It's not the year 10. It's the year 2010. Surely we've learnt to stop using two digits for our years?
Bah. Most industries don't even have to think about two digit year rollover for another 50 years at least, and 00 is 10 years behind us now so I think it's safe to start moving back to two digit year storage again.
While you can't discount it completely, Mars is only about 10% of the mass of Earth so weight is not such as big a problem. On a planet heavier than Earth it could be worse though...
On a planet where water is hard to find you might want to use something else as your shielding too.
If I found something like that on my car, I'd be parking the car somewhere really inconvenient and then calling the police about the ticking device on my car. Having them clear a x block radius around a major metropolitan area should get a bit of attention, and maybe I'd at least get a formal apology, or failing that, the fun of watching different government departments yelling at each other.
We used to live by a dirt road often frequented by trucks (so dust everywhere), and had a few hundred 3" disks and at the time myself and my siblings were all under 15 years of age, so not necessarily the most careful of people, and I only remember having one failed disk ever.
This contrasts sharply with the 3.5" disks these days which can't be trusted to successfully carry your data from one side of the room to another (admittedly, any disk drive these days is likely covered in dust, and old, and the data density is about 8x compared to the old 3" disks).
Didn't the Amstrad use a 3inch disk? I remember seeing a machine that did data conversion across disks/tapes and when I asked about anyone ever wanting data from Amstrads he said "Oh, the 3inch drive? It's cheaper than a blanking plate so we just stick one in but not bother wiring it up."
I always thought of it as a 3+1/4" disk but most of the literature these days calls it 3". The drive might have been cheap but in Australia we were paying $11/disk in the final days that we owned it.
This story is an amazing coincidence. I discovered relativity before Einstein, but I never published my findings. Do you agree recognition is long overdue?
I stole Einstein's research, applied it to building a time machine, then went back in time and discovered it before him. I _still_ didn't get recognition and worse still, his research now claims that time travel is impossible so I can't try it again.
I had an Amstrad CPC 664 in the 8 bit era, and it because fairly obvious even to a 9 year old that games were a fair bit cheaper on tape than they were on disk (possibly because Amstrad had made an unfortunate choice of 3.25" disks which quickly became very expensive, but more likely it was just a 'whatever the market can bear' thing). So i'd buy them on tape and copy them to disk - a single disk could normally hold anywhere from 10-20 tape games per side. At the start the games were trivially protected with a system-honoured no-copy flag so that the basic calls wouldn't work, but that was easy enough to defeat, but they quickly became more elaborate from different tape image type flags to completely custom tape I/O routines (but that was easy enough - just let the custom I/O routine load the data into memory then save it yourself). It ended up being more fun copying the game from tape to disk than actually playing it:)
My biggest thrill was finding a text message after decrypting layer upon layer of encrypted code congratulating me for getting that far and inviting me to call a phone number in the UK (I assume) (possibly the police:)
Sad to think it will never quite be like that again...
Write it yourself. The fact that you would even consider this without thinking about the potential for it to be a serious Career Limiting Move means that it should be a fun ride:)
Seriously though, install XP at some base service pack level - sp1 or sp2 might do, then connect it to the internet without any firewall. The viruses will find you.
But you could have a bit more fun than that. Write an exe file that simply pops up a "if this was a virus you'd be pwn3d by now" message. Then pick one of the popular kids in the class (lets call her Jane Smith), and send an email around to your whole class from an anonymous hotmail account (or some service that allows sending exe files) with a subject of "Ha Ha. Look at what Jane Smith got up to last night." and include the exe file with a message "pics attached". Fail everyone who opens it. You'll probably still lose your job due to the idiots they put in power, but at least you'll have taught your class a lesson (the lesson being "if you're a teacher, it pays not to think for yourself".)
You don't say what the age of your students is. If it's a university or TAFE level class you might get away with it, but you only have to offend one daddy's girl and it's all over.
I've often wondered why we have compact portable atomic bombs, but no compact portable atomic generators.
From the discovery of fire it was thousands of years before we figured out how to get useful mechanical work from it (steam engine etc). Lots of problems with nukes to be solved yet.
No, I'm thinking that some portable nuke plants are in order here. Even something that has to be mounted on a semi flatbed is going to be more useful than a solar panel. At least the flatbed could be rolled into a large trench and covered with camo netting and guarded by dirt and sandbag berms.
