many animals depend on icy habitats (polar bears, penguins) which are going to disappear with increasing temperature. Increased melting will disrupt the north Atlantic drift which will completely change the climate of northern Europe to something like the previous ice age. Um, doesn't the second event cancel out the first event?
It wasn't abandoned. We made numerous attempts to reclaim it, all of which were brutally put down. It's not "abandonment" if the latest two-bit empire decides to slaughter any Jews making for the Holy Land. My knowledge of this time is very weak. My understanding is that Rome cleared the area out. The Palestinians took over the empty space. I don't have any knowledge, concerning the area, between then and WWII. Can you suggest an article to read?
Yeah it sucks that you have to either pay money or endure scary messages from the web browser. There should be a way to label your site as self-signed where it wouldn't get the special secure icon or magic green glowing bar in the web browser, but on the other hand the user wouldn't be pestered about an invalid certificate (unless the cert offered really has changed since last time the user visited the site).
As far as I know, all systems allow you to import a self-signed certificate. There is the initial warning. However, once you tell the computer to trust it, it doesn't complain again.
SSL to an untrusted host is just as bad as no ssl because the man-in-the-middle (which is kind of the definition of an ISP) could easily produce a certificate that says, "hey, I'm what ever page you wanted to look at". And the insert ads.
I've always wondered how this works. You make a self-signed certificate and publish it from your site. The ISP intercepts your certificate and replaces it with theirs. When a client requests a secure page, you transmit an encrypted page to the ISP. The ISP decrypts it using your certificate, inserts an ad, reencrypts it using their certificate, and transmits the modified page to the client. Is that about it?
So the problem isn't that "you have to either pay money or endure scary messages". It's that you need a reliable method of verifying the certificate.
Some time ago, I watched an Outer Limits that dealt with a similar issue. However, it wasn't making machine copies of ourselves. It was transporting long distances.
The transporting device worked by mapping every atom in the subject and transmitting that data to a far-away device. The far-away device would then construct the subject, from local material, using the transmitted data map. The original subject was terminated after the map was created.
A return trip would use the same procedures. At the end of the trip, the subject would exist in meat-space, have all the memories of the original subject, and all the memories acquired during the trip. However, the original subject would be long dead.
Now, given the concepts explored above, would being copied into a virtual existence be any different than being copied via the transporter device?
Conservatives are the ones that follow the constitution and do little to hamper our freedoms. Check out Reagan - the greatest president of the 20th century Yes, all hail the creator of the "War on Drugs". And remember, "Just say No".
Are you upset that windows doesn't ship with drivers for every printer and accessory, or are you upset that Windows doesn't ship with 400 other programs pre-installed?
I admit, it's been a while. The last time I installed Windows on one of my computers was Windows XP Pro. I had just bought a new SATA motherboard. However, XP didn't have drivers for SATA. It was suggested that I download the drivers and save them to a floppy. However, the computer didn't have a floppy drive. That was when I learned how to streamline an install disk. I've never had to patch a Linux install disk to get it to work.
Besides that, it's nice to not have to shuffle through a dozen different disks, and twice as many reboots, just to get a usable system.
Now, as I said, this was a while ago. I moved into a job shortly afterward that required me to do mass installations. Microsoft's Windows PE is a nice system. It was really nice when they added the ability to contact a local server for drivers. However, even that needed to be patched to support the network card we were using. My one major complaint with the system is that it requires signed drivers. Every once in a while I encounter a piece of hardware that doesn't have signed drivers. And, every once in a while, I need to modify an INF file to add a PCI or USB id. This invalidates the signature.
Go in to a public meeting and use a few. Or a church. Or a PTA meeting.
The semi-public forums you list are formal in nature. Go to most informal public gatherings and you will find that people use a much more common variant of the language. Now, with your concern over what is said in public, I'd be very interested in your opinion concerning the public Internet. Would you favor a Federal law prohibiting Trolls on Slashdot, prohibiting top-posting on mailing lists, or prohibiting buzz-words on political sites? What is your opinion concerning the federal regulation of non-formal public gatherings, such as your local biker bar?
