Seems to me like the costs involved in simply extending the contest by a day or two(or 5) to run longer, as well as conduct any trail repairs and such, are minimal compared to the potential rewards from much more competition.
However, I suspect that the "big boy" defense contractors will get first pickings even if they have shit for entries, and if the armed services -really- want to stack the deck, they'll pick the independent teams they think have the least chance to fill out the other 15 or so slots.
If you don't believe me, just look at some of the wonderful moves the armed services have made in the past when things were supposed to be open to fair bidding etc. Or, look at the current bids for Iraq stuff- one does wonder what sort of commission Cheney gets these days- oh wait, that would be his Haliburton retirement account...
It is *very* difficult to enforce medical treatment on someone who has NOT been legally declared mentally incompetent and assigned a guardian
Actually, it's exceptionally(frighteningly) easy, at least in Massachusetts. Your parents, as well as any nurse, doctor, law enforcement officer or judge can determine you are a danger to yourself and have you indefinitely committed, with no due process. You get a review, but the time window is "several weeks" if I recall. Now, picture having spent several weeks in a mental institution(probably a state one, and keep in mind, funding for mental facilities has been severely slashed thanks to Governor Mitt Romney) and trying to convince a panel of psychologists you're not insane. I'd probably go insane just from frustration and despair. The phrase "yeah, sure, buddy, you're not crazy, we don't hear THAT one all the time" comes to mind.
The Boston Globe did a big story about it several years ago; one of the cases I remember involved a patient of a psychologist decided to stop having sessions with her, and when she asked if he would hurt himself, he refused to answer the question, saying she should know him better than that and he found it insulting. A matter of hours later, uniformed cops broke into his house, slammed him to the floor and handcuffed him in front of his wife and young children- and he spent weeks in a mental facility despite the efforts of his wife to get him out.
It's terribly frightening- the same possibilities for abuse exist as with the Indian law which allows you to declare a relative dead, and is widely used to steal property from unpopular relatives(the Peace ig Nobel Prize winner was a victim of this.) At least those people aren't imprisoned against their will, denied counsel, and unlocateable (citing the new patient confidentiality rules, mental hospitals will simply deny a patient exists.)
Read on SecurityFocus, a 55 year old woman spammed an FBI computer crime agent.
Great. So what about:
the thousands of people getting ripped off daily on eBay
the DDoS's against blackhole list services
the thousands of script kiddies running loose
...? It seems like every day I'm reading about how some guy got screwed over and the FBI/SP/Local cops just didn't give a shit enough to do anything about it, whether it was technology related or otherwise, because it wasn't sexy enough. Crime is crime is crime.
Case and point, you can pretty much scam anyone outside of your state and get away with it because interstate fraud laws have a $5,000 'ground floor'. That single law is probably the most responsible for the prolific fraud we've ever seen, virtual or otherwise. I could loose $4900 tomorrow and the FBI won't do jack shit. Some FBI nerd gets a scam email any moron would know not to answer, and they call out the swat teams. Faaaaantastic.
It's like the local cops who don't give a shit if your laptop, your radio, etc were stolen and hundreds of dollars in damage done to your car. But, mind you, they've got all day to sit out on 'speed patrol'...
Re:To: OpenBSD team From: Security Exploits
on
OpenBSD 3.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
1 point for sarcasm, -2 points for not knowing that the p designation refers to the portable version of OpenSSH, not patch release.
Zero points for not being able to pull your head out of your ass and laugh, and for chrissakes, it was NOT a troll, it was a JOKE. Jesus you OpenBSD people are touchy.
To: OpenBSD team From: Security Exploits
on
OpenBSD 3.4 Released
·
· Score: -1, Troll
We just couldn't wait another 2 days
Neither will we, mwuhahaaha. I hope you enjoy releasing 3.4p1, 3.4p1.1, 3.4p1p1 and 3.4p1p1.1!
That's because you are probably installing one of those candy-ass distros on new fancy-pants hardware.
Or, what I could be doing is hardware and distro indepentend. In any case, at the time, it was a P4/1Ghz, intel mobo, intel network card, intel graphics. Very standard system, running "candy ass" Redhat 8.0.
Well, then spend some time to contribute more up-to-date docs! It's not that hard, just simple writing. If outdated docs are your itch, scratch 'em by writing new ones. This is free software, after all, and it's produced by all of us.
