I've heard the rate at which people who commit identity theft get caught is around 1 in 7000.
So you have a much better than 99.9% chance to just do it to your heart's content and walk away with the money. That's pretty freakin' scary. A crime where you never have to see your victims, never have to face any consequences, and make tons of money. Can you imagine what would happen if a misguided Robin Hood decided to popularize the techniques and teach them to America's poor? Would the entire banking industry collapse at once? With a million people doing it simultaneously you would obviously overload the already overloaded investigative ability of the gov't and probably change the ration to 1 in 100,000 getting caught.
It is extremely good to see this sort of fierce competition driving astronomy.
As open source developers, we all know the power of competition, how advances on both sides of the OS wars have driven the other to catch up or improve. If this sort of competition drives the development of telescopes then we can expect a lot of advances in science and space over the next few years
This is extremely exciting news. Maybe in years to come we will be able to see the headlines on alien newspapers.
Light emanating from earth really does'nt die out, right? So if it was possible for us to either travel faster than light or warp space time into a circle and then get a powerful enough telescope, then we should be able to see events from the past, right?
That is travel faster than light, to a long distance, turn around and then look at earth with a powerful telescope, we should be able to see kennedy getting shot? wouldnt we? Or maybe bend spacetime so that all the light which left earth years ago comes back to earth ?
yahoo, excite and hotbot were called search engines?
And Amazon sold books, and did it well?
Then somebody said "Portals" and they became "portals".
Then somebody said "Auction" and they all followed e-bay.
Then somebody said "e-commerce" and they all started selling everything.
And books became Amazon's sideline to their patents on everything but the color of money.
And their site became a Navigational Nightmare(TM) (patent pending).
Now everybody wants to be a search engine again.
The reason Google is succesful is because it does it gives people the information they want, and stays the hell out of their way.
Ok "the masses" to me means people who aren't overly computer literate, but are interested in transporting data from home to work or wherever.
As for backup, usually that is handled automatically at work. At home maybe all they would need to do is backup documents and email.. which will fit on a cd. And besides, relying on one 120gb HD as a backup makes no sense. If you want incremental backups... it won't last long. And you need removable media to store somewhere else.
As for the "computer saavy" person. Christ.. It'd be much cheaper for me to simply carry around an HD on it's own, open the friggin case and plug it into an IDE channel.
Is it just me, or does this thing sound exactly like the Cobalt Cube from a few years back? It ran a modified Red Hat, was an "Internet appliance" turn-key box, and did all the fun router/web server/email server/file server stuff with just a simple interface.
One is a political ideology, the other is an economic philosophy.
Unfettered corporate capitalism leads to fascism (the state regulation of the economy) in that the state becomes a tool of the corporations, rather like you see in the USA today.
A well-structured capitalist society *requires* government intervention, for the same reasons a well-structured civil society requires government intervention (in the form of the police, and the judicial arm of the government). Even if you ignore the travesty of corporations-as-entities as practiced by the USA today, and concentrate on corporations-as-public-charters (such as the the US had before about 1880 or so), you still need regulation and monitoring. Otherwise, the biggest corporations will carry the most power, and therefore have the ability to "regulate" (in the political and economic sense) the functioning of corporations of lesser power.
This is why the US has the Sherman Act, and anti-trust laws. Now, these laws are not followed, as is evidenced by the recent anti-trust ruling against Microsoft, and the refusal by the US government to follow through on any meaningful penalty. But, even criminal law doesn't work against corporations, as seen by the recent inaction of the US government against the Enron corporation, and its executives responsible for those crimes.
The "true principals of capitalism" work no better than the true principles of communism. (*NOT* that there has been an implementation of true communism, except on extremely small scales. The most we've ever seen practiced by as large as a country is socialism.)
Things become declassified some time after it no longer serves any purpose to keep those things secret. There is no magical automatic expiration date on sensitive information. 50 years is probably quite long enough for most information to become irrelevant, but it would certainly be "ridiculous" to claim that all information should be declassified after fifty years.