There are a variety of public forums available in the world. Why should informal forums be banned in this specific medium (public airwaves)? It certainly can't be due to the limited availability of frequency spectrum. In my area, there are 10 channels broadcast out of a possible 82. Digital television offers even more possible channels. If it's just a matter of forcing broadcasters to provide formal forums to the public, I'd think it would be a simple matter to delegate a block of the available channels to such an endeavor.
Before someone comes in and talks about the 'stupid consumer',... I can think of a few reasons why the readership wouldn't care about the news quality, without calling anyone stupid. The first one off the top of my head is that they don't recognize it as low quality. Without a direct effect, the reader only knows what they are told.
People who want to destroy private industry always make the claim that profit undermines quality, as if consumers don't want quality. Who is the customer? Who paid for the publication? Most news services use an advertising-based model. The customer is the business paying for the advertising. Now, you can argue that ad-space is worthless without readership. However, from the reader's point of view, the publication is free. Therefore, reduced quality is acceptable. It only becomes unacceptable when news that directly impacts a large portion of the readership isn't reported.
I swear that I saw a PBS show a few months back that claimed that alcohol converted testosterone into estrogen in males, and the opposite in females. However, I can't find any references now. A Google search showed several links that talked about alcohol inhibiting testosterone. I also found a few that mentioned a rise in estrogen resulting from the metabolic breakdown of alcohol in the liver. So your joke might not be too far from the truth.
Thank goodness even moreso for encryption Hmm, encryption is only really needed to protect credit card numbers and business website credentials. Current best practice should be to block all other forms of encryption. The next step should be to develop protocols that protect credit card numbers and business website credentials, but can't be used for other forms of communication.
Now, I don't agree with what I wrote above. However, I recently had a conversation with a network manager on why encryption, with the exception of port 443, was blocked. His reply was that encryption is a liability. He can't track encrypted traffic. Considering his network is part of a corporation's infrastructure, not a public ISP, he is liable if that encrypted traffic ends up being porn.
I wonder, will the line between corporate and public network ever blur to the point that my first statement is seriously considered on public networks?
Tivo is pretty much screwed at this point because most people are content with the crappy DVRs their cable/satellite providers now give them.
They are just going after Dish because DirecTV still has Tivo DVRs in service, they made a deal with Comcast (which uses Motorola), and Time Warner uses Scientific Atlanta which is a stretch to call it a DVR ("piece of crap" is a better term).
I have Dish DVR. I thought about switching to DirectTV to see what the competition offered. According to the DirectTV sales people, the DVR offered by DirectTV lacks a feature that I find important. I have a dual tuner dish and two TVs in my house. The DVR from Dish can record both signals and send them to both TVs at the same time.This means I can watch shows recorded on the DVR from either TV, record two shows at the same time, and still have independent channel switching. The DVR offered by DirectTV can't do this. I would need two DVRs and I wouldn't be able watch the content from DVR1 on TV2. If DirectTV uses Tivo, I'd say the DVR from Dish is better.
"We had another cut today between Dubai and Muscat three hours back. The cable was about 80G capacity, it had telephone, Internet data, everything," one Flag official, who declined to be named, told Zawya Dow Jones.
The cable, known as Falcon, delivers services to countries in the Mediterranean and Gulf region, he added.
"It may take sometime to fix the cut but we are rerouting the traffic to another cable in the U.K. and U.S., the bandwidth utilization will go down," the official said.
So, a "Flag official, who declined to be named" reports that a major portion of the Gulf region's communications are being rerouted through the US and UK.
It's probably not as fishy as it sounds. I seem to recall a major portion of all Internet traffic at least passes through the US. However, it does make you wonder.
I own a bound copy of a screenplay for a movie called "iRobot". The screenplay has absolutely no relation to the movie of the same name. I believe it was an early draft to show producers. However, I'd much rather see the movie if it had followed this screenplay.
Maybe YOU don't do any graphic design, video editing, audio production, etc; maybe all YOUR computer use is text-based stuff; I can't say I've ever done any real graphic design work in a shell (excluding ASCII art and HTML). However, I do plenty of video and audio editing from the command prompt. It would be a major pain if I were stuck with a GUI to script cuts, fades, concatenations, mixing, conversations, normalization, etc. GUI interfaces are a poor choice for any batch processing.
