They seem to be using the Referrer: string to "protect" themselves from deep-linking. Unfortunately for those of us who disable that particular header in our proxies...
I've seen several of the new IBM ads, but I've not see this one. Anyone have a pointer to a nice (Linux viewable, please) MPEG or RealVideo stream of it?
Anybody have any real idea what.tel is for? Is it for WAP accessable sites (e.g. slashdot.tel for a WAP version of/.), or for Net->Phone gateways (quick, bring up 911.tel!) or for whistle-blowers (I'm gonna.tel, I'm gonna.tel!)?
(Both responders to my post make good comments, and it's a crying shame they weren't moderated up to match my post. Go back and read their posts.)
Both individuals respond to my assertion that distilling alcohol takes more energy than the alcohol has. Allow me to make the point that distilling alcohol from 3% to 70% is pretty easy, however due to the hydrophillic nature of alcohol, going from 70% to the better than 97% or so needed to be a good fuel for cars takes several distilation cycles, each of which converts higher-grade heat energy into lower-grade heat.
I will grant, some interesting ideas for getting rid of that last bit of water have been proposed: I personally like the idea of absorbing the water with corn starch, then fermenting the sodden corn starch....
If you use every bit of energy in the biomass, buring what you don't ferment, reclaiming the waste heat from one step to drive the next, feeding the leftovers to livestock to create meat, and (this is the biggie) use as little artificial fertilizer and pesticides as possible, you can make the energy cycle work.
The point I'm trying to make, because it often gets glossed over, it that if you think you can take the Iowa corn crop as it is produced today and think you can get a positive energy result by making fuel out of it, you are mistaken.
Too many times in the alternate fuel debate people don't look at the whole system costs (battery powered car people that ignore the pollution of creating the batteries and the electricity to charge them, for example). I am just trying to get people to take the whole mess into account first. Just as when you give a neophyte Linux and they find they cannot use it, building up synfuels with false promises doesn't help, it hurts.
This is somewhat off-topic, but I think it does pertain.
For the past year, I've been getting spammed by folks using open relays at Earthlink (most of the offenders are on UU.NET). Now, I've tried to bring this to the attention of abuse@earthlink.net, and I've even gone so far at to call them and try to get them to close their relays. The spams continue. (BTW: Earthlink has a phone line just for spam complaints: 1-888-356-7726, or 1-800-ELN-SPAM. Called it too. No results.) Since we all know open relays are considered harmful, why hasn't Earthlink closed them?
I submit that it is because Earthlink doesn't give a rat's pink furry asshole about their customers, the Internet, your rights, or anything but making money: closing the relays would cost them money, so they don't.
From what I read of the story, Earthlink didn't say "Bugger off, we won't let you eavesdrop on our customers!", they said "Your hardware is crashing our system (costing us money), let US do the monitoring for you."
Hardly being "Champions Of Freedom" if you ask me.
BTW: If anyone else is getting spam from Earthlink's open relays: save it, send it to abuse@earthlink.net, and think about contacting the MAPS RBL: I am working on getting together enough evidence to satisfy the RBL's requirements to get Earthlink blackholed.
I keep seeing people talking about methanol or alcohol as a fuel. It won't work!
Let's review:
The concept is that you have a renewable energy source. You effectively are harvesting sunlight.
This only works if the amount of energy you get out of the fuel is greater than the amount of energy it takes to produce the fuel.
In order to distill alcohol to the point where it will burn as a fuel takes more energy than burning the alcohol produces.
Conclusion: alcohol is not a renewable fuel source. Now, if you are locating a nuclear plant next to the distillary to make up the difference, then you can use alcohol as an energy storage medium, just as you can use hydrogen or really big springs. But it isn't an energy source, it is an energy storage system. The neat thing about gasoline is that you get more energy out of burning it than it takes to produce it. It's just not a renewable source...
Obviously, Senator Hatch has been seriously exposed to all the GNU rays coming from Caldera!
