As someone who spends a lot of time in multinational scientific facilities (e.g. the Swiss Light Source)... I don't understand the "Should it go to Japan?" question. It's infrastructure for the greater scientific community, so it doesn't matter where it's built.
Sure it does! Political, geological and socioeconomic stability are prime factors in building one of these things. Why the SSC showed us that politics and economics will ruin your particle collider. So if Japan is better with their money than the US and has a geologically stable site and doesn't go to war with China in the near future, it's a good site.
Selecting a good site will increase your chances of it actually becoming infrastructure for the greater scientific community. Just ask Weinberg.
I'm amused how he looks a little more and more like Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now every year. I'm pretty sure that there's eventually going to be an investor meeting in a temple surrounded by spikes with iMacs and Apple computers skewered on them somewhere in Redmond. Ballmer will be sweating out and squeezing cool water over his bald forehead while rambling slowly in spurts to SEC reporters who are trying to make heads or tails of what he is saying. Minions will be slaughtering a cow with chairs in the background while he sputters on about Windows 8's success and how they said his methods were madness.
Microsoft Has Been Watching, and It Says You're Getting Used To Windows 8
Much like a kid who has broken his arm "gets used to" a cast or sling. Much like a cow who has been electrocuted many times by a fence "gets used to" staying away from it. Much like someone convicted of a DUI "gets used to" riding a bicycle.
'Even with the rumblings, we feel confident that it's a moment in time more than an actual problem.'
Under what circumstances, exactly, would someone who works for Microsoft ever say anything contrary to that? Anything could be going on, good or bad, and that is exactly what they would say to dismiss criticism.
The requested URL (ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2529390&cid=38076772) was not found.
This is the correct link. Man, first a major typo from a Wikipedia article and now this, I think I'm done with Slashdot for today. Not even sure how that happened...
If you're not afraid of programming (and it sounds like you're not): R. Gimme more details if you want to know what packages to use for graphing and stuff but installing R is incredibly easy. At the risk of tooting my own horn, you can read through this post, the corresponding story and the replies to it. There are a ton of packages for producing graphs. Are you going for accuracy? Beauty? Speed? What?
Lastly, please don't hate on the TI-84. I still have mine as well as a TI-89 and while they were both expensive, they are beautiful and trustworthy devices. Both have outlasted countless other computing machines that have passed through my usage.
Gun laws are an oxymoron. Criminals, by definition, do not abide by the laws. So it is only the good people that do not have guns in gun free zones. I do have strong feelings about gun laws but I do not think that this is the time to air them.
Ever Heard of Capitalism?
on
The Web We Lost
·
· Score: 4, Informative
they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they've certainly made a small number of people rich
For better or for worse, these are very important things in a Capitalistic society.
But they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves
For better or for worse, these are completely worthless things in a Capitlistic society.
We get bulls*** turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.
So it has been, so it is now and so it always shall be: Money drives everything. I don't understand Anil Dash's point and I didn't get much new information from it. It's pretty generic. Make observations (very easy) and then offer conclusions that are bland and optimistic like:
We'll fix these things; I don't worry about that. The technology industry, like all industries, follows cycles, and the pendulum is swinging back to the broad, empowering philosophies that underpinned the early social web. But we're going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web means, akin to the years we spent as everyone moved off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much more to the experience of the Internet than what they know.
Wow this guy uses some pretty strong rhetoric for not having to explain how this is ever going to be fixed. Also, I feel like he fails to even scratch the surface of what is a very deep "intellectual property" hole of copyright and patents giving the mindset that other companies shouldn't use our ideas to make money or we want that money. And that is so ingrained right now that I don't see "we'll fix these things" as a given. Also this "pendulum" concept he speaks of is hilarious. Care to explain the historic swings of this pendulum to me?
Call me when somebody has a solution that will work. Since you'll never be calling me, I'll just continue to deal with the current state of things.
Shipped/Unshipped for Me
People who say that Kickstarter is rife with scams might be right about a few projects but I think that the people who operate that site keep it pretty legit. My own personal history wtih the site (and, yeah, I realize this is going to reveal a lot about me but I don't really care) is that I have received:
Nature of Code book PDFs (plan on doing a review of it after holidays)
Two old forgotten sci-fi books (from Singularity & Co)
Three separate physical magazines on special interests
Four CD albums by new artists
20 of the same Rmashackle Glory vinyl album (don't ask)
Several T-shirts like fangamer's kickstarter
FTL (RTS game)
Now, that said, I'm still waiting on three or four video games to be released like Grandroids, NASA's Astronaut game, Kitaru and, of course, the OUYA console. I'm also waiting on a movie that is well overdue (although the dude running it is very responsive and was clearly in over his head), playing cards, a new cartoon from Ren & Stimpy's creator, a board game called "The New Science" (which I might also try to review for Slashdot) and another DVD/CD combo and T-shirt which were very recent so it's not a big deal.