That'd be great, except the whole reason I was looking for HOWTOs on a particular subject was because I needed to figure out how to do it- not because I already knew how to do it.
The problem is that those with the knowledge are keeping it to themselves(hello, kernel developers, are you listening?), and not contributing to the LDP...
The Linux Documentation Project is happy to announce its 10-year anniversary!
...and most of their docs are celebrating their 10th year anniversary since their last change/update.
Ok, so it's a slight exaggeration, but an enormous number of TLDP documents- mostly HOWTOs- are so horribly, embarrassingly out of date that they are completely, entirely, useless. Like the networking related howtos that cover 2.0 kernel features...
I cannot actually think of a single major HOWTO that I've actually found up-to-date enough to be useable on a linux distro released in the last 2 years.
It wouldn't be halloween without a linux jack-o-lantern
You bastards! No false advertising here. Just pictures of a pumpkin with a penguin cut into it, and some seperate pictures of one of those micro-pcs. Dammit, I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how he got the thing into the pumpkin and why there weren't any pictures of it...
Now before everyone begins to quote Ben Franklin, please consider that he lived in a very different era where the ability of a very few to cause significant harm was simply not available. He was saying, don't let the gov't take my gun because I may need it to protect myself from intruders or even the gov't.
No, no, no no, NO!
The famous "They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" is NOT about guns. You could not be further from the truth.
The quote means exactly what is says- if you're willing to give up your freedom, you didn't deserve it in the first place- because if you truly valued and appreciated your freedom, you'd understand that being truly free has risks- the risks that someone will abuse that freedom.
That risk is the price you pay for being a US citizen, and in this day and age it is such a minute risk it is absurd(WTC=3000 people, once. Highway deaths EVERY YEAR? 40,000. Heart disease deaths EVERY YEAR? 700,000).
Ben Franklin is flipping in his grave as Bush and Ashcroft- who have done more damage to our personal liberty than anyone else in our history- call themselves "patriots"; they are lying, grandstanding cowards- little more than scam artists who have show the public a future where the Bad Man With The Turban goes away if they just bend over at the airport. True patriots are willing to take the risk so that they remain free. Sheep are willing to trade their freedom for safety.
Whats the difference from that and these?
NASA System [nasa.gov]
Well, Postdoc is like requiring your shaver to be interfaced to your toaster while the TV is on channel 2 just so the frying pan works so you can make breakfast- but only if you use organic brown eggs. Seriously, did you read the about-Postdoc page and see how literally cobbled together it is? I was personally amazed there wasn't any duct tape mentioned.
Diracian [diracian.com]
It actually works, instead of giving a MySQL error?
from the whole-lotta-clock-cycles dept.
[snip]
yes, it's running MacOSX Jaguar ( soon Panther)
More like whole-lotta-CD-jockying. Perhaps the bio department can lend a hand by donating the services of their chimps to handle the CD swapping.
(Yes, I'm aware there are smarter ways of doing it, but isn't it a fun mental picture, 100 chimps running around a cluster of G5's and throwing bananas and CDs at each other?) Talk about your fun install-fests.
Sounds cruel, but medical technology is largely to blame for overpopulation, boosting the birth rate, raising the average life expectancy...
Plauges, STDs are all, to some extent, 'reactions' by 'mother nature' to bring us under control. Want to see a clearer-cut example? Forest fire fighting. Forests have been around for quite some time without us meddling with their natural processes. We step in, start fighting the small fires which thinned the forests out- and boom, all of the sudden, nobody can figure out why we've MASSIVE fires.
The problem is not so much technology itself as the misappropriation of it by people egged on by thel "won't someone think of the children" types. Won't someone think of the tree owls who are homeless after that last fire? We'd better meddle!
Is it worthy or is it just another player that falls short of the iPod's greatness?
Let's see:
iPod: revision #3 or 4(I've lost track.) Like the rest of Apple's electronics, each revision is better than the last and encorporates everything they learned from the previous. Dell: first shot. Probably went to taiwanese companies and said "make us an iPod".
Larger all around
buttons versus iPod's touch-sensitive, sealed, no-moving-parts interface
No remote, no mic, no flash reader, no nifty powered-from-iPod FM transmitters.
Not cross-platform
Not useable as a storage device(or is it? Couldn't tell)
Not nearly as pretty(chrome, white.Tough to beat)
World's most popular online music service versus...musicmatch.
