Another sub-optimal thing about Mozilla under the X Windows system is that Mozilla seems to set the backing store setting on all windows to NotUseful. This forces Mozilla to re-render any window that has had an Expose event (i.e. resorting the window stacking order, which means if you are a "open many windows and click around" type of guy like me you do a lot of re-rendering). If I weren't so damn busy at work, I'd pull down the sources and see if changing the settings would make Mozilla better or worse.
According to an article in Science News (sorry, the article itself isn't online, but here's the references for the article), about 70% of the genes that code for chemoreceptors in our olfactory bulbs are faulty (in the average person. For some people it's worse). For dogs, the number of genes is roughly the same as humans, but all of theirs work.
The question is, what would happen if you modified a human embryo to correct this? ( patch -d1 <good_genes.diff) Would you get a human with a dog's level of scent-awareness? Would some other sense suffer (less visual acutity/worse hearing/???) Remember that even in humans, the olfactory bulb is wired in pretty fundamentally (down in the reptile part of our brain.) Consider how smells can trigger memories. What then?
Also, most folks here have been talking about having infrared. Sorry, but you aren't going to be able to see thermal IR: your own body heat would jam it. At best, you could see "optical" IR like your remote control puts out. Unless you are trying to break into a security area that uses IR detectors, or you like watching your Palm talk to your Furby (get your minds out of the gutter, you trolls, and into the sewer with the rest of us) this would be of little use.
Hey, I never said a valid e-mail address was a perfect defense against forged data. However, I'd hope they would a) consider any @hotmail.com, @altavista.com, or @yahoo.com address with less trust than a more verifiable address, and b) require several confirming reports, from several IP addresses (even several IP address blocks), before they really got mediaval on them.
As for the comment about my suggested solution being "a bit extreme": no. A bit extreme would involve molten lead, a funnel, and the services of a proctologist.
Several posts have asked, "How can they prevent someone from faking the logs?"
It looks like you have to sign up with these guys, and get an ID from them, before you can contribute. Therefor, anybody wishing to poison the database must give a valid e-mail. Presumably, the only way an IP will get in the top ten is if MORE THAN ONE person reports it. Also, I'm sure that any e-mail address that is found to be submitting bogus data will be dropped in a heartbeat.
However, I'd want to put a little "noise filtering" on the scripts from my system: I frequently have www.grc.com scan my system to make sure nothing gets screwed up, and I'd hate to get Gibson Research in trouble. Also, on occasion one of my friends machines will trip my firewall.
What we need is for this data to be collected and the offending ISPs made to solve the problem. Too many ISPs have the attitude of "not my yob": unless you grab their testicles with a rusty pair of pliers and threaten to have your laywer twist if they don't take action, they do nothing.
This is just a cover story for the AU government's new censorship system. As they get the bugs worked out, the speed will come back, and they will claim to have "fixed" the cable....
I mean, here I am, I've come up with a means to provide global telephone coverage (the description of which is to large to fit into this margin), so how can I deploy my monopo^H^H^H^H^Hcompetitive service with this sword of Damocles over my head?
Actually, it's not that much bandwidth. Assuming a normal 16QAM signal (and that's being rather conservative), you get roughly 4 bits/Hz. Therefor, 1 Gbps is roughly 250 MHz. One TV channel is roughly 6 MHz, so this is only about 40 TV channels. One satellite (C band) is 26 transponders, or half the needed bandwidth.
Looked at another way: 250 MHz bandwidth at 26 GHz is a Q of 100.
BAH! Give my a (soon-to-be-)dead computer, and a high power rifle any day of the week! You should see what an Enfield.303, a.30-06, or better still a.458 Magnum does to a monitor. An AR-15 is fun too, but a little light for real satisfaction. Nothing like dumping 3500 foot-pounds of energy into something to take your frustrations out.
There are several reasons that the US doesn't have as widespread coverage as the UK:
The UK is the size of Kansas and Nebraska. This makes deploying a new network much simpler: less area to cover
Since you can cover all of the UK with a lot fewer towers, Metcalf's law comes into play sooner: the value of a network goes up as the square of the number of nodes. Since it's easier to supply most of the UK with digital service, it makes more sense to have a digial phone. In the US, since you MUST have AMPS to be able to use your phone anywhere other than a big city, what is the point in having a GSM-only phone?
