Yes, but you see, my computer is powered by a dynamo attached to the rear hub of a bicycle.
The only real cost to me is the extra caffine and doghnuts I need to keep peddling.
Waste of money? An entire project that, in order to survive, has to litterally get people to come and give them free access to their spare clock cycles?
I suppose you're either dumb, ill-informed, or just want to piss people off, but you should read up on an issue before developing an opinion. Any issue.
For example, SpaceGuard, which looks for earth-crossing asteroids, has the funding and staff roughly equivalent to a small urban McDonalds franchise.
SpaceGuard has SETI pwned six ways from sunday for all that, too. SETI is more like a small rural McDonalds franchise that only opens on Friday and Sunday because that's when all the city folk are driving up to their cabins at the lake, but the other five days, nobody ever uses that dirt road.
The only way SETI gets anything done is by leeching clock cylcles off of other people.
What the fuck can Sun do to stop hunger, poverty, etc? And with Microsoft, Apple, and everybody else giving computers to schools it's really the school's fault if they don't have computers. You can get a million dollar lab of them for free if you whine to the right people.
Well, seeing as we crank out roughly a quarter billion sentient beings a year, and none has yet destroyed humanity, I don't see one or two extras accomplishing a goddamn thing.
Aren't...lead shielding a bit heaavy
Well, the reactor would have to be shielded during launch, but one's its up to Earth-orbit, there's no crew to worry about, so you don't need shielding. The reactor may still be heavy, but this is a truely massive spacecraft that'll probably have insane power demands, and will be too far out for solar panels to be useful, so a nuclear reactor would be a lot lighter than hauling along a plutonium battery or, god forbid, a chemical-reaction generator.
It's the main reason nuclear powered airplanes never flew
That and safety issues. A meltdown on the ground isn't that big an issue, provided the reactor is contained and maintained correctly (Three Mile Island, not that long after in radiological terms, registers no radiation over background).
(well the Russians had one that flew but most of the staff operating it died as it was not shielded at all)
Maybe the Soviet Union's half-century penchant for uncontained, unshielded, untested, unmaintained, unfunded, and unsafe hardware contributed to that? No, couldn't be.
The idea sounds more feasable... as soon as it's in space you don't need to worry about mass to much
Yes you do. You may not have weight, but you still have inertia to deal with when you try to maneuver the vehicle. However, the reason it isn't as much of an issue on an unmanned spacecraft is that there's no worry about safety. If it blows up, oh well, you threw away a lot of money, but it was out in space and nobody died. If it leaks, same difference. It's too far away to kill people.
transport of spare parts for the reactor is going to be very expensive
There won't be spare parts. If there were, how the hell would they be installed if needed? The downside to unmanned space missions is that there's minimal room to fix things once they're broken. Spare parts take up weight you can't spare, and they don't install themselves. When Gallileo's high gain antenna died, they didn't have a spare motor they could install to retune it. They just said fsck it and used the low-gain. Even Hubble doesn't carry any spare parts with them. If they're needed, they have to be sent up there after the fact, which you can't do beyond earth-orbit.
Actually, in the majority of systems we've found, they have a Jupiter mass planet orbiting almost within the star's corona. The first one's were 8, 10, and 15 times closer to their parent star than Mercury is to ours, although the new ones are a bit less crazy.
At any rate, we can't detect anything smaller than a large gas giant (I havn't kept up on the extrasolar planet scene for a while, but last I checked, they still didn't have any strong evidence for Saturn-mass planets). Furthur, we dtect them by the "wobble" they impart on the star they're orbiting. You try to discover Europa by watching how the sun wobbles. You'll probably be able to extrapolate Jupiter and Saturn, and considering that we're so close to the sun, Uranus and Neptune should be feasible too. But anything else would have its effect on the sun completely overwhelmed by four planets, any one of which outmasses all the other non-solar material in the solar system (and one of which outmasses not just the other material, but the other three gas giants as well).
