It was bought and paid for by amoral corporations who pursue nothing but a God known only as "the Jefferson."
The answer is simple. Money is corrupting (Eh... Ok, wrong tense) government, and solution is to remove money from the equation. If you are elected to high public office (State or federal level), you may recieve no money WHAT SO EVER from anyone during your campaign, or during your tenure of office except for the normal salary of a congressperson. If you do recieve money, you are out NOW (As in, "You no longer work here. Get out.") and your seat is vacant until the next elections.
Of course, there are obvious reasons the current criminals in office will not allow anything that would force them to be honest to occur.
I would be most interested in a device that can remain coherent under the 8000*F and several hundred bars of pressure needed to make liquid carbon AND perform the 10 quintillion operations per second minimum for Longhorn:)
Hold on a minute... When I took up 1.2 gB installing Linux, it also came with almost every program I would ever use, along with remote desktop, several servers, and more (As in, "several thousand dollars worth of commercial software and a hundred reboots in Windows terms"). Windows, when installed, comes with... Windows, WMP, and IE. Out of the box, it can't connect to the internet, read a PDF, read an Office document, or do almost anything *useful* until you've gone through installation hell.
You're comparing apples to zebras. The 1 gB linux install is an operating system plus a thousand applications. The 1 gB Windows install is an operating system with a handful of bundled applications.
-----
It is common knowledge that microsoft products are by default about as safe from penetration as a prostitute's vagina, and Microsoft is no doubt aware that most of it's users will never change the default settings.
Microsoft had, and continues to, demonstrate a complete inability to produce secure software regardless of supposed efforts to do so, probably because they are suffering from chronic featuritis and will not remove an insecure item if it will also break some (most likely useless) feature.
For as long as this mentality continues, their products will remain bloated and insecure.
We are now approaching the point where other operating systems can compete with Windows tit for tat, and as those alternatives surpass Windows, Microsoft's featuritis and inability to rectify the mess that is their source code will turn around and kick their feet out from under them.
When I play BZflag, if you do certain activities too often (teamkilling, usually) the server will usually automatically kick you.
If your computer is infected with malware (spamware, adware, spyware, trojans, viruses, etc), it will constantly be generating large amounts of traffic on seemingly random ports. Your ISP will kick you for being a danger to the rest of the Internet. If you attempt to reconnect without cleaning your computer, you will be kicked again.
If the installation of these cameras made people feel less than human, it would not have been the people insisting they be installed. You did read the article, right?
As for being a waste of money, I do have to agree that it probably won't work because of technical problems. But it was the community who wanted to pay for $60000 of cameras being installed in response to $400000 of theft; It's their money to waste.
The final, unquestionable proof that the USPTO is truly fucked up beyond all recognition. I mean, what do those PTO idiots think it means when their computer repeats keys when the key is held down? I have a laptop from 1982 that does this! Consider God-only-knows what other stupid patents they grant, and this is a true SNAFU: Situation normal, all fucked up.
If you're going to grant every single idiotic patent that comes your way, you might as well just replace it with a motion-activated tape player that says "Patent Granted!"
On a more serious note, I want to know how on earth they could possibly review a patent for *five years* and not see glaringly obvious prior art from at least 20 years ago. They can't all be this stupid, can they? *whispers in my ear* I'm going to go cry now...
Y'Know, I think I'll apply for a patent on "A means to generate an electromotive force by motion of a conducting material through a magnetic field" and for "A means to drive said conductor through magnetic field by union of carbon and oxygen atoms." Not only is it glaringly obvious, but the level of scientific knowledge required to understand it is far beyond anything these morons are capable of. Then you'll all have to pay me for the alternator in your car:)
Before someone gets killed with one of them randomly pops and comes back?
Suppose someone shot a high-power CO2 laser at it and cut the thing open from 50 miles away on the ground? (They really do sell 700 watt CO2 lasers on E-Bay)
At any rate, I don't care as long as the keep the damned things AWAY from Frazier Park; It's the only dark sky site within an hours drive of me.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're not going to get anywhere at all in the business world by thumbing your nose at the product whose formats control 90% of document exchanges. Although M$ is undeniably an abusive monopoly, and their products suck more the Michael Jackson on technical merits, the fact is that you have to interoperate well the the market leader to have much hope of toppling the leader.
And a slight nitpick: MS office is only compatible with it's current incarnation; The article even says that it's breaking things with 97 and even 2000.
Oh, you want the... Well, sorry sir, but I accidently dropped the magnetic medium my one-time pad was on on top of this here supermagnet. Sorry; Hope you got a few centuries spare on a Cray. Don't scare me like that next time!
