear idea of who their opponents are and they're developing the most effective methods of defeating them.
Except... that habitat will have its own go-gooders and enforcers, and the rules will be vastly more restrictive than anything you see here.
Somehow I doubt the average nerd is going to load up a spaceship with clones of their mother. Oh, OK maybe you're right:).
That's just a consequence of living with others in a closed space, and the absolutely vital requirement for extreme resource conservation. Someone's going to be on your case if you so much as whack off anywhere but in the water reclaimation port.
You'd be mad to try travelling light years in something that fragile; you'd be almost certain to die due to some kind of failure during the decades required to get to another star. I'm thinking more like an O'Neill habitat than an Apollo capsule.
Consumers should choose Windows if they want a sound system that actually works right. Repeat after me: There is no excuse for latent sound in 2010. When I shoot another player in an online game, I would like to hear the sound in sync with the action, and not 100 ms later.
Weird; I've only played a few games on Ubuntu (e.g. UT99 and Guild Wars) but I haven't noticed anything like that.
The bigger problem with Ubuntu sound is when it doesn't work at all; for example trying to play any kind of sound while there's a Flash plugin running in Firefox. Or xbmc with Ion's HDMI audio, which used to work in 9.10 and kind of works a bit after a lot of reconfiguration in 10.04.
Guess what: The girls on the voyage to Proxima Centauri in 2300 aren't going to like you any more than the ones here and now, and you'll be hating them just as much for it.
Yes they will, because they'll be programmed to. Nerds will fill their starships with Natalie Portman clones whose sole purpose in life is to worship them.
While I do tend to agree that sitting on a spaceship travelling for years from one place to another is likely to be boring after a while, as I see it the biggest benefit will not be gettig where you're going, but getting away from where you were. It's pretty hard for do-gooders to tell other people what to do if they're living in a self-contained habitat light years away in deep space.
Law is a difficult topic and requires a lot of training.
Law is a difficult topic and requires a lot of training because laws are written by lawyers. So long as that's the case, law-makers will never do in one paragraph what they could stretch to a thousand pages.
This series very blatantly sets out to get away from that. Even from the very first episode where he has to save the Earth without any of his usual toys - or in his own words: "No TARDIS. No Sonic Screwdriver. Two minutes to spare!".
Cool; sounds like it's worth watching when it does get here:).
even when they aren't doing that, the writing is just bad.
But it was in most of the previous seasons too. Whatsisname's scripts basically came down to setting up a situation with lots of conflict and then waving the sonic screwdriver to make everything go back to normal ('Doctor, there are three million Daleks outside who want to talk to you about this script for Hamlet they've worked out' buzz from sonic screwdriver 'Not any more'); not to mention Rose reappearing every third episode even though at the end of the episode the Doctor would say that she really was gone for good this time.
Admittedly this season hasn't actually got here yet so for all I know it could be even worse, but it doesn't have much to compare to.
Apparently the Dutch offered to send ships that could recover 97% of the oil a couple of months back, but they weren't allowed due to US environmental regulations:
Yes, don't trust anything unless you absolutely have to. In user land, for example, we have SELinux and Apparmor to prevent applications from accessing things they shouldn't; protecting the kernel is obviously harder.
How about the Linux model, where if the user decides to load it then it can do absolutely anything with the system?
Generally speaking, Linux drivers are only installed if signed by the distro repository, and you have to trust that key: if it's compromised you're toast. Windows has three bazillion drivers signed by three bazillion keys and only one needs to be compromised.
Nor will Linux drivers be loaded automatically from a random USB key just because you browsed there.
it's hardly an OS problem if some wanker has written a nasty driver then signed it with a legit cert
I somewhat disagree: it clearly shows the flaws in an either/or trust model of that kind. Either it's signed and it's trusted to do anything at all to your system or it's not trusted to do anything at all... you only need one rogue signing key to break that model.
So, this is a problem if you've left your router with its default admin password, or there's a vulnerability in the firmware which can be exploited. The same as every other possible exploit of consumer^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hall hardware.
Fortunately there aren't millions of routers out there with known vulnerabilities allowing you to reprogram them without a password, often just using a simple URL you can put in an image tag. Oh, hang on, there are: the router my ISP ships was exploited a year or two back in some Central American country to reprogram its DNS server to redirect banking accesses to a phishing site.
But I agree, I don't really see what this attack adds over just using an image tag going to http://router/powned.
Totally useless comment. An attack on a SCADA is a targetted attack. If you are running it on another type of OS, the attacker will simply write it for that OS.
Because all OSes are equally vulnerable to being owned by anyone who plugs a USB key into the hardware.
"A few minutes running from place to place" is the worst description of the game you could have ever devised
No, it's a very accurate description of the game.
