Yellowstone's largest eruption was 2,500 times more powerful than St. Helens.
It's eruptions cover hundreds of square kilometers, not tens of thousands.
Most of the United States by area would see a few meters of ash, not a football field's worth (which would be plenty devestating enough).
Yay for mods blindly modding up posts that contain numbers as "informative."
This seems to be a backlash against too many instances of molesters given unbelievably light sentences, early parole despite being a clear risk for repeat offense, and so on. It's maddening that we have to swing back and forth like this without finding a reasonable solution in the middle.
Plot the magnitude of the crime on one axis and the length of the sentence on another - there's no correlation. The common sense isn't gone, it was never there. Laws are not passed because they are prudent and there is something to do, but because the idiot masses have panicked and demand that something be done. Hence we end up with a patchwork of ridiculous overshooting and undershooting.
It might help if America's sadistic prison system didn't gaurantee that anyone who isn't a hardened criminal going in will be one coming out, but that's another story.
If you're going to strip people of their rights, start with a group/groups that everyone hate(s). Then anyone protesting is clearly pro-[group everyone hates] so they are untrustworthy and suspect themselves. Works for anti-west terrorists. Worked for Bush. Worked for Pol Pot. Worked for McCarthy. Worked for Hitler. Worked for Stalin.
Yes, until you can jump over some major technical and philosophical hurdles:
It's fundamentally more difficult to transmit a given amount of information a longer distance - money x time ~= distance x data - so it will never be economical to extend my desktop's local bandwidth (now routinely measured in GBps) far enough away for thin clients to work well.
I've used --display over my lan plenty enough. If this is how your server-based suite is going to perform over a sub-millisecond-latency 100Mbps synchronous connection, give up now - responsiveness is obviously and horrifically inferior to local desktop. You're never going to beat this problem, because desktop bandwidth grows just like network bandwidth.
Do you really think it's a good idea to hand complete control over everything you can do with your computer^W dumb terminal to someone else?
Now it's not just lusers who get their identities stolen, I will too because some dumbass ran a trojan that let them take over the server.
Thin clients and dumb terminals are dead for a reason. Let them rest in peace.
I recently got KDE 4.2 installed and took it for a test drive. First, something about kernel 2.6.18 that I'd been using resulted in system crashes - not even Magic SysRq keys worked. Putting in an overdue new kernel fixed that and I took it for a test-run that ultimately lasted 2 days. My system isn't particularly great - 2.4Ghz Athlon64, 1GB DDR533, nVidia 7300gt, generic PATA hard drive - but KDE 4 ran like a champ. I got full and perfectly smooth compositing/transparency.
It is as you say very pretty. Endless configurability of effects/compositing/multidesktop/etc via right-clicking title bar and hitting "window behavior." However, I had to flip between 2 or 3 menus to setup my desktop switches! One to enable switching when the mouse is pressed against a side, a second to enable the plasmoid (grid/sphere/cylinder/etc) for the effect I selected, and a third to select the side I wanted to press against. That is a Bad Thing, but fixing it comes down to rearranging some menus. With compositing enabled, I of course had great fun playing with transparency and wiggly-windows and such.
I liked the "draw on desktop" widget greatly. Now, put a color picker/small pallet and line-width picker in the corner and you've got yourself a sale! This is good as both a silly toy and to let me jot down or highlight stuff for other users. Add a selectable "poweruser menu" (and name it that) that does some more sophisticated stuff and you've got a competitor for the electronic-whiteboard thing they used in some of my classes. Oh, and try to work on it's frame/capture rate. It's one of those things that's got to run smoothly.
The new colors for Konsole were nice, a bit more sedate and less glaringly saturated than 3.5's Konsole default. Kwrite was beautiful, loved the new syntax highlighting. Konqueror... Loved it to death. Canvas element support was very nice (yay, I can play most javascript games now), and at last my preferred browser has the "last session unexpectedly exited; restore?" dialog. Konqueror as a file browser - disappointing. The default is a nauseating exercise in "How much space can we waste with giant icons and whitespace." Seriously, monitors don't get too much past 1920x1200 before you go dual-panel - KDE 4 fullscreen showed maybe 120 icons whereas I just selected 250 in Konqueror. Personal opinion, I know; It was a fairly short exercise to kill the whitespace and shrink back to smallish icons.
