Before I RTFA I was going to post "Thanks Google, you'll be forcing me to finally install an ad blocker"
But after RTFA I see that half the posts in here are misguided.
There is one issue though: can javascript on the pages click the ad causing them to auto-play? If so, it's bad for both users and for Google - from Google's (and its customers) perspective it will be a new form of click fraud. From users' perspective, it'll suck because their bandwidth will be used up for these ads. How can Google police such activites with its affiliates?
When police would spy on Mafia members, were you upset about their rights being violated?
I don't know, does the constitution allow for search warrants to enable legal searching, which of course extends to wiretaps?
Oh right, it does and it's legal. Blanket wiretapping of everyone without a) probable cause or b) a warrant issued by the judicial branch is a major violation of fourth, first, and fifth amendments.
CMYK is available in several variants, and IIRC, is in the core project's experimental branch, FYI.
Support for vectors, real macros (graphic designers should not be expected to write scripts), droplets, the ability to undo filters/macros, strong PDF support, far better layer design (including layer effects), ability to edit text without losing all effects/warps/etc. one has applied. Hell, there is a list a mile long I could come up with given two minutes' running them side by side. There is no replacement for Photoshop, Illustrator, or Acrobat in the Linux world. The Gimp is usable, and so is inkscape, but once you have experienced the Adobe graphics/illustration programs, nothing else remotely compares.
I am very anxiously awaiting the day Adobe announces a Linux port of their creative suite.
When there are 6+ billion people on the planet, do you really want someone to 'run the numbers' to determine if your life is worthwhile?
No, but I do want to move around my own country freely, without being harassed at airports because police are barred from profiling (e.g., practicing actual forensic science by spot-checking folks who fit the likely profile of suspected terrorists), not have government agencies (or contractors) listening to my business or personal telephone conversations, and be able to bear arms as the Constitution guarantees I can (I own no guns BTW and I am actually ashamed of that as I view the 2nd amendment as a responsibility and not a right).
I want to be able to search Google for anything that comes to mind (model rocket building, aircraft technology, where to buy chemicals to make rockets, etc.) without fearing that Uncle Sam is going to investigate and harass me. I want to be able to play with homemade pyrotechnics on my parents' property (they have a good-sized yard) like my dad and the local police officers used to back in the 1970s. You cannot do those things any more without becoming "certified" and "licensed" (e.g., raise revenue for Uncle Sam to waste more money on pet projects) or without being suspected of being a terrorist.
It's disgusting how willingly so many citizens have thrown away our rights in exchange for nothing more than "feeling" safer, without actually improving security one iota.
Why the hell is that modded flamebait? The poster may be mis-guided and may not value his constitutional rights, but why is that post modded down rather than some other post modded up? It does NOT come across as flamebait in the slightest. At worst he's flat-out wrong.
Sheesh. Stop throwing mod points away.
Now to address your point JavaLord - it is not an all-or-nothing scenario. Law enforcement worked very well in this country prior to 09/11/2001, and would have continued to do so afterward even without limiting our constitutional rights. Even after virtually eliminating our second amendment rights, enacting laws which put general aviation into jeopardy, infringing on first, fourth, and fifth amendment rights by spying on citizens inside our borders, is our country any safer?
Answer: NO. Dubya himself admits that not all terrorism activities can be stopped. In the meantime we've been handing over our essential liberties in exchange for a little temporary apparant security.
But for some odd reason, his gov. was capable of stopping these.
Now, I am not defending Duhbya (far from it, I hate the fucker for committing treason by working to eliminate our constitutional rights and hope he chokes on another pretzel and next time around no one is there to help him), but Clinton's administration did NOT prevent the first WTC attack. It was an attempt which FAILED because the terrorists vastly underestimated how sound the structure was by a long shot. Both Clinton and Bush were scum, and as much as I disliked Clinton, Bush has been far, far worse. Just look at the whole NSA wiretapping EVERYBODY issue.
