Um, the point of a VPN is to set up a secure tunnel to get to your destination network with the traffic encrypted en route, so it doesn't matter whether your ISP is snooping on your traffic or not. Now, if you wanted to host your destination server or network somewhere like Canada or someplace with less intrusive government monitoring, that might well be a good thought.
The problem is that the US via CALEA is requiring things like Cisco routers used to terminate many VPN connections be wiretap-friendly, so using a VPN tunnel might not be as safe as it was before that law came about. Cisco has a page about this, but it doesn't actually give you much specific info:
We'd have to work around that nasty speed of light thing first.
True, that's a big problem compared with the popular "space opera" notion we've gotten from Star Wars, Star Trek, and so forth. But if we could get a vessel up to 10% of light speed, we could get to Epsilon Eridani in about 107 years, which isn't an impossibly long timeframe.
Of course, the fastest we've gotten any space craft going is about 0.02% of light speed (Helios 2 @ 241,350 km/h), if I've done my math right, but that took advantage of the solar gravity well to accelerate into a tighter orbit, rather than fighting out of it enough to reach escape velocity with respect to Sol. The Voyager series craft, for contrast, have managed to reach system escape velocity, but only retained a velocity of about 0.003% of c (62,100 km/h). We'd need to get them going some thousand times faster than what we've done so far to make interstellar voyages to the closer stars doable within something vaguely close to a human lifespan.
Seconded. The actual Exoplanets site here has a lot more real data, it actually links to the abstracts of the papers where the discoveries were actually published, and has zero ads:
Maybe not so lucky. Most of the planets in our solar system (not all) have their rotational axes mostly parallel to their orbital axis. I assume there's some reason for that, perhaps simply if they are spun off of the sun then they acquire it's angular momentum. Or like the moon where tidal forces lock the orbit. In any case then, the next question is if the solar systems in our galaxy mainly orbit in the plane of the galaxies rotation. I'd assume so.
The rotational axis of a planet isn't nearly as important as whether the planets orbit with similar inclinations with regard to the equator of their parent star-- for the transit method to work, the planet has to cross in front of the star in the same plane that we are observing from for it to be visible. Except for Pluto, every other planet in our solar system orbits within nearly the same plane as the equator of the Sun-- Mercury is skewed by 7 degrees, but everything else is between 1 and 4 degrees.
By contrast, the inclination of the rotational axis of the planet itself with regard to its orbital plane is much larger and much more varied, check here for the data:
Based on accretion modelling of theoretical systems, the likely explanation is that most planets form around the same time as the central sun is coalescing enough gas to ignite, and end up inheriting very similar angular momentum in terms of their orbit. It would be expected that they would rotate on their axes in the same plane, but collisions between large asteroids or planetesimals could well have enough energy to alter the direction that the planet spins. The amount of energy required to move the planet to a significantly different orbit is much larger, so it is not expected that such collisions would change the size of the orbit, the length of the year, etc, by very much.
I'm not sure I'd consider something on a parabolic or hyperbolic orbit to be a "satellite".
Agreed. Elsewhere in the article in mentions the "Solar Wind Experiment" as being on the "Wind" *spacecraft*. On the other hand, it's not unreasonable to consider this thing as being a satellite of the Sun, assuming it's not going faster than Sol's escape velocity...?
I can easily believe a creationist would read "6 days to get a degree" literally as "6 years" in practice, but then they'd could simply believe that the time felt like it was "six eons", and it would all work out exactly as God (or the Holy Noodly Appendage) planned it.
The hydrogen mentioned is not hydrogen it's protons (hydrogen without the electron), which are accelareted by the Suns magnetic field.
True, but a bare proton rapidly latches onto any nearby atoms which have an electron cloud to form a very strong ionic bond, forming something like HeH+ (prefered) or H2H+ from the stuff likely to be readily available in the solar wind.
Here on Earth, a bare proton is the acid part of (water-based) chemistry-- stuff like H2SO4 or HF, etc, lose a proton and it latches onto a nearby water molecule to make H2OH+ [plus several more (H2O)s clustering to that]. Anyway, so long as the proton/hydrogen atom stays ionized, the atom it's hanging out with is going to be dragged along with it when the proton gets accelerated by the Sun's magnetic fields, flares, and all of that cool stuff.
