Wars generally had a beginning, middle, and end when the Constitution was drafted. At the time, nations declared war on each other rather than abstractions. Since terrorism is a tactic there won't ever be a victory against "The Terrorists". Any of our enemies can and will resort to terrorism from time to time. This causes the continual state of emergency that George Orwell warned us about. Now we are always at war and war always means a blank check for the President. Yes, the president has a duty to protect the nation from external threat. He also swore twice to "Defend and Protect the Constitution". The Constitution doesn't say anything about being used as Presidential toliet paper in a perpetual wartime.
The MythTV doesn't have stupid restrictions deliberately built into it. There are some but at least those are addressable without a goon squad confiscating your equipment.
I think it'll happen in time. Energy is simply going to have to become even more expensive that it is now to overcome the combined factors of "Eeewwww! Nukular!" and the considerable security costs. Even with centralized co-location and any number of ideal factors, securing plutonium fuel won't be cheap. Probably cheaper than what Middle Eastern energy will cost 20 years from now though.
The problem isn't securing the reactor(s). The problem is preventing the fuel manufactured in them from being further refined after being stolen from one of x# facilities. Power reactors that burn uranium are using fuel that has been enriched to about 40% U235. To get the >99% U235 needed to make a bomb, that fuel has to be further enriched in a big hard-to-hide industrial process. Plutonium on the other hand can be chemically separated from a fuel substrate into far more potent stuff. The wherewithal to accomplish this can be bought with low millions of dollars or maybe even high hundred thousands.
To economically secure plutonium burning powerplants, you'd have to have a limited number of very large plants strategically placed on the power grid. The fuel would have to be tracked from production reactor to power reactor and back. It may go through the breeder a number of times before being completely spent.
You really can't be loose with plutonium power fuel. It is altogether a different animal from uranium.
What is the outcome of trying to vaporize nuclear waste?
You'd spew radioactivity into the atmosphere and be left with a pile of radioactive slag. The absolute best you could hope for is a smaller pile of more intensely radioactive waste.
A far better plan is to "burn" the radioactive waste in fast breeders and manufacture more fuel. True the fuel you get is easily refined by chemical means into bomb grade material but you can't have everything.
KOffice, AbiWord, Gnumeric and others continue to evolve largely without the kind of money Sun is putting into them. In many ways save MS compatibility they are superior to OOO in speed, resource usage, and interface. The MS compatibility will come in time as well for those projects. OOO strikes me more as a transistional software than a defining one. With QT4/KDE4, KOffice will be widely available on OS X and Windows too. That release should be interesting.
OS X has some minor issues, like having no "show desktop" button that I'd have to get a script for that doesn't always work correct.
I largely agree with you but OS X DOES address that one. If you have the Expose stuff turned on, press F11 and all the Windows will scootch to the sides. Do whatever you have to do and F11 pulls them back in.
I think Vista is where Microsoft will fork strongly.
Vista will be XP Mark 2. I believe 98 was the last time people were lined up all the way around the block to buy a latest Windows version. Vista will come pre-installed on Dells and will slowly trickle into homes that way. Businesses will continue to stay on XP or even 2000 as long as they possibly can. Equipment replacement cycles will force the issue for them though. It will take two to three years to become the most commonly encountered Windows.
Perhaps OSS developers should spend less time copying Windows and/or Apple and start thinking about new ways of using our computers.
And when they do, there is this other kind of poster who complains that OSS will never succeed if it isn't more like Windows. Maybe OSS developers should continue doing what they do best: Work on whatever they want to work on or are paid to work on.
The AM-100 is a datalogger used to collect data from photovoltaic panel fed inverters. It is no longer manufactured and the only software available to collect data from the logger runs in DOS. I run FreeDOS on top of DOSemu in Linux to collect this data. When running under Win98, the logger software would not be stable for more than three days at a time. It was no more stable under DOSemu but I used a cron job to kill and restart the software at midnight (no sunlight so it wasn't collecting data anyway...). Other scripts scrape the CSV files the logger software produces to make graphs.
I futhermore run the DOSemu session under GNU screen. This allows me to view the logger software remotely w/ssh. FreeDOS in combination with other tools allowed me to usefully extend the capabilities of a no longer manufactured hardware/software product.
Why do they make us go through all that SCSI business, when at least 95% of the people who use it have no SCSI?
Because CD Burners and really CD-ROM drives in general use the SCSI command set. When speaking of SCSI, there is the command set and a set of physical electronic specifications regarding connectors, buses, voltages and so forth.
