pft the Martian organisms are already awake. They are too cunning to be spotted by our rovers, and will not sit idly by while we attempt the terraforming of their planet. Anyone who has ever read Ray Bradbury knows that Martians are hostile to colonists!
Rather that terraforming a whole planet and radically altering something we know next to nothing about (for instance destroying the undetected biodiversity that probably already exists on Mars), why not try to build a greenhouse for people...
I cannot argue with you on business logic. I think you are probably right. The big oil money people have a vested interest (although i see it as shortsighted) in maintaining the status quo. Why else woudl they come out with biased reports saying global warming is a myth. http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2005/05/e xxon_chart.html
I just think it (biofuel) is a more environmental and efficient way to do things. The money and politics of getting there are a real issue. UNH seems to have done a lot of good research in the area and if I ever go for a pHD I'm going to try to get into on one of their teams.
Maybe if we had a president like Jimmy Carter we could have federal endorsement for biofuels!
I hope I am not drifting to far offtopic when I mention the billions of dollars and the American, British and Iraqi lives we are spending to secure our oil interests in Iraq. $354 billion is not much compared to what we are spending in occupying Iraq!
Conservation (driving a small car and use a trailer if you need to haul a load instead of buying a truck/ride a bike/take the bus) would go a long way too! And of course you can run any diesel engine off of waste vegetable oil with the right kit.
Unfortunately right now we are pretty dependent on fossil fuels. Biofuels are a step in the right direction! Certainly an electric hydrogen-liberating, hydrogen-burning fireplace is not the right direction towards a more sustainable world!
biofuel is great AND sustainable, and we actually don't need to have that much more farmland to produce enough to meet the countries energy needs! http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
hydrogen right now is just terribly inefficient. now if you new a way to separate hydrogen from water easily... I think the storage problems are less difficult to overcome. Of course the vendors of this fireplace have solved the `storage' problem provided and made an extrememly inefficient electric heater.
Personally if I have to use electric heat I just leave all my computers on. They generate enough heat to keep my basement warm:)
I don't see why the guys `suspicious' behavior should incriminate him. If I eat a bean burrito in my car, and every time a cop drives by I hide the burrito underneath my seat and deny what I was doing, that does not make eating a burrito criminal.
What this ends up doing is setting a precedent of illegalizing free wireless access points. When I lived in an apartment, we strung coaxial cable around back so that my neighbors could share my dialup internet connection. They chipped in $ for the 24 hour connection.
I wonder if the real reason for this criminalization of accessing open networks is because ISPs want to make more money. It is one thing if a user cracks a WEP key or tried to gain illegitimate access to a network, but we are talking about an open network.
Similarly, if I set up a free burrito stand, and you come and take a burrito without paying, I should not have the right to prosecute!
> I don't think you've checked very recently. The vast majority of ATM's have been Windows based for at least 2 or 3 years.
Actually at my bank (I won't disclose the name of the bank), they do use OS/2 WARP. I have seen a particular ATM reboot multiple times within the last few months
The tellers (nonautomated), run XP on the desktop and reboot into DOS for certain operations
Well I do see your point, but I still disagree. Letting your kid play in the playground is not irresponsible. However, letting your kid play on a playground during a thunderstorm is irresponsible. It is still not right to kidnap your kids!
The way i would work your analogy into the microsoft thing is if you were encouraging parents all over the world to encourage them to let their kids play in the playgrounds during thunderstorms, it would be beneficial if an accident proved you wrong, so you could recommend better child care policy.
I do not justify any criminal mischief, but I think in this case this criminal mischief did serve to expose Microsoft's gross negligence and was a net benefit to Microsoft and the computing community.
As to whether or not to put the guy in prison, I do not know what should be done. If he was just trying to create problems and not teach us all a valuable security lesson, then I am less sympathetic. Then again, I did stupid things when I was 17 too:)
What he has done is ultimately a favor to microsoft. He has demonstrated to them the importance of security, and demonstrated to end users the importance of patch management by exposing this vulnerability.
If he did not do it, someone else would have. We are just lucky Sasser was noisy and identifyable. A subtle worm which requires Tripwire to detect which spread on the same scale would be a disaster indeed!
From reading the article, I did not notice the name microsoft in there. Who is to say that these trojans ran on Microsoft software? Perhaps these
trojan-infected machines were running GNU-hurd or OsX? The writeup says "given the current state of Windows security", but I don't have enough information to conclude that this was a compromise of Microsoft software.
