"States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic."
- referring to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea
Tip regarding CVs: try to be polite to the people who insist that you buy an expensive proprietary word processor running on an expensive proprietary operating system to write your CVs in, when they can't even be bothered to view the PDF file that you sent them.
"How far do you go to protect your information against 'Big Brother' or even your family/friends?"
The obvious one would be not to respond to every security-related question with a bunch of details about all the levels of encryption and different passwords you use, just to show how technical and paranoid you are.
It's just a big video file dammit, I don't even know what this marutuku thing is...
Slashdot poll: when do you reveal your password
[ ] When a cute researcher asks for it
[ ] When offered a free pen for doing so
[ ] When slashdot asks about my 3l337 cracker defenses
[ ] At every dinner-party opportunity
[ ] All of the above
"How is this wireless charging, if you need to place the object on a specific pad?"
Well, there's a whole bunch of wires going to the pad. And a whole bunch of wires coming from whatever's on the pad. And all those wires need to be connected and working. But in the middle, there's this tiniest sliver of free space where there aren't any wires. So it's called wireless.
Just like a "wireless" (radio) which is a box full of wires, with an aerial wire, attached to the mains by a power wire, which we call wireless.
"First off, tell me. Which standards does PGP follow?"
RFC 2440? It means that you can send messages to PGP, GnuPG, and Hushmail users without them needing additional software. It means your message gets decrypted and checked automatically in KMail and TheBat, and by existing plugins for Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Evolution, Mutt, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail.
OpenPGP may have been created from PGP rather than the other way around, but you can't deny that it's the standard for encrypted and signed email messages.
"If only Bram Cohen would had licensed the original bittorrent under the GPL (rather than the MITL), people would not be able to profit so easily from his work."
Presumably it's not the profit which is the problem, so much as the creation of non-Free software which is competing in an an unfair* way with the original.
*unfair as in, one project can take freely from the other, but not vice-versa.
But we all already knew this right? It's not like RMS warned us in 1985 about the problems with non-GPL licenses...
"For Asimovian robots, the Three Laws, are implicit in the construction of the positronic brain. However this applies only to Asimovian robots."
One way of looking at it is: science fiction writers have done an incredible amount of research into possible scenarios resulting from various premises. For example, Asimov has sketched out for us a lot of the changes we can expect from a world in which we decide that robots should work for humans, where ownership of the robot has less priority than protecting humankind. That's one future we could choose, and it's been thoroughly explored in an easy-to-read format. And it's not just one writer here, there are many people looking at societies where robot labour is freely available.
Other science fiction writers and computer-game writers have sketched out what we can expect from certain other choices made today. Most notably, writers have explored a world in which robots are commonly used as military weapons, or used to enforce the wishes of a ruling class. There are more authors working in this area, so a wider variety of scenarios are presented, but most of them tend to the same conclusion, that a world covered in military robots wouldn't be somewhere that we'd like to live.
An asimovian world, although it has some problems, seems fundamentally more stable, more pleasant, and more prosperous than a Terminator-style battleground world.
So for this particular decision: "what should robots do, fight for the military, or serve humanity?" we have an unusually large amount of information available to us about the consequences of each path. And that's why I'd quote the first law when discussing UCAV operations - not because it's some plot-element that exists only in Asimov's mind, but because it's a valid piece of research that directly affects our decisions today.
"The article only briefly mentions response time -- doesn't explain it."
TomsHardware (don't pretend you need a link) have been plotting response-time against brightness change in their reviews recently, showing the advertised 14ms (or whatever) on the black-white transition, and response times increasing for changes of greyscale (with a peak somewhere around the 25% brightness change of maybe 30ms for a "14ms" monitor)
Comments on aria also mention that images seem to linger longer when there is blue involved, perhaps giving another insight into the fudging of numbers which is used to calculate the published response speed.
"IE have proposed introducting simlar measures to IE6 using ActiveX and DHTML."
