Actually its more like 2436mi (4000*.609), so it'd take 34.8 hours at 70MPH or 24 hours at 101.5MPH (I can imagine there being many cops in the middle of Australia...)
I'm currently doing the same (working on my private), and I have to say: TAKE IT ON YOUR SOLO... you'll appreciate it when you're on a 50nm leg and bored as fuck...
Funny that everyone says its slashdotted... I can still get to it (then again, I live about 10 miles from the server...).
So you want to be a marine biologist? Well sonny, or sonnette, as the case may be, why don't you just sit down and let a real marine biologist give you some damn good advice. And wipe that smirk off your face, sit up straight and for goodness sakes stop fidgeting! You'd think you had lice the way you are carrying on. You do? Oh well, never mind.
First of all there are three really, really bad reasons to want to be a marine biologist. If you have even an inkling that these are yours, please run away as fast as possible, 'cause neither you nor we will be happy.
Three Really, Really Bad Reasons to Want to Be a Marine Biologist
Reason Number One: "I want to be a marine biologist so that I can talk to dolphins."
Believing this is simply the Kiss of Death. This is the verbal equivalent of reaching down your throat, pulling out your own intestines, wrapping them around your neck and choking yourself. When we hear this our impulse is to thwack you a good one on your keester with the frozen haddock we keep within arm's reach just for this occasion.
And why is that? It is because, and please listen carefully, while you may want to talk to dolphins, dolphins do not want to talk to you. That's right. Mostly, dolphins want to eat fishes and have sex with other dolphins. And that pretty much cuts you out of the loop, doesn't it? Oh, I know that there are the occasional dolphins that hang around beaches, swim with humans and seem to be chummy, but these are the exceptions. You don't judge the whole human race by the people who attend monster car rallies, do you?
Just be honest with yourself. If you want to talk to dolphins you don't want to be a biologist. What you really want to do is explore your past lives, get in touch with the Cosmic Oneness and conduct similar-minded individuals on tours to Central America looking for evidence that We Are Not Alone. Our experience is that people who feel this way last about 6.5 minutes in any biology program.
Reason Number Two: "I want to be a marine biologist because I really like Jacques Cousteau."
That's nice. We really like Jacques Cousteau, too. But, drinking thousands of gallons of red wine while scuba diving around the world does not make you a marine biologist. It makes you a wonderful and effective spokesperson for the sea, and gives you a liver with the consistency of a chocolate necco wafer, but it does not make you a marine biologist.
Reason Number Three: "I want to be a marine biologist because I want to make big bucks."
Okay, here's the bottom line. By Federal law, marine biologists have to take a vow of poverty and chastity. Poverty, because you are not going to make squat-j-doodly in this job. Just how squat is the doodly we are talking about? Well, five years after finishing my PhD I was making slightly less than a beginning manager at McDonalds. Ooh, a 36 year old guy with 13 years of college and 5 years of post-doctoral experience making just about as much as a semi-literate 19 year old with pimples the size of Bolivia, who can speak perhaps 3 words at a time before the term "you know" enters the conversation.
And chastity because, well, who's going to date a marine biologist? The smell alone tends to dissuade a large proportion of the opposite sex.
Two Really, Really Good Reasons to Want to Be a Marine Biologist
Reason Number One: "You can dress and act almost any way you want."
This is true. Marine biologists are almost entirely free of any of those silly restrictions that blight the professional landscape of our fellow proletarians. This is because no one really cares about what we do or what we say. You want to come to work dressed in scabrous khaki shorts and a torn black Sandman shirt? Fine. You want to grow a scruffy beard, get a tattoo of a gooseneck barnacle on your arm or burp at inopportune moments? No problem, just do good work.
Reason Number Two: "If you like it, just do it."
Look, the reality is that you only go around once in life and if, by chance, you do come back, knowing how you have behaved in this life, you will undoubtedly come back as a slime mold. And most slime molds cannot be marine biologists. So just go out there and do what you enjoy. Marine biology is a wonderful profession. You want to find cancer cures by grinding up sponges? How about figuring out why hammerhead sharks always come back to the same seamount? Or where is the missing carbon dioxide that industries are producing; could the ocean be soaking it up? All neat projects. But pay attention here. None of this involves drinking copious quantities of fermented grape juice, while intoning "The ocean, she is strange and wondrous, filled with animals that disturb even a Frenchman."