No matter what better-than-fossil-fuel energy source they bring into battle, it's going to be of interest to the enemy. It doesn't matter if it's nuclear, solar, or hamster wheels, if it works better than what they are using now then the enemy will want it.
Based on something I read recently about the army being a bit too chubby, maybe a few human powered 'hamster wheels' might be a good idea...
Most P2P protocols have at least some trouble working with local NAT. If it was implemented on a large scale there might be a few more problems, and it certainly gives ISP's (the ones running the NAT) more control over the traffic they route. I wonder how quickly the RIAA and friends will pick up on that and start pushing for NAT instead of IPv6...
I don't have any RSI, but I can see that this method of computer use would free my hands, which would be highly beneficial to 99% of my computer use...
Well... he said "most users" and you said "advanced users", so I think you're a little confused as to who you are actually disagreeing with.
FWIW, i'm a sysadmin, and every single one of my admin tasks is made harder since Vista came along. Everything I want to do involves at least two more clicks and a delay while the UAC prompt comes up. Just about everything has been renamed and/or moved for no obvious reason other than to make sure the user knows they are using the new modern Vista/7 OS and not the clunky old XP era OS.
a) Sharing duplicates is not theft of the original b) There are no canons on ships involved.
I know you're just trying to be funny but have you ever actually been to Eastern Europe??? Software theft over there is exactly that - guys with eye patches, wooden legs, and parrots on their shoulders cruising around in great big ships with canons on them. And when they duplicate your software, they do take the original too.
How will you support yourself when you are old then? Your kids won't because you won't have any, or you'll only have one. And don't tell me that all the stock and real estate you purchased will fund your retirement - it's not worth anything when there is nobody left to buy it or live in it.
You'll need a lot of immigrants to fill the holes left by your vanishing population. Fortunately the third world is full of people that would just love to come and live in your country.
Don't get me wrong, the world is definitely overpopulated, but dropping from 320 million to 50 million in 80 years is not a good way of doing it.
So does this involve an Oracle database somehow - in which case "Oracle" should have been capitalized - or are we talking about a real, honest-to-goodness oracle?
For a moment I thought we were talking about _the_ Oracle, although that also should have been capitalized. I think it's unwise to draw any conclusions from spelling or grammatical forms that you might see on the internet though. Even more unwise if the source is slashdot:)
An unidentified somebody pointing a gun at you means they intend to kill you.
Your daddy might have told you to never point a gun at anything you aren't going to kill, but the bad guys daddy might have told him that people are more likely to do what they want if you point a gun at them.
If they intended to kill you then you'll already be dead before you notice the gun pointing at you. If they haven't killed you yet then there's a good chance they won't unless you piss them off.
Putting the camera away is the LEAST of the actions you should take. Responding more accordingly would be a higher priority. I.e. somebody points a gun at you, you should shoot them. Afterall, they are making it clear they intend to kill you. It's you or them at that point.
"Excuse me Mr Bad Guy, just wait a second while I get my gun". If someone is pointing a gun at you and you make sudden 'getting my gun' movements then you are more likely to die, not less.
If your options do not include "shoot them" because you are unarmed, then that is entirely your own sorry fault. The choice may cost you your life. Good luck.
If most of the sheep have guns then I guess the rest of the sheep need guns too. Sounds like a real fun way to live. At least most of the crooks know they don't need to bring a gun with them - they'll almost certainly find one there anyway.
Where I live, having a gun in your car without a really really good reason would get you in big trouble.
"a non-uniformed police officer on a traffic stop using a non-labeled vehicle, not identifying himself as police before pointing a gun like a crazy man"?
I'm not completely sure but I think that someone pointing a gun at you in a public place has already waived their right to privacy, be they police office or generic crazy person.
That said, if someone points a gun at you, hasn't identified themselves as a police officer, and asks you to put the camera away, i think it's probably best to comply. There are no outcomes in such a situation that are going to be a win for privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
what does it taste like?
It's not the year 10. It's the year 2010. Surely we've learnt to stop using two digits for our years?
Bah. Most industries don't even have to think about two digit year rollover for another 50 years at least, and 00 is 10 years behind us now so I think it's safe to start moving back to two digit year storage again.
While you can't discount it completely, Mars is only about 10% of the mass of Earth so weight is not such as big a problem. On a planet heavier than Earth it could be worse though...
On a planet where water is hard to find you might want to use something else as your shielding too.
If I found something like that on my car, I'd be parking the car somewhere really inconvenient and then calling the police about the ticking device on my car. Having them clear a x block radius around a major metropolitan area should get a bit of attention, and maybe I'd at least get a formal apology, or failing that, the fun of watching different government departments yelling at each other.
