WTC/Pentagon attack sure was properly planned and "well-executed" but on a scale from 1 to 10 Osama would probably give it just a 7,5 rating. Too many things went "wrong" (mind you, in the terrorists view of the things).
If they had slowed down just a bit and waited another 30 minutes till the building was completely filled with workers, they probably would have killed a bunch more people.
You're right, though. They were clever, but they weren't *that* clever.
Go tell that to the people who bought mutual funds with those stocks
Yes, but those people in those mutual funds have been soaking up windfall profits for the last decade.
If you want your money to be safe, go stick it in Citibank (or your local equivalent) and earn next-to-no interest. If you want to make better returns, go invest in a variety of blue-chips (and accept that one or two of them might go bust every so often, but the cumulative return will be higher). If you want to make big gains but are prepared to lose big, go play with derivatives or invest in startups.
Every time you invest in the stock market, or get somebody else to do it for you, there's a risk of losing money. I've had some money in a mutual fund for the past five years (in Australia). Some quarters, the net value goes backwards signifcantly. Overall, my investment has doubled in value, and even taking inflation into account, I've made a good gain. But it might halve in value tomorrow. That's the risk you take.
Yes, I know that a lot of you seem to dislike the idea of unionism, but when employers start to pull this kind of crap wouldn't having the employees organised so that they can put pressure on employers to change policy (if they refuse to listen to common sense) be a good thing?
Virtually everybody that makes big, complex machinery that needs periodic repair tries to obfuscate things so that a) you have to use their spare parts, and b) you have to use their technicians to do it.
Photocopier makers used to be notorious for this sort of thing (they still are, it's just that all new photocopiers are now laser printers:) ).
Note that you can incorporate portions of the code into your proprietary product, which doesn't have to be released under the same license, and that you don't have to provide source. As far as the recipient of the software is concerned (who might go on to use sections of it in their own proprietary products), it is more liberal than the GPL.
Don't get confused, though, the developers, Xiph, still provide full source and thus the algorithms are completely public.
The reason the BSD license is chosen for this project is presumably the same reason the Vorbis libraries are BSD-licensed - so that VP3 support can be incorporated into proprietary software, which as I have posted elsewhere in this discussion is IMHO a good thing.
Microsoft and Apple already have plenty of proprietary video and audio codecs, some of which are de facto standards, so if they incorporate an incompatible hack of "VP3" that's bad luck, but doesn't actually makes things any worse.
If it's GPL'd, the above isn't possible. However, it's also much more difficult to incorporate unhacked VP3 support into their players and encoders, because they have to write their own code rather than just using the available library. That is bad, because we (the free software using community) *want* them to add VP3 support to their proprietary players. Let me repeat that - VP3 support in proprietary software is a good thing.
Why, you may ask? Because if it is available in the software that everybody uses (which, sadly, at this point is still proprietary software), it might become a de facto standard, become the standard format web video clips, for instance, are encoded in, and thus free software users are no longer second-class citizens when it comes to video codecs. Additionally, it makes the ultimate migration of Windows users over to free desktops that much easier.
I believe even RMS has agreed, on occasion, that the BSD license can be appropriate if it helps free file formats become the standard.
While you're printing numbers on the little beggars, could you do away with the penny? It's just a wallet-filler; you can't buy anything with it.
Australia did away with one and two cent pieces years ago and we don't miss them.
And, while you're at it, fix up your bloody immigration form you fill out on the plane to take a short trip to the States. As well as asking whether I was involved in the Jewish Holocaust (well, no, but I killed a few hundred Tutsis in Rwanda and the odd dozen Bosnians, but I suppose that's OK), it asks whether I had "committed any crimes of moral turpitude" (can I call my lawyer to determine whether killing Tutsis and Bosnians is a crime of moral turpitude? I don't feel in the least guilty about it, and given the last question it doesn't seem like the US is too cut up about it).
The key question with this device is: how fast can this thing move? IIRC, current airships really struggle on windy days to get *anywhere*. Funnily enough, major fires almost always occur on windy days. On the same note, if it's as slow as I'm expecting here, it's like to take hours and hours to get these things to a fire. The beauty of fixed-wing aircraft and even firefighting choppersis that you can have one base and have them fighting a fire hundreds of kilometres away in an hour.