The downside to that approach is that emergency vehicles encounter cars stopped at a red light at every intersection. Where I live, drivers panic when an emergency vehicle approaches, move their car six inches towards the side of the road, and don't realize they should go through a red light to clear the roadway.
Where I live, you see a red light, you stop. The intersection clears itself because everyone is stopped. The emergency vehicle can easily get through the intersection by going around the stopped vehicles, into the oncoming lane, through the intersection, and back into the proper lane. If you are not at an intersection, move off the road.
Running a red light is only going to cause more accidents and more delays for the emergency vehicle.
Re:Waiting for Godot^H^H^H^Hentoo
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KDE 4.0 Is Out
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· Score: 1
As soon as this shows up in Gentoo Portage (the main branch, not an SVN overlay) I intend to backup my configuration and switch to KDE4 Why switch? If it's done like previous KDE upgrades, it will be slotted. Just pick your preferred environment from KDM and use both effortlessly.
Re:Doesn't compare
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KDE 4.0 Is Out
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If an application comes with KDE (KWrite for example), I can see adding the K. It signifies that the application is actually part of the KDE project. Developers outside the KDE project sometimes use the K to signify that the application depends on kdelibs. I think this is what started the problem. Gnome's use of G is a little more confusing to me. The G in Gnome stands for GNU. However, it's sometimes used by developers to signify that the application was designed for Gnome. Does that application use G to signify that it requires Gnome, or that the copyright is owned by the GNU foundation, or both? I would rather the G just signify that GNU owns the copyright.
Avidemux2 has an interesting scheme. They have an executionable that checks the name it was called by. It has soft links called avidemux_cli, avidemux_qt4, and avidemux_gtk. This makes much more sense. If your application depends on kdelibs, and it's not part of the KDE project, call it application_kde.
How about this.
If it's in the KDE menu, it's a KDE APPLICATION!
If it's in the Gnome menu, it's a GNOME APPLICATION!
Gnome and KDE use the same configuration files for the menu (/usr/share/applications/*.desktop ). You can edit the.desktop file to prevent it from appearing in one menu or the other. That way you can start gedit when in Gnome and kwrite when in KDE if that is what you want.
...most GUI apps are not started by typing in the actually program filename
At least rename the shortcuts the GUI launches.
On my K-Menu, under Graphics, is an icon labeled "GNU Image Manipulation Program". It starts the gimp-2.4 application. For the menu, it's fine that it's labeled "GNU Image Manipulation Program". However, I'd rather type gimp (or gimp-2.4) if I choose to start it from the command line. If most GUI apps are not started by typing in the actual program filename, then why would you need to rename the shortcuts the GUI launches? Just set the icon name to the longer name.
Re:This Could Be The Worst Thing For KDE
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KDE 4.0 Is Out
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· Score: 1
But consider Joe Average, the non-technical guy who decides to ditch Windows in favour of Linux, since he's read a few good things about it and all that. Assume for the sake of the argument, that he installs Kubuntu. His current KDE version - and he is probably aware of it, or will find out very soon - is 3.5.8. Now he visits kubuntu.com. The site tells it in no uncertain terms that "KDE4 is the start of something amazing" and to "be free with KDE4".
I'm curious about your definition of "Joe Average, the non-technical guy". Is this the Joe Average that has never visited Microsoft's main website, just clicks "Yes" to software updates provided by Windows Update, and at most changes the wallpaper and screen saver? Or is this the Joe Average that installs every virus that claims to remove viruses and surfs Warez sites? I can see where the second Joe Average might be a problem, on any platform.
So, what happens to Joe Average? He installs KDE4, tries out a few things, finds it broken in several places, not working as expected in others and not configurable where he may want it to be configurable. Compared to WinXP, it will feel to him as a significant step backwards (probably more because of the brokenness than the lack of features compared to KDE3). In the end, he'll just go back to Windows because, clearly Linux isn't there yet.
That's a bit of a stretch. Joe started with a stable copy of KDE3. He played with it enough to figure out how to upgrade to KDE4 all on his own. In the end, if he is unhappy with KDE4, he will undo his upgrades and go back to KDE3. If Joe does react the way you predict, let's hope he doesn't come across a blog praising TWM.
