Why not *both* conservation *and* increased generation? I mean, I agree with you completely, in that we can't use efficiency to solve our energy problems - not only do we have to deal with population growth, but there's also the issue of other countries developing, so that their populations use more energy per-capita.
To top all that off, if you make things more efficient, people will use them more. So, if someone's car gets 50% more miles per gallon, they're very likely to drive 50% or 60% more miles than they would with a less efficient car. True, some people will drive the same, but lots of other people will just drive more (use the increased efficiency to live farther from work or school, or maybe take more weekend recreational trips, etc).
But, efficiency is still a good thing. Why? It acts like a multiplier for any new generation brought online. If you increase energy efficiency by, say, 30 percent, then every Gigawatt of production you bring online is like 1.43 Gigawatts. See what I'm saying? If you could achieve an across-the-board efficiency gain of 50%, that's like getting 2GW of generation for every 1GW you bring actually online. Although. . . 30-50 percent efficiency gains, across-the-board, seems rather unrealistic, but who knows?
Dunno if this is gonna happen yet, or not, but I've seen articles about the use of oLed sheets as light sources - instead of being a 'bulb' in the usual sense, think more like those ceiling mounted fluorescent light fixtures with diffusers so common in schools, office buildings, and retail. Or, think of a computer monitor that is all white (although, the light need not be pure white - could be offwhite colors - could even change the color when you want, maybe), but brighter. They also say that OLEDs will become thin and flexible, so you could take your OLED 'film' and wrap it around a curved surface or something.
So, you could have lighting that looks like a sort of 'standard' table-lamp with a lampshade - except the 'lampshade' is actually the OLED 'film', giving off light directly into the room, with no bulb inside the lampshade.
That's still a number of years into the future, if it ever happens. OLEDs have to become many times cheaper than they are now before that'll happen.
Well, they never actually say how *much* energy is used, specifically, to calculate the energy used, *but* I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that since the laser pulse only lasts a femtosecond (they do say that, specifically), it's not really using that much energy. Femto prefix indicates 1*10^-15, or 1 divided by a number which is 1 with 15 zeroes after it. That's an incredibly small amount of time. So, even if the power used is rated in Gigawatts, or even thousands of Gigawatts, remembering that Watts = Joules per second, the actual Joules of energy used is likely to be very small, because of the much-less-than-1-second time it runs.
It's like thinking in terms of, if I'm traveling at a speed of 1 million miles per hour, for one femtosecond, how far have I moved? Answer: 0.0000000176 inches.
Honestly, Slashdot moderation is a mystery to me. This particular post was not something I consider anywhere close to my best work - it was just throwing out some off-the-cuff thoughts of things that *might or might not* be problems - in Ohio, we don't have many (any?) concrete roads, so I have very limited experience with them. Sounds like those aren't really problems.
Of course, that comment gets modded +5. Some of what I consider my *better* comments have often gotten no moderation, or negative moderation.
I begin to think slashdot moderation is a lottery system. *grin*
Can anyone who is familiar with both, tell me - Google Wave sounds to me to be awefully similar to Microsoft Office Groove - but more open, so that potentially anyone can use it? Am I far off the mark here? From the descriptions I've seen, it sounds kind of similar to Groove. Only using open, cross-platform, standards-based technologies (HTML, Jabber, etc)?
Let's not forget the Anti-virus vendors "quietly installs Firefox Extension", and I think Java also does, no? And yes, this is not news - it's a dupe of a story/. posted months ago.
Personally, I don't really care. I installed.Net support on my computer, and if Microsoft adds a Firefox extension to allow.Net in Firefox in addition to IE, that just means Firefox (at least on Windows) will work with more websites (although, ideally, websites wouldn't be embedding non-cross-platform.Net stuff when they could use Java, Flash, or something else instead; and yes, I know about Mono. ..but given Microsoft's recent TomTom lawsuit, I don't really want to use.Net on a non-Microsoft platform - I really, truly think Microsoft are just trying to setup an extortion racket on Linux users who make use of Mono).