There are four steps which belong between 2 and 3:
3 Imply that safety (temporary security) trumps the constitution, despite what Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and Adams all warned us of 4 Abuse the Executive Order power (which itself should be ruled unconstitutional. LEGISLATORS create laws, EXECUTIVE enforces laws, at least, last time I checked the Constitution that's what it stated very clearly) 5 Blame everything blocking your dictatorship on ter'rists, pedophiles, and crack dealers 6. Award any contracts resulting from steps 2-6 to companies in which you or your major campaign contributors hold a stake in 7. PROFIT
AT&T, you voided your right to keep your proprietary information locked up as trade secrets when you chose to engage in illegal activities with the government, conspiring to undermine our inalienable constitutional rights, namely the fourth and first amendments (and possibly the fifth in some cases if the "fishing" does turn up a crime). As bad as it is for pedophiles and terrorist and crack dealers to get away with what they're doing, I'd choose dealing with having those scumbags continue doing what they're doing than to lose my inalienable constitutional rights.
You got caught committing treason, and are now crying foul and are in essence trying to use the "trade secret" crap to get out of trouble and not lose customer confidence? Sorry, too late.
Gimpshop is nothing more than a slightly reorganized gimp which is still different enough from Photoshop to require relearning, and doesn't address the fact that gimp is still missing a LOT that Photoshop has to offer.
True enough, but really, I'd rather fund neither and let those projects rely on private funding. If taxpayer dollars didn't go to fund every warmonger's whim or special interest's fancy, then there would be more money in the hands of those who actually want to fund projects like this.
Expected answer from the "I want to believe" types: Actually it won't; such photos of LGM which are conspiring with the government to make crop circles and mutilate cattle everywhere will be classified or lost, or at least will cameras will conveniently "malfunction" for those shots resulting in a blurry photo. They're out there -- really, and they're the ones who teamed up with the Illuminati to put Dubya in power!
That's okay, based on the growth of Windows, Windows Forever+1 (the version following Vista) should boast disk requirements of 500GB just for the operating system if you plot out the growth curve. Don't worry, Microsoft will be prompting hard disk manufacturers to keep push disk capacities higher at faster rates. The thing that WILL suck though is the amount of time defrag.exe will take to complete. Ouch!
This cheap shot was made possible by that evil tool of the debil, Mozilla Firefox instead of the nice safe and secure closed-source Internet Exploiter.(it's safer BECAUSE it's closed source, or so I've heard recently)
Seriously though, commodity disk drives are at 500GB already. Given the rate at which disk storage has been advancing, we'll have multi-terabyte drives within a couple of years. Combine big disk drives with multiple-core CPUs, a PC can dedicate a couple of cores to losslessly compress the files down to a (relatively) manageable size.
As far as the sky being mostly black; if the CCDs they are using are reasonably sensitive, and if the primary optic is larger than a couple of centimeters (RTFA and you'll see it's 8.4-meters) there are going to be a LOT of stars and not so much blackness in the photos. It's not like they're taking photos through a 2mm-7mm or so iris limited to magnitude 6 (e.g., the human eye).
Now, another thing from TFA:
"We would like the rest of the money to come from the federal government," says Sweeney.
Of course they would. Taxpayers don't fund enough pet projects already. What's another $300mil? Ugh.
I have an idea for overhauling all of NASA, let alone just implementing an oh-so-trendy blog:
How about firing the whole lot of politicians and PHBs and hire visionaries, pioneers, and engineers? Folks such as Burt Rutan, for example. While some would say he doesn't have the expertise to build a shuttle replacement, look at what he accomplished with minimal resources at his own company; he has designed quite a few high-performance near-stall proof aircraft (The Vari-EZ and derivatives), the Beech Starship (If I ever come into a lot of money I'd pay well over market value to own one, to keep Beech from destroying it. It's a gorgeous aircraft), several fighters, the Proteus, and of course SpaceShipOne. He bucks trends and doesn't accept status quo as the end-all, be all way of doing things. Heck, even the SpaceShipOne benefactor Paul Allen would be a great addition to NASA. And again, he does things efficiently. He'd be the ideal visionary to manage an organization such as NASA and to see that money is being spent to achieve results rather than to maintain high salaries for a select few PHBs and politicians, and spending a token amount of the allocated budget on money-pit pet projects like the ISS.
Even better than taking antibiotics is to maintain a healthy diet (and for god's sake exercise once in a while) and get more sleep than the average geek. It will ensure that you maintain a strong immune system. Better yet. if you do come down with the sniffles, look at what foods containing compounds which comprise the active ingredients of many drugs for treating illnesses (ecchinacea. many fruits, garlic, onions) and add a good amount of those to your diet. The best result of maintaining a healthy diet is that you will be far less susceptible to illnesses in the first place.