You start the game, and have to sit through thirty-second animations just to get into the character creation. You create a character and have to sit through about ten minutes of poorly-acted, poorly rendered unskippable cut-scene in order to get to a point where you can actually control your character and make any kind of decision about what's going on. You go to a planet where you spend a minute or so running around before the game goes into another cutscene where you're forced to watch one of your Artificial Stupidiy squad-mates (who was obviously going to die from his laughable dialog on the ship) do something really stupid that you'd never have let them do. You get another couple of minutes of walking from that place to another place and shooting a couple of things with horribly consolised combat system (why do I have to press a special key to use cover when I could just, like hide behind the cover) while your AS squad-mates happily stand out in the open while the bad guys are shooting at you. Then you have to sit through another long, tedious, unskippable cut-scene before you shoot a few more guys. Then you have to watch another long, unskippable cut-scene where your character does something stupid that you would never do before you get sent back to the ship to sit through another long, unskippable cut-scene. Then you get to spend a couple of minutes walking around the ship before you're subjected to the next long, unskippable cut-scene.
A couple of minutes walking around between each tedious cut-scene is not a game in any sense that I understand; if I wanted to watch a bad SF B-movie I could buy one for $3 from the bargain bin and it would be over much faster without the tediously bad shooting sequences and, unless Tim Hines directed it, with far less walking.
Re: Your Bioware silliness. Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2, and Dragon Age: Origins. Consider your confidence restored, you're very welcome, thank me later.
ME1 is one of the worst 'games' I've ever played, and the ME2 demo seemed even worse. I have to use the quotes because I can hardly call it a game when it mostly consists of a few minutes running from place to place and the occasional poorly implemented combat sequence between interminable and unskippable cutscenes; ME2 did all that and also eliminated any need to think because whatever you were supposed to do next was indicated by a big flashing box.
Re: Bethesda. Fallout 3. Again, consider your confidence restored, you're very welcome, thank me later.
Fallout 3, one of the pioneers of stupid DLC tricks?
Other than the fact that the type of casualty which would lead to the need for this kind of escape system is such a far fetched edge case that you might as well stock holy water, garlic, and a gun with silver bullets as well...
Wihch would you rather have: a big hole in your shuttle heat shield and no chance of surviving, or a big hole in your shuttle heat shield and seven MOOSE packs in a locker that give you some chance of surviving?
Because while you can probably spare a few hundred kilos for emergency survival, you sure aren't going to carry an escape capsule which can bring your whole crew back to Earth in comfort, just in case it's needed.
Nope. You don't need guidance for an emergency reentry-vehicle following a ballistic trajectory; sure, it's nice, but if you shape the heat-shield correctly then drag will keep it pointed in the right direction so you don't burn up... at worst you need a light cold gas thruster just to get the heat-shield oriented before you hit the atmosphere.
And where do you plan to store your Apollo-sized reentry capsule in the space shuttle? Note of course that it would have to be larger than Apollo in order to carry a full shuttle crew.
You can't carry seven personal reentry capsules on a space shuttle because you have neither the space or the mass available to do so. You can carry seven parachutes and inflatable personal heat shields.
Slashdot Mirror
It will almost certainly raise the quality of the online comments (real names, people who care enough to pay) which in turn may build one of the few worthwhile community forums around a news site.
But no-one will ever know about it unless they pay to view the site. And that's even less likely now that no-one links to the Times anymore.
And yes, the Times is 'just a rag' these days; Murdoch has pretty much destroyed the repuation that was built up 'over hundreds of years'.
Because cars are not driven by computer, any driver that is remotely conscious of his surroundings would be able to spot the difficulty with trying to utilize paths that are clearly not intended for anyone to utilize.
But people who don't know what they're doing are probably the most likely to rely on a sat-nav and not question it when it tells them to do something stupid.
It's not like you're going to make a bigger bomb than the US has. You're just going to get some dumb-ass to blow his hand off.
If said dumb-ass is an aspiring suicide bomber, that would sound like a win all around.
I would have thought that unless there was an immediate threat, the FBI would have much preferred to monitor the blog and find out who was posting and reading so they could arrest the bad guys, rather than shutting it down and letting them know they've been rumbled.
Well, yeah, technically you're right - an asteroid causing the extinction of the human species would cost nothing at all, so the cost of trying to defend against it would certainly be vastly higher. Good thinking!
Exactly: in the real world the odds of such an impact are minute over forseeable human timescales, so spending trillions of dollars to 'defend' against it would be insane. Even the odds of losing a city in that time are tiny, so spending billions would probably be a waste too.
But the 'true believes' demand we should spend vast amounts of money now to try to stop something that's unlikely to occur in the next few million years. And probably own shares in 'Asteroid Stoppers, Inc'.
