Our water supply is metered, as is anyone in Australia who is on 'mains' water. Reading my water service contract, they won't cut off your water supply completely if you fail to pay your bills, but they will install a choke to cut down the flow so you can use it for drinking and cooking but not much else. I guess it will fill up a toilet too if you wait long enough.
I'm finding more and more articles that appear on Slashdot, appear on an au news site that I read (http://abc.net.au/news) days, even weeks, beforehand.
If a million crackpots come up with new technologies to attract venture capital for a million years, one of them might actually stumble across an actual new technology. Maybe todays that day?
I think that human beings are an incredibly variable lot, and some people can tolerate the effects of caffeine (and indeed lack of sleep) a lot better than others.
Caffeine makes me jumpy and makes my heart feel like it's doing crazy things long before it really starts to keep me awake. And when it does keep me awake, it might as well not for all the difference it makes to my productivity.
Pseudoephedrine on the other hand... wheeeeeeeeeeee:)
Why would a person with actual esp want to claim a million by exposing themselves as having real powers? They can get enough money to set themselves up for life by getting the numbers to a decent lottery draw, and nobody need know anything other than that they were very lucky, once.
If I could read minds and/or predict the future i sure as hell wouldn't want anyone to know about it.
I think some of the point of this (apart from making Linux do something pretty cool:) was that by milking the cows when they are ready to be milked, they are happier and maybe (i don't think the article mentioned it) have a higher milk output. Remember that a cows milk is normally there to feed baby cows, which feed throughout the day, not once in the morning and once at night.
This couldn't easily be done with a casual workforce - cows are normally on farms which tend to be some distance from population centers. Nobody will want to get woken up at 3 in the morning just because a cow suddenly feels like getting milked.
Also, more technology like this means more jobs for us nerds:)
Personally, I find the idea of an adult human drinking milk from another mammal pretty odd, but according to the size of the dairy industy, i'm in the minority.
I owned a PCChips motherboard once, back in the days when the Pentium166 was about a mid-range computer. Horrible beast. I think i had to underclock the CPU and FSB to make it work reliably, and the IDE BMDMA drivers for windows didn't really exist, and enabling DMA under linux caused corruption that was undetected by the drivers. I only detected it by copying large files around and comparing them. My filesystem was hosed many times until I figured out what was causing it and turned DMA off.
Also, I think (although I may be wrong, it was quite a while ago) that PCChips were the ones who put fake L2 cache chips on the motherboard. They looked like cache but were in fact not.
I must be an even-older-timer... I remember the days of 'dumb' modems which didn't have any real intelligence, eg didn't do commands at all.
The Commodore 64 modem was capable of auto dialling by pulsing the DTR line (which in turn took the line on/off hook) at the correct rates. I wrote some code for my modem on the Amiga which did much the same thing on the modem I had for that. I was about 13 at the time though... maybe i'm not such an old timer:)
For a while I was also able to dial a phone manually too, by flicking the hang up thing at the appropriate frequencies.
Along the same lines, it seems like they have accomplished two mutually unnecessary feats. If it can be charged from outside the body, then it hardly needs to last 12 years does it?
If you created a battery that should be charged every 12 months (but would run for, say, 36 months in case you were a bit slack about your yearly checkup+recharge), it could be much smaller than the 12 year version. And I for one would feel much better knowing I wasn't carrying around so much lithium.
Make sure you don't use the cheaper third party battery though, they've been known to explode:)
I can see it now, instead of these 'sniffer' things, you walk through a furnace. If you explode, you probably had a bomb. If you merely burn, then you were probably clean.
They tried a similar thing a while back when hunting witches.
Could there be a way of determining the distance of the card from the reader, that couldn't be trivially worked around? Obviously a simple radio ping wouldn't cut it as that could be spoofed by the repeater, and I have no idea if the distances we are talking about could even be measurable (mm vs 10's of m)
So I guess the ping would have to involve the same sort of rsa, which would make any timing measurement unusable.
Which pretty much means that 'no' is the answer to my question.
Many many people are posting along these lines. Do you all really think that Mastercard hasn't already thought of this and solved it???
A simple solution would be to have an RSA key + engine on the card, so that the 'scanner' issues a challenge to the card and if the card can supply the decrypted string then it passes. A limit of 1 challenge per 30 seconds would stop anyone getting any useful data out of it. Presumably this is do-able using today's technology... or would an RSA engine use more power than could be received via the RF?
And the security guards will jump you when you walk _into_ the store if you don't have a credit card on you, since obviously you are there to steal stuff.
Whenever a genetic disease kills a person, that's evolution.
Not quite. You'd have to be killed before you were able to pass on your genetic material.