Now, I've only put money in here that I didn't really care about. Yeah, it adds up to real cash but I've been quite happy with all of the things I've gotten out of this and super excited about the future projects. I agreed that the facebook glasses sound like a scam but I was really disheartened when people called the OCULUS a scam. Nobody seems to be covering Zeyez's engineering updates and all the comments are just that it's still a scam and they want their money back.
So why is there there so much negativity associated with Kickstarter? My experience has been largely positive although I would have thought I would be seeing the NASA game sooner (the other funding didn't hit until November of 2012) and I thought I would be watching "Flood Tide" by now. Aside from that, my experience has been largely positive. Do people have negative stories where they've been screwed or cheated or lied to on Kickstarter?
"No presents this year, little Timmy. Also, I just got off the phone with the Australian Authorities who said they found Santa dead in Murray Sunset National Park. Unfortunately it looks like Santa had a new iPhone for navigation and was forced to eat eight of his reindeer. Then there was apparently a struggle between him and the last reindeer. After several blows, it broke free and eventually flew off to leave Santa to bleed out in the dirt from gory antler wounds. These are sad times but we still have each other, just no more frivolous Christmas gifts -- ever again!"
EK: No, no and no. We don't develop malware and we don't publish exploits. Both happen to be illegal — and amoral. I don't recommend you doing either too.
Firemen don't start fires...
Actually, yeah they do, it's called "live fire training." And since they do it in a controlled area like a shipping container or abandoned house marked for demolition worth nothing with nobody at risk, I would think that you too would do that sort of work considering you can set up a VM and have no risk and try to get ahead of the virus authors. That's exactly what the author had me do when I read and reviewed the Metasploit guide.
Do you have a link to the law that says writing viruses is illegal? You're saying that if I set up a network of computers in my house disconnected from the internet and infect them to study how a botnet mutates, that would be illegal? How do you actively combat mutating malware without studying it and growing it internally?
Doctors might not infect people but they certainly grow cultures of bad bacteria and study viruses that they keep in a lab. Honestly I was quite shocked by this knee jerk response.
Well, that's bizarre, when I go to the demonstration page in Firefox nothing happens yet when I go to it in IE, it magically works. What are they doing in their demonstration page that is different? Browser version shouldn't matter, right?
Conversely this just sounds like Microsoft being bit in the ass by giving their browser special privileges to native OS libs and dlls.
Well, I like to think that when a news reports on something like a study and it turns out that there was a reason to doubt that study in the first place, it's that news organization's prerogative to make sure that they follow up on that story. The fact is he's still listed on the board of PXP.
This doesn't even have to do with computers, or anything even remotely nerd-like...
Fracking is indeed nerd-like for the geologists, environmentalists and anyone concerned with energy or resource dependence. Fracking for shale resources is going to have a key effect on the future of the world. That will affect everything nerd-like. To quote Jim Rogers:
If the 19th century belonged to Britain, and the 20th century to the United States. Then the 21st century will surely belong to China. My advice: Make sure your kids learn Chinese.
And I feel like western nations are clawing at any sort of straw they can find to prevent that. Unfortunately I personally feel this has resulted in putting all our eggs in natural gas and developing those resources at all costs.
Easy to make, hard to use, and people not using theirs increases the scarcity and value of mine!
Dearest Grandson,
Thank you for the wonderful Christmas gift you gave me this year! Why I hadn't even heard of the bitter coins prior to our yuletide celebration but after you left I got on the google and found this lovely place called the Silk Road on the interwebs where I could get all the Viagra I wanted. I haven't split your grandmother in half like that since VE day. But that's not all I got on there, why it takes me back to the great war and the things you could get overseas. And, bless it, those bitter coining A-rabs sold me the stickiest icky I ever did toke! Oh, my, Hjalmer would have loved to puff puff on this stuff, too bad the Krauts gunned him up on that god forsaken beach in France.
Well, do you know where I can get more of those bitter coins? Musta been more than wacky tabaccy in that herb cause Grandpa's got the shakes and now your grandmother's demanding more of the Beast with Two Backs so if you have another wallet laying around with some of those bitter coins, I'd very much appreciate it.
I'm confused, how exactly does one 'kill' Linux? I thought that one of the beautiful aspects of the GPL is its robustness. Everyone is free to do basically anything they want (with the most minor caveats) which is great because that means you can always just fork GPL'd code as long as you release your changes with your distributions. Even though I've moved from Debian to Xubuntu for my personal computers, I could very easily move back. This is not true with my servers (which have remained Debian for that very reason).
