What a load of FUD. I've found the Pale Moon people, on IRC and otherwise, to be extremely helpful. I use Pale Moon on linux exclusively and it is well supported.
As for being "frozen" in the past, have you used Pale Moon recently? Just because the version number doesn't increase at the rate of Chrome or Firefox doesn't mean they aren't making improvements from sub version to sub version. It's noticeable.
And what do you mean by "all the HTML 5 features"? Do you mean they refuse to implement the digital rights management extensions that were forced into Firefox? All the better. The Pale Moon team is consistently on the side of the user.
Firefox has added DRM, removed about:config options, added unremoveable bloatware (ie, Pocket), and they intend to abandon the vast majority of the existing XUL based add-on/extension ecosystem.
Pale Moon's future is as bright as Mozilla Firefox's is dark.
None of the "links" to those actions have been heard in a court of law. He was never charged with a crime, and never indicted. In fact when asked about it the Dept. of Justice says that all such evidence are state secrets and we'll just have to take their word and arbitrary assertions as fact.
For those that avoid apple and want to use computers; you can view the model predictions with the 'iNTEGRATED SPACE WEATHER ANALYSIS SYSTEM' which is very cross platform and browser: http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov/iswa/iSWA.html , look under the "Events" tab.
I'm not sure why this is considered news, except for that Messenger is orbiting Mecury now and has been in the news recently. Messenger has been in the direct path of larger CMEs many times in it's looping paths to reach Mercury.
I wonder if anyone at CNET remembers being around that age. I did the same thing, with the same script kiddie software when I was 13. My ISP had it's mail servers knocked offline for 4 hours that night as 60,000 or so emails piled up in a school adversary's parent's mailbox. My local dial-up ISP, being rational, simply cut off my parent's account. No other action was taken.
A couple of apology letters from me to the ISP and target later, my parent's dia-up account was restored/reactivated. I learned my lesson and no great harm was done.
By labeling such juvenile pranks as 'spam' people's wrath can be gathered quite easily. The proper distinction between this and the spam most everyone hates, once made, makes even the punishment given out in this case seem too great.
Obviously when one is dealing with objective law very little room can be allowed for context and non-emprically statable variables to influence justice. But in the situations of the type above I believe there is adequete 'wiggle-room' in the statues to allow for case-by-case interpetation. If this can not be done, perhaps it is the statues themselves that need to be reconsidered.
Homebuilt Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation Devices
on
Remote Control for Humans?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Most anyone (here (I'd hope)) can build a working galvanic vestibulator in their home for under $5. It's just a 0.1hz~70hz squarewave sinking ~20 milliamps of current through your neck. You can easily do that with a 555 in astable mode (R1=2kOhm,R2=26kOhm,C=.1uF--it'll have a frequency of about 27hz and a duty cycle near %50), a 9v battery or two, some pennies, cotton, and a bit of saltwater. Place the ghetto electrodes beind your ears. Play with the frequency in the above range by using knob potentiometers. I've found ~15-30hz to be best.
Even more fun can be had with a cheap Atmel ATtiny2313 8bit microcontroller (or PIC if you're that type). They cost about ~$2 each but you can sample them from large manufacturers for free (I've sampled 9 ATtiny2313 for free now). They can be programmed right from the serial port in simple (you can ignore the LEDs, but hey leave them in and you have a persistance of vision toy too), or slightly less simple manners.
If you just want to test the effect out then just the 9vs, a few pennies, some cotton, salt water, and a little wire will do. Simply series the batteries and make electrodes out of the materials previously mentioned, warm water works best. Apply the electrodes to your mastoid proccesses and you'll feel the 'acceleration'...and a bit of stinging, but not too bad. (It'd be best if you had a soldering iron, but you could go without if really needed.)
> Has anyone else had this idea too, or am I the only weirdo around here?
Yes, Bill Beaty did years ago. I imagine you took the idea from him. Give some credit where it's due.
"Kindergarten Solar-powered Death Squad
Take a large crowd of children out into the sunshine and give each one a 20cm square mirror. Show them how to aim all of their little spots of sunlight at the same distant object, then stand back and see what they do. Better yet, run away. "
- http://www.amasci.com/hoax.html
I run a Radeon 9700 Pro, 2 Geforce2 MX200s, and 2 TNT2 16MB cards in my single Antec midtower case with a P4c 2.4Ghz. All are air cooled with stock fans. I have no heat problems.
