So everyone with more money than you should give it all to charity?
You think those starving children in Africa wouldn't go out for a meal at a fancy restaurant if they were given a billion pounds? Then perhaps buy some nice shoes? They could just use it to buy everyone in their country just the right amount of food to make sure they're not classed as 'starving' for a while, but I highly suspect they might want to enjoy themselves a little too. They might even buy a bike or a car. You know, some people like to have fun occasionally, when it is within their means?
I'm very sure Larry and Sergey have caused more money to go to charity than you ever will. Just because they also want to use their money - money that they have earned by creating an excellent business - to have a bit of fun doesn't make them evil. It's easy to point the finger, but I bet you'd buy a nice car and house if you were a billionaire, rather than live in a slum. Any of us slashdotters could survive on a lot less than what we have. Why do you even have a slashdot account and access to a computer? Why aren't you out there earning as much money as you can so that you can redistribute the wealth?
The problem is not with our "consumerist culture", it's with corrupt and moronic governments who run their countries into the ground and treat their citizens like shit. No amount of charity is going to turn a country like that around if its leaders are corrupt.
First of all, that doesn't actually have anything to do with your original comment of a car having to be kept on the ground by gravity!
Secondly, are you suggesting a rocket powered car would go go faster without its wheels too (without being given skis, or wings and control surfaces)? I doubt it.. it would probably just slide along a bit at first, then dig into the ground, possibly flipping over and flopping around a bit, perhaps taking off for a moment if it gets upside down and is travelling fast enough to create any lift.. but it would destroy itself before getting anywhere near 1000mph.
I think a more practical item would be brain and intestine holders! Nobody is walking away from something like that in a crash..:s
It's not like a 1000mph car is even useful for anything - it is still impressive to develop the tech, and it could be useful for other applications, but personally I'd just design an AI to pilot the car rather than risk someone's life like that. I love my cars, but if you need to move that fast, you move through the air where stuff like bumps in the ground and wheel bearings aren't going to cause problems. I think anything over 200mph in a car is asking for trouble - you get to the horizon almost as soon as you can see it.
It sounds more like this is something like Steam. It does lock content to an account. But you can take the account wherever you want, and download your content again because it's tied to your account and not your machine. The problem with the annoying kinds of DRM is that they tend to tie down your music/games/whatever to one location.
It's like Microsoft say you're only allowed to install Windows on one machine. That's the sort of DRM that the recording industry like to push. Imagine Microsoft said that you only had to pay once then you could use it on any machine you want as long as you were the only person using it at the time? That's like Steam (or network licensing for professional software, which often makes more sense than standalone licenses).
That's the contrast in my opinion. Steam style DRM is actually useful because it provides you with a way to be able to download your legally owned stuff wherever you go in a way that won't worry the people who licensed it to you. That saves you from having to setup your own server for backups of your games or music*. But restrictive DRM is just.. restrictive.
Yes, DRM can be broken, but I don't have a problem with letting companies try to protect their own software as long as they do it in a way that actually benefits me rather than causes me troubles.
* of course if their DRM servers happen to be taken offline without first freeing all of your content, you're fucked.. but Sony and Valve aren't going to die anytime soon. And if they do go down, that's a good excuse to 'legally' break the DRM..
If Microsoft products are loosing ground, they have a great future in the mining and dredging industries! Imagine being able to dig things up without all that expensive heavy machinery!
Why can't these vendors make a product that only allows my "good" programs to execute and nothing else?
Hmm.. sell perfect AV solution once.. or.. sell imperfect solution on a yearly subscription.. let me think now.. no, I can't see why they wouldn't release a product based on white-listing at all!
As thePowerOfGraySkull says though, trying this method with uneducated users doesn't really work anyway, as they tend to just white-list anything without caring. It would probably work quite well for your average geek though - especially when combined with a list of hashes for well known 'good' software. As you say, it would be a hell of a lot easier than keeping track of all possible 'bad' software.
One of our porn addict directors insists on always downloading those programs that claim to make your computer faster or clean up spyware infections etc. I'm surprised he isn't totally bankrupt by now. He's probably bleeding money to both legitimate anti-spyware companies, but also a few scammers who sell stuff that isn't really anti-spyware, not to mention people who have probably copied his credit card number and siphon money off it, etc. I don't really enjoy having to let him connect up to our network. I'm very tempted to get him to buy a Mac as his next machine, but he'd probably manage to screw that up somehow too.
