Your information is incorrent. The "kid" in question was seventeen years, nine months old when he committed murder.
While it certainly can be debated whether it was the right thing to do or not, it hardly seems to me that those three months would suddenly flip a switch from "murder is OK" to "murder is wrong."
Why does an Internet Explorer security patch get treated with derision from the editors, while a security patch for Konqurer gets by with no editorial comment whatsoever? Let's face it, there are no "minor" security problems.
Phone NASA. Their phone number is (713) 483-3111. Explain that it's very important that you get away as soon as possible.
If they do not cooperate, phone any friend you may have in the White House -- (202) 456-1414 -- to have a word on your behalf with the with the guys at NASA.
If you don't have any friends at the White House, phone the Kremlin (ask the overseas operator for 0107-095-295-9051). They don't have any friends there either (at least, none to speak of), but they do seem to have a little influence, so you may as well try.
If that fails, phone the Pope for guidance. His telephone number is 011-39-6-6982, and I gather his switchboard is infallible.
If all these attempts fail, flag down a passing flying saucer and explain that it's vitally important you get away before your phone bill arrives.
Douglas Adams
From "A Guide to the Guide -- Some unhelpful remarks from the author"; Introduction to the The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide
It seems to me that the editor's were completely justified in doing what they did to that thread. Like it or not, it is offtopic. And notice that they haven't really silenced anyone: all the posts are still there. They may be marked so that the average reader doesn't see them by default, but they are still there, and readable by anyone who has the interest.
For better or worse, the site is run by the editors, and they can do whatever they want. It's stated clearly that they want discussions to stay on topic, probably because that's what the average reader wants. If I'm reading an article about Oracle, I don't necessarily want to have hundreds of posts about trolls and the slashdot culture mixed in there.
On the other hand, the idea that there should be a meta-slashdot story posted, with discussion on these topics would be highly appropriate. My suggestion would be that you write a well-reasoned editorial about it... the post above, with some editing might suffice. Post it in your journal, and submit it to the editors. There are instructions on what to do with editorials in the FAQ. It seems to be more productive than just whining at -1.
I know I am offtopic, and hence not really taking my advice. So you don't need to point that out. And you can feel free to moderate me if you really want to.
But I can't believe they managed to play Quake on a CPU without a heatsink unless the mobo they used was doctored in some way to throttle speed based on the thermal diode reading.
Just to clarify, maybe you should take a look at the video again. (You did watch the video before posting, right?:b ) Despite what the blurb on the previous article would have you believe, the didn't play quake on a CPU without a heatsink. Without a heat sink, the system immediately shut down. They managed to play Quake for nine minutes on a system with the heat sink fan disabled.
More believeable, isn't it? Admittedly, I don't know enough about the subject to judge whether the video is fake or not, but it's not as wildly unbelieveable as all that.
The problem here is that the only thing providing acceleration to the satellite is gravity. Recall that to stay in a circular trajectory, we must have the condition a = v^2/r. The force on the satellite is only gravity, which acts with a strength of F = (G*Ms*Me)/(r^2). By Newton's second law, F = Ms*a, so Ms*v^2/r = (G*Ms*Me)/(r^2). Simplifying, v^2 = G*Me/r .
Now, recall v = distance / time. distance = 2*pi*r, time = 1 (day). Therefore, we find 4*pi^2*r^2 = G*Me/r, or r = (G*Me/(4*pi^2))^(1/3)
Therefore, under only the infuence of gravity, there is only one height at which geosynchronus orbit is possible, since in orbital mechanics speed is proportional to distance.
One problem I can see with your solution is how you would make the system trustworthy. As you yourself state, under ZKS's system, ZKS can figure out what you're doing. Similarly, under a collective system it seems that a node (or a sufficiently large group of nodes) could similarly gain information about any individual user's traffic. This isn't a problem for ZKS, since they control all the machines, and hence if you trust ZKS, you can trust the whole network. Under a collective system, wouldn't you have to assume that all the nodes are hostile? It seems that this would make the system virtually impossible to implement, right?
I'm not just asking to be annoying, I'm actually curious if there's a way to do this.
