I reached 5500ft with a single lightweight "C" engine powered rocket. I recall the entire thing (with engine) weighing less than 10 ounces, though I might be wrong about that exactly. I then built another one that weighed 7 or 8 ounces and used a "D" engine. I never recovered it after the launch, because we never saw the streamer deploy. We followed it up as high as we could see, and then never saw anything again. Based on rough estimates, I'd say it probably reached over 6000ft, but I'm not sure.
Sorry, but this is not a good topic for Slashdot to try covering. Not unless you want to hire about a dozen new people to go through submissions and determine what is worth posting and what isn't. This subject is way beyond the depth and scope of a site like this, because this is not a technical discussion. It's one thing to post a story about a new engine that has extremely low emissions/triple-digit fuel economy/weighs less than 10lbs/etc. It's another thing to post a story about somebody modifying a car. Unless they do something like, say, make it capable of flying (literally), then I don't think it belongs on Slashdot.
Please, you honestly should not attempt to cover this topic on Slashdot. Aside from the first few dozen comments, you're going to get lots of flame wars, often revolving around the topic of "rice". It's just not a good idea. Leave it to the sites that can properly cover the subject - THE CAR FAN SITES.
Interesting proof of concept
on
Server In A Fly
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Ok, this is actually a good proof of concept for the private sector. Of course, the US Army (and CIA as well) is rather ahead of this one, having built small mechanical bugs with cameras and wireless links in them. Or at least they were working on that project. Great for observing terrorists inside their caves, but the transmission tends to break up easily inside caves. Same problem with the ground robots they used. Easier to use earth-penetrating radar in overhead surveilance.
I seem to recall reading in "Into the Storm: A Study in Command" by Tom Clancy and Gen. Franks (ret) that the troops were able to track incoming artillery rounds before they even arrived, allowing them some time to get a warning out.
If you think artillery isn't a problem for field troops because of our "air superiority", you're very much wrong. Building a cannon of any type, primitive or advanced, is relatively easy for a nation-state. No ammount of advance bombing can wipe out all of the enemy artillery (unless we just carpet bomb the nation w/ nukes..)
Even in Desert Storm, it was a problem. But we calculated the reverse trajectory right back to the enemy and blew them away with our own artillery. Nonetheless, if any of those incoming shells had contained chemical or biological agents, our troops would have been in serious danger. This gives them a chance at avoiding artillery strikes entirely.
On a side note, as part of FCS2012 (previously FCS2025), the US Army is developing systems to track incoming projectiles of any sort, including tiny bullets. Last I heard, it was still in testing, but it was going to be implemented in combat to help locate snipers, and to eventually control energy shielding systems on tanks and such, if not to outright destroy the incoming round.
CCDs are getting damn quick and very high-res, and with just a few frames of data, a microprocessor as old as the P5 could track the projectile well enough to do an intercept. Launching a projectile of any sort (even a high-velocity gunshot) cannot be done quick enough sometimes due to the mechanical energy you must expend. Therefore, a purely electrical response is the only option that can assure early detonation.
However, as somebody mentioned already, when will we get some of these mounted on the sharks??
The US Army is testing ultra-high speed CCDs for future use on armored transport vehicles and tanks. These cameras combined with some very nice CPUs will actually determine the exact location of an incoming projectile and its rate of speed in time to deploy a defensive mechanism such as a short-burst magnetic pulse -- this would cut energy needs down to realistic levels while still providing defensive capabilities. The big problem with high-energy defensive systems has always been that they suck up way too much juice to last long, but with this system, they can make the tanks and such nearly invulnerable (until they run over a landmine, anyway:) ).
While it's true that if it did happen, the NSA sure as heck wouldn't admit it, you have to realize that it's fairly easy to build a communications system that is unhackable in real-time. Besides, the enemies that we would be going after using this technology are unlikely to be sophisticated enough to crack a multi-gigabit encrypted signal that is hopping from one frequency to the next at a rate of thousands of frequencies per second. Sure, with an few hundred thousand computers operating together, you could probably begin to crack it over time. But even the US and Japan don't have computers powerful enough to do it in real time (I don't care if you say the NSA has ones that could do it, because that's not provable and is therefore not relevant to inteligent discussion).