Configuration and customizability were great, typically so of KDE. We need a tutorial here; I don't have any problem navigating through about 30 tabs to set things up my way, but new users would be either overwhelmed or never know how much their desktop could do. Even a short popup explaining what Akonadi is and why I just spent the time to let it onto my MySql installation would be nice. And why did it have a problem creating its personal database after I gave it privileges to do so? Anyway, there's so much KDE 4 can do - most people will need a guided tour.
The bad... Okay, it's simply not acceptable for my keyboard to stop working about once a day and force me to exit to console and startx again. I don't care why, not acceptable - fix it, now, or this isn't going anywhere. This is ultimately what made me end my test-drive and decide not to move my emails/etc over yet. I did however discover that KDE4's desktop restore is fantastically faster than 3.5's - kudos.
There really needs to be a "taskbar always on top" option. I spent some time looking and if it's there it's hidden so it might as well not be there. Every user of Windows and previous versions of KDE and Gnome will expect the "max size" button to cover everything but the taskbar and for good reason!
Oh yeah, scroll wheel can change window opacity - good. Letting it scroll a window down to 0% opacity and disappearing - bad, no matter how good it would be for pranks.
Ultimately, I miss my "spiffy new desktop" but it's got a few glitches (fix the no-keyboard thing and I'm back) that are enough for me to hesitate. Final verdict: Tried 4.2 beta 1, waiting for 4.2.1 so I can get my asciifish screensaver back!
No, not the pansy thing using chemicals - the original where you blow yourself into space using nuclear bombs and pusher plates. No other way you'll ever get enough materials up there, not even enough to start a mining operation if you kicked a passing asteroid into high orbit. For that matter, there's no other way we can possibly establish a meaningful presence in space absent major breakthroughs in materials science and/or theoretical physics.
By "meaningful," I mean space stations with at least hundreds of people on them. Bases on other planets. In short, something that will survive the planet-depopulating fuckup that's going to happen sooner or later and have enough genetic diversity to continue.
I just checked and my box (2.4Ghz Athlon 64, 1GB 533Mhz ram, one pata hard drive, nvidia 7300gt video card) uses a 400W Duro supply. I've had this thing for about 5 years or so with no problems. It looks more like the $20 models than the expensive ones.
User: "Hi, I'd like to order $HIGH_SPEED_SERVICE."
Tech: "Ok, cool. Are you going to run an SMTP server?"
User: "Um... no, what's that?"
Tech: *Puts user down for modem w/firewall that rate-limits SMTP and doesn't allow sending to noncommercial IP blocks*
Spammer: "shit shit shit, my bots can't send any email!"
GaAs also has an inferior hole mobility, so you're out of luck trying to make anything that requires fast complementary pairs of transistors. Emitter-coupled logic is good to go though - enjoy your CPU eating 400 watts no matter what it's doing.
In short, they don't realize that it takes both the United part and the States part before the United States of Europe will work. So until they do, we're trapped in a metastable state and waiting for it to decay.
There are plenty unhappy people in America but no homegrown suicide bombers. What we don't have is a system that explicitly sets out to systematically oppress and render voiceless segments of the population - that is what's behind suicide bombers, because it takes away any value life has.
Then for the most part we get into a bullshit pissing contest of "your voice can't be heard because you're violent" and "we turn to violence because you won't let us be heard" to avoid anyone having to admit they're wrong.
Fire in particular has enough big explodey things (Rebirth of the Blight and destruction of the frigate, attacks on the High Beyond, destruction of Relay & Sjandra Kei, battle at Harmonious Repose, final battle with the Blight fleet, and Countermeasure's vengeance, along with several fights on the Tine's World) to sate the stupid masses while the rest of us sit back and watch Vinge's fantastic opera play out.
Deepness I'm a bit more hesitant about... So many of the great things about that book, especially what it has to say about governance, would just be too subtle. The masses would entirely miss the point while 40 years of quiet interplay passed before Pham takes action...