I'm not sure why this is a big deal. There are other ways to get high-quality MPEG videos onto your computer than this. For example, Hauppauge has recently come out with a new TV tuner with on-board MPEG2 compression... take a look here. I'll admit it's a cool hack, but it's hardly the only possible source of high-quality video like this. Claiming that this Tivo hack alone will allow a "video napster" is just silly.
Although I'm not sure, I think newer versions of the Napster client load a page from their site in an embedded IE control when you start the program. (Like I said, I'm not sure... the newer versions tended to be very unstable, so I downgraded.)
Anyway, that would be how they can count every instance of the client as a hit to their site.
All right. It's a troll, but I'll bite anyway. As both a geek and a member of a fraternity, I have to say that you're being far too general. You're letting the experiences of a few bad apples spoil your conception of what fraternities are about.
Let me tell you about some of the things my fraternity does: We sponsor a buffolo wing eating contest to benefit various charities. We, as part of the larger greek community, put on a broadway show as a fundraiser for the local children's hospital. For our school's spring carnival, we spent thousands of dollars and thousands of man-hours of work to build a booth which had little kids lining up for forty minutes to get in, and still leaving with a grin on their face.
We throw parties. But all of our parties are dry. No one has ever passed out at one of our parties. Our basement doesn't smell like beer and vomit. We certianly don't include rapists amoung our brothers; we wouldn't allow anyone to join who is disrespectful to women, or disrespectful in general. In short, we take the concept of a fraternity as a brotherhood of men who care about each other and the community seriously.
And yet, by your classification, we are "mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging rapists" and "motherfuckers [who] exhibit all the moral judgment and respect for others you'd witness with a pack of wild, snarling dogs." Stop over generalizing, and go out and actually meet some fraternity members. Don't turn your nose up and greek letters. You might be surprised. I certainly was.
-Aaron Hertz
I know I'm repeating points that other people have made before, but I think they need to be said. Everyone, repeat after me: I do not have the right to use aim. AOL has put together a program, a standard, and a lot of servers to serve the needs of their customers who want to easily talk to people outside the AOL network, and in order to make it more popular opened it up to almost unlimited use by other people. So you have to use their client? That's their right.
The point is you can either play by their rules, or go somewhere else. No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to use AIM. There are alternatives available: MSN and Yahoo both have messaging clients, and there's everyone's favorite Jabber. "But," you complain, "my friends don't use them!" So what? That gives you two options. One, use the official client. It there's not one available for your platform of choice, too bad. Look back up above: you do not have the right to use aim. Two: get your friends to use something else that you like better. But don't whine that because you want to talk to your friends, you have the right to use AOL's system in a way that they don't like. Because you don't. You and your friends are free to move somewhere else... but are not free to force AOL to do anything that it doesn't want to, or to steal their service without their consent.
First, there are a few available... at a high cost. See, for example, http://www.us.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10272 421. It's a classic chicken and egg problem. Prices are high because there's very little demand for HDTV tuners. And there's no demand because in most markets there's nothing that's available on HDTV that's not also available on standard TV, using equipment that everyone already has and that's dirt cheap by comparison. And there's not more content because there's nobody out there to recieve the content, so advertisers don't want to advertise on it and TV stations have no incentive to air new programming in HDTV.
As far as computer-based solutions, for better or worse, most people don't have monitors that are nearly as large as their televisions, or have computers set up where they want to watch TV. I'm a starving college student, so I use a TV card just because it was a lot cheaper. But in the consumer marketplace, how many people are going to sacrifice the ability to sit back on your couch and watch TV for a higher-quality picture?
In short, TV is good enough. HDTV looks much nicer, I agree. But for most purposes, standard TV is high enough quality that the added expense associated with HDTV, combined with the lack of digital signals, makes the upgrade not worthwhile.
I dunno about that... at the college I'm going to, there's talk of putting in new, internet connected washers and dryers that will email you when your clothes are done. I can't wait!