It wouldn't have mattered. Maybe for those particular people, they might have lived a few more years. But trans-Atlantic expeditions were all the rage, and all the monarchs in Europe just had to have one. If Columbus hadn't gone, then some French or British or Portugese guy would have. The net result would have been the same. Columbus doesn't have the blood of millions on his hands, the kings of Europe do.
I have a bunch of fake rocks, and then I leave the key sitting on top of the window frame. I've come home a couple times to find the fake rocks turned over and tossed around, but nobody's ever found the key.
Keep in mind that the article said that hiding messages in images is NOT a great way to hide important stuff by itself, but that it could be used as a second layer of security.
Lets have four people, shall we? They all run servers, and they all have an important file on there they don't want other people to find.
Johnny keeps his file unencrypted and unhidden.
Billy keeps his encrypted, but unhidden.
Mike hides his in an mp3, but unencrypted.
Joe hides his in a jpeg after encrypting it.
Johnny's most likely to have his stolen, obviously. But Billy's file is more likely to be found than either Mike or Joe's, even though Mike's has no encryption on the file itself. Even though the person who took Billy's file doesn't have the information in it, finding it it one step closer to stealing it.
Now, Mike and Joe are both considerably less likely to have this file found, unless the data theif expects them to hide it in a media file like this. On the off chance that the hacker DOES find the file, though, Mike's is as good as stolen, just like Johnny's.
However, Joe is the most secure of the bunch. Not only is his file encrypted, but it's also hidden, meaning it's unlikely that the hacker will even get the encrypted version. They can't crack what they can't find.
Even after what Johnny did, he can go furthur. Encrypt his password, hide the text in an image, rename the image to a.dll or.o and hide it in a system directory. Sure, it's not 100% secure, but it's better than leaving even the most secure file laying around.
An interesting technique for hiding "questionable content" on your computer is to zip it up and rename the file something like syskrnl32.dll or winld64.sys or something important-sounding, then putting it in c:\windows\system. Back in the days of windows 3.11, I could go into DOS and do an attrib +d on it, but they seem to have taken the d attribute out since Windows 95.
I think a quote would be better than anything I can say here:
"Nobody learns anything if you punch their lights out anymore. Hell, somebody does something sick and twisted to me, and If I kill him, I'M the one who goes to jail! The only way to get anything done anymore is to sue the hell out of people.
I don't even think it has to go so far as being entirely open-source, but it can't be closed and locked up like it is. Multiple independent firms (a mix of competitors of Diebold and companies that aren't competing with Diebold), government agencies, and (especially) the UN's election monitoring committee (I forgot the proper name for it, the one we got kicked off of after the 2000 election), and any agencies or companies they want to assess the software.
This way, plenty of people who either have no stake in the system, or have a stake in its failure, will all run the system through the wringer. If they can find any shortcomming, and then prove it in tests, then Diebold goes back to the drawing board. If Diebold can't fix it, then what they've accomplished, along with their nice fat government contract, gets passed off to another electronic voting company.
I also like a post I saw above: Placing 100 of Diebold's machines "out in the open," as a hack target with a $10,000 reward for anybody who manages to hack one in such a way that would threaten an election (Crashing it, changing counts, revealing counts before the polls close, whatever).
The lawyer sends the C&D letter on penalty of purjury. However, if his boss (Diebold in this case) represented to him that these letters were, in fact, justified, he isn't at fault, as he believed he was acting within the extent of the DMCA (Or at least there's not way to prove otherwise in court).
And to make things worse, when Diebold told the lawyer(s) that they were justified in sending the C&D letters, THAT statement was not made under pentalty of purjury. It's one of those loopholes in the law that really should be pulled shut.
For years, Carmageddon was one of my favorite games. It spent more time installed in my harddrive than Chrono Trigger spent plugged into my SNES.
If you don't know, the point of Carmageddon is to drive around, run over pedestrians, and repeatedly engage in high-speed collitions with the other vehicles in the race until only one car is still running.