Related to this issue is how manoeuverable this baby is in windy conditions at low altitudes. Fires happen on windy days, and if this baby can't manoeuver into position quickly and safely on a windy day it's going to be useless.
Their aerial reloading scheme sounds ridiculous. Whilst I have no doubt it can be made to work, technically, it makes no sense to have aircraft that could be dumping water directly on the fire refilling this beastie. The only systems that make sense are either a) hover and suck water out of a lake or river, or b) land and reload.
Both schemes have their problems - chiefly, how long it takes to descend and climb, which IIRC is really slow compared to other flying machines, and thus increasing the cycle time of the system. For the hover-reload system, you also need to adjust the lift really quickly to compensate for all that mass, which may well be the limiting factor on how fast the system can reload this way. Landing this beast won't be a quick process, either.
Finally, even given the vastly increased water-carrying capacity of this system, just dumping water in the general direction of fires isn't generally how they get put out. The water needs to be directed precisely. If they have to operate at high altitude, I can't see them being able to direct it precisely enough.
All in all, I don't see this idea being particularly useful for firefighting, unless it's a heck of a lot faster than what we generally envisiage airships to be.
It's not supposed to be a faithful rendition of the book. It's an extended mickey-taking of the wild-and-wacky political ideas expressed in it, and takes some potshots at war propaganda along the way.
Some even argue that Heinlein's book was itself a parody of those political attitudes, but if so it was way too subtle for most people to get.
There are two different issues here, one of great concern to the entire net, the other of concern primarily to online gamers.
The first issue is that somebody will figure out how to allow users to run unauthorised code, thus allowing the cheats that ruin PC online gaming to be replicated on the XBox and PS2. That's a worry for MS, Sony, and the gamers who want to play the games, but it's beatable in a closed system - make sure everybody in the system is identifiable to the operator as a real person, and if people are detected using bots (by either technical means or complaints from other users followed by monitoring) ban them from the system. Why is this more possible here than in the PC world? Simple. Microsoft and Sony can impose a monopoly on where you play online, which isn't the case for PC's.
The other issue is that somebody might figure out how to crack these boxes from afar (and, because they're all identical, once you've got one you've got them all). Now, people don't keep commercially-sensitive data on them, so the worst that can happen from the owner's POV is that the box is rendered unusable and they have to take it back to the store. However, they'd make a really good place to run DDoS's from.
The best way to make this harder, IMHO, would be to require people using these boxes to use special broadband connections that have been firewalled upstream to let only let normal traffic in and out - nobody should be trying to establish connections with these consoles, and the only things they should be trying to connect to are the game servers. Anything else should be firewalled off. The firewall would presumably be carefully monitored.
One wonders also whether game code runs "as root" on the XBox. Obviously such code should have direct access to the video hardware, but whether it has unfettered access to the file system is another question. Surely it's possible given the restricted functionality available and given an unmodified XBox, that only code signed by Microsoft can alter certain key files? (In other words, avoid "local root exploits" in services runnable by game code). That way, even if a game has a buffer overflow or the like in its network code, nothing too serious can be compromised and the problem presumably goes away on power-cycle when the whole game is reloaded fresh from DVD.
Normally, it takes technologies like this very little time to spread themselves around the world. However, there's nothing like Tivo available yet in Australia, or for that matter anywhere outside the States AFAIK.
Now that the technology has been debugged and the business case proved, why the hell can't we buy these things here?
Yes, I know Andrew Tridgell hacked one to make it work, but surely we don't have to go to that kind of effort to make it work . . .
Australians tend to be much more pragmatic about things than Americans, who will often fight something tooth-and-nail on principle whereas we (speaking in generalizations here) don't really care until something starts to have concrete effects. Hence, this system has been totally uncontroversial because it's been totally ineffective. Therefore, there's been no incentive for it to leak. If this list actually started affecting people, it almost certainly would.
Stuff *hosted* domestically has been issued with takedown notices (legal LART's, as one other poster has put it) - we don't know exactly what, but it's most likely porn. Consequently, the local online pornographers have shifted to overseas hosting services. Interestingly enough, nobody has paid any attention to newsgroup porn, all manner of which is still hosted on domestic news servers including the big part government owned ISP/Telco Telstra. Nobody is blocking *any* IP's from overseas, so no technical countermeasures are required.