False. The existence of a bot on my PC doesn't endanger my life. Nor does it stop me from using that PC to surf the net, listen to MP3s, or watch bittorent-downloaded tv shows.
Oh well aren't you a self-centered douchebag. It doesn't immediately and personally harm me so fuck everyone else I'm hurting along the way. By that logic, I have the right to pour used chemicals and etchants down my drain because it gets things done from my perspective and doesn't immediately hurt me.
If by "stolen" you mean "I kept handing my PIN, account number, and mother's maiden name over to the same criminals no matter how many times I was told not to," then yes. Yes you should, for your own protection.
There's a third asshole in this scene: YOU. If you don't want slashdot to be assholes to you, stop being assholes to us! There's no "but he did it first" cycle bullshit you can pull here - You letting your machine be used for spamming is the first wrong.
Clean your machine up and stop aiding & abetting the theft of our time, money, and network bandwidth and you'll find we can be suprisingly reasonable.
You have no more right to let your spambot- and virus-riddled computer terrorize the greater Internet than you have to let your 10 year old kids drive themselves to school over public roads.
If you'd like to set up a private lan (or even private wan) and let the spambots blast away on it, go right ahead. But doing that to the public internet makes you an accomplice in the theft of services from me and every node that the spambot's garbage has to be routed through.
We've got a 42" 1080p lcd tv and a Dish HD to feed it. The video is (presumably) 1080p over analog component. I can see the difference, but I truly don't give a shit for the most part.
When we still had the SD DVR and I had to stretch Stargate Atlantis (meaning the effective resolution was sub-SD) to fill the screen, I got tweaked more than a little. But other than that (which doesn't happen anymore with the non-4:3-aware HD DVR), I can honestly say that I don't much care. Yeah, I can pause Law & Order and count the strands of Elizabeth Rohm's hair or stop Atlantis and count the stubble in John Sheperd's beard - but so what?
I'm here to watch the criminals get caught or the Wraith be foiled again, not to stroke my e-penis to the thought of how awesome my screen's picture is. Unless the picture is suffering horrible abberations or the audio is like 64kbps mp3, those don't really impede the story.
In conclusion: It's absolutely astonishing how many details your brain can paint in or interpolate if you let it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a fast connection, so I don't have to wait...
Yellowstone's largest eruption was 2,500 times more powerful than St. Helens.
It's eruptions cover hundreds of square kilometers, not tens of thousands.
Most of the United States by area would see a few meters of ash, not a football field's worth (which would be plenty devestating enough).
Yay for mods blindly modding up posts that contain numbers as "informative."
Plot the magnitude of the crime on one axis and the length of the sentence on another - there's no correlation. The common sense isn't gone, it was never there. Laws are not passed because they are prudent and there is something to do, but because the idiot masses have panicked and demand that something be done. Hence we end up with a patchwork of ridiculous overshooting and undershooting.
It might help if America's sadistic prison system didn't gaurantee that anyone who isn't a hardened criminal going in will be one coming out, but that's another story.
If you're going to strip people of their rights, start with a group/groups that everyone hate(s). Then anyone protesting is clearly pro-[group everyone hates] so they are untrustworthy and suspect themselves. Works for anti-west terrorists. Worked for Bush. Worked for Pol Pot. Worked for McCarthy. Worked for Hitler. Worked for Stalin.
So, why do you want to help rapists, notseamus?
Thin clients and dumb terminals are dead for a reason. Let them rest in peace.
I recently got KDE 4.2 installed and took it for a test drive. First, something about kernel 2.6.18 that I'd been using resulted in system crashes - not even Magic SysRq keys worked. Putting in an overdue new kernel fixed that and I took it for a test-run that ultimately lasted 2 days. My system isn't particularly great - 2.4Ghz Athlon64, 1GB DDR533, nVidia 7300gt, generic PATA hard drive - but KDE 4 ran like a champ. I got full and perfectly smooth compositing/transparency.
It is as you say very pretty. Endless configurability of effects/compositing/multidesktop/etc via right-clicking title bar and hitting "window behavior." However, I had to flip between 2 or 3 menus to setup my desktop switches! One to enable switching when the mouse is pressed against a side, a second to enable the plasmoid (grid/sphere/cylinder/etc) for the effect I selected, and a third to select the side I wanted to press against. That is a Bad Thing, but fixing it comes down to rearranging some menus. With compositing enabled, I of course had great fun playing with transparency and wiggly-windows and such.