The command set is not tied in any way to physical SCSI implementations. SCSI commands can even be issued over IDE buses to devices that understand them. For many years, the path of least resistance as far as writing CD burning software was concerned was to make CD burners appear as pure SCSI devices. CD burners use the SCSI inspired MMC command set but recent Linux/BSD implementations of hard drive buses make it possible to cleanly send whatever commands the device speaks over the physical bus in use.
Incidentally, IEEE1394/Firewire devices also speak SCSI and are handled as SCSI devices on Linux systems.
It looked like simple honest direct language to me. I understood immediately what Debian's beef is and why they had it. I saw nothing that even remotely resembled a personal attack.
Good for Jorg to stick to his guns. He can choose whatever license he wants to release his code under.
Of course he is. This freedom extends to releasing code that nobody else can legally use. A CDDL build system+GPL codebase isn't legal for anyone else but Jorg to distribute. More power to him.
Here are the fields I use in the Firefox User Agent Switcher definition:
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) App Name: Microsoft Internet Explorer App Version: 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Platform: Win32 Vendor: Linux-Firefox-IE only coding poor-www.w3c.org
Basically, use the Vendor part of a UA string to bitch 'em out.
I've used that from time to time. I crafted a User Agent String that looks enough like Windows to let me through but still has "This is really a Linux machine. This is unnecessary: www.w3c.com" embedded in it.
Exactly. Is it really that hard to find evidence that shows the date of an installation?
Probably. This is why a clean install would be the wrong thing to do. Reimaging a drive would be far more ambigous. What you would have then is a drive where most of the files are before x date. That would be suspicious but not as suspicious as running an OEM recovery CD. I can even think of a way to handle that. You need a script that backdates the clock to the image creation date, touches some appropriate files, forward dates the clock a bit then touches more files. The script will repeat the bump-date-touch-move-forward routine until it reaches the present. The script itself should be run from a CD or other media.
Before reimaging, it would be advisable to overwrite the drive with random number. After re-imaging and date-scripting, the install should be exercised with as many apps run and closed as possible as well and creating a deleting files to create plausible on-disk data structures.
I have a lot of those songs but I've correctly tagged mine. Smokabowla is from the Technohippies.
Incidentally I own and have ripped for my own personal use every one of Weird Al's albums. I remember that I did have a slightly hard time getting one of the tracks to rip but it could have been my burner.
Ordinarily I'd agree but I read somewhere (sorry, no cite) that there is only enough raw material for that for another 30 odd years anyway.
Only if this foolish resistance to breeder reactors continues. Most so-called nuclear waste still has over 90% of it's energy content. Run it through a fast breeder and you wind up with additional fuel (which is unfortunately easy to refine into bomb fuel) and a smaller amount of more intensely radioactive waste. Yes, that smaller amount of waste is hotter but it will be hot for far less time because the more radioactive something is the shorter the half-life.
A properly secured breeder fuel production system will last hundreds of years at least rather than 10.
True but it is also true that biofuel != NET increase CO2.
A biofueled economy would put CO2 in the atmosphere at the consumer end of the cycle but it takes it out of the atmosphere at the production end of the cycle. Over time, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will not increase due to biofuels.
That overly-libertarian viewpoint isn't terribly realistic. First off, most of us don't have access to the facilities required to "test it yourself". Secondly, the supply of food from "other people" is catch as catch can. Thirdly, food producers and supermarkets are allowed to flat-out lie about terms like "organic" and "natural". Fourthly, a pantry stocked with verifiably clean food is more expensive than what most people can afford. Remember folks that free-market invisible hand stuff only works when all sides of a transaction have access to complete and accurate information.
Regulated capitalism may indeed suck but it is superior to the alternatives. It simply is NOT acceptable to sell shit-contaminated foodstuffs for human consumption. I'm not going to seriously entertain any political or social viewpoint that says it is.
Meat packers are already sloppy with intestinal contents on the slaughtering and packing lines. I don't object to technology like this per se but the packers will use it as a way to be even looser and more disgusting with their production hygiene. We eat what they produce. The acceptable amount of shit on the meat whether treated or not should be ZERO.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW - Anyone remember back to when the Soviets used to buy up Ataris and canabilize their chips for sonobouys?
Link?
