Holy crap, that 3-d stereogram of Iapetus was awesome! Just... awesome! It's so irritating when I reach out and expect to feel something:)
Now they just need to take the two channels and use vertical/horizontal polarization so you can get full color (like they do at Terminator 3D in Disneyland CA). If only monitors could change polarization 120 times a second on a whim:)
Couple other things too... to be honest, the descent sound sounded like white noise. The synth radar, well, was beeps returning faster and faster and louder and louder. And NASA seems to have a bias against jpeg... the hi-res pictures are available (in the case of Iapetus 3-D) as a 36K jpeg or a 618K tiff... huh?
Tron 2.0 rocks - until it suddenly just ends, you get the feeling it could go on forever. But I do have one question...
Why, for things like the recognizer, did they use megabytes of bitmapped textures for nothing but an outline when they could have used lines + polygon offset? Only 1000 times more space efficient... Plus, in TRON, the outlines don't get larger as you approach, unlike a texture.
There's nothing hand-shaded about Tron's graphics. Either is was generated by III/Digital/etc and was flat shaded polygons (bit, light sailer, Sark's carrier), or it was raytracing + CSG generated by MAGI (tank, recognizer, lightcycles, all complex action scenes).
"Nuclear power has a series of terrible consequences that have been shown to occur."
Care to name some? France generates 3/4 of it's power with nuclear reactors and they don't seem to have any problems. Hell, in any power plant in the western world, you could have a Chernobyl-type meltdown and so what - it's called a containment dome.
"safety in the running of a plant"
You're exposed to more intense radiation in a fossil fuel plant or an airliner flight or during a sunbath than in a nuclear power plant. Fossil fuel plants spew tons of Uranium and Thorium into the atmosphere every year. If anything, a nuclear power plant is safer than a fossil fuel power plant.
As for the waste, about 95 to 98 percent of it is still good nuclear fuel that's been poisoned by fission byproducts. If greens would stop howling about "mobile Chernobyls" (How are we going to stuff a hundred million curies of radioactivity into a 100 gallon drum anyway?) and let the government reprocess the 'spent' fuel, 95 percent of the problem would disappear! Then the few cubic meters of radioactive sludge remaining could be locked into ceramics and buried forever.
"30% efficient solar cells."
Not going to bite... Go read the actual article and the comments. Hint: the device could theoretically be 30% efficient.
Re:What a load of absolute bullshit
on
Smart Guns are Coming
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why would anyone willingly buy one of these toy guns?
That's the point of the legislation. It doesn't matter if you'd willingly buy it or not... it's all you can legally get.
People act suprised. Monopoly corporation fires lawsuits to stop competition (aka attempts to protect it's income stream). People again act suprised. Why? The only legal reason that corporations exist is to make as much money as possible. Since they forgot to append "within moral reason" to that, you end up with entities that meet the definition of a psychopath.
Add to that the fact that the fact that we give them the standing of a person in the eyes of the law (ie the right to sue) and the fact that Congress has no term limits (ie let's game the system), and you'll get an idea what's wrong.
If you want a bitingly cynical look at the problems America is currently facing, go buy "America, the book" by Jon Stewart. Believe me, it is SO worth $20 for the hardback version.
I've got my little home server that provides wired ethernet access to three others in our house. Am I an ISP? After all, I do provide internet service to those computers.
Now suppose I were to run cat5 to my neighbors (some of whom have DSL too), and specify their IPs as alternate routing addresses to my own gateway. Using IP6, we all give ourselves internal static addresses and have servers that act as external gateways. Are we all now ISP's? Suppose our little private network continues to expand, with people on the periphery plugging in and adding new external links, more bandwidth, etc. Eventually, we end up with an actual mesh network like the internet was meant to be!
(Also suppose, out of curiosity, that no unneeded ports are opened, that all known RIAA/MPAA/BSA IPs are blacklisted, and that the servers don't keep logs of any kind. If they want info, they can't get here and there's nothing to get ANYWAY)
"legit adware" Error... does not compute... How can something that hijacks your computer to shove advertisements in your face ever be legitimate, backed by a company or not?