Personally I feel like Canonical has done a lot for Linux and they've done that by taking risks. Now Shuttleworth is taking risks that a lot of people simply do not agree with. It's fine to criticize these in detail but a hyperbole like "killing Linux" frankly befuddles me. How is this going to disrupt CentOS or Debian or Gentoo or Slackware or any other distro of Linux? Furthermore, how is this going to disrupt the core kernel itself? Linux is robust. Linux is alive and vibrant on servers. Canonical made a move to make it a desktop OS just like Android was an effort to put it on phones. If they think that taking their code is a smart gamble and you so strongly disagree with it, fork that code and start doing your own development.
Shuttleworth can't kill Linux. He can make stupid decisions that negatively affect Ubuntu but at the end of the day, he's getting money for that development from backers and has the say in which direction that development team takes. He worked on Debian a while ago and left because he disagreed with it. Now if you're developing for Ubuntu and you don't like his direction, leave and make MasterNerdGuyLinux or whatever you want to call it. No one's stopping you, the Linux kernel development marches on, what's the problem here?
Microsoft can't kill Linux and neither will Shuttleworth -- that's a testament to Linux. He can jeopardize his marketshare but at the end of the day I will argue that Shuttleworth has made a major positive impact on Linux despite my frank disagreement with his latest developments.
This is a confusingly ignorant misunderstanding that I constantly see reiterated on Slashdot. There is only a finite amount of arable land and that is 18% of the United States with 0.21% of that being permanent crops. From this site, you can see in this graph that the figure of 18% actually fluctuates. Now, there's a lot of factors at play but drought is a big one and this idea that you "just move the cattle North" to the new land is downright laughable. Temperature is not the only factor in making land arable. Why does Iowa produce more corn than per acre than any other state? Well, the soil has a lot to do with it but also the temperature is better than, say, Minnesota even though there's a lot of corn and soy grown in Minnesota.
During the dust bowl of the 1930s, we should have learned that you can't just "move cattle and farming North a bit" to avoid droughts. We also should have learned how important it is to combat erosion and protect our water supplies.
What happened last season in Texas was they failed to grow their own roughage (hay, straw, alfalfa, sorghum, etc) for their steers to eat and so they paid top dollar to have it shipped down to them and other states profited from Texas' loss. This is not a sustainable model. Moving cattle northward will not work, there is a reason ranching flourished in Texas -- any areas north of there that have the same conditions have long become ranches. Even if someone does the math and says "Oh, hey, this area of Montana here is going to be highly sought after" it's not like a massive ranch in Texas can pick up operations and move them to Montana in a single season. You're going to see restructuralization problems and the United States consumer will cry highway robbery when their already subsidized McDonald's burger costs $1.33 instead of $0.99. Should Texas become akin to Arizona, our economy will feel it.
Or maybe I can finally get grass fed beef from the USA?
You can already buy this from Montana and other states. The problem is how much grassland can support free roaming cattle. Again, a lesson learned from the Dust Bowl, we need to build ranches and feed them in order to prevent top soil erosion. If you demand they be free roaming and you calculate it, beef will become incredibly expensive and not a viable option for the entire populace.
Over all a small increase in the price of beef is not the end of the world. The decreased red meat consumption would probably be a good thing on average for us.
Right, those grapes were sour anyway?
Texas still has lots of oil and natural gas.
So? Most states depend on multiple sources of revenue, right? You should be alarmed when any major industry faces a major problem. Otherwise, why not just kill off all the other industries and embrace "lots of oil and natural gas"? Well, that's simple, you use what you got and Texas is losing arable land to grow food for their cattle.
Its agriculture was living on borrowed time anyway. Once the aquifer went dry that was coming to an end.
An unsustainable agricultural strategy is bad agriculture. Doesn't everything -- even your oil and natural gas -- depend on the availability of water? You make it sound like we just turned Texas into Mars and probably for the better? Ruining land is not the answer and this report states that Texas will get more arid so measures should be taken to at least prepare for that, wouldn't you think?
sea levels to rise almost a meter more than present over the next century... hardly a doomsday scenario
I believe you don't realise quite how many people live within a vertical metre of sea level.
Well, that's a valid point however hamanity's war with the sea is nothing new and the Dutch have become quite adept at it (with 20% of their country being reclaimed land). Now, that has a whole bunch of caveats about how much trouble they face is that system ever fails and we've all probably heard about that. I would bet that if people believed these reports, some relatively inexpensive measures could be taken to prevent a much more expensive catastrophe. I don't know how much these efforts could help Florida -- an occasional hurricane might make them a bigger problem. But engineers have been tackling this problem.