Wars generally had a beginning, middle, and end when the Constitution was drafted. At the time, nations declared war on each other rather than abstractions. Since terrorism is a tactic there won't ever be a victory against "The Terrorists". Any of our enemies can and will resort to terrorism from time to time. This causes the continual state of emergency that George Orwell warned us about. Now we are always at war and war always means a blank check for the President. Yes, the president has a duty to protect the nation from external threat. He also swore twice to "Defend and Protect the Constitution". The Constitution doesn't say anything about being used as Presidential toliet paper in a perpetual wartime.
Your method decompresses lossy audio then (more than likely) recompresses it with a lossy codec. This tool strips the DRM off the original AAC file.
The MythTV doesn't have stupid restrictions deliberately built into it. There are some but at least those are addressable without a goon squad confiscating your equipment.
I think it'll happen in time. Energy is simply going to have to become even more expensive that it is now to overcome the combined factors of "Eeewwww! Nukular!" and the considerable security costs. Even with centralized co-location and any number of ideal factors, securing plutonium fuel won't be cheap. Probably cheaper than what Middle Eastern energy will cost 20 years from now though.
The problem isn't securing the reactor(s). The problem is preventing the fuel manufactured in them from being further refined after being stolen from one of x# facilities. Power reactors that burn uranium are using fuel that has been enriched to about 40% U235. To get the >99% U235 needed to make a bomb, that fuel has to be further enriched in a big hard-to-hide industrial process. Plutonium on the other hand can be chemically separated from a fuel substrate into far more potent stuff. The wherewithal to accomplish this can be bought with low millions of dollars or maybe even high hundred thousands.
To economically secure plutonium burning powerplants, you'd have to have a limited number of very large plants strategically placed on the power grid. The fuel would have to be tracked from production reactor to power reactor and back. It may go through the breeder a number of times before being completely spent.
You really can't be loose with plutonium power fuel. It is altogether a different animal from uranium.
What is the outcome of trying to vaporize nuclear waste?
You'd spew radioactivity into the atmosphere and be left with a pile of radioactive slag. The absolute best you could hope for is a smaller pile of more intensely radioactive waste.
A far better plan is to "burn" the radioactive waste in fast breeders and manufacture more fuel. True the fuel you get is easily refined by chemical means into bomb grade material but you can't have everything.
KOffice, AbiWord, Gnumeric and others continue to evolve largely without the kind of money Sun is putting into them. In many ways save MS compatibility they are superior to OOO in speed, resource usage, and interface. The MS compatibility will come in time as well for those projects. OOO strikes me more as a transistional software than a defining one. With QT4/KDE4, KOffice will be widely available on OS X and Windows too. That release should be interesting.
OS X has some minor issues, like having no "show desktop" button that I'd have to get a script for that doesn't always work correct.
I largely agree with you but OS X DOES address that one. If you have the Expose stuff turned on, press F11 and all the Windows will scootch to the sides. Do whatever you have to do and F11 pulls them back in.
I think Vista is where Microsoft will fork strongly.
Vista will be XP Mark 2. I believe 98 was the last time people were lined up all the way around the block to buy a latest Windows version. Vista will come pre-installed on Dells and will slowly trickle into homes that way. Businesses will continue to stay on XP or even 2000 as long as they possibly can. Equipment replacement cycles will force the issue for them though. It will take two to three years to become the most commonly encountered Windows.
Perhaps OSS developers should spend less time copying Windows and/or Apple and start thinking about new ways of using our computers.
And when they do, there is this other kind of poster who complains that OSS will never succeed if it isn't more like Windows. Maybe OSS developers should continue doing what they do best: Work on whatever they want to work on or are paid to work on.
The AM-100 is a datalogger used to collect data from photovoltaic panel fed inverters. It is no longer manufactured and the only software available to collect data from the logger runs in DOS. I run FreeDOS on top of DOSemu in Linux to collect this data. When running under Win98, the logger software would not be stable for more than three days at a time. It was no more stable under DOSemu but I used a cron job to kill and restart the software at midnight (no sunlight so it wasn't collecting data anyway...). Other scripts scrape the CSV files the logger software produces to make graphs. I futhermore run the DOSemu session under GNU screen. This allows me to view the logger software remotely w/ssh. FreeDOS in combination with other tools allowed me to usefully extend the capabilities of a no longer manufactured hardware/software product.
Why do they make us go through all that SCSI business, when at least 95% of the people who use it have no SCSI?
Because CD Burners and really CD-ROM drives in general use the SCSI command set. When speaking of SCSI, there is the command set and a set of physical electronic specifications regarding connectors, buses, voltages and so forth.