EMF is electro-motive force. EMP is electromagnetic pulse. Try looking up explosively pumped flux compression generators or vircators (or any high pulsed power microwave (no, not your home microwave 2.45Ghz setup) transmitter. It'll do you some good.
I thought you could only be punished for crimes you have been charged for and found guilty of having commit. Not for crimes you may have done or are likely to do.
That's just silly. There are plenty of US laws based on futurecrime. Just look at, say, drug law. You are charged with a crime because you may commit a crime under the influence in the future.
For the most part, you're right, big iron is a thing of the past. Perhaps all those burning Abrams on the side of the road in Iraq hit with RPGs, er somehow disabled, are just flukes. Oh well, the most interesting government tech thrusts are in less-than-lethal techs.
Try looking up recent research on calmatives (despite international treaty, they're hiding under the less-than-lethal mantra), and vortex based weapons (a round based modification for the MK19-3 automatic grenade launcher). Hell, I've even read entire thesis from the naval academy on the use of smells for controlling crowds. It is a very active field of military research, you just don't hear about it.
...but there's always a place for railguns. Being able to bombard a country from outside the range of anti-ship missles (without expensive cruise missles) is still needed.
Very different. I and a friend of mine were suspended for a year from Minnesota State University, Mankato for exploring the steam tunnels--the credits we had are on hold till the suspension is up. The appeals process was full of, "In this day and age..." "911..." etc.
We've both just written the entire thing off and moved onto other universities.
>Any biology majors here care to tell me how many >photons the eye needs to 'see' a reasonably >bright star? With that information, you can >calculate the rest (left as an exercise for the >reader).
The rods in human eyes are incredibly efficient photoreceptors. They can reportedly be triggered by individual photons under optimal conditions. This was proven by experiment in the mid 1950s sometime in a pitch black room after 30 minutes of adaptation. A controlled light source was placed at an angle of 20 degrees or so away from the eye plane and tests were done such that the absolute minimum threshold of light intensity was found. Calculations based on angle, spread, etc were made and the area the light source would hit in the eye. It was found that, as stated above, rods could reliably detect single photons.
It's an evolutionary limit of sorts. I may be off on the procedure as I'm recalling it from an odd psychophysics book I read back at uni but I'm fairly sure of the single photon thing.
While it would seem logical to do such a thing, there is a fundamental flaw in your logic. You seem to hold the belief that the government has the same freedom of action as a private individual.
An individual has the right to discriminate, and profile, and do whatever he or she wishes as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others. Restricting outside access to property you own is certainly not violating anyone's rights.
But the (United States) government is explicitly unable, never mind the fact that a government should not be able to do anything that is not explicitly stated in the first place, from doing the above such things as they violate the rights of individuals. These are not rights guaranteed in the constitution, granted, but they should not be abandoned quite so easily to gain so little.
It comes down to if you believe the government should be able to use the concepts of 'future crime' (You might do something in the future, so we charge you now. Think drug laws.) and 'collectivism' (You are guilty by association. Your great grandfather killed a man? It's likely you will too.) as evidence in criminal cases. I feel that going down that path could lead to hard times ahead, and should be avoided at any cost.
Remember, the (United States) government was founded on the ideas of logic and objectivity. And it's actions are constrained to operated within these arenas of thought. Your example using an individual's rights as an argument for the government's ability to do the same expands government power beyond the limits set by the constitution.
Government Rights != Individual Rights.
But hey, that's just my analysis of the situation. I could be wrong.
First of all, it's not peer2peer. It's client-server.
There are still a few trackers where the original hotline community lives on. Like the "No Banner" types and such. (www.tracker-tracker.com for a listing). Just today I did a quick refresh of blight.dhs.org and was greeted by a listing of servers that were all banner free, usually running pre-1.5 servers or hx (a free hotline clone for unix {a port has been made to win32} http://hx.fortyoz.org/ for more details), and pretty much all of them had guest download on. The server owners were quite friendly in fact. Hotline is far from the decaying cess pit you describe.
Of course there are many banner scheme servers. But if you look beyond that and use a real tracker you'll see what I mean.
Also, he DID persue legal action against Hotline Communications LTD...and lost.
Of course I was a little bit sensationalist, how else would I get the article posted on slashdot.
Also, when I submitted this article the chances were really quite high compared to anything that we've found floating out in space in the past.
