A certificate-based trust metric has already been implemented, in the form of Advogato. You need to be vouched for by existing members, and you gain ranks as more people certify you. Bad nodes can be separated and isolated, protecting the entire network. Orkut may offer some new features, but so far I haven't heard of anything groundbreaking in it's design.
Secondly, I don't see the point of all these Friendster-like websites. I manage my friends quite well without my relationships being formalized via the Internet. Seeing how I'm connected to other people doesn't interest me one bit. Maybe I'm weird, but it just seems... unnecessary.
UnitedLinux could have been a real contender in creating a standardized version of Linux for everyone to use. But Darl McBride and his insane schemes had to ruin it for everyone...
In a way it's good, because OSDL was formed instead, and that looks like it might actually achieve something.
I know I'll lose my karma for this, but I will stand by my principles and say what I believe. Slashdot is very eager to criticize Microsoft for donating to the UN, yet it's quite happy when, say, China takes advantage of open source software. Has Slashdot considered that providing software for free to countries such as China is essentially tacit support for oppressive regimes? How is this any better than donating to the UN?
Far-fetched? Think about it: With MySQL, the People's Army will now be able to do multiple queries on their tables of democratic activists in Olog(n) time instead of lengthy searches in card catalogs. How about building cheap firewalls so the people can't get the unbiased reporting that CNN provides? Or using Apache to publish lists of Falun Gong people to their police forces instantly? I doubt that never crossed your minds when you were coding away in your parents' basements. If that does not concern you, consider something else. When China eventually goes to war with Taiwan, we want to be able turn their command and control facilities into the computing equivalent of a train-wreck. One of the advantages of Windows never mentioned in the article is the ability of Microsoft to remotely deactivate Windows XP in the case of a national emergency. So, it could be a strategic benefit to have the UN using Windows.
Anyway, I know this is going to get modded down, but I urge you to think about it.
Number 1 reason against software patents
on
Perens on Patents
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Proprietary code should be defended not by a patent, but by copyright.
You can copyright content that is a product of intellectual endeavour, but you can't patent the words used to write it, nor can you patent grammatical structure and the vocabulary used, or the type of media used to store and distribute. And that is exactly what software patents attempt to do, restrict the very language and tools we use to creative our work. It is very easy to accidentally invent a method used to solve a problem strictly in a clean-room situation that could infringe on some unknown patent.
Copyright is the right way to protect software, not patents.
Thank you for pointing that out. It's not like the press release didn't rub everyone's faces in the fact it's European.
Perosonally, I think that the ESA has a serious case of American Wang Envy. Scratch that. The whole damn socialist European Union seems to have it. Why does every press release have to mention how they are doing it "better" than we Americans are..... Yeah sure.
I Agree totally that X clipboard copy-paste support is bad and X.org should focus on that, instead of eye candy and fast performance.
I talk about exchange of binary data through clipboard (because I can see that many OSS types think that clipboard is for text only). I mean copying and pasting graphics, fragments of graphics (rectangular and irregular shares), with alpha; sound; video; Hypertext with images copied to local application (not some lazy trick where Hypertext copied from Mozilla to OpenOffice has is untouched and images are still loaded from the network when you store that file and try to reload it at home).
I remember back in the day Xfree86 needed to be a company to trademark the term "Xfree86" so they created this weird organization with a constitution and all. There was the "board" and there was the "core". Later another set was added, people who had commit access to CVS, but weren't on the core. At the bottom there were regular joe developers.
The thing is that no one really knew what the core did except that it had a private email list. Even the people on the core didn't know. (I'm not joking).
Historically, XFree86 has had closed-style, "Cathedral", developement. If you wanted to look at the development code or read the developers emails, you had to apply. Then they opened up the CVS repository to the world. Then last year they openned up all the development email and dissolved the core group.
It's good to see times change, and that they have moved to a more open, "Bazaar" style approach. It's a sign that the project is becoming more open and responsive to developers. The only better outcome would be if Xouvert were involved in the new X.org, but you can't have everything. I think this is a good thing for everyone.
We may not be able to stop companies from inserting RFID tags on their stuff, which becomes *our* stuff when we buy it, but we sure as damn can find these tags and remove or destroy them after buying the products.
How hard would it be to build your own RFID detector? If it is too hard for Joe and Jane Average, how much might one cost at Target/Walgreens/geektoys.com... or even Walmart?
Somebody want to start a business making these? I have a manufacturing background...