I played this game for longer than I've had my license, and I still play it occasionally now, although it's horribly outdated and I'm good enough at it that I don't watch the screen anymore.
But my point is that, as realistic as the damage and control models of the game was (for the time, anyway. Nothing compared to more recent games) I have never, ever, EVER done something even remotely as stupid on the road as I have in the game.
I know plenty of people who drive like I do in Carmageddon, but I know only one other person who actually played Carmageddon, and he's not old enough to get a license yet.
It was never a really popular game, so I seriously doubt any significant fraction of the tens of millions of idiots who regularly drive like the fool described in the above post play Carmageddon. People have driven like morons since the 20's ("Would ya' slow down you maniac! The limit's 15, not 18! That model isn't even rated to go that fast!"), and nobody has ever needed GTA or Carmageddon or whatever to inspire them to do so.
Not only all that, try to strafe wile firing and reloading at full clip. You can't run and shoot, let alone run and aim, reload, and dodge the enemy.
Many times as I've played Quake, if I ever do meet a real army of cybernetic undead, I'll piss my pants long before I'll plunge headlong into the fray with a shotgun.
It isn't something we have to do. This thing is effectively a credit card that we can't lose, leave at home, etc. Carry it around in your pocket, implant it under the skin of your forearm, no major difference.
Personally, after today, I'd love to have my credit card implanted in my body. I left my Shell Club card home, and had to pay an extra 25 cents a gallon for gas. Then I get to work and realize I have no quarters, so I can't get breakfast from the vending machines. Then, on my lunch break, I realize I don't have any form of currency on me whatsoever, and I didn't even get to eat.
Much as they tell me "Don't leave home without it," I'd like a card that I can't leave home without.
Try doing more searches on there, though. They pay more senators and congressmen than just this one, democrat and republican. It may not be that expensive to buy one senator, and cheaper to buy a congressman, since they campaign on a pretty limited scale. But try to buy fifty or sixty senators and a good two hundred congressmen, as well as governors and state legislators, presidential candidates, etc (Personally, I wouldn't be suprised if the RIAA regularly plays both sides, funding opposing candidates so they can't lose either way). It's an expensive game once you start playing.
From the RIAA's past blather, I think they mainly want this exemtion so they can better deal with independent record labels and radio stations (both internet and airwave). Legally, they don't need this sort of thing to deal with file swappers (although it can't hurt by any means).
How about we stop allowing them to pay off these lawmakers with huge donations (even through other channels) and they stop being able to throw their weight around.
The problem with stopping corporate payoffs is that once major companies start paying off politicians, they can't be stopped. They can block a ban on this sort of thing just as easily as they can push this exemtion through. The politicians getting the money won't go against the companies, and the politicians who don't get the money don't stand a reasonable chance of winning an election against the existing polticians on the sweeping scale (voting majority in both houses plus the president) it would take to change things.
Gun? It would take a lot more than that to stop the RIAA or SCO or even my uncle Gerry. I'm going to buy an inconveniently large ground-to-ground missile system. Anybody got about half an acre they could donate for me to park it on?
Don't be so hash on SCO. Most of their smarter mokeys have died of old age and illness. The ones that they have left keep typing l's instead of 1's. They'll never finish their IP lawsuit against the mokeys trying to type the Great American Novel at this rate.
Not very well paraphrased... The letter was from SGI, not SCO. A more accurate paraphrasing:
Dear SCO,
Please go suck and egg.
Thank you, and have a nice day.
SGI.
PS: We sent this to the Linux Community since you seem to have blocked our emails. I'm sure you'll get it either way.
Even the best weather simulation will have innaccuracies. Even if they monitor global butterfly activity and can accurately model each butterfly's impact on the universe, those damn mosquitos will throw the whole thing out of whack a good.02%.
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Yes, but you see, my computer is powered by a dynamo attached to the rear hub of a bicycle. The only real cost to me is the extra caffine and doghnuts I need to keep peddling.
