Depressing that people in the US think this is such a crazy, laughable idea:( (Disclaimer, as a smug Euroweenie I and most of the rest of us regard it as pretty incomprehensible that mass religion still holds such a force in US society.)
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm sure he'd love to FUD some particularly pointed-haired bosses into avoiding Linux altogether (or to only using SLES); I just don't think they'll really try the suicidal SCO approach of actually suing IBM (or Red Hat, or end users.) When he says Linux users haven't paid "properly", he means in the sense of a tribute or danegeld to the Borg. In the Microsoft worldview, *everyone's* benefited somehow from MS' amazing breakthrough software, so everyone on the planet "owes" them something. He's not seriously suggesting they'll try to get money from everyone on the planet. But when another group return to the fold of happy paying Microsoft customers, of course he sees that as "proper", in the sense of "the inevitable correct order of things". In fact that word "properly" gives a rather chilling insight into that worldview... he really does think the world owes Microsoft a living.
The other point I was making is that the scenario of a MS blessed SLES with proprietary borg code including is actually a far bigger threat than hollow vague threats about people "owing" MS. They know the SCO approach loses, and that it's pointless to try to take it - whilst IBM are on Linus' side, anyway. Poisoning the well, "embracing and extending" Linux through a SLES trojan horse is a much scarier proposition, especially for those of us swivel-eyed "Free software" zealots, who care more about Freedom than quality. Cos the Microsoft Linux *will* be "better", in most people's view, at interop with Windows environments. This is really, really scary prospect:(
No indeed, in fact one thing that IS certain is that something critical will break on the rovers sooner or later. However the Steve Squyres has said that the team plan each day as if it's the rover's last. Charging over the edge of the closet alcove (and losing mobility at the bottom, say) would lose us lots of great data from the remaining 90-120 degrees of the rim Steve's said they'll traverse before entering VC.
No, give em real British ale, brewed from hops. A couple of months to readjust (because drinking eight pints of ale won't kill you, but by god you'll wish you were dead the next morning) and they will become civilised, moderate imbibers of a healthy amount of proper, nutricious, healing beer. And a new dawn will rise, flowers will blossom in the streets, yea verily Wolverhampton town centre shall become as a garden of paradise.
On a side note, I think they are being too cautious with Opportunity right now. They should send it into the crater *now* rather than search for the best entrance. It is living on borrowed time and could croak any minute.
...but that statement's been true since Sol 1. One of the reasons the rovers have lasted so long is that the JPL teams have made intelligent trade-offs between not doing anything too hasty and wasting time. Oppy got stuck at Erebus for six months or more when it looked like the IDD joint had busted. Whilst it's sitting still, the only wear on the vehicle is thermal cycling (and the slow decay of the batteries' charge capacity). Oh and the mass spectrometer takes a bit longer to do an integration... but these are slow processes. OTOH driving hard has been associated with all the close escapes - the Purgatory dune when oppy buried herself up to the hubcaps in a dune because the software didn't realise it was stuck, and carried on turning the wheels, digging further and further into the dune. It took two weeks of churning to get the first few inches out of that trap, but the team knew it'd work eventually because they'd tested it in the sandpit back on earth.
All imagery from both MER rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) is available on the web; due to the distributed nature of the Cornell team it's not unusual for members of the thriving amateur data jockeys and pixel pushers to be working on stiching panoramas or integrating multiple wavelength versions of the same shot into colour versions before the actual team members see it. BTW:you'll need a lot, lot more than a single disk to get all the MER data, and when HiRISE gets going... heh,heh,heh;))
I think everyone's missing the point of what Ballmer's actually talking about here.
He's not suggesting MS will sue Red Hat or anyone else using Linux.
He's saying they're going to put some hideous borg-approved kludges into SuSE, presumably AD integration, SMB stuff, perhaps some sort of agent to make SLES appear as little Tuxes on whatever the MS network management console looks like. Then they'll try to get any MS users thinking of having a go with Linux to try the poisoned SuSE variety. Fast forward five years: all the big corp vendors (Oracle, er... Cognos, Seibel, SAP, all that stuff) will support only SLES, which will be the long-dreaded "Microsoft Linux[tm]" product that so many jokes have been made about here over the last seven years.
The big Leonid outburst (the one that might be like the 1966 "hyperspace" event) was due in 1997 or 1998. This year could be a decent display, though, if you're lucky you might see the odd fireball - which are spectacular.