For the United States, I think a bigger doomsday scenario of this is for agriculture in Texas. Texas already lost $7.62 billion in agricultural this year and if you're telling me that that part of North America is going to get more arid? Well, droughts are something that humans have long had problems with. You can build all the irrigation you want but when that's dried up, there's not a lot you can do. If you like to eat beef and if you like Texas to be a productive state in the union, you should probably be concerned about this.
If one of my workers told the whole country why he thought I was stupid, I'd fire him too, regardless the merit
HA! "Fear will keep them in line"? Well, I'm sure the rest of the country has great faith in you if your response to a challenge of your position is to just get rid of the guy. Oh my god that's funny! Did you know that in my software development team, we challenge each other all the time and, no, we don't have our coworkers offed if we are wrong. Is Derek Khanna on his way to the gulags? Perhaps a Republican Rehabilitation camp in Fairbanks, AK?
He's 24 and probably still believes that United States politics offer an open and free forum where you can put forth ideas no matter what side you're on and the change that follows can be a good thing if the logic behind it is sound. Surely the worst that could happen is that your party would have to explain again logically why your brief was incorrect and unsound?
Boy it sure was hard typing that with a straight face.
They've publicly disowned the brief and now it looks like they're cutting off the hand that wrote it... but have they actually put forth a logical and rationale rebuttal that explains why Khanna was so wrong that his termination was necessary?
If my employer came to me and said, "Pack it up, you don't have a job tomorrow." I'd be very interested in knowing why and being completely fine with my termination if they were just batshit insane in their reasoning. I'm sure I'm not the only one that suspects this came as an order from an industry lobbyist or at least in the form of "This is very interesting work by Khanna. On an unrelated note *cough* *cough* you might be hard pressed for campaign donations next election cycle."
Oh, and I am absolutely relishing the goodwill and lip service paid to the Republicans in the initial Slashdot comments.
Modern Distros still have some major rough edges. I cant even get ubuntu to stop turning off the monitor, and there is nowhere in the UI that even offers it. I tried 7 different vectors at the command line before i gave up. It shouldnt be that hard.
Click the icon at the very right of the menu bar and select System Settings.
Click Brightness and Lock.
Change the value in the Lock screen after drop-down list.
Why put him in a straightjacket? Crowds gather to listen to him rant and rave -- does that bother you? Why not let him opine for hours until he's hoarse if it fits his fancy?
but the real problem with the "Just run Linux" solution is that non-Computer Science people want to do things like answer e-mail, write correspondence, and buy software from the store that has a nice, easy installer.
I'm sorry, I didn't see anywhere in this actual article where he urges people to "Just run Linux" as you quoted, could you help me find it here? Whether or not he rambles about how people should use Linux seems a separate point from his (in my opinion) valid criticisms of Apple, wouldn't you say?
Or are you just trying to get to the talking points that you've learned to parrot...
Freedom is nice, but when it involves having to become a computer engineer to exercise it - most people will take the padded handcuffs.
OH! Okay, I see you have little to say about what was discussed in the article so you fall back on the same old boring bullshit. Carry on. Let me help you with that quote:
Freedom is nice, but when it involves having to become a civil engineer or economist to exercise it - most people will take the oppressive government.
Freedom is nice, but when it involves having to become a biological engineer to exercise it - most people will take big pharma.
Freedom is nice, but when it involves having to become a radio engineer to exercise it - most people will take the FCC.
Do I need to keep going or are you done with your "Freedom is nice but I'll totally trade it for some trivial shit" statements?
everyone has design patents and patents rectangles and other shapes. check the patent office.
You're saying that everyone has the same design patents? I was under the impression that rounded corners on icons belonged solely to Apple? Or are you saying I can get my own patent for rounded squares that open up an application on a mobile device? I mean wasn't the whole logic in the Samsung Galaxy case about their devices being black with rounded corners and Apple's devices being black with rounded corners? I mean... how does Samsung get their own design patent for that since you claim "everyone" has them?
IV is just a mutual fund and all the big tech companies like apple, google, cisco and others invest in their patent pools
I don't think you know what a mutual fund is. I don't think IV pays back to Apple, Google, Cisco, et al like they would if they were a mutual fund. And IV claims to be "helping the small guys" manage patent portfolios (although I can't find an example of this either). Furthermore, I found it really funny that you claim these large companies are their customers. Do you have any evidence of this? Because when This American Life did a story on them, they were having a hard time finding these imaginary revenue streams you speak of. Oh, you claim they have nothing to do with patent wars? Gee, it's super odd that on IV's site they have an article explaining how patent wars are a natural and necessary business expense and they've been going on since the beginning of time.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who spends a lot of time in multinational scientific facilities (e.g. the Swiss Light Source) ... I don't understand the "Should it go to Japan?" question. It's infrastructure for the greater scientific community, so it doesn't matter where it's built.