So long as the government has the authority to keep some things secret, it's well within that authority to keep things secret for fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand years.
You may believe that fifty-year-old secrets are "ridiculous", but you can't justify that belief without knowing exactly what the secret is.
The same thing is keeping me from switching to VoIP that keeps me switching to cell phone only... 911 access.
When I can pick up my VoIP phone and the cops know where I am, that'll be when I switch.
I just feel better knowing my family can pick up the phone and get immediate help...
Davak
Just because VoIP involves voice, that does NOT mean it's the same as telephone service. The monopolistic nature of telephone service (only one company can realistically have lines in a given area, particularly in the "last mile") makes heavy regulation and regulatory fees necessary. VoIP does not suffer from this physical limitation to competition, and thus any number of VoIP providers can exist in any area. This is yet another blatant attempt of government to cash in on an emerging technology.
This year is the year we go 64 bit! Which is actually quite a big thing (remember when we went 32 bit?)
The rivalry between AMD and Intel is getting pretty intense, and they're level right now. Who do you think will end up on top by this time next year?
It's going to be down to If I had to say, I would vouch for Intel. They have the money and tech. I do love AMDs inexpensive chips though. It will be good to see who brings the world into 64-bit and who screws up.
I agree entirely. Opera used to be the only browser I could cope with and I wanted something open source. I was not impressed with mozilla (after spending 2 hours compiling it), but firebird really sets the bar for browsers now and has done everything right that mozilla has done wrong.
I'm not saying that Mozilla is a bad browser, I suppose it's a matter of taste.
I'm sure this is all MS FUD, with their "Shared Source" initiatives giving it to a privilaged few, it seems that Microsoft is even less willing to give away their precious source code these days.
To quote bill gates: "To all those open source types who came down here looking for my code, I have only five words for you: From my cold, dead CVS."
The real issue with LOL and such is that it is overused to a point whereby it no longer means what it says. LOL now means "I find that funny" rather than "Laughing out Loud".
I bet my new motherboard that 99% of the times people say lol they aren't actually laughing out loud.
So it is actually lying. When you say lol and you're not laughing, you're lying without thinking about it. A simple, humble "haha" or ":)" is more honest, and looks less AOL.
Century-old math problem may have been solved By Jascha Hoffman, Globe Correspondent, 12/30/2003
BERKELEY, Calif. -- A reclusive Russian mathematician appears to have answered a question that has stumped mathematicians for more than a century.
After a decade of isolation in St. Petersburg, over the last year Grigory Perelman posted a few papers to an online archive. Although he has no known plans to publish them, his work has sent shock waves through what is usually a quiet field.
At two conferences held during the last two weeks in California, a range of specialists scrutinized Perelman's work, trying to grasp all the details and look for potential flaws.
If Perelman really has proved the so-called Poincare Conjecture, as many believe he has, he will become known as one of the great mathematicians of the 21st century and will be first in line for a $1 million prize offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge.
Colleagues say Perelman, who did not attend the California conferences and did not respond to a request for comment, couldn't care less about the money, and doesn't want the attention. Known for his single-minded devotion to research, he seldom appears in public; he answers e-mails from mathematicians, but no one else.
"What mathematicians enjoy is the chase of really difficult problems," said Hyam Rubinstein, a mathematician who came from Australia to attend meetings at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley and the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto, Calif., hoping to better understand Perelman's solution. "This problem is like the Mount Everest of math conjectures, so everyone wants to be the first to climb it."
The Poincare Conjecture, named after the Frenchman who proposed it in 1904, is the question that essentially founded the field of topology, the "rubber-sheet geometry" that looks at the properties of surfaces that don't change no matter how much you stretch or bend them.
To solve it, one would have to prove something that no one seriously doubts: that, just as there is only one way to bend a two-dimensional plane into a shape without holes -- the sphere -- there is likewise only one way to bend three-dimensional space into a shape that has no holes. Though abstract, the conjecture has powerful practical implications: Solve it and you may be able to describe the shape of the universe.