What they probably mean is that the concept of RFID systems originated in the 1940's as a means of distinguishing friendly aircraft from enemy aircraft. Large powered RFID tags, or transponders, were placed on friendly aircraft. When interrogated by a radar signal, these transponders would give the appropriate response to identify the carrying aircraft as `friendly.' This IFF (Identify: Friend or Foe) system was the first obvious use of RFID and present day aviation traffic control is still based on IFF concepts.
The invention of the microchip and subsequent technological advances led to the design and use of passive RFID tags (tags that could be read without the use of on-tag power, such as batteries). The lack of on-tag power reduces their cost, but forces passive RFID tags to obtain their power from the interrogation signal of the tag reader. The minimal power obtained in this manner limits their read range to a few feet.
One of the great things about Linux's scheduler is that it is O(1).
0(1) is a "term" from computer science. When applied to schedulers, it basically means that no matter how many processes there are to schedule, a 0(1) scheduler's overhead will not significantly increase.
Of course, with a small number of threads/processes to schedule, the Linux 0(1) scheduler will have greater initial overhead. It isn't until there are quite a few processes that it starts to show its power, and the more processes there are, the more useful it is. On a busy server with 4+ processors and thousands of processes, a standard scheduler's overhead is so great that it often exceeds the overhead of most of the individual server processes. With computer hardware more than anything else and computer software less than anything else, you get what you pay for.
The APU is a new invention that could also reduce the military's reliance on oil. It doesn't drive the engines of the Army's long-haul trucks, but it will run almost everything else, from the heating and air conditioning to the vehicle's water pump and other accessories. It's powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. The hydrogen comes from a small set of tanks attached to the cab, but eventually the hydrogen could come directly from the diesel fuel that runs the engine itself. A fuel-cell APU can increase the efficiency of a typical diesel engine by as much as ten-fold. And the less noise and emissions a truck generates, the lower the chance it'll be spotted by the enemy.
Personally, I think that best solution is a reduction in military and government spending on fuel, along with everything else. After all, the government is the greatest polluter on the planet.
It's interesting to see the tools on the Rover finally being used to examine the soil. Apparently, it's using microscopes and 2 spectromoters to analyse the dust - the machine equivalent of giving it a good poke around to see what it's made of. Naturally, these tools generate *a lot* of information, up to 100 megabits in one session. It may not seem like much to us, but they don't exactly have broadband on Mars, so it's a lot of data, and it's an impressive achievement.
The existence of olivine is particularly surprising, because it doesn't survive weathering. This may be because the soil is made up of fine volcanic particles, or because the olivine was actually from underneath the soil.
As for the strange "stickiness" of the dust, they think that it may be because of sulfate and chloride salts that come from volcanic activity, dust storms, or even evaporated water. It's tantalizing data, and I hope they continue to get interesting results like this.
Microsoft has just received a Common Criteria certification for Windows 2000 at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4. Security experts have been saying for years that the the security of the Windows family of products is hopelessly inadequate. Now there is a rigorous government certification confirming this. What does it all mean? This paper suggests that Microsoft spent millions of dollars producing documentation that shows that Windows 2000 meets an inadequate set of requirements, and that you can have reasonably strong confidence that this is the case.
So which is it, Slashdot? I'm confused.
Is EAL worthwhile or is it an "inadequate set of requirements"? Is EAL 4 worse than EAL 3?
Personally, I'm suspicious of most certifications, from business to security. Usually, they're just a way for the certifying company (in this case Common Criteria) to make easy money.
Anyway, maybe we should just wait for Eros, which is supposed to achieve EAL 7 when it is fully implemented, due to it's powerful and secure design, better than both Unix and Windows.
We all know how good committees are at deciding things. Compromise usually leads to the lowest common denominator. Do we really want a Linux desktop that's designed by a committee? Isn't that against the whole spirit of free software?
Interesting paper. Just as I thought, ECC has less overheads than RSA, which means it can perform stronger encryption, faster. The main advantage that RSA has over ECC is that it is a more mature problem, and so has been exposed to more mathematical analysis.
I think that once ECC has been around for longer and has been proven in the field, it will become more accepted and be as respectable as RSA. After all, ECC has all the advantages of public-key but does not have the overhead problem.
I often hear that elliptic curve cryptography is less trustworthy than traditional number field methods, due to having received less expert scrutiny. Such arguments should be considered with a grain of salt. Just about all commercial public-key cryptography relies on the difficulty of a discrete log problem. This mathematical problem predates modern cryptography.
