I've noticed the same thing. Attacks on skeptics were personal and vindictive, not only here on Slashdot, but on every blog, mailing list, or news feed where the issue came up. The term Settled Science was thrown around like a bitchslap.
Perhaps people have learned that Argument vicieux don't help, or perhaps people have opened their eyes to more data. For what ever reason, the politically correct line hasn't wavered much (other than changing the terminology from Global Warming to Climate Change), but at least articles like the cited one get a) published and b) covered, where as they were often frozen out of publications or discussion in the past.
The discussion is changing, but the the politics are still in attack mode.
There were versions of some of the popular First Person Shooters back in the day that would handle multi screens. They were great, for about 15 minutes, then vertigo set in, and even walking up the stairs out of the basement became a challenge.
I suspect it was something to do with Visual Simulation of Motion with no motor or balance system feedback that did me in, but it could have been the pizza and jolt cola.
That said, my original comment about them "handling it right" had more to do with the way they handled replacing the DNS servers once that decision had been made. They used a private organization with a good reputation that wasn't beholden to any governmental organization. This pretty much nullifies the paranoid delusions of people like GP
Nullifies it for the moment, until some months from now someone releases a study using this data, and you are no where around to retract your words.
The GP was in fact correct, neither the FBI or some any pedestal dwelling third party was entitled to this data, and the best solution was to just drop the request.
The complete NON-ISSUE this has turned out to be since the servers were shut down indicates that they could have just dropped the requests and no one would have be hurt that bad.
The Top 3 stolen vehicles per vehicles produced are the Audi S8, Shelby G2, and BMW M5. #4 was the Dodge Charger topping the list of what could be called production run cars (production over 50 thousand units).
The ECU/ECM controls all engine functions. If it doesn't give the go ahead, your car won't run, no matter how many wires are cut apart or spliced together.
Watch the video that the OP links to. They hotwired it to silence the alarm. Then they pushed it out of frame, probably chained it to another car or maybe even winched it up on a flatbed after that. They'll muck with the ECU lock when they get it back to the chop shop and can take their time.
Exactly. It was a gang of 4, not a lone Johnny Hotwire. They didn't dare try to start it, they simply pushed it away and had a commercial looking flatbed wrecker waiting nearby. They weren't even too concerned with covering the cameras even though they knew they were there.
You assume that the sticker price of the car has something to do with it's value when stolen. I'd content that the ability to sell the stolen car or parts are what determines how much it's stolen. The top 3 cars are also very very popular cars, meaning there's a lot of demand for parts, and for the car itself.
Only expensive cars are stolen for parts. Other cars are simply stolen, had the plates switch with some other plates and sold fir dirt cheap to people who don't worry about license and registration.
The top cars in 2001 (last figures I can find on the net) sorted by Thefts per 1000 Vehicles Produced, is an odd list of cheap and mid range cars. Nothing really expensive shows up till well down the list.
Like breaking into Operating systems, people go with what is EASY, not what will get them the most money. The high price thefts are the work of professionals, and a lot of those cars leave the country intact, without even being stripped for parts.
What content is it AOL has that people want to see?
Perhaps you have never head of Amazon EC2, and don't know that Amazon runs one of the largest cloud services in the world. Any time any website grows quickly, or comes under attack, needs to ramp up their compute power, or distribute their system there is a good chance they will contract with Amazon.
Yes in some cases it does apply to some GNU situations. Its just that there are very few browsers written into any other OS.
The size of KDE's built in browser, Konqueror, often could not be distinguished from the rest KDE because it was dependent on having so much else of KDE installed. Installing on top of Gnome pulled in a mountain of other packages. Even when Gnome had X, a window manger and all the same linux core libraries already installed.
So in your childish attempt to make a point you've only proven mine.
And the fact that you don't understand the difference between running an application under an operating system and running an application as PART of an operating system is pretty telling.
why was it still pushed to stable branch then? (I use firefox though, never had too bad memory problems with it and it hasn't crashed in ages).