So if one of those red-light-cameras snaps a picture of my car running down a pedestrian...
A bit over the top. I was thinking more along the lines of telephone usage. If a neighbor asks to use the phone, I welcome them into my kitchen, sit at the table, and ask that they keep it local. I might even provide coffee. However, there is no way I'd ever attach a phone to the front gate and advertise it as free to the public.
As to the legal defense of having an open network, I would think it largely depends on how common and acceptable the practice is. If most people in an area have (and expect to be able to have) an open network, perhaps it would work well as a defense. I think this is largely what Bruce is advocating, making the practice common and acceptable.
I surmise that they would much rather see energy prices skyrocket, and no new sources be developed. This would necessitate a worldwide Powerdown scenario, which would effectively halt, if not at least dramatically slow, worldwide growth. Only after this state, would their vision of society be palpable to the masses. I live in a cold climate. The first thing I'd do, should a worldwide powerdown occur, is grab an axe. I'd then head to the nearest unsettled habitat. I wonder if any of the other 2-million people who live near me would have the same idea.
Hmmm... Ok so tell me how often are you going to be visiting the Microsoft website if you happen to be a Linux and Firefox user? I spend about an hour a day on Microsoft's website as part of my regular job. I manage a computer refurbishing center. Most of our customer's want Windows. However, our internal systems are all Linux-based.
Hmm, I wonder how it would handle on a 32MB PII? It's a laptop I'm putting together for my 4-year old. Unfortunately, the system max is 64MB and I haven't been able to find compatible memory for it. It does run Gentoo and GCompris rather nicely, using the matchbox window manager.
The rendering engine that handles all the ugly old hand-written crap is known as "quirks mode" and is full of all their weird kludges that make those pages readable. If the page has the right document type declaration , it uses a standards compliance mode.
Things must have changed quite a bit in the last couple of years since I played around with software that generated code for you. All of my hand-written code starts with the right document type declaration and easily passes validation. However, I do get handed code that is automatically generated from time to time. I keep a program called Tidy around to strip all of the garbage out of it.
Props to Microsoft for offering some compatibility with standards. It might make my job a little easier.
And on the other side of the fence, try and remove konqueror from kde. OK, emerge -C konqueror. It's removed. I've run KDE without konqueror installed. Other packages can provide a file/Internet browser. In the case of Microsoft, I'd like to see a pluggable rendering engine. Sure, a lot of things are tied to the rendering engine. Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, Help, and the desktop are just a few. Now, imaging if you could uninstall IE's rendering engine and replace it with the Gecko or KHTML engine. That is what I'd like to see. That would be competition without removing any functionality from Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, all systems allow you to import a self-signed certificate. There is the initial warning. However, once you tell the computer to trust it, it doesn't complain again.
SSL to an untrusted host is just as bad as no ssl because the man-in-the-middle (which is kind of the definition of an ISP) could easily produce a certificate that says, "hey, I'm what ever page you wanted to look at". And the insert ads.I've always wondered how this works. You make a self-signed certificate and publish it from your site. The ISP intercepts your certificate and replaces it with theirs. When a client requests a secure page, you transmit an encrypted page to the ISP. The ISP decrypts it using your certificate, inserts an ad, reencrypts it using their certificate, and transmits the modified page to the client. Is that about it?
So the problem isn't that "you have to either pay money or endure scary messages". It's that you need a reliable method of verifying the certificate.
Some time ago, I watched an Outer Limits that dealt with a similar issue. However, it wasn't making machine copies of ourselves. It was transporting long distances.
The transporting device worked by mapping every atom in the subject and transmitting that data to a far-away device. The far-away device would then construct the subject, from local material, using the transmitted data map. The original subject was terminated after the map was created.
A return trip would use the same procedures. At the end of the trip, the subject would exist in meat-space, have all the memories of the original subject, and all the memories acquired during the trip. However, the original subject would be long dead.
Now, given the concepts explored above, would being copied into a virtual existence be any different than being copied via the transporter device?
