No one, including the US or former Soviet government, has ever had that much tritium in one place like that.
Bullshit.
The Hanford Reservation has several square MILES contaiminated with tritium.
It was in the last process stream before discharging it to the ground - over the course of 40 years.
Here's a list of figures showing the groundwater contamination at the Hanford Site. Keep in mind that the area in the boundary is 540 SQUARE MILES. Check out map S-7.
That contamination doesn't include what is trapped in the vadose, the waste streams that have been treated in treatment facilities, and the tritium produced at Savannah River, Pocatello, and New York.
Okay, everyone has had a great deal of fun at Microsoft's expense today with the stories of Dept of Homeland Security dumping IE, and Microsoft taking nearly a month to fix a BIG exploit in IE. But I wonder if Microsoft's problems are less a function of them 'getting it' as much as it is a case of them being a 'victim of their own success'. Follow along with me for a minute.
When MS started its rise to the top, they hired as many of the brightest minds as they could to make their software the best of class. While many of us probably find the corner-cutting a bit too much to take, it is possible to have both world-class software while meeting a marketing deadline. It happens, but less frequently than MS or its defenders/supporters would like to think it does (lightning striking the same point twice *without* a lightning rod).
They continued to compete heavily in the OS market despite the fact that they initially wanted to be nothing more than a computer language business. The OS was to be the cash cow that would allow them to be a more effective language business. But now they own the OS business and are driving their business model into other ventures (consoles, entertainment centers, telephones, automotive brainboxes, etc). They just follow the same formula that lead to their smashing success in moving into the OS and office app market: buy the best brains in the field and use their project management skills and VOILA!, they are the new masters of the [insert market segment].
But consider the sandbox their bright minds play in: a homogeneous computing environment with computer scientists guarding the facility from outside intrusion. As has been noted in another slashdot article, Microsoft's products work wonderfully inside of Microsoft's campus.
They have extremely talented people working with the highest-end equipment in an environment where everything works nearly 100% of the time. Is it so surprising that they do not view the world the way we do?
After all, most of the companies that I have worked for are staffed with (largely) computer-illiterate people and whose firewall is maintained by a PFY with a high-school diploma.
Perhaps it would be better for Microsoft if they force their developers to create their products in environments that their customers use. In fact, maybe they should send their developers to test their products in the heterogeneous environments of their customers for a month or two.
Let them work the bugs out on their time for a change.
I use one quite a bit. The ground-penetrating radar is probably not much different than this device in physical principles. That means it is subject to the same problems as my GPR:
1) high clay content can wash out any signal, 2) metallic objects (aluminum foil has been mentioned) can render the device useless, and 3) too many objects can interfere.
There have been numerous examples posted here where you just spring a few moving decoys around the building and now the operator on the outside has just as much valuable information as they had without the $20KUSD device attached to their arm.
Microsoft should be applauded for taking such a bold step. This is definately the right move from a company who has always put usability at the top of the list for their programmers.
But I think that it will only be implemented by corporate users and tech-savy Windows users. I see a new generation of TweakUI-like applications on the horizion that will allow inexperienced users to defeat the controls that MS is building into this service pack.
Consider what will happen when someone wants to install an application that is not set up to override the port restrictions that are default in this SP. I can see a whole bunch of folks googling for hack-packs that will disable all of the port protection so that the app will run.
Keep in mind that not all software vendors are responsible corporations who have an image to protect. The smaller niche vendors may worry about their reputation, but they are more interested in making their product work despite what MS has done to the OS to provide better security.
As has been pointed out several times/., security is only as good as the vigilence of the system administrator. If users don't patch because it makes their machine 'hard' to operate, they will definately look for applications that will defeat security systems.
No offense intended, but when you make an OS so simple that a five-year-old can operate it, you should expect five-year-old reasoning from the system administrator.
The PLoS publications will be the litmus test of whether a different model of scientific publishing can exist.
If the PLoS model proves unsuccessful, it will not be due to the lack of peer-review as some comments here have suggested. All of the submissions are subjected to the same rigorous peer process as subscription-based publications.
The current system will eventually break under its own weight. Universities can ill afford to continue to see large increases in their subscription rates. As the prices increase, so does the number of titles being dropped. Scientific inquiry suffers as a result.