Congrats, you answered your question in the same sentence you asked it.
For the vast majority of people, most never saw the leaks, because they use a browser , then exit it, and do other work. The OS recovers all the leaked memory at that time.
But some people only know how to use a browser, and that is all the do on a computer. (facebook junkies mostly). They fire it up, and stay there for hours on end. Leaks matter to these people only when their machine slows down (Most are not computer literate enough to detect a leak until it gets rather large).
while with only one tab open it takes 31 MB, i.e. there seems to be no memory overhead for the software itself
Which is exactly what the GP was saying: that any browser written into a specific OS can use the facilities of the OS itself to mask its true size. Its sort of like measuring the memory impact of the Chrome browser running on a Chrome-OS tablet.
But disregarding memory utilization by the browser itself, your numbers are pretty interesting all by themselves.
What the heck is IE doing with that extra 11meg per tab when there are multiple tabs open? The web page itself is only the size that it is, and presumably the tests all loaded the same pages in the same order. 11meg is a pretty good guess for the average size of pages. Its almost as if IE build a page in the background and handing the whole thing to the render engine while keeping a copy as backup.
I wonder if the tests were run in a memory constrained machine? The idea that unused ram is wasted ram might lead some of these developer to use what is available more or less freely depending on available ram.
Actually I think it will happen VERY soon. Within a year or two.
Why? Because there are so many different radio standards in Cellular use already, in so many different Frequency Blocks, and so many different protocols. Handset manufacturers would love to have one radio package to install and be done. Who ever comes out with one of these that can be switched to handle any cellular network worldwide with just an API call wins. Its game over for all the discrete chip makers.
Plus if you can strip out the WIFI, and Bluetooth chipset there will be more power savings. And the software to do this won't be any more trouble or require any more power than the discrete chips do now. (Radio chipsets are already run by software. We call them binary blobs in linux, or Roms in Android.).
Actually we don't have much evidence for 50 warheads theory. Maybe 200, but not 50. Often these predictions are based on speculation and take on the trappings of truth, but when you track them down you find a single source with very little science behind it. The gigantic explosions of the Krakatoa volcano was equivalent to about 13,000 times the nuclear yield of the bomb that devasted Hiroshima, Japan, during WWII, and it lowered global temperature by 1.2 degrees C for one year.
So 50 nukes = Krakatoa? No. Try something like a thousand or 500 modern day nukes for equivalent power. But Krakatoa blew from below and lofted the entire volcano into the atmosphere. Nukes are triggered above ground and don't lift anywhere near that much material.
We heard the same predictions for all the smoke kicked up when Saddam fired all the oil wells. There were people actually wringing their hands and talking in terms of the "end of the world". You could see the smoke from space, so clearly it meant doom.
We've found at Chernobyl that radiation can also be survivable, even in fairly high quantities.
So as long as all the Nuclear nations don't fire everything at once, a regional nuclear war is likely to be a humanitarian disaster, but not that big of a deal globally.
Note: there is also the modern day assessment that only the US, China, Great Britain, and maybe France would have enough weapons to offer reprisal. And among the smaller nations, whoever strikes first would not have to face a counter attack. This would cut the number of actual warheads detonated.
This is the scary part if you ask me. With nobody else willing to step in on either side, and the participants having no launch on warning capabilities, the situation with proliferation of Nukes is such that some nut-job will sooner or later launch a surprise attack knowing they will not have their own country destroyed in return. MAD only works if its truly MAD and if religious nut jobs don't see it as a path to heaven.
Not really. There are large blocks of spectrum already set aside for use of personal radio devices. Just about anything goes in those bandwidths, subject only to power limitations and staying inside of the spectrum block.
The FCC is all for this type of use. The FCC is also fully in favor of reallocation spectrum when the situation and demand changes, which is why analog TV is a thing of the past.