Waste of money? An entire project that, in order to survive, has to litterally get people to come and give them free access to their spare clock cycles? I suppose you're either dumb, ill-informed, or just want to piss people off, but you should read up on an issue before developing an opinion. Any issue. For example, SpaceGuard, which looks for earth-crossing asteroids, has the funding and staff roughly equivalent to a small urban McDonalds franchise. SpaceGuard has SETI pwned six ways from sunday for all that, too. SETI is more like a small rural McDonalds franchise that only opens on Friday and Sunday because that's when all the city folk are driving up to their cabins at the lake, but the other five days, nobody ever uses that dirt road. The only way SETI gets anything done is by leeching clock cylcles off of other people. What the fuck can Sun do to stop hunger, poverty, etc? And with Microsoft, Apple, and everybody else giving computers to schools it's really the school's fault if they don't have computers. You can get a million dollar lab of them for free if you whine to the right people.
Well, seeing as we crank out roughly a quarter billion sentient beings a year, and none has yet destroyed humanity, I don't see one or two extras accomplishing a goddamn thing.
Aren't ...lead shielding a bit heaavy
Well, the reactor would have to be shielded during launch, but one's its up to Earth-orbit, there's no crew to worry about, so you don't need shielding. The reactor may still be heavy, but this is a truely massive spacecraft that'll probably have insane power demands, and will be too far out for solar panels to be useful, so a nuclear reactor would be a lot lighter than hauling along a plutonium battery or, god forbid, a chemical-reaction generator.
It's the main reason nuclear powered airplanes never flew
That and safety issues. A meltdown on the ground isn't that big an issue, provided the reactor is contained and maintained correctly (Three Mile Island, not that long after in radiological terms, registers no radiation over background).
(well the Russians had one that flew but most of the staff operating it died as it was not shielded at all)
Maybe the Soviet Union's half-century penchant for uncontained, unshielded, untested, unmaintained, unfunded, and unsafe hardware contributed to that? No, couldn't be.
The idea sounds more feasable ... as soon as it's in space you don't need to worry about mass to much
Yes you do. You may not have weight, but you still have inertia to deal with when you try to maneuver the vehicle. However, the reason it isn't as much of an issue on an unmanned spacecraft is that there's no worry about safety. If it blows up, oh well, you threw away a lot of money, but it was out in space and nobody died. If it leaks, same difference. It's too far away to kill people.
transport of spare parts for the reactor is going to be very expensive
There won't be spare parts. If there were, how the hell would they be installed if needed? The downside to unmanned space missions is that there's minimal room to fix things once they're broken. Spare parts take up weight you can't spare, and they don't install themselves. When Gallileo's high gain antenna died, they didn't have a spare motor they could install to retune it. They just said fsck it and used the low-gain. Even Hubble doesn't carry any spare parts with them. If they're needed, they have to be sent up there after the fact, which you can't do beyond earth-orbit.
Actually, in the majority of systems we've found, they have a Jupiter mass planet orbiting almost within the star's corona. The first one's were 8, 10, and 15 times closer to their parent star than Mercury is to ours, although the new ones are a bit less crazy. At any rate, we can't detect anything smaller than a large gas giant (I havn't kept up on the extrasolar planet scene for a while, but last I checked, they still didn't have any strong evidence for Saturn-mass planets). Furthur, we dtect them by the "wobble" they impart on the star they're orbiting. You try to discover Europa by watching how the sun wobbles. You'll probably be able to extrapolate Jupiter and Saturn, and considering that we're so close to the sun, Uranus and Neptune should be feasible too. But anything else would have its effect on the sun completely overwhelmed by four planets, any one of which outmasses all the other non-solar material in the solar system (and one of which outmasses not just the other material, but the other three gas giants as well).