Sure it does! Political, geological and socioeconomic stability are prime factors in building one of these things. Why the SSC showed us that politics and economics will ruin your particle collider. So if Japan is better with their money than the US and has a geologically stable site and doesn't go to war with China in the near future, it's a good site.
Selecting a good site will increase your chances of it actually becoming infrastructure for the greater scientific community. Just ask Weinberg.
I'm amused how he looks a little more and more like Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now every year. I'm pretty sure that there's eventually going to be an investor meeting in a temple surrounded by spikes with iMacs and Apple computers skewered on them somewhere in Redmond. Ballmer will be sweating out and squeezing cool water over his bald forehead while rambling slowly in spurts to SEC reporters who are trying to make heads or tails of what he is saying. Minions will be slaughtering a cow with chairs in the background while he sputters on about Windows 8's success and how they said his methods were madness.
Microsoft Has Been Watching, and It Says You're Getting Used To Windows 8
Much like a kid who has broken his arm "gets used to" a cast or sling. Much like a cow who has been electrocuted many times by a fence "gets used to" staying away from it. Much like someone convicted of a DUI "gets used to" riding a bicycle.
'Even with the rumblings, we feel confident that it's a moment in time more than an actual problem.'
Under what circumstances, exactly, would someone who works for Microsoft ever say anything contrary to that? Anything could be going on, good or bad, and that is exactly what they would say to dismiss criticism.
The requested URL (ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2529390&cid=38076772) was not found.
This is the correct link. Man, first a major typo from a Wikipedia article and now this, I think I'm done with Slashdot for today. Not even sure how that happened ...
If you're not afraid of programming (and it sounds like you're not): R. Gimme more details if you want to know what packages to use for graphing and stuff but installing R is incredibly easy. At the risk of tooting my own horn, you can read through this post, the corresponding story and the replies to it. There are a ton of packages for producing graphs. Are you going for accuracy? Beauty? Speed? What?
Lastly, please don't hate on the TI-84. I still have mine as well as a TI-89 and while they were both expensive, they are beautiful and trustworthy devices. Both have outlasted countless other computing machines that have passed through my usage.
Gun laws are an oxymoron. Criminals, by definition, do not abide by the laws. So it is only the good people that do not have guns in gun free zones. I do have strong feelings about gun laws but I do not think that this is the time to air them.
There are 300,000 gun related deaths in the United States each year. Therefore, by your logic,we can never discuss gun control.
they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they've certainly made a small number of people rich
For better or for worse, these are very important things in a Capitalistic society.
But they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves
For better or for worse, these are completely worthless things in a Capitlistic society.
We get bulls*** turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.
So it has been, so it is now and so it always shall be: Money drives everything. I don't understand Anil Dash's point and I didn't get much new information from it. It's pretty generic. Make observations (very easy) and then offer conclusions that are bland and optimistic like:
We'll fix these things; I don't worry about that. The technology industry, like all industries, follows cycles, and the pendulum is swinging back to the broad, empowering philosophies that underpinned the early social web. But we're going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web means, akin to the years we spent as everyone moved off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much more to the experience of the Internet than what they know.
Wow this guy uses some pretty strong rhetoric for not having to explain how this is ever going to be fixed. Also, I feel like he fails to even scratch the surface of what is a very deep "intellectual property" hole of copyright and patents giving the mindset that other companies shouldn't use our ideas to make money or we want that money. And that is so ingrained right now that I don't see "we'll fix these things" as a given. Also this "pendulum" concept he speaks of is hilarious. Care to explain the historic swings of this pendulum to me?
Call me when somebody has a solution that will work. Since you'll never be calling me, I'll just continue to deal with the current state of things.
Now, that said, I'm still waiting on three or four video games to be released like Grandroids, NASA's Astronaut game, Kitaru and, of course, the OUYA console. I'm also waiting on a movie that is well overdue (although the dude running it is very responsive and was clearly in over his head), playing cards, a new cartoon from Ren & Stimpy's creator, a board game called "The New Science" (which I might also try to review for Slashdot) and another DVD/CD combo and T-shirt which were very recent so it's not a big deal.
Now, I've only put money in here that I didn't really care about. Yeah, it adds up to real cash but I've been quite happy with all of the things I've gotten out of this and super excited about the future projects. I agreed that the facebook glasses sound like a scam but I was really disheartened when people called the OCULUS a scam. Nobody seems to be covering Zeyez's engineering updates and all the comments are just that it's still a scam and they want their money back.