As discrete log gets easier, longer bit-lengths are required to keep the methods safe. Discrete logs in ordinary number groups, like Zp*, are now much easier to solve than in elliptic curve groups. The discrete log problem for ordinary groups has been getting steadily easier, due to the discovery of, and successive refinements in the Number Field Sieve (NFS) techniques. In contrast, Elliptic curve group discrete log techniques have not seen significant improvement in the past 20 years. This is good news for elliptic methods. This difference accounts for todays reduced key-size requirements for elliptic curves. With today's knowledge, bit-for-bit, elliptic curve groups seem to be a lot safer. However, this is largely a matter of efficiency, and the increased efficiency is partially offset by more complex group arithmetic.
Microsoft hates Xbox hacking, and is using every legal mean to stop it, in particular, the DMCA. Nintendo might use the same tactics, as they have used the DMCA in the past. The DMCA is increasingly being used as a way to defeat competition and enforce shoddy business practices -- not to uphold legitimate rights. If it continues, it won't be long before auto manufacturers are including chips to defeat third-party auto parts from working with their vehicles, and you can look forward to seriously inflated prices when you need to get new brake pads or whatever on your car because they'll be suing the competition out of business.
When you buy a product, it should be YOURS, period, end of story. If you want to mod your Xbox into a PC, and you have the skills to do it, then you damn well ought to be able to do so. Once you pay your $175 (or whatever they're going for) for an Xbox, Microsoft should cease to have any control over what you do with it -- save voiding the warranty if you decide to take it apart and start modding it.
Parking Assist relies on a built-in computer, steering sensor and a tiny camera in the car's rear and works like this: A dashboard display shows the image taken by the camera. When you near a parking space and shift into reverse, computerized lines pop up on the display, along with arrows pointing up, down, left and right.
Using the arrows, you move the lines around until they define exactly where you want the car to be parked. Then you push the "set" button on the display. Keep your foot lightly on the brake pedal, and the car will start backing up, the steering wheel responding to an invisible hand. Voila, the car will park itself in the spot you've chosen with the arrows.
But be careful. Hands-free driving doesn't mean you can read a book or doze off. The system has no artificial intelligence that actually recognizes objects -- so it won't stop for a person or a cat or anything else you shouldn't be running over. You still have to hit the brakes yourself. And the system is designed so that it will shut itself off if you lift your foot from the brake pedal, making the car go too fast. Intelligent Parking Assist also will back you into a garage, and can "remember" three parking spots.
And now for the major limitation: The system works only in situations where the car can continuously back up into a space -- not for those tight spots where you must inch your way into a space by going back and forth, wrestling with the wheel.
Why is it when some one does something stupid on UNIX and screws their HDD, its the user that is blamed but when the user CHOOSES to run Windows and CHOOSES to run Internet Explorer and CHOOSES to have their default mail client to be Outlook Express, for some reason they're immune to this barrage of RTFM and instead it is Microsoft who gets the blame.
Sure, I love the Microsoft bashing mosh pit just as much as the next Linux user, however, in all honesty, when is the end user going to take responsibility for their actions? doesn't this sound like the a-typical senario in the "real world", something bad happens and the government is blamed for not stopping the idiot from hurting themself.
The fact remains that the end user does VERY little to protect themselves. Sure, we'll have a chorus of ranters claiming that in their zyx operating system world, they would *NEVER* need that and through some miracle, some how their operating system of choice is immune to all vunerabilities.
The fact remains that no matter what operating system you run, you HAVE to take precautions. Run an anti-virus, make sure your software and virus definitions are updated, run a GOOD firewall and actually learn how to use the computer so that you can set up the firewall so that is it beneficial rather than a hindrance.
If you follow these VERY basic precautions, I would be VERY surprised if you get infected.
In a perfect world, one WOULDN'T need to take these precautions, software would be bug free, everyone would be honest Joe's and Jane's, however, that isn't the case, the fact is, the world is filled with losers, script kiddies and other parasites and unfortunately the only way to defeat these people is to make their conquests so meaningless that they'll go back to nicking car badges off cars and boasting to their friends about what level of "Rainbow Islands" they got up to on their SEGA.
One proposal is a formula that would sentence deceptive spammers to more time in prison for each e-mail address spammed. Considering that spammers can get thousands of addresses in one swoop, that should put most spammers in prison for a long, long time.