To have a "complete" test we'd have to know every possible vector of attack. If we knew that then couldn't we build a perfect AV system? I doubt that will ever happen.
One man's virus could be another man's new fangled networked utility that could have similar characteristics to a virus. Wouldn't something like P2P clients or a busy SMTP server appear to be threats to a heuristic virus scanner? So you have to use black or whitelists rather than rely on heuristics. Whitelists are pretty good, but you still need an OS with no security holes for them to work properly - not to mention users that won't just blindly authorise unknown applications.
It would be nice to be able to scan a program and be told what kind of connections it may try to make, and to where, what files it will create or modify on your machine, registry options it will add if it's a Windows application, etc. Does anyone know of applications that do this? It would probably be easiest to just have some kind of virtualisation or WINE like environment to just run the program and see what it tries to do..
i imagine a bunch of floating house would also go to pieces as they smash into each other down the block
Sounds pretty easily solved by anchors, and perhaps rubber impact barriers round the edges just in case (but that wouldn't work so well in stormy weather).
whats to stop a floating house from hitting a car and rolling?
If everyone was living in floating houses, wouldn't they have boats rather than cars? And what exactly would cause a house to 'roll' just because it hit a car? Houses are much heavier than cars so they'd likely just push the car along because of their greater momentum. If the car was cemented into the ground and there was a big wave driving the house then perhaps it would have a chance of toppling, but if you have designed in a nice low centre of gravity (ie just have one floor, or have a lot of ballast in the bottom), it would have to be a biiiig wave.
A floating house would have everything bolted down too. You think people have their refridgerators flying around everywhere inside their limousines, private jets and yachts? If you're going to suggest problems, try to come up with some obvious solutions yourself before tellling these problems to other people. If you can think up solutions, chances are that engineers can too.
It's not like to make a floating house you would just take a normal house and put an inflatable raft in the foundations. If you were that worried about your area flooding, you could just buy a proper houseboat or get a house somewhere else.
Re:Not coloured impressed just yet
on
The Walking House
·
· Score: 1
Best yet, you can re-configure your house into a giant mecha and join the fight against evil arch-villains
When I was reading up on LOTR on wikipedia it actually said that Tolkien wrote is as one book, but split it into 3 parts because of the war going on, maybe people at the time had less to spend on buying books, or making books.
I perhaps would be able to get through LOTR better these days as I have better spacial awareness and geographical knowledge than when I first tried to read it, but the idea still doesn't entrall me. There are hundreds of other books that I'd rather read or even re-read first.
The highest losses from the pipeline were in February 1978, when a deliberate explosion led to more than 16,000 barrels (2,500 mÂ) leaking out at Steele Creek, near Fairbanks
And one jerk actually shot a hole in the pipeline on purpose, leading to 6000 barrels of loss.
They have a lot of observation stations and people scouring the pipeline as well, so like I said unless there is a decent defense (or even just warning) system on the tracks then something like this is just asking for trouble.
I admit it won't happen very often, but just pointing out that it would be a very good target for those people that are always making such a big deal about terrorism, they concentrate on airports and ignore the more likely threats. Airport "security" is so unnecessarily tight these days - any terrorists that did try to use a plane as an improvised missile would get taken out pretty quickly by the passengers like in the infamous Flight 93 on 9/11.
As I said I am not that bothered about it myself and I would go ahead with plans if it was economically viable - but considering the big song and dance the government makes about airplanes and the PATRIOT act, if they built something like this it would either be a good act of defiance showing that they're regaining some backbone, or it would prove that they were just using the public to gain more power.
LOTR was one of the most boring books I have ever read. I didn't even reach the third book, I stopped about 20 pages from the end of the second. It's one of the few books where I consider the movie to be better (despite not being a fan of the movies either). I hope they don't screw up the Hobbit anyway, which I have always enjoyed. All fantasy stories these days could be referred to as a poor man's Tolkien, if you're going to think of things that way.
The Harry Potter books are much better than the movies. I'm glad I read the first 4 before the first movie was out, otherwise I probably would have a low opinion of the whole thing too. The last movie was particularly poorly directed I thought.