The ocean is an exciting, never-dull place that is perfect for piddling away your existence. And just think, you actually get paid to think cool thoughts and do cool things.
PDF (thanks to ps2pdf.com) available at http://homer.artificialcheese.com/fccm01_pilchard. pdf (I'm not putting an HTML link in for a reason, I don't want everyont to get it from me) PLEASE MIRROR! I dont have nearly enough bandwidth to withstand the/. effect!
Re:A great example of open-source at work.
on
Five Years of KDE
·
· Score: 1
I don't know the complete history of KDE, and quite frankly, I don't care, but in its 5 years has KDE ever had a near-complete rewrite like 9x->NT?
Re:A great example of open-source at work.
on
Five Years of KDE
·
· Score: 4, Troll
Or, rather, to use the same 5 year timespan, in 5 years, Microsoft went from Windows 95 to WindowsXP. That is a huge leap in terms of stability and security (both up) and boot time (down).
Dmitri Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who, until recently, lived and worked in
Moscow. He wrote a program that was legal in Russia, and in most of the world, a
program his employer, ElcomSoft, then sold on the Internet. Adobe Corporation
bought a copy and complained to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the
program violated American law and that, by the way, Mr. Sklyarov was about to
give a lecture in Las Vegas describing the weaknesses in Adobe's electronic book
software. Two weeks ago, the F.B.I. arrested Mr. Sklyarov. He still sits in a
Las Vegas jail.
Something is going terribly wrong with copyright law in America. Mr. Sklyarov
himself did not violate any law, and his employer did not violate anyone's
copyright. What his program did was to enable the user of an Adobe eBook Reader
to disable restrictions that the publisher of a particular electronic book
formatted for Adobe's reader might have imposed. Adobe's eBook Reader, for
example, has a read-aloud function. With it, the computer will read out loud an
appropriately formatted eBook text. A publisher can disable that function for a
particular eBook. Mr. Sklyarov's program would enable the purchaser of such a
disabled eBook to overcome the restriction. A blind person, for example, could
use ElcomSoft's program to listen to a book.
The problem from Adobe's perspective, however, is that the same software
could enable a pirate to copy an electronic book otherwise readable only with
Adobe's reader technology -- then sell that copy to others without the
publisher's permission. That would be a copyright violation, and it is that
possibility that led Congress to enact the statute that has now landed Mr.
Sklyarov in jail -- the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The D.M.C.A. outlaws technologies designed to circumvent other technologies
that protect copyrighted material. It is law protecting software code protecting
copyright. The trouble, however, is that technologies that protect copyrighted
material are never as subtle as the law of copyright. Copyright law permits fair
use of copyrighted material; technologies that protect copyrighted material need
not. Copyright law protects for a limited time; technologies have no such limit.
Thus when the D.M.C.A. protects technology that in turn protects copyrighted
material, it often protects much more broadly than copyright law does. It makes
criminal what copyright law would forgive.
Using software code to enforce law is controversial enough. Making it a crime
to crack that technology, whether or not the use of that ability would be a
copyright violation, is to delegate lawmaking to code writers. Yet that is
precisely what the D.M.C.A. does. The relevant protection for copyrighted
material becomes as the technology says, not as copyright law requires.
America is essentially alone in this strategy of techno-lawmaking. Most
nations in the world -- including, importantly for Mr. Sklyarov, Russia --
regulate copyright violations through copyright law, not through laws aimed at
code writers. But what the Sklyarov case means is that this controversial
experiment in the United States now essentially regulates the world. If you
produce and distribute code that cracks technological protection systems, and
that code can be accessed in the United States, then it's just a matter of time
before our F.B.I. comes knocking at your door.
This is bad law and bad policy. It not only interferes with the legitimate
use of copyrighted material, it undermines security more generally. Research
into security and encryption depends upon the right to crack and report. Only if
weaknesses can be discovered and described openly will they be fixed.
