Most web commenting is pretty ridiculous amateur-hour nonsense. Its housewives and teens giving us their "wisdom." Web forums have been politicized by partisans. Fringe nutters have turned everything into their own PR outlets.
Slashdot is slightly better than the youtube/twitter rabble because its a site focused on technology (usually) and has a moderation system. A general news site with any sort of moderation? Madness. I can tolerate slashdot, metafilter, and most of reddit. Everything else is so terrible it makes you realize that crap like "OMG Ghost hunters is the REALZ" or "Vaccines cause autism!!!" is how a lot of people think and critical thinking and a little literacy are the exception, not the norm.
Dahl is right. While the media needs a check agaisnt bias and poor reporting, I doubt these twitter comments are helping. Looks like they are just lowing the signal to noise ratio even more. I guess anything to help make Wolf Blitzer look smart. I guess Neil Postman has finally been proved right:
>hey don't want to allow OSX to run on anything other than their hardware,
They dont. They sue people who sell OSX based machines. This update targets hobbyists and techies who know what they are doing and who dont need Apple's hand holding for "user experience" as you put it. Open your eyes already. Its embarrassing to see a place like slashdot that supposedly is all about the DIY ethic defending bullshit actions by one of technology's most controlling and DRM friendly companies.
The US military has a research arm that gets it wrong sometimes, but we're not seeing psychic soldiers reading the minds of terrorists in the field or anything. We're not deploying the gay bomb anywhere. If anything, its sometimes interesting to hear some out of the box ideas. Look at the success of the predator drone, which is an old idea and one scoffed at for a long time.
The difference here is that Iraq is buying these things and using them instead of tested methods. They are letting guys with cars full of bombs pass through checkpoints because their magic wand said so.
>he Pentagon and intel agencies actually spent millions on "psychic warfare" projects at one point
An intel/defense organization is like any business. Managers (usually generals) have pet projects and try these things. Its not everyone in charge sat down and said "Yes, we need psychics now!" If there's any government institution that is by its nature skeptical its the military, because new unproven methods turn into lost lives and lost wars pretty quickly.
>So where is the leaked document so that I may judge for myself?
Nowhere. This is the kind of rumor-mongering and partisan "journalism" that gets people into a huff. They get all angry, make grand statements about the state of the nation/world/human nature, make generalizations about politicians, and promise to never vote for x or y again. They hop on some marginalized 3rd-party bandwagon and later when its revealed that this was a lot of scare tactics and bad journalism, they dont care or bother to follow up.
Reminds me on how people on the right were obsessed with satanic cults, tri-lateral commission, and jet contrails back in the 1980s and 1990s. They are now the leaders of the 'teabagger' community or Birchers or ultraconservative Republicans; they completely lack any skepticism, mental sophistication or any understanding of proof. They sit around and cry about socialism/communism, vaccine conspiracies, and make mindless comparisons of Obama to Hitler. This is the same smear bullshit. I'll wait for some facts, thanks.
>We also saw how well communist ideas worked for Russia (from our perspective) during the early 40's, and actually did things that headed us ever so slightly in the direction of communism.
Communism isnt social programs like Social Security. Communism is state owned property and means of production. This is something tea baggers should have been taught in school. Social Security isnt paid for by nationalizing all the business, its a tax, same as roads, navies, etc.
Removing property from people and running a state command economy has nothing to do with these things. Heck, by the 1940s the Soviets were in a panic because the world was modernizing and the "commune" concept was only successful with the simple economics of the agrarian system and all the command economy voodoo cant compete with an open market in a complex economy. Forty years later their fears were realized when they couldnt afford anything and shortly collapsed.
I think the lesson here is centralized planning economies attached to a totalitarian government == fail. Not "theres wisdom in command economies." Sadly, a lot of the pro-communist people in the states were fed carefully engineered propaganda and life in the Soviet Union was not what they thought it was. This all tied in with what the Unions were doing but Unions didnt need communist sympathizers, if anything having people in their ranks only hurt them politically.
>They see enormous advantages in operating closed-cartel oriented markets, with severely curtailed republic systems and controlled public messages.