I want to go back and see if the version of DMCA that Senator Hatch supported was the same as the version that passed. Sometimes they slip a fast one in, and maybe that's why he's so pissed.
What if somebody who is NOT very OSS-freindly wants to register a.gnu domain? Given that it is now SOP to register a domain in.com,.org, and.net, what will prevent Microsoft from registering microsoft.gnu?
Unless the control of registration in the.gnu domain is turned over to the FSF, I see no advantage to this. If control is turned over to the FSF, many people will cry fowl. You just cannot win (Thermodynamics, Law 1)
But rather for the/. crew: when would you see deploying TUX as a server for/.?
This is the real question: when will people for whom serving web pages is their bread and butter adopt this? Apache already has this level of trustworthiness, how long until TUX has it?
You know, I am really getting tired of *BSD people saying "Linux is insecure". Linux isn't insecure, Linux is the kernel! Many Linux distros are insecure, but is Linux any less secure than the *BSD kernels? Let's start being correct: many Linux distros are less secure than the *BSD distros.
Now, I will agree it is a shame that RedHad doesn't take more time to make the default installs secure....
I don't know what the guy who built the x86 still used to solder the still shut, but if he used standard Drat Shack solder, the result of the still could kill you with lead poisoning. Use lead free solder, like plumbers use.
It's not especially hard/b> to jam cell phones, but it is quite unlawful. If you get caught, the FCC (US) or DTI (UK) or whomever will cause you great pain.
Like so many other things, this is best solved by society at large deciding "We're not gonna take it": The next time a phone rings in the theater, get everybody around the miscreant to shout "Is this a theater or a phone booth?" Keep yelling this as long as the jackass is in the theater. Eventually people will realize that rude behavior (phone in theater) will be met with rude behavior (people yelling at you).
In addition, for folks talking on the phone while driving, go listen to this RealAudio Clip from Cartalk: it's of this moron yapping on his cellphone to a calling when he wrecks! It's a classic!
Keep your door locked then. If it is, then there is no problem, if it's not, it's your fault.
Make you a deal, Sebastard: Post your physical address, and I'll come over and jiggle your front door some evening. Hey, if it's locked, it's not a problem, is it?
I think you'd be a little disturbed were this to happen, and I think you'd have a problem with it. If not, then you are far too trusting a soul for the world we find ourselves in.
I would offer to give you my physical address, but I find cleaning blood off my wooden front porch to be rather difficult....
I disagree with random pinging being "fair use", consider:
My computer is connected to the Internet 24/7 via DSL. However, I do not provide any services to the Internet, and in fact have my firewall configured to deny (do not accept, do not respond) any inbound connections. There is no good reason anybody should be pinging my system: you ping to test connectivity, and since you cannot connect to my system, you have no reason to be testing if you can connect.
I consider pinging my system to be the electronic equivalent of jiggling my front doorknob to see if the door will open: Is it "fair use" of my front door?
It's one thing to ping a public site ("Hello? Slashdot? You alive?") but randomly pinging hosts is wrong!
Where did you get the idea that any form of carbon would be coming in from the moon? We've been talking about He3, which even after fusion would only be He4 and maybe Li. The moon is pretty carbon poor IIRC.
Actually, all EME (earth-moon-earth) work is done at 2 meters and above (144MHz and above), not in the HF bands (generally taken to be 50MHz and below). HF bounces off the ionosphere, not the moon.
As for beaming power to/from the moon: it will spread, and the beamwidth from the moon would be roughly the size of the earth. You'd have to cover the whole earth with antennas and diodes to recover the power. It'd make more sense to put the collectors in low earth orbit: the beamwidths then would be roughly football field sized. However, the stupid environmentalists (as opposed to the more common but less vocal smart environmentalists) scream because there's "radiation" involved.