Increasingly, in the United States, this freedom has been lost. In April, for
example, Edward Felten, a Princeton professor and encryption researcher,
received a letter from recording industry lawyers warning him that a paper he
was about to present at a conference -- it described the weaknesses of an
encryption system -- could subject him to enforcement actions under the D.M.C.A..
Mr. Felten understood the threat and decided not to present his paper. Largely
as a result of this experience, he is now the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit
challenging the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on First Amendment grounds.
Authors have an important and legitimate interest in protecting their
copyrights. The law should help authors where it can. But the law should not
push its power beyond the protection of copyright, and the law should especially
not criminalize activities that are central to research in encryption and
security.
Adobe understands this. After extensive meetings with the nonprofit
Electronic Frontier Foundation -- and widespread protests on the Internet, at
Adobe's San Jose, Calif., headquarters, in Moscow and elsewhere -- Adobe
announced it did not think the prosecution of Mr. Sklyarov was conducive to the
best interests of the parties involved or of the industry.
Yet Mr. Sklyarov still languishes in jail, puzzled, no doubt, about how a
free society can jail someone for writing code that was legal where written,
just because he comes to the United States and gives a report on encryption
weaknesses.
Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, is author of the
forthcoming ``The Future of Ideas'' and a member of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation board.
I just used it the other day for the first time, and pkg_add (on OpenBSD, and I'm sure a few others) is absolutely wonderful. All you have to type in is the full name of the tgz file, which can be on a local disk or an ftp server. NOTHING could be better than that!
The most expensive possible PowerMac G4 configuration is $ 12,406. Sadly, they give you $1,000 in "Promotion Savings" after charging you $2,000 for 1.5GB RAM; this did not help my "quest for the skies". However, considering that you could get 1.5GB RAM for about $375 elsewhere (see http://www.ramseeker.com ) I fear that I am not very impressed.
Over at pricewatch you can get 3x512MB for $132. 6x256MB is even cheaper ($108), but of course PowerMac motherboards dont have 6+ RAM slots.
shadowrealm, mirage-mrg, and purity were all newsgroups for posting commercial movies (usually cams or screeners, an occasional dvd) by the various movie groups. divx was for posting movies encoded with the divx codec, and they were, without exception, commercial movies you would see in theaters or rent. movies was the same way, only any codec was allowed (usually the group-specific codec was allowed in the their newsgroup). Just FYI (and not that I ever used them... I heard it... from a.... "friend").
Just a friendly reminder, you cant buy anything thats not for sale. The creators of the CDDB database sold out and they are the ones the users should be angry with. Gracenote simply bought the database, and did what they saw fit with it (which is to make a profit, since they are a corporation after all...)
I recently isntall OpenBSD as a router for my home network and its wonderful. The install took less than 30 minutes from a home-brewed CD. It automagically recognized all of my hardware, and was much less painful than some linux installs I've done. Installing apache was painless (except I had to install libtool first), and NAT, dhcpd, and ipf were pre-installed, all I had to do was enable them.
Note: OpenBSD used to claim 3 years without a remote root exploit and 2 years without a local one, but they dropped the local record a few months ago after one was found, and now the remote root exploit record is up to 4 years.
Wonderful post. One thing, (since I really like your writing style, and you're obviously passionate about it) could you explain how a switching power supply works and why its better?
Slashdot Mirror
Also, the last time I checked "other chemicals" could be anything from aspirin, to water, to oxygen, to cyanide...
/me notes that cyanide is nearly half carbon and asprin (acetylsalicyclic acid) is over half carbon
Like, what are the chances of flipping heads 10 times in a row (maybe 1 in 500)? And I know I could figure that out, but I'm too lazy at the moment.
Oh come on! 2^10 is 1024! Every geek should know that! 1/1024 for 10 consecutive heads...
Actually its more like 2436mi (4000*.609), so it'd take 34.8 hours at 70MPH or 24 hours at 101.5MPH (I can imagine there being many cops in the middle of Australia...)
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.asp? customer_id=555&order_code=X200PAD - $2057 in base config (you can take out some of the ram or something...). 2.9 pounds. Begone, troll.