Sorry officer, I always keep my floppies together with magnets. Oh... You mean magnets erase floppies? Oops...
* Please standardize the controls to some degree; I didn't have to read a manual to figure out how to make our Minolta X-700 take a picture.
* That poor Minolta has survived 2 nasty drops and keeps going. How well would a digital have fared if it fell from 5 feet twice?
* Speed - I dunno what's going on, but the camera was set to ISO 200, and there was still measurable blur on a sunny day even though I was holding the camera as still as I can without a tripod. Either that or I didn't account for the delay between press and picture.
* Not really a thing for most people, but I can use the Minolta to take pictures of a tesla coil in operation. I don't want to get the digital camera anywhere near that damn thing:)
* I'll still be able to "read" and enlarge film negatives in 50 or 100 years (At least B&W - Color dyes may break down)
Not really meaning to post anything radically insightful here, just what I think.
Just remember: Nothing in our lifetimes is likely to be sharper than an 8x10 inch sheet of film:). Not that many people will pay for the equipment to utilize such a thing, though
For starters, I'll be damned if your fscking spybot will ever acess my hard drive. Block all ports by default, opening as needed.
How, exactly, does a remote program ruffle through my files without my permission, anyway? Mandated backdoors? Screw them.
If it looks for an audio "fingerprint," how will it react if some 10-year-old wrote a 5K program to insert a random byte every N bytes of the MP3 (or any file)? If I do something as idiotic as flipping all the bits? The ways to foil things that search based on fingerprints are too many to name.
Who the hell gave you permission to look at my private e-mails? Oh, yeah... I DIDN'T!
Amendment IV: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
How exactly will it react to a file named "Britney-Spears.mp3" that contains nothing but static?
Did I mention the violation of privacy?
They've already admitted that it's completely impotent against encrypted traffic, and there are already encrypted p2p clients.
For the love of God, don't these control freaks realize when they're beaten?
OK, I think I've got most of the obvious replies out of the way. It's obvious that the current control freaks "up there" see the Internet, and realize quite well what it can and will do them if they can't nip it in it's budding stages. Kid yourself not: They will wage an all-out war against privacy on the Internet. And as always, all that is needed for evil to win is for good to do nothing.
Contact your congressperson. Have all your friends do the same. Snail-mail them. E-Mail them. Donate money to their campaigns. Get the word out!
Use their own litigious bullshit against them. If every p2p client simply implemented a one-byte XOR on all outgoing and incoming transmissions, it would be quite illegal for the (RI || MP) AA to attempt to decode it because of that wonderful piece of legislation called the DMCA. Remember? Illegal to circumvent any acess control device? By implementing such a measure (even one so braindead that it could be cracked brute-force by a 20-year-old laptop in a matter of seconds), it is illegal for anyone to decode your transmissions without your express permission. I give express permission to everyone except scum would work for the (RI || MP) AA.
The best part is the horrible or wonderful (depending on your view) irony of it: Screwed by their own bought-and-paid-for legislation. Geeks the world over will roll on the floor laughing their asses off!
Have all the p2p applications use a one-byte XOR bitflip at each end... the SAME one byte. Since you've now encrypted your digital information, it's illegal for anyone to break the "encryption," despite the fact that it stops no one from copying or wiretapping anything, because of that wonderful law that all good patriots support, the DMCA!
Thus, if anyone tells you that you've been sharing, tell them that it's illegal for anyone to decrypt your digital transmissions without your permission. If anything, it's a perfect way to demonstrate what a bunch of bulls*it the DMCA is.
If someone with a pair actually does go to court, they can simply point out that the (RI || MP) AA were breaking the law and that their case is therefore null and void. And you say that no good can come of it?
Hateful responses? Death threats? Please direct all of them to my image consultants, the RIAA:)
Now, if it happens to be one of the applications bundled with Mandrake I can just use the software installer and everything works perfectly every time. However, whether I'm downloading and compiling from source or trying to install RPM's, I've repeatedly been dragged into what can only be called dependency hell!
OK, I've downloaded NiftyApp. If I'm compiling from source, I'll find out about the dependencies while running./configure; with RPM, I find out when it spits out the word "depencencies:"
So I find out what it's dependencies are. I go to Google and RPMFind and locate + download the required packages. But lo and behold, these packages too have unsatisfied dependencies. Sometimes I end up repeating this cycle so many times I just give up: For God's sake, how many damn dependencies can this program *HAVE*?
