Well this is all true... and I agree... people have no "right" not to be annoyed in any society. If someone wants to run up to be and say "dookie!" at the top of their lungs every day for the next 10 years.. I'll have to learn to deal. (Ignoring harassment laws)
But if that person ran up to me an injected a small amount of mercury into me every day and as a result increased my likelyhood of death from mercury poisoning by a non zero number every day... I'd want em locked up.
Now second hand smoke is not as bad as mercury sure... but anything you do that increases my chance of death by one iota, I'm gonna want that legislated out of my face _right now_.
> It's a pretty long way from a pool of amino acids to a human being, IMO.
About 3.85 billion years one would say.;)
I think the main problem many people have with this problem is actually understanding the time scales involved.
3.8 billion years is a _really_ long time for things to be happening randomly in. Especially in the volume they were occurring.
Please read the article I linked to in my original post. It describes some of the processes you seem unclear of in probably the easiest terms for a non Biologist to understand.
IAAB with a background in organic chemistry, and I find it totally reasonable to expect the modern complexity that we see and that initial random chemical mixtures are totally adequate when the test tube is the size of a planet and your experimental timeframe is billions of years.
As for the experiments showing oxygen would have inhibited organic molecules forming. It's been hypothesized and so far seemed consistent to assume that free oxygen in the air was pretty rare in the good old days of earths formation and came later as a waste product pumped into the air by the now well established and rapidly spreading simple organisms that had developed in an oxygen starved environment. Remember kiddies, not all life needs oxygen to live. Also, the simpler it is... the less likely it is to require it.
Life didn't "come from nothing". It developed over time from increasingly complex molecules developing in a chemically reactive soup that was our early world.
Heck we don't even need that. There is now good radioscopic evidence that there might be some reasonable complex molecules locked up in comets that could have crashed into earth from other life rich planets (wherever they might be) but even without this it can be shown in the lab that complex life could quite reasonably developed from chemicals bashing round in a reactive substrate. Learn some chemistry, learn some maths and learn some biology... then re-read your last statement and try not to die of embarrassment
Yea.. except I didn't quote numbers. Because the numbers are meaningless. What is important is the content. Of the fist 3 pages of US lawsuit pages a lot of them were about frivolous lawsuits (some were what I would consider legit). However look at the actual pages.
Most of the responses to "Dutch woman sues" are pages about people other than Dutch women suing and just happens to have the word "Dutch" on the same page.
Now look at the content of the first page of results for "American woman sues", oh look most of them are about American Women or American people suing. For example this gem "Recording 'Ass.' of America Sues Dead Woman". That the kind of thing we see everywhere else in the world.
My response stands to the other reply as well. I wasn't saying there were a lot of hits. But rather a lot of hits _WITH FRIVELOUS LAWSUIT CONTENT_ for the American search.
Speaking as a person born in Europe but who grew up (8yrs -> 18yrs) in the US then moved overseas again, I am not ignorant of the US legal system and have had to listen to enough people (while in the US) utter the sentence "You should sue em" when told about their friends slightest malady that might in some way be linked to someone else.
As for examples of frivolous lawsuits. I typed "American woman sues" and "American man sues" into Google and got so depressed I couldn't be bothered copying all the links. You can use Google, try it.
Having grown up in the US and now living overseas I spend most of my time not being derisive of but vaguely embarrassed for the citizens of the US. I _do_ have an idea of how things work over there and let me tell you, It's pretty messed up.
People in other developed countries just don't have this "sue em" muscle that the Americans seem to have worked out to Olympian proportions. Sue you get frivolous lawsuits in other countries. But follow them. 99% of the time they get thrown out of court by a judge trying not to laugh because it's rude. Follow the US ones and the article usually starts with "A woman was awarded a record amount today for her lawsuit against..."
It would only be censorship if the posts were removed as a result of modding. As it stands it only shows the opinion of the slashdot community of the post made
If the majority of the/. community is liberal, libertarian or non-conservative then of _course_ conservative posts are going to be modded down.