Fuck you, you don't know me or my beliefs. The REAL problem with the world is people like you - people who lump broad groups of other people that they don't understand or are afraid of into narrow categories and focus all of their bitterness and hatred onto them
You know I actually saw on the BBC news recently that scientists were considering releasing a Japanese insect into the wild in the UK to get rid of some Japanese weed that is thriving in some of our rivers. Reminded me of that very quote. I don't think winter will save us though. People are complete idiots sometimes..
Hey I know that, you know that, but your government either likes to pretend or really believes that there are going to be more terrorist attacks. I usually get annoyed at people expecting terrorist attacks at airports all the time or whatever (and I live in Scotland where those morons tried to blow up their landrover at glasgow airport).
The thing is that since they made a big deal out of the whole thing, Al Qaeda probably would take such an easy opportunity to piss them off. I'd probably want to do that if I'd had the hell bombed out of my friends and family for the last few years, and I think this would be a great way to send the "Great Satan" into even more of an economic depression. There's no way they could defend thousands of miles of highly expensive maglev track adequately. Railway lines are cheap as chips in comparison.
I don't think they'd do it even without the whole terrorist situation anyway. It just doesn't seem practical. Perhaps in a looooong time as the original poster said, it will make economic sense. Hopefully everyone will be playing nicely by then. Not likely though.
I hope you can afford automated laser defense systems along the whole line by that time too, because something like that would be an awesome target for a terrorist attack. Even if you didn't kill anyone, just damaging the lines would cost a whole lot of money in repairs and inconvenience a lot of people.
I don't think the US government can risk anything like this while their "war on terror" is still in effect. Canada or Russia maybe could do it if they can free up budget for it - not so many people seem to hate them (okay some little countries around Russia hate it, but they haven't shown as much initiative as Al Qaeda).
Slashdot Mirror
So everyone with more money than you should give it all to charity?
You think those starving children in Africa wouldn't go out for a meal at a fancy restaurant if they were given a billion pounds? Then perhaps buy some nice shoes? They could just use it to buy everyone in their country just the right amount of food to make sure they're not classed as 'starving' for a while, but I highly suspect they might want to enjoy themselves a little too. They might even buy a bike or a car. You know, some people like to have fun occasionally, when it is within their means?
I'm very sure Larry and Sergey have caused more money to go to charity than you ever will. Just because they also want to use their money - money that they have earned by creating an excellent business - to have a bit of fun doesn't make them evil. It's easy to point the finger, but I bet you'd buy a nice car and house if you were a billionaire, rather than live in a slum. Any of us slashdotters could survive on a lot less than what we have. Why do you even have a slashdot account and access to a computer? Why aren't you out there earning as much money as you can so that you can redistribute the wealth?
The problem is not with our "consumerist culture", it's with corrupt and moronic governments who run their countries into the ground and treat their citizens like shit. No amount of charity is going to turn a country like that around if its leaders are corrupt.
I would think a lot slower.
First of all, that doesn't actually have anything to do with your original comment of a car having to be kept on the ground by gravity!
Secondly, are you suggesting a rocket powered car would go go faster without its wheels too (without being given skis, or wings and control surfaces)? I doubt it.. it would probably just slide along a bit at first, then dig into the ground, possibly flipping over and flopping around a bit, perhaps taking off for a moment if it gets upside down and is travelling fast enough to create any lift.. but it would destroy itself before getting anywhere near 1000mph.
I think a more practical item would be brain and intestine holders! Nobody is walking away from something like that in a crash.. :s
It's not like a 1000mph car is even useful for anything - it is still impressive to develop the tech, and it could be useful for other applications, but personally I'd just design an AI to pilot the car rather than risk someone's life like that. I love my cars, but if you need to move that fast, you move through the air where stuff like bumps in the ground and wheel bearings aren't going to cause problems. I think anything over 200mph in a car is asking for trouble - you get to the horizon almost as soon as you can see it.
So.. supercars and racing cars aren't "cars" either?
Even at top speed, it would only travel 11 miles in 40 seconds..
It sounds more like this is something like Steam. It does lock content to an account. But you can take the account wherever you want, and download your content again because it's tied to your account and not your machine. The problem with the annoying kinds of DRM is that they tend to tie down your music/games/whatever to one location.