The game changer here would be in the Cell Phone industry which can substitute a single radio chip to do all the protocols, wifi, cellular, bluetooth, as well as mix and match them at will. New air protocols could be invented over night without waiting for expensive chip developments. Its a cost reduction path as well as a device longevity path.
Although it sounds wonderful when your cell phone is stuck on CDMA or your Bluetooth lacks all the latest capabilities, there are still problems of having an infinite number of antennas available (yes, we already have software defined antennas) in a small place.
There will still have to be frequency restrictions imposed in the hardware itself because the FCC can't afford to allow Joe Random Programmer bringing down jumbo jets. But within authorized bands the ability to use new methods without waiting for the next chip means that we can build a replacement for entire infrastructures much more quickly, while maintaining existing technology for as long as we need it.
Somewhere in this world there are still 029 card punches in use. I suspect we will keep some of our current stuff long after it should be scrapped.
The most likely scenario for a thermonuclear war is between one or two smaller states with long running hatred and religious fanatical governments. The big players are likely to stay out of it. It will be far from a global event, and won't even fully destroy the states involved.
Lets say Pakistan and India have a go, or Iran and Israel: I don't see any other state too interested to jump into that mix on any of the sides. The participants get stung hard, exhaust their arsenals and beg for humanitarian aid.
Contrary to popular belief a few tens of warheads going off is not going to affect life on earth that much from a biological stand point.
Don't forget that nukes are, for the most part concentrated in the hands of nations that value human life, or at least their own lives. Once that is changed, and the whacko religious states that see death as a pathway to virgins get ahold of nukes and a deliver vehicle all bets are off.
AL Qaeda are symbolic pikers compared to religious zealots bent on ridding the world of something they perceive as evil and willing to sacrifice themselves and their own citizens to do so.
In a world where everyone has weaponry of Mutually Assured Destruction, what means are left to maintain any order? One could argue it just gives anyone a free hand to do anything short of launching to anyone else.
Actually, polling is becoming increasingly unreliable. The press had universally decided Walker would lose his Wisconsin recall. They were all wrong. And if they were all wrong about that they are asking themselves what else they were wrong about.
People have taken to lying on polls, mostly because they are sick of them.
Prior art is prior art. It doesn't require a fully functional device.
Mockups were functional to some degree, simply not capable of being fitted into the airplane. Prior Art.
You seem to have skipped over this line: "You don't seriously think the Airforce would go to production without a built in HUD betting that one would come along eventually do you?"
Further, the airforce got this idea from somewhere. It was out there in a proposal or design document. Prior Art.
You simply can not hand waive away the fact that nobody decides to leave out a major functional piece of an airplane cocpit (the HUD) without already having a better solution in hand. Prior art.
If you would understand a thing or two about patents you would know that words describing the purpose are not actual claims nor do they even have to be proven. Everything in the actual claims had already been done by the military.
What does it matter if its fully functional or not? Since when is having all the bugs out a criteria for getting a patent?
The F35 helmet was designed, prototyped, contracted for, built, and put into production BEFORE the F35 was even built because they knew all along the F35 was not going to incorporate a cockpit HUD.
Big heavy clunky mock-ups were used on the F35 simulator years before the first plane rolled off the assembly line. (You don't seriously think the Airforce would go to production without a built in HUD betting that one would come along eventually do you?)
Further the F35 wasn't the first such rear projection helmet.
The idea was already out there when Apple filed its patent.
Slashdot Mirror
I've noticed the same thing.
Attacks on skeptics were personal and vindictive, not only here on Slashdot, but on every blog, mailing list, or news feed where the issue came up. The term Settled Science was thrown around like a bitchslap.
Perhaps people have learned that Argument vicieux don't help, or perhaps people have opened their eyes to more data.
For what ever reason, the politically correct line hasn't wavered much (other than changing the terminology from Global Warming to Climate Change), but at least articles like the cited one get a) published and b) covered, where as they were often frozen out of publications or discussion in the past.