I'd imagine that as drag slows the faster-moving gas in the wind, each molecule will have more and more time for a free electron to show up from the huge amperage in the solar arcs & flares, and de-ionize the bare proton.
Why is this making the/. is beyond me"
Hmm. I gather that the editor thought that topics related to the Sun would have a certain rarity factor for your typical pale Slashdot geek.:-) Besides, if you RTA, you'd notice that they said understanding this kinda plasma stuff would help us here make better large-screen plasma displays and perhaps laptop screens and so forth.
Solar Plasma => Better Computer Displays ought to parse OK here on/.
I figure many people on Slashdot are a bit odd from time to time-- at the very least-- so a "+/-1 Crazy" mod might not indicate much more than "+1 Still Breathing" option would. But I want to find a way of modding people "+1 Drunk" or "+2 Drunker":
99 unmodded posts on Slashdot, 99 posts to go, Take one down, mod it around, 98 unmodded posts on Slashdot...
Were you expecting someone to answer "no"? Even on Slashdot, that seems to be an odd question to ask someone else...:-)
Do you mean to imply there is some other subjective perspective we should be taking in describing our existence/world/experience (such as describing planets)?
Sure. Try using your imagination.
If that doesn't work out, try listening to Terrence McKenna with DMT.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why would a sphere have low gravity? Couldn't you just add mass to the shell to increase gravity?
Oddly enough, no.:-)
Extra mass farther away from you than the center of gravity doesn't count-- if you dug a very deep tunnel towards the center of the earth, you'd find yourself weighing less the deeper you got.
...except I can't really see why a corporation would bother paying people to feed the/. trolls.
Salespeople call "feeding the audience" "advertising". Salepeople like their companies to spend lots of money advertising because they tend to get a percentage as commision. Slashdot normally displays two ads per page, which are probably worth around a buck per pageview apiece....
I already find it a bit odd to exist in a society where it seems to be of great importance for things like a cup of coffee to come with a "WARNING: contents are hot!" statement, and where a pack of toothpicks comes with warnings about not sticking them into your ears or your eyes.
Anyway, so I spent a moment trying to figure out how Apple might write a disclaimer suggesting that you probably shouldn't insert an iPod up your butt, even if for some reason someone thought that doing so was a good idea. Fortunately, my mental censor starting activating....
I don't think we've gotten tachyon-based Internet connections working yet...although there are probably VC firms who would toss money at a startup which claimed to make such things.:-)
Anyway, yes, you're right that it's much farther to do a round-trip to geosynchonous orbit than to do a bounce off of something in LEO, but the fixed position of geosync orbits is much more suitable for a continuous connection than having to swap between low-orbit satellites as they move into and out of your field of view.
Cable might be a low tech solution, but it's a proven one and is the shortest distance between two points.
It'd be shorter to take a linear path through the earth than to follow a "great circle" arc along the surface. Actually, come to think of it, what we should do is acquire some old-fashioned Russian nuclear reactors, and have them do the Chernobyl/China Syndrome thing in an appropriate location, and run the cable down through the resulting tunnel to the other side.
Viola! Shorter cable runs, and anyone who thinks about driving a backhoe or dropping a ship anchor to break the fibre had better be prepared to deal with the radiation and fallout....
And what, pray tell, is Time Warner getting patent infringement suits over? Or patenting themselves for that matter?
Cable set-top boxes & internet routers. Mechanisms for correcting the optical dispersion of long-distance fibre runs. Fibre or coax in-line amplifiers. Stuff like that.
You have a point, but I think the Honeynet project has a better one-- the RIAA and MediaSentry do all kinds of proactive seeding of bad audio files, scanning for open filesharing ports, etc, etc...but a honeynet starts off by being passive and only responds to connections which are initiated from elsewhere.
If you discover a subnet which scans your IP range and snarfs up a buncha email addresses which have never been publicised elsewhere (and are hidden behind appropriate robots.txt or META noindex,nofollow tags), and then later you find lots of spam coming towards these addresses, you can track them down much more precisely. Of course, some or many of the IPs involved will be from random virusized dynamic IPs at large ISPs, but I betcha they'll be able to track down a number of static subnets running on shady ISPs who tolerate spammers.