Many of the discussions on this topic seem to presume this was in fact a trojan that ran on Windows, but even though my gut tells me most trojans target Windows, there is no reason (from the news sources) to believe that this wasn't an engineered alternative OS compromise. Check news.google.com, none of the reports seems to shed any light on the OS of the compromised systems. An ftp server is mentioned, but that's about it. Why do people assume that this was a Microsoft compromise? Is this a fair assumption?
If this is a fair assumption, why don't any of the articles mention Microsoft?
I must confess I am not an expert in all kinds of emissions, but I am gathering that these fine particulate emissions are soot. Fuels that produce large amounts of ash tend to have a high mineral content. For instance when burning coal (high mineral content) you get lots of ash and soot. When burning wood pellets (low mineral content) you get very little.
Clean diesel or biodiesel should not produce these harmful emissions. It should be mostly CO2.
I did check out some of your links and I noticed this snippet from your californialung.org link:
To significantly reduce the amount of pollutants and cancer-causing toxic air contaminants, California must promote cleaner alternatives where possible and substantially reduce diesel emissions through the use of retrofit devices and lower-emitting diesel fuel. The American Lung Association of California has been advocating for restrictions on diesel emissions and promotion of alternative fuels. Local American Lung Associations around the state have been working with their local transit agencies and school districts to encourage them to switch over to buses powered by natural gas. Until we make a concerted effort to rid our state of dirty diesel fuel and transition to lower-emission fuels and cleaner alternative fuels, diesel exhaust will remain a serious public health threat
I believe biodiesel is a low-emission fuel and less of a danger than gasoline burning hybrids. There is a lot of health threatening pollution created just from drilling for and refining oil into gasoline and diesel fuels. Burning waste and commercial grown vegetable oils as a fuel source just makes sense.
Note the biodiesel.org faq specifically mentions lower particulate matter: "Biodiesel is the only alternative fuel to have fully completed the health effects testing requirements of the Clean Air Act. The use of biodiesel in a conventional diesel engine results in substantial reduction of unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter compared to emissions from diesel fuel." Unfortunately they don't give numbers. If you can find a side by side comparison of gas to diesel to biodiesel, I would love to see it!
Umm, I know several Massachussettsians that drive diesel vehicles. One of them drives a VOLVO with a VOLKSWAGEN ENGINE in it that has been converted to STRAIGHT VEGETABLE OIL. Fer crying out loud GREASECARS.COM is run out of Northhampton, MA.
Perhaps the reason your specific model of car is not permitted is because of the missions problem. Both California and Mass allow privately owned diesel vehicles.
http://vehicletest.state.ma.us/diesel.html
The high sulphur emissions from diesels (I think's it's HSO2 or HSO3 or something) are due to the fuel not the car. If you get unsulphured diesel which is not really available in the United States, you won't have this problem.
However if you burn BIODIESEL or STRAIGHT VEGETABLE OIL, you can get the high mileage of a diesel engine using sustainable fuel sources and only putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere which would be put in by the inevitable decomposition of waste vegetable oils anyways.
BIODIESEL > HYBRID
Of course try starting a 14 year old diesel Jetta in the winter in New England and you might say something different!
For instance if you want to use amavisd.new (which has a lot more features than amavis like per user SA settings), you cannot use the postfix supplied with Debian. An MTA is a pretty important thing, and unless you can have a backport you have to fight against the package management system to get yours working. There are backported versions of the packages available (thanks Norbert!), but there is no guarrantee that patches will be available in a timely fashion. It is for these reasons, that I am now looking very seriously at Gentoo.
This is mostly true, *but* I have found that even on servers Debian stable falls a little short.
For instance if you want to configure postfix/amavisd/spamassassin, you will find that debian's postfix and amavis are woefully out of date. It's not even an issue of stability, they are just using an old release. If I have to get the
production release of _someSoftwarePackage_ by compiling it myself or from a backport source, I lose all the advantages of Debian's patch management.
I was very excited about testing becoming stable,
but I am not sure what the timeline is for that.
Since I am not a Debian volunteer, I cannot really complain. They are doing a good job, but things are not yet perfect.
Other distributions may be catching up to debian with alternatives to apt (I have not really checked them out), but I don't think they will have the same quality assurance of Debian. Fedora RC5 might be great for playing nethack, but would you really want to run your business on it?
Well, actually, you are incorrect. Testing does get security updates. I doubt they are made available as quickly as the security fixes to stable, but I guess that depends on the individual package maintainer.
You can see my apt source for debian (TESTING) security updates.
Slashdot Mirror
"and I for one welcome our new Google overlords" :-)
if what you say is true, then how come the Google Desktop is only available form Microsoft OS'es?
pft the Martian organisms are already awake.