Dozens of the best mathematicians of the last century tried with all kinds of approaches to solve the conjecture. Some thought they had it for months, even years, but counter-examples and flaws just kept springing up. Simply-stated but elusive to prove -- like Fermat's Last Theorem -- this conjecture has spurred the development of whole branches of mathematics.
A decade ago, after some work in the United States that colleagues described as "brilliant," Perelman gave up a promising career to work in seclusion in St. Petersburg. Although he appears occasionally, most recently for lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and several other US schools last spring, he keeps a very low profile.
Even in mathematical circles, surprisingly little is known about him, and those who know him often don't want to speak publicly about his work.
At any rate, he seems to have used his time alone wisely. While working out the Poincare Conjecture, Perelman also seems to have established a much stronger result, one that could change many branches of mathematics. Called the "Geometrization Conjecture," it is a far-reaching claim that joins topology and geometry, by stating that all space-like structures can be divided into parts, each of which can be described by one of three kinds of simple geometric models. Like a similar result for surfaces proved a century ago, this would have profound consequences in almost all areas of mathematics.
As the foundation for his proof, Perelman used a method called Ricci flow, invented in the mid-1980s by Columbi
Not one to feed the trolls, but they need to be countered once in a while.
BSD is not dying, BSD is not a "terminal OS". BSD is fast, stable, scalable and rivals Linux in areas of security (especially openBSD) and openness. It's a good middle ground for developers worried about the implications of the GPL and has it's advantages as well as disadvantages.
BSD and Linux both have their place in the Open Source world, and neither will be leaving us any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
mirror of article available here [google.com]
FOR A FULL LISTING OF GNAA MP3S PLEASE SEE GNAA MP3 WEBSITE [mp3.com] gngngngngngngngngGNAA The K in KDE stands for Krap." "Why would I want a desktop with a smelly foot on it?" "Linux has below average SMP support." "My BSD machines have much better uptimes and stability than my Linux machines." "Object-oriented programming is difficult to use and doesn't increase productivity." "Open source software has poorer levels of QA than proprietary solutions." "Python scales up for large projects better than Perl." BLA HBLA BLA HA HBALHA
I've heard the rate at which people who commit identity theft get caught is around 1 in 7000.
So you have a much better than 99.9% chance to just do it to your heart's content and walk away with the money. That's pretty freakin' scary. A crime where you never have to see your victims, never have to face any consequences, and make tons of money. Can you imagine what would happen if a misguided Robin Hood decided to popularize the techniques and teach them to America's poor? Would the entire banking industry collapse at once? With a million people doing it simultaneously you would obviously overload the already overloaded investigative ability of the gov't and probably change the ration to 1 in 100,000 getting caught.
It is extremely good to see this sort of fierce competition driving astronomy.
As open source developers, we all know the power of competition, how advances on both sides of the OS wars have driven the other to catch up or improve. If this sort of competition drives the development of telescopes then we can expect a lot of advances in science and space over the next few years
This is extremely exciting news. Maybe in years to come we will be able to see the headlines on alien newspapers.
Light emanating from earth really does'nt die out, right? So if it was possible for us to either travel faster than light or warp space time into a circle and then get a powerful enough telescope, then we should be able to see events from the past, right?
That is travel faster than light, to a long distance, turn around and then look at earth with a powerful telescope, we should be able to see kennedy getting shot? wouldnt we? Or maybe bend spacetime so that all the light which left earth years ago comes back to earth ?
yahoo, excite and hotbot were called search engines?
And Amazon sold books, and did it well?
Then somebody said "Portals" and they became "portals".
Then somebody said "Auction" and they all followed e-bay.
Then somebody said "e-commerce" and they all started selling everything.
And books became Amazon's sideline to their patents on everything but the color of money. And their site became a Navigational Nightmare(TM) (patent pending).
Now everybody wants to be a search engine again.
The reason Google is succesful is because it does it gives people the information they want, and stays the hell out of their way.