There's a substantial element of Slashdot readers that are confused about the difference between reality and fantasy. It's just about barely possible that NASA might manage to mount a successful Apollo-like Mars mission in 20 or 30 years' time. (By which I mean, bounce around in a rover, collect some rocks, dig a couple of holes here & there to look at bedrock.) This will all be scientifically useful and interesting stuff. But it's no more going to lead to terraforming and mass colonisation than the Amundensen Base at the South Pole means humans are going to "colonise the Antartic". In fact, the south pole is a lot more hospitable and conducive to human life than Mars is - by a factor of a thousand or so.
That's a shame, given his understanding of the importance of copyright control by the artist in the world of music. I can't find the rant on the back of the recent CD releases but it could come straight from Slashdot...
My Mum's a devout member of the Church of England - in fact she's on the PCC and is a churchwarden. So, IMO, she/has/ been brainwashed by a cult.
What I actually do is to make it a joke whilst still making clear what nonsense I think it is.... "Hi Mum, back from mumbo-jumbo land, 'eh? Was it a good session of fairy stories this week?"
Two passive water heating panels have cut our electricity bill by 30-40% this year. Three panels, about 2m x 1.5x each, 20 year life span IIRC. Cost £4-£5K to buy & install, will pay for themselves in five or six years (looking at it purely financially - of course part of the motivation for doing this is to reduce our carbon footprint.) We've also installed a lot of very very expensive double glazing - our house isn't a listed building (though it is three hundred years old in parts) but we still didn't want to wreck the elevation with crappy PVC rubbish; instead we've got individually hand-made window frames with the correct small-sized panes. Actually it's improved the look quite a lot, as we got to rip out a lot of hideous late 60s "minimalist" style T frames:)
You will definately want to see these in case one of your family members or friends starts to push you to take a weekend course "that will create new possibilities"...
Right, because I always uncritically accept any new-age self-help bullshit spouted by family or friends... oh wait, no, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves and never speak to them again. (Seriously. I once split up with a girlfriend mostly because she just couldn't get it through her head that Carlos Casta-frickin-neda was a charlatan.)
No doubt those of us who get dragged into providing unpaid technical support for family & friends, yet who want to do the right thing to help make the world a better place, know exactly what to do. We cannot deny the fruits of our superiour intellect to the world for the greater good,and we have a duty to make sure we help people out. Sooo... spread this rumour as hard and as fast as you can. By this time next year Windows will have been banned by every government in the world. MUAH!!hahahaha.
It seems that a vast majority of the public is mis-informed when it comes to voting fraud and the history of.
No shit, Sherlock. Here's a free clue: democracy exists in other places than America. No-one else has a tenth - a HUNDREDTH of the brouhaha America does with a perfectly simple process.
What's so difficult about it? You get a bunch of people together after the polling station closes down, burn the old ballots and make up new ones.
A crazy idea, I know, but (and I'm sorry to do this skipping CD impression) here in the UK... the ballot boxes are watched by observers from each party. As soon as the polling station closes, the ballot boxes are sealed in the presence of observers and taken to the count, where the seals are broken again with witnesses.
Sure you could bribe a few dozen people here or there, but remember there are usually dozens (at least) of polling stations you'd have to cover. Even if everyone took the money, someone would get pissed and call a late-night phone in or the Guardian or whatever.
Why does everyone think paper ballots are foolproof? Remember, the election results are determined by the people counting the ballots, not the ballot technology itself.
If the candidates representatives (who observe the count) aren't happy about the result, they complain to the Returning Officer. The result can't be declared until they're all happy, and yes on the odd rare occasion (once or twice a decade) one constituency in the UK goes to a ridiculously close count - IIRC someone in the current parliament has a single figure majority (six I think.) If any one candidate isn't happy, they say so and the counting is repeated, sometimes several times. The individual people counting the votes can't cheat because they're in full public view, closely watched by the candidates, and if they try it they go to jail. Transparency, you see. Any conspiracy to work around all this would be so obvious that even if a concession was beaten out of a candidate, it would be obvious what had happened, and we'd all have another revolution. (We haven't had one for, ooh, four hundred years or so, and the current system hasn't changed much in that time.)
Personally, I'd like to see a touch-screen voting system that prints a completed ballot after the user has made their selection and that the voter then looks at to verify, and then walks over to a reader which reads the ballot and records the result. Election law should specify the standard form of the ballot, and should mandate that different companies make the touch-screen system and the ballot reading system used at each polling station. Both the touch-screen system and the ballot counting system would maintain independent totals, and of course the paper ballot would be preserved for hand recounts, which would take place automatically if the touch-screen system and the ballot reading system differed by more than one vote.