Web authors purchase a certificate from verisign with their msn passport and replace all <a href=""> tags with a client-side activeX control written in the.NET framework that uses the windows encryption subsystem services to query a certificate stored in a protected partition of your disk using an encryption key stored in the registry. Legacy websites using <a href=""> will then have the user prompted with an "this link could contain viruses, [yes] [no]" dialog box, where the answer supplied would remain in memory until the end of the current login session. Trusted links would be created by the webdesigner ticking a box to say that their downloadable application is marked safe to run on the user's computer.
"Also many malware type apps which install themselves through javascript exploits may install a keyboard logger, or even change the address bar when a user types "www.amazon.com". IE will display the correct URL but will go to a hacked copy of the site while the user is unaware."
Sounds complicated. Couldn't they just put their own entry for ebay.com into the hosts file?
"When I read news, I want 3 page articles about it. Most of these stories you read online or in a paper could be put into one sentence and it would have the same value."
Try wikinews for coverage which stands a chance of running to more than one thought, or Wikipedia/current events which should have lots of links to detailed background information.
Yahoo "full coverage" also used to be quite good at grouping the "ongoing" news about a particular topic, so you could read the whole history as well as just the latest event.
"Your company runs OO.o, Evolution, and Firefox on Windows. You're asked to cut costs, so you point out that you can deploy the exact same thing on Linux"
Uh, actually you'd be spending more money in that scenario by doing an O/S migration, buying linux licenses (as you do), and finding somewhere to put the Windows experts. The cheap option favoured by a company trying to cut costs, would be to make do with whatever they're using, and not buy anything new. That would be the sign of a failing company of course, but you already said they're trying to cut costs, even after migrating their office suite to Free Software.
If you're equipping a load of new PCs however, or if you're trying to cut support costs (they're not normally visible enough for someone to moan about, even after a virus infection) then you'd have a point. Or if you're planning for the long-term. Or doing IT in a large company. Or starting a company. But replacing everything with linux doesn't immediately get you a profit, and only saves money if you were about to purchase commerical software.
"Give Drupal a try. It is very customizable, and you should be able to configure it to do whatever you would like."
Agree with this: Drupal seems neat, well-organised, easy to setup, and it's pretty well optimised for "stories, blogs, and comments" systems similar to slashdot.
Two cameras observed the surface during the latter stages of the descent and, as the probe slowly spins, they built up a mosaic of pictures around the landing site. In addition, a side-view visible imager obtained a horizontal view of the horizon and of the underside of the cloud deck.
"Not so simple- if your NEIGHBOR buys their seed, and you have the same type of crop, cross pollination by the wind could turn you into an Intellectual Property Pirate."
By planting on this land you agree to the following terms and conditions...
But seriously, what IP law can a seed possibly infringe upon? It can't be copyright because monsanto didn't create the seed, they just modified it. It can't be a trade-secret because nobody's trying to extract information from the seed. It can't be a patent because the farmer hasn't used any genetic-engineering techniques, they're just replanting, and it can't be contract law in the cases where seeds were blown in and not purchased (and even when purchased, you have the whole "EULA are invalid" debate).
Slashdot Mirror
And the rest of their threats?
"What about doctors? Lawyers? Accountants? Schools? Bookstores? etc."
They're all safe, they use WindowsXP.
According to their website, it's now "easier than ever to download security updates."
"Finally, a tip regarding CV's"
Tip regarding CVs: try to be polite to the people who insist that you buy an expensive proprietary word processor running on an expensive proprietary operating system to write your CVs in, when they can't even be bothered to view the PDF file that you sent them.
Please go back in time and stop yourself from writing that story before I have the chance to read it...
"You know why Slashdot number-identifies even Anonymous Cowards posts?"
The same reason that banks use a social-security number to identify state (and not US) citizens?
"How far do you go to protect your information against 'Big Brother' or even your family/friends?"
The obvious one would be not to respond to every security-related question with a bunch of details about all the levels of encryption and different passwords you use, just to show how technical and paranoid you are.