Also, niche publications are often dropped by publishers due to the small number of subscribers. The effect on the groups who need that publication outlet is tremendous. Imagine new discoveries going unpublished, regardless of whether they are part of a 'high tech' science market.
The fact remains, as outlets for research are pruned, so is the opportunity for scientific inquiry. I don't profess to have all the answers to this problem, but I do know that we need to push back on publishers to force a change in thinking.
They exist to serve the scientific community, not the other way around.
At the Pacific Northwest Natinonal Laboratory every machine excessed for schools, non-profits, or for public auction has its hard drive removed and then subjected to a machine similar to this bugger.
Believe me, no data is going to survive the bearing press.
Many of the recent Slashdot comments regarding the ADTI President Ken Brown's defense of his controversial tome noted that his principle audience was not the Linux community, or even the IT industry. His target audience is the policy-makers in Washington D.C. How is that group informed about issues surrounding open source in general and the Linux kernel specifically? One 'trade' publication, FCW Media Group, "produces information resources that help government IT buyers... form an integrated information system to help them purchase, build and manage technology in government." They are 'our' target audience in defending the concept of software libre, in advancing open protocols and other standards, and in correcting FUD. The May 3rd online issue provides one such opportunity to advance Linux in government research.
Nothing stops the flow of FUD like well-positioned information.
"The Samizdat report recommends that the U.S. government should invest $5 billion in research and development efforts that produce true open source products, such as BSD and MIT license-based open source."
I hope he convinces the Congress to fund this research.
Because they will have the BSD and/or MIT license, all GPL authors will have to do is incorporate the code and keep the attribution.
No problem, Ken. Keep us apprised of your progress in lobbying Congress.
As for asserting that the open source community, or Linus in general, is guilty of theft, you haven't made your case. In fact, your witnesses (at trial for slander, I assume) will testify in support of the plaintiff.
"If Time Inc. wants to keep its communications safe, it should invest in some sort of encryption software that allows privileged readers to open the mail but prevents them from forwarding, printing, or otherwise duplicating it. Microsoft, which publishes Slate, even makes a product for such occasions."
I hope it's as beautiful and scenici as I remember it being 20 years ago.
No timber, no jobs, no prospects for an expanding economic base....
Yeah, it is still the same as it was 20 years ago. They may try to take a stab at tourism, but it is pretty far off the "beaten path" for most folks. The bikers (of the mountain variety), backpackers and cross-country skiers have tried to keep it to themselves for the last ~10 years.
Once you get out of the High Plateau region, Eastern Oregon is pretty scenic.
Fedora core user == Redhat Linux Enterprise beta tester
You say that like it is a bad thing.
What do you want for free? I don't remember anyone charging me for FC2, but I do remember 20+ lockups a week on a NT4.0 machine. I paid handsomely for that abuse.
Which is why I haven't purchased another Microsoft product since.
An OS like Linux can be made to boot super-fast by properly tuning the system...
No argument there. But that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
I think there is a product-developer attitude that you just download any distro you have some experience with and start installing. Custom systems can indeed be built and preinstalled into ROM and that would be the ideal method. Unfortunately, the people who make the mistake of "one-size-fits-all" think that loading every binary and libarary onto the device just because they have the drivespace and then running every service because it is loaded is a good idea.
That was what my post was meant to address. Guess I wasn't specific enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep.
That is how most of the tritium was created.
That doesn't mean it isn't tritium.
No one, including the US or former Soviet government, has ever had that much tritium in one place like that.
Bullshit.
The Hanford Reservation has several square MILES contaiminated with tritium.
It was in the last process stream before discharging it to the ground - over the course of 40 years.
Here's a list of figures showing the groundwater contamination at the Hanford Site. Keep in mind that the area in the boundary is 540 SQUARE MILES. Check out map S-7.
That contamination doesn't include what is trapped in the vadose, the waste streams that have been treated in treatment facilities, and the tritium produced at Savannah River, Pocatello, and New York.
Okay, everyone has had a great deal of fun at Microsoft's expense today with the stories of Dept of Homeland Security dumping IE, and Microsoft taking nearly a month to fix a BIG exploit in IE. But I wonder if Microsoft's problems are less a function of them 'getting it' as much as it is a case of them being a 'victim of their own success'. Follow along with me for a minute.