I'm currently doing the same (working on my private), and I have to say: TAKE IT ON YOUR SOLO... you'll appreciate it when you're on a 50nm leg and bored as fuck...
How about the Airbus A320 that went into the forest in France? That was a control system malfunction.
Except the speed of light is 186,000sm/sec.. so it'd be 1/5280th of that figure, or 0.000203598485sec or .2msec or 200usec...
E is covered by the FAA, you just don't (usually) have ATC breathing down your neck...
Don't burn it. Leave it as gas/oil/coal.
Mark Duell
Buy a decent pair of roadbikes (or a tandem) and ride as much as you can. Runner's high is an amazing thing after 5 hours in the saddle.
Funny that everyone says its slashdotted... I can still get to it (then again, I live about 10 miles from the server...).
So you want to be a marine biologist? Well sonny, or sonnette, as the case may be, why don't you just sit down and let a real marine biologist give you some damn good advice. And wipe that smirk off your face, sit up straight and for goodness sakes stop fidgeting! You'd think you had lice the way you are carrying on. You do? Oh well, never mind.
First of all there are three really, really bad reasons to want to be a marine biologist. If you have even an inkling that these are yours, please run away as fast as possible, 'cause neither you nor we will be happy.
Three Really, Really Bad Reasons to Want to Be a Marine Biologist
Reason Number One: "I want to be a marine biologist so that I can talk to dolphins."
Believing this is simply the Kiss of Death. This is the verbal equivalent of reaching down your throat, pulling out your own intestines, wrapping them around your neck and choking yourself. When we hear this our impulse is to thwack you a good one on your keester with the frozen haddock we keep within arm's reach just for this occasion.
And why is that? It is because, and please listen carefully, while you may want to talk to dolphins, dolphins do not want to talk to you. That's right. Mostly, dolphins want to eat fishes and have sex with other dolphins. And that pretty much cuts you out of the loop, doesn't it? Oh, I know that there are the occasional dolphins that hang around beaches, swim with humans and seem to be chummy, but these are the exceptions. You don't judge the whole human race by the people who attend monster car rallies, do you?
Just be honest with yourself. If you want to talk to dolphins you don't want to be a biologist. What you really want to do is explore your past lives, get in touch with the Cosmic Oneness and conduct similar-minded individuals on tours to Central America looking for evidence that We Are Not Alone. Our experience is that people who feel this way last about 6.5 minutes in any biology program.
Reason Number Two: "I want to be a marine biologist because I really like Jacques Cousteau."
That's nice. We really like Jacques Cousteau, too. But, drinking thousands of gallons of red wine while scuba diving around the world does not make you a marine biologist. It makes you a wonderful and effective spokesperson for the sea, and gives you a liver with the consistency of a chocolate necco wafer, but it does not make you a marine biologist.
Reason Number Three: "I want to be a marine biologist because I want to make big bucks."
Okay, here's the bottom line. By Federal law, marine biologists have to take a vow of poverty and chastity. Poverty, because you are not going to make squat-j-doodly in this job. Just how squat is the doodly we are talking about? Well, five years after finishing my PhD I was making slightly less than a beginning manager at McDonalds. Ooh, a 36 year old guy with 13 years of college and 5 years of post-doctoral experience making just about as much as a semi-literate 19 year old with pimples the size of Bolivia, who can speak perhaps 3 words at a time before the term "you know" enters the conversation.
And chastity because, well, who's going to date a marine biologist? The smell alone tends to dissuade a large proportion of the opposite sex.
Two Really, Really Good Reasons to Want to Be a Marine Biologist
Reason Number One: "You can dress and act almost any way you want."
This is true. Marine biologists are almost entirely free of any of those silly restrictions that blight the professional landscape of our fellow proletarians. This is because no one really cares about what we do or what we say. You want to come to work dressed in scabrous khaki shorts and a torn black Sandman shirt? Fine. You want to grow a scruffy beard, get a tattoo of a gooseneck barnacle on your arm or burp at inopportune moments? No problem, just do good work.
Reason Number Two: "If you like it, just do it."