Cardscan's Accucard already does this- and has for quite some time. When you scan a card, you get the option to add it to Accucard, and the owner of the card(provided they have an email address) gets an email asking if the info is correct and if they'd like to keep their info up to date in the future. Any future copies of their card that get scanned automatically get the new info, I believe.
This is important, because Corex(makers of Cardscan) already have one big thing the P2P companies don't- they have their foot in the door already with their Cardscan units, which are owned by people who need this service the most- sales people and the like. It's like trying to sell gas to car owners, the two just go together. While some sales people may have P2P software on their systems, it's unlikely given the crackdown on p2p apps by many companies....and they're not about to put client information into some two-bit p2p program.
...you thought "New York Times, Registration Required" was the name of the newspaper.
New York Times [snip] [link to Google copy of article]
And in other news, NYT(reg required) reports that Satan is wondering who turned off the heat. Also, NYT(reg required) reports that pigs were spotted on apporach for Laguardia, but nobody noticed because of the Concorde. Meanwhile, WMDs were actually found in Iraq, except only aljazira(sp?) reported it, so nobody actually believed it.
I mean seriously- you first-time-readers might not realize what a big deal this is! This has got to be a milestone on slashdot- "first story ever which contained a NY times article with a no-registration-required link provided in the actual story".
Now, for the obligatory conspiracy angle- was it editors only approving articles w/reg-required links, or were they editing the stories? Or are the slashdot 'editors'(term used loosely) little green men from another world?
If we find anyone publicly calling us spyware, we correct it and take action if necessary,' said Scott Eagle, Gator's senior vice president of marketing. So be careful what you say in your comments...
Well, I guess I better not say that it's spyware, because of course it's not spyware, now is it? And Mr. Eagle does not work for a sleazy, slimy company which does not sneak its software onto unsuspecting users.
As if to imply that wars aren't already being fought over water...just look at Israel, which diverted the River Jordan away from Syria.
Or, for something closer to home, try reading the Milagro Beanfield War, about a poor farmer who dares to use enough water for his field so he can eat. Rich cattle rancher/farmer gets all the water because he's in bed with the state officials..
High-end computer systems may surpass the computational ability of the standard human brain within 20 years
Arggg...computational ability does NOT EQUAL SENTIENCE! Nor will it EVER!
Why is it that people keep thinking that it's like the scifi movies, where you build a big enough computer and it magically starts 'learning' and becomes 'alive'?
Entrants will traverse more than 3,000km of the Australian continent from tropical Darwin to balmy Adelaide
Oy, govnah. Sounds like Mad Max, it does- only a might quiet'ah, none of them pesky cannibals an' bettah scenery.
I dare someone to show up with a crazy looking vehicle and start taking out contestants with crude weaponry. Extra bonus points if your vehicle spews fire, brandishes lots of pointy edges, and gets under 5mpg. That'll show those eco-freaks who's boss.
Slashdot Mirror
What's wrong with that? I hate vasts! Out with the vasts!
(Apparently, you're history buffs, but not spelling buffs.)
Every time our early-80's GE microwave kicks in, the TV goes all fuzzy. TV's infrastructure. I smell prior art...or is that burning popcorn...
I for one welcome our new over-sized, deadly solar radiation overlords!
All our Van Allen Belt are belong to them...
Seems to me like the costs involved in simply extending the contest by a day or two(or 5) to run longer, as well as conduct any trail repairs and such, are minimal compared to the potential rewards from much more competition.
However, I suspect that the "big boy" defense contractors will get first pickings even if they have shit for entries, and if the armed services -really- want to stack the deck, they'll pick the independent teams they think have the least chance to fill out the other 15 or so slots.
If you don't believe me, just look at some of the wonderful moves the armed services have made in the past when things were supposed to be open to fair bidding etc. Or, look at the current bids for Iraq stuff- one does wonder what sort of commission Cheney gets these days- oh wait, that would be his Haliburton retirement account...
Actually, it's exceptionally(frighteningly) easy, at least in Massachusetts. Your parents, as well as any nurse, doctor, law enforcement officer or judge can determine you are a danger to yourself and have you indefinitely committed, with no due process. You get a review, but the time window is "several weeks" if I recall. Now, picture having spent several weeks in a mental institution(probably a state one, and keep in mind, funding for mental facilities has been severely slashed thanks to Governor Mitt Romney) and trying to convince a panel of psychologists you're not insane. I'd probably go insane just from frustration and despair. The phrase "yeah, sure, buddy, you're not crazy, we don't hear THAT one all the time" comes to mind.