Other times (This is usually where I give up), the computer starts acting as if it's on crack:
rpm -i annoying-dependency.rpm
Error: package annoying-dependency is already installed.
rpm -e annoying-dependency
Error: Package not installed.
Make up your mind: Which is it, installed or not installed?!?!?
In short, I'm saying that Linux seriously needs to improve packaging. At the very least, list all the packages that your program needs installed before it can compile in a help file. That will at least save me the trouble of discovering them manually. Or list the deps on your website or Sourceforge page. I've tried installing K3D, for example, and just given up, having hunted down about 8 other RPMs and then getting the crack scenario described above. Even if it doesn't prove impossible to clear up the dependencies, It's still a major PITA to try and install, for example, MPlayer and end up downloading 5 packages for that program, and then hunting down 6 more for A/V control.
Now, I'm pretty technically proficient. I'm not afraid of the evil command line, I can use a console, and don't mind manually editing config files. If *I* can't get half the programs I download to install, what hope do ordinary users have? (Heck, considering the obscene amount of hard drive space most of us have, why not just offer a statically compiled version for download? It was the only way I could get the Game of Life (GOL) to work)
Luckily, Linux comes with about 95% of the applications I would ever use anyway. But the remaining 5% make me want to pull my hair out!
Close... A scanning tunelling microscope uses piezo elements to move the detector over the surface of the sample; The distance is measures by the nanoamperes of current flowing between it and the sample.
A scanning electron microscope works by projecting an electron beam at the target, and measuring what gets diffracted. It's main disadvantage is the requirement of a high vacuum to function.
Slashdot Mirror
"I just paid 2.01 for 85 octane)!!"
You think YOU got it bad... Here in Santa Clarita, CA we live *On Top Of An Oil Field* and pay $2.50 for regular. Shortage my ass...
"I see stupid people. They're everywhere, and they don't even know they're stupid."
It was bought and paid for by amoral corporations who pursue nothing but a God known only as "the Jefferson."
The answer is simple. Money is corrupting (Eh... Ok, wrong tense) government, and solution is to remove money from the equation. If you are elected to high public office (State or federal level), you may recieve no money WHAT SO EVER from anyone during your campaign, or during your tenure of office except for the normal salary of a congressperson. If you do recieve money, you are out NOW (As in, "You no longer work here. Get out.") and your seat is vacant until the next elections.
Of course, there are obvious reasons the current criminals in office will not allow anything that would force them to be honest to occur.
- Already riddled by malware
- Connected directly to the internet with no firewall
- Used by people who have no clue how to remove a worm
- Who also continue to open every untrusted attachement they get
- Used by people with computer IQ's far below room temperature in Celsius
You might just be suprised. I have a feeling that I'm only half-joking.---
I would be most interested in a device that can remain coherent under the 8000*F and several hundred bars of pressure needed to make liquid carbon AND perform the 10 quintillion operations per second minimum for Longhorn :)
Hold on a minute... When I took up 1.2 gB installing Linux, it also came with almost every program I would ever use, along with remote desktop, several servers, and more (As in, "several thousand dollars worth of commercial software and a hundred reboots in Windows terms"). Windows, when installed, comes with... Windows, WMP, and IE. Out of the box, it can't connect to the internet, read a PDF, read an Office document, or do almost anything *useful* until you've gone through installation hell.
You're comparing apples to zebras. The 1 gB linux install is an operating system plus a thousand applications. The 1 gB Windows install is an operating system with a handful of bundled applications.
-----
It is common knowledge that microsoft products are by default about as safe from penetration as a prostitute's vagina, and Microsoft is no doubt aware that most of it's users will never change the default settings.
Microsoft had, and continues to, demonstrate a complete inability to produce secure software regardless of supposed efforts to do so, probably because they are suffering from chronic featuritis and will not remove an insecure item if it will also break some (most likely useless) feature.
For as long as this mentality continues, their products will remain bloated and insecure.
We are now approaching the point where other operating systems can compete with Windows tit for tat, and as those alternatives surpass Windows, Microsoft's featuritis and inability to rectify the mess that is their source code will turn around and kick their feet out from under them.
When I play BZflag, if you do certain activities too often (teamkilling, usually) the server will usually automatically kick you.
If your computer is infected with malware (spamware, adware, spyware, trojans, viruses, etc), it will constantly be generating large amounts of traffic on seemingly random ports. Your ISP will kick you for being a danger to the rest of the Internet. If you attempt to reconnect without cleaning your computer, you will be kicked again.