Trust me, the US Army is developing encryption systems for the FCS2012 program that won't likely be broken any time soon.
You speak of those figures being fabricated, yet you fail to provide any sort of reference for your own numbers. The logic of ther average Slashdot poster continues to be completely non-impressive.
Hey people, this kind of thing is being taken out of context. Congress MUST setup nuclear policy from the get-go. That's all this paper is about - policy. You guys would probably be frightened to hear that we have target lists of what we'd nuke in Russia, China, and several other nations in the event of nuclear war. Good grief. I'd be horrified if I ever learned that the Pentagon DIDN'T do any planning in regards to nuclear weapons. We've got over 6,000 active warheads. To think that nobody ever thought about the way to use them in the event we need to is ludicrous. I'm willing to bet that somewhere in the DoD's massive archives are plans for the defense of Taiwain against a Chinese invasion. I'd also bet that a similar plan exists for the possible counter-invasion of China. Having the power and knowing how to use it are two totally different things. The planning of how to utilize the A-bomb in WW2 was being developed before we even knew if we'd have "the bomb" by the end of the war. Otherwise, we might have blindly used nukes to clear the beaches of Japan as we invaded. Nuclear weapons are controversial, but no matter how you look at it, so long as the exist, the owners must have clear planning about how to use them in the event of need.
For the love of God, think about what you're saying. I hate Microsoft with a passion, but stopping them from shipping a product because it might hurt innovation? How the hell do you come to THAT conclusion? Besides, the economic impact would be severe. The computer industry NEEDS WinXP to be launched in October to help fuel consumer and business buying, thus giving the tech companies a much-needed boost. If XP were blocked, the computer industry might not recover at all this year. Economy aside, blocking XP just makes absolutely no sense.
If that's the way you feel about it, what do we need mechanics for? I'm sure you could go on the internet and locate all the information you'd need to fix your car, no matter what's wrong with it (well, maybe not if you blew it into millions of pieces, but you get the idea). Heck, why hire a network administrator when the befuddled users could just get the information they need from the internet?
Oh, that's right. Not everybody has the time to find it themselves, and some are just too lazy or too dumb to know where to look. Having somebody on hand who knows from personal experience how to do the job right, especially with archaic computer hardware, is a very valuable thing.
The interceptor technology is fine. It's the basic stuff the military keeps fucking up. First, they encounter a glitch in the ICBM they were going to blow up. Uhm, excuse me? A glitch in one of the most common types of ICBMs used for our national defense? Oh, that makes me feel so reassured. Second, the interceptor fails to seperate from the booster rocket. Uh, isn't that kind of basic there fellas? Third, the ICBM didn't deploy the decoys. I thought the decoys were released in the same manor as MIRVs. If that's correct, then the USSR could have basically leveled North America and only sustained minor damage from what few of our bombers could've gotten through. The failure of the NMD test isn't what bothers me. It's the reasons it failed.
We don't have any sort of war going on right now, so which Chinese embassy do we blow up and how do we make it look accidental? Seriously, though, this pisses me off. If we go to war with somebody and anybody dies because the enemy used an American-designed nuke, I'm going to be really enraged. Sure, the first Soviet A-Bomb was based entirely on the original plans drawn up at Los Alamos, and that is what the Chinese currently have (presuming they haven't started building W88's from the plans they swiped last year). But most of the major Soviet nuclear designs were their own. With all the recently missing computer hardware, I cannot believe for a second that some of this stuff isn't the direct result of espionage, no matter what the government tries to tell us. Get your act together before you end up forking over the entire SDI plan to everyone, damnit!