They are too cunning to be spotted by our rovers,
and will not sit idly by while we attempt the terraforming of their planet. Anyone who has ever read Ray Bradbury knows that Martians are hostile to colonists!
Rather that terraforming a whole planet and radically
altering something we know next to nothing about (for instance destroying the undetected biodiversity that probably already exists on Mars), why not try to build a greenhouse for people...
I cannot argue with you on business logic. I think you are probably right. The big oil money people have a vested interest (although i see it as shortsighted) in maintaining the status quo. Why else woudl they come out with biased reports saying global warming is a myth.e xxon_chart.html
http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2005/05/
I just think it (biofuel) is a more environmental and efficient way to do things. The money and politics of getting there are a real issue. UNH seems to have done a lot of good research in the area and if I ever go for a pHD I'm going to try to get into on one of their teams.
Maybe if we had a president like Jimmy Carter we could have federal endorsement for biofuels!
I hope I am not drifting to far offtopic when I mention the billions of dollars and the American, British and Iraqi lives we are spending to secure our oil interests in Iraq. $354 billion is not much compared to what we are spending in occupying Iraq!
Conservation (driving a small car and use a trailer if you need to haul a load instead of buying a truck/ride a bike/take the bus) would go
a long way too! And of course you can run any
diesel engine off of waste vegetable oil with the right kit.
Unfortunately right now we are pretty dependent on
fossil fuels. Biofuels are a step in the right direction! Certainly an electric hydrogen-liberating, hydrogen-burning fireplace is not the right direction towards a more sustainable world!
biofuel is great AND sustainable, and we actually don't need
:)
to have that much more farmland to produce enough
to meet the countries energy needs!
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
hydrogen right now is just terribly inefficient. now if you new a way to separate hydrogen from water easily... I think the storage problems are less difficult to overcome. Of course the vendors of this fireplace have solved the `storage' problem provided and made an extrememly inefficient electric heater.
Personally if I have to use electric heat I just leave all my computers on. They generate enough heat to keep my basement warm
I don't see why the guys `suspicious' behavior should incriminate him. If I eat a bean burrito in my car, and every time a cop drives by I hide the burrito underneath my seat and deny what I was doing, that does not make eating a burrito criminal.
What this ends up doing is setting a precedent of illegalizing free wireless access points. When I lived in an apartment, we strung coaxial cable around back so that my neighbors could share my dialup internet connection. They chipped in $ for the 24 hour connection.
I wonder if the real reason for this criminalization of accessing open networks is because ISPs want to make more money. It is one thing if a user cracks a WEP key or tried to gain illegitimate access to a network, but we are talking about an open network.
Similarly, if I set up a free burrito stand, and you come and take a burrito without paying, I should not have the right to prosecute!
Is this why olvwm is so successful?
Actually I like olvwm a lot, and enlightenment.
KDE is pretty, but I am unable to bear its slowness for long.
Enlightenment is the king of all wms!
> I don't think you've checked very recently. The vast majority of ATM's have been Windows based for at least 2 or 3 years.
Actually at my bank (I won't disclose the name of the bank), they do use OS/2 WARP. I have seen a particular ATM reboot multiple times within the last few months
The tellers (nonautomated), run XP on the desktop and reboot into DOS for certain operations
Well I do see your point, but I still disagree.
:)
Letting your kid play in the playground is not irresponsible. However, letting your kid play on a playground during a thunderstorm is irresponsible.
It is still not right to kidnap your kids!
The way i would work your analogy into the microsoft thing is if you were encouraging parents all over the world to encourage them to let their kids play in the playgrounds during thunderstorms, it would be beneficial if an accident proved you wrong, so you could recommend better child care policy.
I do not justify any criminal mischief, but I think in this case this criminal mischief did serve to expose Microsoft's gross negligence and was a net benefit to Microsoft and the computing community.
As to whether or not to put the guy in prison, I do not know what should be done. If he was just trying to create problems and not teach us all a valuable security lesson, then I am less sympathetic. Then again, I did stupid things when I was 17 too
What he has done is ultimately a favor to microsoft.
He has demonstrated to them the importance of security, and demonstrated to end users the importance of patch management by exposing this vulnerability.
If he did not do it, someone else would have. We are just lucky Sasser was noisy and identifyable. A subtle worm which requires Tripwire to detect which spread on the same scale would be a disaster indeed!
From reading the article, I did not notice the name microsoft in there. Who is to say that these trojans ran on Microsoft software? Perhaps these trojan-infected machines were running GNU-hurd or OsX? The writeup says "given the current state of Windows security", but I don't have enough information to conclude that this was a compromise of Microsoft software.