Asteroid/Comet impacts are not an if, but a when. It will happen someday. Maybe I was a bit enthusiastic...but still, you have to get the general public educated about it somehow.
Of course nuclear war is a threat, but I see an impact as a far greater threat of totally wiping out all life on earth.
Anyway, NASA changed their page only hours after I submitted the story, don't blame me or the editors for this "sensationalistic material". If you need someone to blame, why not NASA?
Hmmm, interesting. I read the "real" article as well, only a few hours earlier than you.
When I read it it still stated there was a chance for impact in 2030. I noticed the page changed a few hours after I submitted the story. You can't really blame me for not being able to edit my story submission.
But thanks for pointing out the update to everyone else.
Well, I know it's a slight bit off topic, but I'd just like to bring this topic up.
Wouldn't one of the new, relatively cheap 3d plastic objects printers be perfect for the spacestation? Some vitally important part is broked? "Oh that's fine, I'll go print out another one". Instead of hauling all the 'stuff' up on the space shuttle you could use the raw materials to make needed parts in space.
Slashdot Mirror
What a load of FUD. I've found the Pale Moon people, on IRC and otherwise, to be extremely helpful. I use Pale Moon on linux exclusively and it is well supported.
As for being "frozen" in the past, have you used Pale Moon recently? Just because the version number doesn't increase at the rate of Chrome or Firefox doesn't mean they aren't making improvements from sub version to sub version. It's noticeable.
And what do you mean by "all the HTML 5 features"? Do you mean they refuse to implement the digital rights management extensions that were forced into Firefox? All the better. The Pale Moon team is consistently on the side of the user.
Firefox has added DRM, removed about:config options, added unremoveable bloatware (ie, Pocket), and they intend to abandon the vast majority of the existing XUL based add-on/extension ecosystem.
Pale Moon's future is as bright as Mozilla Firefox's is dark.
None of the "links" to those actions have been heard in a court of law. He was never charged with a crime, and never indicted. In fact when asked about it the Dept. of Justice says that all such evidence are state secrets and we'll just have to take their word and arbitrary assertions as fact.
Does this effect the Flash 11 beta?
The best videos, processed and raw, are available in javascript, flash, and mpg from the lockheedmartin/solarsoft group that handles SDO AIA: http://sdowww.lmsal.com/sdomedia/ssw/ssw_client/data/ssw_service_110606_235609_98013/www/
If you look at the proton monitors in L1 http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ace/SIS_24h.html and earth geosynchronous http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/rt_plots/Proton.gif orbit there is a very suggestive correlation between this flare and a flux of high energy protons! The timing is about right and the flare itself is positioned such that the parker spiral http://spaceweather.uma.es/solarstorms_files/figura1bc.JPG of the interplanetary magnetic field http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2434rAbImf0 would put earth in sun spot 1226's path http://i.imgur.com/ZIffl.gif. This tight coupling of timing between the flare time (~06:30:00) and proton arrival (07:00:00) suggests not a coronal mass ejection (that takes days) but instead of weakly relativistic particle beam traveling down the magnetic field lines to earth in only tens of minutes. This interpetation is confirmed by the UMA automatic solar energetic particle forcaster http://spaceweather.uma.es/forecastpanel.htm and later in the day mentioned by a press release http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-unusual-solar-storm-disrupt-earth.html.
For those that avoid apple and want to use computers; you can view the model predictions with the 'iNTEGRATED SPACE WEATHER ANALYSIS SYSTEM' which is very cross platform and browser: http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov/iswa/iSWA.html , look under the "Events" tab.
Here's a direct link to the heliosphere model showing the coronal mass ejection and Messenger that was discussed: http://iswa.ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov:8080/IswaSystemWebApp/StreamArgumentServlet?cygnetInstanceId=65209753&argumentId=1
I'm not sure why this is considered news, except for that Messenger is orbiting Mecury now and has been in the news recently. Messenger has been in the direct path of larger CMEs many times in it's looping paths to reach Mercury.
I wonder if anyone at CNET remembers being around that age. I did the same thing, with the same script kiddie software when I was 13. My ISP had it's mail servers knocked offline for 4 hours that night as 60,000 or so emails piled up in a school adversary's parent's mailbox. My local dial-up ISP, being rational, simply cut off my parent's account. No other action was taken.