Current Athlon is going away very soon
on
Athlons Sold Out
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· Score: 2
The reason AMD has sold all of its Athlon processors is not because they don't have the capacity to produce more, it's because the last 2.2 million Athlons produced (and sold this quarter) will very likely be the last of the current generation of Athlons ever produced. The Thunderbird (Athlon w/ 256KB on-die L2 at full speed) and Spitfire (Athlon w/ 64-128KB on-die L2 at full speed) cores are replacing the Athlon and (eventually) the K6-2. AMD didn't think that Intel would be quite this far behind on processor shipments, so demand really was much higher than expected. This is way too early for AMD to have sold all the CPUs it will produce this quarter, so it just means that they've sold all the old Athlon processors they will produce this quarter. In other words, AMD is going to be shipping a whole lot of new processors this quarter that will beat the snot out of the P3 (even when it has super-expensive RDRAM).
This is incorrect. The Athlon die, coupled with 8mb of L2 cache would simply be enormous, even on a.18um process. Also, Sharky Extreme misreported this information. The socketed version of the Athlon is the Athlon Select, but this version is the low-end one. Only the high-end version, the Athlon Professional, will have these cache sizes. The Athlon Professional will also be in the Slot B (that's the current Alpha standard) format. Sharky Extreme is about as unreliable as The Register when it comes to processor information. For a better explanation of some of the problems with Sharky Extreme, take a look at http://www.jc-news.com/pc/.
If Unisys decides to file a lawsuit against you for using GIF's, any intelligent judge can realize that the patent is completely bogus. And really, JPEG is too large a format to use everywhere, and PNG isn't widely enough supported yet. Unisys can kiss my ass, I'm keeping my gifs and I'm not buying a stupid license! 3D Alpha
When I first read that, I thought it was a big joke. I thought "No, that can't be. Nobody is that stupid." WHAT KIND OF SICK SCREWED UP MORON WOULD VOTE IN FAVOR OF THAT?
"We think that this will extend the rights of end users," Nimmer said.
YOU FSCKING IDIOT! YOU'RE TAKING AWAY OUR RIGHTS AND GIVING THE CORPORATIONS COMPLETE CONTROL OF EVERYTHING!
I never thought I'd say this, but Canada suddenly looks like a really nice place to live.
Oh gee, this is such terrible news! The US Government has decided that it needs to protect it's computer networks from being hacked! What a crime against freedom! I mean, really, people, are you all on crack? There have been an enourmous number of government sites hacked, and they want to stop it from continuing. This is nothing unexpected and is really being blown out of proportion by you people.
The only reason humans "fill up" their brains (if this is even possible) is because we absorb way too much useless information. For example, in the course of reading through the comments here, I've obsorbed the information that somebody thinks the human brain holds hundreds of exobits, 13TB, or 122mb. This has no relevance to anything, I just happen to have remembered it. Most humans have selectively photographic memories, but we can never remember an entire page of text because we remember only the concept of the picture or object. Very few people can memorize an entire page of text on one reading (I am so jealous of those people!)
I don't quite know why everybody is scared of the US government reading their e-mail or seeing what they send to other people. Honestly, the US government does not care that much either. People who are going to blow up a building do not announce it in advance over the internet.
The only form of electronic espionage being done over the internet from inside the US is that of smuggling high-level secrets out of the country (ie. nuclear warhead data). In those situations, the US government clearly was unable to intercept the data, despite it being taken without heavy encryption. In my honest opinion, Echelon is a lot of FUD.
The only practical uses of complex encryption areby corporations transmitting valuable or sensative information over the internet, and, of course, government research labs. You don't need anything higher than 40-bit encryption to protect your computer, since you don't have anything worthy of stealing (if you do, you're either a corporation or you're holding something illegal).
The US government is not the threat here, folks. Nor is it any other government trying to steal the data of the people. The only threat is from inter-governmental espionage resulting in the proliferation of advanced nuclear weapons systems (ie. Chinese/Russian spies dating from the late 1930's).
Ok, so people are already saying that this movie is going to be the best ever. Even I say (and truly believe) that it will be the most successful movie of all time. No other movie in history has ever completely sold out within hours in my city. Two theatres, 450 seats each, brand spanking new (opening Friday), eleven showings a day. That's 9900 tickets, SOLD OUT IN JUST THREE HOURS. Regardless of whether the movie actually blows (which I don't think it will), it will likely be amongst the highest grossing movies of all time.