Ok "the masses" to me means people who aren't overly computer literate, but are interested in transporting data from home to work or wherever. As for backup, usually that is handled automatically at work. At home maybe all they would need to do is backup documents and email.. which will fit on a cd. And besides, relying on one 120gb HD as a backup makes no sense. If you want incremental backups... it won't last long. And you need removable media to store somewhere else. As for the "computer saavy" person. Christ.. It'd be much cheaper for me to simply carry around an HD on it's own, open the friggin case and plug it into an IDE channel.
Is it just me, or does this thing sound exactly like the Cobalt Cube from a few years back? It ran a modified Red Hat, was an "Internet appliance" turn-key box, and did all the fun router/web server/email server/file server stuff with just a simple interface.
What's old is new again, I suppose.
One is a political ideology, the other is an economic philosophy. Unfettered corporate capitalism leads to fascism (the state regulation of the economy) in that the state becomes a tool of the corporations, rather like you see in the USA today. A well-structured capitalist society *requires* government intervention, for the same reasons a well-structured civil society requires government intervention (in the form of the police, and the judicial arm of the government). Even if you ignore the travesty of corporations-as-entities as practiced by the USA today, and concentrate on corporations-as-public-charters (such as the the US had before about 1880 or so), you still need regulation and monitoring. Otherwise, the biggest corporations will carry the most power, and therefore have the ability to "regulate" (in the political and economic sense) the functioning of corporations of lesser power. This is why the US has the Sherman Act, and anti-trust laws. Now, these laws are not followed, as is evidenced by the recent anti-trust ruling against Microsoft, and the refusal by the US government to follow through on any meaningful penalty. But, even criminal law doesn't work against corporations, as seen by the recent inaction of the US government against the Enron corporation, and its executives responsible for those crimes. The "true principals of capitalism" work no better than the true principles of communism. (*NOT* that there has been an implementation of true communism, except on extremely small scales. The most we've ever seen practiced by as large as a country is socialism.)
Things become declassified some time after it no longer serves any purpose to keep those things secret. There is no magical automatic expiration date on sensitive information. 50 years is probably quite long enough for most information to become irrelevant, but it would certainly be "ridiculous" to claim that all information should be declassified after fifty years. So long as the government has the authority to keep some things secret, it's well within that authority to keep things secret for fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand years. You may believe that fifty-year-old secrets are "ridiculous", but you can't justify that belief without knowing exactly what the secret is.
The same thing is keeping me from switching to VoIP that keeps me switching to cell phone only... 911 access. When I can pick up my VoIP phone and the cops know where I am, that'll be when I switch. I just feel better knowing my family can pick up the phone and get immediate help... Davak
Just because VoIP involves voice, that does NOT mean it's the same as telephone service. The monopolistic nature of telephone service (only one company can realistically have lines in a given area, particularly in the "last mile") makes heavy regulation and regulatory fees necessary. VoIP does not suffer from this physical limitation to competition, and thus any number of VoIP providers can exist in any area. This is yet another blatant attempt of government to cash in on an emerging technology.
This year is the year we go 64 bit! Which is actually quite a big thing (remember when we went 32 bit?)
The rivalry between AMD and Intel is getting pretty intense, and they're level right now. Who do you think will end up on top by this time next year?
It's going to be down to If I had to say, I would vouch for Intel. They have the money and tech. I do love AMDs inexpensive chips though. It will be good to see who brings the world into 64-bit and who screws up.
I agree entirely. Opera used to be the only browser I could cope with and I wanted something open source. I was not impressed with mozilla (after spending 2 hours compiling it), but firebird really sets the bar for browsers now and has done everything right that mozilla has done wrong.
I'm not saying that Mozilla is a bad browser, I suppose it's a matter of taste.
Please overlook my blatantly incorrect use of the word FUD. Many thanks, and a happy new year to you. :)
"Microsoft warms up to open source"
I'm sure this is all MS FUD, with their "Shared Source" initiatives giving it to a privilaged few, it seems that Microsoft is even less willing to give away their precious source code these days.
To quote bill gates: "To all those open source types who came down here looking for my code, I have only five words for you: From my cold, dead CVS."
The real issue with LOL and such is that it is overused to a point whereby it no longer means what it says. LOL now means "I find that funny" rather than "Laughing out Loud".