I have to ask. . . the MAP (Main Article Poster) was asking for a *lightweight* SVG implementation. If he uses Qt, won't he have to load the *entire* Qt library, including all the code for all the different windows and widgets and data structures he's not interested in? How modular is Qt? I suppose if they've broken it down into enough libraries, maybe the set of libs he would need to load might not be bad. . .
Oh, one more very important note on winter driving - dark pavement means it's easier to find the road when the rest of your field of vision is all white from snow on the ground and in the air. White roads + white snow = cars and trucks off the road.
The real question to be asking is, are there any WiMAX SIP or Skype handsets? I know there are WiFi SIP/Skype phones which look like cell phones, but use Wifi instead. Is there any reason someone couldn't come out with same thing, but with WiMax?
I tried googling for a few different combinations of terms, but didn't come up with anything. Still, seems like such a beast should be possible, and maybe could have better battery life than a netbook?
There might be some safety issues with making road surfaces reflect more light. ..things that come to mind:
* Increased road glare on sunny days - good sun glasses could largely deal with this, but if you don't happen to have a pair of sunglasses, you might be having a pretty hard time seeing on very bright days.
* Night driving: harder to see the painted lines and reflectors embedded in the concrete (I'm not sure if this would really be much of a problem or not, but maybe could be)
* Winter driving - In the winter, I'm sure that black pavement absorbing sunlight has some beneficial effect in the form of melting ice off the road sooner than light-colored pavement would. Lighter colored road surfaces might lead to ice lasting longer, or requiring more salt to be put on the roads by road crews.
What kind of an idiot CEO decides with a very small company and almost no capital, to lock horns with one of the largest companies out their with a very. . . let's say 'speculative' business proposition at best? I suppose, maybe, if you're going to test the waters, perhaps doing it as a small company with no assets might actually be very cunning, because if you lose, Apple really isn't able to take anything. ..but at the same time, without sufficient funds, there's little chance you can survive the legal battles you first have to face in order to try to attain a ruling from the Courts that your business doesn't actually infringe their copyrights.
(I mean, if I pay Apple for Mac OS X, in order to put it on a different computer, I fail to see how that has infringed their *COPY* rights - the copy is legal; they shouldn't have any say in what I do with that copy or what hardware I run it on, once the copy is licensed, but. . . it was obvious Apple would try to stop them with a lawsuit, and they'd have to fight the total GARBAGE law known as the DMCA,, before they could ever get to the point of, hopefully, getting a ruling that they weren't infringing).
"true, however digital photography is a.) modifiable (sometimes you don't want this) 2.) Digital photography still requires processing."
For point a), if you are worried about that, we have cryptographic signing systems; For point b) - plan ahead, and you can easily give the other party a copy on a CD, SD card, USB flash drive, etc. Or even, maybe, print a hard copy (I realize you won't always have access to a printer at a job site, but it is possible; for example, most construction projects have a little trailer to serve as an office for the engineer, foreman, and the client, which could be equipped with an inkjet printer). Heck, I've even seen little 'travel' printers you could probably setup on the seat of your car/truck/SUV and plug into the cigarette lighter socket (or, as it should probably be called nowadays, the accessories socket).
Still, I say more power to these people trying to preserve a little slice of history. If people wish to use polaroids, that's there business. In the end though, IIRC, those polaroid photos could get pretty expensive pretty quick. Which, I think, was one of the huge drivers to move people to digital - while you can certainly get digital cameras that cost $1000+, you can also get a halfway decent camera for $100, and you only have to pay for photos you actually print. My parents have, probably 1000 digital photos they've taken with the camera we got them a few years back (honestly, they should probably delete some of them, but oh well, SD cards are cheap), which probably would have cost them hundreds of dollars on polaroid or 35mm. They only really have to pay for the photos they actually print though, which is only a small handful.
Plus, if the print doesn't hold up as well as traditional photos, it's easy to print a new copy in a few years (something harder to do with a polaroid, though certainly possible).
You have to feed your horse/oxe/whatever that pulls the buggy/carriage/wagon/cart. Growing feed for enough animals to provide conveyance for Billions of people would require a lot of land and fertilizers (I think). Plus there are also issues of veterinary health care - production of pharmaceuticals for the animals, X-rays/MRI, surgeries, etc. Animals take quite a bit of energy to care for. It might still be less than cars use, however, and a lot of that energy is solar-via-biomass.