My second point is that anybody who trusts movie critics on ANYTHING is a fool. If I had seen every movie ever made for the past 25 years, I'd probably get kind of grouchy and picky about movies. I also have made it a point NOT to read ANY of the hype in magazines and such, simply because I knew that it might well ruin the experience if I already had every detail in my head. I have seen both trailers, the four commercials, have the official movie poster, have the soundtrack, and will probably be buying the new toys. I've read almost every single Star Wars novel published. I know what the general plotline is, but that does not make me any less excited to see it. If I had the money, I would have paid for those charity tickets to get to see it early. Above all else, I want to see for myself if Lucas is still the greatest mind in the movie industry. But don't render judgement on the movie until you've actually seen it.
If that's the most original thing they can think of as a joke for April Fools, the ruskies must REALLY be dumb.. You can't make an effective joke about anything THIS serious over the internet.. The headline tipped me off right away.. Linus moving to Russia to make practically no money (given the current value of the ruble; or lack thereof) working on porting linux to a chip that does not even exist? Come on, people.. let's try and be creative once in awhile, ok?
I can put up with your crashes. I can put up with your bloated programming. I can put up with your slow performance. But I cannot, and will not put up with wrongful and illegal invasions of my privacy. This is not something that you can fix with a patch or a program, Microsoft. This is not something you can cover with FUD. Violating my rights is the fastest way to your inevitable destruction and collapse.
I am in the process of downloading Red Hat Linux 5.2, and will no longer use Windows on any active internet connections. Good bye, and good riddance, Microsoft.
I've been waiting for Red Hat to release version 6.0 before I took the dive and seriously tried out Linux (I had a stint with it before on my P100 using Red Hat 5.0, but felt that version had a few problems that made it more trouble than it was worth). Now, I'm going to pick up a copy of Red Hat Linux 5.2 at the first available opportunity.
Looking forward to the land of stable computing, Grave
Slashdot Mirror
I reached 5500ft with a single lightweight "C" engine powered rocket. I recall the entire thing (with engine) weighing less than 10 ounces, though I might be wrong about that exactly. I then built another one that weighed 7 or 8 ounces and used a "D" engine. I never recovered it after the launch, because we never saw the streamer deploy. We followed it up as high as we could see, and then never saw anything again. Based on rough estimates, I'd say it probably reached over 6000ft, but I'm not sure.
Sorry, but this is not a good topic for Slashdot to try covering. Not unless you want to hire about a dozen new people to go through submissions and determine what is worth posting and what isn't. This subject is way beyond the depth and scope of a site like this, because this is not a technical discussion. It's one thing to post a story about a new engine that has extremely low emissions/triple-digit fuel economy/weighs less than 10lbs/etc. It's another thing to post a story about somebody modifying a car. Unless they do something like, say, make it capable of flying (literally), then I don't think it belongs on Slashdot.
Please, you honestly should not attempt to cover this topic on Slashdot. Aside from the first few dozen comments, you're going to get lots of flame wars, often revolving around the topic of "rice". It's just not a good idea. Leave it to the sites that can properly cover the subject - THE CAR FAN SITES.
Ok, this is actually a good proof of concept for the private sector. Of course, the US Army (and CIA as well) is rather ahead of this one, having built small mechanical bugs with cameras and wireless links in them. Or at least they were working on that project. Great for observing terrorists inside their caves, but the transmission tends to break up easily inside caves. Same problem with the ground robots they used. Easier to use earth-penetrating radar in overhead surveilance.
I seem to recall reading in "Into the Storm: A Study in Command" by Tom Clancy and Gen. Franks (ret) that the troops were able to track incoming artillery rounds before they even arrived, allowing them some time to get a warning out.
If you think artillery isn't a problem for field troops because of our "air superiority", you're very much wrong. Building a cannon of any type, primitive or advanced, is relatively easy for a nation-state. No ammount of advance bombing can wipe out all of the enemy artillery (unless we just carpet bomb the nation w/ nukes..)