It's like Microsoft say you're only allowed to install Windows on one machine. That's the sort of DRM that the recording industry like to push. Imagine Microsoft said that you only had to pay once then you could use it on any machine you want as long as you were the only person using it at the time? That's like Steam (or network licensing for professional software, which often makes more sense than standalone licenses).
That's the contrast in my opinion. Steam style DRM is actually useful because it provides you with a way to be able to download your legally owned stuff wherever you go in a way that won't worry the people who licensed it to you. That saves you from having to setup your own server for backups of your games or music*. But restrictive DRM is just .. restrictive.
Yes, DRM can be broken, but I don't have a problem with letting companies try to protect their own software as long as they do it in a way that actually benefits me rather than causes me troubles.
* of course if their DRM servers happen to be taken offline without first freeing all of your content, you're fucked.. but Sony and Valve aren't going to die anytime soon. And if they do go down, that's a good excuse to 'legally' break the DRM..
If Microsoft products are loosing ground, they have a great future in the mining and dredging industries! Imagine being able to dig things up without all that expensive heavy machinery!
Yeah, you're right. I wouldn't want to be arrested for dis-turban the peace.
Why can't these vendors make a product that only allows my "good" programs to execute and nothing else?
Hmm.. sell perfect AV solution once.. or.. sell imperfect solution on a yearly subscription.. let me think now.. no, I can't see why they wouldn't release a product based on white-listing at all!
As thePowerOfGraySkull says though, trying this method with uneducated users doesn't really work anyway, as they tend to just white-list anything without caring. It would probably work quite well for your average geek though - especially when combined with a list of hashes for well known 'good' software. As you say, it would be a hell of a lot easier than keeping track of all possible 'bad' software.
One of our porn addict directors insists on always downloading those programs that claim to make your computer faster or clean up spyware infections etc. I'm surprised he isn't totally bankrupt by now. He's probably bleeding money to both legitimate anti-spyware companies, but also a few scammers who sell stuff that isn't really anti-spyware, not to mention people who have probably copied his credit card number and siphon money off it, etc. I don't really enjoy having to let him connect up to our network. I'm very tempted to get him to buy a Mac as his next machine, but he'd probably manage to screw that up somehow too.
To have a "complete" test we'd have to know every possible vector of attack. If we knew that then couldn't we build a perfect AV system? I doubt that will ever happen.
One man's virus could be another man's new fangled networked utility that could have similar characteristics to a virus. Wouldn't something like P2P clients or a busy SMTP server appear to be threats to a heuristic virus scanner? So you have to use black or whitelists rather than rely on heuristics. Whitelists are pretty good, but you still need an OS with no security holes for them to work properly - not to mention users that won't just blindly authorise unknown applications.
It would be nice to be able to scan a program and be told what kind of connections it may try to make, and to where, what files it will create or modify on your machine, registry options it will add if it's a Windows application, etc. Does anyone know of applications that do this? It would probably be easiest to just have some kind of virtualisation or WINE like environment to just run the program and see what it tries to do..
Damn. I knew I should have shelled out extra for the anti-virus option on my toaster.
One more pun like that and they'll never find where you were beret'd.
At last! We finally live in the days when money throwing money at a project can magically make the results better!
i imagine a bunch of floating house would also go to pieces as they smash into each other down the block
Sounds pretty easily solved by anchors, and perhaps rubber impact barriers round the edges just in case (but that wouldn't work so well in stormy weather).
whats to stop a floating house from hitting a car and rolling?
If everyone was living in floating houses, wouldn't they have boats rather than cars? And what exactly would cause a house to 'roll' just because it hit a car? Houses are much heavier than cars so they'd likely just push the car along because of their greater momentum. If the car was cemented into the ground and there was a big wave driving the house then perhaps it would have a chance of toppling, but if you have designed in a nice low centre of gravity (ie just have one floor, or have a lot of ballast in the bottom), it would have to be a biiiig wave.
A floating house would have everything bolted down too. You think people have their refridgerators flying around everywhere inside their limousines, private jets and yachts? If you're going to suggest problems, try to come up with some obvious solutions yourself before tellling these problems to other people. If you can think up solutions, chances are that engineers can too.
It's not like to make a floating house you would just take a normal house and put an inflatable raft in the foundations. If you were that worried about your area flooding, you could just buy a proper houseboat or get a house somewhere else.