But, now, think about the greenhouse emissions (methane) from all the animals that would be necessary, the public health problems of animal manure *everywhere*. From a public health standpoint, even with the problems of CO2 emissions, I feel cars are much less of a disease threat than having billions of extra beasts-of-burden in the world.
Seriously, there are many applications (particularly in cryptography) where having a fast supply of true random data is important. I don't really know if this bot succeeds in that role, but I suppose it could. Before someone objects that 1 to 6 isn't sufficiently random, consider combining multiple dice roles into a single value. . . that is, treat each die as a digit in a base-6 number, to create a value as large as you need - you can create numbers with as many bits as you need this way:
35105304250512114023
Seems like a pretty strong source of entropy, although, you would likely want to do something like for whatever the value n on the die is, subtract one, so you have a range of 0 to 5, instead of 1 to 6 (0 is a very important number to have). You will also need to apply some logic to compensate for the bit-width difference between base-2 and base-6 - that is, if you wanted, say, an 8 bit binary value, you need to be able to represent up to at least 0-255(base-10). The minumum number of base-6 digits required to represent values in the range 0-255(base-10), is 4 base-6 digits, but that actually gives a range of 0-1295 (base 10), which requires at least 11 binary bits. So, to get to a random binary value, you need to somehow force the range from 0-1295, down to 0-255. One approach would be to use the modules operation, e.g. n = n mod 255, but that will bias the results a tiny bit (I say that, because, since the range isn't a perfect multiple of 255 [1295 ~= 5.07843 * 255, where the notation ~= is used for 'is approximately equal to'], you will have a slightly greater chance of getting values in the low-end of the range), although I'm not sure if that slight bias would be enough to be a problem in most applications - still, if you're designing a machine to provide cryptographically strong random values for use in binary computers, then you should be using powers-of-two-sided dice (e.g. 4-, 8-, or 16- sided dice).
Still, the basic concept of a dice-rolling robot could be a good source of entropy.
I don't know much about Australian law, but. . . why is the dorm responsible for tennant actions? My landlord isn't responsible for crimes I commit. Why would the dorm management be liable? If they are, then your laws in Australia really are broken. Are you *sure* that he incurs liability against the housing unit?
First of all, trees might not be the best source of cellulose. Other plant types are probably better, in terms of the amount of cellulose yield per acre per year (things like switchgrass, bamboo, hemp, etc which grow faster and denser).
Such an industry will, of necessity, be growing large quantities of these plants, which will be pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and freeing up oxygen. Yes, we should still work on protecting rainforests and other wild areas - we shouldn't need to cut/burn down all the rainforests to have enough land to grow the plants.
Even if we did use trees - again, such an industry would lead to *more* trees, not less trees, because the energy industry would need huge quantities of plant matter.
Think about it like this - are cattle at risk of going extinct because of ranching? No - because ranchers BREED the cattle. As long as man eats beef, cows are safe from ever coming close to extinction. I'm sure there are probably more cows on earth now than ever before in history. Now, apply the same economic forces to plant matter, and you have guaranteed, well, not biological diversity, that's true, but you've at least guaranteed that whatever plants are grown for fuel will be grown in massive quantities.
The truth is, if you are worried about ecology and environment, the biggest problem is human overpopulation. We need to try to self-control our reproduction, as a species, so we can drop our population from, whatever it is today - something like 6.5 Billion, down to something more sustainable like 4 Billion-ish.
On the one hand,/. is one of the only web-sites I've seen with a moderation system for comments, which is kind of cool. On the other hand, the way the moderation system works on/. will sometimes lead to crappy moderation.
On an article about a UK plan to provide universal free broadband internet, I got modded 0:Troll for this post. Not sure how that is a troll given what the main article was about.
It happens, take a breath, move on. Don't put too much faith in slashdot moderation.
There should have been a question mark at the end of the subject line of my previous post, for those confused. I just forgot it when typing out the subject.