If the majority on/. don't like Bush or conservative thought then it's going to get less airtime (without being physically removed i.e censored) than more liberal views.
You are trying to say that conservative views should get the same ratings as liberal views in a majority liberal forum. Have you the brain worms? This is the equivilent of insisting that the republicans give equal airtime to democratic policies at their convenstions. Ain't going to happen
Welcome to democracy... we hope you enjoy your stay.
What _you_ are forgetting is that/. is not 100% US based. I would be interested to see what percentage of/. are in the US.
Some of us mod up anti-Bush, anti-Republican posts not because we're democrats (not having any of those down here in New Zealand) but rather becasue Bush scares the hell out of the rest of the world.
You don't have to be Democrat to hate Bush
You're accusing the community of/. of being Democratic-centric while at the same time being totally blinded by your America-centrism.
Actually this is pretty funny. We had the same problem here in NZ only instead of blocking the calls totally (Which is a little harsh) we make it so if you call a number in a "suspect" country (of which there are about 10) then you get prompted to hit a random number to continue (i.e sometimes it's 1, sometimes it's 9 etc etc) This allows a real person to proceed while a porn or trojan dialer is thwarted. Well at least until they figure out how to write a voice recognition module for their trojan.
We had a major TV article on this here in NZ just the other day. And yes I work for IHUG.
I basically built a box to do nothing other than fileserv. I put together a nice simple old PC (550mhz with 256 meg of ram) and mounted it in an old rack mount case I had lying round.
It's running debian with 2.4.26.
I'm running software raid and installed 2 x 2 interface IDE cards.
I threw in 6 seagate 120 gig drives (the ones with the 8 meg cache) and ran raid5 across 5 of them and a hot spare to rebuild the raid should a drvie fail. Each drive has it's own IDE channel to prevent channel faliure from screwing my raid.
I'm using ext3 as the filesystem and wrote my own little raid mon script that SMS's me should a drive fail and alarms locally.
This setup has been rock steady and gives me 460 (ish) gig of usable space after formatting.
For added peice of mind the machine is plugged into a UPS that is connected to the machine via Serial. If the UPS kicks in it shuts the machine down properly after sending an alarm SMS (the DSL and switch are also on the UPS) (yes I'm a paranoid freak)
This makes a perfectly good media and file server and I've had no problem with it in the few months I've had it.
I also reccomend setting the spin down time onm the drives manually with hdparm. It was getting awfully warm in the box till I turned that on on the seagates. Modern drives are rather hot.;)
I have the whole thing mounted via SMB on my other boxes around the house and it's fast,(gig ethernet) reliable and easy.
Tho do remember that no amount of raiding will save you if you lose 2 drives through some horrible freak of badness, and no raid level is going to protect you from a house fire. Hence mine also rsyncs all my absoloutely vital files (scanned family photos and docs) offsite to a file storage site every night at 2am so as not to chew my bandwidth dduring usable times. Don't forget the only truely secure data is that which is backed up.. and offsite.... twice.;)
How hard can it _possibly_ be to make a machine that given 2 -> more options allows you to slecet multiple or one of those options?
I mean _really_?
Sure I can understand that adding security would adda layer of complexity.. but it looks like they aren't even doing that right.
The manual voting machine has got to be one of the simplist tools ever. How can you screw up a digital counterpart like this so badly? You'd almost have to _try_ to make it mess up this much.
Yea.. I'm sorry but the first thing I thought when I saw this article was : "Ok.. so what do I have to take to make this bigger?"
However what I suspect is that while they have found the portion of the brain that helps with problem solving actual intelligence is linked to far more factors than one area
For example someone who has a small "cache" area and can't hold too many images at once may be able to work round this with a greater long term storage capacity which they can draw on.
It's all well and good to be able to cache images and information quickly. doesn't help you if you're outputting onto a 10 meg Hard drive.
Nah the ports are closed... you just log connection attempts to those ports and the daemon (the one I have) trolls through the logs for the connection attempts.
The command I use is
iptables -A INPUT -d 203.109.158.50 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 745:1000 -j LOG
works sweet and no open ports.