Best yet, you can re-configure your house into a giant mecha and join the fight against evil arch-villains
There we go, fixed that for you ;)
I meant initiative in the sense of creativity and using new ideas. Having a plain old war isn't very inventive!
When I was reading up on LOTR on wikipedia it actually said that Tolkien wrote is as one book, but split it into 3 parts because of the war going on, maybe people at the time had less to spend on buying books, or making books.
I perhaps would be able to get through LOTR better these days as I have better spacial awareness and geographical knowledge than when I first tried to read it, but the idea still doesn't entrall me. There are hundreds of other books that I'd rather read or even re-read first.
From Wikipedia:
The highest losses from the pipeline were in February 1978, when a deliberate explosion led to more than 16,000 barrels (2,500 mÂ) leaking out at Steele Creek, near Fairbanks
And one jerk actually shot a hole in the pipeline on purpose, leading to 6000 barrels of loss.
They have a lot of observation stations and people scouring the pipeline as well, so like I said unless there is a decent defense (or even just warning) system on the tracks then something like this is just asking for trouble.
I admit it won't happen very often, but just pointing out that it would be a very good target for those people that are always making such a big deal about terrorism, they concentrate on airports and ignore the more likely threats. Airport "security" is so unnecessarily tight these days - any terrorists that did try to use a plane as an improvised missile would get taken out pretty quickly by the passengers like in the infamous Flight 93 on 9/11.
As I said I am not that bothered about it myself and I would go ahead with plans if it was economically viable - but considering the big song and dance the government makes about airplanes and the PATRIOT act, if they built something like this it would either be a good act of defiance showing that they're regaining some backbone, or it would prove that they were just using the public to gain more power.
LOTR was one of the most boring books I have ever read. I didn't even reach the third book, I stopped about 20 pages from the end of the second. It's one of the few books where I consider the movie to be better (despite not being a fan of the movies either). I hope they don't screw up the Hobbit anyway, which I have always enjoyed. All fantasy stories these days could be referred to as a poor man's Tolkien, if you're going to think of things that way.
The Harry Potter books are much better than the movies. I'm glad I read the first 4 before the first movie was out, otherwise I probably would have a low opinion of the whole thing too. The last movie was particularly poorly directed I thought.
Fuck you, you don't know me or my beliefs. The REAL problem with the world is people like you - people who lump broad groups of other people that they don't understand or are afraid of into narrow categories and focus all of their bitterness and hatred onto them
This could be the most ironic post evaaaaaar!
You know I actually saw on the BBC news recently that scientists were considering releasing a Japanese insect into the wild in the UK to get rid of some Japanese weed that is thriving in some of our rivers. Reminded me of that very quote. I don't think winter will save us though. People are complete idiots sometimes..
Try to combat, or try not. There is no try and.
Hey I know that, you know that, but your government either likes to pretend or really believes that there are going to be more terrorist attacks. I usually get annoyed at people expecting terrorist attacks at airports all the time or whatever (and I live in Scotland where those morons tried to blow up their landrover at glasgow airport).
The thing is that since they made a big deal out of the whole thing, Al Qaeda probably would take such an easy opportunity to piss them off. I'd probably want to do that if I'd had the hell bombed out of my friends and family for the last few years, and I think this would be a great way to send the "Great Satan" into even more of an economic depression. There's no way they could defend thousands of miles of highly expensive maglev track adequately. Railway lines are cheap as chips in comparison.
I don't think they'd do it even without the whole terrorist situation anyway. It just doesn't seem practical. Perhaps in a looooong time as the original poster said, it will make economic sense. Hopefully everyone will be playing nicely by then. Not likely though.
I hope you can afford automated laser defense systems along the whole line by that time too, because something like that would be an awesome target for a terrorist attack. Even if you didn't kill anyone, just damaging the lines would cost a whole lot of money in repairs and inconvenience a lot of people.
I don't think the US government can risk anything like this while their "war on terror" is still in effect. Canada or Russia maybe could do it if they can free up budget for it - not so many people seem to hate them (okay some little countries around Russia hate it, but they haven't shown as much initiative as Al Qaeda).
Freudian DiscWorld slips are more embarrassing than reading Harry Potter?
I like both, but DiscWorld definitely has more geek-chic.