We used to live by a dirt road often frequented by trucks (so dust everywhere), and had a few hundred 3" disks and at the time myself and my siblings were all under 15 years of age, so not necessarily the most careful of people, and I only remember having one failed disk ever.
This contrasts sharply with the 3.5" disks these days which can't be trusted to successfully carry your data from one side of the room to another (admittedly, any disk drive these days is likely covered in dust, and old, and the data density is about 8x compared to the old 3" disks).
Didn't the Amstrad use a 3inch disk? I remember seeing a machine that did data conversion across disks/tapes and when I asked about anyone ever wanting data from Amstrads he said "Oh, the 3inch drive? It's cheaper than a blanking plate so we just stick one in but not bother wiring it up."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_cpc#Floppy_disk_drive
I always thought of it as a 3+1/4" disk but most of the literature these days calls it 3". The drive might have been cheap but in Australia we were paying $11/disk in the final days that we owned it.
This story is an amazing coincidence. I discovered relativity before Einstein, but I never published my findings. Do you agree recognition is long overdue?
I stole Einstein's research, applied it to building a time machine, then went back in time and discovered it before him. I _still_ didn't get recognition and worse still, his research now claims that time travel is impossible so I can't try it again.
I had an Amstrad CPC 664 in the 8 bit era, and it because fairly obvious even to a 9 year old that games were a fair bit cheaper on tape than they were on disk (possibly because Amstrad had made an unfortunate choice of 3.25" disks which quickly became very expensive, but more likely it was just a 'whatever the market can bear' thing). So i'd buy them on tape and copy them to disk - a single disk could normally hold anywhere from 10-20 tape games per side. At the start the games were trivially protected with a system-honoured no-copy flag so that the basic calls wouldn't work, but that was easy enough to defeat, but they quickly became more elaborate from different tape image type flags to completely custom tape I/O routines (but that was easy enough - just let the custom I/O routine load the data into memory then save it yourself). It ended up being more fun copying the game from tape to disk than actually playing it :)
My biggest thrill was finding a text message after decrypting layer upon layer of encrypted code congratulating me for getting that far and inviting me to call a phone number in the UK (I assume) (possibly the police :)
Sad to think it will never quite be like that again...
Write it yourself. The fact that you would even consider this without thinking about the potential for it to be a serious Career Limiting Move means that it should be a fun ride :)
Seriously though, install XP at some base service pack level - sp1 or sp2 might do, then connect it to the internet without any firewall. The viruses will find you.
But you could have a bit more fun than that. Write an exe file that simply pops up a "if this was a virus you'd be pwn3d by now" message. Then pick one of the popular kids in the class (lets call her Jane Smith), and send an email around to your whole class from an anonymous hotmail account (or some service that allows sending exe files) with a subject of "Ha Ha. Look at what Jane Smith got up to last night." and include the exe file with a message "pics attached". Fail everyone who opens it. You'll probably still lose your job due to the idiots they put in power, but at least you'll have taught your class a lesson (the lesson being "if you're a teacher, it pays not to think for yourself".)
You don't say what the age of your students is. If it's a university or TAFE level class you might get away with it, but you only have to offend one daddy's girl and it's all over.
I've often wondered why we have compact portable atomic bombs, but no compact portable atomic generators.
From the discovery of fire it was thousands of years before we figured out how to get useful mechanical work from it (steam engine etc). Lots of problems with nukes to be solved yet.
No, I'm thinking that some portable nuke plants are in order here. Even something that has to be mounted on a semi flatbed is going to be more useful than a solar panel. At least the flatbed could be rolled into a large trench and covered with camo netting and guarded by dirt and sandbag berms.
No matter what better-than-fossil-fuel energy source they bring into battle, it's going to be of interest to the enemy. It doesn't matter if it's nuclear, solar, or hamster wheels, if it works better than what they are using now then the enemy will want it.
Based on something I read recently about the army being a bit too chubby, maybe a few human powered 'hamster wheels' might be a good idea...
Most P2P protocols have at least some trouble working with local NAT. If it was implemented on a large scale there might be a few more problems, and it certainly gives ISP's (the ones running the NAT) more control over the traffic they route. I wonder how quickly the RIAA and friends will pick up on that and start pushing for NAT instead of IPv6...
I don't have any RSI, but I can see that this method of computer use would free my hands, which would be highly beneficial to 99% of my computer use...