At least in most states, you have to pay a "vehicle excise tax" in order to register it and get a license plate-- but that's not an income tax, though. If you don't drive the vehicle on public roads, perhaps because it needs a lot of repair, you don't need to pay....
You are right up there with the GNU folk when they say "To release a non-free program is always ethically tainted." Which ethics demand that other people consult you and design their product to your wants before offering it for sale when you may not even buy it?
None whatsoever. You've responded to the grandparent, but your response veers in an entirely different path than the original point.
While there are a few people who believe that non-free programs are always tainted, and RMS probably leads that list-- there are plenty of people writing GPL'ed software who also do commercial/proprietary development from time to time, or even every day as a part of their normal job. I don't see anything wrong with someone writing and selling software if they and their customers agree, so long as they don't try to prevent other people from writing free software which can do similar things.
To get back to the original point, if you own a machine, it's yours and you have the right to control what it does, what software runs on it, and so forth. If you want to run proprietary software, free software, or some combination of both, that's entirely up to you. The problem comes when proprietary software tries to prevent you from controlling what your machine does, ie by installing malicious software which cannot be easily deleted, or which runs and does things you don't want the software to do (ie, send out spam, display pop-up ads, prevent you from burning CD's [think StarForce], etc).
While I don't like the "pay for extra content model", the solution is to buy other games, or to play free ones (Nethack, Angband, Scorched Earth/Scorched 3D), not to stop playing entirely....
There are two stable possibilities: where the two stars orbit each other fairly closely (ie, 0-4 AU from the article, IIRC), and planets then orbit the common center of gravity formed by these two stars...or where one star has a very distant orbit, which is so far that it doesn't disrupt planets close in to the bigger primary.
If the second binary star is in a medium-sized orbit (ie, somewhere between where Jupiter and Pluto are in our system), it seems to be the case that this disrupts the planet-forming disk of gas so much that no planets are likely to form.
If you want to see a full list of all known exoplanets, go here: http://exoplanets.org/planets.shtml The column marked "a (AU)" is orbital radius, where 1 AU is the earth's distance from the sun.
Nice. Perhaps having rm look at a filename called "-i" and interpret that as a command-line flag is probably the best "bug as feature" offered so far.:-)
Wow! I wasn't aware that Microsoft doesn't implement page zero as being unwritable under Windows.
On any system with a working protected memory/VM, you'd get a segv or bus error...I wonder how many bugs Windows programmers would catch if trying to dereference a NULL pointer (either for reading or for writing) actually generated an exception or error condition...?:-)
Adding cryptography or secure signing of zone files might be useful if you were either trying to keep info private from eavesdroppers, or wanted to verify that when you went to www.mybank.com, the address record you looked up was actually signed by your bank.
But nobody (or not many people) use DNSSEC to encrypt zone transfers, and almost everybody hits a recursive nameserver run by your ISP or perhaps local to your company's network, which means that the end-user is never going to know whether the DNS query they issued returned a signed response or was forged from the authoritative DNS server. When done well, DNS spoofing can completely mangle a lot of network interactions one would really like to take for granted, such as being able to look up Microsoft's windowsupdate site, Apple's software update, anti-virus update sites, and so forth.
Right now, you have to dig deep into the bowels of BIND to even notice whether a zone has been signed, and there is pretty much zero feedback about that status which propogates back to a client like a web browser or your platform-specific software update mechanism. Until that changes, I don't see DNSSEC doing anything really useful to solve the genuine problems which it might be useful to solve. If all you wanted was a way to encrypt zone transfers, using rsync over SSH is a lot easier to deal with.
Safari 2.0.4 under OS X deals with it mostly OK-- it beach-balls for a few seconds, and Safari's VSIZE jumps from ~300 MB to 2.5 GB, but it does open OK as a grey image with a white border. I can hear the disk swapping if I scroll around the image...:-)
Personally, my biggest concern about the proposed agenda is discussions about proxy registrations. I hold proxy registrations on three domains, and I feel it's important to me -- important enough that I would seriously consider dropping my domains if they were done away with.