When MS started its rise to the top, they hired as many of the brightest minds as they could to make their software the best of class. While many of us probably find the corner-cutting a bit too much to take, it is possible to have both world-class software while meeting a marketing deadline. It happens, but less frequently than MS or its defenders/supporters would like to think it does (lightning striking the same point twice *without* a lightning rod).
They continued to compete heavily in the OS market despite the fact that they initially wanted to be nothing more than a computer language business. The OS was to be the cash cow that would allow them to be a more effective language business. But now they own the OS business and are driving their business model into other ventures (consoles, entertainment centers, telephones, automotive brainboxes, etc). They just follow the same formula that lead to their smashing success in moving into the OS and office app market: buy the best brains in the field and use their project management skills and VOILA!, they are the new masters of the [insert market segment].
But consider the sandbox their bright minds play in: a homogeneous computing environment with computer scientists guarding the facility from outside intrusion. As has been noted in another slashdot article, Microsoft's products work wonderfully inside of Microsoft's campus.
They have extremely talented people working with the highest-end equipment in an environment where everything works nearly 100% of the time. Is it so surprising that they do not view the world the way we do?
After all, most of the companies that I have worked for are staffed with (largely) computer-illiterate people and whose firewall is maintained by a PFY with a high-school diploma.
Perhaps it would be better for Microsoft if they force their developers to create their products in environments that their customers use. In fact, maybe they should send their developers to test their products in the heterogeneous environments of their customers for a month or two.
Let them work the bugs out on their time for a change.
I use one quite a bit. The ground-penetrating radar is probably not much different than this device in physical principles. That means it is subject to the same problems as my GPR:
1) high clay content can wash out any signal,
2) metallic objects (aluminum foil has been mentioned) can render the device useless, and
3) too many objects can interfere.
There have been numerous examples posted here where you just spring a few moving decoys around the building and now the operator on the outside has just as much valuable information as they had without the $20KUSD device attached to their arm.
This thing is a boat anchor.
Or have dogs moving around the house.
All I have to say is "outside" to my pointer and he will not stand still until he gets to go outside.
That provides a good 45 minute defense.
The highest digital TV resolution is 1920x1080, although it's questionable whether most current content has that much detail.
You can be sure that porn will the the first!
Microsoft should be applauded for taking such a bold step. This is definately the right move from a company who has always put usability at the top of the list for their programmers.
/., security is only as good as the vigilence of the system administrator. If users don't patch because it makes their machine 'hard' to operate, they will definately look for applications that will defeat security systems.
But I think that it will only be implemented by corporate users and tech-savy Windows users. I see a new generation of TweakUI-like applications on the horizion that will allow inexperienced users to defeat the controls that MS is building into this service pack.
Consider what will happen when someone wants to install an application that is not set up to override the port restrictions that are default in this SP. I can see a whole bunch of folks googling for hack-packs that will disable all of the port protection so that the app will run.
Keep in mind that not all software vendors are responsible corporations who have an image to protect. The smaller niche vendors may worry about their reputation, but they are more interested in making their product work despite what MS has done to the OS to provide better security.
As has been pointed out several times
No offense intended, but when you make an OS so simple that a five-year-old can operate it, you should expect five-year-old reasoning from the system administrator.
Sonny Bono (D)
Sonny ran as, and was elected as, a Republican.
His wife continues to hold his seat as a Republican.
Admit it - you'd like to hold her seat too.
http://www.house.gov/bono/
She's nuts, but I'd still hit it.
Aye. Do you think anyone would take her seriously if she didn't look great in a tight skirt?
She called for the extermination of 700 million followers of Islam.
That is one hell of a fatwa.
I spent 11 years there, my wife 20.
We liked it too.
when I visit my family in Vancouver, Washington.
He picked a nice city to live in.
One interesting factoid: Portland has an incredibly lively sex industry (strip clubs, adult stores etc).
Maybe there's something about Linus we didn't know about?
The PLoS publications will be the litmus test of whether a different model of scientific publishing can exist.
If the PLoS model proves unsuccessful, it will not be due to the lack of peer-review as some comments here have suggested. All of the submissions are subjected to the same rigorous peer process as subscription-based publications.
