Not content with the fact we will die in less than ten billionths of the time interval discussed in this story, some of us still obsess with thinking we know the answers to the universe.
How will this affect your behaviour today? Will you re-think going to that club? Will you pick up an extra piece of litter? Will you go and buy up all the compressed helium you can find?
Seriously.. can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Religions?
Hey, sure, let's tax e-mails. And while we're at it, how bout we let any mentally disturbed idiot obtain guns and go shoot his school mates!
(We'll politely ignore the fact that the innocent school girls whom the NRA assume carry guns to protect themselves are thankful guns are so easy to obtain).
YOU ESS AYE.. YOU ESS AYE!
(Americans on average are really dumb. British on average are really selfish.)
I rent in London; because of this I have no control over the landline, and use the mobile for all my phone needs.
I've recently been telling off a company I deal with as they, along with most UK companies, have only special 08xx numbers for their customer service departments. Now, in Britain, the 08xx number may be free to landlines (as in 0800) or charged at special rates, both lower and higher (0845 and 087 numbers). At any rate, these are not ordinary local numbers, and CANNOT be dialled from overseas (as anyone who has booked with EasyJet and tried to cancel from France has discovered).
Now get this: in the UK, even though most customer service companies use 08xx numbers, they are NOT included in the mobile phone "minute" packages. Instead they are charged in addition to whatever minute entitlements the mobile phone user has.
I simply refuse to call most company customer service lines because I'm not prepared to pay extortionate rates for what is otherwise a free (or lower-cost) call from a landline.
I'm not an Anonymous Coward. I'm an Australian in London. And let me state unequivocally that the Anonymous Coward was right! The British DO NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR OWN ACTIONS. Rather they turn around and either tell you to f*** off, or grunt as if you're being stupid for questioning them.
Maybe Britain is the rudest nation in the world, at least Londoners are.
By the way I saw the documentary. I never realised what c**ts the senior Scientologists are. They spy and dig up dirt on anyone that opposes them, but fear their own truths to the point they will declare war on anything that could expose them.
I never realised how evil Scientology was till I viewed that documentary. It puts all the Scientology spin into context. Remember, Scientologists, you can't con an honest man! The truth is quiet but powerful, and all your loud dishonest propaganda cannot overcome it, try as you might, as pathetically as you might.
I remember trying ICQ a long long time ago before yahoo! and msn messenger became popular. I hated the thing. I don't know what language it was written in but it was pathetically slow and bloated. I recall sticking with IRC until yahoo! and msn came up with better written clients.
I'm not a physicist, but won't the turbines cause a drag effect on the cars, resulting in the cars burning more fuel? Is so, aren't they just moving the problem from one place to another? There's no such thing as free energy, right?
Even worse, wind turbines extract energy out of moving air by slowing that air down. That is why, in theoretical terms, a wind turbine can be a maximum of 50 per cent efficient.
Taking moving pollution from vehicles and slowing it down cannot possibly be a good thing...
I wonder if flash drives could include a maximum-erase-count for each erase unit, that the operating system could query to get an accurate age of the device (by determining the erase unit with the greatest number of erases).
Then your laptop could say "clone flash drive now.. only 20% of lifetime remaining".
This sort of thing happens often in business as well as academic institutions. Powerful people (who usually gain their power through dishonesty) get powerful jobs and rarely have their qualifications checked.
In cases of fraud like this I believe the employing institution should be permitted to sue and recover all income paid to that employee. Certainly, though, it does nothing to reverse the damage caused by the dishonest employee.
It's never okay to lie at a job interview. If you don't have the skills or the experience then it is up to the employer to determine if you are worth taking on board and training.
While we're throwing statistics around, last time I checked (which was a while ago) flash chips could be written a maximum of 10,000 or 100,000 times. This makes it useful for recording photographs or storing mp3s, but for a read-write medium that is regularly updated, there are serious risks of wearing out the flash?
Now, most flash drive systems try to minimise the odds of reaching that write number limit by re-assigning pages within the flash unit.
I'd just like more confidence that flash can be overwritten more often before seriously considering using it for anything other than a read-only file system for a laptop.