Obvious, I know, but given the audience here. the majority of folks on this site probably keep Mountain Dew IVs, a volume discount at the local McDonalds, chinese or thai restaurant, and the nearest pizza parlor.;)
Because n00bs with mod points like to feel all impotent, er, important and everything, and disregard the guidelines which tell you to focus on modding up rather than down. Personally, I would love to see a quiz folks have to pass in order to be eligible for mod points. The test would consist of comments from/. which within context ANYONE with any sense of humor would find funny, but without context maybe not so much. If the user finds any of them unfunny or would consider them to be troll or flamebait comments, the users should be permanently ineligible for mod points.
Maybe then threads would become readable with a threshold of 5, because great posts would then be modded up because mod points won't have been wasted on modding funny posts (or at least attempts at humor) down.
Gee, Why do most users run Windows as admin every day? Stupid programming by third-party vendors (or sometimes even on Microsoft's part), and runas is too much of a pain for the average user (and re-introduces the exploit ANYHOW). If, say, Quickbooks calls Outlook through MAPI and Outlook is configured to use Word as its editor (the default configuration IIRC) and the template just happens to have the infection in place in normal.dot, guess what? Even though the user is set up as a limited user, the user just got rooted.
Is Microsoft to blame for the whole situation? Yes and no. They have guidelines for application design that the likes of Intuit (and many others) ignores, but on the other hand Microsoft had the technical ability to enforce the admin vs. non-admin issue with Windows 2000 and XP, and in the name of backwards compatibility did not do so. That doesn't excuse Intuit and others from poor programming practices, but the blame should be shared by companies in addition to Microsoft.
As far as word document infections go: WHY is a WORD document allowed to use VB to silently install components on the system? Run as admin or non-admin, this kind of behavior by an application is totally inexcusable. Applications should have write access to $HOME and $TEMP and that's it, and writing to other locations should require confirmation. One would argue that it shouldn't be the case because in Unix root is "god" and can nuke the entire filesystem if root so desires, but it's different because Unix didn't gain popularity until very long after security was tightly integrated into the system. On Unix is safe for the system or application to assume that if root said to rm -rf/, root MEANT to rm -rf/, and do it NOW. Where Windows came from NO security to a theoretically superior security model (it is in theory superior, if it were implemented as originally designed) but due to backwards compatibility deploying it as designed is unacceptable, then Windows should require confirmation any time things outside of $HOME and $TEMP are modified.
One might argue that asking confirmation would be annoying, that may be true. In that case, you could have a [ ]Don't ask me again this session or [ ] don't ask me again (for five minutes) option, to make it more similar to "sudo" (e.g, depending on the system, if I sudo on a box, and run multiple commands within a short time, I only need to authenticate once, but wait a few minutes then I need to reauthenticate).
There are workable ways for Microsoft to fix the security issue AND maintain at least some level of backwards compatibility. Obviously the ideal solution would be to sandbox applications into virtual machines. but that could break interprocess communication mechanisms.
Contained within that document will be the information to conduct a wire transfer of $10,000usd for each machine infected by the rootkit. In order to receive the compensation for the inconvenienced suffered, all you need to do is complete the form contained within. Require fields include name, DOB, SS#, and your primary checking routing and account numbers and the info will be automatically submitted for payment. A nominal fee for handling transfer costs will be deducted from your checking account. Don't worry, this is secure - you can trust Microsoft Word.
Since this is Microsoft, you will see a patch extremely quickly in accordance with their new update schedule intended to make network administrators' lives easier - the second tuesday of the month following completion of the defect. Of course, since this defect is not critical and is overblown (Obviously if this were a bug in an Open Source product, not only would it infect your machine but it would devour your first-born baby, burn down your house, and empty your bank accounts all simultaneously) developers will get right to work on it as soon as Windows Forever is released. The patch will be known as Microsoft Office 2007.;)
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Before I RTFA I was going to post "Thanks Google, you'll be forcing me to finally install an ad blocker"
But after RTFA I see that half the posts in here are misguided.