Look, the reality is that you only go around once in life and if, by chance, you do come back, knowing how you have behaved in this life, you will undoubtedly come back as a slime mold. And most slime molds cannot be marine biologists. So just go out there and do what you enjoy. Marine biology is a wonderful profession. You want to find cancer cures by grinding up sponges? How about figuring out why hammerhead sharks always come back to the same seamount? Or where is the missing carbon dioxide that industries are producing; could the ocean be soaking it up? All neat projects. But pay attention here. None of this involves drinking copious quantities of fermented grape juice, while intoning "The ocean, she is strange and wondrous, filled with animals that disturb even a Frenchman."
The ocean is an exciting, never-dull place that is perfect for piddling away your existence. And just think, you actually get paid to think cool thoughts and do cool things.
And so what if you will never have sex again?
PDF (thanks to ps2pdf.com) available at http://homer.artificialcheese.com/fccm01_pilchard. pdf (I'm not putting an HTML link in for a reason, I don't want everyont to get it from me) /. effect!
PLEASE MIRROR! I dont have nearly enough bandwidth to withstand the
I don't know the complete history of KDE, and quite frankly, I don't care, but in its 5 years has KDE ever had a near-complete rewrite like 9x->NT?
Or, rather, to use the same 5 year timespan, in 5 years, Microsoft went from Windows 95 to WindowsXP. That is a huge leap in terms of stability and security (both up) and boot time (down).
By LAWRENCE LESSIG
STANFORD, Calif.
Dmitri Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who, until recently, lived and worked in Moscow. He wrote a program that was legal in Russia, and in most of the world, a program his employer, ElcomSoft, then sold on the Internet. Adobe Corporation bought a copy and complained to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the program violated American law and that, by the way, Mr. Sklyarov was about to give a lecture in Las Vegas describing the weaknesses in Adobe's electronic book software. Two weeks ago, the F.B.I. arrested Mr. Sklyarov. He still sits in a Las Vegas jail.
Something is going terribly wrong with copyright law in America. Mr. Sklyarov himself did not violate any law, and his employer did not violate anyone's copyright. What his program did was to enable the user of an Adobe eBook Reader to disable restrictions that the publisher of a particular electronic book formatted for Adobe's reader might have imposed. Adobe's eBook Reader, for example, has a read-aloud function. With it, the computer will read out loud an appropriately formatted eBook text. A publisher can disable that function for a particular eBook. Mr. Sklyarov's program would enable the purchaser of such a disabled eBook to overcome the restriction. A blind person, for example, could use ElcomSoft's program to listen to a book.
The problem from Adobe's perspective, however, is that the same software could enable a pirate to copy an electronic book otherwise readable only with Adobe's reader technology -- then sell that copy to others without the publisher's permission. That would be a copyright violation, and it is that possibility that led Congress to enact the statute that has now landed Mr. Sklyarov in jail -- the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The D.M.C.A. outlaws technologies designed to circumvent other technologies that protect copyrighted material. It is law protecting software code protecting copyright. The trouble, however, is that technologies that protect copyrighted material are never as subtle as the law of copyright. Copyright law permits fair use of copyrighted material; technologies that protect copyrighted material need not. Copyright law protects for a limited time; technologies have no such limit.
Thus when the D.M.C.A. protects technology that in turn protects copyrighted material, it often protects much more broadly than copyright law does. It makes criminal what copyright law would forgive.
Using software code to enforce law is controversial enough. Making it a crime to crack that technology, whether or not the use of that ability would be a copyright violation, is to delegate lawmaking to code writers. Yet that is precisely what the D.M.C.A. does. The relevant protection for copyrighted material becomes as the technology says, not as copyright law requires.
America is essentially alone in this strategy of techno-lawmaking. Most nations in the world -- including, importantly for Mr. Sklyarov, Russia -- regulate copyright violations through copyright law, not through laws aimed at code writers. But what the Sklyarov case means is that this controversial experiment in the United States now essentially regulates the world. If you produce and distribute code that cracks technological protection systems, and that code can be accessed in the United States, then it's just a matter of time before our F.B.I. comes knocking at your door.