So why is there there so much negativity associated with Kickstarter? My experience has been largely positive although I would have thought I would be seeing the NASA game sooner (the other funding didn't hit until November of 2012) and I thought I would be watching "Flood Tide" by now. Aside from that, my experience has been largely positive. Do people have negative stories where they've been screwed or cheated or lied to on Kickstarter?
And that's why no presents, he got lost.
"No presents this year, little Timmy. Also, I just got off the phone with the Australian Authorities who said they found Santa dead in Murray Sunset National Park. Unfortunately it looks like Santa had a new iPhone for navigation and was forced to eat eight of his reindeer. Then there was apparently a struggle between him and the last reindeer. After several blows, it broke free and eventually flew off to leave Santa to bleed out in the dirt from gory antler wounds. These are sad times but we still have each other, just no more frivolous Christmas gifts -- ever again!"
*walks away nipping on a fifth of bourbon*
EK: No, no and no. We don't develop malware and we don't publish exploits. Both happen to be illegal — and amoral. I don't recommend you doing either too.
...
Firemen don't start fires
Actually, yeah they do, it's called "live fire training." And since they do it in a controlled area like a shipping container or abandoned house marked for demolition worth nothing with nobody at risk, I would think that you too would do that sort of work considering you can set up a VM and have no risk and try to get ahead of the virus authors. That's exactly what the author had me do when I read and reviewed the Metasploit guide.
Do you have a link to the law that says writing viruses is illegal? You're saying that if I set up a network of computers in my house disconnected from the internet and infect them to study how a botnet mutates, that would be illegal? How do you actively combat mutating malware without studying it and growing it internally?
Doctors might not infect people but they certainly grow cultures of bad bacteria and study viruses that they keep in a lab. Honestly I was quite shocked by this knee jerk response.
Google Image Search: Attractive Dick Van Dyke
Oh dear god!
Well, that's bizarre, when I go to the demonstration page in Firefox nothing happens yet when I go to it in IE, it magically works. What are they doing in their demonstration page that is different? Browser version shouldn't matter, right?
Conversely this just sounds like Microsoft being bit in the ass by giving their browser special privileges to native OS libs and dlls.
Seriously, why the hell is this on Slashdot?
Well, I like to think that when a news reports on something like a study and it turns out that there was a reason to doubt that study in the first place, it's that news organization's prerogative to make sure that they follow up on that story. The fact is he's still listed on the board of PXP.
This doesn't even have to do with computers, or anything even remotely nerd-like ...
Fracking is indeed nerd-like for the geologists, environmentalists and anyone concerned with energy or resource dependence. Fracking for shale resources is going to have a key effect on the future of the world. That will affect everything nerd-like. To quote Jim Rogers:
If the 19th century belonged to Britain, and the 20th century to the United States. Then the 21st century will surely belong to China. My advice: Make sure your kids learn Chinese.
And I feel like western nations are clawing at any sort of straw they can find to prevent that. Unfortunately I personally feel this has resulted in putting all our eggs in natural gas and developing those resources at all costs.
Easy to make, hard to use, and people not using theirs increases the scarcity and value of mine!
Dearest Grandson,
Thank you for the wonderful Christmas gift you gave me this year! Why I hadn't even heard of the bitter coins prior to our yuletide celebration but after you left I got on the google and found this lovely place called the Silk Road on the interwebs where I could get all the Viagra I wanted. I haven't split your grandmother in half like that since VE day. But that's not all I got on there, why it takes me back to the great war and the things you could get overseas. And, bless it, those bitter coining A-rabs sold me the stickiest icky I ever did toke! Oh, my, Hjalmer would have loved to puff puff on this stuff, too bad the Krauts gunned him up on that god forsaken beach in France.
Well, do you know where I can get more of those bitter coins? Musta been more than wacky tabaccy in that herb cause Grandpa's got the shakes and now your grandmother's demanding more of the Beast with Two Backs so if you have another wallet laying around with some of those bitter coins, I'd very much appreciate it.
Love,
Grandpa
Why are you trying to kill Linux?
I'm confused, how exactly does one 'kill' Linux? I thought that one of the beautiful aspects of the GPL is its robustness. Everyone is free to do basically anything they want (with the most minor caveats) which is great because that means you can always just fork GPL'd code as long as you release your changes with your distributions. Even though I've moved from Debian to Xubuntu for my personal computers, I could very easily move back. This is not true with my servers (which have remained Debian for that very reason).