This isn't that new.. I've been using he perl portknocking daemon (after heavily modifying it to support iptables instead of ipchains and some more robust code such as pulling the password out of the code in plaintext.) for about a month now.. works really well.
No substitute for being up to date with patches and a good secure root passwd but given I can now just firewall off ssh except when someone knocks to come in it's pretty good.
"As a Hong Kong resident I can tell you I would have absolutely no reservations whatsoever about letting my 13 year old daughter roam the streets of even the darkest parts of HK at 3am alone."
I thought they were cracking down on underage prostitutes in Hong Kong?
Mannn I would kill to get out of IT. After 8 years of this crap I am so ready to do something else... _anything_ else.
I have a friend who's done well in IT. He just quit his job and bought an apple farm.
Initially we mocked his move.. but then he turned t us and said.
"You know what I'm gonna do tomorrow? I'm gonna get up... go to the porch... sit in a chair and watch my apples grow. No cellphone, no on call, no customer busting my balls to make their solution go, just watch my apples grow.. and be picked by someone else."
At that point we all went quiet and got whistfull looks in our eyes.
Oh yea... anything but IT.
Slashdot Mirror
Well this is all true... and I agree... people have no "right" not to be annoyed in any society. If someone wants to run up to be and say "dookie!" at the top of their lungs every day for the next 10 years.. I'll have to learn to deal. (Ignoring harassment laws)
But if that person ran up to me an injected a small amount of mercury into me every day and as a result increased my likelyhood of death from mercury poisoning by a non zero number every day... I'd want em locked up.
Now second hand smoke is not as bad as mercury sure... but anything you do that increases my chance of death by one iota, I'm gonna want that legislated out of my face _right now_.
> It's a pretty long way from a pool of amino acids to a human being, IMO.
;)
About 3.85 billion years one would say.
I think the main problem many people have with this problem is actually understanding the time scales involved.
3.8 billion years is a _really_ long time for things to be happening randomly in. Especially in the volume they were occurring.
Please read the article I linked to in my original post. It describes some of the processes you seem unclear of in probably the easiest terms for a non Biologist to understand.
IAAB with a background in organic chemistry, and I find it totally reasonable to expect the modern complexity that we see and that initial random chemical mixtures are totally adequate when the test tube is the size of a planet and your experimental timeframe is billions of years.
As for the experiments showing oxygen would have inhibited organic molecules forming. It's been hypothesized and so far seemed consistent to assume that free oxygen in the air was pretty rare in the good old days of earths formation and came later as a waste product pumped into the air by the now well established and rapidly spreading simple organisms that had developed in an oxygen starved environment. Remember kiddies, not all life needs oxygen to live. Also, the simpler it is... the less likely it is to require it.
Looks like someone needs to actually learn some science... Here let me help
. html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob
Life didn't "come from nothing". It developed over time from increasingly complex molecules developing in a chemically reactive soup that was our early world.
Heck we don't even need that. There is now good radioscopic evidence that there might be some reasonable complex molecules locked up in comets that could have crashed into earth from other life rich planets (wherever they might be) but even without this it can be shown in the lab that complex life could quite reasonably developed from chemicals bashing round in a reactive substrate. Learn some chemistry, learn some maths and learn some biology... then re-read your last statement and try not to die of embarrassment
You're welcome
Well Played Mr Venn, Well played.
http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=050820
What? you guys don't have a chip already?
/kai) for others with them.
I do.
http://tagged.kaos.gen.nz/kai/
And a forum at the above (minus the
It even has onboard storage for carrying some of my info around.
Yea.. except I didn't quote numbers. Because the numbers are meaningless. What is important is the content. Of the fist 3 pages of US lawsuit pages a lot of them were about frivolous lawsuits (some were what I would consider legit). However look at the actual pages.
Most of the responses to "Dutch woman sues" are pages about people other than Dutch women suing and just happens to have the word "Dutch" on the same page.