My immediate thought was "F*** eSolutions" :)
If the installation of these cameras made people feel less than human, it would not have been the people insisting they be installed. You did read the article, right?
As for being a waste of money, I do have to agree that it probably won't work because of technical problems. But it was the community who wanted to pay for $60000 of cameras being installed in response to $400000 of theft; It's their money to waste.
The final, unquestionable proof that the USPTO is truly fucked up beyond all recognition. I mean, what do those PTO idiots think it means when their computer repeats keys when the key is held down? I have a laptop from 1982 that does this! Consider God-only-knows what other stupid patents they grant, and this is a true SNAFU: Situation normal, all fucked up.
:)
If you're going to grant every single idiotic patent that comes your way, you might as well just replace it with a motion-activated tape player that says "Patent Granted!"
On a more serious note, I want to know how on earth they could possibly review a patent for *five years* and not see glaringly obvious prior art from at least 20 years ago. They can't all be this stupid, can they? *whispers in my ear* I'm going to go cry now...
Y'Know, I think I'll apply for a patent on "A means to generate an electromotive force by motion of a conducting material through a magnetic field" and for "A means to drive said conductor through magnetic field by union of carbon and oxygen atoms." Not only is it glaringly obvious, but the level of scientific knowledge required to understand it is far beyond anything these morons are capable of. Then you'll all have to pay me for the alternator in your car
- This is being installed in one little town
- That recently had a rash of burglaries
- From houses that are mostly worth 500K +
- At the insistence of the residents themselves
This is NOT, I repeat NOT 1984 and it is NOT a conspiracy to do anything but scare the conspiracy freaks.Before someone gets killed with one of them randomly pops and comes back?
Suppose someone shot a high-power CO2 laser at it and cut the thing open from 50 miles away on the ground? (They really do sell 700 watt CO2 lasers on E-Bay)
At any rate, I don't care as long as the keep the damned things AWAY from Frazier Park; It's the only dark sky site within an hours drive of me.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're not going to get anywhere at all in the business world by thumbing your nose at the product whose formats control 90% of document exchanges. Although M$ is undeniably an abusive monopoly, and their products suck more the Michael Jackson on technical merits, the fact is that you have to interoperate well the the market leader to have much hope of toppling the leader.
And a slight nitpick: MS office is only compatible with it's current incarnation; The article even says that it's breaking things with 97 and even 2000.
OMG... I was crying laughing... I sure hope none of the children who drew those things see that page. OMG...
Oh, you want the... Well, sorry sir, but I accidently dropped the magnetic medium my one-time pad was on on top of this here supermagnet. Sorry; Hope you got a few centuries spare on a Cray. Don't scare me like that next time!
Sorry officer, I always keep my floppies together with magnets. Oh... You mean magnets erase floppies? Oops...
* Please standardize the controls to some degree; I didn't have to read a manual to figure out how to make our Minolta X-700 take a picture. :)
:). Not that many people will pay for the equipment to utilize such a thing, though
* That poor Minolta has survived 2 nasty drops and keeps going. How well would a digital have fared if it fell from 5 feet twice?
* Speed - I dunno what's going on, but the camera was set to ISO 200, and there was still measurable blur on a sunny day even though I was holding the camera as still as I can without a tripod. Either that or I didn't account for the delay between press and picture.
* Not really a thing for most people, but I can use the Minolta to take pictures of a tesla coil in operation. I don't want to get the digital camera anywhere near that damn thing
* I'll still be able to "read" and enlarge film negatives in 50 or 100 years (At least B&W - Color dyes may break down)
Not really meaning to post anything radically insightful here, just what I think.
Just remember: Nothing in our lifetimes is likely to be sharper than an 8x10 inch sheet of film
"So figuring only one 2 hour movie a night you won't even get a year out of one bulb."
:)
Huh? 2000 hours / 2 hours per movie = 1000 movies = 1000 nights ~= 3 years per bulb... What math class were you in?
For starters, I'll be damned if your fscking spybot will ever acess my hard drive. Block all ports by default, opening as needed.
How, exactly, does a remote program ruffle through my files without my permission, anyway? Mandated backdoors? Screw them.
If it looks for an audio "fingerprint," how will it react if some 10-year-old wrote a 5K program to insert a random byte every N bytes of the MP3 (or any file)? If I do something as idiotic as flipping all the bits? The ways to foil things that search based on fingerprints are too many to name.
Who the hell gave you permission to look at my private e-mails? Oh, yeah... I DIDN'T!
Amendment IV: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
How exactly will it react to a file named "Britney-Spears.mp3" that contains nothing but static? Did I mention the violation of privacy?
