I've run on KDE ever since I switched to Linux with Mandrake 8.2. One thing I've noticed of late is that Konqueror seems to freaking hemmorage memory over time. My machine has 1GB of ram, and eventually it reaches the point where Konqueror and X combine to use up 2/3 of my physical memory. Throw in Amarok and a few other low-level hogs (like mysqld) and it's page swapping time. At this point, I just have to restart my desktop (luckily KDE [mostly] saves it's state before doing this) and poof, back to being snappy.
It usually takes about two weeks to a month of nominal use, but still. I run my desktop continually, and it's an annoyance. I lose time-dependent web pages, SSL web pages, and all my SSH terminals.
IMO, something shouldn't be released out of alpha until "valgrind --leak-check=full --show-reachable=yes [app]" doesn't show any lost blocks more than a few hundred bytes.
Given sufficient resources, time, and dedication, ANY log can be altered.
If the "unalterable" log is maintained in software, it's a comparatively simple matter of hoisting it up on a VM. Since we're presumably talking about white-collar crime, it's a fair bet they have or can get root access to the machine to install the VM and rootkit to hide it. At that point, the CEO can do anything and the system can't fight back. Capture passwords of people logging in, alter data, you name it.
A hardware system would be more robust, but still vulnerable. I imagine the most likely attack vector would be Man in the Middle - Just take over the box that guards/drives the logger machine.
I think that we are going to soon see a lot of events like this, wherein information is recorded and stored indefinitely. It's an inevitable trend in a world where the price per unit storage is decreasing at an exponential or faster rate. As processing power and networking rates do the same, they are creating a situation where the cost of archiving previously used data and sorting through it in the future ceases to be an impediment.
And with the proper safegaurds, this is not a bad thing. In fact, it's unbelivably wonderful. There's no question of whether or not I committed the crime; System records indicate I was not there. What do I mean by proper safeguards? To start with, the system must be "open." By this, I mean that anyone must have access to all recorded streams without exception. The police can regularly download the info out of the plate scanner, I can download it, you can download it. I also mean that all accesses of the data should be archived by a given system as well and equally accessible. In short, my answer to "Quis Custodiet Custodes Ipsos" is that everyone does. And everyone can also watch everyone.
This kind of situation would create a self-perpetuating cycle of positive feedback to prevent abuse. If you're being a dick, looking through the system for no reason but to invade people's lives or find minor technicalities to harass them, it will be discovered. Then, the reaction will be others subjecting you to the same. Since you do not want this and know it will happen, you won't do it in the first place.
What I'm saying is that digital recording, processing, and storage are rapidly supplementing human eyes, the brain, and paper. Digital systems offer enormously superior accuracy and recall, without the possibility of bias. If it's done right, we can prevent the wrong people from us that for the wrong purpose. But fighting against it's mere existence won't help, work to guide it to the right outcome!
As it is now: FedEx charges you whatever to send your package, they deliver it.
Without network neutrality: Fedex charges you an arm and a leg to take the package and then they preemptively extort money from people who want to see their package sometime this year.
The Internet is a tool. Just like cars are tools, guns are tools, and Zyklon-B is a chemical tool. Tools have no moral status; They do neither right nor wrong. What people do with tools is what is right or wrong.
The solution to terrorists and pedophiles abusing the 'Net is to hunt down and kill the terrorists and pedophiles, not harm the 'Net.
Now I'm going to have to completely avoid the Internet to avoid having the book spoiled. On the other hand, that meme from Order of the Phoenix did give me an interesting perspective as I read it. For once, I saw what some innocuous event was about beforehand.
PS: Oh, and fuck whoever posted that spoiler halfway down. Fuck you with reciprocating saw.
There are a lot of things you can cite as examples of litigious shitholes. Some recent ones from Fark include that cunt who sued a drycleaner for $57 Million over their losing a pair of pants and the dipshit parents who sued so their children who failed school could still walk on graduation day. Then there's the bullshit we saw over the other Hot Coffee incident. But the McDonalds hot coffee case is not bull:
The coffee was not just hot, it was stored 10*c short of boiling. This is mainly because their coffee loses it's taste when stored at a more sane temperature. When it was spilled, the woman received second and third degree burns on her legs and needed skin grafts to heal. She originally sued McDonalds to have them cover her $20,000 of medical bills. Evidently their lawyers were unrepentant pricks (as those representing large corporations tend to be) and pissed off the jury, so the jury instead awarded her millions. Then everyone saw "Jury awards millions.." and went to get out their "Leap to Conclusions" mat.
