THANK YOU - someone that actually understands the issue of errors in databases
It is shame this discussion is effectively dead now. That is what is so annoying about Slashdot - by the time genuinely insightful comments are made, the article is too far down the page for anyone to bother reading/moderating it.
Firstly, I can't believe I was moderated down just because I happened to make some points the tin-foil hat brigade didn't afree with.
Anyway, I will just pick up on a couple of points, because I should be working...
>I can't drive. I already have plenty of forms of ID which are accepted everywhere (credit cards, bank statements, utility bills, passport...)
The only form of ID you mentioned there is a passport. All the others just show that you have in your possession an object with a name on, which you say is yours. Not everyone has a passport. You also have to pay to get one. Current passports are easy to fake because they are trusted as a document in their own right, as opposed to being linked to a centralised database.
>on paedophiles...
I think you will agree that you should have to provide proof of who you are to get some jobs. There should be a form of ID that is highly secure in these cases, i.e. one which cannot be fooled without faking the card, and hacking into the database. And despite what people think, there are plenty of databases that are almost infallibly secure.
>Here's a clue: The problem with the numerous current forms of ID is not the IDs themselves- it's *people* who fail to follow the relevant procedures properly. We absolutely don't need ID cards, what we need is for people to be more responsible and to do their jobs properly. And, yes, to fix flaws in existing procedures. An ID card, or associated laws and punishments, can't and won't magically cause any of those things to happen.
I agree wholeheartedly with you that people are the problem with the current system. That is why I personally believe we would be much better off if we had a GOOD centralised, computer system. Once set up correctly, a computer never makes mistakes. Their beauty (in this case) is that they are inflexible. Everyone would be treated the same. A correctly configured system would only need a comparatively small infrastrucure of trusted people to be effective. Admittedly choosing those people would be a problem, but you don't hear many cases of wayward MI6 agents (I know there have been some). Safeguards would obviously be made to ensure no one person could do anything damaging.
Be clear that I was not arguing that this particular ID system would have been great. I was merely pointing out that ID cards are not inherently bad.
I was also thinking about ID cards the other day and I was actually thinking how good they would be.
I consider myself a decent citizen and would have no objection to being able to identify myself when required. There are a lot of people that are not decent citizens, so I also like the idea that compulsory ID cards would:
eliminate (or severely reduce) state benefit fraud
prevent so-called NHS tourists sponging off our already over-stretched health system
prevent punk-ass 15-year old kids getting into pubs, getting pissed and then tearing up town centres
allow people that don't want to learn to drive to have some form of ID card that is actually accepted everywhere
prevent known peadophiles from being able to get jobs anywhere near children
cut down on illegal immigration
I'm sure there are other points I will think of as soon as I hit submit. Anyway, the first 3 points would directly improve my experience as a citizen. Or subject - it has no bearing on my life what you decide to call me.
It makes me angry when people knee-jerk over ID cards. They:
Would not help the government track you. They don't have built in RFID that are scanned everytime you walk through a shop doorway.
Do not necessarily need to unify with drivers licenses and passports. I think this is where Blunkett got it wrong in trying to link three largely indepedent ideas - national ID, international ID and Driving Eligibility.
Are only an invasion of "privacy" if you are forced to carry them. I don't think anyone was considering this in the UK.
I am sure some people's objection to these compulsory ID cards was mainly that they would be charged to get them. I concede that is totally unacceptable and they should be funded via taxes (so the poor are not unnecessarily burdened).
People talk about the expense of setting up the system. Yes, it would be very expensive, but that is largely a one-off expense that could well save money in the long run (see fraud prevention above).
People talk about problems of the "one true database" being wrong. Well they only need to get it right once. Your identity doesn't ever change. It's pretty unlikely you would be "accidentally" added to the list of sex offenders or known terrorists. In fact, another plus is that it would largely eliminate problems of people with the same name being persecuted as sex offenders.
To me it seems so ridiculous that, at the minute, a lot of people use names as some kind of unique identifiers. Then they realise names are not very unique so they try to use the date of birth too. Then they find two people with the same name who were born on the same day!
Lastly, those people that bitch about eroding civil liberties: you don't have to imagine the worst case scenario from day one. You only need to kick up a fuss when it appears things are actually going Too Far (TM). In case you didn't realise it, the government is actually made up of ordinary people in the UK and everything they do is for the (at least, perceived) best interests of the nation as a whole. (This should be contrasted with America where most things your government does are in the interests of the corporations that bankroll any major politician's career.)
There are a lot of caveats of implementing ID cards, but done properly they could be an excellent improvement to the country.
I find the degree of ignorance exposed in that article is truly shocking.
I would be very interested to see how the people who are well informed about the issues are voting. It would be hard to define "well informed", but you could use measures such as how many indepedent news sources they consult per day, how long they spend reading news, etc.
My guess is that Kerry might well come out on top. To be honest, as a non-American, the only reason I can see that Bush is still so popular is that he appeals to the "lowest common demominator" and those people that just don't give a shit about the world outside America.