"Just TRY to find the equivalent free program now!"
I wrote a script to do something like that once... It was kinda like this:
cd/usr/bin ls | openssl dgst -md5 >/root/thissum date >> changes diff thissum oldsum >> changes mv -f thissum oldsum
Not exactly sophisticated or flexible, but it works. Surround it with a FOR loop containing a list of target directories and redirect stderror to/dev/null and you're all set. Put that, a couple of checks to see if you've been rooted, and chkrootkit into a daily or hourly crontab, and run rkdet, and you're on the way...
This just goes back and forth and back and forth over whether OSS is less exploited becauase it is more secure or because no one cares/wants to exploit it.
Well, an OSS project happens to drive almost 2/3 of the WWW pages on the Internet and it's widely agreed to be far more secure than IIS despite being by far the largest target. The problem at Microsoft is that, no matter how good a team of coders they may have and no matter how good the code they *could* produce is, they are controlled by marketoids, with the result that the newest features override the 1000 new security headaches they will cause.
Then again, having earned the almost pathological hate of every hacker in the world doesn't help...
If you take a look at the big chart, why is it that the clock speeds have increased by ~10 fold from start to end, but the front side busses have only increased ~5 fold?
That when they shut suprnova.org down, the Azureus bittorrent client on Sourceforge got 3 million downloads in 2 days? Someone needs to go to Washington and beat everyone in sight with the Cluebat: Trying to resist the Internet is futile. Stop trying.
That has gotten more durable over the years is keyboards. Olden day keyboards had actual keys under each cap, and all the switches were mounted on PCB's. These days it's nothing but a rubber and plastic arrangement. The upside is that one can smash a keyboard repeatedly and so violently as to break it's hard plastic shell in half while leaving the rubber keys intact. Not that I've ever done that, though...
"We have no law capable of describing the enormity of your crime." Rot in Hell, Diebold. Rot in Hell forever.
What Diebold is deserving of aside, consider the closest we do have to a law that is capable of describing their crime. What the Constitution defines as treason: "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
Someone who would attempt to undermine the democratic process that is the bedrock of our nation is, without question, it's enemy. By creating election machines that are so grossly insecure a monkey can hack them, and fighting requirements for a paper trail tooth and nail, Diebold is guilty of giving aid to America's enemies.
For crimes on this scale, America holds only one penalty.
For those in Southern California who want dark...
on
Geminid Meteor Shower
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Go to Mt. Pinos. If you live around the LA area, just hop on the I-5 north. Keep going until you get to a sign that says "Frazier Park" and turn off. Then head past the gas stations and keep on going straight. You'll pass through town, into the hills (with lots of little country homes) and finally into the winding road that goes up Mount Pinos. As you go up the windy little road, you'll notice little signs on the right side of the road that have numbers on them... The road ends at 13.50.
When you arrive, the view is just breathtaking. Every constellation clearly visible. The end of the road is a large, cleared parking area ringed by trees up to about 20 degrees elevation. And it's definetly Geminid season... I saw about 10 or 12 meteors in the occasional times I looked up over about 3 hours.
Come heavily dressed (hits freezing before midnight): I find that two shirts and a jacket plus sweat pants and windbreaker pants will keep you warm for about 3-4 hours.
"Myself, and everybody I know are better off than 5 years ago. Quite a bit so, in fact. Thank you very much."
You must not know anyone but CEO's and upper management, because they are the only group that's really done well in the last 4 years. Almost everyone else's income is static or shrinking after accounting for inflation. Google for "concentration of wealth."
And what about those cocksucking ISPs who provide 'bulletproof hosting?' As long as there is an economic incentive to spam, there will be spammers, just as there will always be drug dealers. Nothing you can do will stop them from spamming: It's simple supply/demand.
You have to stop it at the source, which is people online who are stupid enough to buy from things they see spamvertized.
ISP sends out test small amount of test spam. Anyone who responds gets a nasty note in their inbox, thier port 25 blocked completely, and is not allowed to use e-mail until they complete a 'How to not do incredibly stupid things' course.