A couple of apology letters from me to the ISP and target later, my parent's dia-up account was restored/reactivated. I learned my lesson and no great harm was done.
By labeling such juvenile pranks as 'spam' people's wrath can be gathered quite easily. The proper distinction between this and the spam most everyone hates, once made, makes even the punishment given out in this case seem too great.
Obviously when one is dealing with objective law very little room can be allowed for context and non-emprically statable variables to influence justice. But in the situations of the type above I believe there is adequete 'wiggle-room' in the statues to allow for case-by-case interpetation. If this can not be done, perhaps it is the statues themselves that need to be reconsidered.
Most anyone (here (I'd hope)) can build a working galvanic vestibulator in their home for under $5. It's just a 0.1hz~70hz squarewave sinking ~20 milliamps of current through your neck. You can easily do that with a 555 in astable mode (R1=2kOhm,R2=26kOhm,C=.1uF--it'll have a frequency of about 27hz and a duty cycle near %50), a 9v battery or two, some pennies, cotton, and a bit of saltwater. Place the ghetto electrodes beind your ears. Play with the frequency in the above range by using knob potentiometers. I've found ~15-30hz to be best.
Even more fun can be had with a cheap Atmel ATtiny2313 8bit microcontroller (or PIC if you're that type). They cost about ~$2 each but you can sample them from large manufacturers for free (I've sampled 9 ATtiny2313 for free now). They can be programmed right from the serial port in simple (you can ignore the LEDs, but hey leave them in and you have a persistance of vision toy too), or slightly less simple manners.
If you just want to test the effect out then just the 9vs, a few pennies, some cotton, salt water, and a little wire will do. Simply series the batteries and make electrodes out of the materials previously mentioned, warm water works best. Apply the electrodes to your mastoid proccesses and you'll feel the 'acceleration'...and a bit of stinging, but not too bad. (It'd be best if you had a soldering iron, but you could go without if really needed.)
He can even have the hero save the day by releasing the spider-egg eating ants in the /. story two before this one.
> Has anyone else had this idea too, or am I the only weirdo around here?
Yes, Bill Beaty did years ago. I imagine you took the idea from him. Give some credit where it's due.
"Kindergarten Solar-powered Death Squad
Take a large crowd of children out into the sunshine and give each one a 20cm square mirror. Show them how to aim all of their little spots of sunlight at the same distant object, then stand back and see what they do. Better yet, run away. "
- http://www.amasci.com/hoax.html
I run a Radeon 9700 Pro, 2 Geforce2 MX200s, and 2 TNT2 16MB cards in my single Antec midtower case with a P4c 2.4Ghz. All are air cooled with stock fans. I have no heat problems.
(brute force multi-monitor setup)
EMF is electro-motive force. EMP is electromagnetic pulse. Try looking up explosively pumped flux compression generators or vircators (or any high pulsed power microwave (no, not your home microwave 2.45Ghz setup) transmitter. It'll do you some good.
I thought you could only be punished for crimes you have been charged for and found guilty of having commit. Not for crimes you may have done or are likely to do.
That's just silly. There are plenty of US laws based on futurecrime. Just look at, say, drug law. You are charged with a crime because you may commit a crime under the influence in the future.
That brings up an interesting point. If you are parodying the movie whilst your filming would it be okay?
Huh. A new secret SID, neat.
For the most part, you're right, big iron is a thing of the past. Perhaps all those burning Abrams on the side of the road in Iraq hit with RPGs, er somehow disabled, are just flukes. Oh well, the most interesting government tech thrusts are in less-than-lethal techs.
...but there's always a place for railguns. Being able to bombard a country from outside the range of anti-ship missles (without expensive cruise missles) is still needed.
Try looking up recent research on calmatives (despite international treaty, they're hiding under the less-than-lethal mantra), and vortex based weapons (a round based modification for the MK19-3 automatic grenade launcher). Hell, I've even read entire thesis from the naval academy on the use of smells for controlling crowds. It is a very active field of military research, you just don't hear about it.
Do you know how expensive widescreen displays and the like are?
17" CRTs are cheap. I have 4 running right now. It cost me ~$200 for this setup. That wouldn't even get me a 17" LCD normally.
>an old P5 266mhz under his desk
A Pentium 5? Yeah, that might do it.
>I guess things are different now...