I liked the "draw on desktop" widget greatly. Now, put a color picker/small pallet and line-width picker in the corner and you've got yourself a sale! This is good as both a silly toy and to let me jot down or highlight stuff for other users. Add a selectable "poweruser menu" (and name it that) that does some more sophisticated stuff and you've got a competitor for the electronic-whiteboard thing they used in some of my classes. Oh, and try to work on it's frame/capture rate. It's one of those things that's got to run smoothly.
The new colors for Konsole were nice, a bit more sedate and less glaringly saturated than 3.5's Konsole default. Kwrite was beautiful, loved the new syntax highlighting. Konqueror... Loved it to death. Canvas element support was very nice (yay, I can play most javascript games now), and at last my preferred browser has the "last session unexpectedly exited; restore?" dialog. Konqueror as a file browser - disappointing. The default is a nauseating exercise in "How much space can we waste with giant icons and whitespace." Seriously, monitors don't get too much past 1920x1200 before you go dual-panel - KDE 4 fullscreen showed maybe 120 icons whereas I just selected 250 in Konqueror. Personal opinion, I know; It was a fairly short exercise to kill the whitespace and shrink back to smallish icons.
Configuration and customizability were great, typically so of KDE. We need a tutorial here; I don't have any problem navigating through about 30 tabs to set things up my way, but new users would be either overwhelmed or never know how much their desktop could do. Even a short popup explaining what Akonadi is and why I just spent the time to let it onto my MySql installation would be nice. And why did it have a problem creating its personal database after I gave it privileges to do so? Anyway, there's so much KDE 4 can do - most people will need a guided tour.
The bad... Okay, it's simply not acceptable for my keyboard to stop working about once a day and force me to exit to console and startx again. I don't care why, not acceptable - fix it, now, or this isn't going anywhere. This is ultimately what made me end my test-drive and decide not to move my emails/etc over yet. I did however discover that KDE4's desktop restore is fantastically faster than 3.5's - kudos.
There really needs to be a "taskbar always on top" option. I spent some time looking and if it's there it's hidden so it might as well not be there. Every user of Windows and previous versions of KDE and Gnome will expect the "max size" button to cover everything but the taskbar and for good reason!
Oh yeah, scroll wheel can change window opacity - good. Letting it scroll a window down to 0% opacity and disappearing - bad, no matter how good it would be for pranks.
Ultimately, I miss my "spiffy new desktop" but it's got a few glitches (fix the no-keyboard thing and I'm back) that are enough for me to hesitate. Final verdict: Tried 4.2 beta 1, waiting for 4.2.1 so I can get my asciifish screensaver back!
Project Orion.
No, not the pansy thing using chemicals - the original where you blow yourself into space using nuclear bombs and pusher plates. No other way you'll ever get enough materials up there, not even enough to start a mining operation if you kicked a passing asteroid into high orbit. For that matter, there's no other way we can possibly establish a meaningful presence in space absent major breakthroughs in materials science and/or theoretical physics.
By "meaningful," I mean space stations with at least hundreds of people on them. Bases on other planets. In short, something that will survive the planet-depopulating fuckup that's going to happen sooner or later and have enough genetic diversity to continue.
This just in: There's only so much energy to be gained by shuffling a few valence shell electrons between atoms.
I just checked and my box (2.4Ghz Athlon 64, 1GB 533Mhz ram, one pata hard drive, nvidia 7300gt video card) uses a 400W Duro supply. I've had this thing for about 5 years or so with no problems. It looks more like the $20 models than the expensive ones.
So, uh, go Duro...
Egress filtering:
User: "Hi, I'd like to order $HIGH_SPEED_SERVICE."
Tech: "Ok, cool. Are you going to run an SMTP server?"
User: "Um... no, what's that?"
Tech: *Puts user down for modem w/firewall that rate-limits SMTP and doesn't allow sending to noncommercial IP blocks*
Spammer: "shit shit shit, my bots can't send any email!"