Strictly speaking, evolution is just what happens when an organism (or group of organisms) has a combination of features (as dictated by their dna) that allow them to have more offspring who in turn carry that dna and are able to reproduce more successfully.
I just noticed for the first time yesterday that my laptop keyboard has two pipe/backslash keys on it! I was logged into a server in the UK (I'm in Australia) and found that my pipe key was mapped to something else ($ i think, because shift+4 is the pound sign). Then I found another one next to the spacebar that i'd never noticed before, and that worked.
This is the laptop i've had for just shy of 3 years (I know this because it is failing badly and I just found out that the warranty runs out in a few days:).
You're probably right. On the other hand, if they had sold them with only the bluray drives (no option of dvd), then nobody would be able to copy them initially, and assuming bluray-r technology becomes available (i'm assuming it won't be available initially), the cost of blanks will be more expensive than the games initially and the cost of a burner too high to make it worthwhile.
Roll on the game royalties!!!
(of course the other side of this is that nobody will buy one because you can't get illegally copied games:)
I have a company car. If I don't do at least 25000 kilometers / year my FBT rate pretty much doubles. Shows how much the government cares about the economy:)
(and to my wife who snoops on slashdot to see what i've been posting -:p )
Any substance that, when withdrwn from, gives you headaches, the sweats and severe drowsiness can be classified as a toxin to the body.
Another interpretation of that would be that headaches, sweating, and drowsiness are signs that you aren't getting enough coffee!!!
Myself, I could count the cups of coffee i've drunk in my life (30 years of it) on one hand. I've seen too many people try to give it up to want to drink it regularly, and i'm highly strung enough as it is. Plus, if I really need it, one can of caffeinated softdrink will keep me awake for a lot longer than if I was a regular drinker:)
So my solution of genetically engineering a rapid growing sea sponge to soak up the oceans a bit won't work? dammit.
Seriously though, doesn't water reach maximum density at 4 degrees celsius, and that this is the reason the oceans don't freeze solid? Assuming that is true (eg my memory of something i learnt at school 20 years ago:), by increasing the ocean temperature won't water expand? it wouldn't take much expansion percentage wise to push the oceans up by an uncomfortable amount...
Slashdot Mirror
Our water supply is metered, as is anyone in Australia who is on 'mains' water. Reading my water service contract, they won't cut off your water supply completely if you fail to pay your bills, but they will install a choke to cut down the flow so you can use it for drinking and cooking but not much else. I guess it will fill up a toilet too if you wait long enough.
and here's me without my mod points :(
I'm finding more and more articles that appear on Slashdot, appear on an au news site that I read (http://abc.net.au/news) days, even weeks, beforehand.
Yet I still keep reading slashdot...
If a million crackpots come up with new technologies to attract venture capital for a million years, one of them might actually stumble across an actual new technology. Maybe todays that day?
Alternatively, they could be using slashdot to come up with an idea of how their technology works, and then implement that :)
I think that human beings are an incredibly variable lot, and some people can tolerate the effects of caffeine (and indeed lack of sleep) a lot better than others.
:)
Caffeine makes me jumpy and makes my heart feel like it's doing crazy things long before it really starts to keep me awake. And when it does keep me awake, it might as well not for all the difference it makes to my productivity.
Pseudoephedrine on the other hand... wheeeeeeeeeeee
Why would a person with actual esp want to claim a million by exposing themselves as having real powers? They can get enough money to set themselves up for life by getting the numbers to a decent lottery draw, and nobody need know anything other than that they were very lucky, once.
If I could read minds and/or predict the future i sure as hell wouldn't want anyone to know about it.
I think some of the point of this (apart from making Linux do something pretty cool :) was that by milking the cows when they are ready to be milked, they are happier and maybe (i don't think the article mentioned it) have a higher milk output. Remember that a cows milk is normally there to feed baby cows, which feed throughout the day, not once in the morning and once at night.
:)
This couldn't easily be done with a casual workforce - cows are normally on farms which tend to be some distance from population centers. Nobody will want to get woken up at 3 in the morning just because a cow suddenly feels like getting milked.
Also, more technology like this means more jobs for us nerds
Personally, I find the idea of an adult human drinking milk from another mammal pretty odd, but according to the size of the dairy industy, i'm in the minority.
I owned a PCChips motherboard once, back in the days when the Pentium166 was about a mid-range computer. Horrible beast. I think i had to underclock the CPU and FSB to make it work reliably, and the IDE BMDMA drivers for windows didn't really exist, and enabling DMA under linux caused corruption that was undetected by the drivers. I only detected it by copying large files around and comparing them. My filesystem was hosed many times until I figured out what was causing it and turned DMA off.
Also, I think (although I may be wrong, it was quite a while ago) that PCChips were the ones who put fake L2 cache chips on the motherboard. They looked like cache but were in fact not.