Personally I feel like Canonical has done a lot for Linux and they've done that by taking risks. Now Shuttleworth is taking risks that a lot of people simply do not agree with. It's fine to criticize these in detail but a hyperbole like "killing Linux" frankly befuddles me. How is this going to disrupt CentOS or Debian or Gentoo or Slackware or any other distro of Linux? Furthermore, how is this going to disrupt the core kernel itself? Linux is robust. Linux is alive and vibrant on servers. Canonical made a move to make it a desktop OS just like Android was an effort to put it on phones. If they think that taking their code is a smart gamble and you so strongly disagree with it, fork that code and start doing your own development.
Shuttleworth can't kill Linux. He can make stupid decisions that negatively affect Ubuntu but at the end of the day, he's getting money for that development from backers and has the say in which direction that development team takes. He worked on Debian a while ago and left because he disagreed with it. Now if you're developing for Ubuntu and you don't like his direction, leave and make MasterNerdGuyLinux or whatever you want to call it. No one's stopping you, the Linux kernel development marches on, what's the problem here?
Microsoft can't kill Linux and neither will Shuttleworth -- that's a testament to Linux. He can jeopardize his marketshare but at the end of the day I will argue that Shuttleworth has made a major positive impact on Linux despite my frank disagreement with his latest developments.
So then beef production moves slightly north?
This is a confusingly ignorant misunderstanding that I constantly see reiterated on Slashdot. There is only a finite amount of arable land and that is 18% of the United States with 0.21% of that being permanent crops. From this site, you can see in this graph that the figure of 18% actually fluctuates. Now, there's a lot of factors at play but drought is a big one and this idea that you "just move the cattle North" to the new land is downright laughable. Temperature is not the only factor in making land arable. Why does Iowa produce more corn than per acre than any other state? Well, the soil has a lot to do with it but also the temperature is better than, say, Minnesota even though there's a lot of corn and soy grown in Minnesota.
During the dust bowl of the 1930s, we should have learned that you can't just "move cattle and farming North a bit" to avoid droughts. We also should have learned how important it is to combat erosion and protect our water supplies.
What happened last season in Texas was they failed to grow their own roughage (hay, straw, alfalfa, sorghum, etc) for their steers to eat and so they paid top dollar to have it shipped down to them and other states profited from Texas' loss. This is not a sustainable model. Moving cattle northward will not work, there is a reason ranching flourished in Texas -- any areas north of there that have the same conditions have long become ranches. Even if someone does the math and says "Oh, hey, this area of Montana here is going to be highly sought after" it's not like a massive ranch in Texas can pick up operations and move them to Montana in a single season. You're going to see restructuralization problems and the United States consumer will cry highway robbery when their already subsidized McDonald's burger costs $1.33 instead of $0.99. Should Texas become akin to Arizona, our economy will feel it.
Or maybe I can finally get grass fed beef from the USA?
You can already buy this from Montana and other states. The problem is how much grassland can support free roaming cattle. Again, a lesson learned from the Dust Bowl, we need to build ranches and feed them in order to prevent top soil erosion. If you demand they be free roaming and you calculate it, beef will become incredibly expensive and not a viable option for the entire populace.
Over all a small increase in the price of beef is not the end of the world. The decreased red meat consumption would probably be a good thing on average for us.
Right, those grapes were sour anyway?
Texas still has lots of oil and natural gas.
So? Most states depend on multiple sources of revenue, right? You should be alarmed when any major industry faces a major problem. Otherwise, why not just kill off all the other industries and embrace "lots of oil and natural gas"? Well, that's simple, you use what you got and Texas is losing arable land to grow food for their cattle.
Its agriculture was living on borrowed time anyway. Once the aquifer went dry that was coming to an end.
An unsustainable agricultural strategy is bad agriculture. Doesn't everything -- even your oil and natural gas -- depend on the availability of water? You make it sound like we just turned Texas into Mars and probably for the better? Ruining land is not the answer and this report states that Texas will get more arid so measures should be taken to at least prepare for that, wouldn't you think?
sea levels to rise almost a meter more than present over the next century ... hardly a doomsday scenario
I believe you don't realise quite how many people live within a vertical metre of sea level.
Well, that's a valid point however hamanity's war with the sea is nothing new and the Dutch have become quite adept at it (with 20% of their country being reclaimed land). Now, that has a whole bunch of caveats about how much trouble they face is that system ever fails and we've all probably heard about that. I would bet that if people believed these reports, some relatively inexpensive measures could be taken to prevent a much more expensive catastrophe. I don't know how much these efforts could help Florida -- an occasional hurricane might make them a bigger problem. But engineers have been tackling this problem.
For the United States, I think a bigger doomsday scenario of this is for agriculture in Texas. Texas already lost $7.62 billion in agricultural this year and if you're telling me that that part of North America is going to get more arid? Well, droughts are something that humans have long had problems with. You can build all the irrigation you want but when that's dried up, there's not a lot you can do. If you like to eat beef and if you like Texas to be a productive state in the union, you should probably be concerned about this.