There is one issue though: can javascript on the pages click the ad causing them to auto-play? If so, it's bad for both users and for Google - from Google's (and its customers) perspective it will be a new form of click fraud. From users' perspective, it'll suck because their bandwidth will be used up for these ads. How can Google police such activites with its affiliates?
I don't know, does the constitution allow for search warrants to enable legal searching, which of course extends to wiretaps?
Oh right, it does and it's legal. Blanket wiretapping of everyone without a) probable cause or b) a warrant issued by the judicial branch is a major violation of fourth, first, and fifth amendments.
CMYK is available in several variants, and IIRC, is in the core project's experimental branch, FYI.
Support for vectors, real macros (graphic designers should not be expected to write scripts), droplets, the ability to undo filters/macros, strong PDF support, far better layer design (including layer effects), ability to edit text without losing all effects/warps/etc. one has applied. Hell, there is a list a mile long I could come up with given two minutes' running them side by side. There is no replacement for Photoshop, Illustrator, or Acrobat in the Linux world. The Gimp is usable, and so is inkscape, but once you have experienced the Adobe graphics/illustration programs, nothing else remotely compares.
I am very anxiously awaiting the day Adobe announces a Linux port of their creative suite.
Godwin? You lose!
Even if he were saying that, he really would not be that far off. I'd say he has been behaving more like Stalin though.
No, but I do want to move around my own country freely, without being harassed at airports because police are barred from profiling (e.g., practicing actual forensic science by spot-checking folks who fit the likely profile of suspected terrorists), not have government agencies (or contractors) listening to my business or personal telephone conversations, and be able to bear arms as the Constitution guarantees I can (I own no guns BTW and I am actually ashamed of that as I view the 2nd amendment as a responsibility and not a right).
I want to be able to search Google for anything that comes to mind (model rocket building, aircraft technology, where to buy chemicals to make rockets, etc.) without fearing that Uncle Sam is going to investigate and harass me. I want to be able to play with homemade pyrotechnics on my parents' property (they have a good-sized yard) like my dad and the local police officers used to back in the 1970s. You cannot do those things any more without becoming "certified" and "licensed" (e.g., raise revenue for Uncle Sam to waste more money on pet projects) or without being suspected of being a terrorist.
It's disgusting how willingly so many citizens have thrown away our rights in exchange for nothing more than "feeling" safer, without actually improving security one iota.
Why the hell is that modded flamebait? The poster may be mis-guided and may not value his constitutional rights, but why is that post modded down rather than some other post modded up? It does NOT come across as flamebait in the slightest. At worst he's flat-out wrong.
Sheesh. Stop throwing mod points away.
Now to address your point JavaLord - it is not an all-or-nothing scenario. Law enforcement worked very well in this country prior to 09/11/2001, and would have continued to do so afterward even without limiting our constitutional rights. Even after virtually eliminating our second amendment rights, enacting laws which put general aviation into jeopardy, infringing on first, fourth, and fifth amendment rights by spying on citizens inside our borders, is our country any safer?
Answer: NO. Dubya himself admits that not all terrorism activities can be stopped. In the meantime we've been handing over our essential liberties in exchange for a little temporary apparant security.
Now, I am not defending Duhbya (far from it, I hate the fucker for committing treason by working to eliminate our constitutional rights and hope he chokes on another pretzel and next time around no one is there to help him), but Clinton's administration did NOT prevent the first WTC attack. It was an attempt which FAILED because the terrorists vastly underestimated how sound the structure was by a long shot. Both Clinton and Bush were scum, and as much as I disliked Clinton, Bush has been far, far worse. Just look at the whole NSA wiretapping EVERYBODY issue.
There are four steps which belong between 2 and 3:
3 Imply that safety (temporary security) trumps the constitution, despite what Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and Adams all warned us of
4 Abuse the Executive Order power (which itself should be ruled unconstitutional. LEGISLATORS create laws, EXECUTIVE enforces laws, at least, last time I checked the Constitution that's what it stated very clearly)
5 Blame everything blocking your dictatorship on ter'rists, pedophiles, and crack dealers
6. Award any contracts resulting from steps 2-6 to companies in which you or your major campaign contributors hold a stake in
7. PROFIT
AT&T, you voided your right to keep your proprietary information locked up as trade secrets when you chose to engage in illegal activities with the government, conspiring to undermine our inalienable constitutional rights, namely the fourth and first amendments (and possibly the fifth in some cases if the "fishing" does turn up a crime). As bad as it is for pedophiles and terrorist and crack dealers to get away with what they're doing, I'd choose dealing with having those scumbags continue doing what they're doing than to lose my inalienable constitutional rights.