Re:Social hack - use "bullfight" for "speed trap".
on
Is Your GPS Naive?
·
· Score: 1
if the purpose of limits really was to promote safety, cops wouldn't have to hide
So let me get this right, you're saying robbers would still attempt to hit a bank with cops manning the tellers?
Last time I checked, everyone slows around a cop on the road. So if the police want to catch speeders, they have to hide!
RIAA employees were discovered with a "significantly disturbing" volume of porn on their own machines. When questioned they denied that the material was sourced from hard drive mirror images..
Just like the Monty Python sketch "the Funniest Joke in the World", developing something that kills itself too quickly isn't going to get propagated far without a lot of effort!
Also, wouldn't passengers need to be in really good health to endure such a journey, and would they need to wear flight suits like fighter pilots just to keep from blacking out?
The article didn't appear to mention acceleration. I'm sure it would be impractical for any mass transport system to accelerate too quickly. However it is entirely possible to have a very fast flight without unreasonable acceleration forces placed on the human body (smacking into another object excepted).
As for the jetlag issue, is it any worse than getting up 6am during the work days, and partying until 6am on weekends? That to me is the more serious jetlag issue! Transcontinental flight has never been that much different for me.
Right now I'm having to deal with the emotional trauma of bringing the world closer to the brink of weather instability every time I take a polluting 747 from Sydney to London.
Will this scramjet product less atmospheric carbon waste? Perhaps it will be too high to be of significant consequence?
Earthquakes are so common in Asia, I don't know why they didn't do this!
Tornados are common in mid-USA, earthquakes are common in California, blackouts are common in the tri-state area.
What is not common is knowing exactly when, or where, they will strike. Not everyone has travelled back to 5 November 1955 and knows the exact such details about a lightning strike!
The cost of laying an undersea cable is HUGE. It is impractical to maintain a thick sheath the entire undersea length. It is only on the ends where the cable comes ashore that much thicker and sturdier sheathing is used because friction and anchors are a lot more common in that area.
I think you'll find for all intents and purposes undersea cables are manufactured to withstand expected engineering problems. But planning for an earthquake is best mitigated by a self-healing ring such as the topology used for the Southern Cross cable between the USA and the South Pacific.
USB devices were never meant to be shared this way.
Maybe not, but I have found myself wondering of late how I have a number of peripherals that are useful to me on several computers, yet I'd rather not have to unplug them from one to put into the other. Notably, my USB webcam, my USB printer, and my USB memory stick reader.
I suppose an alternative to sharing devices is using a server, like a print server. Which essentially does the same thing as a switch, it lets one person "own" the device for a period of time.
I tried installing Ubuntu 64-bit (amd64) 6.06LTS onto a Dell Precision 690 (dual duo-core processors). Was fine except it couldn't find the drivers for the SAS drives I were using. But Ubuntu 6.10 installed great straight off the disc!
A point to note, 64-bit Macromedia Flash for linux isn't out yet - so one has to do something tricky, like install nspluginwrapper (http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/en/projects/nsplug inwrapper) that allows the use of 32-bit plugins for Firefox.
Apart from that all the standard 64-bit apps for linux work fine!
I grew up in an age where Morse Code seemed unnecessary, I remember the discussions about this all the way through university. Still, I decided to learn Morse Code for myself, and although I only passed at 6 wpm I had hoped that one day I would pass the 12 wpm exam.
I believe that Morse Code is still good to learn, much like ocean-goers could benefit from learning celestial navigation techniques even though GPS has all but obliterated the need.
One of the skills of a Ham Radio operator is potentially assisting in civil disasters. And having an extra tool for communication (perhaps a weak morse-only signal) is surely of benefit even if it might only be used rarely.
So to sum up: I understand the reasons for removing the requirement, but I still think Morse Code is a good thing to learn.
Indeed, routers do contain all this information - in fact the routing protocols pretty much distribute all this information.
But there needs to be a way for clients to easily obtain an answer from their local network as to whether or not an IP can be regarded as "local" or "inexpensive". GeoIP look-ups are at best a guess; I've known many situations where two unfriendly ISPs in a country quite happily route traffic between each other via another country (it happened in New Zealand where two ISPs would communicate via the USA, can you imagine the extra latency?).