I can't think of a situation where an eNewsPaper would require more than one page of ePaper... isn't that the whole idea?
I must be an even-older-timer... I remember the days of 'dumb' modems which didn't have any real intelligence, eg didn't do commands at all.
:)
The Commodore 64 modem was capable of auto dialling by pulsing the DTR line (which in turn took the line on/off hook) at the correct rates. I wrote some code for my modem on the Amiga which did much the same thing on the modem I had for that. I was about 13 at the time though... maybe i'm not such an old timer
For a while I was also able to dial a phone manually too, by flicking the hang up thing at the appropriate frequencies.
Along the same lines, it seems like they have accomplished two mutually unnecessary feats. If it can be charged from outside the body, then it hardly needs to last 12 years does it?
:)
If you created a battery that should be charged every 12 months (but would run for, say, 36 months in case you were a bit slack about your yearly checkup+recharge), it could be much smaller than the 12 year version. And I for one would feel much better knowing I wasn't carrying around so much lithium.
Make sure you don't use the cheaper third party battery though, they've been known to explode
I can see it now, instead of these 'sniffer' things, you walk through a furnace. If you explode, you probably had a bomb. If you merely burn, then you were probably clean.
They tried a similar thing a while back when hunting witches.
Could there be a way of determining the distance of the card from the reader, that couldn't be trivially worked around? Obviously a simple radio ping wouldn't cut it as that could be spoofed by the repeater, and I have no idea if the distances we are talking about could even be measurable (mm vs 10's of m)
So I guess the ping would have to involve the same sort of rsa, which would make any timing measurement unusable.
Which pretty much means that 'no' is the answer to my question.
Many many people are posting along these lines. Do you all really think that Mastercard hasn't already thought of this and solved it???
A simple solution would be to have an RSA key + engine on the card, so that the 'scanner' issues a challenge to the card and if the card can supply the decrypted string then it passes. A limit of 1 challenge per 30 seconds would stop anyone getting any useful data out of it. Presumably this is do-able using today's technology... or would an RSA engine use more power than could be received via the RF?
I'm sure there are many other solutions too.
And the security guards will jump you when you walk _into_ the store if you don't have a credit card on you, since obviously you are there to steal stuff.
Whenever a genetic disease kills a person, that's evolution.
Not quite. You'd have to be killed before you were able to pass on your genetic material.
Strictly speaking, evolution is just what happens when an organism (or group of organisms) has a combination of features (as dictated by their dna) that allow them to have more offspring who in turn carry that dna and are able to reproduce more successfully.
I just noticed for the first time yesterday that my laptop keyboard has two pipe/backslash keys on it! I was logged into a server in the UK (I'm in Australia) and found that my pipe key was mapped to something else ($ i think, because shift+4 is the pound sign). Then I found another one next to the spacebar that i'd never noticed before, and that worked.
:).
This is the laptop i've had for just shy of 3 years (I know this because it is failing badly and I just found out that the warranty runs out in a few days
You're probably right. On the other hand, if they had sold them with only the bluray drives (no option of dvd), then nobody would be able to copy them initially, and assuming bluray-r technology becomes available (i'm assuming it won't be available initially), the cost of blanks will be more expensive than the games initially and the cost of a burner too high to make it worthwhile.
:)
Roll on the game royalties!!!
(of course the other side of this is that nobody will buy one because you can't get illegally copied games
What's with that?
I have a company car. If I don't do at least 25000 kilometers / year my FBT rate pretty much doubles. Shows how much the government cares about the economy :)
:p )
(and to my wife who snoops on slashdot to see what i've been posting -
Any substance that, when withdrwn from, gives you headaches, the sweats and severe drowsiness can be classified as a toxin to the body.
:)
Another interpretation of that would be that headaches, sweating, and drowsiness are signs that you aren't getting enough coffee!!!
Myself, I could count the cups of coffee i've drunk in my life (30 years of it) on one hand. I've seen too many people try to give it up to want to drink it regularly, and i'm highly strung enough as it is. Plus, if I really need it, one can of caffeinated softdrink will keep me awake for a lot longer than if I was a regular drinker
So my solution of genetically engineering a rapid growing sea sponge to soak up the oceans a bit won't work? dammit.
:), by increasing the ocean temperature won't water expand? it wouldn't take much expansion percentage wise to push the oceans up by an uncomfortable amount...
Seriously though, doesn't water reach maximum density at 4 degrees celsius, and that this is the reason the oceans don't freeze solid? Assuming that is true (eg my memory of something i learnt at school 20 years ago
... Robocop then.
Sometimes just rotating the drive quickly by snapping your wrist back and forth would do it
:)
and sometimes, if the stiction was great enough, it would tear the heads from their mountings