The current system will eventually break under its own weight. Universities can ill afford to continue to see large increases in their subscription rates. As the prices increase, so does the number of titles being dropped. Scientific inquiry suffers as a result.
Also, niche publications are often dropped by publishers due to the small number of subscribers. The effect on the groups who need that publication outlet is tremendous. Imagine new discoveries going unpublished, regardless of whether they are part of a 'high tech' science market.
The fact remains, as outlets for research are pruned, so is the opportunity for scientific inquiry. I don't profess to have all the answers to this problem, but I do know that we need to push back on publishers to force a change in thinking.
They exist to serve the scientific community, not the other way around.
At the Pacific Northwest Natinonal Laboratory every machine excessed for schools, non-profits, or for public auction has its hard drive removed and then subjected to a machine similar to this bugger.
Believe me, no data is going to survive the bearing press.
A name like the Alexis de 'Tokeville' Institute might explain some of the rather odd reasoning used by its principles.
"How will open source user's be assured that they won't be pulled into court because of some actual or alleged stolen code?"
How will closed source user's be assured that they won't be pulled into court because of some actual or alleged stolen code?
Why should open source shoulder all of the doubt?
Many of the recent Slashdot comments regarding the ADTI President Ken Brown's defense of his controversial tome noted that his principle audience was not the Linux community, or even the IT industry. His target audience is the policy-makers in Washington D.C. How is that group informed about issues surrounding open source in general and the Linux kernel specifically? One 'trade' publication, FCW Media Group, "produces information resources that help government IT buyers... form an integrated information system to help them purchase, build and manage technology in government." They are 'our' target audience in defending the concept of software libre, in advancing open protocols and other standards, and in correcting FUD. The May 3rd online issue provides one such opportunity to advance Linux in government research.
Nothing stops the flow of FUD like well-positioned information.
"The Samizdat report recommends that the U.S. government should invest $5 billion in research and development efforts that produce true open source products, such as BSD and MIT license-based open source."
I hope he convinces the Congress to fund this research.
Because they will have the BSD and/or MIT license, all GPL authors will have to do is incorporate the code and keep the attribution.
No problem, Ken. Keep us apprised of your progress in lobbying Congress.
As for asserting that the open source community, or Linus in general, is guilty of theft, you haven't made your case. In fact, your witnesses (at trial for slander, I assume) will testify in support of the plaintiff.
That will be funny.
Thanks for catching the misspell, and the link.
"If Time Inc. wants to keep its communications safe, it should invest in some sort of encryption software that allows privileged readers to open the mail but prevents them from forwarding, printing, or otherwise duplicating it. Microsoft, which publishes Slate, even makes a product for such occasions."
Oh they're good.... they're really good.....
I hope it's as beautiful and scenici as I remember it being 20 years ago.
No timber, no jobs, no prospects for an expanding economic base....
Yeah, it is still the same as it was 20 years ago. They may try to take a stab at tourism, but it is pretty far off the "beaten path" for most folks. The bikers (of the mountain variety), backpackers and cross-country skiers have tried to keep it to themselves for the last ~10 years.
Once you get out of the High Plateau region, Eastern Oregon is pretty scenic.
Fedora core user == Redhat Linux Enterprise beta tester
You say that like it is a bad thing.
What do you want for free? I don't remember anyone charging me for FC2, but I do remember 20+ lockups a week on a NT4.0 machine. I paid handsomely for that abuse.
Which is why I haven't purchased another Microsoft product since.
Amity! C'mon now, we all know that Silverton is where it's at!
Silverton? Capitol of Mobile Home Manufacturing?
Nah, Enterprise is where its at.
How long until the first one takes a shot at this structure?
An OS like Linux can be made to boot super-fast by properly tuning the system...
No argument there. But that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
I think there is a product-developer attitude that you just download any distro you have some experience with and start installing. Custom systems can indeed be built and preinstalled into ROM and that would be the ideal method. Unfortunately, the people who make the mistake of "one-size-fits-all" think that loading every binary and libarary onto the device just because they have the drivespace and then running every service because it is loaded is a good idea.
That was what my post was meant to address. Guess I wasn't specific enough.