Since you'll need AMPS anyway, what is the motivation to a cellular provider to set up a GSM network in most places? The phones are more expensive (being dual-mode, and frequently dual-band), the infrastructure is more expensive, and the users/MHz ratio isn't that much better (3 users/25kHz channel for the standard vocoder (6/channel for the half-rate vocoders which aren't available yet) vs. 1/channel for AMPS)
Getting frequency spectrum in the 800-900MHz region is a bitch. Getting phones to work in the 1.6GHz region is a bitch (great for short ranges (<2 miles/cell site) but not very good when you have to go long distances)
I seriously doubt you'll see AMPS die off in the US for another 20 years. The thing that will eventually kill AMPS will be the lack of data services on IS-54, and that won't become important to the masses for another 10 years.
Oops! You are correct. It's been about 10 years since my last optics class, and my memory was faulty (must remember to upgrate to ECC...) I thought for SURE that I remembered the refractive index being the square root of the ratios of the speeds. Thanks for the correction.
However, what gets me about the post to which I was originally responding was the guy's insistance that "this cannot be" when items in several respected science journals had reported items with refractive indixes less than zero, and even stranger items with negative mu and/or epsilon. He obviously never asked himself, "if a material has a negative mu or epsilon, what does that imply about c in the material?"
I'm fighting off a cold right now, so I'm not running on all eight cylinders. Is c=sqrt(mu*epsilon), or is it sqrt(1/mu*epsilon)? I've been pushing bits rather than EMF for too long...
Actually, sir, the refractive index of a material is the square root of the ratio of the speed of light in in a vacuum vs. the speed of light in the material. Therefor, a negative refractive index is perfectly valid. Go look it up in a good bood on physics.
Furthurmore, I almost gave you an "overrated" myself, before deciding to post instead. The moderator probably used "overrated" since there is no "-1: false" moderation. Your post isn't flamebait (although some of your responses border on flamebait), nor is it a troll, it is simply wrong.
This is great news - one of the things that I require before I will buy a TiVo is Ethernet support. The other thing is a program guide for C-Band (large dish) satellite service, esp. the backhaul feeds.
Several people have talked about reverse engineering the TiVo program guide service. While I agree that TiVo should be able to make money selling a service, I also think that a little competition would be a good thing: I don't think TiVo wants to support C-Band. Perhaps somebody else will. I'd happily pay for a guide service for C-Band (I already pay for a paper guide for C-Band), preferably one I can grep for what I want to record (SELECT all from MOVIETYPE="Spaghetti Western" AND COMMERCIALS="false") (OK, that was psuedo-SQL not grep regex).
Being able to archive programs (as provided by Fair Use) would be nice too.
What diabolical plan had seized Bill crazed imagination? </bodytype>
First, there's the lackluster defense in court. Next, the "offer you can't refuse" to Corel. Then the hack news. Now this. Is BG trying to destroy his company? This is almost like a Greek tragedy: the personality flaws of the main character bringing him down in the end - BG's paranoia and megalomania driving his company down doobie-down-down-down. Anybody else have a vision of Bill as Slim Pickens riding a nuke down, whooping all the way?
People keep talking about the heat buildup at Mach 1.5. You forget the Sonic Wind series of experiments: Strap a fool to a rocket-powered sled on rails and light the fuse. Fool and sled exceed Mach 1. Fool and sled hit pool of water and slow down at 20 g's plus.
They have video of this up at the Cosmosphere, but unfortunatly not online. You can actually see the shockwaves from the leading edge of the fool!
Actually, the speed of sound goes UP as the air pressure goes down. At sea level, Mach 1 is roughly 700 miles/hour, while at 100,000 feet where the Habu fly it's about 1000 miles/hour.
However, I did not say "accept the situation and don't act to change it". I said "Deal with the reality of the situation, and make sure you can act to change it by being on the outside of the bars".
One day, as I was heading home from work, a police car whipped around my car and proceeded down the highway at great speed. I continued on my way at the speed limit. Nearing the turn-off to my neigborhood, I saw several police cars pulled off on that road, and a civilian car pulled over. Several police officers were arrayed around the civilian car, in the stance of men ready to draw down. I continued down the highway, and took a second route to my home.
A somewhat boring story, but it illustrates my point. I could have turned off on my normal street. I was committing no crime (at least that I was aware of). However, realizing that being anywhere near a crime scene is a bad idea for anybody, I exercised common sense and avoided the scene.
This idiot started doing the very things a cracker would do to a site that had been cracked. Was he breaking the law? No. Was he being smart? NO. The site didn't ask him to do this. He had no authority to do this. He fit the profile of a cracker. He was dumb.