It wouldn't have mattered. Maybe for those particular people, they might have lived a few more years. But trans-Atlantic expeditions were all the rage, and all the monarchs in Europe just had to have one. If Columbus hadn't gone, then some French or British or Portugese guy would have. The net result would have been the same. Columbus doesn't have the blood of millions on his hands, the kings of Europe do.
I have a bunch of fake rocks, and then I leave the key sitting on top of the window frame. I've come home a couple times to find the fake rocks turned over and tossed around, but nobody's ever found the key.
Keep in mind that the article said that hiding messages in images is NOT a great way to hide important stuff by itself, but that it could be used as a second layer of security. Lets have four people, shall we? They all run servers, and they all have an important file on there they don't want other people to find. Johnny keeps his file unencrypted and unhidden. Billy keeps his encrypted, but unhidden. Mike hides his in an mp3, but unencrypted. Joe hides his in a jpeg after encrypting it. Johnny's most likely to have his stolen, obviously. But Billy's file is more likely to be found than either Mike or Joe's, even though Mike's has no encryption on the file itself. Even though the person who took Billy's file doesn't have the information in it, finding it it one step closer to stealing it. Now, Mike and Joe are both considerably less likely to have this file found, unless the data theif expects them to hide it in a media file like this. On the off chance that the hacker DOES find the file, though, Mike's is as good as stolen, just like Johnny's. However, Joe is the most secure of the bunch. Not only is his file encrypted, but it's also hidden, meaning it's unlikely that the hacker will even get the encrypted version. They can't crack what they can't find. Even after what Johnny did, he can go furthur. Encrypt his password, hide the text in an image, rename the image to a .dll or .o and hide it in a system directory. Sure, it's not 100% secure, but it's better than leaving even the most secure file laying around.
An interesting technique for hiding "questionable content" on your computer is to zip it up and rename the file something like syskrnl32.dll or winld64.sys or something important-sounding, then putting it in c:\windows\system. Back in the days of windows 3.11, I could go into DOS and do an attrib +d on it, but they seem to have taken the d attribute out since Windows 95.
I think a quote would be better than anything I can say here:
"Nobody learns anything if you punch their lights out anymore. Hell, somebody does something sick and twisted to me, and If I kill him, I'M the one who goes to jail! The only way to get anything done anymore is to sue the hell out of people.
I don't even think it has to go so far as being entirely open-source, but it can't be closed and locked up like it is. Multiple independent firms (a mix of competitors of Diebold and companies that aren't competing with Diebold), government agencies, and (especially) the UN's election monitoring committee (I forgot the proper name for it, the one we got kicked off of after the 2000 election), and any agencies or companies they want to assess the software.
This way, plenty of people who either have no stake in the system, or have a stake in its failure, will all run the system through the wringer. If they can find any shortcomming, and then prove it in tests, then Diebold goes back to the drawing board. If Diebold can't fix it, then what they've accomplished, along with their nice fat government contract, gets passed off to another electronic voting company.
I also like a post I saw above: Placing 100 of Diebold's machines "out in the open," as a hack target with a $10,000 reward for anybody who manages to hack one in such a way that would threaten an election (Crashing it, changing counts, revealing counts before the polls close, whatever).
In effect, yes.
The lawyer sends the C&D letter on penalty of purjury. However, if his boss (Diebold in this case) represented to him that these letters were, in fact, justified, he isn't at fault, as he believed he was acting within the extent of the DMCA (Or at least there's not way to prove otherwise in court).
And to make things worse, when Diebold told the lawyer(s) that they were justified in sending the C&D letters, THAT statement was not made under pentalty of purjury. It's one of those loopholes in the law that really should be pulled shut.
For years, Carmageddon was one of my favorite games. It spent more time installed in my harddrive than Chrono Trigger spent plugged into my SNES.
If you don't know, the point of Carmageddon is to drive around, run over pedestrians, and repeatedly engage in high-speed collitions with the other vehicles in the race until only one car is still running.
I played this game for longer than I've had my license, and I still play it occasionally now, although it's horribly outdated and I'm good enough at it that I don't watch the screen anymore.