Corn (a.k.a. methanol): The goal for this is to harvest sunlight - to get more energy out of the fuel than it costs to make it. However, to distill alcohol to a point where it can be burned as fuel takes more energy than you get from burning the alcohol. In other words, you need some other energy source to make it work. ***BZZT!***
Solar: Nevermind that current solar cells are about an order of magnitude more costly than coal (even with all the scrubbers to keep the ash out of the air, and even factoring in the costs of the added greenhouse effect). Never mind that making a solar cell creates more pollution that it prevents (do you have any IDEA how dirty making semiconductors is?) Never mind the fact that solar cells don't last forever, they have to be replaced every 5-10 years. Nevermind....
Hydrogen: Much the same problem as alcohol - you need another source of power to split water. You don't get as much energy out of burning the hydrogen as you put into splitting it off. Also, there's the little problem of storing it: hydrogen embrittles steel tanks, it diffuses through the tank and collects outside, waiting for an excuse to blow up (at NASA facilities all LH2 tanks are in buildings with openings in the roof, to prevent the hydrogen from leaking.) You can try to entrain the hydrogen in zeolite storage, but then you have to heat the zeolite to drive the hydrogen out. You also lose (note to others: lose, not loose!) your storage capacity - you now cannot store as much energy as you can in the form of gasoline.
Yes, research is being done on using photosynthesis to split water into hydrogen (again, harvesting sunlight), and research is being done on how to store the hydrogen in a fashion that would allow you to fill your tank and have reasonable range, but it isn't here yet! And it IS being funded quite well, it's just a very hard problem and takes time.
I don't know the mass of the moon off the top of my head, but it is greather than quadrillions of tons (10^16 tons). Assume that a one part per billion change might cause some problems - that is still over 10^7 tons! At 1000 tons per year, that is still over ten thousand years before we could even begin to modify the moon's orbit.
Come on people, DO THE FREAKIN' MATH before you start spouting off!
Secondly, the moon is a lifeless ROCK! You could strip-mine the surface of the moon, spread the chat back over where you mined when you were done, and NOBODY COULD TELL THE DIFFERENCE! I'm all for protecting the environment, but there is no environment on the moon!
85p/litre? Thanks for giving me something else to celebrate today! Last time I was in the UK was a couple of years ago, so my price fix was out of date.
Will the 'Net replace the Theater?
on
Movies Online?
·
· Score: 2
Will the 'Net replace the Theater? Not until there is a format that all the movie companies can agree upon that is available for all platforms, from Windows and Mac to appliances to Linux/*BSD. This will not happen soon since such a format would have poor playback^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcopy protection (which we all know is useless, but the movie industry does not).
Also, there are classes of films that are best viewed with others, in a theater. After all, how many people want to invite 100 hard-core Rocky Horror Picture Show fans (a.k.a. sluts by RHPS fans) to their house? Just vacuuming up the rice would take a month....
You might not want to use US gas in a UK car. Not only could it cause you to swerve unavoidably right when going through the roundabouts, but UK petrol is 91 octane, whereas "regular" US gas is 85-87 octane. Since US engine tend to be larger displacement, we use a lower compression to get the same horsepower than the smaller engines used in the UK. You put US gas in a high-compression UK engine and it'll knock like a door-to-door saleman. You'd have to buy Premium gas, which is more expensive (but at ~US$1.799/USgal here in Kansas, still a damn sight better than UK60p/litre.)
I'm on NTLUG's emailing list, and I drool over several of the meetings I see. However, for a less than one day event, the drive from Wichita down just isn't worth it anymore. Back when the SuperSaturday computer sale was worth it, I would drive down Friday night after work, get hotel room, get up in the AM, go to the show, the NTLUG meeting (and the Atari meeting. That's the kind of weirdo I am), and then drive home. Now that a) SuperSaturday isn't super, b) SuperSaturday isn't on the same day as the NTLUG meetings, c) the NTLUG meetings aren't at the same place as all the others, well....