Do you *seriously* contend that losing your housing with like 2 weeks' notice or something ridiculous like that is a fitting response to the activity in question? I totally have sympathy for this guy. I don't see why anyone should lose their housing over copyright infringement. I mean, just disable his ethernet ports for a week or something. I fail to see how kicking someone out of the building with short notice is an appropriate response for minor copyright infringement.
I put crime in quotes, because I believe it's only a civil infraction (although, I don't know much about Australian copyright law). In any case, getting kicked out of a dorm room for one 'count' of copyright infringement seems a little harsh, no? I mean, they could have started by just cutting his Internet access for a couple days or a week or something.
I mean, I really fail to see how it is even *legal* to kick someone out of a dorm room/apartment/etc for copyright infringement. Don't you guys have any tennants' rights laws in Australia?
That now makes more sense. Thank you for the more detailed explanation which actually makes some kind of sense. So, in a way, this isn't *exactly* a flaw in the standard, but how the OpenSSH team decided to implement that particular clause of the standard (that is, how they interpreted the standard).
I *did* read the TFA, and it really wasn't clear in the article at all. Why even bother mentioning Debian and Linux, if the problem was an SSH problem, and not at all specific to Debian or Linux? Seems like it was just a somewhat poorly written article, adding confusion where there didn't have to be. People will take away from this that this is a Linux problem, and might not consider the possibility that, e.g. Mac OS X (which I believe includes some version of OpenSSH) may *possibly* be shipping an affected version of the software (I'm not saying it is, I'm just saying that the article author wrote the article in such a way that it appears the problem is strongly linked to Linux, when it sounds, upon further examination, like it isn't).
It's really not definitive from the article whether or not other implementations are or might be affected, despite your assertion.
I agree with you there - but you generally wouldn't say that an undefined behavior which doesn't contradict the standard, but also isn't specified by the standard, is a problem with the standard itself. Since the security researcher said it was a problem with the standard itself, seems like that would mean that any *conforming* implementation of that standard would be affected by such a problem.
So, apparently, it's not important for the electorate in a republic to have information available, which might help them be better informed voters? Yes, the USA is not a *direct* democracy, but I've always been taught that a republic is a type of democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not *both* conservation *and* increased generation? I mean, I agree with you completely, in that we can't use efficiency to solve our energy problems - not only do we have to deal with population growth, but there's also the issue of other countries developing, so that their populations use more energy per-capita.
To top all that off, if you make things more efficient, people will use them more. So, if someone's car gets 50% more miles per gallon, they're very likely to drive 50% or 60% more miles than they would with a less efficient car. True, some people will drive the same, but lots of other people will just drive more (use the increased efficiency to live farther from work or school, or maybe take more weekend recreational trips, etc).
But, efficiency is still a good thing. Why? It acts like a multiplier for any new generation brought online. If you increase energy efficiency by, say, 30 percent, then every Gigawatt of production you bring online is like 1.43 Gigawatts. See what I'm saying? If you could achieve an across-the-board efficiency gain of 50%, that's like getting 2GW of generation for every 1GW you bring actually online. Although. . . 30-50 percent efficiency gains, across-the-board, seems rather unrealistic, but who knows?
Dunno if this is gonna happen yet, or not, but I've seen articles about the use of oLed sheets as light sources - instead of being a 'bulb' in the usual sense, think more like those ceiling mounted fluorescent light fixtures with diffusers so common in schools, office buildings, and retail. Or, think of a computer monitor that is all white (although, the light need not be pure white - could be offwhite colors - could even change the color when you want, maybe), but brighter. They also say that OLEDs will become thin and flexible, so you could take your OLED 'film' and wrap it around a curved surface or something.
So, you could have lighting that looks like a sort of 'standard' table-lamp with a lampshade - except the 'lampshade' is actually the OLED 'film', giving off light directly into the room, with no bulb inside the lampshade.
That's still a number of years into the future, if it ever happens. OLEDs have to become many times cheaper than they are now before that'll happen.
The first sentence should have read: "Well, they never actually say how *much* power is used,. . ." (emphasis only to show the change).