The Boston Globe did a big story about it several years ago; one of the cases I remember involved a patient of a psychologist decided to stop having sessions with her, and when she asked if he would hurt himself, he refused to answer the question, saying she should know him better than that and he found it insulting. A matter of hours later, uniformed cops broke into his house, slammed him to the floor and handcuffed him in front of his wife and young children- and he spent weeks in a mental facility despite the efforts of his wife to get him out.
It's terribly frightening- the same possibilities for abuse exist as with the Indian law which allows you to declare a relative dead, and is widely used to steal property from unpopular relatives(the Peace ig Nobel Prize winner was a victim of this.) At least those people aren't imprisoned against their will, denied counsel, and unlocateable (citing the new patient confidentiality rules, mental hospitals will simply deny a patient exists.)
Danger Will Robinson, Danger! Rant Ahead!
Read on SecurityFocus, a 55 year old woman spammed an FBI computer crime agent.
Great. So what about:
...? It seems like every day I'm reading about how some guy got screwed over and the FBI/SP/Local cops just didn't give a shit enough to do anything about it, whether it was technology related or otherwise, because it wasn't sexy enough. Crime is crime is crime.
Case and point, you can pretty much scam anyone outside of your state and get away with it because interstate fraud laws have a $5,000 'ground floor'. That single law is probably the most responsible for the prolific fraud we've ever seen, virtual or otherwise. I could loose $4900 tomorrow and the FBI won't do jack shit. Some FBI nerd gets a scam email any moron would know not to answer, and they call out the swat teams. Faaaaantastic.
It's like the local cops who don't give a shit if your laptop, your radio, etc were stolen and hundreds of dollars in damage done to your car. But, mind you, they've got all day to sit out on 'speed patrol'...
Zero points for not being able to pull your head out of your ass and laugh, and for chrissakes, it was NOT a troll, it was a JOKE. Jesus you OpenBSD people are touchy.
Neither will we, mwuhahaaha. I hope you enjoy releasing 3.4p1, 3.4p1.1, 3.4p1p1 and 3.4p1p1.1!
MWUAHAHAHAH, HAHAHAHA, HAHAhahahaSNORKcoughcoughhaaaaaaaaark. Nmmm, yes.
Or, what I could be doing is hardware and distro indepentend. In any case, at the time, it was a P4/1Ghz, intel mobo, intel network card, intel graphics. Very standard system, running "candy ass" Redhat 8.0.
That'd be great, except the whole reason I was looking for HOWTOs on a particular subject was because I needed to figure out how to do it- not because I already knew how to do it.
The problem is that those with the knowledge are keeping it to themselves(hello, kernel developers, are you listening?), and not contributing to the LDP...
...and most of their docs are celebrating their 10th year anniversary since their last change/update.
Ok, so it's a slight exaggeration, but an enormous number of TLDP documents- mostly HOWTOs- are so horribly, embarrassingly out of date that they are completely, entirely, useless. Like the networking related howtos that cover 2.0 kernel features...
I cannot actually think of a single major HOWTO that I've actually found up-to-date enough to be useable on a linux distro released in the last 2 years.
You bastards! No false advertising here. Just pictures of a pumpkin with a penguin cut into it, and some seperate pictures of one of those micro-pcs. Dammit, I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how he got the thing into the pumpkin and why there weren't any pictures of it...
No, no, no no, NO!
The famous "They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" is NOT about guns. You could not be further from the truth.
The quote means exactly what is says- if you're willing to give up your freedom, you didn't deserve it in the first place- because if you truly valued and appreciated your freedom, you'd understand that being truly free has risks- the risks that someone will abuse that freedom.
That risk is the price you pay for being a US citizen, and in this day and age it is such a minute risk it is absurd(WTC=3000 people, once. Highway deaths EVERY YEAR? 40,000. Heart disease deaths EVERY YEAR? 700,000).
Ben Franklin is flipping in his grave as Bush and Ashcroft- who have done more damage to our personal liberty than anyone else in our history- call themselves "patriots"; they are lying, grandstanding cowards- little more than scam artists who have show the public a future where the Bad Man With The Turban goes away if they just bend over at the airport. True patriots are willing to take the risk so that they remain free. Sheep are willing to trade their freedom for safety.