It seems to me that one of the biggest mistakes the KC show people made was in not getting the word out: I found out about this by a chance reference on ZDNET, and wouldn't have otherwise. Yes, they advertised in LJ, but that was a half-page ad buried in the back with all the other ads I might read if I have a bought of constipation. Now, if they had pushed for a mention on/. or userfriendly.org, or had a story in LJ, that would have been better.
Better still would have been to work with NTLUG, ACLUG, and all the other LUGs within a day's drive, to get the event in the local papers, on the local radio stations, and talked about in the local communities. Then they might have had enough people coming in to keep everybody around.
But this "Build it and they will come" attitude will fail every time.
Slashdot Mirror
They seem to be using the Referrer: string to "protect" themselves from deep-linking. Unfortunately for those of us who disable that particular header in our proxies...
I've seen several of the new IBM ads, but I've not see this one. Anyone have a pointer to a nice (Linux viewable, please) MPEG or RealVideo stream of it?
BTW, anybody ever see the Caldera ad on TV?
Anybody have any real idea what .tel is for? Is it for WAP accessable sites (e.g. slashdot.tel for a WAP version of /.), or for Net->Phone gateways (quick, bring up 911.tel!) or for whistle-blowers (I'm gonna .tel, I'm gonna .tel!)?
(Both responders to my post make good comments, and it's a crying shame they weren't moderated up to match my post. Go back and read their posts.)
Both individuals respond to my assertion that distilling alcohol takes more energy than the alcohol has. Allow me to make the point that distilling alcohol from 3% to 70% is pretty easy, however due to the hydrophillic nature of alcohol, going from 70% to the better than 97% or so needed to be a good fuel for cars takes several distilation cycles, each of which converts higher-grade heat energy into lower-grade heat.
I will grant, some interesting ideas for getting rid of that last bit of water have been proposed: I personally like the idea of absorbing the water with corn starch, then fermenting the sodden corn starch....
If you use every bit of energy in the biomass, buring what you don't ferment, reclaiming the waste heat from one step to drive the next, feeding the leftovers to livestock to create meat, and (this is the biggie) use as little artificial fertilizer and pesticides as possible, you can make the energy cycle work.
The point I'm trying to make, because it often gets glossed over, it that if you think you can take the Iowa corn crop as it is produced today and think you can get a positive energy result by making fuel out of it, you are mistaken.
Too many times in the alternate fuel debate people don't look at the whole system costs (battery powered car people that ignore the pollution of creating the batteries and the electricity to charge them, for example). I am just trying to get people to take the whole mess into account first. Just as when you give a neophyte Linux and they find they cannot use it, building up synfuels with false promises doesn't help, it hurts.
This is somewhat off-topic, but I think it does pertain.
For the past year, I've been getting spammed by folks using open relays at Earthlink (most of the offenders are on UU.NET). Now, I've tried to bring this to the attention of abuse@earthlink.net, and I've even gone so far at to call them and try to get them to close their relays. The spams continue. (BTW: Earthlink has a phone line just for spam complaints: 1-888-356-7726, or 1-800-ELN-SPAM. Called it too. No results.) Since we all know open relays are considered harmful, why hasn't Earthlink closed them?
I submit that it is because Earthlink doesn't give a rat's pink furry asshole about their customers, the Internet, your rights, or anything but making money: closing the relays would cost them money, so they don't.
From what I read of the story, Earthlink didn't say "Bugger off, we won't let you eavesdrop on our customers!", they said "Your hardware is crashing our system (costing us money), let US do the monitoring for you."
Hardly being "Champions Of Freedom" if you ask me.
BTW: If anyone else is getting spam from Earthlink's open relays: save it, send it to abuse@earthlink.net, and think about contacting the MAPS RBL: I am working on getting together enough evidence to satisfy the RBL's requirements to get Earthlink blackholed.
I keep seeing people talking about methanol or alcohol as a fuel. It won't work!
Let's review:
The concept is that you have a renewable energy source. You effectively are harvesting sunlight.
This only works if the amount of energy you get out of the fuel is greater than the amount of energy it takes to produce the fuel.