No client would want to support a heavy-weight routing protocol that requires a reasonable about of memory. All the client needs is a very simple directory look up service, much in the same way ARP or DHCP works - DNS is another example although DNS is not a multicast service.
But to follow on from what you've said, it could be relatively straightforward for a cost-cutting ISP to have a multicast server that is brainy enough to talk the local routing protocol to the network of routers it contains (so that an internal list of local IPs can be compiled) and simple/fast enough to respond to all the clients' "is this IP a cheap/local one?" questions.
Anyway, I like to dream.. the odds of someone coming up with a simple directory service for costing IPs and the likelihood ISPs adopted it and the likelihood of P2P client writers adopting such a directory lookup by default is slim!
It is a good theory that moving distribution to many decentralised locations will improve content distribution. But present-day distribution networks and large-bandwidth sites have already bought and installed the infrastructure to send large volumes of bandwidth to Tier-1 ISP distribution points, and so forth to smaller ISPs etc. This works today.
I am agreed that P2P isn't necessarily bad - in fact if P2P algorithms could favour traffic within the same subnet, or indeed allow an ISP to somehow inform the P2P client which nodes are on the same ISP, then an ISP could actually benefit as traffic fills up the internal pipes and less traffic has to be purchased from other ISPs.
To expand on this point, perhaps a multicast protocol like DHCP on the local subject could be implemented; call it the "ISP IP Directory" protocol, or IID, and basically a P2P client would send a multicast query to the IID address with a query ("is x.x.x.x within your network? Or within your preferred peers?") and the IID server would respond with a yes/no. Then P2Ps could optimally download from preferred addresses..!
A shift in thinking in the design of P2P protocols is required if we really want to optimise bandwidth and content distribution.
I welcome this increased interest and activity in the package format. Recently I was trying to build RPMs for the second time, and just found it a difficult task. I have the authoritative book on the subject, "Maximum RPM", however that book was written in 1997 - long before RPM 4.0 came out upon which all of today's distributions rely.
So I would like to see some improved documentation efforts on using the package format if it isn't to languish!
I don't think this article is meant to be a deb vs rpm vs pkg discussion, that has been done many times before..
Slashdot Mirror
Not content with the fact we will die in less than ten billionths of the time interval discussed in this story, some of us still obsess with thinking we know the answers to the universe.
How will this affect your behaviour today? Will you re-think going to that club? Will you pick up an extra piece of litter? Will you go and buy up all the compressed helium you can find?
Seriously.. can't we just leave the Big Answers to the Religions?
Hey, sure, let's tax e-mails. And while we're at it, how bout we let any mentally disturbed idiot obtain guns and go shoot his school mates!
(We'll politely ignore the fact that the innocent school girls whom the NRA assume carry guns to protect themselves are thankful guns are so easy to obtain).
YOU ESS AYE.. YOU ESS AYE!
(Americans on average are really dumb. British on average are really selfish.)
I rent in London; because of this I have no control over the landline, and use the mobile for all my phone needs.
I've recently been telling off a company I deal with as they, along with most UK companies, have only special 08xx numbers for their customer service departments. Now, in Britain, the 08xx number may be free to landlines (as in 0800) or charged at special rates, both lower and higher (0845 and 087 numbers). At any rate, these are not ordinary local numbers, and CANNOT be dialled from overseas (as anyone who has booked with EasyJet and tried to cancel from France has discovered).
Now get this: in the UK, even though most customer service companies use 08xx numbers, they are NOT included in the mobile phone "minute" packages. Instead they are charged in addition to whatever minute entitlements the mobile phone user has.
I simply refuse to call most company customer service lines because I'm not prepared to pay extortionate rates for what is otherwise a free (or lower-cost) call from a landline.
Sigh; the UK is really messed up.
I'm not an Anonymous Coward. I'm an Australian in London. And let me state unequivocally that the Anonymous Coward was right! The British DO NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR OWN ACTIONS. Rather they turn around and either tell you to f*** off, or grunt as if you're being stupid for questioning them.
Maybe Britain is the rudest nation in the world, at least Londoners are.