Whats the difference from that and these?
NASA System [nasa.gov]
Well, Postdoc is like requiring your shaver to be interfaced to your toaster while the TV is on channel 2 just so the frying pan works so you can make breakfast- but only if you use organic brown eggs. Seriously, did you read the about-Postdoc page and see how literally cobbled together it is? I was personally amazed there wasn't any duct tape mentioned.
Diracian [diracian.com]
It actually works, instead of giving a MySQL error?
[snip]
yes, it's running MacOSX Jaguar ( soon Panther)
More like whole-lotta-CD-jockying. Perhaps the bio department can lend a hand by donating the services of their chimps to handle the CD swapping.
(Yes, I'm aware there are smarter ways of doing it, but isn't it a fun mental picture, 100 chimps running around a cluster of G5's and throwing bananas and CDs at each other?) Talk about your fun install-fests.
Yep. They want to see the neat "Genie" effect of their soul going to [some rock/hell/heaven/nowhere] when they crash into a brick wall.
What about overpopulation?
Sounds cruel, but medical technology is largely to blame for overpopulation, boosting the birth rate, raising the average life expectancy...
Plauges, STDs are all, to some extent, 'reactions' by 'mother nature' to bring us under control. Want to see a clearer-cut example? Forest fire fighting. Forests have been around for quite some time without us meddling with their natural processes. We step in, start fighting the small fires which thinned the forests out- and boom, all of the sudden, nobody can figure out why we've MASSIVE fires.
The problem is not so much technology itself as the misappropriation of it by people egged on by thel "won't someone think of the children" types. Won't someone think of the tree owls who are homeless after that last fire? We'd better meddle!
Let's see:
I take it back- not even close.
Cardscan's Accucard already does this- and has for quite some time. When you scan a card, you get the option to add it to Accucard, and the owner of the card(provided they have an email address) gets an email asking if the info is correct and if they'd like to keep their info up to date in the future. Any future copies of their card that get scanned automatically get the new info, I believe.
This is important, because Corex(makers of Cardscan) already have one big thing the P2P companies don't- they have their foot in the door already with their Cardscan units, which are owned by people who need this service the most- sales people and the like. It's like trying to sell gas to car owners, the two just go together. While some sales people may have P2P software on their systems, it's unlikely given the crackdown on p2p apps by many companies....and they're not about to put client information into some two-bit p2p program.
...you thought "New York Times, Registration Required" was the name of the newspaper. New York Times [snip] [link to Google copy of article]
And in other news, NYT(reg required) reports that Satan is wondering who turned off the heat. Also, NYT(reg required) reports that pigs were spotted on apporach for Laguardia, but nobody noticed because of the Concorde. Meanwhile, WMDs were actually found in Iraq, except only aljazira(sp?) reported it, so nobody actually believed it.
I mean seriously- you first-time-readers might not realize what a big deal this is! This has got to be a milestone on slashdot- "first story ever which contained a NY times article with a no-registration-required link provided in the actual story".
Now, for the obligatory conspiracy angle- was it editors only approving articles w/reg-required links, or were they editing the stories? Or are the slashdot 'editors'(term used loosely) little green men from another world?
Well, I guess I better not say that it's spyware, because of course it's not spyware, now is it? And Mr. Eagle does not work for a sleazy, slimy company which does not sneak its software onto unsuspecting users.
Patents bad...popunders bad...patent stops pop..unders...ehhhhhhhhH!
[Head-explodes]
As if to imply that wars aren't already being fought over water...just look at Israel, which diverted the River Jordan away from Syria.
Or, for something closer to home, try reading the Milagro Beanfield War, about a poor farmer who dares to use enough water for his field so he can eat. Rich cattle rancher/farmer gets all the water because he's in bed with the state officials..
Arggg...computational ability does NOT EQUAL SENTIENCE! Nor will it EVER!
Why is it that people keep thinking that it's like the scifi movies, where you build a big enough computer and it magically starts 'learning' and becomes 'alive'?
Oy, govnah. Sounds like Mad Max, it does- only a might quiet'ah, none of them pesky cannibals an' bettah scenery.
I dare someone to show up with a crazy looking vehicle and start taking out contestants with crude weaponry. Extra bonus points if your vehicle spews fire, brandishes lots of pointy edges, and gets under 5mpg. That'll show those eco-freaks who's boss.