The discussion is changing, but the the politics are still in attack mode.
There were versions of some of the popular First Person Shooters back in the day that would handle multi screens.
They were great, for about 15 minutes, then vertigo set in, and even walking up the stairs out of the basement became a challenge.
I suspect it was something to do with Visual Simulation of Motion with no motor or balance system feedback that did me in, but it could have
been the pizza and jolt cola.
That said, my original comment about them "handling it right" had more to do with the way they handled replacing the DNS servers once that decision had been made. They used a private organization with a good reputation that wasn't beholden to any governmental organization. This pretty much nullifies the paranoid delusions of people like GP
Nullifies it for the moment, until some months from now someone releases a study using this data, and you are no where around to retract your words.
The GP was in fact correct, neither the FBI or some any pedestal dwelling third party was entitled to this data, and the best solution was to just drop the request.
The complete NON-ISSUE this has turned out to be since the servers were shut down indicates that they could have just dropped the requests and no one would have be hurt that bad.
It looks like Honda continues to make improvements.
From 2001 when the Civic was stolen 1.76 times per vehicle produced, in 2009 it is down to 0.7830 thefts per vehicle produced.
See http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2011-10-24/html/2011-27370.htm
The Top 3 stolen vehicles per vehicles produced are the Audi S8, Shelby G2, and BMW M5. #4 was the Dodge Charger topping the list of what could be called production run cars (production over 50 thousand units).
Watch the video that the OP links to. They hotwired it to silence the alarm. Then they pushed it out of frame, probably chained it to another car or maybe even winched it up on a flatbed after that. They'll muck with the ECU lock when they get it back to the chop shop and can take their time.
Exactly. It was a gang of 4, not a lone Johnny Hotwire.
They didn't dare try to start it, they simply pushed it away and had a commercial looking flatbed wrecker waiting nearby.
They weren't even too concerned with covering the cameras even though they knew they were there.
You assume that the sticker price of the car has something to do with it's value when stolen. I'd content that the ability to sell the stolen car or parts are what determines how much it's stolen. The top 3 cars are also very very popular cars, meaning there's a lot of demand for parts, and for the car itself.
Only expensive cars are stolen for parts.
Other cars are simply stolen, had the plates switch with some other plates and sold fir dirt cheap to people who don't worry about license and registration.
The top cars in 2001 (last figures I can find on the net) sorted by Thefts per 1000 Vehicles Produced, is an odd list of cheap and mid range cars. Nothing really expensive shows up till well down the list.
Like breaking into Operating systems, people go with what is EASY, not what will get them the most money. The high price thefts are the work of professionals, and a lot of those cars leave the country intact, without even being stripped for parts.
because the Honda Civic is the most stolen car [msn.com] (and the Accord is #2, down one spot from the last time I looked.)
Your story was from 1995.
If we are going to quote yesterdays obsolete news, can we at least keep it from the same century?
By 2001, the Civic and the Accord had worked their way from the top of the list to about 140th position
Since then Honda has been working very hard to eliminate this, with coded keys and top notch electronics.
oops, AOL, not amazon, my bad.
What content is it AOL has that people want to see?
Perhaps you have never head of Amazon EC2, and don't know that Amazon runs one of the largest cloud services in the world. Any time any website grows quickly, or comes under attack, needs to ramp up their compute power, or distribute their system there is a good chance they will contract with Amazon.
Yes in some cases it does apply to some GNU situations. Its just that there are very few browsers written into any other OS.
The size of KDE's built in browser, Konqueror, often could not be distinguished from the rest KDE because it was dependent on having so much else of KDE installed. Installing on top of Gnome pulled in a mountain of other packages. Even when Gnome had X, a window manger and all the same linux core libraries already installed.
So in your childish attempt to make a point you've only proven mine.
And the fact that you don't understand the difference between running an application under an operating system and running an application as PART of an operating system is pretty telling.
why was it still pushed to stable branch then? (I use firefox though, never had too bad memory problems with it and it hasn't crashed in ages).