In order to distill alcohol to the point where it will burn as a fuel takes more energy than burning the alcohol produces.
Conclusion: alcohol is not a renewable fuel source. Now, if you are locating a nuclear plant next to the distillary to make up the difference, then you can use alcohol as an energy storage medium, just as you can use hydrogen or really big springs. But it isn't an energy source, it is an energy storage system.
The neat thing about gasoline is that you get more energy out of burning it than it takes to produce it. It's just not a renewable source...
Obviously, Senator Hatch has been seriously exposed to all the GNU rays coming from Caldera!
I want to go back and see if the version of DMCA that Senator Hatch supported was the same as the version that passed. Sometimes they slip a fast one in, and maybe that's why he's so pissed.
Battle On, Hatch!
What if somebody who is NOT very OSS-freindly wants to register a .gnu domain? Given that it is now SOP to register a domain in .com,.org, and .net, what will prevent Microsoft from registering microsoft.gnu?
.gnu domain is turned over to the FSF, I see no advantage to this. If control is turned over to the FSF, many people will cry fowl. You just cannot win (Thermodynamics, Law 1)
Unless the control of registration in the
But rather for the /. crew: when would you see deploying TUX as a server for /.?
This is the real question: when will people for whom serving web pages is their bread and butter adopt this? Apache already has this level of trustworthiness, how long until TUX has it?
You know, I am really getting tired of *BSD people saying "Linux is insecure". Linux isn't insecure, Linux is the kernel! Many Linux distros are insecure, but is Linux any less secure than the *BSD kernels? Let's start being correct: many Linux distros are less secure than the *BSD distros.
Now, I will agree it is a shame that RedHad doesn't take more time to make the default installs secure....
I don't know what the guy who built the x86 still used to solder the still shut, but if he used standard Drat Shack solder, the result of the still could kill you with lead poisoning. Use lead free solder, like plumbers use.
I want to hear Boston's "Foreplay/Long Time", or "Get Organ-ized" on this...
/. ....
Wonder if Mr. Sholtz reads
It's not especially hard/b> to jam cell phones, but it is quite unlawful. If you get caught, the FCC (US) or DTI (UK) or whomever will cause you great pain.
Like so many other things, this is best solved by society at large deciding "We're not gonna take it": The next time a phone rings in the theater, get everybody around the miscreant to shout "Is this a theater or a phone booth?" Keep yelling this as long as the jackass is in the theater. Eventually people will realize that rude behavior (phone in theater) will be met with rude behavior (people yelling at you).
In addition, for folks talking on the phone while driving, go listen to this RealAudio Clip from Cartalk: it's of this moron yapping on his cellphone to a calling when he wrecks! It's a classic!
Make you a deal, Sebastard: Post your physical address, and I'll come over and jiggle your front door some evening. Hey, if it's locked, it's not a problem, is it?
I think you'd be a little disturbed were this to happen, and I think you'd have a problem with it. If not, then you are far too trusting a soul for the world we find ourselves in.
I would offer to give you my physical address, but I find cleaning blood off my wooden front porch to be rather difficult....
I disagree with random pinging being "fair use", consider:
My computer is connected to the Internet 24/7 via DSL. However, I do not provide any services to the Internet, and in fact have my firewall configured to deny (do not accept, do not respond) any inbound connections. There is no good reason anybody should be pinging my system: you ping to test connectivity, and since you cannot connect to my system, you have no reason to be testing if you can connect.
I consider pinging my system to be the electronic equivalent of jiggling my front doorknob to see if the door will open: Is it "fair use" of my front door?
It's one thing to ping a public site ("Hello? Slashdot? You alive?") but randomly pinging hosts is wrong!
Where did you get the idea that any form of carbon would be coming in from the moon? We've been talking about He3, which even after fusion would only be He4 and maybe Li. The moon is pretty carbon poor IIRC.