What absolute bunk.
If you're looking at a global warming analogy, you'd probably be better to look at the numerous calls for 'global asteroid defence' against a threat which would almost certainly cost vastly less than the cost of trying to defend against it.
The scary part of this is that even if current planners have no intention of ever fighting a war against the U.S. history has shown that when military and political leaders believe that they are in a position to win such a war they often choose to wage it even if a rational analysis says that it is a bad idea (see World War I).
The Germans would easily have captured France in WWI if they'd been rational; it was the irrational changes to their highly rational war plan that led to disaster on the Western Front. IMHO the Chinese military seem far more rational than the US military at this time... they have a clear idea of who their opponents are and they're developing the most effective methods of defeating them.
Except... that habitat will have its own go-gooders and enforcers, and the rules will be vastly more restrictive than anything you see here.
Somehow I doubt the average nerd is going to load up a spaceship with clones of their mother. Oh, OK maybe you're right :).
That's just a consequence of living with others in a closed space, and the absolutely vital requirement for extreme resource conservation. Someone's going to be on your case if you so much as whack off anywhere but in the water reclaimation port.
You'd be mad to try travelling light years in something that fragile; you'd be almost certain to die due to some kind of failure during the decades required to get to another star. I'm thinking more like an O'Neill habitat than an Apollo capsule.
Consumers should choose Windows if they want a sound system that actually works right. Repeat after me: There is no excuse for latent sound in 2010. When I shoot another player in an online game, I would like to hear the sound in sync with the action, and not 100 ms later.
Weird; I've only played a few games on Ubuntu (e.g. UT99 and Guild Wars) but I haven't noticed anything like that.
The bigger problem with Ubuntu sound is when it doesn't work at all; for example trying to play any kind of sound while there's a Flash plugin running in Firefox. Or xbmc with Ion's HDMI audio, which used to work in 9.10 and kind of works a bit after a lot of reconfiguration in 10.04.
I can't install the language patch (click on it in Opera, garbage on my screen. right click and save as, now I have it saved but how to install it??)
What language patch?
I can't use bittorrent, (can't install wine because I don't know how to install a package handler because of the above problem)
Why would you install Windows software when you can install equivalent Linux software instead?
Guess what: The girls on the voyage to Proxima Centauri in 2300 aren't going to like you any more than the ones here and now, and you'll be hating them just as much for it.
Yes they will, because they'll be programmed to. Nerds will fill their starships with Natalie Portman clones whose sole purpose in life is to worship them.
While I do tend to agree that sitting on a spaceship travelling for years from one place to another is likely to be boring after a while, as I see it the biggest benefit will not be gettig where you're going, but getting away from where you were. It's pretty hard for do-gooders to tell other people what to do if they're living in a self-contained habitat light years away in deep space.
Law is a difficult topic and requires a lot of training.
Law is a difficult topic and requires a lot of training because laws are written by lawyers. So long as that's the case, law-makers will never do in one paragraph what they could stretch to a thousand pages.
This series very blatantly sets out to get away from that. Even from the very first episode where he has to save the Earth without any of his usual toys - or in his own words: "No TARDIS. No Sonic Screwdriver. Two minutes to spare!".
Cool; sounds like it's worth watching when it does get here :).
even when they aren't doing that, the writing is just bad.
But it was in most of the previous seasons too. Whatsisname's scripts basically came down to setting up a situation with lots of conflict and then waving the sonic screwdriver to make everything go back to normal ('Doctor, there are three million Daleks outside who want to talk to you about this script for Hamlet they've worked out' buzz from sonic screwdriver 'Not any more'); not to mention Rose reappearing every third episode even though at the end of the episode the Doctor would say that she really was gone for good this time.
Admittedly this season hasn't actually got here yet so for all I know it could be even worse, but it doesn't have much to compare to.
Apparently the Dutch offered to send ships that could recover 97% of the oil a couple of months back, but they weren't allowed due to US environmental regulations:
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/dutch-oil-spill-response-team-standby-us-oil-disaster
Do you propose a better model?
Yes, don't trust anything unless you absolutely have to. In user land, for example, we have SELinux and Apparmor to prevent applications from accessing things they shouldn't; protecting the kernel is obviously harder.
How about the Linux model, where if the user decides to load it then it can do absolutely anything with the system?
Generally speaking, Linux drivers are only installed if signed by the distro repository, and you have to trust that key: if it's compromised you're toast. Windows has three bazillion drivers signed by three bazillion keys and only one needs to be compromised.
Nor will Linux drivers be loaded automatically from a random USB key just because you browsed there.
it's hardly an OS problem if some wanker has written a nasty driver then signed it with a legit cert
I somewhat disagree: it clearly shows the flaws in an either/or trust model of that kind. Either it's signed and it's trusted to do anything at all to your system or it's not trusted to do anything at all... you only need one rogue signing key to break that model.