It's just a big video file dammit, I don't even know what this marutuku thing is...
Slashdot poll: when do you reveal your password
[ ] When a cute researcher asks for it
[ ] When offered a free pen for doing so
[ ] When slashdot asks about my 3l337 cracker defenses
[ ] At every dinner-party opportunity
[ ] All of the above
"How is this wireless charging, if you need to place the object on a specific pad?"
Well, there's a whole bunch of wires going to the pad. And a whole bunch of wires coming from whatever's on the pad. And all those wires need to be connected and working. But in the middle, there's this tiniest sliver of free space where there aren't any wires. So it's called wireless.
Just like a "wireless" (radio) which is a box full of wires, with an aerial wire, attached to the mains by a power wire, which we call wireless.
"First off, tell me. Which standards does PGP follow?"
RFC 2440? It means that you can send messages to PGP, GnuPG, and Hushmail users without them needing additional software. It means your message gets decrypted and checked automatically in KMail and TheBat, and by existing plugins for Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Evolution, Mutt, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail.
OpenPGP may have been created from PGP rather than the other way around, but you can't deny that it's the standard for encrypted and signed email messages.
"If only Bram Cohen would had licensed the original bittorrent under the GPL (rather than the MITL), people would not be able to profit so easily from his work."
Presumably it's not the profit which is the problem, so much as the creation of non-Free software which is competing in an an unfair* way with the original.
*unfair as in, one project can take freely from the other, but not vice-versa.
But we all already knew this right? It's not like RMS warned us in 1985 about the problems with non-GPL licenses...
"For Asimovian robots, the Three Laws, are implicit in the construction of the positronic brain. However this applies only to Asimovian robots."
One way of looking at it is: science fiction writers have done an incredible amount of research into possible scenarios resulting from various premises. For example, Asimov has sketched out for us a lot of the changes we can expect from a world in which we decide that robots should work for humans, where ownership of the robot has less priority than protecting humankind. That's one future we could choose, and it's been thoroughly explored in an easy-to-read format. And it's not just one writer here, there are many people looking at societies where robot labour is freely available.
Other science fiction writers and computer-game writers have sketched out what we can expect from certain other choices made today. Most notably, writers have explored a world in which robots are commonly used as military weapons, or used to enforce the wishes of a ruling class. There are more authors working in this area, so a wider variety of scenarios are presented, but most of them tend to the same conclusion, that a world covered in military robots wouldn't be somewhere that we'd like to live.
An asimovian world, although it has some problems, seems fundamentally more stable, more pleasant, and more prosperous than a Terminator-style battleground world.
So for this particular decision: "what should robots do, fight for the military, or serve humanity?" we have an unusually large amount of information available to us about the consequences of each path. And that's why I'd quote the first law when discussing UCAV operations - not because it's some plot-element that exists only in Asimov's mind, but because it's a valid piece of research that directly affects our decisions today.
"You mean, before this, you would have thought it would be okay to use non-private ID numbers as passwords?"
Please prove you are who you say you are, by revealing your date of birth and your mother's maiden name.
(I'm not joking, that public-record information is used to access my bank account over the phone)
"Being a programmer, you probably want one of the dvorak layouts tweaked for programming (that put braces and stuff in easy locations)."
Or just become a lisp programmer, and have two foot-pedals installed labelled "(" and ")"...
"imagine saying I develop webpages with LAMR ;)"
The alternative being serious, professional names like Plone, Drupal, and Zope?
"The article only briefly mentions response time -- doesn't explain it."
TomsHardware (don't pretend you need a link) have been plotting response-time against brightness change in their reviews recently, showing the advertised 14ms (or whatever) on the black-white transition, and response times increasing for changes of greyscale (with a peak somewhere around the 25% brightness change of maybe 30ms for a "14ms" monitor)
Comments on aria also mention that images seem to linger longer when there is blue involved, perhaps giving another insight into the fudging of numbers which is used to calculate the published response speed.