The command set is not tied in any way to physical SCSI implementations. SCSI commands can even be issued over IDE buses to devices that understand them. For many years, the path of least resistance as far as writing CD burning software was concerned was to make CD burners appear as pure SCSI devices. CD burners use the SCSI inspired MMC command set but recent Linux/BSD implementations of hard drive buses make it possible to cleanly send whatever commands the device speaks over the physical bus in use.
Incidentally, IEEE1394/Firewire devices also speak SCSI and are handled as SCSI devices on Linux systems.
It looked like simple honest direct language to me. I understood immediately what Debian's beef is and why they had it. I saw nothing that even remotely resembled a personal attack.
How about you explain it for us moral simpletons?
As it happens, providing misleading data is exactly what Al Queda recommends, so maybe we all need to start behaving like terrorists now?
So marketing shills are going to conflate swapping Kroger club cards with flying airplanes into buildings?
I'm a terrorist because I make things slightly difficult for marketing flacks? WTF?
Good for Jorg to stick to his guns. He can choose whatever license he wants to release his code under.
Of course he is. This freedom extends to releasing code that nobody else can legally use. A CDDL build system+GPL codebase isn't legal for anyone else but Jorg to distribute. More power to him.
Here are the fields I use in the Firefox User Agent Switcher definition:
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
App Name: Microsoft Internet Explorer
App Version: 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Platform: Win32
Vendor: Linux-Firefox-IE only coding poor-www.w3c.org
Basically, use the Vendor part of a UA string to bitch 'em out.
Did that at home. I'll paste it to you when I get home.
I've used that from time to time. I crafted a User Agent String that looks enough like Windows to let me through but still has "This is really a Linux machine. This is unnecessary: www.w3c.com" embedded in it.
Exactly. Is it really that hard to find evidence that shows the date of an installation?
Probably. This is why a clean install would be the wrong thing to do. Reimaging a drive would be far more ambigous. What you would have then is a drive where most of the files are before x date. That would be suspicious but not as suspicious as running an OEM recovery CD. I can even think of a way to handle that. You need a script that backdates the clock to the image creation date, touches some appropriate files, forward dates the clock a bit then touches more files. The script will repeat the bump-date-touch-move-forward routine until it reaches the present. The script itself should be run from a CD or other media.
Before reimaging, it would be advisable to overwrite the drive with random number. After re-imaging and date-scripting, the install should be exercised with as many apps run and closed as possible as well and creating a deleting files to create plausible on-disk data structures.
I have a lot of those songs but I've correctly tagged mine. Smokabowla is from the Technohippies. Incidentally I own and have ripped for my own personal use every one of Weird Al's albums. I remember that I did have a slightly hard time getting one of the tracks to rip but it could have been my burner.
Ordinarily I'd agree but I read somewhere (sorry, no cite) that there is only enough raw material for that for another 30 odd years anyway.
Only if this foolish resistance to breeder reactors continues. Most so-called nuclear waste still has over 90% of it's energy content. Run it through a fast breeder and you wind up with additional fuel (which is unfortunately easy to refine into bomb fuel) and a smaller amount of more intensely radioactive waste. Yes, that smaller amount of waste is hotter but it will be hot for far less time because the more radioactive something is the shorter the half-life.
A properly secured breeder fuel production system will last hundreds of years at least rather than 10.
biofuel != no CO2
True but it is also true that biofuel != NET increase CO2.
A biofueled economy would put CO2 in the atmosphere at the consumer end of the cycle but it takes it out of the atmosphere at the production end of the cycle. Over time, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will not increase due to biofuels.
That overly-libertarian viewpoint isn't terribly realistic. First off, most of us don't have access to the facilities required to "test it yourself". Secondly, the supply of food from "other people" is catch as catch can. Thirdly, food producers and supermarkets are allowed to flat-out lie about terms like "organic" and "natural". Fourthly, a pantry stocked with verifiably clean food is more expensive than what most people can afford. Remember folks that free-market invisible hand stuff only works when all sides of a transaction have access to complete and accurate information.
Regulated capitalism may indeed suck but it is superior to the alternatives. It simply is NOT acceptable to sell shit-contaminated foodstuffs for human consumption. I'm not going to seriously entertain any political or social viewpoint that says it is.
Meat packers are already sloppy with intestinal contents on the slaughtering and packing lines. I don't object to technology like this per se but the packers will use it as a way to be even looser and more disgusting with their production hygiene. We eat what they produce. The acceptable amount of shit on the meat whether treated or not should be ZERO.