I admit, it's been a while. The last time I installed Windows on one of my computers was Windows XP Pro. I had just bought a new SATA motherboard. However, XP didn't have drivers for SATA. It was suggested that I download the drivers and save them to a floppy. However, the computer didn't have a floppy drive. That was when I learned how to streamline an install disk. I've never had to patch a Linux install disk to get it to work.
Besides that, it's nice to not have to shuffle through a dozen different disks, and twice as many reboots, just to get a usable system.
Now, as I said, this was a while ago. I moved into a job shortly afterward that required me to do mass installations. Microsoft's Windows PE is a nice system. It was really nice when they added the ability to contact a local server for drivers. However, even that needed to be patched to support the network card we were using. My one major complaint with the system is that it requires signed drivers. Every once in a while I encounter a piece of hardware that doesn't have signed drivers. And, every once in a while, I need to modify an INF file to add a PCI or USB id. This invalidates the signature.
The semi-public forums you list are formal in nature. Go to most informal public gatherings and you will find that people use a much more common variant of the language. Now, with your concern over what is said in public, I'd be very interested in your opinion concerning the public Internet. Would you favor a Federal law prohibiting Trolls on Slashdot, prohibiting top-posting on mailing lists, or prohibiting buzz-words on political sites? What is your opinion concerning the federal regulation of non-formal public gatherings, such as your local biker bar?
There are a variety of public forums available in the world. Why should informal forums be banned in this specific medium (public airwaves)? It certainly can't be due to the limited availability of frequency spectrum. In my area, there are 10 channels broadcast out of a possible 82. Digital television offers even more possible channels. If it's just a matter of forcing broadcasters to provide formal forums to the public, I'd think it would be a simple matter to delegate a block of the available channels to such an endeavor.
I swear that I saw a PBS show a few months back that claimed that alcohol converted testosterone into estrogen in males, and the opposite in females. However, I can't find any references now. A Google search showed several links that talked about alcohol inhibiting testosterone. I also found a few that mentioned a rise in estrogen resulting from the metabolic breakdown of alcohol in the liver. So your joke might not be too far from the truth.
Tivo is pretty much screwed at this point because most people are content with the crappy DVRs their cable/satellite providers now give them.
They are just going after Dish because DirecTV still has Tivo DVRs in service, they made a deal with Comcast (which uses Motorola), and Time Warner uses Scientific Atlanta which is a stretch to call it a DVR ("piece of crap" is a better term).
I have Dish DVR. I thought about switching to DirectTV to see what the competition offered. According to the DirectTV sales people, the DVR offered by DirectTV lacks a feature that I find important. I have a dual tuner dish and two TVs in my house. The DVR from Dish can record both signals and send them to both TVs at the same time.This means I can watch shows recorded on the DVR from either TV, record two shows at the same time, and still have independent channel switching. The DVR offered by DirectTV can't do this. I would need two DVRs and I wouldn't be able watch the content from DVR1 on TV2. If DirectTV uses Tivo, I'd say the DVR from Dish is better.
I thought this was interesting:
"We had another cut today between Dubai and Muscat three hours back. The cable was about 80G capacity, it had telephone, Internet data, everything," one Flag official, who declined to be named, told Zawya Dow Jones.
The cable, known as Falcon, delivers services to countries in the Mediterranean and Gulf region, he added.
"It may take sometime to fix the cut but we are rerouting the traffic to another cable in the U.K. and U.S., the bandwidth utilization will go down," the official said.
So, a "Flag official, who declined to be named" reports that a major portion of the Gulf region's communications are being rerouted through the US and UK.It's probably not as fishy as it sounds. I seem to recall a major portion of all Internet traffic at least passes through the US. However, it does make you wonder.
I own a bound copy of a screenplay for a movie called "iRobot". The screenplay has absolutely no relation to the movie of the same name. I believe it was an early draft to show producers. However, I'd much rather see the movie if it had followed this screenplay.
I'm just wondering how long it will be before some Windows user wants to show me a screen-shot. I can already play the conversation in my head:
"Hey, check out this cool, new desktop I downloaded. I bet your Linux machines don't have anything that compares."
Followed by:
"Wow, you have KDE on Linux already? You guys sure do clone software fast."