ISP's are, however, required to offer their customers Netnanny-style filtering software (from an approved list of filtering software providers) which additionally checks the government's list of blocked sites. Last I heard the takeup rate on that software was approximately 0%:)
As I've said before several times here, it was just a stunt to keep a particular federal Senator on side for a vote on tax changes. It's a stupid law, but compared to the *other* stupid things this particular government has done (and their are scads of them) this one at least has the virtue of being irrelevant.
Middle class by American standards maybe, but still very, very rich by the standards of the country. And, to be fair, their ancestors forcibly took land off the original inhabitants. So it's not unreasonable for the native inhabitants to want a chance to own some of their land again.
However, using mob violence to transfer land from largely white landowners who at least paid their workforce and ran the land reasonably efficiently, to a bunch of party cronies whose only skills are violence and sucking up, isn't going to help the welfare of the Zimbabwean people one iota.
But, frankly, that's all pretty irrelevant compared to the other big issue facing Zimbabwe. It's estimated that 25% of the adult population is HIV-positive. The ability to treat them will be pretty minimal, so they will likely die painful, extended deaths within a decade or so. And before you go on about malaria and other diseases, they kill young children and the elderly. AIDS largely kills adults in the prime of their life, thus ripping the guts out of their society. Puts things in perspective, doesn't it?
All the more shameful is Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and the rest of the putatively democratic ANC's refusal to speak out against Mugabe and his thugs.
Yeah, it's pretty disappointing, but to be fair it's a lot easier to say those kinds of things when you don't have to live next door to them. The Australian government is, for instance, mealy-mouthed about Indonesia's corruption and thuggery, mainly because there are certain things we need from Indonesia (like not letting drug and people smugglers through, and shutting down Al-Queda cells there) and if we don't kiss their arse occasionally they are petulant enough to stop doing those things to spite us. Similar things probably apply WRT Zimbabwe and SA. They did have the courtesy to go along (once beaten round the head by the UK, NZ, and to a lesser extent Australia) with the suspension of Zimbabwe from the British Commonwealth (which says to the world that they now regard Zimbabwe as undemocratic).
Of course there's the issue that some in the ANC, whatever the leadership knows, probably have a sneaking sympathy for people sticking it to rich white landowners.
There's around 4 million people in greater Sydney. If it was in the States, it would be approximately the tenth biggest city. Not even the MPAA or the Wachowski brothers can shut down a city that size just for the hell of it:)
Amnesty International, as well as the EFA and some of the other civil liberties groups, has been harassing senators over this one. Consequently, it's not only the opposition narky about this bill, it's a fair number of members of the government as well.
It's kinda nice to see that some politicians can actually be convinced to act wrt privacy and civil liberties if they're prodded hard enough.
I used it in my final year project. The only problem I had with it at the time was a documentation issue - they don't actually specify the runtimes of their algorithms.
However, it was certainly pretty damn fast, and I didn't come across any bugs.
Occasionally the book publishing industry does try and nibble away at libraries' privileges. They mostly lose because of the wonderful image libraries tend to have. There have been/. stories in the past on just this point (somebody else can dig them up if they're interested).
Whilst I don't have a 1000 uid, I've been around here for a long, long, time. Mr Warner has been making, er, "provocative" comments for as long as I can remember. Just like/. has *always* had duplicate stories and editors who can't spell.
Radio hams can do some pretty amazing things, but I dunno how they can overcome the fact that receiving weak signals from that far out requires a really big dish to collect enough signal.
Of course, you wouldn't put it past ham radio people to build their own 70-metre dish if they really put their minds to it:)
Slashdot Mirror
If they had slowed down just a bit and waited another 30 minutes till the building was completely filled with workers, they probably would have killed a bunch more people.
You're right, though. They were clever, but they weren't *that* clever.
Yes, but those people in those mutual funds have been soaking up windfall profits for the last decade.
If you want your money to be safe, go stick it in Citibank (or your local equivalent) and earn next-to-no interest. If you want to make better returns, go invest in a variety of blue-chips (and accept that one or two of them might go bust every so often, but the cumulative return will be higher). If you want to make big gains but are prepared to lose big, go play with derivatives or invest in startups.