You've got a point, but note that you can set up as many private domains for yourself and your company or clients as you like, without ever publicizing anything to anyone else. However, if you want your domains to be part of the world-wide consensus view of the DNS namespace, these domains have to be publicly available in order to function. If a domain is publically available, then there has to be some way to contact the domain's owner in order to deal with spam and other forms of network abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, the point of a VPN is to set up a secure tunnel to get to your destination network with the traffic encrypted en route, so it doesn't matter whether your ISP is snooping on your traffic or not. Now, if you wanted to host your destination server or network somewhere like Canada or someplace with less intrusive government monitoring, that might well be a good thought.
e pt/
The problem is that the US via CALEA is requiring things like Cisco routers used to terminate many VPN connections be wiretap-friendly, so using a VPN tunnel might not be as safe as it was before that law came about. Cisco has a page about this, but it doesn't actually give you much specific info:
http://www.cisco.com/wwl/regaffairs/lawful_interc
True, that's a big problem compared with the popular "space opera" notion we've gotten from Star Wars, Star Trek, and so forth. But if we could get a vessel up to 10% of light speed, we could get to Epsilon Eridani in about 107 years, which isn't an impossibly long timeframe.
Of course, the fastest we've gotten any space craft going is about 0.02% of light speed (Helios 2 @ 241,350 km/h), if I've done my math right, but that took advantage of the solar gravity well to accelerate into a tighter orbit, rather than fighting out of it enough to reach escape velocity with respect to Sol. The Voyager series craft, for contrast, have managed to reach system escape velocity, but only retained a velocity of about 0.003% of c (62,100 km/h). We'd need to get them going some thousand times faster than what we've done so far to make interstellar voyages to the closer stars doable within something vaguely close to a human lifespan.
Seconded. The actual Exoplanets site here has a lot more real data, it actually links to the abstracts of the papers where the discoveries were actually published, and has zero ads:
http://exoplanets.org/planets.shtml
The rotational axis of a planet isn't nearly as important as whether the planets orbit with similar inclinations with regard to the equator of their parent star-- for the transit method to work, the planet has to cross in front of the star in the same plane that we are observing from for it to be visible. Except for Pluto, every other planet in our solar system orbits within nearly the same plane as the equator of the Sun-- Mercury is skewed by 7 degrees, but everything else is between 1 and 4 degrees.
By contrast, the inclination of the rotational axis of the planet itself with regard to its orbital plane is much larger and much more varied, check here for the data:
http://www.dovada.com/orbital_data.htm
Based on accretion modelling of theoretical systems, the likely explanation is that most planets form around the same time as the central sun is coalescing enough gas to ignite, and end up inheriting very similar angular momentum in terms of their orbit. It would be expected that they would rotate on their axes in the same plane, but collisions between large asteroids or planetesimals could well have enough energy to alter the direction that the planet spins. The amount of energy required to move the planet to a significantly different orbit is much larger, so it is not expected that such collisions would change the size of the orbit, the length of the year, etc, by very much.
Linux supports X11, which seems to have all of the attributes you've listed....
Agreed. Elsewhere in the article in mentions the "Solar Wind Experiment" as being on the "Wind" *spacecraft*. On the other hand, it's not unreasonable to consider this thing as being a satellite of the Sun, assuming it's not going faster than Sol's escape velocity...?
I can easily believe a creationist would read "6 days to get a degree" literally as "6 years" in practice, but then they'd could simply believe that the time felt like it was "six eons", and it would all work out exactly as God (or the Holy Noodly Appendage) planned it.
True, but a bare proton rapidly latches onto any nearby atoms which have an electron cloud to form a very strong ionic bond, forming something like HeH+ (prefered) or H2H+ from the stuff likely to be readily available in the solar wind.
Here on Earth, a bare proton is the acid part of (water-based) chemistry-- stuff like H2SO4 or HF, etc, lose a proton and it latches onto a nearby water molecule to make H2OH+ [plus several more (H2O)s clustering to that]. Anyway, so long as the proton/hydrogen atom stays ionized, the atom it's hanging out with is going to be dragged along with it when the proton gets accelerated by the Sun's magnetic fields, flares, and all of that cool stuff.