Yes, but why, for god's sake, WHY??? Every time this story comes up people point out that everyone else in the world uses bits of paper and a bit locked metal box. Why go to all the huge effort & expense to build electronic voting when paper votes work perfectly well?? No-one ever answers, just like you they describe their pet concept for an electronic voting system. Madness, complete bloody madness.
In the UK they're called spoiled ballots (people sometimes write things on the ballots, or put ticks rather than crosses, or various other randomness.) They aren't counted, but are retained; in the event of a recount, they're rechecked. Of course representatives of all the candidates observe this process along with the Returning Officer, who's legally responsible for conducting the poll and declaring the result (he, and it's usually still a he, is the fat middle-aged local councillor who stands up before a big banner saying "Crawley!... Gateway to Croydon!" or whatever, and reads out the votes cast plus the "...and I therefore declare that [x] has been duly elected to serve as the member for the constituency of [y]."
It works pretty well. Occasionally small-scale attempts to rig local contests are exposed and a couple of idiots go to jail. Widescale manipulation, enough to actually alter a result, is pretty much impossible; you'd need too many people to keep it secret. It's a distributed, parallel, transparent process... and like the Canadian poster's system it seems to work pretty well here, too, not counting the scumbags who manage to get people to let them do it to them...
And the same in the UK, and as far as I know, everywhere else in Europe too. In fact, does anyone else anywhere apart from India and the US feel that paper and pencil are too old-fashioned?
You are mistaken. Greatly amplified warming in the Arctic is a pretty unanimous conclusion from decent GCMs (climate models). That the Arctic has seen an increase in average temperatures of around five degrees Celsius in, in fact, uncontroversial. One random story from a quick google: here. RealClimate.org also has very good science, albeit way over the heads of, say, mainstream TV news in terms of complexity and detail.
Does anyone actually know anyone that has been affected by any of these exploits? Seems to me that the odds of actually visiting a site that "runs" the exploit is incredibly low.
Oh yes. Just take a look at your local spam filter logs. A favourite tactic is to own a hosting centre farm (CPanel exploits were the favourite a couple of months back) and compromise hundreds of sites simultaneously. Alternatively, banner ad servers are a popular way to "get the message out".
Slashdot Mirror
As well as the Dawkins book ("The God Delusion", for those of you on the other side of the Atlantic -- I guess it's been supressed as "unAmerican" over there) this is a good, interesting, authoritative and rather depressing read: American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury.
Hey, you seem to know what you're talking about. You know Immunity are looking at actually building these?
The other point I was making is that the scenario of a MS blessed SLES with proprietary borg code including is actually a far bigger threat than hollow vague threats about people "owing" MS. They know the SCO approach loses, and that it's pointless to try to take it - whilst IBM are on Linus' side, anyway. Poisoning the well, "embracing and extending" Linux through a SLES trojan horse is a much scarier proposition, especially for those of us swivel-eyed "Free software" zealots, who care more about Freedom than quality. Cos the Microsoft Linux *will* be "better", in most people's view, at interop with Windows environments. This is really, really scary prospect :(
No indeed, in fact one thing that IS certain is that something critical will break on the rovers sooner or later. However the Steve Squyres has said that the team plan each day as if it's the rover's last. Charging over the edge of the closet alcove (and losing mobility at the bottom, say) would lose us lots of great data from the remaining 90-120 degrees of the rim Steve's said they'll traverse before entering VC.
No, give em real British ale, brewed from hops. A couple of months to readjust (because drinking eight pints of ale won't kill you, but by god you'll wish you were dead the next morning) and they will become civilised, moderate imbibers of a healthy amount of proper, nutricious, healing beer. And a new dawn will rise, flowers will blossom in the streets, yea verily Wolverhampton town centre shall become as a garden of paradise.
...but that statement's been true since Sol 1. One of the reasons the rovers have lasted so long is that the JPL teams have made intelligent trade-offs between not doing anything too hasty and wasting time. Oppy got stuck at Erebus for six months or more when it looked like the IDD joint had busted. Whilst it's sitting still, the only wear on the vehicle is thermal cycling (and the slow decay of the batteries' charge capacity). Oh and the mass spectrometer takes a bit longer to do an integration... but these are slow processes. OTOH driving hard has been associated with all the close escapes - the Purgatory dune when oppy buried herself up to the hubcaps in a dune because the software didn't realise it was stuck, and carried on turning the wheels, digging further and further into the dune. It took two weeks of churning to get the first few inches out of that trap, but the team knew it'd work eventually because they'd tested it in the sandpit back on earth.