The problem is that the Federal Sentencing Guidelines limit judges to a narrow ranges of sentences a court can choose from when punishing violators of federal criminal law. The guidelines work off of a point system that sets a starting value for a particular crime, and then adds or subtracts points for specific aggravating or mitigating circumstances. A convicted kidnapper, for example, starts off with 24 sentencing points which is about 5-6 years in prison.
The question is how many points should spamming get, and how many "bonus" points should spammers get for aggravated offences. These could be things like using sophisticated means to harvest email addresses or commiting more serious crimes, like identity theft or fraud, as well as spamming.
HF radio is *the* communication medium for many life-critical situations. It is the only affordable communication line for many NGOs operating in third world countries, and HF equipment is much easier to setup and more rubust than satellite equipment.
Until now, the HF spectrum has been carefully regulated to avoid harmful interference. It is just not acceptable to sacrifice it simply to get a cheaper Internet access. There are a good set of broadband technologies available which almost do not interfere with HF users.
Let's hope politicians don't wait to do anything until a true emergency happens...
The early episodes are beyond comparison, very top notch stuff.
However, as the first season got on, the writing seemed to degrade noticeably and the plot got a little wonky at the end when Church decides to do that thing he does (avoiding spoilage).
I'd advise them to slow down a bit, produce fewer episodes and take us back to the excellent writing of the first 5 episodes.
The bizarre claims of conspiracy theorists just go on and on. If you go to their websites you can read more than any brain can handle. I have read literally dozens of things that ``prove'' the moon landings were faked, for example, and each one is rather easily shown to be wrong by anyone with experience in such things.
I think the problem here is twofold: we tend to want to believe (or at least listen to) conspiracy theories, particularly to do with space. Also, the evidence is presented in such a way that, if you are unfamiliar with the odd nature of the vacuum of space and of space travel, it sounds reasonable.
Plone is built on top of the open source application server Zope and the accompanying Content Management Framework which have thousands of developers around the world supporting it.
Plone is ideal as an intranet and extranet server, as a document publishing system, a portal server and as a groupware tool for collaboration between separately located entities. A versatile software product like Plone can be used in a myriad of ways.
Who uses Plone? Many organisations. NASA / Jet Propulsion Labs, Lufthansa, the Austrian Government.
Slashdot Mirror
A certificate-based trust metric has already been implemented, in the form of Advogato. You need to be vouched for by existing members, and you gain ranks as more people certify you. Bad nodes can be separated and isolated, protecting the entire network. Orkut may offer some new features, but so far I haven't heard of anything groundbreaking in it's design.
... unnecessary.
Secondly, I don't see the point of all these Friendster-like websites. I manage my friends quite well without my relationships being formalized via the Internet. Seeing how I'm connected to other people doesn't interest me one bit. Maybe I'm weird, but it just seems
UnitedLinux could have been a real contender in creating a standardized version of Linux for everyone to use. But Darl McBride and his insane schemes had to ruin it for everyone...
In a way it's good, because OSDL was formed instead, and that looks like it might actually achieve something.
I know I'll lose my karma for this, but I will stand by my principles and say what I believe. Slashdot is very eager to criticize Microsoft for donating to the UN, yet it's quite happy when, say, China takes advantage of open source software. Has Slashdot considered that providing software for free to countries such as China is essentially tacit support for oppressive regimes? How is this any better than donating to the UN?
Far-fetched? Think about it: With MySQL, the People's Army will now be able to do multiple queries on their tables of democratic activists in Olog(n) time instead of lengthy searches in card catalogs. How about building cheap firewalls so the people can't get the unbiased reporting that CNN provides? Or using Apache to publish lists of Falun Gong people to their police forces instantly? I doubt that never crossed your minds when you were coding away in your parents' basements. If that does not concern you, consider something else. When China eventually goes to war with Taiwan, we want to be able turn their command and control facilities into the computing equivalent of a train-wreck. One of the advantages of Windows never mentioned in the article is the ability of Microsoft to remotely deactivate Windows XP in the case of a national emergency. So, it could be a strategic benefit to have the UN using Windows.
Anyway, I know this is going to get modded down, but I urge you to think about it.
Proprietary code should be defended not by a patent, but by copyright.