Yes, the people you see in recent AOL commercials would complain. Why should they have to know which one is gas and which is brake on their SUV? Too bad, so sad... you do something THAT stupid, you lose.
This might sound callous, but something has to be some before the, as Data put it, "worst elements of capitalism" destroy E-Mail.
We've got 1536/256 ADSL at my hosue (Whoever thought of making connections asynchronous should be made to suffer, along with the "let's change IP's for no reason" guy). It's connected straight to my gateway box, which is a psycho-paranoid IP-masquerade for our LAN as well as a limited internet server (http/ftp/ssh/bzflag).
And oh, does a lot of crap ever go *plink* against that firewall. This is an IP that is not on Google, and does not advertize it's presence to the 'Net. There are probably 10 to 20 attempts to exploit Apache every day (Including some damn attempt to overflow it with a huge garbage query that makes my logs very ugly), along with a litany of thing requesting stuff from a windows directory. Probably as many attacks against proftpd, usually erroneous login attempts. Loads of garbage attempts to log in to sshd as root, test, and admin along with a few null passwords. On the packet filter level, I get probably 500 incoming connections from p2p programs (both because I use them and from the previous guy) a day. And believe it or not, Sasser, Slammer, Bagel, and Satan's Backdoor still come knocking. So, yeah... If all that crap got relayed to my dad's win2K box, it'd be pwn3d 20 times a day.
Now, let's not talk about my relatives who use Windows 98, even on dialup.
Re:These young whippersnappers...
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Go read "the Jungle" by Upton Sinclair and you'll realize that what the parent said is a lot like what someone from the early 20th or late 19th centuries would have said to almost any worker who complained today.
Actually, it's story largely parallels what seems to happen at EA (though not to the same extent): Optimistic young people come here and eagerly work long hours, then realize they're getting screwed by the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy crap, that 3-d stereogram of Iapetus was awesome! Just... awesome! It's so irritating when I reach out and expect to feel something :)
:)
Now they just need to take the two channels and use vertical/horizontal polarization so you can get full color (like they do at Terminator 3D in Disneyland CA). If only monitors could change polarization 120 times a second on a whim
Couple other things too... to be honest, the descent sound sounded like white noise. The synth radar, well, was beeps returning faster and faster and louder and louder. And NASA seems to have a bias against jpeg... the hi-res pictures are available (in the case of Iapetus 3-D) as a 36K jpeg or a 618K tiff... huh?
Tron 2.0 rocks - until it suddenly just ends, you get the feeling it could go on forever. But I do have one question...
Why, for things like the recognizer, did they use megabytes of bitmapped textures for nothing but an outline when they could have used lines + polygon offset? Only 1000 times more space efficient... Plus, in TRON, the outlines don't get larger as you approach, unlike a texture.
There's nothing hand-shaded about Tron's graphics. Either is was generated by III/Digital/etc and was flat shaded polygons (bit, light sailer, Sark's carrier), or it was raytracing + CSG generated by MAGI (tank, recognizer, lightcycles, all complex action scenes).
:)
And my favorite thing is the end credits music
"Nuclear power has a series of terrible consequences that have been shown to occur."
Care to name some? France generates 3/4 of it's power with nuclear reactors and they don't seem to have any problems. Hell, in any power plant in the western world, you could have a Chernobyl-type meltdown and so what - it's called a containment dome.
"safety in the running of a plant"
You're exposed to more intense radiation in a fossil fuel plant or an airliner flight or during a sunbath than in a nuclear power plant. Fossil fuel plants spew tons of Uranium and Thorium into the atmosphere every year. If anything, a nuclear power plant is safer than a fossil fuel power plant.
As for the waste, about 95 to 98 percent of it is still good nuclear fuel that's been poisoned by fission byproducts. If greens would stop howling about "mobile Chernobyls" (How are we going to stuff a hundred million curies of radioactivity into a 100 gallon drum anyway?) and let the government reprocess the 'spent' fuel, 95 percent of the problem would disappear! Then the few cubic meters of radioactive sludge remaining could be locked into ceramics and buried forever.