If one of my workers told the whole country why he thought I was stupid, I'd fire him too, regardless the merit
HA! "Fear will keep them in line"? Well, I'm sure the rest of the country has great faith in you if your response to a challenge of your position is to just get rid of the guy. Oh my god that's funny! Did you know that in my software development team, we challenge each other all the time and, no, we don't have our coworkers offed if we are wrong. Is Derek Khanna on his way to the gulags? Perhaps a Republican Rehabilitation camp in Fairbanks, AK?
He had to know this would cost him his job.
He could not have expected anything else.
He's 24 and probably still believes that United States politics offer an open and free forum where you can put forth ideas no matter what side you're on and the change that follows can be a good thing if the logic behind it is sound. Surely the worst that could happen is that your party would have to explain again logically why your brief was incorrect and unsound?
Boy it sure was hard typing that with a straight face.
They've publicly disowned the brief and now it looks like they're cutting off the hand that wrote it ... but have they actually put forth a logical and rationale rebuttal that explains why Khanna was so wrong that his termination was necessary?
If my employer came to me and said, "Pack it up, you don't have a job tomorrow." I'd be very interested in knowing why and being completely fine with my termination if they were just batshit insane in their reasoning. I'm sure I'm not the only one that suspects this came as an order from an industry lobbyist or at least in the form of "This is very interesting work by Khanna. On an unrelated note *cough* *cough* you might be hard pressed for campaign donations next election cycle."
Oh, and I am absolutely relishing the goodwill and lip service paid to the Republicans in the initial Slashdot comments.
This reminded me of a three year old discussion I had on Slashdot before about thorium's fuel cycle yielding uranium-233 ... not sure if new evidence has come to light, can't read the Nature article.
Modern Distros still have some major rough edges. I cant even get ubuntu to stop turning off the monitor, and there is nowhere in the UI that even offers it. I tried 7 different vectors at the command line before i gave up. It shouldnt be that hard.
Not sure what a vector at the command line means but after 10 seconds of clicking through their help guide:
Click the icon at the very right of the menu bar and select System Settings.
Click Brightness and Lock.
Change the value in the Lock screen after drop-down list.
but the real problem with the "Just run Linux" solution is that non-Computer Science people want to do things like answer e-mail, write correspondence, and buy software from the store that has a nice, easy installer.
I'm sorry, I didn't see anywhere in this actual article where he urges people to "Just run Linux" as you quoted, could you help me find it here? Whether or not he rambles about how people should use Linux seems a separate point from his (in my opinion) valid criticisms of Apple, wouldn't you say?
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Or are you just trying to get to the talking points that you've learned to parrot
Freedom is nice, but when it involves having to become a computer engineer to exercise it - most people will take the padded handcuffs.
OH! Okay, I see you have little to say about what was discussed in the article so you fall back on the same old boring bullshit. Carry on. Let me help you with that quote:
Freedom is nice, but when it involves having to become a civil engineer or economist to exercise it - most people will take the oppressive government.
Freedom is nice, but when it involves having to become a biological engineer to exercise it - most people will take big pharma.
Freedom is nice, but when it involves having to become a radio engineer to exercise it - most people will take the FCC.
Do I need to keep going or are you done with your "Freedom is nice but I'll totally trade it for some trivial shit" statements?
everyone has design patents and patents rectangles and other shapes. check the patent office.
You're saying that everyone has the same design patents? I was under the impression that rounded corners on icons belonged solely to Apple? Or are you saying I can get my own patent for rounded squares that open up an application on a mobile device? I mean wasn't the whole logic in the Samsung Galaxy case about their devices being black with rounded corners and Apple's devices being black with rounded corners? I mean ... how does Samsung get their own design patent for that since you claim "everyone" has them?
IV is just a mutual fund and all the big tech companies like apple, google, cisco and others invest in their patent pools
I don't think you know what a mutual fund is. I don't think IV pays back to Apple, Google, Cisco, et al like they would if they were a mutual fund. And IV claims to be "helping the small guys" manage patent portfolios (although I can't find an example of this either). Furthermore, I found it really funny that you claim these large companies are their customers. Do you have any evidence of this? Because when This American Life did a story on them, they were having a hard time finding these imaginary revenue streams you speak of. Oh, you claim they have nothing to do with patent wars? Gee, it's super odd that on IV's site they have an article explaining how patent wars are a natural and necessary business expense and they've been going on since the beginning of time.
For many people, however, the only 'true' Batmobile is the original version driven by Adam West in the 1960s TV series
Well if you want to get all LATFH about it, the first vehicle labeled "Batmobile" was a red sedan in Detective Comics #27 released in May of 1939.