You got caught committing treason, and are now crying foul and are in essence trying to use the "trade secret" crap to get out of trouble and not lose customer confidence? Sorry, too late.
Gimpshop is nothing more than a slightly reorganized gimp which is still different enough from Photoshop to require relearning, and doesn't address the fact that gimp is still missing a LOT that Photoshop has to offer.
At one time MTV used to stand for Music Television instead of Moronic Television.
D'oh that was bad!!
Er, on that note, on a not-so-fresh day a scratch and sniff like that would not be a good thing. (are you puking yet? Well, you should be!)
Screw that, I'll just take the replicator. Hell, I have a new business idea:
1. Buy replicator
2. Program it to produce Jeri Ryan replicants
3. Buy ad space on slashdot
4. $$$PROFIT$$$
Ah hell, it'd be easier just to have Jeri Ryan blow-up dolls made and still profit plenty.
Once? Oh so you're not the typical slashdotter with a SAN dedicated to porn? ;)
If you want instant evil, you could also become a career politician. ;) There's only one Spock's beard but plenty of public offices for you to run for.
True enough, but really, I'd rather fund neither and let those projects rely on private funding. If taxpayer dollars didn't go to fund every warmonger's whim or special interest's fancy, then there would be more money in the hands of those who actually want to fund projects like this.
Expected answer from the "I want to believe" types: Actually it won't; such photos of LGM which are conspiring with the government to make crop circles and mutilate cattle everywhere will be classified or lost, or at least will cameras will conveniently "malfunction" for those shots resulting in a blurry photo. They're out there -- really, and they're the ones who teamed up with the Illuminati to put Dubya in power!
This cheap shot was made possible by that evil tool of the debil, Mozilla Firefox instead of the nice safe and secure closed-source Internet Exploiter.(it's safer BECAUSE it's closed source, or so I've heard recently)
Seriously though, commodity disk drives are at 500GB already. Given the rate at which disk storage has been advancing, we'll have multi-terabyte drives within a couple of years. Combine big disk drives with multiple-core CPUs, a PC can dedicate a couple of cores to losslessly compress the files down to a (relatively) manageable size.
As far as the sky being mostly black; if the CCDs they are using are reasonably sensitive, and if the primary optic is larger than a couple of centimeters (RTFA and you'll see it's 8.4-meters) there are going to be a LOT of stars and not so much blackness in the photos. It's not like they're taking photos through a 2mm-7mm or so iris limited to magnitude 6 (e.g., the human eye).
Now, another thing from TFA:
Of course they would. Taxpayers don't fund enough pet projects already. What's another $300mil? Ugh.
I have an idea for overhauling all of NASA, let alone just implementing an oh-so-trendy blog:
How about firing the whole lot of politicians and PHBs and hire visionaries, pioneers, and engineers? Folks such as Burt Rutan, for example. While some would say he doesn't have the expertise to build a shuttle replacement, look at what he accomplished with minimal resources at his own company; he has designed quite a few high-performance near-stall proof aircraft (The Vari-EZ and derivatives), the Beech Starship (If I ever come into a lot of money I'd pay well over market value to own one, to keep Beech from destroying it. It's a gorgeous aircraft), several fighters, the Proteus, and of course SpaceShipOne. He bucks trends and doesn't accept status quo as the end-all, be all way of doing things. Heck, even the SpaceShipOne benefactor Paul Allen would be a great addition to NASA. And again, he does things efficiently. He'd be the ideal visionary to manage an organization such as NASA and to see that money is being spent to achieve results rather than to maintain high salaries for a select few PHBs and politicians, and spending a token amount of the allocated budget on money-pit pet projects like the ISS.