Congrats, you answered your question in the same sentence you asked it.
For the vast majority of people, most never saw the leaks, because they use a browser , then exit it, and do other work. The OS recovers all the leaked memory at that time.
But some people only know how to use a browser, and that is all the do on a computer. (facebook junkies mostly). They fire it up, and stay there for hours on end. Leaks matter to these people only when their machine slows down (Most are not computer literate enough to detect a leak until it gets rather large).
No, he's saying that a screw up long ago prevents him from ever looking at it again.
Its the old "cut off your nose to spite your face method" of software selection. There is no redemption in some people's eyes.
while with only one tab open it takes 31 MB, i.e. there seems to be no memory overhead for the software itself
Which is exactly what the GP was saying: that any browser written into a specific OS can use the facilities of the OS itself to mask its true size.
Its sort of like measuring the memory impact of the Chrome browser running on a Chrome-OS tablet.
But disregarding memory utilization by the browser itself, your numbers are pretty interesting all by themselves.
What the heck is IE doing with that extra 11meg per tab when there are multiple tabs open? The web page itself is only the size that it is, and presumably the tests all loaded the same pages in the same order. 11meg is a pretty good guess for the average size of pages. Its almost as if IE build a page in the background and handing the whole thing to the render engine while keeping a copy as backup.
I wonder if the tests were run in a memory constrained machine? The idea that unused ram is wasted ram might lead some of these developer to use what is available more or less freely depending on available ram.
And which countries had nuclear weapons in the first world war?
Try to keep up with the topic at hand.
Actually I think it will happen VERY soon. Within a year or two.
Why? Because there are so many different radio standards in Cellular use already, in so many different Frequency Blocks, and so many different protocols.
Handset manufacturers would love to have one radio package to install and be done.
Who ever comes out with one of these that can be switched to handle any cellular network worldwide with just an API call wins. Its game over for all the discrete chip makers.
Plus if you can strip out the WIFI, and Bluetooth chipset there will be more power savings. And the software to do this won't be any more trouble or require any more power than the discrete chips do now. (Radio chipsets are already run by software. We call them binary blobs in linux, or Roms in Android.).
Actually we don't have much evidence for 50 warheads theory. Maybe 200, but not 50.
Often these predictions are based on speculation and take on the trappings of truth, but when you track them down you find a single source with very little science behind it. The gigantic explosions of the Krakatoa volcano was equivalent to about 13,000 times the nuclear yield of the bomb that devasted Hiroshima, Japan, during WWII, and it lowered global temperature by 1.2 degrees C for one year.
So 50 nukes = Krakatoa? No. Try something like a thousand or 500 modern day nukes for equivalent power.
But Krakatoa blew from below and lofted the entire volcano into the atmosphere. Nukes are triggered above ground and don't lift anywhere near that much material.
We heard the same predictions for all the smoke kicked up when Saddam fired all the oil wells. There were people actually wringing their hands and talking in terms of the "end of the world". You could see the smoke from space, so clearly it meant doom.
We've found at Chernobyl that radiation can also be survivable, even in fairly high quantities.
So as long as all the Nuclear nations don't fire everything at once, a regional nuclear war is likely to be a humanitarian disaster, but not that big of a deal globally.
Note: there is also the modern day assessment that only the US, China, Great Britain, and maybe France would have enough weapons to offer reprisal. And among the smaller nations, whoever strikes first would not have to face a counter attack. This would cut the number of actual warheads detonated.
This is the scary part if you ask me. With nobody else willing to step in on either side, and the participants having no launch on warning capabilities, the situation with proliferation of Nukes is such that some nut-job will sooner or later launch a surprise attack knowing they will not have their own country destroyed in return.
MAD only works if its truly MAD and if religious nut jobs don't see it as a path to heaven.
Not really.
There are large blocks of spectrum already set aside for use of personal radio devices. Just about anything goes in those bandwidths, subject only to power limitations and staying inside of the spectrum block.