I know this is popular in libertarian circles but its a bunch of BS. Unlike a lot of anti-US commentators I have been to some of these countries and know immigrants from there. Its cute to see people go apeshit over internet connectivity and scream "decline of the west!!!" while tipping their hats to countries like China and Russia where human rights are less than a joke. Where political prisoners are the norm, where censorship firewall is the norm, where gays are beaten to death in front of police, where joining the opposition party is a risk to your life, where not subscribing to the state religion is a death sentence, where education is propaganda, etc.
I think this all stems from certain people hating the West for getting things right like the enlightenment, allowing criticism of religion and politics, allowing women full rights, allowing free speech, giving rights to minorities, allowing more than one party, univeral healthcare (sans a few), etc. Its sad that the 'small government' people are cozying up to dictators, warlords, and thugs because they envy success done with the large modern state which is almost always democratic, free market, and free speech.
As far as the East winding up, dont confuse catching up with getting past. A lot of these countries were poverty states until recently and have terrible GDP per capita and terrible governments, terrible crime, and terrible abuses. They have a significant portion of the population which is ready to revolt but is only held down by totalitarian elements (see China and Iran). Ironically, they have only grown by accepting Western values like capitalism, easy access to markets, and some level of government and social openness.
The article has some serious flaws. It claims that these machines are in use. I dont think the author understands that millimeter wave machines are passive. They are not active. So all the concerns about radiation are unfounded scaremongering. Again, Im asking for studies that show these machines that are in use are dangerous.
>don't allow the *sustained* I/O speed to exceed about 32 Megabytes per second.
What?
My esata port blows that away. Heck, I do imaging on a crappy laptop and do better than that a with plain-jane bottom of the barrel USB disk thats on its last legs.
I still cant think of where this limit would even come from. Laptops have the same chipsets as desktops. The only real limitation is the slower laptop drive, but that has nothing to do with the laptop per se. Connect a 3.5" or an SSD and it'll perform like a desktop.
>Needless to say, everyone in line was a bit pissed that the TSA was giving extra screening to the old lady when they just waved the Arab guys through without a second glance.
Err, racial and religious profiling has serious drawbacks. Random testing along with metal detectors, milimeter scan, etc is a better way. Not to mention terrorists arent stupid. Theyre not going to dress up in full garb. The 9/11 hijackers wore street clothes and business casual clothes.
Terrorists and drug smugglers also prey upon the weak and stupid. I can remember how many times Ive been asked to "hold my bag please, it is a package for my son" in line to get on a plane or a train.
>"What the fuck are you morons searching her for? The towelheads are the ones flying shit into buildings!"
Stay classy.
>Maybe scanned him a few extra times to make sure his DNA was totally fucked up.
With what exactly? The passive metal detector and passive millimeter wave device? Perhaps it would behoove us all in air travel if didnt point at funny looking people and scream "terrorist" like the moron in your story.
>Hopefully my sperm aren't being fried when I walk through a scanner in an airport--at least the parents of the 30s were using X-rays for their convenience and not the invasion of their privacy!
Airports use metal detectors for humans, not xrays. The new millimeter wave machines arent xrays. As far as safety, have is been demonstrated that these machines damage organisms in regular usage? It seems to me that a lot of this is reactionary nonsense like "I'm allergic to wifi!!" nonsense.I am concered about safety, but jumping on the naturalist/homeopathy/conspiracy theory bandwagon doesnt do us any good.
Not to mention just flying on a plane gives you a nice dose of cosmic rays, sans superpowers.
>not the invasion of their privacy!
Yes, lets give up on airport security. That will end well.
I dont think Im doing anything wrong, we just have different usage patterns. First off, the original poster claimed full ubuntu ran on 256megs of RAM. No, thats the minimum requirement for the standard installer. If you have a machine with less than that you need an alternate install disk. Or you do what I do: use xubuntu. I cant imagine running full ubuntu on less than 1gig.
My xubuntu machine barely runs at 256, which I think is a fair assessment. It boots, runs fine, but when I load up firefox, open a bunch of tabs, play some music, run a mail client, etc then it just runs out of RAM. I dont see its ram usage being much better than 2000 or even XP, but I have to deal with a less impressive and featured GUI.