I'd imagine that as drag slows the faster-moving gas in the wind, each molecule will have more and more time for a free electron to show up from the huge amperage in the solar arcs & flares, and de-ionize the bare proton.
Why is this making theHmm. I gather that the editor thought that topics related to the Sun would have a certain rarity factor for your typical pale Slashdot geek. :-) Besides, if you RTA, you'd notice that they said understanding this kinda plasma stuff would help us here make better large-screen plasma displays and perhaps laptop screens and so forth.
Solar Plasma => Better Computer Displays ought to parse OK here on /.
I figure many people on Slashdot are a bit odd from time to time-- at the very least-- so a "+/-1 Crazy" mod might not indicate much more than "+1 Still Breathing" option would. But I want to find a way of modding people "+1 Drunk" or "+2 Drunker":
99 unmodded posts on Slashdot,
99 posts to go,
Take one down, mod it around,
98 unmodded posts on Slashdot...
Were you expecting someone to answer "no"? Even on Slashdot, that seems to be an odd question to ask someone else... :-)
Do you mean to imply there is some other subjective perspective we should be taking in describing our existence/world/experience (such as describing planets)?
Sure. Try using your imagination.
If that doesn't work out, try listening to Terrence McKenna with DMT.
Couldn't you just add mass to the shell to increase gravity?
Oddly enough, no. :-)
Extra mass farther away from you than the center of gravity doesn't count-- if you dug a very deep tunnel towards the center of the earth, you'd find yourself weighing less the deeper you got.
...except I can't really see why a corporation would bother paying people to feed theSalespeople call "feeding the audience" "advertising". Salepeople like their companies to spend lots of money advertising because they tend to get a percentage as commision. Slashdot normally displays two ads per page, which are probably worth around a buck per pageview apiece....
Umm...what? :-)
I already find it a bit odd to exist in a society where it seems to be of great importance for things like a cup of coffee to come with a "WARNING: contents are hot!" statement, and where a pack of toothpicks comes with warnings about not sticking them into your ears or your eyes.
Anyway, so I spent a moment trying to figure out how Apple might write a disclaimer suggesting that you probably shouldn't insert an iPod up your butt, even if for some reason someone thought that doing so was a good idea. Fortunately, my mental censor starting activating....
Light is *slow*?! Umm, compared with what?
I don't think we've gotten tachyon-based Internet connections working yet...although there are probably VC firms who would toss money at a startup which claimed to make such things. :-)
Anyway, yes, you're right that it's much farther to do a round-trip to geosynchonous orbit than to do a bounce off of something in LEO, but the fixed position of geosync orbits is much more suitable for a continuous connection than having to swap between low-orbit satellites as they move into and out of your field of view.
Cable might be a low tech solution, but it's a proven one and is the shortest distance between two points.
It'd be shorter to take a linear path through the earth than to follow a "great circle" arc along the surface. Actually, come to think of it, what we should do is acquire some old-fashioned Russian nuclear reactors, and have them do the Chernobyl/China Syndrome thing in an appropriate location, and run the cable down through the resulting tunnel to the other side.
Viola! Shorter cable runs, and anyone who thinks about driving a backhoe or dropping a ship anchor to break the fibre had better be prepared to deal with the radiation and fallout....
Cable set-top boxes & internet routers. Mechanisms for correcting the optical dispersion of long-distance fibre runs. Fibre or coax in-line amplifiers. Stuff like that.
You have a point, but I think the Honeynet project has a better one-- the RIAA and MediaSentry do all kinds of proactive seeding of bad audio files, scanning for open filesharing ports, etc, etc...but a honeynet starts off by being passive and only responds to connections which are initiated from elsewhere.
If you discover a subnet which scans your IP range and snarfs up a buncha email addresses which have never been publicised elsewhere (and are hidden behind appropriate robots.txt or META noindex,nofollow tags), and then later you find lots of spam coming towards these addresses, you can track them down much more precisely. Of course, some or many of the IPs involved will be from random virusized dynamic IPs at large ISPs, but I betcha they'll be able to track down a number of static subnets running on shady ISPs who tolerate spammers.