Even in Desert Storm, it was a problem. But we calculated the reverse trajectory right back to the enemy and blew them away with our own artillery. Nonetheless, if any of those incoming shells had contained chemical or biological agents, our troops would have been in serious danger. This gives them a chance at avoiding artillery strikes entirely.
On a side note, as part of FCS2012 (previously FCS2025), the US Army is developing systems to track incoming projectiles of any sort, including tiny bullets. Last I heard, it was still in testing, but it was going to be implemented in combat to help locate snipers, and to eventually control energy shielding systems on tanks and such, if not to outright destroy the incoming round.
CCDs are getting damn quick and very high-res, and with just a few frames of data, a microprocessor as old as the P5 could track the projectile well enough to do an intercept. Launching a projectile of any sort (even a high-velocity gunshot) cannot be done quick enough sometimes due to the mechanical energy you must expend. Therefore, a purely electrical response is the only option that can assure early detonation.
However, as somebody mentioned already, when will we get some of these mounted on the sharks??
The US Army is testing ultra-high speed CCDs for future use on armored transport vehicles and tanks. These cameras combined with some very nice CPUs will actually determine the exact location of an incoming projectile and its rate of speed in time to deploy a defensive mechanism such as a short-burst magnetic pulse -- this would cut energy needs down to realistic levels while still providing defensive capabilities. The big problem with high-energy defensive systems has always been that they suck up way too much juice to last long, but with this system, they can make the tanks and such nearly invulnerable (until they run over a landmine, anyway :) ).
While it's true that if it did happen, the NSA sure as heck wouldn't admit it, you have to realize that it's fairly easy to build a communications system that is unhackable in real-time. Besides, the enemies that we would be going after using this technology are unlikely to be sophisticated enough to crack a multi-gigabit encrypted signal that is hopping from one frequency to the next at a rate of thousands of frequencies per second. Sure, with an few hundred thousand computers operating together, you could probably begin to crack it over time. But even the US and Japan don't have computers powerful enough to do it in real time (I don't care if you say the NSA has ones that could do it, because that's not provable and is therefore not relevant to inteligent discussion).
Trust me, the US Army is developing encryption systems for the FCS2012 program that won't likely be broken any time soon.
You speak of those figures being fabricated, yet you fail to provide any sort of reference for your own numbers. The logic of ther average Slashdot poster continues to be completely non-impressive.
Hey people, this kind of thing is being taken out of context. Congress MUST setup nuclear policy from the get-go. That's all this paper is about - policy. You guys would probably be frightened to hear that we have target lists of what we'd nuke in Russia, China, and several other nations in the event of nuclear war. Good grief. I'd be horrified if I ever learned that the Pentagon DIDN'T do any planning in regards to nuclear weapons. We've got over 6,000 active warheads. To think that nobody ever thought about the way to use them in the event we need to is ludicrous. I'm willing to bet that somewhere in the DoD's massive archives are plans for the defense of Taiwain against a Chinese invasion. I'd also bet that a similar plan exists for the possible counter-invasion of China. Having the power and knowing how to use it are two totally different things. The planning of how to utilize the A-bomb in WW2 was being developed before we even knew if we'd have "the bomb" by the end of the war. Otherwise, we might have blindly used nukes to clear the beaches of Japan as we invaded. Nuclear weapons are controversial, but no matter how you look at it, so long as the exist, the owners must have clear planning about how to use them in the event of need.
For the love of God, think about what you're saying. I hate Microsoft with a passion, but stopping them from shipping a product because it might hurt innovation? How the hell do you come to THAT conclusion? Besides, the economic impact would be severe. The computer industry NEEDS WinXP to be launched in October to help fuel consumer and business buying, thus giving the tech companies a much-needed boost. If XP were blocked, the computer industry might not recover at all this year. Economy aside, blocking XP just makes absolutely no sense.
You also forgot the one in the abandoned TV repair shop.