That said, I am very impressed by xubuntu. Network manager could use some work. I usually just remove it and deal with IP addresses the old fashioned way. I think it hurts the linux community to spread lies about ram. Linux isnt magic. If you want to run a distro thats similar to the bells and whistles of OSX or Win7 then youre going to have to use a similar amount of RAM. Youre not getting away with using 1/4 the ram without giving up gnome.
Except he's not going to shake up anything, other than investor dollars. I dont know how many times it needs to be said: gamers dont want to wear equipment. No gloves or helmets or chest pieces. Its market suicide.
Not to mention that stuff begins to smell after a while. Brings back memories of playing Photon way back when.
Not sure, but XP could do this natively. You could usually just bridge the two connections and setup a peer-to-peer wifi connection. It was WEP only, I believe Win7 can do WPA2.
Where do you expect countries run by dictators (Syria has been under martial law since 1963 and more or less a client state for Iran) that have shit for university, shit for engineering, and oppression as the norm to get advanced anti-missile systems? They cant design their own. They would be starting with 1950s tech at best.
They knew they were taking a chance with foreign made equipment, but, they really dont have a choice.
Also, its worth noting that there may not have been an intentional backdoor/killswitch, this could have been a hack known to the US and others but not to Syria:
Im not buying one anytime soon either. Hopefully people will stop saying "OMG SSD ONLY FAILS ONE WAY: READ ONLY." Im sick of hearing that psuedowisdom on slashdot. SSD drives have many fail modes. 'Read only' is just one. Most likely the thing just wont turn on or you'll have massive corruption. Its fast but its not more reliable than a mechanical hard disk. Perhaps less so.
Slashdot Mirror
Most web commenting is pretty ridiculous amateur-hour nonsense. Its housewives and teens giving us their "wisdom." Web forums have been politicized by partisans. Fringe nutters have turned everything into their own PR outlets.
Slashdot is slightly better than the youtube/twitter rabble because its a site focused on technology (usually) and has a moderation system. A general news site with any sort of moderation? Madness. I can tolerate slashdot, metafilter, and most of reddit. Everything else is so terrible it makes you realize that crap like "OMG Ghost hunters is the REALZ" or "Vaccines cause autism!!!" is how a lot of people think and critical thinking and a little literacy are the exception, not the norm.
Dahl is right. While the media needs a check agaisnt bias and poor reporting, I doubt these twitter comments are helping. Looks like they are just lowing the signal to noise ratio even more. I guess anything to help make Wolf Blitzer look smart. I guess Neil Postman has finally been proved right:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
>hey don't want to allow OSX to run on anything other than their hardware,
They dont. They sue people who sell OSX based machines. This update targets hobbyists and techies who know what they are doing and who dont need Apple's hand holding for "user experience" as you put it. Open your eyes already. Its embarrassing to see a place like slashdot that supposedly is all about the DIY ethic defending bullshit actions by one of technology's most controlling and DRM friendly companies.
http://keepass.info/download.html
What? Linksys sells a special 54g for WRT. Im too lazy to get the full model number but it ends with L.
Big deal. Wrap it in an AutoHotKey script, make it invis, whatever you want. Admins who wait for MSIs are pretty lazy or dont know scripting.
The US military has a research arm that gets it wrong sometimes, but we're not seeing psychic soldiers reading the minds of terrorists in the field or anything. We're not deploying the gay bomb anywhere. If anything, its sometimes interesting to hear some out of the box ideas. Look at the success of the predator drone, which is an old idea and one scoffed at for a long time.
The difference here is that Iraq is buying these things and using them instead of tested methods. They are letting guys with cars full of bombs pass through checkpoints because their magic wand said so.
>he Pentagon and intel agencies actually spent millions on "psychic warfare" projects at one point
An intel/defense organization is like any business. Managers (usually generals) have pet projects and try these things. Its not everyone in charge sat down and said "Yes, we need psychics now!" If there's any government institution that is by its nature skeptical its the military, because new unproven methods turn into lost lives and lost wars pretty quickly.
Right, they'll wave it over a car, think its clean, and let it blow up a bunch of people. In bomb sniffing its the false negatives that kill.
Sure, it finds bombs, but youre spending hours wandering around and forgetting about the time you didnt find a bomb.
>So where is the leaked document so that I may judge for myself?