"30% efficient solar cells."
Not going to bite... Go read the actual article and the comments. Hint: the device could theoretically be 30% efficient.
Why would anyone willingly buy one of these toy guns?
That's the point of the legislation. It doesn't matter if you'd willingly buy it or not... it's all you can legally get.
People act suprised. Monopoly corporation fires lawsuits to stop competition (aka attempts to protect it's income stream). People again act suprised. Why? The only legal reason that corporations exist is to make as much money as possible. Since they forgot to append "within moral reason" to that, you end up with entities that meet the definition of a psychopath.
Add to that the fact that the fact that we give them the standing of a person in the eyes of the law (ie the right to sue) and the fact that Congress has no term limits (ie let's game the system), and you'll get an idea what's wrong.
If you want a bitingly cynical look at the problems America is currently facing, go buy "America, the book" by Jon Stewart. Believe me, it is SO worth $20 for the hardback version.
Well, off to watch Battlestar Galactica...
I've got my little home server that provides wired ethernet access to three others in our house. Am I an ISP? After all, I do provide internet service to those computers.
Now suppose I were to run cat5 to my neighbors (some of whom have DSL too), and specify their IPs as alternate routing addresses to my own gateway. Using IP6, we all give ourselves internal static addresses and have servers that act as external gateways. Are we all now ISP's? Suppose our little private network continues to expand, with people on the periphery plugging in and adding new external links, more bandwidth, etc. Eventually, we end up with an actual mesh network like the internet was meant to be!
(Also suppose, out of curiosity, that no unneeded ports are opened, that all known RIAA/MPAA/BSA IPs are blacklisted, and that the servers don't keep logs of any kind. If they want info, they can't get here and there's nothing to get ANYWAY)
"legit adware" Error... does not compute... How can something that hijacks your computer to shove advertisements in your face ever be legitimate, backed by a company or not?
"Just TRY to find the equivalent free program now!"
/usr/bin /root/thissum
/dev/null and you're all set. Put that, a couple of checks to see if you've been rooted, and chkrootkit into a daily or hourly crontab, and run rkdet, and you're on the way...
I wrote a script to do something like that once... It was kinda like this:
cd
ls | openssl dgst -md5 >
date >> changes
diff thissum oldsum >> changes
mv -f thissum oldsum
Not exactly sophisticated or flexible, but it works. Surround it with a FOR loop containing a list of target directories and redirect stderror to
Er... why not just reserve the last 4096 of 65535 possible return values for errors? if(returned > 61439) ohShit(there_was_an_error);
This just goes back and forth and back and forth over whether OSS is less exploited becauase it is more secure or because no one cares/wants to exploit it.
Well, an OSS project happens to drive almost 2/3 of the WWW pages on the Internet and it's widely agreed to be far more secure than IIS despite being by far the largest target. The problem at Microsoft is that, no matter how good a team of coders they may have and no matter how good the code they *could* produce is, they are controlled by marketoids, with the result that the newest features override the 1000 new security headaches they will cause.
Then again, having earned the almost pathological hate of every hacker in the world doesn't help...
If you take a look at the big chart, why is it that the clock speeds have increased by ~10 fold from start to end, but the front side busses have only increased ~5 fold?
"We are offering this laser for sale to responsible adults only."
That when they shut suprnova.org down, the Azureus bittorrent client on Sourceforge got 3 million downloads in 2 days? Someone needs to go to Washington and beat everyone in sight with the Cluebat: Trying to resist the Internet is futile. Stop trying.
That has gotten more durable over the years is keyboards. Olden day keyboards had actual keys under each cap, and all the switches were mounted on PCB's. These days it's nothing but a rubber and plastic arrangement. The upside is that one can smash a keyboard repeatedly and so violently as to break it's hard plastic shell in half while leaving the rubber keys intact. Not that I've ever done that, though...
"We have no law capable of describing the enormity of your crime." Rot in Hell, Diebold. Rot in Hell forever.