Well, they never actually say how *much* energy is used, specifically, to calculate the energy used, *but* I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that since the laser pulse only lasts a femtosecond (they do say that, specifically), it's not really using that much energy. Femto prefix indicates 1*10^-15, or 1 divided by a number which is 1 with 15 zeroes after it. That's an incredibly small amount of time. So, even if the power used is rated in Gigawatts, or even thousands of Gigawatts, remembering that Watts = Joules per second, the actual Joules of energy used is likely to be very small, because of the much-less-than-1-second time it runs.
It's like thinking in terms of, if I'm traveling at a speed of 1 million miles per hour, for one femtosecond, how far have I moved? Answer: 0.0000000176 inches.
Honestly, Slashdot moderation is a mystery to me. This particular post was not something I consider anywhere close to my best work - it was just throwing out some off-the-cuff thoughts of things that *might or might not* be problems - in Ohio, we don't have many (any?) concrete roads, so I have very limited experience with them. Sounds like those aren't really problems.
Of course, that comment gets modded +5. Some of what I consider my *better* comments have often gotten no moderation, or negative moderation.
I begin to think slashdot moderation is a lottery system. *grin*
Can anyone who is familiar with both, tell me - Google Wave sounds to me to be awefully similar to Microsoft Office Groove - but more open, so that potentially anyone can use it? Am I far off the mark here? From the descriptions I've seen, it sounds kind of similar to Groove. Only using open, cross-platform, standards-based technologies (HTML, Jabber, etc)?
Let's not forget the Anti-virus vendors "quietly installs Firefox Extension", and I think Java also does, no? And yes, this is not news - it's a dupe of a story /. posted months ago.
Personally, I don't really care. I installed .Net support on my computer, and if Microsoft adds a Firefox extension to allow .Net in Firefox in addition to IE, that just means Firefox (at least on Windows) will work with more websites (although, ideally, websites wouldn't be embedding non-cross-platform .Net stuff when they could use Java, Flash, or something else instead; and yes, I know about Mono. . .but given Microsoft's recent TomTom lawsuit, I don't really want to use .Net on a non-Microsoft platform - I really, truly think Microsoft are just trying to setup an extortion racket on Linux users who make use of Mono).
I have to ask. . . the MAP (Main Article Poster) was asking for a *lightweight* SVG implementation. If he uses Qt, won't he have to load the *entire* Qt library, including all the code for all the different windows and widgets and data structures he's not interested in? How modular is Qt? I suppose if they've broken it down into enough libraries, maybe the set of libs he would need to load might not be bad. . .
Oh, one more very important note on winter driving - dark pavement means it's easier to find the road when the rest of your field of vision is all white from snow on the ground and in the air. White roads + white snow = cars and trucks off the road.
The real question to be asking is, are there any WiMAX SIP or Skype handsets? I know there are WiFi SIP/Skype phones which look like cell phones, but use Wifi instead. Is there any reason someone couldn't come out with same thing, but with WiMax?
I tried googling for a few different combinations of terms, but didn't come up with anything. Still, seems like such a beast should be possible, and maybe could have better battery life than a netbook?
There might be some safety issues with making road surfaces reflect more light. . .things that come to mind:
* Increased road glare on sunny days - good sun glasses could largely deal with this, but if you don't happen to have a pair of sunglasses, you might be having a pretty hard time seeing on very bright days.
* Night driving: harder to see the painted lines and reflectors embedded in the concrete (I'm not sure if this would really be much of a problem or not, but maybe could be)
* Winter driving - In the winter, I'm sure that black pavement absorbing sunlight has some beneficial effect in the form of melting ice off the road sooner than light-colored pavement would. Lighter colored road surfaces might lead to ice lasting longer, or requiring more salt to be put on the roads by road crews.
What kind of an idiot CEO decides with a very small company and almost no capital, to lock horns with one of the largest companies out their with a very. . . let's say 'speculative' business proposition at best? I suppose, maybe, if you're going to test the waters, perhaps doing it as a small company with no assets might actually be very cunning, because if you lose, Apple really isn't able to take anything. . .but at the same time, without sufficient funds, there's little chance you can survive the legal battles you first have to face in order to try to attain a ruling from the Courts that your business doesn't actually infringe their copyrights.