What about the bugs that have already been found, but have not been fixed? As I recall, there are some quite serious bugs on bugzilla that are outstanding. Surely mozilla should also be offering bounty to actually fix these?
It is not very professional to make a 1.0 release with a load of known bugs in it.
Do I understand this correctly? Does he want to ensure that his central heating can stay running for 8 hours during a potential power outage? What is the point of that? You're not really going to get that cold within 8 hours. The human race did manage to survive for tens of thousands of years without central heating. Piece of advice one: forget about the central heating and buy a decent coat for power cuts.
Anyway, assuming he actually wants to keep other more important things running - life support machine perhaps - he has 2 options:
A generator
Lots of lead acid batteries
Simple as that. The first option is cheap and effective, but makes a bit of noise, and will need somewhere outside to run it. The second option needs quite a bit of space, is expensive and requires a fair amount of other expenditure for charging circuits, inverters, etc. It also runs out after a while and there is nothing you can do then. If you use a generator, you can always put more petrol/diesel in, assuming you keep a decent stock.
Solution: Google for a 1500W generator (e.g.).
Problem solved - next question please.
You don't need to move - in most places you can simply turn down the air conditioning in the summer to save the energy for heating in the winter. It is more efficient to heat a room than to cool it anyway.
Also, nothing is mentioned about wear. From my understanding, the rate of wear is a real killer for these tiny devices.
Just think, if 0.5mm wears off the sliding surfaces in a conventional turbine, not big deal... if 0.5mm wears off the surfaces of this device you have nothing left.
A cluster of 5 units has a teraflop of processing. I couldn't see anywhere where it said how many of these they have.
The thing that is amazing is that you have a teraflop in 15U! Just imagine a room full of the things, and that might give you more indication of the amount of processing needed to spy on everyone.
One of the reasons the internet has become so popular is because everyone can have their say. Unfortunately, this has the side effect that there is a lot of incorrect and misleading information out there. Everything is also self-reinforcing, because one person often copies their "facts" from another website without first checking the veracity. Even major news outlets and scientific publications have been caught out by this in the past.
Getting slightly OT here, but I just want to add my recommendation for using PICs.
They're excellent for home projects like this because they are cheap and very easy to use. In many projects you don't need any other ICs and very few extra components. The assembly instruction set is very simple and almost trivial to learn. Or you can use a C compiler (I believe you can get a basic one for free from here).
Check out Microchip.com for information on the different chips available. They range from the small, simple 12 series to the more powerful 18 series (which support things like USB, I2C, CAN, A/Ds,...)
P.S. No, I don't work for microchip, I just like their products
Clearly not all the viewers share the submitter's appreciation of these movies!
Re:Nuclear energy works!
on
China Goes Nuclear
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Part of what scares people is the far reaching and long lasting effects of any disaster. An enormous amount of land was affected by Chernobyl (as far away as Cumbria in England, see here) and could remain unusable for 100's of years.
It is also almost impossible to carry out any "clean up", even if the money was available.
Having said this, I personally believe the chances of an accident in a modern reactor are very low. If they could be sited in useless land (e.g. desert) as well, they benefits would outweigh the risks.
Slashdot Mirror
It is shame this discussion is effectively dead now. That is what is so annoying about Slashdot - by the time genuinely insightful comments are made, the article is too far down the page for anyone to bother reading/moderating it.
Anyway, I will just pick up on a couple of points, because I should be working...
>I can't drive. I already have plenty of forms of ID which are accepted everywhere (credit cards, bank statements, utility bills, passport...)
The only form of ID you mentioned there is a passport. All the others just show that you have in your possession an object with a name on, which you say is yours. Not everyone has a passport. You also have to pay to get one. Current passports are easy to fake because they are trusted as a document in their own right, as opposed to being linked to a centralised database.
>on paedophiles...
I think you will agree that you should have to provide proof of who you are to get some jobs. There should be a form of ID that is highly secure in these cases, i.e. one which cannot be fooled without faking the card, and hacking into the database. And despite what people think, there are plenty of databases that are almost infallibly secure.
>Here's a clue: The problem with the numerous current forms of ID is not the IDs themselves- it's *people* who fail to follow the relevant procedures properly. We absolutely don't need ID cards, what we need is for people to be more responsible and to do their jobs properly. And, yes, to fix flaws in existing procedures. An ID card, or associated laws and punishments, can't and won't magically cause any of those things to happen.
I agree wholeheartedly with you that people are the problem with the current system. That is why I personally believe we would be much better off if we had a GOOD centralised, computer system. Once set up correctly, a computer never makes mistakes. Their beauty (in this case) is that they are inflexible. Everyone would be treated the same. A correctly configured system would only need a comparatively small infrastrucure of trusted people to be effective. Admittedly choosing those people would be a problem, but you don't hear many cases of wayward MI6 agents (I know there have been some). Safeguards would obviously be made to ensure no one person could do anything damaging.Be clear that I was not arguing that this particular ID system would have been great. I was merely pointing out that ID cards are not inherently bad.