Now look at the content of the first page of results for "American woman sues", oh look most of them are about American Women or American people suing. For example this gem "Recording 'Ass.' of America Sues Dead Woman". That the kind of thing we see everywhere else in the world.
My response stands to the other reply as well. I wasn't saying there were a lot of hits. But rather a lot of hits _WITH FRIVELOUS LAWSUIT CONTENT_ for the American search.
Speaking as a person born in Europe but who grew up (8yrs -> 18yrs) in the US then moved overseas again, I am not ignorant of the US legal system and have had to listen to enough people (while in the US) utter the sentence "You should sue em" when told about their friends slightest malady that might in some way be linked to someone else.
As for examples of frivolous lawsuits. I typed "American woman sues" and "American man sues" into Google and got so depressed I couldn't be bothered copying all the links. You can use Google, try it.
Having grown up in the US and now living overseas I spend most of my time not being derisive of but vaguely embarrassed for the citizens of the US. I _do_ have an idea of how things work over there and let me tell you, It's pretty messed up.
People in other developed countries just don't have this "sue em" muscle that the Americans seem to have worked out to Olympian proportions. Sue you get frivolous lawsuits in other countries. But follow them. 99% of the time they get thrown out of court by a judge trying not to laugh because it's rude. Follow the US ones and the article usually starts with "A woman was awarded a record amount today for her lawsuit against..."
It would only be censorship if the posts were removed as a result of modding. As it stands it only shows the opinion of the slashdot community of the post made
/. community is liberal, libertarian or non-conservative then of _course_ conservative posts are going to be modded down.
/. don't like Bush or conservative thought then it's going to get less airtime (without being physically removed i.e censored) than more liberal views.
If the majority of the
If the majority on
You are trying to say that conservative views should get the same ratings as liberal views in a majority liberal forum. Have you the brain worms? This is the equivilent of insisting that the republicans give equal airtime to democratic policies at their convenstions. Ain't going to happen
Welcome to democracy... we hope you enjoy your stay.
What _you_ are forgetting is that /. is not 100% US based. I would be interested to see what percentage of /. are in the US.
/. of being Democratic-centric while at the same time being totally blinded by your America-centrism.
Some of us mod up anti-Bush, anti-Republican posts not because we're democrats (not having any of those down here in New Zealand) but rather becasue Bush scares the hell out of the rest of the world.
You don't have to be Democrat to hate Bush
You're accusing the community of
And then there are those who tag themselves...
http://tagged.kaos.gen.nz/
For people who _want_ to be a number.
RTFA : Of the 7 causes of aging is gene mutaion.
Cause of cancer? : Gene mutation
One of the side effects of this "cure" for aging is that it clears up cancer too. Not to mention a host of other degenrative illnesses.
Sure we could still die from the common cold or a car accident but this is all about stopping our stupid meat sacks from wearing out.
The US does seem fond of decalring war on nouns.
"War on Terror"
"War on Drugs"
As was stated.. those are not going so well.
I think they should just declare war on Freedom and happiness. Those wars are already working much better.
38 gig huh? Which is smaller than the total size of my current donkey queue... which is comming down quite nicely thank you.
I just bought one of these for my raid fileserv.
http://www.aquilatech.co.nz/index2.htm
Nice,cheap (price is in NZ pesos), reasonably sized and holds 16 drives. Tho I do reccomend rounded cables or it gets a little tight.
Actually this is pretty funny. We had the same problem here in NZ only instead of blocking the calls totally (Which is a little harsh) we make it so if you call a number in a "suspect" country (of which there are about 10) then you get prompted to hit a random number to continue (i.e sometimes it's 1, sometimes it's 9 etc etc) This allows a real person to proceed while a porn or trojan dialer is thwarted. Well at least until they figure out how to write a voice recognition module for their trojan.
4 32505%3fformat=htmlLink to story
We had a major TV article on this here in NZ just the other day. And yes I work for IHUG.
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/tvone_minisite_story_skin/
I have just finished doing this exact thing.