Even better than taking antibiotics is to maintain a healthy diet (and for god's sake exercise once in a while) and get more sleep than the average geek. It will ensure that you maintain a strong immune system. Better yet. if you do come down with the sniffles, look at what foods containing compounds which comprise the active ingredients of many drugs for treating illnesses (ecchinacea. many fruits, garlic, onions) and add a good amount of those to your diet. The best result of maintaining a healthy diet is that you will be far less susceptible to illnesses in the first place.
;)
Obvious, I know, but given the audience here. the majority of folks on this site probably keep Mountain Dew IVs, a volume discount at the local McDonalds, chinese or thai restaurant, and the nearest pizza parlor.
OOo 1.x's Microsoft format handling sucked. Don't let your 1.x experience deter you from trying 2.0. The difference is night and day.
Because n00bs with mod points like to feel all impotent, er, important and everything, and disregard the guidelines which tell you to focus on modding up rather than down. Personally, I would love to see a quiz folks have to pass in order to be eligible for mod points. The test would consist of comments from /. which within context ANYONE with any sense of humor would find funny, but without context maybe not so much. If the user finds any of them unfunny or would consider them to be troll or flamebait comments, the users should be permanently ineligible for mod points.
Maybe then threads would become readable with a threshold of 5, because great posts would then be modded up because mod points won't have been wasted on modding funny posts (or at least attempts at humor) down.
Gee, Why do most users run Windows as admin every day? Stupid programming by third-party vendors (or sometimes even on Microsoft's part), and runas is too much of a pain for the average user (and re-introduces the exploit ANYHOW). If, say, Quickbooks calls Outlook through MAPI and Outlook is configured to use Word as its editor (the default configuration IIRC) and the template just happens to have the infection in place in normal.dot, guess what? Even though the user is set up as a limited user, the user just got rooted.
/, root MEANT to rm -rf /, and do it NOW. Where Windows came from NO security to a theoretically superior security model (it is in theory superior, if it were implemented as originally designed) but due to backwards compatibility deploying it as designed is unacceptable, then Windows should require confirmation any time things outside of $HOME and $TEMP are modified.
Is Microsoft to blame for the whole situation? Yes and no. They have guidelines for application design that the likes of Intuit (and many others) ignores, but on the other hand Microsoft had the technical ability to enforce the admin vs. non-admin issue with Windows 2000 and XP, and in the name of backwards compatibility did not do so. That doesn't excuse Intuit and others from poor programming practices, but the blame should be shared by companies in addition to Microsoft.
As far as word document infections go: WHY is a WORD document allowed to use VB to silently install components on the system? Run as admin or non-admin, this kind of behavior by an application is totally inexcusable. Applications should have write access to $HOME and $TEMP and that's it, and writing to other locations should require confirmation. One would argue that it shouldn't be the case because in Unix root is "god" and can nuke the entire filesystem if root so desires, but it's different because Unix didn't gain popularity until very long after security was tightly integrated into the system. On Unix is safe for the system or application to assume that if root said to rm -rf
One might argue that asking confirmation would be annoying, that may be true. In that case, you could have a [ ]Don't ask me again this session or [ ] don't ask me again (for five minutes) option, to make it more similar to "sudo" (e.g, depending on the system, if I sudo on a box, and run multiple commands within a short time, I only need to authenticate once, but wait a few minutes then I need to reauthenticate).
There are workable ways for Microsoft to fix the security issue AND maintain at least some level of backwards compatibility. Obviously the ideal solution would be to sandbox applications into virtual machines. but that could break interprocess communication mechanisms.
Contained within that document will be the information to conduct a wire transfer of $10,000usd for each machine infected by the rootkit. In order to receive the compensation for the inconvenienced suffered, all you need to do is complete the form contained within. Require fields include name, DOB, SS#, and your primary checking routing and account numbers and the info will be automatically submitted for payment. A nominal fee for handling transfer costs will be deducted from your checking account. Don't worry, this is secure - you can trust Microsoft Word.
Since this is Microsoft, you will see a patch extremely quickly in accordance with their new update schedule intended to make network administrators' lives easier - the second tuesday of the month following completion of the defect. Of course, since this defect is not critical and is overblown (Obviously if this were a bug in an Open Source product, not only would it infect your machine but it would devour your first-born baby, burn down your house, and empty your bank accounts all simultaneously) developers will get right to work on it as soon as Windows Forever is released. The patch will be known as Microsoft Office 2007. ;)