Many of the discussions on this topic seem to presume this was in fact a trojan that ran on Windows, but even though my gut tells me most trojans target Windows, there is no reason (from the news sources) to believe that this wasn't an engineered alternative OS compromise. Check news.google.com, none of the reports seems to shed any light on the OS of the compromised systems. An ftp server is mentioned, but that's about it. Why do people assume that this was a Microsoft compromise? Is this a fair assumption?
If this is a fair assumption, why don't any of the articles mention Microsoft?
I must confess I am not an expert in all kinds of emissions, but I am gathering that these fine particulate emissions are soot. Fuels that produce large amounts of ash tend to have a high mineral content. For instance when burning coal (high mineral content) you get lots of ash and soot. When burning wood pellets (low mineral content) you get very little. Clean diesel or biodiesel should not produce these harmful emissions. It should be mostly CO2. I did check out some of your links and I noticed this snippet from your californialung.org link: To significantly reduce the amount of pollutants and cancer-causing toxic air contaminants, California must promote cleaner alternatives where possible and substantially reduce diesel emissions through the use of retrofit devices and lower-emitting diesel fuel. The American Lung Association of California has been advocating for restrictions on diesel emissions and promotion of alternative fuels. Local American Lung Associations around the state have been working with their local transit agencies and school districts to encourage them to switch over to buses powered by natural gas. Until we make a concerted effort to rid our state of dirty diesel fuel and transition to lower-emission fuels and cleaner alternative fuels, diesel exhaust will remain a serious public health threat I believe biodiesel is a low-emission fuel and less of a danger than gasoline burning hybrids. There is a lot of health threatening pollution created just from drilling for and refining oil into gasoline and diesel fuels. Burning waste and commercial grown vegetable oils as a fuel source just makes sense. Note the biodiesel.org faq specifically mentions lower particulate matter: "Biodiesel is the only alternative fuel to have fully completed the health effects testing requirements of the Clean Air Act. The use of biodiesel in a conventional diesel engine results in substantial reduction of unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter compared to emissions from diesel fuel." Unfortunately they don't give numbers. If you can find a side by side comparison of gas to diesel to biodiesel, I would love to see it!
Umm, I know several Massachussettsians that drive diesel vehicles. One of them drives a VOLVO with a VOLKSWAGEN ENGINE in it that has been converted to STRAIGHT VEGETABLE OIL. Fer crying out loud GREASECARS.COM is run out of Northhampton, MA. Perhaps the reason your specific model of car is not permitted is because of the missions problem. Both California and Mass allow privately owned diesel vehicles. http://vehicletest.state.ma.us/diesel.html
The high sulphur emissions from diesels (I think's it's HSO2 or HSO3 or something) are due to the fuel
not the car. If you get unsulphured diesel which is not really available in the United States, you won't have this problem.
However if you burn BIODIESEL or STRAIGHT VEGETABLE OIL, you can get the high mileage of a diesel engine using sustainable fuel sources and only putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere which would be put in by the inevitable decomposition of waste vegetable oils anyways.
BIODIESEL > HYBRID
Of course try starting a 14 year old diesel Jetta in the winter in New England and you might say something different!
For instance if you want to use amavisd.new (which has a lot more features than amavis like per user
SA settings), you cannot use the postfix supplied with Debian. An MTA is a pretty important thing,
and unless you can have a backport you have to fight against the package management system to get yours working. There are backported versions of the packages available (thanks Norbert!), but there is no guarrantee that patches will be available in a timely fashion. It is for these reasons, that I am now looking very seriously at Gentoo.
This is mostly true, *but* I have found that even on servers Debian stable falls a little short. For instance if you want to configure postfix/amavisd/spamassassin, you will find that debian's postfix and amavis are woefully out of date. It's not even an issue of stability, they are just using an old release. If I have to get the production release of _someSoftwarePackage_ by compiling it myself or from a backport source, I lose all the advantages of Debian's patch management. I was very excited about testing becoming stable, but I am not sure what the timeline is for that. Since I am not a Debian volunteer, I cannot really complain. They are doing a good job, but things are not yet perfect. Other distributions may be catching up to debian with alternatives to apt (I have not really checked them out), but I don't think they will have the same quality assurance of Debian. Fedora RC5 might be great for playing nethack, but would you really want to run your business on it?
Well, actually, you are incorrect. Testing does get security updates. I doubt they are made available as quickly as the security fixes to stable, but I guess that depends on the individual package maintainer.
t esting/
You can see my apt source for debian (TESTING)
security updates.
http://security.debian.org/debian-security/dists/