What Diebold is deserving of aside, consider the closest we do have to a law that is capable of describing their crime. What the Constitution defines as treason: "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
Someone who would attempt to undermine the democratic process that is the bedrock of our nation is, without question, it's enemy. By creating election machines that are so grossly insecure a monkey can hack them, and fighting requirements for a paper trail tooth and nail, Diebold is guilty of giving aid to America's enemies.
For crimes on this scale, America holds only one penalty.
They say a fool and his money are soon parted...
Go to Mt. Pinos. If you live around the LA area, just hop on the I-5 north. Keep going until you get to a sign that says "Frazier Park" and turn off. Then head past the gas stations and keep on going straight. You'll pass through town, into the hills (with lots of little country homes) and finally into the winding road that goes up Mount Pinos. As you go up the windy little road, you'll notice little signs on the right side of the road that have numbers on them... The road ends at 13.50.
When you arrive, the view is just breathtaking. Every constellation clearly visible. The end of the road is a large, cleared parking area ringed by trees up to about 20 degrees elevation. And it's definetly Geminid season... I saw about 10 or 12 meteors in the occasional times I looked up over about 3 hours.
Come heavily dressed (hits freezing before midnight): I find that two shirts and a jacket plus sweat pants and windbreaker pants will keep you warm for about 3-4 hours.
To get an idea of the weather, use the Mt. Pinos Dark Sky Clock.
According to my C compiler, 2^2 = 2.
"Myself, and everybody I know are better off than 5 years ago. Quite a bit so, in fact. Thank you very much."
You must not know anyone but CEO's and upper management, because they are the only group that's really done well in the last 4 years. Almost everyone else's income is static or shrinking after accounting for inflation. Google for "concentration of wealth."
It is not referenced anywhere on the 'Net, does not respond to pings of any kind, etc. It doesn't stick it's head up over the trench.
And what about those cocksucking ISPs who provide 'bulletproof hosting?' As long as there is an economic incentive to spam, there will be spammers, just as there will always be drug dealers. Nothing you can do will stop them from spamming: It's simple supply/demand.
You have to stop it at the source, which is people online who are stupid enough to buy from things they see spamvertized.
ISP sends out test small amount of test spam. Anyone who responds gets a nasty note in their inbox, thier port 25 blocked completely, and is not allowed to use e-mail until they complete a 'How to not do incredibly stupid things' course.
Yes, the people you see in recent AOL commercials would complain. Why should they have to know which one is gas and which is brake on their SUV? Too bad, so sad... you do something THAT stupid, you lose.
This might sound callous, but something has to be some before the, as Data put it, "worst elements of capitalism" destroy E-Mail.
We've got 1536/256 ADSL at my hosue (Whoever thought of making connections asynchronous should be made to suffer, along with the "let's change IP's for no reason" guy). It's connected straight to my gateway box, which is a psycho-paranoid IP-masquerade for our LAN as well as a limited internet server (http/ftp/ssh/bzflag).
And oh, does a lot of crap ever go *plink* against that firewall. This is an IP that is not on Google, and does not advertize it's presence to the 'Net. There are probably 10 to 20 attempts to exploit Apache every day (Including some damn attempt to overflow it with a huge garbage query that makes my logs very ugly), along with a litany of thing requesting stuff from a windows directory. Probably as many attacks against proftpd, usually erroneous login attempts. Loads of garbage attempts to log in to sshd as root, test, and admin along with a few null passwords. On the packet filter level, I get probably 500 incoming connections from p2p programs (both because I use them and from the previous guy) a day. And believe it or not, Sasser, Slammer, Bagel, and Satan's Backdoor still come knocking. So, yeah... If all that crap got relayed to my dad's win2K box, it'd be pwn3d 20 times a day.
Now, let's not talk about my relatives who use Windows 98, even on dialup.
Zilog? WTF?
Go read "the Jungle" by Upton Sinclair and you'll realize that what the parent said is a lot like what someone from the early 20th or late 19th centuries would have said to almost any worker who complained today.
Actually, it's story largely parallels what seems to happen at EA (though not to the same extent): Optimistic young people come here and eagerly work long hours, then realize they're getting screwed by the system.