You have presented a logical and reasoned statement devoid of wild-eyed paranoia in a thread involving government. There is no place for that here - Prepare to be burned at stake!
On a more serious note, changing our energy & middle east policies are the necessary long-term steps to stop terrorism. In the short term, I agree that technology is just a tool and should be used to prevent attacks where possible.
Instead of trying to reduce the signal level in spam, bury the bastards in noise. Set up a nonprofit organization which people join (after giving real-life details and a deposit and being confirmed) which flags an email as spam. When that happens, participating clients (available to everyone) begin contacting the website given in the mail. Result: spammer website and ISP buried in noise and bandwidth bills.
Either that, or someone needs to write the next massive-spread virus and have it break your computer and force you to have it serviced. That'll break the botnets...
How about because taking this course won't make the US government and most of the civilized world want to hunt you down and either imprison or kill you ^_^
In a closed system, Entropy always goes up.
That's the second law, now you know what's up.
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'Cause Entropy will take it although it seems a shame.
The Second Law as we now know is quite clear to state,
That Entropy must increase and not dissipate.
I think you're misunderstanding some things. The whole entire point of ODF is that it's impossible go be locked in, because everything needed to implement the standard is open, hence the term "open standard." In the unlikely event you can't download a document translator for your needs, you can write your own. For the same reason, OOXML is not an open standard because saying "Do this like $PROPRIETARY_PROGRAM did it" requires information that is not open, ergo the standard is not open.
You have to remember that there is no such thing as an "open standard" from Microsoft. Anything that looks like it is almost certainly an attempt to lock your information into their formats again. It's not exactly "embrace, extend, extinguish," because this one came pre-extended. Guess who the only organization that knows how Word95 actually handles things is? So guess who's the only one that can gaurantee "100% accuracy" with OOXML? Microsoft have acheived their objective - OOXML will force you to use their software.
One side wants to rape the principle that made the Internet great, the other wants to save it. Compromising with evil doesn't stop it, it emboldens it and only delays the inevitable confrontation.
Ancestor Simulations are supposed to take info from the past to see how we arrived at the present.
Joking aside, this would indeed seem to be an early version of an Ancestor-Simluation. Which would appear to imply that we are living in computers ourselves, since even now we are trying to run such simulations. And that opens up a really big can of worms:
Are simulated universes nested recursively? To what extent? Do they regress forever? Do "higher up" simulators judge and/or interact with their simulations?
WiFi is limited to less than half a watt or a watt (IIRC) by FCC restrictions of unlicensed RF transmitters, whereas microwave ovens are 500 to 1500 watts. More importantly, WiFi antennae aren't built into chambers designed to create a standing wave of energy, which amplifies their power by reflecting microwaves off the walls and giving them the chance to heat the water again.
What I gather is that they use multiple magnetrons or microwave circuits to generate frequencies that will resonate with all the common bonds in hydrocarbons, just as 2.4Ghz is the resonant frequency of the protons in a water molecule swinging back and forth. However, they also claim (for example) that it can dissolve the insulation off a piece of copper wire. But it's still the same principle as a microwave oven, so I ask: how can they put a conductor into the chamber and not have it immediately burn up due to microwave absorbtion? Cut it up into teeny bits?
What function does this service offer that FreeBSD + tftpd wouldn't? Log in over the Internet, shuffle files about, leave. Same thing, with the added bonus of not getting assraped by Microsoft's EULA.
Ya know, frankly someone needs to create something like that: Preinstall a stripped-down FreeBSD on a micro-sized computer, duck tape a bigass hard drive to it, and run nfs/tftpd and some media center software on it. Then you plug it in to your network, put it's address into your browser, fill out the questionaire, and it's ready to use. Just be sure to put in a button that says "geek" to take away the cutsey stuff and it's golden.
When the 1.5 FoS was written, wouldn't it have been based on the assumption that planes would be entirely or at least mostly metal, with all that that implies? In particular, don't composite structures usually need to be stronger/stiffer than comparable metal ones because the reduced weight leads to greater acceleration from the same applied force?
Eh, I'm up for some shits'n'giggles and I've got some time to pass. Of course, the fact that I disagree is certain proof that I am part of "the conspiracy" which is defined as anyone who thinks you're wrong and refuses to immediately acknowledge your obvious correctness.