You're sort of half right, but you've got your facts pretty messed up. The real story is:
There are two varieties of peppered moths in England, one dark colored, one light colored. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the light-colored moths dominated. After the Industrial Revolution, the dark colored moths dominated. Tutt, an ecologist, proposed a theory to explain this in 1896: the trees in England had become covered in soot from all the coal burning. Therefore the light colored moths, which used to have good cameoflage, now stood out on the darker trees and were easily eaten by birds, while the dark moths, which in the past had been more easily seen and eaten, now blended in well and survived. It's a classic example of natural selection in action.
What's really scary is who's buying this information. Look at the end of the article. Their only two clients are listed: an educational website (makes perfect sense) and...
The Department of Defense. Why on earth does the Department of Defense need to know where kids are going on the internet? I'm scared...
There's a major flaw in your statements. If I collect on my liability insurance, it's for something that I did unintentionally: hitting another car. If my insurance company can prove that I intentionally hit the other car, they won't pay a dime. So why would the situation be any different with "infringement insurance?"
But... how would somebody's DVD unintentionally end up on a warez site? I can't think of any reasonable way that this could happen.
Insurance is designed to cover things that are unavoidable and unpredictable. Whereas you copying a DVD is neither unavoidable nor unpredictable, so the argument for insurance just doesn't make any sense.
Actually, according to the shell theorem, in the center of a spherical object with evenly distributed mass (which decribes planents and moons pretty well), the gravitational force from all the material at a greater radius from the center than the object you're considering cancels out. So, in this case, the object would feel no force at all.
Ok... I gotta laugh here. I am a huge anime nut, and I fully agree that Ghost in the Shell is a great movie. But it's not a terribly fast paced one... There are many fast action scenes, but interspersed with them are an equal number of really slow (although beautifully drawn) scenes. Point is, this movie can put you to sleep just as easily, if you don't feel like paying attention.
Folks, rememeber the OJ trial? There we saw DNA evidience, based on modern science, with proven error rates and a far lower possibility of subjective reading, being totally rejected as forensic evidence. And yet, many people are locked up every day on the basis of fingerprint evidence, based on 19th century science, with unproven error rates and based entirely on subjective judgement.
Does anyone else see a double standard here? And how can we help society to make better, objective scientific judgements, rather than just listening to demagogues?
Slashdot Mirror
But what about Natalie Portman petrified in Hot Grits?
It's a classic slashdot dish!
And while you're in the area, check out Classic Video on Craig Street. There's an excellent collection of anime for rent.
Your information is incorrent. The "kid" in question was seventeen years, nine months old when he committed murder.
While it certainly can be debated whether it was the right thing to do or not, it hardly seems to me that those three months would suddenly flip a switch from "murder is OK" to "murder is wrong."
Why does an Internet Explorer security patch get treated with derision from the editors, while a security patch for Konqurer gets by with no editorial comment whatsoever? Let's face it, there are no "minor" security problems.
A little consistency is all I ask!
What? No!<br><br>
<a href="http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif">ht tp://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif</a>
Douglas Adams
From "A Guide to the Guide -- Some unhelpful remarks from the author"; Introduction to the The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide
It seems to me that the editor's were completely justified in doing what they did to that thread. Like it or not, it is offtopic. And notice that they haven't really silenced anyone: all the posts are still there. They may be marked so that the average reader doesn't see them by default, but they are still there, and readable by anyone who has the interest.
For better or worse, the site is run by the editors, and they can do whatever they want. It's stated clearly that they want discussions to stay on topic, probably because that's what the average reader wants. If I'm reading an article about Oracle, I don't necessarily want to have hundreds of posts about trolls and the slashdot culture mixed in there.
On the other hand, the idea that there should be a meta-slashdot story posted, with discussion on these topics would be highly appropriate. My suggestion would be that you write a well-reasoned editorial about it... the post above, with some editing might suffice. Post it in your journal, and submit it to the editors. There are instructions on what to do with editorials in the FAQ. It seems to be more productive than just whining at -1.
I know I am offtopic, and hence not really taking my advice. So you don't need to point that out. And you can feel free to moderate me if you really want to.
But I can't believe they managed to play Quake on a CPU without a heatsink unless the mobo they used was doctored in some way to throttle speed based on the thermal diode reading.