All imagery from both MER rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) is available on the web; due to the distributed nature of the Cornell team it's not unusual for members of the thriving amateur data jockeys and pixel pushers to be working on stiching panoramas or integrating multiple wavelength versions of the same shot into colour versions before the actual team members see it. BTW:you'll need a lot, lot more than a single disk to get all the MER data, and when HiRISE gets going... heh,heh,heh ;))
He's not suggesting MS will sue Red Hat or anyone else using Linux.
He's saying they're going to put some hideous borg-approved kludges into SuSE, presumably AD integration, SMB stuff, perhaps some sort of agent to make SLES appear as little Tuxes on whatever the MS network management console looks like. Then they'll try to get any MS users thinking of having a go with Linux to try the poisoned SuSE variety. Fast forward five years: all the big corp vendors (Oracle, er... Cognos, Seibel, SAP, all that stuff) will support only SLES, which will be the long-dreaded "Microsoft Linux[tm]" product that so many jokes have been made about here over the last seven years.
The big Leonid outburst (the one that might be like the 1966 "hyperspace" event) was due in 1997 or 1998. This year could be a decent display, though, if you're lucky you might see the odd fireball - which are spectacular.
There's a substantial element of Slashdot readers that are confused about the difference between reality and fantasy. It's just about barely possible that NASA might manage to mount a successful Apollo-like Mars mission in 20 or 30 years' time. (By which I mean, bounce around in a rover, collect some rocks, dig a couple of holes here & there to look at bedrock.) This will all be scientifically useful and interesting stuff. But it's no more going to lead to terraforming and mass colonisation than the Amundensen Base at the South Pole means humans are going to "colonise the Antartic". In fact, the south pole is a lot more hospitable and conducive to human life than Mars is - by a factor of a thousand or so.
That's a shame, given his understanding of the importance of copyright control by the artist in the world of music. I can't find the rant on the back of the recent CD releases but it could come straight from Slashdot...
anyway here's some interesting stuff on his site.
What I actually do is to make it a joke whilst still making clear what nonsense I think it is.... "Hi Mum, back from mumbo-jumbo land, 'eh? Was it a good session of fairy stories this week?"
Two passive water heating panels have cut our electricity bill by 30-40% this year. Three panels, about 2m x 1.5x each, 20 year life span IIRC. Cost £4-£5K to buy & install, will pay for themselves in five or six years (looking at it purely financially - of course part of the motivation for doing this is to reduce our carbon footprint.) We've also installed a lot of very very expensive double glazing - our house isn't a listed building (though it is three hundred years old in parts) but we still didn't want to wreck the elevation with crappy PVC rubbish; instead we've got individually hand-made window frames with the correct small-sized panes. Actually it's improved the look quite a lot, as we got to rip out a lot of hideous late 60s "minimalist" style T frames :)
No doubt those of us who get dragged into providing unpaid technical support for family & friends, yet who want to do the right thing to help make the world a better place, know exactly what to do. We cannot deny the fruits of our superiour intellect to the world for the greater good ,and we have a duty to make sure we help people out. Sooo... spread this rumour as hard and as fast as you can. By this time next year Windows will have been banned by every government in the world. MUAH!!hahahaha.
No, that was a Tranax MiniBank 1500. Different vendor.
Sure you could bribe a few dozen people here or there, but remember there are usually dozens (at least) of polling stations you'd have to cover. Even if everyone took the money, someone would get pissed and call a late-night phone in or the Guardian or whatever.
It works pretty well. Occasionally small-scale attempts to rig local contests are exposed and a couple of idiots go to jail. Widescale manipulation, enough to actually alter a result, is pretty much impossible; you'd need too many people to keep it secret. It's a distributed, parallel, transparent process... and like the Canadian poster's system it seems to work pretty well here, too, not counting the scumbags who manage to get people to let them do it to them...
And the same in the UK, and as far as I know, everywhere else in Europe too. In fact, does anyone else anywhere apart from India and the US feel that paper and pencil are too old-fashioned?
You are mistaken. Greatly amplified warming in the Arctic is a pretty unanimous conclusion from decent GCMs (climate models). That the Arctic has seen an increase in average temperatures of around five degrees Celsius in, in fact, uncontroversial. One random story from a quick google: here. RealClimate.org also has very good science, albeit way over the heads of, say, mainstream TV news in terms of complexity and detail.