(I mean, if I pay Apple for Mac OS X, in order to put it on a different computer, I fail to see how that has infringed their *COPY* rights - the copy is legal; they shouldn't have any say in what I do with that copy or what hardware I run it on, once the copy is licensed, but. . . it was obvious Apple would try to stop them with a lawsuit, and they'd have to fight the total GARBAGE law known as the DMCA,, before they could ever get to the point of, hopefully, getting a ruling that they weren't infringing).
"true, however digital photography is a.) modifiable (sometimes you don't want this) 2.) Digital photography still requires processing."
For point a), if you are worried about that, we have cryptographic signing systems; For point b) - plan ahead, and you can easily give the other party a copy on a CD, SD card, USB flash drive, etc. Or even, maybe, print a hard copy (I realize you won't always have access to a printer at a job site, but it is possible; for example, most construction projects have a little trailer to serve as an office for the engineer, foreman, and the client, which could be equipped with an inkjet printer). Heck, I've even seen little 'travel' printers you could probably setup on the seat of your car/truck/SUV and plug into the cigarette lighter socket (or, as it should probably be called nowadays, the accessories socket).
Still, I say more power to these people trying to preserve a little slice of history. If people wish to use polaroids, that's there business. In the end though, IIRC, those polaroid photos could get pretty expensive pretty quick. Which, I think, was one of the huge drivers to move people to digital - while you can certainly get digital cameras that cost $1000+, you can also get a halfway decent camera for $100, and you only have to pay for photos you actually print. My parents have, probably 1000 digital photos they've taken with the camera we got them a few years back (honestly, they should probably delete some of them, but oh well, SD cards are cheap), which probably would have cost them hundreds of dollars on polaroid or 35mm. They only really have to pay for the photos they actually print though, which is only a small handful.
Plus, if the print doesn't hold up as well as traditional photos, it's easy to print a new copy in a few years (something harder to do with a polaroid, though certainly possible).
You have to feed your horse/oxe/whatever that pulls the buggy/carriage/wagon/cart. Growing feed for enough animals to provide conveyance for Billions of people would require a lot of land and fertilizers (I think). Plus there are also issues of veterinary health care - production of pharmaceuticals for the animals, X-rays/MRI, surgeries, etc. Animals take quite a bit of energy to care for. It might still be less than cars use, however, and a lot of that energy is solar-via-biomass.
But, now, think about the greenhouse emissions (methane) from all the animals that would be necessary, the public health problems of animal manure *everywhere*. From a public health standpoint, even with the problems of CO2 emissions, I feel cars are much less of a disease threat than having billions of extra beasts-of-burden in the world.
/dev/random
Seriously, there are many applications (particularly in cryptography) where having a fast supply of true random data is important. I don't really know if this bot succeeds in that role, but I suppose it could. Before someone objects that 1 to 6 isn't sufficiently random, consider combining multiple dice roles into a single value. . . that is, treat each die as a digit in a base-6 number, to create a value as large as you need - you can create numbers with as many bits as you need this way:
35105304250512114023
Seems like a pretty strong source of entropy, although, you would likely want to do something like for whatever the value n on the die is, subtract one, so you have a range of 0 to 5, instead of 1 to 6 (0 is a very important number to have). You will also need to apply some logic to compensate for the bit-width difference between base-2 and base-6 - that is, if you wanted, say, an 8 bit binary value, you need to be able to represent up to at least 0-255(base-10). The minumum number of base-6 digits required to represent values in the range 0-255(base-10), is 4 base-6 digits, but that actually gives a range of 0-1295 (base 10), which requires at least 11 binary bits. So, to get to a random binary value, you need to somehow force the range from 0-1295, down to 0-255. One approach would be to use the modules operation, e.g. n = n mod 255, but that will bias the results a tiny bit (I say that, because, since the range isn't a perfect multiple of 255 [1295 ~= 5.07843 * 255, where the notation ~= is used for 'is approximately equal to'], you will have a slightly greater chance of getting values in the low-end of the range), although I'm not sure if that slight bias would be enough to be a problem in most applications - still, if you're designing a machine to provide cryptographically strong random values for use in binary computers, then you should be using powers-of-two-sided dice (e.g. 4-, 8-, or 16- sided dice).
Still, the basic concept of a dice-rolling robot could be a good source of entropy.