Arguing that arguments that are not peer-reviewed by mainstream astrophysicists do not count is disingenuous. People who have staked their careers on the mainstream theories will resist every attempt at disruptive paradigm shifts.
Right. The guy who comes up with proof that one of our most basic theories is erroneous will be hated. He most certainly will not be one of the most celebrated scientists of all time like Einstein, and he most definitely will not win a Nobel prize for his insights. Because scientists hate discovering new and remarkable things they didn't know about before. History is full of scientists like John Levy, whose work on asteroid impacts was supressed by The Establishment even after he presented clear and convincing evidence that he was correct... No, wait, asteroid impacts are in every geology and astronomy book today.
The announcement made by the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) that the SNO detector has the capability to determine whether solar neutrinos are changing their type en route to Earth is false on its face. There is no way that measurements made at only one end (here on Earth) of a transmission channel (that stretches from the Suns center to Earth) can reveal changes that occur farther up the channel (say, within the Sun itself, or near Mercury or Venus).
Consider a freight train that runs from New York to Chicago. We live in Chicago and are only able to observe the train as it arrives in Chicago. It pulls in with 4 freight cars, 2 tank cars, and 1 flat car. How is it possible, no matter how sophisticated our method of observation, for us to make any conclusions whatever about whether freight cars, tank cars, or flat cars have been added to or subtracted from the train at, say, Cleveland? Moreover, how is it possible to say that freight cars have turned into tank cars or flat cars along the route somewhere?
Horray for superficially plausible but completely incorrect analogies. Regardless of whatever happens to neutrinos on their way to earth, they can't simply disappear. Your analogy is simply wrong, because we do know that matter-energy was not added or lost in the neutrino stream, because neutrinos don't interact with squat. So now, we think we know what the train was like when it left. We know nothing was added or lost, yet the cars aren't what we expected. Is the logical conclusion that the neutrino waveforms changed or that it's all a giant conspiracy?
Sustained nuclear fusion using extreme heat and pressure is a Will-O-the-Wisp (literal meaning - fools fire) that has been desperately sought after for over 50 years. It has never been obtained in any laboratory. Its existence in the Suns core is nothing more than a proclaimed hypothesis. We cannot see into the Sun. We cannot observe what is occurring below the photosphere. The Electric Sun model does indeed include the probability that empirically confirmed nuclear fusion is occurring near the surface of the Sun.
Let me make sure I've got this right... you're comparing the conditions in experimental fusion reactors to those which exist in the core of a star? And then saying that since our fusion reactors don't work, starfusion doesn't work? I'm afraid there are some minor differences, like the fact that the core of a star is compacted to twenty times the density of lead by gravity. There's also the basic fact that energy loss is proportional to area and fusion output to volume, which puts our tiny reactors at a slight disadvantage.
Either you truly don't know these things about fusion physics, which casts doubt on how much else you don't know, or you are intentionally ignoring them.
Slashdot Mirror
Try Keramik - that rounds the edges off nicely.
For fonts - KDE Control Center : Appearances : Fonts : Antialiasing
I've run on KDE ever since I switched to Linux with Mandrake 8.2. One thing I've noticed of late is that Konqueror seems to freaking hemmorage memory over time. My machine has 1GB of ram, and eventually it reaches the point where Konqueror and X combine to use up 2/3 of my physical memory. Throw in Amarok and a few other low-level hogs (like mysqld) and it's page swapping time. At this point, I just have to restart my desktop (luckily KDE [mostly] saves it's state before doing this) and poof, back to being snappy.
It usually takes about two weeks to a month of nominal use, but still. I run my desktop continually, and it's an annoyance. I lose time-dependent web pages, SSL web pages, and all my SSH terminals.
IMO, something shouldn't be released out of alpha until "valgrind --leak-check=full --show-reachable=yes [app]" doesn't show any lost blocks more than a few hundred bytes.
A lot of those scare me - I need the gradients/contrast to know where one window or button ends and the next begins.
Keramic widgets/style + Desert Red color scheme + Crystal SVG icons + "contrast" bar at 1/3 is what I use.
Given sufficient resources, time, and dedication, ANY log can be altered.
If the "unalterable" log is maintained in software, it's a comparatively simple matter of hoisting it up on a VM. Since we're presumably talking about white-collar crime, it's a fair bet they have or can get root access to the machine to install the VM and rootkit to hide it. At that point, the CEO can do anything and the system can't fight back. Capture passwords of people logging in, alter data, you name it.