:b ) Despite what the blurb on the previous article would have you believe, the didn't play quake on a CPU without a heatsink. Without a heat sink, the system immediately shut down. They managed to play Quake for nine minutes on a system with the heat sink fan disabled.
Just to clarify, maybe you should take a look at the video again. (You did watch the video before posting, right?
More believeable, isn't it? Admittedly, I don't know enough about the subject to judge whether the video is fake or not, but it's not as wildly unbelieveable as all that.
The problem here is that the only thing providing acceleration to the satellite is gravity. Recall that to stay in a circular trajectory, we must have the condition a = v^2/r. The force on the satellite is only gravity, which acts with a strength of F = (G*Ms*Me)/(r^2). By Newton's second law, F = Ms*a, so Ms*v^2/r = (G*Ms*Me)/(r^2). Simplifying, v^2 = G*Me/r .
Now, recall v = distance / time. distance = 2*pi*r, time = 1 (day). Therefore, we find 4*pi^2*r^2 = G*Me/r, or r = (G*Me/(4*pi^2))^(1/3)
Therefore, under only the infuence of gravity, there is only one height at which geosynchronus orbit is possible, since in orbital mechanics speed is proportional to distance.
Do the physics before flaming, ok?
One problem I can see with your solution is how you would make the system trustworthy. As you yourself state, under ZKS's system, ZKS can figure out what you're doing. Similarly, under a collective system it seems that a node (or a sufficiently large group of nodes) could similarly gain information about any individual user's traffic. This isn't a problem for ZKS, since they control all the machines, and hence if you trust ZKS, you can trust the whole network. Under a collective system, wouldn't you have to assume that all the nodes are hostile? It seems that this would make the system virtually impossible to implement, right?
I'm not just asking to be annoying, I'm actually curious if there's a way to do this.
What kind of masochist would submit his own site for slashdotting?
I'm not sure why this is a big deal. There are other ways to get high-quality MPEG videos onto your computer than this. For example, Hauppauge has recently come out with a new TV tuner with on-board MPEG2 compression... take a look here. I'll admit it's a cool hack, but it's hardly the only possible source of high-quality video like this. Claiming that this Tivo hack alone will allow a "video napster" is just silly.
Although I'm not sure, I think newer versions of the Napster client load a page from their site in an embedded IE control when you start the program. (Like I said, I'm not sure... the newer versions tended to be very unstable, so I downgraded.)
Anyway, that would be how they can count every instance of the client as a hit to their site.
All right. It's a troll, but I'll bite anyway. As both a geek and a member of a fraternity, I have to say that you're being far too general. You're letting the experiences of a few bad apples spoil your conception of what fraternities are about. Let me tell you about some of the things my fraternity does: We sponsor a buffolo wing eating contest to benefit various charities. We, as part of the larger greek community, put on a broadway show as a fundraiser for the local children's hospital. For our school's spring carnival, we spent thousands of dollars and thousands of man-hours of work to build a booth which had little kids lining up for forty minutes to get in, and still leaving with a grin on their face. We throw parties. But all of our parties are dry. No one has ever passed out at one of our parties. Our basement doesn't smell like beer and vomit. We certianly don't include rapists amoung our brothers; we wouldn't allow anyone to join who is disrespectful to women, or disrespectful in general. In short, we take the concept of a fraternity as a brotherhood of men who care about each other and the community seriously. And yet, by your classification, we are "mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging rapists" and "motherfuckers [who] exhibit all the moral judgment and respect for others you'd witness with a pack of wild, snarling dogs." Stop over generalizing, and go out and actually meet some fraternity members. Don't turn your nose up and greek letters. You might be surprised. I certainly was. -Aaron Hertz
There is such a site already... and has been mentioned on Slashdot fairly often. It's at http://www.bountyquest.com.
I know I'm repeating points that other people have made before, but I think they need to be said. Everyone, repeat after me: I do not have the right to use aim. AOL has put together a program, a standard, and a lot of servers to serve the needs of their customers who want to easily talk to people outside the AOL network, and in order to make it more popular opened it up to almost unlimited use by other people. So you have to use their client? That's their right.