Every time you invest in the stock market, or get somebody else to do it for you, there's a risk of losing money. I've had some money in a mutual fund for the past five years (in Australia). Some quarters, the net value goes backwards signifcantly. Overall, my investment has doubled in value, and even taking inflation into account, I've made a good gain. But it might halve in value tomorrow. That's the risk you take.
Yes, I know that a lot of you seem to dislike the idea of unionism, but when employers start to pull this kind of crap wouldn't having the employees organised so that they can put pressure on employers to change policy (if they refuse to listen to common sense) be a good thing?
Photocopier makers used to be notorious for this sort of thing (they still are, it's just that all new photocopiers are now laser printers :) ).
In a word, no. The Xfree project's license is a good example of a modern "BSD license".
Note that you can incorporate portions of the code into your proprietary product, which doesn't have to be released under the same license, and that you don't have to provide source. As far as the recipient of the software is concerned (who might go on to use sections of it in their own proprietary products), it is more liberal than the GPL.
Don't get confused, though, the developers, Xiph, still provide full source and thus the algorithms are completely public.
The reason the BSD license is chosen for this project is presumably the same reason the Vorbis libraries are BSD-licensed - so that VP3 support can be incorporated into proprietary software, which as I have posted elsewhere in this discussion is IMHO a good thing.
If it's GPL'd, the above isn't possible. However, it's also much more difficult to incorporate unhacked VP3 support into their players and encoders, because they have to write their own code rather than just using the available library. That is bad, because we (the free software using community) *want* them to add VP3 support to their proprietary players. Let me repeat that - VP3 support in proprietary software is a good thing.
Why, you may ask? Because if it is available in the software that everybody uses (which, sadly, at this point is still proprietary software), it might become a de facto standard, become the standard format web video clips, for instance, are encoded in, and thus free software users are no longer second-class citizens when it comes to video codecs. Additionally, it makes the ultimate migration of Windows users over to free desktops that much easier.
I believe even RMS has agreed, on occasion, that the BSD license can be appropriate if it helps free file formats become the standard.
It's very much still in business.
And, while you're at it, fix up your bloody immigration form you fill out on the plane to take a short trip to the States. As well as asking whether I was involved in the Jewish Holocaust (well, no, but I killed a few hundred Tutsis in Rwanda and the odd dozen Bosnians, but I suppose that's OK), it asks whether I had "committed any crimes of moral turpitude" (can I call my lawyer to determine whether killing Tutsis and Bosnians is a crime of moral turpitude? I don't feel in the least guilty about it, and given the last question it doesn't seem like the US is too cut up about it).
Related to this issue is how manoeuverable this baby is in windy conditions at low altitudes. Fires happen on windy days, and if this baby can't manoeuver into position quickly and safely on a windy day it's going to be useless.
Their aerial reloading scheme sounds ridiculous. Whilst I have no doubt it can be made to work, technically, it makes no sense to have aircraft that could be dumping water directly on the fire refilling this beastie. The only systems that make sense are either a) hover and suck water out of a lake or river, or b) land and reload.
Both schemes have their problems - chiefly, how long it takes to descend and climb, which IIRC is really slow compared to other flying machines, and thus increasing the cycle time of the system. For the hover-reload system, you also need to adjust the lift really quickly to compensate for all that mass, which may well be the limiting factor on how fast the system can reload this way. Landing this beast won't be a quick process, either.
Finally, even given the vastly increased water-carrying capacity of this system, just dumping water in the general direction of fires isn't generally how they get put out. The water needs to be directed precisely. If they have to operate at high altitude, I can't see them being able to direct it precisely enough.
All in all, I don't see this idea being particularly useful for firefighting, unless it's a heck of a lot faster than what we generally envisiage airships to be.
The Wikipedia has extensive discussion on this topic here.
Some even argue that Heinlein's book was itself a parody of those political attitudes, but if so it was way too subtle for most people to get.
The other issue is that somebody might figure out how to crack these boxes from afar (and, because they're all identical, once you've got one you've got them all). Now, people don't keep commercially-sensitive data on them, so the worst that can happen from the owner's POV is that the box is rendered unusable and they have to take it back to the store. However, they'd make a really good place to run DDoS's from.