Nowhere. This is the kind of rumor-mongering and partisan "journalism" that gets people into a huff. They get all angry, make grand statements about the state of the nation/world/human nature, make generalizations about politicians, and promise to never vote for x or y again. They hop on some marginalized 3rd-party bandwagon and later when its revealed that this was a lot of scare tactics and bad journalism, they dont care or bother to follow up.
Reminds me on how people on the right were obsessed with satanic cults, tri-lateral commission, and jet contrails back in the 1980s and 1990s. They are now the leaders of the 'teabagger' community or Birchers or ultraconservative Republicans; they completely lack any skepticism, mental sophistication or any understanding of proof. They sit around and cry about socialism/communism, vaccine conspiracies, and make mindless comparisons of Obama to Hitler. This is the same smear bullshit. I'll wait for some facts, thanks.
Aging nerds trying to sound cool when they were never good with clever insults to begin with?
You hold something with the wii, you dont wear a helmet or chest piece. People in general dont want to wear stuff. Its been true since the 1980s.
>We also saw how well communist ideas worked for Russia (from our perspective) during the early 40's, and actually did things that headed us ever so slightly in the direction of communism.
Communism isnt social programs like Social Security. Communism is state owned property and means of production. This is something tea baggers should have been taught in school. Social Security isnt paid for by nationalizing all the business, its a tax, same as roads, navies, etc.
Removing property from people and running a state command economy has nothing to do with these things. Heck, by the 1940s the Soviets were in a panic because the world was modernizing and the "commune" concept was only successful with the simple economics of the agrarian system and all the command economy voodoo cant compete with an open market in a complex economy. Forty years later their fears were realized when they couldnt afford anything and shortly collapsed.
I think the lesson here is centralized planning economies attached to a totalitarian government == fail. Not "theres wisdom in command economies." Sadly, a lot of the pro-communist people in the states were fed carefully engineered propaganda and life in the Soviet Union was not what they thought it was. This all tied in with what the Unions were doing but Unions didnt need communist sympathizers, if anything having people in their ranks only hurt them politically.
>They see enormous advantages in operating closed-cartel oriented markets, with severely curtailed republic systems and controlled public messages.
I know this is popular in libertarian circles but its a bunch of BS. Unlike a lot of anti-US commentators I have been to some of these countries and know immigrants from there. Its cute to see people go apeshit over internet connectivity and scream "decline of the west!!!" while tipping their hats to countries like China and Russia where human rights are less than a joke. Where political prisoners are the norm, where censorship firewall is the norm, where gays are beaten to death in front of police, where joining the opposition party is a risk to your life, where not subscribing to the state religion is a death sentence, where education is propaganda, etc.
I think this all stems from certain people hating the West for getting things right like the enlightenment, allowing criticism of religion and politics, allowing women full rights, allowing free speech, giving rights to minorities, allowing more than one party, univeral healthcare (sans a few), etc. Its sad that the 'small government' people are cozying up to dictators, warlords, and thugs because they envy success done with the large modern state which is almost always democratic, free market, and free speech.
As far as the East winding up, dont confuse catching up with getting past. A lot of these countries were poverty states until recently and have terrible GDP per capita and terrible governments, terrible crime, and terrible abuses. They have a significant portion of the population which is ready to revolt but is only held down by totalitarian elements (see China and Iran). Ironically, they have only grown by accepting Western values like capitalism, easy access to markets, and some level of government and social openness.
The millimeter wave machines in US airports are passive, not active. So this is all interesting but academic.
The article has some serious flaws. It claims that these machines are in use. I dont think the author understands that millimeter wave machines are passive. They are not active. So all the concerns about radiation are unfounded scaremongering. Again, Im asking for studies that show these machines that are in use are dangerous.
>don't allow the *sustained* I/O speed to exceed about 32 Megabytes per second.
What?
My esata port blows that away. Heck, I do imaging on a crappy laptop and do better than that a with plain-jane bottom of the barrel USB disk thats on its last legs.
I still cant think of where this limit would even come from. Laptops have the same chipsets as desktops. The only real limitation is the slower laptop drive, but that has nothing to do with the laptop per se. Connect a 3.5" or an SSD and it'll perform like a desktop.
>Needless to say, everyone in line was a bit pissed that the TSA was giving extra screening to the old lady when they just waved the Arab guys through without a second glance.