;)
;)
I basically built a box to do nothing other than fileserv. I put together a nice simple old PC (550mhz with 256 meg of ram) and mounted it in an old rack mount case I had lying round.
It's running debian with 2.4.26.
I'm running software raid and installed 2 x 2 interface IDE cards.
I threw in 6 seagate 120 gig drives (the ones with the 8 meg cache) and ran raid5 across 5 of them and a hot spare to rebuild the raid should a drvie fail. Each drive has it's own IDE channel to prevent channel faliure from screwing my raid.
I'm using ext3 as the filesystem and wrote my own little raid mon script that SMS's me should a drive fail and alarms locally.
This setup has been rock steady and gives me 460 (ish) gig of usable space after formatting.
For added peice of mind the machine is plugged into a UPS that is connected to the machine via Serial. If the UPS kicks in it shuts the machine down properly after sending an alarm SMS (the DSL and switch are also on the UPS) (yes I'm a paranoid freak)
This makes a perfectly good media and file server and I've had no problem with it in the few months I've had it.
I also reccomend setting the spin down time onm the drives manually with hdparm. It was getting awfully warm in the box till I turned that on on the seagates. Modern drives are rather hot.
I have the whole thing mounted via SMB on my other boxes around the house and it's fast,(gig ethernet) reliable and easy.
Tho do remember that no amount of raiding will save you if you lose 2 drives through some horrible freak of badness, and no raid level is going to protect you from a house fire. Hence mine also rsyncs all my absoloutely vital files (scanned family photos and docs) offsite to a file storage site every night at 2am so as not to chew my bandwidth dduring usable times. Don't forget the only truely secure data is that which is backed up.. and offsite.... twice.
How hard can it _possibly_ be to make a machine that given 2 -> more options allows you to slecet multiple or one of those options?
I mean _really_?
Sure I can understand that adding security would adda layer of complexity.. but it looks like they aren't even doing that right.
The manual voting machine has got to be one of the simplist tools ever. How can you screw up a digital counterpart like this so badly? You'd almost have to _try_ to make it mess up this much.
Yea.. I'm sorry but the first thing I thought when I saw this article was : "Ok.. so what do I have to take to make this bigger?"
However what I suspect is that while they have found the portion of the brain that helps with problem solving actual intelligence is linked to far more factors than one area
For example someone who has a small "cache" area and can't hold too many images at once may be able to work round this with a greater long term storage capacity which they can draw on.
It's all well and good to be able to cache images and information quickly. doesn't help you if you're outputting onto a 10 meg Hard drive.
Nah the ports are closed... you just log connection attempts to those ports and the daemon (the one I have) trolls through the logs for the connection attempts.
The command I use is
iptables -A INPUT -d 203.109.158.50 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 745:1000 -j LOG works sweet and no open ports.
This isn't that new.. I've been using he perl portknocking daemon (after heavily modifying it to support iptables instead of ipchains and some more robust code such as pulling the password out of the code in plaintext.) for about a month now.. works really well. No substitute for being up to date with patches and a good secure root passwd but given I can now just firewall off ssh except when someone knocks to come in it's pretty good.
"As a Hong Kong resident I can tell you I would have absolutely no reservations whatsoever about letting my 13 year old daughter roam the streets of even the darkest parts of HK at 3am alone." I thought they were cracking down on underage prostitutes in Hong Kong?
Mannn I would kill to get out of IT. After 8 years of this crap I am so ready to do something else... _anything_ else. I have a friend who's done well in IT. He just quit his job and bought an apple farm. Initially we mocked his move.. but then he turned t us and said. "You know what I'm gonna do tomorrow? I'm gonna get up... go to the porch... sit in a chair and watch my apples grow. No cellphone, no on call, no customer busting my balls to make their solution go, just watch my apples grow.. and be picked by someone else." At that point we all went quiet and got whistfull looks in our eyes. Oh yea... anything but IT.
Wow basing a failed operating system name on a failed operating system.. How amazingly appropreate.
Wow basing a failed operating system name on a failed operating system.. How amazingly appropreate.
Curse you and your pretty eyes!