The best way to make this harder, IMHO, would be to require people using these boxes to use special broadband connections that have been firewalled upstream to let only let normal traffic in and out - nobody should be trying to establish connections with these consoles, and the only things they should be trying to connect to are the game servers. Anything else should be firewalled off. The firewall would presumably be carefully monitored.
One wonders also whether game code runs "as root" on the XBox. Obviously such code should have direct access to the video hardware, but whether it has unfettered access to the file system is another question. Surely it's possible given the restricted functionality available and given an unmodified XBox, that only code signed by Microsoft can alter certain key files? (In other words, avoid "local root exploits" in services runnable by game code). That way, even if a game has a buffer overflow or the like in its network code, nothing too serious can be compromised and the problem presumably goes away on power-cycle when the whole game is reloaded fresh from DVD.
Now that the technology has been debugged and the business case proved, why the hell can't we buy these things here?
Yes, I know Andrew Tridgell hacked one to make it work, but surely we don't have to go to that kind of effort to make it work . . .
Australians tend to be much more pragmatic about things than Americans, who will often fight something tooth-and-nail on principle whereas we (speaking in generalizations here) don't really care until something starts to have concrete effects. Hence, this system has been totally uncontroversial because it's been totally ineffective. Therefore, there's been no incentive for it to leak. If this list actually started affecting people, it almost certainly would.
ISP's are, however, required to offer their customers Netnanny-style filtering software (from an approved list of filtering software providers) which additionally checks the government's list of blocked sites. Last I heard the takeup rate on that software was approximately 0% :)
As I've said before several times here, it was just a stunt to keep a particular federal Senator on side for a vote on tax changes. It's a stupid law, but compared to the *other* stupid things this particular government has done (and their are scads of them) this one at least has the virtue of being irrelevant.
However, using mob violence to transfer land from largely white landowners who at least paid their workforce and ran the land reasonably efficiently, to a bunch of party cronies whose only skills are violence and sucking up, isn't going to help the welfare of the Zimbabwean people one iota.
But, frankly, that's all pretty irrelevant compared to the other big issue facing Zimbabwe. It's estimated that 25% of the adult population is HIV-positive. The ability to treat them will be pretty minimal, so they will likely die painful, extended deaths within a decade or so. And before you go on about malaria and other diseases, they kill young children and the elderly. AIDS largely kills adults in the prime of their life, thus ripping the guts out of their society. Puts things in perspective, doesn't it?
Yeah, it's pretty disappointing, but to be fair it's a lot easier to say those kinds of things when you don't have to live next door to them. The Australian government is, for instance, mealy-mouthed about Indonesia's corruption and thuggery, mainly because there are certain things we need from Indonesia (like not letting drug and people smugglers through, and shutting down Al-Queda cells there) and if we don't kiss their arse occasionally they are petulant enough to stop doing those things to spite us. Similar things probably apply WRT Zimbabwe and SA. They did have the courtesy to go along (once beaten round the head by the UK, NZ, and to a lesser extent Australia) with the suspension of Zimbabwe from the British Commonwealth (which says to the world that they now regard Zimbabwe as undemocratic).
Of course there's the issue that some in the ANC, whatever the leadership knows, probably have a sneaking sympathy for people sticking it to rich white landowners.
Wherever you live, you must have a better class of redneck. Here it's GutRot Lager, or premix rocketfuel and Coke.
There's around 4 million people in greater Sydney. If it was in the States, it would be approximately the tenth biggest city. Not even the MPAA or the Wachowski brothers can shut down a city that size just for the hell of it :)
It's kinda nice to see that some politicians can actually be convinced to act wrt privacy and civil liberties if they're prodded hard enough.
However, it was certainly pretty damn fast, and I didn't come across any bugs.
Occasionally the book publishing industry does try and nibble away at libraries' privileges. They mostly lose because of the wonderful image libraries tend to have. There have been /. stories in the past on just this point (somebody else can dig them up if they're interested).
Whilst I don't have a 1000 uid, I've been around here for a long, long, time. Mr Warner has been making, er, "provocative" comments for as long as I can remember. Just like /. has *always* had duplicate stories and editors who can't spell.
Of course, you wouldn't put it past ham radio people to build their own 70-metre dish if they really put their minds to it :)
The antennas on the satellites are fine. The antenna dishes *on the ground* have been out in the weather for decades and need renovation.