I'd love to learn more about how to crack cell phones - I work in the cellular industry, so it is of some bearing to my job. However, because I work in the cell industry, I have all the tools to turn that knowledge into action, and I'd have a really hard time explaining why I have that gear around (they're engineering prototypes. Honest!). As a result, I don't go to the cell phone cracking sites.
I'm not saying the FBI isn't wrong here. The way our current government conducts itself is shameful. But if I poke at a lion with a short stick, the lion may have been overreacting, but I'm still going to be the one bleeding...
My question is, "What percentage of wiretap search warrants ever generate evidence that is used in a real criminal prosecution, and how has that percentage changed in recent times?"
From what I've heard, the number of actual wiretaps is going up, while the number of times those wiretaps actually contribute to a prosecution is going down.
In fairness to law enforcement, the mere fact that the number of wiretaps is going up is not in and of itself a bad sign, since the amount of communications is going up. However, one would hope that the ratio of (wiretaps that generate evidence used in a prosecution)/(wiretaps) would be holding constant or increasing. From what I've heard, the actual ratio is plummetting - the government is fishing more and more, and getting less and less for it.
I believe that the government should be required to place a specified time limit on any wiretap warrant (time <= 6 months), and at the end of that time either
prosecute a case and present the data from the wiretap, or
go to the individual tapped, inform him of the tap, and present to him the data gathered in the tap (and destroy all other copies of the data).
This would force the government to be more careful in selecting targets to tap. As it is now, if "Murry the Snitch" says I'm selling drugs (because he's on the hot spot and needs to give a name, any name, to the police), and they tap me for a few years and find nothing, then they quietly bury the data without so much as a by your leave. If they had to present to me the data so gathered, and the source of the information leading to the search warrant (does "the right to confront your accusor" ring a bell?), then I could (hell, would) bring suit against the the law enforcement agency involved as well as "Murry".
Of course, this has about as much chance of being passed into law and enforced as freezing a pot of water by placing it on a hot stove.
... and how many FOB's (Friends of Bill) are pushing up daisies right now.
However, since assasination is a) very difficult and b) counter-productive (since it causes a backlash against the benefiting party) I think the change would not noticably increase the risk.
I have thought things through, in depth. I also don't allow a knee-jerk bigoted view of my opponents to color my thinking.
There's no need to modify BIND: all that is needed is to modify the data on the root name servers. The problem is that ICANN won't allow new TLDs to be added to the root name servers. There are two possible solutions to this:
The US government forces ICANN to accept new root server entries from anybody with a specified level of support (I wouldn't want JethroBillyBob's Internet and Oil Change to be able to create a new TLD, unless Jethro has several big servers).
Somebody creates a new set of root name servers, and people start pointing their name servers at them instead.
The former offends my Libertarian views, the latter has been tried with some success. However, as Metcalf's law states, the value of a network varies as the square of the number of nodes in the network: as second heirarchy of name servers is useful only if it has a significant number of users. Perhaps if a consortium of the larger ISPs got together, and made it their default, it might work.
However, do we wish to trade ICANN for AOL/UUNet/Qwest/Microsoft?
Sorry, but you are incorrect. The Z80 and the 6502 both had an address space of 2^16 bytes (65536). I know, I used to make my living programming Z80's, and was a fairly accomplished 6502 hacker in my day.
Slashdot Mirror
Another sub-optimal thing about Mozilla under the X Windows system is that Mozilla seems to set the backing store setting on all windows to NotUseful. This forces Mozilla to re-render any window that has had an Expose event (i.e. resorting the window stacking order, which means if you are a "open many windows and click around" type of guy like me you do a lot of re-rendering). If I weren't so damn busy at work, I'd pull down the sources and see if changing the settings would make Mozilla better or worse.
According to an article in Science News (sorry, the article itself isn't online, but here's the references for the article), about 70% of the genes that code for chemoreceptors in our olfactory bulbs are faulty (in the average person. For some people it's worse). For dogs, the number of genes is roughly the same as humans, but all of theirs work.
The question is, what would happen if you modified a human embryo to correct this? ( patch -d1 <good_genes.diff) Would you get a human with a dog's level of scent-awareness? Would some other sense suffer (less visual acutity/worse hearing/???) Remember that even in humans, the olfactory bulb is wired in pretty fundamentally (down in the reptile part of our brain.) Consider how smells can trigger memories. What then?
Also, most folks here have been talking about having infrared. Sorry, but you aren't going to be able to see thermal IR: your own body heat would jam it. At best, you could see "optical" IR like your remote control puts out. Unless you are trying to break into a security area that uses IR detectors, or you like watching your Palm talk to your Furby (get your minds out of the gutter, you trolls, and into the sewer with the rest of us) this would be of little use.