A hardware system would be more robust, but still vulnerable. I imagine the most likely attack vector would be Man in the Middle - Just take over the box that guards/drives the logger machine.
I think that we are going to soon see a lot of events like this, wherein information is recorded and stored indefinitely. It's an inevitable trend in a world where the price per unit storage is decreasing at an exponential or faster rate. As processing power and networking rates do the same, they are creating a situation where the cost of archiving previously used data and sorting through it in the future ceases to be an impediment.
And with the proper safegaurds, this is not a bad thing. In fact, it's unbelivably wonderful. There's no question of whether or not I committed the crime; System records indicate I was not there. What do I mean by proper safeguards? To start with, the system must be "open." By this, I mean that anyone must have access to all recorded streams without exception. The police can regularly download the info out of the plate scanner, I can download it, you can download it. I also mean that all accesses of the data should be archived by a given system as well and equally accessible. In short, my answer to "Quis Custodiet Custodes Ipsos" is that everyone does. And everyone can also watch everyone.
This kind of situation would create a self-perpetuating cycle of positive feedback to prevent abuse. If you're being a dick, looking through the system for no reason but to invade people's lives or find minor technicalities to harass them, it will be discovered. Then, the reaction will be others subjecting you to the same. Since you do not want this and know it will happen, you won't do it in the first place.
What I'm saying is that digital recording, processing, and storage are rapidly supplementing human eyes, the brain, and paper. Digital systems offer enormously superior accuracy and recall, without the possibility of bias. If it's done right, we can prevent the wrong people from us that for the wrong purpose. But fighting against it's mere existence won't help, work to guide it to the right outcome!
As it is now: FedEx charges you whatever to send your package, they deliver it.
Without network neutrality: Fedex charges you an arm and a leg to take the package and then they preemptively extort money from people who want to see their package sometime this year.
The Internet is a tool. Just like cars are tools, guns are tools, and Zyklon-B is a chemical tool. Tools have no moral status; They do neither right nor wrong. What people do with tools is what is right or wrong.
The solution to terrorists and pedophiles abusing the 'Net is to hunt down and kill the terrorists and pedophiles, not harm the 'Net.
Now I'm going to have to completely avoid the Internet to avoid having the book spoiled. On the other hand, that meme from Order of the Phoenix did give me an interesting perspective as I read it. For once, I saw what some innocuous event was about beforehand.
PS: Oh, and fuck whoever posted that spoiler halfway down. Fuck you with reciprocating saw.
There are a lot of things you can cite as examples of litigious shitholes. Some recent ones from Fark include that cunt who sued a drycleaner for $57 Million over their losing a pair of pants and the dipshit parents who sued so their children who failed school could still walk on graduation day. Then there's the bullshit we saw over the other Hot Coffee incident. But the McDonalds hot coffee case is not bull:
The coffee was not just hot, it was stored 10*c short of boiling. This is mainly because their coffee loses it's taste when stored at a more sane temperature. When it was spilled, the woman received second and third degree burns on her legs and needed skin grafts to heal. She originally sued McDonalds to have them cover her $20,000 of medical bills. Evidently their lawyers were unrepentant pricks (as those representing large corporations tend to be) and pissed off the jury, so the jury instead awarded her millions. Then everyone saw "Jury awards millions.." and went to get out their "Leap to Conclusions" mat.
Or at least really cheap. Then we (the media corporations) can lock you in and rape you at our leisure.
That's all it's about folks.
Yes, why would there be a lot of deaths in the place all the really sick people go to? Anything so obvious must be an evil plot.
Their resistance only makes our E-penises harder!
You have presented a logical and reasoned statement devoid of wild-eyed paranoia in a thread involving government. There is no place for that here - Prepare to be burned at stake!
On a more serious note, changing our energy & middle east policies are the necessary long-term steps to stop terrorism. In the short term, I agree that technology is just a tool and should be used to prevent attacks where possible.
Instead of trying to reduce the signal level in spam, bury the bastards in noise. Set up a nonprofit organization which people join (after giving real-life details and a deposit and being confirmed) which flags an email as spam. When that happens, participating clients (available to everyone) begin contacting the website given in the mail. Result: spammer website and ISP buried in noise and bandwidth bills.
Either that, or someone needs to write the next massive-spread virus and have it break your computer and force you to have it serviced. That'll break the botnets...