You can copyright content that is a product of intellectual endeavour, but you can't patent the words used to write it, nor can you patent grammatical structure and the vocabulary used, or the type of media used to store and distribute. And that is exactly what software patents attempt to do, restrict the very language and tools we use to creative our work. It is very easy to accidentally invent a method used to solve a problem strictly in a clean-room situation that could infringe on some unknown patent.
Copyright is the right way to protect software, not patents.
Thank you for pointing that out. It's not like the press release didn't rub everyone's faces in the fact it's European.
Perosonally, I think that the ESA has a serious case of American Wang Envy. Scratch that. The whole damn socialist European Union seems to have it. Why does every press release have to mention how they are doing it "better" than we Americans are..... Yeah sure.
I Agree totally that X clipboard copy-paste support is bad and X.org should focus on that, instead of eye candy and fast performance.
I talk about exchange of binary data through clipboard (because I can see that many OSS types think that clipboard is for text only). I mean copying and pasting graphics, fragments of graphics (rectangular and irregular shares), with alpha; sound; video; Hypertext with images copied to local application (not some lazy trick where Hypertext copied from Mozilla to OpenOffice has is untouched and images are still loaded from the network when you store that file and try to reload it at home).
I remember back in the day Xfree86 needed to be a company to trademark the term "Xfree86" so they created this weird organization with a constitution and all. There was the "board" and there was the "core". Later another set was added, people who had commit access to CVS, but weren't on the core. At the bottom there were regular joe developers.
The thing is that no one really knew what the core did except that it had a private email list. Even the people on the core didn't know. (I'm not joking).
Historically, XFree86 has had closed-style, "Cathedral", developement. If you wanted to look at the development code or read the developers emails, you had to apply. Then they opened up the CVS repository to the world. Then last year they openned up all the development email and dissolved the core group.
It's good to see times change, and that they have moved to a more open, "Bazaar" style approach. It's a sign that the project is becoming more open and responsive to developers. The only better outcome would be if Xouvert were involved in the new X.org, but you can't have everything. I think this is a good thing for everyone.
We may not be able to stop companies from inserting RFID tags on their stuff, which becomes *our* stuff when we buy it, but we sure as damn can find these tags and remove or destroy them after buying the products.
... or even Walmart?
How hard would it be to build your own RFID detector? If it is too hard for Joe and Jane Average, how much might one cost at Target/Walgreens/geektoys.com
Somebody want to start a business making these? I have a manufacturing background...
What they probably mean is that the concept of RFID systems originated in the 1940's as a means of distinguishing friendly aircraft from enemy aircraft. Large powered RFID tags, or transponders, were placed on friendly aircraft. When interrogated by a radar signal, these transponders would give the appropriate response to identify the carrying aircraft as `friendly.' This IFF (Identify: Friend or Foe) system was the first obvious use of RFID and present day aviation traffic control is still based on IFF concepts.
The invention of the microchip and subsequent technological advances led to the design and use of passive RFID tags (tags that could be read without the use of on-tag power, such as batteries). The lack of on-tag power reduces their cost, but forces passive RFID tags to obtain their power from the interrogation signal of the tag reader. The minimal power obtained in this manner limits their read range to a few feet.
One of the great things about Linux's scheduler is that it is O(1).
0(1) is a "term" from computer science. When applied to schedulers, it basically means that no matter how many processes there are to schedule, a 0(1) scheduler's overhead will not significantly increase.
Of course, with a small number of threads/processes to schedule, the Linux 0(1) scheduler will have greater initial overhead. It isn't until there are quite a few processes that it starts to show its power, and the more processes there are, the more useful it is.
On a busy server with 4+ processors and thousands of processes, a standard scheduler's overhead is so great that it often exceeds the overhead of most of the individual server processes.
With computer hardware more than anything else and computer software less than anything else, you get what you pay for.
The APU is a new invention that could also reduce the military's reliance on oil. It doesn't drive the engines of the Army's long-haul trucks, but it will run almost everything else, from the heating and air conditioning to the vehicle's water pump and other accessories. It's powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. The hydrogen comes from a small set of tanks attached to the cab, but eventually the hydrogen could come directly from the diesel fuel that runs the engine itself. A fuel-cell APU can increase the efficiency of a typical diesel engine by as much as ten-fold. And the less noise and emissions a truck generates, the lower the chance it'll be spotted by the enemy.
Personally, I think that best solution is a reduction in military and government spending on fuel, along with everything else. After all, the government is the greatest polluter on the planet.