If that's the way you feel about it, what do we need mechanics for? I'm sure you could go on the internet and locate all the information you'd need to fix your car, no matter what's wrong with it (well, maybe not if you blew it into millions of pieces, but you get the idea). Heck, why hire a network administrator when the befuddled users could just get the information they need from the internet?
Oh, that's right. Not everybody has the time to find it themselves, and some are just too lazy or too dumb to know where to look. Having somebody on hand who knows from personal experience how to do the job right, especially with archaic computer hardware, is a very valuable thing.
Andrew Walbert
The interceptor technology is fine. It's the basic stuff the military keeps fucking up. First, they encounter a glitch in the ICBM they were going to blow up. Uhm, excuse me? A glitch in one of the most common types of ICBMs used for our national defense? Oh, that makes me feel so reassured. Second, the interceptor fails to seperate from the booster rocket. Uh, isn't that kind of basic there fellas? Third, the ICBM didn't deploy the decoys. I thought the decoys were released in the same manor as MIRVs. If that's correct, then the USSR could have basically leveled North America and only sustained minor damage from what few of our bombers could've gotten through. The failure of the NMD test isn't what bothers me. It's the reasons it failed.
Andrew Walbert
We don't have any sort of war going on right now, so which Chinese embassy do we blow up and how do we make it look accidental? Seriously, though, this pisses me off. If we go to war with somebody and anybody dies because the enemy used an American-designed nuke, I'm going to be really enraged. Sure, the first Soviet A-Bomb was based entirely on the original plans drawn up at Los Alamos, and that is what the Chinese currently have (presuming they haven't started building W88's from the plans they swiped last year). But most of the major Soviet nuclear designs were their own. With all the recently missing computer hardware, I cannot believe for a second that some of this stuff isn't the direct result of espionage, no matter what the government tries to tell us. Get your act together before you end up forking over the entire SDI plan to everyone, damnit!
The reason AMD has sold all of its Athlon processors is not because they don't have the capacity to produce more, it's because the last 2.2 million Athlons produced (and sold this quarter) will very likely be the last of the current generation of Athlons ever produced. The Thunderbird (Athlon w/ 256KB on-die L2 at full speed) and Spitfire (Athlon w/ 64-128KB on-die L2 at full speed) cores are replacing the Athlon and (eventually) the K6-2. AMD didn't think that Intel would be quite this far behind on processor shipments, so demand really was much higher than expected. This is way too early for AMD to have sold all the CPUs it will produce this quarter, so it just means that they've sold all the old Athlon processors they will produce this quarter. In other words, AMD is going to be shipping a whole lot of new processors this quarter that will beat the snot out of the P3 (even when it has super-expensive RDRAM).
This is incorrect. The Athlon die, coupled with 8mb of L2 cache would simply be enormous, even on a .18um process. Also, Sharky Extreme misreported this information. The socketed version of the Athlon is the Athlon Select, but this version is the low-end one. Only the high-end version, the Athlon Professional, will have these cache sizes. The Athlon Professional will also be in the Slot B (that's the current Alpha standard) format. Sharky Extreme is about as unreliable as The Register when it comes to processor information. For a better explanation of some of the problems with Sharky Extreme, take a look at http://www.jc-news.com/pc/.
If Unisys decides to file a lawsuit against you for using GIF's, any intelligent judge can realize that the patent is completely bogus. And really, JPEG is too large a format to use everywhere, and PNG isn't widely enough supported yet. Unisys can kiss my ass, I'm keeping my gifs and I'm not buying a stupid license! 3D Alpha
When I first read that, I thought it was a big joke. I thought "No, that can't be. Nobody is that stupid." WHAT KIND OF SICK SCREWED UP MORON WOULD VOTE IN FAVOR OF THAT?
"We think that this will extend the rights of end users," Nimmer said.
YOU FSCKING IDIOT! YOU'RE TAKING AWAY OUR RIGHTS AND GIVING THE CORPORATIONS COMPLETE CONTROL OF EVERYTHING!
I never thought I'd say this, but Canada suddenly looks like a really nice place to live.