Forget lazy. I just don't want to get any more nasty, oily smears on my screen than I have to.
Now, bring me Dillinger's desk from Tron and you'll make me consider it...
GaAs also has an inferior hole mobility, so you're out of luck trying to make anything that requires fast complementary pairs of transistors. Emitter-coupled logic is good to go though - enjoy your CPU eating 400 watts no matter what it's doing.
In short, they don't realize that it takes both the United part and the States part before the United States of Europe will work. So until they do, we're trapped in a metastable state and waiting for it to decay.
I would say "must be a troll," but Poe's Law says otherwise.
You do know it was a few dipshits working for Verizon who have now been fired, right?
(!happy) !=> suicidal killer
hopeless => suicidal killer
There are plenty unhappy people in America but no homegrown suicide bombers. What we don't have is a system that explicitly sets out to systematically oppress and render voiceless segments of the population - that is what's behind suicide bombers, because it takes away any value life has.
Then for the most part we get into a bullshit pissing contest of "your voice can't be heard because you're violent" and "we turn to violence because you won't let us be heard" to avoid anyone having to admit they're wrong.
No one can ever be allowed to forget the day Wapanese script kiddies defaced perl.org with anime porn.
Fire in particular has enough big explodey things (Rebirth of the Blight and destruction of the frigate, attacks on the High Beyond, destruction of Relay & Sjandra Kei, battle at Harmonious Repose, final battle with the Blight fleet, and Countermeasure's vengeance, along with several fights on the Tine's World) to sate the stupid masses while the rest of us sit back and watch Vinge's fantastic opera play out.
Deepness I'm a bit more hesitant about... So many of the great things about that book, especially what it has to say about governance, would just be too subtle. The masses would entirely miss the point while 40 years of quiet interplay passed before Pham takes action...
I'm going with Czechoslovakia. And after that, I bet on selectRandom(EASTERN_EUROPEAN_COUNTRIES);
The simplest and most effective way to remove the threat of enraged spam victims nuking your machine is to make it stop spamming them.
Oh well aren't you a self-centered douchebag. It doesn't immediately and personally harm me so fuck everyone else I'm hurting along the way. By that logic, I have the right to pour used chemicals and etchants down my drain because it gets things done from my perspective and doesn't immediately hurt me.
If by "stolen" you mean "I kept handing my PIN, account number, and mother's maiden name over to the same criminals no matter how many times I was told not to," then yes. Yes you should, for your own protection.
There's a third asshole in this scene: YOU. If you don't want slashdot to be assholes to you, stop being assholes to us! There's no "but he did it first" cycle bullshit you can pull here - You letting your machine be used for spamming is the first wrong.
Clean your machine up and stop aiding & abetting the theft of our time, money, and network bandwidth and you'll find we can be suprisingly reasonable.
You have no more right to let your spambot- and virus-riddled computer terrorize the greater Internet than you have to let your 10 year old kids drive themselves to school over public roads.
If you'd like to set up a private lan (or even private wan) and let the spambots blast away on it, go right ahead. But doing that to the public internet makes you an accomplice in the theft of services from me and every node that the spambot's garbage has to be routed through.
We've got a 42" 1080p lcd tv and a Dish HD to feed it. The video is (presumably) 1080p over analog component. I can see the difference, but I truly don't give a shit for the most part.
When we still had the SD DVR and I had to stretch Stargate Atlantis (meaning the effective resolution was sub-SD) to fill the screen, I got tweaked more than a little. But other than that (which doesn't happen anymore with the non-4:3-aware HD DVR), I can honestly say that I don't much care. Yeah, I can pause Law & Order and count the strands of Elizabeth Rohm's hair or stop Atlantis and count the stubble in John Sheperd's beard - but so what?
I'm here to watch the criminals get caught or the Wraith be foiled again, not to stroke my e-penis to the thought of how awesome my screen's picture is. Unless the picture is suffering horrible abberations or the audio is like 64kbps mp3, those don't really impede the story.
In conclusion: It's absolutely astonishing how many details your brain can paint in or interpolate if you let it.
There is no possible way any ISP would reconnect someone like McColo out of ignorance: TeliaSonera was bribed.