The FCC is all for this type of use. The FCC is also fully in favor of reallocation spectrum when the situation and demand changes, which is why analog TV is a thing of the past.
There is precedent for this.
The game changer here would be in the Cell Phone industry which can substitute a single radio chip to do all the protocols, wifi, cellular, bluetooth, as well as mix and match them at will. New air protocols could be invented over night without waiting for expensive chip developments. Its a cost reduction path as well as a device longevity path.
Although it sounds wonderful when your cell phone is stuck on CDMA or your Bluetooth lacks all the latest capabilities, there are still problems of having an infinite number of antennas available (yes, we already have software defined antennas) in a small place.
There will still have to be frequency restrictions imposed in the hardware itself because the FCC can't afford to allow Joe Random Programmer bringing down jumbo jets. But within authorized bands the ability to use new methods without waiting for the next chip means that we can build a replacement for entire infrastructures much more quickly, while maintaining existing technology for as long as we need it.
Somewhere in this world there are still 029 card punches in use. I suspect we will keep some of our current stuff long after it should be scrapped.
Not likely to happen that way.
The most likely scenario for a thermonuclear war is between one or two smaller states with long running hatred
and religious fanatical governments.
The big players are likely to stay out of it. It will be far from a global event, and won't even fully destroy the
states involved.
Lets say Pakistan and India have a go, or Iran and Israel: I don't see any other state too interested
to jump into that mix on any of the sides. The participants get stung hard, exhaust their arsenals
and beg for humanitarian aid.
Contrary to popular belief a few tens of warheads going off is not going to affect life on earth
that much from a biological stand point.
Don't forget that nukes are, for the most part concentrated in the hands of nations that value human life, or at least
their own lives. Once that is changed, and the whacko religious states that see death as a pathway to virgins get
ahold of nukes and a deliver vehicle all bets are off.
AL Qaeda are symbolic pikers compared to religious zealots bent on ridding the world of something they
perceive as evil and willing to sacrifice themselves and their own citizens to do so.
In a world where everyone has weaponry of Mutually Assured Destruction, what means are left to maintain any order?
One could argue it just gives anyone a free hand to do anything short of launching to anyone else.
Actually, polling is becoming increasingly unreliable. The press had universally decided Walker would lose his Wisconsin recall. They were all wrong.
And if they were all wrong about that they are asking themselves what else they were wrong about.
People have taken to lying on polls, mostly because they are sick of them.
Prior art is prior art.
It doesn't require a fully functional device.
Mockups were functional to some degree, simply not capable of being fitted into the airplane. Prior Art.
You seem to have skipped over this line:
"You don't seriously think the Airforce would go to production without a built in HUD betting that one would come along eventually do you?"
Further, the airforce got this idea from somewhere. It was out there in a proposal or design document. Prior Art.
You simply can not hand waive away the fact that nobody decides to leave out a major functional piece of an airplane cocpit (the HUD) without already having a better solution in hand. Prior art.
Oh, and did I mention: PRIOR ART.
Not yet combat ready doesn't matter a bit. Why are you throwing that out there?
That it needs fixes and refinement means nothing.
It designed and built, that that is Prior Art.
If you would understand a thing or two about patents you would know that words describing the purpose are not actual claims nor do they even have to be proven. Everything in the actual claims had already been done by the military.
What does it matter if its fully functional or not? Since when is having all the bugs out a criteria for getting a patent?
The F35 helmet was designed, prototyped, contracted for, built, and put into production BEFORE the F35 was even built because they knew all along the F35 was not going to incorporate a cockpit HUD.
Big heavy clunky mock-ups were used on the F35 simulator years before the first plane rolled off the assembly line. (You don't seriously think the Airforce would go to production without a built in HUD betting that one would come along eventually do you?)
Further the F35 wasn't the first such rear projection helmet.
The idea was already out there when Apple filed its patent.