But my point is that, as realistic as the damage and control models of the game was (for the time, anyway. Nothing compared to more recent games) I have never, ever, EVER done something even remotely as stupid on the road as I have in the game.
I know plenty of people who drive like I do in Carmageddon, but I know only one other person who actually played Carmageddon, and he's not old enough to get a license yet.
It was never a really popular game, so I seriously doubt any significant fraction of the tens of millions of idiots who regularly drive like the fool described in the above post play Carmageddon. People have driven like morons since the 20's ("Would ya' slow down you maniac! The limit's 15, not 18! That model isn't even rated to go that fast!"), and nobody has ever needed GTA or Carmageddon or whatever to inspire them to do so.
Yeah, but what are the odds this man is schooled in the ways of Quake? If you havn't played those games, Pac Man can still be a bit over-stimulating.
Not only all that, try to strafe wile firing and reloading at full clip. You can't run and shoot, let alone run and aim, reload, and dodge the enemy. Many times as I've played Quake, if I ever do meet a real army of cybernetic undead, I'll piss my pants long before I'll plunge headlong into the fray with a shotgun.
It isn't something we have to do. This thing is effectively a credit card that we can't lose, leave at home, etc. Carry it around in your pocket, implant it under the skin of your forearm, no major difference. Personally, after today, I'd love to have my credit card implanted in my body. I left my Shell Club card home, and had to pay an extra 25 cents a gallon for gas. Then I get to work and realize I have no quarters, so I can't get breakfast from the vending machines. Then, on my lunch break, I realize I don't have any form of currency on me whatsoever, and I didn't even get to eat.
Much as they tell me "Don't leave home without it," I'd like a card that I can't leave home without.
Try doing more searches on there, though. They pay more senators and congressmen than just this one, democrat and republican. It may not be that expensive to buy one senator, and cheaper to buy a congressman, since they campaign on a pretty limited scale. But try to buy fifty or sixty senators and a good two hundred congressmen, as well as governors and state legislators, presidential candidates, etc (Personally, I wouldn't be suprised if the RIAA regularly plays both sides, funding opposing candidates so they can't lose either way). It's an expensive game once you start playing.
From the RIAA's past blather, I think they mainly want this exemtion so they can better deal with independent record labels and radio stations (both internet and airwave). Legally, they don't need this sort of thing to deal with file swappers (although it can't hurt by any means).
How about we stop allowing them to pay off these lawmakers with huge donations (even through other channels) and they stop being able to throw their weight around.
The problem with stopping corporate payoffs is that once major companies start paying off politicians, they can't be stopped. They can block a ban on this sort of thing just as easily as they can push this exemtion through. The politicians getting the money won't go against the companies, and the politicians who don't get the money don't stand a reasonable chance of winning an election against the existing polticians on the sweeping scale (voting majority in both houses plus the president) it would take to change things.
The Democrats started this with the RIAA. Don't blame Republicans, put the blame where it belongs: The whole bunch of them.
Gun? It would take a lot more than that to stop the RIAA or SCO or even my uncle Gerry. I'm going to buy an inconveniently large ground-to-ground missile system. Anybody got about half an acre they could donate for me to park it on?
Don't be so hash on SCO. Most of their smarter mokeys have died of old age and illness. The ones that they have left keep typing l's instead of 1's. They'll never finish their IP lawsuit against the mokeys trying to type the Great American Novel at this rate.
Not very well paraphrased... The letter was from SGI, not SCO. A more accurate paraphrasing: Dear SCO, Please go suck and egg. Thank you, and have a nice day. SGI. PS: We sent this to the Linux Community since you seem to have blocked our emails. I'm sure you'll get it either way.
Even the best weather simulation will have innaccuracies. Even if they monitor global butterfly activity and can accurately model each butterfly's impact on the universe, those damn mosquitos will throw the whole thing out of whack a good .02%.
Keep in mind that millions of Americans can't leave their house if it were on fire.