They've already admitted that it's completely impotent against encrypted traffic, and there are already encrypted p2p clients.
For the love of God, don't these control freaks realize when they're beaten?
OK, I think I've got most of the obvious replies out of the way. It's obvious that the current control freaks "up there" see the Internet, and realize quite well what it can and will do them if they can't nip it in it's budding stages. Kid yourself not: They will wage an all-out war against privacy on the Internet. And as always, all that is needed for evil to win is for good to do nothing.
Contact your congressperson. Have all your friends do the same. Snail-mail them. E-Mail them. Donate money to their campaigns. Get the word out!
"Is this governement so struborn that it will continue trying the same thing over and over again expecting a different result?"
Heh... I once heard in a movie that this is called "insanity."
Do what the original did: A show about today's world in in space. Who do you think the Klingons originally represented?
Use their own litigious bullshit against them. If every p2p client simply implemented a one-byte XOR on all outgoing and incoming transmissions, it would be quite illegal for the (RI || MP) AA to attempt to decode it because of that wonderful piece of legislation called the DMCA. Remember? Illegal to circumvent any acess control device? By implementing such a measure (even one so braindead that it could be cracked brute-force by a 20-year-old laptop in a matter of seconds), it is illegal for anyone to decode your transmissions without your express permission. I give express permission to everyone except scum would work for the (RI || MP) AA.
The best part is the horrible or wonderful (depending on your view) irony of it: Screwed by their own bought-and-paid-for legislation. Geeks the world over will roll on the floor laughing their asses off!
Have all the p2p applications use a one-byte XOR bitflip at each end... the SAME one byte. Since you've now encrypted your digital information, it's illegal for anyone to break the "encryption," despite the fact that it stops no one from copying or wiretapping anything, because of that wonderful law that all good patriots support, the DMCA!
:)
Thus, if anyone tells you that you've been sharing, tell them that it's illegal for anyone to decrypt your digital transmissions without your permission. If anything, it's a perfect way to demonstrate what a bunch of bulls*it the DMCA is.
If someone with a pair actually does go to court, they can simply point out that the (RI || MP) AA were breaking the law and that their case is therefore null and void. And you say that no good can come of it?
Hateful responses? Death threats? Please direct all of them to my image consultants, the RIAA
With one huge exception: software installation
./configure; with RPM, I find out when it spits out the word "depencencies:"
Now, if it happens to be one of the applications bundled with Mandrake I can just use the software installer and everything works perfectly every time. However, whether I'm downloading and compiling from source or trying to install RPM's, I've repeatedly been dragged into what can only be called dependency hell!
OK, I've downloaded NiftyApp. If I'm compiling from source, I'll find out about the dependencies while running
So I find out what it's dependencies are. I go to Google and RPMFind and locate + download the required packages. But lo and behold, these packages too have unsatisfied dependencies. Sometimes I end up repeating this cycle so many times I just give up: For God's sake, how many damn dependencies can this program *HAVE*?
Other times (This is usually where I give up), the computer starts acting as if it's on crack:
rpm -i annoying-dependency.rpm
Error: package annoying-dependency is already installed.
rpm -e annoying-dependency
Error: Package not installed.
Make up your mind: Which is it, installed or not installed?!?!?
In short, I'm saying that Linux seriously needs to improve packaging. At the very least, list all the packages that your program needs installed before it can compile in a help file. That will at least save me the trouble of discovering them manually. Or list the deps on your website or Sourceforge page. I've tried installing K3D, for example, and just given up, having hunted down about 8 other RPMs and then getting the crack scenario described above. Even if it doesn't prove impossible to clear up the dependencies, It's still a major PITA to try and install, for example, MPlayer and end up downloading 5 packages for that program, and then hunting down 6 more for A/V control.
Now, I'm pretty technically proficient. I'm not afraid of the evil command line, I can use a console, and don't mind manually editing config files. If *I* can't get half the programs I download to install, what hope do ordinary users have? (Heck, considering the obscene amount of hard drive space most of us have, why not just offer a statically compiled version for download? It was the only way I could get the Game of Life (GOL) to work)
Luckily, Linux comes with about 95% of the applications I would ever use anyway. But the remaining 5% make me want to pull my hair out!
Close... A scanning tunelling microscope uses piezo elements to move the detector over the surface of the sample; The distance is measures by the nanoamperes of current flowing between it and the sample.
A scanning electron microscope works by projecting an electron beam at the target, and measuring what gets diffracted. It's main disadvantage is the requirement of a high vacuum to function.