I consider myself a decent citizen and would have no objection to being able to identify myself when required. There are a lot of people that are not decent citizens, so I also like the idea that compulsory ID cards would:
I'm sure there are other points I will think of as soon as I hit submit. Anyway, the first 3 points would directly improve my experience as a citizen. Or subject - it has no bearing on my life what you decide to call me.
It makes me angry when people knee-jerk over ID cards. They:
I am sure some people's objection to these compulsory ID cards was mainly that they would be charged to get them. I concede that is totally unacceptable and they should be funded via taxes (so the poor are not unnecessarily burdened).
People talk about the expense of setting up the system. Yes, it would be very expensive, but that is largely a one-off expense that could well save money in the long run (see fraud prevention above).
People talk about problems of the "one true database" being wrong. Well they only need to get it right once. Your identity doesn't ever change. It's pretty unlikely you would be "accidentally" added to the list of sex offenders or known terrorists. In fact, another plus is that it would largely eliminate problems of people with the same name being persecuted as sex offenders.
To me it seems so ridiculous that, at the minute, a lot of people use names as some kind of unique identifiers. Then they realise names are not very unique so they try to use the date of birth too. Then they find two people with the same name who were born on the same day!
Lastly, those people that bitch about eroding civil liberties: you don't have to imagine the worst case scenario from day one. You only need to kick up a fuss when it appears things are actually going Too Far (TM). In case you didn't realise it, the government is actually made up of ordinary people in the UK and everything they do is for the (at least, perceived) best interests of the nation as a whole. (This should be contrasted with America where most things your government does are in the interests of the corporations that bankroll any major politician's career.)
There are a lot of caveats of implementing ID cards, but done properly they could be an excellent improvement to the country.
I would be very interested to see how the people who are well informed about the issues are voting. It would be hard to define "well informed", but you could use measures such as how many indepedent news sources they consult per day, how long they spend reading news, etc.
My guess is that Kerry might well come out on top. To be honest, as a non-American, the only reason I can see that Bush is still so popular is that he appeals to the "lowest common demominator" and those people that just don't give a shit about the world outside America.
They're actually only blocking georgewbush.com, not the IP 65.172.163.222 which the domainname points to. So http://65.172.163.222 works fine abroad.
It is not very professional to make a 1.0 release with a load of known bugs in it.
They could be used to charge the batteries, but it sounds like he is trying to do things cheaply, so should just use the mains for that.
Simple as that. The first option is cheap and effective, but makes a bit of noise, and will need somewhere outside to run it. The second option needs quite a bit of space, is expensive and requires a fair amount of other expenditure for charging circuits, inverters, etc. It also runs out after a while and there is nothing you can do then. If you use a generator, you can always put more petrol/diesel in, assuming you keep a decent stock.
Solution: Google for a 1500W generator (e.g.). Problem solved - next question please.
Let's just take a look at that stock price.
LOL!
It's hardly rocket science.
Just think, if 0.5mm wears off the sliding surfaces in a conventional turbine, not big deal... if 0.5mm wears off the surfaces of this device you have nothing left.
The thing that is amazing is that you have a teraflop in 15U! Just imagine a room full of the things, and that might give you more indication of the amount of processing needed to spy on everyone.
One of the reasons the internet has become so popular is because everyone can have their say. Unfortunately, this has the side effect that there is a lot of incorrect and misleading information out there. Everything is also self-reinforcing, because one person often copies their "facts" from another website without first checking the veracity. Even major news outlets and scientific publications have been caught out by this in the past.
Anyway, I think the moral of the story is that space flight can be suprisingly cheap once you have removed the cost of politics.
Well, I bet he doesn't have a real girlfriend to write the letter to! If he does, he probably spends more time with his OS (or should that be SO?!)
Since 2000, Windows has been at least as stable as Linux, if not more so.
They're excellent for home projects like this because they are cheap and very easy to use. In many projects you don't need any other ICs and very few extra components. The assembly instruction set is very simple and almost trivial to learn. Or you can use a C compiler (I believe you can get a basic one for free from here).
Check out Microchip.com for information on the different chips available. They range from the small, simple 12 series to the more powerful 18 series (which support things like USB, I2C, CAN, A/Ds, ...)
P.S. No, I don't work for microchip, I just like their products
I think you underestimate the laziness and ineptitude of most Windows users. Why else would they still be running IE anyway?
Oh yeah, here's that link you asked for.
Yes, but it does potentially represent that it has been installed on 1 million computers, which is no mean feat in 4 days.
How about adding a few more downloads?! Get it here.
Not much info there yet, but might be worth bookmarking for the future.
Ewoks: The Battle for Endor.
Clearly not all the viewers share the submitter's appreciation of these movies!
It is also almost impossible to carry out any "clean up", even if the money was available.
Having said this, I personally believe the chances of an accident in a modern reactor are very low. If they could be sited in useless land (e.g. desert) as well, they benefits would outweigh the risks.
Screen Size Diag: 7.2 ", Resolution: 1280 x 768
But not your eyes!