<Sorry, couldn't resist...>
Actually, all EME (earth-moon-earth) work is done at 2 meters and above (144MHz and above), not in the HF bands (generally taken to be 50MHz and below). HF bounces off the ionosphere, not the moon.
As for beaming power to/from the moon: it will spread, and the beamwidth from the moon would be roughly the size of the earth. You'd have to cover the whole earth with antennas and diodes to recover the power. It'd make more sense to put the collectors in low earth orbit: the beamwidths then would be roughly football field sized. However, the stupid environmentalists (as opposed to the more common but less vocal smart environmentalists) scream because there's "radiation" involved.
Yes, research is being done on using photosynthesis to split water into hydrogen (again, harvesting sunlight), and research is being done on how to store the hydrogen in a fashion that would allow you to fill your tank and have reasonable range, but it isn't here yet! And it IS being funded quite well, it's just a very hard problem and takes time.
I don't know the mass of the moon off the top of my head, but it is greather than quadrillions of tons (10^16 tons). Assume that a one part per billion change might cause some problems - that is still over 10^7 tons! At 1000 tons per year, that is still over ten thousand years before we could even begin to modify the moon's orbit.
Come on people, DO THE FREAKIN' MATH before you start spouting off!
Secondly, the moon is a lifeless ROCK! You could strip-mine the surface of the moon, spread the chat back over where you mined when you were done, and NOBODY COULD TELL THE DIFFERENCE! I'm all for protecting the environment, but there is no environment on the moon!
85p/litre? Thanks for giving me something else to celebrate today! Last time I was in the UK was a couple of years ago, so my price fix was out of date.
Will the 'Net replace the Theater? Not until there is a format that all the movie companies can agree upon that is available for all platforms, from Windows and Mac to appliances to Linux/*BSD. This will not happen soon since such a format would have poor playback^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcopy protection (which we all know is useless, but the movie industry does not).
Also, there are classes of films that are best viewed with others, in a theater. After all, how many people want to invite 100 hard-core Rocky Horror Picture Show fans (a.k.a. sluts by RHPS fans) to their house? Just vacuuming up the rice would take a month....
You might not want to use US gas in a UK car. Not only could it cause you to swerve unavoidably right when going through the roundabouts, but UK petrol is 91 octane, whereas "regular" US gas is 85-87 octane. Since US engine tend to be larger displacement, we use a lower compression to get the same horsepower than the smaller engines used in the UK. You put US gas in a high-compression UK engine and it'll knock like a door-to-door saleman. You'd have to buy Premium gas, which is more expensive (but at ~US$1.799/USgal here in Kansas, still a damn sight better than UK60p/litre.)
If you are *nix user, don't bother downloading the movies. They are Sorenson all the way. Pity, such a high-tech site denied to high-tech people....
I'm on NTLUG's emailing list, and I drool over several of the meetings I see. However, for a less than one day event, the drive from Wichita down just isn't worth it anymore. Back when the SuperSaturday computer sale was worth it, I would drive down Friday night after work, get hotel room, get up in the AM, go to the show, the NTLUG meeting (and the Atari meeting. That's the kind of weirdo I am), and then drive home. Now that a) SuperSaturday isn't super, b) SuperSaturday isn't on the same day as the NTLUG meetings, c) the NTLUG meetings aren't at the same place as all the others, well....
/. or userfriendly.org, or had a story in LJ, that would have been better.
It seems to me that one of the biggest mistakes the KC show people made was in not getting the word out: I found out about this by a chance reference on ZDNET, and wouldn't have otherwise. Yes, they advertised in LJ, but that was a half-page ad buried in the back with all the other ads I might read if I have a bought of constipation. Now, if they had pushed for a mention on
Better still would have been to work with NTLUG, ACLUG, and all the other LUGs within a day's drive, to get the event in the local papers, on the local radio stations, and talked about in the local communities. Then they might have had enough people coming in to keep everybody around.
But this "Build it and they will come" attitude will fail every time.