Hey, I never said a valid e-mail address was a perfect defense against forged data. However, I'd hope they would a) consider any @hotmail.com, @altavista.com, or @yahoo.com address with less trust than a more verifiable address, and b) require several confirming reports, from several IP addresses (even several IP address blocks), before they really got mediaval on them.
As for the comment about my suggested solution being "a bit extreme": no. A bit extreme would involve molten lead, a funnel, and the services of a proctologist.
That would only be a bit extreme.
Several posts have asked, "How can they prevent someone from faking the logs?"
It looks like you have to sign up with these guys, and get an ID from them, before you can contribute. Therefor, anybody wishing to poison the database must give a valid e-mail. Presumably, the only way an IP will get in the top ten is if MORE THAN ONE person reports it. Also, I'm sure that any e-mail address that is found to be submitting bogus data will be dropped in a heartbeat.
However, I'd want to put a little "noise filtering" on the scripts from my system: I frequently have www.grc.com scan my system to make sure nothing gets screwed up, and I'd hate to get Gibson Research in trouble. Also, on occasion one of my friends machines will trip my firewall.
What we need is for this data to be collected and the offending ISPs made to solve the problem. Too many ISPs have the attitude of "not my yob": unless you grab their testicles with a rusty pair of pliers and threaten to have your laywer twist if they don't take action, they do nothing.
This is just a cover story for the AU government's new censorship system. As they get the bugs worked out, the speed will come back, and they will claim to have "fixed" the cable....
How many times must we stake this undead beast?
I mean, here I am, I've come up with a means to provide global telephone coverage (the description of which is to large to fit into this margin), so how can I deploy my monopo^H^H^H^H^Hcompetitive service with this sword of Damocles over my head?
Somebody call the Slayer....
Actually, it's not that much bandwidth. Assuming a normal 16QAM signal (and that's being rather conservative), you get roughly 4 bits/Hz. Therefor, 1 Gbps is roughly 250 MHz. One TV channel is roughly 6 MHz, so this is only about 40 TV channels. One satellite (C band) is 26 transponders, or half the needed bandwidth.
Looked at another way: 250 MHz bandwidth at 26 GHz is a Q of 100.
BAH! Give my a (soon-to-be-)dead computer, and a high power rifle any day of the week! You should see what an Enfield .303, a .30-06, or better still a .458 Magnum does to a monitor. An AR-15 is fun too, but a little light for real satisfaction. Nothing like dumping 3500 foot-pounds of energy into something to take your frustrations out.
I seriously doubt you'll see AMPS die off in the US for another 20 years. The thing that will eventually kill AMPS will be the lack of data services on IS-54, and that won't become important to the masses for another 10 years.
Oops! You are correct. It's been about 10 years since my last optics class, and my memory was faulty (must remember to upgrate to ECC...) I thought for SURE that I remembered the refractive index being the square root of the ratios of the speeds. Thanks for the correction.
However, what gets me about the post to which I was originally responding was the guy's insistance that "this cannot be" when items in several respected science journals had reported items with refractive indixes less than zero, and even stranger items with negative mu and/or epsilon. He obviously never asked himself, "if a material has a negative mu or epsilon, what does that imply about c in the material?"
I'm fighting off a cold right now, so I'm not running on all eight cylinders. Is c=sqrt(mu*epsilon), or is it sqrt(1/mu*epsilon)? I've been pushing bits rather than EMF for too long...
Actually, sir, the refractive index of a material is the square root of the ratio of the speed of light in in a vacuum vs. the speed of light in the material. Therefor, a negative refractive index is perfectly valid. Go look it up in a good bood on physics.
Furthurmore, I almost gave you an "overrated" myself, before deciding to post instead. The moderator probably used "overrated" since there is no "-1: false" moderation. Your post isn't flamebait (although some of your responses border on flamebait), nor is it a troll, it is simply wrong.
This is great news - one of the things that I require before I will buy a TiVo is Ethernet support. The other thing is a program guide for C-Band (large dish) satellite service, esp. the backhaul feeds.
Several people have talked about reverse engineering the TiVo program guide service. While I agree that TiVo should be able to make money selling a service, I also think that a little competition would be a good thing: I don't think TiVo wants to support C-Band. Perhaps somebody else will. I'd happily pay for a guide service for C-Band (I already pay for a paper guide for C-Band), preferably one I can grep for what I want to record (SELECT all from MOVIETYPE="Spaghetti Western" AND COMMERCIALS="false") (OK, that was psuedo-SQL not grep regex).