Err, racial and religious profiling has serious drawbacks. Random testing along with metal detectors, milimeter scan, etc is a better way. Not to mention terrorists arent stupid. Theyre not going to dress up in full garb. The 9/11 hijackers wore street clothes and business casual clothes.
Terrorists and drug smugglers also prey upon the weak and stupid. I can remember how many times Ive been asked to "hold my bag please, it is a package for my son" in line to get on a plane or a train.
>"What the fuck are you morons searching her for? The towelheads are the ones flying shit into buildings!"
Stay classy.
>Maybe scanned him a few extra times to make sure his DNA was totally fucked up.
With what exactly? The passive metal detector and passive millimeter wave device? Perhaps it would behoove us all in air travel if didnt point at funny looking people and scream "terrorist" like the moron in your story.
>Hopefully my sperm aren't being fried when I walk through a scanner in an airport--at least the parents of the 30s were using X-rays for their convenience and not the invasion of their privacy!
Airports use metal detectors for humans, not xrays. The new millimeter wave machines arent xrays. As far as safety, have is been demonstrated that these machines damage organisms in regular usage? It seems to me that a lot of this is reactionary nonsense like "I'm allergic to wifi!!" nonsense.I am concered about safety, but jumping on the naturalist/homeopathy/conspiracy theory bandwagon doesnt do us any good.
Not to mention just flying on a plane gives you a nice dose of cosmic rays, sans superpowers.
>not the invasion of their privacy!
Yes, lets give up on airport security. That will end well.
I dont think Im doing anything wrong, we just have different usage patterns. First off, the original poster claimed full ubuntu ran on 256megs of RAM. No, thats the minimum requirement for the standard installer. If you have a machine with less than that you need an alternate install disk. Or you do what I do: use xubuntu. I cant imagine running full ubuntu on less than 1gig.
My xubuntu machine barely runs at 256, which I think is a fair assessment. It boots, runs fine, but when I load up firefox, open a bunch of tabs, play some music, run a mail client, etc then it just runs out of RAM. I dont see its ram usage being much better than 2000 or even XP, but I have to deal with a less impressive and featured GUI.
That said, I am very impressed by xubuntu. Network manager could use some work. I usually just remove it and deal with IP addresses the old fashioned way. I think it hurts the linux community to spread lies about ram. Linux isnt magic. If you want to run a distro thats similar to the bells and whistles of OSX or Win7 then youre going to have to use a similar amount of RAM. Youre not getting away with using 1/4 the ram without giving up gnome.
I can barely run xubuntu on a machine with 256megs or ram let alone full ubuntu.
>The era of Netbooks is upon us, and it looks like Microsoft will miss the bus.
Considering netbooks are shipping with 7 and ram costs less than shipping, I'll take the 2gig model, thanks. More ram for my apps.
Except he's not going to shake up anything, other than investor dollars. I dont know how many times it needs to be said: gamers dont want to wear equipment. No gloves or helmets or chest pieces. Its market suicide.
Not to mention that stuff begins to smell after a while. Brings back memories of playing Photon way back when.
Not sure, but XP could do this natively. You could usually just bridge the two connections and setup a peer-to-peer wifi connection. It was WEP only, I believe Win7 can do WPA2.
Where do you expect countries run by dictators (Syria has been under martial law since 1963 and more or less a client state for Iran) that have shit for university, shit for engineering, and oppression as the norm to get advanced anti-missile systems? They cant design their own. They would be starting with 1950s tech at best.
They knew they were taking a chance with foreign made equipment, but, they really dont have a choice.
Also, its worth noting that there may not have been an intentional backdoor/killswitch, this could have been a hack known to the US and others but not to Syria:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/10/how-israel-spoo/
Im not buying one anytime soon either. Hopefully people will stop saying "OMG SSD ONLY FAILS ONE WAY: READ ONLY." Im sick of hearing that psuedowisdom on slashdot. SSD drives have many fail modes. 'Read only' is just one. Most likely the thing just wont turn on or you'll have massive corruption. Its fast but its not more reliable than a mechanical hard disk. Perhaps less so.
>Does it mean that anyone can now use those patents royalty free as long as they use the gpl'd code?
The UMTS driver is going to be a binary blob, not open source.