Airlines should probably be treated like public utilities, if not actually socialized.
Yeah, putting the government in charge would _really_ improve airline travel.
They are already so heavily managed and burdened by government that they can hardly be called free enterprises.
Then, uh, get the government out of the way and let airlines run the airline business instead of burrowcrats.
So, this is a problem if you've left your router with its default admin password, or there's a vulnerability in the firmware which can be exploited. The same as every other possible exploit of consumer^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hall hardware.
Fortunately there aren't millions of routers out there with known vulnerabilities allowing you to reprogram them without a password, often just using a simple URL you can put in an image tag. Oh, hang on, there are: the router my ISP ships was exploited a year or two back in some Central American country to reprogram its DNS server to redirect banking accesses to a phishing site.
But I agree, I don't really see what this attack adds over just using an image tag going to http://router/powned.
Are you being sarcastic, or just delusional?
It's about as likely to happen as NASA getting a new heavy lifter off the ground by 2015; not that it matters since they have no use for it.
Totally useless comment. An attack on a SCADA is a targetted attack. If you are running it on another type of OS, the attacker will simply write it for that OS.
Because all OSes are equally vulnerable to being owned by anyone who plugs a USB key into the hardware.
"A few minutes running from place to place" is the worst description of the game you could have ever devised
No, it's a very accurate description of the game.
You start the game, and have to sit through thirty-second animations just to get into the character creation. You create a character and have to sit through about ten minutes of poorly-acted, poorly rendered unskippable cut-scene in order to get to a point where you can actually control your character and make any kind of decision about what's going on. You go to a planet where you spend a minute or so running around before the game goes into another cutscene where you're forced to watch one of your Artificial Stupidiy squad-mates (who was obviously going to die from his laughable dialog on the ship) do something really stupid that you'd never have let them do. You get another couple of minutes of walking from that place to another place and shooting a couple of things with horribly consolised combat system (why do I have to press a special key to use cover when I could just, like hide behind the cover) while your AS squad-mates happily stand out in the open while the bad guys are shooting at you. Then you have to sit through another long, tedious, unskippable cut-scene before you shoot a few more guys. Then you have to watch another long, unskippable cut-scene where your character does something stupid that you would never do before you get sent back to the ship to sit through another long, unskippable cut-scene. Then you get to spend a couple of minutes walking around the ship before you're subjected to the next long, unskippable cut-scene.
A couple of minutes walking around between each tedious cut-scene is not a game in any sense that I understand; if I wanted to watch a bad SF B-movie I could buy one for $3 from the bargain bin and it would be over much faster without the tediously bad shooting sequences and, unless Tim Hines directed it, with far less walking.
Re: Your Bioware silliness. Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2, and Dragon Age: Origins. Consider your confidence restored, you're very welcome, thank me later.
ME1 is one of the worst 'games' I've ever played, and the ME2 demo seemed even worse. I have to use the quotes because I can hardly call it a game when it mostly consists of a few minutes running from place to place and the occasional poorly implemented combat sequence between interminable and unskippable cutscenes; ME2 did all that and also eliminated any need to think because whatever you were supposed to do next was indicated by a big flashing box.
Re: Bethesda. Fallout 3. Again, consider your confidence restored, you're very welcome, thank me later.
Fallout 3, one of the pioneers of stupid DLC tricks?
Other than the fact that the type of casualty which would lead to the need for this kind of escape system is such a far fetched edge case that you might as well stock holy water, garlic, and a gun with silver bullets as well...
Wihch would you rather have: a big hole in your shuttle heat shield and no chance of surviving, or a big hole in your shuttle heat shield and seven MOOSE packs in a locker that give you some chance of surviving?
Because while you can probably spare a few hundred kilos for emergency survival, you sure aren't going to carry an escape capsule which can bring your whole crew back to Earth in comfort, just in case it's needed.
and RCS. And guidance
Nope. You don't need guidance for an emergency reentry-vehicle following a ballistic trajectory; sure, it's nice, but if you shape the heat-shield correctly then drag will keep it pointed in the right direction so you don't burn up... at worst you need a light cold gas thruster just to get the heat-shield oriented before you hit the atmosphere.
And where do you plan to store your Apollo-sized reentry capsule in the space shuttle? Note of course that it would have to be larger than Apollo in order to carry a full shuttle crew.
But thats just a small capsule.
No, _it's not a capsule at all_
You can't carry seven personal reentry capsules on a space shuttle because you have neither the space or the mass available to do so. You can carry seven parachutes and inflatable personal heat shields.
Think ejection seat, not Apollo capsule.