*snigger*
Oops. Got confused by the indenting. Bring on the abuse.
Couldn't disagree with you more.
Well... he said "most users" and you said "advanced users", so I think you're a little confused as to who you are actually disagreeing with.
FWIW, i'm a sysadmin, and every single one of my admin tasks is made harder since Vista came along. Everything I want to do involves at least two more clicks and a delay while the UAC prompt comes up. Just about everything has been renamed and/or moved for no obvious reason other than to make sure the user knows they are using the new modern Vista/7 OS and not the clunky old XP era OS.
cruising around in great big ships with canons on them
I didn't know they took canons.
Well... now you do. Sometimes the Pope goes along for the ride too.
a) Sharing duplicates is not theft of the original
b) There are no canons on ships involved.
I know you're just trying to be funny but have you ever actually been to Eastern Europe??? Software theft over there is exactly that - guys with eye patches, wooden legs, and parrots on their shoulders cruising around in great big ships with canons on them. And when they duplicate your software, they do take the original too.
How will you support yourself when you are old then? Your kids won't because you won't have any, or you'll only have one. And don't tell me that all the stock and real estate you purchased will fund your retirement - it's not worth anything when there is nobody left to buy it or live in it.
You'll need a lot of immigrants to fill the holes left by your vanishing population. Fortunately the third world is full of people that would just love to come and live in your country.
Don't get me wrong, the world is definitely overpopulated, but dropping from 320 million to 50 million in 80 years is not a good way of doing it.
The keys were SHA256 hashes based on the customer ID and some salt, I wished him good luck with that.
The difference between a determined hacker and a determined idiot is sometimes difficult to determine. Fortunately, even idiots get lucky sometimes :)
NEVER underestimate a determined hacker.
Especially one who's been told it can't be done.
browsed it briefly. Learnt a few new words.
Kind of dumb that "new porNographers" was listed there, as "porN" is already mentioned on its own.
Curious that "belgium" is deemed not offensive at all :)
Yeah. I can't see it being that spectacular past the opening credits (which will be cool).
So does this involve an Oracle database somehow - in which case "Oracle" should have been capitalized - or are we talking about a real, honest-to-goodness oracle?
For a moment I thought we were talking about _the_ Oracle, although that also should have been capitalized. I think it's unwise to draw any conclusions from spelling or grammatical forms that you might see on the internet though. Even more unwise if the source is slashdot :)
For instance, if you saw the phrase "I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse" on slashdot, it would be probably still be a story about equine masturbation.
An unidentified somebody pointing a gun at you means they intend to kill you.
Your daddy might have told you to never point a gun at anything you aren't going to kill, but the bad guys daddy might have told him that people are more likely to do what they want if you point a gun at them.
If they intended to kill you then you'll already be dead before you notice the gun pointing at you. If they haven't killed you yet then there's a good chance they won't unless you piss them off.
Putting the camera away is the LEAST of the actions you should take. Responding more accordingly would be a higher priority. I.e. somebody points a gun at you, you should shoot them. Afterall, they are making it clear they intend to kill you. It's you or them at that point.
"Excuse me Mr Bad Guy, just wait a second while I get my gun". If someone is pointing a gun at you and you make sudden 'getting my gun' movements then you are more likely to die, not less.
If your options do not include "shoot them" because you are unarmed, then that is entirely your own sorry fault. The choice may cost you your life. Good luck.
If most of the sheep have guns then I guess the rest of the sheep need guns too. Sounds like a real fun way to live. At least most of the crooks know they don't need to bring a gun with them - they'll almost certainly find one there anyway.
Where I live, having a gun in your car without a really really good reason would get you in big trouble.
That is true of anything. If it uses electricity, the plant efficiency is the same.
As a percentage of energy used, yes, but as a total the less energy you use the better.
Electrical radiant is not at all an inefficient way to heat your house.
Unless it's really really cold outside a heat pump (eg reverse cycle air conditioner) is a much more efficient solution.
"a non-uniformed police officer on a traffic stop using a non-labeled vehicle, not identifying himself as police before pointing a gun like a crazy man"?
I'm not completely sure but I think that someone pointing a gun at you in a public place has already waived their right to privacy, be they police office or generic crazy person.
That said, if someone points a gun at you, hasn't identified themselves as a police officer, and asks you to put the camera away, i think it's probably best to comply. There are no outcomes in such a situation that are going to be a win for privacy.