I bet my new motherboard that 99% of the times people say lol they aren't actually laughing out loud.
So it is actually lying. When you say lol and you're not laughing, you're lying without thinking about it. A simple, humble "haha" or ":)" is more honest, and looks less AOL.
Happy new year, LOL.
1. KaZaA
2. Harry Potter
3. American Idol
4. Britney Spears
5. 50 Cent
6. Eminem
7. WWE
8. Paris Hilton 9. NASCAR
10. Christina Aguilera
I wonder which ones Yahoo were paid to feature in that "top 10" and which one made the real top 10.
I thought the #1 search has always been "Sex".
Century-old math problem may have been solved
By Jascha Hoffman, Globe Correspondent, 12/30/2003
BERKELEY, Calif. -- A reclusive Russian mathematician appears to have answered a question that has stumped mathematicians for more than a century.
After a decade of isolation in St. Petersburg, over the last year Grigory Perelman posted a few papers to an online archive. Although he has no known plans to publish them, his work has sent shock waves through what is usually a quiet field.
At two conferences held during the last two weeks in California, a range of specialists scrutinized Perelman's work, trying to grasp all the details and look for potential flaws.
If Perelman really has proved the so-called Poincare Conjecture, as many believe he has, he will become known as one of the great mathematicians of the 21st century and will be first in line for a $1 million prize offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge.
Colleagues say Perelman, who did not attend the California conferences and did not respond to a request for comment, couldn't care less about the money, and doesn't want the attention. Known for his single-minded devotion to research, he seldom appears in public; he answers e-mails from mathematicians, but no one else.
"What mathematicians enjoy is the chase of really difficult problems," said Hyam Rubinstein, a mathematician who came from Australia to attend meetings at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley and the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto, Calif., hoping to better understand Perelman's solution. "This problem is like the Mount Everest of math conjectures, so everyone wants to be the first to climb it."
The Poincare Conjecture, named after the Frenchman who proposed it in 1904, is the question that essentially founded the field of topology, the "rubber-sheet geometry" that looks at the properties of surfaces that don't change no matter how much you stretch or bend them.
To solve it, one would have to prove something that no one seriously doubts: that, just as there is only one way to bend a two-dimensional plane into a shape without holes -- the sphere -- there is likewise only one way to bend three-dimensional space into a shape that has no holes. Though abstract, the conjecture has powerful practical implications: Solve it and you may be able to describe the shape of the universe.
Dozens of the best mathematicians of the last century tried with all kinds of approaches to solve the conjecture. Some thought they had it for months, even years, but counter-examples and flaws just kept springing up. Simply-stated but elusive to prove -- like Fermat's Last Theorem -- this conjecture has spurred the development of whole branches of mathematics.
A decade ago, after some work in the United States that colleagues described as "brilliant," Perelman gave up a promising career to work in seclusion in St. Petersburg. Although he appears occasionally, most recently for lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and several other US schools last spring, he keeps a very low profile.
Even in mathematical circles, surprisingly little is known about him, and those who know him often don't want to speak publicly about his work.
At any rate, he seems to have used his time alone wisely. While working out the Poincare Conjecture, Perelman also seems to have established a much stronger result, one that could change many branches of mathematics. Called the "Geometrization Conjecture," it is a far-reaching claim that joins topology and geometry, by stating that all space-like structures can be divided into parts, each of which can be described by one of three kinds of simple geometric models. Like a similar result for surfaces proved a century ago, this would have profound consequences in almost all areas of mathematics.
As the foundation for his proof, Perelman used a method called Ricci flow, invented in the mid-1980s by Columbi
Not one to feed the trolls, but they need to be countered once in a while.
BSD is not dying, BSD is not a "terminal OS". BSD is fast, stable, scalable and rivals Linux in areas of security (especially openBSD) and openness. It's a good middle ground for developers worried about the implications of the GPL and has it's advantages as well as disadvantages.
BSD and Linux both have their place in the Open Source world, and neither will be leaving us any time soon.