It's interesting to see the tools on the Rover finally being used to examine the soil. Apparently, it's using microscopes and 2 spectromoters to analyse the dust - the machine equivalent of giving it a good poke around to see what it's made of. Naturally, these tools generate *a lot* of information, up to 100 megabits in one session. It may not seem like much to us, but they don't exactly have broadband on Mars, so it's a lot of data, and it's an impressive achievement.
The existence of olivine is particularly surprising, because it doesn't survive weathering. This may be because the soil is made up of fine volcanic particles, or because the olivine was actually from underneath the soil.
As for the strange "stickiness" of the dust, they think that it may be because of sulfate and chloride salts that come from volcanic activity, dust storms, or even evaporated water. It's tantalizing data, and I hope they continue to get interesting results like this.
But just 1 year ago, weren't we criticizing Windows for achieving EAL 4:
So which is it, Slashdot? I'm confused.
Is EAL worthwhile or is it an "inadequate set of requirements"? Is EAL 4 worse than EAL 3?
Personally, I'm suspicious of most certifications, from business to security. Usually, they're just a way for the certifying company (in this case Common Criteria) to make easy money.
Anyway, maybe we should just wait for Eros, which is supposed to achieve EAL 7 when it is fully implemented, due to it's powerful and secure design, better than both Unix and Windows.
We all know how good committees are at deciding things. Compromise usually leads to the lowest common denominator. Do we really want a Linux desktop that's designed by a committee? Isn't that against the whole spirit of free software?
Interesting paper. Just as I thought, ECC has less overheads than RSA, which means it can perform stronger encryption, faster. The main advantage that RSA has over ECC is that it is a more mature problem, and so has been exposed to more mathematical analysis.
I think that once ECC has been around for longer and has been proven in the field, it will become more accepted and be as respectable as RSA. After all, ECC has all the advantages of public-key but does not have the overhead problem.
I often hear that elliptic curve cryptography is less trustworthy than traditional number field methods, due to having received less expert scrutiny. Such arguments should be considered with a grain of salt. Just about all commercial public-key cryptography relies on the difficulty of a discrete log problem. This mathematical problem predates modern cryptography.
As discrete log gets easier, longer bit-lengths are required to keep the methods safe. Discrete logs in ordinary number groups, like Zp*, are now much easier to solve than in elliptic curve groups. The discrete log problem for ordinary groups has been getting steadily easier, due to the discovery of, and successive refinements in the Number Field Sieve (NFS) techniques. In contrast, Elliptic curve group discrete log techniques have not seen significant improvement in the past 20 years. This is good news for elliptic methods. This difference accounts for todays reduced key-size requirements for elliptic curves. With today's knowledge, bit-for-bit, elliptic curve groups seem to be a lot safer. However, this is largely a matter of efficiency, and the increased efficiency is partially offset by more complex group arithmetic.
Microsoft hates Xbox hacking, and is using every legal mean to stop it, in particular, the DMCA. Nintendo might use the same tactics, as they have used the DMCA in the past. The DMCA is increasingly being used as a way to defeat competition and enforce shoddy business practices -- not to uphold legitimate rights. If it continues, it won't be long before auto manufacturers are including chips to defeat third-party auto parts from working with their vehicles, and you can look forward to seriously inflated prices when you need to get new brake pads or whatever on your car because they'll be suing the competition out of business.
When you buy a product, it should be YOURS, period, end of story. If you want to mod your Xbox into a PC, and you have the skills to do it, then you damn well ought to be able to do so. Once you pay your $175 (or whatever they're going for) for an Xbox, Microsoft should cease to have any control over what you do with it -- save voiding the warranty if you decide to take it apart and start modding it.
Parking Assist relies on a built-in computer, steering sensor and a tiny camera in the car's rear and works like this: A dashboard display shows the image taken by the camera. When you near a parking space and shift into reverse, computerized lines pop up on the display, along with arrows pointing up, down, left and right.
Using the arrows, you move the lines around until they define exactly where you want the car to be parked. Then you push the "set" button on the display. Keep your foot lightly on the brake pedal, and the car will start backing up, the steering wheel responding to an invisible hand. Voila, the car will park itself in the spot you've chosen with the arrows.
But be careful. Hands-free driving doesn't mean you can read a book or doze off. The system has no artificial intelligence that actually recognizes objects -- so it won't stop for a person or a cat or anything else you shouldn't be running over. You still have to hit the brakes yourself. And the system is designed so that it will shut itself off if you lift your foot from the brake pedal, making the car go too fast. Intelligent Parking Assist also will back you into a garage, and can "remember" three parking spots.