This is bad law and bad policy. It not only interferes with the legitimate use of copyrighted material, it undermines security more generally. Research into security and encryption depends upon the right to crack and report. Only if weaknesses can be discovered and described openly will they be fixed.
Increasingly, in the United States, this freedom has been lost. In April, for example, Edward Felten, a Princeton professor and encryption researcher, received a letter from recording industry lawyers warning him that a paper he was about to present at a conference -- it described the weaknesses of an encryption system -- could subject him to enforcement actions under the D.M.C.A.. Mr. Felten understood the threat and decided not to present his paper. Largely as a result of this experience, he is now the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on First Amendment grounds.
Authors have an important and legitimate interest in protecting their copyrights. The law should help authors where it can. But the law should not push its power beyond the protection of copyright, and the law should especially not criminalize activities that are central to research in encryption and security.
Adobe understands this. After extensive meetings with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation -- and widespread protests on the Internet, at Adobe's San Jose, Calif., headquarters, in Moscow and elsewhere -- Adobe announced it did not think the prosecution of Mr. Sklyarov was conducive to the best interests of the parties involved or of the industry.
Yet Mr. Sklyarov still languishes in jail, puzzled, no doubt, about how a free society can jail someone for writing code that was legal where written, just because he comes to the United States and gives a report on encryption weaknesses.
Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, is author of the forthcoming ``The Future of Ideas'' and a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation board.Mark Duell
I just used it the other day for the first time, and pkg_add (on OpenBSD, and I'm sure a few others) is absolutely wonderful. All you have to type in is the full name of the tgz file, which can be on a local disk or an ftp server. NOTHING could be better than that!
Moderators: I _hope_ you see the satire.
Mark Duell
The most expensive possible PowerMac G4 configuration is $ 12,406. Sadly, they give you $1,000 in "Promotion Savings" after charging you $2,000 for 1.5GB RAM; this did not help my "quest for the skies". However, considering that you could get 1.5GB RAM for about $375 elsewhere (see http://www.ramseeker.com ) I fear that I am not very impressed.
Over at pricewatch you can get 3x512MB for $132. 6x256MB is even cheaper ($108), but of course PowerMac motherboards dont have 6+ RAM slots.
Mark Duell
shadowrealm, mirage-mrg, and purity were all newsgroups for posting commercial movies (usually cams or screeners, an occasional dvd) by the various movie groups. divx was for posting movies encoded with the divx codec, and they were, without exception, commercial movies you would see in theaters or rent. movies was the same way, only any codec was allowed (usually the group-specific codec was allowed in the their newsgroup). Just FYI (and not that I ever used them... I heard it... from a.... "friend").
Mark Duell
They got alt.binaries.pictures.centerfolds.playboy, but they missed alt.binaries.full.post.verified.playboy :)
Mark Duell
Just a friendly reminder, you cant buy anything thats not for sale. The creators of the CDDB database sold out and they are the ones the users should be angry with. Gracenote simply bought the database, and did what they saw fit with it (which is to make a profit, since they are a corporation after all...)
Mark Duell
Assuming OpenBSD was informed on 9 June 2001, still 6 days turnaround isn't bad when you compare it to the turnaround on Microsoft patches.
OpenBSD also tests their patches rigorously to make sure that they dont cause more problems *cough*Microsoft*cough*
Mark Duell
I recently isntall OpenBSD as a router for my home network and its wonderful. The install took less than 30 minutes from a home-brewed CD. It automagically recognized all of my hardware, and was much less painful than some linux installs I've done.
Installing apache was painless (except I had to install libtool first), and NAT, dhcpd, and ipf were pre-installed, all I had to do was enable them.
Note: OpenBSD used to claim 3 years without a remote root exploit and 2 years without a local one, but they dropped the local record a few months ago after one was found, and now the remote root exploit record is up to 4 years.
Mark Duell
I know its kind of an odd thought, but you could buy the @Guard firewall, which does all of those.
Mark Duell
Wonderful post. One thing, (since I really like your writing style, and you're obviously passionate about it) could you explain how a switching power supply works and why its better?
Mark Duell
This story from a few days ago is very similar, but a different source and different info.
Wouldnt an UPDATE be more appropriate?
Mark Duell