How about because taking this course won't make the US government and most of the civilized world want to hunt you down and either imprison or kill you ^_^
I think you're misunderstanding some things. The whole entire point of ODF is that it's impossible go be locked in, because everything needed to implement the standard is open, hence the term "open standard." In the unlikely event you can't download a document translator for your needs, you can write your own. For the same reason, OOXML is not an open standard because saying "Do this like $PROPRIETARY_PROGRAM did it" requires information that is not open, ergo the standard is not open.
You have to remember that there is no such thing as an "open standard" from Microsoft. Anything that looks like it is almost certainly an attempt to lock your information into their formats again. It's not exactly "embrace, extend, extinguish," because this one came pre-extended. Guess who the only organization that knows how Word95 actually handles things is? So guess who's the only one that can gaurantee "100% accuracy" with OOXML? Microsoft have acheived their objective - OOXML will force you to use their software.
One side wants to rape the principle that made the Internet great, the other wants to save it. Compromising with evil doesn't stop it, it emboldens it and only delays the inevitable confrontation.
Ancestor Simulations are supposed to take info from the past to see how we arrived at the present.
Joking aside, this would indeed seem to be an early version of an Ancestor-Simluation. Which would appear to imply that we are living in computers ourselves, since even now we are trying to run such simulations. And that opens up a really big can of worms:
Are simulated universes nested recursively? To what extent? Do they regress forever? Do "higher up" simulators judge and/or interact with their simulations?
Regardless, singularity FTW!
WiFi is limited to less than half a watt or a watt (IIRC) by FCC restrictions of unlicensed RF transmitters, whereas microwave ovens are 500 to 1500 watts. More importantly, WiFi antennae aren't built into chambers designed to create a standing wave of energy, which amplifies their power by reflecting microwaves off the walls and giving them the chance to heat the water again.
What I gather is that they use multiple magnetrons or microwave circuits to generate frequencies that will resonate with all the common bonds in hydrocarbons, just as 2.4Ghz is the resonant frequency of the protons in a water molecule swinging back and forth. However, they also claim (for example) that it can dissolve the insulation off a piece of copper wire. But it's still the same principle as a microwave oven, so I ask: how can they put a conductor into the chamber and not have it immediately burn up due to microwave absorbtion? Cut it up into teeny bits?
What function does this service offer that FreeBSD + tftpd wouldn't? Log in over the Internet, shuffle files about, leave. Same thing, with the added bonus of not getting assraped by Microsoft's EULA.
Ya know, frankly someone needs to create something like that: Preinstall a stripped-down FreeBSD on a micro-sized computer, duck tape a bigass hard drive to it, and run nfs/tftpd and some media center software on it. Then you plug it in to your network, put it's address into your browser, fill out the questionaire, and it's ready to use. Just be sure to put in a button that says "geek" to take away the cutsey stuff and it's golden.
When the 1.5 FoS was written, wouldn't it have been based on the assumption that planes would be entirely or at least mostly metal, with all that that implies? In particular, don't composite structures usually need to be stronger/stiffer than comparable metal ones because the reduced weight leads to greater acceleration from the same applied force?
Right. The guy who comes up with proof that one of our most basic theories is erroneous will be hated. He most certainly will not be one of the most celebrated scientists of all time like Einstein, and he most definitely will not win a Nobel prize for his insights. Because scientists hate discovering new and remarkable things they didn't know about before. History is full of scientists like John Levy, whose work on asteroid impacts was supressed by The Establishment even after he presented clear and convincing evidence that he was correct... No, wait, asteroid impacts are in every geology and astronomy book today.
Horray for superficially plausible but completely incorrect analogies. Regardless of whatever happens to neutrinos on their way to earth, they can't simply disappear. Your analogy is simply wrong, because we do know that matter-energy was not added or lost in the neutrino stream, because neutrinos don't interact with squat. So now, we think we know what the train was like when it left. We know nothing was added or lost, yet the cars aren't what we expected. Is the logical conclusion that the neutrino waveforms changed or that it's all a giant conspiracy?
Let me make sure I've got this right... you're comparing the conditions in experimental fusion reactors to those which exist in the core of a star? And then saying that since our fusion reactors don't work, starfusion doesn't work? I'm afraid there are some minor differences, like the fact that the core of a star is compacted to twenty times the density of lead by gravity. There's also the basic fact that energy loss is proportional to area and fusion output to volume, which puts our tiny reactors at a slight disadvantage.
Either you truly don't know these things about fusion physics, which casts doubt on how much else you don't know, or you are intentionally ignoring them.