I don't know much about Australian law, but. . . why is the dorm responsible for tennant actions? My landlord isn't responsible for crimes I commit. Why would the dorm management be liable? If they are, then your laws in Australia really are broken. Are you *sure* that he incurs liability against the housing unit?
First of all, trees might not be the best source of cellulose. Other plant types are probably better, in terms of the amount of cellulose yield per acre per year (things like switchgrass, bamboo, hemp, etc which grow faster and denser).
Such an industry will, of necessity, be growing large quantities of these plants, which will be pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and freeing up oxygen. Yes, we should still work on protecting rainforests and other wild areas - we shouldn't need to cut/burn down all the rainforests to have enough land to grow the plants.
Even if we did use trees - again, such an industry would lead to *more* trees, not less trees, because the energy industry would need huge quantities of plant matter.
Think about it like this - are cattle at risk of going extinct because of ranching? No - because ranchers BREED the cattle. As long as man eats beef, cows are safe from ever coming close to extinction. I'm sure there are probably more cows on earth now than ever before in history. Now, apply the same economic forces to plant matter, and you have guaranteed, well, not biological diversity, that's true, but you've at least guaranteed that whatever plants are grown for fuel will be grown in massive quantities.
The truth is, if you are worried about ecology and environment, the biggest problem is human overpopulation. We need to try to self-control our reproduction, as a species, so we can drop our population from, whatever it is today - something like 6.5 Billion, down to something more sustainable like 4 Billion-ish.
On the one hand, /. is one of the only web-sites I've seen with a moderation system for comments, which is kind of cool. On the other hand, the way the moderation system works on /. will sometimes lead to crappy moderation.
On an article about a UK plan to provide universal free broadband internet, I got modded 0:Troll for this post. Not sure how that is a troll given what the main article was about.
It happens, take a breath, move on. Don't put too much faith in slashdot moderation.
There should have been a question mark at the end of the subject line of my previous post, for those confused. I just forgot it when typing out the subject.
Do you *seriously* contend that losing your housing with like 2 weeks' notice or something ridiculous like that is a fitting response to the activity in question? I totally have sympathy for this guy. I don't see why anyone should lose their housing over copyright infringement. I mean, just disable his ethernet ports for a week or something. I fail to see how kicking someone out of the building with short notice is an appropriate response for minor copyright infringement.
I put crime in quotes, because I believe it's only a civil infraction (although, I don't know much about Australian copyright law). In any case, getting kicked out of a dorm room for one 'count' of copyright infringement seems a little harsh, no? I mean, they could have started by just cutting his Internet access for a couple days or a week or something.
I mean, I really fail to see how it is even *legal* to kick someone out of a dorm room/apartment/etc for copyright infringement. Don't you guys have any tennants' rights laws in Australia?
That now makes more sense. Thank you for the more detailed explanation which actually makes some kind of sense. So, in a way, this isn't *exactly* a flaw in the standard, but how the OpenSSH team decided to implement that particular clause of the standard (that is, how they interpreted the standard).
I *did* read the TFA, and it really wasn't clear in the article at all. Why even bother mentioning Debian and Linux, if the problem was an SSH problem, and not at all specific to Debian or Linux? Seems like it was just a somewhat poorly written article, adding confusion where there didn't have to be. People will take away from this that this is a Linux problem, and might not consider the possibility that, e.g. Mac OS X (which I believe includes some version of OpenSSH) may *possibly* be shipping an affected version of the software (I'm not saying it is, I'm just saying that the article author wrote the article in such a way that it appears the problem is strongly linked to Linux, when it sounds, upon further examination, like it isn't).
It's really not definitive from the article whether or not other implementations are or might be affected, despite your assertion.
I agree with you there - but you generally wouldn't say that an undefined behavior which doesn't contradict the standard, but also isn't specified by the standard, is a problem with the standard itself. Since the security researcher said it was a problem with the standard itself, seems like that would mean that any *conforming* implementation of that standard would be affected by such a problem.
So, apparently, it's not important for the electorate in a republic to have information available, which might help them be better informed voters? Yes, the USA is not a *direct* democracy, but I've always been taught that a republic is a type of democracy.