Where I live, you see a red light, you stop. The intersection clears itself because everyone is stopped. The emergency vehicle can easily get through the intersection by going around the stopped vehicles, into the oncoming lane, through the intersection, and back into the proper lane. If you are not at an intersection, move off the road.
Running a red light is only going to cause more accidents and more delays for the emergency vehicle.
If an application comes with KDE (KWrite for example), I can see adding the K. It signifies that the application is actually part of the KDE project. Developers outside the KDE project sometimes use the K to signify that the application depends on kdelibs. I think this is what started the problem. Gnome's use of G is a little more confusing to me. The G in Gnome stands for GNU. However, it's sometimes used by developers to signify that the application was designed for Gnome. Does that application use G to signify that it requires Gnome, or that the copyright is owned by the GNU foundation, or both? I would rather the G just signify that GNU owns the copyright.
Avidemux2 has an interesting scheme. They have an executionable that checks the name it was called by. It has soft links called avidemux_cli, avidemux_qt4, and avidemux_gtk. This makes much more sense. If your application depends on kdelibs, and it's not part of the KDE project, call it application_kde.
How about this. If it's in the KDE menu, it's a KDE APPLICATION! If it's in the Gnome menu, it's a GNOME APPLICATION!Gnome and KDE use the same configuration files for the menu ( /usr/share/applications/*.desktop ). You can edit the .desktop file to prevent it from appearing in one menu or the other. That way you can start gedit when in Gnome and kwrite when in KDE if that is what you want.
...most GUI apps are not started by typing in the actually program filename At least rename the shortcuts the GUI launches.On my K-Menu, under Graphics, is an icon labeled "GNU Image Manipulation Program". It starts the gimp-2.4 application. For the menu, it's fine that it's labeled "GNU Image Manipulation Program". However, I'd rather type gimp (or gimp-2.4) if I choose to start it from the command line. If most GUI apps are not started by typing in the actual program filename, then why would you need to rename the shortcuts the GUI launches? Just set the icon name to the longer name.
I'm curious about your definition of "Joe Average, the non-technical guy". Is this the Joe Average that has never visited Microsoft's main website, just clicks "Yes" to software updates provided by Windows Update, and at most changes the wallpaper and screen saver? Or is this the Joe Average that installs every virus that claims to remove viruses and surfs Warez sites? I can see where the second Joe Average might be a problem, on any platform.
So, what happens to Joe Average? He installs KDE4, tries out a few things, finds it broken in several places, not working as expected in others and not configurable where he may want it to be configurable. Compared to WinXP, it will feel to him as a significant step backwards (probably more because of the brokenness than the lack of features compared to KDE3). In the end, he'll just go back to Windows because, clearly Linux isn't there yet.That's a bit of a stretch. Joe started with a stable copy of KDE3. He played with it enough to figure out how to upgrade to KDE4 all on his own. In the end, if he is unhappy with KDE4, he will undo his upgrades and go back to KDE3. If Joe does react the way you predict, let's hope he doesn't come across a blog praising TWM.
A bit over the top. I was thinking more along the lines of telephone usage. If a neighbor asks to use the phone, I welcome them into my kitchen, sit at the table, and ask that they keep it local. I might even provide coffee. However, there is no way I'd ever attach a phone to the front gate and advertise it as free to the public.
As to the legal defense of having an open network, I would think it largely depends on how common and acceptable the practice is. If most people in an area have (and expect to be able to have) an open network, perhaps it would work well as a defense. I think this is largely what Bruce is advocating, making the practice common and acceptable.
Hmm, I wonder how it would handle on a 32MB PII? It's a laptop I'm putting together for my 4-year old. Unfortunately, the system max is 64MB and I haven't been able to find compatible memory for it. It does run Gentoo and GCompris rather nicely, using the matchbox window manager.
Things must have changed quite a bit in the last couple of years since I played around with software that generated code for you. All of my hand-written code starts with the right document type declaration and easily passes validation. However, I do get handed code that is automatically generated from time to time. I keep a program called Tidy around to strip all of the garbage out of it.
Props to Microsoft for offering some compatibility with standards. It might make my job a little easier.