And now for the major limitation: The system works only in situations where the car can continuously back up into a space -- not for those tight spots where you must inch your way into a space by going back and forth, wrestling with the wheel.
Why is it when some one does something stupid on UNIX and screws their HDD, its the user that is blamed but when the user CHOOSES to run Windows and CHOOSES to run Internet Explorer and CHOOSES to have their default mail client to be Outlook Express, for some reason they're immune to this barrage of RTFM and instead it is Microsoft who gets the blame.
Sure, I love the Microsoft bashing mosh pit just as much as the next Linux user, however, in all honesty, when is the end user going to take responsibility for their actions? doesn't this sound like the a-typical senario in the "real world", something bad happens and the government is blamed for not stopping the idiot from hurting themself.
The fact remains that the end user does VERY little to protect themselves. Sure, we'll have a chorus of ranters claiming that in their zyx operating system world, they would *NEVER* need that and through some miracle, some how their operating system of choice is immune to all vunerabilities.
The fact remains that no matter what operating system you run, you HAVE to take precautions. Run an anti-virus, make sure your software and virus definitions are updated, run a GOOD firewall and actually learn how to use the computer so that you can set up the firewall so that is it beneficial rather than a hindrance.
If you follow these VERY basic precautions, I would be VERY surprised if you get infected.
In a perfect world, one WOULDN'T need to take these precautions, software would be bug free, everyone would be honest Joe's and Jane's, however, that isn't the case, the fact is, the world is filled with losers, script kiddies and other parasites and unfortunately the only way to defeat these people is to make their conquests so meaningless that they'll go back to nicking car badges off cars and boasting to their friends about what level of "Rainbow Islands" they got up to on their SEGA.
Btw, does any one remember that game?
One proposal is a formula that would sentence deceptive spammers to more time in prison for each e-mail address spammed. Considering that spammers can get thousands of addresses in one swoop, that should put most spammers in prison for a long, long time.
The problem is that the Federal Sentencing Guidelines limit judges to a narrow ranges of sentences a court can choose from when punishing violators of federal criminal law. The guidelines work off of a point system that sets a starting value for a particular crime, and then adds or subtracts points for specific aggravating or mitigating circumstances. A convicted kidnapper, for example, starts off with 24 sentencing points which is about 5-6 years in prison.
The question is how many points should spamming get, and how many "bonus" points should spammers get for aggravated offences. These could be things like using sophisticated means to harvest email addresses or commiting more serious crimes, like identity theft or fraud, as well as spamming.
HF radio is *the* communication medium for many life-critical situations. It is the only affordable communication line for many NGOs operating in third world countries, and HF equipment is much easier to setup and more rubust than satellite equipment.
Until now, the HF spectrum has been carefully regulated to avoid harmful interference. It is just not acceptable to sacrifice it simply to get a cheaper Internet access. There are a good set of broadband technologies available which almost do not interfere with HF users.
Let's hope politicians don't wait to do anything until a true emergency happens...
The early episodes are beyond comparison, very top notch stuff.
However, as the first season got on, the writing seemed to degrade noticeably and the plot got a little wonky at the end when Church decides to do that thing he does (avoiding spoilage).
I'd advise them to slow down a bit, produce fewer episodes and take us back to the excellent writing of the first 5 episodes.
That they feel threatened by a one-man software website? Do they think that he could come up with a better version of their products?
The bizarre claims of conspiracy theorists just go on and on. If you go to their websites you can read more than any brain can handle. I have read literally dozens of things that ``prove'' the moon landings were faked, for example, and each one is rather easily shown to be wrong by anyone with experience in such things.
I think the problem here is twofold: we tend to want to believe (or at least listen to) conspiracy theories, particularly to do with space. Also, the evidence is presented in such a way that, if you are unfamiliar with the odd nature of the vacuum of space and of space travel, it sounds reasonable.
Plone is built on top of the open source application server Zope and the accompanying Content Management Framework which have thousands of developers around the world supporting it.
Plone is ideal as an intranet and extranet server, as a document publishing system, a portal server and as a groupware tool for collaboration between separately located entities. A versatile software product like Plone can be used in a myriad of ways.
Who uses Plone? Many organisations. NASA / Jet Propulsion Labs, Lufthansa, the Austrian Government.