Oh gee, this is such terrible news! The US Government has decided that it needs to protect it's computer networks from being hacked! What a crime against freedom! I mean, really, people, are you all on crack? There have been an enourmous number of government sites hacked, and they want to stop it from continuing. This is nothing unexpected and is really being blown out of proportion by you people.
The only reason humans "fill up" their brains (if this is even possible) is because we absorb way too much useless information. For example, in the course of reading through the comments here, I've obsorbed the information that somebody thinks the human brain holds hundreds of exobits, 13TB, or 122mb. This has no relevance to anything, I just happen to have remembered it. Most humans have selectively photographic memories, but we can never remember an entire page of text because we remember only the concept of the picture or object. Very few people can memorize an entire page of text on one reading (I am so jealous of those people!)
I don't quite know why everybody is scared of the US government reading their e-mail or seeing what they send to other people. Honestly, the US government does not care that much either. People who are going to blow up a building do not announce it in advance over the internet.
The only form of electronic espionage being done over the internet from inside the US is that of smuggling high-level secrets out of the country (ie. nuclear warhead data). In those situations, the US government clearly was unable to intercept the data, despite it being taken without heavy encryption. In my honest opinion, Echelon is a lot of FUD.
The only practical uses of complex encryption areby corporations transmitting valuable or sensative information over the internet, and, of course, government research labs. You don't need anything higher than 40-bit encryption to protect your computer, since you don't have anything worthy of stealing (if you do, you're either a corporation or you're holding something illegal).
The US government is not the threat here, folks. Nor is it any other government trying to steal the data of the people. The only threat is from inter-governmental espionage resulting in the proliferation of advanced nuclear weapons systems (ie. Chinese/Russian spies dating from the late 1930's).
Ok, so people are already saying that this movie is going to be the best ever. Even I say (and truly believe) that it will be the most successful movie of all time. No other movie in history has ever completely sold out within hours in my city. Two theatres, 450 seats each, brand spanking new (opening Friday), eleven showings a day. That's 9900 tickets, SOLD OUT IN JUST THREE HOURS. Regardless of whether the movie actually blows (which I don't think it will), it will likely be amongst the highest grossing movies of all time.
My second point is that anybody who trusts movie critics on ANYTHING is a fool. If I had seen every movie ever made for the past 25 years, I'd probably get kind of grouchy and picky about movies. I also have made it a point NOT to read ANY of the hype in magazines and such, simply because I knew that it might well ruin the experience if I already had every detail in my head. I have seen both trailers, the four commercials, have the official movie poster, have the soundtrack, and will probably be buying the new toys. I've read almost every single Star Wars novel published. I know what the general plotline is, but that does not make me any less excited to see it. If I had the money, I would have paid for those charity tickets to get to see it early. Above all else, I want to see for myself if Lucas is still the greatest mind in the movie industry. But don't render judgement on the movie until you've actually seen it.
If that's the most original thing they can think of as a joke for April Fools, the ruskies must REALLY be dumb.. You can't make an effective joke about anything THIS serious over the internet.. The headline tipped me off right away.. Linus moving to Russia to make practically no money (given the current value of the ruble; or lack thereof) working on porting linux to a chip that does not even exist? Come on, people.. let's try and be creative once in awhile, ok?
I can put up with your crashes. I can put up with your bloated programming. I can put up with your slow performance. But I cannot, and will not put up with wrongful and illegal invasions of my privacy. This is not something that you can fix with a patch or a program, Microsoft. This is not something you can cover with FUD. Violating my rights is the fastest way to your inevitable destruction and collapse.
I am in the process of downloading Red Hat Linux 5.2, and will no longer use Windows on any active internet connections. Good bye, and good riddance, Microsoft.
I've been waiting for Red Hat to release version 6.0 before I took the dive and seriously tried out Linux (I had a stint with it before on my P100 using Red Hat 5.0, but felt that version had a few problems that made it more trouble than it was worth). Now, I'm going to pick up a copy of Red Hat Linux 5.2 at the first available opportunity.
Looking forward to the land of stable computing,
Grave