By the way I saw the documentary. I never realised what c**ts the senior Scientologists are. They spy and dig up dirt on anyone that opposes them, but fear their own truths to the point they will declare war on anything that could expose them.
I never realised how evil Scientology was till I viewed that documentary. It puts all the Scientology spin into context. Remember, Scientologists, you can't con an honest man! The truth is quiet but powerful, and all your loud dishonest propaganda cannot overcome it, try as you might, as pathetically as you might.
I remember trying ICQ a long long time ago before yahoo! and msn messenger became popular. I hated the thing. I don't know what language it was written in but it was pathetically slow and bloated. I recall sticking with IRC until yahoo! and msn came up with better written clients.
.. I tell myself, before I go to sleep..
(Split Enz)
Even worse, wind turbines extract energy out of moving air by slowing that air down. That is why, in theoretical terms, a wind turbine can be a maximum of 50 per cent efficient.
Taking moving pollution from vehicles and slowing it down cannot possibly be a good thing...
I wonder if flash drives could include a maximum-erase-count for each erase unit, that the operating system could query to get an accurate age of the device (by determining the erase unit with the greatest number of erases).
Then your laptop could say "clone flash drive now.. only 20% of lifetime remaining".
I agree..
This sort of thing happens often in business as well as academic institutions. Powerful people (who usually gain their power through dishonesty) get powerful jobs and rarely have their qualifications checked.
In cases of fraud like this I believe the employing institution should be permitted to sue and recover all income paid to that employee. Certainly, though, it does nothing to reverse the damage caused by the dishonest employee.
It's never okay to lie at a job interview. If you don't have the skills or the experience then it is up to the employer to determine if you are worth taking on board and training.
While we're throwing statistics around, last time I checked (which was a while ago) flash chips could be written a maximum of 10,000 or 100,000 times. This makes it useful for recording photographs or storing mp3s, but for a read-write medium that is regularly updated, there are serious risks of wearing out the flash?
Now, most flash drive systems try to minimise the odds of reaching that write number limit by re-assigning pages within the flash unit.
I'd just like more confidence that flash can be overwritten more often before seriously considering using it for anything other than a read-only file system for a laptop.
So let me get this right, you're saying robbers would still attempt to hit a bank with cops manning the tellers?
Last time I checked, everyone slows around a cop on the road. So if the police want to catch speeders, they have to hide!
RIAA employees were discovered with a "significantly disturbing" volume of porn on their own machines. When questioned they denied that the material was sourced from hard drive mirror images..
Starcraft was one of the last games I truly enjoyed playing a lot. I would really welcome a new one.
Just like the Monty Python sketch "the Funniest Joke in the World", developing something that kills itself too quickly isn't going to get propagated far without a lot of effort!
The article didn't appear to mention acceleration. I'm sure it would be impractical for any mass transport system to accelerate too quickly. However it is entirely possible to have a very fast flight without unreasonable acceleration forces placed on the human body (smacking into another object excepted).
As for the jetlag issue, is it any worse than getting up 6am during the work days, and partying until 6am on weekends? That to me is the more serious jetlag issue! Transcontinental flight has never been that much different for me.
Right now I'm having to deal with the emotional trauma of bringing the world closer to the brink of weather instability every time I take a polluting 747 from Sydney to London.
Will this scramjet product less atmospheric carbon waste? Perhaps it will be too high to be of significant consequence?
Tornados are common in mid-USA, earthquakes are common in California, blackouts are common in the tri-state area.
What is not common is knowing exactly when, or where, they will strike. Not everyone has travelled back to 5 November 1955 and knows the exact such details about a lightning strike!
The cost of laying an undersea cable is HUGE. It is impractical to maintain a thick sheath the entire undersea length. It is only on the ends where the cable comes ashore that much thicker and sturdier sheathing is used because friction and anchors are a lot more common in that area.
I think you'll find for all intents and purposes undersea cables are manufactured to withstand expected engineering problems. But planning for an earthquake is best mitigated by a self-healing ring such as the topology used for the Southern Cross cable between the USA and the South Pacific.
Maybe not, but I have found myself wondering of late how I have a number of peripherals that are useful to me on several computers, yet I'd rather not have to unplug them from one to put into the other. Notably, my USB webcam, my USB printer, and my USB memory stick reader.