*cough* PSInet/UUNet *cough* Telephonica.es *cough* cogentco *cough*
At least in most states, you have to pay a "vehicle excise tax" in order to register it and get a license plate-- but that's not an income tax, though. If you don't drive the vehicle on public roads, perhaps because it needs a lot of repair, you don't need to pay....
None whatsoever. You've responded to the grandparent, but your response veers in an entirely different path than the original point.
While there are a few people who believe that non-free programs are always tainted, and RMS probably leads that list-- there are plenty of people writing GPL'ed software who also do commercial/proprietary development from time to time, or even every day as a part of their normal job. I don't see anything wrong with someone writing and selling software if they and their customers agree, so long as they don't try to prevent other people from writing free software which can do similar things.
To get back to the original point, if you own a machine, it's yours and you have the right to control what it does, what software runs on it, and so forth. If you want to run proprietary software, free software, or some combination of both, that's entirely up to you. The problem comes when proprietary software tries to prevent you from controlling what your machine does, ie by installing malicious software which cannot be easily deleted, or which runs and does things you don't want the software to do (ie, send out spam, display pop-up ads, prevent you from burning CD's [think StarForce], etc).
While I don't like the "pay for extra content model", the solution is to buy other games, or to play free ones (Nethack, Angband, Scorched Earth/Scorched 3D), not to stop playing entirely....
There are two stable possibilities: where the two stars orbit each other fairly closely (ie, 0-4 AU from the article, IIRC), and planets then orbit the common center of gravity formed by these two stars...or where one star has a very distant orbit, which is so far that it doesn't disrupt planets close in to the bigger primary.
If the second binary star is in a medium-sized orbit (ie, somewhere between where Jupiter and Pluto are in our system), it seems to be the case that this disrupts the planet-forming disk of gas so much that no planets are likely to form.
If you want to see a full list of all known exoplanets, go here: http://exoplanets.org/planets.shtml
The column marked "a (AU)" is orbital radius, where 1 AU is the earth's distance from the sun.
Nice. Perhaps having rm look at a filename called "-i" and interpret that as a command-line flag is probably the best "bug as feature" offered so far. :-)
Wow! I wasn't aware that Microsoft doesn't implement page zero as being unwritable under Windows.
:-)
On any system with a working protected memory/VM, you'd get a segv or bus error...I wonder how many bugs Windows programmers would catch if trying to dereference a NULL pointer (either for reading or for writing) actually generated an exception or error condition...?
Adding cryptography or secure signing of zone files might be useful if you were either trying to keep info private from eavesdroppers, or wanted to verify that when you went to www.mybank.com, the address record you looked up was actually signed by your bank.
But nobody (or not many people) use DNSSEC to encrypt zone transfers, and almost everybody hits a recursive nameserver run by your ISP or perhaps local to your company's network, which means that the end-user is never going to know whether the DNS query they issued returned a signed response or was forged from the authoritative DNS server. When done well, DNS spoofing can completely mangle a lot of network interactions one would really like to take for granted, such as being able to look up Microsoft's windowsupdate site, Apple's software update, anti-virus update sites, and so forth.
Right now, you have to dig deep into the bowels of BIND to even notice whether a zone has been signed, and there is pretty much zero feedback about that status which propogates back to a client like a web browser or your platform-specific software update mechanism. Until that changes, I don't see DNSSEC doing anything really useful to solve the genuine problems which it might be useful to solve. If all you wanted was a way to encrypt zone transfers, using rsync over SSH is a lot easier to deal with.
Safari 2.0.4 under OS X deals with it mostly OK-- it beach-balls for a few seconds, and Safari's VSIZE jumps from ~300 MB to 2.5 GB, but it does open OK as a grey image with a white border. I can hear the disk swapping if I scroll around the image... :-)
You've got a point, but note that you can set up as many private domains for yourself and your company or clients as you like, without ever publicizing anything to anyone else. However, if you want your domains to be part of the world-wide consensus view of the DNS namespace, these domains have to be publicly available in order to function. If a domain is publically available, then there has to be some way to contact the domain's owner in order to deal with spam and other forms of network abuse.