Very different. I and a friend of mine were suspended for a year from Minnesota State University, Mankato for exploring the steam tunnels--the credits we had are on hold till the suspension is up. The appeals process was full of, "In this day and age..." "911..." etc.
We've both just written the entire thing off and moved onto other universities.
>Any biology majors here care to tell me how many
>photons the eye needs to 'see' a reasonably >bright star? With that information, you can
>calculate the rest (left as an exercise for the
>reader).
The rods in human eyes are incredibly efficient photoreceptors. They can reportedly be triggered by individual photons under optimal conditions. This was proven by experiment in the mid 1950s sometime in a pitch black room after 30 minutes of adaptation. A controlled light source was placed at an angle of 20 degrees or so away from the eye plane and tests were done such that the absolute minimum threshold of light intensity was found. Calculations based on angle, spread, etc were made and the area the light source would hit in the eye. It was found that, as stated above, rods could reliably detect single photons.
It's an evolutionary limit of sorts. I may be off on the procedure as I'm recalling it from an odd psychophysics book I read back at uni but I'm fairly sure of the single photon thing.
While it would seem logical to do such a thing, there is a fundamental flaw in your logic. You seem to hold the belief that the government has the same freedom of action as a private individual.
An individual has the right to discriminate, and profile, and do whatever he or she wishes as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others. Restricting outside access to property you own is certainly not violating anyone's rights.
But the (United States) government is explicitly unable, never mind the fact that a government should not be able to do anything that is not explicitly stated in the first place, from doing the above such things as they violate the rights of individuals. These are not rights guaranteed in the constitution, granted, but they should not be abandoned quite so easily to gain so little.
It comes down to if you believe the government should be able to use the concepts of 'future crime' (You might do something in the future, so we charge you now. Think drug laws.) and 'collectivism' (You are guilty by association. Your great grandfather killed a man? It's likely you will too.) as evidence in criminal cases. I feel that going down that path could lead to hard times ahead, and should be avoided at any cost.
Remember, the (United States) government was founded on the ideas of logic and objectivity. And it's actions are constrained to operated within these arenas of thought. Your example using an individual's rights as an argument for the government's ability to do the same expands government power beyond the limits set by the constitution.
Government Rights != Individual Rights.
But hey, that's just my analysis of the situation. I could be wrong.
First of all, it's not peer2peer. It's client-server.
There are still a few trackers where the original hotline community lives on. Like the "No Banner" types and such. (www.tracker-tracker.com for a listing). Just today I did a quick refresh of blight.dhs.org and was greeted by a listing of servers that were all banner free, usually running pre-1.5 servers or hx (a free hotline clone for unix {a port has been made to win32} http://hx.fortyoz.org/ for more details), and pretty much all of them had guest download on. The server owners were quite friendly in fact. Hotline is far from the decaying cess pit you describe.
Of course there are many banner scheme servers. But if you look beyond that and use a real tracker you'll see what I mean.
Also, he DID persue legal action against Hotline Communications LTD...and lost.
-----------------------------
I have a smart math teacher then...He can both code, and he knew what my binary shirt said! I was pretty impressed.
(he had visited thinkgeek)
-----------------------------
Of course I was a little bit sensationalist, how else would I get the article posted on slashdot. Also, when I submitted this article the chances were really quite high compared to anything that we've found floating out in space in the past.
Asteroid/Comet impacts are not an if, but a when. It will happen someday. Maybe I was a bit enthusiastic...but still, you have to get the general public educated about it somehow.
Of course nuclear war is a threat, but I see an impact as a far greater threat of totally wiping out all life on earth.
Anyway, NASA changed their page only hours after I submitted the story, don't blame me or the editors for this "sensationalistic material". If you need someone to blame, why not NASA?
-----------------------------
Hmmm, interesting. I read the "real" article as well, only a few hours earlier than you.
When I read it it still stated there was a chance for impact in 2030. I noticed the page changed a few hours after I submitted the story. You can't really blame me for not being able to edit my story submission.
But thanks for pointing out the update to everyone else.
-----------------------------
Well, I know it's a slight bit off topic, but I'd just like to bring this topic up.
Wouldn't one of the new, relatively cheap 3d plastic objects printers be perfect for the spacestation? Some vitally important part is broked? "Oh that's fine, I'll go print out another one". Instead of hauling all the 'stuff' up on the space shuttle you could use the raw materials to make needed parts in space.
Just my $.02
-----------------------------