I suppose an alternative to sharing devices is using a server, like a print server. Which essentially does the same thing as a switch, it lets one person "own" the device for a period of time.
I tried installing Ubuntu 64-bit (amd64) 6.06LTS onto a Dell Precision 690 (dual duo-core processors). Was fine except it couldn't find the drivers for the SAS drives I were using. But Ubuntu 6.10 installed great straight off the disc!
g inwrapper) that allows the use of 32-bit plugins for Firefox.
A point to note, 64-bit Macromedia Flash for linux isn't out yet - so one has to do something tricky, like install nspluginwrapper (http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/en/projects/nsplu
Apart from that all the standard 64-bit apps for linux work fine!
I grew up in an age where Morse Code seemed unnecessary, I remember the discussions about this all the way through university. Still, I decided to learn Morse Code for myself, and although I only passed at 6 wpm I had hoped that one day I would pass the 12 wpm exam.
I believe that Morse Code is still good to learn, much like ocean-goers could benefit from learning celestial navigation techniques even though GPS has all but obliterated the need.
One of the skills of a Ham Radio operator is potentially assisting in civil disasters. And having an extra tool for communication (perhaps a weak morse-only signal) is surely of benefit even if it might only be used rarely.
So to sum up: I understand the reasons for removing the requirement, but I still think Morse Code is a good thing to learn.
Indeed, routers do contain all this information - in fact the routing protocols pretty much distribute all this information.
But there needs to be a way for clients to easily obtain an answer from their local network as to whether or not an IP can be regarded as "local" or "inexpensive". GeoIP look-ups are at best a guess; I've known many situations where two unfriendly ISPs in a country quite happily route traffic between each other via another country (it happened in New Zealand where two ISPs would communicate via the USA, can you imagine the extra latency?).
No client would want to support a heavy-weight routing protocol that requires a reasonable about of memory. All the client needs is a very simple directory look up service, much in the same way ARP or DHCP works - DNS is another example although DNS is not a multicast service.
But to follow on from what you've said, it could be relatively straightforward for a cost-cutting ISP to have a multicast server that is brainy enough to talk the local routing protocol to the network of routers it contains (so that an internal list of local IPs can be compiled) and simple/fast enough to respond to all the clients' "is this IP a cheap/local one?" questions.
Anyway, I like to dream.. the odds of someone coming up with a simple directory service for costing IPs and the likelihood ISPs adopted it and the likelihood of P2P client writers adopting such a directory lookup by default is slim!
It is a good theory that moving distribution to many decentralised locations will improve content distribution. But present-day distribution networks and large-bandwidth sites have already bought and installed the infrastructure to send large volumes of bandwidth to Tier-1 ISP distribution points, and so forth to smaller ISPs etc. This works today.
I am agreed that P2P isn't necessarily bad - in fact if P2P algorithms could favour traffic within the same subnet, or indeed allow an ISP to somehow inform the P2P client which nodes are on the same ISP, then an ISP could actually benefit as traffic fills up the internal pipes and less traffic has to be purchased from other ISPs.
To expand on this point, perhaps a multicast protocol like DHCP on the local subject could be implemented; call it the "ISP IP Directory" protocol, or IID, and basically a P2P client would send a multicast query to the IID address with a query ("is x.x.x.x within your network? Or within your preferred peers?") and the IID server would respond with a yes/no. Then P2Ps could optimally download from preferred addresses..!
A shift in thinking in the design of P2P protocols is required if we really want to optimise bandwidth and content distribution.
I welcome this increased interest and activity in the package format. Recently I was trying to build RPMs for the second time, and just found it a difficult task. I have the authoritative book on the subject, "Maximum RPM", however that book was written in 1997 - long before RPM 4.0 came out upon which all of today's distributions rely.
So I would like to see some improved documentation efforts on using the package format if it isn't to languish!
I don't think this article is meant to be a deb vs rpm vs pkg discussion, that has been done many times before..
Hmm.. either way, at least Perl is under the radar for now..
I seem to recall that even volunteers frag.. (news article about soldier accused of killing superior in Iraq)