"IE have proposed introducting simlar measures to IE6 using ActiveX and DHTML."
.NET framework that uses the windows encryption subsystem services to query a certificate stored in a protected partition of your disk using an encryption key stored in the registry. Legacy websites using <a href=""> will then have the user prompted with an "this link could contain viruses, [yes] [no]" dialog box, where the answer supplied would remain in memory until the end of the current login session. Trusted links would be created by the webdesigner ticking a box to say that their downloadable application is marked safe to run on the user's computer.
Web authors purchase a certificate from verisign with their msn passport and replace all <a href=""> tags with a client-side activeX control written in the
Think you missed some punctuation...
c lamation;&exclamation;&exclamation;&exclamation;&e xclamation;&exclamation;&exclamation;]]" />
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<answer type="long" xmlns:h="http://www.w3.org/TR/slashdot/answer">
<content="![CDATA[N0&exclamation;&exclamation;&ex
</answer>
"Also many malware type apps which install themselves through javascript exploits may install a keyboard logger, or even change the address bar when a user types "www.amazon.com". IE will display the correct URL but will go to a hacked copy of the site while the user is unaware."
Sounds complicated. Couldn't they just put their own entry for ebay.com into the hosts file?
"Every craftsman I know spends a lot of time and effort making sure he has good tools and materials"
Indeed. If there's anything worse than "task x has to be done by tomorrow", it's "task x has to be done by tomorrow using only Microsoft tools"
It's pronounced "nome". Not "guh-nome"
As in,
"nome": small crockery chap who sits in your garden pretending to fish
"guh-nome": an operating system, recognisable as a GNU project by the hard "G" in the name
"When I read news, I want 3 page articles about it. Most of these stories you read online or in a paper could be put into one sentence and it would have the same value."
Try wikinews for coverage which stands a chance of running to more than one thought, or Wikipedia/current events which should have lots of links to detailed background information.
Yahoo "full coverage" also used to be quite good at grouping the "ongoing" news about a particular topic, so you could read the whole history as well as just the latest event.
Or just get the Financial Times, of course...
"Your company runs OO.o, Evolution, and Firefox on Windows. You're asked to cut costs, so you point out that you can deploy the exact same thing on Linux"
Uh, actually you'd be spending more money in that scenario by doing an O/S migration, buying linux licenses (as you do), and finding somewhere to put the Windows experts. The cheap option favoured by a company trying to cut costs, would be to make do with whatever they're using, and not buy anything new. That would be the sign of a failing company of course, but you already said they're trying to cut costs, even after migrating their office suite to Free Software.
If you're equipping a load of new PCs however, or if you're trying to cut support costs (they're not normally visible enough for someone to moan about, even after a virus infection) then you'd have a point. Or if you're planning for the long-term. Or doing IT in a large company. Or starting a company. But replacing everything with linux doesn't immediately get you a profit, and only saves money if you were about to purchase commerical software.
"Give Drupal a try. It is very customizable, and you should be able to configure it to do whatever you would like."
Agree with this: Drupal seems neat, well-organised, easy to setup, and it's pretty well optimised for "stories, blogs, and comments" systems similar to slashdot.
"Not so simple- if your NEIGHBOR buys their seed, and you have the same type of crop, cross pollination by the wind could turn you into an Intellectual Property Pirate."
By planting on this land you agree to the following terms and conditions...
But seriously, what IP law can a seed possibly infringe upon? It can't be copyright because monsanto didn't create the seed, they just modified it. It can't be a trade-secret because nobody's trying to extract information from the seed. It can't be a patent because the farmer hasn't used any genetic-engineering techniques, they're just replanting, and it can't be contract law in the cases where seeds were blown in and not purchased (and even when purchased, you have the whole "EULA are invalid" debate).
"I too would prefer more stickers. Stickers indicating that the aforementioned stickers are not proven facts, but they themselves are opinions"
A business card with "the text on the other side is not a fact" printed on both sides...