Being able to archive programs (as provided by Fair Use ) would be nice too.
Thought so. Sounded like something the old farts would say, rather than us "appliance operators".
One of the myriad reasons I've not pursued Section 1.
WRT your sig: where'd you hear that, HF or 2 meters?
What diabolical plan had seized Bill crazed imagination?
</bodytype>
First, there's the lackluster defense in court. Next, the "offer you can't refuse" to Corel. Then the hack news. Now this. Is BG trying to destroy his company? This is almost like a Greek tragedy: the personality flaws of the main character bringing him down in the end - BG's paranoia and megalomania driving his company down doobie-down-down-down. Anybody else have a vision of Bill as Slim Pickens riding a nuke down, whooping all the way?
So, it will be omnipotent and annoying. Great....
People keep talking about the heat buildup at Mach 1.5. You forget the Sonic Wind series of experiments: Strap a fool to a rocket-powered sled on rails and light the fuse. Fool and sled exceed Mach 1. Fool and sled hit pool of water and slow down at 20 g's plus.
They have video of this up at the Cosmosphere, but unfortunatly not online. You can actually see the shockwaves from the leading edge of the fool!
Actually, the speed of sound goes UP as the air pressure goes down. At sea level, Mach 1 is roughly 700 miles/hour, while at 100,000 feet where the Habu fly it's about 1000 miles/hour.
I invoke Godwin by reference. I win.
However, I did not say "accept the situation and don't act to change it". I said "Deal with the reality of the situation, and make sure you can act to change it by being on the outside of the bars".
A somewhat boring story, but it illustrates my point. I could have turned off on my normal street. I was committing no crime (at least that I was aware of). However, realizing that being anywhere near a crime scene is a bad idea for anybody, I exercised common sense and avoided the scene.
This idiot started doing the very things a cracker would do to a site that had been cracked. Was he breaking the law? No. Was he being smart? NO . The site didn't ask him to do this. He had no authority to do this. He fit the profile of a cracker. He was dumb.
I'd love to learn more about how to crack cell phones - I work in the cellular industry, so it is of some bearing to my job. However, because I work in the cell industry, I have all the tools to turn that knowledge into action, and I'd have a really hard time explaining why I have that gear around (they're engineering prototypes. Honest!). As a result, I don't go to the cell phone cracking sites.
I'm not saying the FBI isn't wrong here. The way our current government conducts itself is shameful. But if I poke at a lion with a short stick, the lion may have been overreacting, but I'm still going to be the one bleeding...
From what I've heard, the number of actual wiretaps is going up, while the number of times those wiretaps actually contribute to a prosecution is going down.
In fairness to law enforcement, the mere fact that the number of wiretaps is going up is not in and of itself a bad sign, since the amount of communications is going up. However, one would hope that the ratio of (wiretaps that generate evidence used in a prosecution)/(wiretaps) would be holding constant or increasing. From what I've heard, the actual ratio is plummetting - the government is fishing more and more, and getting less and less for it.
I believe that the government should be required to place a specified time limit on any wiretap warrant (time <= 6 months), and at the end of that time either
This would force the government to be more careful in selecting targets to tap. As it is now, if "Murry the Snitch" says I'm selling drugs (because he's on the hot spot and needs to give a name, any name, to the police), and they tap me for a few years and find nothing, then they quietly bury the data without so much as a by your leave. If they had to present to me the data so gathered, and the source of the information leading to the search warrant (does "the right to confront your accusor" ring a bell?), then I could (hell, would) bring suit against the the law enforcement agency involved as well as "Murry".
Of course, this has about as much chance of being passed into law and enforced as freezing a pot of water by placing it on a hot stove.
... and how many FOB's (Friends of Bill) are pushing up daisies right now.
However, since assasination is a) very difficult and b) counter-productive (since it causes a backlash against the benefiting party) I think the change would not noticably increase the risk.
I have thought things through, in depth. I also don't allow a knee-jerk bigoted view of my opponents to color my thinking.
The former offends my Libertarian views, the latter has been tried with some success. However, as Metcalf's law states, the value of a network varies as the square of the number of nodes in the network: as second heirarchy of name servers is useful only if it has a significant number of users. Perhaps if a consortium of the larger ISPs got together, and made it their default, it might work.
However, do we wish to trade ICANN for AOL/UUNet/Qwest/Microsoft?
Sorry, but you are incorrect. The Z80 and the 6502 both had an address space of 2^16 bytes (65536). I know, I used to make my living programming Z80's, and was a fairly accomplished 6502 hacker in my day.