:)
The point is you can either play by their rules, or go somewhere else. No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to use AIM. There are alternatives available: MSN and Yahoo both have messaging clients, and there's everyone's favorite Jabber. "But," you complain, "my friends don't use them!" So what? That gives you two options. One, use the official client. It there's not one available for your platform of choice, too bad. Look back up above: you do not have the right to use aim. Two: get your friends to use something else that you like better. But don't whine that because you want to talk to your friends, you have the right to use AOL's system in a way that they don't like. Because you don't. You and your friends are free to move somewhere else... but are not free to force AOL to do anything that it doesn't want to, or to steal their service without their consent.
Sorry, that ran a little longer than I intended
First, there are a few available... at a high cost. See, for example, http://www.us.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10272 421. It's a classic chicken and egg problem. Prices are high because there's very little demand for HDTV tuners. And there's no demand because in most markets there's nothing that's available on HDTV that's not also available on standard TV, using equipment that everyone already has and that's dirt cheap by comparison. And there's not more content because there's nobody out there to recieve the content, so advertisers don't want to advertise on it and TV stations have no incentive to air new programming in HDTV.
As far as computer-based solutions, for better or worse, most people don't have monitors that are nearly as large as their televisions, or have computers set up where they want to watch TV. I'm a starving college student, so I use a TV card just because it was a lot cheaper. But in the consumer marketplace, how many people are going to sacrifice the ability to sit back on your couch and watch TV for a higher-quality picture?
In short, TV is good enough. HDTV looks much nicer, I agree. But for most purposes, standard TV is high enough quality that the added expense associated with HDTV, combined with the lack of digital signals, makes the upgrade not worthwhile.
Or so it seems to me.
I dunno about that... at the college I'm going to, there's talk of putting in new, internet connected washers and dryers that will email you when your clothes are done. I can't wait!
You're sort of half right, but you've got your facts pretty messed up. The real story is:
There are two varieties of peppered moths in England, one dark colored, one light colored. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the light-colored moths dominated. After the Industrial Revolution, the dark colored moths dominated. Tutt, an ecologist, proposed a theory to explain this in 1896: the trees in England had become covered in soot from all the coal burning. Therefore the light colored moths, which used to have good cameoflage, now stood out on the darker trees and were easily eaten by birds, while the dark moths, which in the past had been more easily seen and eaten, now blended in well and survived. It's a classic example of natural selection in action.
So... get your facts straight before posting.
What's really scary is who's buying this information. Look at the end of the article. Their only two clients are listed: an educational website (makes perfect sense) and...
The Department of Defense. Why on earth does the Department of Defense need to know where kids are going on the internet? I'm scared...
There's a major flaw in your statements. If I collect on my liability insurance, it's for something that I did unintentionally: hitting another car. If my insurance company can prove that I intentionally hit the other car, they won't pay a dime. So why would the situation be any different with "infringement insurance?"
But... how would somebody's DVD unintentionally end up on a warez site? I can't think of any reasonable way that this could happen.
Insurance is designed to cover things that are unavoidable and unpredictable. Whereas you copying a DVD is neither unavoidable nor unpredictable, so the argument for insurance just doesn't make any sense.
Actually, according to the shell theorem, in the center of a spherical object with evenly distributed mass (which decribes planents and moons pretty well), the gravitational force from all the material at a greater radius from the center than the object you're considering cancels out. So, in this case, the object would feel no force at all.
I wouldn't buy that... DVDs like that on Ebay are pirated, with a lousy translations and even worse picture quality.
Ok... I gotta laugh here. I am a huge anime nut, and I fully agree that Ghost in the Shell is a great movie. But it's not a terribly fast paced one... There are many fast action scenes, but interspersed with them are an equal number of really slow (although beautifully drawn) scenes. Point is, this movie can put you to sleep just as easily, if you don't feel like paying attention.
Folks, rememeber the OJ trial? There we saw DNA evidience, based on modern science, with proven error rates and a far lower possibility of subjective reading, being totally rejected as forensic evidence. And yet, many people are locked up every day on the basis of fingerprint evidence, based on 19th century science, with unproven error rates and based entirely on subjective judgement.
Does anyone else see a double standard here? And how can we help society to make better, objective scientific judgements, rather than just listening to demagogues?